By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service

President Obama says his new fuel-efficiency standards will help end our dependence on oil, which is another way of saying that once these rules go into effect, we will instead be dependent on hubris.

President Obama says his new fuel-efficiency standards will help end our dependence on oil, which is another way of saying that once these rules go into effect, we will instead be dependent on hubris.

Want to know what do to save the Republicans? Make them into Democrats, and along the way, criticize them for what they haven't done as well as for what both they and the Democrats do, only don't mention that the Democrats are guilty, too.

Here's the first thing you shouldn't do in front of Al Gore. Be skeptical about catastrophic, human-caused global warming. He will rip your reputation apart, just as he once did to reputable, honorable scientists in congressional hearings.

Supreme Court Justice David Souter is retiring, President Barack Obama will soon nominate a successor, and the cry is that it be a woman because, you know, it would be just dreadful otherwise.

Oh, no, that's not true, said officials of the Obama administration after an allegation of bullyboy tactics in negotiations with one creditor over Chrysler's future. The charge was that if the company did not back down from its position, the White House would sick the press corps on its reputation.

Swine flu could soon be slaying scads of us, some think, and the Indiana health commissioner says don't shake hands with anyone. Vice president Joe Biden says try to avoid subways or planes. European governments say don't travel to the United States. And people are buying up protective facemasks left and right.

Democrat Nancy Pelosi wants a truth commission to investigate possible U.S. facilitators of torture and criminal prosecutions if it comes to that, and here is what I wonder -- does she also want poetic justice?

In the midst of emitting oohs and ahs over Barack Obama's first 100 days or so as president, Joe Klein of Time magazine quotes with glowing approval some words his hero spoke in a speech at Georgetown University.

Liberal commentators were recently having a great, big if indignant chuckle at the expense of all those tea party yo-yos who didn't get it that President Obama had a tax cut in mind for them, and that, hey, it was conservatism that brewed the current mess.