For the first time, the Democrats are abandoning white working-class voters and will instead try to win in 2012 by strengthening a coalition of elite liberals and poor minorities, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment -- professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists -- and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

Edsall says that white voters without college degrees are "an unattainable cohort."

Ruy Texiera, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress said, "[t]he Republican Party has become the party of the white working class" especially after that demographic broke abandoned the Democrats by a 30-point margin in 2010.

Identity politics is a practical way to secure victory, but does not bode well for the unity of the country.  When a party pursues a particular demographic group, it wants to promise them things, namely handouts paid for by taxpayers.

A top priority of the less affluent wing of today's left alliance is the strengthening of the safety net, including health care, food stamps, infant nutrition and unemployment compensation.

On the flip side, a party that has no use for a particular demographic ignores it.  It stops reaching out to it, stops running candidates that appeal to them, and stops talking about issues they care about. Now that Democrats are abandoning the white middle-class, guess who is going to get the checks in the mail from Democratic administrations and guess who'll be paying for them. The Democratic Party is saying, in effect, "Vote for us and we'll give you their money." And they said George W. Bush was divisive?

Republicans and Democrats used to be divided on economic lines. The Democrats of 20^th century supported the little guy--the union workers and the farmers--while the Republicans were the party of Wall Street bankers and CEOs. Now, it's increasingly looking like the Democrats are pursuing voters solely because of their race. If the political divide in the coming years is drawn along racial lines only, then the country is headed for serious trouble. 

Michelle Obama is leading a campaign to fight child obesity.

"We want to eliminate this problem of childhood obesity in a generation," the First Lady told Good Morning America in 2010 to kick off her Let's Move nutrition program.

"We all know the numbers," she said. "I mean, one in three kids are overweight or obese, and we're spending $150 billion a year treating obesity-related illnesses."

I'm politically aware enough to realize that her campaign is all about politics, designed to showcase her leadership skills in a safe arena, in what's become a tradition for previous First Ladies, including Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan.

However, that doesn't take away from the legitimacy of the issue selected for Michelle Obama to crusade against. The CDC reports that childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years. American kids, like American adults, are fat. Food is easily obtainable and cheap, even for poor people.

Sure enough, a study from the Oakland-based nonprofit Children Now showed that 37% of low-income children are overweight or obese.

But while Mrs. Obama complains about kids eating too much, other Progressives say they're starving. Kids can't be fat and starving at the same time, can they?

In the Progressive world we live in, they can.

CNN reported that one in five children are "at risk of hunger." And no, they don't mean hungry the way fat people are always hungry--CNN means they're starving, and cited a report from Feeding America.

The nonprofit Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks around the United States, reports one in five children are at risk of hunger.

CNN also referenced a 2010 Department of Agriculture report that 14.5% of households in the United States "lacked the resources to provide enough food for everybody." Kids don't have access to food and are starving, they say.

Michelle Obama and Children Now says kids are fat. The USDA, Feeding America, and CNN say they're starving. So what's going on?

Despite the opposing messages, Mrs. Obama, CNN, the USDA ,and the nonprofit groups are coming from the same place--they're just using two different tactics.

The overarching concern of each of those Progressive entities is to lead you stupid people to do the right thing. You see, you're not responsible enough to take care of your children's nutrition. You feed them too much fast food and not enough veggie wraps like enlightened people do. You need to be nudged to do the right thing.

In a world of socialized medicine, we can't have a bunch of fat people increasing the cost for everybody. So, we're going to treat you like infants and, in Mrs. Obama's case, we'll teach you how to shop at a grocery store, and in CNN's case we'll lie to you and say that children are starving to get your attention to get you to part with even more of your taxpayer dollars to fund more government programs to tell you how to live your life.

Tragically, we waste time, money, and energy worrying about getting food into the mouths of people that are already suffering from obesity instead of committing those resources to helping truly starving people in other countries.

Things are never quite so disgusting while they're still happening. It's only when we look back when we see how bad things were. Had we read that in Ancient Rome well-fed Romans complained they didn't have enough food as they engorged themselves on lavish sofas while non-Roman children died in the street of starvation, we'd shake our heads in disbelief.

But the same thing is happening in the United States, it's just not obvious to most people, particularly Progressives. If Progressives were eating ants off an anthill in Africa to stave off starvation, however, they might see how disgusting it is to spend your time fighting to get more money to pay for food to go into the mouths of already-fat American children.

 Yet in our backwards society, those Progressive elites are the smart ones that we get our information from and lead us, even though a child has more sense than they do.

"I'm Mitt Romney, and I approved this message."

With that routine statement at the end of the Romney Campaign's first ad against President Obama, the candidate put his seal of approval on what was revealed to be a deceitful attempt to twist the words of his Democratic opponent.

What makes the incident more frustrating for conservatives is that Romney didn't have to diminish himself by taking the president out of context--Obama himself has provided a treasure trove of statements that would make great political ads. Why does his campaign need to make stuff up?

Romney's ad quotes Obama as saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." While Obama said those words, right before it he said, "Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote..."

So Obama was quoting McCain. The Romney ad leaves the viewer with the false impression that Obama said he'll lose in 2012 if he talks about the economy.

ABC's Jake Tapper tweeted that the ad isn't just misleading. "It's TV-station-refuse-to-air-it-misleading."

Chances are Romney himself is not splicing together video in a dishonest way. But his stamp is on it, and so he deserves criticism. Mitt, this is the type of stuff conservatives expect from Jon Stewart and Media Matters. This is beneath your campaign.

The Heritage Foundation provided a great way to visualize the media's biased coverage of the gaping chasm between how Tea Partiers and Occupiers behaved at their respective protests. The left-wing media was desperate for any examples of violence it could pin on the conservative movement, even blaming it for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords by a disturbed young man who had no ties whatsoever to the Tea Party.

Any of the following events would be front-page stories for weeks if they happened:

• Tea Party Protester Defecates on Police Car
• Riot Police Arrest Tea Party Protesters
• Repairing Tea Party Damage to City Hall Could Cost $400,000
• Tea Party Protesters Sing 'F*** the USA'"
• Tea Party Speaker: Violence Will be Necessary to Achieve Our Goals
• Tea Party Protests Go Global; Riots in Rome
• Police in Riot Gear Clear Tea Party Protesters in California City

The media would be justifiably outraged if the Tea Party was guilty of any of the above. Instead, the media is guilty of hypocrisy for not crying out at all, because those acts were committed by Occupiers, not Tea Partiers.

Matters concerning local libraries don't normally attract this kind of attention, but in this era of far-left Occupy protests, anything goes.

The Simi Valley City Council is considering privatizing the local library, drawing the ire of liberal bloggers and Democratic Party officials.  The usual left-wing groups will turn out to protest their dissatisfaction with the plan, which is par for the course. But what's interesting here is who else is rallying support against the privatization plan.

A website called raisethefist.com, which is littered with red stars (must be Macy's fans), links to the Simi protest's Facebook event page. Judging by the website's contents, its editors apparently are big supporters of the Occupy movement as well as Copwatch, a self-described "revolutionary" organization that encourages visitors to its website to "Check-a-pig."  The Facebook link on raisethefist.com was created by the Los Angeles Independent Media Center, which describes itself as a "non-commercial, non corporate, anti-capitalist collective."

What probably happened is that either a local organizer or protester sent a press release of sorts to the Los Angeles Independent Media Center, which probably maintains a list of far-left websites, such as raisethefist.com, that it can post free advertisements on.

It's interesting to note, however, that issues interesting to supposedly mainstream Democrats are also embraced by radical anti-police, revolutionary groups.

Greece's government was thrown into turmoil Tuesday when Prime Minister George Papandreou blindsided core European Union countries by announcing he'd seek a public referendum on the EU's plan to bail out his struggling country in exchange for a continuation of unpopular austerity measures.

It's complicated, it's far away, and we have our own problems to worry about. Should we be concerned about what's going on with Greece and the European Union?

The Star cited a USA Today poll of economists that showed that "although the Greek debt crisis might trigger a European recession, at worst it would be a drag on the U.S. recovery."

The news coming from Greece sounds scarier than those economists let on. Read this alarming description from the Daily Mail:

Markets nosedived around the world, with billions wiped off the value of Britain's leading firms, as Athens announced extraordinary plans to sack its military leaders amid rampant speculation that it was trying to head off a coup d'etat.

'It's all over. The government is about to collapse,' said one Greek official. Greece's former deputy finance minister Petros Doukas agreed: 'The **** has hit the fan.'

The prime minister was so concerned about a military coup (an "outcome said to have been deemed possible in a secret assessment by the CIA") he took the bold step of removing key military leaders.  That sounds pretty serious. A Greek collapse doesn't bode well for other European countries, according to economists that apparently didn't take part in the USA Today poll.

Economists warned that if Greece rejects the debt deal hammered out only last week, which would entail years of austerity, the entire future of the single currency is in peril.

They predicted that Italy, Spain and Portugal are likely to be plunged into a profound economic crisis because of their failure to get to grips with their towering debts.

The Globe and Mail was equally optimistic

Thursday's G20 summit in Cannes, intended to be a self-congratulatory gathering at which Europe's leaders would hail their rescue of the euro, has turned into a panicked emergency session facing a looming collapse of governments, markets, economies and painstakingly crafted plans.

A collapse of the European economy is only going to cause us a small ripple? One only needs to look back at the 20th Century to see how European financial crises are resolved.