Donald Kaul

The air is still thick with outrage over President Barack Obama's attempt to require all employers to provide insurance coverage for people who desire (or need) birth control.

Catholic bishops and their fellow travelers exploded in righteous indignation over a proposal that would have required religious institutions (but not churches) to offer employees the same contraception coverage required of other, secular institutions under the Obama health plan.

Breaking news: Republicans have found their long-sought alternative to Mitt Romney.

Surprisingly, it's Mitt Romney.

Remember the old Mitt Romney? That white-shoe Republican who was all for health care mandates? Who favored reproductive choice and who was no enemy to gay rights — that Mitt Romney?

He's dead, a casualty of the political wars in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida.

Washington's talking about cutting the military budget. Whoopee.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently revealed plans to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the Pentagon's budget in the next decade, with possibly more reductions on the way.

We're going to have fewer soldiers, fewer warplanes and ships, and not so many missiles. We'll cut back a bit on nuclear weapons. If Congress buys this plan, the Pentagon's $530 billion-a-year base budget, which excludes extras like the wars we're actually fighting, would shrink to a mere $472 billion by 2013. Double whoopee.

Newt Gingrich has a Super PAC called "Winning Our Future." Mitt Romney's is called "Restore Our Future."

I know, technically Super PACs don't belong to candidates. But only innocents like Boy Scouts and the Supreme Court believe that. In the real world, this new kind of political action committee, created in the wake of a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, is a powerful campaign weapon.

I generally make New Year's resolutions in hopes of becoming a better person — more disciplined, healthier, or, at the very least, less pathetic. Some of these resolutions last until nightfall. Some don't. None ever sees February.

This year, I'm taking a different approach. I'm going to concentrate on giving up things. Not things like smoking — been there, done that. I mean giving up on ideas I have pursued through the years into one blind alley after another.

Ideas like climate change, for example.

Yet another Republican ABM (Anybody But Mitt) candidate has experienced failure to launch.

The Newt Gingrich rocket that seemed oh-so-formidable just a few weeks ago didn't survive an avalanche of negative ads financed by stealth Romney money in Iowa. It crashed and burned on takeoff.

Romney rolled to victory by a whopping eight-vote margin over — surprise, surprise! — Rick Santorum, yet another new candidate fresh out of the ABM design studio. Romney, whose support (as George Will observed) "has fluctuated wildly between 23 and 26 percent," got just under 25 percent of the vote.

Ask anyone. I pride myself on being seldom surprised, shocked almost never.

2011, however, called my cool into question. I was nothing but shockingly surprised all year.

Take Barack Obama, particularly since the 2010 Congressional election or, as I like to call it, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I thought he’d be better.

Not that I didn’t have certain reservations about him from the beginning — his inexperience, for one thing. He’d never really run anything, let alone a government. But I thought he was smart as a whip and could figure it out.

The Iowa caucuses may be over by the time you read this. But it doesn’t matter. The caucuses are the second-most fraudulent event on the nation's political calendar.

The first, of course, is the Ames Straw Poll. It's entirely meaningless, but political reporters pay attention to it because if they didn’t, their editors would make them cover a real story, like a meeting of the local water board.

Quick! Who won the Ames Straw Poll in August?

Did you forget already? I thought so.

It's now officially too late to do your Christmas shopping early.

That's OK. Doing your Christmas shopping late counts too. Remember, it's not the thought behind the gift that counts; it's what you spend on it.

Oh, I imagine you Xmasologists out there are offended by such crass materialism. You say that Christmas should be all about the birth of Christ and we should walk around looking pious.

I say that's nonsense.

Historically, you could even argue that the ultra-religious Christmas is un-American. The Pilgrims certainly thought so.

No wonder the American people are confused — about the economy, the nation, the Middle East, the onrushing election, and everything else. People keep feeding them bad information.

For example, how many times have you heard a commentator say that the mess in Washington is the fault of both parties because neither party will compromise? I'm guessing…many.

It's not true, not even a little bit.