HE’S GOOD AT CLAIMING CREDIT AND CASTING BLAME: A reader emails: “Obama is taking credit for unemployment declines in Ohio . . . When those declines are actually due to 1) shale gas development in the state, 2) drill and casing steel manufacturing as a result of incased oil and gas development on state and private leases throughout many states, 3) taxpayer funded bailouts of GM and Chrysler, and 4) workforce relocation to other states.”

Related: Energy Jobs a Driving Force in Ohio Economic Recovery.

With new domestic oil and gas production being one of the few bright spots in the otherwise lousy Obama economy, it’s ironic that Dick Cheney’s legacy may be helping Obama get re-elected.

REASON TV: How City Hall is F*cking Record Store Day!

TAKING THE GAS-PUMP POST-IT CAMPAIGN TO A NEW LEVEL: Reader Alex Lecea emails, “Saw an ad for this site on Drudge this morning, thought you’d be interested.” Heh.

UPDATE: Reader Chris Fox writes:

Could we have possibly drawn a more stark comparison between the Tea Party minded and the OWS minded? We say it with Post-It notes. They say it with feces and spray paint. They made a mess of DC and Wisconsin. We cleaned it up and left it better than we found it. Oh, and we also didn’t rape or kill anyone.

Post-its are also the tool of the business-minded. No wonder it never occurred to the OWS crowd.

Heh. How true.

WELL, GLAD TO BE OF HELP: Reader Dan O’Brien writes:

Last fall I started a workout program at the local gym. I hired a personal trainer who worked there and he had me doing general strength training. I went so far and eventually didn’t renew my PT sessions. I worked a bit on my own, but was generally lost and frustrated with the process. THEN I watched your interview with Mark Rippetoe and all that changed. I bought Mark’s latest edition Starting Strength and started his program. I now have a direction and a purpose to my work outs. I’ve added equipment to my home gym and again, through your recommendation of Amazon Prime membership, saved a ton of money on equipment purchases and shipping fees.

For example, I bought 2 45lb grip style lifting plates for $40 each with zero shipping costs. This beat the price of my local Wal-Mart not counting the savings on purchase tax.

Again, your interview with Mark and your recommendation of Amazon Prime have change my life. Thank you.

You can’t beat Amazon Prime. And since that interview I’ve incorporated more of Rippetoe’s approach into my own workouts, and I’ve definitely seen an improvement.

Other readers favor Gary Taubes. Reader David Brown writes: “Thank you for the Gary Taubes links. Fifteen #’s down so far.” And reader Jack Howard emails:

How many times have you linked to Gary Taubes and others’ books that point out that the Death Food is carbs, not fat?

I’ve lost 76 pounds to date on the ‘Low Food Diet’ (my term) using a simple calorie counting phone app (there’s lots of them out there)

The discovery in this was not finding out how little we get to eat now. It was realizing the industrial quantities we used to eat without so much as a thought. It was realizing there is no hard line between being overweight and those 600-700 pounders on The Learning Channel and the half tonners in the Guinness Book of World Records. There is only eating more or eating less. I have decided to give Less a shot.

Yes, I use the Livestrong App to track calories and exercise, and it works quite well. I was inspired to try it by a friend’s wife who lost over 60 pounds and now looks fabulous. It lets you check the calories and composition of restaurant food from its database before ordering, too, which is very useful.

The thing is, for most people not being fat is a choice you have to make. If you follow the path of least resistance in today’s world, you’ll probably be (at least) pudgy, and quite possibly downright corpulent. Watching both your overall food intake and in particular keeping carbs down, and doing weight training, will take you a long way toward staying healthy and fit.

Alternatively, you can get one of those motorized scooters with a double-wide seat. I understand from the commercials that you may not have to pay a dime out of your own pocket . . . .

I should also note that although I’m skeptical of his approach, quite a few readers have written to say thanks for the link to Dr. William Davis’s Wheat Belly. One of my blog-buddies wrote me a while back to say he’d lost 30 pounds and felt much better.

While some of these diets are better than others — and some are better for some people than for others, I suspect — almost anything that makes you pay attention to what you eat is likely to do some good.

SHOCKER: More Anti-Semitism At Occupy Wall Street.

INTERVIEW: Joel Kotkin on the Great California Exodus.

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

The scruffy-looking urban studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of California’s dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.

“Basically, if you don’t own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven’t robbed a bank and don’t have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak,” says Mr. Kotkin.

While many middle-class families have moved inland, those regions don’t have the same allure or amenities as the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing and everything else is cheaper and there’s no income tax.

And things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their “smart growth” plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. “What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s,” Mr. Kotkin declares.

Read the whole thing.

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW: Sen. Hatch In 1995: ‘Running For Re-Election Is Not On The List’ For 2012.

UPDATE: Reader Lars Theriot writes: “It occurs to me that any other thing that caused people to react the way Orrin Hatch is reacting when you threaten to take it away from them would be labeled an addictive substance and banned.”

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The Democratic War on One Woman: Politics trumps civility for Senators Boxer, Lautenberg and Reid. “There is the war on women that isn’t real, but that Democrats keep talking about. Then there is the Democratic war on one woman, which says a lot about how that party operates.”

JAMES TARANTO: Another attack on Romney predictably backfires. “The truth is that Romney and Obama are both products of distinctively American subcultures–respectively, the Mormon church and the academic left. The difference is that whereas the Mormons, for more than a century, have aspired to join the American mainstream, the academic left is aggressively adversarial. It’s true that there is much about Mormonism that seems odd to people of other faiths. But a contest over whose opponent is weirder is one Obama cannot possibly win.”

SHOCKINGLY, I DIDN’T MAKE THE LIST: The Most Influential Lawyers In The World.

THAT’S THE “NONPARTISAN CBO” SPEAKING: CBO: Obama Budget Would Reduce Economic Growth. “Larger deficits caused by the budget would cause the government to issue more bonds, sucking up private capital to finance its debts and thereby reducing the funds businesses could use to expand and hire, the CBO said. An increased tax on capital gains included in the president’s plan would also tend to reduce private capital, it says.”

VAST LEFT-WING CONSPIRACY: DOJ Refers Reporter To Media Matters.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Are Democrats Fleeing Obama’s Sinking Ship? “Perhaps Democrats know something the rest of us don’t about Barack Obama’s political fortunes. What else explains the increasing numbers who are openly defying the president on two key election issues? The notoriously thin-skinned Obama could not have been happy with the news last week that, as the Hill newspaper put it, ‘an increasing number of Democrats are taking potshots at President Obama’s health care law.’ . . . This fear is even more evident when you look at the growing opposition among Democrats to Obama’s position on the Keystone XL pipeline. Obama may have thought he’d cleverly handled the issue by putting it off until next year, and that no one would think to defy his veto threats. But when Republicans called his bluff with a bill to force a start on construction, 69 Democrats rushed to join them, giving the House bill a veto-proof majority. The Senate bill is just a vote or two away from overcoming a Democratic filibuster.”

HYPE AND HYPERTROPHY: How Lamborghini Lost Its Man Card. Plus, thoughts on masculinity in general and the “war on men” in particular.

A TOM MAGUIRE CRITIQUE: Zimmerman Bond Hearing – Media Reaction. Plus, from the comments: “When the Guardian did a better liveblog, than any of the ‘usual suspects’ you know they dropped the ball.”

SHUFFLIN’ THROUGH THE STREET, ASKIN’ PEOPLE: WHASSA MATTA WIT YOU BOY? “Unemployed, perennially confrontational talking head Keith Olbermann aimlessly wandered around Central Park South earlier this week, seemingly looking for a friend or a purpose.”

CHANGE: Obama Sees Steep Dropoff in Cash From Major Donors.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

So a candidate is increasingly unpopular with American donors but retains a vestige of foreign popularity, particularly in certain countries which would like to see “flexibility” on issues in like missile defense in a 2nd term. If there were some way this theoretical candidate could accept foreign donations, it would be awfully tempting. Of course, such a gambit would require drastic measures, like using a series of small and untraceable donations. Cash would be too cumbersome, so this candidate would probably want to use credit cards…hmm…, ah, but the address verification system would need to be disabled to allow that….hmmm…, tempting, but there’s no way the press would let a candidate get away with something that blatant. So I guess we’re safe. Whew! I was getting worried for a minute there.

Yeah, that could never happen.

ED DRISCOLL: President Goldman Sachs Presents ‘The Muppet Show,’ Sponsored by GE.

Consider this another example of Blair’s Law: Goldman Sachs, the company that thinks of its customers as “muppets,” is deeply in bed with the Obama administration, right down to their fundraising operations. The leader of said administration thinks of most Americans as lethargic bitter clingers, typical white people, who’ve acted stupidly, who’ve become soft, and who have lost their imagination and willingness to go along with the big government projects he envisions for them. (“What about more smart grids?” “We need more moon shot!”) And the above articles appear on a subsidiary Website of General Electric, whose CEO is Obama’s “Jobs Czar,” when he’s not sending GE’s own jobs to China, and whose on-air talent at the sister network to CNBC thinks of half the American people in arguably even worse terms than Obama himself does.

Read the whole thing.

Plus: “Barack Obama’s reelection campaign has released the most recent list of names of fundraising bundlers. On that list is Jon Corzine, the former governor of New Jersey and embattled money man, the former head of MF Global.”

PAUL MIRENGOFF is back to Power Line.

MEDIAITE’S TOMMY CHRISTOPHER IS OBVIOUSLY A RACIST: I mean, who but a racist would assume that isn’t working has something to do with black people?

When I first saw the banner this afternoon, the multiple meanings were clear: President Obama‘s policies aren’t working, the Obama presidency isn’t working, President Obama…isn’t working, as in, doing any work. That’s not a nice thing to say about any president, but like it or not, it becomes a more loaded accusation when leveled at our first black president.

Christopher is obviously someone who reflexively thinks of black people as lazy. Sure, he says that some “friends” agreed with him, but they’re probably just bigots who share his prejudices. For shame. And shame on Mediaite for having this latter-day Theodore Bilbo on its staff!

CAROLINE GLICK: The Elephant Of Jew-Hatred.

OBAMA AT FENWAY: A reader emails:

Jumbotron-sized Obama with a message for Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary game this afternoon against Yankees. Half the crowd–by our guess–was actually booing, and only a few cheers aloud. This is Boston! Bad tidings.

Don’t use my name, since I’m a Red Sox fan lurking in NY.

Was anybody else there to hear this?

UPDATE: Reader Chris Lynch writes: “A number of the Boston based sportswriters I follow on Twitter reported Obama’s video message getting booed. I didn’t see it because they didn’t show it on NESN (the network 75% owned by the Red Sox). The fact that they tacked the message from the ‘most powerful man in the world’ onto the end of the celebration when most people were going to the beer lines or bathrooms and went to commercial on TV instead of showing it is even more telling. Almost as if ‘yeah yeah – not this guy again’ even in the heart of the Bluest State in the Union.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s confirmation from Mediaite, though since they employ a well-known racist you might want to take that with a grain of salt. But luckily, Weasel Zippers is on it, too.

CORONER: Breitbart Died of Natural Causes.

AUSTIN BAY ON SYRIA: Assad’s Creeping War of Repression.

WHEN JOB APPLICANTS reject themselves first.