† Every Bubble Bursts Eventually: Washington Post political pundit Chris Cillizza notes that "President Obama has never been more public" but that there is an "inverse relationship between Obama’s high public profile and his declining poll numbers" and poses the question “How can Obama show the American people that he is working tirelessly to re-start the economy without appearing as though he is feckless at doing just that?” Based on how he handled the S&P downgrade, perception is reality, and Obama has proven himself “devoid of ideas, bitter about political opposition and completely in over his head,” writes WaPo conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin. “If the election were held today, I bet he’d lose. By a lot,” she adds.

That Obama will be a one-term president seems less a wager and more a sure thing to The Stiletto. Consider this from National Journal:

Newly released state-by-state approval numbers for President Obama suggest that in 2012 he could face fewer options for assembling an Electoral College majority and increased pressure to capture racially diverse states. As a result, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, among others, appear to be evolving into critical battlegrounds on the campaign map.

The polling results, released earlier this week by Gallup, underscore both the stability of each party’s Electoral College base and the shifting roster of swing states that could decide the 2012 contest. …

In 2008, the Obama campaign prided itself on expanding the playing field by contesting states previously considered reliably Republican. Next year, the president may find fewer plausible pathways to victory. “In 2008, there may have been many paths … but at this stage it looks like he’s got to thread the needle to get reelected,” said Carl Forti, a founder and partner of the GOP consulting firm Black Rock Group, and the director of an independent-expenditure group supporting Mitt Romney. “There is no margin for error in the road they are going down.”

The Gallup data suggests that the 2012 election “will almost certainly come down to ten swing states,” according to The Washington Post, which is “a smaller number of true swing states than we saw in 2008”:

In each of those ten states - Iowa, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Mexico, Ohio, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado - the President’s approval rating is somewhere between 44 percent and 49 percent. …

The Gallup data, which was taken from tracking polls conducted by the organization over the first six months of the year, makes clear not only where the presidential race is likely to be fought but also swing states in past elections that might not see as much action this cycle.

Obama’s job approval rating in Indiana and Missouri - he won the Hoosier State and narrowly lost Show Me State in 2008 - are at 42 percent, territory that will make it difficult for him to recover in time for November 2012.

Perhaps the biggest shocker of the data is that Obama stands at just 40 percent job approval in New Hampshire, a state that moved heavily toward Democrats in 2008 but saw Republican gains across the board in 2010. Given the primacy of the Granite State in the GOP presidential fight and the state’s record as a swing state, it’s uniquely possible that it could wind up in our final list of swing states when all is said and done.

But wait – there’s an even bigger shocker:  A new Quinnipiac poll finds that in “the most heavily Democratic large state” in the U.S., more NYers disapprove of the job Obama is doing than approve (49 percent v. 45 percent). But as big a disappointment as Obama has been, it will apparently take more than his disastrous stewardship of the economy for NY to become a swing state: 49 percent of people would still vote for him over a generic Repub (34 percent).

† The Summer Of Our Discontent: This rant about the unemployment rate, the debt ceiling and being in hock to the Chinese to bankroll our spending by comedian Felonious Munk is not safe for work - if China forgave $1 million in debt for every cuss word we'd be back in the black - but is a message that President Barack Hussein Obama needs to hear. [Hat Tip: The Blaze]

† Is It Too Soon To Discuss The “I Word”?: Perhaps in an effort to make amends to his constituents for being amongst a group of seven TX House Repubs to vote for to raise the country's debt ceiling by $2 trillion, Rep. Michael Burgess agreed with one attendee at a local Tea Party meeting who “suggested that the House push for impeachment proceedings against President Obama to obstruct the president from pushing his agenda,” reports  the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

"It needs to happen, and I agree with you it would tie things up," Burgess said. "No question about that."

When asked about the comment later, Burgess said he wasn't sure whether the proper charges to bring up articles of impeachment against Obama were there, but he didn't rule out pursuing such a course.

"We need to tie things up," Burgess said. "The longer we allow the damage to continue unchecked, the worse things are going to be for us."

† Breasts Are Not Udders: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “shifting tactics” and pushing hospitals to change their protocols in the maternity ward with the goal of having 60 percent of women breast feed at least part of the time for the first six months by the end of the decade, The Wall Street Journal reports:

Hospitals are key to encouraging breast-feeding because the steps taken immediately after birth are essential to help women establish an adequate milk supply and effective nursing practices. If a woman doesn't really try breast-feeding until a week after giving birth, she probably won't be successful, experts say.

"What happens in the first three days can make or break your breast-feeding success," says Jane Morton, a pediatrician at Burgess Pediatrics in Menlo Park, Calif., who helped develop a breast-feeding medicine program at Stanford University.

Many hospitals may interfere by giving newborns supplemental formula even when there isn't a medical necessity, for instance if a baby appears to have difficulty latching on to the breast. Some hospitals also routinely remove the baby from the mother for more than an hour after birth for tests or measurements and put the baby in a central nursery at night, according to the CDC reports.

Surveys show that most women intend to breast-feed after birth and about 75% start nursing in the hospital. But the numbers drop off quickly when women return home. One week after birth, half of mothers have already given their babies formula, the CDC says.

After citing the familiar litany of the benefits of breast feeding – none of which have been proved in studies with robust scientific methodologies – The Journal article acknowledges, that medical or anatomical issues as well as work and lifestyle constraints preclude some women from being able to nurse. Here’s an example of one of those lifestyle constraints.

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: Did he or didn’t he? Tucker Carlson’s political website The Daily Caller wanted to know – and assigned a couple of reporters to find out – whether lib gasbag Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) passed gas during an on-air interview with Rachel Maddow, reports Mediaite. The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind in this slo-mo clip, courtesy of Daily Rushbo: 
 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Obama Gets A “Makeover”): Two years ago, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and other libs saw Obama like this:  

Now, the MSM and Dems are lamenting that "we are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes":  

As The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn mischievously notes, “there was a day - especially after he finished ahead in the 1976 Iowa caucuses - that Mr. Carter was hailed as the intelligent outsider who was going to clean up Washington and forever change American politics”: 

We can chart that change in the pages of the New York Times. After Iowa, we see an establishment forced to abandon its preferred candidates begin to fall in love. Three decades before Mr. Obama told his people "We are the ones we've been waiting for," Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote that "Mr. Carter seems to have made the restoration of the people's faith in themselves his primary campaign strategy."

Anthony Lewis noted how listeners come away "struck most of all by how smart Carter is," and he found the Georgian's bid for the presidency "a little reminiscent of John Kennedy's emergence in 1960." …

[I]t's not just the way President Obama's policies have not worked out that invites the Jimmy Carter parallel. It's also the over-the-top praise each received before entering office. In both 1976 and 2008, each Democrat was presented as the kind of smart, cool, new politico who was going to—fill in the cliché—"transcend politics as we know it," "appeal across traditional lines," "bring America together," etc.

When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Does The U.S. Need An Election Monitor?): In their relentless fight against voter ID laws, Dems vacillate between pretending that voter fraud doesn’t exist and playing the race card by accusing state lawmakers of wanting to reinstate Jim Crow – even though all voters would be required to show ID, and states adopting these laws issue IDs to non-drivers for free. The first tactic will be harder to pull off now that three Dems in NC have admitted that they each voted for Barack Obama twice (he wasn’t using his middle name back then, only “racists” were); District Judge Donald Mosley, imposed the maximum fine of $5,000 on ACORN for perpetrating a massive voter fraud conspiracy that made a "mockery" of the nation's election process ("This isn't a banana republic," the judge said); and in April a MS jury convicted Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee member Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots after a forensic scientist testified that her  DNA was on the inner seals of five envelopes containing ballots.

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): Bristol Sheriff Thomas Hodgson and Plymouth Sheriff Joseph McDonald are “openly defying” Gov. Deval Patrick’s (D-MA) wishes and “moving forward with plans to join the federal Secure Communities program,” The Boston Herald reports:

“There’s nothing he can do,” Hodgson said of Patrick. “He can complain or do whatever he wants. He can challenge me legally. I don’t frankly care. I didn’t get elected by the governor.”

The two Republican sheriffs are slated to meet with officials from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency next week to hash out plans to share inmates’ fingerprints and other information to weed out illegal aliens.

Forty-two states take part in the program but Patrick pulled Massachusetts out, citing concerns that illegals were being deported after being charged with only minor crimes. The governor also argued that the state routinely shares arrestees’ fingerprints with the FBI and refers all convicted felons to ICE.

“The governor’s position is nothing short of irresponsible,” Hodgson said. “Anytime we can implement an initiative to make our communities safer, we have an obligation to do that.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, The Link Between Autism, Vaccines And Scientific Misconduct Elucidated): In this post for New York Times blog Opinionator, University of Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting discusses why observational studies – a media mainstay, particularly in health/fitness/nutrition/women’s magazines – are junk science:

An article in the May Consumer Reports Health … discussed the widely publicized medical study that showed, contrary to expectations, that “raising HDL (good) cholesterol with drugs did nothing to protect against heart attacks.”  This, the article said, was surprising because observational studies had shown that people with lower levels of HDL had more heart attacks than those with higher levels of HDL. An observational study, however, shows only a correlation between two variables (e.g., level of HDL and number of heart attacks). The new result came from a randomized clinical study, using one group of patients who receive a given treatment and a “control group” of patients who do not. Unlike an observational study, such a study can show whether or not, for example, higher HDL actually prevents heart attacks. The article went on to emphasize that “we should almost never rely on the results of observational studies, which can only suggest associations with disease but not prove them.”

There are cases in which very careful observational studies involving large numbers of subjects can establish causal connections; this was how we learned that smoking causes lung cancer. But most observational studies, including almost all reported in popular media, use a small number of subjects and, at best, suggest directions for further research and do not establish reliable conclusions.

The clear message, then, is to pay attention to randomized clinical studies, but don’t rely on observational studies. 

Yes, once upon a time that would have been the message. But The Wall Street Journal reports that “[s]ince 2001, while the number of papers published in research journals has risen 44%, the number retracted has leapt more than 15-fold” and that it often takes years between publication of a fraudulent paper to its retraction, during which time thousands of patients can be harmed as doctors change their treatment protocols to act on the new findings:

Just 22 retraction notices appeared in 2001, but 139 in 2006 and 339 last year. Through seven months of this year, there have been 210, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science, an index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals world-wide.

In a sign of the times, a blog called "Retraction Watch" has popped up to monitor the flow.

Science is based on trust, and most researchers accept findings published in peer-reviewed journals. The studies spur others to embark on related avenues of research, so if one paper is later found to be tainted, an entire edifice of work comes into doubt. Millions of dollars' worth of private and government funding may go to waste, and, in the case of medical science, patients can be put at risk. …

Retractions related to fraud showed a more than sevenfold increase between 2004 and 2009, exceeding the twofold rise in retractions related to mere error, according to an analysis published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. The analyst, Grant Steen, reached that conclusion after studying 742 medicine and biology papers that were withdrawn from 2000 to 2010. He said 73.5% were retracted simply for error but 26.6% were retracted for fraud.

Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, a prestigious British peer-reviewed journal founded in 1823, explains the temptation to fudge or fabricate results: "The stakes are so high. A single paper in Lancet and you get your chair and you get your money. It's your passport to success."

And speaking of wasted government funding for fraudulent research, Human Events reports that inspector general's office of the Department of Interior are investigating government biologists Charles Monnett and Jeffrey Gleason over claims made in a paper published by the journal Polar Biology in 2006 that “that the “drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open-water periods continues”:

The disputed paper … galvanized the environmental movement that led to the bear’s controversial listing in 2008 as threatened, and it is now protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Although the four dead bears cited in the paper were observed from 1,500 feet during flights over the Beaufort Sea, and the carcasses were never recovered or examined, Gleason told investigators it is likely the creatures drowned in a sudden windstorm that produced 30-knot winds, not for lack of an ice pack.

“We never mentioned global warming in the paper,” Gleason told the investigators, according to the transcript.

“But it’s inferred,” responded investigator Eric May.  “That’s why the world took it up as a global warming tangent.”

Investigators are also looking into the why the “peer” who reviewed the paper was done by Monnett’s wife Lisa Rotterman. Human Events notes that Attorney General Eric Holder has declined to pursue criminal charges, but the scientists may be subject to administrative action for any wrongdoing.

Remember when science was a noble profession? Neither does The Stiletto.