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As President Bush made his farewell tour of Europe, one could almost be forgiven for thinking the continent had become an afterthought for the United States.

Yet such a view would ignore the fact that a strong trans-Atlantic alliance is needed now more than ever, as America shares many more values, challenges and goals with the democracies of Europe than with any other nations.

This was evident during a recent seminar organized by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the German Ministry of Defense. As a Manfred Woerner Seminar Fellow, I had the opportunity to join with more than two dozen American and German professionals in discussions with key German, NATO and European Union foreign policy and security leaders.

The United States, Germany and the other European democracies all share common values, and many of our people share common ancestries. We all desire secure yet open societies where people have a voice in their government and are free to pursue happy, productive lives. This much is clear.

What was also made clear during the seminar was that while our shared values and history point to a desire for greater trans-Atlantic cooperation, the similarity of the challenges we face demand it. The democracies of the West cannot hope to be successful without working together.

When the terrorists attack again -- as Homeland Security repeatedly has warned us they will -- how many survivors will be consoled because the U.S. Supreme Court looked out for the "rights" of terrorists before the rights of their dead loved ones?

Will the dead be wrapped in a copy of the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling granting foreign detainees -- whose mission is to destroy our Constitution, our country and way of life -- the right to appeal to U.S. civilian courts to challenge their detention, a right that should be reserved only for American citizens?

Granting terrorists seized on the battlefield access to civilian courts also sends another message: America is not serious about winning the war. It tells them they can "game" the system, demanding rights and protections unknown in their countries of origin.

Justice Antonin Scalia said 30 former detainees allegedly have returned to the battlefield to kill American troops and others. On whose hands should be their blood? Who should be held accountable for the blood of Americans killed by terrorists who have gained their freedom courtesy of a federal judge, a judge who has usurped the authority and judgment of the executive branch and the military?

This is bound to demoralize our soldiers, who will wonder why they should bother to seize terrorists at all if they are just going to be released.

One way Americans can save money on travel this summer? How about we stay home and send our luggage on vacation instead?

Because of a new fee schedule at American Airlines, for a mere $80, two suitcases will be able to fly round-trip to the destination of their choice.

As of Sunday, American is now charging $15 each way for the first checked bag, or $30 for the round-trip. The airline has already started charging $25 for the second checked bag on each leg of the journey.

What this means is that for $80, a two-bag set of luggage can have a pretty good time going to, say, Cape Cod for the summer.

Of course, if you want to go along with the bags, it'll cost extra.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided that Guantanamo Bay detainees have the right (known as habeas corpus) to challenge the legality of their detentions in federal district court. It did not authorize the release of a single detainee.

The decision infuriated Justice Antonin Scalia. It "will make the war harder on us," he asserted in dissent. "It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Scalia's overheated rhetoric harms a crucial national decision that must be made about what to do next with the detainees. Be afraid! he says. And know whom to blame when the next terrorist attack comes. It's exactly this kind of demagoguery, designed to limit debate, that got us where we are today, with the Congress adopting a detainee law based on fear rather than effective policy and American principles.

The sad truth is that Guantanamo has been an epic failure. For more than six years, hundreds of individuals have been held there, some on the flimsiest of evidence and some undoubtedly dangerous, devoted terrorists. Fewer than 300 remain today. None has been tried by the military tribunals set up by President Bush in 2001 and ratified by Congress in 2006. Hundreds have been released to their home countries after an opaque process in which the military determined that they "no longer" pose a threat. Some have returned to battle.

Scalia seems to believe that Guantanamo has made Americans safer. But we know that Guantanamo and its harsh interrogation policies have attracted global disapproval and made it difficult for our allies to cooperate with us on counterterrorism issues. And are we safer today than we would have been if the president, in 2001 or early 2002, had established a legally sustainable process for determining whether individuals brought to the prison at Guantanamo were in fact associated with the Taliban or al-Qaida, as the U.S. State Department advised?

The most urgent foreign policy problem that the next U.S. president will face won't be Iraq. Nor will it be Iran.

The next terrorist attack on America is likely to originate, according to the top U.S. military commander, Adm. Mike Mullen, in a place you've probably never heard of: the FATA. That's the acronym for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northern Pakistan.

The FATA is a lawless expanse along the Afghan border where al-Qaida, the Taliban and other jihadi groups are now based.

From these safe havens, they attack NATO troops in Afghanistan, plan terrorist attacks abroad and threaten Pakistan itself -- a nuclear state.

Neither Pakistan nor the Bush administration has a strategy to curb FATA's jihadis. Indeed, the situation seems to be getting worse.

World leaders fight terrorism all the time, with summit meetings and sound bites and security initiatives. But they have studiously ignored one of the most common and brutal varieties of terrorism in the world today.

This is a kind of terrorism that disproportionately targets children. It involves not weapons of mass destruction but simply AK-47s, machetes and pointed sticks. It is mass rape -- and it will be elevated, belatedly, to a spot on the international agenda this week.

The United Nations Security Council will hold a special session on sexual violence Thursday in New York City, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leading the debate. This session, sponsored by the United States and backed by a Security Council resolution calling for regular follow-up reports, just may help mass rape graduate from an unmentionable to a serious foreign policy issue.

The world woke up to this phenomenon in 1993, after discovering that Serbian forces had set up a network of "rape camps" in which women and girls, some as young as 12, were enslaved. Since then, we've seen similar patterns of systematic rape in many countries, and it has become clear that mass rape is not just a byproduct of war but also sometimes a deliberate weapon.

There are two reasons for this. First, mass rape is very effective militarily. From the viewpoint of a militia, getting into a firefight is risky, so it's preferable to terrorize civilians sympathetic to a rival group and drive them away, depriving the rivals of support.

A few words about white trash. I've always found that term offensive, its ubiquity notwithstanding. I have a number of reasons, but the most important is that it is a gratuitous insult to the white poor. Of course, they are one of the few groups remaining one can insult with relative impunity.

Granted, Vice President Dick Cheney did not actually use the term "white trash" in the "joke" he recently attempted at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He didn't need to. It was there, understood, without being spoken.

The remark came in a discussion of the Cheney family tree. "We have Cheneys on both sides of the family," he said. "And we don't even live in West Virginia."

Get it? Ha-ha-ha. I mean, you know how it is up there in the hills and hollers of that state where the population is 95 percent white and the median family income is $10,000 below the national average: cousins marry cousins, brothers bed their pipe-smoking sisters. Pardon me while I slap my knee.

The comedy stylings of Dick Cheney drew bipartisan condemnation from West Virginia lawmakers, and Cheney quickly issued an apology, which is good enough as far as it goes. Still, it's too bad there does not exist -- at least, not to my knowledge -- a national organization, an NAACP for poverty, as it were, that could provide us with context, help us see Cheney's "joke" not as an isolated episode but as part and parcel of a national pattern of neglect, if not outright scorn, for the have-nots among us.

Barack Obama's recent call for responsible fatherhood was welcome, overdue -- and misleadingly incomplete.

That America's fathers need to embrace their most important role is no secret. Activist fathers have been trying to make the same claim for decades, without much success.

Not all fathers are trying to be good dads, it goes without saying. But neither are all absent by choice, as Obama's message implied.

His plea to fathers came on Father's Day, a time we usually reserve for praising good men. Noting the plague of fatherless homes, he called on fathers who have abandoned their responsibilities to act like men, not boys.

Hear, hear.

We got there early, or so I thought. But no.

Some 4,000 people had gotten there ahead of us, forcing us to take seats in the far upper reaches of the cavernous historic Fox Theatre in downtown Atlanta. We had all come to watch a black-and-white movie churned out by the studio system more than 60 years ago, long before most of us in the audience had been born.

We came to watch Humphrey Bogart lament that "of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

We came to giggle at Claude Rains claiming to be "shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here."

And we came to hear Bogie tell Ingrid Bergman one more time that "it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

Imagine that it's Saturday morning and you woke up with a sore throat. You can tell it's strep throat. But your doctor's office is closed, and a sore throat isn't something you take to an emergency room.

You will have to spend the entire weekend feeling worse and worse with a hope that Monday morning you will be able to talk your doctor's office into finding an appointment for you.

An Eagle article indicated that another option could be right around the corner, literally ("Walgreens to open walk-in clinics in Wichita," June 12 Business Today). Across the nation, in-store health clinics are opening in pharmacies, Wal-Marts, Targets and grocery stores. Such clinics are rapidly multiplying, with estimates of 1,500 to 1,800 opening by the end of 2008.

These clinics offer an alternative avenue for care for both the insured and uninsured. As policymakers debate how to approach the concerns of the uninsured in the United States, they should acknowledge the advantages offered by these private sector clinics and make sure not to stifle these innovations.

In-store clinics offer both acute and preventive care. The acute care options are for diagnosis and treatment of basic cases such as strep throat, sinus infections, earaches, bladder infections and more. Preventive services generally are available for blood-sugar testing, cholesterol screening, routine physicals and vaccinations.

Some individuals have taken a few poorly considered comments I made for their own purposes, stretching my comments far beyond anything I know or believe ("Concerns arise over SRS files' validity," June 8 Eagle).

First, let me make clear that I do not know of or believe there has been an instance in which an assistant county or district attorney has asked or demanded that a social worker with the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services commit perjury or misrepresent the facts of a situation.

Child welfare cases are some of the most emotional situations professionals are asked to address. At times the emotion and stress can lead to a lack of civility. This can happen in various places, and it was never my intention to imply it has only ever happened in Sedgwick County.

In fact, one of the aspects of my comments I most deeply regret is that they did not recognize the great strides that have been made in Sedgwick County, through the leadership of District Attorney Nola Foulston, to improve the professionalism and civility of the interactions among various participants in the child welfare system. That I failed to acknowledge this does not contribute to what Foulston is trying to achieve, and I will have to work hard to repair this breach.

The disputes I was referring to in my comments, and for which I was not clear, have nothing to do with the veracity of the information provided in legal documents. Rather, there are at times disputes over what facts are relevant to the case at hand in assessing a child's current safety. In these situations, professionals, all dedicated to doing their best to keep a child safe, can disagree about what factors should be considered and the correct course of action. Ultimately, it is up to the juvenile court judges to mediate these disputes and, through their fact-finding, make the right decisions.

We are barely at the beginning of the long period in which most Americans will give their first serious scrutiny to the presidential candidates and decide whether Barack Obama or John McCain will get their vote.

McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura.

Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating. That is why a pair of strategy decisions made in the past two weeks could prove troublesome for him.

The first was Obama's turning down McCain's invitation to join him in a series of town hall meetings, where they would appear together and answer questions from real voters.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe initially called the idea "appealing." But nine days later, when he got around to responding, Plouffe countered with something quite different from the 10 informal discussions McCain proposed holding before the late-summer nominating conventions. Plouffe said that in addition to the three traditional debates under official sponsorship later in the fall, there could be only two others -- one on economics on July 4 and another on foreign policy in August.

Who was the tall young man, the quiet guy with the small wire-rimmed glasses, who was spending the entire day, every day, with the badly wounded soldier in Room 5711 at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center?

The doctors, the nurses, the technicians and assorted attendants all wanted to know. The man was always very quiet and polite and quick to help out however he could. Who was he?

Joshua Hubbell and Luis Rosa-Valentin were best friends at Meade Senior High School at Fort Meade, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C. Josh graduated in 2000 and Luis in 2001. Both of their dads were career soldiers.

"We'd go straight from school to his house to play video games," Josh told me last weekend.

A few years ago, Josh, who is 26, learned he had testicular cancer. "At that young age, you think you're invincible," he said. "The toll that it took mentally was just devastating."

After Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton recently met for a private tete-a-tete, speculation mushroomed as to what Obama might be offering his former rival. Pundits cited all the possibilities: the vice presidency, a spot in the Cabinet, Senate majority leader and -- yes -- appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Is it possible that Obama might adopt Dwight Eisenhower's 1952 strategy for dealing with a contentious political rival? California Gov. Earl Warren had run for president three times and saw himself in line for the Republican presidential nomination in '52, but the war hero of Europe came home and derailed his plans.

Myths abound concerning the Eisenhower-Warren relationship, including the erroneous story that Ike used an appointment to the court to repay Warren for support at the Republican convention, where he didn't have a majority of delegates secured. In fact, Warren didn't release his delegates until after the contest was over.

But after his election in November, Eisenhower strode into Herbert Brownell's room at the Commodore Hotel in New York City, where the future attorney general was working on Cabinet appointments. According to Brownell, Ike announced, "I want Gov. Warren to know that we consider him a part of the Eisenhower team." Did he want Warren in the Cabinet? No, said the president-elect, "I think he'd be a good man on the Supreme Court."

Eisenhower placed the call himself. "Governor," Warren recalled Eisenhower saying, "I want you to know that I intend to offer you the first vacancy on the Supreme Court." Eisenhower confirmed the call in his memoirs but claimed that he was only "considering the possibility." But the proof of this secret deal lies in the fact that when Chief Justice Fred Vinson died the following September, Eisenhower nominated Warren for the job.

At the end of a long presentation outlining new services, new doctors, new facilities and a growth in income this year at a rate greater than the growth of the economy, the unusually savvy and successful senior vice president and chief medical officer of Stormont-Vail HealthCare, Kent Palmberg, sighed and quietly said, "I'm not sure where all this is going, but we'll probably end up with something like Medicare for all."

He added, "I'm not sure that's all bad. They pay promptly, predictably and adequately, with a minimum of paperwork. That beats costly fighting with scores of insurance companies, plus caring for the many uninsured."

Palmberg's audience was about 35 retired physicians, men and women who had provided good medical care for Kansans over some or all of the past 50 years, and who participated in the unprecedented growth of our profession. I watched closely. None flinched, none shook his head or raised her hand to register an objection.

Their probable attitudes coincide with a 2007 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that found 59 percent of physicians in the United States support "government legislation to establish national health insurance," up 10 percent in five years.

Palmberg, who oversees the nearly 170 physicians who provide care at 23 locations in northeast Kansas, was also affirming the December 2007 endorsement by the American College of Physicians, medicine's largest specialty society, of a single-payer national health system as "one pathway" to universal coverage.

Someone is going to think this column is racist. That person -- he or she will be white -- will be unable to point to so much as a semicolon that suggests I believe in the native superiority of my, or any other, race. Rather, the accusation will be based in the fact that the column discusses race, period.

It's a phenomenon I've seen many times, most recently when a friend of mine told me that a friend of hers regards me as racist because I write about race. To which I gave my standard answer: If that's how it works, I'll start writing about money. Then I'll be a billionaire.

I offer the foregoing as a gesture of solidarity with an elementary schoolteacher in California who wrote to ask my opinion of two incidents that happened in her class.

In the first, a white boy -- we'll call him Bobby -- disagreed with a black boy. The black boy, who had been explaining something about his family to the teacher, told Bobby he would not understand because he was white. Bobby said this was racist.

In the second incident, Bobby complained that a classmate had called him a white boy. The classmate was a white girl. Bobby said she was racist.

The only thing more tedious than doing housework is reading about housework.

Yet with the gritty determination of a committed obsessive-compulsive, I plowed through a recent 8,000-word New York Times Magazine expose on the current state of gender equity in the American home: "When Mom and Dad Share it All."

Apparently, men and women are still not equal partners. In fact, they're so unequal that they're more or less stuck in the same trends of 90 years ago, despite our best efforts to get men to be better women and women to be better men.

Alas, still foiled.

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin's National Survey of Families and Households indicate that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week compared with the average husband's 14. When wives stay home, they do 38 hours of housework a week compared with men's 12.