My friend Edward Goodliffe called me yesterday from the offices of Pan Southern Petroleum Corp. in Puckett, Mississippi.  He’s on Pan Southern’s board and wanted to tell me about a fascinating oil play he thought ToThePointers should know about.

There’s a small reserve in a remote area of the state called Bentonia Field.  It was drilled in the late 1980s by Coho Resources and has thus far yielded 1,700,000 barrels of oil from multiple pay zones.  Coho, however, has suffered massive mismanagement and has gone in and out of bankruptcy several times.  Bentonia became neglected, with its equipment falling into

In a talk entitled "The Map of the Future" I gave last week in Dallas, I discussed which countries throughout the world were or could become the greatest threats to America's national security. At the top of the list, more dangerous than Iran or North Korea or China, I placed Mexico. The bottomless inferiority complex that Mexico feels towards America is summed up in an old saying known to all Mexicans as "Mexico's Curse," the lament that their country is "So far from God, so close to the United States." The truth, however, is the reverse. Today, Americans lament "America's Curse," that their country is so close to Mexico.

Ronald Reagan was fond of describing the ultimate optimist:  a young boy digging determinedly through a huge pile of horse manure, shouting "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!"So here I am, that kid trying to find the pony buried in this pile of, ah ... manure the Supreme Court just dumped on America.

In early 1994, Hillary Clinton was riding high. Her plan for government seizure of the entire health care system of America was being treated by the media as a fait accompli. The Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich in the House and Bob Dole in the Senate, had capitulated. HillaryCare was a done deal.Then one lone Senator stood up in the well of the United States Senate and announced that he was going to single-handedly pull the emergency brake on the runaway train. "This plan to nationalize health care," he announced, "will pass over my cold dead political body." By September, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell bitterly pronounced HillaryCare legislatively dead due to "Republican obstructionism." But the obstruction wasn't Republican. It was one single Republican Senator. His name was Phil Gramm.

Book Discussion : Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Scholastic: 2003)

Like so many other kids, my son learned how to read by reading Harry Potter. He was five years old, and would sit next to me as I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to him.

He began picking out words as his eyes followed my hand moving down the page as I read. Then phrases, then parts of sentences, and by the end of the book, entire sentences. That was in 1997. When Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets came out the next year,

Let's do what we're supposed to do here, and get right "to the point": The most important country in the world at this moment is Iran.

To be "led down the garden path" is to be lured by subterfuge into a garden of seduction. The metaphor is of modern origin, with the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) revealing its first use in the 1920s. It denotes being misled, deceived, conned, seduced, hoodwinked. This is why the so-called Road Map for Arab-Israeli Peace should be called the Garden Path instead.George Bush has been led down the Garden Path by the State Department. The entire "Road Map" enterprise is an ego-trip by Foggy Bottom bureaucrats in the obsessively pro-Arab Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (BNEA). Led by Assistant Secretary William Burns, the BNEA guys feel they have been shown-up and humiliated by Rumsfeld's Pentagon. They look upon the military victory in Iraq as their diplomatic failure. They are determined to have the geopolitical spotlight taken off Rummy and shine instead on whom it rightfully belongs: them.

In 1957, a 21 year-old kid named Otto Kuczynski showed up at Ellis Island in New York harbor with his teen-age wife, Hërta, an 8 month-old baby boy, and all the money he had in the world: $27.For centuries, Otto's family lived in the village of Beregomet in a fairly-tale region of primeval forests and ancient castles tucked into a corner of southeastern Europe known to the Romans as Dacia, and millennia later, to the Austrians as Galicia. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up after WWI, Galicia was made a part of Romania and called Northern Bucovina. The place became a nightmare war-zone during WWII, with Otto spending his pre-teen years trying not be killed by Nazis and Russians.