For a guy thought to be sleeping in some shack in the middle of nowhere, Osama bin Laden is certainly a hot topic of discussion. A front-page headline in The New York Times this week blares: “Bush Advisers See a Failed Strategy Against Al Qaeda.” Really? Do all the president’s men believe that, after hundreds of billions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, Osama and his killers are prospering? Can that be possible?

If you liked making bets you’d never lose (up to now), try asking the name of the American poet whose statue sits on the “Literary Walk” of New York’s Central Park. It’s not Longfellow, Whitman or Robert Frost. It’s ...

“And then what?” That is the question which should be asked of those who are demanding that we pull out of Iraq now.

Senate Democrats, who had announced an all-nighter Tuesday to reiterate their anti-war positions, packed it in shortly before midnight, surrendering to a greater desire for a few hours sleep. Only a handful of stalwart senators kept the Senate — technically — in session. We know that Senate Democrats don’t have the staying power to win the war in Iraq, but can’t they even make it through the night without some shuteye?

Thompson may be more than a drop in the bucket

Did you hear the one about the $15 million worth of ice someone paid for and never used? They finally just decided to let it all melt. After all, it was just a drop in the bucket.

On July 11, New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen wrote an article titled, “In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions.”

Historians in the future will undoubtedly find many and varied lessons from the war in Iraq. But we in the present do not have the luxury of waiting for all the evidence to be in before we start to understand what has gone wrong and what has gone right in Iraq.

For six years, the Bush administration has kept America safe from another terrorist attack, allowing the Democrats to claim that the war on terrorism is a fraud, a “bumper sticker,” a sneaky ploy by a power-mad president to create an apocryphal enemy so he could spy on innocent librarians in Wisconsin. And that’s the view of the moderate Democrats. The rest of them think Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks.

God is either in control or He is not. If He is not, then we are on our own to work out things as best we can and the whole of life is senseless, futile, and without meaning. If, however, God is in control, then whatever comes, both the good and the difficult, has meaning and ultimate purpose.

Ever wondered where all those inconsiderate people that infest our county come from? You know the ones: people who use the 10 items or less check-out lanes when they have 20 items or more and scowl if you dare to point out their mistake.

Having chicken pox revisit one a half century later — albeit under the innocuous name of shingles — provides one some involuntary leisure time.

“All we are saying is give peace a chance,” says John Lennon’s anti-war protest song.

But though President Bush’s recent remarks to the Greater Cleveland Partnership may have borrowed a page from Lennon’s songbook, they sang quite a different tune to a pro-war beat. All Bush is saying is give Gen. David Petraeus a chance.

One day I was lamenting to my friend, Patti, who helps me in my office, about my smart-aleck mouth.

“I just can’t help myself,” I complained as she looked over some files. “Somebody says or does something that I don’t cotton to and I just pop right back at them with a dagger-sharp comeuppance. Then, I feel terrible because I smarted off like that. It’s not Biblical.”

Leesburg, Va.: “Calm anticipation” is the only way I can describe the feeling here. I’ve been involved in a wedding or two and by the time they’re less than 24 hours away, there’s usually a degree of hysteria just under a surface that is often very thinly veneered.

Answers to your questions about life, religion and the Bible

Pastors get some of the darndest, most interesting questions from people in their churches and people they meet. Here are a few that I’ve gotten over the years and recently via email since this column started.

I click when I walk. It’s a bit odd, but I’m getting used to it. It’s better than the alternative.

I had been falling quite a bit — enough to alarm one of my sons, who suggested that I might want to sell my house and move into a ground-level dwelling that would eliminate stairs.

This one could possibly get me kicked out of the Men’s Club. At the very least it will certainly be the source of constant ribbing for years to come. The guys at the fire department will never let me live it down, but I’m not ashamed to admit it.

New findings from glacier experts signal it’s time to remove another catastrophe from the list of alarmist global-warming predictions.

Tonight (July 10) in response to many and repeated requests I banned a long-time poster from this site.

This poster finally crossed the civilized line once too often, and he (or it) is gone.

The drought – one of the worst ever – is on everyone’s mind this summer.

How dry is it?

It’s so dry that turtles are trying to drink from the bird bath.

Some unknown author once said, “Everybody should believe in something; I believe I’ll have another drink.”

Democratic senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took a less cynical and more substantive approach to faith in a recent interview with The New York Times. The quality and depth of one’s relationship with God should be personal and beyond the judgment of others, unless one is running for president and chooses to talk about it as part of a campaign plan to win the election.

You’re not gonna believe what I’ve done now. In fact, it is probably the last thing you’d expect.

I learned to drive a skid-steer loader.

WASHINGTON — National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley visited Capitol Hill just before Congress adjourned June 29 for the Fourth of July. Meetings with a half-dozen senior Republican senators were clearly intended to extinguish fires set by Sen. Richard Lugar’s unexpected break from President Bush’s Iraq policy. They failed.

If you believe the Bush presidency is a failure, what then?

Do you delight in whacking him like a piñata for the next 18 months with your only objective a Democratic blowout victory in the 2008 election?

Back in the late 1960s, during graduate study at UCLA, I had a casual conversation with Professor Armen Alchian, one of my tenacious mentors. Professor Alchian is among the top 20th-century contributors to economic knowledge. During our graduate student/faculty coffee hour conversation, I was trying to impress Professor Alchian with my knowledge of type I and type II statistical errors.

The line about looking thin by hanging out with fat people is Rodney Dangerfield’s. To apply his comic wisdom to the presidential race, just look at the fat guys as the ones who started their campaigns too soon, and their skinny compatriots as those who waited until America started giving a hoot about presidential politics.

When my research assistant and her husband took my wife and me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, I was impressed when I heard her for the first time speak Chinese as she ordered food.

Extended stretches of my youth and early middle age were spent joyfully, if not triumphantly, working in political campaigns in some 38 states and Venezuela. My duties included fund-raising, an experience that left an “anti-Calvinist,” convinced that the Creator bestowed large amounts of money on the least appealing and interesting of His creatures.

ST. LOUIS — Barring a last-minute switch, Cardinals shortstop David Eckstein will not be at next week’s All-Star Game — but Sports Illustrated gave him a more important recognition this spring. The magazine asked 413 Major League Baseball players, “Which player gets the most out of the least talent?” — and Eckstein received 77 percent of the votes. No other player received more than 3 percent.

After another terrorist incident last week, it is obvious that Great Britain is paying a huge price for allowing millions of Muslims to enter the country largely unsupervised. If those bombs had gone off in central London, scores might have been killed, and it was just luck the lethal cars were discovered before they blew.