This video from Jon Stewart reveals again the herd mentality that is the press and the professional talking-points circuit. They’ve all anointed a troika atop the GOP nomination sweepstakes — Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry — but it takes a TV comedian to remind us that Romney and Perry have won nothing, and that someone else — someone they ignore or mock — came within about 150 votes of winning. That guys name is Ron Paul (the name they shall not mention). While I generally disagree with Congressman Paul, he has more integrity than the other three put together and squared.

Last year when I flew back east with my family, a TSA agent detained my 12-year-old daughter to search her floral pink roll-on bag. While Emma stood there and cried, the agent pulled out markers, drawing paper, socks, and girls panties, but no weapons or explosives. None of the  passengers seemed reassured that a terrorist threat had been averted. I know I wasn’t, and my wife was so angry that, if anything, the level of potential threat rose.

Yesterday while flying home, a friend and her family were similarly held up by TSA, this time so that her son could be frisked.  Clearly, he is another imminent threat. (He starts kindergarten tomorrow.)

Good news, though:   The TSA is further bolstering its training and its security measures. Now, in addition to frisking kids and pawing their gummy bears, they will chat up everyone in line. After an extensive two-week training course, they will employ new skills in casual interrogation and reading of  “micro-expressions.” I don’t mind their reading my expressions — I’m going to make them no matter what — but here is my planned answer when they ask me what is the purpose of my trip:  “None of your damn business. I still live in what’s left of America.” And then they can read the accompanying expression on my face.

If the Taliban or al Qaeda ever succeed in convincing middle-class Americans to strap their kids with explosives to blow up planes, I suggest that we just turn the country over to them, because truly they will have won, and deservedly so, because we will have abandoned all decency, all morality, and every shred of common sense. In the meantime, I think they should leave the kids alone and not grill us about where we’re going or why.

This little photo on Facebook is generating some traffic. It’s a shot of books in the backpack of a U.S. soldier deployed in Afghanistan. We can’t make out all of them, but I applaud the thinking behind two of them:  Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (which must be required reading in every college literature or creative-writing class, because everyone I know in one of those has read it) and “The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.”

I would add “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut (and not, notably, “Slaughterhouse Five,” probably best left for reading when one isn’t actively deployed).

What would you add, if you were fighting a miserable war in a terrible faraway clime?

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”

So here’s the question:  How come I know this quote from Frederick Douglass and, apparently, Barack Obama doesn’t? Because I have to think if he knew it, he’d heed it, instead of hoping to get along with people powerfully opposed to him.

I saw the new “Planet of the Apes” movie last night (“Rise of the…”) and absolutely loved it. (But then, I love all the “Apes” movies… with the exception of the execrable Tim Burton version.) One of the many delights of the movie were all the references to the classic film series, which many members of this Los Angeles cinema audience got. (When one of the characters cried out “Take your stinkin’ paw off me you damn dirty ape!” the audience broke out in applause.) The LA Times has helpfully compiled a list of all the new movie’s tips-of-the-hat  to its forebears. Here it is.

I look forward to the attendant dance craze in which each of us is asked to “Rotate Your Owl.”

How did Obama blow the debt-ceiling negotiation? Maybe he just wasn’t crazy enough.

Remember the recent show by Echo and the Bunnymen that left my friend seething? Sounds like something similar happened with Kings of Leon, but at least the band members had the good manners to apologize for their singer.

We all know there’s an “Avengers” movie coming out next summer.

But… what if that movie had come out in the 1950’s (before the comic even began, in 1963). Maybe it would look like this.

Animal lovers who coo over little kitties are by many reports warm, sensitive people always interested in finding a new home for a pet in need.

Except, that is, when the cat reminds them of Hitler.