With all the reports coming out that recommend we scale back on life-saving medical exams there is one we might soon see from still another group of experts.

This one concerns depression. It concludes that diagnosis, medication and counseling won’t work anyway, so why bother trying? After all, the best we can expect from dealing with negative feelings are false positives.

As with most things, the path that led Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to allegedly stage an attack on his fellow servicemen and -women at Fort Hood was complex. No doubt his minority status had something to do with it, although an awful lot of adherents of minority religions get along just fine in the U.S. military. Heck, these days, anybody who professes any religious belief at all is going to find himself a target for somebody's criticism. Still, it's highly plausible that a practicing Muslim in the post-9/11 military would run up against more than his share.

Beyond all this identity stuff, however, it looks as if Hasan had a clear history of professional incompetence, at least according to a memo from a supervisor at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

Beth Noveck is working at the White House, getting really serious about giving all Americans a serious voice in running our federal government.

She talks about how this is happening at city and state levels in Open Government Laboratories of Democracy: Read more...

Tom from Illinois, a conservative who is one of my best-informed readers, wrote me yesterday to alert me to the storm I had kicked up with my column on Sarah Palin. Very few of the comments that follow my columns are useful — most are angry, accusatory and partisan, written by wingers on the left and right who will never be happy with anything they see under my byline. I credit and criticize both parties, respect people and ideas in both parties, and value bipartisanship and independence. It's lonely in the middle.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who blithely admits to planning the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in downtown New York, deserves to be put to death. Less clear is Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement last week that New York City was the best venue to pursue the case against them.

This is plainly absurd. Holding the trial in New York puts a big bull’s-eye on the downtown area. It is common sense that holding the trial in the twice-attacked lower Manhattan community makes it more likely New York will be attacked again. Moreover, the cost of providing security for the trial could easily exceed $100 million for a city that is already embroiled in a fiscal crisis.

It is time for Democrats to act like Democrats, talk like Democrats and take their case to the country, as real Democrats used to do.

In the last 24 hours, AOL announced it is letting go of a third of its workforce. New mortgage numbers reveal the highest foreclosure rate ever recorded. The foreclosure crisis has now spread to prime loans as well as sub-prime. FHA loans are becoming disastrously delinquent, while the FHA loan guarantee program, structured to protect the banks more than the nation, now finances high-priced home purchases that borrowers can't afford, who put little money down while they trade on the stock market and buy luxury homes with government guarantees.

From my point of view, President Barack Obama is the most intelligent and savvy of Democratic presidents to come to power in the post-war period. He has a sensory intuition that allows him to catch up quickly on things and he is far better at external things than internal things.

China ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr., the best of the current China hands, gives him the highest marks on his visit to China. Even the Campaign for Tibet seemed cautiously optimistic. Obama’s problem is that history has cast his role at the end of a vast epoch. History has made him the last agent of a realm of ideas that are suited to an age long past and a vastly different America.

On "Hardball" Thursday night, Chris Matthews asked Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) if Sarah Palin was qualified to be president.

Here's the right answer:

Three years out from the 2012 presidential elections, Sarah Palin is far, far more qualified to be president than Barack Obama was three years before he became president. In 2005, Obama had not even yet started serving his measly two years in the United States Senate. Three years before being elected president, the sum of Obama's experience was being a "community organizer" and serving in the Illinois State Legislature. His claim to fame was a great speech read from a teleprompter at the Democratic National Convention. Palin has been giving extensive interviews (yes, on policy matters, too) with no notes in front of her. Obama still can't live without his teleprompter.

OK. A week ago I commented on the nasty blog posts directed at Newsweek after their layoffs. And I got blasted from conservatives — some of the language was really not nice, guys!

Well…..after seeing the latest cover of Sarah Palin in her exercise shorts and a come-hither look, with the caption “She’s Bad News for the GOP — And for Everybody Else, Too,” I have to swallow very hard. Read more...