This Sunday, Newark Mayor Cory Booker went on NBC's Meet the Press, home of David Gregory's meatball pitch to right-handed batters, and called Barack Obama's attacks on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital record "nauseating."

Yesterday morning, the New York Times reported on a super-PAC plan submitted to Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs. Entitled, "The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good," it proposed a $10 million series of ads tying Obama to Reverend Jeremiah Wright. By early afternoon, Ricketts had abandoned the plan outright.

Ah, Florida, cradle of justice. One day, when they document the great codifiers of the law, the names will ring out: Hammurabi, Solon, Justinian, Blackstone, Napoleon, Tallahassee. Last Friday, the state that's hosted the politically ugly Trayvon Martin reality show handed down a 20-year sentence against Marissa Alexander.

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that, when he attended prep school, Mitt Romney mocked and assaulted students suspected of being gay. Call me a cynic, but I expect more from America's future sociopaths. When stories come out about non-consensual masturbation or the younger, feminine boys being expected to "do mouth stuff" on the seniors ("But no queer business or nothin'!") then it's a prep school scandal.

Even for conservatives, the Mitt Romney campaign provides a meeting point between high finance and low expectations. Now that the GOP nomination is all but officially wrapped up, Mitt is free to shake the Etch-a-Sketch, tack to the center and betray the perfectly reasonable people who wear felt hats, stockings and breeches to point out the villainy of, say, Head Start.

It's about as easy to lose track of Mitt Romney's political gaffes as it is to lose track of the number of drinks you've had during a beer pong tournament. Their pace is relentless, both are sort of shamefully satisfying, and ultimately they make your head hurt.

This weekend, Karl Rove's mom-and-pop PAC, American Crossroads, took a couple shiny quarters out of its $100 million billfold and gave the world "Obama Cool," a political attack ad that accuses Barack Obama of being cool.

Former Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon and Watergate co-conspirator Chuck Colson died this weekend. Besides being a criminal and an intolerant far-right evangelical, he's perhaps most famous for saying, "I would walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Dick Nixon."

Eight days ago, the Wall Street Journal published another column promising a "stable Afghanistan" from the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon. It might as well have been assembled by playing Powerball. O'Hanlon cranks the hopper, opens the little cage and out comes another bromide: "Closer"! "Accomplishing"! "Goals"! "Exit Strategy"!

Two Sundays ago, the New York Times ran an article about Mitt Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two have known each other for about 35 years. They went through Boston Consulting Group's "boot camp" together. They "can almost speak in shorthand." They finish each other's sentences and once accidentally ate from opposite ends of the same long strand of spaghetti. Their lives are an endless geopolitical meet-cute: Romney wants to run the nuclear big-box store of the United States, but he has enough love in his heart that he'd never crush the beautiful Middle Eastern shop around the corner.

On Sunday, Bill Kristol, chronically incorrect steward of his daddy's magazine movement, dismissed liberals' and black activists' outraged response to the Trayvon Martin killing as "just demagoguery... mostly on the side of those who want to indict the whole society for this death." The following day, Rush Limbaugh said the response was "doing more harm to the black community than anything else." How blessed the black community must feel to have their best interests overseen by the living embodiment of everything wrong with white people.

Even when one or two stories dominate a national news cycle, there are still thousands more circulating beneath them. Most of these are local, which is great luck for local journalists, who can use them to fend off angry senior-citizen complaints that nobody's explained why Dahlia's Café—the one with the all-afternoon early bird!—was replaced with a "Chipottle."

Last weekend, America's subterranean war monster, Lord Kinbote Dick Cheney, received a new heart from a Virginia hospital. Apparently, he even got it legally, although we'll never know if the hospital in question first deferred him five times. The right got a new faintly Obamacare-related talking point, and the left—even as it worried about the invalidation of the most important health care reform in generations—well, it didn't really get it at all.

A funny thing happened in a New York Magazine blog post last Friday. In a piece on Occupy Wall Street's upcoming plans, reporter Joe Coscarelli made a little mistake. He wrote:

Wednesday morning, a man working for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign described the transition from the primaries to the general election as "a reset button. Everything changes. It's almost like an Etch A Sketch."

Last night, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it would investigate the death of Trayvon Martin, after watching outrage build as Florida authorities appeared to do nothing for 23 days. The 17-year-old Martin was walking through a residential development in Sanford, Fla. and was chased down and shot by a 28-year-old man named George Zimmerman. If this sounds painfully familiar, it should.

The most recent article from The Nation's Jeremy Scahill profiled the imprisonment of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye. For covering American cluster bomb strikes in Yemen and the radicalization of Yemeni citizens and their support for Al Qaeda, Shaye has been beaten and tortured, imprisoned for two years and, at America's request, seen a presidential pardon from Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh indefinitely tabled.

You could be forgiven if, on learning of a U.S. Army Staff Sergeant executing 16 people in villages near Kandahar, you secretly wished that he was some virulent racist—a vicious dickhead who slipped through the vetting process.

Provocateur, website founder and collector of America's largest wads of spittle Andrew Breitbart died last Thursday morning, when some sentient shred of his cardiac organ kamikazed out of an exhausted sense of justice.

Last night's white glower rally in Michigan was supposed to tell us something novel and important, instead of mumbling vague phrases we've heard before. This time, we thought, a GOP primary vote would be decisive, recasting the narrative for the future, solidifying positions and increasing momentum.