So Reince Priebus mentions on my show Wednesday that the RNC is gearing up to focus some attention on Hillary’s less-than-stellar years at State, and HuffPo front pages the story and 1500+ angry commentators chime in.

Just a bit defensive, no?

Hey, read the NYT’s Mark Leibovich’s ringing defense of Hill’s State years…or Politico’s Maggie Haberman’s. (Pete Dominick flunked the “Hillary for $100″ Double Jeopardy as well.)

Hard to extoll a record that doesn’t exist.  Amassing frequent flyer miles doesn’t count unless you are George Clooney in Up In The Air.

Hillary flopped at State.  Did zip in the Senate.  And is the grandmother of Obamacare.  And three folks told me during my two day D.C. stay this week that the new DH book is devastating.  No wonder many Ds want Elizabeth Warren to run.

(Full Preisbus transcript here as soon as available.)

You know your first New Year’s Resolution ought to be to preorder and then read The Happiest Life when it arrives on your doorstep 12/31/13 and act on in 1/1/14.

But your second resolution should be to sign up for and compete in the best half marathon in the land –or the 5 K if you are just getting started– the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Half Marathon, run in Irvine, California on Saturday January 11.

2014 Southern California

I have run –well, trundled– this race a half dozen times and it is flat, fast, and fun, full of high school and junior high kids training for the Los Angeles Marathon as well as thousands of oldsters, both serious and slow, on one of the nicest courses in the land.

Look at it this way: With Obamacare arriving, you had better get into and stay in shape.

Rick Gibson, the Athletic Director of Woodbridge HS in Irvine the student athletes of which have staffed the race for a quarter century joins me in the last half hour of today’s program to push fitness as the New Year’s resolution that shouldn’t wait until 1/1 to get started.  Go sign up now and motivate e yourself for the 11th!

Where does it come from, the constant and often bitter battle between left and right in the country?

One of the country’s leading public intellectuals, Yuval Levin, makes a compelling argument in a new book that we can blame it all on two very familiar names and their two very different views of human nature and politics: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.

Yuval will join me in hour two today to discuss The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left:

Flash: Obamacare Dangerous to Health of Poor
By Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute

Well, Halleluiah.  The Obamacare website is up and running.

Of course, at only half a million applications processed so far… and accounting for the ones that the system garbled or couldn’t verify or seems to have lost… and anticipating the tens of millions of Americans predicted to lose coverage once the employer mandate kicks in and it turns out to be simpler and cheaper for companies to send workers to the government’s back-up plan (the one paid for by the so-called “fine” that Chief Justice John Roberts correctly identified as a “tax”) than to navigate the troubled waters of Obamacare’s rules and costs… America should achieve the fervently promised universal coverage by — Oh, I don’t know — how about sometime in the next decade.  Maybe.

I guess that’s what you call close enough for government work.

To think of it.  A scant two months ago, 85 percent of the people in this happy republic had health insurance they liked, valued, and wanted to keep.  Period.  Now anger, anxiety and disgust fill the land. Continue Reading