If the president signs any of it, good. If he vetoes, it will be clarifying. Who then will be the party of no? The vetoed legislation would become the framework for a 2016 GOP platform. Let the debate begin.

Pass legislation. When Obama signs, you've shown seriousness and the ability to govern. When he vetoes, you've clarified the differences between party philosophies and prepared the ground for 2016.

Washington is the only place in the world where a gaffe is when a politician accidently speaks the truth.

If Russia were to do something that it could do, it looks like it might even be preparing to do, to invade Ukraine and essentially to dismember it, this would be the one item that could reflect really badly on Trump because of the warm way he spoke about Putin.

Clashes of values and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history that accounts for that other constant - conflict and war.

Why should we care about the coup? First, because we depend on Yemen's government to support our drone war against another local menace, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). It's not clear if we can even maintain our embassy in Yemen, let alone conduct operations against AQAP. And second, because growing Iranian hegemony is a mortal threat to our allies and interests in the entire Middle East.

I think the first thing is to recognize a mistake that Obama made. And others have made in thinking that you can revolutionize a system that's unbelievably complex and interlinked, one-sixth of the economy. That was a mistake because whenever you change one thing, it changes 80 other things, and now if you're changing everything at once, you have no idea what the outcome is going to be and you get all of these unintended side effects.