Forty years ago, American railroads were in trouble. The Penn Central, the largest railroad, had recently gone bankrupt.

Are Republicans no longer the party more inclined to military interventions and an assertive foreign policy?

It's a question raised by the enthusiastic response to Sen. Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster and to his not-very-interventionist foreign policy.

It's raised also by House Republicans' willingness to accept the budget sequester, which includes defense cuts that former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called "devastating."

What parts of America have been growing during these years of sluggish economic growth?

Answers come from comparing the Census Bureau's just-released estimates of metropolitan area populations in July 2012 with the results of the Census conducted in 2010.

The focus here is on the 51 metro areas with populations of more than 1 million where 55 percent of Americans live, most of them of course not in central cities but in suburbs and exurbs.

Two growth champs stick out -- Austin and Raleigh. A half-century ago, neither of them amounted to much.

Rarely does a political party issue a document so scathingly critical of itself and its most recent presidential nominee as the report of the five-member Growth and Opportunity Project of the Republican National Committee.

In an opinion article in the Columbus Dispatch, Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced that he has changed his mind and now supports same-sex marriage.

The College of Cardinals met in conclave on Tuesday to begin the process of electing a new pope.

They're flailing. That's the impression I get from watching Barack Obama and his White House over the past week.

The Dow set a new high on Tuesday, but the larger economy is a different story. What if today's sluggish economic growth turns out to be the new normal? That's the unsettling question asked by some of our most creative economic thinkers.

Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It's not an entirely unfair question.

Barack Obama is said to believe that he can win the political fight over the sequester. That's certainly the conventional wisdom.