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Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was "addicted to oil," and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: "Get more addicted to oil."

Actually, it's more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can't totally take off. Then try to strong-arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It's as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: "C'mon, guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we'll all go straight."

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is. But it gets better. The president actually had the gall to set a deadline for this drug deal:

"I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past," Bush said. "Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions. If congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act."

The Kansas Supreme Court's 6-1 decision extending juveniles the right to trial by jury didn't come with any cash attached. But it's certain to increase the price of criminal justice in the state, especially in urban courts such as Sedgwick County's with a lot of juvenile offenders.

Legislators and locals had better be thinking how to pay for this sweeping new mandate, which applies to all pending and future juvenile prosecutions. As Judge James Burgess, chief juvenile judge of the Sedgwick County District Court, told The Eagle editorial board, "The whole state's going to pay" in jury fees, lawyers' fees and more.

Until last week, juvenile offenders in Kansas could ask for a jury trial, but a judge had the power to grant or reject the request. In reversing the lower courts' decisions in a Finney County case, the court said that "changes to the Kansas Juvenile Justice Code since 1984 have eroded the benevolent, child-cognizant, rehabilitative" character that distinguished the juvenile system from the adult criminal system. For that reason, it held that "juveniles henceforth have a constitutional right to a jury trial under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments."

Not all those who newly have the right will exercise it. As it was, only 4 percent of the 14,000 juvenile offender cases in Kansas during fiscal year 2007 went to trial at all (most cases were resolved by plea or diversion agreements).

And juries are considered unpredictable. Will adult jurors be unsympathetic to kids who've behaved badly? Or will jurors, unlike seasoned juvenile judges, be pushovers for newly well-groomed youths telling sob stories?

When Barack Obama decided last week to throw off the constraints on campaign spending that go with the acceptance of public financing, he was rightly criticized for rigging the system in his own favor.

That was a predictable response. For the better part of four decades, the press and public interest groups have focused on campaign spending as the most serious distorting force in our elections.

Meantime, they have paid much less attention to what may well be a larger problem -- the way that district lines are drawn to create safe havens for one party or the other, in effect denying voters any choice of representation.

With new computer technology, politicians' ability to design districts that meet the legal requirement for equal population, while guaranteeing their fellow partisans easy passage into office, has never been greater.

In 2002 and 2006, the most recent off-year elections, about 9 of 10 congressional districts were won by more than 10 percentage points -- a clear sign that the game had been rigged in advance, when the lines were drawn in the state legislatures.

Among the least-noted aspects of the seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the psychological toll they are taking on those who have volunteered to fight them. Increasingly, they are being medicated on the battlefield, and many thousands are returning with brain damage and psychological wounds that cause tremendous suffering and have the potential to alter their lives forever.

A recent article that I thought would have gotten much more attention was the cover piece in Time magazine, "The Military's Secret Weapon," which disclosed that "for the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Soldiers and Marines are being sent into the war zones again and again because the pool of young people willing to join up and fight is so small. In addition to the obvious physical danger, repeated tours in combat are blueprints for psychological disaster.

A study by RAND Corp. found that the psychological toll of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan may in fact be "disproportionately high compared to the physical injuries of combat."

Post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries, major depression and suicide are exacting a fearful price from combat soldiers and Marines. These matters are not even being talked about enough, much less dealt with adequately.

The French are different from you and me. Yes, they have President Nicolas Sarkozy.

And they have his wife, Carla.

And they have "the Carla effect," as it's known in Paris.

If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a "tamer of men" and had a "man-eating" past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she'd had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on "The View" to sweeten her image.

It's hard to imagine the decibel level on Fox News if Michelle Obama put out a CD this summer, as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is, with songs featuring lyrics such as "I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers/a child." Then there is the song "Ma came": "You are my junk/more deadly than Afghan heroin/more dangerous than Colombian white..../My guy, I roll him up and smoke him."

The Iraq war's defenders like to bash the press for pushing the bad news and ignoring the good. Maybe they'll be happy to hear that the bad news doesn't rate anymore.

When a bomb killed at least 51 Iraqis at a Baghdad market last week, ending an extended run of relative calm, only one of the three network newscasts (NBC's) even bothered to mention it.

If you follow the nation's opinion pages and the presidential campaign, Iraq seems as contentious an issue as Vietnam was in 1968. But in the country itself, Cindy versus Michelle, not Shiites versus Sunnis, is the hotter battle.

In America, the war has been a settled issue since early 2007. No matter what has happened in Iraq since then, no matter what anyone on any side of the Iraq debate has had to say about it, polls consistently have found that a majority of Americans judge the war a mistake and want out. For that majority, the war is over except for finalizing the withdrawal details.

But John McCain and the war's last cheerleaders don't recognize this immutable reality. It's their constant and often shrill refrain that if only those peacenik McGovern Democrats and the "liberal media" acknowledged that violence is down in Iraq -- as indeed it is, substantially -- voters will want to press on to "victory" and not "surrender." And therefore go for McCain.

There is a reason progress in Iraq is not receiving more attention. It isn't that Americans are "bored" or "tired" or have "moved on" or "don't care" or "have already made up their minds that the war was a colossal mistake." All of these are variations on themes articulated by certain liberals, Bush haters, Barack Obama supporters (but I repeat myself) inside and outside the big media.

The main reason progress in Iraq is not receiving more attention is that the progress is considerable and the big media are not paying attention because they don't like the new story line.

A headline in Saturday's New York Times told you all you needed to know about the reluctance of the mainstream media to report on progress in Iraq. It read, "Big Gains for Iraq Security, but Questions Linger."

"What's going right?" began the lead sentence, which quickly added, "And can it last?" This is typical Times nay-saying, which undercuts anything that might reflect positively on the Bush administration or John McCain's election prospects.

The story continued with these reluctantly offered positive gems: "Violence in all of Iraq is the lowest since March 2004. The two largest cities, Baghdad and Basra, are calmer than they have been for years. The third largest, Mosul, is in the midst of a major security operation. On Thursday, Iraqi forces swept unopposed through the southern city of Amara, which has been controlled by Shiite militias." And then in a rebuke to all of those Democrats on Capitol Hill who have been saying, well, yes, the military has done a great job and violence is down, but there is no political settlement and so the Bush administration has failed, the story said, "There is a sense that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government has more political traction than any of its predecessors."

The pages of this newspaper often display the sentiments of Kansans frustrated by the cost of energy, including the high cost of gasoline. I support many proposals to address escalating prices, but these solutions are going nowhere until there is a collective will to do something about the energy crisis.

That will does not currently exist, because Republicans and Democrats are trying to posture themselves to deflect blame and capture political gains. I disagree with my colleagues and believe Congress should be solution-minded, not partisan.

The energy challenge requires a diverse solution of developing all available energy resources. While the demand for energy has continued to increase over the years, there has been no significant change in our domestic supply. We must lift federal bans on oil and natural gas exploration in Alaska and off our coasts to increase our domestic supply.

Expanded production of domestic oil and natural gas resources alone cannot solve this problem. The solution must include initiatives to support renewable energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and nuclear power, as well as biofuels made in states such as Kansas. Energy development must also be accompanied by energy conservation. We must encourage more efficient vehicles and construction of energy-conserving buildings.

If we are to solve this nation's energy problem, Democrats and Republicans must work together to promote conservation, aggressively pursue forms of renewable energy, and develop domestic exploration and production of oil and natural gas.

Let's go back and consider how the world looked in the winter of 2006-07. Iraq was in free fall, with horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing that sent a steady stream of bad news across the world media. The American public delivered a stunning electoral judgment against the Iraq war, the Republican Party and President Bush.

Expert opinion swung behind the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for handing off more of the problems to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria. Republicans on Capitol Hill were quietly contemptuous of the president while Democrats were loudly so.

Democratic leaders such as Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., considered the war lost. Barack Obama called for a U.S. withdrawal starting in the spring of 2007.

The arguments floating around opinion pages and seminar rooms were overwhelmingly against the idea of a surge: A mere 20,000 additional troops would not make a difference. The U.S. presence provoked violence, rather than diminished it. The more the United States did, the less the Iraqis would step up to do. Iraq was in a civil war, and it was insanity to put American troops in the middle of it.

Almost every top general was against the surge. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was against it, according to recent reports. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called for a smaller U.S. presence, not a bigger one.

The U.S. Justice Department is easily the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country. If used for the wrong purposes, its ability to commit the vast resources of the federal government against an individual or group can do great damage to lives and careers.

For that reason, laws and rules have been adopted to prevent the hijacking of the Justice Department to advance a partisan or ideological cause. But that's exactly what the Bush administration did.

"It's a tragedy because, for many years, the only agency that really had a standing as the untouchable agency from partisan politics was the Justice Department," said David Iglesias, a former U.S. attorney and stalwart Republican fired because he refused to use his authority for partisan purposes. "And unfortunately, what's happened over the past couple of years has tarred it with a very, very ugly brush."

The campaign to turn the Justice Department into an enforcement arm of the Republican Party extended even to its hiring of legal interns.

By federal law and by longtime tradition, legal internships at the Justice Department had been awarded strictly on the basis of merit. But in the Bush administration, well-qualified students deemed to have some sort of hidden liberal bent were systematically rejected; less-qualified students with poorer academic records but a record of conservative activism were hired instead. It was affirmative action for the dumb but partisan.

It wasn't long ago that conservative critics of environmental regulation -- including the industries that pollute the nation's air, water and land -- claimed that a market-based approach was the only sensible way to control environmentally damaging activities. Earlier this month in the U.S. Senate, that's exactly what was on offer, in the form of a cap-and-trade system for limiting the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. But when presented with a bill adopting the approach they'd once championed, the conservatives refused to take "yes" for an answer.

During the 1970s and 1980s, conservatives railed against efforts to protect public health and the environment, deriding emissions restrictions as "command-and-control," even "Soviet-style," regulation. They promoted such market-based solutions as emissions-trading markets, which were superior because they would achieve environmental protection goals more efficiently.

A cap-and-trade system was their preferred approach. It would allow those with low costs of controlling pollution to limit their emissions more than traditional environmental regulations would have required, and then to sell their excess "allowances" to those with high pollution-control costs. Those who purchased allowances would satisfy their legal obligations by buying emission allowances instead of limiting their emissions.

Progressives were skeptical at first. They feared that emissions trading would amount to little more than a shell game in which polluters exchanged "credits" or "allowances" on paper, obscuring the fact that no real environmental progress was being made. They also argued that polluters ought to be required to reduce emissions as much as they could, a standard inconsistent with a system in which polluters can buy their way out of emissions-control obligations.

Ultimately, in 1990 Congress decided to give the approach a try, creating a cap-and-trade program for electric utilities aimed at controlling acid rain.

I recently rewatched the movie "Obsession -- Radical Islam's War Against the West." The film shows propaganda videos from Iran, which included shots of U.S. forces kicking in doors, missiles being launched, Arab children crying, Muslims running with their wounded. Interspersed throughout were images of a smiling President Bush.

None of this is particularly original. What stands out, though, is the realization that since this movie was released in 2006, the United States has increased troop levels in Iraq, redoubled efforts to rout al-Qaida there. If anything, Bush has given propagandists more fuel to inflame the anti-American Arab street.

Our forces might have driven Iraqis into the arms of the radicals. Instead, the reverse happened.

It seems Iraqis have decided that al-Qaida, not America, is the "foremost enemy." That al-Qaida, not America, had come to fight the people of Iraq.

Does this mean Iraqis want America encamped there forever? Of course not. Or that innocent life hasn't been lost as the result of U.S. actions? No.

Do we really want to put Christian faith on trial during this presidential election season? Is this really the debate we are called to undertake to nominate our president in November?

It seems this is the direction we are headed if we take heed of certain Christian voices.

Columnist Cal Thomas stated that Barack Obama "either hasn't read the Bible or, if he has, doesn't believe it if he embraces such thin theological wisps," which Thomas chose to highlight ("Obama's faith is not biblical," June 13 Opinion).

In a speech on his radio program last week, James Dobson raged against Obama by stating, "I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology." He also accused Obama of distorting the Bible and pushing a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution.

And The Eagle's own Brent Castillo jumped into the fray as he extolled the benefits of conservatism over the dangers of liberalism (June 19 Opinion). Conservative ideals, he suggested, "are generally better than liberal ones, and those conservative beliefs often lead people to make choices that are more beneficial to our society."

People campaign for the presidency by talking their heads off. By the time the winner reaches the White House, the habit is so ingrained that it is impossible to shake.

The result has been what professor Jeffrey Tulis of the University of Texas 21 years ago labeled "the rhetorical presidency," his term for an office in which the principal goal is to mobilize public opinion successfully enough to dominate the dealings with Congress and even foreign powers.

Now, another scholar, Elvin T. Lim of Wesleyan University, has offered a revision of the Tulis theory that sheds fascinating and disturbing light on the torrent of communications that are unleashed by the "communicator in chief." In a slim book titled "The Anti-Intellectual Presidency," he argues that the real problem is not the increased quantity of words coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. but the sharp decline in content -- especially of logical argument.

Complaints about vacuous official rhetoric and the "dumbing down" of presidential speeches, news conferences and interviews are standard fare. Lim found strong evidence to support those complaints, not just in his interviews with the retired speechwriters, but in the presidential texts themselves.

In what must have been a heroic effort, he applied standard techniques of content analysis to state papers of every president from Washington to the second Bush. His tool is something called the Flesch Readability score -- a measure of the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word. The higher the Flesch score, the simpler to get the meaning.

It is not difficult to understand why Barack Obama has a fear of scarves. In the 17 months he has been pursuing the presidency, the senator has faced a crude and shameless campaign from conservative pundits, GOP functionaries and assorted ignoramuses in the peanut gallery to prove him a secret Muslim -- a "Manchurian candidate," as one put it -- trained from birth to subvert America from within and, I don't know, make us all eat falafels or something.

On about a half-second of intelligent reflection, the flaw in that theory is apparent: If unfriendly forces had indeed inserted a "secret" Muslim among us, said Muslim would have blond hair, blue eyes, flag pins out the wazoo and a name like Joe Smith. Too bad intelligent reflection is a stranger to the people in question. With a grim fanaticism, they seize upon every perceived crumb of Obama's "Muslimness" to press their case, using everything from his middle name to his disdain for the cheap patriotism of the American flag lapel pin to a photo of him wearing native dress on a trip to Somalia.

So it's easy to see why workers for his campaign barred two women wearing hijabs, Muslim head scarves, from sitting behind him, within range of TV cameras, at a June 16 rally in Detroit. When someone is throwing at you, you don't hand him rocks.

But that doesn't make what the workers did right.

Yes, Obama apologized profusely. Good for him. It would be easier to take the apology seriously, though, if: Somewhere in the past year of manifold denials that he is a Muslim, Obama had found the time, space or guts to point out that there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim, particularly in a nation that enshrined religious freedom in its founding documents. And he hadn't spent so much time treating the American Muslim community as one does the carrier of a contagious disease.