As if we needed it, last week provided a fresh reminder about how the government behaves in the wild. And it has nothing to do with the IRS, Benghazi, or Eric Holder. 

The Scrapbook was drawn like a moth to the flame by this eye-grabbing teaser last week on the front page of the Washington Post’s Health & Science section: “A metallic-green beetle has arrived .  .  . If you live near an ash tree, beware.” The headline was equally unnerving: “Exotic beetle has killed 100 million ash trees​—​and maybe some humans, too.” It gets worse. The Post cites a study linking the emerald ash borer (EAB), an invasive species, to 21,000 deaths.

It may be hard to believe, or maybe it’s all too believable; but here in Washington the chattering classes are beginning to ask a question that, elsewhere in America, might seem premature: After Obama, what? 

The state of the union today is uneasy, at best. Washington is crippled by gridlock while Americans across the country feel alienated from their government, so much so that the president feels compelled to remind them that the government is “us.” But is it really so, in a meaningful sense? Sure, the people choose their lawmakers through elections, but does the government actually represent their interests? If it does, why does it fail to solve their problems?

Gabriel Gomez is an ambitious guy. In January, with Massachusetts senator John Kerry all but certain to be confirmed as secretary of state, the 47-year-old Gomez wrote a letter to Governor Deval Patrick. Between Kerry’s resignation and the special election to fill his seat in the Senate, Patrick, a Democrat, would need to nominate a temporary replacement. Though a lifelong Republican, Gomez tried to appeal to Patrick’s sense of bipartisanship and asked the governor to choose him.

Human cloning is finally here, and it is going to spark a political conflagration. First, some background.

The burgeoning deficit has stopped burgeoning, at least for now. So Republican plans to attack the profligate president and to use the debt ceiling as a weapon to get more spending cuts can be shelved. Conservative deficit hawks should turn to a more immediate and important task—devising policies that will help the economy to grow at a rate that ends middle-class malaise and gets the millions who are out of work back into the workforce.

The Cold War is now so over that it might as well be grouped with the ancient ice ages, but there is one echo rolling across Europe from East to West: the Russian attempt to dominate the natural gas market on the European continent. As the energy sector accounts for 25 percent of Russia’s economy, any large changes in energy markets present major challenges for Vladimir Putin.

By most accounts, Kermit Gosnell seemed stunned last week when a jury found him guilty of three counts of first-degree murder in what seemed to have been his routine killings of newborn babies at his abortion clinic in Philadelphia; he thought he was doing his job. Abortion is legal and is a much-touted right. The president recently lavished praise on Planned Parenthood, a lobbyist for which had testified to Florida legislators in March that an infant born alive in the course of an abortion might be left to die anyhow. 

SeaTac, Wash.

There is no curse on the second term of presidents. When presidents lose credibility, when trust vanishes and their word is no longer accepted, they have only themselves to blame. That was true for President Nixon, among many others, and now it’s true for President Obama.