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Grand Rapids, Michigan (CNN) -- As a voter, aren't you tired of feeling as if you don't really have a choice?

Primaries have an assortment of personalities to sort through early on, but at the end of the day, the general election often forces us into a this-or-that, the lesser-of-two-evils scenario.

Technically that scenario is still a choice, but I bet if you went to an all-you-can-eat buffet and they only served mashed potatoes and mashed potatoes with gravy, you would want your money back.

And when I look at some of the decisions President Obama has made, that's exactly what I want, my money back.

But then I look at the field of Republican candidates and I just feel trapped, as our election process has become less about which candidate you prefer and more like which limb you want to cut off.

The only GOP candidate I find myself wanting to hear more from is Jon Huntsman, who, when I last checked, finished a hair below Lady Gaga and a handful of rocks in the latest Gallup poll.

"He's a nice guy, but he's out of his league," said Bob List, a former Nevada governor and GOP strategist.

Is Huntsman a charismatic politician?

No.

But wow -- a former governor who oversaw the biggest tax cut in his state's history, maintained a surplus in the budget, speaks fluent Chinese and is a talented enough musician to play on stage with REO Speedwagon is deemed "out of his league." But Rick Perry, the dude who got a "D" in economics and brags about creating more minimum wage jobs, many without benefits, than any other governor is not?

I don't know what kind of league List is talking about, but it sounds nuts to me.

It's those kinds of insider statements that have me reminiscing about the free-wheeling Ross Perot.

True, the 1992 independent candidate didn't win. He finished third behind winner Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. But man was he fun. He didn't have to deal with the Lists in his party, and because of that, the nearly 20 million people who voted for him didn't feel as trapped.

Think about it: Perot captured nearly 19% of the popular vote, more than 50% of them independents. This was at a time in which no one really paid attention to independent voters. But in 2008, independent voters were credited with being the difference makers, and today the big GOP question is whether a social conservative in the primary can appeal to moderates and independents in the general.

Huntsman's showing a bit more personality now, and he is unveiling a jobs package ahead of Obama and Mitt Romney. But the reality is, it doesn't matter. He effectively eliminated his chances of making conservatives swoon, and thus winning the GOP nomination, when he tweeted that he believes in evolution and global warming.

(CNN) -- Before the last drops of rain from Hurricane Irene had dried, the attacks began on meteorologists for not accurately forecasting the exact strength of this weather system.

The cries came from mainstream media, social media and even the unsocial streets of New York, where I live: "How can these guys call this a friggin' hurricane?!"

Whenever the weathermen/women are the slightest bit off in their forecasts, they instantly became punching bags for the rest of us.

People ask: How can the weathermen be wrong so often? Here is the simple answer: They are trying to predict the future! It's a forecast, meaning a prediction about an event yet to happen.

And to make it more challenging, they are dealing with the weather, which to me, is a mystical, awe-inspiring creature. How can anyone know for certain what this supernatural beast will do? Yet these climate prognosticators, these weather gurus, these meteorologist psychics, if you will, are continually attacked for not predicting with pinpoint precision that, for example, 3 inches of snow, not 6, will fall from the mass of water droplets, known as clouds, positioned thousands of feet above us.

Some also take issue with meteorologists for seeming too excited when a major weather calamity is on the horizon. Yes, it's true, sometimes the forecasters do seem almost giddy, but to them, these events are like the Super Bowl, the World Series and the Magic: The Gathering world championship all rolled into one.

And keep in mind the usual plight of our weatherpeople. Most have college degrees in atmospheric or meteorological sciences; they were picked on in high school for being president of the Weather Club and bragging that they knew the difference between stratocumulus and cirrus fibratus clouds. They went into this field to make a difference in people's lives. But in general, they are relegated to a three-minute segment right after the sports and just before a story about a water-skiing squirrel or "Joey," the snake who can swallow a whole corn dog.

(CNN) -- Although I have always considered myself a feminist, I was, in the days following Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest, unable to join the sisterhood in condemning a man -- albeit of dubious moral record -- for the crime of attempted rape before he had actually been found guilty.

Having written a piece attempting to explain the French outrage at the "perp walk" and public shaming of someone theoretically innocent until proven guilty, I ducked the flak and watched the case unfold in silent bafflement that my own views could be so at variance with those of my fellow female journalists in Britain and America.

Have I gone native, I wondered? Have I been corrupted by French libertinism?

I do not think of myself as a libertine. I believe in the wisdom of monogamy for optimal happiness and I think that transparency in a relationship is a desirable goal. I do not, however, underestimate the difficulty of marriage and I refuse to judge others for a failure to live up to the above standards.

I also accept the notion that it is possible to be happy in what used to be called "an open marriage," and although that would not be my choice, I refuse to judge others if it is theirs.

Knowing, as I did, Strauss-Kahn's reputation as a sexual predator and philanderer, I was not drawn to the man, even before he went to America and I doubt that I would have voted for him, but I still felt queasy at the sight of those shaming placards outside the courtroom on the day of his release, or of the abusive cry of: "DSK, you're a sick bastard and your wife is even sicker."

Clearly I have little stomach for the witch-hunt because I was also shocked by a column in Britain's Daily Telegraph that attacked even Strauss-Kahn's long-suffering wife, Anne Sinclair, for her decision to stand by her husband. Allison Pearson's tirade was entitled "When forgiveness goes a step too far." "Forgiveness is good," writes Pearson. "Even so, the nauseating sight of French heiress and journalist Anne Sinclair standing by her man, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, sets a new low. The former IMF chief may have been acquitted of attempted rape against a hotel maid, but is there anyone who can look at that swaggering silverback primate without a shudder? Ugh ... Shame on his indulgent wife."

Why is it that this woman feels she has the right to condemn this couple in this way?

(CNN) -- Three months ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives tried to slash 2012 spending for the Federal Emergency Management Agency by 55% compared with 2011 spending levels, 70% compared with the 2010 budget. Thankfully, Senate Democrats avoided the most extreme cuts to FEMA. But since then, the United States has been pelted by several major disasters and FEMA is almost out of money.

Nonetheless, Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia -- whose own district was the much-damaged epicenter of a severe earthquake last week -- said he would not increase FEMA's funding until spending is cut elsewhere.

We shouldn't be surprised. Republicans also said they wouldn't do anything to help the economy and the middle class unless spending was cut from the very poor and elderly: proposing cuts to food stamps and Medicare. It's as if millions of Americans are drowning while Republicans stand on the shore, hoarding life preservers by the armfuls. You can have one in a natural disaster or get one later if you're old or unemployed -- but you can't have both.

Of course, many conservatives want to get rid of life preservers altogether. This weekend, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul made waves by saying FEMA should be destroyed. In its policy manifesto for members of Congress, the libertarian Cato Institute urged that FEMA "should be abolished," saying that "by using taxpayer dollars to provide disaster relief and subsidized insurance, FEMA itself encourages Americans to build in disaster-prone areas and makes the rest of us pick up the tab for those risky decisions." Indeed, when the small town of Mineral, Virginia, built itself over a fault line in 1890, it should have foreseen last week's earthquake. And don't even get me started on New York City brazenly popping up in the path of a hurricane.

Conservatives hate FEMA precisely because it represents the ideals of government at its best. Not always the implementation -- the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed the dire need for reforms in FEMA's chain of command. But the spirit -- that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, through our government, we "unite in common efforts for the common good."

Just as up and down the East Coast this weekend, good neighbors helped those who couldn't help themselves, in these crisis moments, good government helps entire neighborhoods, towns and even cities that can't help themselves.

(CNN) -- Imagine if long-term drought were to strike a part of the rural United States, Wyoming say, or Montana.

There would be bank foreclosures as the price of cattle would fall because there was too many of them on the market, families would tragically lose their farms, and grocery lists would be trimmed.

But would people starve, actually waste away until their bodies began to devour themselves?

In Southern Somalia, Djibouti, parts of Ethiopia and in refugee camps in Kenya at the moment, up to 12 million people, basically half a Canada, are facing death.

In Somalia, the people already in crisis number about four million. Mothers, for example, are again making the Sophie's choice of how to share the small resources of remaining food amongst their children.

And the tired old terms to explain it all are again repeated. The cause, we are told, is drought. The "caused by drought" formula is not only lazy journalism. We've heard that song sung so often in the past that it may now make us immune to the famine's claim on us.

Certainly, drought is a trigger of famine. And global warming might be extending the length of droughts. But Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist famously said that no substantial famine has ever occurred in a liberal democracy. I believe Sen is right. Famines occur in places where people are tyrannized over either by governments or, in the case of Southern Somalia, by private armies and militias. They occur in places where even in the lead-up years to famine, farmers are not always able to plant crops with security, without the likelihood that they might be confiscated, or that the village granary will be burned by armies, private and government.

Washington (CNN) -- Over at Bloomberg, Jonathan Alter poses a question to non-supporters of President Obama:

"Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president? I'm not talking here about him as a tactician and communicator. We can agree that he has played some bad poker with Congress. ... (But) what, specifically, has he done wrong on policy?"

OK, I'll play.

Obama made three crucially bad economic decisions in the first year of his presidency:

1) Obama deferred to Democrats in Congress on the writing of his fiscal stimulus. He fought for a big total, but he paid much less attention to what was included in the total. The predictable result: a stimulus that most economists condemn as very poorly designed.

Congress larded up the stimulus with ancient Democratic wish lists utterly irrelevant to the crisis at hand: $15 billion for more Pell grants, $9 billion for community and rural development, $20 billion for the renewable energy tax credit and so on. $87 billion was used to bail out state governments that had overspent on Medicaid. About $140 billion was put toward individual tax rebates that -- most economists warned -- would do little or nothing to stimulate economic activity. Only about $100 billion of the stimulus -- one dollar in eight -- went to support new infrastructure projects. When Americans wonder: "Where's our Hoover Dam? Where's our East River Drive?" the answer is directly traced to Obama's abdication of decision-making in 2009.

Obama may have assumed that if his first stimulus failed, he could always go back for a second. But his mission in 2009 was to overwhelm the crisis. Instead, he allowed congressional Democratic spending priorities to overwhelm his economic leadership.

2) Obama failed to mobilize the Federal Reserve to support his fiscal stimulus.

During the financial meltdown of 2008-09, the Fed acted boldly and decisively to save the banking system. Once the banking crisis was contained, however, the Fed's boldness faded. It ended its first round of quantitative easing in spring 2010, for fear of sparking inflation. Yet inflation barely existed as a problem in 2010, while unemployment remained desperate.

When the economy sputtered and stalled in summer 2010, the Fed reacted slowly. Not until almost the end of the year did it try a second -- and much smaller -- round of quantitative easing. QE2 provided a little economic impetus in early 2011, but by summer 2011, the U.S. economy had stalled again.

The Federal Reserve has not delivered anywhere close to the monetary stimulus the U.S. economy needs. Yes, the Fed is independent of the president. But presidents can shape the Fed through their power to name Federal Reserve governors. Obama has failed to get his people on the board. Yes, he's encountered Republican obstruction. I make no excuse for such behavior by some figures in my party. On the other hand, Obama is hardly the first president in history to encounter obstruction. The difference between Obama and his predecessors: When obstructed, Obama usually yields.