One of the big advantages that President Obama has, as he plays "chicken" with the Congressional Republicans along the "fiscal cliff," is that Obama is a master of the plausible lie, which will never be exposed by the mainstream media — nor, apparently, by the Republicans.

Amid all the political and media hoopla about the "fiscal cliff" crisis, there are a few facts that are worth noting.

First of all, despite all the melodrama about raising taxes on "the rich," even if that is done it will scarcely make a dent in the government's financial problems.

If everyone in America had read Stephen Moore's new book, Who's The Fairest of Them All?, Barack Obama would have lost the election in a landslide.

The point here is not to say, "Where was Stephen Moore when we needed him?" A more apt question might be, "Where was the whole economics profession when we needed them?" Where were the media?  For that matter, where were the Republicans?

Anyone who has followed the decades-long controversies over the role of genes in IQ scores will recognize the names of the two leading advocates of opposite conclusions on that subject — Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley and Professor James R. Flynn, an American expatriate at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Few things can make you appreciate home like staying in a hotel. This includes not only low-budget, bare bones hotels but also sweepingly large and ornate luxury hotels. What many hotels seem to have in common are needless hassles.

Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is one of those old fairy tales for children which has a heavy message that a lot of adults should listen to. The labor unions which have driven the makers of Twinkies into bankruptcy, potentially destroying  18,500 jobs, could have learned a lot from that old children's fairy tale.

The most successful Republican presidential candidate of the past half century — Ronald Reagan, who was elected and reelected with landslide victories — bore little resemblance to the moderate candidates that Republican conventional wisdom depicts as the key to victory, even though most of these moderate candidates have in fact gone down to defeat.

If non-white voters can only be gotten by pandering to them with goodies earmarked for them, then Republicans are doomed, even if they choose to go that route. An alternative way to make inroads into the overwhelming majority of minority votes for Democrats would be for the Republicans to articulate a coherent case for their principles and the benefits that those principles offer to all Americans.

Mitt Romney now joins the long list of the kinds of presidential candidates favored by the Republican establishment — nice, moderate losers, people with no coherently articulated vision, despite how many ad hoc talking points they may have.

Dare we risk how far President Obama will go when he never has to face the voters again, and can appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his power grabs? Will this still be America in 2016?