Here is another good news/bad news column about the 112th Congress.

The Romney 4 percent Pentagon budget is no “spike”; it’s more like a return to normal, even very constrained military spending given the global mission of America’s armed forces.

When he was director of central intelligence, Leon Panetta earned a reputation as an energetic advocate for his agency. When he replaced Robert Gates at the Pentagon, it was reasonable to hope that Panetta would continue to play the role of a senior statesman.

As China grows less predictable and the United States less willing to shoulder its responsibilities, familiar patterns of bilateral relations must change.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The Obama budget is already being ripped by Republicans as a political document and by deficit hawks for its failure to attack the debt problem vigorously enough. But in context, it is worth a brief comparison to the Romney and Santorum visions.

Mead urges Washington to “enter into deep strategic conversations” with each of these powers, so as to start building effective partnerships.  The problem is, we’ve already tried that, with most of them.

‘A prolonged and solemn farce,” Churchill’s description of 1930s disarmament talks, applies even more accurately to the annual round of UN climate talks, which just wrapped up their 17th year of world-saving negotiations in Durban, South Africa, with another 11th-hour “breakthrough” that amounts only to agreeing to meet again next year and repeat the farce.