National Commentary

This was the week Mitt Romney should have sealed the Republican presidential nomination. He was expected to win Tuesday's caucuses in Colorado, to win or tie in Minnesota and to do credibly well in Missouri. Instead, the former Massachusetts governor managed to lose all three contests to Rick Santorum, a candidate who has spent most of the campaign stuck near the bottom of the polls.

The latest embarrassment from President Barack Obama is more than an embarrassment. It's an assault on faith that begins with a 2,500-page health care bill enacted with no one expected to read it except the bureaucrats paid to translate its obscurities into thousands more pages of regulations.

After a prolonged look at a phrase that could have been interpreted multiple ways, the president and the masters of your life in the Department of Health and Human Services bypassed the sensible and decreed we are now in the age of mandated contraception coverage, one step closer to Utopian bliss.

Yet another intimate portrait has just emerged about one of the most prominent and pivotal world leaders of the early 1960s, arguably the most dangerous and highly charged years of the Cold War.

An iconic hero for many, thanks to his charismatic personality and demonstrated courage, this former head of state is also controversial thanks to personal behavior, which can only be described as reckless.

Listening to the 911 tapes now, after we know what was about to happen at family killer Josh Powell's house, the 911 call takers seem agonizingly dense and rude.

They ask questions that seem bizarrely off point, constantly interrupting and speaking over callers as they try to explain themselves.

As Powell is about to strike his children with a hatchet and set his house on fire, a 911 call taker asks Powell's case worker, who is calling from her cell phone in the driveway in front of his house, "Are you in a vehicle now or on foot?"

JERUSALEM -- With violent political winds battering their Arab neighbors, Israelis have watched with a mixture of nervousness and hope, wondering what the changes will mean for them. Will the end of dictatorships mean a better chance for peace and good relations, or will they usher in even more instability and insecurity?

Mitt Romney's ill-considered remark about the destitute, "I'm not concerned about the very poor," and his subsequent awkward explanation of it represented something more noteworthy than a rich man's gaffe. The question raised by the episode is not simply whether the candidate can articulate his views more clearly but whether the dire economic circumstances of tens of millions of Americans are truly understood, or can even be acknowledged, by the GOP.

When it comes to national security, Michael V. Hayden is no shrinking violet. As CIA director, he ran the Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretaps against suspected terrorists.

But the retired air force general admits to being a little squeamish about the Obama administration's expanding use of pilotless drones to kill suspected terrorists around the world -- including, occasionally, U.S. citizens.