Open Thread

Lots to talk about this weekend in politics, the economy, and sports.

Have at it.

While he may look like a stereotypical presidential candidate, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney's campaign organization doesn't look the part at all, at least according to this Politico article which takes a look at how he's set up his staff structure.

According to the piece, Romney runs a more vertical-oriented structure which can streamline processes but might potentially make him too caught up in the details to run things effectively. On the other hand, he clearly is more than just a figurehead the way that Barack Obama was during his 2008 campaign:

You know the drill.

As the unofficial head of the Democratic Party, presumably the wishes of President Obama ought to carry some weight among his fellow liberals in Congress. Sadly for him, it appears that congressional Democrats don't seem to have much regard for Obama's agenda. They don't seem to have any interest in getting it enacted as IBD notes:

John Heilemann's lengthy reported chronicle of the campaign strategies of the presidential campaigns has been out for a few days and is must-reading if you haven't checked it out yet. One key portion of the article concerns President Obama's money problem. After campaign aides boasted that they would raise near $1 billion in support of their candidate, reality has proven their predictions to be nothing but wishful thinking.

For the first time ever, it is now possible that a sitting president might actually raise less money than his challenger. Having less money doesn't matter necessarily given the fact that many candidates with smaller financial resources have been able to win. Still, it is unprecedented and the panic at Team Obama is palpable:

As time goes on, the hastily constructed second-degree murder case against George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin is continuing to collapse as more evidence formerly known only by the prosecution is released to the public.

The first is that Martin seems to have been less interested in running away from Zimmerman and more in bashing him, according to a witness interviewed by police within minutes of the shooting. But that's not all:

I'm sure there's nothing to talk about this weekend what with the Facebook IPO, the campaign, the economy, hockey playoffs, basketball playoffs, etc.

But try to discuss something, okay?

It probably wasn't his decision (one hopes not) but the latest update to the White House website is really quite embarrassing: It appears that people have gone into the site's biographies of the past 9 presidents and inserted electioneering material touting President Obama into them. As chronicled by IBD's Andrew Malcom:

Politics, the economy, sports, go to it - politely please.

(Note to commenters: This post is the first one on NB which uses Disqus for commenting purposes.) While liberals have been waxing rapsodic about Greece and France voting for wasteful socialism, conservatives last night have two victories to be crowing about in Wisconsin and Indiana.

In Wisconsin, government reformer Scott Walker received more votes in the GOP primary than his Democratic challengers did in their primary. In addition, the greedy government employee unions' hand-picked candidate, Kathleen Falk, went down in defeat.

Wisconsin Republican Scott Walker has been the target of government union bosses since he began talking about a series of small reforms designed to preserve state employee pensions without breaking the budget. Despite the crony millions being spent, however, Walker seems likely to be able to stave off the union attempt to depose him in a recall election.

That likelihood is perhaps what inspired AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka to lower expectations and already proclaim "victory," even if Walker is not defeated.

Over the weekend, French president Nicolas Sarkozy went down in defeat to Socialist Francois Hollande. Do you see the election as having any bearing on the American elections or is it just an anomaly?

Sports, politics, the economy - have at it.

Just keep it clean!

As you've probably heard by now, President Obama has admitted to fabricating a woman in one of his two autobiographies. Apparently, he's had a hand in fabricating another woman, a hypothetical one named "Julia," who supposedly is representative of just how helpful his policies are to women:

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has now been formally exposed for lying about her knowledge of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding by a new book from a former CIA counterterrorism officer who actually gave her a briefing about them.

In other words, Pelosi and other congressional Democrats who later decried the use of "torture" when it became politically advantageous, knew about and did not object to them for years beforehand:

You know the drill. Just keep it clean! :-)

As part of the ludicrous "war on women" idea that liberals have been pushing designed to scare educated females into voting Democrat, the old notion of a "pay gap" between men and women performing similar jobs has been resurrected. Unfortunately, as Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, it's a bunch of nonsense. While it's true that some women get paid less than men, that's because generally women with children are less likely to work longer hours at work. Take kids out of the picture, however, and it is women who actually earn more. Could it be that people are simply adjusting their own lives to fit their wants and needs? Perish the thought!

College professors are always assigning grades to their students but what would happen if the subjects they teach were graded in terms of income-earning potential?

Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education, we can now see what the average lifetime earning potential is for different majors. It probably comes as no surprise that majors like "community organizing" or counseling psychology make very little. What might surprise is just how little that is. Chart and commentary are below the fold.

Today's starter topic: Liberal college students love monetary redistribution but they don't seem to love redistribution when it comes to their own grades:

Today's starter topic: The left has long believed that taxes and regulations don't have an impact on economies. Reality says otherwise as the current anemic economic recovery has proven but also as the mass exodus from the state of California has demonstrated: