Less than a year after Sandy left so many homes and businesses devastated, City Hall rolled out an ambitious $20 billion plan to prepare New York for an age of extreme weather, an age in which storms like Sandy could become the new normal.

The plan is a solid start for new and creative thinking about New York’s vulnerability to 21st-century weather patterns. And it shows that Sandy truly was a wake-up call for local government—no longer can New York pretend that it is invulnerable to storm patterns that have caused so much damage elsewhere around the globe.

Mr. Bloomberg’s plan centers on creating new protections for those who live in or near flood-prone areas—and those who may live in or near them in the future. In other words, City Hall does not intend to surrender large swaths of the city’s shoreline to nature, as some have advocated. Rather, through a complex plan of man-made barriers, sea walls and other obstacles, the city hopes to better protect homes, businesses and institutions from floods and storm surges.

It is estimated that the number of people living in flood-prone areas will double, from 400,000 to 800,000, by the middle of the 21st century. The mayor’s plan is a practical acknowledgement of that reality. For the most part, it seeks to protect, rather than eject, those who choose to live by sea.

The mayor’s plan shows that the lessons of last October’s superstorm will not pass unlearned. Extreme weather is a fact of 21st-century life, and this plan recognizes that reality.

Many experts agree that the next 10 months are critical for the Middle East and, indeed, the rest of the globe. Iran continues to defy the world with its development of nuclear weaponry. The horror in Syria only gets worse, and tensions may spill over to Lebanon. Meanwhile, in North Africa, Islamic terrorists continue to pile up appalling body counts as they seek to expand their reach into new territories.

The world, Pat Moynihan observed many years ago, is a dangerous place. One wonders what he would make of today’s conflicts.

Now as never before, the president needs his best people to be on their game. If the U.S. fails to exert critical leadership over the next few months, Israel could face the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, a nation that makes no attempt to disguise its bloodthirsty anti-Semitism. And the rest of the region could descend into anarchy.

This is why so many people were dismayed—and continue to be dismayed—over Mr. Obama’s choice of Chuck Hagel to lead the Defense Department. Mr. Hagel’s record suggests that he is less than enthusiastic about projecting American power and our core values. His miserable, unprepared performance during his confirmation hearings only added to loud worries about Mr. Hagel’s suitability for this key role.

In the meantime, on Capitol Hill, the man who would chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, finds himself enmeshed in a controversy involving a friend and generous donor to his campaign, eye surgeon Salomon Melgen. According to news reports, the senator intervened to help a company co-owned by Dr. Melgen—who doesn’t even live in New Jersey—to win a port security contract in the Dominican Republic, and Dr. Melgen in turn provided the senator with a pair of round-trip flights to the DR. The senator recently reimbursed the doctor nearly $60,000 for the trips taken three years ago. It’s hard to believe that Mr. Menendez, a lifelong public servant, simply forgot to repay an amount that represents about a third of his yearly salary.

Mr. Menendez will be preoccupied over the next few months as investigators continue to probe his unseemly dealings with Dr. Melgen. In the meantime, who will be running—really running—the Foreign Relations Committee?

The Hagel nomination and the Menendez controversy could not have come at a worse time for the White House. The president’s foreign policy legacy surely will be written over the next year. That point was driven home earlier this week, when the North Koreans tested another nuclear weapon, this one much larger than its previous two. So add the Korean peninsula—and a brand-new secretary of state, John Kerry, who is certainly versed in foreign affairs but has yet to demonstrate the presence of his larger-than-life predecessor, Hillary Clinton—to the list of global powder kegs that will require the White House’s undivided attention.

The Hagel nomination and Mr. Menendez’s future remain in the Senate’s hands. We’ve called on the Senate to reject Mr. Hagel. Majority Leader Harry Reid needs to intervene in the Menendez business as well. The senator should not chair such a crucial committee while the FBI is looking into matters close to home.

The administration can’t afford distractions, not now. The world, after all, is a very dangerous place.

That is quite a concession from the GOP’s leaders on Capitol Hill. Not long ago, they would have stood firm against any plan to raise an additional dime in revenue. But they understand reality, and they know that last month’s elections didn’t go particularly well for their party.

Unfortunately, the White House seems incapable of putting ideology and dogma aside in the best interests of the nation. President Obama’s deficit reductions include not a dollar’s worth of cuts in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid spending.

But, of course, the biggest item in the president’s plan is a tax hike on well-off Americans-—nearly a trillion dollars worth of tax hikes, in fact.

It’s tempting to dismiss the president’s proposal as simply not serious. And, of course, it is just the beginning of the high-stakes poker game that will occupy Washington for the next two weeks.

But still, anyone who followed this year’s presidential campaign knows that the president is quite serious in his demagogic insistence that the well-off are simply not doing their fair share. What’s more, the president has refused to confront his party’s hard-liners, who really do believe (or say they do) that Washington can balance its books without reforming federal entitlement programs.

Social Security cost Washington $762 billion in the most recent fiscal year. Medicare cost another $470 billion. These are big numbers, even by Washington’s standards. Social Security costs more than national defense. And yet some Democratic hard-liners would have you believe that the program doesn’t need to be reformed.

Republicans know (and some no doubt fear) that by conceding the point on revenues, they have created a space for possible tax hikes. If nothing else, Speaker John Boehner and his colleagues have shown an admirable degree of flexibility. You can be certain that the tea party crowd is up in arms over any plan to raise more revenue for the federal government.

The question is whether the White House can reply in kind, and whether the president has the will and the determination to defy his party’s dogmatic defenders of entitlement programs. Mr. Obama needs to remind them that in fewer than 20 years—the blink of an eye in the life of this republic—there will be 72 million Americans over the age of 65. That’s compared with about 40 million today. How in the world can Washington afford current levels of benefits for so many senior citizens?

Politicians and policymakers alike have been fretting about this other fiscal cliff for decades. Little has been done. Now is the time to get entitlement reform done. The president has to tell members of his party’s left wing that the status quo is unacceptable and unaffordable.

A deal requires pragmatism and flexibility. It’s time the White House showed more than a little of both.

Hacker and wife. (Tequila Minksy)

In The New York Times opinion section on Sunday, CUNY professor Andrew Hacker asked readers a question: Is Algebra Necessary? Mr. Hacker eventually reasoned the answer was no. Hundreds of his readers across the country screamed back, “Yes!”

These opinion articles are predisposed to garner strong reactions. Close to 100 readers might comment on an opinion piece on a controversial topic such as American involvement in the Middle East. Mr. Hacker’s article drove 474 commentators to their computers before The Times stopped accepting the respondents.

They weren't to be halted; they then turned to the open platform of the web. Bloggers and mathematicians alike took to their keyboards to pile on the rage and some praise about the suggestion that algebra should be an elective.

Mr. Hacker, for one, is shocked. “My home computer is just about undergoing a seizure,” he told The Observer yesterday afternoon when we reached him over the phone. “I’ve been getting e-mails from Abilene, Texas! I’m surprised the gray old New York Times has infiltrated all of these places.”

While many of those who were driven to blog about the issue seem to vehemently oppose Mr. Hacker’s stance, he told us the e-mails and comments he has received have also been positive. His wife discovered a post on the the Facebook page of The Monkees band member Michael Nesmith defending Mr. Hacker’s stance on the issue after novelist Jane Smiley sent him a link to the op-ed. “Forcing me to learn school-taught algebra was like trying to teach a lion table manners,” wrote Mr. Nesmith. “Manners are useful, but not so much to a lion.”

“Then he got 600 more comments about me,” Mr. Hacker laughed.

Despite the outrage, Mr. Hacker remains firm as ever on his stance against mandatory algebra, and even more so against an abstract group of people he labels as “math people” or “math major."

He doesn’t agree that algebra skills are necessary. He then asked The Observer—reporters and likely holders of degrees not so numbers oriented—if we studied math at any point during college (we haven’t). “Math majors,” he tells us, “math majors have their minds so sharpened, that their opinions about Syria are more valid than your opinions about Syria because once you do math and algebra, your mind becomes superior and so do your opinions in every field.”

He does believe that algebra sharpens the mind, but he doesn’t feel this brain sharpening should be required. As a result, he tells us he has been called “anti-intellctual” and “anti-rigor.”

“I’m all in favor of rigor,” said Mr. Hacker. “Chess! Chess would be a marvelous way to sharpen minds. I don’t think millions of students should be mandated to play chess.”

This is not the first time Mr. Hacker has stirred the academic pot. His book about the “myth” of higher education decried tenure. But he insists that his intent is not to cause as much trouble as he often does. “Whenever you question a possession that people have, like money, tenure, math knowledge, they get very defensive,” he explained.

But that’s not going to stop Mr. Hacker from writing his opinions about what he sees to be fact versus what he asserts is fiction. “You know what? I’m a professor, I’m a scholar and I’m interested in the truth,” he told us. “If I see there’s myth, superstition and self-delusion I think, ‘Hey, there’s a thing called academic freedom, we’ll blow the whistle.’”

Dan Willingham, author of Why Students Don’t Like School and professor at the University of Virginia, presented a more typical argument to The Observer. “If you leave it up to an eighth grader or ninth grader, they’re probably not going to opt into algebra,” he said.

Mr. Willingham said the result might be stronger disparities between poor and wealthy families in terms of achievement and college educations, adding that tracking in this manner can be a problem because without the foundation algebra and the core principles it introduces, mathematics, in general, won’t be as helpful in the future. “You’re going to end up limiting the greater possibility of what kids can do.”

After reading the argument, Mr. Willingham penned his own opposition to the piece called “Yes, Algebra is Necessary,” on his personal website.

According to him, many of the comments supporting Mr. Hacker seemed to rely on personal experiences. “Everyone has individual stories,” he told us. “They know someone who hated math and hated being subjected to it. But there are lots of counter stories of kids who thought they hated math but ended up working through it and are glad they did.”

Many of the articles comments opened their arguments with phrases like “I thought this was satire” or “Seriously?” Mr. Willingham himself began his counter saying that when he saw the op-ed, he “mistook it for a joke.”

He recognizes that the argument got pretty heated. “It is actually a little personal,” he told us. “It’s obviously very provocative, calling for a major realignment as what we think of as standard curriculum. But also, as funny as it sounds, people love math.”

Meanwhile, the heartfelt criticisms have, if anything, made Mr. Hacker more certain his position is correct. He thinks the “math people” doth protest too much. “I have a hunch they know their case isn’t that strong.”

With any luck, that’s about to change. States have begun to implement or at least discuss the legalization of on-line poker with an eye on taxing winnings, just as they are taxed in brick-and-mortar casinos. Other states are seeking to eliminate bans on all kinds of gambling, knowing full well that it is taking place anyway, so why not divert some of the cash into the treasuries of states and municipalities?

Governor Andrew Cuomo reportedly is looking into an expansion of gaming in New York, while some states are studying Washington, D.C.’s recent legalization of on-line poker, a move that has produced an extra $9 million in yearly revenues for the city. That’s all good, because right now countless millions are being spent at the federal level in a vain attempt to crack down on on-line gambling.

It’s a lost cause, and it’s time that governments at all levels recognize—and profit from—reality. People are going to gamble. Either governments can waste resources trying to suppress this activity, or they can legalize it and get a piece of the action.

“If there is going to be gaming, how should it be done?” Mr. Cuomo asked recently. “And that issue, that question, is an important question for the state.”

It is important because the state needs creative solutions to its revenue issues. The state constitutional ban on casinos is out of date. Let’s get rid of it.

Now, however, as it prepares to mourn its fallen heroes yet again, the department faces another challenge. Soon, thousands of would-be firefighters will take a civil service test in hopes of qualifying for a job with the FDNY. It will be the first such test given in four years, and it will be one of the most important such tests given since FDNY reformers insisted on qualifying tests more than a century ago.

Simply put, the FDNY is too white and too male. At a time when the Police Department has become a model of diversity, at a time when other fire departments around the country have found a way to incorporate and even welcome women as colleagues, the FDNY’s overwhelmingly white male work force is an anachronism. Worse, it is a court case waiting to be made.

Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano knows what is at stake when new hiring begins. If the department’s hiring practices continue as usual, lawsuits on behalf of women and minorities inevitably will be brought, and a judge could order a new round of testing. That would delay the hiring of young new recruits and inevitably add to tensions in the city’s firehouses.

So Commissioner Cassano is spending the summer in minority neighborhoods, encouraging underrepresented groups to prepare for and take the test. But encouragement isn’t enough—the commissioner has to reassure women and minorities that they are welcome in the firehouse. That has not always been the case, as more than a few women and black firefighters have said publicly.

New York has made great strides ameliorating racial tension in the city over the past decade. But the lack of diversity in one of the city’s most storied departments remains a sore point. This needs to be fixed, now, so that the new class of the Bravest looks more like New York City.

But that does not mean that the campaign has gotten serious. Not when a character like Michele Bachmann is running around with a claim to be the front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination.

Such a campaign might be described as pathetic. But serious? Not unless the nation’s Republicans truly are prepared to turn back the clock to a time and a place when gay people were denied dignity and civil rights, when people with foreign-sounding names and backgrounds were considered suspect, and when American policymakers and ordinary citizens conducted their business as though the rest of the world simply didn’t exist—or wasn’t worthy of consideration.

In the aftermath of the congresswoman’s showing in Iowa, some pundits noted that Ms. Bachmann appeals to some Republican voters because she speaks from the heart and believes what she says. And that is precisely why it seems so difficult to describe her success as anything but a sad and tragic farce.

In recent interviews in The New Yorker and on the television talk shows, Ms. Bachmann made many things clear, not the least of which is that she considers gay people to be something less than human. She and her husband are invested in the notion that they can “convert” gay people from their despicable lifestyle (in their view) to good, red-blooded, all-American heterosexuality.

Needless to say, the congresswoman from Minnesota is not a big fan of gay marriage or, indeed, of any efforts to accord gay people the same rights, liberties and freedoms she celebrates in her tiresome rhetoric. This, perhaps, should not come as a surprise, given that she has associated with people who seem to think that African Americans were better off under slavery—because, you see, the gentle, well-meaning, white slaveholders helped keep slave families intact, except, of course, when there was profit to be made in selling off a mother, a father or a few children.

If Michele Bachmann really does believe what she says, if she really does speak from the heart as some observers contend, she is perhaps the most mean-spirited, bigoted presidential aspirant since George Wallace in 1968. Like Wallace did, Ms. Bachmann opposes civil rights (for blacks, in Wallace’s case; for gays, in Ms. Bachmann’s). Like Wallace did, she seeks to capitalize on anger and frustration by pointing the finger of blame at others—the possibly foreign-born black man in the White House; the gays who prey on the innocent and the pure; the secularists who believe in the separation of church and state.

Michele Bachmann is to 2012 what Wallace was to 1968—a vicious figure whose rhetoric is designed to inflame hatred and resentment. Her rise to prominence shows that the forces of reaction and intolerance remain powerful in certain parts of the country and in certain factions of the Republican Party.

They may yet prevail, but only if the Republican Party as a whole refuses to get serious.

If you thought the debt ceiling deal would forestall a taste of financial Armageddon, well, you obviously were wrong—but don’t beat yourself up. President Obama and lots of other smart people in Washington were of a similar mind.

The folks at Standard & Poor’s spent years giving their approval to all kinds of dubious practices in the financial industry. With the credibility of rating agencies at an all-time low thanks to the debt meltdown, S.&P. decided to get tough with the sovereign government of the United States, downgrading U.S. paper from a AAA rating to a AA-plus. You already know how the stock market reacted to this sudden burst of caution from S.&P.

There’s an argument to be made that the U.S. should have been called to task a long time ago for its unsustainable, highly leveraged spending spree over the past decade. We have fought wars we cannot afford, made promises we cannot keep and unveiled programs we cannot sustain. Through it all, S.&P. and the two other ratings agencies handed out their top ratings with few questions asked.

That, of course, was the pattern for nearly any paper issued by anybody during the subprime mortgage bubble. Ironically, S.&P. was probably the most responsible of the raters, but that’s not saying much.

There surely is a point to be made about Washington’s dangerous levels of debt. And that point has been made through the democratic process and through bipartisan negotiation. Critics of unfettered federal spending were sent to Washington last year and have succeeded in beginning a conversation not about growing government, but about cutting government and allowing market forces to grow faster and become more creative.

The debt crisis changed the conversation in Washington and brought needed attention to the country’s levels of spending and debt. For S.&P. to suddenly downgrade the country’s debt at such a moment was irresponsible.

S.&P. might well feel guilty about handing out sterling ratings to shady enterprises in the past. But now was not the time to express remorse. It has only made things worse.

She did just that the other day, unveiling an alternative school budget that seeks to minimize the mayor’s plan to eliminate 6,100 teaching positions, most of them through layoffs. Ms. Quinn’s plan calls for $75 million in spending cuts to other programs, including the Department of Education’s transportation budget.

Ms. Quinn’s plan would reduce, but not eliminate, the need to shed teaching jobs. And some of her proposed cuts, including a 1 percent reduction in the department’s $1.5 billion transportation budget, could entangle the city in a lawsuit over school bus service.

Nevertheless, the speaker’s plan can and should be the beginning of a public debate and, perhaps, a private negotiation. And Ms. Quinn had the good fortune to release her plan when one of her potential mayoral foes, Mr. Weiner, was in the process of committing career suicide, and another, Mr. Liu, was engaged in a politics-as-usual love fest with special interests.

With this alternative spending plan, Speaker Quinn elevated her stature and seriousness of purpose. Let the debate begin.

Did we mention that Mr. Liu is a potential mayoral candidate in 2013 who hopes to cash in on the support of the city’s public employee unions?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has been trying desperately to reform the system before it forces the city into bankruptcy, was rightly skeptical of Mr. Liu’s facts and figures. Mr. Bloomberg’s office noted that Mr. Liu’s report assumed that life expectancy rates will not change in the coming half-century. Perhaps the comptroller knows something that the rest of us don’t?

Mr. Liu’s study may be flawed, but it is not without good news: some hard-won reforms in the city’s pension system, including a tiered system for newer employees, are bringing down long-term costs. Mr. Bloomberg and others have been arguing for years that the current system, with defined pensions and generous health-care coverage, is simply unaffordable.

The city and state simply cannot afford the kind of pension and health-care benefits they have offered in the past, when life expectancy and health-care costs were lower. Public employees perform honorable work, but should they really be eligible for retirement while still in their 50’s, or even their late 40’s—when many file their papers, collect their benefits and launch second careers?

The system remains in desperate need of radical change. Mr. Liu is determined to resist those changes in return for union support in 2013. Something to keep in mind as the shadow campaign to succeed Mr. Bloomberg begins to take shape.