Frank James

Updated on 2/14/2013 @ 5:20 pm

Thursday brought the latest twist in the saga of Chuck Hagel's nomination to be President Obama's second-term defense secretary.

Hagel's nomination came two Senate votes short of the required 60 that would have allowed it to proceed to a final vote. The vote, largely along party lines, was 58 to 40 with one senator voting present.

President Obama's second inaugural address was widely perceived as a throwing down of the gauntlet in how it framed his progressive faith in government and challenged his Republican political opponents in any number of ways.

Given that, expect to see more glove-throwing Tuesday as the president delivers the first State of the Union speech of his second term.

(Revised on 2/6/1013 at 12:28 pm ET to include FCC comment.)

In Washington, there's always one kind of alleged war or another against some group or idea — the war on women, the war on religion and the war on the Second Amendment come quickly to mind.

This week, many of us became aware of another supposed conflict we had never heard of: essentially, a war on Wi-Fi.

Of all the individuals in President Obama's first-term Cabinet, physicist Steven Chu was arguably the least likely to be found in official Washington.

The Energy Department secretary, after all, was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from the University of California, Berkeley, the first science laureate to serve as a Cabinet secretary.

So what did we learn from Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel's sometimes rocky confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee?

1) We learned that the former two-term Republican senator from Nebraska with the reputation for speaking his mind and not sticking to his party's talking points has through the years said lots of things that could be used against him in such a setting.

And they were. Repeatedly.

There are some people who viewed the news that the economy shrank toward the end of the year as a bracing wake-up call, a gloomy foreshadowing of what could happen if even bigger automatic reductions start March 1. But don't count on it changing the dynamics of the current debate over the so-called sequester.

If President Obama wanted to pick the perfect wedge issue to split the Republican Party, he could hardly have improved on a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's immigration laws.

Not that he has an ulterior motive in advocating for action on Capitol Hill. But it works out the same way.

That was evident Monday, as conservatives reacted to the news that a bipartisan group of senators had agreed on a blueprint for comprehensive changes in immigration laws. The fissures among Republicans were popping up all over.