Week In The News: Newtown, Fiscal Cliff, Benghazi Report

The aftermath of an American massacre. Blame for Benghazi. Plans, A, B, and C for the fiscal cliff. Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.

It was a week of anguish. It was a week of no Plan B. In Newtown, Connecticut and across the country, stunned grief at the killings of so many – little children, teachers. A terrible national wake-up call. Maybe a call to action.

In Washington, the glimmer of a fiscal cliff deal, then nothing. House speaker John Boehner went another way, for his own Plan B. Was embarrassingly rebuffed when his own House Republicans said no way to a tax hike on millionaires. So now what? Robert Bork is gone. Daniel Inouye.

This hour, On Point: our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.
-Tom Ashbrook

Molly Ball, political reporter for the Atlantic.

Rick Klein, senior Washington Editor for ABC News.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst.

Foreign Policy "Amid the furor over the attack on our U.S. consulate and the death of four Americans serving in Libya, Secretary Hillary Clinton convened an internal State Department review — and that Accountability Review Board has just released its report. Clinton has cannily already said she will adopt all of the recommendations in the report. Unfortunately, even doing so will not solve the problems that occurred in Benghazi."

Slate "In the 1990s, politicians backed by the NRA attacked researchers for publishing data on firearm research. For good measure, they also went after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for funding the research. According to the NRA, such science is not “legitimate.”To make sure federal agencies got the message, Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) sponsored an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget, the exact amount it had spent on firearms research the previous year."

Hartford Courant "After a week of intensive investigation following the slaughter of 20 first graders and six women at an elementary school in Newtown, normally promising lines of inquiry have turned up little if anything to shed light on what motivated Adam Lanza, the reclusive, 20-year old gunman, to kill. A preliminary examination of his cellular telephone showed that he had made or received few, if any calls, investigators and others familiar with the matter said. No information has yet emerged from investigators on any possible text messages he may have sent or received."