The trouble with gun control is that what might make sense in Compton might not make sense in a Midwestern state full of deer hunters.

The current brain-dead gun control debate has more to do with media-reaction politics than any kind of coherent policy. A lot of these tragedy inspired laws aren't even enforced, or wouldn't have stopped the criminal in the first place.

A recurring them in these position paragraphs is the end to political footballs, and we've wasted far too many dollars on this one. Increase enforcement of curent federal gun laws and move on. Any state that wants to do something different, feel free. That's the beauty of the 10th Amendment. If the feds have left it open, states can do what they please.

The latest sounds-good, works-bad proposal out there in the gun control field is the idea of ballistically fingerprinting every gun in America. It sounds all Dick Tracy, that the bullet could be tracked to the owner immediately. In the real world, it's spending millions of dollars on a system so unreliable one stolen gun would foil it (and even worse, you get feds arriving at the home of a person already victimized by a robbery).

Ballistic fingerprinting also goes against 230-some years of American history. It's never been a good idea to give the government a list of all the guns, because that list becomes a kind of power of its own, and that power can lead bad people to try things they otherwise wouldn't.

When it comes to gun control, no more political footballs. And time for people to appreciate the bureaucracy-busting power of the 10th Amendment.

In the Middle East, our immediate political problem comes from a business problem. Those people are using our money to fight us. We have to stop funding that immediately, through partnerships with other countries, through conservation and through alternative energy sources.

The only form of a tax hike I'd ever endorse is one on gasoline, and that proposal comes with a whole bunch of qualifiers. It has to be slow and gradual and some of the money must go to easing the tax tables on poor people hit hardest. We have to find a way to make it as revenue-neutral as possible on the trucking industry because any other way would spark inflation.

The government can't make people conserve and can't make gas guzzlers go away. That has to be done by free markets, and the best way to motivate people in a certain direction is to raise the price.

There are two other reasons why raising the gas tax would be a good idea. First, foreign oil makes us weaker. Secondly, terrorists from those regions are costing us billions in increased security. That money has to come from somewhere.

The long-range problem of the Middle East involves two recurring themes in Islamic history, the question of updating the religion to meet modern conditions, and the question of one great superstate. The Prophet, peace be unto him, as is the polite way to say it, said a new man shall come and revive the religion every 100 years. Apparently, we're still waiting.

In terms of peacefully restoring the caliphate, it's too complicated to get into detail here, but there's one historic fact to remember. At the height of Islamic power, when the empire stretched from Spain to China, the Arabs worked peacefully and prosperously with the Jews. There's a lesson in that, folks.

Don't fall asleep just yet. According to a recent report from the Council on Foreign Relations, we remain very vulnerable to a terrorist attack in a lot of areas.

The first response to the war on terror was a law called the Patriot Act that puts a strain on the Constitution in a few spots. The second response was the cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. Apparently in Washington, nothing can get done unless a 170-thousand person bureaucracy is built first. As a final insult, the bill was packed with pork. We need to do better than that.

I'd have voted no. We need to spend money where it counts -- on training and equipment, on barriers and computer networks, on port screeners and CIA agents.

We already had a Federal Emergency Management Agency and by all accounts it's one of the best in the world. Now we have bureaucrats instead of a shore patrol. Great work, Congress.

The second issue to address is what fighting this kind of war means in terms of intelligence.

Most people don't know that the biggest U.S. intelligence agency isn't the FBI or CIA but the NSA. Most people don't know there have been legendary turf wars between these guys. Add in intelligence from the Department of Defense and Customs and the scope of the problem becomes clear.

People who trade in secrets do not give them up easily. If you want to make America safer, intelligence-sharing is the first issue to address.

Last time I noticed, Microsoft had issued 40-some security patches for its software so far this year. Our over-reliance on such security-challenged software is a national hazard. We have to stop that hazard from becoming a tragedy.

Microsoft also showed that our nation's antitrust laws do not work in an era of rapid change. Americans generally tolerate a bidness-is-bidness attitude if it doesn't get out of hand. Well, with Microsoft it has. In the two areas of its monopoly dominance, it is running 85 and 75 percent profit margins. Not even Rockefeller -- with the original American monopoly -- had such gall.

A footnote in the monopoly case said it all. There were 18 places where a Microsoft software product was hailed as an innovation, and 18 citations of where Microsoft had gobbled up another company to get that innovation.

Now here's another example of how mega-big business bends the rules. Microsoft has never paid a dividend. Never. It has $40.5 billion in cash on hand, by far the largest cash hoard in corporate history, but it won't pay a dividend, which is, after all, kind of a fundamental in this whole stock market, investment thing.

Now consider this. On any dividend payment, Bill Gates would pay 39 percent taxes. When he sells the stock, he pays 20 percent capital gains taxes. Anybody out there see a possible connection?

I'm no financial expert, but you don't have to be a CPA to see that if our laws can't handle the situations, new laws are needed. While we are at it, answer me this -- why are the financial results told to stock holders different different than the results the feds use for calculating taxes? Can anybody tell me how this makes any sense at all? Can somebody tell me why companies that move overseas to dodge taxes are still listed on American stock exchanges? Ah, don't get me started.

There's a fundamental disconnect between the government we talk about (better pay for teachers) and what we get (financial benefits for well-heeled special-interests).

I believe government should literally pay dividends. Instead of more taxes and more bureaucracies, I propose specific assessments for specific projects of specific durations. Voters know that if you create any kind of temporary tax, the way politicians work, it will become a permanent tax.

These assessments would be used for one-time expenditures that result in full-blown corporations, valued and traded on Wall Street, with taxpayers getting real stock and real dividends from their investment/assessment. The idea is to get government to make the one-time investments private industry would never consider, form the joint venture, and then get out of the way.

For instance, to boost the economies of three states, our nation should burn more coal. Now to damage the environment in seven or eight states, we should burn more coal. So what is clearly needed is some way to foot the bill for the extra-expensive, state of the art anti-pollution devices.

This type of approach would allow the government to offer, for instance, some giant energy companies something like $500 million in pollution equipment for each new $1 billion coal-fired power plant that can replace some old tree killing plant. The end result would be joint-effort corporations, with all the government-financed shares getting divided by the number of people who vote.

The fields of electricity (and electrical distribution) present a convergence of public policy needs and legitimate business opportunities. This is a field with great potential. If the power grid needs more backup capacity to be able to respond to terrorism, why should the spending be corporate welfare? Why not give people stock in it?

Now there is a clear distinction between people who hold their own personal views and the anti-abortion industrial complex that preys upon them for their own fund-raising andpolitical-power-base reasons. Not many movements survive 30 years; if the public was going to sway, it would have swayed by now.

The leaders in the anti-abortion industrial complex are spinning false hopes as a way to stay in business. Civil rights moved from a brave woman on a bus to the voting rights act in a decade. Prohibition was over in about a decade. It is high time to free these people of legitimate faith and interests to pursue another, more productive path.

Instead of fighting losing legal battles, may we all promote adoption, abstinence, birth control -- whatever it takes. It's time for a hearts and minds approach. It's time to stop the anti-abortion industrial complex from harassing stressed-out women at clinics. It's time to get off the back of some poor woman on the street as a way to get on CNN's "Crossfire."

The fresh way to break the monopoly hold on education is through architecture. Build the schools, structure the system, then leave it up to educators to reinvent themselves to fit it. They're good people. They're up to the task.

Schools all across America are aging and in need of replacement. So why build the same old thing? Let's design schools like shopping malls. Let's design the curriculum to be a mix of small group instruction and lecture-hall settings (except the lecture hall is more like a cineplex delivering vivid visual instruction). Instead of textbooks that start going obsolete the day they are printed, think of downloaded materials through the school print room.

In these mini-movie theatres, I see a free, nationally delivered model curriculum, available for parents and students alike using digital technology. If's there's any aspect of the curriculum objectionable in a specific locality, they have absolute right to opt out. They have the right to use this kind of curriculum delivery system to enhance teachers or replace them. Like I said, educators are pros, they'll figure it out. Especially when there's such a possibility of small-class, personalized instruction.

The idea behind free educational content is to radically reduce the cost of education to localities, not promote some kind of hidden social agenda. The fundamental reason I came up with this approach is that if you cut the costs of operations, you can finally start paying teachers what they are worth.

Think about it. I've been listening to politicians talk about raising pay for cops and teacher for 30 years, and what has happened? Not much. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. It's time for a plan.

Here's another thing. American parents fork out billions in afternoon day care every year. Don't you think there would be a big boost to the economy if schools stayed open 8 to 5? And while we're still at it, how much of the school year is wasted by refreshing kids on what they forgot over the summer? Don't you think year-round schools, with four little breaks instead of one long summer, might be a better way to spend our money?

An unfettered free market will generally benefit everybody but the poor, because it's hard to turn a profit on people with no money.

My economic concerns are so wide-ranging it's hard to fit them in six paragraphs. I can cite areas such as the Great Plains as a microcosm of broad-based trends. I can cite my own life as a Rust Belt refugee. I saw my union job with a pension go poof. I've been downsized, I've been laid off, I've been the subject of creative euphemisms. And I've not been alone.

It was not that long ago that part of the social contract of a job was that the company would pay for your pension, too. The 401(k) was touted as an improvement, that you could do a better job yourself. What a sales job. We are now paying with our own money what the company used to pay. And better yet, where did that money go? Well, during the time of the rise of the privatized pension, the gap between top executives and averaged workers exploded.

Now consider this. The stock market boomed because all the baby boomers started saving for retirement in the 401(k)s. They have to start pulling money out when they turn 70. What do you think will happen to the market then?

And consider this. You will very, very likely be in a much higher tax bracket when you retire than when you are a young worker. The taxes you pay at that time will be higher.

Like I said at the beginning, my economic thoughts go farther than six paragraphs. But here's a teaser on one. If schools are financed by property taxes, won't rich neighborhood schools always be better? To recast the old line, it's not the rich getting richer, it's an attempt to make the poor more stupid. We've got to be able to do better than that.

Current environmental debate is far too narrow, too old and tired. Do CFCs eat up the ozone hole, is there really such a thing as global warming, stuff like that. We have to accept the notion that man is affecting his environment as a fact, then leave it to the scientists to quibble over each other's calculations.

This is not far-out tree-hugger science. Satellite pictures of modern urban areas clearly show how trees have been replaced by parking lots. There are all kinds of impacts, such as floods and water pollution. I'm not going to waste time with people arguing over this much impact or that much impact because that it is a distraction from the main question -- what are we going to do about it?

Environmental improvements need to be balanced against their cost to the American economy versus the good of the planet. The lowest impact which does the most good should go first. One place to start is in building codes, and the phasing in of requirements for earth-friendly features such as solar power and gray-water systems. Make it gradual, but make it happen. Make the commitment.

For many young people, the environment is closely connected to Third World development issues. This is the kind of stuff the people who protest at World Trade Organization meetings complain about. I'm very sympathetic to many of their concerns, but I need to remind those folks that politics is the art of the practical. As of right now, they march in the streets because they don't think conventional politicians are listening to them. They are right. That needs to change.

As mentioned in discussing the Middle East, the only kind of tax increase I care to stomach is an increase in the gasoline tax. It is offered more as a national securiity / foreign dependency issue than an environmental one, though environmental improvements could eventually be pretty significant.

We need to protect our water, we need to promote alternative energy sources and conservation. We need to preserve open spaces. We need to live as well as we do today while using fewer resources. It's not rocket science, it's Earth science, and we need to get on with it. Even if it means taking on high-powered, deep-pocketed special interests. Mother Earth needs a lobbyist. Sign me up.

At left, six-paragraph boil-downs on some major issues of the day. Mouse over to see the topic, and click to read details.

The political industrial complex, as it has come into being over the last 30 years, has managed to drive voter participation to new lows. The political pros actually want it that way because it increases the power of their special interests.

The spin doctor school of politics has had its chance, and it has failed. Time for something better.

A candidate has to have what computer programmers call "a killer app." Mine is a total rethinking of how the government spends its money. I believe government should literally pay dividends, and look forward to the opportunity to expand on this idea.

Since those dividends would be paid to voters, this would, in effect, be paying people to vote. Now politicians routinely take some kind of moral highground on this issue, the voting as a duty argument, and it's utter nonsense. The votes of politicians are bought and paid for all the time. It's time to even the scales.