Jed Babbin has an excellent idea of how to rescue some of the American children being held hostage in Saudi Arabia.

According to DoneDeal, Greg Bear's epic S-F novel, The Forge of God, its sequal, The Anvil of God, and a yet to be written third book in the series, are being developed as motion pictures.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey is having fun, according to the Washington Times, with those who said that Welfare Reform would be a disaster for the poor. The real record?

•There are 4.2 million fewer people living in poverty today.
•The poverty rate of single mothers is at its lowest point in U.S. history.
•Employment of single mothers has nearly doubled and employment of mothers without a high school diploma has increased by 60 percent.
•The share of children living in single-mother families has fallen, with no correlated increase in abuse against women and children.

Looks like the covert phase of the liberation of Iraq is in full swing. And everybody in the country seems to be cool with that, except of course for Chris Mathews and Joe Biden.

Next stop should be, in my opinion, Saudi Arabia. The reasons are stated below.

The Sunday morning talkshows are having a group orgasm over the thirtieth anniversary of Watergate. Ah, those were to days, when the journalists were young, when they actually brought down a President, and when people still watched network news.

The White House, increadibly, seems to be about to reward Palestinian terrorism with something called "provisional statehood". If that weren't horrible enough, Ari Fleischer has given the back of his hand to Pat Roush and dozens of other American women whose daughters have been kidnapped by their Saudi fathers and are being held in Saudi Arabia under barbaric conditions, in violation of American law and every standard of human decency. This kind of appeasement of Saudi barbarism and arrogance is not only bad policy, as it sends a signal that they can walk over the United States any time they want, but horrible politics as the mothers and grandmothers of these girls are not going to give up and Congress, which is showing more honor than the White House and especially the State Department in this matter, will take action if no one else does.

These, of course, are the same "allies" who fund terrorists and stoke the hatred of America and Israel on state sponsered media. It's an amazing situation. If a group of American girls were being held by Al Qaeda terrorists, the President would use all the might and majesty of the United States to get them back. But in a situation which is morally no different, our government seems to wish that the issue would go away. This is intolerable, indefensiable, and unteniable.

The President should immediately send the following message to the Saudi potentates. They must behave by the civilized norms of humanity, release these girls, American citizens all, and stop funding and formenting terrorism, or else diplomatic and economic sanctions will be imposed. If he doesn't, Congress is going to do it for him sooner or later.

And of course, We the People can have our say. If we abhore the kidnapping and mistreatment of American girls, we can contact President George W. Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney, or contact the White House by more conventional means:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

COMMENTS: 202-456-1111
SWITCHBOARD: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461

And as for the State Department, the focus of dishonor on this issue:

Main switchboard number:
(202) 647-4000

Main address:
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

And, of course, the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

Three men are sitting on a bench across the street from the Alamo. One's a
Texan wearing a Stetson hat. One's a Muslim wearing a turban, and the third
an Apache Indian with an eagle feather woven in his hair.

The Indian is rather glum and says, "Once my people were many, but now we are
few."

The Muslim puffs up and says, "Once were few, but now we are many millions."

The Texan adjusts his hat, finishes rolling a smoke, leans back on the bench
and drawls, "That's cause we ain't played cowboys and Muslims yet."

I just finished reading a wonderful alternate history novel.

It's entitled Hannibals Children by John Maddox Roberts.

The premise is that Hannibal defeated the Romans in the Second Punic War. Instead of destroying Rome, he allows the Romans to go into exile in the far north. The Romans found a second empire along the banks of the Danube and conquer the Germans and the Gauls. The story picks up a century later, with the Romans ready now to march south and take back Italy and pay the Carthegenians back for their humiliation.

Naturally it's the first in a series.

Japan seems to have the capability to send people into space, if it so wishes.

Under the new management of Sean O'Keefe, NASA seems to be on track to actually getting a handle on the costs of the space station.

After that, the task is to find ways to take ISS beyond core complete. My suggestion is to take the space station private and work that problem out commercially.

Hot on the heels of the proposed remake of Three Hundred Spartans, now comes a remark of El Cid, the early sixties epic staring Charleton Heston about the 11th Century hero who united Christians and Muslims in Spain against an invading army of Islamic fanatics. What an interesting message for our age that film would make.

Richard Starr thinks that the Democrats are like bad poker players, unable to play effectively with a losing hand. George W. Bush has all of the aces, apparently.

Now does that make Dubya the Bret Maverick of American politics? Well, he does have a slight resemblence to Mel Gibson (James Garner is too old and can't play conservative charectors anyway.)

The Bush Administration has relaxed EPA rules in order to allow utilities to modernize some old power plants which were exempt from clean air rules under a grandfather clause of the Clean Air Act. The rules being relaxed would have required utilities to put in expensive antipollution devices, which meant that utilities were just declining to modernize. Now utilities will be able to make their plants more effecient, which will decrease pollution and lower utility bills.

Naturally the Denocrats and environmental extremists are going berserk, actually accusing the administration of wanted to kill people.

Some of my gentle readers have complained that they often can't find Children of Apollo in the stores and that very often the point and click stores (such as Amazon) have the book on back order. Chalk that one down to my small press publisher's not being able to keep up with the unexpected demand. I've been assured that steps are being taken to correct that situation.

The quickest and cheapest way to get a copy, in the meantime, is to order directly from the publisher. Also, check at the space website or the alternate history website which are listed to the left. I have bookmarked all the online stores I know of which carry the book.

Someone's doing a remake of the classic early 60s epic Three Hundred Spartans which stared Richard Egan as King Leonidas who led the Spartans at the Battle of Thermoplyae. That makes two Themoplyae projects, including Gates of Fire from the Steven Pressfield novel.

The idea that there is a link between clerical celibacy and child molestation is, to say the least, controversial. Is there something about clerical celibacy which turns people into pederasts? Or does clerical celibacy attract men who have a prodisposition toward little boys? Or, as many of my conservative friends suggest, are both suppositions bunk?

One thing about having married clerics (an arrangement which seems to have worked well in Protestant dominations for five hundred years and in Judaism for thousands of years), one would know who enjoys sex with adults and therefore are not likely to prey on the altar boys. Not a perfect correlation, of course, but a good, general rule of thumb nevertheless.

The ABM Treaty is dead. At last it is legal for the United States to defend itself against missiles.

Now that Afghan women have been liberated from Islamic fanaticism by the might of American power, it's time for another group of women to be liberated. These are American women and girls held in Saudi Arabia by their Saudi fathers, in violation of American law and every decent idea of human rights. They are being aided and abetted by our own State Department.

Professor Reynolds muses on how future space settlers will govern themselves. It's a situation which I think Captain William Whittington of Virginia (circi 17th Century) and Lt. Cornelius Whittington of the Continental Army (1776-1783) would be well familier with. And more importantly they would approve.

In a desperate move to keep American defenseless, a bunch of House Democrats (along with out and out socialist Bernie Sanders) has sued in federal court to stop the country from withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.