CREDIT MYTHS that even smart people believe.

IF ADDING 4 TRILLION DOLLARS TO THE NATIONAL DEBT WAS “UNPATRIOTIC,” then what about Obama’s $5 Trillion?

“The RNC certainly remembers this attack — and they’re featuring it in a new ad this week. While Bush added $4 trillion in eight years, Obama has added $5 trillion in just over three — and deficits will remain over the Bush-era deficits for the next several years in Obama’s own budget projections.”

ANDY GRIFFITH HAS DIED. I prefer to remember him as Sheriff Andy Taylor, rather than as a shill for ObamaCare.

HMM: Poll: Likely Voters Say Carter Was Better President Than Obama.

IS WALL STREET LEAVING WALL STREET BEHIND?

Wall Street as we know it may not be long for this world—though the movement that occupied its parks has little to do with it. The New York Times reports that, despite good years for America’s investment bankers, the number of mid-level financial positions on the Street is slowly dropping as banks escape the city’s regulations, high taxes, and high labor costs to open offices in friendlier states like Utah, North Carolina, and Florida.

New York city is looking more and more like a Potemkin Village these days. The middle levels of the city’s private sector are hollowing out, with fewer positions between the high wage titans and the low wage service-sector workers. Wall Street’s CEOs may still keep their high-rent digs in Lower Manhattan, but the cohort of well-paid but not super-rich employees that forms the middle class of any investment bank is quietly moving out of the city for cheaper rents elsewhere.

This is a textbook case of how the blue social model creates exactly those conditions that Americans deplore. New York’s complicated regulatory structure, high rents and high welfare costs make it almost impossible for even wealthy companies to maintain mass middle-class employment.

Meanwhile Nanny Bloomberg bans big gulps and ignores the bedbug problem.

FREEDOM: Groups that fought anti-piracy bills post their ‘Declaration of Internet Freedom.’

WAR ON PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: Exclusive Video: Bike Cop Shuts Down Video as Protesters Call for Eric Holder to be Fired.

NEW MODEL: Last year, Kickstarter provided more arts money than the National Endowment for the Arts. And without the cronyism and backscratching.

AT AMAZON, Top Deals In Electronics.

Also, today only: Recent hit albums on MP3 for $1.99.

CHANGE: Young Voters Cool On Obama. Probably something to do with massive unemployment and overhanging debt. Just at a guess.

ANOTHER FAKE HATE CRIME: “In March, hundreds of students at Central Connecticut State University held a rally to back Alexandra Pennell, a student who told the crowd that she had been receiving notes in her dormitory room attacking her for being a lesbian. Now Pennell has been expelled from the university and faces numerous criminal charges that she faked the notes.”

MICHAEL WALSH: “I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet on the Right just how awful the John Roberts Obamacare decision really is, or what nasty consequences will now flow from it.”

YES, YES, YES: Want To Keep A/C On? Bury Power Lines.

Too bad we didn’t use that stimulus money on something useful, like hardening our infrastructure, instead of frittering it away on green payoffs to Obama supporters.

But then, if we’d done that, it would have produced too many jobs for burly men. And we can’t have that.

Related: East Coast Storm Keeps Millions In The Dark.

JOURNALISM: Washington Post Fact Checker: I Don’t Fact Check Our Own Writers.

#GREENFAIL: Bankrupt Colo. solar firm sticks taxpayers for $68 million, doomed by poor quality.

FROM “HOPE AND CHANGE” TO “POLITICALLY TOXIC:” Roll Call: After Health Care Ruling, Law Still Politically Toxic.

The Supreme Court’s decision upholding President Barack Obama’s health care law is a historic policy victory for his administration and the Democrats who lost control of the House and their filibuster-proof Senate majority pushing the reform through Congress in the face of united GOP opposition.

But the politics of the Affordable Care Act — or “Obamacare” — are unlikely to improve for Obama and Congressional Democrats running for re-election in 2012, and in fact could boost presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and GOP candidates running down the ticket. Why isn’t Obama’s victory likely to translate into a political boost at the polls? Because, voters’ negative feelings about Obama’s health care overhaul had little to do with questions of its constitutionality.

Constitutional or not, it’s a lousy idea, and voters know it.

ISRAEL AND ENERGY: “Israel is set to shake up the energy landscape in the Middle East like no one has ever seen before. Last week, Israel Opportunity Energy Resources LP discovered an offshore oil and gas field with an estimated 1.4 billion barrels of oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. According to the company’s Chairman, Ronny Halman, “The quantity of gas discovered… makes it the third-largest offshore discovery to date.” It follows last June’s announcement of uncovering 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 800 million barrels of oil in Israel’s Tamar and Leviathan offshore fields. Yet, for Israel, these discoveries are only the beginning.”

BUT WHERE’S OBAMA? D.C. Area Power Outages Linger and Anger at Pepco Grows.

LIFE IN MAYOR BLOOMBERG’S NEW YORK: Photograph the Police, Get Named “Professional Agitators” in Wanted Poster. And a semi-literate wanted poster at that. The poster gives a Sgt. Nicholson’s cell number, so I hope some people have called him to point out the inappropriateness of this behavior.

UPDATE: Yeah, they’re big lefties. So what? They still have a right to video the police.

PRIVACY: Twitter complied with 75 percent of US requests for user information. “Twitter received 679 requests for user information from the U.S. government in the last year, according to a report released by the company Monday. The requests from the United States exceeded that of any other country, and Twitter released ‘some or all’ of the information asked for in 75 percent of these requests, the company said.”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Manufacturing in U.S. Unexpectedly Contracted in June.

BOB ZUBRIN: Incinerating America’s West: The massive western wildfires could have been avoided with intelligent forest management and less hysteria from the greens.

GOTCHER “HOPE AND CHANGE” RIGHT HERE: Obama “Will Pivot to the Drug War” in Second Term, Claim Anonymous White House Sources.

Hey, rube!

UPDATE: Reader Alan LeWinter snarks: “How many terms needed before Obama pivots to the economy?” Heh.

RED-LIGHT CAMERA UPDATE: Pasadena Shuts Down Red-Light Cameras. “City officials decided not to renew a contract with American Traffic Systems Inc. for the city’s seven red-light cameras, citing a lack of enforcement from Los Angeles County courts, time wasted by Pasadena police officers and questions about the cameras’ effectiveness in improving traffic safety. Additionally, the program — while never expected to bring in a lot of money — is running at a $4,487 deficit, the Pasadena Sun reported.” Ha. I don’t believe that about the expectations. There’s a reason they call these things “revenue-light cameras.” But passive resistance — people just don’t pay, and it’s too hard to go after them — seems to be frustrating these things in many places.