The news:

Taylor to have plea agreement hearing on Monday
Posted: Friday July 27, 2007 9:02PM; Updated: Friday July 27, 2007 9:45PM

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — One of Michael Vick’s co-defendants doesn’t want to wait for trial.

Instead, a plea agreement hearing has been scheduled for Tony Taylor at 9 a.m. Monday in the federal dogfighting conspiracy case.

Taylor’s hearing was added to U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson’s docket Friday, a day after he and the other three defendants pleaded not guilty before the same judge. Vick and the others still are scheduled for trial Nov. 26.

Prosecutors claim Taylor, 34, found the Surry County property purchased by Vick and used it as the site of “Bad Newz Kennels,” a dogfighting enterprise. The Hampton man also allegedly helped purchase pit bulls and killed at least two dogs that fared poorly in test fights.

Perhaps Taylor’s impending plea will squelch the annoying Old Media comparisons of the Vick case to that of the innocent Duke lacrosse players wrongly indicted by Prosecutor Mike Nifong last year.

A week ago, in probably the most egregious example of Duke-Vick projection, Sports Illustrated writer Peter King appointed himself to be NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s translator:

The most telling 23 words regarding Michael Vick’s immediate future as a football player came late in the NFL’s statement about the alleged heinous, dastardly and despicable acts that led to charges being filed against the former savior of the Atlanta Falcons.

Michael Vick’s guilt has not yet been proven, and we believe that all concerned should allow the legal process to determine the facts.

With that, rookie commissioner Roger Goodell sent a strong message: This is not going to be the Duke lacrosse case.

Does anyone besides Peter King and a few other race-obsessed reporters, opportunists, and attention-seekers think Roger Goodell had the Duke situation in mind when he made his statement?

Reacting to the Vick indictment on ESPN, Roger Cossack admonished “us” (he actually said “let’s not”) not to repeat the same mistakes as “we” did in the Duke case. If by “we,” Cossack meant the New York Times, many other Old Media outlets, the Duke administration, and 88 horrid faculty members who signed an inflammatory letter — all of whom in essence presumed guilt when the legal process had barely begun — he has a small point. If he was telling reporters and others to lay low until there is a final verdict, he was really calling for inappropriate, unwarranted, and unprecedented self-censorship.

Turner’s plea, if it indeed occurs on Monday, should break any hoped-for Vick-Duke parallels to bits. But I expect some will continue to play the tune, even though:

• No one in the Duke case copped a plea.
• Nifong, the now-disgraced Duke prosecutor, never had any objective evidence of substance (much of it was, to put it delicately, tainted); the Vick prosecutors have a mountain of physical evidence.
• The Duke indictment was an exercise in prosecutorial fanstasy; the Vick indictment’s 18 pages laboriously recite alleged facts and events that will need to be refuted in their entirety.
• The Duke case had holes you could drive a Mack Truck through, and the only question was whether one of the students would break, not because of guilt, but to stop the accompanying hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees from piling up. The Vick indictment has a sounder foundation, and it’s not unreasonable to predict that Michael Vick faces a difficult challenge trying to beat this rap.

All of which shows that there is no point in trying to draw parallels between the two situations. Other than the proceedings taking place in a courtroom, there are none.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA; bold is mine):

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 3.4 percent in the second quarter of 2007, according to advance estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP increased 0.6 percent. (Note: BEA is incorrect about the final 1Q07 figure, which is 0.7%. — Ed.)

The Bureau emphasized that the second-quarter “advance” estimates are based on source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency (see the box on page 3). The second-quarter “preliminary” estimates, based on more comprehensive data, will be released on August 30, 2007.

As noted previously, given the continued expansions announced in all three months of the quarter in the Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing and Non-Manufacturing reports, along with steady employment growth, this acceptable GDP result seemed inevitable.

Of course, there are two more revisions to come — in August, as BEA notes, plus a final one in September.

As has been the case so often in the past five or so years, the report came in ahead of expectations, which were for 3.2%.

__________________________________________

UPDATE: Here’s BEA’s quick look at the detail –

The increase in real GDP in the second quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE) for services, exports, nonresidential structures, federal government spending, and state and local government spending that were partly offset by a negative contribution from residential fixed investment. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, decreased.

….. The real change in private inventories added 0.15 percentage point to the second-quarter change in real GDP after subtracting 0.65 percentage point from the first-quarter change.

The first GDP report for the quarter isn’t showing the inventory bounceback I was thinking might take place, but inventory “surprises,” if they exist, normally don’t get picked up until the second or third release. I suspect/hope that you’ll see at least a couple of tenths on the upside from this factor when the August and September revisions are released. Of course, I thought the bounceback might occur in the first quarter, and it didn’t, so maybe it’s not coming at all — which begs the question of how in the world companies have managed to reduce inventories substantially and perhaps permanently.

UPDATE 2: I want to mention a couple of things about the prior-period revisions that accompanied the BEA’s report today.

First, GDP growth in 2004 (from 3.9% to 3.6%), 2005 (from 3.2% to 3.1%), and 2006 (from 3.3% to 2.9%) were all revised a bit downward. Though I don’t have the detail, I believe the trend in such after-the-fact revisions by BEA has been consistently downward for well over a decade.

Second, the other revisions that I bet won’t get much media play are to disposable income. The are in the UP direction, and of the same magnitude as the GDP decreases:

The average annual rate of growth of real disposable personal income for 2003-2006 was 2.8 percent, 0.3 percentage point more than in the previously published estimates.

UPDATE 3: Sure enough, The Associated Press’s initial coverage of today’s BEA release reports the GDP revisions and ignores the disposable income changes. Text that was clearly prepared in advance also harps on the President’s low polling on economic stewardship and a free commercial for the opposition –

Trying to capitalize on that, Democrats have accused the president of not doing enough to help close the gap between low- and high-wage workers.

AP obviously missed this mid-July BizzyBlog post — “The Meme That Won’t Die: Growing Income Inequality’.”

From Sydney, Australia:

July 15, 2007

HUGO Borbilas has a dramatic scar to remember the day he diced with death and won.

On July 2, the five year-old was leaning on the mailbox of his family’s Darlington home waiting for a playmate to arrive when he lost his footing and became impaled on the cast-iron fence.

An iron spike plunged fivecentimetres into his throat, narrowly missing his carotid artery, oesophagus, windpipe, all the major nerves in his neck and throat and just stopping short of his brain.

Doctors say the fall could have killed him instantly. Instead he was able to pull himself off the spike and scream for his mother, Priscilla Boswell, who was inside with her other child, eight-month-old Tom.

“It’s really barbaric to get cut by a spike in your neck,” Ms Boswell said. “It’s something from the dark ages.

“It’s a horrible thing to think about.

“You just feel sick. I was holding Hugo on the ground and calling the ambulance with the phone in the other hand. I must have screamed and people walking past heard me.”

Passers-by rushed into the house.

They wrapped Hugo in a clean towel following directions given by paramedics to Ms Boswell over the phone.

Hugo’s father, Peter Borbilas, ran from the cafe he owns at the end of the street as the boy was rushed to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.

After an initial examination and scans, the parents suffered an agonising five-hour wait before their son was transferred to Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, for emergency surgery.

Doctors warned the family Hugo might have brain damage or spinal injury and could suffer stroke, intestinal infection and eye problems.

“I could put my index finger in the wound right through to the knuckle,” pediatric surgeon Vincent Varjavandi said last week.

“It ran up towards his brain but just fell short. It went between everything: his windpipe, his oesophagus … Cutting any of those could have proved fatal either in the bleeding at the scene or in the hours afterwards,” Dr Varjavandi said.

Go here for the rest of the story.