In a discussion with plenty of other objectionable elements on Sean Hannity's Fox News show Friday, Juan Williams asserted that "There's no question that if you look at our Constitution, there are elements of racism right in it." Note his use of the present tense.

The version of this country's founding document Williams was referencing must be 147 or more years old, because the only element of the original Constitution which was arguably racist — the inclusion of non-free persons as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of allocating House seats in Article I — went away when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. Even that argument ignores the existence of white slaves at the time of its adoption.

At the recent meeting of the world's elites in Davos, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon circulated a proposal to ban cars in all major cities in the world by dense-packing their layouts. The cost, as I noted on Monday: a mere $90 trillion (that's right, trillion). It's telling in a foreboding sense that the pair's idea wasn't laughed off the continent.

Enviro-nutty ideas such as these trace their origin to Gore's 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance," in which Gore called the internal combustion engine "the mankind's greatest enemy." In reality, it is arguably the greatest enabler of human progress in the world's history. So readers should take some delight in articles appearing two years apart — one at Time.com, and another at the Wall Street Journal, where the authors predict that the odds seem to be in favor of the evil internal combustion engine continuing to outshine the enviros' favored alternatives for at least the next couple of decades. Gore and his media enablers surely wail and gnash their teeth when such inconvenient items rear their scientific heads.

The nation’s leading newspapers buried the Senate’s strong 62-36 vote for the "controversial" Keystone XL pipeline inside Friday’s newspapers. Nine Democrats joined unanimous Republicans in setting up an Obama veto. Other stories seemed more interesting to the papers -- like the president's budget plans.

House vote?

In his State of the Union address — perhaps, based on the recommendations for government involvement and control he made therein, better described as his Statist of the Union address — President Obama referenced the "growing" U.S. economy at least three times, but "recovery" only once. Specifically, he claimed that "thanks to a growing economy, the recovery is touching more and more lives."

The recovery, which Obama acknowledged is still in progress over 5-1/2 years after the recession officially ended, has a great deal more "touching" to do. On January 12, the National Association of Counties released a detailed study which most of the press ignored, but which would have been front-page and broadcast-leading news in a Republican or conservative presidential administration. The NACo report showed that only 65 of the nation's 3,069 counties have fully recovered from the recession. That's bad enough, but even with that ugly statistic, the results involved are worse than they appear.

The old saying — "To err is human, but to really screw things up, you need a computer" — needs an update. In this case, it's "To err is human, but to wreck an entire industry, you need to have the federal government try to force it to computerize."

I'm referring to the government's attempt to coerce doctors into using its mandated, "clunky, time-sucking" electronic health records system. Somehow, it's barely news, with a story by Politico Magazine's Arthur Allen constituting a rare exception, that over a quarter-million doctors, i.e., half of all who are eligible, face fines next year for "failing to use the systems in the way the government required."