BizzyBlog readers know:

• I don’t appreciate candidates for Congress who won’t live in their district, and feel that they deserve no voter consideration, regardless of their issue positions.
• I don’t appreciate candidates relying on out-of-district and out-of-state contributions to run their campaigns. I came away from the discussions at this post last week firmly believing that the US Constitution would allow state legislatures to prohibit out-of-state contributions to US Senate and congressional races.

So of course I think this e-mailed press release from Chuck Blasdel, candidate in Ohio’s 6th District congressional race, about “Green Card” Charlie Wilson is simply outstanding:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 29, 2006

MEDIA CONTACT
Ryan Stenger
740-424-3358

Blasdel Invites Charlie Wilson to Move to the 6th District
Offers campaign staff to help move furniture

WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF THE 6TH DISTRICT, OH – Congressional Candidate and 6th District resident Chuck Blasdel today made a special invite to his opponent Charlie Wilson, to move into the district that he is trying to represent, and his campaign staff will drive to the 18th Congressional District to help him pack.

“Charlie Wilson claims to be a man of the people, but he won’t live inside the district he wants to represent,” said Blasdel Campaign Manager Ryan Stenger. “Charlie is happy in his mansion, Stately Wilson Manor, in the 18th District, but the real workers, families and voters of the 6th District want somebody that understands their needs, not the needs of other Congressional Districts.”

“We are hoping that Charlie will show his dedication to the people of the 6th District and move among them, and if he does, the rest of the campaign staff and I will travel to his mansion and help him move,” said Stenger. “I think the traditional word they use is carpet-bagger, but regardless of the terminology, I cannot imagine looking into the eyes of a voter and asking them to support you when you don’t live inside the district.”

Wilson has repeatedly shown his neglect of the 6th District, starting in March when he got more signatures on his nominating petitions from other districts, than he did in the 6th, and failed to make the meager 50 signatures required to be an official candidate. Wilson also continues to campaign outside of the district and the state, saying himself that he cannot raise money inside of the 6th district.

“Charlie himself has said that he cannot raise money inside the 6th District so he has to travel to Pennsylvania to raise campaign cash,” said Stenger “That should be a message to Charlie that the 6th District doesn’t want him.”

“Maybe Charlie doesn’t want to drink the water in the 6th District?”

Rock on, Chuck Blasdel!

____________________________

BY THE WAY: That “drink the water” taunt at the end of the Blasdel release is not a throwaway line — Go here (months-old HT to Lincoln Logs, who also posted on the above press release earlier this evening) to see why. Here’s a tease: “Wilson’s ‘questionable past’ includes his concerns about how the dumping of raw sewage into the Ohio River more than a decade ago would impact his political career …..”

David Frum at the American Enterprise Institute (HT Little Green Footballs via e-mailer Larwyn) supplies a correction one probably will not see where it would matter (I added links related posts at the blogs Frum cited; I could not locate a related MyPetJawa link):

Perhaps you saw the images in your newspaper or on television:

“A Lebanese man counts U.S dollar bills received from Hizbollah members in a school in Bourj el-Barajneh, a southern suburb of Beirut, August 19, 2006. Hizbollah handed out bundles of cash on Friday to people whose homes were wrecked by Israeli bombing, consolidating the Iranian-backed group’s support among Lebanon’s Shiites and embarrassing the Beirut government. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard (LEBANON)”

This scene and dozens more like it flashed around the planet. Only one thing was missing–the thin wire security strip that runs from top to bottom of a genuine US$100 bill. The money Hezbollah was passing was counterfeit, as should have been evident to anybody who studied the photographs with due care.

Care was due because of Hezbollah’s history of counterfeiting: In June, 2004, the U.S. Department of the Treasury publicly cited Hezbollah as one of the planet’s leading forgers of U.S. currency.

But this knowledge was disregarded by the news organizations who queued up to publicize Hezbollah’s pseudo-philanthropy. The passing of counterfeit bills was detected not by the reporters and photographers on the spot, but by bloggers thousands of miles away: SnappedShots.com (here and here), MyPetJawa, and Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs. These sites magnified photographs and showed them to currency experts and detected irregularity after irregularity in the bills.
Maybe it’s too much to expect journalists to be currency experts …..

Stop. Right. There.

Maybe the journalists aren’t. But given Hezbollah’s forgery history, Reuters and others owed the world a close examination of the photos before releasing them. It is the height of irresponsibility that they did no such thing.

The press’s Arab-state paymasters are surely pleased that no amount of noise in the blogosphere, or agate-type corrections in publications that ran the original stories, will make up for the false impressions of generosity the compliant press helped Hezbollah create.

On August 10, in response to an e-mail from an outraged veteran who also happens to be a trusted tipster, I looked at this “cartoon” by Dan Asmussen at the San Francisco Chronicle (far right item at link):

My e-mailer had seen it linked at the “Left Rail” on Jim Romenesko’s media review site at Poynter Online.

I thought the “cartoon” was, and still is, juvenile gibberish. The e-mailing vet made the excellent point that it was, and still is, crass and offensive to use dead soldiers’ caskets as a backdrop for “humor.” I suggested that readers let Romensko, the Chronicle’s Reader Rep, and Mr. Asmussen know their feelings about the cartoon. I have no idea what the response was, but I do know that the vets’ own e-mail to Romenesko was NOT printed in Romenesko’s Letters section.

This is where it gets weird. A couple of days later, my e-mailer informed me that Romenesko’s link to the cartoon had been removed. By the time I checked the Left Rail myself, I wasn’t sure whether it had been removed or had simply become old enough to drop off because of newer items.

No biggie — I decided to wait until Romenesko updated his Left Rail Archive to confirm whether the link had simply been removed or had gotten old. So, I waited ….. and waited ….. and waited. The Archive, which is supposed to be updated weekly, STILL hasn’t been updated since the week ended August 6, and is now three weeks behind. An e-mail and phone call to Romenesko as to the reasons for the delay in updating have both gone unanswered.

It is bizarre indeed to think that a Big Media guy like Romenesko might actually be stalling on updating the Left Rail Archive until he thinks a lil’ ole blogger in Ohio has stopped paying attention. But there aren’t a lot of good alternative explanations. In the meantime, he is inconveniencing readers who want to go back to Left Rail items that should have entered the Archive during that time.

I suppose it could simply be that a webmaster isn’t up-to-date on his work, but ordinarily, as with this blog, an archive update is an automatic process. I don’t know, maybe Jimbo’s tired, looking for a job somewhere else, and falling off in the conscientiousness department.

So, what’s the deal? Did Romenesko drop the link to an offensive cartoon without comment and send it down the memory hole? At least two people want to know what’s up, and my e-mailer especially deserves an answer.

____________________________

UPDATE, 8:15 PM: Welcome to Pajamas Media readers! To be very clear (because I think the PJM post isn’t), Asmussen and the Chronicle are not being questioned here (10:30 PM — for the “memory hole” treatment. See Update 2 for more). The issue is whether Romenesko buried a “Left Rail” link he originally posted on August 9 or 10 without saying anything about it, and then failed to update his “Left Rail Archive” for three weeks to defer discovery of the deletion, as pictured here just minutes ago:

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It STILL seems bizarre to me that he would go to those lengths, but as noted in the original post, I don’t have an alternative explanation.

UPDATE 2: My e-mailing vet reminds me that Asmussen and the SF Chronicle should not be considered off the hook for bad taste, total lack of humor, and for offending those who think that using dead soldiers’ caskets is not an appropriate thing to do in a “cartoon” (not necessarily in that order).

So noted, especially considering how too many people bent over and accepted the idea that cartoons of this guy suddenly became off-limits simply because extremists said so earlier this year.

At TCS Daily, Worstall dissects nicely (bolds are mine):

….. what’s getting missed is that little something that we in the real reality-based community have been trying to point out to the minimum and living wage fanatics for decades. When the price of something is raised people use or buy less of it. Now, we’ve been told endlessly that this isn’t true, that raising the minimum wage won’t mean job losses, or reductions in hours on offer, that companies will simply use their labor force “more efficiently”.

….. The proof of this contention? The difference between WalMart and Costco in how much they pay their workers and how many workers they use. Costco does pay more; it also uses about one quarter of the number of employees.

….. It’s been a number of years since I lived in the US but Costco is the place where you drag that 50lb bag of rice to the door yourself, right? WalMart is the one where cheery souls are employed solely to bid you good day as you enter? So, in theory, we could in fact get WalMart to pay the same as Costco by making similarly efficient use of labor: that is, firing between two thirds and three quarters of their staff.

….. We could even look at the profit made per employee: $9,000 at Costco, $7,700 at WalMart. If we were of a Marxist cast of mind, seeing profit as purely and solely the surplus value extracted from the labor of the worker, we would thus say that Costco is even more exploitative than WalMart, would we not?

Do read the whole thing.

For the quarter ended June 30 (considered third quarter by the courts, as their fiscal year ends on September 30), the official number of bankruptcy filings was 155,833. The detailed stats at the US Bankruptcy Court web site (available as Excel downloads at the indicated link) show that 150,975 were non-business (i.e., individual and family).

The article discussed at this previous post said that total non-business (”individual”) filings was 142,815. I have no explanation for this annoying difference.

Observations in general, from looking at the court’s spreadsheets and at this CardTrak article:

• This quarter is the last one in which anyone can try to claim that last year’s rush to file ahead of the October 17 effective date of last year’s law change had any role in suppressing the quarterly results.
• The monthly numbers continue to climb. Annualizing the June-July numbers according to CardTrak would lead one to predict that the ongoing annual filing rate will be 700,000 to 750,000 — about half the annual rate that occurred in 2002 through 2005. Factor in an expected increase in filings that will occur after the upcoming Christmas shopping season, and the annual number will probably be closer to 800,000.
• The mix of filings has changed substantially. Chapter 13 filings requiring partial payments of creditors for a 3-5 year period, which were 27% and 23% of all filings in the second quarters of 2004 and 2005, respectively, shot up to over 40% of all filings in the second quarter of 2006. The Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) specifically intended to force more filers into a partial-payments regimen, and it appears to have succeeded in doing just that. Though it might appear to be obvious that such a change would be for the better, the real results of Chapter 13 filings, which include failures about 60% the time (see Point 9 at link) to carry through with the payment plan, make the desirability of this change very debatable. In fact, I believe that the forced calculations inherent in BAPCPA’s “Means Test” will cause the Chapter 13 failure rate to be even higher.
• The biggest surprise to me, and something I predicted would go in the other direction, is that the rate of Chapter 13 filings in southeastern districts has gone up. For example, more than half of the second quarter 2006 filings in FL, AL, and GA, were 13s, up from about 26% in 2005. I expected a reduction, because southern districts have traditionally placed many filers in 13s even though they would have qualified for Chapter 7 (total discharge of all unsecured debt). The 2006 result makes me wonder if those districts are still doing that, even though BAPCPA’s formula-driven calculation of who can and cant’ file Chapter 7 supposedly has no flexibility.

There are a few unknowns in this that will be very difficult to get a handle on. First, how many people who figure out that they would be forced to go through Chapter 13 decide not to file after seeing what the Means Test will do them? Second, how many people, either because of the fact that attorneys’ fees under the new law are significantly higher, or because they (erroneously) have the impression that filing for bankruptcy has become impossibly difficult, are deciding not to look into filing? Third, how many people discussed in the first two questions are contributing to what appears to be a significant increase in home foreclosures — and if people who would have filed for bankruptcy under the old law are instead losing their homes under the new law, is that really what we want to see happen?

This chart should be embedded on the forehead of anyone who claims that the federal government didn’t do enough, or hasn’t done enough, to help with the recovery effort from last year’s hurricanes:

OpinionJournal.com’s editorial on the Katrina post-hurricane disaster is here (may require free e-mail registration), and makes the salient points, including how Southern Mississippi’s recovery has progressed so much better than New Orleans’.

I think a lot of people would have been willing to pay to see this. And look who tried to claim “illegal blockade”:

Greenpeace was Thursday forced to give up trying to get its flagship, the Rainbow Warrior II, into the harbour of the southern French city of Marseille after a two-day blockade by French tuna fishermen and refusals from authorities.

The environmental activist group’s ship was seen leaving the area under escort from a French coastguard tugboat.

A senior Greenpeace activist on the vessel, Francois Provost, said the Rainbow Warrior II was now heading to Cartegena in southern Spain.

Its attempt to dock in Marseille to campaign against overfishing of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean Sea sparked a protest blockade by French fishermen Wednesday.

They used more than 20 trawlers to encircle the Greenpeace ship and prevent it getting into the harbour.

The fishermen’s action paralysed the southern city’s busy port and left 1,000 people stranded there since late Wednesday because their ferries to Mediterranean destinations were unable to enter.

The fishermen only lifted the blockade after the Greenpeace vessel agreed to leave the area.

“The fishermen, based on Greenpeace’s agreement to be towed, have agreed to move away,” the prefet, or top regional government official, Christian Fremont, told journalists after a meeting with fishermen union representatives.

The organisation had called the French fishermen’s blockade “illegal,” even though it resembled the environmental group’s own sea protests in the past against other vessels, notably those carrying nuclear waste or hunting whales.

I’m not saying I support what the fishermen did in paralyzing the port, but the local/regional government should have done more to get Greenpeace to go away much sooner, as they had made it clear that Greenpeace would not be allowed to dock.

The New York Times composes (link may require registration).

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek disposes.

From the BBC — At least they’ve got the right idea (free healthcare for illegal immigrants is not a “right”), but the execution is awful:

NHS ‘in illegal immigrants mess’

The system to ensure illegal immigrants do not receive free NHS care is unworkable, doctors and lawyers say.

The government says failed asylum seekers or others without permission to be in the UK should only get limited free care, including emergency aid.

But GPs and primary care trusts said there was no way of ensuring illegal immigrants did not get free care.

David Lock, of law firm Mills and Reeve, which is advising some of the trusts, said the system was in a mess.

Mr Lock, a former Labour MP, said his firm represented scores of NHS primary care trusts and he was frequently being asked for advice.

He said he was telling them to carry on treating illegal immigrants who were already on GP lists as there was no practical way of removing them from the NHS register.

“The system is a complete mess. There is conflicting advice out there and NHS trusts do not know where they stand.

“If it is the case that illegal immigrants should not be getting free care, how is that to be enforced?

….. There are estimated to be about 400,000 illegal immigrants in the country.

But having an illiegal-immigrant population of 400,000, which proportionate to the US population is the equivalent of about 2 million, would be a relatively nice problem to have.

It all started in a web forum:

Separated at birth, 3-year-old twins reunited via cyberspace
Moms on adoption forum discover Chinese daughters likely sisters
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, August 27, 2006CHICAGO – A pair of 3-year-old twins from China who were adopted separately by American families have found their way into each others’ arms.

The girls’ mothers – Holly Funk of suburban Chicago and Diana Ramirez of suburban Miami – met on a Web site for parents who had gone through international adoptions.

After a flurry of e-mails comparing photographs and biographical details, DNA testing proved the families’ suspicions: The girls are probably fraternal twins. Both families had named their daughters Mia.

At a reunion recently at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, Mia Diamond Funk and Mia Hanying Ramirez shyly surveyed each other, then reached for each other’s hand.

“I’m just awed,” said Ms. Funk. “Grateful to God. To me, it’s a divine thing. It’s a miracle. In the sea of humanity, these kids found each other.”

DNA tests established an 85 percent probability that the girls are at least half sisters. The girls had been abandoned on a sidewalk near a Yangzhou textile factory a week apart and adopted two years ago.

Ms. Funk and her husband, Douglas, hope to bring their Mia to Miami in October. Both sets of parents say they are committed to staying in touch and often let the twins talk to each other on the phone.

This time it’s in a real editorial (may require registration) as opposed to the editorials that are misidentified as news (HT TaxProf Blog):

In coming weeks, the Internal Revenue Service plans to start ….. laying off nearly half of the auditors who examine estate tax returns of the wealthiest taxpayers.

Concern for appearances should, on its own, impel the agency to scuttle its plans.

….. The rationale for laying off estate tax auditors is also unconvincing. To allay suspicions the cutbacks are a way to shield wealthy heirs from taxes, two Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee, John Lewis of Georgia and Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota, sent a letter recently to Mr. Everson, asking for facts and figures to justify the job cuts.

Mr. Everson responded with a “trust me” letter. He said that the I.R.S. could enforce the law with a smaller staff because the number of estate tax returns was expected to decline.

As shown at this previous post, the personnel cuts the IRS plans to implement in the estate tax division are completely in sync with the currently falling volume of estate tax returns, based on readily available info at the IRS web site. In a nutshell, returns filed and planned auditor cuts are both in the 40%-45% range.

The Times’ attempt to stir class up envy over one of those rare things, a logical personnel move by the government, is disgraceful — consistent, but still disgraceful.

As to “concern for appearances,” if I were running the Times, I’d be more “concerned” about the “appearance” of this: