"President Obama is less than stalwart in the fight against ISIS and doesn't seem overly concerned about Vladimir Putin's predation in Ukraine or China's aggression in the South China Sea.

"It is the fight against climate change, an allegedly dire threat to the nation's security, that brings out his inner Churchill.

"In remarks to the Coast Guard Academy commencement on May 20, Obama pledged his undying hostility to climate change and his determination to fight it on the beaches and in the fields. He called it 'one of the most severe threats' we face and 'an immediate risk to our national security.'...

"He hailed the Coast Guard for building more fuel-efficient cutters and the Marines for deploying with portable solar panels. It was one of the most insipid calls to arms ever made by an American commander in chief, and there is unlikely to be much competition until President Elizabeth Warren rallies the US Navy against income inequality."

"Denny Hastert -- the former House speaker now indicted for violating regulations on bank withdrawals that were originally meant to snare drug dealers -- as a man of integrity according to his former House colleagues.

"By the sketchy standards of Illinois politics, that might well have been true. But his fall from grace should prompt other questions about how a former high-school teacher who held elective office from 1981 to 2007 could leave Congress with a fortune estimated at $4 million to $17 million. When he entered Congress in 1987, he was worth at most $275,000. Hastert was the beneficiary of very lucky land deals while in Congress; and since leaving office, he has earned more than $2 million a year as a lobbyist. That helps explain how he could agree to pay $3.5 million to a former student to cover up an ancient sex-abuse scandal."

"He was the longest-serving Republican House speaker in U.S. history, and proud of how far he'd come from his days as a small-town high school teacher and wrestling coach.

"'Coach,' in fact, was a nickname that stuck.

"So news Thursday that Dennis Hastert faces a federal indictment was a shock to many. As House speaker from 1999 to 2007, the husky, gray-thatched Illinoisan was just two heartbeats away from the presidency. At 73, he has been in recent years working mostly behind the scenes as a Washington power broker. ...

"It also emerged that the Illinois House put on hold a proposal to spend $500,000 to put a statue in the state Capitol honoring Hastert. He declined the offer about a month ago, a spokesman for House Speaker Michael Madigan said."

"While retrenching abroad, the Obama Administration remains committed to expanding Washington's footprint at home. Behold the Environmental Protection Agency's rewrite Wednesday of the Clean Water Act that extends federal jurisdiction over tens of millions of acres of private land.

"The Clean Water Act limits the federal government to regulating the 'navigable waters of the United States' like the Colorado River or Lake Michigan. In 1986 the EPA expanded that definition to seize jurisdiction over tributaries and adjacent wetlands. Now it is extending federal control over just about any creek, pond, prairie pothole or muddy farm field that EPA says has a 'significant nexus' to a navigable waterway. ...

"Congress should try use its regulatory review powers to overturn the new rule, forcing Members to show whose side they'€™re on -- the average landowner's or the Washington water police."

"What is unique about American foreign policy today is not just that it is rudderless, but how quickly and completely the 70-year postwar order seems to have disintegrated -- and how little interest the American people take in the collapse, thanks to the administration's apparent redeeming message, which translates, 'It's their misfortune and none of our own.' ...

"Meanwhile, no one seems to much care that between 2009 and 2017, we will have borrowed 8 trillion more dollars. Yet for all that stimulus, the U.S. economy still has staggering labor non-participation rates, flat GDP growth, and stagnant household income. As long as zero interest rates continue, the rich make lots of money in the stock market, and the debt can grow by $500 billion a year and still be serviced. Financial sobriety is now defined as higher taxes bringing in record revenues to service half-trillion-dollar annual additions to an $18 trillion debt."

"'About a quarter of all non-elderly Americans with private insurance coverage do not have sufficient liquid assets to pay even a mid-range deductible, which at today's rates would be $1,200 for single coverage and $2,400 for family coverage,' the Wall Street Journal reported in March.

"So now, many of the same groups that agitated for Obamacare are agitating for new government spending or tighter controls on the insurance industry and businesses to 'solve' the problem. But perhaps the first question to ask is: How did those deductibles get so high in the first place?

"The answer is Obamacare. ...

"As the Associated Press noted, some Democrats see high deductibles and out-of-pocket costs as an issue they can exploit in 2016. But Republicans have a sharply effective response: Why should voters trust Democrats to solve a problem they made worse in the first place?"

"[I]n our effort to accommodate many Americans by making the last Monday in May, Memorial Day, we have lost sight of the significance of this day to our nation. Instead of using Memorial Day as a time to honor and reflect on the sacrifices made by Americans in combat, many Americans use the day as a celebration of the beginning of summer."

"Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it's the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who's in charge -- while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America's alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall. ...

"We are scraping bottom. Following six years of President Obama's steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America's standing in the region has collapsed. And yet the question incessantly asked of the various presidential candidates is not about that. It's a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?"

"Estimates vary about how many Republicans are after the party's presidential nomination, but the number 19 keeps coming up. Nothing in nature comes in sets of 19. The only '19' in my memory is the Rolling Stones singing about someone's 19th nervous breakdown. Welcome to the world of GOP party officials, many on the verge of multiple nervous breakdowns over the flood tide of candidates. ...

"A GOP donor told me recently, 'Having 19 candidates is unseemly.' Politics? Unseemly? ...

"Between the GOP 19 and the Democratic One over the next year, give me an unseemly political spectacle."

"Hillary is beginning her trek to November 2016 with a built-in 'ick factor' regarding her essential truthfulness and the sense that she spends her life dancing around and about ethical lines. ...

"The tarnishment is permanent. The Clinton brand is damaged. The question is whether it's going to tarnish the Democratic Party."