Some good thoughts on taxes from the Heritage Foundation

Lawmakers should also enact a federal Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights statute that limits annual spending increases to the inflation rate plus population growth. Such a law would force lawmakers to do what families already do: set priorities and make trade-offs. A federal Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights would create a framework to save as much as $4 trillion over the next decade, which is enough to make the recent tax cuts permanent, fix the Alternative Minimum Tax, transition Social Security to personal accounts, and reduce the budget deficit.[6]

Increased tax revenues show once again that the 2003 tax relief is working. Yet long-term spending projections remain dire. Lawmakers should not abandon efforts to rein in spending.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE!!!

Oh My! NO more troubles?

To my small readership I pose the following question. What do you think of this idea

Can't remember phone numbers, worried about an upcoming exam or desperately want to give up smoking? In future, the answer will be simple: just pop a pill.

a new report by leading scientists in the fields of psychology and neuroscience argues that, very soon, there really will be a pill for every ill.

"It is possible that [advances] could usher in a new era of drug use without addiction," said the report by Foresight, the government's science-based thinktank.

"In a world that is increasingly non-stop and competitive, the individual's use of such substances may move from the fringe to the norm."

However, the report said the widespread adoption of new brain-enhancing drugs was not without risks and would raise "significant ethical, social and practical issues."

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AND POST SOME COMMENTS

Consider what kind of BARBARIANS we face

The Muslim American Society reports.

In Iraq a bomber has killed 24 children who surounded a US military Humvee where soldiers were passing out candy to the kids.

Some 20 more children were wounded in the blast, while a U.S. soldier died and three were injured, hospital and U.S. sources said.

"Children gathered round the Americans who were handing out sweets. Suddenly a suicide car bomber drove round from a side street and blew himself up," Sergeant David Abrams told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"The vehicle, laden with explosives, drove up to a [U.S. military] Humvee before detonating. Many Iraqi civilians, mostly children, were around the Humvee at the time of the blast," Abrams said.

Abu Hamed whose 12-year-old son Mohammed was killed, said: "I was at home. I heard the explosion. I rushed outside to find my son. I only found his bicycle."

He found his son in the hospital morgue.

"I recognized him from his head. The rest of the body was completely burnt."

Among the young bodies at the morgue, some headless or missing limbs, two children still clutched blue chocolate wrappers.

The attack stunned the impoverished east Baghdad neighborhood of mostly Shiite Muslims and Christians, reports the AP.

Hassan Mohammed, whose 13-year-old son Alaa also died, swore at insurgents for attacking civilians.

"Why do they attack our children? They just destroyed one U.S. Humvee, but they killed dozens of our children," he said as women screamed, slapped their faces and beat themselves over the head.

"What sort of a resistance is this? It's a crime," he added.

At Kindi hospital, one distraught woman swathed in black sat cross-legged outside the operating room. "May God curse the mujahedeen and their leader," she cried as she pounded her own head in grief, reports the AP.

The entire article can be accessed HERE.

The next time some one tells you that Christians are uptight prudes....

.... just remember this outstanding book review HERE.

Jay Wood reviews the book Lust by renowned philosopher Simon Blackburn, who thinks that Christian faith has repressed people.

Wood challenges Blackburn:

Christianity and natural reason have long taught that our appetites for food, drink, sleep, sex, and the other natural pleasure associated with the body can be out of whack, ill-tuned, excessive, or deficient. The unprecedented abundance of food, leisure, drink, and sexual stimulation that contemporary Americans enjoy has neither increased our fulfillment nor decreased the number and degree of dysfunctions associated with these goods, as any talk show or bestseller list will attest. Moreover, Christianity has never regarded lust, or the other sins of appetite, as the worst of sins—though they may be among the most common, arising as they often do in the "heat of the moment" and without the full consent of the will (see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 154, art. 3). Lust can't compare in seriousness with envy, anger, and the many species of pride, culminating in the satanic desire to supplant God. Rather, Christianity has always taught that our appetite for sexual pleasure, just like those for food, drink, and sleep, needs to be tutored, trained with bit and bridle, sensitive to the slightest touch of command, lest it rampage out of control, dragging us helter-skelter after it.

Blackburn thinks that the highest state of sexual desire and activity occurs amidst what he calls "Hobbesian unity," after Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher famous for describing life in the state of nature as "poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short." Hobbes wrote of sexual intimacy, which Blackburn elaborates on as a state in which sexual partners are in a communion of body and mind, reciprocally sensitive to each other, "responding and adjusting to each other delicately for the entire performance," much like musicians who more or less unconsciously adjust to each other's playing. Blackburn seems not to grasp that the attentive reciprocity lovers achieve in Hobbesian unity not only does not qualify as lust, it is a most happy aspect of conjugal bliss, as those "repressed" Puritans pointed out using the same musical metaphors long before Blackburn. One Puritan writer wrote that married couples "may joyfully give due benevolence one to the other; as two musical instruments rightly fitted do make a most pleasant and sweet harmony in a well tuned consort"

TAKE TIME TO READ THE WHOLE REVIEW

Deficit Reduction

The New York Times reports that the projected federal deficit has shrunk by nearly 100 BILLION dollars.

It would be interesting to see how the deficit would be doing if it weren't for the war on terror spending that was forced on the country after 9/11. AND IF PRESIDENT BUSH HAD NOT INCREASED DOMESTIC, NON DEFENSE SPENDING DRAMATICALLY.

But, the least one can say is. . . . cutting taxes does not seem to have ruined us yet. The Times, however, can't really get enthusiastic about it.

For one thing, analysts note, federal spending has continued to climb rapidly, about 7 percent this year. Despite cutbacks in many domestic programs, spending has surged for the war in Iraq as well as in certain benefit programs providing health coverage.

In addition, while a lot of the increase in tax revenue flows from the improving economy and higher incomes, part of the jump stemmed from a special factor: the expiration of a temporary tax break that allowed companies to write off their investment in new equipment much more rapidly than normal.

That tax break reduced revenue by about $61 billion in 2004, but it merely postponed taxes that companies would have to pay once their equipment was fully depreciated.

Other financial hurdles may be down the road. Mr. Bush's intention to extend his tax cuts indefinitely, and to add new ones, would drain more than $1.4 trillion from government coffers over the next 10 years.

As the Medicare expansion into prescription drugs begins to take effect, the cost is estimated at about $33 billion in 2006, with increases every year after that. In 2015, the annual cost of the program is expected to be about $137 billion.

A senior White House official cautioned that it was too early to make definitive judgments about whether the tax cuts had fulfilled the promises of "supply side" economics, a Reagan era concept that posits a direct relationship between lower tax rates and faster economic growth.

"We need to wait for more data," said Ben S. Bernanke, who took over this month as chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, at a conference on Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute.

But Mr. Bernanke said the tax cuts had undoubtedly contributed to economic growth, which in turn bolstered tax receipts.

"One consequence of strong income growth is that we are enjoying higher-than-expected levels of tax collections," he said.

The Times suggests that the President's future tax cuts would take 1.4 trillion out of the budget over the next 10 years. But in the sentence right above that they note that the first tax cut "reduced revenue by about $61 billion in 2004, but it merely postponed taxes that companies would have to pay once their equipment was fully depreciated."

Given that the deficit has shrunk by nearly 100 billion, doesn't that mean that there has been a positive cash flow for the government by lessening taxes? So, maybe 1.4 trillion in tax cuts will produce well over 2 trillion in tax revenues.

JUST A THOUGHT

Iraq and al Queda -- the Connections

In the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn reveal the willful ignorance of the media's and the anti-war movement's insistence that "THERE WAS NO CONNECTION BETWEEN IRAQ AND AL QUEDA'S AGGRESSION TOWARD THE US."

. . .more than two years after the Iraqi regime of Saddamm Hussein was ousted, there is much we do not know about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. We do know, however, that there was one. We know about this relationship not from Bush administration assertions but from internal Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents recovered in Iraq after the war--documents that have been authenticated by a U.S. intelligence community long hostile to the very idea that any such relationship exists.

We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden's request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE

Pope Benedict XI Opposes Harry Potter Novels

The following is an online report about a letter from then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XI, expressing concern about J. K. Rowling's enormously popular novel series about Harry Potter.

LifeSiteNews.com

Wednesday July 13, 2005

Pope Opposes Harry Potter Novels - Signed Letters from Cardinal Ratzinger Now Online

RIMSTING, Germany, July 13, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - LifeSiteNews.com has obtained and made available online copies of two letters sent by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was recently elected Pope, to a German critic of the Harry Potter novels. In March 2003, a month after the English press throughout the world falsely proclaimed that Pope John Paul II approved of Harry Potter, the man who was to become his successor sent a letter to a Gabriele Kuby outlining his agreement with her opposition to J.K. Rowling's offerings. (See below for links to scanned copies of the letters signed by Cardinal Ratzinger.)

As the sixth issue of Rowling's Harry Potter series - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - is about to be released, the news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger expressed serious reservations about the novels is now finally being revealed to the English-speaking world still under the impression the Vatican approves the Potter novels.

In a letter dated March 7, 2003 Cardinal Ratzinger thanked Kuby for her "instructive" book Harry Potter - gut oder böse (Harry Potter- good or evil?), in which Kuby says the Potter books corrupt the hearts of the young, preventing them from developing a properly ordered sense of good and evil, thus harming their relationship with God while that relationship is still in its infancy.

"It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly," wrote Cardinal Ratzinger.

The letter also encouraged Kuby to send her book on Potter to the Vatican prelate who quipped about Potter during a press briefing which led to the false press about the Vatican support of Potter. At a Vatican press conference to present a study document on the New Age in April 2003, one of the presenters - Fr. Peter Fleedwood - made a positive comment on the Harry Potter books in response to a question from a reporter. Headlines such as "Pope Approves Potter" (Toronto Star), "Pope Sticks Up for Potter Books" (BBC), "Harry Potter Is Ok With The Pontiff" (Chicago Sun Times) and "Vatican: Harry Potter's OK with us" (CNN Asia) littered the mainstream media.

In a second letter sent to Kuby on May 27, 2003, Cardinal Ratzinger "gladly" gave his permission to Kuby to make public "my judgement about Harry Potter."

The most prominent Potter critic in North America, Catholic novelist and painter Michael O'Brien commented to LifeSiteNews.com on the "judgement" of now-Pope Benedict saying, "This discernment on the part of Benedict XVI reveals the Holy Father's depth and wide ranging gifts of spiritual discernment." O'Brien, author of a book dealing with fantasy literature for children added, "it is consistent with many of the statements he's been making since his election to the Chair of Peter, indeed for the past 20 years - a probing accurate read of the massing spiritual warfare that is moving to a new level of struggle in western civilization. He is a man in whom a prodigious intellect is integrated with great spiritual gifts. He is the father of the universal church and we would do well to listen to him."

MY THOUGHTS:

What is troublesome about Harry Potter? The issue that trouble's most is the magic and references to manipulating events through magic. But what is it that is problematic about magic in a Christian worldview? The most basic problem is that magic is a worldview that keeps the practicioner of the "arts" in control of things. So far as I can interpret, the Old Testament's rejection of magic is based on this concern. Magic manipulates forces and ultimately magic is seen, in pagan cultures, as a way of manipulating even the divine. The God of Israel, of course, would have none of that. Worship and trust, not control, is the attitude of the heart that the reality of the God of the scriptures requires of us.

In the place of manipulation and control, the scriptures invite people to a relationship with God based on faith, trust, obedience, love, and peace. In the place of spells that can change the nature of things (magic), the God revealed in scripture calls us to prayer. Of course, many Christians approach prayer in a more magical than scriptural way, as though our praying in and of itself changes things. (God changes things by allowing us the honor of making our petitions known, but that does not insure any results.) And we are called to worship God in the midst of life's challenges, all the while seeking to accomplish His will. But ultimately, the Christian knows the final result is not in our hands, but in the Triune God's control.

Now, having considered some things that Christians ultimately ought to reject about HP, let's consider the following aspects of these novels. First, the Potter series accentuates the importance of courage and friendship and honor. These are traditional virtues of Greek and Roman culture that the early Christians affirmed as the highest expressions that non-Christian culture could produce. Surely Christians can rejoice that Rowling has written novels that celebrate these virtues. Secondly, Harry Potter's adventures always reference the cruciality and the power of Love and self-giving in the world. These things are what Karl Barth, the great German theologian of the 20th century, would call "echoes" of the Gospel -- not adequate witnesses, but things that Christians can affirm and be glad for. Thirdly, for a kid from a Christian family to read the Potter series is an opportunity for the parents (assuming that the parents know enough about their own faith) to help the child think through the differences between the Christian worldview and that of Hogwarts. Finally, the Church needs to engage our children with the Gospel in a way that expands their imaginations, so that what Cardinal Ratzinger called "subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly," need not be so tempting.

The Christian reaction to Harry Potter ought not be simply rejection, but seriousness about the wonder, the beauty, the glory, the power, the truth, and the life of the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Stem Cell debate, despite the best scientific findings

The President and his allies in the Congress are attempting to let science set the political agenda for Stem Cell research and avoid the problematic moral questions that Embroynic stem cell research raises.

Here is the Fox News report

go here for a good article on Adult Stem cell research and why it gets so little notice

86% of Americans expect democrats to unreasonably oppose President Bush's nominee(s) to the Supreme Court

At least that is what a CNN poll says. Upordownvote.com has the details

Mark Levin on the President's failure to be loyal to his base

He lays out the situation well, here

A well-reasoned Catholic Response to Neo-Darwinian Naturalism

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna has written a very good article discussing how Darwinian Naturalism is incompatible with Catholic (and I would say all Christian) doctrinal teaching.

Here's a taste:

The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things. Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the "death of God" that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the philosophers.

Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.

Read it here

London suicide bombers

Well, its official...........

The terrorist attack in London was carried out by four suicide/homocide bombers. Read about it in the Hindustan Times

Here's the really troubling part. This kind of murder and attack on our nations is one that we cannot reasonably expect to be able to defend ourselves against in any comprehensive way.

The only option for people in the Western democracies is to live courageously and watchfully and be ready to die.

Thomas Sowell on the Supreme Court and the Future

Read Thomas Sowell's excellent analysis of the current breaux-ha-ha over the courts.

Here!

Meanwhile, many of the signs of social degeneration can be traced to the courts that are supposed to be upholding law and order but which have too often become places for judges to indulge their egos and impose fashionable theories as the law of the land.

Some judges and Supreme Court justices may flatter themselves that they are helping the poor and the disadvantaged but their arbitrary notions often hurt the less fortunate most of all.

Whose homes are going to be bulldozed to make way for a new shopping mall or hotel complex under the Supreme Court's expanded notion of eminent domain? Mansions in Beverly Hills? Condos on Park Avenue? Or working class homes and apartment buildings?

And here!

Many people are too young to realize that there was never a federal ban against abortions before Roe v. Wade created a "Constitutional right" to abortion out of thin air. Before that, the federal government had nothing to say about the subject and the various states had a variety of laws regulating abortions.

What is even more dangerous than this political fixation on abortion is the underlying notion that judicial nominees are to be confirmed or voted down on the basis of how they might rule on particular policy issues.

The separation of powers means not only that judges should stay out of policy issues that belong to legislative bodies but also that the Senate should respect the judicial branch and not try to predetermine how judges will rule on legal issues.

Then here!

A Justice confirmed to the Supreme Court by a narrow vote in the Senate will have just as much authority as a Justice confirmed unanimously.

Regardless of who is nominated to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor or what the outcome of the confirmation vote may be, something urgently needs to be done to stop Senate confirmation hearings from being scenes of public humiliations that can deprive the American people of the services of highly qualified individuals.

We certainly need better quality people than most of those now serving on the Supreme Court. Putting nominees through a cheap hazing circus on TV is not the way to get such people.

A Muddle headed Earth worshipper?

James Wolcott writes here.

I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong--Mother Nature's fist of fury, Gaia's stern rebuke. Considering the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature with deforesting, stripmining, and the destruction of animal habitat, it only seems fair that nature get some of its own back and teach us that there are forces greater than our own.

It would seem that for some people such as Wolcott the death of humans and the destruction of people's lives is something to revel in. Someday Wolcott will discover that there is indeed a "force greater than our own." To stand before God with a cold-heart toward the suffering of helpless and innocent human beings ............ YIKES! (Remember people can only live in the world they have and the people of Alabama and West Florida did not create the technology that they must use that contributes to global warming or enviornmental toxins.)

I guess Wolcott was estatic when the tsunami his south Asia.

Robert Bork's latest article online --- The Supreme Court

Here he lays out an incredibly incisive analysis of the current state of the Court.

What do the nomination of a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor, constitutional law, and moral chaos have to do with one another? A good deal more than you may think.

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay wrote of America that "providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs." Such a people enjoy the same moral assumptions, the cement that forms a society rather than a cluster of groups. Though Jay's conditions have long been obsolete, until recently Americans did possess a large body of common moral assumptions rooted in our original Anglo-Protestant culture, and expressed in law. Now, however, a variety of disintegrating influences are undermining that unanimity, not least among them is the capture of constitutional law by an extreme liberationist philosophy. America is becoming a cacophony of voices proclaiming different, or no, truths.

Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution, and philosophical incompetence is lethal.

Consider just a few of the court's accomplishments: The justices have weakened the authority of other institutions, public and private, such as schools, businesses and churches; assisted in sapping the vitality of religion through a transparently false interpretation of the establishment clause; denigrated marriage and family; destroyed taboos about vile language in public; protected as free speech the basest pornography, including computer-simulated child pornography; weakened political parties and permitted prior restraints on political speech, violating the core of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech; created a right to abortion virtually on demand, invalidating the laws of all 50 states; whittled down capital punishment, on the path, apparently, to abolishing it entirely; mounted a campaign to normalize homosexuality, culminating soon, it seems obvious, in a right to homosexual marriage; permitted discrimination on the basis of race and sex at the expense of white males; and made the criminal justice system needlessly slow and complex, tipping the balance in favor of criminals.

Read the entire thing. He is right to the bone.

Supreme Court and Liberal fear

E. J. Dionne, a not too very original pundit, thinks George Bush should not expect to be able to nominate Supreme Court justices.

Many Republicans are already saying that since Bush won the last election and since Republicans control the Senate, the president's choice should be confirmed with dispatch. But as former judge Robert Bork wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court "is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy." Today's Republican majority, based on Bush's 50.7 percent of the vote in 2004, has no inherent right to exercise near-total control over that "most powerful branch."

What Dionne does not recognize is that the Republicans also increased their hold on the Senate by four seats to 55.

But, more importantly, Dionne does not think that democratic principles and a republican form of government are adequate for governance. Note his fear that the Supreme Court is the "most powerful branch" of government. That tells you how Dionne sees politics. The Court has too much power, because the Legislative Branch is so disfunctional and so unwilling to exercise its constitutional power to limit the jurisdiction of the Court (Article 2).

If I know Robert Bork (who Dionne quotes as an authority -- what an irony), Bork was not suggesting that the Court should be the most powerful. He was simply describing the way our politics have be working for the last 30 years. A self-govening peopl, govern themselves through deliberation by elected officials and reach compromise or, where compromises is not possible, live with the consequences of the process -- AND THEN SEEK REDRESS THROUGH THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS.

READ DIONNE'S ARTICLE

Journalistic Integrity

On the one hand one might admire Judith Miller's unwillingness to reveal her source and instead go to jail for civil contempt of court. On the other, however, this can do nothing but help her career. Four months in jail will make for a great book and unencumbered research time. No doubt it will be hard for any family she might have, but in the long view of things......... she will benefit.

Read this report about the prison where she is incarcerated. It ain't Alcatraz!

The London Attack and the needs of the poor

The G8 summit was supposed to focus on the needs of Africa and global warming. Thanks to Al queda (if Al Q was the perpetrator) the poorest of the poor in Africa might get short-changed because of the blood-thirsty grandstanding of radical Islam. Now the attention is on terrorism.

The mighty cowards (or pretenders?) speak

This post was on the Al Qayda Fortress Internet site, purportedly by a group calling themselves Secret Organisation Group of Al-Qa'ida of Jihad Organisation in Europe.

"In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and the dauntless fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

"O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader Government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Here are the comments of London's Mayor, Ken Livingstone. (Hat Tip: The Corner)

"I want to say one thing, specifically to the world today - this was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful, it was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers, it was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian ... young and old ... that isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted fate, it is an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder."

"They seek to divide London, they seek Londoners to turn against each other ... this city of London is the greatest in the world because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack."

(SPEAKING DIRECTLY TO THE COWARDS OF AL QUEDA)
"I know that you personally do not fear to give your own life in exchange to taking others [that is why you are so dangerous] ... but I know you do fear you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society ... in the days that follow, look at our airports, look at our seaports and look at our railway stations ... you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world, will arrive in London to become Londoners, to fulfill their dream and achieve their potential ... whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail."

Bully for Ken and for the English who follow his call.

Terrorism in London

Read these eyewitness reports

The big question is: What will the ultimate reaction of the English people be. One can only hope that it will be the reaction of those stalwart Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Scottish, Welsh types that was manifest during the Nazi bombing of London.

Perhaps Tony Blair might become less infatuated with pleasing the European nay-sayers and focused on the dangers inherent in a world where terrorism and terrorists are tolerated and catered to, even passively.