IN THE CLAMOR over immigration, the demand for more border security has been unrelenting.

According to a Washington Post-ABC poll released last week, 70 percent of Americans want Dzhokhar Tsarnaev put to death if he is convicted of the Boston Marathon bombing.

It's the Holy Grail that Massachusetts Republicans have been seeking for years: the blueprint for getting candidates elected to statewide office.

If truth-in-labeling rules applied to Congress, the proposed law giving states the power to collect sales tax from out-of-state online retailers would be named the Marketplace Unfairness Act.

IF KIM JONG UN thinks he can shake down Washington by threatening nuclear apocalypse, President Obama says, the belligerent North Korean dictator has another think coming.

SCARCELY HAD the terrible news from Copley Square broken when the somber prediction began to be heard everywhere: Boston will never be the same. The Marathon will never be the same. Patriots Day will never be the same.

In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written behind bars 50 years ago this week, Martin Luther King invokes God 15 times and mentions the words "Christ" or "Christian" 21 times. But he refers to "law" 41 times – more than both of them combined – and thereby hangs a lesson.

So the Mayor of Boston, channeling his inner Captain Renault, is shocked – shocked! – to find that Boston's taxi industry is a rigged and pitiless racket.

Ten years ago this week, the United States led an invasion of Iraq with the explicit purpose of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

HILLARY CLINTON STEPPED DOWN after four years as secretary of state amid swathes of flattery excessive even by Washington's sycophantic standards.

Lawyers representing three of the men charged in the New Delhi gang rape case said last week that they would enter pleas of not guilty on their clients' behalf. In most criminal prosecutions, that would be unremarkable. But the lawyers who stepped forward to represent the suspects in this case did so in the face of emotional protests by fellow attorneys, many of whom insisted that no one should defend those accused of such a terrible crime.

I DON'T FALL IN LOVE with politicians – the last presidential candidate I voted for with ardor was Ronald Reagan in 1980 – and my heart doesn't break when those I support don't win. Nor am I a party loyalist.

"Civility" was a popular buzzword last year when then-Senator Scott Brown and his Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren signed a much-hyped "People's Pledge" to keep third-party advertising out of their rapidly escalating US Senate contest.

Eleven years ago, al-Qaeda terrorist Richard Reid tried to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 with a bomb hidden in his shoes. As a result, air travelers to this day must remove their shoes to pass through security at US airports.

WHEN IT COMES to foreign policy, John F. Kerry is no John F. Kennedy.

Whatever else the New Year brings, at least it won't be a presidential election or any of the primaries, caucuses, or conventions leading up to it. Which is more than OK with me. American presidential campaigns have grown excruciatingly overlong, and I look forward to a respite from the obsessive political coverage, the ginned-up gaffes and controversies, the rush to dissect each twitch in public opinion, the avalanche of dishonest advertising and disingenuous "fact-checking."

It Is remarkable how confident so many people are that they know what causes – and just how to prevent – horrific massacres like Friday's bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

FERTILITY IN AMERICA has been declining for years. According to the Pew Research Center, the nation's birth rate hit an all-time low in 2011 – just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. It was almost twice as high – 123 births per 1,000 women – at the peak of the Baby Boom in 1957.

To everything there is a season, the Good Book says, and in Michigan workplaces the season of freedom is arriving at last.

In the American experience, anti-Semitic decrees have been virtually unthinkable. Religious liberty is enshrined in the Constitution, and early in his presidency George Washington went out of his way to assure the young nation's Jews that "the Government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." During the long centuries of Jewish exile, powerful officials had often promulgated sweeping edicts depriving Jews of their rights or driving them from their homes. In America, that could never happen. But 150 years ago this month, it did.