I've always been skeptical of the two alternatives floated that Obama could use to avoid a debt ceiling standoff, but I've also liked them both and I continue to like them both far more than the option of the U.S. voluntarily defaulting on its debt, which is a silly thing considering that the U.S. controls its currency supply.

But I'll be quick about it.

"The average Medicare couple pays $109,000 into the program and gets $343,000 in benefits out, according to the Urban Institute. This is $234,000 in free money."

No! No! No! No!  It is not free money.  It is paid, as a tax, over the course of a working life.

Just based on conversations I've had over the years, one of the assumed best things about the enduring democracy of the United States is that we've had one Constitution, amended infrequently, for a very long time.  Other countries, we're told, go through constitutions quite frequently and others don't have them at all.  Today, Louis Michael Seidman writes in The Times that we should give up on the Constitution all together.  It has become, he argues, an impediment to smart decision-making and an appeal to a long departed gentry who would not understand the problems we face today.

Apparently casting about for ideas for an Op-ed column this week, Nicholas Kristof has gone back to the "philanthrocapitalism" well with a column titled "How Giving Became Cool."  He credits Ted Turner's decision to funnel $1 billion for charitable causes through the United Nations a few years back, and then his agitating for more generosity from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have since championed "The Giving Pledge,

...Picture it.  It was the middle 1990s.  Kurt Cobain still breathed.  Courtney Love still made sense.  People wore flannel on top of their flannel.  Britney Spears was a Mouseketeer and a virgin.  Some people still carried pocket pagers, known as "beepers."  Well, only drug dealers.  Pay phones existed.  The rapper Ice-T was an unlikely candidate for starring in a Law and Order spin-off.

Friends, please consider signing this petition urging President Obama to think harder and to come up with a qualified Democrat, rather than former Senator Chuck Hagel, as the next Secretary of Defense.

This might be* stupid, but hear me out.

One of the problems with guns is that for all the fancy gadgets and accessories, they are pretty low tech.  You can put a laser site on a rifle.  It's still just an enhanced version of a very old technology.  It's a technology that is so old that it is not networked in any way.  It cannot be controlled from afar any more than a hammer or hacksaw can be.

I know I've brought this up before but back in the 90s, when I worked at a chain book/video/music store, a dude used to come in with his family and a nine millimeter pistol in a shoulder holster.  The rules back then in New Mexico were that it was legal to carry an unconcealed firearm, though establishments were allowed to ban them and it was illegal to discharge a firearm within the city limits.  So, this guy with his military style haircut (but not the kind of body or discipline you'd associate with having completed the most basic basic training) would come into the store with his piece i

There are 300 million guns in America, which is enough to arm everyone.  About half of households are gun owners.  That includes the house I grew up with.  It includes some of my colleagues and friends.  It includes right wingers and left wingers.  They're good people and to them, guns are objects and they have as much a right to them as they do to any other object in their lives.

From a spending standpoint one of the problems for Social Security, and for any retirement annuity or lifetime pension, is how to maintain purchasing power for recipients in a world of generally rising prices.  It would be so nice, all agree, if prices could just be made not to rise so quickly.  This is, unfortunately, very difficult to control.

The way David Gregory framed his "fiscal cliff" question on Meet The Press today is extremely revealing.  "What cuts," he asked his Democratic guest (I'm paraphrasing a little), "are Democrats willing to accept that will be truly painful?"  The answer, by the way, was "farm subsidies."  So, yes, the whole exchange was absurd.

Unconventional ideas need champions and they have to start somewhere.  Today, Thomas Friedman pushes Arne Duncan, current Secretary of Education as the next Secretary of State.  It's a quirky idea, but interesting.

First, though, Friedman has to deal with the very obvious problem of why he'd prefer such a contrarian pick over the front runner, current Ambassador to the United Nations and longtime Obama confidante, Susan Rice.

Decided to torture myself with Meet The Press this morning.

Today my favorite Op-Ed writer of them all, Thomas Friedman, tackles the skills of America's workers.  Based on the testimony of Traci Tapani, who inherited a small sheet metal company in Wyoming, Friedman has concluded that America's workers don't have the skills for what modern work requires.

Fascinating piece in The LA Times about a call that Mitt Romney had with his donors.  Romney basically repeats the 47% argument, without the blunt language.  Obama won, says Romney, because he turned out throngs of people who want health care and the possibility of student loan forgiveness.

For example:

Late in the week, The Daily called with the kind of assignment that no opinion writer could turn down.  Obama has a chance to be the Reagan of the left, they said.  If he gets a reasonable amount of what he wants in his second term, what will America look like?  Writing this longer essay was an exercise in optimism and, though I tried to be realistic, I also found it kind of a tonic for cynicism.  Things can get better, with just the ideas that Obama has expressed and hinted at.

At 78, Roth says he hasn't written anything of substance in 3 years and that 2010's Nemesis will have been his last novel.  Oddly enough, I picked up

It's noon and the Dow is down over 300 points (about 2.4% in this age of big numbers) and so, if it hasn't started already, people are going to try to say that the markets are rejecting the public's choice of a second Obama term, and of a larger Democratic majority in the Senate, or both of those things.

Ramona asks, flabbergasted, why this guy Romney is even able to make a race out of this.  Over at Slate, Tom Scocca seems to have the answer.  Race.  Well, and gender.  It's white guys who are giving Romney a fighting chance, even though, as Daggers like DF have concluded, it's still Obama's election to lose.  E

As a New Yorker, I've always been willing to vote third party in general elections.  Heck, when my wife and I moved this year and needed to re-register, we both switched form Democrat to Independent.  We'd only joined the Dems to vote for Hillary when she ran in the Senate primary.  Overall, we both have the same problems with mainstream Democrats that many of you do.