Andanh.com

Imagine if President Bush announced a plan for Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs that declared: They will cease accumulating nuclear weapons by 2025. We will accomplish this through incentives and voluntary action, without mandates.

Bush would be ridiculed, but in essence, that's the plan he announced for climate change last week. He set a target for halting the growth in carbon dioxide emissions by 2025, without specific mandates to achieve that, and in the meantime he blasted proposed Senate legislation for tougher measures as unnecessary.

Unnecessary? When scientists detect accelerating melting in the Arctic and confidently predict centuries of coastal retreats and climate shifts, endangering the only planet we have?

Three respected climate experts made that troubling argument in an important essay in Nature this month, offering a sobering warning that the climate problem is much bigger than anticipated. That's largely because of increased use of coal in booming Asian economies.

For example, imagine that we instituted a brutally high gas tax that reduced emissions from American vehicles by 25 percent. That would be a stunning achievement -- and in just nine months, China's increased emissions would have more than made up the difference.

What this country needs is a bipartisan effort to reform health care. Fortunately, such an effort has just been announced. It couldn't come at a better time.

Americans pay more for health care than any other nation on the planet.

More Americans go bankrupt because of medical bills than in other countries.

Worse, Americans have a lower life expectancy than citizens of other developed nations while also experiencing higher infant mortality rates.

Health care reform is one of those chronic problems that everyone knows must be resolved for the sake of both the citizens and the nation. The issue is so politically charged, however, that nothing gets done while the problem grows bigger.

I have epilepsy, a disability, but may not be considered disabled in a legal sense. I also have cerebral palsy, another disability.

Does the fact that I use a power wheelchair make me not disabled in the eyes of our courts? I don't know, but it might.

I'm being serious here.

When Congress passed the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, it meant the law to cover anyone with a disability or a history of being disabled or who was perceived as being disabled.

The ADA was a bipartisan measure. In the Senate, its chief sponsors were Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan. In the House, former Rep. Tony Coelho, D-Calif., was a main backer.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled 7-2 that the death penalty by lethal injection in Kentucky, which uses a cocktail of three drugs, is not a violation of the Constitution's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment." Other states, which had placed their lethal injection methods on hold pending a court ruling, are now expected to proceed.

No news report I saw appreciated the irony of the 7-2 vote, the same margin by which the court decided in 1973 that unborn babies could be killed in any manner, with or without drugs to dull their pain.

In self-defense, most see nothing wrong with taking a life if another person is about to take theirs. It is only if the killer succeeds that some strange notion kicks in that the killer's life suddenly inherits value and comes under constitutional protection.

Conversely, the unborn child, according to the same court, only has a right to live if the woman carrying it gives it that right. Should she decide not to give birth, any method, including drug cocktails, is allowed. It mocks life when anti-death penalty people advocate for the guilty while caring nothing for the unborn.

In one of the written opinions, Justice Samuel Alito referred to the ethics rules of the medical profession, which, he said, bar physicians from taking part in executions. This was one of the issues in the Kentucky case, where it was argued that nonprofessionals might not administer the drugs properly and thus might inflict excruciating pain.

Nine years ago the Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel.

In any case, the Economist asserted, the world faced "the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future."

Oil closed above $117 Monday.

It's not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven't heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

How you answer this question depends largely on what you believe is driving the rise in resource prices. Broadly speaking, there are three competing views.