Reaffirming his commitment to protect current and future generations who depend on Social Security, President Obama declared in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, “Our government shouldn’t make promises we cannot keep -- but we must keep the promises we’ve already made.”  Indeed, we must keep the promise of old-age security that Americans have earned through hard work. The nation’s politicians should be held accountable to keep their word that they will not cut the Social Security benefits of older workers, retirees, people with disabilities and the children of deceased and disabled parents.

The GOP’s response to President Obama's first post re-election State of the Union Address in some ways will be markedly different than in its response to his prior addresses. But in one way it will be the same. Its blatant frontal assault on him didn’t work for four years. So this time the GOP’s rebuttal will be softer and gentler in tone and theme. But underneath the flowery rhetoric, the GOP’s relentless attack on his policies is still very much in place.

“Media elites have convinced themselves that there is a crisis in Social Security,” said Eric Kingson, a professor of social work at Syracuse University and co-chair of the advocacy group Social Security Works. Kingson, who served as a policy advisor on presidential commissions on the issue in the 1980s and ’90s, said there is indeed an increasing crisis around adequate funding for retirement in America. “But they [journalists] focus on the most conservative framing of the crisis,” he said. In reality, Kingson added, “Social Security is the one bright spot” in the federal government.

Will the U.S. economy go over the “fiscal cliff” after New Years Day? If so, what will that mean to the country’s most financially vulnerable people? Former White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) told reporters on a national telephone briefing Thursday, organized by New America Media and CBPP, that he believes Democrats and Republicans will take the budget negotiations to and possibly over the cliff’s edge. 

The Tea Party’s brand of patented loose cannon obstructionism is too threatening to a GOP still reeling from the election flop. The ouster of the Tea Party hardliners and desertions by GOP bigwigs from the movement was hardly the first rumbling that the lights are dimming for the Tea Party. A year earlier, polls showed that far more Americans had an unfavorable view of the Tea Party than when it roared on the scene a couple of years earlier. The disaffection cut across all lines and that included many conservatives. 

As the vice presidential debate’s referee, Martha Raddatz of ABC News is getting high marks almost all around for regaining a modicum of respect for the media, following Jim Lehrer’s limpid performance in the first presidential debate. What’s being widely missed by the ringside scorekeepers, however, is that while Raddatz is getting a pass for dwelling too much on foreign policy — after all, her colleagues allow, she is a foreign correspondent -- she badly flubbed the portion of the debate devoted to entitlement programs.

In an apparent off-the-cuff remark, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan gushed that he thought it was a “cool thing” that an African-American was president. But Ryan’s rapture with President Obama didn’t last past the first sentence. In the next breath he quickly added that he didn’t like much else about Obama. The much else was how much Obama has spent on health, education and job development programs that would help the poor and minorities. That spending has been fiscal heresy for Ryan.

Talk of the end of American exceptionalism seems to be everywhere lately, but in at least one area, the United States inarguably reigns supreme.  Currently, per capita health care expenditures in the U.S. are approaching $8,000 a year, far more than anywhere else in the world.  The nation with the second-highest per capita cost, Norway, spends  $2,500 less per person per year.  What do Americans get for their money?  A life expectancy of 78.2 years, slightly ahead of Panama and Libya.

The merry month of March might well have marked the beginning of the end of political lunacy in the United States, replaced by a refreshing maturity among the electorate——never mind the various fevered fanatics currently holding public office, or hoping to. Signs are numerous that zealotry has had its day in the sun, and that radical pragmatism, if you will, shall be the Zeitgeist come November.