A few months ago, media pundits debated whether it was appropriate to host the G8 summit in Russia, with an increasingly authoritarian Vladimir Putin stalling action on Iran's nuclear development. The response from the administration was essentially that we will never get the Russians onboard if we’re not nice to them. This answer was accepted with a “let’s see” approach and the controversy was forgotten.

Well, the G8 summit just ended, and I am hard-pressed to recall what was accomplished.

Every Tuesday for the past three months, my Daily Free Press colleague Sufia Khalid has written a weekly critique of American culture, politics and media. It is the editorial policy of that newspaper not to allow responses from fellow columnists on their pages. But Ms. Khalid’s piece last Tuesday crossed every reasonable line of tact and editorial quality, and so, believing that a response to her and the problem she represents is both necessary and proper, along with refusal from the Free Press editors to publish this response, I resign from the Daily Free Press and am writing this outside its pages.

Congress took up the issue of illegal immigration this week. While I do not know the perfect solution to this issue, there is one aspect of the Sensenbrenner bill -- passed in the House in December and now being debated in the Senate -- that is very clear: The law would make every resident of this country not following legal immigration processes a felon. With the sweep of a pen, millions of people would become criminals, subject to arrest and imprisonment along with anyone who aids them.

Twenty-seven years after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, a showdown over the country's nuclear program and continued hostility between Iran and the United States seem inevitable. U.S. forces on four borders and the effective nuclear deterrent of North Korea make nuclear weapons a strategic interest of the Iranian regime and a matter of national pride. For Americans, the war on terror and the phony election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the high pulpit of fundamentalist rhetoric perpetuate the image of a fanatical regime that must be stopped.