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.

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.

Obama to Freeze Pay for Most Federal Workers for 2 Years  —  WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to announce a two-year pay freeze for civilian federal workers later Monday morning, according to an administration official, the latest White House move intended to demonstrate concern over sky-high deficit spending.

Blasts target Iranian nuclear scientists  —  One professor dies, another is injured on their morning commutes.  The attacks prompt a stern warning by the head of IranÂ's atomic energy agency.  —  Reporting from Beirut — Two separate explosions killed a nuclear scientist and injured another …

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 …

Democrats warm to tax-cut compromise  —  A faction of congressional Democrats is making a push to persuade President Obama to consider a compromise on tax policy that would leave only the nation's 315,000 richest households facing higher taxes in January.  —  Over the past few 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'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.

The Times then and now  —  The New York Times is participating in the dissemination of the stolen State Department cables that have been made available to it in one way or another via WikiLeaks.  My friend Steve Hayward recalls that only last year the New York Times ostentatiously declined …

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 …

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 BIG UNEASY  —  T he German and Chinese governments, Republican congressmen, the liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz, and Sarah Palin don't agree on much.  But they're united in their opposition to the Federal Reserve's second round of quantitative easing—or, as it's known, QE2.

Thomas L. Friedman: Nation-Building at Home Just as Crucial a Slogan Now as it Was 14 Columns Ago  —  Today's Thomas L. Friedman column is a familiar if distasteful brew of what-Americans-want ventriloquism and public policy by bumper sticker.  Sample: … And so on.

Dead Green Treaty Stinks Up The Room  —  What a difference a year makes.  Last year at this time, the Great Green Delusion — that the United Nations process could deliver a treaty that would stop global warming dead in its tracks — was the hottest idea in town.