Former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin raises a troubling possibility: What if Barack Obama is too normcore to be a world leader?

With the Russian parliament unanimously approving Vladimir Putin's request to send troops into mainland Ukraine, the American government made another overture this afternoon urging Russia to reconsider its strategy.

Pictured above are the scribblings of Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, who used them during his (boring) pre-Super Bowl sit-down with President Obama last Sunday, and is now auctioning them off on his personal website for charity.

[The president gives Sunny Obama a belly rub in the White House's Blue Room as Bo and Michelle look on with skepticism. Image via @WhiteHouse/Twitter.]

Good news for fetuses: the rate of U.S. abortions have hit a new low under President Obama. Not since the legalization of abortion during the Nixon Administration in 1973 has the abortion rate been so low, at just 16.9 abortions per 1,000 pregnancies.

On Sunday The New Yorker published David Remnick’s splashy 17,000-word profile of Barack Obama, featuring the second-term President’s thoughts on marijuana, partisan gridlock, and hazy plans for his family’s post-White House life. The magazine’s access came with a price, though.

On this New Year's Day in America, 2014, the nation's typists ("thought leaders") are required to use their long-dormant psychic abilities to designate the next 12 months as the Year of Something or Other, whether that be "accidental mass suicide" or "wearable automobiles" or "raccoon-sized talking spiders." Such predictions will generally be wrong, yet there is also the remote possibility that the simple act of making a prediction will cause it to happen, no matter how ridiculous or vile.

By taking a selfie with the "voluptuously curvy" "blonde bimbo" "Danish cupcake" prime minister and her "gentle gams" "covered by nothing more substantial than sheer black stockings," Barack Obama acted like "a hormone-ravaged frat boy on a road trip to a strip bar." Andrea Peyser was robbed of the 2013 Bad Sex in Fiction award.

National Journal's Ron Fournier has smuggled a new dispatch through the censors posted around the Capital Beltway, describing the latest gross abuse of power by Maximum Leader Barack Obama: freezing out the photographic representatives of the free press in favor of "flooding the public with state-run media."

President Obama said in an interview with NBC News today that he is sorry some Americans have lost their existing health coverage due to the Affordable Care Act rollout. "I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," he told Chuck Todd. "We've got to work hard to make sure they know we hear them."

"In that same meeting, the authors report, Mr. Obama seemed to be thinking about the killing of Osama bin Laden and the United States’ use of drones in the war against Al Qaeda. 'Turns out I’m really good at killing people,' they quote him as saying. 'Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.'"

Jofi Joseph, the White House staffer fired last week (and unmasked on Tuesday by The Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin) for tweeting disparagingly about Obama administration officials, turns out to have been one of those Internet-based tough guys who make Twitter such a valuable medium. A few highlights from an archive of Joseph’s pseudonymous Twitter handle, @natsecwonk:

Tomorrow President Obama will declare that the Obamacare website glitches are "unacceptable." And speaking of unacceptable, Sen. Ted Cruz told ABC's This Week on Sunday that "I would do anything, and will continue to do anything, to stop the train wreck that is Obamacare."

The fox is a clever beast, famously outsmarting human and animal rivals in ancient fables, recent movies and a current Top 10 song. Humanity's relationship with the fox has long been balanced between bemused tolerance and "let's shoot them for fun and raise them in cages, for fur." But there are abundant signs that the foxes have had quite enough of people, and are making coordinated global moves to take over civilization.

The Washington Post’s Ed Rogers, a “PostPartisan” columnist, has been thinking lately: What if the recent closing of a WWII memorial in Washington, D.C., prompted by the federal shutdown, were somehow connected to those baseless allegations that the Obama administration sicced IRS agents on its political opponents?

Last spring, after a ricin-tainted letter was sent to President Obama, the FBI arrested Paul Kevin Curtis, an Elvis impersonator and Prince super-fan from Mississippi, on suspicion of mailing the poison correspondence. But then a week later, charges against Curtis were dropped and soon another Mississippi musician was taken into custody, Tae Kwon Do instructor J. Everett Dutschke, who turned out to be Curtis's bitter rival. In the October issue of GQ, author/writer Wells Tower digs into the feud and the whole thing gets weirder—so so so much weirder.

Is there anything Senator Ted Cruz got right this week?

In a new poll, American historians gave Barack Obama's presidency a grade of "B-." What grade would you give Barack Obama's presidency? Everyone wants to hear your opinion.