Michael Medved has a different take on the president’s latest flip-flop:

Some observers see the new position as a desperate attempt to bring new energy and oomph to the campaign’s lagging fundraising, and sure enough the president sent out a melodramatic money-begging message (“If you agree, you can stand up with me here”) the same day he made the big announcement. But in a race where each side will raise and spend in excess of a billion dollars, it’s hard to imagine that a few extra million from gay activists (or even hundreds of millions) would alter the outcome decisively.

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Michael Barone explains:

In 2008, Obama won 53 percent of the vote, the highest percentage for any Democratic nominee in history except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Now he’s averaging 46 percent in recent polls.

That’s much closer to the 45 percent that Democratic candidates won in elections to the House in 2010. And in the last three presidential elections, the winning candidate has won the same percentage (or within 1 percent) as his party’s percentage in House elections two years before.

Obama had a popular-vote margin of 7 percent in 2008. But Republicans had a margin of 7 percent in the popular vote for the House in 2010. If you tote up the electoral votes in the states they carried, you find them with a 351–184 edge over Democrats (the remaining three in the District of Columbia are obviously Democratic).

The election is in a month.

Let’s start with the 2008 map. Then let’s give Romney all the states that at least two-thirds of you said he would win – Florida, North Carolina, Indiana, Ohio, Nevada, Iowa, and New Hampshire.

I’ll also give Romney Virginia, which I forgot to list yesterday, and which has been trending Republican.

Then we end up with this map:

Romney wins!

But what if we use my more optimistic scenario, and give Romney Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan as well? Well, then it’s an electoral landslide:

Not only is a Romney win likely, an electoral landslide is very plausible too.

Quite possibly:

If the election were held today, Mitt Romney would win by a landslide.

The published polls reflect a close race for two reasons:

1. They poll only registered voters, not likely voters. Rasmussen is the only pollster who tests likely voters, and his latest tracking poll has Romney ahead by 48-43.

2. As discussed in previous columns, a study of the undecided voters in the past eight elections in which incumbents sought a second term as president reveals that only Bush-43 gained any of the undecided vote. Johnson in ’64, Nixon in ’72, Ford in ’76, Carter in ’80, Reagan in ’84, Bush in ’92 and Clinton in ’96 all failed to pick up a single undecided vote.

So when polls show President Obama at 45 percent of the vote, they are really reflecting a likely 55-45 Romney victory, at the very least.

And check the box:

She should be our role model. We should all do the same thing she did and proclaim ourselves members of whichever fashionable list of preferred “minorities” the racists administering affirmative apartheid happen to be promoting this week.

There are lots of ways we can do so. First, anthropologists believe that the human species originated on the African continent. So, by my reckoning, that makes us all African-Americans. Why can’t we proclaim ourselves such on the “race identification forms” used for hiring and college admissions?

[...]

That’s not all: most Jews can claim to be Hispanics. Why? Because so many Jews have ancestors who lived in Spain and its colonies or on the Iberian peninsula. Take me, for example (and I hear my wife in the background saying, “Take him, please!”) Despite my Germanic Ashkenazi surname, we Plauts originated in medieval Spain. So ever since I was a freshman in college in Philadelphia, I have proclaimed myself a Hispanic. True, I do not speak Spanish, but since when is that relevant? Lots of other Hispanics do not speak Spanish. How many African-Americans speak African languages? Let’s watch the affirmative Klansters drag out some tape measures to measure skull shapes and noses and utilize other Nazi anthropological methods for establishing race to keep us out!

And if all that fails, we can all claim to be Native Americans — at least all of us who were born in the United States and so are natives and have bona fide birth certificates.

And those evil Super PACs:

The problem, say Democrats, is that the Biden comments poked an existing bruise among the president’s supporters in the gay community. The rush to bowdlerize  what Biden had said turned  a glancing tap of the bruise into a grinding fist.

A source who raises money for Democrats says that Obama has mostly maxed out with donations from the gay political community, but that his Super PAC and other nonaffiliated support groups still need massive high-dollar donations. A lot of potential donors are influential members of the gay community who follow the same-sex marriage issue closely and who were likely to be most offended by the president holding on to his same, “evolving” stance. How could an Obama bundler—one of those financial backers who raises huge sums from their circle of friends—who had been convincing those same friends that the president was with them, continue to make calls with this fresh slap in the face. Says the Democratic fundraiser: “Once this became a litmus test if you’re a gay bundler, after 100 hours saying ‘the president is going to do the right thing’ now you’re calling saying ‘sorry this happened, but I can’t raise another dollar unless you do the right thing.’ ”

The inimitable James Taranto:

It’s pretty rich that Obama keeps accusing Republicans of “social Darwinism” when he’s the one who’s evolving.

Video here. Quote:

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

I can’t understand why he’s doing this. So help me figure it out.

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Via Hot Air comes this wonderful “news”:

Obama went so far as to call the president’s position “incoherent,” and questioned how Obama could adamantly support the legalization of same-sex marriage on a state level but not a federal one.

“Tell me, how does that make any sense?” Obama said. “The truth is, it doesn’t. I don’t have a clue what the president means when he says things like that, and quite frankly, I don’t think he does, either.”

Though President Obama has yet to respond to Obama’s remarks, Beltway insiders said the increased pressure from the White House has, in effect, put Obama on notice. Sources confirmed that by using the power of the presidency, Obama is ostensibly forcing Obama to make a decision sooner rather than later.

“When the president addresses you directly, you can’t ignore him,” NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker said. “I think what we can take away from today’s remarks is that the president is genuinely frustrated, not just with Obama the president, but Obama the man. The section in his speech where he questioned how, as the first black president, Obama could fail to fight for the equal rights of gays and lesbians was particularly powerful.”

I think he’ll win all of the following, except Colorado.

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He’s trying to save $750K by shutting down a military dog training center that saves lives:

When a dog and handler receive advanced training in Yuma and then lead a patrol in Afghanistan where they find one hidden booby trap, it can easily save five or ten combatants from injury or death on any given day. Not only have the dogs learned to smell the bomb component chemicals, but they can actually hear the unique low sound the wind makes as it blows over a nearly invisible nylon fishing line or thin metal one, both of which are used as booby-trap tripwires. And dogs trained to track have caught insurgents, a valuable source of intelligence, without firefights.

Where could the U.S. come up with that $750,000 that this dog-training program costs each year?

Michelle Obama’s vacations, as of last year, the UK Daily Mail has estimated, cost taxpayers over $10 million. And at least once, the Obamas’ dog Bo has flown separately from his owner(s) on vacation in an Air Force Gulfstream jet. If Michelle Obama had cut her vacation expenses down to $5 million and Bo had traveled with the Obamas, that would probably have saved enough money to pay the expenses of the Inter-Service Advanced Skills K-9 Course for eight to ten years.

Through data mining:

That math may herald the premature end of Walker’s term when he has to defend his office next month. (Democrats will select their nominee in a primary today.) But there’s a consolation for Republicans: They’re thrilled to get their hands on the petition documents, and the 900,039 names they believe will help them make sense of the state’s political geography on behalf of Mitt Romney this fall. Indeed, the boom in large-scale signature-gathering efforts—most visible in 16 different recall campaigns filed in Wisconsin over the past year, and similar efforts elsewhere in the Midwest—has fixed attention on a largely unmined source of political data that can help clarify fault lines in a difficult to gauge electorate. “They’ve just handed us the names of 900,000 people who are known, or are likely to be, anti-conservative voters. It’s a huge favor they’ve done.” says Rick Wiley, the political director of the Republican National Committee, which has 22 offices open in Wisconsin coordinating anti-recall efforts. “Without it you were stuck with somehow IDing these voters.”

Just one quote among many, where liberals display how compassionate and understanding they are:

Can I just kill everyone in North Carolina? #angry #gaymarriage

He waived his right to a speedy trial, ensuring that it’ll be October or later before he’s tried.

The strategy is obvious: Zimmerman’s lawyer would rather try the case on the evidence than in the media. So he’s taking as much time as possible to let the case fade from the news.

Sad, but true: In this case, justice delayed is justice granted.