The Administration

President Obama was doing his best to run and hide on entitlement reform, but his cover has all but evaporated. First, Democrats said it was OK for Obama to punt on reforms of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid because Republicans would attack him if he went first. So he ignored the recommendations of his own debt commission's report, released the first week in December. Then he skipped addressing the thorny issue in his State of the Union address. Then he skipped the issue again in his budget. He is three for three. Then House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he would pledge not to attack any proposal Obama offered on entitlement reform. Still nothing.

On March 11, 2011, Wesley K. Clark, former NATO chief, penned an op-ed in The Washington Post to say that Libya doesn’t meet the test for U.S. military action.

Clark’s statement suggested a brewing division in liberal opinion, and two days later a former adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Anne-Marie Slaughter, challenged his view in The New York Times, saying “Col. Gadhafi makes the most of the world’s dithering and steadily retakes rebel-held towns.” She called for a no-fly zone and discussed five main arguments against, none of which, she said, held up. Yesterday, President Obama and Secretary Clinton got their no-fly zone.

What I thought was odd about this discussion was that it appeared to begin in the mainstream press only with Clark’s thoughtful opposition while one major political figure likely to enter the presidential race of 2012 had already discussed a no-fly zone on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show: Sarah Palin.

The answer, in a word, is yes.

A Mike Deaver (Reagan), a Dick Morris (Clinton), a David Gergen (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Clinton) would have seen this coming a week ago and any one of them would likely have advised the boss to postpone his trip Saturday to Brazil — followed by Chile and El Salvador — and certainly not to turn it into a family vacation. (Michelle and the girls will be joining him.)

On the other hand, Brazil is a hugely important trading partner for the U.S — the world’s seventh largest economy — and it’s natural for an American president to take notice. The president has said that the main purpose of his trip is to massage trade deals and boost jobs at home.

The chickens have finally come home to roost.

We're at the 3 a.m. call that candidate Hillary Clinton foreshadowed during her 2008 presidential campaign. She warned that electing a president with little or no experience would place our nation in danger by not knowing what to do in times of crisis.

President Obama probably has good intentions, yet he continues to tread lightly on the world stage. At this very moment there is a clarion call for strong leadership from the United States as the lone superpower on earth. Many crises are constantly erupting around the globe and the world is screaming for leadership with backbone and clarity.

If you had to choose the most important news event taking place this week, what would it be? The earthquake/tsunami/radiation leak in Japan? Libya’s potential civil war? The budget battle taking place here at home?

Or — drum-roll, please — gender inequality (in America, of course!)?

Good grief. Does this White House ever know when to stop?

Yes, March is Women’s History Month, and the White House just released a report, Women in America, it's eager to advance. So, despite the unrest around the globe, President Obama chose to focus his weekly radio address on the status of women.

Did you know it’s National Sunshine Week? The National Security Archive reminded us that it is, in noting the 2011 Knight Open Government Survey. That report reminds the public that the Obama administration, which promised an oceanic change on transparency and openness in government, has been slow to get there — to put it mildly.

The president wasted no time in admonishing all federal government departments and agencies — one minute into his administration — that he demanded new policies to open government operations to public scrutiny. But at the halfway point in his administration, his operatives have not walked the walk, even if their leader has talked the talk.

Vice President Joe Biden is in Russia, lecturing officials there on the need for reform but emphasizing his earlier and friendly metaphor, echoed by his boss Barack Obama, that it is time for the U.S. to “push the reset button” in its relationship with Russia. While in Moscow, Biden also met with President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

While Biden is in Moscow, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He tells visibly stunned senators that the biggest threats to our nation are Russian and China. Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) suggests that in his opinion, Iran and North Korea are more menacing to the U.S.

Joe Manchin, the new senator from West Virginia, put it pretty well. President Obama has “failed to lead,” he said.

I might have put it differently. Obama has failed to even show up.

Woody Allen once said that nine-tenths of any job is just showing up. The president is not currently meeting that threshold.

The president has not only failed to lead on the budget negotiations. He is leaving that job to Joe Biden and Harry Reid. Well, let’s be clear. He is leaving all of the negotiations to Harry Reid, the man who just barely beat Sharron Angle last year.

If a good mind is a terrible thing to waste, it is a terrible thing to see a good man fall into the political gutter in the cause of personal political ambition.

Yesterday I wrote how Mike Huckabee was courting the extremist birthers by smearing the president about Kenya and raising the ridiculous issue of the Mau Maus. Now Huckabee, who says he misspoke about Kenya, and then proceeded to try to tie the president to Indonesia, says that while most Americans grew up with the Boy Scouts, the president grew up in the madrassas.

Let’s be clear. Let’s be honest. What Huckabee is doing is appealing to the bigot vote, which he apparently considers important in the GOP presidential primaries. It is called innuendo. The president of the United States, in this appeal to bigotry, is not quite American and not quite Christian. He is, according to this guilt by innuendo, more Kenyan or Indonesian than American. He is, according to this guilt by innuendo, somehow tied to madrassas, which implies, in this appeal to ignorance, that the president is somehow tied to foreigners and Muslims.

Yesterday NBC Nightly News called for an interview. They were producing a segment on the White House’s newly released report on Women in America — “a statistical portrait” of “how women are fairing in the United States today.”

Despite a lengthy interview with Savannah Guthrie, I later learned that NBC cut me from the segment. It’s television, I get it, and things change. My ego is less bruised, however, than my respect for network news. The segment that ensued was terrible.

The show included a rundown of the report, clips from an interview with White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, and a series of ill-informed “woman-on-the-street” opinions about the “wage gap.”

Good grief. Really?