The streets seemed narrow, sinister. Liberty One and Two loomed, recently constructed and gleaming with menace, in the distance. Philly was the steam vent my dad used to warn us we'd end up sleeping on if we didn't study harder.

The recent kerfuffle over the announcement of new settlement construction in East Jerusalem obscured a much more serious problem: the growing infeasibility of the two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Last year's killings of two pedestrians by wayward bikers have launched a kind of War on Bikers, replete with city councilcritters proposing lunatic fines and absurd registration schemes, and columnists launching attacks on our two-wheeled brethren.

The election of a Republican senator from Massachusetts is being painted in the national media as a political earthquake for a state allegedly ideologically located somewhere between Cuba and Maoist China.

Why would Obama, with such an ambitious domestic-policy agenda at stake, choose to sacrifice his presidency at the altar of Afghanistan?

So now, casual political observer, you're probably frustrated, and perhaps a bit mystified by this tendency of our system to produce middling, ineffective laws that please precisely no one. The median voter theorem (MVT) is your prime suspect.

No other wealthy, advanced democracy features a health care system with such a combination of mind-boggling administrative waste, naked avarice and crushing indifference to the plight of the poor.

Obama appears willing to throw money at alternative energy without questioning the fundamental paradigm that governs American social order. He believes we will find a new technology to enable what the critic James Howard Kunstler calls our "happy motoring utopia" — the organization of American society around highways, suburbs, strip malls and gas stations.

Does Bill Clinton cruise into his library to check out books and use the free Internet to surf for porn? Does anyone have a membership card in the Nixon Library, and what are the late fees like? Is there a special section for Jimmy Carter's books in the Jimmy Carter presidential library?

You'll find no remorse from the I-bankers, financiers and Wall Street dilettantes who led us into this disaster by extending and trading bad credit like NFL draft slots. They helped convince Americans that something can be had for nothing — which is true, but only if you have good lobbyists.