When I'm old and gray, and have kids who I can force to listen to my stories, I'll tell them about how I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with Frank Buckles.

Buckles, of course, was the last known living World War I veteran. He died late Sunday at his home in Charles Town, W.V. His story has been told countless times by journalists like me who made the two-hour drive from Washington to his picturesque 330-acre farm. And I bet he told every one of those journalists, that his own story wasn't such a big deal.

At 16, Buckles was turned away from a U.S. Marines recruiting station because he was too young to enlist. He later went back to that same recruiting office and told them he was 21, but was rejected a second time because he wasn't heavy enough [In accounts to other reporters, Buckles said he was rejected on his second try for being flatfooted]. Eventually, he found an Army recruiter willing to take him.

He volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver, because he heard it was the quickest way to the front--and he wanted to be where the action was. He spent time in England and later France, but said he didn't come within 40 miles of the fighting. After the war's end in 1918, he was assigned to a prisoner-of-war escort company that was returning POWs to Germany.

Buckles recalled that when he arrived in Germany with the soldiers, a local German organization greeted the men with coffee. As he stood in line to get a cup himself, he told the elderly man serving him -- in a bit of German he'd picked up -- that the coffee was good.

The German, pleased that Buckles spoke his language, gave him a slice of potato bread. Buckles again thanked him in German, and the old man presented him with a slice of bologna.

"After that I was always encouraged to learn foreign languages," Buckles told me in an interview for the Chicago Tribune nearly four years ago. Even at 106, his bookshelves were filled with German, French, Italian and Spanish language books.

After a short stint working at the post office in Oklahoma after returning home from the war, Buckles spent much of the next three decades seeing the world and working in the shipping business.

Ironically, while he managed to come out of World War I as a soldier unscathed, he wasn't so lucky as a civilian during World War II. While he was in Manila on business in 1941, the Japanese invaded the Philippines and Buckles was taken prisoner.

He would spend more than three years as a prisoner of war. He lost more than 50 pounds during the time of his capture, and near the end of his internment, a Japanese guard caught an American as he tried to slip back into camp after heading out to forage for food.

"The Japanese guard told him to wait where he had stopped him," Buckles told me. "He came back with his gun and shot him right there." Buckles was among those rescued in a famous parachute mission by the 11th Airborne Division in February 1945.

Buckles took his role as the last veteran of the "War That Was to End all Wars" seriously, but he wasn't a braggart.

Over the years, Buckles probably retold his story to hundreds of journalists and historians. And in December 2009, at a spry 108, Buckles testified before Congress in support of a proposal to turn a Washington, D.C., monument honoring local residents who fought in World War I into a memorial honoring all Americans who served in the war.

When I visited him just before Memorial Day 2007, his daughter, Susannah Flanagan, was worried about wearing him out--and asked me and my colleague Pete Souza (now the White House photographer) to keep our interview to an hour. But Buckles kept telling us stories. Asking our opinion of what was going on in Iraq, and sharing his own concerns about the war.

After about two hours of chatting, Flanagan peaked in and offered a subtle cue for me to wrap it up. I thanked Buckles for sharing his remarkable story and service, but Buckles wouldn't have any of it

The way he saw it, he just happened to serve during a remarkable period of American history and lived longest to tell the world about it.

The latest development in Wisconsin's wild budget debate is a case of mistaken identity. The Buffalo Beast, originally co-founded by bombastic journalistic Matt Taibbi, had one of its staffers call up Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker while posing as libertarian industrialist/political activist David Koch; hi-jinks ensued.

In real life, Koch's money has helped conservative activists support Walker's efforts to pass a controversial budget bill. In this call, which Walker's office confirmed, fake "David Koch" gets Walker to spill his guts on unions, Democrats ... and Mika Brzezinski. A few highlights from the transcript:

Walker: I've got layoff notices ready....
Koch: Beautiful; beautiful. Gotta crush that union.
Walker: [bragging about how he doesn't budge].... I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the Assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders -- talk, not negotiate, and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn. But I'll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state Assembly.... Legally, we believe, once they've gone into session, they don't physically have to be there. If they're actually in session for that day and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they'd have quorum.... So we're double-checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them, that's the only reason why. We'd only do it if they came back to the capital with all 14 of them....
Koch: Bring a baseball bat. That's what I'd do.
Walker: I have one in my office; you'd be happy with that. I have a slugger with my name on it. ...
Koch: You're the first domino.
Walker: Yep. This is our moment.

If you're gonna cut, spread the pain around. Or so the Brits would advise you.

I have a piece out today in National Journal magazine looking at the early lessons for American lawmakers from the United Kingdom's recently enacted austerity programs. It's a good time to check in on the British experience, given the still-raging debate on the House floor over budget cuts for the current fiscal year. The U.K. just began implementing a dramatic package of steep spending cuts and tax reform - including some hikes - designed to curb the British budget deficit and reduce soaring national debt.

The evidence so far is nowhere near conclusive on how the austerity measures will affect the U.K.'s growth and employment, though the Conservative-led coalition government estimated last year the measures will result in the elimination of about a half-million public sector jobs. But there may be a political lesson coming across the pond for U.S. lawmakers if they hope to find bipartisan agreement with President Obama on plans to tackle long-term questions of taxes, spending (especially entitlements) and reducing U.S. debt levels. That lesson would be, don't just cut the things your opponents like.

In the U.K., notes Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, "they kept absolutely no one safe. Every single individual in the UK is going to feel the impact of these cuts." It's a deliberate strategy: "If you start exempting one (group), the next special interest group is going to pop their head up and say, what about me? What about me?"

Contrast that to House Republicans, who have so far reveled in votes to cut some of liberals' most cherished spending - including major reductions in environmental protection, defunding of Obama's signature health care and financial regulation laws. (Some of those programs - such as Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate greenhouse gases, poll well with voters broadly, not just the left.) Perhaps National Journal's Kelsey Snell summed it up best when she tweeted today that the House voted to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, but to keep Pentagon sponsorship of NASCAR races.

Here's the problem: Cutting liberal-loved programs alone won't go nearly far enough to reduce the national debt or even stabilize it. For that, you'll likely need major changes in programs that wide majorities of Americans like, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and likely some unpopular tax increases, too. A lift like that needs coalition support. Which is to say, everybody must hurt.

The Jay Carney era has begun.

With his first turn at the White House podium, the new press secretary didn't make any news, but he still managed to win some points with the press corps. His answers were concise. He didn't spend an inordinate amount of time answering the cable and network reporters questions, and unlike his predecessor, Robert Gibbs, he took questions from reporters from smaller outlets in the back of the briefing room.

Yesterday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan disagreed about whether the Republican budget, to be released in April, will include the kinds of specific plans for entitlement reform that the president's budget lacked. One day later, Ryan and GOP leadership announced they'll put their cards on the table.

"Our budget will lead where the President has failed, and it will include real entitlement reforms so that we can have a conversation with the American people about the challenges we face and the need to chart a new path to prosperity," Ryan said in an e-mailed statement. "Our reforms will focus both on saving these programs for current and future generations of Americans and on getting our debt under control and our economy growing."

Ryan and the House GOP could have used Obama's punt as an excuse to avoid hard choices of their own, but now say they won't. If Ryan can get House Republicans behind a serious entitlement reform plan, it will be a major accomplishment and give his party the rhetorical high ground over the White House and the Democrats. But this could turn into a political trap laid by the administration: There are risks in specificity, hence the president's punt this week, and benefit cuts that will likely be part of any entitlement reform plan will attract immediate and vociferous criticism.

We had some sense that this was coming in the NJ newsroom -- Ryan's staff cancelled a mid-afternoon interview in favor of the announcement -- but specifics are still hard to come by. Ryan's Roadmap for the American Future will no doubt hold some clues, and House Republican leaders had already been talking about Medicare reform along those lines or based on the deal Ryan had negotiated with former Clinton OMB Director Alice Rivlin.

It's a big opportunity for Ryan, whose ideas have been on the cutting edge of conservative economic policy since the Roadmap's original release in 2008. Ryan has long worried that entitlements are unsustainable and that the key to solving the U.S. debt problem lies in their radical overhaul.

Democrats think Ryan goes too far, believing Social Security, which is solvent through 2037, can be fixed with relatively small changes, and that last year's health care overhaul represents a serious first step towards controlling growing health care costs that nearly everyone agrees are the largest driver of long-term debt.

The White House was heavily criticized for not including specifics about long-term debt reduction in its budget, released Monday, and particularly for giving a short shrift to the recommendations of his own fiscal commission. However, administration officials wanted to bring all parties to the table before negotiations begin. While commissioners from both parties voted to support the fiscal commission's plan, including fiscally conservative Republican senators, no members of the House Republican delegation supported the document.

The lack of clarity in the Republican House has made establishing initial positions difficult --- while Ryan's plan is popular with House conservatives, it has not yet been embraced by Republican leadership, and both parties have been reluctant to lay their offers on the table in an uncertain political environment.

You might have heard that the House GOP is now planning to cut $100 billion in spending following pressure from newly-elected conservatives who want them to honor their Pledge to America. That's not precisely true, as we'll explain, but perhaps more importantly, congressional Republicans' insistence on the $100 billion number could prove troublesome down the road.

First, the arithmetic: House Republicans now intend to cut $100 billion -- from last year's White House budget request, which was never enacted. Compared to current real spending, the House GOP plans a cut of about $59 billion, and would still spend $15 billion more on domestic discretionary programs than in 2008.

There's nothing problematic about comparing the GOP's plan with the president's proposed budget to highlight policy differences, but it does matter when you're trying to claim the cuts as savings. Despite the insistence of Republican leaders, their current proposal doesn't match their Pledge to America:

"With common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops, we will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, prebailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone and putting us on a path to balance the budget and pay down the debt."

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