The Obama administration initially billed France about $18 million to cover U.S. military support for its mission in Mali, while Canada offered similar services at no cost.
So much for the "Grand Bargain" -- or at least for the not-so-grand gutting of Social Security and Medicare that the "very serious" thought-leaders of Washington political and media circles have always found so appealing. Whatever President Obama may have contemplated up until now, his second inaugural address, delivered yesterday on the steps of the Capitol, bluntly repudiated Republican arguments against the social safety net -- and forcefully identified those popular programs with the most sacred American values.
"We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity," said Obama -- not only because it is the responsibility we have to each other as human beings, but because security and dignity, for every man, woman, and child, are the existential foundations of freedom.
Commentators both left and right agree that Barack Obama's second inaugural speech Monday was highly partisan, with shoutouts to his constituencies on the left and defiance of his critics on the right.
President Obama in his inaugural address made it clear he intends to protect the nation's entitlement programs. In the world of Washington politics, this amounts to a pledge that the president will make sure that no changes will be made to programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, "Government can."
Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average -- until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California.
Open-access people, meet the copyright laws. Much has been written about Aaron Swartz, the computer genius who killed himself after being charged with a variety of cybercrimes. Some ardent friends accuse the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of having cruelly called in the police to deal with him.
By then, MIT had foiled multiple attempts to illegally download academic journals and realized that someone had broken in to a wire closet to achieve the same end. MIT security analysts had also detected activity from China on the netbook being used, making them extra wary.
Have the House Republicans come up with a winning strategy on the debt ceiling and spending cuts? Or just a viable one? Maybe so.
They certainly need one that is at least the latter, if not the former. Barack Obama is up in the polls since the election, as most re-elected presidents have been. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows him with 52 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval. Other public polls have similar results.
In contrast, the NBC/WSJ poll reports that only 26 percent have positive feelings about the Republican Party and 51 negative feelings. Toward Speaker John Boehner only 18 percent have positive feelings and 37 percent negative feelings.
Aaron Swartz: Robin Hood or John Dillinger? He was not as virtuous as Robin and hardly as bad as John. Call the computer genius saint or sinner, few will argue with labeling his suicide at age 26 a "tragic loss."
His friends in the "free culture movement" now accuse federal authorities of having driven Swartz to kill himself over "baseless" charges. But he did break into a computer-wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and download academic papers for free distribution to the world. Had he been a street kid ripping off copper pipes, as opposed to tech star "liberating" information, would there have been much outcry over a prosecutor's threat of jail time?
Following the school shooting horror in Newtown, Conn., our nation shares a heartfelt belief that something must be done. Polls instantly showed an increase in support for stricter gun control laws. Fifty-one percent of American adults expressed that view in Rasmussen Reports polling.
A prolonged confrontation over the nation's debt ceiling -- unlike the "fiscal cliff," which provoked many scary headlines -- could truly be grave for both America and the world. While press coverage often mentions the possibility of lowered credit ratings for the U.S. Treasury (again), that might only be the mildest consequence if Republicans in Congress actually refuse to authorize borrowing and avoid default.
To judge from his surly demeanor and defiant words at his press conference on Monday, Barack Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern.
His point blank refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling was clearly designed to make the House Republicans look bad.
But Obama knows very well that negotiations usually accompany legislation to increase the government's debt limit. As Gordon Gray of the conservative American Action Network points out, most of the 17 increases in the debt ceiling over the last 20 years have been part of broader measures.
We in the media rarely lie to you.
But that leaves plenty of room to take things wildly out of context.
That's where most big scare stories come from, like recent headlines about GM foods. GM means "genetically modified," which means scientists add genes, altering the plant's DNA, in this case to make the crop resistant to pests.
"When it comes to torture," Amy Poehler said Sunday night as she opened the Golden Globes award ceremony, "I trust a lady who spent three years married to James Cameron." Yuk, yuk, YUCK.
That same evening on PBS's "Downton Abbey," the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) admonished granddaughter Lady Sybil, "Vulgarity is no substitute for wit." Now that was clever.
It's often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few years more than the Biblical lifespan of three score and 10.
The football helmet that State Department staffers presented Hillary Clinton upon her return to the office was cute, but only sort of. Same went for the "Clinton" football jersey bearing the number 112. That's how many countries she's visited since becoming secretary of state.
Clinton had been away sick for a month. She had suffered a stomach virus, which dehydrated her, which made her woozy, which led to a fall, which caused a concussion, which landed her in a hospital with a blood clot in her head.
Official Washington hailed the deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff as a significant bipartisan accomplishment. However, voters around the country viewed the deal in very partisan terms: Seven out of 10 Democrats approved of it, while seven out of 10 Republicans disapproved.
Just a few days after reaching that agreement, an inside-the-Beltway publication reported another area of bipartisan agreement. Politico explained that while Washington Democrats have always viewed GOP voters as a problem, Washington Republicans "in many a post-election soul-searching session" have come to agree. More precisely, the article said the party's Election 2012 failures have "brought forth one principal conclusion from establishment Republicans: They have a primary problem."
When Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned on national television over the weekend that Chuck Hagel "would be the most antagonistic secretary of defense toward the state of Israel in our nation's history," either his memory served him very poorly -- or he was simply lying to smear his former Senate colleague. For whatever Hagel's perspective on Mideast policy may be, it would be absurd to compare him with the Secretary of Defense whose hardline hostility toward Israel became notorious during the Reagan administration.
Barack Obama, we have been told by his admirers on the left and right, is an instinctive centrist, a moderate always ready to negotiate compromises, a politician deeply interested in the nuances of public policy.
The Obama administration now proposes to spend millions more on handouts, despite ample evidence of their perverse effects.
Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, says, "The single most important thing HUD does is provide rental assistance to America's most vulnerable families -- and the Obama administration is proposing bold steps to meet their needs." They always propose "bold steps."
A decorated Vietnam vet, Chuck Hagel combines experience in war with skepticism over turning to military solutions where diplomacy might work. Add to those qualifications a tendency to speak his mind (after using it), and the former Republican senator from Nebraska seems uniquely placed to lead the Department of Defense in 2013.
