Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much...) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers.

Liberals believe that they can't get a fair shake from the media anymore.

While history never repeats itself, political patterns do.

Americans continue to suffer from a notoriously short attention span. They get mad as hell with reasonable frequency, but quickly return to their families and sitcoms. Meanwhile, the corporate lobbies stay right where they are, outlasting all the populist hysteria.

There are more people at Obama's table offering ideas than there were five years ago, but when it came to facing up to the Republicans' threat to force a double-dip recession if they didn't get their millionaires' tax cut, they still amounted to nothing. And therein lies our fundamental problem.

Veteran print editors and reporters at places like the 'Times' and 'The New Yorker' manage to feed and clothe their families without costing their companies a million bucks a month, and they produce a great deal more valuable reporting and analysis than the network news stars do.

President Obama has lowered taxes more than he has raised them, and they are today lower than they were in President Reagan's time. But you don't hear conservatives crowing about that.