“John F. Kennedy” on The Daily Caller

In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is digitizing reams of JFK artifacts. Among them: The president’s application to Harvard, including mediocre test scores and a refreshingly banal personal essay. (more)

“Stop the bad stuff” is what John Boehner told a bunch of us at breakfast a few weeks before the election. That’s how he defined the GOP mission. Now he’s speaker. (more)

Hugo Chavez, the yanqui-hating dictator of Venezuela, will not accept Washington’s proposed emissary and has dared the United States to break diplomatic relations. It seems Ambassador-select Larry Palmer’s sin is that he did not applaud Chavez when he used his rubber-stamp parliament to perpetuate his dictatorial regime. The State Department’s limp-wristed response was to cancel the visa of the Venezuelan ambassador. That, and silence from the White House, told the megalomaniac in Caracas exactly what the United States will do when Iran finishes building a nuclear missile base in Venezuela — absolutely nothing. (more)

Senate Republicans bound together last night to defeat the infamous omnibus pork spending bill, all fat-infested $1.1 trillion of it. (more)

John F. Kennedy wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book in the 1950s titled Profiles in Courage. Bill Clinton in 1992 had an incident called his “Sister Souljah moment” — a phrase that has become synonymous with the same definition of political courage used by then-Sen. Kennedy in his famous work: the willingness to stand up to your own base when you feel it is the right thing to do, even though it might be the hardest thing to do. (more)

Is cutting taxes immoral? Some people are arguing that extending tax cuts to the wealthy is just that. Was supporting Obamacare and taxpayer-funded abortion moral then? (more)

No political figure in America should ever, for any reason, mix religion and politics. To do so is to threaten the very foundation of the Republic. (more)

Arlington, Virginia (CNN) — After mostly avoiding the spotlight for decades, many of the former U.S. Secret Service agents who were assigned to protect President John F. Kennedy are now offering their accounts of the day he was assassinated, 47 years ago Monday. (more)

Today is the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Honoring the memory of the popular president once hailed as American’s own King of Camelot, The Delaware County Daily Times has put together a list of the top 10 songs inspired by JFK. (more)

The other night on his show “Countdown,” Olbermann responded to a gaseous piece of nonsense written by Ted Koppel. Koppel had held forth in the Washington Post about the death of news, by which he meant the fact-based reports from the golden age of journalism — which, as Jack Shafer noted in Slate, happened to coincide with Koppel’s own career in the mid to late 20th century. Koppel then scolded Fox News and Keith Olbermann for dismantling this great tradition with their partisanship and disregard for facts. (more)

Ted Sorenson passed away this week. He was the famed JFK aide who helped the then-senator from Massachusetts with the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage. He served John F. Kennedy loyally and well. (more)

In Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, he reveals highly classified and sensitive information about lethal CIA clandestine counterterrorism operations, including drone attacks and secret CIA-run “counterterrorism pursuit teams” to kill terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Woodward does not reveal the identities of CIA covert operatives, but his and other revelations, including that President Barack Obama has authorized the killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, suggest that one or more “assassins” not unlike Vince Flynn’s fictional Mitch Rapp are out there. (more)

If you are the press secretary to the President of the United States, the main thing to avoid is becoming the story yourself. You are a “spokesman.” A mouthpiece. And as such, it’s best to keep your size elevens out of your mouth. (more)

First Lady Michelle Obama is venturing out onto the campaign trail to shore up embattled Democratic candidates. Apparently, Lady Macbeth wasn’t available. (more)

Mr. Emanuel praised Mr. Obama as ‘‘the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has faced.” He fought back tears as he thanked his wife and three children, seated in the front row of the East Room for the farewell ceremony.  (more)

Arthur Penn, the stage, television and motion picture director whose revolutionary treatment of sex and violence in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde” transformed the American film industry, died Tuesday night, the day after he turned 88. (more)

In my last piece, I explained the White House’s economic policy process as directed by the National Economic Council (NEC). The NEC process is a critical determinant of national policies, and one worthy of greater public appreciation. A new book from Steven Rattner has emerged, purporting to shed light on this process as it related to the auto industry bailout. The “tell-all” nature of published excerpts from the book is exactly the wrong way to go about this. (more)

A mistake has been made in the Oval Office makeover that goes beyond the beige. (more)

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a potential candidate for president in 2012, will travel to Texas next week to challenge Democratic President John F. Kennedy’s historic 1960 address on religion and politics in America. (more)

Iraq policy was not the only Bush-era relic that President Obama moved on from Tuesday, as he announced the next phase of operations in the country the U.S. invaded in 2003. (more)