BREAKING: If you conduct a poll made up of 73 percent whites, 61 percent Midwesterners and Southerners, 66 percent non-college grads, 69 percent non-Democrats and 56 percent land-line users, you can get a Politico headline proclaiming Obama the worst president since World War II.

The front page of today's New York Times has astonishing news for a nation accustomed to life on an eternal war footing: Defense secretary Chuck Hagel has proposed shrinking the United States military to a size, as the subheadline puts it, "Equal to That of 1940." Online, where the subheads are more expansive, the paper elaborates:

Majority Leader John Boehner's spokesman says Barack Obama's latest 11-page healthcare proposal is "shorter than a comic book," which is bad. Needs more pages! But not as many as the House bill, which Boehner called "1,990 pages of bureaucracy."