A colleague of mine, a very smart man but not in sync with me politically, told me a few weeks ago that he believes that I will come to my senses before the election and pull the lever for Mitt Romney.  I will make this decision, he assures me, based solely on Obama's mishandling of the economy and I will realize that the various issues that I have with the Republican party, Tea Party crazies and the religious right, do not apply to Romney.

Yesterday, as I was riding in a taxicab through one of New York's Indian/Pakistani neighborhoods, next to its dreadful airports that are inferior to everything in China, the cab driver said something amazing to me.  "Every dog has his day," he said.  I thought about this.  I realize that it had something to do with dog racing.  And maybe even Thomas Friedman who, has a writer, generally makes a pretty good Greyhound.  Though, seriously, you should see the busses in Calcutta.  They don't just have Wi-Fi, they run on Wi-Fi, floating effortlessly above the pavement.

This morning, Joe Nocera writes an interesting column about the Facebook IPO which I think is ultimately wrong. Nocera's take is that, aside from people angry that the investment banks lowered their revenue forecasts without telling all clients (and simultaneously raising both the price of the IPO and the number of shares sold) that investors don't really have a lot to complain about.

Remember back when Rand Paul got into trouble for saying that he wouldn't have supported the landmark civil rights legislation that outlawed such perverse practices as segregated drinking fountains and "whites only" lunch counters? 

This morning, as I was walking to the gym, I passed a small apartment building, nestled amongst the townhouses of West 10th street.  From somewhere on the upper floors of the building I heard a woman shouting and finally screaming.  First it was "Leave me alone!"  Then it was "Get off of me!  Get off of me!"  This was punctuated by screams, but they sounding like shrieks of anger rather than terror or pain, though it takes a lot of assumptions to get to that judgment.

Eduardo Saverin, something of a villain in the Facebook tale, is about the become a billionaire, assuming the social network's initial public offering, scheduled for this week, is successful.  From the $15,000 he invested to help Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg pay for servers, Saverin will get an estimated $4 billion payday.

We all did stupid things when we were young and the private preparatory academies of the type that Romney attended in the fifties and sixties were settings for all sorts of bullying and boorish behaviors and boys forced unnaturally together in search of A Separate Peace.

No, I'm not defending Naomi Schafer Riley as any art form, including the writing of an 800-900 word newspaper article can be practiced badly.  To not even read what you're criticizing is pretty low.  But Dr. Cleveland, Professor of Dagblog, sets a very high standard for columnists.  Paul Krugman, who sticks (usually) to his discipline, is praised while David Brooks and Ross Douthat are singled out for writing on a broader array of topics which they cannot, by definition, claim expertise.

"Is Our Adults Learning?" asks David Brooks in The New York Times today (the paper where columnists don't appear to be edited much.)  In this column, Brooks talks about the fight between stimulus supporters and austerity supporters.  He concludes that both sides relied on grand theories but that three years and $800 billion later, we are none the wiser as to which policy choice was better:

I'm certainly not the first to make this observation.  Logicians going back to Aristotle and probably prior, have warned us about the potential tyranny of experts that can arise in any society.  Even people with credentials can be wrong.  Einstein made mistakes.  When William F. Buckley joked, a long time ago, that he would rather be ruled by a random sampling from the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard, he did have something of a point.

I was actually a little embarassed for Talkingpointsmemo when I read its kind of breathless coverage of Obama stating the obvious fact that he "wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth."  TPM's editors seemed to think this was some sort of Oscar Wildean bon mot or Mencken-style broadside worth repeating.