In the November 22 issue of Newsweek magazine, Daniel Stone defended the Obama administration by blaming the institution of the presidency for failures rather than the chief executive himself: "The issue is not Obama, it’s the office....Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency?" The same argument was used to excuse an overwhelmed Jimmy Carter 30 years earlier.

The sub-headline for the piece read: "The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world." At one point, Stone explained: "Among a handful of presidential historians Newsweek contacted for this story, there was a general consensus that the modern presidency may have become too bloated." A January 13, 1980 Washington Post article made a similar conclusion about the beleaguered Carter administration: "Voters have lowered their expectations of what any president can accomplish; they have accepted the notion that this country may never again have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House."

The latest piece of evidence supporting that truth arrived on Friday, when Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics released April's Regional and State Unemployment Summary.

The report tells us that Oklahoma had a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 6.6% last month. That's far lower than the 9.9% reported for the entire USA two weeks ago. No state with a larger population has a lower unemployment rate than the Sooner State (states with lower April unemployment rates were KS - 6.5%; NE at 5.0%; ND - 3.8%; SD - 4.7%; and VT - 6.4%).

As seen in the chart below, Oklahoma's unemployment rate has been significantly lower than the national rate for well over two years, and on average in 2009 was that way across all major ethnic groups (source data for 2006 to 2009 can be accessed here; scroll down to "Annual Average Statewide Data"):

If Ellie Light is indeed a Democratic operative, she is only the proverbial tip of the party's astroturfing iceberg. Patterico's investigative work, which was also at the forefront of the blogosphere's efforts to expose Light, have revealed an even greater effort at manufacturing the appearance of public support for Democratic policies.

Organizing for America and the Democratic Party each have forms on their websites for supporters to write letters to the editors of their local papers. Both have suggested "talking points" next to the submission form. Both advise supporters to use their own words, but talking points from both of the sites have appeared in letters to the editor in a multitude of newspapers nationwide.

"Our system works better for the insurance companies that [sic] it does for the American people. Tens of millions of Americans have no health insurance, living one accident away from total financial disaster." That exact quote, a suggested talking point at OFA's website, has appeared--typo and all--in the San Marcos Daily Record, the Berkeley Daily Planet, the Petersburg Progress-Index, and the Madison Capitol Times. A version with the typo corrected appeared in the Huntsville Times.

When a prominent anti-war group changes its position on whether or not American troops should be pulled out of Afghanistan, you would think typically anti-war media outlets would be all over the news.

Apparently not, for a Christian Science Monitor article published Tuesday concerning Code Pink's change of heart on the war in Afghanistan mysteriously generated very little media attention.

Before exploring why that might be, here were the shocking details: