Republicans are forcing the sequester because they refuse to accept revenue that could be achieved by closing loopholes that benefit the most powerful corporations or wealthiest individuals. President Obama is right. A majority of voters agree with him. They agree with him in polls. Democrats have won three of the last four national elections. House Democrats received more votes than House Republicans in 2012. The dominance of the right in the GOP leads to the dominance of Democrats in national elections. The social Darwinism of Ayn Rand, which is the policy of Republicans, is poisoned tea for the GOP. Republicans who claim the fingerprints of the president are all over the sequester are continuing the politics of delusion. The president is winning the debate. Again. The GOP brand is poison. Period.

The dormant desire to restore Israel to Jewish values is exploding, said Naftali Bennett, who brings a new force and a new generation of politics to the Knesset in Israel. According to reports, he says that if the United States doesn’t take care of Iran’s nuclear production, they should let Israel do it themselves. So he seems to be asking America for permission. This is the new Israel? For all the rhetoric, Iran is not a real and credible threat to the United States any more than Iraq was or North Korea is. Iran is a threat to Israel and nothing could be more obvious. Israel should remove the threat. A new Israel would not ask permission, and until Israel stops asking permission, it will continue to be an American sub-state cursed by the vicissitudes of neurotic American presidential politics.

Will President Obama bomb Iran? Maybe. My guess is yes. But he will only do so as a bargaining chip. If Obama were to bomb Iran, he would come back to Israel with a bargaining chip demanding a Palestinian state. Israel should act and not ask. In one fell swoop, it would bring safety to Israel and independence, removing Israel from American peonage.

The good news is that the House has finally passed the Violence Against Women Act. The reauthorization of the 20-year-old law is now headed to the president’s desk after previous defeats by House Republicans.

The truly bad news is that 138 Republicans voted no and 164 voted to eviscerate it with a senseless amendment.

Make no mistake, these are big numbers.  The fringe of the Republican Party in the House is no longer the “fringe.”  They are the majority.

The youth unemployment rate for newly minted college graduates in the 20- to 24-year-old age bracket is at an all-time high of 60.6 percent, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Labor.

This raises the question of whether students can find meaningful employment after graduation with the degrees they currently have.

Identity thieves will stop at nothing to pawn others' identities for their own personal gain. But you know the newest trend in identity theft has reached an ultimate low when identity thieves start to target innocent children for their own personal gain.

Despite his declaration that the Senate “needs to get off their ass,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) may have opened up the possibility of negotiations on real tax reform.

Of course, tax committee chairmen Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) are deep into negotiations to come up with workable ideas to reform our tax system. So Boehner’s comments today weren’t totally out of the blue.

But Boehner may realize the key to a grand bargain is as much in revamping our tax system as it is in the Tea Party’s slash and burn politics. As much as the Republicans love to repeat “we have a spending problem,” the smart ones know deep down that we have a revenue problem too.

Demographics are destiny. Nothing else makes history. When the changes ahead are shipped into denial is when chaos and disaster ensue. And the potential disasters America faces today do not come from global warming, nuclear weapons, the Russians, the hippies or the rednecks. They come from the economic division of America between the red states, which are rising in capital and prosperity, and the left and right coasts, which are receding in economic power. Demographer Joel Kotkin well outlines the transition in a Wall Street Journal essay yesterday title, “America’s Red State Growth Corridors.”

“In the wake of the 2012 presidential election, some political commentators have written political obituaries of the ‘red’ or conservative-leaning states, envisioning a brave new world dominated by fashionably blue bastions in the Northeast or California,” he writes. “But political fortunes are notoriously fickle, while economic trends tend to be more enduring. ... These trends point to a U.S. economic future dominated by four growth corridors that are generally less dense, more affordable, and markedly more conservative and pro-business: the Great Plains, the Intermountain West, the Third Coast (spanning the Gulf states from Texas to Florida), and the Southeastern industrial belt.”

Historically, these regions were little more than resource colonies or low-wage labor sites for richer, more technically advanced areas, says Kotkin. By promoting policies that encourage enterprise and spark economic growth, they’re catching up.

 The most interesting question about the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering is whether any Republican will have the courage to say what many of them privately believe: the way of extremism is the way to GOP disaster. In this sense, CPAC is Sister Souljah waiting to happen, awaiting a Republican willing to criticize extremism directly to them, as Bill Clinton did in the Sister Souljah affair.

People who are unaffiliated with a political party, while sometimes thought of as being indecisive, are actually people who demonstrate the ability to think for themselves. Anyone who is blindly loyal to the platform of a political party has given up their God-given right to exercise their independent thought processes. They degrade their own worth.