The clerical dictatorship in Iran wants the defeat of President Bush because his commitment to political democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and his endorsement of freedom for the people of Iran, threatens a regime that knows it is deeply unpopular.

Fidel Castro also wants to see Bush defeated because his determination to help democratic allies could threaten the emerging pro-Castro axis in Latin America. Both dictatorships have plans that could result in visible and sharp foreign policy setbacks that might cost President Bush the 2004 election.

Georgians enthusiastically elected Mikheil Saakashvili president of Georgia on Sunday, Jan. 4. He is a the youthful, center-right leader of the Georgian opposition who overthrew President Eduard Shevardnadze in the "Rose Revolution" last November. Mr. Saakashvili has received more than 80 percent of the vote in elections that were the most peaceful and transparent since Georgian independence.

In mainstream discussions taxation amounts to little more than the unpleasant burden that comes from government spending, no different from having to earn money so as to buy stuff in any normal household. Politicians make spending decisions, which become public policy and commit government to fund what was promised and the funding comes from taxes. No other source of revenue is even considered.

A recent meeting of top government economists and policy makers at the Washington-based Brookings Institute was addressed by several mainstream thinkers and their message was that unless taxes are increased, or at least the Bush tax cuts

Witnessing the scramble among Democratic presidential hopefuls to appeal to voters in the various states about to have primaries is not a pleasant experience. What has come to be the main theme of these candidates is the refrain that whoever isn’t rich, whoever has had a brush with poverty at anytime in his or her life, must want and is fully entitled to have governments engage in massive, relentless wealth redistribution. This is a pitiful and quite disgusting message to put out in America, the country to which the poor of the world used to — and often still — flock precisely to escape their poverty through hard work, entrepreneurship, and ingenuity.

In the American South, William Faulkner once wrote, the past isn't dead. It isn't even past. This may become truer the farther south one goes.