The Cherokees are on the warpath. Watch out Kimosabe!

AP:

California’s budget deficit has swelled to a projected $16 billion — much larger than had been predicted just months ago — and will force severe cuts to schools and public safety

LA Times:

California would have to pay $6 billion to complete a 130-mile segment by September 2017, a plan that requires 120 permits and buying 1,100 parcels of land…It would mean spending as much as $3.5 million every calendar day, holidays and weekends included — the fastest rate of transportation construction known in U.S. history

(BTW, the high-speed rail project was sold based on insane estimates of ridership.) Maybe California can raise the money from that $1000 fine for throwing a frisbee.

A piece in the NYT on capitalism:

Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal — just open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.

I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.

There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error.

Is that so? Consider this chart:

Since Deng Xiaoping legitimized capitalism in China thirty years ago, per capita income has quadrupled and half a billion people have been lifted out of grinding poverty. Seems moral to us.

Tammy Bruce:

I think it’s time to address why the Chicago Jesus suddenly went Gay for Pay. I’m happy to provide that analysis to you It turns out it’s more Gay for Pay, a Legacy and a Job After I’m Fired…We know he doesn’t give a damn about the issue, and oh sure, he’ll get a bit more cash from the left, but it really won’t even make a dent in what he wants to fund-raise or plans on spending. None of the swing-states at risk during the election were hanging by a thread on this issue (to say the least), and in fact this will likely hurt him in at least North Carolina and Virginia. Then it dawned on me -– Obama’s internal polls must show him losing to Romney, and handily…That’s my take -– Obama’s now thinking legacy and a job, and who’s gonna pay for that Obama Library in Chicago. Hey, liberal Hollywood and establishment gays sure do have lots of money and shouldn’t they give it to the First Gay President

The problem is that he still sounds like he really thinks he’s going to win. Time: “In a series of interviews with campaign officials in Chicago, it is clear that the entire re-elect operation likes its odds of winning a second term. The informal slogan is essentially ‘Be confident, but take nothing for granted’.” Frankly we don’t know what the heck is going on.

As we noted the other day, we remember life in 1965 as a teenager. It was a pretty different USA back then, with the likes of Gomer Pyle, Andy Griffith, Red Skelton, and Bewitched all in the top ten TV shows. As we were thinking about that Washington Post piece about Mitt Romney’s shenanigans 47 years ago, we wondered how old the author was. It turns out that we haven’t been able to determine that yet, but he seems reasonably young, and he apparently got his start as a fact-checker for the NY Observer twelve years ago. Maybe we’ll give him a call and find out, since his bio doesn’t appear on the websites of the Post or Observer or NYT or Globe, where he seems also to have worked. We have no idea what did or did not happen at Cranbrook half a century ago, but a number of the motivations that have been attributed to Romney by various parties do not fit very well with the way we recall life in high school in 1965.

Congressional testimony from the GAO:

USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions. The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.

Video here. It turns out we don’t need an Apollo program for energy independence — it’s way easier than going to the moon. Such low hanging fruit for a President Romney. HT: IHTM

When the NYT was celebrating the Twitter Revolutions, that in itself was a reason to be skeptical or the messaging service. And then there was that Congressman whose name we forget. Twitter means twubble. But of course there are in fact excellent uses for Twitter. It helped get a kid out of the hoosegow in Egypt. And it turns out that 140 characters is an excellent length for a one-liner.

Over at Breitbart, John Nolte discusses the power of using Twitter as a political weapon by those on the right. His analysis makes a lot of sense: conservatives vastly outnumber liberals in the United States, but you wouldn’t guess that because media people are often 12 to 1 on the other side. Services like Twitter remove the filter and suddenly there are a whole lot more people on your side than you would have suspected.

NY Post:

When sermons of Obama’s Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright, surfaced during the Iowa primaries, it threatened to derail Obama’s campaign. ABC aired one where Wright screamed, “Goddamn America!” Edward Klein interviewed Wright, who told him Obama’s team tried to buy his silence…“How much money did he offer you?” “One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Wright said. “Did Obama himself ever make an effort to see you?”

“Yes,” Wright said. “Barack said he wanted to meet me in secret, in a secure place. And I said, ‘You’re used to coming to my home, you’ve been here countless times, so what’s wrong with coming to my home?’ So we met in the living room of the parsonage of Trinity United Church of Christ, at South Pleasant Avenue right off 95th Street, just Barack and me. I don’t know if he had a wire on him…“Barack said, ‘I’m sorry you don’t see it the way I do. Do you know what your problem is?’ And I said, ‘No, what’s my problem?’ And he said, ‘You have to tell the truth.’

If true, that last statement says a lot, doesn’t it? And there’s more:

Jealous Michelle vs. Oprah. How two of America’s most powerful women grew to despise each other…Oprah also wanted to broadcast a show from the White House on the subject of exercise and weight control. Once again, Oprah waited in vain for a response from the White House. When an answer finally arrived, it was curt to the point of rudeness: “That wouldn’t fit into the first lady’s plans”…”Michelle hates fat people and doesn’t want me waddling around the White House.”

We don’t believe we’ve ever seen a meltdown like this. This goes way beyond politics. These people really are seen as jerks by some of those who know them best, and the critics have gone on the record at a time when their only motivation can be settling scores. (Mimi Alford waited 50 years.) Come to think of it, maybe Bill Ayers is in fact genuinely ticked off that he didn’t get any of the royalties from Dreams. Bonus question: in the privacy of the voting booth, will Oprah vote for Romney?

Gallup tries to be upbeat in a piece entitled “Six in 10 Say Obama Same-Sex Marriage View Won’t Sway Vote,” but if you make it to paragraph six, there’s this:

a key to assessing how the change in Obama’s view of same-sex marriage will affect his vote share this fall would be to look at its effect on independents…23% of independents and 10% of Democrats say it makes them less likely to vote for Obama, while a smaller 11% of independents and 2% of Republicans say it makes them more likely to vote for Obama. Those figures suggest Obama’s gay marriage position is likely to cost him more independent and Democratic votes than he would gain in independent and Republican votes, clearly indicating that his new position is more of a net minus

These numbers are very high indeed. Independents flipped by 33 points in 2010, and now an additional net 12% are less likely to vote Democrat? As for Democrats themselves, 10% is a large number to be moved by a single issue, an issue we’ve previously written about without having numbers. And the reality is probably even worse than this poll suggests, since the sample is adults, and likely voter screens produce results more favorable to the GOP. Wow.

VDH summarizes things today:

Give Obama some credit. He has framed the 2012 election as a conflict of visions unlike any of our time. It’s our choice now, no excuses, no one left to blame…for 30 years we have been lectured to death about global warming, the brilliant Ivy League technocrats, the genius of Keynesian borrowing, the need for multiculturalism in the White House, if only we had open borders, why lawyers and academics need to be in charge —- all on the “what if” presumption that no one in his right mind would let any of the above become gospel. And so we had the constant liberal whine, “if only.…” Now we have it in the flesh, and in cathartic fashion Obama is going to purge us of that unhinged temptation for another generation…Add all that up, and one loses 6-8 points. Keep doing it and he will lose even more. At this rate, Obama will be October surprising Iran.

FWIW, we don’t think that an Iran October surprise would work. Between the president and Fauxcahontas, we’ve seen enough of the faculty lounge — one that knows nothing about business and has no desire to learn — for a long,long time.

From the standpoint of victory, the defenders of the Alamo were on the wrong side of history. But after the Alamo came Remember the Alamo! At NRO, Jonah Goldberg discusses the speciousness of using “the wrong side of history” as argument.

This is funny. We have no idea who these people are, but it’s MSNBC and the folks there don’t seem to be having a good week.

The governor of North Carolina:

“Folks are saying what in the world is going on in North Carolina. We look like Mississippi.”

The voters disagreed with the governor’s position by 61-39%, but she has a lot of celebrities on her side. Kind of like that famous headline, governor to voters, drop dead.

If 43% of likely voters strongly disapprove of your performance (over twice as many as strongly approve), just how the heck do you get elected?

Winston Churchill died in 1965. We remember watching parts of the funeral via Telstar, a non-geosynchronous satellite that sent portions of the BBC broadcast to CBS, NBC and ABC. It seemed very, very important, though we had virtually no idea of who the man was. We know the lyrics of most of the Billboard hits below, since we’d listen to them on our six transistor Silvertone radio.

1. Wooly Bully, Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs
2. I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch), Four Tops
3. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones
4. You Were On My Mind, We Five
5. You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, Righteous Brothers
6. Downtown, Petula Clark
7. Help!, The Beatles
8. Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat, Herman’s Hermits
9. Crying in the Chapel, Elvis Presley
10. My Girl, The Temptations
11. Help Me, Rhonda, Beach Boys
12. King of the Road, Roger Miller
13. The Birds and the Bees, Jewel Aikens
14. Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Mel Carter
15. Shotgun, Jr. Walker & The All Stars
16. I Got You Babe, Sonny and Cher
17. This Diamond Ring, Gary Lewis and The Playboys
18. The “In” Crowd, Ramsey Lewis Trio
19. Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter, Herman’s Hermits
20. Stop! In The Name Of Love, Supremes
21. Unchained Melody, Righteous Brothers
22. Silhouettes, Herman’s Hermits
23. I’ll Never Find Another You, Seekers
24. Cara Mia, Jay and The Americans
25. Mr. Tambourine Man, Byrds
26. Cast Your Fate to the Wind, Sounds Orchestral
27. Yes I’m Ready, Barbara Mason
28. What’s New Pussycat??, Tom Jones
29. Eve of Destruction, Barry McGuire
30. Hang On Sloopy, McCoys
31. Ticket to Ride, The Beatles

We don’t recall LBJ announcing an increase of 50,000 troops in Vietnam to bring the total to 125,000 men, nor many of the other big news stories of that year. The fall of 1965 was particularly exciting because we started high school — our Latin teacher subsequently became the abbot of the monastery. And oh yes, in the spring of that year the Dinocrat would sometimes get set upon by a local jerk after getting off Bus 13 from elementary school. But that seems like such a long time ago.

Once again, the president’s re-election team, with the active cooperation of the legacy media, trotted out a lame story, this one from forty-seven years ago, to make Romney look bad. This time it was on on the gay marriage issue, but it was hardly the first time they collectively tried the tactic against Romney. And once again they had to backtrack immediately. What an inept bunch they appear to be. How very odd. Or perhaps not so odd at all. The thing they did well in 2008 is no longer available to them since they have defined over the last three years what “change” means — as in “have you got any spare change?”

And consider the strangeness of the gay marriage announcement. It had been in the works for months, as evidenced by the coincidence of the Washington Post’s publication of a long-planned 5500 word hit piece on Romney the day after the president went on TV. We understand how raising the issue helped the Chicago boys on the fundraising side, but it made little sense electorally. First, the president’s position would appear to solve a lot of Romney’s Evangelical problems. Second, consider the numbers. Obama won in 2008 by 9.5 million votes. But over 11 million of the 15.6 million African American voters for Obama — fully 70% or more — oppose him on the gay marriage issue. Surely some of this critical voting bloc are likely to consider sitting the election out. Killing two birds with one stone makes no sense if you’re the birds.

Rasmussen:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows Mitt Romney earning 50% of the vote and President Obama attracting 43%…Thirty-seven percent (37%) give the president good or excellent marks for his handling of the economy. Forty-eight percent (48%) say he’s doing a poor job.

Poor job defined here.

Apparently so.

Paul Rahe wrote this in February, when it was just beginning to become clear that the president’s re-election strategy would be to ditch his 2008 persona entirely, and fundraise and run as a man of the left:

Michael Barone mentioned Obama’s decree with regard to contraception and abortifacients in tandem with a brief discussion of the President’s decision to reject the construction of the Keystone Pipeline. He was, I think, right to do so -– for there is no good reason that any student of public policy can cite for doing what the President did. Cancelling the pipeline will not delay or stop the extraction of oil from the tar sands in Alberta, and the pipeline itself would pose no environmental threat. If the President’s decision had any purpose, it was symbolic –- an indication to all that he cared not one whit about the plight of the white working class and that he was capable of punishing those whom he does not like and more than willing to do so. In 2008, when he first ran for the Presidency, Barack Obama posed as a moderate most of the time.

This time, he is openly running as a radical. His aim is to win a mandate for the fundamental transformation of the United States that he promised in passing on the eve of his election four years ago and that he promised again when he called his administration The New Foundation. In the process, he intends to reshape the Democratic coalition -– to bring the old hypocrisy to an end, to eliminate those who stand in the way of the final consolidation of the administrative entitlements state, to drive out the faithful Catholics once and for all, to jettison the white working class, and to build a new American regime on a coalition of highly educated upper-middle class whites, feminists, African-Americans, Hispanics, illegal immigrants, and those belonging to the public-sector unions.

To Americans outside this coalition, he intends to show no mercy. Mark my words. If Barack Obama wins in November, he will force the Catholic hospitals to perform abortions, and the bishops, priests, and nuns who fostered the steady growth of the administrative entitlements state, thinking that they were pursuing “the common good,” will reap what they have sown. In the end, politics has as its focus persuasion. Our difficulties are a function of policy, not of mismanagement.

Discipline, not incompetence. Democrat pollster Doug Schoen noted two years ago that the administration was governing against the will of a majority of Americans, and that resulted in historic electoral losses for the Democrats. Now, with the decision to come out in favor of gay marriage, we’re happy to see that the Rorschach test is gone, and that the president has fully embraced being a man of the left — but we’re puzzled as to how this works to his benefit electorally, especially among his most loyal supporters.

Taranto:

Victory has a thousand fathers, as John F. Kennedy observed, but defeat has two mommies. Every state that has cast a ballot on the question has voted against same-sex marriage, including three socially liberal ones (California, Maine and Oregon). North Carolina, which Obama carried in 2008, did so just this week by a vote of 61% to 39%…

The Democratic coalition depends on overwhelming support from blacks and strong support from Hispanics. Blacks and Hispanics alike are less apt than whites to support same-sex marriage. When California passed Proposition 8 in 2008, exit polls showed it had the support of 70% of blacks, 53% of Latinos and only 49% of whites…

Exit polls show that in 2004, blacks constituted 11% of the presidential electorate. In 2008 that figure rose to 13%. Blacks supported John Kerry over George W. Bush by 88% to 11% and Obama over John McCain by 95% to 4%.

That would mean Kerry got approximately 11.8 million black votes to Bush’s 1.5 million, while Obama got 16.2 million to McCain’s 0.6 million. Kerry’s margin among black voters was 10.3 million, Obama’s 15.6 million, an improvement of some 5.3 million, more than half his overall 9.5 million margin.

Extrapolating the California Prop 8 results nationally, around 11 million African Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 disagree with his position on gay marriage. Maybe that’s irrelevant to what happens in 2012, but that’s hard to believe.