In his forthcoming biography of Barack Obama, author David Maraniss turns to letters and diaries kept by former confidants and old flames of the young Obama to document the President's history.  The biography, which has uncovered some inconsistencies in Obama's own memoirs, is already making the President squirm.

The present edition of Vanity Fair is running a short adaptation of Maraniss's work, which zeroes in on Obama's relationships with two ex-girlfriends, both white, from his early twenties.  In a letter to girlfriend Alex McNear, with whom he had become acquainted at Occidental College, the young Obama wrote about literature and of his quest to find himself.  Excerpts:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

[...]

Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

Now, I've read neither Dreams from My Father nor The Audacity of Hope, but Ann Althouse thinks that these excerpts from his old letters should put to rest the notion that Bill Ayers ghost wrote the memoirs.   "I am now willing to believe Obama wrote his own memoir," she writes. "This is that jejune 'creative writing' style that I was talking about back in 2009."

Jejune indeed.  And entirely pretentious.

(h/t Mollie Hemingway)

The Ninth Circuit, the most liberal federal appeals court in the country, today unanimously rejected the lawsuit brought against me by Jose Padilla, who is currently serving his sentence for criminal conspiracy charges as an associate of al Qaeda.  Despite his conviction, he sued everyone involved in his detention as an enemy combatant.  He had already lost in the Fourth Circuit in South Carolina in his lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon and military officials who were in charge of the Charleston brig, where he was held.

The Ninth Circuit’s decision confirms that this litigation has been baseless from the outset.  For several years, Padilla and his attorneys have been harassing the government officials he believes to have been responsible for his detention, and ultimately conviction as a terrorist.  He has now lost before two separate courts of appeals, and will need to find a new hobby for his remaining time in prison.

Today has been an unusual day in sports.

It started on a high note with the announcement that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would sign Eric LeGrand to an NFL contract. LeGrand, a standout at Rutgers University under then-coach -- and Rutgers grid savior -- Greg Schiano, was paralyzed in a hit in October of 2010. His story is truly an emotional one, mostly because of LeGrand's seemingly God-given gift to accept his situation with hope and good humor. Schiano, now the coach in Tampa Bay, made the classy move today. 

Then, I read that Andy Pettitte may have sunk the government's case against Roger Clemens. Clemens is on trial for lying to Congress about use of performance-enhancing drugs. Pettitte was called to testify because he had said that in 1999 or 2000 Clemens told him he had used HGH (human growth hormone). Pettitte and Clemens were once as tight as two sports buddies and fellow Texan pitchers could be. Their relationship chilled, but perhaps it's back on after today. In testimony this morning, Pettitte said it was “50/50” that he may have misheard Clemens. The final ruling, in many people’s opinion, seemed to rest on Pettitte, who, other than a brief dalliance himself with HGH, is considered to be an athlete and man of the highest principles. The others in the case all have some serious flaws.

Finally, just in the past hour or so, I see that Junior Seau has died from either a self-inflicted gunshot wound or in some sort of gunfight in his California home.

Barack Obama on the stump promoting Obamacare in 2009:

Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you. First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan.  Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.

Now the promises of 2009 meet the reality of 2012. The findings of a new report out of the House of Representatives, as reported by the Daily Caller:

A new report prepared by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee suggests that companies would save billions of dollars by ending health insurance coverage for employees under Presidents Barack Obama’s health care reform law.

Based on an analysis of health care data received from 71 of the America’s Fortune 100 companies, the report found that if the companies terminate insurance coverage in favor of paying the $2,000 per employee penalty, they would incur a financial benefit.

According to the report, companies surveyed would save on average $400 million — or a total of $28.6 billion in 2014 — simply by putting their employees on the government exchanges.

Between 2014 and 2023, the report says, the average savings per company would be nearly $6 billion, a total savings of $422.4 billion.

This, of course, was the problem all along. Whether or not "you" keep your plan is inextricably tied to whether or not "you" pay for your plan. If, like about 45 percent of Americans (according to the most recent Gallup numbers), you receive your insurance through your employer, the decision isn't yours to make.

Points to the president for honesty. No one in the government is taking your current health insurance away from you. They're just making it so unpalatable for employers that your boss will do the dirty work for them. Squint hard enough and you may be able to see the distinction.

The left seems to think this video is damning in some way, but I think it's maybe the best I've seen Romney when it comes to defending capitalism and wealth. He's talking at the house of Papa Johns' CEO:

Here's Romney's opening lines, of the trees are the right height nature, before he gets into his normal campaign riff. But note the two lines he adds on:

Who would have imagined pizza could build this, you know that? This is really something. Don’t you love this country? What a home this is, what grounds these are, the pool, the golf course...

You know if a Democrat were here he’d look around and say no one should live like this. Republicans come here and say everyone should live like this.

This continues Romney's marked improvement in talking about his personal wealth. What I wrote a few months back after the Ann Romney "I don't consider myself wealthy" line:

Look, I see what you were trying to say here, but you flubbed it again. Someone please help these folks talk about being rich? The ability to go "severely capitalist" would actually help you – and seem more authentic than some transparently false narrative involving bootstraps.

Just say it: “I am very rich. I do not apologize for it. My goal in life is to give you every opportunity to get rich, too.” Remember your Coolidge: “I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves.” How hard is that?

Getting this rhetoric right is key for Romney's response to these sorts of attacks from Obama's campaign.

Over at Elle magazine, reader "Caught in a Love Spell" asks advice columnist E. Jean about whether she should leave her fiancé to be with a man that she is having a passionate affair with.

At my father’s funeral, I ran into an old friend. We grew up together, his was the shoulder I cried on, and we ended up having sex. We’ve been doing so ever since—a year and a half. The problem is that during this whole time, he’s had a girlfriend, and I’ve been engaged to be married to another man. 

"Caught" explains that the two of them "just can't stop having sex with" each other. She writes, in anguish, "We’ve fought a hundred times over stopping and not seeing each other, but we always end up back together, no matter how bad the previous fight was. Why can’t we walk away? Why is this so hard to stop?"

E. Jean steps in with some advice:

Miss Caught, My Cauliflower: Halt! You’re marrying the wrong man. Marry the man with whom you fight “a hundred times” because you can’t cease seeing each other. Marry the man with whom you “can’t stop having sex.” Marry the man with whom you “always end up back together.” Marry the man your DNA is shouting for you to marry, and your chances for happiness are damn good. To quote the captivating Martin Amis, “Marry your sexual obsession: …the one you never quite got to the end of.”

Yes, it's advice. But is it good advice?

In his fabulous book The Happiness Hypothesis, psychology professor Jonathan Haidt thinks that E. Jean's type of reasoning about love is seriously flawed--and that acting on it will cause people to lead less happy lives. The culprit of such bad advice is not any one person, like E. Jean, but a deeply embedded belief in our pop culture that the experience of being in love must meet a very specific set of criteria. This is the "love myth."

Haidt explains:

As I see it, the modern myth of true love involves these beliefs: True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever. You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it. (It’s not just Hollywood that perpetrates the myth; Bollywood, the Indian film industry, is even more romanticized.)

Because so many of us were raised on the myth--there's a Facebook group called "Disney Movies Gave Me Unrealistic Expectations About Love"-- and because so many of us will decide to (or not to) marry someone based off of it, we are shutting ourselves off from real romantic love:

But if true love is defined as eternal passion, it is biologically impossible. To see this, and to save the dignity of love, you have to understand the difference between two kinds of love: passionate and companionate.

Passionate love is the kind that "Caught" from Elle is experiencing. It is a "wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of feelings.”

Companionate love is less exciting, but more lasting: “the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.”

The problem with passionate love is that it eventually fades. And that creates major problems for the person who decides to marry someone based on the expectation that passionate love will last forever--the most major of the problems being, of course, divorce.

Haidt explains:

Passionate love is a drug. Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin (euphoric well-being, sometimes described in sexual terms) and cocaine (euphoria combined with giddiness and energy). It’s no wonder: Passionate love alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine. Any experience that feels intensely good releases dopamine, and the dopamine link is crucial here because drugs that artificially raise dopamine levels, as do heroin and cocaine, put you at risk of addiction. If you take cocaine once a month, you won’t become addicted, but if you take it every day, you will. No drug can keep you continuously high. The brain reacts to a chronic surplus of dopamine, develops neurochemical reactions that oppose it, and restores its own equilibrium. At that point, tolerance has set in, and when the drug is withdrawn, the brain is unbalanced in the opposite direction: pain, lethargy, and despair follow withdrawal from cocaine or from passionate love.

So if passionate love is a drug—literally a drug—it has to wear off eventually. Nobody can stay high forever (although if you find passionate love in a long-distance relationship, it’s like taking cocaine once a month; the drug can retain its potency because of your suffering between doses). If passionate love is allowed to run its joyous course, there must come a day when it weakens. One of the lovers usually feels the change first. It’s like waking up from a shared dream to see your sleeping partner drooling. In those moments of returning sanity, the lover may see flaws and defects to which she was blind before. The beloved falls off the pedestal, and then, because our minds are so sensitive to changes, her change in feeling can take on exaggerated importance. “Oh, my God,” she thinks, “the magic has worn off--I’m not in love with him anymore.” If she subscribes to the myth of true love, she might even consider breaking up with him. After all, if the magic ended, it can’t be true love. But if she does end the relationship, she might be making a mistake.

So does true love exist? Haidt thinks that it does:

True love exists, I believe, but it is not—cannot be—passion that lasts forever. True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other. Companionate love looks weak in the graph above because it can never attain the intensity of passionate love. But if we change the time scale from six months to sixty years, as in the next figure, it is passionate love that seems trivial—a flash in the pan—while companionate love can last a lifetime [You can see the graph here on page 127 and 128]. When we admire a couple still in love on their fiftieth anniversary, it is this blend of loves—mostly companionate—that we are admiring.

There's a great article over at The Atlantic that addresses a lot of these themes (and, in doing so, shows us that couples in old-fashioned arranged marriages may be wiser about love than those in the West who get married for love). I would quote the whole piece if I could, but here is the key part:

Hollywood--and all of the "happily ever after" stories it cooks up—deserves a lot of the blame for our distorted ideas about what marriage should be, according to [research psychologist Robert] Epstein. "There are literally millions of Americans in therapy because of violated expectations around those ideas," Epstein claims, referring to the discrepancy between our idealized notion of love and reality. (Indeed, even Amina--who isn't exactly thrilled with George—likes romantic comedies; "her favorites were Sleepless in Seattle, Mystic Pizza, and Pretty Woman," as Freudenberger writes.)

But don't romantic happy endings significantly pre-date Disney, going back at least as far as Shakespeare? Sure, in Western culture, Epstein says. But folk tales and love stories from Asian cultures have, traditionally, ended differently from ours, he says, with more ambiguous endings—ones that we would find unsatisfying—even if the Westernization of the world is starting to change that.

The historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, agrees that Westerners would have more success with marriage if they thought of it more as a "working partnership," as she puts it. Love " doesn't have to hit you like a storm and then move on."

Companionate love may not be as romantic or fiery as passionate love, but scholars seem to agree that it ultimately makes couples happier and keeps them together longer. So maybe "Caught" should think twice before leaving her fiancé for the thrill and excitement of her childhood friend.

Earlier today, we saw reports that Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese dissident who has been oppressed because of his powerful activism against China's forced abortion policy, left the U.S. embassy where he'd sought refuge. The headlines emphasized that he'd been "reunited" with his family. Now, the Associated Press reveals that he left the embassy under the most horrible conditions:

BREAKING --AP: Chen tells AP he was told Chinese officials would have killed his wife had he not left embassy

And one of the people who helped Chen escape, He Peirong, is herself detained now.

At about 5:00 a.m. Dublin time, I skyped Peirong one last time and she did not answer. She had been detained, and no one has heard from her since.   We don’t know if Peirong is being tortured or whether her detention will last days, months or years.

In pressing for Chen’s freedom, let us also press for the freedom of his rescuer, He Peirong, a hero in her own right.   She stood up for Chen during his time of greatest need.  The least we can do is stand by her as she pays a terrible price for her courage.

I wish that the United States had done more to ensure Chen's safety and that of his family and friends. I'm not sure if anything could have been done, but the response of China shows that this regime -- beloved as it may be by New York Times columnists -- remains one of the most oppressive in the world.

One of my favorite new Tumblrs ("a blogging platform that allows users to seamlessly display photos, videos and text in an easy-to-use format") is called "Hey Girl, It's Paul Ryan." The Washington Post explains:

The Ryan-themed site, which draws inspiration from another Tumblr site poking fun at actor Ryan Gossling, features news photos of the Wisconsin Republican juxtaposed with fiscally-inspired pick up lines, including “Stop, girl! Those Laffer curves are driving me wild” and “Girl, you must be an Obama entitlement program ... because you are definitely raising my interest rate.”

You get the idea.

Emily Zanotti, a self-described “freelance political communications consultant and comedian from Chicago” who also blogs for NakedDC.com, said she and her friends got the idea for the site after wondering what Ryan — who enjoys “Noodling,” or catching catfish with bare hands — might look like shirtless as he chased after catfish in a river.

“Really, we just put it together as an inside joke,” she said in an e-mail. “I’ve worked with lots of politicos (I’m a libertarian and work primarily with conservatives), and Paul Ryan is a bit of an ‘economic heartthrob’ among us, if you will. We liked the way that Paul Ryan and the meme fit together, and thought it might just appeal to people who work on the Hill or at least in the political industry. We didn’t anticipate that it would become as huge as it did.”

Even when I was the only girl in my entire university class studying economics, I thought fiscal conservatism was totally sexy. I'm vindicated.

More importantly, though, I think this shows that Paul Ryan has an appeal and charisma that might serve fiscal conservatives well into the future.

With the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's eradication from the mortal sphere comes a swirl of political quarreling over President Obama's spiking of the football. The other day, Obama chided Mitt Romney, in his typically peevish and unsubtle fashion, for opposing the policy he eventually pursued of unilateral action during the 2008 campaign:

“I assume that people meant what they said when they said it. That’s been at least my practice,” he said. “I said that I would go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him and I did. if there are others who said one thing and now suggest they would do something else, I’d go ahead and let them explain.”

But Romney's response - a line about the fact that the decision to take out Osama bin Laden unilaterally was so obvious, of course he would've done it, even Jimmy Carter would've done it - strikes me as wrong-headed. So too do attempts by those on the right, such as by Ben Shapiro here, or John Bolton here, to argue that it wasn’t a "gutsy call" on the part of the president at all. I think this is inaccurate argument to advance, and I think it does no political service to the right to diminish Obama's role in the OBL raid. In fact, I'd argue that Obama is accomplishing that himself. But let's come back to that point.

First, for Shapiro: there are strategic, operational, and tactical levels of decision-making in times of war. Telling the commander of SOCOM to lead an operation, and him telling a SEAL commander to lead at a tactical level, is not passing the buck in any way, shape, or form from the strategic decision President Obama made. Even Ed Morrissey is skeptical.  Those on the right need to realize that their best response to questions on this is simply saying they're proud of the men and women who accomplished this aim, and move on before getting into disputes about the chain of command.

Second, for  Bolton. The former U.N. ambassador's continued revisionism regarding Osama bin Laden only makes him seem smaller. He says: 

“I understand the Obama administration is trying to make the argument that foreign policy is a strength of theirs, using the killing of Osama bin Laden. But the way I would look at it is this: Osama bin Laden was killed while Obama was president–he wasn’t killed because Obama was president.”

Well, look at it this way: thanks to our two party system, there were only two people who could possibly be president “while” Osama bin Laden was killed. President Obama's opponent explicitly opposed the method used to kill him throughout the 2008 campaign — a unilateral attack within a sovereign nation and a purported ally. When asked this specific question during their 2008 debate, McCain said that he'd work with the Pakistanis, not go directly in to kill bin Laden unilaterally. From the videotape:

QUESTIONER: "Should the United States respect Pakistani sovereignty and not pursue al-Qaida terrorists who maintain bases there, or should we ignore their borders and pursue our enemies, like we did in Cambodia during the Vietnam War?"

OBAMA: ...I do believe that we have to change our policies with Pakistan. We can't coddle, as we did, a dictator, give him billions of dollars, and then he's making peace treaties with the Taliban and militants. What I have said is we're going encourage democracy in Pakistan, expand our non-military aid to Pakistan so that they have more of a stake in working with us, but insisting that they go after these militants.

And if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out.

MCCAIN: You know, my hero is a guy named Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt used to say walk softly – talk softly, but carry a big stick. Senator Obama likes to talk loudly. In fact, he said he wants to announce that he's going to attack Pakistan. Remarkable. You know, if you are a country and you're trying to gain the support of another country, then you want to do everything you can that they would act in a cooperative fashion. When you announce that you're going to launch an attack into another country, it's pretty obvious that you have the effect that it had in Pakistan: It turns public opinion against us… Now, our relations with Pakistan are critical, because the border areas are being used as safe havens by the Taliban and Al Qaida and other extremist organizations, and we have to get their support…. We need to help the Pakistani government go into Waziristan, where I visited, a very rough country, and – and get the support of the people, and get them to work with us and turn against the cruel Taliban and others. And by working and coordinating our efforts together, not threatening to attack them, but working with them, and where necessary use force, but talk softly, but carry a big stick.

Obama rebutted McCain by saying that wasn't what he was suggesting at all:

OBAMA: I want to be very clear about what I said. Nobody called for the invasion of Pakistan. Sen. McCain continues to repeat this. What I said was the same thing that the audience here today heard me say, which is, if Pakistan is unable or unwilling to hunt down bin Laden and take him out, then we should. Now, that I think has to be our policy, because they are threatening to kill more Americans.

Now some might say this was more about McCain saying telegraphing the punch was unwise. But he made no such critique in other situations, instead demagoguing: “Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?” More McCain: “Pakistan is a sovereign nation... [they] want Bin Laden out of their hair and out of their country.”  He criticized the lone fellow Republican candidate who took the same position as Obama. And when Sarah Palin went rogue and suggested she agreed with Obama's policy that we should violate Pakistani borders if they didn't hunt terrorists there at our behest, McCain quickly shut her down and suggested it was just idle talk.

This was not just a difference of saying what you were going to do, telegraphing a punch. It was a fundamental policy difference of strategic importance: whether we should act unilaterally to take out bin Laden, or whether cooperation with the Pakistanis was necessary or advisable. Given our numerous problems with intel leaks through the ISI and the unreliability of Pakistan's Pervaiz Musharraf, it was not a small item of debate, but a very meaningful one. McCain gave us plenty of evidence he supported the latter view, which in retrospect looks as brazenly naïve as it always was, particularly considering where bin Laden was ultimately found.

Back to Bolton: saying Osama bin Laden was killed “while” Barack Obama was president ignores the fact that the very policy difference between the two men directly impacted how and why bin Laden was killed. (My own opinion is that when someone implements a policy that was the opposite of his opponents', and the policy succeeds, you credit him.) Unless, of course, Bolton would have us believe McCain was lying all along, or would have changed his mind when confronted with facts as president (McCain, of course, being known as a man who is not at all stubborn and changes his mind with ease). And remember that McCain also opposed the exact same interrogation methods and facilities Obama did... methods and facilities that yes, despite the left's best efforts to rebut the charge, led to bin Laden's death.

Now to Romney. I think his error here was the smallest of the bunch, but he still shouldn't have given the press the Carter-namecheck answer that ordering the strike was obvious. It seems, to a smaller degree than Bolton, to make the "gutsy call" into an obvious move. It wasn't, and suggesting otherwise is historical revisionism. There are so many possible outcomes which could've hurt the U.S. effort, turning into an embarrassing international incident, that a cooperative move with the Pakistanis or a hands-off drone strike both seemed like more pragmatic, responsible decisions to many in Washington's policy elite, and even some in his own administration. And that ignores Romney's own weakness on this point, which provides the press another opportunity to bash him.

If those on the right would just leave well enough alone, I believe Obama would have done, and in fact is doing, his best to make himself seem smaller on the issue. He can't help but repeatedly spike the football concerning bin Laden's death, and he is going to keep on doing it this whole campaign. These repeated invocations about how important he was to the mission just make him seem egotistical and self-aggrandizing, lecturing us for not giving him enough credit. It is unbecoming and unpresidential of him to order the historians how to frame history - Obama, not content to be his own messiah, seems to forever be trying to write his own Bible as well - and such a performance would play poorly with independent voters, who eventually would tire of him acting like he shot the bullet through bin Laden's skull himself.

Unfortunately, by disputing this so loudly and so publicly, the right takes the focus off of the economy or unemployment and makes the election talk focus on how much credit Obama should get for ridding the world of one of its most evil men. This is not, in my opinion, a "winning strategy."

So those on the right should let Obama spike the football again and again like a petulant child. He won't have the restraint to refrain from doing it so often that it grates. Instead, the right should realize that their best response to questions on this is simply saying: “I'm so proud of our men and women in uniform who eradicated Osama bin Laden from the face of the earth... and I'm glad that President Obama came around to our position that information gathered through enhanced interrogation can help us destroy our enemies.” Simple, classy, accurate, and then move on to talking about things people will actually vote about.

Trust me, there's a reason I posted this on Ricochet.

Once upon a time Squeeze turned out tight brilliant pop tunes that often told a tale. Earnest young love in lower-class straits, boozy pub misadventures. The vernacular lyrics may have mystified American audiences - it took me a while to figure out, for example, that a character who pretended he was flush with cash “had done his mother’s meter” meant that he’d stolen the coins she used to pay for the gas in the flat. (I think.) (Delingpole or James of England, help me out.) 

They had two fine singer-songwriters (one a crooner, the other a guy who sang like a frog with a cold) a propulsive drummer, and a manic jester keyboard player. Too smart to be just pop, too personal to be a post-punk Important Band like the Clash, too human for nerd-wave status like the Talking Heads. You could sense the weariness  as soon as they hit it big, though. “Sweets from a Stranger” was over-produced; it spawned a hit single the old fans didn’t like; the songwriting wasn’t up to par. They were tired, and the band split up after the tour. 

They reunited, but the spark was never there. The songs developed a bad case of Costelloitis, swapping melody and simple structure for baroque indulgence. But every so often they’d just bang out a classic, and “Frank” had “Rose I Said,” an urgent little number with a a rote hook but a classic chorus. This live version is too rushed, but what makes it Ricochet-worthy is the chap who introduces the band. He was a fan. Smart guy, but you knew that.

So, Pat: Did you get to hang with the band after the show?

Last night on the eve of May Day, a rabble of vandals marched through San Francisco's Mission District, launching paint bombs at storefronts, smashing in car windows, and shattering the window of my favorite bakery, Tartine. 

The SF Chronicle captures the reactions of devastated business owners trying to make sense of the destruction.

Jeremy Tooker, owner of Four Barrel Coffee, was wiping paint off his store's windows as broken glass crunched beneath pedestrians' feet. He said a friend had alerted him of the damage after stopping a protester from smashing the glass storefront with a crowbar - and taking a hit to his arm.

"This just seems like they're frustrated with their impotency at this point," Tooker said. "It's like, 'Look at me, I'm still here, I'm still occupying.' "

As Koskoff smoked a cigarette by the damaged Aston Martin, he said he didn't understand protesters' motives.

"They're coming through the Mission, where there aren't any corporations, just a lot of small businesses, which is what they're all about," he said. "It doesn't make sense."

[...]

"Occupy is saying it's not them, but we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Occupy, now would we?" Michelle Horneff-Cohen, a real estate broker, said as she shivered next to the broken window of her workplace, Property Management Systems.

She said she had been dragged out of bed to deal with the damage. Although her company has insurance, she said, it will have to pay for much of the cost of repairs.

"I think it's [expletive]," Horneff-Cohen said. "We are the 99 percent, and this is [expletive]."

Democrats have thus far been at least loosely supportive of the Occupy Movement, employing the populist 99 percent language for their own political aims.  But the cognitive dissonance revealed here—i.e. "We are the 99 percent, and this is [expletive]"— by the San Francisco small business owners who are spending their day dealing with damage to their property, makes me wonder if Democrats will continue to treat the Occupiers as political kin going forward into this year's election.  I can't imagine that would be a good move.

Meanwhile, today in Oakland a group of about 100 protesters are busy harassing the banks.  One of the protesters explains his motives thus:

"We are here today because capitalism has destroyed basic human need," said a 20-year-old protester who only identified himself as Connor.

"I am sort of into the libertarian/communist thing myself," he said. "I am an advocate of human need, not monetary need.

Libertarian-communism.  Only in Oakland.

Regardless of what you think of Austrian economics (your author is sympathetic, if not a full-fledged convert), you have to give credit for chutzpah to Robert Wenzel, editor and publisher of the site Economic Policy Journal and a sharp critic of the Federal Reserve. Last week, Wenzel, at the bank's invitation, delivered a speech at the New York Fed ... where he savaged the central bank's policies and called for the institution to be abolished.

That may be wise. It may be foolish. But this is undoubtedly one of the most audacious codas ever delivered in a policy speech:

The noose is tightening on your organization. Vast amounts of money printing are now required to keep your manipulated economy afloat. It will ultimately result in huge price inflation, or, if you stop printing, another massive economic crash will occur. There is no other way out.

Again, thank you for inviting me. You have prepared food, so I will not be rude — I will stay and eat.

Let's have one good meal here. Let's make it a feast. Then I ask you, I plead with you, I beg you all, walk out of here with me, never to come back. It's the moral and ethical thing to do. Nothing good goes on in this place. Let's lock the doors and leave the building to the spiders, moths, and four-legged rats.

As discussed on Ricochet yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden recently gave a speech revealing the source of his vaunted foreign policy expertise –“Dr. Strangelove” (yes, the movie). But that wasn’t Hollywood Joe’s only movie reference. Like other surrogates for President Barack Obama, Biden has begun attacking presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney as a “Back to the Future” candidate.

While the Obama campaign hopes to define Romney as backward looking, the attack backfires as badly as a DeLorean time machine. If, as team Obama says, Romney is the candidate who wants to take America back to the future, then Obama must be the president who has taken America back into the past. Over at Forbes, I have a new column looking at how Obama longs for life before Ronald Reagan.

The Pew Research Center has good news on the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden's death:

A year after the death of its leader, al Qaeda is widely unpopular among Muslim publics. A new poll by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, conducted March 19 to April 13, 2012, finds majorities – and mostly large majorities – expressing negative views of the terrorist group in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and Lebanon.

Great news, right?  Only 21% of Egypt, 15% of Jordan, 13% of Pakistan, 6% of Turkey and 2% of Lebanon express even favorable views toward the terrorist group.

Looked another way, of course, that means that al Qaeda enjoys the support of 47,284,049 Muslims in only five of the 50 countries in which a majority of the population is Muslim.

Not a typo -- according to this survey, more than 47 million Muslims in only five countries support the terrorist group. If roughly similar percentages of Muslims support al Qaeda in the remaining countries -- which include Indonesia, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia -- we're talking a lot of support.

I wonder which way the media reports of this survey will frame it -- as comfortingly low support or frighteningly high.

On the other hand, before his death last year, Pew used to measure confidence in Osama bin Laden. And those figures plummeted among Muslims over the years.

In the latest episode of "Girls," Hannah (Lena Dunham) gets two pieces of seriously bad news. The less bad of the two is that her ex-boyfriend of two years from college is actually gay--and, as he tells her at the bar, would fantasize about men when they were together.

The second more serious bit of bad tidings is that Hannah has a sexually transmitted disease: HPV. The reason that Hannah is at the bar with her ex in the first place is because she is trying to figure out who gave her the STD.

Elijah, her ex, is not the source. That leaves Adam, the hipster creep Hannah's been sleeping with. Adam, who plays with her belly fat and fantasizes in bed that she's an eleven-year-old girl, had told Hannah earlier in the episode that he didn't give her the STD because he's been tested for it.

Turns out that Adam is a liar. Men can't get tested for HPV. And now Hannah is left to deal with the consequences of their condomless hook ups.

As the episode is coming to a close, a seriously demoralized Hannah sits in bed with her laptop open. What does she do? She pulls up her Twitter account:

She types: “You lose some, you lose some.” Self-pity. But she doesn’t hit send. She starts over, this time more explicitly: ”My life has been a lie, my ex-boyfriend dates a guy.” Again, she deletes; starts over. Finally, she taps out what amounts to a code: “All adventurous women do.”

"All adventurous women do." As Emily Nussbaum points out over at the New Yorker's culture blog, "No stranger who reads those words will know quite what they mean. They’re a credo, a pose—it’s a phrase she heard from a friend, who was repeating what another friend said, giving her a sophisticated attitude with which to face HPV."

Exactly. Hannah, who is feeling depressed, covers up her true emotions with the appearance of strength. Via Twitter, she glibly comforts herself by acting like HPV is a rite of passage for young "adventurous" women. But it's all pretense. We know it and she knows it.

Moments later, Hannah's roommate and best friend Marnie comes home. The two of them chat, catch up on their days, and then start dancing their worries away to Robyn's "Dancing On My Own," a song that, like Hannah's tweet, is defined by the sentiment of acting strong when you're really feeling vulnerable and alone.

That's how the show ends. It's a great sequence, capturing how emotionally dishonest we can be with ourselves and with the world when we're staring down a conflict.

In my column this week for Defining Ideas, I argue that the key to economic recovery is liberalizing labor markets, not relying on macroeconomic “fixes.”

Grim is the right word to describe the latest economic news from both the European Union and the United States. Throughout the European Union, austerity programs have failed both politically and economically. In Spain, unemployment rates have soared above 24 percent. The Dutch government is on the edge of collapse because of the popular and political unwillingness to accept the austerity program proposed by its conservative government. Romania is not far behind. Greece, Italy, and Portugal remain in perilous condition. France faces a presidential run-off election between President Nicholas Sarkozy, who is moving rightward on immigration issues, and the free-spending socialist candidate Franciose Hollande. On the American front, the decline of GDP growth to 2.2 percent rightly raises fears that our sputtering domestic recovery is just about over.

It is no surprise, therefore, that leading columnists like Paul Krugman have taken this opportunity to announce triumphantly that austerity is a “fairy tale” that shatters the social confidence that it is designed to shore up. It is futile to invoke fiscal austerity, he argues, when economically beleaguered countries really need to be “spending more to offset falling private demand.” The cure is supposed to be increased government spending, but that solution has its own serious problems. Krugman assumes that the declines in private demand and private investment are attributable to mysterious external forces that are beyond the power of government to control.

But both macroeconomic programs are doomed to failure. Only by changing our microeconomic policy—reforming the labor market, specifically—will we start seeing economic growth. The calcification of labor markets with regulation upon regulation is the primary impediment to economic recovery today, as I explain further over at Defining Ideas.

Last week, we took a bit of heat for not announcing that we have moved the podcasts to Thursdays while Rob's TV show is in production. So we wanted to get the word out early and loudly that for this week only, we're moving to Friday so our good pal Jonah Goldberg could join us for the full hour. 

To pass the time, get your hands on a copy of Jonah's new book The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas either on Amazon or later this week, on Audible (Jonah reads it!). 

Also, enjoy (OK, that may be the wrong word) this interview Jonah did yesterday with world class twit Piers Morgan. On Friday, we'll ask Jonah how he was able to resist the urge to reach across the table and clock him (h/t Ricochet member Joseph Eager).

One of the overarching themes running through media coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King riots has been the transformation of the Los Angeles Police Department, with said theme being summed up thus: The cops were bad guys then, but are good (or better) guys now.

The constant regurgitation of this theme reflects an ignorance of conditions in Los Angeles as they existed in the years leading up to the riots, and as one who has served with the LAPD for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years, I find it more than a bit tiresome.

Reason.com’s Tim Cavenaugh, in an otherwise commendable piece on conditions then and now in South Central Los Angeles (yes, Mr. Cavenaugh, people still call it “South Central,” despite what people at City Hall might wish), can’t resist a backhanded slap at the LAPD.  “It would be more accurate to say,” he writes, “the trouble of 1992 came from a mixture of extremely volatile identity politics and a police force more focused on terrorizing the citizens than on solving crimes.”

To the extent the citizens in South Central L.A. were terrorized in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, it wasn’t by the police but rather by the gangsters who besieged the area’s decent people and made them fearful of leaving their homes, and sometimes of staying in them.  South Central L.A. is patrolled by officers from four police stations: Southwest, 77th Street, Southeast, and Newton Divisions.  I worked at all four of them through the 80's and into the 90's, and I recall that it was fairly routine to field five or six two-officer units on P.M. Watch at each division, with perhaps two additional units on Mid-P.M. Watch.  In other words, on a typical night in the entirety of South Central L.A. there were but 50 to 70 police officers on duty during the busiest hours of the day.  And this was at a time when all four of those divisions were handling a hundred murders or more – sometimes a lot more – each year.  The crack cocaine epidemic and the gang activity it spawned was simply beyond any hope of control for the paltry allotment of officers the city saw fit to assign there.

But we did our best, working overtime most nights and spending most of our days at the Criminal Courts Building or the Compton courthouse, all in the effort to help the decent people we encountered every day.  To ridicule those efforts, to ridicule those of us who worked in the most troubled of neighborhoods in the most troubled of times by saying we were “more focused on terrorizing the citizens than on solving crimes” is as insulting as it is erroneous.

But insults and errors are even harder to bear when they are accompanied by sanctimony, such as can be found in this piece, by Los Angeles Times editor Jim Newton.  “The Los Angeles riots represented the culmination of many failures,” he writes, “the failure to provide hope for young people; the failure to supply education and jobs in the numbers that would stabilize communities; the failure to engage those communities in their own protection instead of relying on harsh and coercive law enforcement.”

Putting aside the pap about providing hope for young people and the rest of Newton’s utopian laundry list, one could argue that in a city where more than a thousand people were murdered and more than 45,000 assaulted, as was the case in both 1991 and 1992, the police were neither harsh nor coercive enough.

And note that Mr. Newton, in assigning blame for the riots on the LAPD, offers not a word of judgment on those who took to the streets and pulled innocent people from the cars before beating them nearly to death.  No, that we have to understand.

But one expects as much from the Los Angeles Times, so there’s no disappointment in reading such a piece.  The real disappointment comes in seeing that people who should know better have bought into the lie that the LAPD of twenty years ago was a festering nest of racists.  In an article at the Neon Tommy website, LAPD Commander Andy Smith told an interviewer about the demands he faced as a young officer at Newton Division.  “Pretty soon,” he said, “everybody in the community looks like a bad guy and heck, most people down here, even though they aren’t wealthy, are law-abiding, hardworking citizens that just want the same thing for their families as you and I want for our family: Live in peace, be able to have a job and work, take care of your family.  We didn’t recognize that for a while.”

Commander Smith is a good man, and among his peers in the LAPD's upper ranks, one of the best, but if he truly believes that today, and if he acted that way as a young cop, I fear I've overestimated him.  Every cop I worked with twenty years ago recognized very well that even in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods, most of the residents were decent and law-abiding.  If he assumed otherwise, more’s the pity, but that’s on him.

While I was disappointed to hear Commander Smith demeaning his former colleagues, I can’t say I was surprised to see LAPD Chief Charlie Beck join the self-flagellating in Monday’s Los Angeles Times.  Chief Beck tips his hand in the piece’s fourth paragraph, when he euphemizes the riots as “civil unrest,” and later when he opts for the benign term “uprising,” as though the riots were something more than criminal behavior on a massive scale.  He closes the piece with a wish for his family members who serve as police officers:

My two children and my son-in-law are all LAPD officers.  Like any parent, I want their future to be safe, secure and happy. But I also want to leave them with a legacy: I want them to belong to a Police Department that is a force for positive change, and one that brings communities together instead of tearing its city apart.

So it was the LAPD that tore the city apart, not the people who committed all those murders and assaults.  This is politically correct revisionism at its worst.  Sure, crime was bad because the cops were mean.  How utterly false, how utterly nauseating.

Who can forget the horror of learning, a few years back, that a modern Airbus A330-200 aircraft simply vanished over mid-Atlantic, initially without a trace?  

Over the weekend, the Telegraph published a chilling analysis of the June 1, 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.  After the autopilot disconnected in a thunderstorm--a fail-safe response to faulty airspeed data from frozen pitot tubes--the pilot flying AF447 commanded excessive nose-up trim, entering a deep stall.  Incredibly, the pilot held this attitude throughout the plane's descent.

For most of its four-minute, 7-mile plunge, AF 447 could have resumed controlled flight if the pilot flying had lowered the nose and held the attitude long enough to regain flying speed.  This basic stall recovery procedure is taught to every pilot in initial training and drilled repeatedly in flight checks.

What went wrong?  In a word:  technology.  Too much technology in between the pilots and the aircraft.

But there is another, worrying implication that the Telegraph can disclose for the first time: that the errors committed by the pilot doing the flying were not corrected by his more experienced colleagues because they did not know he was behaving in a manner bound to induce a stall. And the reason for that fatal lack of awareness lies partly in the design of the control stick – the “side stick” – used in all Airbus cockpits.

 Cockpit controls in most modern airliners are connected to computers, not directly to engines and flight surfaces.  Both Boeing and Airbus make extensive use of such "fly-by-wire" systems.  Where Airbus goes further--a step too far in the case of AF447--is in eliminating the tactile signaling provided by the older controls.  In a conventional aircraft,  the pilot flying commands a nose-up attitude by pulling the stick back and the stick on the other side of the cockpit likewise moves aft, providing feedback to the PNF (pilot not flying).  Boeing emulates this control behavior in its fly-by-wire aircraft, Airbus does not.  Relax back-pressure in a new Boeing airliner and the nose will lower to its previously trimmed position, just like an old-style cable-and-hydraulics plane.  In an Airbus, the computer carries on with the last command input until receiving a new one, even though the stick is visibly in the neutral position.  

Under normal circumstances, the Airbus approach provides a lower pilot workload--a better "user experience" in Web 2.0-speak.  However, in the corner case of an emergency with multiple instrument failures, overloaded pilots lack the physical cues that would likely have saved 228 souls on board AF447.

And the problem of too much well-meaning-but-intrusive technology goes beyond the flight controls:  even the design of the computer-automated stall warning contributed to the disaster.

Bonin’s insistent efforts to climb soon deprived even the computers of the vital angle-of-attack information. An A330’s angle of attack is measured by a fin projecting from the fuselage. When forward speed fell to 60 knots there was insufficient airflow to make the mechanism work. The computers, which are programmed not to feed pilots misleading information, could no longer make sense of the data they were receiving and blanked out some of the instruments. Also, the stall warnings ceased. It was up to the pilots to do some old-fashioned flying.

With no knowledge of airspeed or angle of attack, the safest thing at high altitude is to descend gently to avoid a stall. This is what David urged Bonin to do, but something bewildering happened when Bonin put the nose down. As the aircraft picked up speed, the input data became valid again and the computers could now make sense of things. Once again they began to shout: “Stall, stall, stall.” Tragically, as Bonin did the right thing to pick up speed, the aircraft seemed to tell him he was making matters worse. If he had continued to descend the warnings would eventually have ceased. But, panicked by the renewed stall alerts, he chose to resume his fatal climb.

That's how the President will want the question framed.  Perhaps we can explore other options.

It is an oft cited talking point of former members of the Bush administration that after 9/11, we were kept safe from terrorist attacks.  I’ve agreed.  While I have my criticisms of President Bush in other areas, on this I have always given him praise for what I understood to be a monumental job of constant diligence.

It was said of President Obama during his 2008 campaign that there existed a fear of his not keeping us safe, most memorably in Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m. phone call” commercial.

Since we have not been attacked on the scale of 9/11, President Obama will in all likelihood claim our continued safety as his own job well done.  What is good for Dick Cheney, he will argue, is good for Barack Obama.

At the center of his talking point on keeping us safe will be his killing of Osama bin Laden.  It has already started.  Today he contrasted himself and Mitt Romney, suggesting his likely opponent would not have killed bin Laden, based upon past statements.

The Romney campaign will face a challenge between now and November on how to respond to the President’s claim of success in keeping us safe.

I’m curious as to what suggestions we might have for the Romney campaign.  There are a number of choices that come to mind, some already being tried by Romney.  Here are a few:

1. Call it shameful to use our safety as a political talking point.
2. Pivot the conversation to foreign policy criticisms of the President.
3. Embarrass the President with his renaming the war on terror to variations like “war on Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and adherents” or the even more clerkish sounding (if that’s even possible) “overseas contingency operations.”

 I stand fearful, however, of this simple rebuttal:  “The people complaining the loudest are doing so blanketed by the safety afforded them by my administration.”  This will be an attempt by the President to make Mitt Romney seem ungrateful toward our military and police.

There is another option for Romney that is often used in courtrooms and I’m wondering if it is similarly used in political campaigns:  Concede the issue.  There are two ways of doing this.

 One way I've done it is to bring up the issue that is least helpful to me before the other guy does.  The goal is to show honesty by not hiding it and to have the jury (voters) hear it said in the best possible light for my client (law of primacy:  studies show people tend toward believing what they hear first).

The other method is to concede by ignoring.  The last thing I want to do is highlight my weakness or my adversary’s strength.  If my client’s case is filled with many other issues, I’ll let one tough issue pass without comment to let it get lost or have the jury conclude that my lack of concern about it means it’s not an issue at all.  I’ll admit that particular brand of subtlety is to be used with caution (but it does work).

The polar opposite of conceding the issue is to punch it out in the center of the ring, perhaps like this: When the President claims success at keeping us safe from terrorists,  Mitt Romney could bring up the Ft.Hood killings as proof of the President’s failure in keeping America safe.  

Will Romney open himself up to the criticism of politicizing the Ft. Hood killings or insensitivity to the victim's families? The Democrats will certainly say that, but how will the American people view it when they do?  What must linger in the campaign strategist’s mind is this: Perhaps that strategy will work because it is true, and it may neutralize the claim of success of the President.

 Are there any other options you can offer the Romney campaign on how to deal with this issue when the President claim's strength (as he did today)?

 Which option do you think is best?

Over on the Member Feed, Maggie Somavilla posted a link to a National Review book review of the horrifying memoir, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.

Reading NR's two page review of the book is overwhelming.  We learn of the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, a young North Korean man who had spent his entire life from infancy in a North Korean gulag with up to 200,000 other prisoners.  He and his fellow prisoners were kept as animals; they lived in squalor, disease, and brutality.   Shin witnessed the beatings and executions of classmates and family members, and was even instrumental in bringing about his mother's and brother's hangings.  The details of his existence in the prison camp reveal a human darkness beyond comprehension.

Being overpowered by sadness and disgust, I shared the review with a handful of close friends so that I wouldn't be alone with the burden of this horrific knowledge.  One friend was outraged by the powerlessness he felt upon reading the review.  "Why isn't the U.S. intervening?" he demanded.  "Someone needs to do something!" 

And then his anger over the situation turned into frustration toward me for making him aware of such an awful reality.  "Well then there is no benefit in the media informing me about atrocities taking place in the res to of the world if no one is helping.  I would prefer to remain ignorant in my San Franciscan community, and go to Giants games and shop at Whole Foods," he concluded.

That's the mentality that our own Claire Berlinski butts in to with her reporting of the goings on in Turkey.  It's a fury induced by powerlessness that people feel when learning about atrocities in a faraway corner of the world.  Either that, or an apathy that results from a desensitization to this kind of news; there will always be madmen and violence and horror in the world, and aside from praying, there's so little that any of us on our own can do about that.

Even if they often fall short, it's easy to see a clear purpose of domestic media—government must be held accountable by the citizens, and the citizenry must be kept informed in order to do that.  But what's the purpose of the media when it comes to reporting on global issues?  Why, for instance, is it important that some nobody like me knows about the horrors that seize North Korea?  Is it merely knowledge for the sake of knowledge?

Rising taxes, a crumbling infrastructure, a draconian regulatory regime, schools that fail to educate, and a state government that remains an arm of the unions.  You can read a lot of complicated data on the current unhappy state of the Golden State--which, of course, looks all the unhappier by comparison with data on the low-tax, low-regulation Lone Star State--or you can simply look at this:

U-Haul rates for one-way 26 foot truck rentals in May:
From Sacramento to Houston: $2,370
From Houston to Sacramento: $1,007
From San Francisco to San Antonio: $2,214
From San Antonio to San Francisco:  $1,069

Thanks to my friend Doug Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth, who claims (he really does) that his aim in directing me to this was not merely to depress me.

In the wake of this weekend's annual White House Correspondents' Dinner (ably chronicled here by Mollie), President Obama is getting media props for his deft touch with humor behind the podium. I'm not sure what the big deal is; we know the president doesn't need a packed house to get off a zinger. After all, here he is, as reported in Jodi Kantor's book, The Obamas (h/t to Jim Geraghty at NRO):

The president had been taking questions for almost an hour. He had apologetically told the mostly liberal crowd that he had been forced to take a centrist point of view in his presidency because of divided government. (Never mind that Obama had told conservative Democrats in Congress that he was one of them, too: “I’m a Blue Dog at heart,” he had said in more than one meeting.)

Ah yes, our president: the centrist misunderstood by liberals, and the liberal misunderstood by centrists. The guy who cites Ronald Reagan to push for tax increases and channels his inner Teddy Roosevelt on the stump in Kansas. Who can fathom the mysteries of his post-partisan ideology, the man himself being a riddle wrapped inside an enigma wrapped inside a press release?

Well, I can. I took up this topic recently in my weekly column for the Center for Individual Freedom. In "Barack Obama, America's Most Radical Moderate," I wrote:

So who is this man now attempting to convince us that he’s a judicious centrist unmoored from ideology? Well, he’s the fellow whose first major legislative accomplishment was a $787 billion spending bill, the largest in American history. He’s the guy who said that under his preferred energy policies, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” He’s the man who racked up more federal debt in three years than George W. Bush did in eight. And he’s the only president in American history to ram through a major, bank-busting entitlement (ObamaCare) over widespread public opposition.

How about his thoughtful generosity towards those who disagree with him? In an interview on Univision, Obama encouraged Latino voters to head to the polls with the attitude that, “We’re gonna punish our enemies.”  He compared Republican opponents of his alternative energy policies (which included the infamous $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, the California solar power firm that eventually went bankrupt) to “founding members of the Flat Earth Society.” And he accused the GOP of practicing “thinly veiled Social Darwinism” for proposing a budget that actually had the temerity to propose taming the federal government’s spendthrift fiscal habits.

Sorry, but there's nothing here to unify those who occupy the country's ideological poles. Except perhaps for this: that Barack Obama sure can tell a joke.