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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and has long been bothered by the Lauber incident.

How the story appears now:

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and said he has been “disturbed” by the Lauber incident since hearing about it several weeks ago

Explanation for the change via ABC:

While the Post reports White as having “long been bothered” by the haircutting incident,” he told ABC News he was not present for the prank, in which Romney is said to have forcefully cut a student’s long hair and was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post.

The Washington Post did not acknowledge a “correction” to the story. Freud said it best: “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” They wanted to beef up the “hit” in their hit piece, and they couldn’t resist going too far.

We’re sure it’s merely a coincidence that this extensively researched piece about Mitt Romney in 1965 appeared the day after this. It’s Jsnuary 7 all over again.

You think that Democrats around the country are going to win — as I hear time and time again from people on the street. Democratic fundraisers, activists, supporters, and even politicians alike have somehow collectively lapsed into the sentiment that the president is going to be reelected and that we have a good shot to take the House back while holding the Senate. I am hearing the garbage that Democratic donors are telling Democratic fundraisers…”Obama has it in the bag”…

I know what you are going to say, “Look at Mitt Romney, look how pathetic he is…” Actually pathetic is a kind word for Romney and this campaign. Mitt Romney is to presidential campaigns as the Delta House grade point average was to Faber College — the worst in history. I mean, my God

We think the confidence that Carville describes comes from the fact that the Democrats he discusses have bought the various negative GOP narratives of the media hook, line and sinker. From the WOW to Zimmerman and all the rest. Republicans are just such awful people. Who’d ever vote for one of them?

The problem with that is the numbers. 2010 happened, and all the ignoring of that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The President’s approval is in the low 40′s among likely voters. Undecideds aren’t really undecided, they’re anti-incumbent. The Jacksonian Democrats have gone. And finally there’s the enthusiasm factor, which seems to us to favor the GOP at this point.

None of this means events can’t change the course of the election. Our point is different: if there is a large Romney victory and a GOP rout that is shocking news to Carville’s Democrats above, it’s largely the media that are at fault. They have created a comfortable bubble that does not conform to reality. Maybe they’ll stop doing stupid things like polling “adults” and using sample bias to create results they like. Dream on. As they did in 2010, they’ll probably blame “public ignorance” and accuse voters of far worse motivations.

a study of the undecided voters in the past eight elections in which incumbents sought a second term as president reveals that only Bush-43 gained any of the undecided vote. Johnson in ’64, Nixon in ’72, Ford in ’76, Carter in ’80, Reagan in ’84, Bush in ’92 and Clinton in ’96 all failed to pick up a single undecided vote.

John Kerry came very close to taking Ohio and winning the election in 2004. Democrat turnout was up 7% over 2000; the problems was that GOP turnout was up 19% in that year. Hard to see a replay of that this year.

I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf

As for the youth vote angle, here’s a reference. (And there’s always the issue of money.) It’s as though the team in Chicago slices and dices polling data in order to serve little inducements to elements of the base — but in doing so, seems to ignore the second order effects of such action. They certainly seem to have been taken by surprise by the blowback.

and gave her campaign 40 whacks. Talk about karma. (BTW, there’s a recent video of the Chad Mitchell Trio singing the song in front of the couch where Lizzie offed papa.)

“The bailout parties no longer have a majority in parliament to vote for measures that plunder the country,” Tsipras told reporters in Athens today after receiving the coalition-building mandate from President Karolos Papoulias. “There will be no 11 billion euros ($14 billion) of additional austerity measures; 150,000 jobs will not be cut.”

Political wrangling after the inconclusive May 6 election has reignited European concerns over Greece’s ability to hold to the terms of a second, 130 billion-euro rescue. Parliament is split down the middle on the two bailout deals negotiated since May 2010, as the country at the epicenter of the debt crisis again risks exit from the euro. Greek stocks sank to their lowest level in about two decades

Bloomberg characterized the elections as “inconclusive,” which seems to imply that after some harsh rhetoric, things will settle down and the bailouts and austerity will proceed. That seems incorrect to us. As we noted the other day, the two major political parties have gotten no less than 77-90% of the vote between them. Now it’s down to about a third. If that’s not a thorough repudiation of business-as-usual, we don’t know what is.

The elections were of course inconclusive in the sense that the pro-bailout parties failed to win a majority and so another election is scheduled probably for June 17. Tsipras also called for nationalizing Greek banks. Expect fireworks.

“Now we face a choice,” the president intoned. “For the last few years, the Republicans who run this Congress have insisted that we go right back to the policies that created this mess.” Wait! What? The Republicans lost control of Congress way back in November, 2006. They won control of the House in an historic electoral blowback against Obama ignoring the economy and his insistence on Obamacare. John Boehner became speaker 16 months ago. The GOP still doesn’t control the Senate.

No wonder so few people showed up.

Assuming that the gas-fired plant managed an 85% capacity factor and a 30-yr plant lifetime, the initial capital expenditure would work out to $0.004/kWh…A bit less than half-a-cent per kilowatt-hour.

Assuming a 25% capacity factor and a 30-yr plant lifetime for the Cimarron Solar Facility, the initial capital expenditure works out to $0.127/kWh…Almost 13 cents per kilowatt-hour!

The average residential electricity rate in the US is currently around 12 cents per kWh. That’s the retail price. As a consumer of electricity, I know which plan I would pick. I’m currently paying about 9 cents per kWh. I sure as heck wouldn’t seek out a provider who would have to raise my current rate by about 50% just to cover their plant construction costs.

So solar is 25x more expensive when you amortize the capital costs over time. Such a waste. The Boulder City solar facility in Nevada cost $141 million, received over $50 million in direct government subsidies, and created 5 jobs. It was of course celebrated by the administration.

Four years after “Obamamania” swept college campuses and across the country, we will get a glimpse of what the phenomenon looks like the second time around. The Obama campaign expects overflow crowds at both OSU and VCU as part of carefully orchestrated optics. Aides want to portray the president as still highly popular among young people and still able to energize large crowds.

BG reports on what actually happened at the OSU event:

Obama drew a crowd of 35,000 at Ohio State when he campaigned for former Governor Ted Strickland in 2010…According to the Toledo Blade, the venue for Obama’s rally seats 20,000…The official Barack Obama Tumblr boasts a figure from ThinkProgress that 14,000 attended the event

“Carefully orchestrated optics?” This is an embarrassing level of ineptitude.

Another version of this dreadful chart. You can’t spin this. HT: Spengler

An exit poll made public just before 9 p.m. nearly two hours after the polls closed, indicated that center-right New Democracy party was in first place with 19 to 20.5 percent of the vote, much less than the 34 percent it won in 2009. But in a major shift, the Socialists, who dominated for decades, won 44 percent of the vote in 2009 and were in power when Greece asked for foreign aid in 2010, appeared to have 13 to 14 percent of the vote, putting them behind the Coalition of the Radical Left, called Syriza, which opposes Greece’s agreement with its foreign lenders. Syriza appeared to be drawing 15.5 to 17 percent of the vote…the far-right Golden Dawn party, whose symbol resembles the swastika and whose members perform Nazi salutes at rallies, attracting 5 to 8 percent of the vote, enough to enter Parliament for the first time…The parliamentary elections were the first time that Greece’s foreign loan agreement had been put to a democratic test, and the outcome appeared clear: a rejection of the terms of the bailout

Remember: “in Greece until now, support for the two major political parties “has never fallen below 77 percent, and it often exceeded 85 percent.” Now it’s about 35% and the most radical left and right wing parties have 20-25%. The odds of the dissolution of the eurozone or the EU itself appear to have gone up considerably.

The political outlook in the tossup states is far from clear. While they all voted for Mr. Obama in 2008, seven have elected Republican governors since then and all have added significant numbers of Republicans to their legislatures or Congressional delegations…Republicans are also making inroads in voter registration. While Democrats retain enrollment advantages in most of the tossup states that register voters by party, their advantage has shrunk in all of them, state elections data shows. Nevada, which had 100,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in 2008, now has only 35,000 more. The Democratic enrollment advantage has also been reduced in Florida and Pennsylvania. Iowa and New Hampshire, where Democrats held the edge in 2008, now both have more registered Republicans. And in Colorado, the only tossup state where registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats in 2008, the Republicans have widened their edge…

The changing makeup of the states offers opportunities for both Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama. The share of white working-class voters has increased in Ohio since 2008, which could benefit Republicans, according to an analysis of census data by William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution. Republicans could also benefit from an increase in the share of votes likely to be cast by older white residents in Colorado, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Other demographic trends are likely to benefit Democrats: minorities make up a greater portion of the electorate in Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia than they did four years ago; and the portion of white college graduates has grown in Colorado, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. The number of voters ages 18 to 29, a group that helped fuel Mr. Obama’s victory four years ago, is rising in Colorado, Florida, Iowa and Nevada.

We’ve said our piece. Now we will just have to wait and see what happens. HT: PP

As we were just saying. It’s not just in places like West Virginia, a comfortably red state in the 2008 presidential election, but North Carolina which was blue in 2008, that Democrat politicians are fleeing the president. HT: GP

Since January 2009, we’ve learned that it hardly matters what the president says. Truth has no particular value to the administration. So they can say ad nauseam that the healthcare bill will cut costs, and you can keep your doctor and so forth. That this rhetoric was untrue, who cares? It helped the bill limp over the finish line. And so on from issue to issue. Words are for fools and the little people; meanwhile, mostly quietly, the administration has pursued a rigid, disciplined New New Left agenda. As a consequence, they have not dealt with the real-world problems of the economy and jobs as they should have done.

A sizeable majority of the American people understands this and is no mood to let it continue, which has been clear since the 2010 election. The administration’s re-election game plan has apparently been to divide and conquer using carefully selected narratives to energize parts of the base, in order to get the election close enough so that votes of dubious provenance in places like Philadelphia and St. Louis could make a difference. But the narratives have all backfired, from Zimmerman to doggiegate to the War on Women. They’ve been parodied, ridiculed, and countered, all at lightning speed.

We’ve been surprised at the ineptitude of the president’s team, but perhaps we shouldn’t be. After all, it’s an insular crew, headed by the 2008 veterans. They know what they know, and what they don’t know they’ve demonstrated that they’re not interested in learning. We could be surprised of course; the administration could tack to the center in a big and impressive way and gain a lot more voters than the ones they’d give up. But we fail to see how the administration is going to get re-elected with the current messaging strategy, no matter what the polls say at the moment.

As we were just saying, the parodies of the inept campaign themes offered by the administration show up pretty quickly. Frank J. Fleming proposes an alternate biography of Julia which is pretty amusing. HT: IP

It’s close to a 50-50 nation when voters are asked if the views of President Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney are mainstream or extreme. Fifty percent (50%) of Likely U.S. Voters describe the president’s views as mainstream, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fifty-one percent (51%) say the same of Romney’s views. Forty percent (40%) think it’s more accurate to describe Obama’s views as extreme, while 35% describe Romney’s views that way. Ten percent (10%) and 14% respectively are undecided about the views of the president and his GOP opponent.

We’ve become an acutely divided country when a former governor of Massachusetts is seen by a third of likely voters as an extremist. HT: PL

Mike and Chantell Sackett brought a case against the EPA to the Supreme Court, challenging a “compliance order” commanding the couple to halt work on a home near Priest Lake, Idaho. The Sacketts pointed out that the land was adjacent to other vacation homes and came with a sewer hookup. The EPA said that the couple was building on protected wetlands and that they couldn’t challenge that determination in court until much later, possibly after large fines accrued. The justices sided with the Sacketts, granting them — and others in their situation — legal review of the EPA’s judgments. Yet the agency ought to have asked itself years ago whether it really needed to hassle a couple seeking to build a home in an existing subdivision, helping to justify every negative caricature of the EPA that Republican presidential hopefuls peddled

Caricature or official policy? It seems like the Sacketts fit the pattern of the EPA going into a “town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them.” And it’s not just the EPA.

Jonah Goldberg wrote the other day about Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain, and other scientific chaps who argue that conservatives suffer from a genetic cognitive impairment that causes us to favor small government. In other words, we’re born stupid. So, thanks to gene sequencing, we now know why conservatives aren’t as smart as, say, Pete Stark, the nigh-on-half-a-century Democratic congressman who believes that Solyndra, which is based in his district, is an automobile manufacturer: “I wish I had a big enough expense allowance to get one of those new ‘S’s’ that Solyndra’s going to make down there, the electric car,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle this week. “My 10 year old is after me. He no longer wants a Porsche. He wants dad to have an ‘S’ sedan.” Pete sounds so out of it, you have to wonder if maybe he’s 1/32nd Republican on his great-great-great-grandmother’s side.

The academy-government-media bubble has little or no understanding of the private sector. So many of the things they believe in, from catastrophic AGW to Keynesian economic solutions to dirigiste industrial policy, seem to be failing apart all at once. Can’t happen fast enough.

If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office — 65.7% then vs. 63.6% today — the U-3 unemployment rate would be 11.1%…the participation rate usually falls during recessions. Yet even if you discount for that and the aging issue, the real unemployment rate would be 9.3%.

You can’t fool people about things like this, as was evidenced by the administration’s Freudian slip the other day.

George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli…is now blamed for the defenestration in oral argument of Obama’s challenge to the Arizona immigration law. The law allows police to check the immigration status of someone stopped for other reasons. Verrilli claimed that constitutes an intrusion on the federal monopoly on immigration enforcement. He was pummeled. Why shouldn’t a state help the federal government enforce the law? “You can see it’s not selling very well,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

But Verrilli never had a chance. This was never a serious legal challenge in the first place. It was confected (and timed) purely for political effect, to highlight immigration as a campaign issue with which to portray Republicans as anti-Hispanic.

Hispanics, however, are just the beginning. The entire Obama campaign is a slice-and-dice operation, pandering to one group after another, particularly those that elected Obama in 2008 — blacks, Hispanics, women, young people — and for whom the thrill is now gone. What to do? Try fear. Create division, stir resentment, by whatever means necessary — bogus court challenges, dead-end Senate bills and a forest of straw men.

Why else would the Justice Department challenge the photo ID law in Texas? To charge Republicans with seeking to disenfranchise Hispanics and blacks, of course. But in 2008 the Supreme Court upheld a similar law from Indiana. And it wasn’t close: 6 to 3, the majority including the venerated liberal John Paul Stevens. Moreover, photo IDs were recommended by the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter. And you surely can’t get into the attorney general’s building without one.

Krauthammer goes on to discuss the WOW and other matters. Our question is: why such a poor script for a re-election campaign? There are at least two answers. The easiest thing to do would be for the administration to change course on the economy, which goes against their ideology, so all there is is attack and divide.

The second issue is very interesting. The experienced ad and campaign men in Chicago must have thought their foolish narratives, constructed and executed with the active collusion of the media, would work much better than they have. We think they are probably surprised that so many of their chosen narratives have become the object of ridicule and parody, often virtually overnight courtesy of new media outlets.

In effect, they appear to have expected that this campaign would be something of a replay of 2008, or if not that, one in which their opponents could be cowed into meekness with the assistance of the legacy media. That explains doggiegate, which resulted from the failure to do even the most rudimentary opposition research on themselves. So the script is not working well at all if you can judge by the unhinged performances on some of the cable channels. What’s next? They’ve got to up their game if they want to win this.

Via HA :though 115,000 jobs were added, total employment fell by 169,000, and 522,000 people left the workforce. As the man said, “the choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead, and an economy that continues down the road we are on.”

We have his cheekbones. By the way, does anyone actually know the name of any relative that distant?

“I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off,” said Warren.

You’ve got to be a pretty committed ideologue to vote for someone like this. Quite a lot of cheek as it were. Time to circle the wagons…..oh, wait, can’t use that one.

The NYT discusses a new book on business:

most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value. The Google founder Sergey Brin might be very rich, but the world is far richer than he is because of Google. Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation -— like seed companies and fast-food restaurants -— have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value.

Success comes from fulfilling a market niche or being the low cost producer, as illustrated above. There is the other end of the spectrum too, which we looked at regarding the media a number of years ago. It has since gotten much worse.

the President is taking the most famous day if you will now in the war, the closest thing this country ever is going to have to a VE Day or a VJ Day in this war which is VOBL Day, right?

No really, it’s much bigger than that. It’s like Shakespeare or something. We happy few that are alive to marvel at the wisdom and insight of the media today.

Robert Tracinski has an interesting piece on “climate change deniers.” Consider the famous “hockey stick” graph above. The Medieval Warm Period is missing, as these charts show. Who are the real climate change deniers? To paraphrase Freud, despite our best efforts to conceal, confession oozes from every pore.

In the Medieval Warm Period the weather became so warm that the Vikings were able to sail to Newfoundland, about half a millennium before Columbus’s voyage. We can debate CO2 and the periodic warmings and coolings of the earth at our leisure. But making the well-documented Medieval Warm Period disappear from the chart is climate change denial of the first order.

Put it this way: if you used a methodology that produced results that were contrary to what everyone has known for centuries, would you continue to use that methodology or would you find one that squared with historical facts? Moreover, how much faith would you put in any predictions that this methodology produced?

It is impossible to convey the constitutional establishment’s near-clinical obsession with, and hysteria over, the possible invalidation of the ACA’s individual mandate. It would, they say, amount to an unconscionable act of aggression on the democratic process. A reversal of the New Deal and a resurrection of the ancien régime of the Second Republic. A judicial coup d’état. The Constitution in Exile. (Never mind that the plaintiffs’ briefs explicitly affirm that Wickard was rightly decided.)

Much handwringing arose over the elite media’s commitment to be fair to both sides even when, as here, there is no reasonable other side. The plaintiffs’ briefs are beneath contempt. Randy Barnett is a creature of The New York Times and its addiction to a false neutrality.

Here are some thoughts from the “unreasonable” other side. It’s very disturbing that, while we can understand the point of view of the other side, they can’t understand ours. We’d find phrases like the “false neutrality” of the New York Times (!!!!!) amusing if the subjects weren’t so serious. Hard to see how this ends well.

Boston Herald on the regrettable Mrs. Warren:

Desperately scrambling to validate Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage amid questions about whether she used her minority status to further her career, the Harvard Law professor’s campaign last night finally came up with what they claim is a Cherokee connection -— her great-great-great-grandmother. “She would be 1⁄32nd of Elizabeth Warren’s total ancestry,” noted genealogist Christopher Child…

The campaign also hastily produced an undated newspaper clip last night from the Muskogee Sunday Phoenix detailing a “Mrs. James P. Rowsey” -— who they said is Warren’s cousin -— and her involvement with the Five Civilized Tribes Museum, which is dedicated to preserving Native American art. “Mrs. James P. Rowsey was Elizabeth’s first cousin —- shared the grandparents in question,” a campaign official said

From a blog via Taranto: “Elizabeth Warren identified herself as a minority law professor…it gets even more interesting: once Warren joined the Harvard faculty, she dropped off the list of minority law faculty.” Ugh. The only good news is that the deeply unfair diversity racket seems to have jumped the shark. HT: BOTW

I’m not troubled by President Obama’s slow jam with Jimmy Fallon, who dubbed the commander in chief “preezy” during Obama’s appearance on late-night TV. No, preezy is making me queasy because his nonstop campaigning is looking, well, sleazy — and his ad suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have killed Osama bin Laden is just the beginning of it…

Obama has managed to take things to a whole new level. According to statistics compiled for a book to be published this summer, the president has already set a record for total first-term fundraisers -— 191 -— and that’s only through March 6. Measured in terms of events that benefit his reelection bid, Obama’s total (inflated in part by relaxed fundraising rules) exceeds the combined total of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter…

an “official” speech to the AFL-CIO…The audience members shouted out Obama’s “Yes, we can” slogan and chanted, “Four more years.” “I’ll take it,” offered the president, who unloaded on congressional Republicans for not spending money on infrastructure projects. “Time after time, the Republicans have gotten together and they’ve said no,” he said. “Boo!” the audience responded. “I sent them a jobs bill that would have put hundreds of thousands of construction workers back to work,” he continued. “Boo!” the audience repeated.

No doubt Mr. Milbank will be voting Democratic in November, but its nice to see that he is offended by the administration’s lack of decorum. As we said, vulgar, self-absorbed, shameless.

How about this as an alternate scenario. Keep mum about bin Laden. (The Pakistanis would complain that something untoward had gone on, but they certainly weren’t going to say that Osama was shacked up two blocks from their West Point.) Milk the drives and disks and forensic evidence in his compound for all they were worth. Follow up every lead in silence. Then, on the one year anniversary, assuming that the remaining intelligence was worth little, make the announcement about what had been done a year ago. You’d look mature and clever, and it would be clear your team could keep a secret. Instead, we have a White House that put publicity over policy, and is even taking a victory lap about it. Appalling creatures, vulgar and vain to the core.

It’s not that the attack is so obviously ridiculous — forget Jimmy Carter, George McGovern would have taken out bin Laden. As an active Navy Seal just said, “the more he tries to take the credit for it, the more the ground operators are saying, ‘Come on, man!’ It really didn’t matter who was president.” Just so.

The worst aspect is that these silly narratives and their absurd ad campaigns are deliberately aimed at a very low level of intelligence and knowledge. This apparently is the administration’s electoral strategy. Gone are the days of “it’s the economy, stupid.” That’s been replaced by “it’s the stupid!” If there are enough such people to for this crew to get re-elected after such a stunning record of failure, the country is in bad shape indeed.