“This early-90s ad for a CD compilation called “Punk” has all your favorite Punk tunes and more! It’s like stepping into CBGB’s in mid-1979 just in time to catch the Thompson Twins launch into a heroin-fueled rage and drop their instruments right in the middle of their generational punk anthem ‘Hold Me Now.’”

And nothing says punk like puffed-out ’80s-era hair metal shag cuts.

Via Kathy Shaidle, who writes, “This is right up there with, if you were a teenager in 1965, and your mother knew you loved The Beatles, so she baked you a special birthday cake… shaped like a beetle.”

One of the reasons some commentators thought Obama would be a shoo-in for re-election is that like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he drew no serious primary opposition as an incumbent president. By contrast, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bush père were challenged by Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan respectively. Lyndon Johnson abandoned his 1968 re-election bid after Eugene McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire and Robert F. Kennedy’s late entry.

The theory goes that presidents lose re-election when they have a strong primary opponent and win when they don’t. This requires treating Buchanan as a “serious” opponent, even though he didn’t win a single primary in 1992 and his best showing, in New Hampshire, was 37%.

Writing at RealClearPolitics, the delightfully named Sean Trende reformulates the rule and carries it back a century: “There are only seven sitting presidents who have ever received less than 60 percent of the vote in any primary: Taft in ’12; Coolidge, ’24; Hoover, ’32; LBJ, ’68; Ford ’76; Carter, ’80; and Bush ’92. All of these presidents, with the exception of Coolidge, were not re-elected.” One of Coolidge’s challengers, Robert LaFollette, ran a third-party challenge. He ended up with 16.5% of the nationwide popular vote and carried his home state, Wisconsin.

Actually, there’s an eighth sitting president who received less than 60% in a primary–in more than one, in fact. That would be Obama in ’12, who, as Trende points out, received just 58.4% in Arkansas, 57.9% in Kentucky, 57.1% in Oklahoma and 59.4% in West Virginia. In Kentucky, his main opponent was “Uncommitted,” another name for Nobody.

If the Trende trend is predictive–admittedly, a big if–Obama is much likelier than not to lose in November. “I think we can reasonably begin to view this as a sort of organic primary challenge to Obama,” Trende writes. “Obama’s not likely to lose any states outright in the primaries; think of this more like Buchanan’s run against George H.W. Bush in 1992.”

At Big Journalism, John Nolte adds:

I’m old enough to remember the weeks-long narrative the media created around Pat Buchanan’s 37% showing in New Hampshire against then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The media used this result to tag Bush as a loser, an incumbent in trouble and unable to hold on to his base. This was all part of a bigger narrative the media was crafting to peg Bush as out-of-touch. Perot eventually won the election for Bill Clinton, but this certainly didn’t help.

Though today’s media won’t admit it, the difference between 1992 and 2012 is a big one and not good news for Obama.  Buchanan was a legitimate insurgent candidate; after years as a columnist and television commenter, Buchanan was  a known quantity with a serious campaign platform and access to all kinds of media coverage. Meanwhile, Obama is losing a larger percentage of the vote to inmates and relatively unknown attorneys. Moreover, Obama is losing nearly one in five votes to the likes of  “uncommitted.”

In 1992, many Republicans voted for Buchanan. In 2012, a whole lot of Democrats are voting against Barack Obama. The closest the Post comes to acknowledging Obama’s troubles is with this:

Regardless of the reasoning, it’s clear that there is a bloc of Democratic voters in every state who want to register their opposition to Obama. … even a minor abandonment of Obama by self-identified Democrats could make a difference this time around.

It’s pretty obvious that the media is desperate to avoid narratives surrounding Obama’s glaring problems with his base. After all, with the economy going in the wrong direction and all of the very public Bain Capital rebellion (the centerpiece of Obama’s re-election strategy), Obama has enough problems.

As a result, Roger L. Simon asks today, “Is Liberalism Dead?”

They will literally do anything or say anything to maintain control.  They will even contradict everything they stand for to survive.

You can really see this in action at CNN. In February of 2010, the network literally baked a cake (surprisingly, Michelle Obama never scolded them about this high-calorie sugary treat) to celebrate the spending binge of the first year of Obama’s “Stimulus” program. Today they’re simply cooking the books.  Just as they did in 2008 by building the Wright Free Zone, “CNN Fails to Refute Bogus Numbers Claiming ‘Obama Spending Binge Never Happened,’” Newsbusters reports.

Which is why, as Doug Ross writes we can watch in real time as “Old Media Is Bleeding Out Right Before Our Eyes.”

Read the whole thing — and then do not miss this post at Buzzfeed, “A User’s Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama.”

Related: Commentary’s Alana Goodman on Conor Friedersdorf, palace guard concern troll. (See also: Frum, David.)

More: Scroll down the Buzzfeed item for this tidbit, spotted by Matt Drudge:

In another section of the [senior] yearbook, students were given a block of space to express thanks and define their high school experience. … Nestled below [Obama's] photographs was one odd line of gratitude: “Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.” … A hippie drug-dealer made his acknowledgments; his own mother did not.

Classy. And Jim Treacher adds:

Why did Obama put his dog on the roof of the car? So it wouldn’t get stoned.

Speaking only for myself, I’m fine with having a president who used to get blazed out of his mind. It’s just funny that the same people who are scrambling to defend him were, shall we say, somewhat less accepting of Bush’s youthful indiscretions.

As Treacher writes, “Question: What’s the sound of David Axelrod’s weekend getting ruined? Answer: Choom.”

You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some left-wing Christians’ and Jews’ claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.

One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the Left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and — of course — Big Government are left-wing angels.

And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the Left fear big corporations but not big government?

The answer is dogma — a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20 to 30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago — big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death — big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca-Cola kill 5 million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad things big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes — the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide — committed by big governments.

How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist dogma. If there is another explanation, I do not know what it is.

In The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

When man loses God he sets about to make new gods. Or as the philosopher Eric Voegelin puts it, “[ W] hen God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.”

Likewise man creates dogmas because man needs dogmas. The light of reason illuminates the darkness and science provides us compasses to find our way. But it does not provide us with reasons to get out of bed in the first place. As John Dos Passos said, “The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave webs.”

You can hear more from Dennis Prager in the latest edition of the Ricochet podcast.

* And how.

According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll released this week, Romney is gaining on Obama’s favorability amongst women at a surprisingly rapid pace. The report indicates that the 19-point lead that the president enjoyed last month has diminished to a mere 7-point advantage in recent weeks.

What gives?

How about an emotionally manipulative, unapologetically condescending, Karl-Rove-concocted messaging strategy that preys on women’s weakness for instantly gratifying experiences coupled with their propensity for self-blame?

In effect, the right is framing Barack Obama as a guilty pleasure, saying to women—or, at the very least, implying—that the fairer sex indulged in his campaign with shameless abandon in 2008 and now they should be atoning in equal proportion.

It’s as if the president were a heedlessly devoured tub of triple-caramel-chunk cookie-dough ice cream that has left a bad taste in your mouth, not to mention a few extra inches on your waistline, and needs to be traded for the presidential equivalent of a rice cake (Romney).

Obama as a guilty pleasure? Where on earth would women have gotten that idea?

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.

The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes — because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him. And unlike previous presidential couples, they are our age, have children the same age and (just imagine the stress of daily life on the campaign) by all accounts should have been fighting even more than we were.”

As we all know, in journalism, two anecdotes are just one short of a national trend. I figured that my friend and I couldn’t possibly be the only ones dreaming, brooding or otherwise obsessing about the Obamas. Were other people, I wondered, being possessed by our new first family?

I launched an e-mail inquiry. And learned that they were. Often, in strikingly similar ways.

Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.

– “Sometimes a President Is Just a President,” Judith Warner, February 5th, 2009, the New York Times.

In the early days of Rudy University, we met with George Kelling, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who, with James Q. Wilson, had written an article called “Broken Windows” in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I had worked closely with Wilson in 1981, when he was cochair of the Task Force on Violent Crime and I was the associate attorney general. In New York, during the 1980s and 1990s, local government seemed to have conceded defeat. The city would actually put up stickers of plants and venetian blinds in the windows of abandoned buildings to disguise the decay. But Wilson had a revelation about crime: focus on the small crimes, such as littering, and keep neighborhoods clean and free of signs of disorder, such as broken windows in a building. The big idea was this: if the neighborhood looks as if someone is watching and maintaining order, it is far more likely that order will prevail. A neighborhood that is clean and well-ordered sends a signal to criminals and citizens alike.

Contrast the above with the video in a new post from Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller: “Watch Occupiers smash up San Francisco’s Mission District as the cops look on helplessly:”

Keep in mind that this video was uploaded by one of the irrepressible scamps involved. They’re proud of this.Yeah, man, don’t mess with the SFPD, or they’ll… um… drive away slowly. Has Internal Affairs investigated the officer who dared to turn on his siren, thus impinging on these children’s right to free speech?

And I was ready to congratulate the one kid who tried to talk some sense into the rest of him, until I realized he was okay with smashing up other people’s property as long as they’re above a certain income level.

These idiots did more property damage in one night than the Tea Party has done to date. Remember, though: Occupy is “mostly peaceful.” Just look at all the windows they didn’t smash. Look at all the walls they didn’t spray-paint. Look at all the police stations they didn’t vandalize.

And Mr. Obama, the once and future community organizer, still has their back. You never know when you need to supply the pitchforks.

Fox News’ Roger Ailes said this recently during an address at his alma mater, Ohio University: “I have one wish for OU, that it continues to be a place for open debate where people from different points of view with various opinions can meet and discuss these things openly. Because there will be no progress, and America will not survive, if we don’t allow that open debate,” Ailes said.

Ailes is right about the crucial importance of freedom of speech and thought in American life. The First Amendment is under intense attack from many points on the ideological compass, but mostly from the far Left.

The enemies of free speech and thought have lately turned to more subtle tools of suppression than merely shouting down speakers. Among these are extortionary threats to launch false charges of racism against companies that support politically incorrect groups, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Read the whole thing, then click over to Lee Stranahan.

At a news conference after the meeting, Barry and several Asian American leaders sought to present a united front, saying that the dialogue is an important step toward defusing long-standing tension between blacks and Asians. Asked about the underlying sources of the conflict, Barry said the United States “has had racial tensions since it was founded.”

“The Irish caught hell, the Jews caught hell, the Polacks caught hell,” Barry said, invoking a word that Polish people have viewed as disparaging. “We want Ward 8 to be the model of diversity.”

Asked later about his reference to “Polacks,” Barry at first denied using the word, then retracted it, saying, “I meant Poles.”

His remark prompted a demand from Gary Kenzer, executive director of the Chicago-based Polish American Association, that Barry “apologize to the Polish American community of this country.”

“You wouldn’t say a derogatory statement to an African American, a Jewish American, and we deserve the same respect,” he said.

Note that while the Washington Post did headline the story “Marion Barry commits new gaffe while apologizing to Asians,” it took them seven paragraphs to actually get to the P-word. This is in sharp contradistinction to the paper’s Bletchley Park-level of ability to discern racism as the cause of even the slightest twitch of bad news involving President Obama.

The memorandum concluded “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”

As that Wikipedia page goes on to note, cooler heads eventually prevailed after the war. Otherwise, just as East Germany traded one totalitarian regime for another, West Germany would have traded the nightmare of Hitler’s scorched earth policy when he knew the war was lost for the Allies’ own scorched earth policy afterwards. Wikipedia quotes former president Herbert Hoover, who reminded advocates of the Morgenthau Plan in 1947 that “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.” West Germany would go on to become an industrial powerhouse, albeit one with a US military base located within it, just in case…

At the Climate Policy Network today, “Green Energy Transition: Germany Fears De-Industrialisation,” translates a page from Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper:

As a result of Germany’s green energy transition, electricity prices are exploding. Consumers and businesses are paying the price while Germany faces gradual de-industrialisation. Economists estimate that the cost of the green energy transition will total 170 billion Euros by 2020. This is more than double of what Germany would have to write off if Greece were to withdraw from the monetary union. “The de-industrialization has already begun,” the EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has warned.

Meanwhile, those on the left who enjoy Earth Hour, an annual celebratory preview of the joys of de-industrialization cooked up in 2007 by the World Wildlife Fund and Australia’s Fairfax Media Limited, should hightail it to Detroit, where the lamps will be going off all over the town, according to Bloomberg News: “Half of Detroit’s Streetlights May Go Out as City Shrinks.” And Detroit isn’t the only failed Blue city where this is occurring:

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois. Detroit’s plan goes further: It would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined. Vacant property and parks account for 37 square miles (96 square kilometers), according to city planners.

“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

Detroit’s dwindling income and property-tax revenue have required residents to endure unreliable buses and strained police services throughout the city. Because streetlights are basic to urban life, deciding what areas to illuminate will reshape the city, said Kirk Cheyfitz, co-founder of a project called Detroit143 — named for the 139 square miles of land, plus water — that publicizes neighborhood issues.

Naturally, the Obama administration views both the 21st century Morganthau Plan in Germany and Detroit’s lights-out policy as how-to guides, not warnings.

Because he’s so real world, you know.

Update: At the Tatler, Bryan Preston writes, “If a private enterprise decided on its own not to service certain parts of a city, we would never hear the end of it. But government doing it is ok. The victims of all this will just keep voting the same people back into office decade after decade.”

In Kentucky, “uncommitted” kept things interesting in the Democratic primary tonight. Obama won, 57-42. But he was running against air.

The results come on the heels of West Virginia’s Democratic primary earlier this monthwhere a felon incarcerated in Texas took 41 percent of the vote from the president.

In Kentucky, Obama did get more total votes than presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who won the GOP primary with almost 67 percent of the vote.

Obama had more than 118,600 votes to Romney’s approximately 117,100.

“They’ll blame the Arkansas result on racism, too,” Bryan concluded, in an update to his post.”

Headline today at the Washington Post, “Kentucky, Arkansas primaries: Is it racism?”

No, none of these Democrats are willing to put their name to that allegation — either generally or for this story. But, it is, without question the prevalent viewpoint they hold privately.

They argue that conservative white Democrats — particularly those in the South and Appalachia — don’t want to vote for an African American for president and, therefore, are willing to cast a ballot for almost anyone else up to and including an incarcerated felon. (Keith Judd, we are looking at you.)

The problem with that theory is that it’s almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.

“There’s no easy or simple answer,” said Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners, a Democratic polling firm. “One man’s racial differences is another man’s cultural differences.”

What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that Appalachia and portions of the South — particularly those states without large African American populations — have long been hostile to President Obama.

Why seems kind of an odd thing to say, as Bryan notes in a See I Told You So post today, linking to a Politico article today with the same JournoList-style leftwing spin on last night’s results:

You Christian wingnuts just can’t stand a black man. We have a troll here who trots that argument out in comments with mind-numbing routine. And they’re right of course, unless you count Allen West, who is a conservative hero. And Clarence Thomas. And Thomas Sowell, and once upon a time, Colin Powell and Alan Keyes etc and etc. Except for them, and J. C. Watts, the former Oklahoma congressman, southerners can’t stand a black man holding office.

At the Wizbang blog, Michael Laprarie describes the WaPo’s headline as a classic example of the “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” style of argument:

Naturally the article brings up the infamous “Bigot Belt” graphic that showed Redneckland to be the only area of the nation that rejected Barack Obama outright in 2008.  Certainly it wasn’t Obama’s elitism, or his anti-Americanism, or his sleazy Chicago cronies, or his youthful infatuation with cocaine and Marxist professors, or his long-time association with a radical domestic terrorist, or his membership in a church led by one of the most inflammatory Black separatist pastors in the country.  Nah, it couldn’t possibly be any of those things that disinterested voters in the South.  It must be because he is half African.  Because that’s all we ever think about down here.

You know what?  I’m actually kinda proud of that map.  Seems we Okies ain’t as dumb as they think we is.

Not surprisingly, Ace has lots of fun with the WaPo story:

A former House member named Tom Cole has an explanation that doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Washington Post’s Racism Decision Desk.

“Obama fares poorly in states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arkansas because he has nothing in common with them. They are rural, he is urban. They are populist, he is elitist. And in case anyone hadn’t noticed, they are conservative while he is liberal. That isn’t just true of Republicans in these states. It is true of Democrats as well.”

That’s just silly.

On the other hand, Donna Brazie finally strikes on the answer. Or, rather, all three of them.

“Race, resentment [and] fear[.]“

There you go.

So, if those are the reasons, why does this moron then continue…

“Democrats have not had any messaging in those states for more than a decade. It’s hard to get voters to like you or even know you when all they hear is negative stuff.”

Ah. So the Democrats have no messaging there. (It’s always about their messaging, never about their policy and agenda.)

But even that last item isn’t true as Newsbusters notes, deconstructing a CNN contributor’s remarks, apparently built upon the same talking points:

CNN contributor Maria Cardona may have forgotten some history as she tried to spin away President Obama’s troubles in the Arkansas and Kentucky Democratic primaries. Cardona, speaking during the 10 a.m. hour of Wednesday’s Newsroom, argued that “Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party.”

President Obama only picked up 58 percent of the vote in the Kentucky Democratic primary, and 60 percent in Arkansas. “Look, Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party. There’s no real infrastructure there. There’s no organization by the Obama campaign there,” Cardona insisted.

Cardona’s first statement ignores some quite recent history, that former President Bill Clinton was the Democratic governor of Arkansas before he ran for president – and that both Arkansas and Kentucky voted for him in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections.

As far as infrastructure goes, both states might be far from solid red as they have had Democratic governors since 2007. Arkansas had two Democratic senators as late as 2011 when former Senator Blanche Lincoln finished out her second term after replacing another Democrat, Senator Dale Bumpers. Meanwhile, Arkansas Democratic Senator Mark Pryor is still serving his second term in the U.S. Senate.

Both states have a Democratic history as well. Since 1950, 11 different Democrats served in Arkansas as governor or acting governor, compared to just three Republican governors. Kentucky has seen 13 Democratic governors since 1950, and only two Republican governors.

Both Kentucky and Arkansas voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Arkansas voted Democratic in every presidential election year from 1920 through 1964. Kentucky, meanwhile, voted Democratic every presidential election from 1932 through 1952, and went for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Cardona’s spin is right up there with Obama’s own, when he ludicrously claimed a year ago that “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.” That would be news to the aforementioned Lyndon Johnson.

But as always with Obama’s palace guard, it has to be the voters — even if they’re Democrats just like the president and the journalists at the WaPo; the president’s faults are never his own, nor are they ever the fault of his ideology and his oikophobia.