Nice try, Republicans, running a political protection racket to push your Medicare scheme. Scrubbed of the sweet talk about saving Medicare, your offer boiled down to this: You older folks support us, and we won't touch a hair on your government health-insurance plan. Only those 55 and under get whacked.

Even after, thanks to Fox News, the first 2012 Republican presidential candidates debate in Greenville, S.C., no semi-serious person can pretend that (s)he knows whom the Tampa GOP Convention will nominate in late August of next year to challenge President Barack Obama. But I am confident enough about one Republican prediction about 2012 to wager a cold drink of your choosing.

These are very tricky times for conservatives in America. For starters, they don't really have a candidate. OK, that's familiar. More unusual: They don't really have an opponent to hate.
Can that be?

The woman lowered her voice. She sounded embarrassed, even ashamed. Earlier this week, she said, she let her kids, ages 5 and 2, wait in the car while she ran into UPS to drop off a package. This took all of a minute or two, but when she told her husband about it that night, he said, "That was so dangerous! Promise me you'll never do that again!"

The big story was that they got him, not that he was stopped. Osama bin Laden was already stopped.
Sure, the al-Qaida movement could still massacre Christians at a Baghdad church and try to put package bombs on cargo planes headed for the United States. But bin Laden's plan for a restored Islamic super-state enforcing a puritanical Islam had sunk into irrelevance for the very people the terrorist sought to inspire.      

The big news is not that Osama bin Laden is dead. I mean, that is certainly big news, but a guy in hiding who has a record price tag on his head is not exactly an effective leader of a revolutionary movement. The big news, at least by my lights, is that Americans waving flags seem to be the biggest demonstrations going on.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Of course, we're celebrating. And of course, they're threatening retaliation. Osama bin Laden is dead, and with him died as much twisted malice as can be found in a man who would send jetliners into office buildings.