The first of the presidential debates is scheduled for tonight. It is unfortunate Ralph Nader will not be allowed to participate, as is customary in the farce some still call a model democracy with a straight face. Even if he were the scope of issues would still be constrained to what a few consolidated media players choose. In the course of these interactions there will be predictable confrontations on the candidates' approaches to taxes, trade, health care, social security, education, and perhaps agriculture. In these areas I only see split hairs off apples and oranges culminating in tidy piles of relatively hollow promises, with massive federal budget deficits making occasional cameos as the elephant in the room brought to you by elephants in backrooms. To stifle yawns from TV-land, there will have to be some prime-time heat generated by conflicts over hot-button topics like abortion, capital punishment, gay rights, stem-cell research, gun control, and immigration, where the partisan lines are already drawn and the majority of votes are already spoken for. Ultimately, just like our military, the debate will become mired in Iraq. Once the cradle of civilization, now the convenient launch point for overly familiar arguments about the use of military force, the condition of homeland security, congressional voting records, faulty intelligence, and what happened back in Viet Nam thirty years ago. This is where we've spent most of the last few years, where the country remains profoundly divided, and where emotions are left raw. It's also where those who lay the most claim to a Savior are ironically the most prone to ignore His advice. In this cloud of pre-emptive smoke, there is one vital topic that may go entirely unmentioned.

Despite what you're being told, your welfare is not threatened by terrorists nearly so much as you are endangered by pollution.

In a highly respected study conducted by the American Cancer Society and Harvard Medical School in 1995, air pollution from coal-fired power plants alone accounted for about 30,000 premature deaths in the United States each year. The National Resources Defense Council re-applied these findings recently to conclude that now the number may be as high as 64,000, making it a greater threat to American lives than drunk driving, homicide, recreational drug overdose, and international terrorism combined. As we whittle away our ozone layer, we are contributing to tens of thousands of new cases of skin cancer, which already annually kills over 120,000 Americans. Clean water is an essential enabler of human life, but some of the water Americans drink today is contaminated with arsenic, mercury, carcinogenic chemicals, sewage, or parasites. Want to save the children? About a million of them in the US have enough lead in their blood to adversely affect behavior and learning. The National Academy of Sciences estimated that a quarter of all pediatric developmental and neurological problems may be caused by environmental pollution. According to international health experts, in the poorest nations of the world diseases caused by environmental degradation kill as many as 20% of kids before the ripe old age of five. And we just can't ignore global warming any longer. A vast majority of scientists in the field of climate change recognize that through our massive consumption of fossil fuels and the ensuing release of accelerated levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that not only have we entered onto a course that will bring about increasingly severe weather phenomena over the decades ahead, but that the trend is probably irreversible at best. Can you say "ice age"? It's not about saving the planet, it's about saving humanity; unfortunately, Superman ain't from Texas.

George W. Bush is the worst environmental president in American history.

As if to set the tone, within a few hours of assuming the Oval Office Bush froze the roadless rules that protect almost 60 million acres of national forests from encroachment. He named an Interior secretary, Gale Norton, who previously worked for the Mountain States Legal Foundation which was founded by environmental enemy James Watt who baldly declared: "We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber." Bush then tabled the issue of arsenic in drinking water, dropped his campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, invited snowmobiles to Yellowstone National Park, reduced the budget for energy efficiency research and alternative power sources, opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, revoked the Interior's right to veto mining permits, gave developers a green light to ignore net loss to national wetlands, and granted a total of $2.4 billion in tax giveaways to General Electric, Chevron, Texaco, and Enron... all this in his first year in office! His administration has since massively expanded oil and gas ventures, overlooked substandard nuclear power facilities, removed barriers to mountaintop removal coal mining, halved funding for for clean water, permitted waste dumping into public waterways, gutted almost all clean air restrictions, and reallocated the bill for Superfund cleanup from polluters to the taxpayer. With 9/11 mentioned in every political argument, it is important to note that the Bush administration pressured the EPA to deliberately tell New York City residents that the air around the World Trade Center ruins was safe without any data to substantiate the claim. The right wing blows a lot of steam about judges who "legislate from the bench", but with the sue-and-settle strategy practiced by the Bush machine in environmental clashes and elsewhere, the executive branch is legislating to accommodate big business from behind closed doors, either refusing to defend the laws they are sworn to uphold or rewriting them ad-hoc. One EPA chief of regulation has already quit because he found himself "fighting a White House that seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce." Who's side are these people on?

In Spain, Germany, and Italy industrialists allied themselves with right-wing leaders who used the provocations of terrorist attacks, continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and homeland security to tame the press, muzzle criticism by opponents, and turn governments over to corporate control. Those governments tapped industrial executives to run ministries and poured government money into corporate coffers with lucrative contracts to prosecute wars and build infrastructure. They encouraged friendly corporations to swallow media outlets and they enriched the wealthiest classes, privatized the commons, and pared down constitutional rights, creating short-term prosperity through pollution-based profits and constant wars.

--Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I know some who think you must be Islamic to be fascist, and that for many of you the mere mention of the environment is a cue to turn off any sensitivity you might still possess. Apathy is the green light for exploitation. New judges are being selected for strong anti-regulation stances, and there are many congressmen who unabashedly oppose any protective measures, such as Senators Orrin Hatch, Pat Roberts, Trent Lott, Michael Enzi, and Craig Thomas or Representatives John Doolittle, Robert Aderholt, Henry Bonilla, Howard McKeon, David Dreier, Roy Blunt, Jim Ryun, Todd Tiahrt, David Vitter, and Doc Hastings. In harmony with Bush these adversaries of Mother Nature will tell you what you want to hear: that America is vast, pristine, beautiful, and unharmed. It is not true. If you exclude Alaska and the isolated patches of barren rock or desert, only half a percent of America is still defined as wilderness and thereby immune from industry interference. The Bush administration would turn even this fraction into corporate fodder, leaving virtually nothing of God's original splendid gifts to future generations. Their progress is mankind's downward spiral.

We have entered the Century of the Environment, in which the immediate future is usefully conceived as a bottleneck: science and technology, combined with foresight and moral courage, must see us through it and out.

--Edward O. Wilson

If by some chance you're still tuned in, here goes with yet another cut from my collection of musical musings. There's only one song left after this, so get them while they're hot.

Protagoras Bound

by Hilfiger Tout

As a member of policy debate teams in high school I was trained to competently argue both sides of an issue. Not only did I eventually decide the activity was not for me, I denounce it as an unhealthy method of teaching kids to vacillate amorally between perspectives and rely exclusively on the testimony of others to make their case. Now I call it like I see it, always.

Please don't debate me. It's my one true talent, okay. I have 23 hours a day to develop these little webs of fucking conspiracy, so please, relax and enjoy your hair.

--Bill Hicks

This song is dedicated to all of the wonderful teachers I had in my pre-college career through the much-maligned American public school system. Not everyone thinks private schools are the answer. Under the license I use, you are permitted to copy, distribute, or perform any of my songs free of charge. Get your royalty free groove on before it's made illegal once and for all.

Software? It's still under raps, but where I don't get cooperation from those paid to assist I'll forge ahead looking for new avenues among those that aren't.

Did you just think something?