It has been more than a day since the horrific act of terror at the Boston Marathon happened. Nobody knows much of anything, at this point, but it certainly hasn't stopped some from taking their free-floating anger and directing it at their own particular "usual suspects." This is pointless, but it is also hard to ignore, as we all wait for actual proof, real data, and the identification of any possible perpetrator of such a tragedy.

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Today, I have nothing to say.

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In this week's news, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died. As a result, Cher fans got a scare. The dangers of hashtag parsing -- because "nowthatchersdead" can be broken up two ways. The other pop culture result of the "Iron Lady's" demise was (you can't make this stuff up) the song "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead" rocketing to the top of the British charts, even though it is three-quarters of a century old. Make of it what you will.

Back home, the New York City bribery scandal where a Democrat tried to buy his way onto the Republican ballot for mayor has taken a bizarre twist. Not just a "sex with a young staffer" sort of twist, but also a "bizarre religious practices" twist as well. Only in New York, we suppose, could a Republican "Theodist" get elected.

Speaking of Ding Dongs and the New York City mayor's office (how's that for an awesome segue?), Anthony Weiner is now exploring his own... um.... chances of winning the mayor's race, apparently. Late night comics everywhere are rejoicing, one assumes. I mean, look how easy it was for a non-professional comedian to put together a joke about it, using only Margaret Thatcher and Republican weirdness as a launching point!

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OK, I'll admit right up front that that title is a bit of hyperbole. I really haven't documented 4,396 other instances of Republican hypocrisy. It just feels like it, that's all. Today's installment even crosses over from garden-variety hypocrisy to full-blown Orwellian doublethink, in fact.

Congressman Greg Walden, who is the leader of the Republican group whose mandate it is to get more Republicans elected to the House of Representatives, just attacked President Barack Obama's budget proposal -- from the left. Stunning, isn't it? Walden decried Obama's offer to use "chained CPI" to gradually reduce Social Security payments to seniors -- which, coincidentally enough, is exactly what progressives are slamming Obama for right now. The progressive response was to be expected, since protecting Social Security is (or used to be, at any rate) a core value of the Democratic Party. But it sure is mighty strange to see Walden over there on the left with the progressives.

To understand exactly how strange this phenomenon is, a little history is required. Here is the Republican storyline on Social Security and Medicare, starting roughly 75 years ago.

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Democrats seem to be showing slightly more enthusiasm these days for attacking the endless filibustering in the Senate by Republicans. If this truly is the beginning of a trend, it would be notable, but it's too early so far to say that it's going to gain political traction or not. We're still waiting for the votes to be counted, to put this another way. But while the glimmerings seen recently from Democrats may not be sustained, it's still worth pointing them out, if only to encourage such behavior among the party at large.

Republicans, except for a brief two-month period when Democrats held a 60-seat advantage (right before the death of Ted Kennedy), have been filibustering with abandon, ever since they lost control of the Senate. They've been able to do so for one reason and one reason alone -- they have not had to pay a political price for doing so. The media has been lulled into a screaming inaccuracy (countless stories run with some form of the untruth: "the Senate requires 60 votes to pass a bill"), which has taken almost all the pressure off Republicans to justify their actions. Democrats have mostly gone along with this as well, except for the occasional "Tsk! Tsk!' from Harry Reid, and except for more-liberal Senate Democrats who never get quoted in the mainstream media.

Perhaps this is changing. At the forefront of this change is President Obama. On gun control legislation, Obama chose his rhetoric carefully, starting with his State Of The Union speech. Obama called loudly for just "a vote," and then tried to shame the Senate into allowing that to happen with the repeated refrain: "They deserve a vote!" By doing this, he was actually setting the legislative bar pretty low (he wasn't demanding passage of a law, after all, just "a vote"), but he has stuck to this idea with tenacity -- even in the face of the "Washington chattering class" pronouncing itself tired of the whole gun control debate, a few weeks back. The groupthink inside the Beltway had all but come to the conclusion: "The public doesn't care about gun control any more, so Obama's legislation is dead and buried, let's just move on to more fun subjects, shall we?" Obama refused to let it drop, though, and kept hammering away at the issue in public. Central to his argument was the "they deserve a vote" idea.

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In the midst of all North Korea's saber-rattling, the United States made a major military announcement yesterday which is going to change the future of warfare in significant ways. Not to put too fine a point on it, but America just unveiled the first working phaser weapon. The Pentagon doesn't call it that, they call it a "laser weapon system," but this is merely semantics from a bunch of guys who probably didn't spend a lot of time watching science-fiction as kids. Their loss. But no matter what the big brass wants to call it, the fact is that Captain Kirk's phasers are now a reality.

The video, which I am too lazy to search for at the moment, shows a ship-mounted laser cannon (again, they probably call it something else, but that's essentially what it is) shooting down an unmanned drone aircraft out of the sky.

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The 2012 election happened over five months ago, at the beginning of November. One notable result of this election was that two states -- Washington and Colorado -- voted to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use. This was a direct challenge to federal drug policy. We are all still waiting for the Obama administration's response. I don't know about you, but I, for one, am getting a little sick and tired of the wait.

I cannot name another contentious issue that President Obama has stonewalled in such a fashion during the same time period. We've had policy announcements, speeches, or other White House activity on such hot-button issues as: gay marriage, gun control, contraception, Social Security, Medicare, taxes, the federal budget, drones, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, immigration reform, women's rights, climate change, and probably a number of others that don't immediately spring to mind. The public knows where Obama stands on these issues, or at the very least knows the general direction of his policy. But not on marijuana. On that particular issue, we are left to guess.

There is simply no excuse for this. Allow me to point out, once again: it has been over five months since the election. During this entire time, we have heard not a peep from Barack Obama, nary a word from Eric Holder. Nothing. The stonewalling is complete.

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We've got a lot to cover this week, so we're going to try to get through everything in a rather foreshortened format. At least, that's the goal (I have lost count of the times I've started one of these columns with "It's going to be shorter this time, dammit!" and then wound up with the usual tome's-worth of text when I get to the end).

First, some "old business" to start. For anyone who missed it, and is still in a foolish mood, some House Democrats put together an amusing "House of Fools" website to poke fun at Republicans.

With that out of the way, we're going to take a quick overview of what the media considers the big stories of the week, and we're going to end up in the Talking Points section with all the stories you may have missed due to the media being distracted by this stuff, just for fun.

President Obama just waded into some brackish waters in the sexism swamp by how he referred to California's attorney general at a fundraiser. Note to politicians: since the late 1970s, it has no longer been acceptable to comment upon professional women's appearance in any way, shape, or form. Obama immediately apologized, but be on the lookout for some late-night comedians making a few funny jokes tonight.

Obama also made a gesture this week, to give up five percent of his income in solidarity with the pain the sequester cuts are causing to hundreds of thousands of workers. Which prompted me to suggest yesterday how the federal budget could easily be cut to save fifty times the money Obama will be saving, by abolishing the offices of the congressional chaplains.

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President Obama is in the news this week, for voluntarily giving up five percent of his yearly pay, to show solidarity with federal workers who will be adversely financially affected by the sequester cuts. This will save the American taxpayer $20,000. This may be a drop in the bucket, so I thought I'd offer up a suggestion as to how to save a lot more money, on a permanent basis: abolish the offices of the two congressional chaplains.

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate spend a lot of money on hiring a spiritual leader. I do not argue that these positions should be abolished on constitutional grounds, but rather for budgetary reasons. And I certainly won't quibble over which of the favorite three target categories for budget-cutting these chaplains should fall under -- waste, fraud, or abuse -- to avoid diversionary theological arguments.

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Back Down To Earth

Before we get to this month's depressing news for Obama fans, we've got a few quick program notes. The Obama Poll Watch site is in the process of updating to reflect the new reality of Obama's second term, and this month we've managed to convert all the "Obama versus previous presidents" charts to more easily show two presidential terms on the same chart. Unfortunately, this meant we didn't have time to clean out the data section at the bottom of this column (by creating a static page for "Obama first term statistics"), so you'll have to put up with a mountain of data for one more month, sorry.

OK, with that out of the way, let's have a look at March's polling. President Obama lost almost all the ground he had gained late in the 2012 election season, and his numbers fell back to where he was roughly six months ago. This isn't as bad as some media have made it out to be, since it may represent Obama's true natural level of support. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, let's take a look at this month's chart:

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

March, 2013

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