It's clearly an orchestrated Republican talking point that health care reform is being "rammed" (or jammed, or crammed) "down our throats." That talking point is silly and deceptive. (After bills passed the House and passed the Senate with a 60-vote majority, the vote to make the details of those bills match is undemocratic?) But I also admit, I find it hilarious.

After days of mounting sexual harasment revelations, Eric Massa has gone old school. As in 12th-century old school. First he was denying that he had any ethics problems, then he was admitting minor ethics problems, then he was resigning over those totally minor ethics problems, then he went on the attack. Those totally-no-big-deal ethics questions he was quitting Congress over? They were trumped up by the House Democratic leadership!

Reading some of the news coverage about the murderers Amy Bishop and Joe Stack over the last two weeks, and some of the responses to them by internet commenters, I've had the nauseating feeling that Bishop and Stack have gotten what they want. Not what they purport to want, of course, not a promotion or a revolution, but the things that their violence was actually aimed at getting them. I've had a hard time putting my objection into clear words, so I'm going to resort to a story from history:

So President Obama's health care summit didn't go anywhere it wasn't expected to go. The Democrats made noises about bipartisan compromise and asked for Republican input. The Republicans demanded the whole bill (or more accurately both the bills) be scrapped entirely. The Democrats got no concessions. No reasonable person would have expected anything else at this point. And Barack Obama, who is a fairly reasonable person, must have expected to play out much the way it did.

So, Andrew Joseph Stack was angry at the IRS for his financial problems. So he got in his plane....

Stop. Stop it. Stop right there.

Do people in the media ever listen to themselves?

We have a person who, aside from being a murderer, feels he's being unjustly treated by the taxman. And that person, who considers his woes so unbearable that he's willing to take human life, has at least one personal aircraft. I know what you're thinking: The poor man. It's like something out of Steinbeck.

Amy Bishop's murder of three colleagues, and attempt to murder three others, looks to be even less about tenure than I originally claimed ... but it's still university tenure that people want to talk about. It's become clear that Bishop would eventually have been fired under almost any conceivable system of review, and that Bishop would almost undoubtedly have responded violently to some other setback sooner or later.

My mother met Al Haig back in 1988, when he was under the impression that he was running for President. (Long before I was Doctor Cleveland I was the Granite State Kid, and in New Hampshire you can personally meet all the candidates, even the ones that other people won't remember were in the primaries.) Mom actually met nearly every primary candidate that year, Democratic and Republican, in a series of events sponsored by a local newspaper.

Friday, at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, a biology professor named Amy Bishop murdered three of her colleagues and wounded three others. Two of the people she wounded are still in critical condition, and I offer my sincere hopes for their complete and swift recovery. The murderer had been denied tenure in the department, and media coverage has centered on the question of tenure. Tenure, that strange and exotic academic rite, is obviously the hook for this story, and the resulting coverage is appalling.

So a lot of people, including the President, have been talking lately about remedying the evils of college football. The chief evil that needs remedying is apparently the Bowl Championship System, which isn't enough of a "real" championship and needs to be replaced with a system of playoffs. That's a big surprise to me, because I can think of a lot of other problems with big-time college football, and instituting playoffs would probably make them worse.

Before the State of the Union address, I'd like to talk about the central issue of the Obama Presidency, which of course none of the talking heads will really get to. Obama's Presidency will hinge on how he handles the economy. More even than the wars, more than health care, more than the political sclerosis of the Senate, it's the economy. The bad news about that?

Barack Obama hasn't thought about the economy.

2009 was a frustrating year for liberals and progressives, and 2010 is off to a bad start. After electing the first unapologetically liberal President of the United States in forty years, with large majorities in both the House and Senate, liberals have seen our agenda diluted, stalled, and now seriously set back. It shouldn't have happened. And now, of course, there is rage and confusion and we are circling into our old firing squad. But as I see it, there are only three questions, and they all have simple answers.

I'm going to shamelessly repost this from Tim F. at Balloon Juice, because it's good and timely advice. Call your member of the House and tell them to vote for health care reform. Tell them loud, and tell them proud. Here's how:

(1) Use a phone. Email has nigh on zero impact. Trust me on this. Letter mail gets read, but you don’t have time. Reach the House switchboard at (202) 224-3121 .

Robert B. Parker died today, in Cambridge, at his writing desk. I turned on my cell after an afternoon class and found that every male member of my family had left a message with the news.

I don't like to blog about narrowly political horse-race topics often, and whoever wins in Massachusetts today I'll be blogging the same big picture. If Coakley wins, it's still instructuve that she had trouble with a specific breed of Democrats (whom I will call the Big Daddy Democrats), and even if she wins there may be trouble ahead in places like Ohio and West Virginia. If COakley loses, Obama and the Dems will still be in much the same relatively difficult place as before, and the difficulties (and their relative nature) won't change radically.

I'm watching the snow through an airport window, thinking about the posts I've meant to get to in the last hectic week or so, and about the things I have to do and the places I have to fly over the next ten days. But for today, it'll have to be a short one, and mostly a metaphor.

When Obama's Nobel Prize was first announced, I tried to explain why the Nobel Committee might have chosen him. Today, as he accepts the Prize, seems like a good time to finish that attempted explanation. But first, two quick things I need to say to frame the discussion.

Exactly three weeks before Christmas, my bank failed.

The day before President Obama announced his Afghanistan strategy, Politico published John F. Harris's very important and newsy thumbsucker about the peril that "anti-Obama storylines" pose to Obama's Presidency. The first sentence of the article is, no kidding, "Presidential politics is about storytelling."

Storytelling. Huh. And here I thought it was about the economy and the two wars.