I really liked the IBD article (Our Own Hundred Years? War) about Bush's appeasement comments. If the shoe didn't fit, Obama and his liberal friends wouldn't be so upset. Obviously, they knew exactly who Bush was referring to and WHY.

And speaking of terminology, Oliver North has a telling article on Muslim Extremism (War of Ideas). Succumbing to politically correct words is not much different than appeasement.

Krauthammer has a great article on Israeli Politics. He is saying that the thing that bothers Israel's neighbors is Israel's success. Hmmm. Sounds like how much of the world feels about the US. My advice: Skip Diana West's article under the same Subject.

You can find more on the appeasement comments under Bush's 2nd Term. Limbaugh has a good article on the subject. We better study history so we don't repeat it. Under the same Subject, the liberal Robinson seems to think that "government as the solution" is coming back into vogue. Sure, the tide ebbs and flows, but many liberal big–government ideas will never come back from the dustbin, like wage and price controls.

We seem to have no dearth of world problems. The Soviet Union goes away and look what surfaces. First the Mideast, and now Venezuela. The IBD debates what we should do, particularly given that we are dependent to the tune of 12% on Venezuelan oil. Interesting reading.

Cliff May has a good article under Democracy. Are we making progress or not? Some positive indications and some not so great.

I don't often highlight Lifestyle articles, but I found Hawkins' article under Men's Issues to be enlightening. Maybe it is old fashioned, but men have always assumed certain responsibilities, as have women. Hawkins lists what those are for men. We would be a whole lot better off if we observed and practiced those responsibilities. It is certainly true that some women are good at men's strengths and vice versa, but if you believe in evolution, this topic is worth debating.

Have a great Friday.

More than five years have passed since the invasion of Iraq, since President Bush stood under the "Mission Accomplished" banner on that aircraft carrier.

While these fifth anniversaries got some notice, another did not: the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, by a U.S. Army tank, on April 8, 2003. The tank attack killed two unembedded journalists, Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network Telecinco. Couso recorded his own death. He was filming from the balcony and caught on tape the distant tank as it rotated its turret and fired on the hotel. A Spanish court has charged three U.S. servicemen with murder, but the U.S. government refuses to hand over the accused soldiers. The story might have ended there, just another day of violence and death in Iraq, were it not for a young U.S. military intelligence veteran who has just decided to blow the whistle.

Foreign Policy: Barack Obama claims he's not an appeaser. But when President Bush attacked those who "seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists," why was the senator sure he was talking about him?

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks" is the famous Hamlet quote referring to pleas of innocence that actually indicate guilt. Did Obama, the near–certain Democratic Party nominee for president, "protest too much" in complaining about Bush's speech to Israel's Knesset on Thursday?

Addressing lawmakers in Jerusalem in a special session of the legislature commemorating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel, the president made comments with which few Americans could find fault.

As Israel enters its 61st year, Israelis may look back with pride. Yet, the realists among them must also look forward with foreboding.

Israel is a modern democracy with the highest standard of living in the Middle East. In the high–tech industries of the future, she is in the first rank. From a nation of fewer than a million in 1948, Israel's population has grown to 7 million. In seven wars –– the 1948 War of Independence, the Sinai invasion of 1956, the Six–Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the Lebanon wars of 1982 and 2006 –– Israel has prevailed, though some of these wars were, as Wellington said of Waterloo, "a damn near–run thing."

LOUISVILLE, Ky. –– The term "politically correct" is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary thus: "Of, relating to, or supporting broad social, political, and educational change, especially to redress historical injustices in matters such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation." Add to that litany of "historical injustices" the title of my New York Times best–seller: "American Heroes in the Fight Against Radical Islam."

In recent weeks, the vocabulary police opened a new front in the war on terror by issuing a list of do's and don'ts for terrorism terminology. In an effort to fight a kinder, gentler war on Islamic radicals, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with unnamed Islamic interest groups, has issued a paper titled "Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations From American Muslims."

Don't know why I bother. The man is leaving office in eight months; his presidency noticeably marked by the uneven tread of the lame duck. But so long as George W. Bush is commander in chief, there remains something mesmerizing about the way he seems to experience his momentous tenure virtually unscratched, even ungrazed, by his many brushes (collisions) with history.

I'm not suggesting callousness on his part regarding American casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; or regarding American civilian casualties due to Islamic terrorism. I think he feels such losses very deeply. In fact, I think he feels everything very deeply. Whether the subject is his feelings about Mexican illegal aliens, the war in Iraq or on–off Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, I think Bush's presidency, at its base, has been an emotional presidency, more gut–driven and temporal than attuned to anything like that sweep of history you hear about.

Before sending Lewis and Clark west, Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis to Philadelphia to see Dr. Benjamin Rush. The eminent doctor prepared a series of scientific questions for the expedition to answer.

Among them, writes Stephen Ambrose: "What Affinity between their (the Indians') religious Ceremonies & those of the Jews?" Jefferson and Lewis, like many of their day and ours, were fascinated by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and thought they might be out there on the Great Plains.

They weren't. They aren't anywhere. Their disappearance into the mists of history since their exile from Israel in 722 B.C. is no mystery. It is the norm, the rule for every ancient people defeated, destroyed, scattered and exiled.

The 60th anniversary of the Jewish state's founding has come and gone. The pundits have pronounced pro and con, and the inevitable scribes from the hinterlands have vented their own obsessions in letters to their editors, some well–considered, but most disclosing only how seriously Washington requires more equitable distribution of the fruits of literacy.

So now that things have calmed a bit, maybe there is some space in the public square for a simple truth to be heard.

Sixty years ago Israel was launched as a new state by the United Nations. Now Palestinians mourn what they regard as Nakba, the "catastrophe." President Bush attended the Israel celebrations but not the Palestinian Nakba functions.

Which really says it all about those six decades. Israel celebrates as Bush arrives to talk of a peace that almost all of its citizens say they want, but virtually none believe will actually happen. The Palestinians mourn, fobbed off with promises of economic assistance and the dream of a separate state, while knowing full well that when it comes to it, the West will always side with Israel in any fundamental quarrel with the Arabs.

WASHINGTON –– The Israelis are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the creation of the nation of Israel.

The Palestinians have only to mourn the loss of their land and the oppression they have suffered as refugees in camps and caves since 1948, their life under military occupation and their humiliation at myriad Israeli checkpoints.

Defeats in wars that had U.S. military and financial support have left the Palestinians in despair. But all that is history now.

There is little new in recent reports of a long–standing feud between the nation's two top law enforcement agencies, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In fact, since 1924 when J. Edgar Hoover took over the ineffectual and corrupt Bureau of Investigation in the Justice department, the FBI has been at odds with nearly every one, usurping the jurisdiction of every police agency from the sheriff's office to its own siblings, like ATF.

With 12,500 agents it has developed into a perfect model of arrogant uncooperativeness, demanding everyone else's information but refusing to give up its own. The result is a national police force that has been caught in one debacle after another without any detrimental consequences to its own operations but with the possibility of plenty for the welfare of Americans. The damage done to national security by the FBI's long–term feud with the CIA prior to Sept. 11, 2001 may be incalculable.

Let me get this straight. It's perfectly fair for Barack Obama and his cohorts to repeatedly disparage President Bush's foreign policy as "cowboy diplomacy" but unspeakably horrific for Bush to analogize the Democrats' approach to foreign policy to appeasing Hitler?

When Obama compared Hillary Clinton's threats against Iran to President Bush's threatening "bluster" and "cowboy diplomacy," no one batted an eye.

But when Mr. Bush, in addressing Israel's Knesset, compared those who want to negotiate with today's terrorists and tyrants to an American senator in 1939 who lamented that Hitler's march into Poland might have been avoided "if only I could have talked to Hitler," Obama, other Democrats and the mainstream media went ballistic.

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama says President George Bush is engaging in the “politicization of foreign policy” in a speech to celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday Tuesday morning.

The Reagan era in American politics is about to end, and we have George W. Bush to thank for its demise. In this respect, it doesn't matter who wins the Democratic nomination or even who wins the general election in the fall.

I was going to try to write this column without using the word "paradigm," but already I've failed: Regardless of who takes the oath of office in January, the paradigm that reigned for nearly three decades — the notion that government is useless, if not inherently evil — is no longer operative.

All three of the remaining presidential candidates propose a far more activist role for government.

Even as we console ourselves with the fact that the Bush presidency is entering its twilight months, we can't help but wish, as artist/political activist Henry Rollins said, that President Bush be allowed to speak only on closed–circuit television. That way, only the U.S. would be privy to his embarrassing speeches.

XIAHE, China –– This is historical Tibet, a land of jutting mountains, sculptures made of yak butter, and serene monks in red robes spinning golden prayer wheels in ancient monasteries.

In the last couple of months, this greater Tibet has also become a land of arsonist monks, armed troops and bloodied protesters. It's not formally under martial law today, but that's what it amounts to, and foreigners have been mostly kept away.

Terrorism: Interpol's authentication of FARC computer data Thursday leaves little doubt about Venezuela's bid to destabilize Colombia. So should the U.S. declare it a terror sponsor and stop buying its oil? Or do nothing?

The Interpol examination confirmed that the contents of three FARC computer laptops, three USB thumb drives and two hard disks, recovered from the camp of FARC chieftain Raul Reyes after a March 1 raid, were authentic.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain described his Democratic rival Barack Obama’s willingness to negotiate with enemies of the United States as “unacceptable” in a conference call Tuesday afternoon.

"I think it is an unacceptable position and shows Senator Obama does not have the knowledge, the experience, the background to make the kind of judgments that are necessary to preserve this nation."

“My question to Senator Obama is ‘what do you want to talk about with them?'” McCain asked. Specifically addressing the scenario in which Obama might meet with Iran’s President Ahmadinejad McCain said, “If Senator Obama wants to sit down across the table form a leader of a country that calls Israel a ‘stinking corpse’ and comes to New York to say he is going to wipe Israel off the map, what is it that he wants to talk about."

WASHINGTON –– Democrats are claiming that high voter turnout in their primaries is proof positive that they'll win the White House in November.

It is a familiar claim, made by one party or the other, that pops up every four years, but it contains not a morsel of truth. Many studies show no correlation between party primary participation and general election results.

Nevertheless, in a memorandum to its supporters and the news media, the Democratic National Committee is crowing, "(R)ecord turnout during the primaries has been transformational for the Democratic Party as record numbers of new voters are being registered."

It had to be one of the single dumbest questions ever asked in the history of network television.

Diane Sawyer was chatting up James Carville, the irascible Clinton loyalist, about the West Virginia Democrat primary. She turned to Mr. Carville and, with a glint in her eye, asked something that almost caused him to fall flat out of his cushy 'Good Morning America' chair. At least I know I certainly would have keeled over had I been asked the same thing.

Referring to the much–reported exit polling in West Virginia that suggested that one out of five Clinton voters said that race was definitely a factor in their decision, Ms. Sawyer, who makes approximately 12 million dollars a year to ask questions on ABC–TV, said the following: "...should Sen. Clinton say she is rejecting the votes of anyone who votes based in any way on color of skin?"

Recently on a talk radio show, the guest, a Democrat, said there was little difference in policy between John McCain and the two Democrats running for President. Many of those calling in agreed. Considering McCain’s recent comments on global climate change and his position on some other issues I can understand why some might have that impression.

If voters are convinced there would not be much difference in policy between a McCain and an Obama presidency, it is likely the majority will go for the young, charismatic candidate who would make history as the first black President. If they vote for Obama thinking he would be the same on policy as John McCain, though, they will be making a big mistake.

Decision '08: Time wonders if John McCain is healthy enough to be president, a question that was never asked of FDR. Meanwhile, a youthful Barack Obama is busily campaigning in each of the 57 states.

Yes, it's true that when young Mr. Obama was romping on the sandy beaches of Hawaii at age 6, McCain was fighting for his country and carrying on that fight for 5 1/2 years in a North Vietnamese prison that made Abu Ghraib look like Club Med. But we find the endless barrage by the mainstream media about McCain's age, mental acuity and physical condition an offensive cheap shot.

Power, money, sex, politics. Hillary Clinton is the ex–wife at the table where her ex–husband sits with his new wife. They've come together for the sake of the children to iron out as amiably as they can the specifics of separation. Hillary's the lady in distress. As odd woman out, she must show strength without the help she has grown accustomed to. It's a new and uncomfortable role.

Presidential politics has a lot in common with sexual politics. Power and money are instrumental, and Barack Obama's got more of both. Hillary's blowout in West Virginia, though continuing to show Obama's difficulty in attracting and reassuring white voters, probably doesn't change anything. Now both Hillary and Barack will find out which of their friends will remain good friends and which ones will go to the other.

One of the most appealing but untested promises of Barack Obama's presidential campaign is that he would break down the partisan divisions in America and govern across party lines. He has a chance to make this gauzy idea of consensus politics concrete in his choice of running mate.

By reaching outside the Democratic Party for his vice presidential nominee — tapping Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, say, or independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York — Obama would in an instant demonstrate that he truly means to change the divisive, lose–lose politics of Washington. It would offer a unity government for a country that seems to want one.

WASHINGTON –– I, for one, never want to see or hear of Barack Obama's ex–preacher again. I will not countenance scurrilous talk about how John McCain adopted his daughter. I will protest vociferously any more stupid innuendo about Obama's middle name. I may punch in the nose anyone who questions the state of the McCains' marriage.

There are many –– MANY –– who will try to trivialize this election by smearing the other party's candidate with as much mud as possible. There have been many indications already of how ridiculously off–base some peripheral players want us to get and how low they are willing to go to win.

In 2006, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel had an inspiration: run culturally conservative Democrats in culturally conservative congressional districts.

This doesn't sound like the stuff of strategic brilliance, but it meant overcoming the cultural condescension of most national Democrats. In his 2006 book "The Plan," Emanuel knocked "What's the Matter With Kansas?" author Thomas Frank for declaring cultural issues less important than economic ones: "It's insulting to suggest that blue–collar workers are wrong to make faith or conscience, not money, their bottom line."

WASHINGTON –– Well, at least they didn't kiss.

I was bracing myself for the lip lock Wednesday when John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Don't look at me. None other than David "Mudcat" Saunders, Edwards' former rural adviser, came up with the idea when he said Obama should kiss Edwards on the lips "to kill this 41–point loss," referring to Hillary Clinton's landslide victory Tuesday in the West Virginia primary.

Instead, the two men exchanged a manly air–hug to commemorate the moment when Edwards threw Clinton under the upholstered sofa on his grandmama's front porch and anointed the Illinois senator with snake oil left over from his own campaign.

O Captain! My Captain!
Our fearful trip is done.
— Walt Whitman

Spurning appeals to throw it in, Hillary Clinton is pressing on. But she has to know her attempted Clinton restoration is over, done, finis.

She began as invincible, inevitable — and ended incoherent. Ended petulant, aggrieved, self–centered, boring, stiff; calculating, cynical, contrived. She began as conservatives’ and moderates’ worst nightmare, and became — shrill, cackling, Chicago–suburb Southern accent, lifelong Yankee fan, and all — the endlessly morphing nightmare Plastic Girl of leftist Democrats as well.

The Democratic Presidential Primary has moved into surreal territory. Last Tuesday, Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory in West Virginia beating Barack Obama by over 40 points. Yet the state of the race hasn’t really changed. Obama still has an insurmountable delegate lead. She may win Kentucky but he is poised to win Oregon and slowly but surely march toward the nomination. Hillary can enjoy her victory and promise to press on, but surely she must know that the game is over.

Hillary Clinton scored a whopping victory in West Virginia. Trounced Barack Obama, who is consistently described as the inevitable presidential nominee.

Hard to know exactly what to do with this information.

Ever since the North Carolina primary (which was only last week, although it does feel as though it happened around 1947) the Democratic establishment has been sending out word that Clinton has a perfect right to run out the rest of the election schedule as long as she doesn't say anything mean about the Chosen One.

The Hillary Nutcracker is sexist. Keeping Florida and Michigan out of each candidate's primary vote tally is not. It's hardball politics.

Hillary Clinton's female supporters are playing hardball politics of their own to get Howard Dean to acknowledge that those votes deserve to be counted. During a private meeting last week, a group of Massachusetts women asked the chairman of the Democratic National Committee to confront the ugliness of sexism, just as Democrats are confronting the ugliness of racism as a result of Barack Obama's presidential bid.

Nothing has been quite as exciting and as disappointing or even disgusting as the grand drama of this Democratic contest for the presidential nomination.

We have seen Barack Obama rise and, with a new tone, make biracial identity a public fact of American life. We have also seen Americans reinvigorated, surging with a refreshing patriotism that is fully aware of the country's shortcomings.

We have seen America's history of struggling toward fairness become, perhaps for the first time, a common heritage that crossed lines of color, class, religion, region and sexual identity.

The US civil rights revolution of the 1950s and ‘60s was one of the greatest social and political liberations in history. It gave African Americans and other minorities new opportunities and new levels of success in virtually every walk of life.

But today we face unprecedented new challenges to indispensable, but often neglected rights enunciated in our Declaration of Independence: “That all men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

After 18 years of a law practice devoted to counseling landowners, home builders and commercial interests affected by the long arm and severe penalties of the Endangered Species Act, I am used to incredulous looks and outraged oaths from clients coming to grips with the Act's incredible burdens on impacted private citizens.

"Are you telling me I can't build my Burger King because a Delhi Sands flower–loving fly that has never been seen and is above ground only a few days a year might be near–by?"

"I can't build a connector road because the noise from construction might damage the hearing of the Stephens' kangaroo rat thus impairing its reproduction?"

Environmental interests and the Bush administration got caught up in a war of words as polar bears were declared a threatened species by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.

Suddenly, the best possible solution materialized as a gauzy tableau: One hungry polar bear, a Bush administration lawyer and an environmental bloviator stranded on a shrinking ice floe in the wind–swept Arctic Ocean.We are cheering for the fuzzy, charismatic megafauna with the snowball countenance and the lump–of–coal nose.

To the extent one can elbow aside a 900–pound carnivore with territorial issues, the polar bear was almost not in the room for Wednesday's announcement.

The resignation of Marina Silva as the environment minister of Brazil is a blow to the very future of the planet. Five years ago, she was appointed guardian of the Amazon but, in that time, she has fought an uphill battle against the loggers and ranchers of Brazilian agribusiness. Indeed, she often seemed a lone voice in the Brazilian government –– outvoted on the introduction of genetically modified grains, on the construction of a new nuclear power plant and on massive infrastructure projects, including two big hydroelectric dams and a major new road in the rainforest. She has finally quit, worn down by ill health and the appointment of a rival minister to speed the approval of energy projects.

Climate Change: Legislation pending in the Senate might warm environmentalists' hearts, but not because of potential cuts in carbon emissions. Their interest is in the heavy economic costs the plans would inflict.

Each bill uses the cap–and–trade scheme to control carbon dioxide emissions. Each establishes limits, then prescribes how to distribute or sell to the private sector the rights to emit specific amounts of greenhouse gases under the cap.

The bill sponsored by Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D–N.M., and Arlen Specter, R–Pa., is the least egregious. It would force greenhouse gas emissions to be cut to about 3% below last year's level.

In a paper published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Zhou et al. (2007) state that "clouds and precipitation play key roles in linking the earth's energy cycle and water cycles," noting that "the sensitivity of deep convective cloud systems and their associated precipitation efficiency in response to climate change are key factors in predicting the future climate." They also report that cloud resolving models or CRMs "have become one of the primary tools to develop the physical parameterizations of moist and other subgrid–scale processes in global circulation and climate models," and that CRMs could someday be used in place of traditional cloud parameterizations in such models.

What was done
The authors measured CO2 uptake of in situ phytoplankton assemblages collected at 35 stations in the Ross Sea polynya during Austral spring and summer, together with 14C uptake for a subset of 11 station samples, while they conducted CO2 manipulation experiments with phytoplankton collected at three Ross Sea locations via shipboard incubations using a semi–continuous batch–culture technique.

What was learned
The researchers report that "for the Phaeocystis–dominated springtime phytoplankton assemblages, there was a statistically significant increase in 14C fixation between 100 and 380 ppm CO2, but no further effects observed at 800 ppm CO2." In the case of the diatom–dominated summertime phytoplankton assemblages, however, the CO2–induced increase in both relative growth rate and primary productivity continued all the way out to the highest CO2 concentration investigated, i.e., 800 ppm, and it promoted "a shift towards larger chain–forming species."

What it means
Noting that the larger chain–forming species of diatoms "are prolific bloom formers with a very high capacity for organic carbon export to the sediments (Stickley et al., 2005)," Tortell et al. concluded that "potential CO2–dependent productivity increases and algal species shifts could thus act to increase the efficiency of the biological pump, enhancing Southern Ocean CO2 uptake and contributing to a negative feedback on increased atmospheric CO2."

The seven Chinese researchers say it is "obvious that, in the current regional average surface temperature series in north China, or probably in the country as a whole, there still remain large effects from urban warming," noting that "the contribution of urban warming to total annual mean surface air temperature change as estimated with the national basic/reference dataset reaches 37.9%."

Clearly, a huge part of the past half–century's global warming, which climate alarmists attribute to the greenhouse effect of CO2 and methane, is nothing more than the good old urban heat island effect, which is not properly removed from the databases of China and probably many other counties as well.

Is democracy on the march or is it in retreat? I put that question to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week. I suggested the answer was, at best, uncertain: Elections in Gaza have led to the creation of a terrorist mini–state ruled by Hamas; freedom in Lebanon is under intense assault by Hezbollah, also a terrorist group; Russia is more authoritarian now than it has been at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall; and Islamist Iran is as tyrannical as ever.

A new study out this week by the Manhattan Institute should dispel a few myths on immigrant assimilation. The study looked at a range of factors –– economic, cultural, and civic –– to assess whether today's immigrants are becoming part of the American mainstream. But it also compared this generation of immigrants to the Great Wave who came to America's shores in the early part of the 20th century. The good news is that today's immigrants appear to be assimilating at faster rates than those older generations of immigrants, even though they start out with more disadvantages.

WASHINGTON –– The court stepped in, summarily overturning laws in 16 states. Tossing aside evidence that the framers of the relevant constitutional provision never intended for it to apply to the situation at hand –– in fact, such laws were in place when the amendment was approved –– the court instead looked to what it grandly described as the "broader, organic purpose of a constitutional amendment."

Another example of "unelected judges" demonstrating "little regard for the authority of ... the states" and "even less interest in the will of the people"? Of judges, unconstrained by constitutional text or history, turning to "emanations ... and other airy constructs the Court has employed over the years as poor substitutes for clear and rigorous constitutional reasoning"?

The case is Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 ruling in which a unanimous Supreme Court found that state laws prohibiting interracial marriage violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The decision has been on my mind recently because of the death of Mildred Loving, the African–American woman who dared to marry a white man and try to live with him in Virginia. Last week, I happened to listen to C–SPAN's riveting rebroadcast of the oral argument.

You can scarcely pick up a paper these days without reading about someone talking about "rights." However, the word "responsibilities" doesn't seem to come up as often. That's a shame because our "responsibilities" are every bit as important as our "rights." In fact, the "responsibilities" are more important in some ways because of our nature.

Marriage is a necessary cornerstone of a civilized society. Crumble that building block and the waves of instability can be felt like tremors foreshadowing an earthquake. Sift through the wreckage of the collapsed mariage, and all too often, you'll find the broken bodies of children. It's never fails to be heartbreaking.

So hey, let's go Hollywood! It's so much more fun there! Tinseltown thinks that subverting marriage and nuking the nuclear family is all good fun, and a savvy profit strategy, to boot. HBO subjected viewers to a whole series glorifying polygamy ("Big Love"). ABC just had a banner week for gay activists with a gay "wedding" on "Brothers and Sisters."

Twelve countries ban HIV–positive visitors, nonimmigrants and immigrants from their territory: Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, Libya, Moldova, Oman, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Sudan and ... the United States. China recently acted to remove its ban on HIV–positive visitors because it feared embarrassment ahead of the Olympics. But America's ban remains.

It seems unthinkable that the country that has been the most generous in helping people with HIV should legally ban all non–Americans who are HIV–positive. But it's true: The leading center of public and private HIV research discriminates against those with HIV.

Ivy certainly looks nice, but you wouldn’t want to stroll through it. Here in Southern California, it’s common knowledge that most of our rodents hang out in the stuff. If bubonic plague ever breaks out in L.A., the source will be found lurking in the shrubbery.

What has me dwelling on ivy is my recent realization that much of what I don’t like about American politics –– namely, American politicians –– can be traced back to Ivy League schools. It can’t just be a coincidence that four or five universities keep spitting out presidential candidates and their spouses with the sort of regularity that Notre Dame used to turn out All American football players.

After the death of Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby, some people are calling for the end of horse racing.

I agree animals should not be made to suffer or die for our amusement, but I am not so naive to think that high–stakes thoroughbred horse racing is going to disappear anytime soon.

Still, it would be nice if there were an alternative to the dangerous game of horse racing, and the alternative I suggest is croquet