By CLIFF MAY, Scripps Howard News Service

Who says you can't have it all? The Democrats, the Left, now have the White House, control of both houses of Congress, a majority of governors' mansions, a majority of state legislatures, the entertainment media, the elite news media, the unions, the educational establishment, the lion's share of the philanthropic community and increasing power over the courts.

When it comes to economics, we know our right from our left. Those on the right, trust markets more than governments. For those on the left -- it's the other way around.

Joe Biden is taking a lot of heat for saying that, should his running mate become president, "it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy ...we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

Just what we needed: In the midst of a global war to defend the West from radical Jihadists, we get a global financial crisis caused by the incompetence and/or corruption of Washington and Wall Street bigwigs.

Twenty-five years ago, several hundred U.S. Marines were stationed in Beirut on a peacekeeping mission. On September 26, an official with the Iranian Intelligence Service in Tehran phoned the Iranian ambassador in Damascus and issued an order to have them killed. Twenty-eight days later, at 6;22 on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983, two suicide bombers struck.

Not since the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s has free speech been as endangered as it is today. Firebombing publishers, murdering filmmakers, issuing death threats against writers and cartoonists, suing researchers, restricting freedom of expression through the U.N. -- these are some of the ways militant Islamists, their enablers and apologists, are seeking to silence their critics.

Let's be blunt: If John McCain wins the election and drops dead during his first year in office, someone not very experienced will become president. But the same is true if Barack Obama wins the election and doesn't drop dead during his first year in office.

HERZLIYA, Israel -- I'm attending the World Summit on Counter-Terrorism in this Tel Aviv suburb and I'm having a coffee and reading the International Herald Tribune. And there on page 2 is a feature, dateline Cairo, reporting that seven years after the attacks of Sept.

Perhaps money can't buy love, but it can certainly purchase power. So as oil prices have been rising, the major oil-producing nations have been gaining clout.

The folks over at OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, must think we're pretty stupid. The other day, Chakib Khelil, the current OPEC president, asserted that "the intrusion of bioethanol on the market" is responsible for 40 percent of recent increases in the price of oil.