Deroy Murdock says our lawmakers should consider how government run health care actually works in places like Canada and Great Britain before voting on a health reform plan.

The President tells members of Congress that he will not slash troop levels in Afghanistan, but has not decided on whether or not to increase those levels.

Michael Goodwin slams the President and his people for going after General McChrystal over his public comments concerning the proposed increase in troop levels for Afghanistan.

Dan Simpson takes the opposite view, calling for the President to sack the General and stop the war.

Robert D. Kaplan believes out continued presence in Afghanistan is helping the Chinese while not doing us much good, which he believes is a good argument for getting out.

Meanwhile, the British are having their own debate over troop levels in Afghanistan.

Anti-war protesters are hoping for a large turnout for their rallies this week. I expect they will not be well attended, despite the fervent hopes of the organizers. They like to look back on the great anti-war rallies during the Vietnam War, and hope to generate a similar response from the public, since polling shows increasing skepticism about the war. But their hopes will be dashed for one simple reason...the size and location of the protests during the Vietnam era, and the energy derived from them, was due almost entirely to the fact that the military draft was in place. All those college kids came out to those protests because they knew that the young men among them were one failed semester away from getting pulled into the Army and sent off to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Today, all the young men and women on college campuses know that if they want to avoid going to Iraq or Afghanistan all the need do is...nothing. Nothing at all. Only their friends and classmates from high school who VOLUNTEER for military service are at risk of getting shot or blown up on some dusty road in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Ralph Peters explains why our intelligence services are not very good at predicting things, like when or whether the Iranians will have a nuclear weapon.

Here is a financial warning sign...the debt markets are still paralyzed.

Despite warning signs like that one, at least one economist thinks things could be looking up for the Democrats in 2010, since he believes that a weaker dollar will lead to an upturn in business and hiring. I think he is whistling as he passes the graveyard.

Here is an interesting item...the Mexican drug cartels, authors of so much brutality inside their country, make most of their money from marijuana, and increasingly their profits are being eroded by locally grown weed here in the States. Here's a thought. Why don't we legalize marijuana and gut their operations, thus diminishing substantially the violence being done? Nah, that makes too much sense.