It has come to my attention, sadly not because I am a keen political observer (although I am) but because the media now reports everything that Sarah Palin says, that apparently British Petroleum (and any of the other companies involved including Halliburton who installed the concrete that was supposed to seal off the backflow of natural gas) is not at fault for the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and then proceeded to spill between 105,840,000 and 181,440,000 gallons (current estimate is 35K-60K bpd and if you multiply those two by the now-72 days it has been leaking then multiply that answer by 42, the number of gallons in the internationally-accepted barrel of oil, you arrive at the range I have stated - estimate as of July 1, 2010) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. To give my readers a measuring stick by which to assess the size of this spill, I could only find two oil spills in bodies of water that were larger than this one and, depending upon which estimation you go with, one of them actually was not larger. The Ixtoc mishap in the Gulf of Mexico occurred when Pemex (the state-owned Mexican oil company) was drilling and unintentionally released approximately 140 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Barring some sort of miracle, this leak is going to release more oil than the Ixtoc leak. At this point, the only oil release into a body of water that is comparable to the Deepwater Horizon accident is when Saddam Hussein intentionally turned the taps on and spewed 240-460 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf during his scorched earth retreat during the Persian Gulf War. The only event that put more oil into a body of water at one time was an act of eco terrorism by Saddam Hussein... now that's saying something about magnitude.

So, back to Sarah. She says that environmentalists like me are the cause of this explosion because if we would have just acquiesced to drilling on land and in shallow water the oil companies wouldn't have to take such huge risks involved in drilling an oil well a mile below the ocean. Imagine my surprise reading this when I had thought that this disaster would finally be the real-life event that convinced average, every day Americans that people like me calling for major money to be put into the research and implementation of a form of energy that the United States, and only the United States, controlled were right.

Here are some things we know that the American consumption of oil has accomplished. First and foremost, we have made countries like Saudi Arabia far more powerful and influential than they ever should have been by giving them enough money for everyone related to the founder of the House of Al-Saud to be able to swim in it like Middle Eastern Scrooge McDucks and putting the Middle East's hands around the neck of every Western economy which they can choke with an embargo as they did in 1973. Second, Saudi Arabia's many princes have invested their money in the construction and support of madrassas, known to the American intelligence community as jihadist manufacturing plants, that teach Wahhabism (a form of Islam that rejects all forms of modernity) and Deobandism (a virulent anti-Western strain of Islam). Therefore, what starts out as our money has been playing a role in killing Americans since the 1990's at the earliest. Just like the United States founds pluralistic democracies, Saudi Arabia founds fundamentalist Wahhabbist Islamic states. Third, we know that the pursuit of ever-larger amounts of oil for the purposes of fuel is damaging one of our greatest advantages as a country which is our natural resources. We need only look to the Gulf Coast to confirm this. Fourth, in our narrow focus on obtaining oil, China is already starting to one-up us on solar power. The Communist government of China is ordering by fiat that certain percentages of their electricity be generated by alternative sources and they are working with American companies to base solar panel manufacturing plants in China. Jobs, might I remind everyone, that should be going to Americans since we are the ones whose research and development has enabled solar energy to become a viable source of electricity. Oil was the source of energy for the 20th century and the race is on to see what country will gain a stranglehold on producing the implements to create electricity any place. any time with little to no negative output. If the United States achieves this, it will improve our economy as the countries of the world come to us to get wired up for electricity and we can decline to sell to countries we deem hostile to our interests.

George Washington, in his farewell address, warned the American people against foreign entanglements. In the context of the time, he meant the foreign entanglements of alliances with European countries so that America would not be dragged into a war in Europe. However, I believe that he would find our embrace of oil to be an even more disturbing foreign entanglement as it gives Saudi Arabia and other countries with the most oil the money to hire the most lobbyists and the power to shut off the spigot if the American government makes policy it doesn't care for. We broke from Britain to obtain our independence and until the second half of the 20th century we had enough domestic oil to stay independent. That is no longer true. Even if we were able to tap every bit of oil America has the right to drill tomorrow it wouldn't cover our demand for energy that expands with each passing year. So this year, on Independence Day, I urge every American to return to the Founding Fathers' message of self-sufficiency and demand of our government that it do more than give some money and lip service to alternative forms of energy. The course of the 21st century depends upon it.

At a fundraiser in Connecticut yesterday evening, the hottest story was whether Rob Simmons and Linda McMahon, who'd had a heated primary battle for the Republican Senate nomination that Simmons lost, would run into each other and, if they did would they be cordial. That is, until Michael Steele showed up. Michael Steele, sounding disturbingly like a leftist European politico, said that the war in Afghanistan "was a war of Obama's choosing. This was not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." Then, transforming into the infamous American isolationist Eugene Debs, he intoned "Well, if he's (Obama) such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed."

I gave you that paragraph break to let his words sink in. On the eve of the high holy day of everything American, July 4th, Michael Steele stated that Afghanistan was a war of Obama's choice and that everyone who has tried to fight in Afghanistan in the last millennium has lost while ironically impugning Obama's grasp of history. The implicit points being made in his remarks are that either September 11, 2001 did not happen (and we all know what sane people think about people who believe that) or that the fact that the command and control for al Qaeda, which carried out the attacks, was located in Afghanistan and that the Taliban refused to hand over the men from the group responsible was not a sufficient reason to engage in hostilities with the Taliban. As best put by another Republican, the war in Afghanistan was the choice of al Qaeda. In an insult to the United States that I find equally offensive, Steele says that everyone in the last thousand years (read: the Soviet Union and the Mongols) that has fought in Afghanistan has failed to win there. I suspect that Ronald Reagan was twirling like Kristi Yamaguchi in his grave when Steele suggested that we could fare no better than the Soviets at this.

I am curious if any Republicans actually agree with Steele, that the situation in Afghanistan is hopeless and that it is time to pack it in and come home. I had previously thought all those who believed that resided on the left of the Democratic Party.

We'll do this one up or down: should Steele step down for being out of line with Republicans on a life-or-death policy issue or are there Republicans that actually do agree with him that he is speaking for?

Furthermore, is this the beginning of the movement towards equilibrium that hands the current ongoing wars off to the current administration and the party out of power contorts itself however it must to make political hay out of the unpopularity of sending American men and women to fight a very long war regardless of the principles involved? I have wondered if Republican core voters would maintain their allegiance to the war in Afghanistan when a Democrat began running it. Will they?

President Barack Obama has managed to pass health care reform which, whether one agrees with its changes or not, is likely to significantly alter how medical care is done in the United States. It now appears that Congress is going to pass a financial regulation bill that, among other things, ends the shadow world in which derivatives operated and will supposedly include positive aspects for the consumer such as a new government watchdog agency. The question is whether with the passing of financial regulation reform Obama will become one of the most influential presidents since Franklin Delano Roosevelt when it comes to changing American society and how it operates, specifically two of its most important aspects: medical care and the financial system.

So, will Obama go down in history as a president that fundamentally altered American life in ways that Theodore Roosevelt (FDA), FDR (Social Security), Dwight Eisenhower (the interstate system), and LBJ (Medicare) changed it or will Obama's changes be repealed, forgotten or are they being over-hyped to begin with?

There was recently a case in the Cincinnati area where the parents of a young boy who had rebuffed all of his parents' efforts to persuade him to go to school had failed so they contacted the police (I want to be clear that the parents DID NOT dial an emergency number, they contacted the police via a non-emergency telephone line) and asked someone from the police to become involved. An officer did talk to the boy and found out that he was refusing to go to school because a little girl was conducting what passes for flirting at their age and he thought she was bullying him. The officer explained to the little boy that she was doing what she was doing because she liked him and not because she didn't like him and he willingly went back to school. Now, this was a harmless and somewhat cute instance of the police resolving an issue with a young child. However, it reminded me of when I have seen parents threaten their recalcitrant young children (perhaps ages 7 and younger) that the police would come and arrest the children if they didn't listen and obey the parents and it made me want to ask the question: is it wrong to use the police as a tool in the tug of war that is getting a stubborn child to mind? If so, what kind of negative consequences can such a tactic sow?

I have given a good deal of thought to this game because it was this game that let the Jets back into the playoffs at which point they whipped the Bengals who were standing between the Jets and the playoffs... the Jets then trounced the Bengals and now the Bengals are set to play the Jets in the first round of the playoffs later today. Given the tough and close fight for the last available playoff spots and that the Jets would have been eliminated from playoff contention if the Colts had won the game (thus giving teams like Pittsburgh a better chance to get in having one less contender) did the Colts mess with the integrity of the game by not playing as hard as they could when they gave up their perfect season by pulling Peyton Manning and other important players before the game was over? Should NFL teams be playing their hardest to win every game or if they are in the playoffs have they won the right to lose games as they choose by pulling important players to rest them and get them ready for the playoffs?

It has been speculated that there is room for a fifth President on the Mount Rushmore monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The four presidents that current grace the monument are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. These four presidents were selected by the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, for protecting the republic and enlarging it. Some think that it is time for the fifth face to be added. Which president should be selected to fill that 5th slot? Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Harry S. Truman? Dwight D. Eisenhower? John F. Kennedy? Ronald Wilson Reagan? George H. W. Bush? Barack H. Obama? Why?

The filibuster, contrary to popular belief, is not an action included in the Constitution. It is simply a rule that the Senate allows to exist. The filibuster was used in the House of Representatives until 1842 when a permanent rule removed it as an option for members to block action on legislation. The filibuster has been used in the Senate to block not only civil rights legislation and threatened to block healthcare legislation but also to block judicial nominees which used to be considered a President's prerogative to choose.

Should the Senate remove the filibuster as an option to block legislation?

I have been reading a book called Empires of Trust by Thomas F. Madden and he proposed this very scenario in his book. In the book, he compares America's European allies (who have turned to the United States to protect them militarily and prevent them from going to war with one another by acting as an outside power uninterested in territorial gain) to Rome's Latin allies from the Italian peninsula. Rome's Latin allies eventually realized that all important decisions affecting them were not being made by their local governments but by the Senate at Rome and so they demanded the right to be Romans themselves, foremost they demanded the right to vote. Rome resisted this demand which led to the Social War from 91 B.C. to 88 B.C. after which Rome conceded citizenship and suffrage to all citizens of its Latin allies.

I doubt that many, if any, would argue that the most important decisions affecting Europe (specifically Western Europe) are not made in the halls of Congress and in the White House. Since this has become the case and the Europeans are, over time, becoming de facto provinces of the United States, that leads to one very important question: should Europeans be allowed to vote in federal elections?

The compromise healthcare reform bill (or as I have taken to calling it, the compromise"d" healthcare reform bill) is not everything I would like. In fact, the provision that I felt was the most important to holding down costs, a public option that was not-for-profit to compete with private for-profit insurance companies, was excised from the bill. That was a bitter pill for me to swallow. Other things are being cut for the sake of getting the bill passed through the Senate, surely things that some reading this liked as much as I liked the public option. I am here to tell you that we have arrived at the point where we choose to accept a watered-down version of healthcare reform or to destroy the very idea of reform ourselves because it is our idea and it has been mangled beyond our own recognition. I am also here to tell you that we absolutely must accept it.

Do not fool yourself into thinking, reader, that I am not dismayed at what is happening in the Senate to the bill. I am. That Joe Lieberman can flout the Democratic Party and a majority of Americans by withholding his procedural vote to shut up filibustering Republicans attempting to kill an up-or-down vote until the government is totally removed from any role in providing health insurance makes me nauseous. Beyond nauseous actually, it makes me angry. But, unfortunately, it also is what it is and that is unavoidable. Lieberman and Nelson are the only votes left available to the Democrats to avoid Republicans blocking all advancement of the bill. Every single moderate Republican in the chamber has shown that they cannot be trusted to vote in favor of their constituents' best interests. Olympia Snowe had flirted with giving the bill her vote so long as the public option was a last resort. Curiously, it is no longer a resort at all and here Snowe stands with other Republicans voting against cloture so those Republican colleagues of her's can talk through the New Year to prevent a vote on healthcare reform.

I was thinking that scuttling the bill might be the best route since opponents of true reform have managed to distort and malign it. But then I realized that those of us in favor of true reform giving up on the bill and withdrawing our support would be an even more resounding victory for them than watering down the bill before it becomes law. Just as with all great changes in American society, this has its detractors and implacable foes and this also cannot be done in one simple bold stroke. The built-in opposition to such a bold stroke is too strong right now. Our current fight is like that of FDR working to change our society. FDR wanted government insurance but did not get it. However, he did get Social Security for the elderly and then, thirty years later, LBJ got a measure of government insurance by passing Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor. Medicare and Medicaid, however, would not have been possible if FDR had not paved the way with Social Security. Just passing part of this bill truly disappoints us, but the political reality is that the parts of this bill we are passing will whet the American people's appetite for the advancements we wanted in the bill that were cut out. Greater government regulation of insurance companies, expanded coverage for the uninsured and the banning of unethical practices by insurance companies like not offering coverage because of pre-existing conditions will, contrary to Republican belief, go over well with the public and make them far more receptive to things like the public option when the Democrats go back to the well the second time. The arc of time is on our side.

There is also a political component to this fight. During the fight to pass civil rights legislation there was a House member named Howard Smith from Virginia who was nicknamed "Judge Smith." Smith was the chairman of the Rules Committee in the House and could singlehandedly block civil rights legislation by manipulating rules about quorum and a number of other things. At one point he disappeared so that the Rules Committee could not meet and since they could not meet they could not advance the civil rights legislation to the full House. Smith eventually lost his fight to block civil rights legislation and his seat in Congress as well. Time erodes opponents to progressive policy ideas. Joe Lieberman, the man reviled by many in the Democratic Party because he seems to be a Republican that caucuses with Democrats for political gain, was at one point within 537 votes of being the Vice President of the United States. However, in the intervening eight years he has managed to marginalize himself through his steadfast support of George W. Bush and then John McCain, the opponent of President Obama in the last election. If there is one thing we can take from this that is a relief, it is that either through more Democrats winning Senate seats or some Republicans coming to support a popular Democratic policy, his "gun to the head" threat that he will not vote to stop a filibuster will become useless and he will not be a powerbroker in the next healthcare debate. The arc of time is on our side.

So, by all means be bitter about how the bill turned out. I'm not pleased. But I urge you to push for its passage and then return to agitating for a public option. Help candidates that are running to replace senators like the Republicans who support a filibuster or Lieberman who radically alter the bill with their single vote. Vote for them. Get others to vote for them. Tout the advantages that were created by this bill. But for God's sake, don't pull your support now. This is the most difficult obstacle to climb. Once this passes and the public gets a good sampling of what it does to the healthcare industry, going back the second time to pass a public option among other things will be so much easier and we that supported the truly progressive form of this bill from the beginning will have achieved what we wanted and the price was just patience and persistence.

The wheels of justice came off the bus in Florida for James Bain 35 years ago. That is when he was convicted of kidnapping and raping a 9 year old boy and sent to prison. Bain did not kidnap or rape the boy and DNA testing proved it this week, resulting in Bain breathing his first free air since he was 19 years old. He is 54 now, the prime of his life given to the state and spent inside prison for a crime he did not commit. There's no true way for the state of Florida to make it up to Bain, but should it try? Should the state of Florida compensate Bain with enough money to live his remaining years well? Or are mistakes like this part of our criminal justice system and Bain should simply be happy with his freedom? Should Florida attempt to compensate Bain some other way for the 35 years he spent inside?

Chris Henry, the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver, has died this morning at age 26 of injuries he sustained after jumping into the back of a truck driven by his fiance while they were fighting.

Henry's death comes as a particularly bitter end to a troubled career that was looking up recently. Oft compared to Randy Moss for his talent at getting open and scoring long touchdowns and being from West Virginia combined with an unfortunate knack for finding trouble, Henry had a number of brushes with the law previously.

Henry had been pulled over multiple times and more than once was either found to be under the influence or in possession of marijuana. He also had party-related issues, being accused of carrying a concealed weapon illegally, using it to assault someone, assaulting a valet in Northern Kentucky and allowing underage women to consume alcohol at his hotel. Henry was arrested for assault again in early 2008 and then waived by the Bengals.

This was the point when Henry's off-the-field troubles started to alleviate. He stayed out of trouble and the Bengals brought him back for the 2008 campaign. He was exhibiting good behavior throughout his second stint with the team and this season he was put on Injured Reserve after breaking his left forearm in a November 8 win against the Baltimore Ravens. Sadly, the injury was probably his undoing.

While Henry was with the team on this second stay, he had been doing well. If he had not sustained the broken forearm he probably would have been with the team in Cincinnati attending meetings and sticking with the team. However, his injury and subsequent inability to play allowed him to go to Charlotte where the incident began. It is being reported that Henry came out of the back of the truck that his fiance was driving after he jumped into the bed while she was leaving her residence.

Today's sad news is compounded by the fact that Henry and his fiance were raising three children together. Circumstances conspired together to end the life of a talented, troubled and very young man while his family and Bengals fans are left with only one question: "Why?" Why now when Henry was doing better and straightening his life out?

Why indeed...

Amanda Knox is now in prison in Italy, serving what will be the third of a twenty six year sentence passed down to her by an Italian court that convicted her of murdering her roommate in Perugia: British student Meredith Kircher. While the verdict was likely incorrect, the one thing that all Americans can be sure of is that the trial that led to the verdict was anything but fair by our standards.

The trouble for Knox began when she was brought in for questioning by Italian authorities. She was reportedly doing the splits and cartwheels in addition to making contradictory and incriminating statements during her interrogation. She also suggested that her boss, a bartender, had argued with Kercher and could be a viable suspect. What was conveniently left out were the facts that she was a young college student in a foreign country whose roommate had just been murdered and she was questioned harshly for hours without a lawyer or a professional interpreter. Those are the just undeniable facts. If one were to speculate about why the interrogation turned out like it did, Knox claims that she was struck twice by her interrogators and she had been smoking hashish with her boyfriend for a few weeks so one suspects that those factors would complicate things and lead to a false self-incrimination.

Around the same time, Knox and her boyfriend went to the mall for her to buy new clothes including underwear. The tabloids, especially British tabloids which were selling by the millions, played this off as a celebratory shopping spree by Knox to prepare for even more sex after she'd finished a gang rape of Kercher with Sollecito (Knox's boyfriend) that turned into a murder. Europeans never bothered to realize that Knox's home was now a crime scene and that she needed to have clean clothes that weren't evidence in a murder investigation.

The tabloids caused Knox even more grief by expanding endlessly on ten pages from a diary belonging to Knox about her sexual experiences and hung the nickname "Foxy Knoxy" around her neck. The sexual escapades mentioned in the diary were wildly exaggerated by the tabloids to sell even more print while the nickname Foxy Knoxy originated years ago back home in Seattle for Knox's prowess on the soccer field, presumably before she became the huge slut that the European media portrayed her as. Also I would say that teens and young adults should take this case as a warning to be careful what they post on sites such as Facebook because once Knox had been arrested, the European media sought out her online profiles, combed them for pictures and then used those pictures to paint her as a sex-obsessed party girl that was capable of the violent rape and murder of her roommate. All this they accomplished by grabbing pictures of Knox when she was partying with friends.

The media coverage tainted the jury pool for Knox's trial and her trial was not moved out of the outraged community where the crime had occurred nor was the jury sequestered so that their opinions during the trial could not be swayed by the ever wilder accusations that the tabloids were printing about Knox.

There was no physical evidence tying Knox to the crime of even to the scene. The knife that was touted as the murder weapon that the Italian police found in Sollecito's possession and claimed had Knox's DNA on the handle end and Kercher's on the tip had two huge problems. Firstly, there was an imprint of the murder weapon left in blood on the bedsheet near Kercher's body and the knife that the police found did not at all match the outline of the murder weapon found at the crime scene and, thus, the police never actually found the murder weapon. Secondly, the DNA evidence was seriously flawed. The DNA that was claimed to have been Kercher's could have been a lot of people's because it was so minute that the lab had to amplify it repeatedly: so much so that it degraded the accuracy of the test and should have made it inconclusive. Also, the knife was from Sollecito's house where Knox had prepared meals and ostensibly used the knife. Even if it were Kercher's blood on the tip (which is extremely doubtful at this point), the prosecution had no logical way to put the knife in Knox's hand at the scene. The knife could have carried Knox's DNA on it from her legitimate use of it to cook all the way to the murder and back without her being involved at all but, more likely, the blood wasn't Kercher's at all and the knife never left Sollecito's. Yet this was considered damning evidence against Knox by the Italian court and jury.

The other physical evidence against Knox was even more questionable. It was DNA recovered from Kercher's bra clasp that the Italians said matched Knox's boyfriend's DNA, Raffaele Sollecito. However, the DNA was not discovered until 46 days (six and a half weeks) after the murder and the DNA was so minute that it also underwent the amplification process that could have made it many people's DNA at the end of the day. At best, this pointed to Sollecito's possible involvement in the murder and said nothing about Knox except that she was either so high she had no clue where Sollecito was or, more likely, was lying to protect her boyfriend. The worst case scenario was that Sollecito's involvement equaled Knox's involvement but the problem is that there was no actual evidence that either was involved, at least none that would stand up in an American court of law.

So, here we are now with Knox having been convicted by an Italian jury that was tainted beyond belief on beyond questionable evidence. Several of the jurors returned with the verdict wearing scarves bearing the colors of the Italian flag, raising questions about whether this conviction was about the evidence or about Italy saving face for saying the case was closed when they arrested Knox and Sollecito while the real killer, Rudy Guede, was on the run in Germany and unknown to the Italian authorities. The evidence, by the way, reliably pointed to Guede without question. Guede lied so frequently that the Italians couldn't even put him on the stand against Knox or Sollecito for fear of him being cross-examined.

The lesson that all Americans who leave our borders should take away from this is that, when you travel to another country, you are at the mercy of their justice system. I have talked to many Americans that believe the American embassy can pull strings to help them in the event they get into trouble. America is not the Roman Empire: you cannot declare you are an American citizen and demand an American trial in front of an American judge and jury with the same rights you'd get at home. All the embassy can do is try to help you contact an attorney, try to help you contact someone back home and check in on you to make sure that your jailers are not starving or otherwise abusing you. That's the end of the line because, other than that, your host government can do any patently unfair thing to you that they wish. This is one of the reasons why I have been hesitant to travel to other countries at all because their criminal justice systems can treat Americans like this and with the local media playing "pin the tail on the American" it can get you railroaded quickly. Not to mention that Italy is far from the worst country to get into trouble with the local law in: Mexico and Eastern European countries are far worse and below them are third world countries which have something called a criminal justice system but it isn't something that any American would recognize as one. So let Amanda Knox's sad story be a cautionary tale for you: before you travel abroad, think very carefully about whether you want to check your Constitutional rights at our border and if you do you'd better strive to keep your nose clean overseas because there's very little your government can do to help you after your host country decides they will arrest you.

I recently discovered the online game Evony by clicking on a web forum advertisement. I normally don't click on ads nor do I typically find worthwhile entertainment on the other end of those advertisements but, with Evony, I was pleasantly surprised.

Evony is a large game that is centered chiefly on the exploitation of resources to build an empire. This is a game plot that is as old as computer games themselves which simply means that the games that stand out are those that package the fight for resources in the best way. After playing Evony for a little over a week I have come to believe that Evony is the game out there that has the best accessibility while also having the strongest packaging of the “resource race” plot line.

Evony's availability over the Internet and its option to always have the option to play for free make it enticing for all gamers. With a standard cable modem Internet set up, Evony loads in less than 30 seconds and is then in your computer's memory and ready to play until either your mouse hand numbs up or your computer needs to restart which gives it the edge over every online game that I have played. You have a user name and a password to get into Evony: there's no CD to lose and the base software doesn't have an alphanumeric key to lose either because Evony's software is small, efficient and freely available to anyone with the Internet. It is the second option that makes Evony a big winner, though, because that ensures Evony is always stocked with players both new and experienced. While the game offers the option to purchase items that will help the player in the game, the game is also fair in that the system daily gives each player a free item reward they can use to help further their own game. Also, players are given the chance to win Evony currency (“cents”) through various opportunities and challenges through the game itself. The best part of all, however, is that unlike other popular online games Evony does not charge a fee to play on its servers: people who choose not to do not have to pay anything. Money only goes for extras on this game.

As I said in the beginning, however, a true winner in a game like this is the one that packages the game play best and that is Evony hands down. Evony uses a slim but varied collection of images and art to represent the units and facilities that a player can build throughout the game which keeps the MB size low but the fun value high. It utilizes a city-based system where players build their first city, can conquer other “flats” to build a second (or third, etc.) city on and can conquer valleys and mountains that will yield a % increase (proportionate to the difficulty of capturing said area) in resource production. Along the way there is an infinite mix-and-match of units, facilities and game strategies that will provide endless hours of entertainment matching wits against the thousands of other players on Evony. Add in that Evony allows each new user 7 days of Beginner's Protection to learn the game and develop their city without being attacked by hostile neighbors and the learning curve is perfect: not so steep that newcomers will give up but not so easy that advanced players will give up. Thanks to its configuration, Evony offers a challenge for all comers. I recommend you sign up today at evony.com and just try it for a few hours. If I'm wrong, it's not much time gone on your part but if I'm right you will have a new game and new friends to have fun with whenever you want.

This is a link to the PDF file put out by the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute that identifies Nidal as one of the contributors to the report that was delivered to the Obama presidential transition team.

This story is burning up the right wing blogs so I adopted a similarly salacious title in the hopes that people who are concerned and think that the President is taking advice from active terrorists will come here and read the actual truth of the matter.

Nidal is one of approximately 300 individuals whose name is connected directly with this report. The others include many officials with the Department of Homeland Security, staffers from both houses of Congress and the Department of Justice.

George Washington University selected those that would participate in the compilation of this report and GWU selected them independent of the then-presidential candidates Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. In fact when selection for this particular report began, Obama had not even secured the Democratic nomination to run for the Presidency. This means that had John McCain won the White House that he would be tied to Nidal right now just as Obama is.

Well, let's put it to the test now. Is one man out of approximately 300 who had a hand in composing a 40-page report (11 pages of which are dedicated to identifying the 300-some participants) able to be honestly said to have been an adviser to the President on terrorism?

Edit @ 7:01 AM EST on 11-7-09: The director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, Frank Cilluffo, has shed new light on how Nidal's name ended up on a document associated with the Obama Transition Team. Nidal's name was included in the official list of participants because he attended HSPI public meetings and provided the HSPI with an RSVP including his information. In the pursuit of transparency, the HSPI lists all people as participants who provide their information to it via an RSVP. It turns out that the person that put Nidal's name on that document was Nidal himself, hardly a ringing endorsement of the man as an adviser and making it questionable that anyone save those that interacted with Nidal at the HSPI meetings knew who he was prior to the tragic events at Fort Hood, Texas.

Butler County recently had an open swine flu vaccination event at the Butler County Fairgrounds where it distributed a great deal of the doses of vaccine allotted to the county. The Hamilton Police provided traffic and crowd control and said that they had seen numerous out of state license plates from states such as Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.

Should people from out of state be permitted to have the same access as Butler County residents to line up to get the vaccine on a first-come-first-serve basis or should people from Butler County and then, if there is some left over, others from the state of Ohio be permitted only?

Video of the Wolf Blitzer interview with the Heene family, specifically Falcon "Balloon Boy" Heene, where Falcon says he didn't come out because "you guys said it was for the show."

This looks pretty cut-and-dried to me: this six year old just unwittingly told the truth that his parents who are hungry for publicity told him to hide in the garage rafters and not come out "for the show" so that they and their crackpot weather experiments could get free media coverage. A stunt, mind you, that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to taxpayers and others when you factor in the price of first responders following this UFO-looking thing for 50 miles and the Denver International Airport shutting down outbound planes heading north from 1:00PM to 1:15PM.

Two Questions:

1) Was this a publicity stunt by Richard Heene?

2) If it was, should Heene face charges and have to reimburse the money?

President Barack Obama was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize today in recognition of his attempts early and often in his young administration to foster international cooperation on important issues like nuclear non-proliferation, the decrease of active nuclear weapons among Russia and the United States (the two state actors with the greatest number of nuclear weapons) and his pursuit of a new start on foreign policy with the Middle East. It was clearly a strong urging by the Nobel Committee for him to continue these efforts until they bear fruit. Simple question: Did President Obama deserve to win the Nobel Peace prize?

This whole Chicago Olympic bid was, from the start, a bit of happenstance that was going to make President Obama political trouble no matter how it ended. Unlike the movie theater, there was no happy ending to be had for Obama himself.

Let's consider the best case scenario: Chicago wins the bid after Obama jets in and is part of a whirlwind presentation to the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and is on his way back to D.C. before the voting is finished. That simply feeds into the narrative that has been woven by his opponents since he became the presumptive Democratic nominee: a smiling, charismatic politician fronting for crooked Chicago cronies in a political marriage of convenience. If Obama succeeded today, the story from conservative bloggers and news outlets would have been "Surprise, surprise... Obama came through yet again for his Chicago buddies in one of the biggest financial boondoggles of all: many millions of dollars flowing into the pockets of construction contractors to make the necessary improvements to host the game and then millions more in tourist dollars lining the pockets of the friends of Obama. It's good to be the king, er, emperor, er, The One." Remember, that was in the best case scenario.

A second scenario is that Obama doesn't go but Chicago wins the bid anyway. Not only does Obama's adoptive hometown feel pretty angry that the President was in a position to help it after all it had done to help him go from an Illinois state senator to the chief executive of the most powerful country in the world, but the opposition's refrain is now "Obama didn't go because he doesn't care about America and doesn't care if something important like the Olympics are hosted here... we said he was un-American and he has proven it yet again. The Democrats say that he is great for international relations and then he abandons his supposed 'hometown' when so much is on the line? He's not only un-American, he's ungrateful too." This is the second best outcome, which is pretty grisly.

A third scenario is that he doesn't go to make his pitch for the Chicago bid and the bid loses the vote. At that point, his hometown is extremely irate after losing while watching Obama do absolutely nothing and his opponents are saying "Obama is an ungrateful and un-American joke as President of this great country that cannot be bothered to do what all three other competing countries' leaders did: show up and make his argument why his country should be chosen to host the games. Who does this guy think he is anyway? This is contemptuous." However, this isn't yet the worst outcome.

The fourth scenario is what has just happened: Obama has put his reputation as a charismatic, lights-out closer on the line to bring the bid home for Chicago and the IOC thumbed its nose at Obama by voting Chicago's bid out in the very first round. Chicago is disturbed at losing but appreciative of their favorite son doing his best to try to carry the ball across the goal line for them. Obama, however, has handed his opponents a political gold mine as he climbed out on a limb too far and his opponents are now cackling and sawing it right out from under him. There is no need for me to suss out what his opponents would be saying because they are already saying it. Eric Erickson at redstate.com types “Hahahahaha. I thought the world would love us more now that Bush was gone. I thought if we whored ourselves out to our enemies, great things would happen. Apparently not,” while Rush Limbaugh says across the airwaves to the faithful RushNation that this was the "worst day of [Obama’s] presidency” and that the president had "wasted his country's time, and his prestige." Also "Obama demeaned the office of the presidency, going on this sales pitch," So, now, Obama has managed to spend political capital for nothing in return in the middle of a difficult legislative fight over healthcare reform, the touchstone of his first term, but he has also nearly destroyed the notion that when he enters the discussion that he is sure to carry the day which his detractors are busy gleefully pointing out as they play "pin the tail on the President." In a rare occurrence the President has allowed the situation to play him rather than him playing the situation. Faced with four unpleasant options that were all net political negatives, he swung hard and struck out by landing in the worst outcome available.

While it's true that this was an unavoidable no-win situation for President Obama, it is equally true that his pursuit of the least negative outcome has resulted in him fumbling the ball and now having to come to terms with the worst-case scenario: both he and Chicago have lost with no consolation prize. Perhaps the lesson to learn from this is when you're going to strike out no matter what, it is best to watch the ball pass instead of swinging so hard that the bat escapes and injures the nearest fans. Being caught looking is better than causing yourself more problems than you've already got.

German chancellor Angela Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) have succeeded in shedding their "grand coalition" with the Social Democrats (SPD). Merkel's CDU in combination with the Free Democrats (FDP) will be able to form a coalition government after the FDP gained approximately 15% to put with the CDU's nearly 34%. SPD gained 31% of the vote in its worst performance in postwar German history. CDU's performance was one of its worst but its slippage was compensated for by their prospective coalition partner the FDP.

While the new coalition is likely to change German domestic policies by adding tax cuts that the FDP ran on, the more important effect of the election is in foreign policy. The SPD, which was controlling foreign policy prior to the election, was uncomfortable verging on hostile with the United States and was had a very close relationship with Russia. The FDP, which is likely to take over foreign policy, is uninterested in working much with Russia and is much more pro-American than the SPD. Unlikely to be repeated is the meeting after Merkel and Medvedev both met with President Barack Obama and then met with one another to compare notes on their meeting.

The new coalition also leaves open an outside chance that Germany could contribute more troops to Afghanistan. The public wants the government to declare a date certain when German troops will be out of Afghanistan but Merkel now has the option of choosing to send more troops there if she wishes. The FDP is likely to support such a move and, if Merkel agrees, it could happen. Although it is unclear if the new coalition could bring that major of a change to the American-German relationship.

Support for the war in Afghanistan is starting to wane. Just recently it surpassed Vietnam as the longest conflict in American history. There are temptations to compare it to Vietnam, but it is not like Vietnam. Well, I take that back, there are similarities.

Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is in that South Asia region and, thus, halfway around the world. Like Vietnam, it has difficult terrain to traverse. Like Vietnam, our opposition will feed every male they have into the American military wood chipper to win the fight. Also like Vietnam, Pakistan is playing Cambodia with regards to a neighboring country that our enemy is using to rest and transport arms and fighters. That is where the significant similarities end.

Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan is not cut in half with a sovereign government trying to take control of the whole country. Also unlike Vietnam, while Afghans don't necessarily like their current government they overwhelmingly despise the Taliban. Unlike Vietnam, our opponents are not being backed by a superpower with money and military technology, just money from Saudis. Unlike Vietnam, our allies are actually involved in this war and deem it just. Most importantly, Vietnam was about containing Communism and a short fight where two boats were damaged. The casus belli for Afghanistan was an attack on American soil that took 3,000 American lives. So, unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan is actually about something other that geopolitics.

However, if you give the American public enough time it always sours on a war, just or not. There is growing sentiment to leave. I cannot say this loudly enough: if we leave now we'll be risking another 9/11. Afghanistan is a failed state without American and NATO troops. More importantly, it is a failed state right next to a hotbed of Islamic extremism in Pakistan. If we leave, they will simply set up shop again in Afghanistan and happily plan our demise like they were doing prior to 9/11. Not only that, but their efforts to topple the Pakistani government will intensify and a toppled Pakistani government means loose nuclear weapons that our enemies could lay their hands on. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate suicide bomb. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually the most dangerous time for America. That is because our desire for revenge is waning, our guard is coming down and we are starting to collectively forget the strong emotions of 9/11. Al Qaeda is most certainly weakened because we have denied, disrupted and destroyed. We have killed many high value targets. Their weakness is why they are switching to attacking hotels and stadiums here: because they lack the operational capability to take on the security measures they would need to circumvent to attack the Pentagon again. However, letting our foot up off their throat now would prove a tragic and fatal mistake. General McChrystal is asking for more troops and President Obama's decision is going to necessarily be tempered by the public opinion on sending more troops to Afghanistan. The public needs to get on board with sending more troops to take control of the situation before it reaches a tipping point and spirals out of our control. Half-measures will not cut it.

Walk away knowing that Afghanistan is a must-win. We walk away and more Americans will die and they won't die fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban, they will die on vacation or watching NFL football. The job must be finished in Afghanistan even if that means remaining there for the next fifty years because daydreams that Afghanistan's central government is going to get it together if we leave are just that: dreams. They have no basis in reality because the government of Afghanistan is a basketcase. The choice is stay and prevent another 9/11 or leave and invite one. It's a simple choice, so simple Americans could make the wrong one.

Kimberly "Kimi" Young's birthday was today, September 26. She would have been 23 today, but for the fact that she passed away on Wednesday, September 23 after just 22 years on earth. Kimberly graduated from Miami University in December 2008, receiving a B.A. in International Studies and a second B.A. in Fine Arts Photography in addition to minors in French and Spanish. Young was an honor student while at Miami.

She was holding down two jobs when she fell ill, one at the Kofenya Coffee Shop where she had worked for four years and the other at the Bagel & Deli where she worked for approximately three years. She stayed in Oxford, home of her alma mater Miami University, while she looked for the right opportunity: a job, pursuing a graduate degree or a nonprofit organization. One friend said she was considering a move to Philadelphia in October to become involved in the local art community. Young had traveled twice to Latin America to study human rights during her time as a student as well.

Young was diagnosed as suffering from the H1N1 “swine flu” virus as well as pneumonia. Three to four days after she really started to feel sick she sought treatment at an Urgent Care facility in nearby Hamilton, Ohio where she was given pain medication, but friends and family say that she resisted going to the hospital because she did not have health insurance and was very concerned about the high costs of a visit to the emergency room. Around the start of this week she showed signs of dehydration and kidney failure. By the time that her roommate called 911 it was a critical situation. Young was rushed to Oxford's McCullough-Hyde Hospital where she became so sick that Air Care transported her to University Hospital in Cincinnati for more specialized and intense treatment than was available at McCullough-Hyde.

Miami University requires all of its students to have medical insurance and offers medical insurance through a policy known as the “Maksin Policy” but, unfortunately, Kimberly was no longer a student and, hence, no longer eligible for a Maksin Policy.

The last days of Kimberly Young's life and her tragic death are emblematic of several wrongs with healthcare in this country. She was working two jobs and yet medical insurance coverage is not priced so that either of her employers could give her the coverage she deserved nor, apparently, could she afford to buy coverage and still afford rent, food and other necessities of life. The stratification of healthcare in this country dictated that while she was an honor student at Miami she should have a health insurance policy but once she had graduated she was no longer worthy of affordable coverage. She was no less full of potential. To the contrary, possessing two bachelors degrees and dreams of a career in which she made life better for others and was a great credit to society, that same society should have hastened to extend its protection to her because she was an American that would go on to do great work. Nor could she conquer her realistic fear that going to the emergency room would result in a bill so enormous that she could not pay when it combined with her student loans and other expenses. That it would follow her and ruin her credit, causing her to be one of the hundreds of thousands in this country who are unfairly punished and financially ruined because they had the bad fortune of getting sick while not being poor enough for Medicaid or hospital charity. These were the fears that haunted her in her last days as she became sicker and sicker, no consolation for this suffering young woman.

To paraphrase Shakespeare: “The fault, dear reader, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” It is possible that had Kimberly Young sought treatment sooner that aggressive action could have prevented her death. It is also possible that Kimberly Young was destined to become a fatality. What remains is the unvarnished, uncomfortable and undeniable truth: regardless if medical care would have saved her life or simply offered her comfort as life ebbed away, Americans have tolerated, and some have even encouraged, the existence of a medical establishment where success is not measured in saved lives or prevented illnesses, but in the presence of black rather than red ink on the bottom line of a corporation's ledger book. Apparently the Bible was right about the love of money being the root of all evil.

I have heard from many that they do not want illegal immigrants to benefit from President Obama's healthcare reform legislation. The primary reasoning behind this is that they do not want illegal immigrants absorbing tax dollars or insurance premiums meant for American citizens proper. The trouble is, illegal immigrants already cost American society a mint right now when they, presumably, are not receiving any assistance meant for low income Americans or those that already have health insurance. They do this in two ways.

When illegal immigrants get sick, they are faced with a decision. They must decide if they are so sick that it is worth seeking medical treatment that could expose them as illegals and get them deported back to their respective country of origin. The decision that they make costs each and every American citizen money regardless of which decision it is that they make.

Let's say they decide that they are so sick that they absolutely must seek medical treatment or they will die or suffer irreparable harm. That means they will be going to the only place that they know they can be treated without having insurance: the emergency room at the local hospital. Because of basic human decency (as well as the law in most states), no one that is sick is turned away from the emergency room when they are seriously ill. The hospital takes them in and treats them. You are probably wondering who pays for this charitable medical treatment and the answer is we do. The hospitals cannot get blood out of a turnip and they cannot get money out of an indigent patient they are forced to treat. Therefore, they charge their paying customers $10 for aspirin, $20 for cable in their hospital room and all the other price gouging that goes on in your itemized bill. If you have ever been hospitalized, find your bill and take a look. The hospital is breaking down everything they do into individual items and then charging you a good deal more for it than it cost the hospital to acquire and treat you with. This is chiefly how they cover all the red ink they expend on the people they treat that are too poor to pay for the treatment and all illegal immigrants fall into this category. Not only is the cost passed along in terms of the money you pay for treatment, but you feel the pain of the systemic inadequacy every time you have to visit the emergency room. Because the emergency room is the only place poor people are assured of getting medical treatment, they all go to their local emergency rooms when they need treatment for anything. If illegal immigrants are brought into the healthcare reform legislation, perhaps all of our hospital bills would go down since hospitals would no be inundated with people that cannot pay their bill.

Their second option costs society too. If they decide that they are not sick enough to risk being caught and deported, that means that they go on being sick. Their affliction may not be an illness that is communicable, but many times it is. Therefore, the longer that they go on being sick without treatment, the longer they will be spreading their illness around to every legal American citizen that they come into contact with. This spreading is no insignificant issue since most illegal immigrants do menial labor that brings them into direct contact with the general public. Exacerbating the problem, they have little or no savings of their own so they cannot afford to stay home and not spread the bug to everyone they meet. However, even if they did have the money to be able to take a few days for the fever to break and their period of contagiousness to pass, most work in jobs where it is taken for granted that they will show up every day and if they do not they lose their job. Therefore, the system is organized in such a way that illegal immigrants have every incentive to act as a human petri dish. Society then pays the price for that organization in decreased productivity each time the sick illegal immigrant passes on his or her illness to another person.

There is another problem that we have yet to hit upon. We have established that illegal immigrants cost money when they become seriously ill and have to seek medical care that they cannot pay for at an emergency room. What we did not cover is how the illegal immigrant gets that way. People with insurance get yearly physicals by their primary physicians where health problems are discovered in their early stages and preventative action is taken to remedy the issue and preserve the person's health. As the old dictum goes, an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure and this situation is no different. Illegal immigrants have no insurance and no primary care physician to discover medical problems in the early stages. As such, the medical problem gets progressively worse until it can only be managed through radical medical intervention. For example, let us say that we have an illegal immigrant named Jorge that works for a fencing company. Jorge has high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol. Both problems can be controlled once a doctor discovers them and prescribes blood pressure medication and statins. However, Jorge has no doctor, has no routine physical and has no health insurance to pay for doctor visits or the medication to control his health problems. One summer day Jorge is working in the heat building a fence and the rest of his crew sees him keel over, clutching his chest. They start CPR and call 911. The ambulance arrives and takes Jorge to the nearest hospital where lifesaving surgery is performed. The surgery costs thousands of dollars that Jorge cannot pay and that the hospital now has to recoup from people like you and me when we seek treatment. Thousands of dollars that could have been prevented with a yearly checkup and two popular medications whose generic forms are fairly inexpensive to buy.

The reality is that the United States already subsidizes healthcare for illegal immigrants. The only difference is that currently we refuse them insurance and only take action when the situation is so dire that the treatment serious and expensive. If we allow them a place in healthcare reform legislation, it will likely sting to give benefits to people that are not supposed to be in the country to start with but it will also likely lower costs across the board, help our medical establishment function smoother and give hospitals that are struggling financially a way to step back from the brink of bankruptcy by reducing the amount of free medical care they have to absorb. It is not the popular solution, but it is the one with the best outcome for all.

Russia's latest response to the Obama administration's attempts to deal on international issues that America wants Russia's assistance on has shown that Russia's leaders have concluded that they can extract what they want from Obama. It's not all Obama's fault, but it partially is.

We'll start with why it is Obama's fault: he hasn't stood up to the Russians. Russia does not understand anything but hard dealing. Obama made the original mistake of thinking that he could deal with them equitably. They will not deal fairly with you unless they are convinced that you will do the equivalent of what they do when they want something: they shut off Europe's natural gas supplies in the dead of winter to coerce an acceptable outcome. Having seen this, they calculated their strategy. Obama's big opening gambit to gain Russian cooperation with reining in Iran's nuclear program was to withdraw the plans for building the Ballistic Missile Defense system facilities with the Poles and Czechs, two neighbors of the Russian sphere of influence and former Warsaw Pact countries. Russia's magnanimous response? They wouldn't position additional missiles in Kaliningrad (Russia's westernmost province), saying that there was no need to escalate and that the BMD was payment for the overland supply route to Afghanistan Russia allowed in its neighboring Central Asian republics. It was nothing but a down payment on the Iran situation. So, to summarize, it is Obama's fault insomuch that he has not drawn a line and stuck to it which has allowed Russia to conclude that he is as green as they thought he was and can be rolled in negotiations. However, that is not the entire story and he cannot be compared 1:1 to any of his recent predecessors.

The United States needs Russia's cooperation to achieve its foreign policy goals more now than it has at any time since Russia was needed as an ally to defeat Nazi Germany in WWII. Therefore, the only President in modern American history that Obama can be compared to is Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not insignificantly, Russia has endured a similar cycle of events prior to Obama's dealings with them as they did prior to Roosevelt's. The domestic situation in Russia prior to Roosevelt was one of domestic strife and revolution as the old order entered its death throes and a new order emerged. Just twenty years ago, the Soviet order entered its death throes and a new order with Vladimir Putin in control emerged from the chaos of party apparatchiks turned "capitalist" oligarchs as they robbed the state blind, taking the fixtures and plumbing and doing it all with forged ownership documents produced on a laser jet printer. The Russian people turned to the Bolsheviks to stop the chaos then as they turned to Putin and his United Russia political party to stop the chaos now. We all know the story of the rise of the Soviets but, more recently, Putin reasserted a strong Russian government that brought the oligarchs under its yoke and renationalized a good deal of what had been denationalized and stolen. Putin's Russia is a relatively stable Russia that is expanding territorially instead of contracting and he is very popular with the Russian people because of it.

Obama is facing two intractable problems that he simply cannot effectively deal with unless he has the cooperation of Russia. Both are equally important with equally harsh and negative consequences in store for the United States in the case of failure. The first is the war in Afghanistan. Bush had little interest in expanding the war front in Afghanistan and, therefore, no need to modify a fairly adversarial stance towards Russia. Obama pledged to expand the war in Afghanistan during the campaign and has held firm to that pledge by working to increase American troops in-country to 63,000 by the end of the year. The current supply situation is not an envious one. The only supply routes into Afghanistan prior to negotiating with Russia was overland through Pakistan and by air through Central Asia. Overland supply routes can carry a much larger amount of supplies than an air supply route can, meaning that the overland Pakistani route would be the logical choice for the most important equipment and weapons to fighting the war. However, that's not the case. The Pakistani route is constantly under threat of hijacking by Taliban and al Qaeda fighters or criminal elements contracted by the groups to rip off the convoys. That means nothing that could be used to kill NATO & American troops (i.e. guns, artillery, ammunition, high tech equipment for gathering intelligence) can be sent by ground. That leaves the overland routes carrying essentially nothing but food and fuel. The air transport route brings in everything else and it was close to full capacity before the recent insertion of far more American troops to help implement General McChrystal's COIN (COunter INsurgency) strategy. That meant that if Obama was going to boost troop levels in Afghanistan and make a concerted effort to turn the war in our favor that he was going to have to acquire an overland supply route through Central Asian countries where law and order was intact and the convoys could be assured far safer passage than their runs through Pakistan which, for all intents and purposes, is enemy territory. So, Russia agreed to allow the United States to negotiate supply line rights with the Central Asian republics that were within its sphere of influence without receiving anything significant in return at that point. As we have now seen, the withdrawal of BMD has been communicated to us by Russia as the price we will be paying for the overland Central Asian supply route that we need to escalate the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.

The second problem that Obama faces, which is to be considered more trouble simply because it is just as serious as the war in Afghanistan and it is going to demand further concessions to the Russians to buy cooperation, military action against Iran or simply accepting a Shiite nuclear bomb. All three have unpleasant consequences and it is now on the administration to make a conclusion about which set of consequences we can best cope with. The next bit of "cooperation" Russia will want from us will likely revolve around their bid to recreate a buffer state system to protect itself from the powers of Western Europe and a rising Turkey. Their paranoia is not exactly unfounded since they were nearly destroyed twice in the last 200 years by massive invasions across the Northern European Plain spearheaded by the two foremost European continental powers at the time of the invasions: France and Germany, respectively. The Russians are well aware that the only reason they are still speaking Russian is because they were able to trade vast amounts of land and men using a scorched earth policy to allow the elements to drive the invaders out for them. It bothers them at a very deep, Freudian level to see the foremost Western military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), right on its doorstep in the Baltic republics and considering the notion of granting Ukraine and Georgia membership to the club. Likely at the top of their wish list is for the United States to become very chilly towards Ukraine and Georgia but, specifically, Ukraine. While Georgia is a serious irritant to the Russians on their weak underbelly, the August 2008 war showed the reality of the situation in the Caucasus region: Russia refuses to be pushed behind the natural boundary to Turkish encroachment, the Caucasus Mountains, it will take military action to make sure it is not pushed behind that barrier and the United States has concluded that it is not worth direct combat with the Russians to keep their southern flank vulnerable. We were and are willing to train and arm the Georgians, but we will not go to bat for them. Plus, Georgia is likely a dead issue anyway now that Russia controls South Ossetia which controls nearly all the Georgian rump state's water supplies (and I call it the rump state because it is a shadow of its former self without South Ossetia and Abkhazia as part of its sovereign territory) as well as preventing Georgia from blocking the Roki Tunnel to prevent Russian reinforcements in the case of another war and also controls Abkhazia which has agreed (along with South Ossetia) to allow Russia to build military bases in their territory. From there Russia can strangle Georgia's most important port as it so chooses by using gunboat diplomacy. With Russia having gained control over Georgia handily, the United States backing away from Georgia will be the scraps from the table. The true objective is to get America and NATO to back away from Ukraine. Ukraine has been part of every successful Russian empire from nearly the beginning as it is intertwined tightly with southern Russia's agricultural and manufacturing segments as well as being potentially fatal to Russia if it becomes an ally of a power that wishes to use Ukraine as a jumping off point in invading Russia. Thus, buying Russia's cooperation has the downside that it would blunt NATO's expansion and that at such a high cost Washington cannot be sure firstly that Russia will vigorously pursue non-proliferation against what is basically a Russian client state in Iran. Secondly, Russia could give a good faith effort in a gasoline embargo and the embargo still may not work at which point America has given away a good deal to Russia and is rewarded by simply jumping to an option they could have chosen to start with: having to accept the existence of a Shiite nuclear bomb in the Middle East.

The problem with the second option is that our current crop of bunkerbusters is widely considered among the military and intelligence communities in the United States to be ineffective against the important Iranian nuclear targets whose destruction would set it back a few years to a decade or more. The Obama administration sped up the development of the 30,000 lbs. MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetration) bomb so that it could be mounted on a B-2 stealth bomber by July 2010, indicating that the administration (rightly) fears that talks and sanctions could go nowhere and they will be left with the least-desired option: rolling the dice on an air strike to cripple the Iranian program. In the best case scenario that the MOPs do their job, the downside will be that the United States will likely have to endure a wave of attacks from Iranian clients such as Hezbollah that have cells all over the world. The Obama administration, when making this decision, will most certainly think back to when Hezbollah's wrath was turned on America instead of Israel as it usually is and the result was a bombing in 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon resulting in the deaths of 299 military members, including 220 Marines. The worst case scenario is that the bunkers are stronger than we thought, we launch air strikes, we do little to no damage and we are now staring down the barrel at Hezbollah (and other Iranian terrorist proxies) retaliation for the strike with no tangible results to show for it. Few have also taken into account that the Iranian government has invested heavily in researching chemical and biological warfare from the moment in 1979 that the Iranian government put together its defense industry up until today and could have something horrible put back to unleash on its enemies. A military strike is literally opening a Pandora's Box because we don't have a good handle on the probability for success nor do we have a good handle on the retaliation that will come as a result of the strike regardless of our success or failure at crippling their nuclear program.

The third option is almost unthinkable. Given Iran's long history of sponsoring terrorist attacks against American targets and those of our allies, can we even contemplate a situation in which we allow them to develop and harness the most destructive power that man has ever devised? Their research, if left unchecked, will not only disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East in favor of a government that detests our closest Muslim allies in the region: Jordan and Saudi Arabia but it could also put Iran's government on negotiation footing with great powers because it will have developed weapons that can kill millions of people and be able to couple that with a delivery system that they've been honing for thirty years that surely still has cells flying under the radar awaiting the order to strike.

While Obama has set a bad example by not driving a harder bargain we also must admit that the reality of the situation has greatly shaped his behavior. The Russians are one of the few entities that can be negotiated with that also has some semblance of a chance to negotiate an acceptable end to this standoff. We do not know how it will end but we know one thing: this is the stuff that nightmare scenarios are made of.

Senator Ted Kennedy passed away just in the last few hours and he took some history with him. His career was so long that I think sometimes people forget the first part of it. Ted Kennedy lived through his brother John's election to the presidency as the first Catholic and then his heartbreaking assassination. He lived through Martin Luther King's push for civil rights for blacks and then his heartbreaking assassination. He lived through his brother Bobby's promising campaign for the presidency and then his heartbreaking assassination. Ted Kennedy was mired in misery. He lost two brothers within five years of one another to violent deaths. He was left as the only one of his generation to carry on the Kennedy legacy in politics and was left as the patriarch of the family after the death of his father, Joseph.

Whether one agreed with Kennedy's politics or not, it is undeniable that he left his mark on American politics, that he advanced many causes that he was concerned about and that he earned his title as the "Liberal Lion of the Senate." When the liberals in the Senate needed leadership, they always looked to Kennedy and Kennedy never failed them. Also, when his nieces and nephews looked to him in the absence of their slain fathers Ted never failed them either. He attended the special events that all children experience as they grow up. "Uncle Teddy" was a surrogate father that soothed the deep emotional wounds left on his nieces and nephews by their fathers' untimely passings. It was not right that JFK and RFK died so young, but for their children, Ted's constant presence in their life made it okay... made it possible to move on from such tremendous pain.

Tonight, one of American politics' great actors has exited the stage and the audience mourns his disappearance with varying levels of regret. There is one thing that this Catholic Democrat knows: rosaries are being said for Teddy in Boston and all over the country tonight for the last true leader of the first American Catholic political dynasty. Godspeed, Teddy.

Just so we're clear, this article is to remember Ted Kennedy in a positive way and not to criticize his failings. Call him a drunk or mention Chappaquiddick and you're on the sideline.

Tom Ridge, the former chief of the Department of Homeland Security, has claimed in his new book that he was pressured to raise the terror alert level in 2004 to improve the Bush administration's political fortunes at a time when Bush was fighting for re-election amidst rising unpopularity. Ridge specifically accuses former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft both of leaning on Ridge to raise the alert level despite there being no increased threat in Ridge's estimation.

Do you believe Ridge's claim that he was pressured by members of the Bush administration to raise the terror alert level to help President Bush win re-election?

It has come to my attention, sadly not because I am a keen political observer (although I am) but because the media now reports everything that Sarah Palin says, that apparently British Petroleum (and any of the other companies involved including Halliburton who installed the concrete that was supposed to seal off the backflow of natural gas) is not at fault for the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and then proceeded to spill between 105,840,000 and 181,440,000 gallons (current estimate is 35K-60K bpd and if you multiply those two by the now-72 days it has been leaking then multiply that answer by 42, the number of gallons in the internationally-accepted barrel of oil, you arrive at the range I have stated - estimate as of July 1, 2010) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. To give my readers a measuring stick by which to assess the size of this spill, I could only find two oil spills in bodies of water that were larger than this one and, depending upon which estimation you go with, one of them actually was not larger. The Ixtoc mishap in the Gulf of Mexico occurred when Pemex (the state-owned Mexican oil company) was drilling and unintentionally released approximately 140 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Barring some sort of miracle, this leak is going to release more oil than the Ixtoc leak. At this point, the only oil release into a body of water that is comparable to the Deepwater Horizon accident is when Saddam Hussein intentionally turned the taps on and spewed 240-460 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf during his scorched earth retreat during the Persian Gulf War. The only event that put more oil into a body of water at one time was an act of eco terrorism by Saddam Hussein... now that's saying something about magnitude.

So, back to Sarah. She says that environmentalists like me are the cause of this explosion because if we would have just acquiesced to drilling on land and in shallow water the oil companies wouldn't have to take such huge risks involved in drilling an oil well a mile below the ocean. Imagine my surprise reading this when I had thought that this disaster would finally be the real-life event that convinced average, every day Americans that people like me calling for major money to be put into the research and implementation of a form of energy that the United States, and only the United States, controlled were right.

Here are some things we know that the American consumption of oil has accomplished. First and foremost, we have made countries like Saudi Arabia far more powerful and influential than they ever should have been by giving them enough money for everyone related to the founder of the House of Al-Saud to be able to swim in it like Middle Eastern Scrooge McDucks and putting the Middle East's hands around the neck of every Western economy which they can choke with an embargo as they did in 1973. Second, Saudi Arabia's many princes have invested their money in the construction and support of madrassas, known to the American intelligence community as jihadist manufacturing plants, that teach Wahhabism (a form of Islam that rejects all forms of modernity) and Deobandism (a virulent anti-Western strain of Islam). Therefore, what starts out as our money has been playing a role in killing Americans since the 1990's at the earliest. Just like the United States founds pluralistic democracies, Saudi Arabia founds fundamentalist Wahhabbist Islamic states. Third, we know that the pursuit of ever-larger amounts of oil for the purposes of fuel is damaging one of our greatest advantages as a country which is our natural resources. We need only look to the Gulf Coast to confirm this. Fourth, in our narrow focus on obtaining oil, China is already starting to one-up us on solar power. The Communist government of China is ordering by fiat that certain percentages of their electricity be generated by alternative sources and they are working with American companies to base solar panel manufacturing plants in China. Jobs, might I remind everyone, that should be going to Americans since we are the ones whose research and development has enabled solar energy to become a viable source of electricity. Oil was the source of energy for the 20th century and the race is on to see what country will gain a stranglehold on producing the implements to create electricity any place. any time with little to no negative output. If the United States achieves this, it will improve our economy as the countries of the world come to us to get wired up for electricity and we can decline to sell to countries we deem hostile to our interests.

George Washington, in his farewell address, warned the American people against foreign entanglements. In the context of the time, he meant the foreign entanglements of alliances with European countries so that America would not be dragged into a war in Europe. However, I believe that he would find our embrace of oil to be an even more disturbing foreign entanglement as it gives Saudi Arabia and other countries with the most oil the money to hire the most lobbyists and the power to shut off the spigot if the American government makes policy it doesn't care for. We broke from Britain to obtain our independence and until the second half of the 20th century we had enough domestic oil to stay independent. That is no longer true. Even if we were able to tap every bit of oil America has the right to drill tomorrow it wouldn't cover our demand for energy that expands with each passing year. So this year, on Independence Day, I urge every American to return to the Founding Fathers' message of self-sufficiency and demand of our government that it do more than give some money and lip service to alternative forms of energy. The course of the 21st century depends upon it.

At a fundraiser in Connecticut yesterday evening, the hottest story was whether Rob Simmons and Linda McMahon, who'd had a heated primary battle for the Republican Senate nomination that Simmons lost, would run into each other and, if they did would they be cordial. That is, until Michael Steele showed up. Michael Steele, sounding disturbingly like a leftist European politico, said that the war in Afghanistan "was a war of Obama's choosing. This was not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." Then, transforming into the infamous American isolationist Eugene Debs, he intoned "Well, if he's (Obama) such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed."

I gave you that paragraph break to let his words sink in. On the eve of the high holy day of everything American, July 4th, Michael Steele stated that Afghanistan was a war of Obama's choice and that everyone who has tried to fight in Afghanistan in the last millennium has lost while ironically impugning Obama's grasp of history. The implicit points being made in his remarks are that either September 11, 2001 did not happen (and we all know what sane people think about people who believe that) or that the fact that the command and control for al Qaeda, which carried out the attacks, was located in Afghanistan and that the Taliban refused to hand over the men from the group responsible was not a sufficient reason to engage in hostilities with the Taliban. As best put by another Republican, the war in Afghanistan was the choice of al Qaeda. In an insult to the United States that I find equally offensive, Steele says that everyone in the last thousand years (read: the Soviet Union and the Mongols) that has fought in Afghanistan has failed to win there. I suspect that Ronald Reagan was twirling like Kristi Yamaguchi in his grave when Steele suggested that we could fare no better than the Soviets at this.

I am curious if any Republicans actually agree with Steele, that the situation in Afghanistan is hopeless and that it is time to pack it in and come home. I had previously thought all those who believed that resided on the left of the Democratic Party.

We'll do this one up or down: should Steele step down for being out of line with Republicans on a life-or-death policy issue or are there Republicans that actually do agree with him that he is speaking for?

Furthermore, is this the beginning of the movement towards equilibrium that hands the current ongoing wars off to the current administration and the party out of power contorts itself however it must to make political hay out of the unpopularity of sending American men and women to fight a very long war regardless of the principles involved? I have wondered if Republican core voters would maintain their allegiance to the war in Afghanistan when a Democrat began running it. Will they?

President Barack Obama has managed to pass health care reform which, whether one agrees with its changes or not, is likely to significantly alter how medical care is done in the United States. It now appears that Congress is going to pass a financial regulation bill that, among other things, ends the shadow world in which derivatives operated and will supposedly include positive aspects for the consumer such as a new government watchdog agency. The question is whether with the passing of financial regulation reform Obama will become one of the most influential presidents since Franklin Delano Roosevelt when it comes to changing American society and how it operates, specifically two of its most important aspects: medical care and the financial system.

So, will Obama go down in history as a president that fundamentally altered American life in ways that Theodore Roosevelt (FDA), FDR (Social Security), Dwight Eisenhower (the interstate system), and LBJ (Medicare) changed it or will Obama's changes be repealed, forgotten or are they being over-hyped to begin with?

There was recently a case in the Cincinnati area where the parents of a young boy who had rebuffed all of his parents' efforts to persuade him to go to school had failed so they contacted the police (I want to be clear that the parents DID NOT dial an emergency number, they contacted the police via a non-emergency telephone line) and asked someone from the police to become involved. An officer did talk to the boy and found out that he was refusing to go to school because a little girl was conducting what passes for flirting at their age and he thought she was bullying him. The officer explained to the little boy that she was doing what she was doing because she liked him and not because she didn't like him and he willingly went back to school. Now, this was a harmless and somewhat cute instance of the police resolving an issue with a young child. However, it reminded me of when I have seen parents threaten their recalcitrant young children (perhaps ages 7 and younger) that the police would come and arrest the children if they didn't listen and obey the parents and it made me want to ask the question: is it wrong to use the police as a tool in the tug of war that is getting a stubborn child to mind? If so, what kind of negative consequences can such a tactic sow?

I have given a good deal of thought to this game because it was this game that let the Jets back into the playoffs at which point they whipped the Bengals who were standing between the Jets and the playoffs... the Jets then trounced the Bengals and now the Bengals are set to play the Jets in the first round of the playoffs later today. Given the tough and close fight for the last available playoff spots and that the Jets would have been eliminated from playoff contention if the Colts had won the game (thus giving teams like Pittsburgh a better chance to get in having one less contender) did the Colts mess with the integrity of the game by not playing as hard as they could when they gave up their perfect season by pulling Peyton Manning and other important players before the game was over? Should NFL teams be playing their hardest to win every game or if they are in the playoffs have they won the right to lose games as they choose by pulling important players to rest them and get them ready for the playoffs?

It has been speculated that there is room for a fifth President on the Mount Rushmore monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The four presidents that current grace the monument are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. These four presidents were selected by the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, for protecting the republic and enlarging it. Some think that it is time for the fifth face to be added. Which president should be selected to fill that 5th slot? Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Harry S. Truman? Dwight D. Eisenhower? John F. Kennedy? Ronald Wilson Reagan? George H. W. Bush? Barack H. Obama? Why?

The filibuster, contrary to popular belief, is not an action included in the Constitution. It is simply a rule that the Senate allows to exist. The filibuster was used in the House of Representatives until 1842 when a permanent rule removed it as an option for members to block action on legislation. The filibuster has been used in the Senate to block not only civil rights legislation and threatened to block healthcare legislation but also to block judicial nominees which used to be considered a President's prerogative to choose.

Should the Senate remove the filibuster as an option to block legislation?

I have been reading a book called Empires of Trust by Thomas F. Madden and he proposed this very scenario in his book. In the book, he compares America's European allies (who have turned to the United States to protect them militarily and prevent them from going to war with one another by acting as an outside power uninterested in territorial gain) to Rome's Latin allies from the Italian peninsula. Rome's Latin allies eventually realized that all important decisions affecting them were not being made by their local governments but by the Senate at Rome and so they demanded the right to be Romans themselves, foremost they demanded the right to vote. Rome resisted this demand which led to the Social War from 91 B.C. to 88 B.C. after which Rome conceded citizenship and suffrage to all citizens of its Latin allies.

I doubt that many, if any, would argue that the most important decisions affecting Europe (specifically Western Europe) are not made in the halls of Congress and in the White House. Since this has become the case and the Europeans are, over time, becoming de facto provinces of the United States, that leads to one very important question: should Europeans be allowed to vote in federal elections?

The compromise healthcare reform bill (or as I have taken to calling it, the compromise"d" healthcare reform bill) is not everything I would like. In fact, the provision that I felt was the most important to holding down costs, a public option that was not-for-profit to compete with private for-profit insurance companies, was excised from the bill. That was a bitter pill for me to swallow. Other things are being cut for the sake of getting the bill passed through the Senate, surely things that some reading this liked as much as I liked the public option. I am here to tell you that we have arrived at the point where we choose to accept a watered-down version of healthcare reform or to destroy the very idea of reform ourselves because it is our idea and it has been mangled beyond our own recognition. I am also here to tell you that we absolutely must accept it.

Do not fool yourself into thinking, reader, that I am not dismayed at what is happening in the Senate to the bill. I am. That Joe Lieberman can flout the Democratic Party and a majority of Americans by withholding his procedural vote to shut up filibustering Republicans attempting to kill an up-or-down vote until the government is totally removed from any role in providing health insurance makes me nauseous. Beyond nauseous actually, it makes me angry. But, unfortunately, it also is what it is and that is unavoidable. Lieberman and Nelson are the only votes left available to the Democrats to avoid Republicans blocking all advancement of the bill. Every single moderate Republican in the chamber has shown that they cannot be trusted to vote in favor of their constituents' best interests. Olympia Snowe had flirted with giving the bill her vote so long as the public option was a last resort. Curiously, it is no longer a resort at all and here Snowe stands with other Republicans voting against cloture so those Republican colleagues of her's can talk through the New Year to prevent a vote on healthcare reform.

I was thinking that scuttling the bill might be the best route since opponents of true reform have managed to distort and malign it. But then I realized that those of us in favor of true reform giving up on the bill and withdrawing our support would be an even more resounding victory for them than watering down the bill before it becomes law. Just as with all great changes in American society, this has its detractors and implacable foes and this also cannot be done in one simple bold stroke. The built-in opposition to such a bold stroke is too strong right now. Our current fight is like that of FDR working to change our society. FDR wanted government insurance but did not get it. However, he did get Social Security for the elderly and then, thirty years later, LBJ got a measure of government insurance by passing Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor. Medicare and Medicaid, however, would not have been possible if FDR had not paved the way with Social Security. Just passing part of this bill truly disappoints us, but the political reality is that the parts of this bill we are passing will whet the American people's appetite for the advancements we wanted in the bill that were cut out. Greater government regulation of insurance companies, expanded coverage for the uninsured and the banning of unethical practices by insurance companies like not offering coverage because of pre-existing conditions will, contrary to Republican belief, go over well with the public and make them far more receptive to things like the public option when the Democrats go back to the well the second time. The arc of time is on our side.

There is also a political component to this fight. During the fight to pass civil rights legislation there was a House member named Howard Smith from Virginia who was nicknamed "Judge Smith." Smith was the chairman of the Rules Committee in the House and could singlehandedly block civil rights legislation by manipulating rules about quorum and a number of other things. At one point he disappeared so that the Rules Committee could not meet and since they could not meet they could not advance the civil rights legislation to the full House. Smith eventually lost his fight to block civil rights legislation and his seat in Congress as well. Time erodes opponents to progressive policy ideas. Joe Lieberman, the man reviled by many in the Democratic Party because he seems to be a Republican that caucuses with Democrats for political gain, was at one point within 537 votes of being the Vice President of the United States. However, in the intervening eight years he has managed to marginalize himself through his steadfast support of George W. Bush and then John McCain, the opponent of President Obama in the last election. If there is one thing we can take from this that is a relief, it is that either through more Democrats winning Senate seats or some Republicans coming to support a popular Democratic policy, his "gun to the head" threat that he will not vote to stop a filibuster will become useless and he will not be a powerbroker in the next healthcare debate. The arc of time is on our side.

So, by all means be bitter about how the bill turned out. I'm not pleased. But I urge you to push for its passage and then return to agitating for a public option. Help candidates that are running to replace senators like the Republicans who support a filibuster or Lieberman who radically alter the bill with their single vote. Vote for them. Get others to vote for them. Tout the advantages that were created by this bill. But for God's sake, don't pull your support now. This is the most difficult obstacle to climb. Once this passes and the public gets a good sampling of what it does to the healthcare industry, going back the second time to pass a public option among other things will be so much easier and we that supported the truly progressive form of this bill from the beginning will have achieved what we wanted and the price was just patience and persistence.

The wheels of justice came off the bus in Florida for James Bain 35 years ago. That is when he was convicted of kidnapping and raping a 9 year old boy and sent to prison. Bain did not kidnap or rape the boy and DNA testing proved it this week, resulting in Bain breathing his first free air since he was 19 years old. He is 54 now, the prime of his life given to the state and spent inside prison for a crime he did not commit. There's no true way for the state of Florida to make it up to Bain, but should it try? Should the state of Florida compensate Bain with enough money to live his remaining years well? Or are mistakes like this part of our criminal justice system and Bain should simply be happy with his freedom? Should Florida attempt to compensate Bain some other way for the 35 years he spent inside?

Chris Henry, the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver, has died this morning at age 26 of injuries he sustained after jumping into the back of a truck driven by his fiance while they were fighting.

Henry's death comes as a particularly bitter end to a troubled career that was looking up recently. Oft compared to Randy Moss for his talent at getting open and scoring long touchdowns and being from West Virginia combined with an unfortunate knack for finding trouble, Henry had a number of brushes with the law previously.

Henry had been pulled over multiple times and more than once was either found to be under the influence or in possession of marijuana. He also had party-related issues, being accused of carrying a concealed weapon illegally, using it to assault someone, assaulting a valet in Northern Kentucky and allowing underage women to consume alcohol at his hotel. Henry was arrested for assault again in early 2008 and then waived by the Bengals.

This was the point when Henry's off-the-field troubles started to alleviate. He stayed out of trouble and the Bengals brought him back for the 2008 campaign. He was exhibiting good behavior throughout his second stint with the team and this season he was put on Injured Reserve after breaking his left forearm in a November 8 win against the Baltimore Ravens. Sadly, the injury was probably his undoing.

While Henry was with the team on this second stay, he had been doing well. If he had not sustained the broken forearm he probably would have been with the team in Cincinnati attending meetings and sticking with the team. However, his injury and subsequent inability to play allowed him to go to Charlotte where the incident began. It is being reported that Henry came out of the back of the truck that his fiance was driving after he jumped into the bed while she was leaving her residence.

Today's sad news is compounded by the fact that Henry and his fiance were raising three children together. Circumstances conspired together to end the life of a talented, troubled and very young man while his family and Bengals fans are left with only one question: "Why?" Why now when Henry was doing better and straightening his life out?

Why indeed...

Amanda Knox is now in prison in Italy, serving what will be the third of a twenty six year sentence passed down to her by an Italian court that convicted her of murdering her roommate in Perugia: British student Meredith Kircher. While the verdict was likely incorrect, the one thing that all Americans can be sure of is that the trial that led to the verdict was anything but fair by our standards.

The trouble for Knox began when she was brought in for questioning by Italian authorities. She was reportedly doing the splits and cartwheels in addition to making contradictory and incriminating statements during her interrogation. She also suggested that her boss, a bartender, had argued with Kercher and could be a viable suspect. What was conveniently left out were the facts that she was a young college student in a foreign country whose roommate had just been murdered and she was questioned harshly for hours without a lawyer or a professional interpreter. Those are the just undeniable facts. If one were to speculate about why the interrogation turned out like it did, Knox claims that she was struck twice by her interrogators and she had been smoking hashish with her boyfriend for a few weeks so one suspects that those factors would complicate things and lead to a false self-incrimination.

Around the same time, Knox and her boyfriend went to the mall for her to buy new clothes including underwear. The tabloids, especially British tabloids which were selling by the millions, played this off as a celebratory shopping spree by Knox to prepare for even more sex after she'd finished a gang rape of Kercher with Sollecito (Knox's boyfriend) that turned into a murder. Europeans never bothered to realize that Knox's home was now a crime scene and that she needed to have clean clothes that weren't evidence in a murder investigation.

The tabloids caused Knox even more grief by expanding endlessly on ten pages from a diary belonging to Knox about her sexual experiences and hung the nickname "Foxy Knoxy" around her neck. The sexual escapades mentioned in the diary were wildly exaggerated by the tabloids to sell even more print while the nickname Foxy Knoxy originated years ago back home in Seattle for Knox's prowess on the soccer field, presumably before she became the huge slut that the European media portrayed her as. Also I would say that teens and young adults should take this case as a warning to be careful what they post on sites such as Facebook because once Knox had been arrested, the European media sought out her online profiles, combed them for pictures and then used those pictures to paint her as a sex-obsessed party girl that was capable of the violent rape and murder of her roommate. All this they accomplished by grabbing pictures of Knox when she was partying with friends.

The media coverage tainted the jury pool for Knox's trial and her trial was not moved out of the outraged community where the crime had occurred nor was the jury sequestered so that their opinions during the trial could not be swayed by the ever wilder accusations that the tabloids were printing about Knox.

There was no physical evidence tying Knox to the crime of even to the scene. The knife that was touted as the murder weapon that the Italian police found in Sollecito's possession and claimed had Knox's DNA on the handle end and Kercher's on the tip had two huge problems. Firstly, there was an imprint of the murder weapon left in blood on the bedsheet near Kercher's body and the knife that the police found did not at all match the outline of the murder weapon found at the crime scene and, thus, the police never actually found the murder weapon. Secondly, the DNA evidence was seriously flawed. The DNA that was claimed to have been Kercher's could have been a lot of people's because it was so minute that the lab had to amplify it repeatedly: so much so that it degraded the accuracy of the test and should have made it inconclusive. Also, the knife was from Sollecito's house where Knox had prepared meals and ostensibly used the knife. Even if it were Kercher's blood on the tip (which is extremely doubtful at this point), the prosecution had no logical way to put the knife in Knox's hand at the scene. The knife could have carried Knox's DNA on it from her legitimate use of it to cook all the way to the murder and back without her being involved at all but, more likely, the blood wasn't Kercher's at all and the knife never left Sollecito's. Yet this was considered damning evidence against Knox by the Italian court and jury.

The other physical evidence against Knox was even more questionable. It was DNA recovered from Kercher's bra clasp that the Italians said matched Knox's boyfriend's DNA, Raffaele Sollecito. However, the DNA was not discovered until 46 days (six and a half weeks) after the murder and the DNA was so minute that it also underwent the amplification process that could have made it many people's DNA at the end of the day. At best, this pointed to Sollecito's possible involvement in the murder and said nothing about Knox except that she was either so high she had no clue where Sollecito was or, more likely, was lying to protect her boyfriend. The worst case scenario was that Sollecito's involvement equaled Knox's involvement but the problem is that there was no actual evidence that either was involved, at least none that would stand up in an American court of law.

So, here we are now with Knox having been convicted by an Italian jury that was tainted beyond belief on beyond questionable evidence. Several of the jurors returned with the verdict wearing scarves bearing the colors of the Italian flag, raising questions about whether this conviction was about the evidence or about Italy saving face for saying the case was closed when they arrested Knox and Sollecito while the real killer, Rudy Guede, was on the run in Germany and unknown to the Italian authorities. The evidence, by the way, reliably pointed to Guede without question. Guede lied so frequently that the Italians couldn't even put him on the stand against Knox or Sollecito for fear of him being cross-examined.

The lesson that all Americans who leave our borders should take away from this is that, when you travel to another country, you are at the mercy of their justice system. I have talked to many Americans that believe the American embassy can pull strings to help them in the event they get into trouble. America is not the Roman Empire: you cannot declare you are an American citizen and demand an American trial in front of an American judge and jury with the same rights you'd get at home. All the embassy can do is try to help you contact an attorney, try to help you contact someone back home and check in on you to make sure that your jailers are not starving or otherwise abusing you. That's the end of the line because, other than that, your host government can do any patently unfair thing to you that they wish. This is one of the reasons why I have been hesitant to travel to other countries at all because their criminal justice systems can treat Americans like this and with the local media playing "pin the tail on the American" it can get you railroaded quickly. Not to mention that Italy is far from the worst country to get into trouble with the local law in: Mexico and Eastern European countries are far worse and below them are third world countries which have something called a criminal justice system but it isn't something that any American would recognize as one. So let Amanda Knox's sad story be a cautionary tale for you: before you travel abroad, think very carefully about whether you want to check your Constitutional rights at our border and if you do you'd better strive to keep your nose clean overseas because there's very little your government can do to help you after your host country decides they will arrest you.

I recently discovered the online game Evony by clicking on a web forum advertisement. I normally don't click on ads nor do I typically find worthwhile entertainment on the other end of those advertisements but, with Evony, I was pleasantly surprised.

Evony is a large game that is centered chiefly on the exploitation of resources to build an empire. This is a game plot that is as old as computer games themselves which simply means that the games that stand out are those that package the fight for resources in the best way. After playing Evony for a little over a week I have come to believe that Evony is the game out there that has the best accessibility while also having the strongest packaging of the “resource race” plot line.

Evony's availability over the Internet and its option to always have the option to play for free make it enticing for all gamers. With a standard cable modem Internet set up, Evony loads in less than 30 seconds and is then in your computer's memory and ready to play until either your mouse hand numbs up or your computer needs to restart which gives it the edge over every online game that I have played. You have a user name and a password to get into Evony: there's no CD to lose and the base software doesn't have an alphanumeric key to lose either because Evony's software is small, efficient and freely available to anyone with the Internet. It is the second option that makes Evony a big winner, though, because that ensures Evony is always stocked with players both new and experienced. While the game offers the option to purchase items that will help the player in the game, the game is also fair in that the system daily gives each player a free item reward they can use to help further their own game. Also, players are given the chance to win Evony currency (“cents”) through various opportunities and challenges through the game itself. The best part of all, however, is that unlike other popular online games Evony does not charge a fee to play on its servers: people who choose not to do not have to pay anything. Money only goes for extras on this game.

As I said in the beginning, however, a true winner in a game like this is the one that packages the game play best and that is Evony hands down. Evony uses a slim but varied collection of images and art to represent the units and facilities that a player can build throughout the game which keeps the MB size low but the fun value high. It utilizes a city-based system where players build their first city, can conquer other “flats” to build a second (or third, etc.) city on and can conquer valleys and mountains that will yield a % increase (proportionate to the difficulty of capturing said area) in resource production. Along the way there is an infinite mix-and-match of units, facilities and game strategies that will provide endless hours of entertainment matching wits against the thousands of other players on Evony. Add in that Evony allows each new user 7 days of Beginner's Protection to learn the game and develop their city without being attacked by hostile neighbors and the learning curve is perfect: not so steep that newcomers will give up but not so easy that advanced players will give up. Thanks to its configuration, Evony offers a challenge for all comers. I recommend you sign up today at evony.com and just try it for a few hours. If I'm wrong, it's not much time gone on your part but if I'm right you will have a new game and new friends to have fun with whenever you want.

This is a link to the PDF file put out by the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute that identifies Nidal as one of the contributors to the report that was delivered to the Obama presidential transition team.

This story is burning up the right wing blogs so I adopted a similarly salacious title in the hopes that people who are concerned and think that the President is taking advice from active terrorists will come here and read the actual truth of the matter.

Nidal is one of approximately 300 individuals whose name is connected directly with this report. The others include many officials with the Department of Homeland Security, staffers from both houses of Congress and the Department of Justice.

George Washington University selected those that would participate in the compilation of this report and GWU selected them independent of the then-presidential candidates Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. In fact when selection for this particular report began, Obama had not even secured the Democratic nomination to run for the Presidency. This means that had John McCain won the White House that he would be tied to Nidal right now just as Obama is.

Well, let's put it to the test now. Is one man out of approximately 300 who had a hand in composing a 40-page report (11 pages of which are dedicated to identifying the 300-some participants) able to be honestly said to have been an adviser to the President on terrorism?

Edit @ 7:01 AM EST on 11-7-09: The director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, Frank Cilluffo, has shed new light on how Nidal's name ended up on a document associated with the Obama Transition Team. Nidal's name was included in the official list of participants because he attended HSPI public meetings and provided the HSPI with an RSVP including his information. In the pursuit of transparency, the HSPI lists all people as participants who provide their information to it via an RSVP. It turns out that the person that put Nidal's name on that document was Nidal himself, hardly a ringing endorsement of the man as an adviser and making it questionable that anyone save those that interacted with Nidal at the HSPI meetings knew who he was prior to the tragic events at Fort Hood, Texas.

Butler County recently had an open swine flu vaccination event at the Butler County Fairgrounds where it distributed a great deal of the doses of vaccine allotted to the county. The Hamilton Police provided traffic and crowd control and said that they had seen numerous out of state license plates from states such as Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.

Should people from out of state be permitted to have the same access as Butler County residents to line up to get the vaccine on a first-come-first-serve basis or should people from Butler County and then, if there is some left over, others from the state of Ohio be permitted only?

Video of the Wolf Blitzer interview with the Heene family, specifically Falcon "Balloon Boy" Heene, where Falcon says he didn't come out because "you guys said it was for the show."

This looks pretty cut-and-dried to me: this six year old just unwittingly told the truth that his parents who are hungry for publicity told him to hide in the garage rafters and not come out "for the show" so that they and their crackpot weather experiments could get free media coverage. A stunt, mind you, that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to taxpayers and others when you factor in the price of first responders following this UFO-looking thing for 50 miles and the Denver International Airport shutting down outbound planes heading north from 1:00PM to 1:15PM.

Two Questions:

1) Was this a publicity stunt by Richard Heene?

2) If it was, should Heene face charges and have to reimburse the money?

President Barack Obama was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize today in recognition of his attempts early and often in his young administration to foster international cooperation on important issues like nuclear non-proliferation, the decrease of active nuclear weapons among Russia and the United States (the two state actors with the greatest number of nuclear weapons) and his pursuit of a new start on foreign policy with the Middle East. It was clearly a strong urging by the Nobel Committee for him to continue these efforts until they bear fruit. Simple question: Did President Obama deserve to win the Nobel Peace prize?

This whole Chicago Olympic bid was, from the start, a bit of happenstance that was going to make President Obama political trouble no matter how it ended. Unlike the movie theater, there was no happy ending to be had for Obama himself.

Let's consider the best case scenario: Chicago wins the bid after Obama jets in and is part of a whirlwind presentation to the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and is on his way back to D.C. before the voting is finished. That simply feeds into the narrative that has been woven by his opponents since he became the presumptive Democratic nominee: a smiling, charismatic politician fronting for crooked Chicago cronies in a political marriage of convenience. If Obama succeeded today, the story from conservative bloggers and news outlets would have been "Surprise, surprise... Obama came through yet again for his Chicago buddies in one of the biggest financial boondoggles of all: many millions of dollars flowing into the pockets of construction contractors to make the necessary improvements to host the game and then millions more in tourist dollars lining the pockets of the friends of Obama. It's good to be the king, er, emperor, er, The One." Remember, that was in the best case scenario.

A second scenario is that Obama doesn't go but Chicago wins the bid anyway. Not only does Obama's adoptive hometown feel pretty angry that the President was in a position to help it after all it had done to help him go from an Illinois state senator to the chief executive of the most powerful country in the world, but the opposition's refrain is now "Obama didn't go because he doesn't care about America and doesn't care if something important like the Olympics are hosted here... we said he was un-American and he has proven it yet again. The Democrats say that he is great for international relations and then he abandons his supposed 'hometown' when so much is on the line? He's not only un-American, he's ungrateful too." This is the second best outcome, which is pretty grisly.

A third scenario is that he doesn't go to make his pitch for the Chicago bid and the bid loses the vote. At that point, his hometown is extremely irate after losing while watching Obama do absolutely nothing and his opponents are saying "Obama is an ungrateful and un-American joke as President of this great country that cannot be bothered to do what all three other competing countries' leaders did: show up and make his argument why his country should be chosen to host the games. Who does this guy think he is anyway? This is contemptuous." However, this isn't yet the worst outcome.

The fourth scenario is what has just happened: Obama has put his reputation as a charismatic, lights-out closer on the line to bring the bid home for Chicago and the IOC thumbed its nose at Obama by voting Chicago's bid out in the very first round. Chicago is disturbed at losing but appreciative of their favorite son doing his best to try to carry the ball across the goal line for them. Obama, however, has handed his opponents a political gold mine as he climbed out on a limb too far and his opponents are now cackling and sawing it right out from under him. There is no need for me to suss out what his opponents would be saying because they are already saying it. Eric Erickson at redstate.com types “Hahahahaha. I thought the world would love us more now that Bush was gone. I thought if we whored ourselves out to our enemies, great things would happen. Apparently not,” while Rush Limbaugh says across the airwaves to the faithful RushNation that this was the "worst day of [Obama’s] presidency” and that the president had "wasted his country's time, and his prestige." Also "Obama demeaned the office of the presidency, going on this sales pitch," So, now, Obama has managed to spend political capital for nothing in return in the middle of a difficult legislative fight over healthcare reform, the touchstone of his first term, but he has also nearly destroyed the notion that when he enters the discussion that he is sure to carry the day which his detractors are busy gleefully pointing out as they play "pin the tail on the President." In a rare occurrence the President has allowed the situation to play him rather than him playing the situation. Faced with four unpleasant options that were all net political negatives, he swung hard and struck out by landing in the worst outcome available.

While it's true that this was an unavoidable no-win situation for President Obama, it is equally true that his pursuit of the least negative outcome has resulted in him fumbling the ball and now having to come to terms with the worst-case scenario: both he and Chicago have lost with no consolation prize. Perhaps the lesson to learn from this is when you're going to strike out no matter what, it is best to watch the ball pass instead of swinging so hard that the bat escapes and injures the nearest fans. Being caught looking is better than causing yourself more problems than you've already got.

German chancellor Angela Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) have succeeded in shedding their "grand coalition" with the Social Democrats (SPD). Merkel's CDU in combination with the Free Democrats (FDP) will be able to form a coalition government after the FDP gained approximately 15% to put with the CDU's nearly 34%. SPD gained 31% of the vote in its worst performance in postwar German history. CDU's performance was one of its worst but its slippage was compensated for by their prospective coalition partner the FDP.

While the new coalition is likely to change German domestic policies by adding tax cuts that the FDP ran on, the more important effect of the election is in foreign policy. The SPD, which was controlling foreign policy prior to the election, was uncomfortable verging on hostile with the United States and was had a very close relationship with Russia. The FDP, which is likely to take over foreign policy, is uninterested in working much with Russia and is much more pro-American than the SPD. Unlikely to be repeated is the meeting after Merkel and Medvedev both met with President Barack Obama and then met with one another to compare notes on their meeting.

The new coalition also leaves open an outside chance that Germany could contribute more troops to Afghanistan. The public wants the government to declare a date certain when German troops will be out of Afghanistan but Merkel now has the option of choosing to send more troops there if she wishes. The FDP is likely to support such a move and, if Merkel agrees, it could happen. Although it is unclear if the new coalition could bring that major of a change to the American-German relationship.

Support for the war in Afghanistan is starting to wane. Just recently it surpassed Vietnam as the longest conflict in American history. There are temptations to compare it to Vietnam, but it is not like Vietnam. Well, I take that back, there are similarities.

Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is in that South Asia region and, thus, halfway around the world. Like Vietnam, it has difficult terrain to traverse. Like Vietnam, our opposition will feed every male they have into the American military wood chipper to win the fight. Also like Vietnam, Pakistan is playing Cambodia with regards to a neighboring country that our enemy is using to rest and transport arms and fighters. That is where the significant similarities end.

Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan is not cut in half with a sovereign government trying to take control of the whole country. Also unlike Vietnam, while Afghans don't necessarily like their current government they overwhelmingly despise the Taliban. Unlike Vietnam, our opponents are not being backed by a superpower with money and military technology, just money from Saudis. Unlike Vietnam, our allies are actually involved in this war and deem it just. Most importantly, Vietnam was about containing Communism and a short fight where two boats were damaged. The casus belli for Afghanistan was an attack on American soil that took 3,000 American lives. So, unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan is actually about something other that geopolitics.

However, if you give the American public enough time it always sours on a war, just or not. There is growing sentiment to leave. I cannot say this loudly enough: if we leave now we'll be risking another 9/11. Afghanistan is a failed state without American and NATO troops. More importantly, it is a failed state right next to a hotbed of Islamic extremism in Pakistan. If we leave, they will simply set up shop again in Afghanistan and happily plan our demise like they were doing prior to 9/11. Not only that, but their efforts to topple the Pakistani government will intensify and a toppled Pakistani government means loose nuclear weapons that our enemies could lay their hands on. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate suicide bomb. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually the most dangerous time for America. That is because our desire for revenge is waning, our guard is coming down and we are starting to collectively forget the strong emotions of 9/11. Al Qaeda is most certainly weakened because we have denied, disrupted and destroyed. We have killed many high value targets. Their weakness is why they are switching to attacking hotels and stadiums here: because they lack the operational capability to take on the security measures they would need to circumvent to attack the Pentagon again. However, letting our foot up off their throat now would prove a tragic and fatal mistake. General McChrystal is asking for more troops and President Obama's decision is going to necessarily be tempered by the public opinion on sending more troops to Afghanistan. The public needs to get on board with sending more troops to take control of the situation before it reaches a tipping point and spirals out of our control. Half-measures will not cut it.

Walk away knowing that Afghanistan is a must-win. We walk away and more Americans will die and they won't die fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban, they will die on vacation or watching NFL football. The job must be finished in Afghanistan even if that means remaining there for the next fifty years because daydreams that Afghanistan's central government is going to get it together if we leave are just that: dreams. They have no basis in reality because the government of Afghanistan is a basketcase. The choice is stay and prevent another 9/11 or leave and invite one. It's a simple choice, so simple Americans could make the wrong one.

Kimberly "Kimi" Young's birthday was today, September 26. She would have been 23 today, but for the fact that she passed away on Wednesday, September 23 after just 22 years on earth. Kimberly graduated from Miami University in December 2008, receiving a B.A. in International Studies and a second B.A. in Fine Arts Photography in addition to minors in French and Spanish. Young was an honor student while at Miami.

She was holding down two jobs when she fell ill, one at the Kofenya Coffee Shop where she had worked for four years and the other at the Bagel & Deli where she worked for approximately three years. She stayed in Oxford, home of her alma mater Miami University, while she looked for the right opportunity: a job, pursuing a graduate degree or a nonprofit organization. One friend said she was considering a move to Philadelphia in October to become involved in the local art community. Young had traveled twice to Latin America to study human rights during her time as a student as well.

Young was diagnosed as suffering from the H1N1 “swine flu” virus as well as pneumonia. Three to four days after she really started to feel sick she sought treatment at an Urgent Care facility in nearby Hamilton, Ohio where she was given pain medication, but friends and family say that she resisted going to the hospital because she did not have health insurance and was very concerned about the high costs of a visit to the emergency room. Around the start of this week she showed signs of dehydration and kidney failure. By the time that her roommate called 911 it was a critical situation. Young was rushed to Oxford's McCullough-Hyde Hospital where she became so sick that Air Care transported her to University Hospital in Cincinnati for more specialized and intense treatment than was available at McCullough-Hyde.

Miami University requires all of its students to have medical insurance and offers medical insurance through a policy known as the “Maksin Policy” but, unfortunately, Kimberly was no longer a student and, hence, no longer eligible for a Maksin Policy.

The last days of Kimberly Young's life and her tragic death are emblematic of several wrongs with healthcare in this country. She was working two jobs and yet medical insurance coverage is not priced so that either of her employers could give her the coverage she deserved nor, apparently, could she afford to buy coverage and still afford rent, food and other necessities of life. The stratification of healthcare in this country dictated that while she was an honor student at Miami she should have a health insurance policy but once she had graduated she was no longer worthy of affordable coverage. She was no less full of potential. To the contrary, possessing two bachelors degrees and dreams of a career in which she made life better for others and was a great credit to society, that same society should have hastened to extend its protection to her because she was an American that would go on to do great work. Nor could she conquer her realistic fear that going to the emergency room would result in a bill so enormous that she could not pay when it combined with her student loans and other expenses. That it would follow her and ruin her credit, causing her to be one of the hundreds of thousands in this country who are unfairly punished and financially ruined because they had the bad fortune of getting sick while not being poor enough for Medicaid or hospital charity. These were the fears that haunted her in her last days as she became sicker and sicker, no consolation for this suffering young woman.

To paraphrase Shakespeare: “The fault, dear reader, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” It is possible that had Kimberly Young sought treatment sooner that aggressive action could have prevented her death. It is also possible that Kimberly Young was destined to become a fatality. What remains is the unvarnished, uncomfortable and undeniable truth: regardless if medical care would have saved her life or simply offered her comfort as life ebbed away, Americans have tolerated, and some have even encouraged, the existence of a medical establishment where success is not measured in saved lives or prevented illnesses, but in the presence of black rather than red ink on the bottom line of a corporation's ledger book. Apparently the Bible was right about the love of money being the root of all evil.

I have heard from many that they do not want illegal immigrants to benefit from President Obama's healthcare reform legislation. The primary reasoning behind this is that they do not want illegal immigrants absorbing tax dollars or insurance premiums meant for American citizens proper. The trouble is, illegal immigrants already cost American society a mint right now when they, presumably, are not receiving any assistance meant for low income Americans or those that already have health insurance. They do this in two ways.

When illegal immigrants get sick, they are faced with a decision. They must decide if they are so sick that it is worth seeking medical treatment that could expose them as illegals and get them deported back to their respective country of origin. The decision that they make costs each and every American citizen money regardless of which decision it is that they make.

Let's say they decide that they are so sick that they absolutely must seek medical treatment or they will die or suffer irreparable harm. That means they will be going to the only place that they know they can be treated without having insurance: the emergency room at the local hospital. Because of basic human decency (as well as the law in most states), no one that is sick is turned away from the emergency room when they are seriously ill. The hospital takes them in and treats them. You are probably wondering who pays for this charitable medical treatment and the answer is we do. The hospitals cannot get blood out of a turnip and they cannot get money out of an indigent patient they are forced to treat. Therefore, they charge their paying customers $10 for aspirin, $20 for cable in their hospital room and all the other price gouging that goes on in your itemized bill. If you have ever been hospitalized, find your bill and take a look. The hospital is breaking down everything they do into individual items and then charging you a good deal more for it than it cost the hospital to acquire and treat you with. This is chiefly how they cover all the red ink they expend on the people they treat that are too poor to pay for the treatment and all illegal immigrants fall into this category. Not only is the cost passed along in terms of the money you pay for treatment, but you feel the pain of the systemic inadequacy every time you have to visit the emergency room. Because the emergency room is the only place poor people are assured of getting medical treatment, they all go to their local emergency rooms when they need treatment for anything. If illegal immigrants are brought into the healthcare reform legislation, perhaps all of our hospital bills would go down since hospitals would no be inundated with people that cannot pay their bill.

Their second option costs society too. If they decide that they are not sick enough to risk being caught and deported, that means that they go on being sick. Their affliction may not be an illness that is communicable, but many times it is. Therefore, the longer that they go on being sick without treatment, the longer they will be spreading their illness around to every legal American citizen that they come into contact with. This spreading is no insignificant issue since most illegal immigrants do menial labor that brings them into direct contact with the general public. Exacerbating the problem, they have little or no savings of their own so they cannot afford to stay home and not spread the bug to everyone they meet. However, even if they did have the money to be able to take a few days for the fever to break and their period of contagiousness to pass, most work in jobs where it is taken for granted that they will show up every day and if they do not they lose their job. Therefore, the system is organized in such a way that illegal immigrants have every incentive to act as a human petri dish. Society then pays the price for that organization in decreased productivity each time the sick illegal immigrant passes on his or her illness to another person.

There is another problem that we have yet to hit upon. We have established that illegal immigrants cost money when they become seriously ill and have to seek medical care that they cannot pay for at an emergency room. What we did not cover is how the illegal immigrant gets that way. People with insurance get yearly physicals by their primary physicians where health problems are discovered in their early stages and preventative action is taken to remedy the issue and preserve the person's health. As the old dictum goes, an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure and this situation is no different. Illegal immigrants have no insurance and no primary care physician to discover medical problems in the early stages. As such, the medical problem gets progressively worse until it can only be managed through radical medical intervention. For example, let us say that we have an illegal immigrant named Jorge that works for a fencing company. Jorge has high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol. Both problems can be controlled once a doctor discovers them and prescribes blood pressure medication and statins. However, Jorge has no doctor, has no routine physical and has no health insurance to pay for doctor visits or the medication to control his health problems. One summer day Jorge is working in the heat building a fence and the rest of his crew sees him keel over, clutching his chest. They start CPR and call 911. The ambulance arrives and takes Jorge to the nearest hospital where lifesaving surgery is performed. The surgery costs thousands of dollars that Jorge cannot pay and that the hospital now has to recoup from people like you and me when we seek treatment. Thousands of dollars that could have been prevented with a yearly checkup and two popular medications whose generic forms are fairly inexpensive to buy.

The reality is that the United States already subsidizes healthcare for illegal immigrants. The only difference is that currently we refuse them insurance and only take action when the situation is so dire that the treatment serious and expensive. If we allow them a place in healthcare reform legislation, it will likely sting to give benefits to people that are not supposed to be in the country to start with but it will also likely lower costs across the board, help our medical establishment function smoother and give hospitals that are struggling financially a way to step back from the brink of bankruptcy by reducing the amount of free medical care they have to absorb. It is not the popular solution, but it is the one with the best outcome for all.

Russia's latest response to the Obama administration's attempts to deal on international issues that America wants Russia's assistance on has shown that Russia's leaders have concluded that they can extract what they want from Obama. It's not all Obama's fault, but it partially is.

We'll start with why it is Obama's fault: he hasn't stood up to the Russians. Russia does not understand anything but hard dealing. Obama made the original mistake of thinking that he could deal with them equitably. They will not deal fairly with you unless they are convinced that you will do the equivalent of what they do when they want something: they shut off Europe's natural gas supplies in the dead of winter to coerce an acceptable outcome. Having seen this, they calculated their strategy. Obama's big opening gambit to gain Russian cooperation with reining in Iran's nuclear program was to withdraw the plans for building the Ballistic Missile Defense system facilities with the Poles and Czechs, two neighbors of the Russian sphere of influence and former Warsaw Pact countries. Russia's magnanimous response? They wouldn't position additional missiles in Kaliningrad (Russia's westernmost province), saying that there was no need to escalate and that the BMD was payment for the overland supply route to Afghanistan Russia allowed in its neighboring Central Asian republics. It was nothing but a down payment on the Iran situation. So, to summarize, it is Obama's fault insomuch that he has not drawn a line and stuck to it which has allowed Russia to conclude that he is as green as they thought he was and can be rolled in negotiations. However, that is not the entire story and he cannot be compared 1:1 to any of his recent predecessors.

The United States needs Russia's cooperation to achieve its foreign policy goals more now than it has at any time since Russia was needed as an ally to defeat Nazi Germany in WWII. Therefore, the only President in modern American history that Obama can be compared to is Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not insignificantly, Russia has endured a similar cycle of events prior to Obama's dealings with them as they did prior to Roosevelt's. The domestic situation in Russia prior to Roosevelt was one of domestic strife and revolution as the old order entered its death throes and a new order emerged. Just twenty years ago, the Soviet order entered its death throes and a new order with Vladimir Putin in control emerged from the chaos of party apparatchiks turned "capitalist" oligarchs as they robbed the state blind, taking the fixtures and plumbing and doing it all with forged ownership documents produced on a laser jet printer. The Russian people turned to the Bolsheviks to stop the chaos then as they turned to Putin and his United Russia political party to stop the chaos now. We all know the story of the rise of the Soviets but, more recently, Putin reasserted a strong Russian government that brought the oligarchs under its yoke and renationalized a good deal of what had been denationalized and stolen. Putin's Russia is a relatively stable Russia that is expanding territorially instead of contracting and he is very popular with the Russian people because of it.

Obama is facing two intractable problems that he simply cannot effectively deal with unless he has the cooperation of Russia. Both are equally important with equally harsh and negative consequences in store for the United States in the case of failure. The first is the war in Afghanistan. Bush had little interest in expanding the war front in Afghanistan and, therefore, no need to modify a fairly adversarial stance towards Russia. Obama pledged to expand the war in Afghanistan during the campaign and has held firm to that pledge by working to increase American troops in-country to 63,000 by the end of the year. The current supply situation is not an envious one. The only supply routes into Afghanistan prior to negotiating with Russia was overland through Pakistan and by air through Central Asia. Overland supply routes can carry a much larger amount of supplies than an air supply route can, meaning that the overland Pakistani route would be the logical choice for the most important equipment and weapons to fighting the war. However, that's not the case. The Pakistani route is constantly under threat of hijacking by Taliban and al Qaeda fighters or criminal elements contracted by the groups to rip off the convoys. That means nothing that could be used to kill NATO & American troops (i.e. guns, artillery, ammunition, high tech equipment for gathering intelligence) can be sent by ground. That leaves the overland routes carrying essentially nothing but food and fuel. The air transport route brings in everything else and it was close to full capacity before the recent insertion of far more American troops to help implement General McChrystal's COIN (COunter INsurgency) strategy. That meant that if Obama was going to boost troop levels in Afghanistan and make a concerted effort to turn the war in our favor that he was going to have to acquire an overland supply route through Central Asian countries where law and order was intact and the convoys could be assured far safer passage than their runs through Pakistan which, for all intents and purposes, is enemy territory. So, Russia agreed to allow the United States to negotiate supply line rights with the Central Asian republics that were within its sphere of influence without receiving anything significant in return at that point. As we have now seen, the withdrawal of BMD has been communicated to us by Russia as the price we will be paying for the overland Central Asian supply route that we need to escalate the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.

The second problem that Obama faces, which is to be considered more trouble simply because it is just as serious as the war in Afghanistan and it is going to demand further concessions to the Russians to buy cooperation, military action against Iran or simply accepting a Shiite nuclear bomb. All three have unpleasant consequences and it is now on the administration to make a conclusion about which set of consequences we can best cope with. The next bit of "cooperation" Russia will want from us will likely revolve around their bid to recreate a buffer state system to protect itself from the powers of Western Europe and a rising Turkey. Their paranoia is not exactly unfounded since they were nearly destroyed twice in the last 200 years by massive invasions across the Northern European Plain spearheaded by the two foremost European continental powers at the time of the invasions: France and Germany, respectively. The Russians are well aware that the only reason they are still speaking Russian is because they were able to trade vast amounts of land and men using a scorched earth policy to allow the elements to drive the invaders out for them. It bothers them at a very deep, Freudian level to see the foremost Western military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), right on its doorstep in the Baltic republics and considering the notion of granting Ukraine and Georgia membership to the club. Likely at the top of their wish list is for the United States to become very chilly towards Ukraine and Georgia but, specifically, Ukraine. While Georgia is a serious irritant to the Russians on their weak underbelly, the August 2008 war showed the reality of the situation in the Caucasus region: Russia refuses to be pushed behind the natural boundary to Turkish encroachment, the Caucasus Mountains, it will take military action to make sure it is not pushed behind that barrier and the United States has concluded that it is not worth direct combat with the Russians to keep their southern flank vulnerable. We were and are willing to train and arm the Georgians, but we will not go to bat for them. Plus, Georgia is likely a dead issue anyway now that Russia controls South Ossetia which controls nearly all the Georgian rump state's water supplies (and I call it the rump state because it is a shadow of its former self without South Ossetia and Abkhazia as part of its sovereign territory) as well as preventing Georgia from blocking the Roki Tunnel to prevent Russian reinforcements in the case of another war and also controls Abkhazia which has agreed (along with South Ossetia) to allow Russia to build military bases in their territory. From there Russia can strangle Georgia's most important port as it so chooses by using gunboat diplomacy. With Russia having gained control over Georgia handily, the United States backing away from Georgia will be the scraps from the table. The true objective is to get America and NATO to back away from Ukraine. Ukraine has been part of every successful Russian empire from nearly the beginning as it is intertwined tightly with southern Russia's agricultural and manufacturing segments as well as being potentially fatal to Russia if it becomes an ally of a power that wishes to use Ukraine as a jumping off point in invading Russia. Thus, buying Russia's cooperation has the downside that it would blunt NATO's expansion and that at such a high cost Washington cannot be sure firstly that Russia will vigorously pursue non-proliferation against what is basically a Russian client state in Iran. Secondly, Russia could give a good faith effort in a gasoline embargo and the embargo still may not work at which point America has given away a good deal to Russia and is rewarded by simply jumping to an option they could have chosen to start with: having to accept the existence of a Shiite nuclear bomb in the Middle East.

The problem with the second option is that our current crop of bunkerbusters is widely considered among the military and intelligence communities in the United States to be ineffective against the important Iranian nuclear targets whose destruction would set it back a few years to a decade or more. The Obama administration sped up the development of the 30,000 lbs. MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetration) bomb so that it could be mounted on a B-2 stealth bomber by July 2010, indicating that the administration (rightly) fears that talks and sanctions could go nowhere and they will be left with the least-desired option: rolling the dice on an air strike to cripple the Iranian program. In the best case scenario that the MOPs do their job, the downside will be that the United States will likely have to endure a wave of attacks from Iranian clients such as Hezbollah that have cells all over the world. The Obama administration, when making this decision, will most certainly think back to when Hezbollah's wrath was turned on America instead of Israel as it usually is and the result was a bombing in 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon resulting in the deaths of 299 military members, including 220 Marines. The worst case scenario is that the bunkers are stronger than we thought, we launch air strikes, we do little to no damage and we are now staring down the barrel at Hezbollah (and other Iranian terrorist proxies) retaliation for the strike with no tangible results to show for it. Few have also taken into account that the Iranian government has invested heavily in researching chemical and biological warfare from the moment in 1979 that the Iranian government put together its defense industry up until today and could have something horrible put back to unleash on its enemies. A military strike is literally opening a Pandora's Box because we don't have a good handle on the probability for success nor do we have a good handle on the retaliation that will come as a result of the strike regardless of our success or failure at crippling their nuclear program.

The third option is almost unthinkable. Given Iran's long history of sponsoring terrorist attacks against American targets and those of our allies, can we even contemplate a situation in which we allow them to develop and harness the most destructive power that man has ever devised? Their research, if left unchecked, will not only disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East in favor of a government that detests our closest Muslim allies in the region: Jordan and Saudi Arabia but it could also put Iran's government on negotiation footing with great powers because it will have developed weapons that can kill millions of people and be able to couple that with a delivery system that they've been honing for thirty years that surely still has cells flying under the radar awaiting the order to strike.

While Obama has set a bad example by not driving a harder bargain we also must admit that the reality of the situation has greatly shaped his behavior. The Russians are one of the few entities that can be negotiated with that also has some semblance of a chance to negotiate an acceptable end to this standoff. We do not know how it will end but we know one thing: this is the stuff that nightmare scenarios are made of.

Senator Ted Kennedy passed away just in the last few hours and he took some history with him. His career was so long that I think sometimes people forget the first part of it. Ted Kennedy lived through his brother John's election to the presidency as the first Catholic and then his heartbreaking assassination. He lived through Martin Luther King's push for civil rights for blacks and then his heartbreaking assassination. He lived through his brother Bobby's promising campaign for the presidency and then his heartbreaking assassination. Ted Kennedy was mired in misery. He lost two brothers within five years of one another to violent deaths. He was left as the only one of his generation to carry on the Kennedy legacy in politics and was left as the patriarch of the family after the death of his father, Joseph.

Whether one agreed with Kennedy's politics or not, it is undeniable that he left his mark on American politics, that he advanced many causes that he was concerned about and that he earned his title as the "Liberal Lion of the Senate." When the liberals in the Senate needed leadership, they always looked to Kennedy and Kennedy never failed them. Also, when his nieces and nephews looked to him in the absence of their slain fathers Ted never failed them either. He attended the special events that all children experience as they grow up. "Uncle Teddy" was a surrogate father that soothed the deep emotional wounds left on his nieces and nephews by their fathers' untimely passings. It was not right that JFK and RFK died so young, but for their children, Ted's constant presence in their life made it okay... made it possible to move on from such tremendous pain.

Tonight, one of American politics' great actors has exited the stage and the audience mourns his disappearance with varying levels of regret. There is one thing that this Catholic Democrat knows: rosaries are being said for Teddy in Boston and all over the country tonight for the last true leader of the first American Catholic political dynasty. Godspeed, Teddy.

Just so we're clear, this article is to remember Ted Kennedy in a positive way and not to criticize his failings. Call him a drunk or mention Chappaquiddick and you're on the sideline.

Tom Ridge, the former chief of the Department of Homeland Security, has claimed in his new book that he was pressured to raise the terror alert level in 2004 to improve the Bush administration's political fortunes at a time when Bush was fighting for re-election amidst rising unpopularity. Ridge specifically accuses former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft both of leaning on Ridge to raise the alert level despite there being no increased threat in Ridge's estimation.

Do you believe Ridge's claim that he was pressured by members of the Bush administration to raise the terror alert level to help President Bush win re-election?