#OBAMAFAIL: “Julia”: Obama marketing machine fail. “How did the slick Obama campaign of 2008, the team that brought modernity, intellectualism, and cool back to D.C., end up making so many missteps this time around? (Remember how much fun #AttackWatch was?) The marketing team at Obama HQ might as well be focus-grouping Rachel Maddow and Debbie Wasserman-Schulz.”

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on office products.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Fears grow over future of blind dissident Chen Guangcheng after Hillary Clinton flies out. After this debacle, I doubt we’ll hear much talk of Hillary replacing Biden on the ticket.

HEH: “Too Much Is Made of This Twitter.”

FAKEGATE UPDATE: New Evidence Released in Fakegate Global Warming Scandal.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Government Prosecution of Student Loan Defaults Rose 25.7% Last Month. Feel the hope and change!

AT AMAZON, new releases in Blu-Ray.

Also, today only, Save up to 70% on Men’s Suits, Sport Coats, and Separates.

EVEN THE WAPO IS POINTING OUT THAT THE NUMBERS DON’T WORK: The Incredible Shrinking Labor Force. “If the same percentage of adults were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent. If the percentage was where it was when George W. Bush took office, the unemployment rate would be 13.1 percent.”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Jobs? What Jobs? Note this chart in particular:

Why have jobs recovered so slowly, and so little, compared to past recessions?

UPDATE: Reader John Hawkins — no, not that one, another John Hawkins — writes: “You keep saying that Jimmy Carter is a best-case scenario for Broke Obama, and looking at that jobs chart confirms it, at least when it comes to employment. Carter’s recession is the yellow line up in the corner. The current red line is four times deeper and five times longer.”

And reader Brock Cusick emails:

Glenn, this chart is more important than just Obama’s awful stewardship of the economy. Look closer. Look at how each recovery takes longer than the previous one. The longest recovery prior to this one was 2001, and the longest recovery before that was 1991. This is a chart of demosclerosis. We don’t just need to get rid of Obama. We need a hard reset of the entire Federal apparatus. A do-over, if you will. Or the next recession will be even worse – no matter who’s in office.

Here’s a simple solution: Any Federal agency which isn’t delivering real value, is shut down. Give the employees a generous exit package to lessen the human cost, but get the regulators to stop interfering with the economy. And any Federal agency that’s kept, gets six months to re-write the regulations so that they’re clear, transparent, market friendly, and less than 100 pages in length.

And, of course, pass a major tax reform. Make the tax code 10 pages in length. Make that a hard cap.

Works for me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Economic historian Eric Schubert writes:

There are two basic reasons why the job situation remains so tough:

First, the current recession is a classic balance sheet recession that was 30 years in the making. The housing bubble of the last decade was the culmination of our increasing love of debt and our failure to save. Nouriel Roubini called it four years ago. His analysis – along with Gary Schilling’s – still holds. The large run-up of government debt under the Obama Administration has allowed private balance sheets to heal. – a process very similar to what Nordic countries faced in the 1990s. The process would have happened if John McCain had won in 2008. An inevitability, unless you want 25-30 percent unemployment over a very short period of time. Low job growth is a function of the laws of economics, not politics.

The problem we now face is that next year the government balance sheet will need to be addressed, which will prolong the hiring slump over the next five years. No sign President Present is up to that job.

Second, there is a structural mismatch on skills and education young men and women are getting and what is needed in the economy. Walter Russell Mead has been writing on the subject extensively for the past year. Too many folks leaning on the Blue Social Model for their future; education needs serious reform. Arnold Kling wrote a convincing column months that there is some strong evidence that a comparable mismatch also prolonged the Great Depression.

http://www.american.com/archive/2011/november/what-if-middle-class-jobs-disappear

While I agree with some of Mr. Cusik’s ideas, Obama has done little either way to impact employment. What he did with the stimulus package, however, was one of the most egregious forms of crony capitalism in the history of this country. And as Michael Barone has repeatedly commented, the President still pushes the outdated Blue Social Model from the 1950s, which makes him more of a square than Governor Romney! In that respect, a second term would slow the healing and transformation our economy needs, and which I believe Governor Romney understands or will soon grasp.

Let’s hope.

SECURITY: Everyone Has Been Hacked. Now What? “On Apr. 7, 2011, five days before Microsoft patched a critical zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer that had been publicly disclosed three months earlier on a security mailing list, unknown attackers launched a spear-phishing attack against workers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. . . . The cleverly crafted missive included a link to a malicious webpage, where workers could get information about employee benefits. But instead of getting facts about a health plan or retirement fund, workers who visited the site using Internet Explorer got bit with malicious code that downloaded silently to their machines. Although the lab detected the spear-phishing attack soon after it began, administrators weren’t quick enough to stop 57 workers from clicking on the malicious link. Luckily, only two employee machines were infected with the code. But that was enough for the intruders to get onto the lab’s network and begin siphoning data. Four days after the e-mails arrived, administrators spotted suspicious traffic leaving a server.”

SCIENCE: Researchers develop sensitive radiation surveillance method. “Researchers have devised a new approach to illicit radioactivity surveillance using a nano-photonic composite scintillation detector. The team at the Georgia Institute of Technology claim their prototype, which combines rare-earth elements and other materials at the nanoscale, improves sensitivity, accuracy and robustness.”

THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.

HEH: Obama Campaign Celebrates Disappointing April Jobs Report. That’s BuzzFeed’s headline, not mine. Plus this: “It may have fallen short of economists’, but the Obama campaign’s Tumblr says, ‘Holler for 26 straight months of job growth.’ Also, they have a tag for ‘holler.'” Of course they do.

We have a holler president, and a holler presidency.

OBAMA FAILS TO DELIVER promised “overflow” crowd. It’s not 2008 anymore.

200 YEARS OF SURGERY.

FRANK J. FLEMING: The More Precise Life of Julia: A few details left out of the Obama campaign slideshow. Frankly, the chainsaw robot arm seems pretty cool to me.

SUCCEEDING WHERE OTHERS FAIL: Why Solarcity Is Succeeding in a Difficult Solar Industry. “The key difference between Solarcity and many other clean-energy startups is that it isn’t trying to take on incumbents with new technology. It makes money by deploying existing solar technology with a novel approach to financing. Solarcity designs, installs, and maintains solar-energy systems fitted to homeowners’ roofs. Instead of asking for a big upfront payment, it leases the systems. As the panels produce power, surplus electricity is sold back to the local utility. Combined with the savings that come from using less power from the grid, this will typically reduce the homeowner’s electric bill by enough to offset the lease payments.”

WHAT WILL BE THE NEXT X-Prize Challenge?

READER ALLEN MITCHUM ASKS ME to plug his thriller novel, 28 Pages. Done! (Note: That’s the title, not the actual length of the book. . . .)

JUST REMEMBER: TECHNICALLY, BEER ISN’T A “TRAIT:” The Trait that Makes Your Partner More Attractive.

THE GREATEST SANDWICH in the world. It just might be.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN, CREATIONISTS WOULD BE LECTURING AT OUR MOST PROMINENT UNIVERSITIES: And they were right! “Dr. Ben Carson is internationally known for his skill as a neurosurgeon and his inspiring life story. But his position on evolution is drawing fire from some professors at Emory University, where he will give the commencement address. . . . Carson will also receive an honorary degree from Emory during the graduation.”

UPDATE: Reader John Steakley writes: “Maybe they should bring back Michael Bellesiles. He will say whatever they want him to say. :)” Heh.

JENNIFER RUBIN THINKS THE NEW MEDIA ARE BLOWING IT AND FALLING FOR OBAMA’S DISTRACTIONS. Well, she has a point, up to a point, but only up to a point. She’s right that the election won’t be decided by dog-eating claims or Julia-campaign-mockery. But she’s wrong if she suggests that we in the blogosphere should be ignoring those things.

First, we’re winning on this stuff, enough so that the New York Times is running scared. That’s a big deal. The Obamites thought they were going to rule the social-media world because, you know, they’re young, tech-savvy hipsters and stuff. Instead, they’ve gotten their heads handed to them again and again.

Second, the new media still doesn’t have the power to set the agenda, really. Sometimes we can force things onto the agenda, but the “agenda” — defined as what most MSM outlets are talking about on a given day — is still set by the MSM. Even hard and steady pushes on things like Fast And Furious haven’t really pushed that (huge) scandal into widespread national discussion; when Jimmy Kimmel joked about it at the Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend, it was obvious that a lot of the audience didn’t know what he meant. And that was at the Correspondents’ Dinner! Send ’em a copy of Katie Pavlich’s book! It’s a bestseller, now. . . .

This may be the last election cycle where that’s true — in 4 years, at its current burn rate, the New York Times may not even exist — but we have more power engaging in jiu-jitsu on things that they have already put on the table. That’s not to undercut Jennifer’s suggestion that other topics deserve more attention than Obama’s dog eating or his cruelly statist vision of Julia’s future, but if you read her list of things the press should be reporting about, few of them are really suitable for new-media coverage.

In truth, the way to push those topics into mainstream media coverage is for Romney to mention them directly; despite press bias, when a candidate talks about things, the press will cover it. If Jennifer knows anyone at the Romney campaign, she might suggest that.

UPDATE: Reader Matt Thullen says it’s battlespace preparation:

I agree with your analysis about how the new (conservative) media should be responding to various campaign distractions. However, you didn’t mention the biggest benefit of the pushback on the various distractions that the Obama team has been surfacing–namely, that the pushback erodes Obama’s sense of “coolness.” Obama benefitted enormously in 2008 from the prevailing notion that he was a cool person and candidate–really, the first presidential candidate since Kennedy that was protrayed as someone that people could socially admire and look up to (I’d argue that Clinton’s coolness was a function of him being a boomer and striking the right chords in the hearts of the boomers in the media).

By pushing back on these ridiculous assertions from the Obama campaign, we’re making him look flat-footed, technologically clueless and therefore more like an old-style politician than anything else. By having to defend themselves against their own mistakes, the Obama campaign will be more a source of ridicule than cool. If anything else, that will erode his support among college-aged kids, or at least diminish the intensity of that support.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

You’re right, the blogosphere should be hitting them on all fronts and let Romney stay above the fray. But instead of playing defense they should be bringing up things MSM conveniently overlooked the first go round…and his record…he has one now…going on the offense and let Obama’s minions have to respond instead of the other way around.

Plus, related thoughts from Stanley Kurtz.

MORE: Further reader thoughts:

You are right about Kimmel’s joke, and while I’m glad Kimmel at least knows about this and was willing to include it (leave aside whether or not it’s a topic that should be joked about, it seems those things are roasts mostly and in that situation everything is fair game) but it is very disturbing that so many there were, literally, clueless. Truly that must have pleased the big O.

And this story has even gotten some attention in the MSM, but I think we all know that if Obama & Holder were Republicans this would have been 24/7 news for months now, Holder would likely be gone along with many minions and Obama would be relentlessly hounded over it.

It is most disturbing that they are getting a pass on this. It really makes one fear what else the Obama administration might be given a pass on, almost anything it would seem.

You are right when you say the only way to keep the government accountable is to have Republicans in office.

I also think it is VERY important that our side is pushing back on the stupid dog stories and memes like “Attack watch” remember that fascistic nonsense?

First of all it prevents them from “shaping the narrative” and getting these ideas into the MSM (because you know they’d be pleased as punch if, for example, the one thing Americans knew about Romney was the Seamus story).

Secondly it makes them look like idiots, which they are, manifestly.

And thirdly, as Alinsky instructs, we enjoy it.

That last is the best reason of all. As I said when Obama was freshly elected, this is the blogosphere — if you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong!

And from reader Amy Otto:

Been debating this one and I agree that new Conservative media should push back hard even on what is termed distractions. Democrats are starting to look like the party yelling “Hey, Get off my lawn” with these missteps.

There’s really nothing subversive nor rebellious about permanent government dependency. Their Brand is failing and new media has been key to chipping away the MSM message to reveal the actual agenda. Horrifying to think where we would be in this election cycle without it.

Democrats have successfully branded conservatives for years as uncool and intolerant. Enjoying seeing this get flipped on its head. Go New Media!

Yep.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Rebranding the Guantanamo military tribunals.