This coming Wednesday will be the 102nd anniversary of the founding of the Boy Scouts of America. It will be lost in the hoopla of the Super Bowl game and all the other events taking place in this nation and around the world.

The millions of boys that have been affected by the Boy Scout movement have impacted this great country and world in ways that are countless and the national media probably won't even mention the organization. If they did, it would probably be in an editorial bemoaning the fact that the Boy Scouts of America have policies that are not deemed politically correct by the elites that pick and choose what should be the standards for this country.

This past weekend the political landscape changed a great deal thanks to the folks in South Carolina. Just days before the pundits were telling the nation that Mitt Romney had a double digit lead and that Newt Gingrich just did not have the money or the team to pull off a win. Then came the debates and the people got involved.

It comes down to the same reason we always play the game or run the race. All the talk prior to the event is speculation. It doesn't matter if the team is ranked first or is undefeated going up against a weaker rival. The game gets played and sometimes there is an upset.

One year from this week we as a nation will watch the inauguration of the president of the United States for the next four-year term. It may be Barack Obama again or it may end up being the Republican challenger. But come what may, there will be an inauguration.

During the months between now and election day we will watch as one man will spend $1 billion running on or away from his record asking for another four-year term. During the same time we will watch as the challenger will spend many hundreds of millions making his point that the resident needs to be defeated and a new direction for this nation needs to be set.

I will never forget the day of April 4, 1968.

I was a student at Poly High School in the San Fernando Valley and I lived in a poor section of the Valley. Racial tensions were high in this country during the 1960s and the unrest in the streets over the Vietnam War was not making things any better. Communication wasn't what it is today with cellular service and Internet connections so news getting onto school campuses was slow, incomplete, filled with rumors. When one inserts a teenager telling and retelling a story, the information is unreliable to say the least.

This past weekend we watched as the clock ticked away the final minutes and then the final seconds of 2011 and we welcomed in 2012. So it is out with the old and in with the new.

I hope for this year that we could all make that a mantra. Out with the old and in with the new. In this case I mean recycling. I know that most of us are working toward the goal of keeping a great deal of our trash out of the landfills and we are doing a fairly good job of that. We can do better but we have changed the nation's culture about recycling so we are making a great deal of progress in that effort. There is another way we need to recycle items around the house and office.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

--The First Amendment

Merry Christmas. As this week comes to an end so does the Christmas shopping experience. Santa Claus will be making his way from the North Pole on Christmas Eve and all the little ones will be tucked in their beds with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads.

During the weeks prior to Christmas we are inundated with sales and advertisements enticing us to buy that latest toy or gadget for those on our list. The stores play the music and the decorations are everywhere. Many people are convinced that the Twelve Days of Christmas are the twelve days before the holiday or are just a catchy tune.

I have heard that the president of the United States is going to have one billion in his campaign war chest to run for re-election. This billion dollars will be spent on top of any money spent by his party to encourage the voters to re-elect the teleprompter-reader-in-chief to another four-year term.

All of this is legal and above board. The president also enjoys the fact that as president, he gets constant coverage by all the news media in the nation and that he may use the presidential bully pulpit to campaign when he claims he is simply addressing his constituents. That is a perk of being president, and all in the past and those in the future will do the same thing.

"Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

Seventy years ago today President Franklin D. Roosevelt stood before a joint session of Congress and uttered these words. During his speech to those assembled in the hall, and to those listening on radios across this great land, the president told the story of the horrific attack that took place in the territory of Hawaii the day before. Up until that Sunday morning back in 1941, most Americans felt secure from an attack by a foreign enemy due to the oceans between the United States and the rest of the world. It changed the way Americans thought about defense forever.