We hear conflicting reports about troop morale in the US armed forces. High-profile people who visit our troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places report that morale is high. After eight years of war since 9/11, however, years more of war ahead, and the US strategy to win it uncertain, others report that troop morale is low. Whatever the situation, now, more than ever, it’s important that American leaders and the American people not take troop morale for granted and exercise great care not to squander this most precious commodity essential to success.

What can I say about the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama? Statements of shock and surprise have poured in from around the world. Even Obama’s fellow travelers were surprised. The president himself could hardly believe it. Perhaps we might pause, however, before we scratch our heads and move on, and consider the “teachable moment” here. Why are so many people saying this is all about George W. Bush; and what does this tell us about America’s European critics and how we should consider what they say and do?

Read my column at http://ewross.com/Its_a_Wonderful_Country.htm

Reading George Will’s back-to-back op-eds last week, “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan” and “One Way or Another, Leaving Iraq” reminds me of Walter Cronkite telling the American people in 1968 that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. Will’s observations about Iraq and Afghanistan, like Cronkite’s about Vietnam, make sense--if you ignore the consequences.

Read the full column at http://ewross.com/Afghanistan_and_Iraq.htm

Amidst the heated ongoing national debate over healthcare reform, the Obama administration last week took aim at the CIA and pulled the trigger. Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a special prosecutor to review cases involving CIA contractors; and President Obama relieved the CIA of responsibility for high-value detainee interrogations and gave it to a multi-agency task force reporting to the National Security Council (NSC). In doing so, they seriously wounded the Agency and reenergized the national debate over how it interrogated high-value terrorists after 9/11. If this is about America’s moral compass, as the president has often phrased it, is he and are we reading it correctly?

The Democrat’s second attempt to nationalize healthcare in the United States is on life support. The patient’s vital signs are weak, and the death panel is about to pull the plug.

It’s been 48 years since May 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy, speaking before a joint session of Congress said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” It’s been nearly 38 years since Apollo 17, the last Moon landing. The US has accomplished a great deal in space since then. Nevertheless, many of us who watched live broadcasts of President Kennedy’s speech and Americans walking on the Moon, and were excited and inspired by those events, are disappointed that we haven’t gone further, much less back to the Moon. Are we 'lost in space,' perpetually going around in circles in orbit above the Earth?

Read my column at http://ewross.com/Lost_in_Space.htm

Imagine, a few of America’s founding fathers and mothers--pick your favorites--suddenly come back to life in the middle of a Democratic townhall meeting. Finding themselves in the midst of a heated discussion, it would appear to them that nothing much had changed in America in nearly two-and-a-half centuries. After listening to what people were arguing about, however, they’d have to wonder if they were even in America.

Read my column at http://ewross.com/Townhall_Meetings.htm

Things haven’t been going well for President Obama lately. Conservative columnists, talk-show hosts, and bloggers are having a field day chronicling the president's fall from the clouds above Mount Olympus. His poll numbers, if not his ambition, have returned to Earth as he has failed to effectively sell his healthcare plan, insinuated a cop was a racist before he had the facts, and delegated too much responsibility to fragmented Democrats in Congress. With Obama's presidency and the Democratic agenda on the line, members of Congress return home in August to meet with their constituents. They'll encounter groups of voters who aren't happy with what Democrats have been doing. It’s America’s growing discontent that’s the real news story this summer. Expect an all out effort by liberals in the media and entertainment to ridicule the voices of opposition.

For a brief moment last week it looked as if the arrest of an African-American university professor by a white policeman was about to become a major racial incident. When the first African-American President of the United States criticized the policeman at a White House news conference, the incident took on a national dimension. Instead, the situation became another lesson in how far America has progressed on the issue of race; and it reminded us how powerful a weapon suggesting someone is racist is.

Read my column at http://ewross.com/The_Professor_the_Cop_and_the_President.htm

Whatever the truth about global warming, the politics of the issue is as much about power and who has it as it is about the environment. Whether it’s those who believe man-made global warming is an imminent threat to human existence or those who simply see it as a key to greater political power, global governance is where the belief that we can manage climate change ultimately leads.

On July 9, none other than the venerable guru of climate change, Al Gore, articulated this in a speech at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, England. In commenting on the US House of Representatives passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill, Gore claimed that it “will dramatically increase the prospects for success” in combating the “crisis” of man-made global warming. “But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.”