An editorial / By Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service

As much as the Iraq war will ever have a formal end it did so this week when President Barack Obama in a rare speech -- only his second -- from the Oval Office pronounced "the end of our combat mission in Iraq."

This spring a blue-ribbon roster of retired military leaders issued a report titled, with characteristic bluntness, "Too Fat to Fight," in which they said the epidemic of childhood obesity was posing a threat to America's national security.

The Obama administration is all but declaring the war in Iraq over. In President Barack Obama's radio address over the weekend. In his planned Oval Office address to the nation Tuesday night to mark the formal end of U.S. combat operations. In the valedictory air of Vice President Joe Biden's trip to Baghdad to preside over a change-of-command ceremony.

Muslims pray five times daily at Ground Zero. On Fridays, their holy day, an imam comes in to preach. Attendance is heavier than usual now because it is Ramadan.

Unlike the proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, which is two blocks away and out of sight of where the World Trade Center once stood, the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial Chapel is really at Ground Zero.

Vacation is supposed to be a time to get away from it all, but dismal economic news followed President Barack Obama to Martha's Vineyard.

On Friday, the Commerce Department said that the gross domestic product's growth for the spring quarter, April to June, was a near-moribund 1.6 percent, down from the department's earlier estimate of 2.4 percent.

Depending on how the absentee-ballot counting goes, the next U.S. senator from Alaska could well be Joe Miller, an anti-spending conservative backed by the Tea Party Express and $550,000 of its money.

If the legality of federally funded stem cell research had to be challenged, there was surely a better way to do it then ordering a blanket halt to the scientists' work, especially as that research had begun to live up to its early promise.

When President Barack Obama finished a review of his strategy in Afghanistan last fall he set what was widely construed to be a deadline for the U.S. to begin withdrawing. At the time, setting a July 2011 timetable was widely considered a mistake, allowing the Taliban to see light at the end of the tunnel.

August seems to be military-dog-and-pony-show month in Iran.

Last week, Tehran boasted about the test firing of a new liquid-fueled surface-to-surface missile, the Qiam-1.

Congressional Republicans don't care much for President Obama's handling of the economy. They've made that abundantly clear.