I sometimes write letters to the editor.

For 23 years, my show has presented thousands of topics that reflect the human experience, including doctors' medical advice and personal health stories that have prompted conversations between our audience members and their health care providers. I trust the viewers, and I know that they are smart and discerning enough to seek out medical opinions to determine what may be best for them.

Oh and here folks is another of those turn the other cheek, love your neighbor Christians that make this country great.

But Drake announced on Fox News Radio something that even Colmes could not wrap his head around. Apparently, in addition to AU’s Lynn and Dr. Tiller, Drake has been praying for the death of – wait for it –President Barack Obama!

“So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?” host Colmes asked in disbelief.

“Yes,” Drake responded.

Drake said he didn’t fear that these statements would maybe place him on a Secret Service or FBI watch list.

“I think it’s appropriate to pray the Word of God,” Drake said. “I’m not saying anything. What I am doing is repeating what God is saying, and if that puts me on somebody’s list, then I’ll just have to be on their list.”

Later, still stunned, Colmes restated the question, “You would like the president of the United States to die?”

Answered Drake, “If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that’s correct.”

In WEIT, I describe several studies showing that natural selection can change species over periods shorter than a human lifetime. These studies have been important in convincing skeptics (although not creationists, who will never be convinced) that natural selection is more than just a speculation, but a force that can really mold animal behaviors, appearances, and reproductive traits in real time. The most famous of these, of course, is the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant on a species of Darwin’s finch. Their work showed that individuals’ beak and body characteristics could change over a single generation when an El Niño event changed the finch’s food. (See The Beak of the Finch, by Jon Weiner, for a popular account of the Grants’ work.)

Now a group of researchers from Canada and the US have reported natural selection acting in guppies, molding their reproductive behavior over a period of only 8 years: roughly 13-26 guppy generations.

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fi ngers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy, ” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.