A few weeks ago, when I wrote about the Bulwer-Lytton contest for the worst first sentence of a novel, I had no idea there was actually a worst novel in the world, too.  The consensus, from what little research I've done on the subject, is that Amanda McKittrick Ros is the author who wins, hands down.  (A literary group that included Tolkien and C.S.

The media is so allergic to common sense these days that nobody has reported on the obvious implications of the Republican complaint that nearly half of Americans had no income tax liability in 2010.  Republicans want to raise taxes on the poor.  This is the subject of my column in The Daily this week.

So, the Iowa Straw Poll went overwhelmingly to candidates who would have been considered fringe last time around, with Michelle Bachmann and Ron Paul combining for something like 55% of the vote. Some Democrats are taking this as consolation, on the theory that even if Obama is vulnerable the Republicans will nominate someone too extreme to beat him.

Good God and Lordy, people, is there anything more ludicrous on the political scene than what happens in Iowa whenever the Republicans don't have a Grand Poobah candidate for President?  This year it was a big barbecue in Ames where just under 17,000 people 16 1/2 years old and over got to pay their $30 to "vote" for a candidate and then party afterward.  Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul were the "winners".  And, not surprisingly, the emperor wore no clothes.

Playing Diogenes, good ol' jollyroger asked us to name some respectable conservatives.  It's a tough game because they all have sins.  I used to cite William Buckley as a personal favorite for his general tone and writing style, but would always be confronted with the crass and ignorant things the guy said about homosexuals in response.  From our lens, none of them are perfect.

Our own Genghis recently wrote a post that posed the rhetorical question, "Why should you vote for Obama?"  The purpose of his post seemed to be to spark thought and discussion about what Obama's potential campaign paths might be in the face of expectedly dreary economic conditions during the 2012 cycle, which reminded of a new model of presidential elections by UCLA's Lynn Vavreck.

Michele Bachmann was on Newsweek's cover this week and editor Tina Brown swears to all who will listen that Bachmann's bizarre cross-eyed skyward gaze was meant only to "capture her intensity".  About the crossed-eyes, Tina says she doesn't see it.  She honestly doesn't know what all the fuss is about.  (Cough, choke, gasp, gag.)

Given our recent discussions of Westen's OpEd and Chait's response, last night's episode of Charlie Rose with Drew Westen, Jonathan Chait and Fareed Zakaria is well worth watching. ~30 minutes

Charlie Rose - a discussion about President Obama's leadership

My column for The Daily today is about the S&P downgrade and its effects but, beyond that, it's about an undercurrent of belief in the U.S. that we should be collectively punished for the sins of borrowing and profligate spending.

There's actually a whole school of "hard money" economics adherents, known as the "Austrian School," that believes this very explicitly.  They see stimulus packages, quantitative easing, Keynesian money printing and other Federal Reserve tactics as ways of avoiding necessary economic pain.  Ron and Rand Paul are in this camp.  They believe that you deal with high unemployment or stagnant wages or even inflation by... living with it.  These are the necessary results of speculative bubbles that you never should have let happen in the first place and if you'd just let the supply of gold be the disciplining factor in economic life, you wouldn't have had these problems in the first place.  I tend to believe that if we did that we'd still be living in 15th century conditions, but that's another story.

When Gov. Rick Perry of Texas called for a day of prayer and fasting in Houston, world-famous televangelist John Hagee answered enthusiastically.

"We pray for our governor, Rick Perry," he gruffly proclaimed, "who has had the courage today to call this time of fasting and prayer just as Abraham Lincoln did in the darkest days of the Civil War."

When Perry officially launches his presidential campaign this weekend, he will not be the only Republican candidate to carry the banner of Christian piety. The presidential pre-primary season has not featured so many brave Christian Abraham Lincolns since the days of Abraham Lincoln himself.

Read the full story at CNN.com

Wait! Don't be misled by the title. I'm not asking for your opinion about whether to vote for Obama. Whatever it is, I promise that we've heard it many times before.

Instead, I'm asking the question that Obama and his political staff will be asking themselves as they head into the 2012 campaign: What reasons will they offer voters to re-elect Obama?

The standard incumbent strategy is the old "stay the course" bromide. Focus on describing your accomplishments and vaguely promise more of the same.

Detroit is my unofficial hometown.  I spent more years in and around Detroit than anywhere else in the country. I loved growing up there, so it would be hard not to have feelings for the city now, even after all of the scandals, the neglect, the excesses, the tearing-down of beautiful landmarks, and the destruction of entire formerly lovely neighborhoods for no earthly good reason other than that nobody cared.

I've thrown away the woe-unto-ye-Barack-Obama post that I started after the debt ceiling debacle, because lots of other people have written it, and truth be told I've written it already myself. Let's take for granted that Obama needs to put up more of a fight against the Republicans, and that compromise and sweet reason aren't working. Here's the question: what to do now?

I see over at Swampland today that likely casualties of the budget deal include the long-term unemployed (who are unlikely to get another extension of unemployment benefits) and, of all things during a time when we're encouraging people to get more education to be better at their jobs, graduate students, who will lose the ability to take out federally subsidized loans.  One can only hope that pulling subsidies for those loans will eventually bring the costs of graduate schools dow

Let's get one thing straight: without a national debt, there is no national defense. This has always been true.

We can all sputter righteously about the evils of borrowing and debt, but a United States government that did not borrow would either have to do without any military at all or else make do with a tiny, ill-equipped military with troops who almost never got their pay, which is what we had before the Washington Administration. Access to credit has always been central to effective government operations, and especially to effective military operations. Gimmicks like "debt ceilings" and "balanced budget amendments" not only threaten the effectiveness of basic, everyday governance but make the government completely incapable of responding to an emergency.

Every year I think about entering a sentence in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, but it always happens after I've seen the announcement of that year's winner.   This particular contest is like a "Worst Fiction in the World" contest, where contestants have to come up with an opening sentence for an imaginary novel that is worse, or at least comparable to, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's first sentence of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford (and the first line of many of Snoopy's unfinished novels).

A NY Times chart reposted and discussed on Econbrowser.

My latest column for The Daily was a reaction Thomas Friedman's recent New York Times column calling for a third party presidential candidate to be selected by some Internet Web site that he says is backed by flashy hedge fund money.

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Rosa Parks,  My Story.