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The President has a lot on his plate, just ask him:
“Do I wish that I had the luxury of maybe dealing with one monumental problem at a time during the course of the year? Of course and in fact, you know, you’ve been hearing sort of our opposition lately saying, ‘Well, he’s trying to do this and that and the other, and he shouldn’t – ‘Look, I wish I had the luxury of just dealing with a modest recession or just dealing with health care or just dealing with energy or just dealing with Iraq or just dealing with Afghanistan. I don’t have that luxury and I don’t think the American people do either.”
You can just sense Mr. Obama wishing he could say to his New York Times interviewers, “you think this shit is easy? Does it look easy?”

It …

Not only did Sean Penn steal the Oscar from Mickey Rourke†, but he set back the gay rights movement by about 20 years in the process.
In that spirit, I thought I’d make this week’s Politics Listology a celebration of some of the most unfortunate political rants delivered by our most famous–and therefore our most brilliant–citizens. Note, I had to keep these fairly recent, if I reached back to the election of 2004, I’d be here all night. With Penn-the-pinko in at number 5, let’s move on.
4. Mickey Rourke – Helluva job, Bushie
Since I just went after Sean Penn on behalf of Mickey Rourke, I feel compelled  to start the list by noting Rourke has had his own share of cringe-inducing political endorsements, and is just about the last person with a Screen Actors Guild card to have a favorable …

In honor of President’s Day, C-SPAN released its Historians Presidential Leadership Survey, in which it asked 65 presidential historians to rank 42 former presidents from first to worst. No surprises up top (Lincoln, Washington, FDR) and a lot of “eh” down at the bottom–is it really fair to call William Henry Harrison the 4th worst President of all time? He caught pneumonia the day he took office and was dead six weeks later.

And frankly, all that negativity really harshed my mellow. So I thought I’d use today’s Listology to help us get past the old “best/worst” binary and instead look at the Presidents who inherited the toughest sets of problems on their Inauguration Days. Here are the top 10:

9. John F. Kennedy, 1961 – Okay, so 1963 was probably President Kennedy’s roughest year (too soon?). But 1961 wasn’t much …

It isn’t news that the marriage of television to politics tends to leave both realms worse off, turning what should be a forum for sober and reasonable debate about the future of our country into mediocre entertainment designed to sell ads to the AARP set. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert built their vacation homes on the very scorched earth left behind by this perpetual dumbing down of both TV journalism and political discourse, where shouting matches between a pair of outsized egos like Geraldo Rivera and Bill O’Reilly pass for policy analysis.

But, is it just me or is it getting worse? Chris Matthews, for one, seems to have lost his goddamned mind. He lapped up Bob Woodward’s vague suggestion that the “nanny and household tax problems” aren’t over for the Obama administration: