This just hot off the wires: Castro says he does not doubt the sincerity of President Obama but there are still many question, such as, “whether a Capitalistic system can save the environment.”

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With the Joe Kline’s of the world trumpeting the emergence of a fundamentally new America with Barack Obama’s election, it might be useful to remember that the same country that elected Obama also elected Ronald Reagan and Goerge W. Bush to two terms. The reason this could happen is that as many as 30 percent of American voters are non-ideological—they vote for the person they like. This can be deduced by polls consistently showing that about 40 to 45 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservative, compared to about 25 to 30 percent of Americans who identify themselves as liberals. The remaining large fraction of so-called swing voters, vote on the basis of a presidential candidate’s personality, charisma, likeability or presidential “aura”. Obama may have an impressive mandate, but this is still a fundamentally conservative country. If he wants to get re-elected he’ll have to learn fast, as Clinton did, to moderate his liberal instincts.

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In news that should come as a surprise to no one, pollsters have found that Democrats are less happy then Republicans. The poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that 37 percent of Republicans are very happy, compared to 25 percent of Democrats. More tellingly, only 9 percent of Republicans are “not too happy,” compared with 20 percent disgruntled Democrats.

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According to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, almost 85% of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least happy. Eric Wilson uses this insight as a launching pad for his overwrought and simplistic analysis of American culture, contained in his book, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.

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If the UN, world governments and NGOs acted with the same coordination and alacrity on issues related to water as they did on global warming, the lives of millions of people around the world could be directly and tangibly improved.

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It would be very easy, by trying to eliminate every perceived ill in this world, using entirely “rational”�logic in the name of progress, to�eradicate the very condition upon which the�meaningful exercise of reason and logic�depends–namely freedom. We must strive to purge pseudo-religious, feel-good, politcally correct thinking from public policy and return to a society based on the principals of individual responsibility, merit, reason (not rationalism)�and a total (not partial) body of evidence.�

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����������� We all know we will drive smaller cars, will pay dearer for a gallon of petro and will eventually be chided into accepting the Euro-zone led carbon-cap emission trading scheme and a concomitant universal expansion of the power of government to regulate and restrict. All this to save the world from an imaginary environmental apocalypse. It�s a twee pipping of course yet it�s as clear as a glass of Chateau De Maligny Chablis. It simply must be. Or as Dylan put it, you don�t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

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Let�s ignore for the moment that the United States is the most creative, innovative, productive, socially mobile, economically free, wealthy (excluding countries such as Bermuda and Luxemburg) and most charitable nation on earth and focus, as lefties like to do, on the negative. Topic of the day�lifespan.

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In their attempt to mitigate America�s dependence on �foreign� oil (a problem which actually doesn�t exist as all oil is, in essence, foreign because it is traded on the world market), our elected quidnuncs have concocted a legislative agenda of meat-headed mischievousness calling for, among other things, 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuel use by 2012, raised to 36 billion gallons by 2022. Nearly a fifth of the nation�s corn crop is now used to make ethanol. Spurred by subsidies, farmers who once grew wheat or soy beans are converting their fields to corn. The result�Agflation. According to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, over the past year the price of orange juice has risen 25%, beef 6%, eggs 20% and milk 5 to 10%. Not surprisingly, the new ethanol capacity has done little to alleviate gas prices. In terms of price per unit of energy, corn grown in Illinois is now higher than crude pumped out of the Saudi desert�roughly $13 per BTU for corn versus $12 per BTU for oil.

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Global warming can be interpreted in a number of ways. Matter-of-factly, it is the environmentalist, save-the-earth, sine qua non of the day. From a political perspective, it is a hot potato, one that astute politicians and corporate chiefs must handle carefully to avoid being tainted as anti-green, and thus viewed in the same light as ax-murderers. Practically and philosophically, however, global warming is really about vast new restrictions on freedom.

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As much of the nation suffers from an extended springtime spell of global anti-warming (like psychoanalysis, global warming theory is non-refutable and explains all outcomes), as, even in the face of springtime blizzards, the unrelenting parade global-warming related stories is ramped up to the level of overt propaganda, as all doubters are stridently shouted down and silenced by Gorean Truth (Thomas Friedman implied anyone who questioned man-made global warming was a �crank�), many are the millions who feel they have no choice but to believe in the �science� that says global warming is here, it is caused by man and it will wreak havoc on the environment and humankind.

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T.S. Elliott got it wrong. It�s February, not April, that has the sadistic streak in it. For it is in February that depression, gambling, alcohol consumption and body piercing peak. This is all documented, trust me, but really the only proof yee need know that all hope has indeed been abandoned in the dreary succession of overcast, flight-postponed, football-less days is the annual airing of the grand-mal spectacle, the Oscars. This utterly pointless, suspense-less, self-congratulatory preen-fest of wealthy high-school dropouts is the high point of the low point of the year.

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Many, if not most, men would bristle at the suggestion they are homophobic. Pre-judging a person is itself unmanly. Yet, at the same time most heterosexual men, at least 85 to 90% of males in the U.S., would admit to being terrified, if not revolted, by the idea of sexually-oriented (not the same as physical) contact with another man.

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While Washington and the media fixates on Iraq, here in the midwest many people are so hopelessly myopic as to be more concerned about such rank mundanities as paying the mortgage and saving money for their childrens’ college expenses.

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The recent outbreaks of violence in Muslim neighborhoods north of Paris prompts the question, why aren�t these and other social problems in Europe more widely reported in the U.S. media? I came across a smallish AP wire report on the torching of buses in Le Blanc-Mensil by youths, in commemoration of the 2005 riots in the same area, buried in the middle section of The Detroit Free Press. Over the past few weeks youths have set flames to more than a half-dozen buses according to the report. Hostility toward anyone in a government uniform�policemen, firefighters, utility workers–in these neighborhoods is rampant and unrestrained. Bus drivers say they are spat upon and threatened and never try to enforce rules, such as paying a fare. And this has been going on, not for weeks, but for years, with nary a mention in our far-flung press, doggedly filing on every car-bombing and power-outage in Iraq.

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In an otherwise fairly forgettable World Series, the most lingering memory may be the arctic-like conditions endured by the players, and the media questioning whether the Series should be played at a warm-weather neutral site.

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One of the unexpected benefits of taking care of one’s ailing parents is time to peruse daytime television programming. I was shaken out of my zombie-like state when Oprah began a segment with a long lead-in about the decline in American critical thinking skills — a thesis which happens to be the theme of my book Think! published this year by Threshold Editions under Mary Matalin.

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Margaret MacMillan’s (Paris 1919) new book Nixon in China: One Week that Changed the World, provides one small, long overdue measure of rehabilitation for the presidency of Richard Nixon. MacMillan is right in singling out Nixon’s trip to China in February 1972 as one of the most significant diplomatic feats�in history. To be sure, Nixon’s insecurity was�a tragi-comic flaw that would�be his political undoing, �but many people forget that in the coldest days of the Cold War, the deft geopolitical manuevering of Nixon-Kissinger kept the Russians and Chinese in check, setting the stage for Ronald Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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In a speech this week British PM Tony Blair chided European leaders for their “mad anti-Americanism,” according to wire reports. He went on to say that the world would be a more dangerous place if Americans “pull up the drawbridge and disengage.”

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By now I’m sure everyone knows that global warming is one of the last cards the hard Left has left to play. Their predictament evokes the title of Kazuo Ishiguro’s book “Remains of the Day.”

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