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HOW MERV GRIFFIN ENHANCED AND EXTENDED THE LIVES OF MILLIONS

I first met Merv in 1977.  Intrigued by my book, The Adventurer's Guide which explained how regular folks could have great adventures around the world, he had me as a guest on The Merv Griffin Show.  We hit it off so well that I ended up being a co-host for his shows featuring famous adventurers and explorers as guests, such as Thor Hyerdahl, Jacques Cousteau, and Lowell Thomas. Whenever I got back from my latest adventure, living with cannibals in New Guinea, skydiving on the North Pole, taking elephants over the Alps, I'd get a call from Merv asking how soon could I be on the show. One conversation with Merv, however, ended up affecting the lives of millions for the better, quite possibly yours.  Millions of people in America are alive today, will live longer, and are in better health because of this one conversation I had with Merv.  It wasn't on his show.  It was in a restaurant at the Riviera Hotel in Vegas.

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SLAUGHTERING INNOCENTS TO IMPRESS CONGRESS

On Tuesday, August 14, Al Qaeda terrorists detonated four massive truck bombs in three Iraqi villages, killing at least 250 civilians (perhaps as many as 500) and wounding many more. The bombings were a sign of Al Qaeda's frustration, desperation and fear. Al Qaeda has been badly battered. It's lost top leaders and thousands of cadres. Even more painful for the Islamists, they've lost ground among the people of Iraq, including former allies. Iraqis got a good taste of Al Qaeda. Now they're spitting it out. Thus the purpose of these dramatic bombings is that Al Qaeda needs to portray Iraq as a continuing failure of U.S. policy. Those dead and maimed Iraqis were just props: The intended audience was Congress The foreign terrorists slaughtering the innocent recognize that their only remaining hope of pulling off a come-from-way-behind win is to convince your senator and your congressman or -woman that it's politically expedient to hand a default victory to a defeated Al Qaeda.

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PROOF OF WARMING: IT’S ALMOST AS HOT AS THE 1930s

It was a small change, made quietly two weeks ago on the website of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  But it could have big implications. Al Gore claimed in his 2006 crockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" that nine of the ten hottest years in history have been in the last decade, with 1998 the warmest year on record. Not so, says the GISS, which is affiliated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Columbia University, and is headed by Dr. James Hansen, scientific godfather of global warming alarmism.  According to the GISS, the hottest years ever in the U.S. were, in order: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939.  Only one year in the last five (2006, 4th) is on this list, and only three in the last ten, compared to four in the 1930s.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF HELPING MEXICO

Imagine if our country were so ravaged by drug cartels that the president sent the military into a third of the states to break the terror. That's where Mexico is today. We all pay the price. Narcotraficante infighting took over 3,000 lives in Mexico last year as the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels struggled for turf. With government officials and police officers facing the old choice of "silver or lead," out-of-control corruption plagued the country. Entire states fell under the influence of the drug lords. Narco-violence spread to previously safe regions, such as Monterrey - the most prosperous city between the Amazon and the Rio Grande. By late 2006, Mexico faced its gravest internal crisis since the Revolution of 1910. In response, Mexicans elected a tough president, Felipe Calderon. And President Calderon took action, ordering the army into nine states and deploying troops to cities such as Tijuana and the run-down resort of Acapulco. But the drug lords are fighting back. Today, the level of violence transcends mere crime. Mexico faces a narco-insurrection. And its government needs help.

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WORKER’S WOES IN IRAN

Mansour Osanloo, who heads the Tehran bus workers' union, was thrown into the infamous Evin prison for the third time last month, after a highly successful European trip on which he tried to inform his Western trade-union brothers of the mounting repression against Iranian workers. During his previous incarcerations, Osanloo had been brutally tortured. Films were distributed showing bruises on his body, and his tongue had been slit. One of Osanloo's fellow union organizers, Mahmoud Salehi of the Saqez Bakery Workers' Association, has been jailed in the city of Sanandaj (Kurdistan Province), where he is said to be in serious medical difficulties. The International Trade Union Confederation and the International Transport Workers' Federation have appropriately called for pickets, protests, and letter-writing campaigns demanding the release of these two brave men. So far as I know, no labor union is planning to demonstrate for them in this country, and certainly the American government has not said a word on their behalf.

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THE LEFT’S ANTI-MILITARY DISHONESTY

What began as a controversy over the credibility of the New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist" is morphing into questions about the integrity of Franklin Foer, editor of the venerable liberal magazine. The controversy began July 13 when the Diarist, a soldier in Iraq, wrote of three instances of shocking behavior.  The soldier has now been identified as Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp.  It is clear that he lied - either to Army investigators or to the magazine. But why was the liberal magazine's editor so eager to believe his lies? [Note by JW: Franklin Foer interviewed me at length for a story he was writing on the Reagan Doctrine in 2003.  The description and quotes of me are accurate, but the whole article turned out to be an anti-conservative screed.  The cover story, Founding Fakers, in the August 18, 2003 issue of The New Republic, demonstrates Foer's left-wing intellectual dishonesty.]

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THE BOURNE ABSURDITY

I took my sons, Brandon and Jackson, to see the latest episode of Matt Damon's film franchise, The Bourne Ultimatum.  Like its predecessors, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, it's great edge-of-the-seat entertainment and extremely well-directed, a first-rate example of action-genre film-making craft. For anyone who knows anything about the CIA, it is also totally absurd. You probably know the films' premise.  Damon plays Jason Bourne, a CIA assassin who has suffered amnesia due to a botched hit attempt.  His efforts to recover his identity and memories arouse the suspicion of CIA officials running illegal secret programs, who then send out a succession of assassins to eliminate him. The term "CIA assassin," of course, will bring an instant guffaw of cynical laughter to those familiar with Langley.  Proof that such folks do not exist is that Hugo Chavez is not dead. Movies love to portray CIA "assets" (as the Bourne films call them) as incredibly skilled and deadly, ruthless professional Terminators - whose mission is to hunt down either each other or innocent civilians, never actual bad guys and real enemies of the US. Why can't Hollywood make a spy-action flick with at least a semblance of reality to it - say about a super-agent faced with world-class incompetence and collusion of CIA operatives in Pakistan, who end-runs them and goes for the villains within the Pakistani government who run both the Taliban terrorists and the heroin smuggling in Afghanistan? That's what's really going on - the CIA led around with a Pak ring through its nose, rather than the movie image of hyper-efficiency and competence - and Hollywood is as clueless about it as Barack Hussein Obama Junior.

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THE ARCTIC OCEAN PIE

While chilling here in Sumatra (see Sumatra Sunrise) after writing an exposition of one entire ocean (the Indian:  see The French Ocean), I never thought I'd soon be writing about another, and one so far away. Yet the Russians' stunt of planting their flag on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole is such a dangerous joke that I'm compelled to do so.  The joke is on the Russians, for there already is an American flag planted there.  Evidently, the six Ruskie explorers in their Mir mini-subs didn't look around very much when they reached the sea floor at 14,000 feet down.  If they had, they would have seen the stars and stripes - or at least what it's encased in. It's quite a story of how that American flag got there.  And it provides quite an opportunity to create an Arctic Ocean Pie - one that the UN doesn't get a slice of.

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A PRO-AMERICAN SHOCKER FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sometimes where a thing is said is bigger news than what was said. That happened on Monday, when The New York Times ran a guest op-ed entitled A War We Just Might Win detailing the progress in Iraq.  Long before the fall of Baghdad, The New York Times was as dogmatically pessimistic about the Bush administration's efforts as it was gushingly supportive of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. It even promoted the least-qualified op-ed writer in North America as its point man for its attacks on our military: Frank Rich, whose experience was with ballet slippers, not combat boots. Frank must feel like a dying swan just now. What did the column in Monday's Times say? Exactly what TTPer have known for months:

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SUMATRA SUNRISE

It's a funny thing about epiphanies - you never know when or where you'll have one.  This particular one of mine came appropriately enough in a church - but this was a church in a village called Tuk Tuk on an island in a lake in Sumatra. It was the joyous singing of the congregation that triggered it, a congregation composed of families, of men and women and children of all ages joined together.  The contrast between this seemingly ordinary Sunday service in a small Christian church with that of a mosque -men only, chanting like joyless robots, their children not with them, nor their wives whom they force to hide behind veils and burqas, was overwhelming. For these courageous churchgoers live on a Christian island surrounded by a Moslem sea.  Sumatra is part of Indonesia, a country with the world's largest Moslem population.  My heart went out to these people happily singing and celebrating their faith.  Tears began streaming down my face and they would not stop. They were tears of gratitude and hope - for I believe these people will not succumb to Islamization but triumph over it.  Here in Sumatra there is a Christian sunrise.  I am going to encourage you to come here, to Lake Toba, and experience this yourself.  After all, in what other magical paradise on the planet can you get a good meal for a dollar and a hotel room for $25?  A spacious room with a balcony that has this view:

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