INSTAVISION: I talk with David Horowitz about his new book, The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future.

MORE MOCKERY: #OBAMAKIDSBOOKS. I like The Little Engine That Couldn’t Without Federal Assistance. Also, My Little Crony. And Fast and Furious George is pretty good. So is Heather Has Two Mommies Without Jobs. And Solynderella.

UPDATE: Reader Sean-David Hubbard writes: “I wonder if Obama’s comments in Roanoke might have become his Macaca moment.” Well, the Macaca thing was driven by the press. The press will do its best to ignore this one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I was just talking on the phone with a friend who said: “Without me doing anything, my net worth has dropped 40% since Obama took office. I didn’t do that. He did.” Ouch.

MORE: Matt Szekely sends: Clifford, the big red delicious dog

And reader Jed Kane writes: “Green Jobs and Scams. I do not like them Sam, I am.”

REPEAL THE EISENHOWER TAX CUTS! Here’s the formerly missing video:

And here’s my column on the subject. Taxes? “They’re rich. They can afford it.”

Republicans in the House and Senate really need to be compiling a list of tax increases the Dems won’t like. This is a good start. I mean, hey, anything that could get a bunch of Hollywood types sounding like Art Laffer . . . .

MAYBE OBAMA SHOULD MEET WITH THAT JOBS COUNCIL OF HIS SOMEDAY: Unemployment Claims Jump; Jobs Market Still in Doldrums. Unexpectedly! “Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 34,000 to a seasonally adjusted 386,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The prior week’s figure was revised up to 352,000 from the previously reported 350,000. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims rising to 365,000 last week.”

UPDATE: Then there’s the whole underemployment problem.

LIFE: “I have a dirty secret to tell: I’m proud to be frat boy.”

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Which Law Schools Are Most at Risk for Missing Their Fall 2012 Enrollment Target?

NICOLE GELINAS: Dodd-Frank’s Protection Racket. “Congress has created a shield for itself, a useless and destructive agency that it can point to when the public justly blames it for failing to fix our ongoing economic problems. Whether the CFPB can protect Congress in that event is unclear, but one thing is certain: despite its name and lofty goals, it can’t protect consumers.”

PAUL BEDARD: Tea Party wants Rubio as VP as Portman hedges.

ANDREW KLAVAN: Making Lemonade from Divorce Lemons.

WHY IOWAHAWK IS A GENIUS (CONT’D):

DATA-MINING COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION: “The new breed of software can predict how well students will do before they even set foot in the classroom. It recommends courses, Netflix-style, based on students’ academic records.”

GOODBYE, LAWYER: Hello Legal Workflow and Process Analyst.

TIM CAVANAUGH ON THE DEMS’ BACKPEDALING: How “You didn’t build that” became “He didn’t say that.”

What do you do when everybody’s claiming your president said something, and you just know he didn’t really say it, but all the video and all the audio and all the transcripts show that he did say it?

This is the dilemma faced by supporters of President Obama in the long wake of last week’s “You didn’t build that” speech. . . .

The popularization of Derridaian post-modernism since the 1990s has generally been a lot of fun, turning mainstream Americans into sharp observers of signs and meaning who are sure that either there’s nothing outside the text or everything is outside the text or both. But at some point it helps to look at that thing above the subtext, which is generally known as “the text.” Up to this point the presidential election has been Obama vs. Obama Junior. With “You didn’t build that,” which his campaign has made no effort to clarify or redirect, the president has drawn a line in the sand.

There is no nebulousness here. Beyond the paragraph quoted above, Obama calls government spending “the investments that grow our economy.” He ridicules the tendency of Americans to brag about being hard workers with a variant of “So’s your old man.” (“Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”) He instinctively names “a great teacher” when looking for somebody to credit for causing success in the working world. The president has boldly presented his view on how an economy works. His supporters should give him the respect of taking his words seriously.

Well, they would, except for their strong intuition that those words will lose.

Plus, from the comments: “The most obnoxious aspect of Obama’s speech isn’t even the contempt he expressed for individual accomplishment. It’s the crass, sad attempt to appeal to communitarian emotions, even though the small-scale communities where this spirit flourishes are largely populated by the ‘bitter clingers’ he despises.”

Also: “They’re in a panic because Obama stupidly said exactly what he and each and every one of them is thinking.”

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Romney Video: “These Hands.” “Did somebody else take out the loan on my father’s house to finance the equipment? . . . Through hard work and a little bit of luck we built this business. Why are you demonizing us for it? We are the solution, not the problem. It’s time we had someone who believes in us. . . . We need somebody who believes in America.”

JOHN LEO: Janitors With College Degrees and the Higher-Education Bubble. “Employers, because they realize that many college graduates aren’t really educated, now routinely quiz job seekers on what they majored in and what courses they took, a practice virtually unknown a generation ago. Good luck if you majored in gender studies, communications, art history, pop culture, or (really) the history of dancing in Montana in the 1850s.”

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Gary Shilling: 25 Out Of The Last 27 Times Retail Sales Collapsed Like This We Were In A Recession.

YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING: Pelosi: House Democrats should skip the national convention. “House minority leader Nancy Pelosi says that Democratic members should stay home and campaign in their districts rather than go to the party’s national convention in North Carolina.”

IT’S NOT JUST CATHOLICS: Leading Protestant college sues over contraception mandate.

STACY MCCAIN: “Is it just me? Is there anyone else who has a hard time imagining Harry Truman doing a 1948 whistle-stop tour, proclaiming that Tom Dewey was hostile to ‘transgender Americans’?”

From the comments: “Is it such a great change to move from being the party of Weiner to being the party of Frank-N-Furter?” The Doctor was a great American.

Plus: Separated At Birth: Stacy McCain and Riff Raff. So that’s why Stacy always wears the fedora. . . .

A PACK, NOT A HERD: Video Shows Florida Armed Robbery Foiled By Armed Patron.

Money quote: “He never expected anyone to be armed.”

WHY ARE THEY SHOUTING JOYOUSLY? Because it’s cool. I’ve spoken to a couple of people who saw a nuclear test, and both said it was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen; the movies and photos, they said, totally failed to do it justice. You would probably feel differently, of course, if it weren’t a test.

BACKPEDALING: ABC News: DNC Regrets Offending Ann Romney, No More Horse Ads.

Well, I guess that means Jessica Springsteen is safe.

AT AMAZON, Top Deals In Electronics.

MORE PROOF THAT FOR BARACK OBAMA, Atlas Shrugged isn’t a cautionary tale, it’s a how-to manual.

“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”

“Who?”

“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”

She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”

Ouch.

ER, BECAUSE HE’S NOT, AND NEVER WAS? Why Romney deleted the line “He’s a nice guy.”