Back in college, we ran for student-body preznident. We promised nothing, played solitaire at the debate — and came within twenty-five votes of the runoff.

The next year, we recruited thirty-one of our friends to run for preznident, because students demanded a choice. It was the longest ballot in campus history.

We called it “participatory satire”, and we were quite proud.

So when we heard that Stephen Colbert — who announced too late for the South Carolina primary, which doesn’t allow write-ins — solved the problem yesterday by claiming Herman Cain!’s votes for his own, it felt like old times. Especially the part where he asked Democrats to vote on the Republican open ballot this Saturday.

The emailed press release, after the break.

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Steve Jobs — to reference Apple a third time — was infamous for his ability to bend perception to his will. Whatever your conventional wisdom, whatever your reasoning, spend five minutes in a room with him, and he’d have you thinking otherwise.

It soon became known as his “reality distortion field”, and because Steve Jobs had World-Historical Instincts, he usually was right. Might have been the acid he dropped.

In preznidential politics, the closest we’ve seen to Jobs-quality reality-bending in living memory was Ronald Reagan. Had you watched his second debate with hapless Jimmy Carter, you would have immediately understood, as we did, that America wanted the charming charlatan to lead it, that Our Exceptional Nation preferred to live a lie rather than suffer in truth.

Reagan won by projecting confidence and optimism — never mind the reality — and successful candidates have followed his lead ever since. It’s not as easy as it looks. Reagan had decades of practice, shilling for one group or another. He knew how to work a room, and a crowd. Ronald Reagan was a natural.

Unlike Mitt Romney.

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In the year of national polling data that RealClearPolitics has on Jon Huntsman, he never broke past 5 percent — and only hit the nickel twice, in December. His entire candidacy can be defined as a margin of error. Yet we were supposed to take him seriously because Important People Told Us So.

Forget Trump. Forget Cain. Jon Huntsman was the Joke Candidate of the Year.

Title: “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing”

Author: Lawrence M. Krauss

Rank: 26

Blurb: “In a cosmological story that rivets as it enlightens, pioneering theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss explains the groundbreaking new scientific advances that turn the most basic philosophical questions on their heads.”

Review: “The book is plagued by !’s every page or paragraph indicating, presumably, the author’s excitement at stating another exciting but improbable fact (unless you are a cosmologist like the author!). As any journalist knows these ‘dead dogs dicks’ are evidence of bad writing as they indicate an inability to relay the excitement in the statement of facts — you shouldn’t need to telegraph to the reader that what they have just read is exciting. If you have to do that then you have failed as a writer, if not as a physicist.”

Customers Also Bought: “The Physics of Star Trek” by Lawrence M. Krauss

Footnote: Any philosophical question that can be answered by science is not a philosophical question.

A Universe from Nothing [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

[via Hodgman]

Let’s start here:

A bill that would limit who could enter public restrooms has been filed in the Tennessee General Assembly. The proposed legislation would restrict access to public restrooms and public dressing rooms designated by sex, to members of that particular sex.

No, wait. It gets better:

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Newt Gingrich “was endorsed by evangelical author and pastor Tim LaHaye, who is best-known for writing a series of books called the ‘Left Behind’ series, an apocalyptic vision of what some Christians believe will happen when true believers in Jesus Christ experience the ‘rapture’ to heaven and nonbelievers are left behind for a period of ‘tribulation.'” [HuffPo, via jwmcsame]