Answer: Tickle the tongue

One way to get a bit into a horse's mouth is to put your hand under his jaw and slide your thumb under his upper lip and into his mouth. Then you tickle his tongue with your thumb and that should make him open his mouth and you can slide the bit into place behind his teeth.

More on Obama's tax policy

This New York Times Magazine story describes these two key components of Obama's tax policy:

1) tax decrease for households in the bottom 80% (those making $118,000 or less) that would average about $900/yr, roughly speaking; and

2) tax increase on the top 0.1 percent of earners (those making an average of $9.1 million).

[Obama] would then pay for the cuts, at least in part, by raising taxes on the affluent to a point where they would eventually be slightly higher than they were under Clinton. For these upper-income families, the Tax Policy Center’s comparisons with McCain are even starker. McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.

It’s hard not to look at that figure and be a little stunned. It would represent a huge tax increase on the wealthy families. But it’s also worth putting the number in some context. The bulk of Obama’s tax increases on the wealthy — about $500,000 of that $800,000 — would simply take away Bush’s tax cuts. The remaining $300,000 wouldn’t nearly reverse their pretax income gains in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, their inflation-adjusted pretax income has roughly doubled.

Obama sweet-talking to Scooter

"The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production," Obama told [David Leonhardt writing for the NYTimes Magazine]. “And I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.”

Into the horse's mouth

How do you get a bit into a horse's mouth? Anyone?