In last week's column, I wrote that Sen. Obama had written a dust jacket blurb for ex-Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers' memoir, "Fugitive Days."  This is not true.  Sen. Obama's praise was for an earlier book by Mr. Ayers, "A Kind and Just Parent," published in 1997. I'm putting this correction at the beginning of this column rather than at the end as is customary because I am mortified by my mistake, and I don't want it to become a part of Internet lore.

There is enough misinformation out there already. On Oct. 11, veteran civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis compared John McCain and Sarah Palin to segregationist George Wallace.

Tbilisi, Georgia. Despite having been invaded two months ago by a country 30 times its size, the Republic of Georgia appears to be dealing with that crisis far better than the United States and other major governments are dealing with the international financial crisis, and thus the question is, "Why"? The answer quite simply is that the Georgia leaders are not so arrogant to think they know better than markets, and hence they are relying on the market to solve most of their problems. The prime minister, Lado Gurgenidze, was both educated and spent considerable time in England and clearly was influenced by Margaret Thatcher. I asked him if he was concerned that the pressures to grow the size of government because of the invasion would undermine Georgia's reforms (note: history shows governments almost always grow in relative size versus the private economy in the time of crisis, such as wars or financial instability, even if governments create the crisis). The prime minister replied that the Georgians have not retreated from their reforms, including shrinking the size of government, and they fully understand any retrenchment would be very damaging.

It was a rainy Saturday morning in March.  I was 14 years old and bored out of my mind with nothing to do.  Stuck indoors, I stared through the rain-splattered window of my room and sighed.  My eyes wandered to the bookshelf nearby, and fell on a book that a friend of my father's had given me some time ago as a present. It had remained ignored and unopened, attracting dust rather than my attention, until now.  The spine of the glossy book jacket proclaimed its title - The Complete Book of Marvels.  What was that about?  The author was Richard Halliburton.  Who was he? I reached for the book, and my life was changed forever. Our home was in a prosaic suburb of Los Angeles - Glendale, California.  Like most other kids, I knew very little about the world.  America was an enormous island, with the rest of the world on the other side of huge oceans, far away. The inside of the book jacket told me that Halliburton had been a famous adventurer in the 1920s and ‘30s.  The book was 20 years old, and was a compilation of his exploits and experiences.  As I paged through the descriptions and black-and-white pictures of dozens of the world's most extraordinary places, I was transfixed. The world, it dawned on me, was a vast place of endless wonders and adventures. What mesmerized me in particular was Halliburton's account of climbing the Matterhorn. I stared at his picture of the Matterhorn, entitled "The Tiger of the Alps," for the longest time. Then, as if I were in a trance, I found myself getting up from the chair in my room and walking down the hall to my parents' room, where I found my Dad in his easy chair, reading an Erle Stanley Gardner detective novel. He looked up at me, waiting for me to say something.  I laid the Halliburton book over the Gardner book on his lap, open to the double-spread picture of the Matterhorn.  He looked down at the picture, then looked back up, still waiting.  I didn't consciously say anything.  I pointed at the picture and heard myself say, "Dad, I want to climb that mountain."

"My friends, we've got them just where we want them," Sen. John McCain said in a revamped stump speech Monday (10/13). Since Sen. Barack Hussein Obama has leads ranging from 4 to 11 percentage points in the major polls, few conservative pundits share Sen. McCain's optimism. Given the severity of the financial crisis, it's doubtful a Republican ticket headed by Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan could prevail this November.   The amazing thing is  Sen. McCain still has a chance to win. That chance will evaporate if economic turmoil continues.  But if the stock and credit markets stabilize and panic subsides, Sen. McCain still could prevail -- but only if he elevates his game in the final debate tomorrow (10/15).

Can you name a country that has a flat 10 percent income tax on both personal and corporate income, and that is also running a budget surplus of 8 percent of gross domestic product (the equivalent of the United States running a budget surplus of more than $1 trillion)? The surprising answer is Bulgaria, formerly one of Europe's most backward countries. Most of the former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe have instituted flat-rate income tax systems. Estonia was the first, and Bulgaria is one of the most recent, having only moved to the 10 percent flat rate at the beginning of this year. It's one of several lessons America and the politicians she elects could learn from Bulgaria.