A NEW BOOK FROM SCOTT “SCRAPPLEFACE” OTT: Hope That Changes: Remembering the Final Days of the Obama Quadrennium. Currently 99 cents on Kindle. Get it while it’s hot!

DEFICIT TOPS $1 TRILLION: “CBO, which releases estimates each month, said the government ran a $192 billion deficit last month. That’s the highest deficit ever for August, which is not traditionally a major month for running in the red. That deep monthly deficit powered the government well past the $1 trillion mark for the fiscal year. With a month still to go, the government is already running $1.17 trillion in arrears.”

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

READER BRYAN FARRIS WRITES: “Given our President’s inability to use an iPhone, I’m beginning to wonder whether this photo-op was staged. If we had a MSM that was doing their job, someone would dare ask the question.”

ANNALS OF THE ONE PERCENT: In A Swirl of Excess, No Guilt Included. “I felt like I was in a cage. But the food was good.”

LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Striking Chicago Teachers Already Doing Awfully Well: “Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work.”

Related: ABC’s Terry Moran asks ‘do striking Chicago teachers know damage they are doing?’; Left flip out, equate with slavery.

UPDATE: Romney: Chicago Teachers Turning Backs On Students.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jeff Brown writes: “How could a motivated Chicago kid or parent try to limit the damage of the teachers’ strike to their education? My first thought, is Khan Academy? I would recommend students coming together online or in person into “study groups” that can overcome the lack of a teacher. Are their other resources out there?”

Khan is good. I don’t know if there are free public online schools in Cook County, but if so that’s another option.

MORE: Ask and ye shall receive: Reader Austin Walne writes: “We provide free online study groups for students all over the world. www.openstudy.com.”

MORE STILL: Reader Michael Cummins writes: “In Florida, the state itself runs an accredited virtual school.”

Plus, the blog comment of the day: “The teachers are upset because they must be (gasp!) evaluated on their work. The parents are upset, not because their kids’ educations are impacted, but because they don’t have a place to drop off their kid. The only people cited as having any concerns whatsoever about education were 16 and 17 year old students.”

Also, Sarah Hoyt emails: “During the year we homeschooled, younger son took classes here: http://lukeion.org/ It’s not free but it’s very, very good, and a classical education never hurt anyone.”

STILL MORE: Reader Michelle Orwick writes: “Any child in Illinois can enroll in Chicago Virtual Charter School. It’s a full-time, tuition free public school option that uses the award-winning (for-profit) K-12 curriculum. We use the K-12 curriculum through our children’s enrollment in the Colorado Virtual Academy, and we love it. It has a far more advanced curriculum in math, science, and history than our public brick-and-mortar school.”

MORE DELICIOUS INVASIVE SPECIES: Elks Make a Dangerous Comeback in Germany. “European elks are using their impressive swimming skills to cross the Oder River from Poland into Germany in search of new territory. But the long-legged giants, which can weigh up to 800 kilograms, are finding their ancient trails broken by busy roads. A motorist killed one on a highway near Berlin this weekend.”

LARRY SOLUM ON the counter-majoritarian difficulty.

I WONDER HOW COME WE’RE NOT HEARING ABOUT GREEN PARTY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE JILL STEIN?

LEFTIES FALL FOR FAKE ROMNEY QUOTE ABOUT SLAVES. These people are not especially bright.

Another newsflash: Romney not actually promising to abolish Martin Luther King holiday.

Also, his campaign slogan didn’t actually come from the KKK. Believe it or not!

On the other hand, Obama really did say “Three proud words — Made In The USA!” And he really is iPhone-challenged. Just in case you’re keeping score.

MAYBE IF THEY TRIED MAKING GOOD MOVIES? Movies suffer worst box-office slump in a decade.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Surge at Tampa Bay community colleges ends. “The number of students enrolled so far this fall is down 4.4 percent at Hillsborough Community College and 2.5 percent at St. Petersburg College. Pasco-Hernando Community College is seeing an even steeper decline — about 8 percent. Those decreases follow explosive growth — double-digit percentages in some years — at all three colleges in recent years. College officials and others offer a variety of explanations for the declines, which show up in both the number of students and the number of credit hours being taken.”

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: LSAT Scores At Top Schools Are Dropping Like Flies.

TOM BLUMER: 43 Months Of Depressing Misery: The Worst Economic Stewardship Since FDR. “The administration’s sole support for its contention that there has been meaningful job market improvement on its watch rests on one carefully chosen statistic: ‘The economy has now added private sector jobs for 30 straight months, for a total of 4.6 million jobs during that period.’ That claim is incorrect. . . . Qualitatively, the job market decay is all around us. The following stats only scratch the surface of the ugliness.”

CHARLES GASPARINO: The Party Of Wall Street:

Among the many falsehoods pushed at last week’s Democratic Convention is that this is the party of the people, unafraid to hold Corporate America responsible for its many ills.

Judging by the records of the last two Democratic administrations, just the opposite appears to be true. Certainly, President Obama and, to some extent, Bill Clinton like to talk a good game in terms of class warfare, but under both men, real corporate crime-fighting has been at best a side issue — despite the immense amounts of white-collar fraud their administrations faced. In fact, neither Obama nor Clinton can hold a candle to the corporate crime-fighting record of George W. Bush, that supposed lapdog for large corporate interests.

Consider: As we near the four-year anniversary of the financial crisis, not a single Wall Street fat cat has been charged with violations of securities laws in connection with the 2008 collapse.

Then we have the outlandish case of MF Global, the brokerage firm run into the ground nearly a year ago by Obama’s pal and campaign-cash bundler, Jon Corzine. It isn’t just that the former Goldman Sachs CEO and New Jersey governor took outsized trading risks that destroyed the firm; his firm appears to have misused and lost $1.6 billion in customer funds in the process.

Under securities laws, those customer funds were supposed to be kept sacrosanct — yet not a single MF Global employee, much less Corzine, has been charged in the matter by the Obama Justice Department or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Talking populism, practicing corporatism.

JUSTIN HIGGINS: We’ve seen these polls before.

STRONGER THAN THE DOLLAR: Oscar Mayer Proposes a New Bacon as a New Currency.

LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Chicago Teachers Walk Out, Charter Schools Unaffected. “Between the charters and the community groups, one begins to get the sense that Chicago — surely representative, in this, of cities and towns across the nation — is having to rebuild a civic society in the gaps left by the official government structure. That is, the official government structure is not so much ‘the only thing we all belong to’ as akin to some outside organization that communities must be prepared to work around.”

UPDATE: A suspicious reader emails: “It MAY be ALL coincidental, but within the last couple of weeks, my cousin told me about a truly diabolical plan for election ‘optics.’ He is a Longshoreman in Texas. His union was considering going on strike for the sole purpose of allowing BHO to intervene and settle the labor dispute and look like either a uniter or maybe even tough on unions. So, when I saw that Rahm’s teachers went on strike in spite of a 16% pay raise offer, my mind went places that logic would never take it, but modern day politics do. Worth watching anyway. Also, to protect my cousin from retribution from union thugs, I suppose it would be best to avoid attribution here.”

Sounds a bit contrived, but who knows? Under Obama, we’ve gone to a lot of places where logic would never have taken us. . . .

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: A big (and updated) version of the biggest, most important chart in American politics.

And let’s just remind people of this chart, too.

For the record, and everything.

UPDATE: Reader Sam Harris recommends this chart, illustrating how the federal government has become “a giant wealth-transfer machine.”

And reader Steve Nelson thinks I should repost this deficit chart: He writes: “It’s especially helpful to note that from 2001 to 2006 the deficit was actually going down in spite of wars and ‘Bush Tax Cuts.’ Then we let the Democrats take over the Congress in 2007, and everything started going south as they got the ability to spend money and impose new laws and regulations.”

Is there an updated version out there somewhere?

A BRIDGE TO THE NEXT MILLENNIUM: Bill Clinton Backs Interstellar Voyage Project.

THIS WEEKEND IN GEORGIA:

To be fair, that’s premium, and it was a just-off-the-interstate gas station. But still. . . .

JUSTICE: When The Law Becomes Oprah-fied. “This new orientation to judgment and to determinations of right and wrong is one of the most far-reaching phenomena in our culture today, permeating the juridical, political, and academic realms from root to tip, with manifestations, ranging from the risible to the grave, that are almost always pernicious.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Iceland Shows Other Europeans How to Survive Bankruptcy.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): An Awful Jobs Report For Young People.

In short, there are a lot more young adults still sitting at their computers, scrounging around jobs boards for work than there should be at this point in the year.

There are other subtle and discouraging aspects of this report for the young. One of the only industries to add significant numbers of workers was food services, which accounted for 28,300 of the 95,000 total new jobs. Restaurant and fast food work is usually a bastion for teenage employment. If that sector is growing, and young people still can’t find employment, it may mean that older workers are now out-competing them for low wage jobs.

Well, because of the Obama Senior Squeeze, a lot of gray-collar workers who might otherwise be retired are having to stay in the workplace.

A LOOK AT THE DRAFT EXECUTIVE ORDER ON CYBERSECURITY: “I suspect that DHS is the big winner, and the Chamber of Commerce the big loser, if the order is issued in this form.”