Tune in to 96.9 Boston Talks this week from 6-10 p.m. to hear me filling in for Michele McPhee. Register at their site to listen live if you are outside of the Boston area. I talked about the underwear bomber, the God gap between New England and the rest of America, and MTV's The Jersey Shore last night. What topics should I discuss in the coming nights?

UPDATE: I will be is guest hosting for Jay Severin from 2-6 p.m. on New Year's Eve on 96.9 Boston Talks.

How dead is the album? The bestselling album of the last decade was by a band that broke up forty years ago. Of the world's 25 bestselling albums of the decade, just two--Nickleback's All the Right Reasons and Amy Whinehouse's Back to Black--were released in the decade's second half. It's the end of the decade that has no name, which means it's time to name the ten best albums from the ten years that have no name. I'm giving those ten years a name: the decade that killed the album. And I'm naming my top ten albums from the decade that killed the album:

10. Jack Johnson & Friends--Sing-a-Longs and Lullabyes for the Film Curious George Bestseller on this list.
9. The National--Boxer (2007) The last voice I heard that deep was singing about Superman and Solomon Grundy.
8. Arcade Fire--Funeral (2004) "Children: Wake up!"
7. Kings of Leon--Because the Times (2007) "Lynyrd Strokes" is supposed to be an insult?
6. The Killers--Sam's Town (2006) Critics love the first album best; the second album is often better.
5. Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs--Show Your Bones (2006) Ditto.
4. The Strokes--This Is It (2001) Do believe the hype.
3. Wilco--Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) You had me at "I am an American aquarium drinker."
2. Ryan Adams--Gold (2001) It's a little bit country; a little bit rock n roll.
1. Pete Yorn--Musicforthemorningafter (2001) All killer, no filler.

Don't player hate. Player participate. Name your favorite album(s) from the past ten years in the comments section. Do it now, because ten years from now such a list might be obsolete.

"You cut down a tree and you're going to throw it out in three weeks," says green fiend Dan Nainan of his dillemma to the New York Times. "If you get a plastic tree, you're wasting petroleum." The solution? Don't celebrate Christmas. This is the message of the Times's (unintentionally?) hilarious "Saying No, No, No to the Ho-Ho-Ho." One writer quoted in the piece suggests that it's necessary for some to "control-Alt-delete Christmas," which is what Pepper Hill did: "It was so liberating!" Christmas Joykills go by many names: Scrooge, Grinch, Madalyn Murray O'Hair. Leave it to the New York Times to celebrate them instead of Christmas.

What is the best FlynnFiles post of 2009? Who would know better than you, loyal reader? Select the best post from the ten nominees below and then cast your ballot in the comments section. And the nominees are....

Last Tuesday's Supper, January 15, 2009
1/20/9--January, 20, 2009
The Pixelated Technicolor Zombie, March 5, 2009
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Murdered 3,000 People. Then the CIA Poured Water Down His Nose., April 20, 2009
The Revolution Will Be Televised Tweeted, June 23, 2009
Battered, July 18, 2009
The Meeting at the Grassy Knoll Behind WTC7 to Discuss Obama's Birth Certificate Is Called To Order, July 21, 2009
An Outbreeder's Modest Proposal for Inbreeder Tolerance, September 25, 2009
'A Dimension Not Only of Sight and Sound, But of Mind,', October 23, 2009
A Shot in the Arm, November, 24, 2009

Vote on the winner in the comments section below.

For the sixth year in a row, FlynnFiles recognizes the best musical offerings of the passing calendar. Click on the links and listen up! Here are top ten songs of 2009:

10. Pearl Jam--The Fixer
9. U2-Breathe
8. Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johansson--Relator
7. Third Eye Blind--Non Dairy Creamer
6. Wilco--One Wing
5. Bon Iver--Blood Bank
4. Neko Case--People Got a Lotta Nerve
3. Regina Spektor--Laughing With
2. BellX1--The Great Defector
1. The Bravery--Slow Poison

Any sins of omission? Commission? Do you have a top ten list? Top five? Top three? Let's see it in the comments section.

The timing of the Democrats' health care bill is impeccable. Everything else--the taxes on health care, the mandate that everybody buy insurance, the further bureaucratization of medicine--is a monstrosity. Just as the vote on the House bill and the procedural vote in the Senate took place on Saturdays, the day of the week when people are paying the least attention, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid schedules the substantive vote on the health care overhaul for the weekend before Christmas--the time of the year when Americans are paying the least attention. Do you think the Democrats realize their plan is a political liability? In addition to scheduling the holiday season vote, Democrats in the Senate are asking their colleagues to quickly vote on a bill that few of them have seen. The amendment process, even in comparison to lighter bills, has been abridged. "And here's the most outrageous part: at the end of this rush, they want us to vote on a bill that no one outside the Majority Leader's conference room has even seen," Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explains. "That's right. The final bill we'll vote on isn't even the one we've had on the floor. It's the deal Democrat leaders have been trying to work out in private."

Less than one third of Americans believe President Obama's proposed health care reforms will be good for America. More than half of the elected representatives of the American people are on record as supporting that legislation. What does this tell us about the health of Edmund Burke's "trustee" model of representation versus his "delegate" model?

"The Constitution, as she has always understood it, as is plain to all who can read it, was a compact between certain States, providing for the establishment of a general government for certain purposes which are expressly prescribed, and stipulating that all rights not granted to the general government are reserved to the States and the people respectively. By ratifying the Constitution, the original States became united in a political partnership, and as voluntary partners they have shared all the privileges and burdens, all the responsibilities and duties, of such, a connection. The Constitution contains no provision for extending the partnership, except so far as to authorize the formation of new States within the limits of the original States or of the territory belonging to them collectively; and it clearly was not contemplated or desired that the question of enlarging the common country should be considered or decided in any other manner than as a question to be submitted, like that upon the adoption of the Constitution, to the people of all the States. The attempt, therefore, on the part of the general government in any of its branches, to enlarge the country, is regarded by Massachusetts as an invasion of the reserved rights of the States and the people, and thus a violation of the Constitution."
--Stephen C. Phillips, "Speech: The Constitution, the Union, the Government," 1846

When a Taunton, Massachusetts teacher asked her students to draw a picture that reminds them of Christmas, one student sketched Jesus dying on the cross. More Easter than Christmas, sure, but more Christmas than Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Reindeer, or the Island of Misfit Toys. The teacher didn't see it that way, and ordered the child to undergo a psychological evaluation. They used to make shoes in Taunton. Now they make idiots. As blogger/talker/columnist Michael Graham put it, "There are definitely some folks in the Taunton school system who need a mental evaluation. But the boy who drew Jesus isn't one of them."

When Ted Kennedy convinces his colleagues to transfer tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to bankroll a Boston memorial for him, hardly a peep is raised in objection. When one of his staffers, evidently learning at the foot of the master, allegedly pilfers $75,000 under Ted Kennedy's nose, the feds come down on him with a six-count indictment. Ngozi Pole: if your name were Ngozi Kennedy (Wasn't there a long lost Kennedy named "Ngozi"?), your indictment would be a joke. But since you were the hired help, and not an actual member of the family, may you have the best public defender, a cellmate without a swastika tattooed on his face, and avoid any "gassing" attacks during any future stay in a medium security penitentiary.

I am currently reading a biography of Unitarian bigwig William Ellery Channing. Several years ago, I purchased in Concord, Massachusetts (the used bookstore is gone--a sign of the times) a different biography of William Ellery Channing only to discover while reading it that the subject was a different William Ellery Channing--the poet rather than the parson. This also happened to me when I picked up a biography of John Winthrop in Northampton, Massachusetts. Fortunately, I recognized my error before reading a book about John Winthrop the Younger, governor of Connecticut and founder of New London, rather than a book about that man's father, Boston Puritan and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The most amazing thing about the book on my nightstand is that, though its publication date was March of 1903, the required reading accoutrements include not only a trusty highlighter, but a pair of scissors, too. That's right, in its 106-plus years of existence, my copy of "William Ellery Channing: Minister of Religion" has never been read! For over a century, this book never realized the ambition of every book: to be read. Its fortunes changed dramatically when I rescued it from the shelves of The Book Bear in West Brookfield, Massachusetts. Sometime later this week, it will have accomplished what its author intended of it when he wrote it in the first years of the 20th century.

According a sticker affixed to the inside of the cover, the book once belonged to the "Crosby Emery" library. From what I can gather, that library, like my own, is a private collection. A quick Google search reveals two academics from my area with that peculiar double surname. The sister, Anne Crosby Emery, served as the dean of the women's college at Brown; her brother, Henry Crosby Emery served as a professor of economics at Bowdoin and then Yale. Strangely, the brother married his sister's step daughter, making his sister his mother-in-law. I am less interested in their peculiar family arrangement than I am in why "William Ellery Channing: Minister of Religion" went unread in the Crosby Emery library.

It evokes the story, certainly belivable even if its tellers aren't very credible, of how the radicals who conducted the Columbia University takeover of 1968 discovered that so many of the books in school president Grayson Kirk's office remained uncut. In other words, the books served as decorative pieces, props, showy furniture dishonestly attesting to their owner's reputation as a man of learning. Am I to make the same deductions about the Crosby Emery library? Based on one uncut book, that would be unfair. As the beneficiary of many well-wishing writers, I ocassionally get a book in the mail that I don't get to read. Perhaps these academics benefitted from the same phenomenon. One hundred years from now, the people reading the books that once lived in my library will be less able to detect unread books. Uncut books are anachronisms. Publishers have been cutting the pages for their readers for at least as long as this brother-sister pair have been dead. So, although my highlights suggest read books, my lack of highlights don't scream "unread book" the way an uncut page does. The history of my unread books will be more obscure to their owners in 2109 than the Crosby Emery library is to me today. The history of a book gets more mysterious as history marches along.

I had this "unkindest cut" experience a few years back reading William James's "Pragmatism." Checking out a copy from Georgetown University's library, I was surprised, toward the end of the read, that turning the page didn't bring me to the next page but rather two pages later. The copy of Pragmatism that I read, as I recounted in a 2006 post, was "a beat-up, 1925 edition that belonged to a Mr. Weeks of Alexandria, Virginia as of December 1, 1943. It seems to have come into Georgetown's possession in 1984. In the book's 81 years of existence, I don't think it has ever been read.... My evidence for writing this is that several of the pages haven't been cut. In the home-stretch of the book, I had to cut, sloppily so, pages 285-288, and then, 297-300. Pragmatism is one of the most talked about philosophy books of the last hundred years. But books talked about are not always books read."

At least people still talk about "Pragmatism." Apart from being unread (until I got my hands on it!), the Channing biography has yet to prompt a review on Amazon. But the fact that I am reading it right now proves that someone (that would be me) is reading it. A book allows readers to converse with writers who lived centuries ago. You are seldom without intelligent company if you make a book your constant companion. The book on my nightstand allows me to glean insight and information from a man who died 105 years ago. He is, chronologically speaking, closer to his subject. That makes me closer to his subject, too.

Broadening one's perspective to include perspectives from beyond the land of the living is a good reason to read books. Broadening one's audience to beyond the realm of those yet born is a good reason to write books. H.G. Wells' time machine, Doctor Who's TARDIS, and Emmitt Brown's DeLorean are the stuff of fiction. The genuine article is the primitive device of bound papyrus that takes readers to days long past and writers to days still far off.

When you don't have the American people, it's tough to get the votes. That's what Harry Reid is discovering in his quest to get a filibuster-proof sixty votes to pass ObamaCare. And if you don't have the votes, when you should have the votes (Republicans control just forty Senate seats), it's likely a sign that how you sold yourself on election day differs from what you are selling today.

Tomorrow, the History Channel airs "The People Speak," a series based on Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." Today, Big Hollywood features Howard Zinn, Intellectual Moron, an evisceration of said book based on my longer piece in "Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas." Read the piece here.

Instead of grilling corporate executives about bonuses and sky-high salaries that are outside of the government's control, why don't congressmen investigate the boom in salaries that they directly control? One of the perverse outcomes of a recession is the windfall in income among federal workers. When the private sector is suffering, it's party time in the government. "Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months--and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted," USA Today's Dennis Cauchon reports. "Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time--in pay and hiring--during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector." The USA Today study found that the average federal worker earns $71,000 a year, compared to the average private sector worker who takes in $40,000 a year. Consider this vomit-inducing item: "When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000." Why is there even a Transportation Department, let alone one employing 1,700 people making $170,000 or more?

The Climategate scandal, exposing "scientists" privately discussing the manipulation of data, reminds of the ACORN scandal showing employees of the activist group offering advice on how to evade tax and prostitution laws. In both instances, hardcore lefties have blamed the messenger. With Climategate, environmentalists immediately shift the conversation from the fraud engaged by various academics toward the hackers who obtained the incriminating emails. With ACORN--no "gate" needed; the organization is so besmirched that its name is synonymous with scandal--the group's backers immediately petitioned authorities in Maryland, California, and elsewhere to investigate the investigative reporters who exposed the malfeasance. Have they never heard the saying, "Don't kill the messenger"?

Rolling Stone has come out with its end-of-the-decade, best-of retrospective that includes the top 100 albums from the aughts (That's the name of our decade that hasn't caught on yet. Give it time.). I must be pretty hip, or Rolling Stone must be really lame because, amazingly, I own 24 of the top 100 albums, including the top three. My own "best of" lists--of the year and of the decade--will arrive shortly. Until then, check out the Rolling Stone list.

David Gelbaum, once anonymous cash cow to an alphabet soup of left-wing organizations, won't be milked again anytime soon. With his portfolio dwindling because of politicized "clean energy" investments, Gelbaum notified the ACLU, the Sierra Club, and other outfits that he can't bankroll them any longer. So what? It's just one donor, right? Gelbaum donations account for 25 percent of the annual budgets of the ACLU and the Sierra Club Foundation. Gelbaum has donated almost $100 million a year for the last four years to various groups. Who says trickle-down economics is a myth? Not the ACLU--at least not anymore.

"Norwegians are incensed over what they view as his shabby response to the prize by cutting short his visit," the Manchester Guardian reports. "The White House has cancelled many of the events peace prize laureates traditionally submit to, including a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children's event promoting peace and a music concert, as well as a visit to an exhibition in his honour at the Nobel peace centre." The recipient is the president of the United States, after all, and not an unemployed politician (Al Gore, Jimmy Carter), as the last two American recipients have been. Rather than feeling snubbed by Obama not attending their parties, shouldn't the Norweirdos who awarded Obama the prize feel "buyer's remorse" in the wake of this man of peace's escalation of the Afghanistan war? War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

"Actually, the past century and a half has seen the school supplant the church as the chief institution (apart from the family) by which social norms are transmitted to the new generation. As the church declined in importance, society relinquished control over it, a process which we call 'the triumph of separation of church and state.' At the same time, the school gained in importance and society subdued it, a process which we call 'the triumph of the principle of free public education.' The right of the teacher to free expression in the classroom, even though his salary is paid by the state, he calls 'academic freedom.' Similarly, the right of the minister to preach the truth as he saw it was one of the things the Arminians meant by 'religious freedom.' Now, of course, it is textbooks rather than sermons that must be orthodox. Perhaps we are in no position to chide our ancestors for 'illiberality.'"
--Conrad Wright, "The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America," 1954

If you want a bag job, call a Massachusetts attorney general. As in any one-party state, the elected top cop exonerates rather than investigates fellow office holders. That's why local political corruption cases, of which there are many, are almost always brought by the feds. In Massachusetts, Democrats don't bring down Democrats. That's why ACORN recruited liberal hack Scott Harshbarger, who made his career by "successfully" prosecuting an innocent family on child sexual abuse charges as a district attorney and maintained it by taking a "see no evil" approach to political corruption as the state's attorney general, to conduct an internal investigation of itself. Surprise! ACORN, according to ACORN and its hired gun Harshbarger, did nothing wrong. Who are you going to believe: ACORN or those lying videos?

Barack Obama's presidential job approval rating has sunk to 47 percent in the latest Gallup Poll. In the history of Gallup's poll, this is the lowest job approval rating for any president 10+ months into their term. Obama can find solace in the truth that history isn't written in real time. At 86 percent, George W. Bush measured highest in the public's estimation at this point in his presidency. Ronald Reagan, by way of comparison, measured lowest (aside from Obama) at 49 percent. Bush's presidency, of course, was an abysmal failure; Reagan's, a smashing success. Obama's? Check back in a few years.

The stamp of Italy is unmistakable on Western Civilization. What institution has been as influential as the Catholic Church or the Roman Empire upon the West? Yet the depiction of Italian Americans in popular culture is often one of crude, uncultured knuckle-draggers.

The formula is a proven success for MTV: the Dog Brothers (actually Greeks?), the scally-capped Tommy, and Sabrina & Charlie (the latter famously threatened to "gut" a limo driver) have proven entertaining fare on the cable network at the expense of ethnic pride. The latest of MTV's anthropological fieldwork among Guido Americanus is The Jersey Shore. Viewers of the program get steroids, silicone, fake tans, and hair gel in abundance. Watch long enough and you might start to smell their cologne or catch a bad case of herpes.

The characters on the Jersey Shore all have nom de guidos: JWOWW, The Situation, Snooki, DJ Pauly D. The ladies of the beachhouse are prone to issuing pot-calling-the-kettle-black epithet accusations of "whore" to rival whores. The roided up gentlemen partake in nightly staredown rituals of unfamiliar roided up gentlemen in dance clubs that devolve into Taxi Driveresque shouts of "You looking at me!" On ocassion, the Guidos fight to determine the silverback ape; the Guidettes kiss each other to outwhore rival whores. Saturday Night Fever came out before these kids were born, and yet many of the dwellers in the Jersey Shore house pass for real-life versions of Saturday Night Fever characters minus the bell bottoms. The torch is always passed to a new generation of Guidos, apparently.

One suspects that the closest that Manhattan hipsters come to experiencing an America beyond their tiny island are their encounters with the Italian-American inhabitants of the boroughs, and the tri-state area, who pour into Big Apple nightclubs on the weekends. These Close Encounters of the Guido kind, one imagines, have not been pleasant for the MTV hipsters. Witnessing a pack of "Guidos" grinding on one's date in a dance club, or perhaps getting one-punched by a "Guido" overdosing on testosterone, must have sent MTV producers into passive-aggressive revenge mode. What better explains the network's vicious portrayal of Italians? These "Guidos" are the closest thing Manhattanites have to hicks, and they are condescended to accordingly.

We're entertained, but at the same time left wondering if MTV would craft a whole series upon stereotypes of Jews, blacks, or gays. The rules of political correctness, for whatever reason, don't cover Italian-Americans. The double standard is bad for society, but it's unclear if it would be better to vigilantly protect every group from unflattering portrayals or lighten up the prohibitions upon laughing at exaggerated versions of cultural representatives.

"Our intention was never to stereotype, discriminate, or offend," MTV contends in an Orwellianism whose translation reads: "Our sole intent was to stereotype, discriminate, and offend because it's good for ratings." Casting and editing can create any reality "reality television" seeks. Viewers of MTV's Jersey Shore might want to remember that the same culture that produced the program's fist-pumping, steroid-sculpted hedonists also gave the world Christopher Columbus, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Dante Alighieri.

I had the great honor of speaking to an Army Special Forces unit this weekend in Springfield, Massachusetts. I have spoken to groups at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and other top universities, but I have never addressed as important an audience as these warriors. I'm certain that some of the students I've addressed over the years will make history. These guys are making history right now. Some of the soldiers have experienced three deployments to Afghanistan since 9/11. With the president's troop surge, they will endure yet another deployment sometime next year. My sense is that the public grasps how hard it is to be a soldier. What often gets overlooked is how hard it is to be in a soldier's family. Deployments transform stable families into single-parent families for months at a time. Parental duties normally shared are shouldered by the stateside parent when the soldier is deployed abroad. Shoveling snow, driving the kids to swimming lessons, grocery shopping, and other formerly shared tasks singularly fall upon the soldier's spouse. It's difficult, and the prolonged separations often lead to permanent separation. A study released late last month showed that the divorce rate in the military has skyrocketted since 9/11. The grim casualty figures remind us of the obvious cost of war. Missed in all this is the terrible price so many American families pay. This past year, more than 500 servicemen and women lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. More than 25,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines lost their families through divorce.

A few thoughts on the Tiger Woods debacle:

1. The Tiger Woods scandal says more about society than it does about Tiger Woods. People fall. They get up. This happens every day. The difference here is that a 300-million-man mob of gawkers obsessively looks on in amusement. Tiger's sins, though shameful, are ordinary. Society's pathological obsession with the sex lives of strangers is what stands out. The entire world has become a supermarket checkout line.

2. You've heard of six degrees of Kevin Bacon. How about six degrees of The Tool Academy? It must be horrifying for Tiger Woods, let alone his bride, that one of his alleged mistresses was last seen by millions of Americans dating this guy on VH1's The Tool Academy. Even Tiger Woods is less than six degrees separated from stupid.

3. Some people can't bring themselves to say that adultery is wrong. It only becomes a moral evil when it's associated with Republicans. Joy Behar made such an argument on "The View" yesterday (I have no idea what Tiger's political views are). Tiger "has never held himself up as one of these pro-marriage, right-wing kind of guys who is anti-gay," rationalized Behar of Tiger's affairs. Who cares? Should Behar's political kin be immune from such scrutiny because of their enlightened opinions. Behar seems to think so. Being a liberal means never having to say you're sorry.

4. The number of bimbos claiming encounters with Tiger has an "I am Sparticus" feel to it. When one or two fledgling reality television stars claim a relationship, it's somewhat believable. Dozens? That actually works in Tiger's favor by discrediting the whole lot. I realize the intent of these women was certainly not as noble as the slaves falsly claiming to be Spartacus, but the effect is nevertheless the same.

5. Tiger's wife is a psycho if the story of her slashing up his face with her fingernails and smashing up his Cadlllac (I thought he sold Buicks?) with a golf club is true. When a man does that, he goes to jail. When a woman does that, it is fare for jokes. Remember: Tiger Woods was seriously injured in a car accident here. Alas, it's probably more rational (Bad word choice here?) to go crazy when you feel your marriage is threatened than it is to crazily pursue liasons.

6. The whole affair highlights how the sex drive overrides judgment. Tiger stands to lose his family, $300 million in divorce court, and hundreds of millions in endorsements because of his extramarital pursuits. By way of comparison, Eliot Spitzer's $1,000-an-hour call girls were a bargain.

7. Public relations 101: Turn the information spicket to full blast. Don't let it drip, drip, drip over the course of several weeks.

Is it okay if I never blog about this again?

Gay marriage may be a courtroom juggernaut, but it is a non starter in legislatures and in ballot boxes. The New York state senate voted against codifying homosexual marriages by a wide margin yesterday. Reading this report on the vote might give one the impression that nobody was against it, but 38 members of the state senate voted no, as opposed to 24 voting yes. Coming on the heels of the voting-booth affirmation of the traditional definition in marriage in Maine, the New York senate's vote confirms that the wave of the future is more canoe wake than tsunami. To loosely borrow from Frank Sinatra, if gay marriage can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere.

Barack Obama is to George W. Bush what Richard Nixon was to Lyndon Johnson. A continuity marked the Vietnam War policies of Presidents 36 and 37. The same will be said by history of the war polices of Presidents 43 and 44. By escalating the troop count in Afghanistan, and continuing the war in Iraq, Barack Obama is proving an able caretaker of George W. Bush's foreign policy legacy. There is a sense in which American foreign policy runs on autopilot once set into motion. It needn't be this way. Instead of playing Nixon to Bush's Johnson, Obama could have played Dwight Eisenhower to Bush's Harry Truman. The Korean War, like our current wars, was unpopular because it did little to further the national interest and came at the expense of thousands of lives and much treasure. Obama quoted from Ike in his speech that he delivered at the general's alma mater in an auditorium called Eisenhower Hall. One would think with all of these reminders of the general/president, the community organizer/president might want to be more like Ike and less like the keeper of Bush's foreign policy legacy that he has become.

It is strange that so many of the people most in need of AIDS education are AIDS educators. That this is so says something about the propagandistic nature of AIDS education, so imbued with the cult of venery that its main purpose is to explain to the unenlightened what they can get away with rather than what they shouldn't even try. One wouldn't knowingly take an LSAT preperation course from someone who flunked pre-law. Why do so many people receive education about AIDS from people who contracted HIV from risky sex practices? CNN highlights the love story of Gwenn Barringer, an AIDS educator, and Shawn Decker, an HIV+ man who has been married to the HIV- Barringer for five years. "It's ironic," Decker notes. "I thought HIV would prevent me from finding love." Instead, HIV found him a wife. Whoever said "love conquers all" wasn't kidding. One is reminded of "Carlos," the unforgettable volunteer for the Gay Men's Health Crisis profiled in Rolling Stone who, despite his work telling other gay men to use condoms, sought unsafe sex encounters with HIV+ men. Carlos, known within such circles as a "bug chaser," described the hypothetical moment when he would contract HIV from a "gift giver" as "the most erotic thing I can imagine." He explained, "I think it turns the other guy on to know that I'm negative and that they're bringing me into the brotherhood. That gets me off, too."

I haven't watched "2012," but I still feel as though I've seen this movie before. In fact, several decades before the invention of motion pictures Americans watched "2012," only they called it "1843" back then. When the apocalypse came and went without incident, the Millerites who prophesied it were widely mocked. Therein lies the difference between predictions with deadlines and open-ended predictions. Though both are equally worthless, the former have a tendency of discrediting would-be Nostradamuses while the latter make their source seem sagacious, oracular even. It's hard enough for people to get the past right. Why are they so hubristic that they think they can pinpoint the end of the world? Anticipating the future, though a popular present pasttime, works when the future is still in the future, but once the future is history so is the prognosticator (or at least should be). It says as much about us as it does about predictions that we award them respect before their sell-by date but ridicule them the day after. Something never proven valid, which describes such conjecture both before and after its due date, should not be given credence. Today, 2012 is almost two years away. In 2013, 2012 will be 1843--at least that's my prediction.

Barack Obama delivered his long awaited address on Afghanistan to a room of West Point cadets (most awake, a few asleep). The president has an amazing ability to speak endlessly while saying nothing. So, finding meaning in 35-minutes of meaningless claptrap is a difficult task. Practically, Obama announced the introduction of 30,000 new U.S. troops into Afghanistan to bring the total near 100,000. Theoretically, Obama channelled George W. Bush's second inaugural address in claiming that we fight for the freedom of other people, we defend our own freedom. It was a fallacy when George W. Bush said it. It's still a fallacy now that Barack Obama mouths the platitudes, and fights the wars, of his predecessor.

The release of a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the impact of the Senate's version of health care reform has Republicans saying the report proves the bill would increase insurance premiums for most Americans, and the Democrats saying the report proves the bill would result in lower premiums for most Americans. The FoxNews.com article on the conflicting interpretations contained this gem: "The logical gap between Democratic leaders' statements and McConnell's is yet another example of how the CBO reports, despite their high level of detail, have become the budgetary equivalent of Rorschach tests in the health care debate--with both parties seeing what they want."

Here in Massachusetts, Governor Mitt Romney and the Democratic leaders of the state legislature all claimed in 2006 that the Commonwealth's overhaul of health care would reduce costs. It didn't. "Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced," Romney bragged in the Wall Street Journal the day before he signed legislation that did no such thing.

Massachusetts has the highest health care costs in the United States (and the U.S. has the highest in the world). This isn't entirely a bad thing. You get what you pay for, and when you pay more you get better. But given that the raison d'etre of the U.S. Senate's bill is to reduce costs--it's called the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," after all--one would think Massachusetts would prove a cautionary tale warning against the very policies within the Senate bill. Alas, just like the CBO's oracular analysis, partisans read whatever set of facts that suits them into the Reverse Massachusetts Miracle signed into law by Mitt Romney almost four years ago.

What has really happened in Massachusetts? Since 2006, costs have increased 28 percent. Next year, Bay State residents should expect their premiums to rise by another 10 percent, according to top insurers surveyed by the Boston Globe. Despite increased contributions by patients and the state, RomneyCare has stiffed hospitals with the bill for the care of the indigent. Six Massachusetts hospitals will file a joint lawsuit today against the state for sticking them with the bill for the care of individuals ostensibly covered by government plans.

Is there any doubt the effect on costs by the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" will be similarly inflationary? The bill artificially increases the demand for health insurance by making it the only product in the United States of America that consumers must purchase under penalty of law. It pays for its dream of universal health care by levying huge taxes upon health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device makers, who will in turn pass those costs on to consumers. And it provides, through partial or full taxpayer subsidy, health insurance to 31 million people who currently don't have health insurance. All of these inflationary elements--mandated insurance, taxes upon health providers, and taxpayer subsidy to the uninsured--were part of RomneyCare, which wildly boosted the cost of health care in Massachusetts. Why will partaking in this same plan on a national basis reap a different harvest than experienced in Massachusetts?

The states are said to be "laboratories of democracy." If so, then what does it foretell about ObamaCare that it bases so much--from mandating insurance to offering a state-run option--on the failed experiment in Massachusetts?