Jeanine Pirro: Time's Up

For those of you outside New York, this is a non-story. For New Yorkers it is the latest saga of a woman who, while looking the part, just never seems to have ever been able to pull it together.

She's attractive. In sound bites she sounds intelligent, though I've never been really impressed. She's attractive. She's been the Westchester County DA for years, and is a semi-regular on cable talk shows. Her husband, the ex-con, is a major contributor and highly influential, which certainly opened doors for her. And she's attractive.

So Republicans in my state have regularly trotted her out in attempts to run her for statewide office. And every time something derails her nascent campaign.

Years ago it was the husband's tax fraud conviction. This year, she started to run against Hillary, though that campaign tripped right out of the box when she lost one of the pages to her speech, and stood there like an idiot for minutes, crystallizing the image of her as a put-up all-show no-substance candidate. She looked like a beauty queen trying to do calculus--I was shocked she didn't try to fill the gap by saying the thing she most wanted was world peace.

Now her campaign against the detestable Andrew Cuomo is dead in the wake of revelations that this DA tried to get Bernie Kerik to illegally tape her cheatin' husband.

She may be an attractive person, but she is an ugly candidate.

New York State's Republican Party is a disaster. I don't know if Pirro is a cause or a symptom, but it is certainly time for her to exit, stage left.

Herr Pope & The Muslims

By some accounts the Pope has now issued his fourth apology to the Muslims of the world, thus continuing to act like he's been assigned penance for impure thoughts-- "OK Benny, give me five Hail Mary's, three Acts of Contrition and seven apologies."

Enough.

Three quick thoughts on the Muslims:

1) When do we in the West get to take a breath from droning on that Islam is a religion of peace, despite all of the evidence to the contrary?

2) When do we get to stop apologizing to these maniacs for such blasphemies as cartoons and chidings about their penchant for violence in the name of religion?

3) When do the Muslims of the world start apologizing for killing innocent people in the name of religion, or in the name of hurt feelings? Or better yet, when do they simply stop the killing?

Four quick thoughts on the Pope:

1) What is he apologizing for? He purposefully quoted an ancient Byzantine emperor who decried the Islamic requirement of spreading their religion at swordpoint. Christians certainly did so in centuries past, but I think it's safe to assume that Christians have no conquerors converting natives at gunpoint anymore. But we do have Muslims trying to do so now, so why was the Pope wrong to point that out?

2) What he did wrong, in my opinion, was to fail to deliver his message clearly and in a non-academic arena. He apparently has a deaf ear to the nuances of modern media and the nature of the lunatics who make up the Middle Eastern "streets".

3) The attempted spin has destroyed any semblance of higher moral ground this Pope may have tried to claim-- he is coming off like some two-bit politician caught with his hand in the cookie jar, or up the intern's dress-- slippin' and slidin' and spinnin'. Not pretty. I don't think it's too much to ask of any world leader, and certainly not a religious one that he or she: thinks about what he's going to say; says what he means; means what he says; and stands by what he's said.

4) This Pope has shown zero tolerance, zero humor, zero grace. There is an old joke describing a poorly run organization that it runs with Italian efficiency and German charm.

I give you today's Vatican.

None of which, by the way, is any excuse for Muslims to kill a nun, destroy property, or go into their usual hysteria any time somebody says something they don't like.

Chavez' Rant: An American Wake-Up Call?

I recently wrote about my own belated concern about our dependence on oil, specifically foreign oil. The recent nonsense at the U.N. is further proof that our addiction to oil is a threat to the lives of our soldiers and our society.

We didn't learn from OPEC, a name we rarely hear anymore. For those of you under 40, OPEC was an organization formed by a group of Middle East oil producers to control the price and production of oil. Their spikes in prices and their unilateral cuts in production wreaked havoc on our economy in the 70's. Increases in production elsewhere, the lifting of artificial domestic restrictions here in the U.S., and the discovery and development of rich oil fields in the North Sea and in the Gulf of Mexico slowly weakened OPEC's grip on us.

But as Chavez and the other petty dictators demonstrated in their speeches at the UN, we may be seeing the rise of a new form of OPEC, one specifically targeted against us, and not all Western countries.

For now, they still need our dollars as much as we need their oil. But as China and India develop that equation may tip dangerously against us.

I wish Bush would seize the day now, but I doubt he will. So our next best hope is that the 2008 election becomes a referendum on US security on all fronts, with an emphasis on keeping us free from terrorism of all kinds, including oil-driven economic terror.

Hybrids; solar power; built-in conservation; a pox on all SUV's; an upgrade to our electric delivery system; perhaps nuclear power; research and development on a Manhattan project scale.

These technologies are here today. We need to act now so that we need never fear the Chavez' of the world.