Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a congressional panel Thursday that shrinking the deficit "should be a top priority," saying that spending projections over the next decade are "clearly unsustainable."

Stressing that the budgetary threat did not emerge from the past three years alone of $1 trillion-plus budget deficits — with a fourth expected for 2012 — meant to ease the recession and aid the recovery, Bernanke warned the debt could explode over the next 20 to 30 years to levels that could paralyze the economy.  The government faces an aging population, fast-rising health care costs, and a failure to close the gap between taxes and spending.

In Nevada four years, ago, less than 3 percent of adults participated in the caucuses.   Pollsters using standard sampling techniques would need to screen out virtually all of their initial respondents to identify true likely caucus-goers.

In the other states, the 2008 turnout was even lower, varying between 1.8 percent of all adults in Colorado to 0.5 percent in Maine.

President Barack Obama has been taking lumps from Republicans for years over his support for Wall Street and health care reform, but today at the National Prayer Breakfast he claimed support from on high to defend two of his most controversial legislative achievements.

Westneat thought that I was objecting to the public money that would be spent on a new university — and there would be large sums from the taxpayer, even if it were a private university, as he had proposed.

Actually, my objection is more fundamental:  Before we build another university, we should find out why our universities are failing to educate so many of their students.

Westneat strikes me as man who is impressed by credentials, so I will bring in, as a witness for my argument, Derek Bok, twice president of Harvard University.  (As far as I can tell, Bok is very respected by his peers.)

In 2006, Bok published Our Underachieving Colleges, a book with a modest title, and a set of dismaying conclusions.  (If you are going to read it, you may want to find the 2008 paperback version, which has an afterword on his second time as president of Harvard.)

In his introduction, Bok summarizes some earlier criticisms and says that, net, college students do learn something — and that many of them are pleased with their college experience.  He then gives his own indictment:

These positive results suggest that the critics were too harsh and too one-sided in their judgements.  They do not prove that all is well with undergraduate education.   Far from it.  Despite the favorable opinions of undergraduates and alumni, a closer look at the record in the chapters that follow shows that colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should.  Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers.  Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education.  Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language.  Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy.  And those are only some of the problems.

I didn't write that; Derek Bok did.  But many others could have, and since 2006, a number of researchers have followed up with studies that strengthen Bok's conclusions.

How bad is it?  Roughly this bad:  About thirty or forty percent of the graduates from our colleges and universities get little from their years in college, except some pleasant social experiences — and some very large debts.

Those college students who do not graduate — and there are millions of them — learn even less, though they may have almost as many pleasant social experiences — and almost as large debts.

Failure on that scale calls for analysis, not replication.  Rather than building a new college or university, we need to learn why our current colleges and universities are failing so many of their students.  When the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge fell down, we didn't build another one like it, we studied it to see what was wrong with the design.

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president's re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?

What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns?  Suppose also that the president's surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity.  On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president's party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly—and accurately—stated that you have no involvement?

PPP's tracking of the Florida Republican primary wraps up with Mitt Romney at 39%, Newt Gingrich at 31%, Rick Santorum at 15%, and Ron Paul at 11%.  Our three days of tracking found very little movement in the race: Romney was at 39-40% every day, Gingrich was at 31-32% every day, Santorum was at 14-15% every day, and Paul was at 9-11% every day.

Another round of new polls on the Florida Republican primary race agree on who is comfortably ahead, but disagree on the size of that margin.  Six new polls released late Sunday or Monday found that Mitt Romney's lead over Newt Gingrich ranges from five to 20 percentage points.

Some of the largest margins came from four polls that reached voters over both landline and mobile phones, including three surveys released on Monday:

So, it turns out that the cool cat billed as "No Drama Obama" by his sycophants is actually quite the drama queen.  While the White House publicly pretends to ignore conservative detractors of his administration, Chief Touchy-Touchy seems to be personally consumed by our critiques.  Yes, mine included.

"[Obama contributor John] Rogers had just noticed a new book by the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin called 'Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies.'  Among many other allegations, Malkin wrote that Michelle Obama — the president's 'bitter half' — was secretly running the country in Lady Macbeth-like fashion.  Malkin even took a hatchet to long-dead Fraser Robinson (Mrs. Obama's father), arguing with no evidence that his job at a water plant made him part of the 'Chicago political corruptocracy.'  The book debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and stayed there for weeks."

The facts? It was a former alderman in Chicago, Leon Depres, who provided evidence that Robinson's job in the city water department was a reward for loyalty to the Daley political faction.

It was Washington Post writer Liza Mundy who reported that the department was "a renowned repository of patronage jobs."

Dorothea Taylor, 86, was largely unknown outside of Alaska before Jan. 20 when she thumped a moose with a shovel while it attacked her dogs and — she later learned — her husband, George.
. . .
She said she harnessed all the strength in her 5-foot-tall, 97-pound frame on the final blow she landed against the moose's rump, which cracked the shovel.

"I hit it with everything I had," Taylor said.

This brings us to the Buffett Rule, which at its heart is a way to raise taxes on dividends and capital gains.  Berkshire still doesn't pay a dividend, and as for capital gains taxes, well, Mr. Buffett has already made clear that he'll largely avoid them by transferring his fortune to the Gates Foundation and to charitable trusts controlled by his family.  In fact, at the 2010 Berkshire annual shareholders meeting, according to Dow Jones Newswires, Mr. Buffett urged attendees to "follow my tax dodging example" and give away their wealth.  Democrats in Washington may enjoy using Mr. Buffett as cover to raise taxes, just as long as they understand that he won't necessarily be paying them.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will "actively support" French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a fellow conservative, in his spring campaign to win re-election, her Christian Democrat (CDU) party in Berlin said.

A spokesman for the CDU said Merkel, in her capacity as the leader of Germany's conservatives, was planning to make several joint campaign appearances with Sarkozy in the spring, ahead of the two-round French election on April 22 and May 6.

Agent Provocateur saw sales jump by more than 12pc, helped by US First Lady Michelle Obama spending $50,000 (£31,794) in one shopping spree.

The First Lady — better known for shopping at more modestly-priced High Street stores — along with the Queen of Qatar, Sheikha Mozah, closed off part of Madison Avenue to spend time in the luxury lingerie shop.  Their purchases contributed to a market-spanking 12.5pc lift in sales.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse.  They have good reason to worry.  In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years.  The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position.  Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union.   Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs.  Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

In Iraq this year I asked an Iraqi military officer doing joint training at an American base what was the big thing he had come to believe about Americans in the years they had been there.  He thought.  "You are a better people than your movies say."  He had judged us by our exports.  He had seen the low slag heap of our culture and assumed it was a true expression of who we are.

Hillary had sent word that she wanted to talk to Obama.  Standing in front of her plane, she apologized to him for the comments of her co-chairman in New Hampshire, Billy Shaheen, who had warned that Republicans would pounce on Obama's confessions of cocaine and marijuana use.

But given the opening, Obama dived in, telling Clinton that she should intervene to stop the pattern of insinuations and attacks by her supporters, including one by a volunteer in Iowa who had forwarded an e-mail claiming Obama was a Muslim.

That's when Hillary got upset and began gesticulating, giving Obama a piece of her mind about what she saw as unfair attacks on his side.  Obama gently put his hand on her arm "to chill her out," as an aide later told me.