Our politics are personality-based, despite the references to ideology. In fact few Americans are well versed in ideology and able to confront the contradictions all around us.

The Republicans, under Reagan, figured out a winning formula: cut taxes and nobody will notice if you increase spending since they are not asked to pay for it. Hence the phenomenon of situational deficit hawks.

Who are they? People who've made money on Wall Street? Can't be, they're evil. Betcha the DHS is a better employer in your community than the private sector. Working for Uncle Sam gives enough time off to rant about the evils of socialism....

The deficit projections for this year have been scaled back because Wall Street is paying taxes, it's just not creating jobs.

In the post-industrial economy, Americans morphed into consumers of imported goods, purchased on credit, rather than producers since anything we can do someone else can do cheaper.

[W]hile our culture of imagination is still vibrant, the other critical factor that still differentiates countries today is good governance, which can harness creativity. And that we may be losing. I am talking about the ability of a society's leaders to think long term, address their problems with the optimal legislation and attract capable people into government. What I increasingly fear today is that America is only able to produce "suboptimal" responses to its biggest problems -- education, debt, financial regulation, health care, energy and environment.

Why? Because at least six things have come together to fracture our public space and paralyze our ability to forge optimal solutions:

1) Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.

2) The gerrymandering of political districts means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center.

3) The cable TV culture encourages shouting and segregating people into their own political echo chambers.

4) A permanent presidential campaign leaves little time for governing.

5) At its best the Internet provides a check on elites and establishments and opens the way for new voices. At its worst, it provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs that attack anyone who departs from their specific orthodoxy.

6) The U.S. business community has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests. It rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.

These six factors are pushing our system, which was designed to have divided powers and to force compromises, into the realm of paralysis. To get anything big done now, we have to generate so many compromises -- couched in 1,000-plus-page bills -- with so many different interest groups that the solutions are suboptimal. We just get the sum of all interest groups.

The miniversion of this is California, which is becoming America's biggest "failed state." Californians had hoped they could overcome their dysfunctional system by electing an outsider, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would slay the system, like the Terminator. But he couldn't.

Obama was elected for similar reasons. People had hoped that his unique story, personality and speaking skills could bring the country together, overcome paralysis and deliver nation-building at home. A lot of the disappointment settling in among Obama voters today is prompted by their dawning realization that maybe, like Arnold, he can't....

Friedman goes on to note it's become the kiss of death for elected officials to ask for sacrifice as we dig deeper into drift and debt. What might push Obama to deliver is some serious competition from the Republicans. Instead the front-runners are all candidates who failed in 2008. It's difficult to imagine Huckabee, Romney, or Palin prevailing, though the reasons in each case are different. "Wall Street bad, capitalism good" may play well as a slogan at rallies, but it offers little in the way of policy guidance.

Most cows need to be milked, you're from the Dairy State this should be second-hand knowledge to you.

There is a double standard here; this relationship will remain on LW's resume a lot longer than it will on that of her BF. Other women will be her harshest critics, in part because they understand exactly what doors female attractiveness opens in professions where the top remains male-dominated. That would be most of 'em. Despite her claims of being ahead of the pack, LW has yet to acknowledge the implications of her choices.

She wasn't all that young, 30-something, a very approachable and dedicated scholar. But she had yet to make her mark in the field. She did eventually, but there was always the question of how his status, and they eventually got married, influenced her career.

I cam remember being in a seminar in which she was a discussant on a graduate student's paper on adultery in Qing dynasty China. I'm sure I wasn't the only one in the room who had to suppress a smirk. This is what you are setting yourself up for by sleeping with the boss. LW.