Barack Obama's birthday is tomorrow (or is it?) and in the spirit of gift giving, I've got something for the 28% of Republicans who don't believe Obama was born in America: An invitation to common ground.

Here's the first place we can agree: It would be nice if the president would ask Hawaii to release his original, long form birth certificate.

There are all kinds of perfectly good moral, legal and political reasons why he shouldn't, but, frankly, I'm still tuckered out from all the perfectly good moral, legal and political reasons Hillary Clinton wouldn't release the Rose Law Firm billing records.

I'm not going through that hell again.

Thousands of years ago people lived in close knit clans and the population of the world was only a tiny fraction of what it is now. People could go an entire life time without ever encountering a stranger. Unfortunately, sometimes strangers purposely encountered them.

One particular day at one particular village a very long time ago, such an encounter took place. It was just after dawn on a foggy morning that the village clan was going about its normal morning routine. Firewood was gathered, fires were lit, and food preparation was underway. Mothers breast fed their babies, children played and elders sat waiting to be fed.

The comforting sounds of fire crackling and children laughing were interrupted by the muffled rumbling of hoof beats and the sharp clatter of scraping metal coming from somewhere beyond the fog. The sounds grew louder and more distinct by the second, and so, sensing danger, the people of the clan quickly gathered together in the center of the camp.

Moments later, emerging from the haze came a terrifying vision:

Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. "We have observed," Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, "the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter (below), which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks."

It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth, about 70 million years ago, was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. A few small early mammals survived, but anything as large as a human, would have almost certainly been wiped out.

The list of cosmic objects that could hit Earth is growing. Scientists study satellite 'tractors' and nuclear weapons as ways to divert asteroids headed our way.

When an object smacked into Jupiter over the weekend, giving astronomers their best cosmic-collision show since the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994, the giant gas ball of a planet took the poke like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

For all its scientific interest, however, the collision also serves as a stark reminder that the solar system remains a shooting gallery - with Earth, as well as Jupiter, on the wrong side of the firing line.

The object's signature on Jupiter's cloud tops initially was discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley as he gathered digital images of the giant planet through his 14.5-inch telescope. After alerting other astronomers to what appeared to be a "scar" in the cloud tops similar to those generated by the pieces of Shoemaker-Levy 9, NASA scientists trained a 3-meter (9.8-foot) infrared telescope on the planet and got a good look at the scar.

Sanford, Ensign, and other regulars receive guidance from the invisible fundamentalist group known as the Family

I can't say I was impressed when I met Sen. John Ensign at the C Street House, the secretive religious enclave on Capitol Hill thrust into the news by its links to three political sex scandals, those of Gov. Mark Sanford; former Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., who allegedly rendezvoused at the C Street House with his mistress, an executive in the industry for which he then became a lobbyist; and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. Although Sanford declared today that his scandal will actually turn out to be good for the people of South Carolina because he's now more firmly in God's control, the once-favored GOP presidential prospect will finish out his term and fade away. And Ensign's residence at the C Street House during his own extramarital affair now threatens to end a career that he and other Republicans hoped would lead him to the White House.

When I met Ensign, he was just back from a run, sweaty and bouncing in place, boasting about the time he'd clocked and teasing a young woman from his office. She seemed annoyed that the senator wouldn't get himself into a shower and back on the job. When I wrote about Sen. Ensign in my book about the evangelical political organization that runs the C Street House, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," I described him as a "conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name."

And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

- Matthew 10:36

This is how they pray: a dozen clear-eyed, smooth-skinned "brothers" gathered together in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoulders like the weave of a cable, leaning in on one another and swaying like the long grass up the hill from the house they share. The house is a handsome, gray, two-story colonial that smells of new carpet and Pine-Sol and aftershave; the men who live there call it Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac, quiet but for the buzz of lawn mowers and kids playing foxes-and-hounds in the park across the road, Ivanwald sits as one house among many, clustered together like mushrooms, all devoted, like these men, to the service of Jesus Christ. The men tend every tulip in the cul-de-sac, trim every magnolia, seal every driveway smooth and black as boot leather. And they pray, assembled at the dining table or on their lawn or in the hallway or in the bunk room or on the basketball court, each man's head bowed in humility and swollen with pride (secretly, he thinks) at being counted among such a fine corps for Christ, among men to whom he will open his heart and whom he will remember when he returns to the world not born-again but remade, no longer an individual but part of the Lord's revolution, his will transformed into a weapon for what the young men call "spiritual war."

Revelations that the Central Intelligence Agency launched a world-wide assassination program, and then concealed its existence from the U.S. Congress and the American people for eight years, carries an implication that death squads may have been employed against political opponents.

The Wall Street Journal reported July 13 that "A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter."

Investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman writes, "The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn't clear, and the CIA won't comment on its substance."

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup - which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman - not to mention ...

According to AccuWeather.com's Chief Meteorologist and Expert Long Range Forecaster Joe Bastardi, cooler-than-normal weather this summer in the Northeast could point to a cold, snowy winter for the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states. He says the heart of winter will be centered over the area from Boston to Washington, D.C.

For people across the Great Lakes and Northeast, this has been the coolest summer in more than a decade. After a period of more classic summer heat in the coming weeks, cooler weather is expected to continue the trend of the "Year Without True Summer." For Southeast residents, the hot topic for the end of summer will be the tropics heating up after August 15th.

The Weather So Far this Summer

This summer has been unusually cool across the Northeast, northern Plains and parts of the West. Places like New York City and Philadelphia, which are typically warm and humid this time of year, have had relatively cool and wet weather instead.

Get out the sweat shirt and forget the shorts.

The low temperature this morning is expected to be near the record low temperature for the day: 49 degrees set in 1940.

Lower than normal temperatures have dominated the first 13 days of July, keeping swimmers out of area pools and forcing people to wear sweat shirts or jackets in the early morning and evening hours.

Ingrid Amberger, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albany, said the jet stream of cool air coming out of the north has remained farther south than it usually is in July.

"It hasn't retreated north," Amberger said. "It usually goes up into Canada."

The first 12 days of July were, on average, nearly 5 degrees cooler than normal, Amberger said.