Following up on a post earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) — a 16 year-old in southern New Jersey was arrested and charged with “harassment and bias intimidation” for getting onto an area Wal-Mart store’s intercom and saying, “Attention, Walmart customers: All black people, leave the store now.”

Though the company had told the local press Friday evening that it believe that a non-employee had been responsible for the incident, the Associated Press did not report that critical fact (see picture of 7:03 a.m. report here) until mid-morning on Saturday, leaving its readers up to that point to infer that a company employee had perpetrated the act.

Now, even though the worst you could say about the company is that it didn’t protect its public address system from customer access Associated Press writer Bruck Shipkowski is citing the incident as “the latest in a series of problems the retailer has had in its dealings with minorities and women.” How disgusting.

Here are key paragraphs from Shipkowski’s POS (pretty outrageous smear):

Police: Boy, 16, made racial comment at NJ Walmart

A 16-year-old boy who police said made an announcement at Walmart ordering all black people in the southern New Jersey store to leave was charged with harassment and bias intimidation, authorities said Saturday.

The boy, whose name is not being released because he is a juvenile, grabbed one of the courtesy phones at Walmart’s Washington Township store Sunday evening and calmly announced: “Attention, Walmart customers: All black people, leave the store now,” police said.

The teen was arrested Friday and released to the custody of his parents; police did not know whether he had a lawyer.

“This was an extremely disturbing event on many levels,” Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean Dalton said at a news conference. “Any statements like these that can cause harm or grave concern must be addressed as quickly we possibly can.”

Dalton said the case would be handled in juvenile court in neighboring Atlantic County, where the boy lives. He would not say whether the boy has a criminal record, citing the teen’s age, and would not disclose the teen’s race, saying that did not factor into the investigation.

… Although a manager quickly went on the intercom system and apologized for the remark, many customers expressed their anger to store management. Some community members said Saturday that they’ve heard reports of similar incidents happening at the store in recent months that were not reported to police.

… The incident was the latest in a series of problems the retailer has had in its dealings with minorities and women.

There have been several past instances of black customers claiming they were treated unfairly at Walmart stores, and the company faced lawsuits alleging that women were passed over in favor of men for pay raises and promotions.

By no stretch of the imagination does anything in the final two excerpted paragraphs matters in relation to the current incident. Of course it doesn’t. But that’s what passes for journalism at the Absolutely Pathetic Associated Press.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Here is the Associated Press’s report on an intercom incident at a southern New Jersey Wal-Mart store as of 7:03 a.m. Saturday (text at link will likely change):

Naturally, most readers will believe that some Wal-Mart associate thought he was being “cute.”

That’s because “somehow” the wire service “forgot” to reveal a key element of the story that as of 7:03 a.m. Saturday had been known for at least eight hours:

A report time-stamped at 8:25 a.m. Saturday at NBC Philadelphia covering the person’s arrest repeats the company’s contention concerning evidence that the person who committed the act was not a store associate.

The story’s placement in AP’s raw news feed (shot taken at about 9:30 a.m.) would seem to indicate that the story’s 7:03 a.m. version was either a significant revision to an existing story or a fresh one:

Gosh, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that the AP was keeping information from its national readers and subscribers in an attempt to make a favorite target of the left look bad during the critical early hours of a story.

Those hallowed keepers of the journalistic flame at the self-described “Essential Global News Network” wouldn’t do that … would they?

Cross-posted at NewBusters.org.

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Cross-posted Update: The AP’s 10:33 iteration carries the company’s contention –

This post went up at 9:54 a.m. at BizzyBlog and 10:06 a.m. at NewsBusters. Hmm.

BizzyBlog-only Update: Are “Officials … staying tight-lipped on the arrest” (per the NBC Philly story) because something about the person arrested doesn’t fit the narrative?

Cross-posted Update, 1:30 p.m.: Bulls-eye, it’s a 16 year-old kid —

Police have arrested a 16-year-old boy in the case of a racial comment that was made over the public-address system at a Walmart store in southern New Jersey.

Police said Saturday the Atlantic County teenager was arrested Friday on charges of harassment and bias intimidation. They say he’s been released to the custody of his parents.

So what is his ethnicity?

Congressman Stupak,

Word has it that you’re considering caving and voting yes to support the implementation of statist health care.

Since you claim to be fighting the good fight for life, please consider this undeniable truth: The entire health care enterprise is anti-life, regardless of the presence or absence of abortion funding in its provisions.

Rationing is anti-life, and is a guaranteed result.

“Death panels” are anti-life, and are a guaranteed result of “comparative effectiveness.”

The people who will be running the health care enterprise are militantly anti-life.

Further, once health care is accepted as a government-guaranteed right, the likelihood that the courts would consider abortion to be a form of “health care” that the government would have to pay for regardless of the legislative language is unacceptably high. I would suggest that this result, effectively gutting the Hyde Amendment, is a near certainty.

Please, please hold firm and vote no on any form of statist health care, and encourage others in your coalition to do the same.

____________________________________________________

Related: At Ace’s place — “Stupak: We Won’t Have a Deal Until Nancy Pelosi Commits Her Unenforceable Empty Promises to Worthless Paper.”

UPDATE (as of 10:57 a.m. at the Corner): “Stupak is ‘Finished with Pelosi.’”

The Corner is doing as good a job as any at keeping up with developments.

There’s also this:

Reps. Driehaus (D., Ohio) and Dahlkemper (D., Penn.), two Stu-Packers, just went into Pelosi’s office. Of the meeting, Dahlkemper says “we’re still working on it.”

Mr. “Allegedly Pro-Life (but not really)” Driehaus, the original post above is also for you.

From Westport, Connecticut:

Published: 01:05 a.m., Friday, March 19, 2010

Last summer, two young lifeguards who never had to administer rescue breaths or CPR during all their summers of lifeguarding, had to do both when a man started to sink under the water at Burying Hill Beach. The Vietnam veteran’s life was truly in the hands of Gordon Kempler and Cooper Whiteside, who were not yet of voting age. They had practiced for a moment like this so many times in the past, but practice often doesn’t truly prepare one for reality.

“When it first happened, I was holding myself back,” Kempler said, “but then I had to take a deep breath, a second where I had to realize, I can’t panic.”

Kempler and Whiteside were successful in sustaining life and for their efforts, they are being honored by the Connecticut Chapter of the American Red Cross at the Lower Fairfield County 2010 Heroes Breakfast March 25 at the Trumbull Marriott. The man’s head, neck and feet were blue after he was pulled out of the water onto shore. He had a very weak pulse, and would actually lose his pulse, but Kempler and Whitestone provided the crucial aid that kept him alive prior to the arrival of a police officer.

Kempler, a 2008 graduate of Staples High School, said the man made a really miraculous recovery “because in my opinion, when I saw him on the beach, with EMS working on him, I didn’t think he had a good chance of making it.”

Unlike Compo Beach in the summer, where there are five lifeguards on duty and five on break all the time, Burying Hill Beach only has two lifeguards at all times. And when one goes on a break, that leaves only one watching the beach.

Whiteside was in the lifeguard chair when he heard a woman scream for help. Kempler was by the lifeguard shack that sits on the top of a hill. Whiteside got to the man first and Kempler called Compo Beach, telling his superiors to send an ambulance. He also grabbed an automated external defibrillator (AED), oxygen and medical kit before making his way down to the beach.

Whiteside said the man had a weak pulse but was not breathing, and so he administered a couple of rescue breaths to get air in his lungs. By this time, Kempler had arrived and the man was coughing up a good deal of water. Both lifeguards turned him over on his side to get all of the liquid out. He was subsequently put back on his back, and was found to have no pulse, which is why Kempler began administering CPR, and did so for about six minutes. Then an officer took over, performing more CPR before EMS got to the scene. Later, EMS personnel hooked the man up to an AED and intubated him. In the end, the man’s life was saved. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

In a Friday piece of presidential protection prose promulgated by the Associated Press, writer Erica Werner correctly identified a number of significant “unfulfilled commitments” relating to proposed health care legislation, and then attempted to make excuses for why they didn’t happen.

Werner’s work was conveniently accompanied by a heavily downplaying headline — “Final health bill omits some of Obama’s promises” — while her rundown of the specifics in reality ended up being “all but two”:

It was a bold response to skyrocketing health insurance premiums. President Barack Obama would give federal authorities the power to block unreasonable rate hikes.

Yet when Democrats unveiled the final, incarnation of their health care bill this week, the proposal was nowhere to be found.

Ditto with several Republican ideas that Obama had said he wanted to include after a televised bipartisan summit last month, including a plan by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to send investigators disguised as patients to hospitals in search of waste, fraud and abuse.

And those “special deals” that Obama railed against and said he wanted to eliminate? With the exception of two of the most notorious – extra Medicaid money for Nebraska and a carve-out for Florida seniors faced with losing certain extra Medicare benefits – they are all still there.

For the White House, these were the latest unfulfilled commitments related to Obama’s health care proposal, starting with his campaign promise to let C-SPAN cameras film negotiations over the bill. Obama also backed down with little apparent regret on his support for a new government-run insurance plan as part of the legislation, a liberal priority.

But was it all the president’s doing?

In the cases of the insurance rate authority, the Republican ideas and the special deals, it came down to Obama making promises that Congress didn’t keep. He can propose whatever he wants, but it’s up to Congress to enshrine it into law.

Arguably, the president could have foreseen that outcome, and was making a low-risk p.r. move by floating proposals – dismissed by critics as insubstantial anyway – whose demise he couldn’t be blamed for.

While the White House worked hard to trumpet Obama’s plans for the rate authority, his embrace of bipartisanship and his opposition to special deals, the administration hardly advertised the lack of follow-through. Understandable, certainly, but perhaps not the new way of doing business that Obama promised to bring to Washington.

Werner also continued the wire service’s annoying habit of saving some of the more important news for the very end when she quotes a health policy consultant who says that “Democrats will have three years to tinker with health reform before universal coverage goes live.”

Geez, after 2,000-plus pages in heaven knows how many Senate and House iterations, with who knows how many new bureaucracies, taxes, mandates, fines, and penalties, we will have to endure another three years of “tinkering” until we know what we’re really going to face in 2014 if the current madness disguised as legislation “passes” this weekend (”passes” is in quotes because the constitutionality of attempt is extremely dubious)?

If so, this will mean that the length of the Wall Street Journal has called “the uncertainty economy” will bear quite a resemblance to how certain not-free countries used to run things, — i.e., five-year plans — while endless establishment press protection prose continues to proliferate.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Link:

Has there ever been a political spectacle like the final throes of ObamaCare? We can’t recall one outside of a banana republic, or, more accurately, Woody Allen’s 1971 classic “Bananas.” Capitol Hill resembles nothing so much as that movie’s farcical coup d’etat in San Marcos as Democrats try to assemble the partisan minimum of 216 House votes—if only for an hour or so at some point on Sunday—and no bribe is too costly, no deal too cynical, no last-minute rewrite too blatant.

… Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually told reporters this week that “nobody wants to vote for the Senate bill,” but she’ll do what it takes to impose it anyway.

… Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced on Tuesday that central California would get extra public water allocations. This was apparently the price for Democrats Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa to vote something other than their consciences. We will hear about many more in the coming days.

… By the way, to make the deficit numbers “work,” Democrats decided at the 11th hour to increase their new tax on investment income to 3.8% from 2.9%. Congratulations.

White House budget director Peter Orszag quickly declared that “The CBO score today should leave no doubt that we are operating in a new fiscal era,” and no kidding. One thing the score also made clear, however, is that Mrs. Pelosi’s reconciliation fixes could easily be blown to pieces in the Senate. While the Democratic strategy is already a wholesale abuse of the traditional reconciliation process, it now bids to violate the actual rules of reconciliation as well.

… Even the political panic over the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, amid an incipient financial collapse and a Presidential election, looks like regular order compared to this ObamaCare mayhem. That the White House and Mrs. Pelosi are still running into such resistance after a year of pleading reveals what an historic blunder ObamaCare really is.

Are we sure that the tax on “investment income” is not also a tax on “retirement distributions”?

________________________________________________

UPDATE: We know that the 3.8% tax hits annuities (HT TaxProf Blog), which is one form for taking retirement distributions:

The rate is higher than the 2.9 percent President Barack Obama proposed in February. The new tax would apply to income from interest, dividends, annuities, royalties, capital gains and rents for individuals who earn more than $200,000 annually and joint filers reporting more than $250,000, according to the legislation.

“It’s a big deal,” said Clint Stretch, a tax analyst for the consulting firm Deloitte Tax LLC. “It extends dramatically the reach of the Medicare hospital insurance tax.”

Note that it also hits landlords. Anyone who doesn’t think this will affect apartment rental costs is kidding themselves.

A TaxProf commenter (direct link to comment not available; just scroll down), Alan Viard of the American Enterprise Institute, says that qualified plan distributions will not be hit with this tax. Fine, but it’s also the kind of thing that has been known to drop out of final bills (if there even is to be such a thing in this case).

According to Fox, that’s vote number 215. Other assessments vary.

Anyone seeing this video from 2008 knew that Carpetbagger Boccieri would sell out his alleged pro-life beliefs when it mattered:

UPDATE: A suggestion from Pete Hoekstra (HT to an e-mailer) —

For health-care opponents getting a busy signal when calling the capitol, Rep. Pete Hoekstra has a message for you:

All politics is local, so swamp the phone lines of the state legislators too.

“If the people in Washington aren’t willing to listen, if the Democrats aren’t willing to listen, then call your local state elected officials and tell them that you’ll hold them personally accountable to what Nancy Pelosi is going to do the American people in Washington this week,” Hoekstra told The Daily Caller of his “Make it Local” idea.

…

As is usual in a war, the first casualty is the truth, including who’s winning and losing.

Reports from the statist health care battlefield range widely, from Fox’s 214-217 to the 192-211 at Ace’s Place, which apparently substantially agrees with a far-lefty blog whose proprietor at one point opposed ObamaCare because it wasn’t radical enough.

Polite, relentless pressure remains the order of the day.

_____________________________________________________

If they need a reason to avoid using the up-down vote-avoiding Slaughter gambit, Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the 222 congresspersons who voted as they did yesterday might consider the points made in a promised lawsuit by Mark Levin’s Landmark Legal Foundation lawsuit that would be filed if it’s used to force statist health care down our throats.

Here’s the essence of the complaint:

Landmark has already prepared a lawsuit that will be filed in federal court the moment the House acts. Such a brazen violation of the core functions of Congress simply cannot be ignored. Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution is clear respecting the manner in which a bill becomes law. Members are required to vote on this bill, not claim they did when they didn’t. The Speaker of the House and her lieutenants are temporary custodians of congressional authority. They are not empowered to do permanent violence to our Constitution.

If statist health care is passed using the Slaughter gambit and the President signs such “legislation” as presented to him, the President and every congressperson will have attempted (if the courts do their duty and stop it) or actually done “permanent violence to our Constitution.”

Regardless, both congressional “passage” and the President’s signature would represent clear and irrefutable violations of the oaths they have sworn to uphold the constitution. Such offenses raise the possibility of — no, they really demand — impeachment and removal from office. Congresspersons who did not commit these offense would have the presumptive perogative — no, really the constitutional duty — to bring articles of impeachment against each and every one of them, and to remove each and every one of them from office. Each and every one of them will have demonstrated that they are unfit for the offices they hold. Their continued presence in those offices would represent a clear and present danger to our form of government.

The only open questions are whether there would be majorities in the House and Senate legitimately interested in doing their duty, and whether there would be the political will to do it. Given the developments in genuine grass-roots activism during the past 14 months, it would be a huge risk to assume that it won’t be there at crunch time.

Update: Jeffrey T. Kuhner at the Washington Times —

The Slaughter Solution is a poisoned chalice. By drinking from it, the Democrats would not only commit political suicide. They would guarantee that any bill signed by Mr. Obama is illegitimate, illegal and blatantly unconstitutional. It would be worse than a strategic blunder; it would be a crime – a moral crime against the American people and a direct abrogation of the Constitution and our very democracy.

It would open Mr. Obama, as well as key congressional leaders such as Mrs. Pelosi, to impeachment. The Slaughter Solution would replace the rule of law with arbitrary one-party rule. It violates the entire basis of our constitutional government – meeting the threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” If it’s enacted, Republicans should campaign for the November elections not only on repealing Obamacare, but on removing Mr. Obama and his gang of leftist thugs from office.

_____________________________________________________

If statist health care dies in the House, accurate history may end up concluding that President Obama put the nail in its coffin in his horrible “rope a dope” interview (transcript here; video here) with Fox News’s Bret Baier Wednesday.

If there were a Pulitzer for interviewing, Baier would get one. As it is, at least in the short-term, he appears to be in the running for leftist Public Enemy Number One. There’s a price to pay for exposing an ignorant punk for what he really is. Fortunately, Baier works for the network that is, in the word of his predecessor Brit Hume, “fair, balanced, and unafraid.”

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Sunday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

The original inspiration for the write-up was Nancy Pelosi’s statement last year that she wanted the House to make state-run health care a Christmas present to the American people. I don’t take kindly to people who tell me, “Here’s your gift, and here’s what you and your children and grandchildren owe me for it.”

From Beijing:

Mar 19, 2010 / 01:06 am (CNA).- Chinese Catholics are preparing for the Feast of St. Joseph with “great celebration.” Looking to Joseph’s example as a holy man and father, religious communities are preparing for final vows and immigrant workers have been invited to church. “Humility, generosity, unconditional devotion, enlivened by a genuine spirit of service, living in poverty, absolute obedience and chastity, all these virtues that distinguish St. Joseph, which the Church celebrates on March 19, are so relevant for men today,” a Beijing priest told his flock during a Lenten retreat, according to Fides.

Parishes dedicated to St. Joseph are especially preparing for the feast. The Parish of St. Joseph in downtown Beijing dates back to a church built by two Jesuit missionaries, Fr. Louis Buglio and Fr. Gabriel de Magallanes. The two were successors of pioneering missionary Fr. Matteo Ricci.

Marking the 400th anniversary of Fr. Ricci’s death, the parish has tried to unite the event with the figure of St. Joseph.

The diocesan religious congregation in Beijing dedicated to St. Joseph is preparing for the final vows of some sisters to be held on the feast day, Fides reports.

Priests have invited immigrant workers to help celebrate the patron saint of workers.

“Dear brothers and sisters, workers, the Church is your home, where you are received and where you breathe spiritual oxygen not only in the days of the Feast of St. Joseph, but all year,” they commented. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Michelle Malkin has the list of Dems who voted “no,” and Driehaus’s name isn’t on it. Nor is Zack Space’s, Charlie Wilson’s, or John Boccieri’s, or Mollohan’s from West Virginia.

Here’s the official roll call.

Nothing Driehaus or his office says about any other related upcoming vote can be believed. For what it’s worth (i.e., nothing), a person at Driehaus’s Cincinnati office told me today that the congressman is a “no” vote on ObamaCare (whatever the heck that is at this point).

The gentlemen noted above and all others who voted “yes” gave us a twofer: They substantively supported ObamaCare, regardless of their final vote (if there ever is to be one), and they showed their utter lack of respect for the oath of office they declared when they were sworn in to protect and defend the Constitution.

Consider this the “See that wasn’t so bad, you can do it again” vote.

_________________________________________________________

UPDATE: I would suggest that the prospects for stopping the madness are not at all good.

All 222 who voted as they did today have already told voters they don’t care about the consequences to the country of short-circuiting the constitutional process. At least three dozen of them would appear to be in line to pay dearly for having done so, no matter how they vote on whatever health care legislation (if any) comes up for a vote in the next several days.

I would not rule out the idea that a few of those whose constituents are intractably mad may even go so far as to resign and say “Nyah, nyah” shortly after their damning vote.

Is it a coincidence that Obama is way behind in filling Homeland Security posts (and likely many others)?

UPDATE 2, March 19, 1:00 a.m.: At Ace’s place, an explanation of the true nature of the vote —

Technically Speaking: Drew notes that this wasn’t a vote on the Slaughter House Rule itself, but on a GOP motion to compel the House to not employ the Slaughter House Rule.

The Slaughter Rule is not yet actually implemented. But the motion to halt it was rejected.

Technically, they could still reject the rule itself.

That’s some (but not much) comfort.

Andrew Breitbart and/or his peeps must be in an oddly generous mood:

Here’s the vid:

Gateway Pundit, who has been all over the Fox News Baier-Obama interview and breaking developments in general, had this reax:

What earthquake in Hawaii? In 1868 there was a major earthquake in Hawaii that killed 77 people. In 1975 an earthquake in Hawaii killed 2 people.

Rush helpfully pointed out today that the Senate health care plan’s “Louisiana Purchase” language was written in such a way as to ensure that Mississippi, which had many areas that were hit almost as economically hard by Katrina as New Orleans was, got no extra money.

From Fred Barnes:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi believes ObamaCare would have a more congenial fate—that it will become as popular as Social Security and Medicare with voters. She’s kidding herself. Social Security and Medicare were popular from the start and passed with bipartisan support. ObamaCare is unpopular and partisan. It’s extremely controversial. Its passage is far more likely to spark a political explosion than a wave of acceptance.

That’s because the American people won’t take kindly to micromanaged de facto tyranny over their daily lives.

Daniel Henninger, in his weekly “Wonderland” column (”Liz Cheney’s Big Question — Is the Obama administration on the right side of national security?”), has a strong analogy of the current War on Terror to the decades-earlier war on crime:

Whether the wolf at the door is a common criminal or a foreign-trained terrorist, the legal issue at the level of the voting booth is simple: Where along the spectrum of personal safety do I and my family feel comfortable? On this score, the incoherence of the Obama administration’s policies on domestic terrorism, detainees and military tribunals unsettles people. When they felt this way about personal safety in the 1970s and ’80s, their votes for “law and order” candidates were an attempt to restore balance. It worked. The Supreme Court narrowed the 1960s’ most expansive interpretations of defendants’ rights.

Barack Obama’s handling of terror is a voting issue. Republican candidates should put it before voters this November and in 2012. Looking at the failed Christmas airliner bombing, the aggressive recruitment of home-grown jihadis and the aborted Najibullah Zazi bombings in New York City, I’d say establishing a policy of coherence and constancy in meeting this threat is more urgent than the health-care odyssey Mr. Obama has forced on us for a year.

I’d say “as important.”

And, as is so often the case, here’s the opening of a “Review and Outlook” editorial that reports news carried almost nowhere else:

Most asbestos trials feature tort lawyers mauling defendant companies. But last week a federal jury in Mississippi turned the tables on a pair of plaintiffs attorneys accused of filing corrupt cases. Let’s hope it’s a trend.

The jury found that William Guy and Thomas Brock committed fraud as part of an asbestos lawsuit they filed in 2001 against Illinois Central Railroad Co. The jurors concluded that the lawyers knew their clients had lied about taking part in an earlier asbestos suit. And they ordered the lawyers to pay $210,000 in actual damages and—turnabout is fair play—a further $210,000 in punitive damages to Illinois Central.

This is the first time to our knowledge that lawyers have been punished for filing fraudulent asbestos lawsuits. The lack of any such penalty is one reason that U.S. courts are still clogged with frivolous suits decades after the asbestos legal explosion began. Illinois Central deserves credit for persevering in this risky suit and providing other defendants with a roadmap for fighting back.

The bolded paragraph makes the event news. Look at how thin the coverage has been.

From Vancouver:

MARCH 6, 2010

Kasey Girdlestone removed Lego piece that was choking nine-month-old baby

A Duncan mother is counting her blessings and a babysitter is being hailed as a hero after the latter saved her infant charge from choking last Saturday night.

Brandee Peart said she would be forever grateful for the quick reaction of 16-year-old babysitter Kasey Girdlestone.

“She saved my daughter’s life,” said Peart.

Words can’t express how grateful the mother of five is to know she’s got a caregiver she can trust.

“I felt like any other babysitter could have been sitting on the computer or ignoring the kids and my baby would have been gone.

“But Kasey was right there on top of it and saved her life.”

Saturday was a joyous day around the Peart household: the day Brandee graduated from nursing school.

To celebrate, she and her husband Philip went for dinner.

As was often the case, Girdlestone was called to mind the kids.

“I babysit regularly for this family,” said the Cowichan Secondary student. “I love their five kids. I have lots of fun when I babysit them.”

Saturday night began like any other, but ended much differently.

While Girdlestone was preparing to give the children dinner, nine-month-old Emily popped a small grey piece of Lego into her mouth.

“I had already found a piece [and picked it up] but she’d found another in the dining room,” Girdlestone explained. “I noticed she was choking when I turned around to give the kids their dinner.”

Girdlestone said she’s taken a babysitting course but never really thought she would have to use the life-saving skills she’d learned.

“It was a very scary situation as it was happening,” she admitted. “I didn’t want to freak out because the other kids were in the same room, so I didn’t want to freak them out.”

Girdlestone leaped into action and attempted the baby version of the Heimlich manoeuvre to no avail.

“I picked her up and held her over my hand and tried patting her back but she kept gagging.”

The piece didn’t budge. “I thought that it was going

to go farther down so I put my finger in her mouth and felt it, so I just grabbed it.”

The move paid off and Emily could again breathe. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Lightly-commented Lightning:

• Add this to the “Oh, he’s soooo brilliant (not)” file — “Obama: Premiums Will Decrease 3000%.” A gaffe like this would be comedy gold … if Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle, or any Republican or conservative had said it. The problem is, in the context of the President’s delivery as seen in the video, he may actually believe that you can decrease something by 3000%. As Instapundit has so often sardonically observed, “Our country is in the best of hands.”
• The Associated Press’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, of all people and of all places, says that ObamaCare will raise insurance premiums, not lower them by double-digits as Obama and Dems claim (at least when they’re not throwing around “3000%”).
• Serial presidential candidate and Cleveland-area congressman Dennis Kucinich is going to vote “yes” on ObamaCare. He was a “no” at crunch time last year, but he would surely have gone to “yes” if he thought the bill was in jeopardy. That’s the message to take away from his switch.
• Now that ACORN has agreed to exit Ohio and not come back, it’s a good time to remind readers by reference to Maggie Thurber’s October 2008 work that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s ties to ACORN run long and deep, and that Brunner ignored Buckeye State vote-related fraud that year.
• From last Friday, via Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh — “How Bad Is the Lehman Bankruptcy Report for Geithner?” Bad enough that a properly-written history will probably show that Geithner’s mishandling of Lehman was deliberately designed to create the artificial crisis- and blackmail-driven atmosphere that led to the creation of TARP.
• Related to the previous item, Third Base Politics notes how many time the name of former Lehman employee and now Ohio gubernatorial John Kasich came up in that 2,200-page bankruptcy report: Zero.
• Via the Financial Times carried at CNBC — “Google ‘99.9%’ Sure It Will Shut Down China Search Engine.” That’s because “talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse.” I am now 99.9% sure that I’ll take a serious look at carrying Google ads on this site and removing the company from the BizzyBlog Internet Wall of Shame. I wonder what Microsoft’s, Yahoo!’s and Cisco’s plans are?
• In more management shuffling, Government/General Motors has a new CFO, who predicts the company will make a full-year profit in 2010. You can almost write it down that if it occurs, it will be despite, not because, of its North American operations.

Comment-Free Lightning:

• Ed Morrissey at Hot Air — “Study shows ObamaCare will destroy as many as 700,000 jobs by 2019″
• Warner Todd Huston at BigJournalism.com — “The Phony ‘Coffee Party’ Astroturfing Continues: MSM Looks the Other Way”
• Also at the BigJ — “But It Fit the Narrative! Media Falls for Phony Toyota Prius Story”
• From the “In Case You Missed It File” in last Thurday’s Washington Examiner — “It’s official now: ObamaCare will fund abortions if it passes”

Final thought: God bless Ingrid Martin — and keep her safe.

Given what is devolving out Washington, this is a particularly opportune time for a definitive call-out.

So gather ’round, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Hugh Hewitt, certain of Rush’s peeps (based on their ignorant e-mails), and other “center-right” talking/blogging Mitt Romney apologists.

Rush, you come in too, because I’m not sure about you either.

Are y’all here? Okay, good.

See that mirror over there? Stand up and make eye contact with yourself for the next few minutes.

All of you are currently and correctly railing against the out-of-control congressional majority, and especially their pathetic, orchestrated talking point that “The American people don’t care about the process, they just want health care reform passed.”

You are crucially correct that the American people care deeply about “the process,” because “the process” is really “the Constitution” and its stated procedures specifically detailing how bills are to become laws.

Fine.

WHERE WERE YOU in 2003-2004 when Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney shredded “the process” otherwise known as the Massachusetts Constitution to unilaterally and illegally impose same-sex “marriage” in the Bay State? (Hugh Hewitt initially got it right, but then fell $trangely $ilent on the topic.)

WHERE WERE YOU in 2007-2008 when so many of us on the center-right were making these self-evident points, while you were virtually and in some cases actually ENDORSING him?

WHEN HAVE YOU EVER denounced Mitt Romney’s authoritarian usurpation of powers he did not constitutionally have? (To this day, same-sex “marriage” has not been constitutionally enacted in Massachusetts.)

WHEN HAVE YOU EVER cited Romney’s actions as the precedent that made it easier for other governors (e.g., Schwarzenegger in California) to defy their own constitutions?

You’ll have to excuse me for believing that your righteous bleats about “the process,” though absolutely correct, ring more than a little hollow.

Hmm. I just noticed that most of you have stopped looking at yourselves.

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NOTE: Though I oppose same-sex “marriage,” even its advocates must admit that the “process” by which it has “legally” come about has serially violated state constitutions and the will of the voters.

Rather than attempt to persuade the American people of the righteousness of their cause, they have chosen authoritarian and sometimes thuggish tactics to get their way. Mitt Romney has served as their chief enabler. Those called out above should be ashamed.

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UPDATE: This post has been reproduced with yours truly’s permission at AIPNews.com.

On Monday, the Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson ripped ObamaCare’s economic claims to shreds (bolds are mine; links were in original):

Almost everything you think you know about health care is probably wrong or, at least, half wrong. Great simplicities and distortions have been peddled in the name of achieving “universal health coverage.” The miseducation has worsened as the debate approaches its climax.

… How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (PDF here) found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found (PDF here).

… Studies of insurance’s effects on health are hard to perform. Some find benefits; others don’t. Medicare’s introduction in 1966 produced no reduction in mortality; some studies of extensions of Medicaid for children didn’t find gains. In the Atlantic recently, economics writer Megan McArdle examined the literature and emerged skeptical. Claims that the uninsured suffer tens of thousands of premature deaths are “open to question.” Conceivably, the “lack of health insurance has no more impact on your health than lack of flood insurance,” she writes.

Though it seems compelling, covering the uninsured is not the health-care system’s major problem. The big problem is uncontrolled spending, which prices people out of the market and burdens government budgets. Obama claims his proposal checks spending. Just the opposite. When people get insurance, they use more health services. Spending rises. By the government’s latest forecast, health spending goes from 17 percent of the economy in 2009 to 19 percent in 2019. Health “reform” would probably increase that.

… “If not now, when? If not us, who?” Obama asks. The answer is: It’s not now, and it’s not “us.” Pass or not, Obama’s proposal is the illusion of “reform,” not the real thing.

Obama, Pelosi, Reid et al don’t care about reform. They care about centralizing power over our lives. It could not be more obvious.

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Since the previous item touched on Massachusetts, it’s worth asking what Mitt Romney, the godfather of CommonwealthCare, aka RomneyCare, thinks of how things are going with so-called “universal coverage” in the Bay State.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Grace-Marie Turner today informs us that Romney believes things are going well.

Turner calls BS, and in the process adds yet another crucial reason why Objectively Unfit Mitt must be stopped if he runs (heavily excerpted because of the Journal’s subscription wall; bolds are mine):

Former Massachusetts governor and likely 2012 presidential aspirant Mitt Romney has been on the wrong side of the defining political battle of our time.

Mr. Romney claimed earlier this month on “Fox News Sunday” that the Massachusetts health reform plan he signed into law in 2006 is “the ultimate conservative plan.” But there are many similarities between it and the ObamaCare loathed by conservative voters.

Both have an individual mandate requiring most residents to have health insurance or pay a penalty. Most businesses are required to participate or pay a fine.

… Mr. Romney’s promise that getting everyone covered would force costs down also is far from being realized. … A typical family of four today faces total annual health costs of nearly $13,788, the highest in the country. Per capita spending is 27% higher than the national average.

… The state’s stubbornly high health costs are partly the result of intrusive government regulations that stifle competition in the insurance market and strict mandates on what services insurance must cover.

… Further, insurance companies are required to sell “just-in-time” policies even if people wait until they are sick to buy coverage. That’s just like the Obama plan. There is growing evidence that many people are gaming the system by purchasing health insurance when they need surgery or other expensive medical care, then dropping it a few months later.

Some Massachusetts safety-net hospitals that treat a disproportionate number of lower-income and uninsured patients are threatening bankruptcy.

… As one would expect, expanded insurance has caused an increase in demand for medical services. But there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in the number of doctors. As a result, many patients are insured in name only: They have health coverage but can’t find a doctor.

… For new patients who do get an appointment with a primary-care doctor, the average waiting time is 44 days, the Medical Society found.

… Mr. Romney insists that in Massachusetts, “We didn’t do what President Obama’s doing, which is putting controls on our system of premiums for private insurance companies.”

But that is what’s happening now: Faced with soaring medical expenses, Gov. Deval Patrick, Mr. Romney’s successor, wants to cap insurance rate increases at 4.8%, not the 8% to 32% increases the companies have requested for April 1. Three of the four major health insurers in Massachusetts showed operating losses for 2009.

… health care is likely to be the defining issue of the 2010 and 2012 elections. Unless Mr. Romney is more honest about the system he set in motion in Massachusetts, he will have a hard time convincing Republican primary voters that he has learned his health-care lesson.

We cannot be sure of that Republican primary voters will dismiss Romney, both because of the size of his personal checkbook and because the primary process is so fundamentally flawed in so many states, leaving it vulnerable to leftist and other tampering. My understanding is that any chance to fix the broken mess was lost at the 2008 Republican Convention when these matters were left alone. (Thank you, John McCain and the RINO establishment.)

Defeating a presidential candidate Romney in the Republican primaries, if it comes to that, is every bit as important as defeating Barack Obama in the 2012 general election. If Romney is the party’s nominee, there will be no remotely acceptable “major party” choice. Principled sensible center-righters (i.e., the large majority of the electorate) will have no alternative but to unite behind a third-party candidate.

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Last night, Mark Levin announced on his show that his Landmark Legal Foundation will challenge any health care legislation “passed” using the Slaughter gambit:

Mark announces that the Landmark Legal Foundation and he are prepared to fight this health care bill if it is passed via the Slaughter rule. They will challenge the constitutionality of the bill because you cannot have a law that is not voted on by Congress – as explicitly said in the Constitution. No previous Congress has ever said that it’s passed a bill when it hasn’t. The reason the politicians are lying and scheming as they try to get Obamacare passed, is because they realize the American people are against it on higher levels than ever before.

Don’t believe the talking points crap (direct YouTube) that it has been done a hundred times before. It hasn’t been; this is unprecedented, and frankly frightening to anyone who believes in what’s left of the Constitution and the rule of law.

From York County, South Carolina:

Published: Wednesday, Mar. 17, 2010
Updated: Wednesday, Mar. 17, 2010 06:46 AM

On Monday morning, 85-year-old John Williams was late for his 9 a.m. appointment at Southern States Physical Therapy.

The little old man with the bright eyes and the brighter smile had been coming since September.

“He is never late,” said office manager Janine Geada. “Like clockwork, he never misses. He’s a true gentleman. So I called his house a few times, but didn’t get him. I figured I would give him until 10.”

But Geada did not return to her work after the calls went unanswered. She knew Williams lived alone, had no wife or children.

Instead of going for a muffin, or to the bank or just plain back to work, Geada got in her car and drove the couple of miles to Williams’ Rock Hill home. She found his car in the back under the carport, but nobody came to the door.

She rushed back to the office and told co-worker Chris Hudson, an assistant physical therapist, who called 911 at 11:20 a.m. Both Hudson and Geada then rushed to Williams’ house.

The ladies who work at Fewell Park across the street saw all the commotion, the police cars and fire truck. At Williams’ home, firefighters broke into the house.

“He was lying on the floor in the kitchen,” said Hudson. “He had a broken hip. He probably fell Sunday night.”

Hudson had just talked with Williams last week about getting some kind of medical alert system. Yet when Williams could not be found, Geada and Hudson did not go back to work.

They did not say they were too busy.

They checked on him – and might have saved Williams’ life.

It’s not uncommon for authorities to get called to check on someone’s welfare.

What is rare and certainly commendable, said Cotton Howell, York County emergency management director, was that Geada and Hudson drove to Williams’ home to check on him.

“These people took extra time and effort to help someone out,” Howell said. “That’s beyond what we normally see.”

Dr. Chad Gindi, director of physical therapy for Southern States, said the staff is taught that clients are not a number but a person to be cared for. He commended Hudson and Geada for their efforts – which went beyond physical therapy and running an office.

“We try to treat them like family,” Gindi said of patients.

Later that evening, Hudson and Geada did not go home from work. They were right there at Piedmont Medical Center, checking on Williams.

“He laughed and said, ‘So you are the gentleman who is responsible for the break-in at my house,’” Hudson said. “He was so thankful. I just told him I was happy to help.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.