By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service

What do you do if you are president of the United States and your country is on an unsustainable, economically disastrous trajectory of vastly increased debt and long-term expenditures taking ever greater percentages of the money needed to keep businesses and jobs going?

Where I live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, we just had one of the coolest, wettest summers in memory, and we've already had snow this fall. I looked at the thermometer the other day, seeing it was just 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and said to my wife, "This darned global warming is going to be the death of us yet."

It almost seems an understatement to say that Norman Borlaug, dead at 95, was one of the greatest men of his time. Through his plant breeding techniques, he saved more lives than anyone in human history, maybe a billion, and you would think there would be universal applause. Only there is not.

Jimmy Carter time and again blames the Middle East's only true democracy, Israel, for the woes in that region while providing excuses for Arab terrorists, and there we have it. This Sunday school-teaching Baptist is an anti-Semite, a hater of Jews, someone whose political views on the subject of Arab-Israeli peace are most persuasively informed by his deep-seated bigotry.

It had begun to look like the worst of the recession was over, but here comes Barack Obama with a Herbert Hoover trick, a tariff increase that could help ignite a widespread trade war, cost us jobs, increase some prices, defeat recovery and keep us in economic misery for a long, long time.

President Obama has managed the unimaginable. He got tens of thousands of ordinary American citizens to leave the comfort of their homes, spend travel money they've been trying to watch very carefully and show up in Washington for a protest of a kind they hadn't even dreamed of in years past. How did he accomplish this feat?

Dive in just about anyplace you like in President Barack Obama's health-care speech the other night, and you bump into something abrasively wrongheaded, so much so that the whole thing can almost be summed up by Rep. Joe Wilson's shout: "Lie!"

So Barack Obama has given his speech to school children, and it was a fine if slightly flawed one, a needed, important call for students to be self-responsible, and I am very close to saying shame on you to some of my fellow conservatives. Why work yourselves into a mountain of frenzy over this pebble of an event?

If for a moment you thought the Obama administration was going to sit there placidly while some on talk radio were so bold as to criticize its actions, think again, because here comes Mark Lloyd, the new diversity officer of the Federal Communications Commission, and a man with a mission.

It's easy to agree with much that's being said about Ted Kennedy in this eulogistic moment. He was utterly dedicated to his liberal principles, and a senator who never shied from the unsung diligence that legislative achievement requires. As many are now emphasizing, he was unquestionably compassionate.