A POSTER FROM SARAH HOYT:

TA-NEHISI COATES: Obama has become Dick Cheney. But most of the folks who hated Cheney will still vote for him. ‘Cause, you know, he’s their Dick Cheney.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Last Compromise. “Many hoped that the election of the first African-American President of the United States meant a decisive turn in the long and troubled history of race relations in the United States. And indeed President Obama’s election was a signal success for the American racial settlement of the 1970s. But at the moment of its greatest success, that settlement—call it the Compromise of 1977—was beginning to unravel, as evidenced by the fact that President Obama’s nearly four years in office to date have witnessed decades of economic progress and rising political power in black America shifting into reverse.”

Not a blog post, but a full-length feature article, this is a must-read.

BRYAN PRESTON TELLS NEWSWEEK WHERE TO FIND THE WIMP.

ANDREW MALCOLM: The Amazing Thing That Didn’t Happen In Iowa.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Why I Detest The Olympics. Me too, except for the beach volleyball.

THEIR APPEAL HAS BECOME MORE SELECTIVE: Obama camp – We are intentionally limiting crowd size at rallies.

AT AMAZON, it’s coupons, coupons, and more coupons.

Also, today only: Canon PIXMA Wireless Inkjet Photo All-In-One Printer, $59.99.

MARKOS MOULITSAS TWEETED THAT THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN WOULD BE AFRAID TO LET PAUL RYAN VISIT FLORIDA: Not so much, as it turns out.

These guys don’t seem to be following the script that the Dems and media had written for them.

UPDATE: Can Romney and Ryan win the Medicare debate? “The reality is just sinking in that Republicans may not only not suffer for their votes to reform Medicare but could actually benefit.”

You know what will kill Medicare as we know it? Medicare as we know it. It’s not just IowaHawk who’s figured that out. So have a lot of voters.

MICHAEL BARONE: Ryan anchors GOP ticket in values of founders.

Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan was supposed to be a problem for the Republicans. So said a chorus of chortling Democrats. So said a gaggle of anonymous seasoned Republican operatives. All of which was echoed gleefully by mainstream media.

The problem, these purveyors of the conventional wisdom all said, was Medicare — to be more specific, the future changes in Medicare set out in the budget resolutions Ryan fashioned as House Budget Committee chairman and persuaded almost all House and Senate Republicans to vote for.

But while Democrats licked their chops at the prospect of scaring old ladies that they’d be sent downhill in wheelchairs, the Medicare issue seems to be working in the other direction.

Romney and Ryan have gone on the offense, noting that while their plan calls for no changes for current Medicare recipients and those older than 55, Obamacare, saved from demolition by Chief Justice John Roberts, cuts $716 billion from politically popular Medicare to pay for Obama’s politically unpopular health care law.

The Romney campaign is putting TV advertising money behind this message, and it will have plenty more to spend — quite possibly more than the Obama forces — once the Romney-Ryan ticket is officially nominated in Tampa, Fla., in ten days. Team Obama is visibly squirming.

It turns out that Ryan and Romney, who in late 2011 and early 2012 moved quietly but deliberately toward embracing the Ryan agenda, may have outthought their adversaries.

To be fair, one of them is Joe Biden. And the other is the guy who picked Joe Biden. . . .

YACHTS ARE MOBILE: Wealthy Italians Take Lessons From John Kerry to Dodge Taxes.

LOOKS LIKE OBAMA HAS LOST THE REAGAN DEMOCRATS. Look at the photo.

UPDATE: Note this from New York State. The story’s about a local Congressional race, but includes this bit:

An Obama supporter in 2008, Pumm said he now agrees with Collins’ criticism of the president.

“The biggest things for me are jobs and the economy,” he said, “and he’s failed on that.” . . .

Yes, he has. Hey, I guess it’s time to run that graphic again!

But then, it’s always time to do that! And you can click on the image for a bigger version, suitable for sharing, posting by the water cooler at work, or whatever . . . .

LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: New York Times: Teachers On The Defensive.

Nothing — nothing — is more important than the education of our children, and while various interests will make competing claims about whether it’s improving or slipping and how best to measure that, education certainly isn’t at the level we want or need it to be. Public education, that is.

All around me I see parents of means going the private route and dipping as far into their bank accounts as necessary to purchase every last advantage a kid can have. . . .

Perhaps most striking are the rifts that have opened between teachers’ unions and Democrats, who had long been their allies. President Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan as education secretary and the administration’s subsequent Race to the Top initiative weren’t exactly music to the unions’ ears.

In Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other cities, Democratic mayors have feuded bitterly with teachers’ unions and at times come to see them as enemies. And at a meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors in June, Democratic mayors joined Republican ones in a unanimous endorsement of so-called parent trigger legislation, about which unions have serious reservations. These laws, recently passed in only a few states but being considered in more, abet parent takeovers of underperforming schools, which may then be replaced with charter schools run by private entities.

Read the whole thing. And note this comment from a formerly unionized teacher.

I spent eight years as a public middle school teacher in a Title I school. It never seemed like the union was doing the kids any favors. I loved my students, but I was surrounded by incompetence and mismanagement. Most of my colleagues were angry, bitter women who didn’t like children. They should not have been teachers, but they could not be fired. At any given time, we had three to four teachers out on administrative leave, which means that they did something worthy of being fired but were protected by the union. For all but a handful of fellow dedicated professionals, I prayed that at least these disinterested adults weren’t doing the kids any harm.

It all finally ground me down, and I left two years ago to teach at a private school. I now work with colleagues who are uniformly stimulating, motivated, creative, and hard-working people. Did I mention that we work HARD? At my unionized public school, the most common thing I heard in the teachers’ lounge was complaining. Now I can’t get away from teachers running lesson plan ideas past me and inviting me to work on interdisciplinary projects with them. I make about $5000 more at this school, and still probably don’t make enough money for the amount of work I do, but I love my job and can’t imagine doing anything else. At my private school, teachers can be fired for incompetence, and we actually have performance reviews and receive helpful feedback from administration.

Imagine that.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Law Schools Jack Up Tuition 4%-6% Despite 14% Decline in Applicants. Apparently, nobody teaches the law of supply and demand.

THE E.U. IS STILL HAIRSPLITTING ON HEZBOLLAH. It goes back to the “proxy war” stuff that we talked about nearly a decade ago. Then there was the whole “flotilla” thing.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Who Made That Tube Top?

ED DRISCOLL: Soledad O’Brien’s Progressive Nostalgia and the Collapse of CNN. “O’Brien has been on the air for over 20 years now, at first NBC, then the nascent MSNBC, and then CNN. How do you cover politics professionally and yet pretend that you’re so naive you haven’t formed opinions, both pro and con about the people and ideologies you cover? It’s a sham — we know it, she knows it, and her bosses know it. But the network heads at Fox and MSNBC are at least smart enough to know that it’s an outdated sham. Which is why they’ve outflanked CNN and left it in the dust.”

SHOCKER: Law Firms To Experience Tepid Growth in 2012.