There’s the coolest buzz making the rounds in Washington’s power watering holes, and let’s cross every finger we have that it’s true.

To review the bidding, Hillary desperately wants to be POTUS. But if Hanoi John gets elected this November, he will obviously as the incumbent be the candidate in 2008. The earliest she could run would then be 2012, deep in her sixties and possibly ancient history. There is only one conclusion she can reach: Her only shot is to run in 2008 - which requires that George Bush be re-elected and John Kerry defeated in 2004.

You’re familiar with the term “October Surprise.” Right at the last moment, in late October, the parties try to pull a rabbit out of the media hat. The Dems sprung a decades-old DUI bust of GW a week before the election in 2000, the Pogo Press went into a feeding frenzy right on cue, and it almost submarined him on election day.

I wish Barbara Comstock running Oppo Research for the Republicans as much luck as it takes to figure out what dirty trick the Dems will try to spring this time. Yet while I’m sure they have an October Surprise planned - the buzz is that Hillary has one planned herself.

No one knows what it is - but we know four things about it.

Everyone in America is holding his or her breath, sure that an Islamofascist terrorist attack will be perpetrated before the November election. Al Qaeda wants to pull off another Spain, it is thought. Blowing up the Madrid trains just before the Spanish election defeated the anti-terrorist Aznar government and put spineless Bambi Zapatero, in office.

Al Qaeda’s greatest goal right now is to prevent the re-election of George Bush. That is why the safest place in the US this month will be Boston. There is no way anything will be perpetrated to attack the Democrat Convention. New York during the Republican Convention is another matter.

But this is what is expected. Here is what worries me.

Whatever might be said about John Kerry's candidacy--one thing for sure is that his choice of John Edwards as his VP running mate should give everyone a reason to reject this ticket--and that is that Kerry has chosen a trial lawyer to sell his philosophy to the American people.

I have been a lawyer for almost 40 years. I am generally proud of the profession, notwithstanding the many corny lawyer jokes I've had to suffer. However, there is one segment of the legal profession of which I am not proud, and that is the so-called trial bar--the plaintiff's' attorneys who have for years raped, pillaged and plundered American society, usually in guise of rectifying ills that don't exist.

The indictment of Enron chairman Kenneth Lay gives the Democrats a “windfall” according to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The indictment of former Enron chief Ken Lay represents an election year windfall for Democrats -- who say the man President Bush nicknamed "Kenny Boy'' is a poster boy for corporate greed and malfeasance. Lay's indictment Wednesday (July 7) in connection with the energy giant's 2001 bankruptcy hands Sen. John Kerry and the Democrats the perfect person to link the president's re-election campaign to the high-living corporate miscreants who left their companies, workers and stockholders in financial ruin, politicians and analysts said.

This week we introduce a new feature to To The Point: The Members' Forum, selected articles submitted by TTPers themselves. We launch this feature with TTPer Wayne Daniels. Publication of such submissions does not imply To The Point's full agreement with them. ---JW

June 30, 2004 marked the "Official" end of the Iraqi occupation. Yes, we will have troops on the ground there for years. Remember it is 59 years and counting that we have had troops stationed in Germany and Japan; 50 years and counting in Korea, etc.

I will argue that the only US strategic interests in Iraq are (1) that the Iraqi government not fund or otherwise support terrorist groups; (2) we need military bases on the borders of three of the primary state sponsors of terrorist groups - Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia; and (3) that enough oil reaches the world markets to keep the price of crude in the $25 to $40 range. As long as these interest are satisfied, we really don't care who controls the streets or the government.

The political class's Edwards-huffing is like a summer heat rash -- it is mildly irritating but should subside in about a week: Wear loosely fitted clothes, keep out of the heat and ease your way through an adequate provision of gin, tonic, limes and bitters. Tropical drinks served with little umbrellas are acceptable substitutes. Now would be an excellent time to catch up on your genuine summer fiction reading (in other words, avoid Edwards media commentary for a week, which is not quite fiction, nor quite non-fiction. It is not so much fiction as it is faction.)

The conservative movement believes in the American people’s ability to rise to the occasion, in their ingenuity. They believe that entitlement, government programs in mass and laws regulating every aspect of our daily lives infringe on the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that government intervention in our daily lives should be held to a necessary minimum.

By contrast, the Left has more ideological factions than a Douglas Fir has needles. There is the NEA, which champions a globalist multicultural agenda in our public schools. Their agenda includes seeing children forced to participate in the study of the Koran in California under the guise of multicultural tolerance while doing everything to banish Christianity from our nations classrooms in total.

There is the ACLU who sued the City of Los Angeles in an effort to remove a cross from their city seal and who chose to represent NAMBLA -- a group that advocates pederasty between men and boys -- in a murder trial under the pretext of free speech.

There is the National Organization for Women and the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League who, without a mandate by the medical community on when life actually begins, has championed as a natural right the act of partial birth abortion. These are but a very few of the “causes” and “action groups” that effectively comprise the Left and the Liberal-Left.