I’ll be short tonight, I’m afraid. I have a dentist appointment coming up (God bless a dentist who schedules evening hours!), with all the gladness and merriment inherent therein.

By way of The View From the Foothills, here’s a neat little utility to clean up your computer desktop.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Although he’s one of the great heroes of my life, I’ve gotten into the habit of arguing against him in recent years. For instance, I consider his constitutional argument extremely weak.

And yet…

And yet, he operated from a transcendent vision of America. He truly believed that this country was the laboratory of the future, that a better world was being created in these states. Nothing, he believed, should be permitted to destroy what was being done here. Slavery was a double threat, first because it made a mockery of the American vision, and second, because it was a political threat to national unity and purpose. Abolitionists derided him as a weakling because he wasn’t prepared to go straight in and get it abolished. He preferred a gradual, peaceful approach. That approach became impossible, and so he made the fateful decision to go to war to preserve the Union.

He himself was the living embodiment of the American dream. He’d been born in a dirt-floored cabin, to people who many considered only marginally human. He’d taken the opportunities this country gave him and used them to rise to the highest office in the land. He believed that everyone should have the same opportunities, and he never wavered from that commitment. In the end he died for it.

I’ve been to his birthplace, one childhood home, New Salem, his Springfield home, the White House, Ford’s Theatre and his tomb. I can’t get free of the man, and I don’t want to.

Sometimes the road goes ever ever on; sometimes it runs under a landslide. New Line Cinemas’ plans to produce “The Hobbit” and another “Lord of the Rings” prequel film could have a big road block. The Tolkien estate and HarperCollins are suing the production company for royalities never paid.

Joe Carter is doing a four parter on saving conservative political discourse and policies in today’s more-hostile-than-yesterday climate. First, stop the bleeding, he says. Next, let’s kill all the lawyers. No, we’ll do that later. Next, start the breathing.

I don’t know that Joe nails in on every point, but he’s close to the mark. It seems to me there are well-defined conservative ideas and there are well-established conservative people who may or may not hold the conservative position on a certain issue. Calling the person a liberal would be unfair, even if you could make a case for his position on the one issue being a liberal position. That is McCain’s problem, as I understand it. It doesn’t matter to may voters and commentators I suppose that the American Conservative Union gives him an 80+% lifetime conservative record. It matters that on the issues McCain has taken leadership, he has led in a liberal direction. You could easily believe he voted with conservatives on their issues out of party loyalty instead of principle, so as president he would be more likely to lead according to his less than conservative principles.

But I’ll vote for him anyway–at least at this point. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

I want to be a good steward of my part of the earth. I think I always have. My parents taught me the evils of littering and some of the joys of gardening. I learned other joys on my own. All of my married life we have kept the house warm in the summer and cool in the winter to save energy (and perhaps our air conditioner). We’ve taught our girls not to waste water, especially during the last several months of the drought, and for watering our house plants we have collected rain water. I know I could do more, but it’s a challenge when it seems everything we’re told about saving the environment is hype and lies.

The latest is National Geographic’s upcoming special, “Six Degrees Could Change the World.” Will the ocean rise 80 feet? You can stop it by turning off your TV and recycling it. It’s an energy hog.

The magazine site states, “Obviously, the most straightforward way to stop the frighteningly rapid rate of climate change is to reduce humans’ output of carbon dioxide by 60 to 80 percent.” So do your part by breathing less, please.

I’ll try to heed Mr. McCain’s advice by calming down, but I hope if he is elected president, he won’t make me change my light bulbs. I don’t want the Department of Energy telling me I can’t use incandescent light bulbs when the alternatives, compact florescent bulbs, really aren’t much better. Their light spectrum is different than the one put off by incandescents, and what is this about special recycling? I can’t put them in the trash can? Is that on the packaging?

Sweden is supposed to be leading the way on this front, but apparently the great Swedish recycling success is as shaky as Ivar Kreuger’s wealth. I’m disenchanted. Who do you believe?

Back in November, NASA reported on its study of the Arctic Ocean. “Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming,” said the lead scientist from the University of Washington. And yet just last week NPR had a spot on a cruise of Antarctica which tried convince us that the cracking glacial ice was our fragile earth breaking up under our feet. I wonder if they question the cracking sounds in their freezers.

Environmentalists have no credibility with me, which is why I’m frustrated with our government’s refusal to drill for oil in the arctic wasteland and their capitulation on so many other points with people who appear to be striving for American failure, third world poverty, and in some cases the termination of undesirable people. What’s a descent steward of creation to do?