Jollification aside, though, we're still one week away from Congress returning to briefly do their job (or at least give the appearance of doing so), before they award themselves another month or so off, in order to campaign. Labor Day is right around the corner (or perhaps blowing past the corner at 75 miles per hour, if you live in the hurricane zone -- which contains, my television assures me, everything east of about Denver).

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But politics isn't social science, where causality must be rigorously proven. Politics is, to be blunt, whatever you can get away with saying to the voters. Think not B.F. Skinner, but rather P.T. Barnum, in other words. "Event X happened because party Y passed legislation Z" is an expected statement from a politician, on any subject under the sun. Call it "spin" if you will, but a large part of it lies in convincing the American public that you have a right to claim credit because of your policies.

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Augusts, to be frank, are not President Obama's friend. The past month was no different, at least as measured by public opinion polling. Obama was on a downswing heading into the month, and his numbers reflect this in a stark way. In other words, it was a bad month for Obama.

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So, while I'll watch tomorrow's Oval Office address, I will be thinking about the question I'd like to ask Obama right now: "Mr. President, when are you going to hold your next press conference?"

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The answer, as with all things Tea Party, is (once again): "it's hard to be sure." We won't really know until after the midterm elections, and at that point so much "spin" will be on the airwaves one might (if one grew up in Kansas, for the sake of argument) be excused the immediate impulse to run for the tornado shelter in the backyard. In other words, even after the elections, the answer is going to depend on who is doing the answering.

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The media, quite obviously, has lost any capacity it once may have had for self-examination, to say nothing of its sense of irony. Every so often, this is proven beyond doubt by a single story. This, sadly, is one of those times.

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There's a mini-tizzy in the media world today after a new poll was released which stated that eighteen percent of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim. "Golly gee! How could they think that?" is the overwhelming tone of most of this media tizziness. Only one article I've seen (so far), though, correctly points the finger where it belongs: at the media themselves.

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President Barack Obama, in a White House Ramadan address last Friday, expressed his thoughts on the "Ground Zero mosque" debate, and in doing so not only got it exactly right, but also managed to change the debate in a considerable way which few have noticed yet. Because in his comments Friday (and in his off-the-cuff comment the next day), the president refocused the debate from the notion of "should be allowed" to the question of "should." In doing so, Obama elevated the level of the debate for both him and the project's detractors.

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Because before we get to that, we simply must begin our column the way we do every week here, which is to call for the abolition of the Pentagon. Yes, as we've done consistently for the past 133 weeks, we demand that the Defense Department's budget be zeroed out entirely. Oh, and also that we immediately adopt a Canadian-style health care system. Can't forget that, as we've been railing about it for ever since Friday Talking Points, Volume One. And lest we forget, President Obama is nothing more than George W. Bush's third term. As I said, none of this will come as any surprise to faithful readers, since we've been saying this sort of thing all along, ever since we were massively disappointed that Dennis Kucinich didn't win the presidency.

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White House press secretary Robert Gibbs recently expressed his frustration with what he called the "professional left," in no uncertain terms. Which, ironically, means the White House and the "professional left" have now achieved parity in that both sides express withering contempt for the other. The irony lies in the fact that both are probably thinking the exact same thing about each other: "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

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