Barack Obama, Wednesday night:

“The single biggest threat to our success is not the other party,” the president said at the Roosevelt Hotel. “It’s us. It’s complacency. It’s apathy. It’s indifference. It’s people feeling like, well, we only got 80 percent of what we want, we didn’t get the other 20, so we’re just going to sit on our hands. We’re not going to go out there. It turns out bringing about change is hard. I thought it was going to be easy. I liked the cute poster of the Obama campaign. I enjoyed the inauguration. It was great when Beyonce and Bono was singing. I didn’t know that we were actually going to have to grind it out, that sometimes we’d have setbacks.”

Dear Mr. President,

We first became aware of your candidacy about three years ago, when you were a guest on the Daily Show. We were impressed: Impressed with your grasp of the issues, impressed with your seriousness, impressed with your lack of cant. You reminded us of what we like about Bill Clinton’s Daily Show appearances, when he’s in policy-wonk mode. We’re not a Bubba fan, but we really respect that about him.

Nor are we an in-the-trenches politico, so we pretty much ignored the race until the night of the Iowa caucus. That evening, two historic things happened:

You won.

And we gave money to a political campaign.

While historians inexplicably find the details of our life uninteresting, we can assure you that both developments were equally unlikely.

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Today’s Stinque Endurance Test measures your ability to maintain composure in the face of increasingly challenging obstacles. How many facts can you withstand before cackling like a hyena?

Fact One:

In 1915, England’s MI6 investigated methods of creating invisible ink.

Fact Two:

Following months of rigorous research at London University, it was determined that “the best invisible ink is semen.”

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Rand Paul:

A spokesman for Rand Paul, the Tea Party-backed Senate candidate in Kentucky, said Paul “will vote against and filibuster any unbalanced budget proposal in the Senate.”

Sharron Angle:

“There are certain things that can be done just by your junior senator,” Angle said, explaining that even if Republicans remain in the minority after 2010, she could filibuster, which allows lone lawmakers to delay legislation through lengthy debate.

“I guarantee that I can talk most anything to death.”

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Our guest columnist is a Beefeater copywriter from 1965, reminding us what we should have done before watching Bristol Palin on Dancing With The Stars last night.

How do you find the time to serve a great martini, especially in a home with small children? Some household rules have been found to help:

First, let the head of the house assume the responsibility for the martini. You can, of course, get someone else to do it — a paid hand on a yacht, a butler if you possess one.

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Todd Henderson, a law professor at the University of Chicago, is mad as hell, and he’s not gonna take Obama’s Clinton-level tax proposal anymore:

The rhetoric in Washington about taxes is about millionaires and the super rich, but the relevant dividing line between millionaires and the middle class is pegged at family income of $250,000. (I’m not a math professor, but last time I checked $250,000 is less than $1 million.) That makes me super rich and subject to a big tax hike if the president has his way.

Without getting deep into numbers, let’s just note that Obama advocates letting the top marginal Bush tax cuts expire. This means that all your income up to $250,000 will benefit from the same extended tax breaks as everyone else. It’s only the income above $250,000 that will be taxed at the confiscatory Clinton rates. Say your income is $300,000: Instead of paying $16,500 on that last $50k, you’ll be paying $1,500 more.

Or — hold on a sec — $4.11 a day.

Hey, that’s coffee and a croissant, pal, and that’s enough to get the good professor heading for the window:

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Citizens United, the people who bought you the Supreme Court, are launching a new movie next week that would make even Christine O’Donnell touch herself:

The first-ever film to tell the entire story of the conservative woman in her own words, “Fire from the Heartland” is a powerful statement about America at a crossroads and the women who have awakened to the crisis. With role models such as Clare Boothe Luce, Margaret Thatcher, and Phyllis Schlafly as inspiration, these women are the unintended consequence of the liberal feminist movement.

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A few months ago, the second anniversary of our Accidental Blogging happened to coincide with “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”, so we outfitted our customary Joyride Jalopy with a special guest from South Park. Which is about all the attention we paid to the event at the time, except to note a few weeks earlier that the event’s instigator had chickened out.

And now she has — let’s capitalize this — Disappeared:

[Molly Norris] is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program — except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.

Whoa. We’re gonna need to retrace a few steps here.

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