A law was made a distant moon ago here:
July and August cannot be too hot.
And there's a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot."

--Camelot, by Alan Jay Lerner & Frederic Loewe

The Legislature of the State of South Dakota distinguished itself by passing an anti-climate change resolution--House Concurrent Resolution No. 1009--late last month,

No, the legislature did not follow King Arthur's lead by attempting to stabilize the state's climate by decree. Instead, it called for "the balanced teaching of global warming" in South Dakota's public schools, borrowing the language and tactics of the ongoing campaign to force the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in America's schools.

On a 36 to 20 vote, South Dakota's House of Representatives urged the state's schools to teach that global warming is a theory rather than a proven fact. Teachers are to impress on students that the significance and "interrelativity" of the "variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological [sic], thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics" that determine global weather patterns are "largely speculative" and that the scientific investigation of global warming has been "complicated and prejudiced" by "political and philosophical viewpoints."

The resolution concludes with a seemingly innocent statement urging that "all instruction on the theory of global warming be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances." The phrase "prevailing classroom circumstances" is a coded way of warning teachers not to present climate change in a way that might anger students or parents who believe that climate change is a hoax hatched by the U.N. to frighten ordinary citizens, justify draconian laws and enrich greedy scientists. It's similar to language advocated by the right-wing group Students for Academic Freedom in its "Academic Bill of Rights", which has been used to attack and even sue college professors whose teaching goes against the beliefs of conservative students.

It's all too easy to trivialize the South Dakota House Resolution and poke holes in the facts and reasoning advanced to support it. The resolution's use of "astrological" instead of "astronomical", the flawed list of anti-climate-change evidence it present--that the earth has been cooling for the last eight years, that there is no evidence of warming in the troposphere, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but "the gas of life"-- and the argument that the existence of naturally driven climate change in the past rules out human-caused climate change today, makes for a document that's hard to take seriously.

Even South Dakota's senate seems to agree. They stripped out the most embarrassing verbiage before passing their own version of the resolution on 24 February.

Unfortunately, the resolution has to be taken seriously. It stands as the lates--but by no means the last--skirmish in a long and continuing battle for the minds as well as the hearts of America's children. As reported by New Scientist, the Texas school board--whose annual purchase of some 48 million textbooks allows it to determine what most of the nation's children stud--voted last March to require textbooks to question the existence of global warming, and, in an astonishing kowtow to "young-earth creationists", deleted the 14-billion-year age of the universe from the science curriculum.

It's not just climate change, evolution, or the age of the earth which are in the crosshairs in this battle, but science as a whole. The religious-conservative movement that helps elect creationist school board members across the country, state legislators like Resolution 1009's author, Don Kopp, the 110 members of the United States Congress who win perfect ratings from ultraconservative groups, or Senator James Inhofe who now wants to file criminal charges against U.S. and British climate scientists, has a far more ambitious agend--nothing less than to replace the pluralistic secular humanism that most people think has defined the United States since its inception with religious fundamentalism.

The movement dates at least to the 1980s, when the Rev. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition with the stated goal of advancing a Christian agenda nationwide through grassroots activism. This still growing movement has made it clear that it is determined to redefine America in the light of the "truth" that the nation was founded not on the basis of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but on fundamentalist Christian beliefs. They see the Bible as true and the wall of separation of church and state as a dangerous myth. Be it evolution, global climate change, or embryonic stem cell research, when science gets in the way, it will be attacked.

As reported in the New York Times, attacking climate change along with evolution may be a way to get around court rulings that so far have found that singling out evolution for so-called balanced presentation in textbooks and classes is clearly religiously motivated and violates the separation of church and state. By also targeting global warming, the age of the universe, or the origin of life, anti-evolutionists can claim that they are merely advocating academic freedom and fair play.

And I suppose it doesn't hurt that the same politicians who seek the votes of true believers are often funded by corporations that are strongly motivated to keep pumping crude, mining coal, or pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

At least in the United States, this is not a challenge to which scientists and those who recognize that science can only thrive in an environment that values facts and reason over Bible-based belief and God-given truth can remain indifferent or uninvolved. A war has been declared, and scientists and their supporters can no more wish it away than South Dakota's legislators can resolve away global climate change.

Like the all other GOP politicians with their eyes on the White House in 2012, the former governor of Alaska will throw her hat into the ring early next year. That will be the easy part. From there, she will begin to raise money and watch the polls. This will continue throughout the bulk of 2011.

In some ways, 2011 will be to Palin what 1999 was to former Vice President Dan Quayle. If you will remember, Quayle declared his candidacy early that year, but was unable to raise much money or gain any traction in the polls. By the end of the summer - more than six months before the first primary or caucus of the 2000 presidential election season - he was out of the race.

However, unlike Quayle in 1999, Palin will be able to raise money - and lots of it. Trouble is, she has a low ceiling on her poll numbers, even within the Republican Party. I'm not sure where that ceiling is, possibly 10, 15, 20, or perhaps even as high as 25 percent. She does a have an extremely loyal band of supporters and admirers, but outside of those people, she's not particularly well-liked. In order words, her support is very deep, but not too wide.

Therefore, while her popularity will appear to be growing at first, it will soon begin to stall at a level that will not lend her much hope of capturing her party's presidential nomination. As political pundits know, the national poll numbers mean very little in the months leading up to the initial nominating contests.

While 25% might seem impressive in the national polls at that point, her problem is going to be in states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, where potential voters would be starting to look closely (and seriously) at all the candidates. I believe she will be having a hard time cracking double digits in any of those places, come November of 2011.

In recent history, it has been impossible to win the Republican presidential nomination without being victorious in at least two of those states, regardless of one's standing nationally. So, not willing to risk humiliation, she will pull out of the race sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Even someone like Palin is pragmatic enough to know when to cut and run. At that point, she will call a press conference and say something to the effect of: "I have decided that I can best serve the interests of my party by supporting [fill-in-the-blank] for president." However, she will never admit that she dropped out because she didn't think she could win.

And, if offered the vice-presidential nomination, she would gladly accept it again. Why, that would be a win-win situation for her. She would have everything to gain and nothing to lose. If her ticket won in the fall of 2012, she would say, "We won." If they lost, she would say, "He lost." From there, she could possibly resurrect her quest for the presidency at some point in the future.

A corporation is comprised of countless individuals, many of whom are probably not residents of the states in which they will be subsidizing campaigns. In fact, since most large corporations are multi-nationals, corporations may be calling the shots in who runs for office in your district even though they may not even be from the United States. The most disturbing aspect of this ruling is its affront against freedom of speech. The founding fathers, in creating the first amendment, sought to offer the constituency rights to which we all equally share. All of us have a voice and a means to communicate. We are, for the most part, on fairly equal ground in this respect. We do not all have easily disposable incomes. Most of us don't: a recent poll revealed that more than half of American individuals make $35,000 a year or less. For a single parent, this toes the poverty line. By claiming that money is tantamount to speech, the Supreme Court has inevitably set up a system in which corporations have the power to hand-pick candidates. We lay citizens cannot compete, as even our individual campaign donations cannot legally exceed $3,600 per candidate. Most of us can't afford airtime or to buy up bill boards as an alternative to our single votes. Our speech has thus been rendered less prominent, and so less important or influential, than that of the corporations.

Whereas we are restricted to one vote per elected official and in our home towns and states, a corporation is now given a free pass to vote with its dollars anywhere and everywhere it chooses. Corporations have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal and can drown out all of our voices to elect officials amenable to their interests. And since a corporation is not human, it has no conscience or consciousness, and cannot be tried for crimes against humanity. It conjures up apocalyptic images of the dystopian novels we are assigned to read in high school and college. We are told to read them to better comprehend the capabilities of runaway power. We are taught that this is a real risk. It is-we should heed these works of literature and find the lesson in this.

A corporation, by virtue of its implicit purpose and function, is run with one reigning goal in mind: to maximize profits in the shortest time possible. All other things are secondary, or more likely, peripheral. Such goals run counter to public health and welfare, social equality, and environmental sustainability. I fear the worse from this and will use an example. In the Appalachian region, a majority of coal (which makes up most of our electricity source) is extracted using a nefarious method called Mountain Top Removal (MTR). The name is literal: the tops of mountains are blown off with reams of high powered dynamite. What is left blacks out the sky and slides down the tops and fills the valley with rock and soot. It chokes and coats the nearby towns with dust, kills all the fish and birds, and leaves an ugly mess in its wake. Kids in towns where MTR is conducted have high levels of asthma, bronchitis, and GI upsets. One small child asleep in his bed was killed by a stray boulder during an MTR 'extraction.' His parents received a judgement of only a few tens of thousands of dollars for the murder of their son from the multi-million dollar coal company responsible (which did not have the proper permit at the time of the incident). One of the largest silos that stores the coal sludge of MTR debris is kept behind an elementary school, where it threatens rupture and drown the school. Townspeople in MTR towns have much higher cases of diseases like cancer and Crohn's. I was shocked to learn something like this was being practiced in our country. But the reason it still goes on is clear: coal companies have a lot of money, do a lot of lobbying, and even take judges ruling on the cases against them on yacht trips. How can poor people compete? They can't. And yet, an effort has been made recently in both state and federal governments to seriously clamp down on this destructive practice. But what chance would small communities stand if all of the electorate was put in place by corporate interests? The slim chance they might have had quickly becomes none. Their dollars are less, so their speech has much less worth to the point of worthlessness.

Another case is our health care system. Health insurance companies maximize profits and eliminate costs by denying people coverage with pre-existing conditions or canceling when the person becomes too much of a "cost-risk" (e.g.: develops cancer). For some reason, many Americans decry implementing more regulation on these companies or a public option in this system because they think some socialization will lead us down some slippery slope to Cold War-era Russia. This is despite the fact that most other developed nations have universal healthcare and have maintained robust democracies (and have higher life expectancies, lower rates of cancer, etc.). It seems strange to me that people are so scared of government-run healthcare, and not corporate-run healthcare, even though the latter can and does take so much more liberties with our lives. To the corporate run healthcare system, we are and continue to be nothing more than consumers who cease to be of worth once they can no longer maximize profits by our continued patronage. I would think even those hard-lined conservatives who don't want a social option in medicine can still see the atrocity in denying or canceling care for these ends. Under the Supreme Court ruling, these problems will accelerate as health insurance companies will continue to pursue and attain their corporate agenda by these means unchecked. Additionally, other corporations will continue to pollute our air, soil and water, and use carcinogenic chemicals in our products without environmental regulations, thereby exacerbating the rate at which we become sick with a myriad of disorders and diseases for which we then cannot secure (afford) health care to treat.

Think this can't happen? It already has been in the works for a long time. Check the voting records of your Congress person and then check his/her campaign donors: you can easily see connection. The Supreme Court ruling will take this several steps further. We will have outright corporate sponsorship of representatives. Their positions in our Congress will be bought by the highest bidders and the agenda of that bidder will be what that representative is beholden to, not to his constituents! This ruling puts Congress in the pockets of corporations and keeps them there. It measures the significance of our free speech in dollars, and defines its worth by stocks. And we as regular people are vastly outweighed.

So what is the purpose of this post: is it just a dystopian vision, an apocalyptic rant to bring down your day? Not completely. It probes us first to reflect on the unconstrained power of the Supreme Court. Unlike the executive and judicial branches, these justices are rendered impervious to public opinion or social concern. They are not beholden to voters, or even to the other branches of our government. Once elected, they may and often do sit on the bench for several decades, legislating with ideologies that reflect the era and influences that affected their appointments, ideologies that may now be irrelevant and obsolete. We need to appeal to our government to consider effective checks to the Court, especially when decisions contradict strong legal precedent and undermine individual rights and the overwhelming will and interest of the people. A Constitutional amendment is perhaps in order to restrain corporate financing of elections, as well as the power of Supreme Court justices. A petition for such an amendment, that would clarify that for-profits are not entitled to 1st amendment rights through subsidization of candidates, is available at www.dontgetrolled.org. Another bright light in this dark tunnel is the introduction of the Fair Elections Now Act in Congress, which would waiver limitations on individual citizen donations and offer competitive public financing options as an alternative to corporate backing. Please make sure to contact your House Reps. and Senators and urge them to co-sponsor and vote for the bill when it hits the floor.

In the interim to attaining the passage of legislation or a proper amendment, we need to understand that this is not necessarily a hopeless situation. But it is a David and Goliath case. We can look beyond the dollar signs and ad campaigns the corporations will no doubt bombard us with. The one possible good thing to come out of this is more transparency in campaign financing. This gives us the opportunity to investigate candidates and understand the subliminal messaging of their rhetoric, what it is they are really supporting. We can still vote, and choose the less funded candidates with no or the least corporate representation. We still have the power to reject the beginning of a plutocracy. We can vote with our dollars. Corporations have power because we fund them. Extremely large corporations with huge government influence and shoddy reputations when it comes to human rights protection are good targets for a boycott, as are those that will emerge as the dominant forces in elections. Whereas it is unrealistic to expect we can completely abstain from supporting corporations, as they are now a ubiquitous facet of our society, we can consume much less and consume more conscientiously. By doing this, we refuse to be just consumers, pawns in the chess game of profit playing. This means patronizing our local co-ops and mom & pop shops over big chain retailers, buying second-hand goods over new, sourcing more food from CSA shares, community gardens and farmer's markets, seeking non-profit over for-profit services when it is a viable option, investing in small-scale renewables and conserving energy at home, driving less and shopping from companies that support democracies at home and abroad (The NGO Green America has a comprehensive online Business Directory of socially and environmentally responsible businesses at http://www.greenamericatoday.org/pubs/greenpages/).

Perhaps this sounds Pollyannaish of me, but we need an appeal. If corporations are in charge of our officials, for now the only control we have over corporations is our financial support of them and we need to scale that back considerably.

Rights are God-given. Other people can take them away, and may also defend them for you, but they cannot give them to you. Rights include the freedom to do as one pleases (within certain limitations) and the opportunity to excel, achieve, and succeed. They also consist of the freedom from being harmed by or unduly burdened or inconvenienced by the government and others, as well as the privilege to serve or give in any way that one chooses.

Examples of rights include those set forth in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, such the freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, the right to bear arms, and the freedom from double jeopardy, self-incrimination, and unreasonable search and seizure. Rights do not include money, material items, or services. Therefore, you do not have a right to forcibly take these things from others or authorize the government to perform this kind of confiscation for you.

Entitlements, one the other hand, are established by governments via elected representatives or direct votes by the people. They include money, material items, services, and various forms of aid and assistance. Entitlements can be initiated or revoked at any time. Entitlements can be fully or partially earned. Examples of earned entitlements are Social Security and Medicare, for which the recipient generally contributes while he or she is working.

However, many entitlements are completely unearned. Examples of these would be food stamps, welfare, and Medicaid. Emergency aid such as that which is provided by FEMA is another example. Some would argue that these things are earned as well, via one's tax dollars. But that's a fallacious argument, as many of those who receive this kind of stuff pay little or nothing in taxes, while most of those in the highest tax brackets never receive anything from these programs.

I hope this has helped you appreciate the difference between rights and entitlements. It is important to know the difference because politicians, demagogues, and other scoundrels will often intentionally attempt to confuse the two for their own selfish purposes. Unfortunately, the ignorant (and greedy) masses will often fall prey to them and swallow their deception -- hook, line, and sinker.

Now their latest move has been to take on the banks and ratchet up the populist rhetoric. There's one problem. Before going at the banks, President Obama needs to get his priorities straight. I agree that some of the bonuses the bankers have given themselves are appalling. But the fundamental issue enraging Americans are access to jobs and capital.

Lets start with access to capital. As an entrepreneur starting a business that will create 60 new jobs in Harlem, I can speak first hand to the difficulty of getting capital from the banks, but I can also speak first hand to a situation where one bank was willing to do everything for our business, but was told by federal regulators that their books were not in good enough order to loan any more money for the foreseeable future. I assume there are other banks like that that are in similar shape.

One of President Obama's strengths is his ability to speak thoughtfully and intelligently about an issue, but his grandstanding rhetoric about fat cat bankers and taking the fight to them is sophomoric. The regulators that are telling certain banks not to lend any more money, work for President Obama. If I were President Obama, once the banking system came off life-support, I would have began an ongoing dialogue with the banking community about which banks are willing to give access to capital but have been advised not to. In parallel I would have also started a dialogue with state and municipal economic development agencies about which programs and projects they wanted to fund but due to cash shortages, were unable to. From those dialogues I would have created a list of projects that the banks and agencies wanted to fund. Then on a case by case basis, I would have created partnerships between the banks and the agencies to direct unused and repaid TARP money to the projects on the list.

Where jobs are concerned, the President has to be aware how his push for healthcare has delayed serious movement on jobs. Case in point the federal government has a New Market Tax Credit program that is part of the Community Renewal Tax Relief Act of 2000. One big part of this program is to create jobs and spur economic development in distressed areas. The program came to a close in 2009. Currently, there are two bills in Congress, S.1583 - the New Markets Tax Credit Extension Act of 2009 and H.R.3811 - New Markets Tax Credit Expansion Act of 2009, that propose to extend the program. Unfortunately no action has been taken on either bill because of the healthcare push.

So while President Obama can proclaim that a fight with the bankers, is a fight he's ready to have, there's more substantive work to be done to get businesses financed and more Americans back to work. I hope that's work he's ready to do.

But what if you want to know the value of the US or the EU or the world's natural resource--seemingly non-trivial items such as forests, watersheds, fisheries, soils, pastures, wetlands and ecosystem services? Not only can't you find a value, nobody can, because nobody is counting.

At a time when economists track every measure of global, national, and local economies as avidly as the vital signs of a patient in intensive care, doesn't it seem strange that something as crucial to the wealth and health of nations as the natural resources and systems on which they rely remains as uncharted as the terra incognita of medieval maps?

Cambridge University professor Sir Partha Dasgupta is one of a handful of economists who see this blank space as not just strange but, as he puts it, "a gaping hole in how nature is embedded into economics." He points out that as long as natural resources and ecosystem services are not measured and valued, they can't be incorporated into economic models and will be ignored in economic decision making.

Dasgupta and a few of his colleagues are striving to flesh out adequate measures of what he calls natural capital and get them incorporated into mainstream economics.

Economics has been phenomenally successful in shaping the way decision makers at all levels think about and evaluate progress, Dasgupta says. In particular, GDP has become the canonical measure of development and the wealth of nations, and guides the economic choices and policies of every country.

The problem with GDP, says Dasgupta, is that it's both inadequate and misleading.

It's inadequate in that, although it is used to measure of the wealth of nations, it leaves out a vital part of that wealth--natural capital. It's misleading because nations relying on GDP to measure progress can easily find themselves looking richer on paper, while in fact they are becoming poorer by degrading their natural resources. While conservationists have been warning of this for years, Dasgupta is one of the first economists to have the data to prove it.

In a recent article in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B (doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0231), Dasgupta traces the development of five countries, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and China from 1970 through 2000. All five show seemingly healthy growth as measured by GDP, per capita GDP, and even HDI (Human Development Index, a composite measure of GDP per person, life expectancy, and education).

The catch is that when Dasgupta includes even a partial evaluation of the wealth lost through depleted natural resources and degraded ecosystem services, the balance sheets of four of those five countries shift into the red. Even as their GDPs and HDIs told these nations that they were getting richer, they were actually getting poorer; their development was unsustainable.

Research in this area has been surprisingly sparse, but consistent in showing that even valuing a small subset of their natural resources reveals that many nations are buying GDP growth at the expense of real wealth. "If I had all the numbers," Dasgupta says, "it would be even worse."

Although Dasgupta says that some of his colleagues continue to view nature as if it were an infinite source of resources and an equally infinite sink for waste products, most now accept that, in principal, it's important to value natural capital. And most economists, he says, now grasp something he proved mathematically a decade ago, that it's possible to develop a measure of comprehensive wealth that would incorporate nature and reflect human well being better than the GDP or the HDI.

This represents progress, but it seems painfully slow as forests continue to be razed, fisheries depleted, and carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere at a record pace. The first substantial study of changes in comprehensive wealth was carried out just 11 years ago, and far too few researchers have followed suit since then. In the meantime, thousands of economists worldwide continue to crank out GDP-based studies, which in turn continue to guide and justify the current pattern of economic decision making and development.

The good news, says Dasgupta, is that the World Bank and UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme, are just now starting a project that will produce a world wealth report every two years. Initially this report will include just a few of the better-measured aspects of natural capital such as fisheries, but it will add other natural resources and ecosystem services over time. "This is the first systematic attempt to value natural capital for the whole world," says Dasgupta, "It has never been done before."

If all goes well, in a few years we may be able to punch a few keys and retrieve some realistic measures of the value of our natural resources and ecosystems. More importantly, decision makers will have actual data to show if their nation is developing sustainably or needs to change course.

If Dasgupta and his colleagues are right, it's a vital step that comes not a moment too soon.

For example, there are only two independents among the 100 U.S. Senators, and none among the 434 members of the House of Representatives (there is currently one vacancy there due to a death). There are no independent governors and only a handful of state legislators across the country who do not identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats. And Abraham Lincoln was the last U.S. President we elected from a third party (yes, the GOP was considered a third party back in 1860).

Therefore, anyone who wishes to have a serious chance to get elected to a job higher than the position of dog catcher generally needs to first get nominated by one of the two major parties. And in order to get nominated, one must go through a kind a hazing process in which he or she must demonstrate loyalty to that party. In other words, to get nominated, one must toe the party line. So, while voters in any given general election do actually have a say-so as to who gets elected, their choices have usually been narrowed down to only two (both of whom are loyalists to their respective parties) by the time they go to the polls.

Very often, voters will think they are electing a moderate candidate, only to later discover that he or she was a wolf in sheep's clothing. That's due to a trick that major party candidates like to play (and usually get away with). After being nominated, candidates from the two major parties tend to downplay their party affiliations and create an illusion of independence during the general election campaign (except in areas dominated by one party or the other). After being elected, however, they quickly get back in line with their party's more polarized agenda. They then repeat this scenario during of each of their re-election campaigns.

The bottom line is this: Because of our two-party system, political office holders are more loyal to the whims of their party leaders than they are to the people who elected them. They fear being dumped by their party more so than they fear being rejected by the people. That's the kind of disservice political parties have done to our country. George Washington saw it coming more than two centuries ago.

1. It's snowing in October, how can the globe be warming?
2. It's 10 below today outside--again, how can that be indicative warming?
3. How can we puny humans be causing climate change? Sounds awfully egotistical to me.
4. Warming and cooling periods have occurred since the beginning of the Earth, why is this any different? It's part of a natural geological cycle.
5. Carbon is not pollution, it is needed to sustain life.
6. Politicians and environmental groups created the myth of climate change (and/or our affect on it) to make money/control the public/serve some other elaborate unnamed socio-political agenda.
7. So and so scientists has published papers debunking climate change or our contribution to it.

It's become exhausting to always explain that weather is not climate. That one day, or even several days (or weeks or months) of a weather pattern is not indicative of an overall climate trend. Years and decades are, though. Climate is a cumulation of weather patterns over a long term. When figuring global climate, it is adding up the weather patterns of the entire world for a period of decades and finding the average. (This is why people making assumptions on climate because of the things that occur just in their city or town, actually seems to me to be epitome of egotism, as though their backyard is the center of the world and should be the defining factor of our climate.) It's pretty simple math actually. Of course, overall, the world is warming, though it's confusing to break it down, because just because the world is warming, doesn't mean every place is warming. Some places are even getting colder (which is why "climate change" is now considered the more appropriate term, though it's contributed to confusing and so alienating some people, who now erroneously argue that scientists can't make up their mind what is going on, so keep changing the name).

Then skeptics also ask how humans can be culpable of such change. We humans engage in activities (deforestation, animal agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels) that both release a lot of greenhouse gases while at the same time get rid of global carbon sinks that would other absord and offset these emissions.

Fact: Greenhouse gases (GHGs) warm the atmosphere. This is as accepted in science and in the lay public as gravity (hence, the name "greenhouse gases"). Now, at the same time we are putting in unprecendented levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since humans evolved, we are experiencing a warming trend that anamolous to our understanding of historical natural cycles. It seems to make sense, then, that our activities and their associated emissions would be connected to this warming trend. Again, simple math. Oh but, the amount of greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere is so tiny compared to what's already there or emitted by natural phenomenons, how does is it enough to force a warming trend? Well, for one, we've degraded most of our natural sinks that would take it out of the atmosphere (the Amazon, the ocean) and two, a system can be strained by something that seems small but isn't in its ripple effects. A large mammal can be taken town by one particular tiny bug or microscopic germ. The germ or bug itself is small, but the disease it causes is large, pandemic even.

Our climate system is like a scale, which had an approximately equal numbers of marbles on each side. But at one point, we humans took a few off one side (the sinks), and put a few too many on the other (GHGs--which might not seemed like a lot, but it was enough), causing the scales to tip and the marbles to spill. We don't know where all the marbles will land just like we don't exactly know all the effects of climate change, but that shouldn't undermine our ability to try to adapt to it or reset the scale so it can become balanced again. Of course, some people argue scale-tipping is a natural geological event, but looking over the planet's geological history, such drastic changes in temperature usually takes tens of thousands of years, not a century and a half, to occur.

Carbon is not a pollution in and of itself. Neither is water. Both carbon and water in moderate doses sustain life and are necessary for its endurance. But too much water can cause flooding, and drowning, as crop farms and New Orleans residents can attest. Likewise, too much carbon in a certain context can be a bad thing as well.

The argument that leaves the most bitter taste in my mouth is that climate change is a fabricated or exaggerated phenomenon to serve some evasive agenda by whacko envionmentalists or the liberal elite. I have asked skeptics on the street who stop me to make this claim, if they have ever been to Alaska or another area in the Arctic. None of them ever have. Well, I have. I ask them what agenda the indigenous peoples of the Arctic are serving in suing the U.S. in the world court to control their emissions, other than trying to safeguard their simple subsistence way of life. These peoples have lived in their regions for a millenia, they now fall through thin sea ice that their ancestors camped on for weeks or months in preparation of Bowhead whale hunts, the whales come much earlier in the season now, and the sea ice is gone. I think they know when there is climate change. A climate skeptic who is a contributor on this site once responded to this by saying "we" (meaning everyone else in the world) can't be expected to sacrifice our ways of life for what he guessed was a few hundred or thousand people who refused to modernize.

Oh, my. Besides the fact that Arctic indigenous peoples actually number in the hundreds of thousands, I found a horrible irony in his words. The United States comprises only 5% of the world population, while it uses over a quarter of its natural resources, including its oil. The average U.S. citizens has a carbon footprint that it is about 15 to 20 times higher than the global average. We have the highest per capita emissions from home energy use, private car use and consumption of animal protein, in the world. And yet, the U.S. is the only developed country that has so far abstained from partaking in a binding international climate treaty or passing its own climate legislation mandate. All this, despite the fact that people in developing countries will suffer the worst effects of climate change. So, really, what country and people is/are truly the minority expecting the majority to suffer for its way of life?

Why would indigenous people lie? Are bugs and animals capable of lying too? I was a wildlife biology student for several years. Resoundingly, species are migrating to areas that are colder than they could historically tolerate. We find tropical sharks swimming in sub-Arctic oceans, diseases now spreading in Arctic waters that never existed because the water was always cold enough to kill the bacteria, bugs that now can live through enough life cycles which lets them eat through trees and make forests fodder for fires in formerly frigid regions. Is ice capable of lying? Ice melts at a certain temperature regardless of our ideologies. And I have seen ice melt in places it never has and is not supposed to. Not because it is following an elaborate lie or agenda, but because it inevitably melts at warmer temperatures. And warmer temperatures is what we have. I have seen houses in coastal Alaska swallowed up by rising sea waters. It is silly to think that such rises won't eventually affect all of us. If we don't want to accredit it to our human behavior, then we are blatantly ignoring the meaning of the word, "greenhouse gas" and how much of it we spew in the context of these effects.

Assuming a perverse agenda on the part of environmentalists is also ironic not only in its implicit and elicit disingenousness, but because it is a projection of the truth of the climate skeptic movement. The truth is, the research of most climate skeptics scientists are heavily subsidized by the fossil fuel and agribusiness lobbies, two groups that undeniably have a strong vested interest in evading the science of climate change and fueling publich mistrust and confusion to keep them paying at the pump and high revenues rolling in.

A typical annual salary for a CEO for a top national or international environmental non-profit usually lies somewhere between $100-$200,000 dollars. This includes only the top dozen or so groups with the most brand name recognition (Sierra Club, NWF, WWF). Admittedly, this is not chump change and it can be validly argued this is too high for any NGO CEO, but this figure needs to be put in perspective. Most other employees at these NGOs, even the higher ups, which form the backbone of these groups and do all of the grunt work, make middle-class wages. CEOs of smaller environmental non-profits, which comprise the vast majority of those that exist (thousands), make barely a middle-class wage, while the other workers might make meager wages at or only slightly above the poverty line. By contrast, the typical annual salary of an oil CEO is several to tens of BILLIONS of dollars, with some of the workers beneath him making millions a year. To keep making that money, the public can't believe in climate change or that our behavior is responsible for it. Again, do the simple math and come up with who has more of a reason to have a devious agenda, and whose scientists are more apt to lie. I have never been provided with scientific research debunking climate change or human contribution to it, that was NOT funded directly or indirectly by oil, gas, coal, car, or livestock interests. However, many of the scientific reports supporting global warming were by government scientists who had their funding cut, were fired, or were marginalized during the heydays of the Bush administration, which got most of their campaign donations from the fossil fuel lobby. Whose agenda are we worrried about?

The E.U. follows something called the precautionary principle, which deems if there is enough evidence to show a connection between two things, the country will err on the side of caution in assuming the connection is not merely incidental and implement the necessary precautions in averting any adverse effect associated with that connection. In other words, the connection does not have to be conclusive, but compelling. So, if there are chemicals that have been linked to cancer (e.g. trends show people exposed to such chemicals have higher rates of cancer, chemicals cause cancer in animal tests, etc.), they regulate or ban that chemical. Similarly, they regulate carbon because of its link to climate change and the projected adverse effects of unmitigated climate change on human and non-human populations. Here in the U.S., we do not follow the precautionary principle (incidentally, we also have much higher incidences of most cancers). With the chemical/cancer connection, we could also argue the connection between climate change and greenhouse gases emitted by our activities are all incidental and there's not enough concrete proof to warrant legislation or behavior change. I would argue, as someone young enough to be expected to live through many of the projected impacts that are though to take place over the next several decades, and who has to ponder if I want to bring children into a world of water wars, floods, droughts, food scarcity and conflict with climate refugees, that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (and many more pounds of arrogance).

The climate change we have catalyzed is like a disease. It has its lapses of remission, where the symptoms are confusing, and sometimes seem to be absent. As with someone chronically ill, there are many good days, weeks or months. But that doesn't mean the disease is cured or never existed in the first place. Overall, the sick person is still getting worse, as the T cells drop or the cancer cells grow, the pain is more frequent every year as it winds down to its conclusion, which may be permanent disability or premature death. Because that person has some good days, or does not "look" sick to an outside observer who isn't a medical professional, should that person avoid treatment? Should the disease be ignored?

The good days, though we should all appreciate them, should not fool skeptics as illustrative of an Earth in balance, or even lull climate change activists into complaisancy or calmness. We should understand that answers aren't always linear or apparent. And we should err on the side of caution, for the sake of our future. Perhaps, as Climategate showed, we do not know everything about the future effects and implication of climate change, and evidence of our contribution to it is not 100% conclusive, but is is very compelling (95% sureness among the scientific community). Can we afford our arrogance?

For more, please check out:

New Scientists: A Guide to the Perplexed: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html

Skeptics and Contrarians:
http://www.sej.org/publications/climate-change/skeptics-and-contrarians-climate-change-guide

DeSmog Blog (find a scientist and where they get their funding):
http://www.desmogblog.com/

LTEs the fossil fuel lobby sent to NYT and other periodical pretending to be regular people to argue against climate change: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/us/politics/19charity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA): http://www.acia.uaf.edu/

Overview of Climate Science: http://www.sej.org/initiatives/climate-change/overview

The Puritans have influenced the Christian conservative political movement. They saw themselves as a "chosen people." The doctrine of Manifest Destiny grew from this belief. It allowed them to practice genocide and take the ancestral lands of Native Americans.

Roger Williams disagreed with the Puritans over their treatment of the native people around Massachusetts Bay. The Puritans, not known for tolerance, expelled him for it. He later went on to found Rhode Island.

The United States, like many other great cultures, has developed a mythology. This mythology influences political life in ways that Americans do not necessarily see. Herbert calls attention to one myth in particular, the "six-gun savior." This hero of the American West shows up in countless books and movies. He comes to save the oppressed. Rather than obeying the rule of law, the six-gun savior is beyond the law. He restores order with violence. Clint Eastwood played the role of a six-gun savior in the movie Dirty Harry.

George W. Bush stepped into this role on 9/11. He saw himself as one appointed by God to bring divine vengeance on those who attacked America. Because his mission came from God, laws no longer restrained him. Because his mission came from God, those who opposed him were enemies of God. Enemies of God deserve destruction, and who better than to destroy them than America? Bush used vaguely religious rhetoric to rally support for his plans. He made the invasion of Iraq a sacred war. He considered those who disagreed with him blasphemers.

Herbert goes on to explain how Christian beliefs have become justification for torture. God, in saving man, tortured his son. He condemns the unfaithful to an eternity of torture. If God tortures his enemies, the six-gun savior can do it for Him.

Anyone who has ever agreed with the bumper sticker "Who would Jesus bomb?" will enjoy this book for its insights. Herbert untangles logical knots that empower Christians to commit extremely un-Christian acts. He explains why many Christian conservatives cannot be persuaded through logic and reason. The only thing he cannot do is tell us how to deprogram them.

Faith-Based War: From 9/11 to Catastrophic Success in Iraq
by T. Walter Herbert
176 pages, 2009 Equinox Publishing, London

What many have seen as simply an aberration driven by the explosive combination of 9/11 and the personalities and political philosophies of Bush, Cheney and their inner circle, Herbert presents as a variation on a theme with deep roots in America's psyche--America as a divinely inspired and guided nation with a God-given mission in the world.

The result is a searching and thought-provoking examination of the fundamental beliefs and myths that drove the nation across the continent, shaped its treatment of the Native American tribes it encountered, defined our role through two world wars and the Cold War, and, redefined by Bush and Cheney, led us to invade Iraq and on to the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

America's vision of itself, its founding myth, Herbert argues, is as a gleaming "city on a hill," a God-given shelter for freedom within and a shining beacon to the rest of the world.

As others have done, Herbert traces this myth to the sermon given by John Winthrop aboard the flagship Arbella as a tiny flotilla of Puritan settlers neared the coast of Massachusetts in 1630. The devoutly religious Winthrop declared to his equally devout followers, "For we most consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."

As God's newly chosen people, the settlers believed that they could expect divine guidance and protection, but only, as Winthrop warned them, if they maintained their own high moral stature in the face of the worldly temptations of wealth and power.

Noble words. However, Herbert shows that from the start, two mirror-image versions of this founding myth competed for dominance.

One, exemplefied by Winthrop's contemporary, the freethinking Roger Williams, held that the fledgling nation's good standing with God demanded moral treatment of others. He asserted, for example, that religious dissent should not be criminalized within the Puritan colony. Even more importantly, he asserted that the Native Americans whom the settlers encountered were human beings with God-given rights comparable to those of the Puritans. In his eyes, Native American lands had not been awarded to the settlers by God, but could only be obtained through fair negotiations.

The alternate view, and the one that Herbert argues has dominated American history, defined the continent that lay before the settlers as their Promised Land, and the settlers as God's chosen inheritors of that land from the natives who, unlike them, were not favored by God. The Indians could be pushed aside and slaughtered in the course of carrying out God's mandate. Success against those defined as enemies to God's plan was not only assured by a benevolent Creator, but demanded by a wrathful one.

Herbert traces these twin, entwined, myths throughout American history. On one hand, he argues, belief in America's special mandate fostered much that is good and great about America. But when the dark side of the mythology dominated, it justified and helped drive two centuries of wars against the Native Americans, exploitation of the continent's resources and people, and, in our post Cold-War era, the exportation of armed capitalism as the highest expression of freedom and democracy.

Herbert focusses most intensely on 9/11 and its aftermath. One of the puzzles that he unravels is the intense surprise, the shock that most American's felt not just at the destruction of 9/11, but at the hatred that drove it. How could others hate us when we live in that city on a hill, when we want nothing more than to be a beacon to the world? The myth, Herbert makes clear, made most of us blind to the negative aspects of America's enormous impact on the world, it created a blind spot through which al Quaeda caught us by surprise.

Herbert goes on to detail the extent to which the darker side of a divinely led America, America acting on behalf of a wrathful God, dominated the character and actions of the Bush administration.

The path Bush chose was an all-out war of good against evil, the unfolding of a divine drama in which our role had less to do with the pragmatics of coping with a complex multilateral world than with acting out the myth of "primal American innocence assaulted by supernatural malice."

It should come as no surprise to students of history that along with such divine mission and mandate came the permission to invade pre-emptively, to abduct, hold without charges or trial, and torture our perceived enemies abroad, and to invade the privacy and erode the rights of citizens at home. Grandiose, God-given missions all too easily unleash a nation or group's worst impulses.

Herbert is a scholar. As such, he builds and supports his analysis on an edefice of historical and current documentation, from Winthrop's city-on-a-hill sermon through recent revelations of the inside workings of the Bush administration. He makes a strong case for the existence and impact of the twin threads of divinely inspired American exceptionalism, inspiration that he shows us can lead to great accomplishments and to great evil.

Readers may differ as to the degree to which this mythology, rather than historical necessity, pragmatic politics, oil, or the peculiar chemistry of the Bush-Cheney White House drove American policy following 9/11. However, anyone who wants to understand America more deeply would be well advised to read Faith-Based War, and read it carefully.

In the end, Herbert's concern is not only to examine the mythological underpinnings of the Bush era, the Iraq war, and earlier moments in our history, but to challenge each of us to scrutinize our own political and social morality. Invoking the infamous image from Abu Ghraib of the hooded man with electrical wires dangling from his outthrust arms, Herbert asks, "Where do you see yourself in this drama? With whom do you stand in the presence of this atrocity?

With a liberal now in the White House, one who ignorantly championed a premature withdrawal from Iraq, and who firmly, and naively, subscribes to the State Department approach to dealing with belligerents, it's clear that America's history of periodic appeasement of tyranny has become reanimated.

Our nation's foes have historically been state-based and our battlefields have been conventional. With the advent of radical Islam in the past three decades, America has been slow to comprehend the depth and resilience of this evil and its response to its nascent threats in the 90s was to treat it as a criminal justice matter.

Although 9/11 clarified that America specifically and the West generally has been targeted for a decades-long war, the memories of that savage morning have faded and the absence of further attacks on our soil has convinced many among us, in particular Democrats, that the threat has abated.

Below is a quote from a little known, much less read, speech by a well known American president. Those familiar with history will probably recognize it, but it demonstrates the civic and cultural disparity that has developed over the decades between those who understand that evil is timeless and those who willfully refuse to recognize the gathering storm.

"It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance...we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts,--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, every thing that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other."

This was President Wilson's war address to Congress on April 2, 1917 and although it may lack the eloquence of a Lincoln or a Washington, it nonetheless acquits the values and principles of America as a beacon for freedom and democracy, and her willingness to project those values to other nations.

Because this jihad against us comes in the form of a stateless and shadowy presence, one manifest in over sixty countries, and because many on the left are reticent to call an ideological aggressor with religious underpinnings an enemy, we've unwittingly abetted its capacity to strike again. Indeed, Mr. Obama has redacted the phrase "war on terrorism" from his administration's lexicon and replaced it with a euphemism, in a wholly obtuse effort to win approval in the court of global opinion.

In the interbellum years after WWI, America and her allies were blinded to the possibility that a revanchist Germany could rekindle its military and unleash the horrors that engulfed Europe. In early 1938, in a letter to his sister, Neville Chamberlain wrote that he would contact Hitler to tell him

"The best thing you [Hitler] can do is tell us exactly what you want for your Sudeten Germans. If it is reasonable we will urge the Czechs to accept and if they do, you must give assurances that you will let them alone in the future."

The problem, of course, is that Hitler was using the issue of the Sudetenland as a pretext for war, and Chamberlain as a predicate for peace.

For reasons that will only become clear with the passage of time, America has moved back into a cycle of appeasement, where interminable diplomacy with Iran will doubtless lead to its acquisition of a nuclear weapon, and where a deliberative hobbling of our intelligence agencies to aggressively pursue their mission will create vulnerabilities that the Islamic extremists will gladly exploit.

As we pray for the three thousand Americans who perished eight years ago today, it's vital that we understand that permitting the slow degradation of our defenses against this enemy is the gravest disservice we can do to their memories and to the future security of our Republic.

For more commentary on the political issues of our day, please to go:

http://clearcommentary.townhall.com

Initially I agreed with the President and my fellow democrats. Now I don't. My main concern is economic development and the revitalization of the black community, I don't think the public option takes us any closer to that goal. Where black economic development is concerned I've read numerous articles by an economist named Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard. For over eight years Dr. Nembhard has been working on a theory of wealth creation in the black community.

In doing so she's unearthed a wealth of history identifying and supporting the existence of black owned and operated cooperatives. Her research has identified cooperatives in the 1930's and 40's ranging from the Consumer's Cooperative Trading Company in Gary, Indiana, which operated a branch store, a credit union, a gas station, as well as the largest black owned and operated grocery store in the country, to the Brick Rural Life School in North Carolina whose members formed a credit union and a health insurance program that covered up to $100 in hospitalization with a .25 cent co-pay(in 1930's and 40's dollars).

Rather than being knowledge for knowledge sake's scholarship, Dr. Nembhard's ongoing research is connecting the dots between past and present and if given the proper exposure could inject a significant black presence into the health care debate. Currently one of the cooperatives that she is studying is the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. Though the federation's primary purpose is to help black farmers be more productive, it is also affiliated with a larger integrated cooperative called the Alliance For Employee Benefits Cooperatives(AEBC). The AEBC is one of the primary groups trying to offer the cooperative model as one that is viable for health insurance reform.

Dr. Nembhard's work could also be applied to the Collective Banking Group--a collection of black church congregations that was initially formed to address issues of redlining in Prince George's County. With a little grit and imagination the collective could address health insurance issues.

Granted, these are two very small examples and it will take a significant effort to get the numbers up to a scale where they make a dent in the cost and delivery of health insurance to the black community. However, where the public option is concerned, the majority of people won't benefit from it until 2013 and after. That's a long time. Given the existing research on coops I think they could scale before 2013. Meanwhile the ability to apply that research not just to health care and health insurance but to other aspects of black economic development leads me to the conclusion that in both the short term and the long, the cooperative approach to health insurance reform is the better approach for us.

We can begin to understand this when we examine that bellwether of primal fear, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who recently pronounced the Obama health care plan "downright evil," and claimed that the plan creates a "death panel" that will decide whether the elderly or disabled are "worthy of care" -- a claim refuted by Factcheck.org, a non-partisan website. That the terms "evil" and "death" were invoked by Palin in what is ostensibly a debate about modifying health care points to the irrational forces at work in this conflict -- arguably, forces that have been underestimated by the President and his top advisors.

We can look at the health care debate in terms of various historical and philosophical dichotomies: federalism vs. anti-federalism; societal vs. individual rights; socialism vs. free-market capitalism, etc. But a much more ancient division in mankind's history suggests itself: that between hunter-gather societies and settled agricultural societies. As historian Thomas Greer explains, sometime around 6000 BC, much of mankind shifted from a nomadic-hunter pattern of existence to one of "settled agrarian life", involving domestication of plants and animals. As Greer notes, we "became food-makers instead of food-finders." In their book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argue that along with this settled, agricultural society came the notion of property rights. Eventually, property-holding farmers came to rely on government for safety and protection.

In contrast, hunter-gatherers had little need for, or emotional investment in, government protection of food or property. Indeed, as Cochran and Harpending argue, the hunter-gatherers "...could usually obtain food fairly easily, since constant local violence kept human numbers below the land's carrying capacity." For the hunter-gatherers, "bursts of strength in war and hunting" were more important than the agrarians' "bourgeois virtues" of maintaining safety, stability, and property.

I believe we find echoes of this cultural dichotomy in the present, often shrill debate about health care. Opponents of so-called "Obama Care" often state the matter in terms of a "government takeover" of health care, or raise the specter of "socialized medicine." Many of these critics believe that individuals should be left essentially to their own devices -- or to the "free market"--when it comes to finding health insurance, or, indeed, health care. They see government as an all-powerful enemy -- one that, in Sarah Palin's world-view, will seize even the power of life and death from those it ostensibly serves. Palin's fears -- irrational though they are, in my view -- are those of the archetypal hunter-gatherer, zealously guarding the freedom to roam, hunt, and survive on one's own wits and wiles. These are not necessarily bad traits, under certain circumstances -- but they may not serve or protect those who are least able to care for themselves.

In contrast, those who favor Obama's type of health-care reform generally see government as a benefactor in the service of civilized society -- one that protects certain fundamental rights, including that of decent, affordable health care. The anxiety of this constituency focuses on the break-down of the social safety net, leaving the sick to fend for themselves amidst predatory insurers and callous capitalists. This, in my view, is a vestige of the settled agrarian's primal fear: the break-down of order, and the abandonment, by government, of those most in need of its protection. These fears, too, may be exaggerated -- though as a physician, I believe the present anarchic state of health care in this country is not very far-removed from the worst fears of the "settled agrarians."

There are, to be sure, fair and rational criticisms that may be leveled against some of the Administration's health care proposals. But I don't believe the vitriol and hysteria coming from some opponents of health care reform can be explained solely in terms of economics. In President Obama's more extreme critics, there is a good deal of the ancient, hunter-gatherer crying out, "Don't fence me in!" Before we can persuade these critics to support genuine health care reform, we need to understand the origins of this cri de coeur-- even if it sounds, to this physician's ear, much like the howl of the nocturnal predator.

Ronald Pies MD is a psychiatrist in the Boston area, and the author of Everything Has Two Handles: The Stoic's Guide to the Art of Living.

Now I know the leader of the free world isn't supposed to get misty and wax philosophic over the death of an entertainer. After all, with the turbulence in Iran and Pakistan, there certainly are more pressing things with which to concern himself. But to put this in a better context, let me take you back to the late 1960's when the first Jackson Five album came out. Before that time images of young, fully expressive black boys did not exist in any serious way in American media. The best we could do was re-runs of the Little Rascals with Stymie, Farina, and Buckwheat. Unlike some black psychologists, I won't go as far as to say that these images were damaging, but suffice it to say, they were far from inspirational. Then in 1969, the album "Diana Ross Presents The Jackson Five" came out. I can tell you from personal experience, that as a young black boy seeing five boys that looked like me on an album cover, was like walking on air.

Granted President Obama's biracial background was not the same as mine or my friends' but that's why I think the images of Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five may have been even more poignant for him. In his book "Dreams Of My Father", the President spoke about grappling with the notion of "black identity". I'm willing to bet that when the President saw that first Jackson Five album cover decades ago, it helped him to feel a sense of pride and allegiance to young black boys with "fros" in every corner of America.

I understand that the President is more about "universalism" than racially specific homilies. Nonetheless I believe if he were to put Michael Jackson and his early life in the context of what it meant to us 30 and 40 something black folks, it would be a story of value to all Americans.

Author, speaker, and entrepreneur Roland Laird is CEO of Posro Media -- see www.posro.com.

During the campaign and since his election, we were told that one of the fundamental strengths of Barack Obama is his post-political, transpartisan approach to governing, which would translate into successes, domestically and in foreign affairs. For two views of that we turn first to Eugene Robinson, writing in today's Washington Post.

For Robinson, we can distill leadership down to certain key components, beginning with Obama's personal narrative and the way his unique ancestral influences have contributed to his universal appeal. Coupled with another vital facet of the ideal leader--humility--which, in Robinson's view, was absent in the prior president and which led to America acting in ways "contrary to our ideals," and you have the complete 21st century leader.

What's intriguing about Robinson's analysis is the studied absence of the principles that won two world wars and the Cold War last century, that overcame the blight of slavery and led to a strong and unwavering insistence upon civil rights for all. Rather, he focuses, rather narrowly, on Obama's adroit, new age view of the world, a place which obligates America to apologize for itself, to meekly assume her place among dozens of other nations, which also demands a revision of history as sweeping as Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust.

There's also an ignorant irony in Robinson's implied argument that Obama set a new tone in his Cairo speech by stating that America is not at war with Islam. There are too many instances to quote, but this was a theme former President Bush maintained throughout his tenure, and it's the height of hypocrisy that liberals such as Robinson are so ideologically incandescent concerning the Obama-phenomenon that he doesn't have the--yes, humility--to admit the truth.

Another paradoxical truth is how the left lionizes emotion over substance. Robinson becomes teary-eyed when recounting the audience member in Cairo who shouted "We love you!" at Obama, comparing it with obvious disdain with the shoe-throwing spectacle during President Bush's news conference in Iraq. So, we have Obama who, as a senator, authored legislation that mandated the removal of all American combat forces by March of 2008, just when the surge was having a positive impact, who, to this day, minimizes the fact that a butcher is no longer installed as chief tyrant of 25 million people, who erroneously called Afghanistan a war of necessity, and who stunned our moral sensibilities by comparing the slaughter of 6 million Jews to the injustices the Palestinians have suffered for the past 60 years. And, this is the man Robinson touts as a Messiah?

For a bracing antidote, let's have a look at this piece by Patrick Buchanan. Although there are many issues where he and I would diverge, sometimes dramatically, in general Buchanan's reading of history, which he deftly applies to current challenges, is at once credible and thoughtful.

I'll let his piece speak for itself, but, since we're on the subject of truths, it's irrefutably true that no American president has ever prevailed in a regional or global conflict with a foreign policy that effectively denigrates his own nation. There's a time and place for apologies and national self-criticism, but they shouldn't be woven into a national narrative thematically expressed in speeches on foreign soil.

Especially in a time when America's civic resolve is frayed its national security is challenged.

Mella is editor of ClearCommentary.com.

However, some of the state's Republicans seem to relish the idea. They realize that they would likely be the dominant party in a nation of Texas suddenly freed from a Democratically-controlled Washington.

Hypothetically, though, what if Texas really attempted to secede? In a complete 180 from the way state politicians are currently reacting, I believe it would be national Republicans -- not Democrats -- who would have the biggest problem with it and subsequently throw up the most roadblocks to such a move. You see, it's a matter of simple arithmetic in Congress and in the Electoral College.

Texas has two Senators and 32 members in the House of Representatives, and therefore gets 34 electoral votes in presidential elections. If Texas were to leave the Union, its congressional delegation and electoral votes would be reapportioned to the remaining 49 states.

Texas is solidly Republican, having gone for the GOP candidates in the last eight presidential elections. In addition, both of its Senators, as well as 20 of its House members, are Republican. Out of the 20 most populous, you cannot find a more dependable state for the national GOP. Without Texas, Republicans would have difficulty not only winning presidential elections but ever having any hopes of regaining a majority in Congress.

Therefore, I believe President Obama and national Democrats would only go through the motions of blocking Texas from seceding, as it would be to their political advantage to let the Lone Star State go. The Republican National Committee, on the other hand, would no doubt fight to the bitter end to keep Texas in the fold -- and be left crying in their beer if unsuccessful.

However, by embracing that argument, Mr. Hill overlooks a more fundamental one: Why is it that people who are convinced they have the moral right to slaughter innocents in the womb also believe their are default moral arbiter in economics? Indeed, this is the same crowd--nay, mob--who would abrogate our 2nd Amendment rights, ensuring that only criminals are armed, who embrace illegal aliens who are draining our public coffers, and who would emasculate our military while inviting radical Islamists in through the front gate.

But, as we descend into the inner-workings of their argument, the first point is radically clear: Regardless of the fact that America has the world's second highest corporate income tax, and that its personal income tax rates are already painfully progressive, it doesn't "give back" to the fiscally unwashed masses in sufficient amounts as to render it 'moral.' Therefore, despite the fact that the top 1 percent of income earners pay 39 percent of all federal income taxes and that the top 5 percent pays 58 percent (and, that the bottom 50 percent pays 4.3 percent), the unalloyed liberals feel it's still not 'fair.'

Beyond the fact that this demonstrates it's not, in fact, about fairness, it proves that such arguments have a limitless elasticity and inexhaustible capacity to soldier on, the abundance of evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It's also a testimony to our public education system, our jaundiced media, and our 'higher' education system, that work in refined harmony to ensure the next generation is thoroughly inculcated with the notion that capitalism is all about greed, not opportunity, that there are winners and losers--which, of course there are and ought to be--and that the latter are permanently mired in failure.

The truth, of course, is a rather more mundane matter. The 'fairness' the left lionizes is really only a matter of a nominally level playing ground, which is to say, bi-lateral contracts, freely negotiated. That begins with the employment contract: Neither the employer nor the employee is forced to accept the contract and neither is obliged to maintain it against his will. It also covers the marketplace: If you want to drive the extra miles to Wal-Mart to save up to thirty percent on groceries, it's your call; the same goes for negotiating with the flinty used car salesman--you can play hardball, but if you don't have the skills or nerve, you'll likely pay sticker price.

The reason all of this is to distasteful to liberals is twofold: First, it places the onus entirely on you, regardless of your innate intelligence, aptitude, or saviness; and, second, by definition, if you fail, it's your fault, which nullifies the left's lengthy (and self-serving) list of excuses, from 'the system,' to one of its many '-isms,' all of which whittle away at the real truth, which is that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own success or failure.

Integrally related is the fact that one episode of failure doesn't mean we're out of the game, rather, it means we might well have learned something to better prepare us for the next challenge. But, in the left's 'zero-sum' game, failure is at once final and humiliating.

There is, in fact, nothing whatsoever 'immoral' in capitalism, which is the system that has lifted more people and nations out of poverty than any other. Because, it not only encourages innovation and risk-taking, it requires us to include accountability in the equation, and, when we're accountable, we tend to play by the rules. That is conspicuously lacking in the left's endorsement of the government as the economic arbiter. Moreover, self-interested behavior becomes an oxymoron when we're obliged to live in a statist nation.

Mella is editor of ClearCommentary.com.

He has in short order alienated all of those who did not vote for him but had hoped that he would govern from the political center. His prior Iraqi policy of immediate disengagement has disappeared in favor of the Bush policy; he has summarily ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. The financial markets are not only disenchanted but downright hostile to his economic policy and have declared, by their actions, his stimulus package ineffective. His treasury department has yet to define with specificity a policy regarding the banking or mortgage crisis.

On one side of his mouth the president flatly states the dire financial circumstances of the nation and after submitting his budget he declares his administration's confidence in substantial growth just one year from now. If that is not a conflicting statement that certainly begs the question: Exactly what is the present economic situation? If that is not the right question then we need to change the meaning of the word conflicting.

Can this guy actually pull this off? Can he beguile and cajole the Democratic Party including the 'blue dog' conservatives? He certainly has won over the media, the young, the naive, and those that have less than those who have more; this Obama period of change is certainly disruptive to those who do not fit into Obama's descriptive of the people.

The president is a socialist; an ideological leftist who has the intention of moving this nation into a socialistic democracy. He did not run a campaign on that agenda, but what's new about that?

Mr. Obama and his faithful wants' the government to make all material decisions; he has no belief in the decisions of individuals. He has proposed a limit on charitable gifts because he does not want the individual to make that decision. He has decided to eliminate mortgage deductions on homes above a certain value because of his obsession with taking from those who have more wealth then he thinks is appropriate. He wants to utilize billions of tax dollars for economic stimulus but that stimulus package obviously does not include those taxi drivers, food servers, laborers, keno runners, bartenders, and all the other blue collar employees in Las Vegas. Didn't Nevada vote blue? Now talk about stupid?

Frankly, I am very concerned that this guy and his faithful will have a devastating effect on this nation's economic and eventual military dominance; he really is a dangerous fellow.

His disciples declare his brilliance. Noting how well he speaks the faithful find comfort in his continuance of electability because they know that rhetoric trumps substance; besides, few of the listeners and viewers understand the workings of high finance, global economics nor do they find particular interest in military dynamics, strategy and tactics as such effects and reflects on American's international obligations. It is so much easier to simply listen and obey.

Obama has no experience but then as enunciated in the presidential campaign Obama has judgment. Besides for experience Obama has his advisors, cabinet, agencies, but then, of course the dragon killer, sorry, the dragon negotiator or tamer and eventual friend of all dragons needs only cursory assistance because he is armed with super-human persuasion, Zen-like insight on reasonableness, plus, Obama has the sixth sense of savvy on all things distanced from the mundane to the heavenly sublime. His persuasion is so awesome that Democrats in congress did not need to read the stimulus bill to vote yes and of course they ratified the largest spending bill ever implemented in the shortest of time.

I do not want to over emphasis his power of persuasion, since, he does have a nice smile, his manner is civil, his grandmother white; his mother was a dedicated liberal who married a black man from Africa; he did graduate from Harvard Law School and oh yes he was a community organizer. The aggregate of these attributes logically enhance the measure of his sum.

Obama the protagonist is thus far the prime mover of his destiny. No other Democrat has his charismatic sway and since the media, a majority of Americans, as well as, the peoples of the world measure their regard for this man somewhere between love and adore to worship and follow him off the cliff or into the darkness of the unknown; the Democrats are quite pleased that their liberator from greedy capitalism; the anointed savior of socialism has finally returned to earth.

But imagine this: Obama's policies, ideals, political philosophy, behavior understanding of business 101, and international reality is dead wrong. He is wrong on taxing the wealthy, wrong on healthcare, wrong on bailing out the auto industry, the banks are taking the government for a ride down a windy road and he is seriously wrong in motivating risk takers to take risk.Obama lives in a novel of socialistic wish it was and someday going to be...The true value of America is found in the individual not the collective. Less governing by government is more freedom for Americans. We conservatives must blow the horn, beat the drums, we must rally and force these liberals out of office in the next election. Obama must not be allowed to succeed in the transference of America the traditional to America of Obama's design.