It is fascinating to see brilliant people belatedly discover the obvious -- and to see an even larger number of brilliant people never discover the obvious.

Random thoughts on the passing scene:

When President Obama keeps talking about "violent extremists" in the abstract, you might wonder whether Presbyterians are running amok.

The firestorm of denunciation of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, for having said that he did not think Barack Obama loved America, is in one sense out of all proportion to that remark -- especially at a time when there are much bigger issues, including wars raging, terrorist atrocities and a nuclear Iran on the horizon.

With 2015 just getting under way, the buzz of political activity makes it seem almost as if we are already in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Just what happened last week on Election Day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?

The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.

The New York Times is again on the warpath against what it calls "predatory lending."

Just what is predatory lending? It is lending that charges a higher interest rate than people like those at the New York Times approve of. According to such thinking -- or lack of thinking -- the answer is to have the government set an interest rate ceiling at a level that will be acceptable to third parties like the New York Times.

Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill once said, "All politics is local." That may have been true in Tip O'Neill's day, but some elections are decisively on national issues -- and the congressional elections this year are overwhelmingly national, just as the elections of 1860 were dominated by one national issue, namely slavery.

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is both a danger in itself and a wake-up call for Americans -- about President Obama, about the institutions of this country and, most important, about ourselves.

Some pundits are saying that President Obama has been floundering in his response to the ISIS crisis because public opinion polls show most Americans don't want another war.

While we talk about democracy and equal rights, we seem increasingly to let both private and government decisions be determined by mob rule. There is nothing democratic about mob rule. It means that some people's votes are to be overruled by other people's disruptions, harassments and threats.