I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when frivolity goes mainstream. This morning's New York Times carries an article raising the issue whether John McCain, born in the Panama Canal Zone while his father, a Navy admiral, was stationed there, is a "natural born citizen" under Article II of the Constitution and therefore eligible to be president. Of course he is. I spent a weekend a while ago in an intermittent e-mail debate with a few other constitutional law scholars on this question, and I was amazed at how such a simple question could be made so needlessly complex.

The last line of the Times article, quoting the author of a long-ago law review article, is that "it is certainly not a frivolous issue." I think that's just what it is, Ptolemaic epicycles of abstruse constitutional reasoning to the contrary notwithstanding.

Professor William Spelman of the University of Texas at Austin estimates that the drop in crime during the 1990s would have been 27 to 34 percent smaller without the prison buildup. In another study, Professor Spelman analyzed the impact of incarceration in Texas counties from 1990 to 2000. The most significant factor responsible for the drop in crime in Texas was the state's prison expansion.

And now the prison buildup may be partially responsible for the recent increase in crime. Just as putting criminals behind bars decreases crime, releasing criminals back into society increases crime.

Noting the goal, “seriously” stated by the Group of Eight, to cut world CO2 emissions in half by the year 2050, a couple of techies at the Tokyo Institute of Technology sat down with their calculators, and coolly worked out what will be required to meet this goal, on an equal per capita basis, around the planet. The 88 percent is the figure for North America. The Europeans get off relatively easily: they only have to shut down 83 percent of their economy; the Japanese 85 percent.

Only 35 percent of the Chinese economy will have to go. And good news for India, much of which is still living in the Arcadian low-carbon past. The Indians get to gun their carbon emissions by 137 percent over the next four decades.

Talking to reporters after the Democratic debate here at Cleveland State University, David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s closest adviser, insisted that Obama didn’t try to spin his way through a question on Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. “I thought that he was very forthright about it,” Axelrod explained. “The point is this: Louis Farrakhan said kind things about [Obama]. From what I read, he didn’t say it was an endorsement, and I think Sen. Obama made clear what his position on Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic statements was.”

The question stemmed from Obama’s initial answer when NBC’s Tim Russert asked, “Do you accept the support of Louis Farrakhan?” Obama might have said, “No.” But instead, he seemed to go out of his way to denounce some of Farrakhan’s statements while not taking on Farrakhan himself.

If you’re running for president not as an unexceptional first-term senator with a thin resume but as the new Messiah, the new Kennedy, the new Gandhi, the new Martin Luther King, you can’t blame folks for leaping ahead to the next stage in the mythic narrative.

Obama-assassination porn is written by his worshipers and testifies to one of the most palpable features of the senator’s campaign -- its faintly ersatz quality, its determination to appropriate Camelot and every other mythic narrative.