Married and unmarried.

The real class distinction in America.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University....

Married couples are having children later than they used to, divorcing less and investing heavily in parenting time. By contrast, a growing share of single mothers have never married, and many have children with more than one man.

“The people with more education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved fathers,” Ms. McLanahan said. “The people with less education are more likely to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.”

She said, “I think this process is creating greater gaps in these children’s life chances.”

It's hard to see how this is going to get any better over time.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paco Wové said:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings have come calling for the lower middle class.

After all of the criticism of Sarah Palin for using target imagery in some campaign literature...

... it's it interesting to see the National Journal writing like this:

As they form a circular firing squad, Romney stepped back. Rather than engage his GOP opponents, as he's done most of his campaign, he's focused almost entirely on his No. 1 target, President Obama.

Romney has received cover from the primary's unprecedented volatility (at least since 1964), which has sent a bushel of candidates to momentary stardom atop the Republican field only to be torn down weeks later. Attacks from rivals and media scrutiny have followed each of these momentary front-runners...

And it's not as though Romney, his past rooted in blue-state Massachusetts, didn't supply his opponents plenty of ammunition. They have the bullets; they're just not firing them.

IN THE COMMENTS: First, the amusing. Mocks the writing in the National Journal — "This almost veers into Bullwer-Lytton territory" — Henry says "Why not go all the way?" and pens a rewrite:

While one candidate after another disintegrated like a clay pigeon at an English hunting weekend, former Governor Romney, encircled with the barrage balloons of his plastic bonhomie, so easily avoided the strafing attacks of candidates Bachmann and Cain, not to mention the kamikaze crash of Governor Perry, that the artillery spotters of the media could only wonder if their radios were broken: the guns of Sevastopol fire into the sea; the assassins' bullet bounces off the ghost shirt of the Mormon underwear; even the bloody dagger of professional ridicule fails to find the heart and the smiling to-be-tyrant only exclaims, "Gosh Brute, lovely day, wot?"

Second, the serious. Scott M wrote:

I don't know anyone that was taken in by the calls for a new civility after the AZ shootings. It struck me as just so much more "I want to feel good about something so this is what I'm going to say and assume it fixes the world" bullshit.

SGT Ted — noting that my "civility bullshit" tag "speaks for itself" — responded:

It struck me that after the AZ shooting that leftists and Democrat Party leadership were just trying to hang it around Republicans necks, when the shooter was a "leftwing pothead" according to his friends.

SGT Ted, Paco Wové said:

You should check out the Althouse comment threads from that day, for example. It took less than 30 minutes for the blame-orgy to start.

I just went back and read that long — 292 comments long — thread, and it's just appalling. 12 minutes after I put up a simple post — "U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot, along with at least 11 others, at a political event in Tuscon" — the get-Sarah business started: "Sarah Palin had AZ's 8th district in her gun sights." That came from someone who was taking a distanced attitude about what other people will be saying —"It would be interesting to follow the conversation on teh Internets today...." But soon it was "Remember, the DHS warned us of the rising threat of violent extremism from the political right" and so on, including much push back from commenters who didn't think we should be talking like that.