1. We are polarized.

This is the headline point from the survey, the gap between what defines a "Republican" from a "Democrat" has only gotten wider since the survey first started in 1987:

Two issues: mandate is constitutional/not, Obama releected with Democratic Senate/not. So four possibilities, let's take in order:

A re-elected Obama with the mandate found constitutional with a Democratic Senate might have some incentive to go moderate—their signature accomplishment is in stone—but will look for someting big. If that is fiscal compromise, they will go left, if only to make things difficult for Republicans in '14 and thus avoid the typical sixth-year losses.

A re-elected Obama with the mandate found unconstitutional with a Democratic Senate will go for broke. What does he have to lose? He's already said he will revise the healthcare law if the mandate is found unconstitutional, so that will very likely dominate the politics of 2013 -- and, with a Dem Senate, no particular incentive to compromise in the lame duck to avoid the fiscal cliff.

A re-elected Obama with the mandate found constitutional with a Republican Senate has little incentive to compromise. He won, healthcare will be implemented, and Republicans can only peck around the edges.

A re-elected Obama with the mandate found unconstitutional with a Republican Senate will be in no mood to compromise, even if he is weakened. It's a second term, not a first, so comparisons to Clinton 1995 are misplaced. He may sign some of what Congress sends him, but does this not seem like a recipe for gridlock and governing through regulation for four years?

So, using a basic 2x2 business school matrix, the most likely result is that Obama has little incentive to compromise. After all, the other factors you cite in your last paragraph, such as changing demographics and the media culture are secular trends not affected by the election.

David Frum is not a conservative. Look no further than his latest CNN opinion piece, “Bloomberg’s Visionary Plan Against Obesity.” Would a conservative write something like this?

After World War I, the region broke up. All of a sudden there were lots of countries wanting to switch to their own currencies.

At the beginning, they used a simple system: Countries simply stamped existing Austro-Hungarian currency with particular markings to turn it into new, domestic currency. Some countries used ornate samps; Romania's stamp was just a cross.

This quickly led to chaos. Everyone wanted to get their money stamped in the country they thought would have the strongest currency. Countries sealed their borders, but it was no use.

If nothing else, Mark Hemingway's terrific reporting from the Libertarian National Convention will leave readers informed and amused. As Hemingway's largely sympathetic article for The Weekly Standard makes clear, the Libertarian party has a problem: its membership, while well meaning, is downright loony. The article is worth reading in full. Among other tidbits:

Activists at the party were "selling solid copper "Barter or Trade" coins with marijuana leaves imprinted on them."

Conference attendees included "Starchild" a well-known San Francisco "sex worker."

The entire convention eventually turned into a "goat rodeo"/"freak show" over arcane matters of party rules and leadership.

Most of [Frum's] earlier books were written from the point of view of a conservative who saw his own side lacking the courage of its convictions. But something changed for Frum in the wake of the Iraq War and other disasters of the Bush Administration, in which he played a small, early role. In 2008, in “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again,” he urged Republicans to embrace less rigid, more centrist positions on the environment, social issues, economics, and other matters as a way back to power. But that book was quickly overtaken by the party’s rabid reaction to its 2008 defeat and Obama’s Presidency. Instead of moving to the sensible middle, it doubled down on its own extremism, both ideologically and as a matter of strategy. Frum entered into a series of scraps—with the radio loudmouths Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, and with his own employer, the American Enterprise Institute, which fired him after he published a critique of the Republican strategy in trying to kill health-care reform.

By 2010, Frum had become one of the party’s few high-profile apostates, and its bravest. “Patriots” is a novel about a wealthy young man who wanders into the conservative (“Constitutionalist”) archipelago in a just barely imaginary Washington and allows himself to be used by various operators for their own ends—which turn out to be more mercenary and self-seeking than principled. Frum’s Republican Party, unlike Lofgren’s, looks less like National Socialism in Weimar Germany than something closer to home—the cynicism of the Gilded Age, when élites turned to pillage and plunder while the country oscillated between rebellion and decay.

Thompson's own comment:

Compared across more than 100 factors measured by the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, from corruption to deficits, JP Morgan analyst Michael Cembalest calculates that the major countries on the euro are more different from each other than basically every random grab bag of nations there is, including: the make-believe reconstituted Ottoman Empire; all the English speaking Eastern and Southern African countries; and all countries on Earth at the 5th parallel north.

And here is your tweetable fact: A monetary union might make more sense for every nation starting with the letter "M" than it does for the euro zone.

Nobody seems to have a positive word for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to ban oversized servings of sugary drinks in New York's food-service establishments.

The mayor has been decried as a nanny. He has been accused of selective enforcement. (A Starbucks 20 ounce drink can have more than 500 calories, but will be exempt from the ban because it contains more than 50% milk.) The beverage industry complains that solutions to the obesity problem ought to be more "comprehensive." One important conservative magazine called the mayor's actions a form of "fascism."

So let's defy the trend here and say: Good for Bloomberg. Obesity is America's most important public health problem, and the mayor has led the way against it. This latest idea may or may not yield results. But it is already raising awareness. Even if it fails to become law, it ought to prod the beverage industry into acting as more responsible corporate citizens.

Sugary drinks now provide 7% of the calories in the American diet, the largest single national source of calories. Teen boys average more than a quart of sugary soda per day. Even adults who say they are trying to lose weight still drink more two 12-ounces cans per day, on average.

Craig Smith: If Obama is re-elected, how do you expect his second term to play out?

At first bitterly, then, maybe … better.

Republicans are vastly more personally hostile to President Obama than they were to President Clinton. They entered the 2012 cycle vastly more confident than in 1996. If Obama nevertheless survives, Republicans will first turn on their defeated candidate (moderate! RINO! Romneycare!), then on the media, then on the American people ("where's the outrage"), but above all on the re-elected Obama. Republicans have worked themselves into a mood of panic and outrage about the president that will not easily be dialed back.

But let's look for signs of hope.

Election years play hell with secrecy. Facing a tough campaign, the Obama administration has begun leaking details of some of its most clandestine operations: the drone attacks in Pakistan and the cyber-war against Iranian nuclear facilities.

Over the past week, readers of The New York Times have learned that the president personally changed the definition of a “non-combatant” so as to reduce the number of non-combatant casualties in Pakistan.

They have learned that, yes, Stuxnet was a joint U.S.-Israeli operation, and that the U.S. has launched newer and more sophisticated computer attacks against Iran following Stuxnet. These stories were all produced with the active co-operation of the most senior White House officials.

Have you wondered how the U.S. managed to infect Iranian computers?

Would a good dog really have been so important that it would inspire ritual significance—and give modern humans a crucial edge over Neandertals? We can’t observe how ancient, but anatomically modern, humans used dogs in their daily life, but there are some interesting possibilities. We know from their bones that the Paleolithic dogs were very large, with a body mass of at least 32 kilograms and a shoulder height of at least 61 centimeters, about the size of a modern German shepherd. Germonpré and her colleagues suggest that these early dogs might have been beasts of burden. They cite ethnographic examples of peoples like the Blackfeet and Hidatsa of the American West, who bred very large, strong dogs specifically for hauling travois or strapped-on packs.

All but one of the six Paleolithic dog sites that have so far been identified preserve large quantities of mammoth bone which, with meat attached, must have been lugged from the kill site to where the group was living. If the dogs carried the meat, humans would have saved a lot of energy, so each kill would have provided a greater net gain in food—even after feeding the dogs. Additional food generally has marked effects on the health of a group. Better-fed females can have more babies, can provide them with more milk and can have babies at shorter intervals. Before long, using pack dogs could have caused the human population to increase.

Dogs may also have contributed more directly to human hunting success. To discover how big a difference dogs could make, Vesa Ruusila and Mauri Pesonen of the Finnish Game and Fisheries Institute investigated what may be the closest easily studied analog to a mammoth hunt: the Finnish moose hunt. Finns use large dogs such as Norwegian elkhounds or Finnish spitzes to find moose and keep them in place by barking until humans can approach and shoot them. In hunting groups of fewer than 10 people, the average carcass weight per hunter without dogs was 8.4 kilograms per day. With dogs, the yield went up to 13.1 kilograms per hunter per day—an increase of 56 percent.

(h/t Jonathan Foreman)

India has grown pretty consistently at 6% since the mid 1980s, with the exception of a faster period in 2004-2007. What looked like a step up in trajectory now looks like a one-off blip driven by a global boom, an uncharacteristic bout of tight fiscal policy and an unsustainable burst of corporate optimism. Political history may have to be rewritten too. The reformers of 1991, who include the present prime minister, have turned out to be not visionaries, but pragmatists without a deep commitment to liberalisation who have been unable to build a lasting consensus among voters and the political class in favour or reform.

6% might still seem pretty good. Trouble is, it might not be good enough:

India, unlike the other BRIC countries, is still desperately poor. One businessman and guru interviewed by your correspondent recently declared that "the next fifteen years will be India's worst since independence" and that there was a one-in-ten chance of a revolution. If India's economic miracle turns out to have been a mirage, it will not be so easy to dismiss that kind of talk as cranky. There is already widespread disgust at corruption. And at least ten million young folk will enter the workforce every year for the next decade or so. They will be coming to the big cities, looking for jobs that won't be created if India expands at a rickshaw rate of growth. Talk of a demographic dividend may turn back into talk of a time bomb.

A lawyer friend points a daunting legal problem with the Edwards prosecution:

During 2011, roughly 100 former militants left Pakistan along with their families and returned to their native villages on the Indian side.

Their fate was closely watched by fighters still stranded in Pakistan.

"Nothing bad happened to them," says Rafiq Ahmed, another former fighter in Muzaffarabad who has been in touch with some of the returnees.

"They were held by the Indian police for debriefing for a few days, and were then released. They are now living normal lives."

But look away from the individual case, and consider the new rule of law effectively established by the jury's refusal to convict. John Edwards raised huge sums of money to buy the silence of his mistress. The government argued that this money should be regarded as a campaign donation subject to disclosure rules. Edwards insisted that neither he nor the donors thought of that money that way - and that because of this private mental reservation, he (and they) broke no law.

Seriously?

If he hadn't been a candidate for president, his friends would not have given him that money. If he hadn't been a candidate, he wouldn't have needed it.

Politicians often have discreditable secrets, secrets that might upset their campaigns. Concealing those secrets can often be integral to their campaign strategy. If money is spent on concealment, what is that money but a campaign expenditure? If a donor gives that money, what else is he (or she) doing but making a campaign contribution?

Israel doesn’t need to wait for a final-status deal with the Palestinians. What it needs is a radically new unilateral approach: It should set the conditions for a territorial compromise based on the principle of two states for two peoples, which is essential for Israel’s future as both a Jewish and a democratic state.

Israel can and must take constructive steps to advance the reality of two states based on the 1967 borders, with land swaps — regardless of whether Palestinian leaders have agreed to accept it. Through a series of unilateral actions, gradual but tangible changes could begin to transform the situation on the ground.

Israel should first declare that it is willing to return to negotiations anytime and that it has no claims of sovereignty on areas east of the existing security barrier. It should then end all settlement construction east of the security barrier and in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. And it should create a plan to help 100,000 settlers who live east of the barrier to relocate within Israel’s recognized borders.

That plan would not take full effect before a peace agreement was in place.