The ceremony began about a half hour or so before sunset.  The couple stood at a cross, made of beige colored Texas limestone, that was erected near the ranch's man-made lake.  The cross and altar, made of the same stone used to construct the Bush's ranch house, will be a landmark at the ranch for years to come.  The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston officiated.

So, for those keeping track at home, that's ten instances of Obama publicly blaming his staff for various screw-ups.

During the 1980s and 1990s, though, did you ever stop and marvel at what a small share of your paycheck you were spending at the supermarket?  I didn't.  I also didn't really notice that gas cost less in the late 1990s than it had in the 1980s.  Yet lately, every time my wife or I pass a new benchmark for filling up our tank — $40, $50 and now $60 — we have a conversation about it.

Price increases are simply more noticeable — more salient, as psychologists would say — than price decreases.  Part of this comes from the notion of loss aversion: human beings dislike a loss more than they like a gain of equivalent size.  If you have to sell your house for less than you bought it for, you're really unhappy.  You hate that ground chuck now costs $2.83 a pound, but you didn't notice that oranges are 31 percent cheaper than they were a year ago.
. . .
Since 2006, of course, home prices have been falling.  But rents have kept rising slowly, which means that, as far as the Consumer Price Index is concerned, housing has somehow gotten more expensive during the real estate crash.

So when the new inflation numbers come out next week, they will indeed be misleading.  They will be artificially high.

Yet on whom does Barack's memoir focus?  On his father - whom Barack, against all evidence (which suggests that Dr. Obama was colossally selfish and narcissistic), seeks to portray as heroic, sympathetic, indeed near-mythic.  Obama père was a polygamist (and a lousy husband to all his wives), but Barack gives no indication that he finds this morally problematic; on the contrary, he seems determined to excuse his father's many failings as consequences of imperialism, colonialism, and/or racism.  One can, of course, well understand why a small boy - or even a young man - might idealize out of all proportion the father he never met.  But Obama shows few signs in this book of recognizing that he's doing this.   Meanwhile, perversely, he treats his mother and grandparents, who by his own account raised him with extraordinary devotion, all but dismissively.  At one point he even suggests that Gramps and Toot were really racists - and that all white people, in fact, are racists, and that black people have been so deformed by this racism that black individuals can hardly be held responsible for their own moral lapses.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood.  It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion.  Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother's Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim.  He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is "irtidad" or "ridda," usually translated from the Arabic as "apostasy," but with connotations of rebellion and treason.  Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim's family may choose to forgive).

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence.   Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger.  In turn, they become less flexible.  Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle.  They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger.  The influence of estrogen makes girls' ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions.  Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps.  Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable.  Three times the rate would be astounding.  But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.s at rates as high as five times that of males.

But I do have tributes to mothers from four very different bloggers: "Babalu", who reminds us of the facts of life, Dan Collins, who takes a light approach, Jeralyn Merritt, who touched my heart by describing how she is taking care of her aging mother, and "neo-neocon", who gives us three generations, and a little family history.

Myanmar's military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week's devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise.

The United Nations sent in three more planes and several trucks loaded with aid, though the junta took over its first two shipments.  The government agreed to let a U.S. cargo plane bring in supplies Monday, but foreign disaster experts still were being barred entry.

"It is wonderful to be back in Oregon," Obama said. "Over the last 15 months, we've traveled to every corner of the United States.  I've now been in 57 states?  I think one left to go.  Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it."

Elite opinion on the Democratic race has congealed around the idea that it is over.   Clinton has no chance whatsoever to win the nomination now.  There is a minority of analysts out there - maybe 5%, maybe even less - who see her path to the nomination as much narrower than it was four days ago, but who still see a path.

I'm with the minority on this one.  I think she is nearly finished, but not quite yet.

Does any of this bother our letter writer?  No.  But this does:

Has anyone noticed? George Bush and his underlings, along with everyone at "fair and balanced" FOX News, keep referring to Myanmar as "Burma" ["Aid slowly trickles into ravaged Myanmar," News, May 7].

What's the point?

Maybe Myanmar should refer to America as "the Colonies" ... ?

Man, it really is time for a change.

(Out of courtesy, I have omitted the letter writer's name, though you can find it easily enough at the link.)

I hesitate to point this out, but the preference for Burma over Myanmar is shared by the leftist San Francisco Chronicle and the leftist Washington Post.  More important, it is shared by the democratic opposition in Burma.  Their broadest organization calls itself the "National Council of the Union of Burma".  So, President Bush is on the side of the people of Burma — and the letter writer is on the side of the cruel military dictatorship.

There is just one thing wrong with calling Clinton the Man from Hope; it isn't completely true.   Clinton was born in Hope in 1946 and lived there (in the care of grandparents) until 1950, but he grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a very different place.  Hot Springs was famous, or, if you prefer, infamous, for its vices, famous enough to attract visitors like Al Capone and Bugs Moran.  Hardly anyone would think those visitors had small town values.

But Clinton got away with it during 1992, though reporters familiar with Arkansas (and Clinton's personal history) must have know that he was being deceptive.

The Obama campaign is pulling a similar trick with his mother.

Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in small-town Kansas.  Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression, and then signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, where he marched across Europe in Patton's army.  Her mother went to work on a bomber assembly line, and after the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved west to Hawaii.

That leaves out a lot.  Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Kansas in 1942, but her family moved to the Seattle area in 1955, and in 1956 settled in a Seattle suburb, Mercer Island, where they moved sharply to the left.  There's a good description of their time in Mercer Island in this long Chicago Tribune article.   Some excerpts:

Obama's mother spent 8th grade through high school here.  Four of those five years were spent on Mercer Island, a 5-mile-long, South America-shaped stretch of Douglas firs and cedars, just across from Seattle in Lake Washington.
. . .
At Mercer High School, two teachers -- Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman -- generated regular parental thunderstorms by teaching their students to challenge societal norms and question all manner of authority.  Foubert, who died recently, taught English.  His texts were cutting edge: "Atlas Shrugged," "The Organization Man," "The Hidden Persuaders," "1984" and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.
. . .
"If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first," said [fellow student] Chip Wall, who described her as "a fellow traveler. . . . We were liberals before we knew what liberals were."

(Or as I would say, leftists.)

Sociologically, Mercer Island was already a long way from small town Kansas, especially for those who fell under the influence of teachers like Foubert and Wichterman.  But Obama would prefer that we not know about that part of his mother's life, even though it was the formative part.

It is not hard to see why Obama wants to conceal this part of his mother's life, just as it is not hard to see why Clinton wanted to call himself the Man from Hope.  In each case, the man wants to claim some connection to small town values, the one directly and the other through his mother.   Clinton got away with it in 1992, and Obama may do the same this year.

The deliberate deception tells us something about both men.  In particular, it tells us that both men are bold liars, willing to deceive even when they know that their deceptions can be detected by anyone who takes a little time to check.  (And both men rely on the forbearance of "mainstream" journalists, some of whom must know the truth.)

Cross posted at Sound Politics.

(The Dunhams didn't go directly from Kansas to Seattle.  After World War II, her family moved to Texas, and from there to Seattle.  So, with the same lack of accuracy, one could say that Barack's mother grew up in Texas.  But I doubt that his campaign will ever make that claim.

Incidentally, I fell for this trick myself, believing for some time that the Dunhams had lived in Kansas most of their lives and then moved to Hawaii to retire.

From Us Magazine through TV Newser: Star Jones lets her old "View" boss Barbara Walters have it on how she's using her tale of adultery with black Republican Sen. Edward Brooke in the Seventies to sell books: "It is a sad day when an icon like Barbara Walters in the sunset of her life is reduced to publicly branding herself as an adulterer, humiliating an innocent family with accounts of her illicit affair and speaking negatively against me all for the sake of selling a book.  It speaks to her true character."

Aside from the never-ending controversy over how Star Jones dramatically lost weight, it's amazing to see how everyone from Oprah to Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post today see Barbara's tale of being a mistress as a fascinating life story, and not a tale of sleazy immorality.

Big Island crops are shriveling as sulfur dioxide from Kilauea wafts over them and envelops them in "vog," or volcanic smog.  People are wheezing, and schoolchildren are being kept indoors during recess.   High gas levels led Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to close several days last month, forcing the evacuation of thousands of visitors.

Residents of this volcanic island are used to toxic gas.  But this haze is so bad that farmers are thinking about growing different crops, and many people are worrying about their health.