Many Republican members of the House of Representatives have taken the extraordinary step of spending the August recess in Washington in order to respond to this heightened public awareness and concern about our parlous energy situation. They are using a House floor populated by tourists and other visitors as a platform from which to challenge an increasingly despotic Speaker Nancy Pelosi to permit legislative initiatives that will reduce our dangerous dependency on foreign oil suppliers who wish us ill.

Among them should be adoption of the Open Fuel Standard, a bipartisan initiative that would require cars sold in America to be capable of using not only gasoline, but "freedom fuels" (notably, ethanol and methanol) that we can readily make here or acquire from people who are not trying to kill us. According to the FDD poll, fully 91 percent of the respondents quite sensibly recognize that fuel choice is the best way to reduce our oil addiction.

Moscow has already demonstrated its serial willingness to use energy as a coercive weapon. Europe's acquiescence to the Russian rape of Georgia is an ominous indicator - both of the prospects for freedom-loving, but relatively weak, nations that look to the West for security and of the risks of energy dependence.

If the Putin-Medvedev regime gets away unscathed with this violent reassertion of authority over what it euphemistically calls the "Near Abroad," all of its once-enslaved neighbors will once again be at risk of Moscow's predations. Accordingly, creative ways must be found to impose costs for such behavior. At the very least, as Sen. John McCain has long suggested, the once-and-future Soviets must not be allowed to behave so while enjoying the privileged status of a member in good standing of the elite club of leading industrial nations, the so-called Group of 8.

Two other episodes this week remind us that the next American president will also have to deal with challenges at home that have worrisome implications both for the character and security of this country: the Islamists' inexorable efforts to insinuate incrementally the repressive theo-political program they call Shariah.

Mr. Mosely's story was picked up by the Associated Press and quickly became a national sensation as talk radio, Michelle Malkin and other bloggers and editorialists took Tysons to task for accommodating this affront to American labor and example of creeping Shariah. Faced with cries for boycotts of its products, the company moved to defuse the furor by making both Labor Day and Eid paid holidays.

The episode has called attention, however, to a serious problem: an influx of what often prove to be quite radical Muslim immigrant populations as part of a State Department refugee-resettlement program dating back to the Clinton administration. At Tysons, they reportedly engage in unhygienic practices and possibly pose a threat to food safety. In Shelbyville and other towns they are populating across America, many of these Islamist refugees are demanding separate Shariah-based legal arrangements and privileges, rather than assimilating.

Each of these events underscore a point that cannot be overemphasized in the run-up to Nov. 4: The man we hire to be our next president will serve as our commander-in-chief in perilous times in which we confront rising threats to our interests abroad and to our Constitution and society at home. Let us pray we choose wisely.