On Thursday, the Pentagon released a report allowing a trickle more of estrogen into the front lines, with women now officially assigned, instead of informally attached, to battalions. But despite an explicit recommendation from a panel of neutral experts, still no ground fighting, no combat infantry, no special forces. In a press release, the women veterans’ Service Women’s Action Network “regretted” the failure to lift the “unfair” Combat Exclusion Policy, which precludes women from becoming infantry members.

Will they never learn? A year ago, the lame duck Congress finally voted an end to the despised exclusion of openly gay men and women from the service, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The same arguments – unit cohesion, unfitness for combat – that were used against open gay service now live on as the last barriers to women. For however many women are fit enough and inclined to take those hard-line jobs, as for the many dedicated gay and lesbian service members, the exclusions are an insurmountable barrier to their aspirations and a costly waste of human power for the country.

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But the new agreement makes it possible for women's groups and some liberal Catholic leaders to maintain a truce on hot-button social issues while working together around issues of women's health and universal access to healthcare. Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America are happy with the solution, and so is Sister Carol Keehan of the Catholic Health Association, who endured withering heat from the bishops and their right-wing allies over the ACA. Kristen Day of Feminists for Life likewise backs the deal. Even New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan called it "a step in the right direction," though he demanded more time to examine the fine print and suggested "legislation will still be required" to protect the church's right to discriminate against women.

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As Salman Rushdie intones his own elegant prose in a rich, musical British accent, a soundtrack plays softly but distinctly in the background. If the music seems particularly well-selected -- if its rhythms subtly match the story's turning points -- that’s because it was commissioned expressly for the purpose.

Though the story is short, Rushdie stops several times to ask the audience if he should continue. At each juncture, rapt listeners beg him to go on. After the performance is over, guests murmur words like “mesmerizing” and “transporting” as they turn back to their tablemates -- and I’m one of them.

The event is a glitzy dinner organized by Booktrack, a company that publishes e-books with "synchronized soundtracks"; the occasion is the launch of the e-publisher's first short story -- Rushdie’s “In the South" -- with accompanying music composed by John Psathas. ("In the South" is available for download now from Booktrack's website.)

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"Get a job," shouted one conservative. "I've got a job," one long-haired demonstrator fired back. "I'm a farmer. I grow the food you eat." The demonstrators, responding to an email message from the D.C. Metropolitan AFL-CIO Labor Council, came from a wide range of unions including the United Auto Workers, the Service Employees International Union, and the Sheet Metal Workers Union. They marched with members from the Fight for Philly community group, the New York Committee for Change, and veterans of the two now-evicted Occupy D.C. sites.

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Anthony Picarello, that group's general counsel, told USA Today that "We're not going to do anything until this is fixed," meaning removing the requirement for fully covered birth control from the healthcare law altogether, because there are "good Catholic business people who can't in good conscience cooperate with this." He added, "If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I'd be covered by the mandate."

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Of course, Santorum is hardly the only Republican candidate who's earned an audition for the role of chief Romney rival, and each one before him has proven spectacularly incapable of capitalizing on the opportunity.

Rick Perry surged to gigantic polling leads when he jumped into the race late last summer, then made a fool of himself in debate after debate and became an afterthought. Herman Cain supplanted Perry sometime during the fall, but fizzled when he couldn't provide a simple, coherent defense of his signature 9-9-9 plan and after a bizarre sexual harassment saga. Then there was Newt Gingrich, whose erratic style and political past gave his (many) intraparty enemies an endless supply of ammunition -- enough to destroy him once in December and then again when he somehow rose from the dead in January.

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No, I know, I know -- they sometimes do, pretty much on the stopped-clock-occasionally-correct principle. And somebody must like each of this year's best-picture nominees, with the possible exception of the universally allergenic "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close." (I appreciated one reader's recent comment that the hidden virtue of that film lay in combining the annual quota of schmaltzy Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock vehicles into one compact package.) After all, the whole reason why "The Artist" appears to be the front-runner is because it's charming and unpretentious and nearly impossible to dislike -- although I don't happen to think it's all that great -- whereas the other nominees do not share that quality.

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The 78-year-old Lagerfeld, a man who co-authored a best-selling diet book featuring "protein sachets," "homeopathic granules" and "quail flambé" -- and who has very publicly struggled with his own weight issues over the years -- has never been one to hold his tongue on the subject of women's bodies. In 2009, he was quoted in the German magazine Focus saying, "No one wants to see curvy women. You've got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly." But this time, the Chanel designer seems to have believed he was paying a compliment. While declaring the British chanteuse "a little too fat," he helpfully acknowledged that "she has a beautiful face and a divine voice" and called her "the thing at the moment."

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This is your chance to hear me repeat all of the things I've been saying for years in my column, except live and in-person, and have your expectations shattered when you discover that the big-shot swashbuckling Pilot is actually just some slouchy old bald guy with a lousy attitude and a terrible speaking voice. Say it isn't so!

I'm thinking maybe I'll just show some travel pictures instead of talking about airlines.  Or hook my iPod up to the speakers and play some Grant Hart songs.

There will be a meet-and-greet sort of thing afterward. I accept cash, checks and gift certificates, plus canned goods and other non-perishables.

* The Funniest Thing Ever Written is exactly that. It's a line from one of Alex Beam's columns back in the fall of 2000:

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Rather than settling anything, this agreement is simply a continuation of the policy framework of both the Bush and the Obama administrations. So what, exactly, is that framework? It is, as Damon Silvers of the Congressional Oversight Panel, which monitored the bailouts, once put it, to preserve the capital structures of the largest banks. "We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks," said Silvers in October, 2010. "We can’t do both." Writing down debt that cannot be paid back -- the approach Franklin Roosevelt took -- is off the table, as it would jeopardize the equity keeping those banks afloat.

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Clad in blue T-shirts and waving tiny red, yellow and blue flags, the lively crowd sang and danced, waiting for the arrival of the man who is the first serious threat to President Hugo Chávez in his 13-year tenure.

Henrique Capriles Radonski is the frontrunner for primaries due to take place on Sunday, in preparation for October’s presidential election.

For the first time in its disjointed history, the opposition he is about to command has finally united to take on the socialist president.

When he arrives, el pueblo — "the people," as Chávez affectionately calls them — crowds around him.

The 39-year-old Capriles has risen up the political ladder in Venezuela over the last decade, once a mayor and now governor of the country’s second-most populous state, Miranda.

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What quickly followed is well known. Several days later, in what journalist James Fallows called “probably the most direct public dressing-down of a military officer, a four-star general, by a civilian superior since Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur, 50 years ago,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called Shinseki’s estimate “wildly off the mark,” and said that “it’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.”

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I know, I know -- to even mention that notion is jarring in a nation whose consumer, epicurean and economic cultures have been respectively defined by the megastore, the Big Mac and the worship of the billionaire. Considering that, it's amazing the word "enough" still exists in the American vernacular at all. But exist it does, and more than that -- the term's morality is actually starting to suffuse the highest-profile debates in the public square.

After the financial meltdown, for example, Congress witnessed an unexpectedly spirited fight over enacting pay caps at bailed-out financial institutions. Beneath the overheated rhetoric, the brawl revolved around determining how much is enough to compensate Wall Street's government-subsidized scam artists.

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So it's not at all surprising that this year's conference opened on Thursday with a parade of teleprompter jokes, a plug for Dinesh D'Souza's "The Roots of Obama's Rage," and apocalyptic warnings like the one from Georgia Rep. Tom Graves, who told attendees that reelecting Obama would be akin to ending "this great story we call America." CPAC crowds -- and, really, grassroots conservatives across the country -- have been delighting in this sort of talk since Obama took office.

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I am the worst person I know. My life is a shambles and I get so desperate for companionship that I talk to someone whose interests overlap with mine somewhat, and I'm so sociopathically charming that she falls in love with me or thinks I'm "great" or that I bring a lot to her life. My technique is to take the few things I know a little something about and present them so that they're accessible or so that they shed some light on a topic she has an interest in. This makes her think I'm worth something. Then I fail to be great in all ways and she's heartbroken.

Yeah, I know this isn't all my fault, that it takes two to make a bad relationship, and all that. And certainly there are women -- most of them -- who wouldn't even look my way. Great for them. But for those who are willing to look my way, don't I have a basic human obligation to keep them safe from my horribleness and inevitable failures? Without exception I say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing or just collapse.

So. Given that I contribute nothing to the world but disappointment and misery, and I can't control my desire for companionship and attention, shouldn't I just kill myself? Isn't that the moral thing to do at this point?

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Sorry, lady. You’ve mistaken me as a responsible, upright citizen. Allow me to introduce myself: I am a former sofa-lounger, and now I qualify as something even lower than that.

My last full-time job ended in January 2009. Everyone at our small pharmaceutical marketing agency received an email invitation to a mandatory staff meeting. And, much like a bad reality show, it was only moments before the scheduled time that we began to realize we weren’t all invited to the same room.

Along with more than 30 colleagues, I got voted off the island.

Those lucky enough to receive invitations to the other room were told to take a long lunch while we poor saps cleared our desks.

I spent the first several weeks in a daze. There is not a lot of room for pride when you’re a single mom, so I filed for unemployment benefits. And in the height of irony, I was told I wasn’t eligible for food assistance because my income was too high.

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