We decided to ring the New Year in with CNN–obviously, Swamp spouse and I are wild party beasts–and we saw this. Oh my.

This is not a list of the best books published in 2012, just the best I’ve read in the past year:

Tom Friedman weighs in on the Chuck Hagel non-nomination, with some very clear thinking. But the Obama Administration is still silent–which remains deeply unfair to Hagel, and deeply satisfying to the extremists who oppose his nomination.

John Kerry will make a fine Secretary of State. He knows the world, and is easy in it. But I’m worried about the Obama Administration hanging Chuck Hagel–Kerry’s good friend and fellow Vietnam veteran–out to dry.

Krauthammer is right about the three components of our culture of violence.

It isn’t easy to find examples of political courage in an election, but I give it a shot in my annual column.

Pete Wehner, with whom I’ve been known to disagree, has some wise things to say about the facile moral posturing that has attended much of the commentary about the Newtown massacre. We’ve been too focused on the need for gun control and spent too little time talking about the far more difficult part of the problem: mental health.

The 2012 election was not a wonderful experience for neoconservatives–and it was a disaster for their beloved hero, Bibi Netanyahu, a foreign leader who tried to influence the American presidential campaign. Indeed, they’ve been proven conclusively ridiculous over the past dozen years, but still they persist. Now they’re after former …

We have new evaluations of David Petraeus this week, in New York Magazine and the New Yorker. The New Yorker piece is by the great war correspondent and author, Dexter Filkins. The New York piece is by former theater critic Frank Rich. They couldn’t be more different.

This week’s print column: How you can mesh Obamacare with Medicare, save money and improve health care–and get Republican support.

Lamar Alexander. Saxby Chambliss. Lindsey Graham. What do they have in common? Well, they’re all members of the Republican Senate sanity caucus (except for Graham’s occasional flights of neocon fantasy).  And each may be facing a crazy-nut rightwing challenge in 2014.

Barack Obama’s victory–which becomes more pronounced every day, as the final votes are counted–has obviously opened the door to a negotiation over tax increases, in which the Republicans will have to make concessions. But there are other formerly taboo subjects that need to be discussed in Washington.

The Republicans are, reportedly, outraged by President Obama’s opening bid in the fiscal cliff talks. Republicans always seem to be outraged. It’s getting boring. They need to step up and make a counter-offer.