Given their prevailing 20th-century mentality and saddled with new and burdensome regulations, banks have little incentive to develop affordable credit options to serve the needs of millions of American consumers.

I’m not talking about the Warren Buffetts of the world; I’m talking about people who wake up every day worried about the future, which unfortunately accounts for most of us. A report released by the Corporation for Enterprise Development found that 127.5 million people are liquid-asset poor, meaning that a sudden loss in household income would leave them below the poverty line in just three months.

When Democrat Shirley Franklin was elected mayor of Atlanta it turned out to be in worse shape than she expected. Then these nice young men from Bain offered to help fix it. As I understand it, it is what Bain does: fix things that are broken. Bain’s Mitt Romney did a great job with the Winter Olympics in Utah in 2002, although I am sure the very controversial dragon dance honoring the White Buffalo as the harbinger of Aquarius sent most conservatives to the fainting couch. Maybe they didn’t notice. Here are three things Bain might also fix: the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and America.

The New York Times has another story of President Obama's forcefulness in the face of national security challenges — the second this week. Today's issue contains a report about Obama ordering cyberattacks on Iran, and the 6,000-word opus the Times ran on Tuesday about Obama's drone campaign is still on the lips of everyone in Washington. A must-read indeed.

Think what you will about the burgeoning use of drone strikes to kill terrorists, the cost, efficacy and sustainability of such a warfare program, the story includes fascinating political revelations as well. To start with, Obama's declaration on day two in office that he would close Guantanamo Bay within one year was not only a goal that would turn out to be impossible, but Obama didn't even expect closing Gitmo to be hard. So ignorant to the political realities of his promise was Obama that he ignored the advice of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder that they might get started lobbying Congress on the issue. They were told no, that healthcare reform was the higher priority.

On the issues of fairness in finance, economics and consumerism, Elizabeth Warren and the Occupy Wall Street movement speak for the majority of Americans. This terrifies the right, frightens the Republicans, and worries a few Democrats who like that money from the 1 percent. In my column this week, “Karl Rove's Grand Slam,” I suggested liberals and Democrats can attack the abuses most recently seen in the JPMorgan trading losses and the Facebook IPO fiasco and attack the Supreme Court travesty in Citizens United, while also raising money from wealthy liberals and Democrats until Citizens United is overturned.

On May 15, 2012, I wrote about the John Edwards trial, predicting that he'd walk. Yesterday he did. One acquittal and five mistrials, after all the government’s evidence, doesn’t warrant another try.

The prosecution COULD retry Edwards, but it won't. The applicable elections law is unclear. The government's unprecedented case was based on a questionable key witness, Edwards's unappealingly sycophantic ex-assistant, who has made a career of soiling the name of his former employer. Mostly, prosecutors know that retrying a case is "like kissing your sister,” as I was told when I proposed doing so in a celebrated trial in the Kennedy Justice Department. The defense knows your case; the juice of surprise is gone; it is the opposite of the original trial, where the deck is stacked for the prosecution.

Now Elizabeth Warren admits she told Harvard and Penn that she was Native American.

When you check those boxes and grab the benefits, you deny others who truly deserve them.

The federal government should stay out of elementary and secondary education.

Education is best decided by students and their parents. Students should have a choice of schools. Parents and students are best able to determine what works best for them, not bureaucrats sitting in their Washington, D.C. ivory tower.

Two moments come to my mind with Eisenhower. How he described the conduct of war was one: "The enemy has to know it is licked." Had it registered in 1914 the 60 million who died 30 years later — 2.5 percent of the world's population — would have been saved.

The second is that great picture on D-Day, probably the most important day in American history since Cemetery Ridge. It is an iconic photograph of Ike straight up and unsentimental as he addressed the Marines, many of whom would be seeing their last day on earth. It talks to everyone and everyone reads it differently. What are these men thinking, and what words does Eisenhower bring to them to fortify their will and courage? (But as kids who take the tour of the Capitol learn from the tour guide, Ike was talking to the men about fly-fishing.)

When I was writing a book about Bill Clinton’s post-presidency, I tracked down every artist I could find who painted Bill. One of them was Simmie Knox, son of a sharecropper and the first African-American commissioned to paint the official White House portrait of a president. Knox told me about his boyhood on a plantation/farm and the segregated schools he attended.

In June 2004 in the East Room at the Bush White House — like now, the country in the midst of a mean reelection campaign — Knox’s portraits of Bill and Hillary, then U.S. senator from New York, were unveiled. I wrote in my book that President Bush won over the Clintons with his greeting, “Welcome home,” and reminded the assembled that he and his father call each other “41” and “43.” Turing to Clinton, Bush said, “We’re glad you’re here, 42.” That was the start of a thaw that produced a genuine and continuing friendship between 41 and 42. When the then-president mentioned Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, and “the incredible pride” she would have felt that morning — she had died in 1994 — he brought the former president to tears.