Washington Post

It's not easy, given the part of Arlington I live in, but I manage to avoid Lee Highway almost entirely. I get some satisfaction out of my personal boycott. I'd rather be stuck at a few more stoplights, and go a little farther to a different grocery store, than incorporate into my daily routine a thoroughfare named after a man who so "nobly" led the fight to preserve slavery and destroy the United States. Don't even get me started on Jefferson Davis Highway and all its enticing commerce!

"The fiscal projections for the United States are so stunning that, one way or another, reform will occur," Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said this week at a forum organized by the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

An earlier episode of these secret talks made real progress on Kashmir and other issues in 2007, as documented by journalist Steve Coll in the New Yorker. ...

Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, echoed that view, saying that any serious proposal to restrain deficits would require politically painful proposals, such as increasing the retirement age and limiting Social Security benefits for high earners. ...

The Smithsonian has decided this whole online contraption may not be a fad after all.

Over the weekend it invited 31 luminaries of the digital age to talk with what the institution hopes are its most energetic thought leaders. The subject: dragging the world's greatest museum complex into the current century.

No small task.

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, the technorati monthly, tells of one Smithsonista who proudly observed that her operation's curators had already carefully picked 1,300 photos and uploaded them to the social-sharing Web site Flickr.

An important proposal being released Monday by the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform urges Congress and the White House to commit immediately to stabilizing the debt at 60 percent of GDP by 2018; come up with a credible plan for getting there; and begin phasing in the necessary policy changes in 2012, once the recovery is fully underway. ... Original Article

"I think the Americans are beginning to understand the magnitude of what is happening in Mexico and who they are in bed with," said Jorge Castaneda, ...