Greatest invention ever (crosswalk technology subcategory) - Via Chive, here's a video of a crosswalk console in Germany.  When you're allowed to cross the street, the screen will show a green bar that indicates how much time is remaining.  But when you're waiting, the console will allow you to play a game of Pong with the person across the street.  Technology is fun.

You, yes you, are going to pay for all this stuff - Opinion Journal: "Desperately seeking middle-class taxes."

The college scam - Maggie's Farm: "Everybody should go to college."  There's an old Bloom County cartoon in which somebody is buying an engagement ring and asks: "Who decided that it was a necessity to get a shiny rock before you can get married?" and the jeweler declares "Guilty!"  The colleges have subtly advanced this elitist trope that the only way to get ahead is to go to college.  It is empirically untrue and the idea is filling the coffers of for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix.  As Mike Rowe or John Ratzenberger would advise: learn a trade.

Will the media finally break out of its Obama reverie?

Here's a post from Doug Ross: "Real unemployment is now 11.7%; propaganda gap hits new level."  The jobs report was awful in every way from downward revisions of previous months, a drop in manufacturing jobs, and the lowest participation rate for men since they starting keeping labor statistics.

And yet, the morning of the jobs report, Joe Scarborough was declaring the jobs report "good news" and a "tailwind" for the President.  It fell to Chuck Todd to tell Joe he was an idiot.  But can you blame Joe?  He's just a pixel in the larger MSM brotherhood out to protect their guy.

Remember when gas prices were the top story on the news every night?  Today, not so much.  Newsbusters: "Networks hype gas prices four times more for Bush than Obama."  Nobody talks about Gitmo anymore and there's zero interest in Obama's secret kill list.  But if Paul Ryan says that Obama stole $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare (he did) then it's time to deploy the "fact checkers."

At some point, that J-school education has to kick in and they'll remember the class on balance and objectivity.  Until then, brace yourself for some "fresh" reports on Romney's tax returns.

Extra - From Instapundit and Ace.

More - Big Government: "Do your job, mainstream media, people are suffering."

Everybody out of the labor pool

Zero Hedge: "The reason why the unemployment rate dropped: the labor participation rate is at fresh 31-year lows."

At a campaign stop today, Obama laid blame for the anemic job growth.  I'll give you three guesses who he blamed and the first two don't count.

Extra - James Pethokoukis - "The awful, awful August jobs report."

Fire up the teleprompters

Wall Street Journal: "Obama to press plan to revive the economy."  Seems to me that should have been on your "to do" list four years ago, champ.

Extra - Commentary: "Obama's recycled promises."

More - Opinion Journal: "Mr. Obama was elected first and foremost with a mandate to fix the economy. Yet when he found himself by rare confluence of luck with 60 votes in the Senate, he put nurturing a fragile recovery secondary to the pursuit of pent-up liberal social policies."

Snap review - This was Obama's speech from 2008: it was full of "we're gonna do this and that" and "the path forward" and "we should choose this way forward" as if he hasn't been President for four years.  There wasn't a hint of a mea culpa for record debt, unemployment, and food stamps.  Well, that may not be true: I think he said things have been tough so he fell to his knees just like Lincoln.  Because he was a President too and therefore a great man.

And, dear Lord, the pandering.  This election isn't about me...it's about you!  Because you're marvelous.  It's you who are the hope.

Finally, as I predicted, there was nothing on entitlement reform, which will swallow the entire budget in 23 years.  Instead it was snark, small-ball, smarmy smiles and straw men.  I can't imagine independents and undecided voters would buy into this.

And this - Charles Krauthammer just called it the "emptiest major speech" Obama's ever given.  Now Joe Trippi is saying that Joe Biden's speech was better...literally.  Gee, maybe they should have brought Clinton out again.

Finally - I need to go to bed but a lot of the adjectives I'm hearing are "flat" or "resigned" or that Obama seems "weighed down."  And I have to wonder: did Obama see some bad news in tomorrow's job report?  The consensus report is something like +120,000 jobs with the unemployment rate staying at 8.3%.  Hmm.

Woman in RNC ad is a Republican - libs freak out

I have to admit I thought this was a spoof, but apparently it's real.  The Republicans ran a tongue-in-cheek ad of a woman "breaking up" with Obama and the lefties shouted "Aha! she's not a Democrat!"

Jim Treacher: "This might be the dumbest nontroversy you'll see all day"

Seriously. They really do think you’re this stupid. I’m surprised they aren’t pointing out that she’s delivering her lines to a cardboard cutout, not the real Obama, and calling that a “problem.”

I think they're trying a little payback after "Republican women for Obama" were actually Democrats.  For extra fun today, a "former Bain employee" who spoke at the DNC never worked for Bain.  Fake but accurate, I presume.

Yeah, right - Ace of Spades: "Obama will address entitlement reform tonight."

Guess who isn't going to be pushing Grandma over a cliff tonight?  The guy who stole $716 billion from Medicare.

Elizabeth Warren's twaddle - There's a reason why this non-Cherokee is trailing in the polls against Scott Brown here in Massachusetts: everything she says is the most vapid, vaporous, platitude-laden nonsense.  Early in her sappy, silly speech tonight she talked about all the jobless in Massachusetts who are "hammered" by corporations and oil companies and nameless Republicans.  This tragedy occurs in a state led by a Democrat governor, an overwhelmingly-Democrat state legislature, in a country led by a Democrat President.  But darn those "fat cats!"

Dora always asks hard questions

Can YOU spot the unsustainable entitlement?

I think the answer is "red."

Hit and Run: "Medicare is doomed"

When Democrats accuse Republicans of wanting to “end Medicare as we know it,” they are right. But Democrats do too. “Medicare as we know it” is no longer an option.
Leaving aside Medicare’s fatal moral defect—that it’s coercively funded—the program is doomed. It has tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities. It threatens working generations with a crushing tax burden. Because of the relative size of the Baby Boom generation, soon there will be only two workers to pay each retiree’s medical bills. Younger people might have other plans for their money.
So something’s got to give, no matter which party is in power.

The Democrats and their cronies in the AARP are trying to sell Americans on the soothing notion that Medicare is a "sacred promise" but the truth is that the well is running dry:

One of the great ironies of this convention already is that speaker after speaker denounces Republicans for being unable to tell the truth or get their facts straight. Meanwhile, one of the most important truths of modern governance—we are well and truly out of money—sits neglected in the corner. This might be a great way to rally the Democratic base, but it's thin gruel for the majority of Americans who think, correctly, that the nation's finances have spun out of control.

Now let's pass that Buffett rule already.  It will pay for literally hours of government spending.

Message discipline - The Democrats run a video declaring "we all belong" to the government.  The Obama campaign declares: "we don't know nothin' about that."

Let's light this candle!

The DNC starts tonight and it's time to celebrate the good news:

Hot Air: "It's official: We are now $16 trillion in debt"
Zero Hedge: "Manufacturing ISM misses, third month in contraction territory; biggest miss in construction spending in one year."
Business  Insider: "FedEx is one of the world's biggest bellwethers, and it just cut its forecast"
PJ Tatler: "June 2012: Food stamp usage increases three times faster than job creation."

Extra - James Pethokoukis - "U.S. is much worse off than four years ago."

I tell you these are honorable men - Given the stories of the complicated relationship between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the former's desire for a Hillary presidency, I wonder if Bill might be preparing the Mark Antony speech.  In the "friends, Romans, countrymen" oration from "Julius Caesar," Antony cleverly turns the crowd against Brutus and the assassins all the while insisting they are "wise" and "honorable."

It's interesting - to say the least - that Clinton is not letting anybody see his speech.  By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes...to North Carolina.

Hostile to business - WashPost: "Obama faces mounting questions over 'you didn't build that' remark"

The timeline of this gaffe is telling: for a solid week, the White House issued no kind of clarification - "we meant roads and bridges!" - until the snap poll results rolled in and then the Most Articulate President ever had to cut a quick commercial to explain what he really meant.  Of course, to believe Obama wasn't being derisive of the hard work of small business owners, you merely need to review the rest of the speech.

Oh, sure, roads and bridges.  Gotcha.

Cut and paste

Entitlement nation - Opinion Journal: "American character is at stake" "What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined."

Fact-checking the fact checkers on welfare reform

Mickey Kaus returns to the work requirement that Obama scrapped: "Credulous fact-checkers fall for 20% scam"

Raise caseloads by 20% and Sebelius’ standard will probably be met. (Maybe raise caseloads 30% just to be sure.) So what looks like a tough get-to-work incentive is actually a paleoliberal “first-get-on-welfare” incentive. But the point of welfare reform isn’t to get more people onto welfare.
It’s understandable that MSM reporters and non-profit checkers–some of whom may have been given only a few hours to get to the bottom of a subject they’ve never written about before–would easily fall for a bit of bureaucratic fakery. Do they have to be so self-righteous about it?

Judging by the MSM's over-reaction to Paul Ryan's speech, it's pretty obvious they're wired into the Obama campaign's Twitter feed and swallows whole the spin.  "False balance" indeed.

Jesse and Creed

The last "Breaking Bad" until 2013 is tonight?  That's quite a long wait.

Predictive model says: Obama's gonna lose

For all you Eeyores out there who think this election is going to be a squeaker: take heart.  Today's Boston Globe has an article (behind pay wall) about the IHS Global Insight model that takes a handful of economic and political factors then calculates the incumbent's percentage of the vote:

The Lexington economic forecasting firm takes two economic indicators plus three political variables, plugs them into a formula, and out pops the percentage of the popular vote the incumbent party is expected to win. The formula has correctly predicted the outcome in 14 of the last 16 presidential elections.

Indeed, most of the model's predictions have been within a percentage point and the worst miss was the 1972 election that underestimated Nixon's re-election share by 4.8%.  And what does the model predict for The One?

The most recent update of the formula, using July economic data, shows President Obama losing decisively, with just over 45 percent of the popular vote.

In other words: landslide territory for Romney.  But if you want to go old-school, there's always the President's approval rating:

A president’s job approval rating is one of the best indicators for assessing his chances of reelection. Typically, the president’s job approval rating on Election Day will be close to the share of the vote he receives. Currently, 48% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president's job performance.

That's Rasmussen's poll.  This morning, Gallup posted Obama's approval rating at 43%.

These numbers all predict a loss for Obama and America still has to digest the new benchmark of $16 trillion in debt and an unemployment rate that - at best - will stay at 8.3%.  Have fun at your convention, Dems.

Is today the day? - U.S. debt clock is about to turn over $16 trillion.

Update - Well, it looks like this is the official one and as of Sunday morning it's at $15.996 T.  That means we're almost certainly going to hit the big 1-6 on Labor Day, right before the DNC.