Hosni Mubarak, it appears, is not going to go quietly, or quickly.
He is not going to play the role assigned him in the White House script that has him resigning and fleeing Egypt in the face of mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square.
Among the biggest losers of the Egyptian uprising are, first, the Mubaraks, who are finished, and, next, the United States and Israel.
Hosni Mubarak will be out by year's end, if not the end of this month, or week. He will not run again and will not be succeeded by son Gamal, whom he had groomed and who has fled to London.
What America was to the world in 1950, General Motors was to the nation.
"O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us," wrote the poet Robert Burns.
As Hu Jintao wings his way home, America's hectoring still ringing in his ears, he must be thinking that maybe we Americans should stop lecturing them and take a closer look at ourselves.
The day that President Obama departed for Arizona to address the nation on the Tucson massacre, Washington was abuzz.
"The success of a party means little except when the nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose," said Woodrow Wilson in his first inaugural. "No one can mistake the purpose for which the nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party."
For those who have read about or vaguely remember the stolid British tribe of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, which held out in its "finest hour," last week brought a disgusting sight.
When communism collapsed in Moscow, Prague and Belgrade at the end of the Cold War, ethnic nationalism surged to the surface in all three nations and tore them apart into 24 countries.
Before Republican senators vote down the strategic arms reduction treaty negotiated by the Obama administration, they should think long and hard about the consequences.
Missiles fired from the Chinese mainland could destroy five of the six major U.S. air bases in the Far East. So states a new report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, adding:
