Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

Over the next decade, cities and states across America will be compelled to tighten their belts as the really big bills - the pension bills they cannot afford - come due. They'll have to go after existing contracts with current workers.

The attack on ObamaCare was that Congress does not have the power under the Commerce Clause to force a private citizen into a private contractual relationship. If such a thing is permitted to stand, the anti-ObamaCare forces argue, there will be no limit to Congress's power in the future.

There's no light at the end of the tunnel in the Republican message, no promise of better things to come. There's only the present stagnation, followed by a slow decline.

Christopher Nolan's astounding third Batman feature, 'The Dark Knight Rises,' represents the true maturation of the superhero movie - and provides the key to understanding the bottomless craving moviegoers have for these films, 34 years after the Christopher Reeve Superman gave birth to the genre.

The Middle East Media Research Institute has spent decades detailing the diseased messages emanating from Palestinian TV and textbooks, instructing children in the glories of suicide terrorism against innocent Israelis.

Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.

By the time Obama came into office, Washington had already agreed over a period of a few weeks to a $700 billion government infusion into the world banking system. Nothing of the sort had ever been done before, and it was done spit spot with very little national debate.

Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.

The most passionately anti-Obama Republican politicians and activists consider themselves the truest and purest of conservatives, and often unleash their scorn and fury on others who also call themselves conservative but differ on strategy and tactics.

Romney has adopted almost every position conservatives want their candidate to espouse: He's pro-life, he wants to repeal ObamaCare, he wants to cut taxes and cut the federal budget, and he wants an unapologetic foreign policy dedicated to the proposition that this too will be the American century.

You'd think experienced political professionals would know better than to place their trust in exit polls, notoriously inaccurate surveys that had John Kerry winning the 2004 election by five points when he actually lost by three.

You want a culture where citizens are free to express themselves and so live in the openness necessary to the functioning of a successful economy? Israel has a free press, much of it openly hostile to the parties in power.

Aside from being bad sportsmanship - Romney basically said Obama won by cheating - he was displaying the same obtuseness about the wants and needs of ordinary people that did more to torpedo his campaign than any goodies Obama might have had to dole out.

The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.

While in Israel, Mitt Romney said something every sane person knows to be true: There is great cultural and political meaning in the fact that Israel has prospered while the Palestinians have festered.

What people adore about superhero movies is the signal quality of the Christopher Nolan films - their complete lack of irony when it comes to the portrayal of heroism and the need for heroes to confront evil.

The United States established itself as a trustworthy new nation in its first two decades after the Revolutionary War by paying its debts, even when many in the country believed it had no obligation to do so. Alexander Hamilton, the founder of this newspaper, insisted on it.

As a member of the Mormon church, Romney is instructed to tithe 10 percent of his income. That's in keeping with most charitable giving: Religious institutions get about one-third of all contributions, according to 'The American' magazine.

It has never made any sense to argue that, unique among the people of the world, Arabs are more concerned on a day-to-day basis about the treatment of people they don't know than they are about how they're going to put food on their own tables, or whether their sons will ever find a job.

Memories of the last nine years have turned Ground Zero from a site of horror, to a reminder of grief, to an occasion for ludicrous artistic posturing - and now to something very close to parody.

When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight - though whether the insight was conscious or not I don't know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model.

One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can't when it's close.

Nixon was an awful president in many ways, including in some of his foreign-policy choices. But he left no doubt that foreign policy and America's leadership in the world outside its borders was of paramount importance to him.

I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion.

Political folk talk a lot these days about 'messaging' - a neologism designed to describe the way in which parties and politicians consciously characterize their efforts. It is only intended to be positive - i.e., 'Our messaging is designed to show we care.'

In the Democratic primary in 2008, the Obama team devised a strategy to use the caucuses and a complicated system of awarding delegates in the state primaries to sneak up on Hillary Clinton and establish a lead Obama never surrendered.

As the Republican nominee, it was Romney's job to find a way to speak to some of those groups of voters and offer practical solutions to their difficulties that both resonated with them and sounded plausible to them.

You want a political culture that works to create conditions under which an economy can thrive? Since signing the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, Israel has spent two decades working to unshackle its economy from its socialist roots, with remarkable results.

The exit polls suggest that after a relatively disappointing first term, Obama managed to reassemble almost all of his 2008 electorate.

Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn't care. This is war - not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that's a victory he savors and desires - unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.

While negativity is politically useful, it is also demoralizing unless it is accompanied - and to some extent overshadowed - by elevated and inspiring ideas about the American future.

That distinctive presidential conduct is now gone forever, banished to the snows of yesteryear by Barack Obama. From the beginning of his presidency to the present, he has spoken specifically and in unprecedented fashion of Republicans as his rivals, his stumbling blocks, the primary cause of his troubles.

Insulting the electorate and accusing it of spiritual weakness and sinfulness are not the ways to get yourself the job of president.

Obama is talking to voters as though he is their boss, or their principal, or their father. He is not any of those things. He is their employee. And employers don't like it when their employees yell at them - even if their employees have it right.

Making recess appointments when the Senate isn't in recess is neither rational nor moderate. It's a raw misuse of executive power by a president whose love of government is his most vulnerable spot with the electorate.

Conservatives must avoid the siren song of schism, or all is lost.

Bouncing a sitting president requires conscious action, a national decision to redirect the country's course. This cuts against the grain, and that's why incumbents have a natural advantage.

For Obama to save himself, he should be thinking about the example of an unlikely Republican predecessor: Richard Nixon.

America is great not because it's a team. America is great because it is a nation whose founding documents elevated the rights of the individual.

Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party's voters.

Some candidates need to say provocative things that make noise to break through the media muffle and get themselves noticed.

She needs to seem tough, and whatever Hillary's weaknesses, tough is a pretty good word to describe her.

Whatever Romney's failings, he certainly doesn't suggest that the United States is teetering on the brink of a moral cesspool.

Why, listening to Obama talk about his economic triumphs over the last three years might make you want to move to the country he was describing. Too bad that country exists primarily in his own head.

The 2004 presidential election that saw George W. Bush win with 51 percent of the vote was the last one Republicans will ever win with the overwhelmingly white and male coalition they have now.

Romney is right that the Obama vision is too centered on government. But his is too centered on the promotion of business and wealth creation at the expense of everything else.

All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of absurdity. He suggested that a vote for him would literally transform the Earth.

Comedians and impressionists used to be two different showbiz animals entirely, but now there's no such thing as a comedian who doesn't do impressions.