CHARLES GASPARINO: Steps In The Double-Talk Direction.

Our president has a funny way with words when it comes to describing the lousy economy. Even for an election year, some of his whoppers would be laughable — if they weren’t coming from a man who wants to remain in charge of the country and its floundering economy for another four years

Speaking after last Friday’s jobs report, President Obama said the economy is taking a “step in the right direction.” Really?

Economic growth as measured by gross domestic product is falling; it’s now less than 2 percent. The Friday report showed that 80,000 jobs were created last month, vs. 77,000 the month before. So, yes, there was an increase — but, earlier in the year, the economy created an average of 226,000 jobs a month. The trend line is actually falling — i.e., we’re headed in the wrong direction.

Hey, it’s still “change.”

ROLL CALL: House Ethics Committee to Probe Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV). “The House Ethics Committee said today it will investigate whether Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) broke any ethics rules or laws when she intervened to save a kidney transplant program at a hospital where her physician husband had a lucrative contract. . . . The New York Times, just days before the request was made, had published a story about how Berkley, over the past five years, had promoted legislation and urged regulators to act in ways that benefited both the transplant program and dialysis centers in the state. Berkley’s husband, Dr. Larry Lehrner, is a nephrologist who has a more than $700,000-a-year contract with University Medical Center and a medical practice that owns dialysis centers.”

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Obama tax proposal: Polls aren’t going to fix this economy.

Raising taxes on people who aren’t you is something easily sold to voters, but that doesn’t mean it’s smart economics. And besides, the administration might want to be careful about touting the majority opinions of likely voters in defense of its policies (cough — health care — cough). Then there is this poll, released today by the Hill, showing that “56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.”

Ouch.

JOHN HINDERAKER ON HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED: “Money was a wonderful thing in 2008, when Barack Obama had so much of it that he became the first major party presidential candidate to turn down federal financing of his campaign. But the worm has turned in 2012. Dismayed by Obama’s lousy record in office, contributors are abandoning his campaign and swinging their support to Mitt Romney. The campaigns have released their June fundraising numbers, and Romney has scored another solid victory. . . . The Democrats’ only complaint about money is that this year, they aren’t raising enough of it. And yet news outlets covered yesterday’s demonstration as though it had some significance, and reported seriously on the fact that people who attend a $50,000 a plate fundraiser are–brace yourself!–rich. Together, the pitiful handful of demonstrators and sympathetic reporters coordinated with the Obama campaign, providing it with material for its latest fundraising appeal.”

TOM BLUMER: ‘Seasonally Adjusted’ Hijinks? The Questionable June Jobs Report. “The report’s seasonally adjusted results made it look as if there’s at least some momentum for job growth, while the raw numbers reveal that there’s really none.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D SEE OPEN RACISM IN OUR NATION’S CAPITAL: And they were right!

CHANGE: Deflation Coming to China? Brace Yourself, America.

UPDATE: China’s Import Growth Misses Estimates For June.

CAMPUS CARRY UPDATE: Georgia Tech students push for guns on campus.

HMM: Solar Flares Keep Getting Stronger. I’m not sure if this is a real trend, but sooner or later it’ll be another Carrington Event, and we’re not ready.

A BLAST FROM THE PAST AND A WARNING FOR THE FUTURE: The 50th anniversary of Starfish Prime: the nuke that shook the world.

We should be hardening infrastructure, but I’ve noted that before. Then again, so has William Forstchen.

WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES SO MUCH HAPPIER THAN LIBERALS? “My first guess, without reading on in the article is that they mind their own business.”

AT AMAZON, bestselling men’s running shoes.

CHANGE: Former Obama Donor Holds High Dollar Fundraiser for Romney with Former Obama Donors.

Related: Dems Losing Their “Trumka” Card? AFL-CIO Curbs Convention Involvement.

A WHILE BACK, PROF. BAINBRIDGE WROTE: “I don’t like Nancy Grace. In fact, let’s be honest, I find her utterly loathsome.”

This won’t help: Mom Savaged By Nancy Grace Sets Self Afire, Dies. She is a disgrace to the legal profession, and to her network.

UPDATE: Another Nancy Grace victim.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZED THE PRESIDENT WOULD FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Brad Pitt’s mom in fear after slamming Obama.

TERROR TACTICS: Science In The Anarchists’ Crosshairs.

Chris Mooney was unavailable for comment.

IOWAHAWK: Scandal: Romney has a Swiss bank account valued at 6 milli-Solyndras.

As usual, we’re supposed to be more angry about what Romney has done with his own money, than about what Obama has done with ours.

RICK SANTELLI AND NIGEL FARAGE: “Euro Titanic” Hits The Iceberg.

TRANSPARENCY: Worst TB Outbreak in 20 Years Kept Secret.

UPDATE: Chuck Simmins emails:

While I did write a piece on this at Examiner, I don’t feel a lot of outrage over the secrecy issue. Public health officials do it all the time. They can read the media, too, and remember the Alar scare, the anthrax scare, the smallpox scare, the SARS scare, the bird flu scare… I think they’re entirely justified in believing that the story might not be covered in a fair and balanced manner.

The criticism of the closing of the TB hospital is total BS. It was one of four remaining in the entire US. Medicine has advanced enough that we no longer need to ship TB patients off to a sanitarium. Closing it and saving the money was a good call.

The CDC report should have created a little more reaction than it did. Florida clearly dropped the ball at the state level. Duval County is whining about budget cuts but they have funds for childhood obesity programs, youth risk behavior surveys and other, less deadly, conditions. I suspect that the public health folks of Duval County have forgotten that job one in PH has always been disease control and prevention. Malaria and yellow fever, and smallpox, in the US disappeared because of that and TB ought to have a similar priority.

Yes, the public health people seem more interested in trendy causes and social control than in disease eradication these days.

HAS THE ROLE OF FACULTY IN UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE ERODED? What do you expect when faculty are outnumbered by administrators?

ESQUIRE: Obama’s Administration Killed a 16-Year-Old American and Didn’t Say Anything About It. This Is Justice?

I believe it’s called “change.”

UPDATE: Moe Lane: “You know what’s missing from this Tom Junod piece on drone strikes? . . . Any repudiation of this piece Junod wrote in response to Election Night 2008.” Yep. Hence my mockery.

Moe continues: “Speaking as one of the ‘moldering’ people that the author later gleefully mocked in that article: YOU wanted this, Tom Junod. You wanted every particle of this. You drank deep at the well of hate in 2008, as the above passage shows, and in your hate you fixated on getting Barack Obama elected. And Barack Obama was. And then Barack Obama decided – because he was and is a weak man, with neither George W Bush’s compassion, nor Bush’s moral strength – to pursue the Global War on Terror on the cheap, and from a distance, and without listening to the screams. So, you want to know why Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed, Tom Junod? Why, it was all done for you. So that you could continue to hate your domestic opponents in peace, and without hindrance. Own it.”

Okay, that’s harsher than mere mockery, but entirely deserved.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes: “Yes, Moe Lane’s observation is harsh and deserved. But, for all his righteousness, it’s a safe bet that Junod will vote for Obama again and not lose one night of sleep having done so: Have you no shame, Mr. Junod? Why ask?”

MORE: A reader emails: “I haven’t dug too deeply into the article or other commentary, but I find it ironic that Obama put in place protocols that end up killing innocent young men searching for their fathers, as that’s sort of what his whole first book is about and what endeared him to so many in the first place.”

ELIZABETH WARREN’S ONGOING CHEROKEE PROBLEMS: You know, all she had to say was that she thought she was part Cherokee, because that was what her family told her, and that now it looks like she was wrong. Which I expect was the truth. People would have understood. Everybody has “family lore,” and some of it doesn’t hold up in the era of Ancestry.com. Instead, she doubled down. But the Cherokee thing, though fun for a lot of people, isn’t the big problem in my opinion. It’s this:

At this point, Warren is little more than the machine candidate, recruited in DC by, among others, Sen. Chuck Schumer (who has sent at least one of his staffers to Boston for the duration).

Most important: Warren’s campaign biography, so craftily constructed over so many years, lies in ruins. Not only did she drive an MG in high school, she only traded in her BMW 528i for a Ford hybrid last year, just before the campaign began.

Her academic bona fides have been savaged in the blogs, and opposition researchers have shown that she was a prodigious house-flipper and home-foreclosure speculator in her old hometown of Oklahoma City.

Her campaign literature still denounces the deregulated credit industry that “squeezed families harder, hawking dangerous mortgages.” Dangerous for many, but profitable for Liz Warren.

In one 1993 transaction, she bought a house for $30,000, then flipped it five months later for $145,000 — a 383 percent gain. Not bad for the woman who less than a year ago bragged of crafting the “intellectual foundations” for Occupy Wall Street.

Given how OWS turned out, that brag should be disqualifying all by itself.

WEIRD, BUT NOT AS WEIRD AS FIRST THOUGHT: Two studies show ‘weird life’ microbe can’t live on arsenic. “A year and a half after one team of researchers claimed they had bred a type of bacteria that could live on arsenic, suggesting that life is weirder than we imagine, two other teams have found that the microbe really doesn’t do anything with the arsenic after all. These two teams say that the microbe, known as GFAJ-1, is somewhat weird, due to the fact that it can survive amid ultra-high concentrations of arsenic. But they confirm the widely held view among microbiologists that GFAJ-1 did not rewrite the existing rules of life — an extraordinary claim that was implied by the initial study, which made a huge splash in December 2010.”

THE PRESS NOT SO INTERESTED in flinging Thurston Howell stereotypes at Obama’s rich donors.

FROM MARK LEVIN: A Pre-Election Tax Proposal. “Ok, two can play the Obama game. Here’s the Levin proposal: A one year tax holiday from all federal taxes of any kind (income, payroll, capital gains, and death) for all tax filers with adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 or less, and all joint and business returns with adjusted gross incomes of $250,000 or less. The status quo will apply to all filers earning above these thresholds.”