Headline staples

When Susan Rice pulled her name from consideration for secretary of state after carrying the Obama administration's water on the Benghazi attacks, headline writers had a field day.

As Greg Mitchell, a writer for The Nation, put it in a tweet: "Okay, now comes the headline deluge: Cooked Rice. Fried Rice. Burnt Rice. Rice-a-Ruined. Chopped Rice."

Interesting times

Joe Lieberman of Connecticut leaves the U.S. Senate after four terms, a national campaign as a Democratic vice presidential nominee and nearly a similar run on John McCain's Republican ticket. The latter stages of his career saw him derided by the left wing of the Democratic Party and spurned in his home state re-election primary (but he won the office as an independent).

The 70-year-old told The New York Times he'd seen some changes over the years.

"When I started here in the Senate," he said, "a blackberry was a fruit, and tweeting was something only birds do."

Not-so-fuzzy math

Mitt Romney said, self-destructively, to campaign contributors during the presidential election that "there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what ... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims."

Yale Law School put the line atop its list of the notable quotes of the year.

And, perhaps ironically, a Battleground Poll conducted a month after the election put Romney's approval rate at, you guessed it, 47 percent.

Familiar faces

A bank robber dressed in a Florida State University sweatshirt went from teller to teller in a recent Virginia bank robbery wearing a Mitt Romney mask. Two years ago the bank was held up in similar, um, fashion. The robber wore a Hillary Clinton mask.

Waiting to inhale

President Barack Obama said in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters last week that the feds have "got bigger fish to fry" than prosecuting recreational pot users whose tokes are now legal in Colorado and the state of Washington.

"It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it's legal."

Former President Jimmy Carter's view on legalizing pot: "I'm in favor of it."

Wag the dog

Anti-tax activist extraordinaire Grover Norquist, perhaps thinking wishfully, sees Republicans on Capitol Hill cutting off Obama's ability to spend much money in his second term.

"Obama will be on a very short leash, fiscally speaking," Norquist said. "He may decide to go blow up small countries he can't pronounce because it won't be any fun to be here because he won't be able to spend the kind of cash he was hoping to."