Obama, despite his (on paper) Congressional majority, knows that a handful of southern Republican senators will be able to filibuster anything he proposes. Playing only to their hard-right base, they probably feel that if Obama says black, they have to say white; knee-jerk resistance to anything and everything the Obama administration proposes is the only play left in their playbook, for a number of reasons.

So the president-elect is lining up the general structure of a deal. Just as FDR had to roll his share of logs to get the New Deal passed, Obama knows that he has to make more than token concessions to the small band of willful idiots who not only can, but will derail his entire recovery plan if it doesn't include tax cuts.

The deal will be: tax cuts (ultimately irrelevant to the recovery--if the American consumer is really the best place to put the money, why are we in this predicament in the first place?) in exchange for infrastructure investment, some sort of job-creation programs, and health care reform. Hopefully a gas tax will be part of the program as well, with revenues going largely to fund the short-term expense of single-payer health care, and secondarily to green energy programs.

No, he shouldn't have to make such a deal. But that's politics, the "art of the possible."

My amazing 13 year old daughter demanded Barbie when she was about 4. We gave in, and for a while she had a whole slew of the silicon vixens underfoot. He best friend's parents, by contrast, refused to let their daughter be sullied. The result of this admittedly anecdotal study with a two-person sample population: Barbie doesn't matter. They're both amazing, happy kids.

Maybe it was because we balanced Barbie purchases with Groovy Girl purchases. Maybe it was because we never once conveyed the expectation that our daughter would rely any less on her wit and intellectual achievement than her older brother. Maybe it was because, frankly, the Barbie doll is only a delivery system for an endless series of wardrobe ensembles. In any case, she emerged unscathed, with (so far) a very healthy self-regard. She knows she's smart, clever, and beautiful.

The problem probably occurs in households like Sarah Palin's, let's say, where parents don't provide countervailing influences to the increasingly quaint notion purveyed in certain quarters that a girl's best (maybe only) asset is her appearance. I don't worry about my son blowing up aliens on his Nintendo, either--he's read some good books and had any number of talks with me and other adults about why it is an atrocity and violence a disease.

Once a year or so ago the parent of one of my daughter's friends said that he was going to enter his daughter in some dumbass local beauty pageant. The offered was extended to my daughter as well--this parent would teach my daughter the runway sashay, etc.--and my amazing offspring responded, "I'd rather succeed in academics."

In your face, Barbie. All of the latter, by the way, we sold to a slightly creepy guy who came to our yard sale a few years ago.

Could you eat?

Why does Stein feel he needs to evoke, as a total non sequitur, Fitzgerald's anti-semitic caricature Meyer Wolfsheim? What's behind that? Clearly there are layers and layers of resentment and hatred behind Mr. Stein's cuddly, flat affect.

let's hope that Obama fulfills every presidential hopeful's perennial promise to "fully fund Head Start." Early childhood education = a healthier, less incarcerated population. It would have a multiplier effect among lower-income parents, and long-term staying power as well. Let's start calling HeadStart a tax cut and see if GOP knees jerk in line.

(With apologies to Jon Stewart)

Dick Armey is 68. It's not as if he grew up in the antebellum South. The fact that he is so intensely threatened by women, homosexuals, and minorities suggests that his problem is a remarkable inattentiveness to everything that has been going on in American society for at least 60 of those years.

It's always fun when their mask slips for a moment and the true purulence underneath shows through. It can't be fun to be there when it happens, though, Joan.

"Fairly or not, it's governors who take the heat for that, no matter what the national situation is."

In Louisiana, far from demanding our boy governor Bobby Jindal's head on a pike, he's still effectively in his honeymoon period with voters. Some years ago, a short-lived attempt to rationalize Louisiana's tax structure raised income taxes and lowered sales taxes, substituting less regressive for more regressive forms of taxation. Last year Jindal cut income taxes without any provision for making up the lost revenue; a one-time Katrina, oil-spike surplus made it seem like a good idea at the time to the memory impaired among us and to those who couldn't add. And to Bobby and the state legislature.

So now higher education is facing an across-the-board cut of up to 30% of its operating budget. The state health system, which Jindal ran as a 25 year-old Wunderkind, is in a similar predicament. Are folks protesting? Nope. "He's so smart," they keep saying. Smart enough to let the Democrats in Washington clean up the mess he quite easily could have minimized or prevented altogether, anyway.

And this guy thinks he's going national in 2012.

who asked the question: watching "Fox News" while the nation is in such a state of toxic shock is like watching daytime TV all day long when you're home sick from school: as Matt Groening observed long ago, it makes you feel worse.

Not to mention the fact that (and I'm speculating here) Hannity is, no doubt, even meaner and less coherent when he's drunk.