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.

Last night when I got home, I found that I’d received a fundraising letter from Barack Obama’s re-election campaign committee. I opened it, scribbled a message on the reply card, and mailed it back. Here was my message:  “Learn how to fight, and I’ll send a check.” Given that the envelope had paid return, the president’s campaign will be paying 76 cents for my registration of fury.

All of my liberal friends have this to say:  “I think he has the hardest job of any president in history.” (Actual quote from a lunch meeting yesterday.) I agree. That’s why we need him to do a better job at it. That’s why we need him to show more spine. They also say  that Republicans won’t give him a break. What I don’t understand is why they ever thought they would; only a fool would have thought that. Politics isn’t about going along to get along (except, evidently, in Mr. Obama’s mind).

Twice in the last two weeks, I had the sinking feeling that I’d made a grievous error, that Hillary Clinton, whom I’d never liked, was the stronger candidate. (The actual thought running through my mind:  She’s got more balls than he does.)  The first time was during the debt-ceiling debacle. Re “a balanced approach” that “includes new revenues” (his words, both times), he said, “I will not yield.” (That’s a direct quote.) On the day he said that, I posted on my Facebook page, “I predict yielding.” That didn’t soften the blow, though, of a disastrous deal that restricts spending precisely when we need it, a proposition that — hold onto your hat — even the Wall Street Journal has now decided that it opposes. And then, after Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. and Wall Street got a closer look at the European debt crisis and ran for cover, the president came out looking very much like Jimmy Carter, plaintively wailing that We Are a Special People, and We Will Always Be AAA, and Our Future Is Bright, and I couldn’t find one person online or in person who was buying a word of it.

The comparison to Jimmy Carter is especially painful to make. I lived through the Carter presidency, and it felt like the world was coming to an end. (Nuclear saber-rattling with the Soviets; boycotting the Olympic Games to prove some point that wasn’t made; a grain embargo that didn’t hurt the Soviets but did hurt American farmers; inflation that drove costs up with every breath; and a failed rescue mission for the hostages that symbolized everything about the administration:  good intentions, bad results.)

I never thought that Mr. Obama’s job would be easy, but I did hope he would fight. He won a number of victories early on in his presidency — when he had a Democratic Congress and it was easier — but I haven’t seen a fight out of him in quite a while now. He caved on eliminating the Bush tax cuts; he caved on every significant point in the completely concocted debt-ceiling drama; he has caved on the general GOP notion that what we need to do is cut spending and further reduce taxes. At this point, I’m not sure what he’ll stand up for. Political power redounds not just from popularity, but also from fear and intimidation. Right now, no one — no one — is afraid of Barack Obama. He hasn’t given them any reason to be. As a former fan and currently reluctant supporter, I encourage Obama the book-lover to pull “The Prince” down off his shelf and read it again.

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.