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.

There's just no nice way to say this.  Greece's creditors are murdering Greece's citizens.  When Greece went to the Troika (the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission) for a loan to keep itself solvent in 2011, the country had to agree to stop covering hospital treatments for unemployed, uninsured citizens.  These people, sick and with no hope of finding work, are now required by the terms of the loan agree

I really think that we should forbid the government from passing temporary laws, especially tax cuts with sunset provisions.  By enacting tax cuts that would eventually expire, George W. Bush was able to win the long-term "budget scoring" game, while also setting a trap for whoever occupied the White House after him.

Mitt Romney keeps swinging and missing on the Libya issue, but it doesn't seem like anyone in the media is telling the Republican nominee to move on.  The attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi is still being treated by the mainstream as some sort of Obama administration failure.

Yet, the complaints seem very picayune in the context of Libya's recent history.

Romney's first complaint, issued nearly as the attack was underway, was that the Obama administration had signaled weakness by "apologizing" for an anti-Muslim Youtube video.

I think that most of us Americans who work for others worry about keeping our jobs.  Today, the board of directors of Citigroup has reached an agreement for Vikram Pandit to leave the board and step down as chief executive.  Pandit was the successor CEO to Charles Prince, who followed the legendary Sanford Weill.

"President Obama likes to be alone," is the lede of Maureen Dowd's column today.  What follows is a completely plausible sounding, totally BS 800 words that I just can't help but excise and comment on, bit by bit.

Mitt Romney, Mormon Meets The Eye

Mitt Romney, Centrist in Disguise!

This is hardly a deep observation and it's certainly not very complicated, but a good chunk of Mitt Romney's argument for his candidacy is that he will undo and then redo the major legislation of the Obama administration.

I didn't know that there were journalists out there who haven't read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where our hero, high on extract from the human adrenal gland, is confronted with the mocking visage of Richard Nixon on the television urging "Sacrifice.  Sacfrifce.  Sacrifice."  But, Frank Bruni seems to have missed it.  When, he wants to know, will our leaders come clean with the American people and demand of them the sacrifices necessary for us to move forward?

In his speech at the United Nations, President Obama did not apologize for the B movie that may or may not have sparked riots throughout the Middle East.  And, of course, the President owes no apologies.  We're a classically liberal democratic republic.  That means that we allow our citizens to be stupid, to be rude and even to be hateful.