Pun Salad

… and a thousand miles behind:

• Happy Birthday to Bob Dylan, who turns 70 today. I'm … considerably less than a thousand miles behind. Tyler Cowen has some "underrated highlights of his career." The Beeb has the scoop on his heroin addiction. (Yes, you can go on to have a decent life, but that doesn't make it any easier.) And Scott Johnson at Power Line is very much worth reading on Hibbing, Minnesota's favorite son.

• You may have heard about President Obama's big speech on the Middle East. Bret Stephens is merciless on the latest example of Barackrobatics:

  For starters, it would be nice if the president could come clean about whether his line about the 1967 line--"mutually agreed swaps" and all--was pathbreaking and controversial, or no big deal. On Sunday, Mr. Obama congratulated himself for choosing the hard road to Mideast peace as he prepares for re-election, only to offer a few minutes later that "there was nothing particularly original in my proposal."

  Good luck figuring that out. I rarely quote twice from the same article, but this was both subtle and devastating:

  On Friday in the Oval Office, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his version of the truth, which was that the 1967 border proposed by Mr. Obama as a basis for negotiating the outlines of a Palestinian state was a nonstarter.

  Administration reaction to this reciprocal act of friendly truth-telling? "That was Bibi over the top," the New York Times quoted one senior U.S. official, using the prime minister's nickname. "That's not how you address the president of the United States."

  Yeah, "Bibi." Don't get so uppity when you're talking to the One.

• For more on Bibi-vs-Barry, Don Surber has a pictorial juxtaposition that speaks more than the expected thousand words.

• For libertarians looking around at the GOP presidential field, Ilya Somin compares and contrasts Gary Johnson and Ron Paul. But for we libertarians who are immigration skeptics, Kevin Williamson points out some negatives.