INSTAVISION: I talk with world-renowned expert Frank J. Fleming about his blockbuster new book, How to Fix Everything in America Forever: The Plan to Keep America Awesome. It’s must-see TV as we explain the role of pain collars and ankle monitors in reforming Congress, and the importance of space-based lasers and giant robots for national defense.

ROGER SIMON: Jerusalem Debacle at the DNC: Whither the Jewish Vote? “The platform reflected the manner in which Obama regards Israel, disdain tempered by desire for Jewish votes and money. How much disdain we might find out if the Los Angeles Times were to release the Khalidi tape. But the Democratic Party fanatics who helm that newspaper would rather walk over their proverbial grandmothers than publicize anything that could damage their secular saint. . . . Anyone, and I defy Dershowitz to contradict this, observing the reaction to Villaraigosa on the convention floor can see that a significant portion of the Democratic Party has a real problem with Israel that appears, though I wish it were not so, painfully close to anti-Semitism.”

UPDATE: Related: In Charlotte, Dems raise a prayer to Big Government. Check out the Gallup numbers on Democratic church attendance, and you can see the role of politics as a substitute for religion here . . . . Hey, what could go wrong?

Also: The Alternative Universe and the Media Feedback Loop.

MORE: Reader Richard Finlay writes: “All this begging for small sums of money (skip pizza, send money to Barack) sounded familiar. It just struck me that it is a technique very common among televangelists.”

AN IDEA SO CRAZY, IT JUST MIGHT WORK! If Obama’s call for “civility… is to be taken seriously,” says Romney, stop comparing your opponents to Nazis.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Five Ways Obama Is No Bill Clinton.

Well, Clinton wouldn’t have blown an already-agreed debt deal by coming back and demanding more after things were settled.

On the other hand, this reminds me of Clinton’s speech last night:

Woodward recounts an episode early in his presidency when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were hammering out final details of the stimulus bill.

Obama phoned in to deliver a “high-minded message,” he writes. Obama went on so long that Pelosi “reached over and pressed the mute button on her phone,” so they could continue to work without the president hearing that they weren’t paying attention.

They both do like to go on.

UPDATE: Another way Obama isn’t like Clinton: WaPo: Worried Democrats scramble to close fundraising gap with GOP.

ANOTHER UPDATE: An email from reader Amy Schley:

My sister, who is very apolitical, posted this on Facebook which shows the trouble the War on Women narrative is having for the younger generation.

“I don’t normally get political, but this one struck a nerve. Do I think women in the same careers as men deserve the same pay? Well, yes. But here’s my problem: both those men and women HAVE ****ing CAREERS. Do you really expect me to be concerned and outraged for those women and their glass ceiling when the the majority of college educated women (and men) of my generation are still stuck outside in our proverbial cardboard boxes in back alleys, shining shoes and
selling papers just to survive?”

She’s got a M.Ed. but can’t find a job teaching, and so is going back to school for speech pathology. I’m a licensed attorney working in a shoe shop. I can’t think of a comment that better encapsulates the frustration we have at out-of-touch politicians.

Yes, the “social issues” stuff is a sort of political luxury good. In today’s economy, the market for such luxuries isn’t as big as it once was.

IRA STOLL: Four big takeaways from the second night of the Democratic National Convention. Including this: “Steny Hoyer faulted Paul Ryan for having ‘voted to put two wars on the credit card.’ Chris Van Hollen, another House Democrat, also faulted Republicans for the cost of ‘two wars’ and ‘a new entitlement,’ presumably a reference to the Medicare prescription drug benefit. But hardly any Democrats opposed the war in Afghanistan, and President Obama, when he came into office, increased the troop commitment there. ObamaCare also makes the prescription drug benefit more expensive (to the federal government, not to seniors) by reducing the so-called doughnut hole range for which seniors must pay the cost of some drugs. It seems a little inconsistent to blame the Republicans alone for these components of the debt or deficit.”

I’M BEGINNING TO THINK THAT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MAY HAVE BECOME POLITICIZED UNDER THIS ADMINISTRATION: Justice Dept. Gallup lawsuit came after Axelrod criticized pollsters. “Internal emails between senior officials at The Gallup Organization, obtained by The Daily Caller, show senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod attempting to subtly intimidate the respected polling firm when its numbers were unfavorable to the president. After Gallup declined to change its polling methodology, Obama’s Department of Justice hit it with an unrelated lawsuit that appears damning on its face.” Well, good for Gallup.

INTELLIGENCE FAILURE: A Classified CIA Mea Culpa on Iraq. Wait, I thought Bush and Cheney cooked up a bunch of lies. You’re saying it was just a mistake by career bureaucrats?

MICHAEL BARONE: National Education Association A Big Force In Charlotte. “Ramona Oliver of the National Education Association, the largest teacher union, says that 350 delegates are NEA members or officials. It’s probably the organization with the largest representation at the Democratic convention and one reason why public employee unions are a powerful constituency in the Democratic party.”

Yes, that’s all explained in this video from Reason TV.

ED MORRISSEY: Democrats: ‘We All Belong to the Government.’ “When major political parties hold conventions, they usually try to craft their messages to reach the broadest possible audience. The parties make the case that they stand for true American values and represent the best hope for freedom and liberty – within their definition of the priorities involved. But even with the acknowledgment that those meanings can shift depending on the issues, the Democratic Party and their convention got off to a very strange and very revealing start this week in Charlotte, North Carolina.”

ROLL CALL: For Barack Obama, it’s Never Been About ‘Better Off.’

The Obama campaign and its chief surrogates have spent the week here cleaning up a mess from the Sunday talk shows, when they collectively declined to answer “yes” to the question: Are Americans better off than they were four years ago?

Answering this question in the affirmative is standard practice for a president running for re-election — regardless of the circumstances he finds himself in. Vice President Joseph Biden tried to reset the campaign’s answer on Monday by telling a crowd at a rally in Detroit: “If you want to know whether we’re better off, I got a bumper sticker for you: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!”

By the end of the Labor Day holiday, everyone on team Obama was with the program, and in the two days since, the president’s supporters have told anyone who asks — or who will listen — that Americans are better off today than they were four years ago. But that has never been President Barack Obama’s re-election message, nor his argument for why he deserves a second term. And it still isn’t. . . .

Obama’s sales pitch, essentially, is that you might not be better off than you were four years ago, but that with enough time, he can make whatever recovery you experience real and lasting. Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that Romney in his acceptance speech in Tampa, Fla., said the answer is simple — “What America needs is jobs, lots of jobs” — while a major theme of GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s speeches has been: “We can do this.”

Can Obama win re-election by convincing voters they will be better off if they give him four more years? We’ll find out.

In other words, he’s asking for a Mulligan.

THE HILL: Lobbyists to help nominate Obama for reelection in Charlotte. “Despite President Obama’s harsh rhetoric toward K Street, lobbyists will be on the convention floor as delegates in Charlotte Wednesday when he is nominated for a second term. That lobbyists will help nominate the president for reelection is a delicious irony, considering Obama’s moves to keep his distance from the influence industry. Neither his campaign nor the Democratic convention accepts political contributions from lobbyists; lobbyists can’t raise funds for the president; and the Obama administration has banned them from serving on federal advisory committees. But lobbyists remain a vital cog in the Democratic Party machine, and a number of them are serving as delegates at this week’s convention. Some lobbyists worked their way up to the senior levels of Democratic state parties and were selected for a trip to Charlotte. One lobbyist-turned-delegate said the president’s restrictions on K Street have been ‘inconsistent.'”

JENNIFER RUBIN: A Night Democrats Would Like To Forget.

UPDATE: Long, and curiously bent: Bill Clinton’s long, long speech about the meanie Republicans.

OUCH: Romney: DNC a ‘celebration of failure.’

But hey, there was this success: After three votes, Dems put Jerusalem, God back in platform.

I credit the power of Matt Drudge. Reaching out, godlike, from a condo in Florida to change the course of the Democratic National Convention.

AT AMAZON, the fall sale on hunting, fishing, and shooting gear. Props to Amazon for selling shooting gear, which some online merchants shy away from.

UPDATE: Reader Mike Buckley writes: “As an online seller of shooting sports accessories, Amazon is by far the most friendly marketplace. Google shopping removed anything gun and eBay severely restricts the sales of gun accessories. To beat a long dead horse, Amazon just gets retail.”

POLITICO: DNC’s Wasserman Schultz, Gaspard cancel interviews amid platform debacle. Note that this is Politico’s headline, not mine. . . .

VIDEO: Jason Mattera Occupies the DNC: Hey, Sign this Communist Petition on My iPad!

STEPHEN GREEN IS drunkblogging Bill Clinton’s speech. “‘The system is rigged,’ says a member of the party responsible for Solyndra.”

Related: Democrats focus on equal pay issue while Obama White House pays women less.

UPDATE: From Stephen Green:

Reelect Obama because… incomplete.

Wow. Lame.

“Are we better off than we were when he took office?”

That’s the “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” of 2012.

7:56PM Dude… incomplete. Mulligan. Do-over.

Clinton delivers these reasons with everything Clinton can muster — and although his voice is a bit weaker than before, he still musters plenty — but these are not good reasons.

7:56PM Oh no. Now he’s riffing on that “Bridge to the 21st Century” line from 1996.

It’s still all about Bill.

It always was.

MORE from Stephen Green: “I haven’t seen a hug that awkward — the one between Clinton and President Obama — since Liza Minnelli and David Gest said ‘I do.'”

MARKETWATCH: Democrats avoid mention of deficits, soaring national debt.

#DNC2012 RACISM: Black Romney Supporter Kicked Out of MSNBC Pavilion.

A REMINDER FROM GALLUP: August Unemployment Not Looking Good. And notice this: “More interestingly, there were no BLS seasonal adjustments in August 2011. If this remains the same in 2012, the Gallup seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for August would be 8.3% while that of the BLS would be 8.7%, assuming a similar increase to that shown in the Gallup data. Further, Gallup’s data show the labor force participation rate to be increasing in August. In turn, that could have an additional negative impact on the unemployment rate for August if the government’s data show a similar pattern.”

So if there was no seasonal adjustment last year, why would there be any seasonal adjustment this year? Same season, right? It’ll be interesting to see what comes out on Friday.

JUST A REMINDER: Repeal The Hollywood Tax Cuts!

ANN ALTHOUSE: Live-blogging Day 2 of the Democratic Convention. “President Obama has focused on jobs since Day 1, says Nancy Pelosi. So… do we get to judge him by the result, or does he get reelection for effort?”

AT HARVARD LAW SCHOOL IS BOGUS: Elizabeth Warren Wins Our Vote!

DO TELL: On federal spending, Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton. See the chart at the link. “I have circled the chart showing federal outlays as percentage of GDP over the course of the Clinton presidency. Outlays decline from 21.4% in FY1993 to just 18.2% in FYI 2001, the last budget passed by a Republican Congress and signed by the Arkansas Democrat. For the past two years, that number has been 24.1%.” To be fair, Clinton didn’t build that budget by himself. He had help from a Republican Congress.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The Problem, Instantiated. “I went to work as an intern for a socially conscious documentary filmmaker, and did a lousy job of sorting footage of a lesbian detective, while Noah sat at home updating his invisible blog. He mostly ate canned beans and basmati rice that he prepared in a rice cooker. We almost never had sex. He got into Internet college and decided not to go.”