North Korea continues to ratchet up the level of tension in the region. What is going on? Someday, when the Kim family regime is gone and the North Korean people are free, we'll get to look into the archives and find out.

Ralph Peters writes about the elections going on in Iran.

As I suspected, some on the Left are trying to link the recent shootings by an anti-abortion whack job and an anti-Semite whack job to the Conservative movement. Paul Krugman is an example of this. Here is a rebuttal.

David Brooks examines the fact that the American people may be at the beginning of a period of drawing back from their big spending ways.

George Will examines the same thing from a slightly different angle.

President Obama is giving up the idea that he could release some of the Gitmo detainees here in the United States. Since the politicians in Europe feel exactly the same way about those detainees as our politicians in Congress ("not in my constituents back yard, you don't"), expect the European governments to refuse any resettlement of the detainees in their countries. Closing Gitmo doesn't look so simple now, does it Mr. President?

Michael Kinsley thinks we need a new national anthem. He is right about it being a difficult song, but I suspect his suggestion will fall on deaf ears.

In the strange but true department, a woman misses that doomed Air France jet, so she lives to fly home to Europe, only to be killed in a car accident.