#DEMONIZATIONFAIL: Poll: Most Americans Have Never Heard of Bain Capital.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Green Politics Hurting Obama In Swing States.

Since the beginning of the recession, America’s “brown jobs” revolution has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise shaky recovery. States like North Dakota and Texas have led the country in growth due to their strong energy sectors, and the discovery of vast quantities of shale gas in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Colorado are now providing new jobs.

These states have more than shale gas in common: all of them are also on the short list of swing states that decide this year’s presidential election. Republicans are seizing the opportunity to make energy politics a centerpiece of their campaign.

Democrats, not so much.

JACK CASHILL: What the Media Choose Not to Know about Trayvon Martin. “In reporting this news of George Zimmerman’s return to jail, more than a few media outlets showed the dangerously deceptive image of Trayvon as 11-year-old cherub. They did so in the assumption that the narrative was still theirs to control. It is not. The blogs, which have been doing the real detective work on this case, have long since taken control away from them.”

MATT WELCH: Get Serious About Governing, Democrats: No amount of crying over evil Scott Walker will help governments fix their bleeding balance sheets.

At The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson compared Walker’s actions to a “jihad” and suggested (paradoxically) that a post-union labor movement might just resort to rioting. Walker “wins one for the plutocrats,” Joan Walsh lamented at Salon, without really explaining how the monocle-wearers could win 38 percent of the union vote.

Such demonization was of a piece with leftish commentary in the run-up to the recall. Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce described Walker as a “goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin,” which would now be subject to “the habits of oligarchy.” Even more grossly, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in The Washington Post that Walker’s policies were intended to “cleanse the electorate of people who don’t look, earn or think like him.”

It’s almost comforting, in such a florid, menacing universe, to wallow in righteous defeat. But I would suggest that if progressives want to change minds and political outcomes, they might try a different strategy: Instead of merely rallying opposition to irredeemable bogeymen, how about providing a concrete, numbers-rich alternative to the brutal budgetary math Walker’s union-tweaking policies were designed to address?

It is a fact that the majority of state budgets are in the red, that overall state spending increased by 81 percent from 2002-2007, and that rare-in-the-private-sector defined benefit pensions for government workers (along with post-retirement medical benefits) are a large and growing portion of state and local budgets, even while being chronically underfunded. The situation is terrible now, and will be much worse in the near future. So, progressives: Tell us concretely what you plan to do about this.

Echoing Tim Geithner, I think they don’t have a plan of their own. They just don’t like yours.

ED MORRISSEY: A Watershed Moment For The Labor Movement. “Earlier this year, Indiana became the first Rust Belt state to enact right-to-work laws. Arizona made their already-restrictive environment even tougher. And now, after targeting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and other republican lawmakers for more than a year, the labor movement has come up empty.”

Related: The anti-Walker “rhetoric wasn’t just hyperbolic. It was strategically suicidal.”

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Also, today only: Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Picture Collection on Blu-Ray, $26.49.

DAN MITCHELL: Estonia and Austerity: Another Exploding Cigar for Paul Krugman. “What makes Krugman’s rant especially amusing is that he wrote it just as the rest of the world is beginning to notice that Estonia is a role model.”

STANLEY KURTZ: Obama’s Third-Party History.

COMEDY GOLD: Hapless anti-Walker protesters in deep denial.

UPDATE: The Hill: Obama frets after ‘terrifying’ recall vote.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Wisconsin Recap: Thanks to Obama, American Left Lies in Smoldering Wreckage.

MORE: Obama Is Killing The Democratic Party. “Not even Jimmy Carter did this much, I would suggest, to jerk his party to the left and hobble its electoral prospects. No wonder Clinton is on a rampage.”

CHANGE: Press Lines Up To Interview San Francisco Tea Partiers at Obama Fundraiser.

Related: San Francisco Tea Party protests Obama. Love the “Breitbart Is Here” t-shirts.

PRIORITIES: Hollywood trip marks Obama’s 150th fundraiser.

President Obama went to Hollywood again Wednesday, marking his 150th fundraiser since taking office during a West Coast swing that ignited Republican claims that the president is far more intensely focused on campaigning rather than governing.

A two-day cash grab in San Francisco and Los Angeles, headlined by a gay rights event at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with television star Ellen DeGeneres and a $25,000-per-head dinner with “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy, was derided by the Republican National Committee as Obama hobnobbing with his “greatest allies, the Hollywood glitterati.”

But others say it is Obama’s repeated clarion calls for money, not the audience, which is most worrisome. Five months before the general election, Obama has already hosted nearly twice as many campaign fundraisers as his immediate predecessors.

Follow the money.

THE HILL: Ethics Case Against Maxine Waters Will Proceed.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: House Republicans to Obama: Scrap Vegas speech, work with us on college loans.

If Obama had done his research he’d know why this is so important.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UMass board approves 4.9 percent fee increase. “The University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees approved a 4.9 percent increase in student fees today, giving its emphatic blessing to a proposal Governor Deval Patrick had slammed the day before in a last-minute letter and phone call to UMass President Robert Caret. . . . Tuesday morning, Patrick weighed in unexpectedly, telling Caret he believed any rise in fees would put too much pressure on students and families, especially given that student loan interest rates are set to double if a deadlocked Congress does not stop them from doing so. He said he believed UMass first needed to ensure it had cut all possible costs.”

You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing. Or maybe Deval’s been reading up on the subject.

JENNIFER RUBIN: Romney Goes For A Walker. “Well before the Wisconsin recall transfixed the political scene, Mitt Romney had accumulated a raft of proposals designed to minimize the power of organized labor.” There’s a list at the link.

ABC NEWS: Senator Asks DOJ to Investigate SWAT-ting Attacks on Conservative Bloggers.

UPDATE: CNN Scooped Again On Its Own Story.

DISTRACTION: Nothing to see here on Wisconsin recall rout, White House says.

NEW CIVILITY: Chuck Lane: Is anyone going to apologize for demonizing Scott Walker?

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ARRESTED for blogging.

NICK GILLESPIE: Wins in Wisconsin and California Signify Triumph of Common Sense and Basic Math Over Status Quo, Ideology; Will Be Replicated Everywhere. “Voters everywhere are finally starting to realize that municipalities, states, and (here’s hoping) the federal government are out of money. That’s the real message of the major contests last night.”

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: President Of Estonia Slams Paul Krugman: ‘Smug, Overbearing & Patronizing.’

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Ray Bradbury’s Power of Memory.

But perhaps he’d like to be remembered this way.

INTERNET PRIVACY: “Free services in exchange for personal information. That’s the ‘privacy bargain’ we all strike on the Web. It could be the worst deal ever.”