As always, I'll be right up front with you. I don't like the whole concept of "Big Brother" speed cameras. But let's call speed cameras what they really are. Speed monitoring cameras are revenue grabbing wolves masquerading in the sheep clothing of public safety.

I am aware that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the Governors' Highway Safety Association and several public opinion polls nationwide support the use of speed cameras as public safety tools. Studies show that where speed cameras are located, speeding is reduced by as much as 70%. If speed cameras really reduce traffic injuries and fatalities, of course, I would be foolish to oppose them. However, the statistics on speed cameras ability to deter traffic accidents are mixed.

Few things in the world are certain. But one certainty is that government will give the stamp of approval on just about any new way to take dollars from our pockets. I sincerely hope that the speed cameras turn out to be the effective public safety tools they are proclaimed to be. I know they will turn out to be the lucrative sources of revenue they have proven to be. 

Decency respects the dead, whereas the First Amendment respects freedom. Which kind of respect should prevail when the two collide?

Specifically, can funeral protests be outlawed without abridging the First Amendment? That question is being widely ignored in the rush to enact federal and state laws to ban such forms of free expression.

It is a simple truth: The highest respect we can pay to our fallen war dead is to respect the principles for which they made the supreme sacrifice. We honor them by honoring those principles of freedom — even when a callous few vainly attempt to demean the dignity rightfully due them.

It's worth taking a step back and recalling that all of this is the result of the December, 2005 story by the New York Times which first reported that the Bush administration was illegally spying on Americans for many years without warrants of any kind.

What were the consequences for the President for having broken the law so deliberately and transparently? Absolutely nothing. The only steps taken by our political class upon exposure by the NYT of this profound lawbreaking is to endorse it all and then suppress any and all efforts to investigate it and subject it to the rule of law.

The Captain was a propaganda stunt from the get-go: a former art student, Steve Rogers, finds himself pumped up with a super-soldier formula, dressed up in stars and stripes, and sent out to the front lines of World War II to boost morale. The 1941 cover of “Captain America Comics No. 1” shows him, with that big letter “A” on his forehead, punching out Hitler. It’s hard to escape the feeling that someone was trying too hard.

During the Watergate scandal he had a crisis of conscience and changed his name to the Nomad. He formed a partnership with the Falcon, the first African-American superhero. In his final adventure, he rebelled against a Superhuman Registration Act to license heroes in a kind of super-D.M.V. The man struggled, visibly and with great effort, to do what he saw as the decent thing.

Just three months ago, the world watched, transfixed, as thousands of Burmese monks marched through the streets of Rangoon. Their demands for change after decades of harsh military rule elicited almost universal sympathy and impassioned calls for solidarity. The United Nations hastily sent its special envoy into Burma. Both President Bush and the First Lady seemed personally affected--Laura Bush, who rarely steps out of her animatronic shell, publicly called on the Burmese junta to make way for democracy and announced that "people everywhere know about the regime's atrocities."

Three months later, the protests already seem long ago.