Fear is a big motivator in politics. This has been known ever since Niccolò Machiavelli pointed it out, at the very least. The Republican Party has shown mastery in the use of this fact for years. To be fair, Democrats also attempt the tactic from time to time, but this isn't really relevant to the discussion of Senator Marco Rubio and his continuing push to get his fellow Republicans to support his efforts on immigration reform. Because while Republican fear-mongering is usually directed at Democrats, Rubio's tactics are aimed directly at members of his own party. His clever talking points are aimed, these days, at House Republicans who are reluctant to support the Senate immigration reform bill Rubio helped draft. Yesterday, he upped the ante in this game, with a frightening (for them) new attempt to scare Republicans into supporting his effort.

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The big political news today, of course, was President Obama's press conference. While the subject matter largely revolved around the National Security Agency reforms Obama is belatedly proposing, I found the rest of the presser to be more interesting, personally -- mostly because the excerpt we're going to provide will in all likelihood be virtually ignored in most media reports. But we'll get to all that in the remainder of the column.

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The news of Bradley Manning's conviction today on multiple charges (and his acquittal on the most serious one) has people lining up to either defend or denounce the verdict. We'll probably be hearing about it all week, in fact. When he is sentenced, it will spur another round of this debate, no doubt.

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The news that Liz Cheney is going to run for a Senate seat in Wyoming has certainly provoked a number of interesting reactions from the inside-the-Beltway set. From the Right, there has been consternation over Cheney primarying a sitting Republican, which mostly focuses on the unseemliness of it all. From the Left, there has been a mixture that I would call "horrified fascination" over the prospects of Dick Cheney's daughter sitting in the upper chamber of Congress (that's the horror part), tempered by the unrestrained glee of watching an internal Republican knife-fight. One thing's for certain, this will be one of the closest-watched primary races in the country next year.

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The recent developments in Egypt have caused an interesting reaction from American political commenters, because real-world events have an annoying way of not fitting neatly into our prepackaged political pigeonholes. The basic questions (such as: "Is the overthrow of Morsi a good thing or a bad thing?") have complex answers, because while many argue that Morsi was bad for Egypt, the way he was removed from office is certainly nothing to celebrate. The United States government can't use the word "coup" because that would mean we'd have to cut off aid, but outside the world of diplomatic fictions, that's exactly what happened: a military coup d'état. As coups go it was a fairly restrained one, but celebrating a populist/military overthrow of a democratically-elected leader is an unusual stance for Americans to take, for obvious reasons. Even if we do like the new guy better than the old guy.

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Arizona is a truly beautiful state. It has many spectacular sights, of which the Grand Canyon is the most awe-inspiring. But Arizona is also a state of forbidding landscapes -- much of the state is desert or near-desert, where the heat of the midday sun is a force of nature to be heavily respected, if not downright feared. But what has put Arizona into the news recently is its "forbidding" political landscape. Specifically, on immigration.

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We stand at the beginning of a grand debate on immigration. America goes through these grand debates every generation or so, and what remains constant is that both sides in the fight can be counted upon to accuse the other side of "playing politics" with the immigration issue. This has, indeed already begun.

Republicans are offering up a splendid display of doublethink on the issue, in order to be able to say: "Hah! We were right all along," no matter what happens. Republicans make two accusations, which are completely contradictory (which doesn't seem to bother them at all), that the whole thing is just a cynical political game: (1) Obama and the Democrats want to legalize 11 million people who will then immediately become reliable Democratic voters, and/or (2) Obama and the Democrats will somehow find a way to scuttle the deal because they really don't want to pass any law, they just want to use the issue to beat up Republicans, in election after election. As I mentioned, no matter what happens, they'll be able to fall back on one of these tropes. Democrats, however, are using the second of these (with slight modification) to explain their own wariness: Republicans just want to be able to say: "We tried something" during the next election, and they will find a way to scuttle the deal in the end while blaming Democrats for the legislative failure.

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Last week, Republicans seem to have decided that the whole "autopsy" business after they got beaten so badly in the 2012 elections was just hogwash, and that they should double-down on their demonization and scapegoatery efforts. The "Plum Line" blog over at WashingtonPost.com has a good rundown (although now that the site is disappearing behind a paywall, I may have to reconsider linking to its articles in the future).

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On a lonely hill outside the small town of Cobh, Ireland (pronounced: "cove"), is a mass grave marked by three somber headstones. As mass graves go, it's a fairly small one; holding not tens of thousands or even thousands, but merely a few hundred bodies. But the relative size of the grave on the scale of human misery is beside the point -- because while few, their deaths had monumental consequences for America. The dead were civilians, not soldiers (more on them in a minute). But their deaths deserve memorializing today just as much as those we remember who wore the uniform of our country. Because this is the final resting place of the people onboard the Lusitania.

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Some weeks, not much happens in political news, and other weeks it seems like almost too much happens. This was one of the latter types of week.

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