Poor Newt.

It's rare for me to have a moment of pity for someone like Newt Gingrich, but I have to admit I'm feeling a little sorry for the guy this week. But before we delve into Newt's campaign problems in greater detail, it seems to me that most pundits are missing a big underlying new reality in the Republican Party. The focus has all been on Newt himself, what he said, and the subsequent ire directed at him by prominent Righties. But after the dust settles on the incident itself, people are going to notice the bigger fact this fracas has illuminated: Republicans are doubling down on Paul Ryan's budget rather than backing away from it, to the point where it has now become the acid test for Republicans in 2012. Which should be good news for Democrats.

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Associated Press headline today: "Coburn drops out of group seeking to cut deficit."

So we're now down to a "Gang of Five," I guess.

For those who don't slavishly follow every power alignment in Washington (which is to say, most people), this is supposed to be momentous news of some sort or another because the "Gang of Six" was supposed to be the sober, realist politicians (three from each party) who were going to hammer out a budget agreement which both sides could live with. A daunting task, to be sure, now made even harder by the fact that Republican Senator Tom Coburn has apparently dropped out of the effort.

Before we delve into what it all means, I have to say one thing. The whole imagery of "gangs" in Congress has always seemed to me to be grossly wrongheaded. I mean, seriously, "gangs"?

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Well, that was a fun couple of weeks, wasn't it? For the past month or so, Donald Trump pretended to run for president and the media pretended he was serious (funniest headline I've seen today, from the Washington Post, "Donald Trump: I'm Fired!"). This entertaining period has now drawn to a close, much to the dismay of late-night comedians everywhere, as The Donald all but admits that the whole thing was a ratings and contract negotiations ploy to boost his "Apprentice" show on NBC. What it all means is that we can now take a look at who is yet to decide to jump into the Republican nomination race in earnest, and without such clownish distraction.

The much bigger nomination news coming out of this weekend was that Mike Huckabee had also decided against another run at the big prize. Unlike Trump, Huckabee would have been a serious candidate with a chance of actually winning the nomination. Like Trump, Huckabee found he enjoyed television more than the rigors of campaigning. Huckabee announced Saturday night that he really didn't have the "fire in the belly" required for a national campaign effort, and that he'd be much more comfortable continuing his commentary from the safe (for Republicans) perch of a Fox News show.

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Ron Paul, apparently, is not a superstitious kind of guy.

Tempting fate, as it were, he announced today that he's running for president once again -- on Friday the thirteenth.

Ron's not the only one making news on this front this particular week, though. I wrote an article on Wednesday looking over the entire Republican field (which is bigger than you might think), and already it's out of date. Newt Gingrich announced his run two days ago, Ron Paul's now officially in, and Mike Huckabee is set to announce his decision tomorrow night (on Fox News, naturally).

In other words, the 2012 race is finally shaping up on the Republican side. There will likely be no nomination race on the Democratic side, since Obama will assumably crush any upstart Democrats who take him on.

One thing worth considering at this point, though, is that we're still a long way off from the 2012 election. And a lot can happen in a year and a half. Pundits who are predicting "the 2012 race will be all about X" (no matter what "X" is) stand a good chance of being wrong. Events have a way of overshadowing carefully crafted campaign plans.

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The longest-running news anchor on American television is stepping down. He will be missed, simply because he is a cut so far above all the blow-dried nincompoops on network and cable television. From the Washington Post story today:

Jim Lehrer, who has anchored PBS's NewsHour program for 36 years, said Thursday morning that he is stepping down from the daily broadcast, ending the longest run of a national anchorman.

Lehrer, 76, said he would leave as anchor on June 6 but would continue to appear on Fridays to moderate the show's weekly news analysis segment featuring a panel of journalists.

. . .

In addition to his familiar role on PBS, the widely respected Lehrer may be best known to American audiences as the moderator of presidential debates. He has handled that job 11 times, including one of the debates between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008.

Lehrer's career spans several eras of television, from a time when most people had black and white sets to the digital age. When he was honored last month with a career achievement award by the National Press Club, the club's president, Mark Hamrick, announced his selection by saying, "Amid the cacophony of a sometimes shrill media landscape, he has remained the true voice of reason, balance and fairness."

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This has been an unusual year, in terms of presidential campaign politics, because (so far) it has run counter to the conventional wisdom. A standard column for any pundit to write every four years is the "Campaign Starting Even Sooner!" article, in which you decry the fact that the presidential race is beginning earlier and earlier each cycle. Not many of those articles have been written this time around.

Consider that, four years ago, every single Democrat and every single Republican candidate were already in the race by February. A total of 19 serious candidates (both parties combined -- both parties had "open" races, I should point out) were already out on the hustings by March, 2007. The last time around, Republican candidates had raised around $50 million by this point.

This time, the story so far has been the lack of such a story. But all such good times must eventually come to an end, and I now find myself sitting down for the first time to assess the Republican field of candidates for 2012. It has become impossible to ignore any further, in other words. The first Republican televised debate happened last week, and today none other than Newt Gingrich officially jumped into the running.

But, because this is a first look at the race, I feel it is necessary to examine the entire field of candidates -- which is enormous, when everyone whose name has ever been mentioned as a possibility is added in. Even weeding out the obvious vanity candidates with no hope leaves over a dozen names, at this point -- and that's not even counting a few names some Republicans are all but begging to get into the race.

Because I'm trying to include simply everybody, this will necessarily have to be a very wide (and not very deep) look at all the possible candidates. It's going to be a lengthy article, folks, just to warn everyone up front. As the race heats up, I promise we'll get more detailed and more focused on the true possibilities. I've divided the candidates up into several categories, on mostly arbitrary criteria (in other words, some of these names could easily move around among the categories as time goes on).

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Every so often, a press release catches my eye in such a fashion that I think to myself: "Aha! This means I don't have to write an article today!" Ahem. Today is one of those days.

The Library of Congress today announced the launch of what they're calling a "National Jukebox" which puts the entire pre-1925 Sony catalogue of recordings online to the public for free. This is the coolest use of tax dollars I've seen in quite a while, so I thought I would give it the exposure it deserves.

In the ongoing debate (which has been raging for over 200 years now) as to the size of government in America, this is the type of thing which should be an exemplary example of government at its finest. These recordings are no longer commercially viable, and Sony would never make any money releasing them. So why not give them to the Library of Congress so that they can be enjoyed by a much wider audience online? These have moved from the commercial world into the realm of being historical documents, and that's exactly what the Library of Congress should be about -- preserving such history for future generations.

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In roughly two months, President Barack Obama is going to announce the beginning of the end of America's longest war. He could not have known, when he initially set this summer for the beginning of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, that the timing would work out so perfectly. With Osama Bin Laden now dead, it's going to be a lot easier to begin pulling out of Afghanistan. The only question left to ask is how fast this drawdown will be accomplished.

Afghanistan has been called "the graveyard of empires" due to the fact that nobody has ever been able to truly conquer it -- and mighty empires have exhausted themselves trying. The United States entered Afghanistan after 9/11 to get rid of the Taliban and the safe havens for Al Qaeda in the country. After the initial success, however, President George W. Bush soon became distracted with his misadventure in Iraq, and never devoted the military force Afghanistan required. If Osama Bin Laden had been killed in the mountains of Tora Bora, it is very likely all American troops would be out of the country by now, but this opportunity was missed. Throughout Bush's tenure, we never had more than 30,000-40,000 troops in Afghanistan. Obama tripled this number in two "surges" (the first of which the media barely noticed), and there are now approximately 100,000 troops in the country. When the second of these escalations was announced, Obama set a deadline of this summer to announce his withdrawal plans.

Now that Bin Laden is dead, Obama has a wider range of options to choose from, in terms of how fast he's going to get our troops home. Bin Laden's death meant (among other things) that Obama has the political leeway to withdraw troops much faster now. The American public is tired of this war (when they even notice we're still fighting it), and the politicians have slowly come to realize this fact. Both Democratic and Republican support for the war is fading in Congress, which (again) makes Obama's task that much easier.

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Mission freakin' accomplished.

I don't care how ironic that sounds to some, it's true. Osama Bin Laden declared war on America, waged that war for years (and killed Americans in doing so), then hid for many more years, and was finally hunted down and killed like an animal. Mission accomplished.

I wouldn't care, at this point, if the White House dusted off the old Bush banner and hung it out on the front of the building. Because the mission of killing our number one enemy was successfully accomplished last week, which pushed almost all other news aside. Some days in the news business you find a "single-story day." This was a single-story week. It was that important.

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The Obama White House was decisive and bold in how they went after Osama Bin Laden last weekend. But in all the planning for this mission, it seems that nobody really planned ahead for success. Because, post-raid, the White House has had somewhat of a communication problem explaining everything to the public. This was avoidable, but is also mostly excusable due to the success of the mission (if you think the political arguments are rough now, just imagine what they would be like if we had failed somehow). Doing a practice run of the press management afterwards was probably pretty low on everyone's priority list last week, in other words, and most of the issues raised since then are already mere historical footnotes to the fact that we "got him."

But there's one issue which is indeed a valid one. The White House should never have let the military use the code name "Geronimo" for either the mission or Osama Bin Laden himself (depending on which media report you believe). Even if they had allow its use, they never should have publicly released the fact that the words transmitted to indicate success were "Geronimo E.K.I.A." (or, if used for the mission, perhaps "Geronimo, E.K.I.A.") The acronym stands for "enemy killed in action," and was the signal that Osama Bin Laden was dead.

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