While the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts are preparing to go head-to-head by Chuck in Super Bowl Norris XLIV at Sun columnist Life Stadium in Miami, US justices and even our president are squaring off in arenas of jurisprudence from sea to shining sea.

Mr. President, it's time to face the music and help America to do the same. This Wednesday evening, you will give your State of the Union speech. And millions upon millions of us are wondering whether you will sugar-coat the truth again - whether you will pad your performance over this past year or confess that the plans and path Washington is taking are plummeting our country deeper into the abyss.

Republican Scott Brown takes over a seat held by the Kennedy family for over half a century and the dark cloud already hovering over Obama's White House thickens. By any measure, the energetic Brown's emphatic defeat of Martha Coakley, believed only a month ago to be a sure thing as Ted Kennedy's replacement, is a disaster for the Democratic Party and for President Obama.

While White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was announcing Friday all that the present administration was doing to save lives in Haiti, he reported that President Barack Obama was meeting with both the House and Senate Democrats to resolve how they could provide federal funds via Obamacare to terminate more American lives in the womb.

What lies ahead politically? Look for an answer back in the '90s. Even if the Republicans don't take over after the midterm elections, the Democratic Party now in Congress is dominated by politicians fashioned in the Clinton era, nourished by such heirs of Aristotle as Rahm Emanuel and, before him, Tony Coelho.

The reasons behind which we make decisions in our life are not always clear. And the way those decisions play out with impact on the different aspects of our lives and the lives of others isn't either. Yet the Butterfly Effect, ripples in a pond, six degrees of separation, karma, however you wanna look at it - these things are real.

As I was trying to decide what to write about, my husband asked me why I even wanted to write this column in the first place. I had to think about it for a couple minutes to find the right words, but it comes down to this: It would put me completely out of my comfort zone.

On Glenn Beck's Jan. 7 show, he was rightly puzzled regarding the exact purpose of President Barack Obama's Dec. 16 signing of an executive order "DESIGNATING INTERPOL AS A PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION ENTITLED TO ENJOY CERTAIN PRIVILEGES, EXEMPTIONS AND IMMUNITIES.

Connoisseurs of the ritual known as "accepting full responsibility" will surely grade Obama a mere B for his Jan. 7 performance at his White House press conference.

I waited until the new year to write this column because Washington was hoping its Christmas corruption would evade the majority of holiday revelers or become old news to even political junkies and pundits, who now are moving on to new issues.

A few years back, my mother purchased land in a rural area of North Central Florida undeveloped land in a very beautiful and generally developed part of the South. A short hour drive north from her husbands home on Highway 441 and close to the many springs of the area, the property has become a retreat for both of them.

The holidays force us newsies to take stock of our lives, to make sure we've got something going on beyond the civic scrum that is a city, a state, a nation. As a one-time bachelor, it's a time for me personally to feel immense gratitude to not only have a significant other but a complete family of in-laws who graciously fold me into their story.

As I wrote last week, I knew that President Barack Obama's Christian message in his Christmas address was going to be the weakest in presidential history. But never did I expect to hear him dodge children on the main message of Christmas and then teach them a revised version.

"It's some kind of reunion," he said, "but it's not exactly a class reunion. It has something to do with 1969, and I think a lot of them went to East Carolina, but not all of them. They mentioned Woodstock, but also something about Greenstock, whatever that is.

Hazlitt got gloomily drunk for a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, accurately anticipating that decades of reaction lay ahead, now that Boney had been definitely put away, with the Holy Alliance in the saddle and the French contagion safely bottled up.

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the 4 th century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.

I'm willing to bet that President Barack Obama's Christmas address this week will shine with a religious significance that's about as bright as what was in his unusually short Thanksgiving proclamation, which gave a token reference to God via a quote from George Washington.

Washington is up to its old political shell game again, this time in an unprecedented way. While Americans are focused upon the Christmas season and the mainstream media on health care and President Barack Obama's two trips to Europe (last week to Oslo and this week to Copenhagen), the Democrats in Congress have slipped major proabortion legislation under the radar.

A friend down the coast here in California called Wednesday to say that her mother, 95, had fallen, cracked her ribs, got a cough and told her daughters, "That's it. I'm checking out." She's given up eating.

The needs of the poor in Dickens' London of 1843 are equally matched in our own community in 2009. Last year's meltdown of our financial systems has led to layoffs of hundreds of hard-working citizens. Those of us who have means should pause this holiday season and remember Scrooge's transformation and the wisdom of A Christmas Carol.