* The White House website still touts Obama’s pledge to halve the deficit. It was $1.3 trillion, and for the fiscal year of 2012, the deficit is projected to be $1.3 trillion. I would check the math on whether $1.3 trillion is one half of $1.3 trillion, but my calculator doesn’t accept numbers that big.

So he didn’t divide the deficit by two, but he did divide it by one. That’s halfway there.

* I was thinking: Isn’t good economic news bad for Obama at this point? Right now, it’s starting to look like the economy is doing better, but a lot of that is because people are so discouraged that they stopped looking for work thus taking themselves out of the unemployment statistics. That gives an artificially low unemployment rate, but if word gets out that the economy is doing better, those people may start looking for work again and suddenly unemployment will go up again because of more people in the workforce. So, best strategy for Obama may be to keep the economy hurting — which he’s much better at than helping it anyway.

* There’s a huge protest at U.S. base in Afghanistan over rumors that a Koran was burned. Things must be going great in that country such that they have no other problems to deal with other than rumors of a book being burned. No wonder things are so awesome in the Middle East!

* Apparently a teenaged girl was knocked up by Hitler. Expect this to enter the contraceptive debate. Of course, you may believe contraceptives will protect your daughter from having Hitler’s love child, but you probably should raise your daughter in a way where she wouldn’t sleep with Hitler in the first place.

* Dick Cheney is lobbying in Maryland for gay marriage. And did you know that the Koch brothers are also pro-gay marriage? So there you have it: The nexus of right-wing evil all in favor of gay marriage. So what’s the chance gay marriage is a right-wing trap that will lead to higher profits for oil companies and more baby seals being clubbed? 99.9%.

* Mexico put up a billboard at their U.S. border saying no more weapons — a jab at America. I’m just surprised the Mexican government functioned long to enough to erect a billboard.

* Wisdom of the Day from Dan Cronin:

Sure, angels can fly, but don’t forget, they live in constant fear of scalpers who want to turn their hair into pasta.

* Here’s another article to file under “Why again are they called ‘progressives’?” It’s a fearful left-wing article about home schooling. Basically the conclusion is that everyone needs to stick to the current school system because that’s how we’ve been doing things and it shouldn’t be questioned and though it’s not great we need to subject our kids to it anyway and just hope eventually it will get better. It’s about as mindlessly dogmatic to an old system as you’ll ever see. As I’ve said, whatever the left accuses us of, that’s what they’re doing — even when they accuse us of being mindlessly conservative.