Max called on the phone and asked if I was going to be home. I explained that if I could go around the world for two bits, I couldn’t get past Waxahachie, so yes, I’d be home. He also wanted to know if I had cold beer and I said, of course, so he said he’d be at my place in a couple of minutes.

So in a few minutes, he showed up, got a beer out of the auxiliary fridge and sat down on my office couch. (I admit the conceit, calling it an office. It’s the third bedroom in our zero lot line equipped with shelves, a filing cabinet and a telephone, so it qualifies as an office.)

I said, “What’s on your mind?” (I had to ask since the issues have been coming so quick and fast since the Anointed One took over, I have to sort them out.)

Max leaned back, took a long pull at a Shiner Bock and asked, “Whaddaya think about the Supreme’s decision yesterday about the firefighters?”

I said, “I think it was a good decision but not for the rationale they gave. All local government entities have had years to make certain their employment tests weren’t biased against minorities. And the municipality in question had taken great pains to eliminate racial prejudice. I understand that the oral part of the test was taken by examining groups consisting of representatives from three races.. You know yourself that oral exams can be unconsciously biased against almost anyone for any number of variables, but the people that designed the test did a hell of a good job to eliminate bias. The important thing was, this was not an entry level examination. In this case, the candidates all had the same training, they all had the same experience, and time on the job was much the same, so the playing field had already been leveled. Had it been a new hire exam, you might suspect the exam was biased, but not in this case. The Supremes, despite the liberal judges’ tendency to exclude qualifications in favor of race, made the right decision, if even for the wrong reason.”

“Damn,” Max said, “I just asked a question, I didn’t expect a lecture.”

“You got a lecture anyway,” I said, “a lecture from someone with twenty years in the personnel business, someone who, when he needed a licensed aircraft inspector, helicopter qualified, to go to the Sinaloa hell-hole for a year, couldn’t care less if the guy was purple with pink polka dots as long as he had the ticket and could do the job.”

“You mean you lose your prejudices?”

“I don’t know if you ever really lose them, Max. But I do know you learn to deal with them. At some point, logic has to take over from inanities that have been pounded into you since birth. When that happens, you can say, “Free at last!”

“That’s interesting. I was the same way about the bad guys. When they were bad, they were bad, no grays. I was completely nonbiased.”

“So you garroted and blew up people without a shred of racial bias in your whole body?”

“Damn tootin’. It was really liberating!” he replied smiling, taking another swig of beer.

It was mid-morning when the phone rang and I let it ring the second time. Max’s number showed up on the little screen so I answered it. “Who’s screwed up this time?” I asked.

“Oh, thanks for the friendly and civil ‘hello,’” Max said.

“Since caller ID came into fashion, I no longer have to be polite thinking the governor or Charlize is calling me,” I replied. “When you call this early, I know someone has screwed the pooch big time.”

“How prescient you are!” Max exclaimed. “It’s one of your right wing radio gun-nuts that’s done it this time.”

“Who was it?”

“A chap named Hal Turner, radio personality and blogger. He was in high dudgeon because three federal judges upheld a ban on handguns in Chicago .”

I sputtered, trying to get my head around that one. “Since when do the gun-toting people in Chicago care what the law says in the first place?” I finally asked.

“Good point,” Max laughed. “Let me tell you what this guy said. He said, and I quote, ‘Let me be the first to say this plainly: Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty. A small price to pay to assure freedom for millions. Obey the Constitution or die!”

“That’s a little over the top even for free speech,” I said, amazed.

“Wait, there’s more,” Max replied. “After Turner made those comments on the air, he went to his web site and posted the judges’ photos, phone numbers, work addresses and courtroom numbers.”

“Oops,” I exclaimed. “Not only did his mouth overload his civil rights, he was openly calling for an assassination! What happened?”

“The G-men went after the loony and arrested him,” Max answered.

“I am not surprised, Max. There’s got to be limits to everything. Come to think of it, he lowered himself to the level of Barney Frank who wanted to post the banking bonus babies’ home addresses so the outraged left-wing rabble could go after their children.”

Max grunted an affirmative. “It seems that no matter how free we are, there’s always some SOB who pushes the envelope too far. But I always remember what somebody smart once said: ‘Democracy is messier than dictatorship.’”

“Dictators have a way of keeping things neat,” I agreed. “They just bury the loose ends. No muss, no fuss.”

Max said, “I’ve got to go now, I just wanted you to know about this Turner fellow, in case you had started thinking the debate was getting civilized.”

“Yeah, thanks for letting me know the political fringe is still alive and pernicious, Max. I was getting complacent.”

“You’re welcome!”

I heard Max before he opened the back door. He was singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” He went into the laundry room, grabbed a beer, and pulled off the cap, tossed it into my office trash can and sat down on my couch. I had been working on one of my penny dreadfuls and had reached a sticking point so I hit save and turned around. He was grinning.

“One of your good-goody, straight-laced Republicans has been following his weewee around again. Don’t you guys ever learn?”

“I think Mark Sanford was committing political suicide, Max,” I replied. “ Argentina ? A sitting governor, disappearing for days? No one in his right mind…”

“You won’t get any argument from me on that point,” Max chuckled. “Like I have said before, when living in this country gets boring, either the Christians or the Republicans make great asses of themselves. Of course, it doesn’t happen as frequently now as in the past, not since the Ayatollah Falwell ascended.”

“Republicans keep proving they are human like anyone else,” I replied wearily. “Much like Democrats, come to think of it. ‘I did not have sex with that woman,’ is a quotation for the ages.”

“Except when ol’ Slick Willy did it, the National Organization for Women thought it was the dearest, cutest thing they had seen,” Max said. “I hear they even put kneepads on a special sale at their on-line NOW Store. But then, the Democrats don’t pretend to be goody-goody. Loose standards are easier to maintain.”

“Speaking of Democrats,” I said. “It looks like they are going to do for health care what Barney and Chris did for mortgage banking.”

“Whatever happens, it’s all Bush’s fault, so why not?” Max giggled. “And at the rate the Republicans are going, anyone they ever dreamed of that could compete against The Anointed One has shot himself in the foot. The last good-looking one is Sarah Palin and she can’t get any support from nobody. It’s going to be a long eight years for you guys. Why, by the time you finally field a candidate that anyone thinks is pretty, ACORN is going to have about 6 million of Harry Reid’s ‘undocumented citizens’ registered to vote and it’s all over. Which reminds me, I understand that one of the faithful has brought up a bill in the House to do away with presidential term limits. You think they may have big long range plans?”

I said, “I wouldn’t be concerned about that; they do that at the start of every session. It’s become sort of a gesture. You just don’t hear about it. Now on the other hand, if a Republican tried such a thing, the New York Times would be breast-beating and garment rending till hell wouldn’t have it.”

Max got up from the couch and looked at some pictures on my wall. “Well, it’s better to be saying nothing than hollering about legislating morality. Did you notice how many states are going for the gay marriage thing? Looks like someone figured out the Constitution is silent on marriage and that leaves it up to the states. How about that?”

“I’d say it’s a definite trend,” I replied, “an unsettling one in some quarters, but it’s there. It’s sort of like the trend toward legalizing medical marijuana you’ve been talking about. Some folks have realized that marijuana isn’t as dangerous as alcohol and are voting accordingly. There’s still a few holdouts, Grand Old Party faithful, most of them.”

“There’s nothing like an old fool sitting around sipping Jack Black and complaining about ‘hippies’ smoking pot,” Max chuckled.

“Well hell, Max,” I said. “If some people didn’t have hypocrisy, they wouldn’t have anything to do at all. After all, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.”

“There’s a joke there somewhere,” he said.

Max came in the back door, stopped at my auxiliary fridge and got himself a bottle of water. He flopped down on the couch.

“Whazzup?” I asked.

He said, “ I’ve been talking with one of my old mates (he prounced it ‘mytes’) down in Canberra , Wilbur Wright.”

“Wilbur Wright?” I asked, “not The Wilbur Wright!”

Max laughed and said, “No. His last name was Wright and when he went through flying school, everyone started calling him Wilbur and it stuck. I first got to know him at Sharm.”

“Oh, I gotcha.”

“Anyway,” Max went on, “we were talking about this and that and I mentioned our heat and he started talking about a dramatic shift in the whole country’s attitude about global warming. In fact, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has put off his plans for the ETS (emissions trading scheme), what we’d call cap-and-trade. They’re putting it off until the middle of 2012. One bunch of politicians wants to wait until they have time to consider the outcome of the Copenhagen climate conference in December and US Senate deliberations.”

“Wow!” I exclaimed, “what happened?”

“It seems that this Aussie intellectual, name of Professor Ian Plimer, recently wrote a book about global warming, titled Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science. It is not sympathetic with the doomsday hysteria and it has been a runaway best-seller. Three weeks after it hit the shelves, it was in its third printing and now it’s up to its fifth printing.”

“Holy mackerel! Hit the jackpot did he?”

“Yep! According to Wilbur, the book played holy hell with the mythology and false claims that have been so popular in the press. Apparently, Prof Plimer is very good at putting things in readable language and he started the Aussies on a big one eighty. But what really kicked the interest was that Paul Sheehan, who writes for the Sydney Morning Herald, reviewed the book and it bowled him over. The Herald had been one of those newspapers that had been hyping the global warming end-of-the-world scenario and Sheehan had been a global warming hysteric. But after reading the book, he described Plimer as ‘one of Australia ’s foremost earth scientists’ and said the book was ‘brilliantly argued.’”

“That must be one hell of a book to turn around one of the hysterics. What did it say?”

“I made some notes when I was talking to Barney because I knew you’d be interested. He was reading from one of Sheehan’s columns.” Max pulled out his little spiral bound notebook with the blue lines. “Here’s one thing the book said:

‘The Earth's climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth's climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy. To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable-human-induced CO2, is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable of an extraordinarily complex natural system is folly.’”\

“Barney also read me Sheehan’s conclusion. Sheehan said, ‘Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.’”

“Holy mackerel, Max! You brought all this wonderful news and I was looking forward to seeing if you read that stupidity that Energy Secretary Chu said in the commencement address he made last week.”

“I didn’t see it but I’ll lay eight to five that those on the side of the angels are lying again,” Max said, chuckling.

“Right you are,” I replied, picking up the paper I had been reading. “Here’s one of the things he said. ‘If the world continues on a business-as-usual path, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that there is a 50-50 chance the temperature change will exceed five degrees by the end of the century….a world five degrees warmer will be a very different place. The change will be so rapid that many species, including us, will have a hard time adapting.’”

“It that true?” Max asked.

“No, of course not.” I replied. “What the IPCC actually said was nada about ‘business as usual’ but it described six ‘marker scenarios’ for global development and provided probability distributions for projected warming under each of them. Exactly none of the six project a 50-50 chance of 5 degrees C by 2100. The scenario ranges run from 1.8° C to a high of 4° C. The IPCC’s assessment report puts it at a likelihood of about 3° C by 2100.”

“So Chu was lying to frighten people just like the rest of the bureaucrats,” Max said, shaking his head.

“Exactly,” I said. “In the meantime, we’ve got the Waxman-Markey bill coming through the process to slap a tax on cow farts and other emissions. It’s nothing but a front for getting control of more and more of the country’s industry. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the law, if passed, will reduce the energy consumption of a typical household by about .8% (eight tenths of one percent) by 2050. And the standard climate models project it will reduce temperatures by about 0.1° C (one tenth of one percent) by 2100.”

“One tenth of a degree benefit by taxing cow farts! I think we have descended into the Theater of the Absurd!” Max exclaimed.

“That’s one way of putting it,” I agreed. “And none of them, Obama, Biden, Gore, Waxman, Franks, Dodd, Chu or Waters has come up with an overall master plan for finding a non-fossil source of energy.”

“But they’ve got to spend three trillion more dollars,” Max said. “After all, that takes a lot of effort.”

Max caught up to me at the bar in the little Eyetie place at the shopping center. Of course it’s not really an Eyetie place but they sell what’s called Eyetie food. As far as I can tell, some Latinas and some WASPS run the place. But that’s neither here nor there. The food’s pretty good and priced reasonably and you can sit in the bar and talk and not get in a fight. Not that I have anything against fighting you understand. But if you really like to get into a teeth-pounding, eye-gouging, cheek-tearing, kidney bruising brawl, there’s places down on Industrial Boulevard (in Dallas) where they can accommodate you.

Max came in, ordered an Irish-rocks and asked me if I saw the television coverage of our President swatting a fly.

I told him I had seen it and I was emotionally moved by his display of dexterity and bravery. Oh course I was affected nothing like the news people present who burst into tears and wet on themselves. I told Max that what I really appreciated was the close up of a lackey policing up the corpse and whisking it away before women and children could be distressed by the carnage.

Max said, “I’m glad they showed film of that so everyone could see it and remember the day, perhaps making a breathless entry in their diaries. Even Fox News carried it, can you believe that? The Dallas Morning News ran a story on it this morning so everyone could tune in. It was the news highlight of the day edging out the voting crisis in Iran."

“Speaking of that,” I said, “I sat down and wrote the DMN editor and told him how much I appreciated a special event like that being covered by the press. After all, I don’t think we praise our intrepid reporters enough for their perseverance and the chances they take to keep us informed.”

“Good for you! Max said. “We need more like you.”

Yeah, yeah, I know. I said I wasn’t going to worry about politics for a while and tend to my purely literary pursuits. I lied. But I have an excuse. Max stormed in this morning in high dudgeon, a state reached when he feels personally affronted, like when a politician tramples all over career security people.

“What’s gone amiss this time?” I asked.

“They’re doing it again,” he rasped, “throwing the spooks under the bus.”

“Oh, yeah,” I responded. “You must be talking about Philip Mudd.”

“I am,” he fumed. “I’ve been pissed off all weekend about this thing.”

(For those that don’t follow the Inside the Beltway news, Obama nominated Phillip Mudd, an imminently qualified career intel officer with FBI and CIA experience, for the job of intelligence chief in the Department of Homeland Security. Friday evening, Mudd “withdrew” from consideration under pressure from the Democrats.)

I said, “From what I read about Mudd, Obama had made a good choice.”

“He did,” Max said. “It was one of those few times that a presidential selection actually made good sense all the way around.”

“Except?” I asked, lifting my eyebrows.

“Max looked disgusted. “Except he would have been handing the Republicans the open investigation they wanted on San Fran Nan’s accusation of criminal conduct in the CIA.”

“Dang, I hadn’t thought of that,” I said in surprise. “Why of course! When the Senators started asking questions prior to approving him, the alleged CIA lying would have inevitably popped up.”

“You’ll recall that the Democrats squelched an investigation into the lying charges on a point of order or some dumb technicality to protect old Nan . Then they looked at Mudd and said, “Whoa! We can’t do that!”

“That’s a shame, Max. So the best man probably won’t get the job now.”

“Hell no!” Max spat. “Anyone else as qualified as Mudd is going to get turned down because he’ll know too damned much to risk the other side getting to question him. So they’ll end up with some political hack who doesn’t know enough to hurt anyone. You see how politicians manage to mediocritize everything? You remember that clown who was running Homeland Security when Katrina hit?”

“I think that’s the name of the game, Max. Politics is a game of tradeoffs. In negotiations, to keep the other guy from blocking you, you end up short of what you really wanted. “

“I really don’t know what else I expected,” Max said, shaking his head in resignation. After all, they keep pooh-poohing Darth Cheney when he talks about the unreleased torture memos. If he’s lying, why don’t they release the memos and expose the lies. Where is that transparency that Obama was so big on? We haven’t seen it yet. Right now, he’s no more transparent than old Darth himself.”

“Sounds like a real steep learning curve to me, Max. After they get the top job, they figure out there are some things it’s much more convenient to keep secret.”

Max finally smiled. “I think you’ve hit on it.”