If California starts building a 130-mile segment of high-speed rail late this year as planned, it will enter into a risky race against a deadline set up under federal law.

The bullet train track through the Central Valley would cost $6 billion and have to be completed by September 2017, or else potentially lose some of its federal funding. It would mean spending as much as $3.5 million every calendar day, holidays and weekends included — the fastest rate of transportation construction known in U.S. history, according to industry and academic experts.

Over four years, the California High-Speed Rail Authority would need as many as 120 permits, mostly from a tangle of government regulatory agencies not known to rush their business. It would need to acquire about 1,100 parcels of land, many from powerful agriculture interests that have already threatened to sue. And it would need to assemble five teams of contractors with giant workforces positioned from Fresno to Bakersfield, moving millions of tons of gravel, steel rail and heavy equipment across the valley.

Yes, a massively expensive boondoggle like this is exactly the sort of thing the nation’s brokest state needs. The eventual cost of the project will be $98 billion!

2. Sarah Palin still can pick ‘em. She was the only prominent pol to back Fischer. Palin’s highest value in the GOP may be in finding talented female candidates (e.g. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley).

3. Republican women are out in force in the 2012 election. Fischer joins Hawaii’s Linda Lingle, Missouri’s Sarah Steelman, Connecticut’s Linda McMahon, New York’s Wendy Long and New Mexico’s Heather Wilson as prominent female Republicans contending in primaries. With the departure of Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the GOP would have only three women in the Senate; That number could easily double with this crop of female candidates.

(via InstaPundit)

From May 5-11, 2012, I conducted a survey of 6,000 likely voters. On such a mammoth sample, the margin of error is less than one percent. I found that Romney has amassed a sizeable lead over Obama of 51-42, far in excess of what published polling and surveys of registered — as opposed to likely voters — are indicating.

If Romney were to win 51 percent of the vote, the election would, of course, be very close. But if he could hold Obama to 42 percent, it would be a landslide. So the obvious question is how Romney should go about winning the voters in between.

[...]

On the economy, 46 percent of these swing voters do not believe that there is any recovery. 23 percent say the economy is the same as when Obama took office, and an additional 23 percent say it is worse. 39 percent say the jobs situation has not improved. 25 percent say it is the same, and 14 percent say it is worse. And 37 percent agree with the statement that “if we look around, there isn’t real evidence that we are actually making progress.”

Specifically, swing voters do not believe that the unemployment rate drop Obama heralds is real. 49 percent agree that “the only reason it goes down is that each month more people give up even looking for work.”

[...]

Will Romney exploit the vulnerabilities this poll suggests? Only time will tell.

SANFORD, Fla. — WFTV has confirmed that autopsy results show 17-year-old Trayvon Martin had injuries to his knuckles when he died.

The information could support George Zimmerman’s claim that Martin beat him up before Zimmerman shot and killed him.

[...]

WFTV has learned that the medical examiner found two injuries on Martin’s body: The fatal gunshot wound and broken skin on his knuckles.

Also no one caught this trend until the WeAskAmerica poll. I’ll have to keep an eye on their polls.

The Republican presidential candidates got three times as many votes as Obama did. He’ll be quite a drag on Bob Kerrey.

“We’ll see how the campaign develops over time. We may take on some of those issues, but probably our best course will be that the president wanted to turn around the economy and he hasn’t and that it is bumping along the bottom. A lot of people like him. You can’t forget the fact that a lot of people who voted for him last time I need to have vote for me this time.”

A medical report compiled by the family physician of accused Trayvon Martin murderer George Zimmerman and obtained exclusively by ABC News found that Zimmerman was diagnosed with a “closed fracture” of his nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury the day after he fatally shot Martin during an alleged altercation.

[...]

The record shows that Zimmerman also suffered bruising in the upper lip and cheek and lower back pain.

[...]

A neighbor told ABC News that the day after the shooting he saw Zimmerman as he spoke to officers outside his home. He too recalled seeing black eyes and significant swelling — as well as a bandage over his nose.

Moments after the shooting Zimmerman told eyewitnesses he shot Martin in self defense. He later told officers his head was being pounded into the pavement and that he feared for his life, but that it was only when Martin seemed to reach for the gun wedges in his waistband that Zimmerman drew his weapon and fired directly into Martin’s chest — killing him.

The medical notes may bolster Zimmerman’s claim that he acted in self-defense because he was being attacked. However, the prosecution contends that Zimmerman instigated the confrontation after profiling the teen, who was walking home after buying skittles and ice tea. [emphasis mine]

That last part in emphasis is a Lying Liberal Media lie. The prosecution’s “case” is so thin that they don’t even claim that Zimmerman “instigated” the confrontation. Instead, the prosecution says a confrontation “ensued.” Also, the prosecution doesn’t mention what “profiling” is, or why a private citizen is guilty of second-degree murder he “profiles” someone.

A new poll of Arkansas Democrats shows Barack Obama receiving support from only 45 percent of Democratic primary voters in Arkansas’s Fourth Congressional District, while 38 percent support his underfunded and relatively unknown primary challenger, Tennessee lawyer John Wolfe, Jr. Seventeen percent are undecided in the district poll.

In an interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Wolfe said the poll results were “unbelievable” and said a defeat for Obama in the Arkansas primary would be “politically cataclysmic.”

Asian-American schoolchildren in New York and Philadelphia have for years been beaten up by their black classmates. But people in the mainstream media who go ballistic if some kid says something unkind on the Internet about a homosexual classmate nevertheless hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil when Asian-American youngsters are victims of violence.

I hadn’t heard of this; so I Googled it. The results are stunning. There’s practically a race war going on between black and Asian students. But it’s a one-sided war where one side fights with violence, and the other haplessly tries to defend itself with non-violent tools. For instance:

On December 3, 2009, more than two dozen Asian immigrant students were beaten in a series of assaults at South Philadelphia High School. The assaults began before 9 a.m. when teachers reported groups of students roaming the halls looking for Asian students. In one classroom, a dozen students rushed inside and assaulted an Asian student, reportedly beating him and throwing a desk on top of him. Before 11 a.m., there was a rush of 20-40 students into a hallway where English Language Learner (ELL) students took classes. While school police held the crowd back, teachers hurried students into classrooms and locked their doors. At lunchtime, Asian immigrant students expressed fear of going to the cafeteria but their request to remain in the classroom during lunch was denied by the school principal who ordered them downstairs where a number of them were subsequently attacked. More than 60-70 students surged upon small groups of Asian students, while security cameras showed other students egging them on. Around 1 p.m., a group of 3-5 students dragged an Asian girl down the stairwell by her hair. Afterschool, ten Asian students requested to remain in the building, expressing fear of larger than usual crowds that had amassed on street corners. They were ordered outside. Although the school principal offered to walk them home, she quickly dropped from sight. A crowd of more than 100 chased, cornered and surrounded the students, mostly young girls, as 20-40 of their peers beat them. At the end of the day, more than two dozen Asian immigrant students had been assaulted, many more were terrorized, and 13 went to the emergency room for treatment.1 Afterwards, a regional superintendent shrugged the day off as a “blip,” and both the District’s safety chief and school principal reported that a minor incident had happened off campus with no injuries.

To add insult to injury, Asians have to score 450 SAT points more than blacks to have the same chance at college admissions, because Asians don’t bring enough “diversity” to campus, and “diversity” is our strength.

The Times/CBS survey is unique in that the pollsters called back the same phone numbers they had a month before. In April, Obama and Romney were dead even. Now, Romney leads by 3 points overall. That’s still within the margin of error — a statistical tie.

But the shifts with women, moderates and independents are all statistically significant. Obama lost 5 points with each of those demographics.

Though the poll receives an A1 billing in the national edition, the story is below the fold on the 17th page of today’s New York edition.

The Times’s previous four monthly polls this year have all received A1 billings in the New York edition, and usually an A17 article, too (on the second page of their inside “National” section). Surely the Times should give better placement to Americans’ opinion of our president, as their editorial board put it, “[taking] the moral high ground on what may be the great civil rights struggle of our time”?

Further, one should never make too much of a single poll, but one finding was truly surprising and doesn’t receive any mention at all: Romney leads Obama among women, 46 to 44, erasing the somewhat substantial gender gap from April’s equivalent poll (Obama 49, Romney 43), and overall, leads the president 46 points to 43.

In their 19-paragraph, 1,129-word analysis, the Times doesn’t deign to mention the female cross-tab number.

The last time I read a dead-tree newspaper, I was a child. But I’m guessing putting something on “A17″ means that most of the fossils who still read the dead-tree Old York Times won’t know about the poll.

Barney Stinson:

“What do you expect? You’re going to meet a cute travel agent when you’re reading a newspaper at a bookstore? None of those things exist anymore.”