All of us are familiar with the famous quote, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Lord Acton). It is not just moral corruption that power produces, but mental corruption as well. The person enamored of power, once given power, gradually grows unable to understand moral principles that an ordinary person understands with ease; the pol eventually becomes convinced that he deserves the power, even that he is needed for his country's survival. At the worst level, he believes that the country is his own personal possession. Example: Robert Mugabe, who claimed that God gave him his country as a possession. This form of mental corruption is one of the reasons that term limits are so important, but limiting a...

The whole topic of the Copenhagen meeting was dealing with anthropogenic global warming. The first of those three words is assumed, not at all proven. If it were to be true, then perhaps something could be done to affect the overall climate, but a full reading of the evidence suggests strongly that (1) the world has been heating irregularly for twelve millennia or more; (2) the models used to simplify and make workable the data are made so as to support the notion of the changes being man-made, not to make an honest evaluation. Every time an exception is found to the models' predictions, which is frequently, the models are changed to accommodate the new data, but not to change the conclusions, which are taken as prima-facie. This is...

The problem in hoping for a repeal of Waxman-Markey lies in the difficulty in getting Congress to admit a mistake, then getting them to pass a repeal, then to get the President, whoever it might be, to sign the repeal. Once there are vested interests in the industries involved in this program, lobbying against repeal will be fierce, and articles of faith, which is what anthropogenic global warming is, die very slowly.

If power corrupts, and indeed it does, it does more than one type of corruption. First, and most obviously, it corrupts morally. That is probably the sense of what Lord Action meant in his famous quote. Also, however, power corrupts the very functioning of one's mind, obscuring to one's consciousness the possibilities other than use of power to solve problems. Sen. Inouye's remarks reveal that type of corruption, as do the acts of very many powerful politicians over history.

The accelerant to the process of this sort of corruption is the desire for power. One can formulate that mental corruption is in proportion to the product of three things, the amount of power, the amount of time in power, and the degree of desire for...