Hence, we read that women like Barack best (except when they don’t). This week, a New York Times/CBS News poll shows women tilting toward Mitt and voters overall favoring him by 46 percent to 43 percent. But you know how girls are. A month ago, according to a CNN/ORC poll, women loved Obama 55 percent to 39 percent. Next week, check your Magic 8-Ball.

Mike Bloomberg!

Colin Powell!

Chris Christie!

Mitch Daniels!

Nonsense. Obama is not the first gay president. He is the first female president.

Right now, they’re warning about the “fiscal cliff” — spending cuts and higher tax rates that will take effect on Jan. 1, unless Congress acts.

The White House’s bland announcementWednesday that the Kremlin chief would not attend a Group of 8 summit at Camp David this week covered a rude rebuff. Obama had tailored the conclave to Putin, moving it from Chicago so that it would be clearly separate from a NATO summit. Earlier this month, Obama dispatched national security adviser Tom Donilon to Moscow to hand Putin what a Russian official described as “a multi-page, detailed document, whose main message is that Obama is ready to cooperate with Putin.”

Sitting in the cab of a $350,000 John Deere tractor pulling a $150,000 Deere corn planter, Greg Carson embodies modern American agriculture. It’s capital-intensive, high-tech, efficient — and now immensely profitable. Looking for a bright spot in the U.S. economy? The farm belt is it.

Today, however, news organizations have to be cutting-edge IT companies.

One, Barack Obama is an evolutionary, 21st-century hero who supports equality for all.

Two, Mitt Romney is a gay-bashing bully mired in the previous century who also supports a war on women and, oh yeah, hates dogs.

Such is the scenario suggested by a new study projecting that 42 percent of American adults will be obese by 2030. That’s 32 million more than today’s 78 million. Of course, they probably won’t be waddling. They’ll be in their cars in the fast-food lane, as they are now. Recall that independent filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”) gained 24.5 pounds after one month of eating exclusively at McDonald’s.

“Obama: Out of the Closet on Gay Marriage!” the Traditional Values Coalition shouted in a news release slamming the president’s announcement that he supports same-sex couples being allowed to marry.

Both men were beneficiaries of voter protests on Tuesday against the Washington status quo — one protest harmless, the other insidious. The benign vote went to Judd, who won 41 percent of the ballots against President Obama in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary. It was an embarrassment for the president but purely symbolic. The more worrisome protest vote benefited Mourdock, who bested six-term Sen. Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary. That election has the potential to make the broken system in Washington more caustic and less functional.

Smoked out by his own vice president, Obama decided to come out of the closet on the issue to ABC News’s Robin Roberts, who rushed her scoop onto the air Wednesday afternoon during the closing minutes of “The Revolution,” ABC’s new talk show featuring a “stellar dream team of experts that will help complete transformations in all areas of life.”

Bill Hewlett and David Packard, tinkering in a California garage, began what became Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and a friend built a computer in the California garage that became Apple’s birthplace. Bill Cook had no garage, so he launched Cook Medical in a spare bedroom in an apartment in this university town. Half a century ago, in flight from Chicago’s winters, he settled here and began making cardiovascular catheters and other medical instruments. One thing led to another, as things have a way of doing when the government stays out of the way, and although Cook died last year, Cook Medical, with its subsidiaries, is the world’s largest family-owned medical devices company.

“I’m sorry,” said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong just days before the election a year ago this week that dealt the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) its worst setback in the five decades since the island city-state became independent.

In the wake of Vice President Biden’s remarks supportive of marriage equality, the continued presidential equivocation makes Obama look weak and evasive.

To his credit, John McCain realized the Obama hatred was getting out of hand, and a few days later, when a woman at one of his events called Obama an “Arab,” McCain did one of the most honorable things in his political career. “No, ma’am,” he said, taking the microphone from the woman and enduring some boos from supporters. “He’s a decent, family-man citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

The 81-year-old Oracle of Omaha and his 88-year-old sidekick, Charlie Munger, are still going strong and still preaching the gospel of value investing. “We’ve been students of other people’s folly, and it’s served us well,” Buffett observed, seemingly for the billionth time. (Multiple conflicts — Buffett is a former director of The Washington Post Co., and Berkshire owns a large share of The Post Co. — make me less than perfectly objective, it should be noted.)

As things stand, the spokesman does not have the supplies necessary to clean up the mess Biden made in his appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Biden gave his full support to same-sex marriage — a position conspicuously at odds with the public stance of his boss, President Obama, who is widely assumed to share Biden’s views but who says that his own thinking is “evolving.”

Voters in France, Greece and even Germany — a hotbed of the austerity cult — told their political leaders, in no uncertain terms, that boosting economic growth is more important than cutting government spending. Here in the United States, I hope that Democrats, at least, were paying attention; I fear that the addled ideologues who control the Republican Party will never get the message.

Doubts are stoked by the Great Recession that slammed prosperous democracies while barely scraping communist China; the crisis of the euro; anxieties about the Arab Spring; and the inability of Japan, Europe and the United States to make tough fiscal choices as their populations age.

I love opinions that I agree with, certainly, but often enough I enjoy even some I disagree with. Having grown up in a politically diverse extended family that spent a great deal of time arguing (fiercely but mostly amiably) about the world, I have always been enchanted by the process through which people reach their conclusions.

There’s no need to bother with street dealers or big drug traffickers.

That’s a stark assessment but true. On one side is a man who has made it his life’s work to build a cross-aisle consensus for keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states. On the other side is a man who mocks his opponent for such efforts and who talks more about fighting Democrats than fighting America’s enemies.

I’m at a loss, even after President Obama’s surprise trip to the war zone. The president’s televised address from Bagram air base raised more questions than it answered. Let’s start with the big one: Why?