"I've got a pen," said President Obama early this week.
"I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions ... that move the ball forward."
"When I can act on my own without Congress, I'm going to do so," the president added Wednesday at North Carolina State.
Smoking Marlboros is now forbidden in Irish bars in New York City. But buying, selling, and smoking marijuana is legal in Colorado.
It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
But where are we going?
With twin suicide bombings in Volgograd, at a train station and on a trolley, 34 Russians are dead and scores are injured and hospitalized.
Moscow and the world have been put on notice by Doku Umarov, the Chechen Islamic terrorist, that the winter Olympics in Sochi, six weeks away, may not now be safe for visitors.
By their heroes shall you know them.
In his eulogy, President Obama put Nelson Mandela in the company of three other heroes: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Lincoln.
What did these men have in common? Three were assassinated, and all four are icons of resistance to white rule over peoples of color.
The scores are in from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, which, every three years, tests 15-year-olds from the world's most advanced countries.For the United States, the report card is dismal. The U.S. ranking has fallen to 17th in reading, 21st in science, and 26th in math.
When, after the massacres at Newtown and the Washington Navy Yard, Republicans refused to outlaw the AR-15 rifle or require background checks for gun purchasers, we were told the party had committed suicide by defying 90 percent of the nation.
"Iran's Nuclear Triumph" roared the headline of the Wall Street Journal editorial. William Kristol is again quoting Churchill on Munich.
Since the news broke Saturday night that Iran had agreed to a six-month freeze on its nuclear program, we are back in the Sudetenland again.
By 1968, Walter Lippmann, the dean of liberal columnists, had concluded that liberalism had reached the end of its tether.
In that liberal epoch, the 1960s, the Democratic Party had marched us into an endless war that was tearing America apart.
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society had produced four "long, hot summers" of racial riots and a national crime rate that had doubled in a decade. The young were alienated, the campuses aflame.
"Nothing is lost save honor."
So said Jim Fisk after he and Jay Gould survived yet another scrape in their corrupt and storied careers in the Gilded Age.
Fisk's dismissal of honor came to mind while watching Barack Obama in Boston smugly explain how his vow -- "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it!" -- was now inoperative.
The pots and pans are clanging for the ouster of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as the Obamacare website roll-out takes on the aspect of that of the Edsel.
Yet, though it is a website that has America laughing, Obama's legacy legislation itself could, in its entirety, be in peril. As ex-pilot George W. Bush used to say, this thing looks like a five-spiral crash.
