"Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's [insert your own "supercommittee" joke here]!"

Sigh. The collusion between Washington types and media types to provide cutesy labels for just about everything has entered a new phase, it seems.

The joint committee on reducing the deficit (I refuse to call it "super" because, well, it's just not) met this week, and immediately proved to just about everyone that the entire exercise is quite likely to produce nothing more than an increase in hot air over the Capitol building.

But maybe I'm being too cynical. Maybe the committee will do something superior. Maybe the sun will rise in the west tomorrow, too, who knows?

Enough of all that -- we'll have plenty of time between now and Thanksgiving to dissect the committee's machinations, so we're going to move quickly on to our own news.

Because today marks the fourth anniversary of this column's appearance. Woo hoo! FTP is four years old, meaning if it were human it would have stopped crapping in its diaper, be walking around under its own power by now, and forming rudimentary independent thoughts. Well, you'll have to be the judge of any parallels on this scale, I suppose. Ahem.

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Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon has just proposed a stunningly good idea: for all legislation which emerges from the joint committee charged with lowering the deficit, direct the congressional "scoring" referee not only to provide the numbers for the impact on the federal budget, but also to provide data on the impact on the unemployment rate and the jobs situation. This is such an excellent idea, both on its merits and politically, that it should immediately be supported by all Democrats. Because it would force the public debate to cover the entire scope of the proposals being offered up, and it would do so by providing the data the public most cares about right now: how will this create or destroy jobs?

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"What will Sarah do?" has been a question on the minds of many in the run-up to the Republican primary season next year. Definitively figuring out the answer to this question is a fool's game, however, because Sarah Palin continually shows the ability to surprise the punditocracy, the public, and the Republican establishment. Only Palin herself is ever confident of knowing what Sarah will do next, in other words.

But that certainly doesn't preclude the rest of us from having fun trying to figure her out. Palin has stated that she will (finally!) announce whether or not she's going to jump into the Republican primary race by the end of this month. Expectations were high that she might just announce her intentions a week ago, at an appearance at a Tea Party event in Iowa. Once again, Palin declined to do so.

Palin's got three options, in essence. Number one, throw her hat in the ring and vie for the Republican presidential nomination against the field. Number two, announce it's been a big tease all along, and she won't be running -- and, likely, that she's going to hold off endorsing any candidate "for now," in a naked effort to keep her teasing of the media going strong for months to come. But there is a third option she might opt for, which seems (upon examination) to have a lot of potential upsides for Palin, and relatively few downsides: running as a third-party candidate.

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President Barack Obama opened his re-election campaign last night with a wowzer of a speech to a joint session of Congress. But we'll get to that in detail in a minute. First, we must mark an important anniversary this week.

I am speaking, of course, of the fact that 45 years ago last night, the first Star Trek episode aired. Titled "The Man Trap," it introduced America to the Enterprise, to Captain Kirk, and to all the other loveable characters and storylines which have now become part of our collective psyche (and, as a bonus, continue to this day to give the Grammar Police the heebie-jeebies every time they hear the split infinitive "...to boldly go where no man has gone before...").

What's that? There's another anniversary this week, you say? I hadn't noticed.

Of course, I am being facetious here. The ten-year mark for the tragedy of 9/11 has been a weeklong media event, and I fully expect this Sunday's political shows to be so crammed full of schmaltz as to be unwatchable. This isn't a commentary on the event itself, rather on the way the media has sensationalized the heck out of it -- for every advertising dollar they can wrest from this important anniversary. Perhaps this is just early-onset curmudgeonality in me, but I have to say I'm already pretty sick of watching the collective media swoon.

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The nation is waiting to hear what President Obama is going to say tomorrow night, when he gives an address to a joint session of Congress on the subject of jobs. Plenty of people have already been offering advice to the White House, but instead we thought it'd be interesting to ask some of the people who are going to be sitting in the audience tomorrow what they'd advise the president to include in his speech.

So we called up Washington and asked around. Below are the responses we got. We specifically did not contact House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, because we were more interested in the responses from individual Democrats rather than statements about the goals of the party as a whole. We contacted a number of Congress members who were unable to provide quotes; due to being out of the country, or due to various disasters happening across the United States in the past few weeks (the day we started calling, a hurricane was on its way towards Washington, for instance). And we did not contact every Democrat, so you shouldn't read too much into who responded and who could not. The responses are arranged in no particular order.

Here are the questions we asked to each of them:

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Another Dismal August

For President Obama, August is indeed the cruelest month.

In 2009, the president ended his "honeymoon" period with the public, with the largest one-month drop in his job approval poll numbers he has ever experienced. In 2010, Obama hit an all-time low for monthly approval numbers. This would be followed, within the next two months, by his lowest daily approval average and his highest daily disapproval average.

This August, President Obama set new all-time lows in approval and all-time highs in disapproval, across the board.

August just isn't a very good month for Obama. There's simply no other way to state how dismal Obama's poll numbers were last month. A quick look at the new chart shows this plainly.

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

August, 2011

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It surpasses all irony and actually enters into the realm of bitter humor that we're about to celebrate Labor Day when the unemployment rate remains at the sky-high level of 9.1 percent. There are millions of Americans who are not laboring for a paycheck this year, and they have nothing at all to celebrate.

Many of them will, no doubt, still attend a barbeque or picnic or parade, or perhaps go to a local beach. But it's a pretty safe bet that few of them (at least the ones not attending the parade) will be thinking much about the meaning of Labor Day.

President Obama is going to spend the weekend hashing out exactly what will be in his upcoming speech on jobs and the economy. It's another fairly safe bet that Obama won't be using the words "Labor" or "Union" in this speech, sadly enough.

Obama's speech was originally planned for Wednesday night, but the Republicans had set that night aside for Reagan worship, so he was forced to move it to Thursday, the same night the first professional football game of the year will be broadcast -- perhaps setting up the tough choice for millions of couch potatoes between watching an hour of politics or watching the pre-game show.

Sigh.

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Lynching is an ugly word. It's ugly precisely because what it refers to is both deeply horrific and utterly counter to what it means to be an American. The history of lynching in this country is, sadly, a long and brutal one. Uncountable human beings -- mostly black males in the South -- were grabbed by what can only be called an angry mob, and summarily executed without benefit of a trial by a jury of their peers for their perceived wrongdoing. In many cases (if not most), this wrongdoing was fictional, it bears pointing out. The history of such lynchings is a sad and shameful chapter in America's story. Lynchings didn't happen in a vacuum, of course, since the broader (and more shameful) history of racial relations formed the backdrop in which such lynchings took place.

All of us should be aware (and ashamed) of this history. That such things took place in our country is something all Americans should know. This almost goes without saying. But what apparently does need saying is the reverse -- that the history of lynching should not be abused and belittled by politicians in hyperbolic fashion to make a much smaller point. Even if -- or perhaps especially if -- the politician in question is an African-American.

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To his supporters, one of Ron Paul's most endearing qualities is his forthrightness. Paul doesn't mince words, he tells you to your face exactly what he thinks. And, to give the man credit, he keeps to his positions even when it would be a lot easier for him to either fudge an answer or tone down his beliefs, the way most politicians do (at certain times).

So it came as no surprise to anyone familiar with Congressman Paul's politics that he would appear this weekend on television -- while Hurricane Irene was still churning up the East Coast -- to reiterate his belief that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) does more harm than good, and shouldn't be a function of the federal government in the first place. For those unaware of the full extent of libertarian thinking on such subjects, it was perhaps a little shocking to hear a Republican candidate for president clearly stating that getting rid of FEMA was part and parcel of the "big government" versus "small government" political debate.

What is astonishing is that nobody seems to have noticed, at least not to the point of taking exception with Paul's stance on FEMA. Ron Paul finally broke through the "media blackout" of his campaign, and appeared this weekend in several national television interviews, making statements like: "We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960. I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district." And nobody bothers to address his position?

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