Democrats in Washington are dead-set on the "sexy issues" that Barack Obama focused on during his campaign: providing health care to every American and passing "historic" climate legislation. Reforming health care would give Democrats the satisfaction of "solving" the health care crisis that has loomed over the United States for decades. Climate legislation would give them green street cred with their environmental supporters, in addition to most of Europe. So while Congress has spent endless amounts of hours on these two issues, the White House has essentially thrown a tremendously important issue to the wayside: the transportation infrastructure of the country.

Back in June, I wrote a note here about the recovery from a Ghana scrap market, by some researchers from PBS, of a disk drive containing information about US Government security contracts. Today's Washington Post has an article about the Agbogbloshie market in Accra, Ghana -- the same market where the disk drive was purchased. It sounds like a pretty grim place, not one we would think of as a suitable place for an 11-year-old to spend his time.

It seems that Mitt Romney is already back in the saddle, only 16 months after he ceded the GOP presidential race to John McCain.

Over the past year, the U.S. government has acquired an unprecedented investment portfolio, including a majority stake in GM and a large ownership stake in Chrysler. These investments have raised a plethora of difficult policy challenges. One of the most important is the ongoing risk that private business decisions may get transformed into public policy issues.

After reading Steven Greydanus' review of the new Harry Potter (which I'm dying to see, but don't know when I'll find the time), I noticed a link at the bottom to an older post he wrote comparing Rowling's presentation of magic with that in Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. I trust my own love for the series is well enough established (and see the excellent series of reflections at Non-Modern), but of all the criticisms of the series I've read, I think Greydanus' is the most sensible.

Saving our planet from catastrophic climate change might require an unprecedented mass co-ordination of all the people our lonely little planet. However, it requires coordinated sacrifice, the west are living unsustainably, the east have not had their fair share yet, Africa is unmanageable ... how will we pull it off?

As Congress barrels toward a complete entanglement of government into the health care system, serious questions come to mind. For example, since we will all be in this system together, don't citizens have the right to ask the government to punish others for "destructive" behaviors that will put stress on the collective health care system?

The U.S. economy is in big trouble right now, and the reform process may be missing a key point. When banks ran into severe trouble late last year, the government responded quickly with a massive bailout, but very little has been done to address a major structural flaw that has left our economy so vulnerable: rampant income inequality. In a system based on consumer spending, we have stretched consumers beyond their limit.

America's failure to reach consensus with foreign powers on what constitutes an act of war in cyber space presents the danger of an inadvertent war. Expert opinion is split on the question of whether cyber attacks can ever reach the level of an act of war. Bruce Schneier recently pooh-poohed web defacement as a truly unserious national security threat. Richard Clarke has been a tireless advocate for the flip side of the argument, namely that cyber attacks are a completely new type of threat to national security that require new policy and new capabilities.

The focus of most reporting on cyber attacks and cyber security in military circles continues to distract the debate away from campaign level cyber attacks. Rather than discussing what a skilled nation-state adversary would do with currently available, known cyber attack strategies, coverage tends to focus on battlefield applications of information technology.

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