The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.

Certainly there are worse sins than doing everything possible to make your presidency matter.

Warren Buffett pays taxes on a smaller percentage of his billions in income than his cleaning lady.

More and more, Democrats are starting to worry they that they have a more um, colorful version of Jimmy Carter on their hands. Obama acts cool as a proverbial cucumber but that awful '70s show seems frightfully close to a rerun.

For the past eight years, the right has been better at working the refs. Now the left is learning how to play the game.

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

I am deeply devoted to the 27,000 songs I can take anywhere on my iPod Classic as well as the exquisitely engineered MacBook Air on which I typed this column.