A massive 13% collapse in durable goods, the biggest since January 2009; a $20 billion miss to annualized Q2 GDP estimates, and well below the lowest estimate, 60+ weeks of constant upward BLS revisions to initial claims “data” and not to mention assorted atrocious economic (note: not to be confused with market – the two are now completely unlinked) data from around the globe. And what does the White House say: the data shows that the “US is making progress.”

I’m not a fan of star endorsements, I don’t think they have any more knowledge about the public good than an elementary school student body.
Having said that, if I had to choose based on celebrity endorsements, I’d take Jack Nicklaus and Mike Rowe over Jay-Z and Beyonce every day. (I’m not even sure who Jay-Z is.)
I can’t remember, which campaign is isolated from the middle-class again?

Republican pollster John McLaughlin:

“The Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted. You can weight to whatever result you want. Some polls have included sizable segments of voters who say they are ‘not enthusiastic’ to vote or non-voters to dilute Republicans. Major pollsters have samples with Republican affiliation in the 20 to 30 percent range, at such low levels not seen since the 1960s in states like Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and which then place Obama ahead. The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias. We’ll see a lot more of this.

h/t EBD

In honour of a portion of the media finally doing their job regarding Obama. Here’s a tribute to POTUS.

With few people on the Left speaking out against this, one wonders what will happen to director Kathryn Bigelow when even more violence occurs after her new film about killing Osama bin Laden is released?
Breitbart’s John Nolte wants to prevent that violence from happening.

Via @Ari Fleischer

….to the man behind the curtain.

“I will never turn Medicare into a voucher.” Barack Obama, 36 hours ago hotair.com/archives/2012/…

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 8, 2012

Last week, however, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that attempts to locate and contact IVAO offices at overseas military installations failed about half the time.

Do 45%+ of Americans consider this Vancouver born woman to be inspirational and representative of those “leaders” who will rescue them financially?

Some are asking an interesting pair of questions:

Was Jennifer Granholm Drunk?     Or just Canadian?

Related: A superb summary of the DNC Convention by Peggy Noonan:

What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they’re not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That’s not a stand, it’s a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool. And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.

h/t John G.

In the “My Name Is …” department, life imitates art. First there was this. Now there is this:

More here.

He gave them permission to do what they do best.
Daily Show Mocks Obama’s ‘Messiah Complex’ at the DNC

Fury, hubris, and finally muted; Bob Woodward’s new book isn’t exactly the glowing tribute to Obama that Woodward’s younger peers would write.
I mean, when you get taken to task by a staffer from Harry Reid you just know you’ve hit Richter scale levels of incompetence.
h/t: David Southam

From EBD in the comments a hilarious take on Obama care.

As a follow-up to the many excellent comments here regarding the “We All Belong to the Government” video, comes the following interviews:

If these folks represent the majority of American citizens then the end of their nation is near.

Kevin DuJan;

The equivalent of this would have been having Marilyn Monroe talking about the things she let JFK do to her on the same night that Jackie Kennedy was going to speak somewhere and announce her plans to renovate the White House. It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen anyone do in real life…

All parties must come to an end. So seems to be the case in Europe and America these days. Most of the Europeans appear to be in deep denial about this, as are at least 45% of Americans. The Telegraph’s Janet Daley illustrates the contrast:

Last week’s Republican national convention sharpened what had been until then only a vague, inchoate theme: this campaign is going to consist of the debate that all Western democratic countries should be engaging in, but which only the United States has the nerve to undertake. The question that will demand an answer lies at the heart of the economic crisis from which the West seems unable to recover. It is so profoundly threatening to the governing consensus of Britain and Europe as to be virtually unutterable here, so we shall have to rely on the robustness of the US political class to make the running.

The comments on the column, from what one would assume are mostly British residents, will provide tremendous insight for future historians about how deeply in denial about the current dismal fiscal situation their country is truly in. In fairness, one can’t reasonably argue that most Canadians would be any more intelligent.

QOTD;

I hear the DNC had a video tribute to Ted Kennedy, the only politician with a confirmed kill in the War on Women.

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) September 5, 2012

Michael Barone;

I’ve been to 22 Democratic and Republican National Conventions in one way, shape or form (see my reflections in this August 25 Wall Street Journal piece) and I’ve been on the floor in 17 of them. So naturally on arriving in Charlotte, I wanted to see the floor of the 18th. So I went over to the Times-Warner Center (the Charlotte Convention Center, like the Tampa Convention Center, houses the press; the convention in each case is in a basketball/hockey arena). And I have one word to report to you. Tiny! Bill Plante of CBS News, who started attending conventions in 1968, when he lugged baggage for Mike Wallace at the Republicans’ convention in Miami Beach, agreed with me that it was the tiniest convention floor he’s ever seen.

Well, this will turn things around.
Related: Clint Eastwood was right.