Only 23% of likely voters think the killing of Christopher Stevens was a "spontaneous reactions to an anti-Islamic video."

57% say it was "planned in advance." And 85% "believe it is likely that terrorists were involved."

Younger voters are far less convinced than their elders that the protests at U.S. embassies in the Middle East have been planned in advance. Female voters are not as sure of that as male voters are.

I'm guessing that the more you like President Obama, the more you've been influenced by the administration's propaganda about the "Innocence of Muslims" video.

The government last week spent $70,000 in Pakistan to run a television ad featuring President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denouncing the video in hopes of limiting protests there.

They don't have to run that ad in the United States, where the mainstream media carries their message free of charge. Here's what they showed in Pakistan:



What's that red flag with the pentagram behind her? It seems kind of Satanic. Is it this:



What's going on there? And, more importantly, should we fly into a rage and take to the streets?

Obama on "60 Minutes": "I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted..."

"... where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest but were focused more on problem-solving that, you know, I haven’t fully accomplished that, haven’t even come close in some cases."

This sentence poses an interesting rhetorical conundrum. If your goal is to avoid constantly being in a slugfest and you are ever not in a slugfest, you have achieved that goal. You could even say you have fully accomplished it, since it was such a low bar, not being constantly in a slugfest.

But obviously Obama did not mean that, since he's confessing failure, though not complete failure. He hasn't fully accomplished what he wanted. But maybe looking at that elaborate, professorily built-up sentence, I'm seeing the opposite of my first reading, and I want to say that he has completely failed. If it's an on-and-off slugfest, it's really still a slugfest. Even a real-life boxing match has rounds and little rest periods. You can't claim to have partially accomplished a change in the slugfestiveness as long as the slugfestivities keep popping up.

The thing is: Our Professor-President has a way of stringing phrases along in what actually ultimately congeals into a sentence that is weirdly arranged but completely grammatical, that conveys the feeling of intelligence and thoughtfulness but — if you pull it apart — yields no significant meaning. But you're not supposed to pull it apart. Why would you do that? It was so lovely, so lulling... so likeable.

Nancy Pelosi objects to Mitt Romney's "Mute Button" ad.

Because she would never ever put any President on mute.

"As speaker and as Democratic leader, any call from the president would be treated with great formality and respect," Pelosi said. "There was absolutely no situation in which either President Bush or President Obama were cut off from speaking. I respect the office of the President and the office of the Speaker, including the historic nature of any communication between these two offices."

Here's the ad, which gets its assertion of fact from Bob Woodward's book:

ADDED: A possible middle ground is: Pelosi had a button that kept the sound at her end from passing through to the President. His voice would still be heard, and he would never be cut off, but she would be free to talk over him and have conversations with whoever was with her. That would make her statement completely true and — ah! I just checked the book text — it would make Woodward's reporting precisely accurate:

Pelosi reached over and pressed the mute button on her phone. They could hear Obama, but now he couldn’t hear them. The president continued speaking, his disembodied voice filling the room, and the two leaders got back to the hard numbers.

Woodward never said she muted the President, and Pelosi's starchy outrage does not include a denial that she muted herself.

"I never knew I’d be on TV as a gay man, but I love the pictures of hairy chests that you’re sending me."

Said Eric Stonestreet, who just won an Emmy for best actor in a comedy for "Modern Family," which I've never seen, but I'd heard of Stonestreet, because I indulge in the guilty pleasure of reading The Daily Mail, and it had pictures of the beautiful actress Charlize Theron purportedly in a relationship with this man. She's "said to have fallen" for him. Okay. Looks aren't everything.

"The window is narrowing for Romney, and he’s in deep, deep trouble."

Said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who worked on the  POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Poll, which showed Obama ahead but not beyond the margin of error. Thanks for your highly professional opinion there, Ms. Lake! She burbles on:

"Ultimately, people don’t like this guy. If they don’t like someone, it’s hard to get people to vote for him — particularly to fire someone they do like."

Deep, deep. Like... like... like. Here's an opinion-taker/shaper who seems to need to say her key words at least twice. So, thanks for the info! What a terrible, terrible man this Mitt Romney is! We do not like him. No no no no no.

But, speaking of liking and not liking to fire people, old man Romney — the villainous wretch! — said it well:



"I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."

Clint Eastwood said it well — if real-time grappling for thoughts is good — in his empty-chair speech:

[Y]ou, we -- we own this country. We -- we own it. It is not you owning it, and not politicians owning it. Politicians are employees of ours. And -- so -- they are just going to come around and beg for votes every few years. It is the same old deal. But I just think it is important that you realize , that you're the best in the world. Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether you're libertarian or whatever, you are the best. And we should not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go.

The top female ad icons of "all time."

According to Ad Age. I put "all time" in quotes, because they don't go back to Elizabethan England, let alone the Stone Age. But they don't overvalue recent years, like most "all time" lists. One is from 2008, but after that, you have to go back to the "Where's the beef lady?" in 1984, which was the year I got my first videotape machine and acquired the power to fast-forward. So 9 out of 10 of these ladies are very familiar to me, but... who's Flo?

At the Sunset-of-Ice-Cream Café...

... wake up and smell the autumn.