You know how you can tell the Age of Reagan has ended? Because at his State of the Union address, Barack Obama didn't do any of those ordinary-folks-who-make-a-difference shout-outs to the gallery, as every POTUS (that is, Populist of the United States) has since the Gipper's first SOTU in 1982. But if Obama had called on someone, given the frustrated and hectoring nature of his speech, I bet I know who he would have liked to ask to stand up and take a bow: James O'Keefe, the putative pimp and ACORN slayer.

The Obama Administration has announced a plan to reduce the budget deficit through a three-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending. What are possible long-term effects?

Yesterday it was security, today's it's recovery: another nifty, ubiquitous word that means a whole lot of different things to different people.

It was a pleasure to listen to a State of the Union address, especially after eight years of his predecessor's alarmist warnings and warlike thundering, in which war, terrorism, and "rogue states" went almost unmentioned.

Say what you will about Barack Obama. But don't accuse the president of veering from the course he charted at a point when his term was new, his popularity ratings were high and Americans took seriously all that talk of "hope" and "change."

Those of us paid to observe Congress have spent the last two weeks watching, with mouth agape, as congressional Democrats slowly raised a loaded gun to their collective mouths and volubly considered pulling the trigger. But sanity has, tentatively, provisionally prevailed.

A new president gets a full year to prepare his initial State of the Union address. That is a blessing and a curse.

Whoever scheduled the special election for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Edward Kennedy on January 19 did Barack Obama no favors.

A suddenly populist Barack Obama tore into the Republicans for siding with banks rather than consumers and taxpayers Sunday in Boston, hoping that his fiery rhetoric would revive the candidacy of embattled Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley.