The greening of the U.S. of A. still has a ways to go. We're plundering Canada's tar sands and mining the Midwest's topsoil to keep our cars on the road. We lay waste to ton after ton of Chinese coal to fuel our cheap-stuff habit. And so on.

But if our habits remain environmentally ruinous, the strategies we use to sell stuff have gone decidedly green.

In general, the advertising industry exists to move product, to urge us to consume as much as possible; and we're at a point in time when it would be really, really smart to consume less. So my question is: does the green-is-the-new-black trend augur an era of less, and smarter, consumption -- or is it the death rattle of a movement in the process of being subsumed into a culture of ravenous consumption?

What's excessive is the idea that we have to steel the national will to respond to an evil of such magnitude. No, we need to keep looking for them and stopping them. Otherwise, if their perverse ambitions to heroism are based on the idea that they are the vanguard of the clash of civilizations, why should we gratify their ambitions? Think of it this way, what if those who frequent the chat rooms found their cause disappearing from the headlines? What if they couldn't find themselves when they try to vanity google? What if they faded from being such a big part of our consciousness? Who would that really hurt -- us, or them?

In McCain's past 25 years in congress he's managed to author not a single piece of legislation that's been signed into law that helps any real people with any real problems. He's spent a lot of time posturing on the Sunday shows, and affiliated himself with a few pieces of modestly progressive legislation that didn't get passed, and then disavowed all those bills.

More broadly, though McCain is a formidable candidate in some respects, "experience" is the time-honored election argument of losers. If voters really valued experience, then veteran senators would be getting elected president all the time. Instead, it almost never happens because normal people don't think that long duration in congress -- an institution that's invariably incredibly unpopular -- is an appealing character trait.

The bottom line is that no one really knows what "natural born citizen" means, and the supreme court would have the final say. Justices who were willing to pick the winner of the 2000 election (albeit by a 5-4 vote) likely would not stand in the way of a McCain inaugural. But whatever happens with McCain, we must decide whether 18th-century concerns about Baron von Steuben should continue to dictate presidential eligibility in 21st-century America, and whether we should continue to send an unmistakable message of exclusion to tens of millions of naturalised Americans.

But far more shocking in that report were the stats on racial disparities in our prison system. The study, conducted by the Pew Center on the States, found that one in 15 black adults is in jail. Among young black men between the ages of 20 and 34, the number in prison reaches a rate of one in nine. This dovetails interestingly with another report released this week by the Eisenhower Foundation, which found that black Americans are still significantly disadvantaged in terms of income, education and other measures of well-being.

States spend an average of $23,876 a year to keep someone in jail, and not much of which is used to curb recidivism rates. Wouldn't that money be better spent on programs that address these continuing societal disparities and give young black men and women better opportunities?

The BBC focused on three words -- “binding international obligations” -- uttered by Daniel Price, a national security advisor to President George W. Bush. Although it remains unclear what, exactly, this means, it is perhaps telling that such statements could grab headlines around the world. The administration seems eager to clarify what it considers misunderstandings about its position on global warming (namely the general perception that it will stop at nothing to quash or at least cripple any international treaty to protect its industry friends).

The problem here is that there isn’t much new.

The anti-Semitism-by-association game that Russert attempted to play on Barack Obama failed, big time, in no small part because Obama has also been dreading that moment -- and preparing for it, too.

As a 46 year-old black man who lived through the Black Power era and its aftermath, Obama is undoubtedly on to the insidious nature of the Farrakhan Litmus Test. He is not responsible for someone who decides to say publically that he is a "good guy," Obama pointed out, paraphrasing comments that Farrakhan made last weekend about the senator's candidacy.

Another way of looking at it is that there was just a kind of assassination fad in the "long sixties." Its victims included not only progressive racial leaders, but also George Wallace. Meanwhile, nothing in the pre-assassination JFK record singled him out as an especially noteworthy civil rights leader and there's no real indication that this is what Lee Harvey Oswald had in mind when he shot him. Basically during the sixties people were getting assassinated irrespective of race, while since the sixties people haven't been getting assassinated even though we've had several noteworthy black politicians.

This should leave us less concerned than many that Barack Obama would be shot, but more concerned that a single assassination could turn into a wave.

What is not warranted is a rush to judgment that these drugs are no good: policymakers and doctors should have sharply in mind that the people most likely to say that pills are pointless are the people who most need them. Nor should it be concluded that the drug companies concerned, which submitted both sets of trial reports to the licensing authorities in this country and the US, pulled a fast one. Trials do not necessarily go unpublished because the results do not “fit” with the hopes of the drug developer; the common reason is that, if results are abnormal, it quite often indicates that the sample was flawed. A study conflating both sets may also be flawed.

The armoury against mental illness is still small. Each weapon in it contains the priceless salve of hope. The need is not to jettison what exists, but to intensify the search for better cures.

John McCain's ability to be up to the rigors of the job draws further scrutiny because he has been diagnosed with melanoma three times. Certainly anyone can suffer from cancer at any age, but again the statistics say the longer we live, the greater chance we have of dying from it.

Because of all that, the choice of a running mate would be more important for a McCain campaign than perhaps any nominee before. Rarely do voters base their decision on whether the vice president would be an acceptable leader, but this year that could be the case for a number of Americans -- enough to swing a close election