National: President Obama yesterday signed an order to begin the $85 billion in budget cuts known as the sequester. He spoke to the press yesterday shortly after the failure of a last-minute meeting with Republicans to avoid drastic across the board budget cuts. “We shouldn’t be making a series of dumb, arbitrary cuts,” he said. Estimating that if the cuts continue into coming months they will cost the US economy 750,000 jobs. “The longer these cuts remain in place, the greater the damage to our economy, a slow grind that will intensify with each passing day,” Mr. Obama said.

• A 2000 page environmental study by the State Department presents no compelling argument that the 1700 mile Keystone Pipeline should not be built.  Environmentalists are shocked. The pipeline would carry Canadian tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, crossing 1,000 bodies of water. Tar sands oil is considered some of the dirtiest available, but the report says that from extraction to transporting and burning it, the oil is not as polluting as its critics say.
• The broke city of Detroit is going to get a state-appointed financial manager to try to straighten its fiscal mess. “If you look at the quality of services for citizens it’s ranked among the worst,” Gov. Rick Snyder said. He’s already met objections from critics who claim it’s a takeover by a white majority state of a black majority city.

Basketball Diplomacy: Former NBA star Dennis Rodman, the cross-dressing, lip-studded, tattooed wild man whose hair changes color like a chameleon, became the first known American to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. They watched basketball together and declared each other “friends for life.” Rodman was there for an HBO show.

Last Day: Bonnie Franklin, star of the 1970s sitcom “One Day at a Time” has died at age 69 in New York of pancreatic cancer. She played a divorced single mother raising two teenage children, which was a groundbreaking departure from the happy nuclear families of television at the time. Starting in 1975 the show ran for nine seasons.

Mind of the Jedi: Proving that he’s the stupidest President ever,  experts pointed out yesterday how Barack Obama mixed his sci-fi metaphors when he said he was unable to use a  “Jedi mind meld” to get inside the heads of Republicans.  Of course, everyone knows that the “Jedi mind trick” is from “Star Wars” and the “Vulcan mind meld” is from Star Trek. Really, jeez. How did this guy get to be President?

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