Wikileaks - Anti-Israel Foreign Policy Experts Got Saudi Arabia, Other Arab Countries 100% Backward On Iran Attack  —  By  —  It didn't get nearly as much play as it should have, but Obama's June 2009 meeting with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah ended with the monarch flying into a tirade …

First priority?  Control federal spending  —  Today is my first day in the U.S. Senate.  With this honor comes a tremendous responsibility to accomplish much for our nation.  —  My top priority is turning our economy around.  In Congress, we had a vigorous debate about the trillion-dollar stimulus.

Leslie Nielsen, Actor, Dies at 84  —  Leslie Nielsen, the Canadian-born actor who in middle age tossed aside three decades of credibility in dramatic and romantic roles to make a new, far more successful career as a comic actor in films like “Airplane!” and the “Naked Gun” series, died on Sunday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 84.

American exceptionalism: an old idea and a new political battle  —  Is this a great country or what?  —  “American exceptionalism” is a phrase that, until recently, was rarely heard outside the confines of think tanks, opinion journals and university history departments.

The Spanish Prisoner  —  The best thing about the Irish right now is that there are so few of them.  By itself, Ireland can't do all that much damage to Europe's prospects.  The same can be said of Greece and of Portugal, which is widely regarded as the next potential domino.  —  But then there's Spain.

Liberal Groups to Propose Routes to Smaller Deficit  —  WASHINGTON — As President Obama's fiscal commission faces a deadline this week for agreement on a plan to shrink the mounting national debt, liberal organizations will unveil debt-reduction proposals of their own in the next two days …

Portland bomb plot suspect felt betrayed by family, thought living in U.S. was sin  —  Mohamed Osman Mohamud was angry at his parents for keeping him from jihad and had thought about carrying out an operation, “something like Mumbai,” since he was 17.  On the two-year anniversary of the shooting …

PRECEDENT AND PROLOGUE  —  Momentous Supreme Court cases tend to move quickly into the slipstream of the Court's history.  In the first ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that ended the doctrine of separate but equal in public education, the Justices cited the case more than twenty-five times.

A Media False Alarm Over the T.S.A.  —  If a squadron of mad scientists surrounded by supercomputers gathered in a laboratory to try to conjure a single news topic that would blow up large, they could not touch the T.S.A. pat-down story.  —  It began with a Drudge Report link to a video …

A's for Good Behavior  —  A few years ago, teachers at Ellis Middle School in Austin, Minn., might have said that their top students were easy to identify: they completed their homework and handed it in on time; were rarely tardy; sat in the front of the class; wrote legibly; and jumped at the chance to do extra-credit assignments.

Most Continue to Favor Gays Serving Openly in Military  —  As the Pentagon prepares to release its highly anticipated survey of military personnel about the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy, most Americans (58%) say they favor allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces.

Obama could learn from Bush  —  The president could solve his communications problem by studying how his predecessor did it.  —  The day before his party's shellacking in this month's elections, President Obama sat down with his economic team to examine the single most important issue for voters across the country: jobs.