Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: diversity, by George

David Wasserman's 2012 Presidential vote tally

Frank Bruni has a note for President Clinton.

What a year you've had, the kind that really burnishes a legend. At the Democratic National Convention, on the campaign trail, in speeches aplenty and during interviews galore, you spoke eloquently about what this country should value, and you spoke unequivocally about where it should head. Such a bounty of convictions, such a harvest of words, except for one that's long overdue: Sorry.

Where's your apology for signing the Defense of Marriage Act?

Frank Lalli looks at Medicare issues from a very understandable personal position.

I've never faced a more confounding reporting challenge than the one I'm engaged in now: What will I pay next year for the pill that controls my blood cancer?

...

Like around 47 million other Medicare beneficiaries, I have until this Friday, Dec. 7, when open enrollment ends, to choose my 2013 Medicare coverage, either through traditional Medicare or a private insurer, as well as my drug coverage ' or I will risk all sorts of complications and potential late penalties.

But if a seasoned personal-finance journalist can't get a straight answer to a simple question, what chance do most people have of picking the right health insurance option?

Ross Douthat wants you to have a baby. Really.

Dana Milbank plays war correspondent to the Republican Party.

It seems the Republicans have run out of squishy moderates to purge. Now they're starting to run conservatives out of town for being insufficiently doctrinaire. ...

The Republicans' negotiating position is morally indefensible. They are holding 98 percent of Americans hostage by refusing to spare them a tax hike unless the wealthiest 2 percent are included.

'Some people seem to think this is leverage. I think that's wrong,' [Sen. Tom Cole, R-OKlahoma]  said. 'You don't consider people's lives as leverage....

Of his intraparty critics, Cole asks: 'Where's your political courage? It's pretty easy to vote 'no' around here.

Kathleen Parker wins the laziest columnist of the week award, by using an imaginary conversation between President Obama and Mitt Romney to create a straw president who mouths her every thought.

Meanwhile George Will delivers a rant on the evils of diversity lifted straight from 1963. So... it's Sunday. And Maureen Dowd delivers a pointless extended Hollywood analogy wrapped around a few sentences of political speculation.  In other words... it's Sunday.

Leonard Pitts looks at another Florida case involving a dead African-American teenager and a shooter who claims self-defense.

We cannot yet know if black blindness was the cause of death for Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old black kid who was killed the night after Thanksgiving. But there is reason to suspect it was. Davis was shot by a 45-year-old white man, Michael David Dunn, who says he saw a rifle. At this writing, police have recovered no such weapon. ...

Consider: someone's got a gun trained on you, about to shoot, yet you have time to reach for your glove box, open it, unholster your own weapon and bring it up? Not even Little Joe Cartwright was that fast on the draw.

Then there's the fact that afterward, Dunn and his girlfriend went to a hotel. You've been threatened, you had to shoot to save your life .'.'. and you go to a hotel? You don't alert authorities about this SUV full of dangerous kids roaming the streets?

Dunn, says Lemonidis, did not realize he had killed Davis until he saw the news the following morning. Yet, he still did not contact authorities, instead driving home to Satellite Beach, about 175 miles south, intending to turn himself in to a neighbor who has law enforcement ties. Police, who had gotten his license plate number from witnesses, soon arrived to arrest him.

Andres Oppenheimer says President Obama should send a thank you note to Hugo Chavez'but before you think this is another wing-nut rant about Obama's socialist pals...

Just as Florida should extend eternal gratitude to Cuba's dictator, Fidel Castro, for the tens of thousands of middle-class professionals who fled to Miami after the 1959 Cuban revolution, Florida authorities should erect a statue to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez for triggering the flight of a good chunk of Venezuela's middle class over the past decade.

There are an estimated 244,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, up from about 91,000 in 2000, a year after Chávez took office, according to U.S. Census figures. ...

Perhaps more interestingly, a majority of Venezuelans in the United States are highly educated. Among Venezuelan-American residents aged 25 to 34, nearly 57 percent have bachelor's or master's degrees, much more than the U.S. national average, according to the 2010 Census figures.

Thank you, Hugo.

Mariam Maquez looks at the relationship between the Hispanic community in South Florida and the Republican Party. My apologies, this column's a couple of weeks old, but I didn't spot it until today.

Cuban-American Republicans, when you dig a little, are not as conservative as they may lead people to believe: polls show they are strong supporters of social services, of Medicare, of Social Security and educational opportunity, thanks to federal loans and grants. ...

Republicans' most attractive message remains a promise of opportunity for all, if you work hard. That message was drowned out the past two years by rhetoric that blames the unemployed for their predicament, blames the children of undocumented immigrants for wanting the American dream, blames college students for not wanting to pay high bank interest rates to get their college loans, blames women for .'.'. You get the picture.

We know how to date the rocks that make up the walls of the Grand Canyon, but how long has there been a canyon? Possibly a lot longer than previously thought.

It had been thought that the canyon formed 6 million years ago. But now two geologists have evidence it is actually closer to 70 million years old.

The way in which the new age was determined is quite interesting, but maybe not as interesting as the image the revised date brings.  T. rex might once have stood at the  south rim and stared down at the proto-Colorado.