Watching Obama glide through his foreign trip so far, nervous Republicans and other patriots have to hope that American voters will not view Obama through the eyes of a Hollywood casting director. That's because one could not cast a man who visually can portray a worldly statesman better.

We all must envy his ability to effortlessly drape his tall, imperially slender form in gilded Louis XV chairs in foreign palaces. Mixing just the right combination of worldly bonhomie and serious mien, his presentation (conveniently presented to the world with video but no audio) make, by comparison, Henry Kissinger, FDR and Winston Churchill all look like clumsy provincial oafs.

The visual is everything in his campaign, for when he does submit himself to the occasional press interview, his actual words read in print must make his handlers as nervous as his visual images make Republicans nervous.

His discussion of his Iraq policy is almost incomprehensible, and his understanding of the world stunningly simplistic.

I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office.  When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created.

We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming.

What if Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and the other Fed board members actually believe that the Consumer Price Index means the same thing as it did in the 1970s?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (an agency of the Labor Dept.) calculates the CPI, not the Federal Reserve. If the Fed Governors are unaware of the changes since then in how it is calculated, it would explain why they aren't in a panic over the current real consumer inflation rate.  It would explain why they really seem to be certain that we are not in a recession. 

It would also mean that unless they wake up from their time warp, the dollar and our economy are truly doomed.

Way back last month in June, Barack "middle name not permitted to be mentioned" Obama campaigned on the theme of "Change We Can Believe In." Now, several days later, in July, his theme should be "Change We Can't Keep Up With."

Abortion, gun control, capital punishment, FISA laws, the status of Jerusalem, faith-based federal programs, public financing of his campaign, welfare, NAFTA and free trade, and his commitment to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church have all fallen to reconsideration, re-phrasing, changed rhetorical modulation and other semantic miracles.

His Iraq position is currently in the process of glissading from "anti" to "pro" - so we will have to wait a while before saying he has actually changed it.

Which brings us as it always does in such circumstances to America's greatest fraud-sniffer, H.L. Mencken. He defined a demagogue as "one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." 

Traveling to Paris in search of business for a Belgian steel mill, after trying 14 days to find the responsible person in the ministry of energy, I sent a telex to the "Director General of the ministry of Energy, department Coal Mines", even though I hadn't a clue what his name was.

Arriving unannounced the next morning at the ministry I bluntly show my telex to a clerk with a pretentious uniform, and, miracle of miracles, he calls somebody who calls somebody and another uniformed clerk appears who guides me through the portals of heaven.
 
I am ushered in a palatial office, compared to which the Oval Office is a cubicle, and I am introduced to a rotund gentleman behind a massive desk: Director General Vautran of the French Coal Mines. My telex had specified why I wanted to see this Emperor of the French Mines.

He looks at me and my young face, asks me my age and: "Do you drink wine?"  I admit that I like a glass from time to time and let slip that my father-in-law is a wine merchant. He ducks behind his imperial desk and hauls a 5 liter (1½ gallon) belly bottle of wine, fills two glasses, hands me one, says "santé" and gulps his down. It is not quite 9 o'clock in the morning.

[Vaclav Klaus is President of the Czech Republic]

It is a great pleasure to announce the English translation of my book Blue Planet in Green Shackles, published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Authors often claim their books speak for themselves. I cautiously agree and will, therefore, speak not about the book itself but about my motivations to write it.

My thinking today is substantially influenced by the fact that I spent most of my life under a Communist regime which ignored and brutally violated human freedom, which wanted to command not only people but also nature itself.

To "command wind and rain" is one of the famous slogans I remember since my childhood. This experience taught me that freedom and rational dealing with the environment are indivisible. It formed my views on the fragility and vulnerability of free society and gave me a special sensitivity to all kinds of factors which may endanger it.

I do not, however, live in the past and do not see the future threats to free society coming from the old and old-fashioned communist ideology. The name of the new danger will undoubtedly be different, but its substance will be very similar.

Whenever retreat-now activists or their favored presidential aspirant are confronted with our progress in Iraq, their stock reply is, "Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq in 2003."

Well, I happen to agree with Sen. Barack Hussein Obama and his supporters on that count: At most, the terrorists had a tenuous connection with Saddam's regime. But it's 2008, not 2003. And our next president will take office in 2009. It's today's reality that matters.

And today's reality is that Al Qaeda is nearing final collapse, Iran has failed in its bid to take over Iraq, and the democratically elected government is gaining in popularity.

What don't the critics like? Democracy? The defeat of Al Qaeda? Moslems turning to the US military for help? Troop cuts? The dramatically improved human-rights situation? What's the problem here?

The answer's simple:

Forty years ago I found out what it's like to do business with Germans.  The lessons learned, I've discovered since, can apply to dealing with businessfolk in general who don't play fair.

During my stay as a director in a Belgian steel mill I was in direct competition with the biggest steel mills of Germany. I was the first to export our special steels to Germany, something like selling sand to the Arabs.

When I started travelling to Germany I found a closed market from the heavy steel industry down to the smallest distributor. They had one price list and the biggest buyers, the German coal mines, still had to buy rigidly from the local distributor. The mines bought thousands and thousands of tons per week and the local distributor got rich while asleep. It was an ironclad market, completely locked up. When I visited the distributors they laughed me out of town.

So I went to the German coal mines and the German ship yards with impossibly low prices. What I expected happened, those consumers called their distributors, who called the big steel mills. Within a couple of weeks I was called out of the blue by a "Herr General Direktor Wolff" who from very high in his steel blue sky ordered me to cease my foolish interference in the German market or else!

I told him politely that I was going into the German steel market no matter what...