He has been running toward it for years, maybe his whole adult life, and suddenly he has arrived. And what he discovers is that inside his new cocoon of Secret Service protection, the presidency of the United States is a very lonely job.

That's what Barack Obama confided in a revealing interview last Sunday with CBS' "60 Minutes." Steve Kroft asked him if he had received any good advice from former presidents, and his answer was poignant.

"You know, they were all incredibly gracious," Obama said. "But I think all of them recognized that there's a certain loneliness to the job. That, you know, you'll get advice, and you'll get counsel. Ultimately, you're the person who's going to be making decisions. And I think that even now, you know, I — you can already feel that fact."

Whither the speculators? They were this summer's front–page news, the subject of congressional hearings, editorials and nightly newscasts. The claimed culprits of oil's price rise, everyone fell over themselves to be tougher on them.

Alas, nothing disappears as fast as a perceived invalidation of the law of supply and demand. Eventually the two reconcile into accepted parameters, and nothing is less newsworthy than the conventional.

However, it is worth recalling this summer's episode for the next time supply and demand are forgotten.

Housing: For years, a self–described "bank terrorist" blackmailed banks into making bad home loans in our inner cities. Now those loans are defaulting by the millions, and he's blaming banks.

Bruce Marks, founder of the leftist Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, makes a good living shaking down banks for loans to deadbeat borrowers that he thinks are entitled to homes.

While Congress spends –– and plans to spend –– like the proverbial drunken sailor to "bailout" various industries for practices that are largely their fault and the fault of those in Congress who were supposed to provide oversight, another deficit looms which is at least as troubling as the economic one.

For the third straight year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has found that a large number of Americans cannot pass a basic 33–question civic literacy test on their country's history and institutions. The multiple–choice questions ask about the inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933 series of government programs (The New Deal) and the three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial). No, I didn't peek at the answers. I received a good education.