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On a sunny Friday in August last year, Judah Abughorab paddled a small, flat boat over the blue Mediterranean Sea about 100 yards off the Gaza Strip's sandy shore.

He doesn't really like to eat fish, but catching them is the unemployed construction worker's favorite pastime.

That day, he netted a half a dozen. Then, through the clear water, he spotted something that made him look again.

"It looked like a person," he says. "Eyes, a face, hands, fingers."

Abughorab says he was scared, but dove five yards down to have a closer look. One touch told him the human form was made of metal.

"I realized it was a statue," he says. "I tried to move it, but it was so heavy I thought it was tied to the bottom."

Cutting defense spending in Washington is about as popular as proposing Social Security cuts. In other words, not very.

Which explains why, following Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's announcement Monday that the Obama administration's new budget would propose shrinking the Army, closing bases and ditching weapons systems, the responses from Capitol Hill lawmakers have been some version of "over my dead body."

Wholly different was the reaction of two former federal officials who don't have to worry about electoral politics anymore: Samuel Skinner, who was Transportation secretary under George H. W. Bush, and former Rep. James Bilbray, a Nevada Democrat who served on the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees.

In 2005, both were members of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC), a bipartisan panel that recommended defense-base closings to Congress.

The difficult politics and intense lobbying surrounding defense cuts explained why BRAC existed to begin with: Congress essentially outsourced base-closure recommendations to the panel because it was politically impossible for members to do the job themselves. Lawmakers had to vote to either accept or reject the entire list. They accepted it.

Both Skinner and Bilbray, now with law firms in Chicago and Las Vegas, respectively, told It's All Politics the Obama administration's proposed defense cuts are a necessary corrective to the surge in defense spending that occurred after 9/11 as the U.S. fought two wars.

"Something's got to be done," Skinner said. "Unfortunately as a result of a lot of decisions that were made over the last 10 years... we've continued to ramp up defense spending at an unprecedented level. It's got to come down. You can argue where the cuts should be made. But everybody knows it's unsustainable going forward. Somebody's going to have to make some hard calls here."

Bilbray echoed those remarks: "The fact is, as the military, as they totally get out of Iraq and close down in Afghanistan, I think it's going to be a natural consequence that the size of the military will shrink," he said.

In a testament to how politics were never far from the process, both men recalled how President Bush had to use his recess appointment powers simply to get them on the base-closure panel.

Their nominations were delayed by senators, including Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, who sought to stall the process because they objected to plans to close facilities in their home states.

When they finally were able to get to work, they were left with only three months to complete their work, Bilbray said.

But even that was better than the current situation. Obama has proposed a new base-closing commission. For two years running, however, Congress has rejected it. Skinner said his understanding is Congress doesn't want to again lose control of the process.

Even so, the Obama budget due to be released next week will once again propose a BRAC that would go into action in 2017 — meaning it would avoid raising hackles in 2016, a presidential election year.

There's plenty of outrage already from Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Skinner said the pushback was fairly predictable.

"It's very difficult for senators where there are strong military installations to come out and say we should make these cuts," he said. "They're trying to defend their constituents from some of these cuts. But everybody's going to have to take some of these cuts. They're going to happen."

It's not just Capitol Hill where political leaders have torn into the Obama administration's proposed cuts — the resistance reaches to the state capitals. Republican Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and other governors have bridled at cuts proposed for their state National Guard units. Those units play indispensable roles during disasters, they contend.

Bilbray suggested that's not the entire explanation for why many governors will resist cuts to their guard units.

He offered a story by way of illustration. Bilbray once got into a dispute with a Mississippi congressman for proposing reductions in guard units similar to those being proposed for active duty forces.

"You would have thought I had asked to sleep with his wife," Bilbray said. "He was really angry about it. The National Guard is sacred in many of the Southern states. There's a tradition. The father, grandfather and great grandfather served in the guard."

For that reason, National Guard units are traditionally much easier to fill in the South than elsewhere. Military officials once told him it might take six months in the South to fill a division that might take five years anywhere else.

"That will explain the resistance you'll see from some of those Southern senators" and governors in coming weeks, he said.

Tensions continue to rise in Ukraine. Thursday's news includes word that:

— "Dozens of heavily armed gunmen seized control of local government buildings in Ukraine's Crimea region early Thursday and raised the Russian flag, mirroring the three-month protest movement that drove Ukraine's pro-Russian president into hiding last week." (The Associated Press) There were no reports of injuries at the sites in Simferopol, the local capital. Ukrainian security forces established a security perimeter around the area.

As the Parallels blog has written, Crimea "is an autonomous part of Ukraine, [that has] strong emotional ties to Russia and [where] a majority of people identify themselves as Russian.

Crimean lawmakers were reported to be preparing to enter the government buildings, possibly to vote on whether to seek to split from Ukraine and seek a union with Russia.

In July of last year, a man named Sidney Sealine went to see the Mona Lisa in Paris.

The idea was to spend some time with the picture, see for himself the special spark that made the painting so famous.

But Sealine couldn't even get close.

In his video of the visit, you see people of every race and nationality crowded around the barricades that separate them from the painting. They're holding cameras over their heads and snapping pictures like paparazzi at a movie opening while the Mona Lisa gazes out at them.

A surprisingly small portrait, it is separated from the crazed crowd by a series of wooden railings and an enormous slab of darkly tinted bulletproof glass.

It's a painting so successful it requires constant protection from the public, and so it can hardly be seen.

Why Is The Mona Lisa – Or Any Piece Of Art – Successful?

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because people believe that there is something profoundly special about it, some quality so distinguishing that it deserves to be as famous as it is.

But is that true?

Several years ago, Princeton professor Matthew Salganik started thinking about success, specifically about how much of success should be attributed to the inherent qualities of the successful thing itself, and how much was just chance. For some essentially random reason, a group of people decided that the thing in question was really good and their attention attracted more attention until there was a herd of people who believed it was special mostly because all the other people believed that it was, but the successful thing wasn't in fact that special.

“ It is hard to make things of very poor quality succeed — though after you meet a basic standard of quality, what becomes a huge hit and what doesn't is essentially a matter of chance.