The topic is Dann, as you would expect. TIB’s listening link is here at Weapons of Mass Discussion, about halfway down on the right.

Links:
- Enquirer says he must resign.
- April 22 — WoMD rips Youngstown Vindy as that paper’s Todd Franko, incredibly, criticizes Republicans for previously having gone after Dann for other things.
- Economic doom-mongering.
- Obama’s radical Weatherpeople friends.
- Chicago’s crime rate is way up.
- Obama supported gas tax holidays in Illinois before he was against a federal gas-tax holiday.

Note: This column originally appeared at Pajamas Media (”Press and Politicians Prematurely Crying Recession”) on Thursday.

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Yesterday, the government reported that the economy’s Gross Domestic Producdt (GDP) grew by an annualized 0.6%.

Many in the press, along with some politicians, who have been matter-of-factly assuming that we’ve been in a recession since early this year, have a little explaining to do.

Don’t stay up waiting for the apologies.

Let me be clear: Even if the result is revised upward a bit in May or June, the economy’s current performance is nothing to celebrate. In fact, I believe there should be more emphasis on the fact that after two really good quarters in 2007 — the second quarter’s 3.8% and the third quarter’s totally-forgotten 4.9% (see BEA table here) — economic growth hasn’t even matched population growth for two consecutive quarters. When that occurs, per-capita GDP, as well as per-household GDP, is going in the wrong direction: down.

But it’s one thing to be unhappy with how things are going. It’s quite another to keep shouting “recession” when GDP growth, though anemic, continues to be positive.

Though technically determining whether and when a recession actually occurred is more complicated, and is actually “determined” after-the-fact by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the everyday working definition of “recession” is very simple:

A recession is defined to be a period of two quarters of negative GDP growth.

Thus: a recession is a national or world event, by definition. And statistical aberrations or one-time events can almost never create a recession; e.g. if there were to be movement of economic activity (measured or real) around Jan 1, 2000, it could create the appearance of only one quarter of negative growth. For a recession to occur the real economy must decline.

(Aside: By that definition, there was no recession in 2000-2002. Just look here.)

The definition just cited is at About.com, which has been owned by the New York Times Company since 2005. Business reporters and columnists at the Times have been routinely ignoring the readily-available guidance at their online property for well over a year.

For example, way back on February 28, 2007, the Times’s David Leonhardt didn’t let the fact that a recession is “a national or world event” stop him from declaring that “For Manufacturing, a Recession Has Arrrived.” He reached the conclusion that manufacturing’s 15% of the economy was in a recession based on one weak durable goods report from the Commerce Department and two slightly below 50% readings (November 2006 and January 2007) in the Manufacturing Index (full index history is here) published by the Institute for Supply Management (ISM). An ISM Index reading above 50% indicates expansion, while below 50% means contraction.

Although he later allowed that we weren’t in a “real recession,” Leonhardt’s invocation of “the R-word” to describe an individual economic sector was inexcusable. What’s more, the manufacturing sector wasn’t even in the neighborhood of distress, and Leonhardt should have known it. The very first day after his article appeared, ISM’s February 2007 Manufacturing Index came in showing expansion, and did so for the next eight months. The Times has ignored requests that they correct Leonhardt’s error.

It isn’t just manufacturing that has been described as in recession. This Times search on “housing recession” shows that the Old Gray Lady has used that term 25 times since October 2006. Housing is in a very bad slump, but, by definition, it cannot be in a recession.

More recently, presumptive announcements that we’re in a recession — not heading for one, but actually IN one, have come from politicians as high up in the food chain as John McCain and Bill Clinton (or perhaps the reporter covering him, who wrote, “He began the night by discussing the current recession ….”).

If politicians are throwing around the R-word, it’s because the press has been, recklessly and repeatedly. A Google News Search done early Thursday morning covering the past 30 days had 132 hits on just one all too commonly used phrase: “the current recession.”

The Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa provided perhaps the most egregious preemptive recession declaration on April 5, when, in the wake of March’s weak Employment Situation Report, she wrote:

It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long.

Reacting to yesterday’s positive GDP report, Aversa acted as if she never wrote those words, didn’t bother to correctly define a recession, and still got in her digs:

The statistic did not meet what economists consider the classic definition of a recession, which is a retraction of the economy. This means that although the economy is stuck in a rut, it is still managing to grow, even if modestly.

Give Old Media reporters and naysaying politicians a few days, tops, and they’ll be telling us we’re in a recession all over again. Talking down the economy appears to be their stock in trade these days. Didn’t somebody rip into Dick Cheney for doing that very thing in late 2000?

Marc Dann MUST resign. If he won’t, he must be removed. After this (HT Weapons of Mass Discussion), it’s hard to imagine how he can have any defenders besides himself. A strong argument can be made that, while less “exciting,” what Dann has done is worse than what led Eliot Spitzer to resign.

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Related — A certain person who I believe knows better tried to put one over on me by claiming that Ohio’s Old Media drove the Dann story, and ridiculed the notion that bloggers were holding their feet to the fire.

What I now recall is that a November Dann affair item was first put forth by Ohio right-side blogger Matt Naugle (who has since moved to another site). It was roundly ridiculed by left-side bloggers such as this one (see “2008 Outlook” at link), and a few on the right, who collectively owe him an apology.

Unless I’m missing something Ohio’s Old Media was nowhere to be found, but got working after that, knowing full well that right-side and left-side bloggers were also on it.

If that chronology is correct, though it’s not a done deal at this moment, Ohio’s state and national left side owe Naugle a big thank-you for helping them take out the trash. That would include Hillary Clinton superdelegate Ted Strickland and Hillary Must-Win-Ohio Clinton, for whom Dann’s continued presence is a ginormous liability.

Ohio’s Old Media would, in my opinion, have been proactively looking for these kinds of things from the get-go if the GOP controlled the Statehouse. In fact, that’s not an opinion; that’s an assertion based on watching them do their jobs, occasionally overzealously and often selectively, during the previous 16 years. From here, it seems like they largely stopped doing their jobs, unless pushed, in early January 2007. Thank goodness for those, like Naugle, who have pushed them.

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Sit down, because you otherwise might faint when I say this: Give CNN (a little) credit for showing a picture from a May Day “comprehensive immigration reform” (i.e., open-borders) rally showing both an American and Mexican flag.

Though many reports, including this one, noted the presence of both countries’ flags at these rallies (earlier reports, which indicated that they were about 50-50, ended up being revised to “mostly American flags” — hmmm), the LA Times managed to shoot a picture with nothing but Old Glories as far the eye could see. Media manipulation is visual, too.

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In my Thursday post on the steep decline in newspaper circulations, I neglected to note that the Denver Post was the only paper in the March 31, 2005 Top 25 that was no longer there in March 31, 2008 (this year’s new addition is the Sacramento Bee).

The Post’s circulation has dropped at least 16% in the past three years. Story cover-ups like this one noted at Slapstick Politics (”‘Brown Pride’ Vandals Hit Denver Suburb, Local MSM Silent”; HT Michelle Malkin) explain why.

If the locals can’t rely on a paper to report the important fundamental facts about an apparent ethnicity-driven incident of major vandalism, why should they buy it, or subscribe to it?

From St. Paul, Minnesota (HT Powerline):

St. Paul man’s gun goes off as he foils a home invasion
Article Last Updated: 05/02/2008 10:21:18 AM CDT

The security alarm sounded in Jon Sokol’s St. Paul home early Wednesday while he and his wife were asleep.

He looked up the stairs from their lower-level bedroom and saw a man, dressed all in black, walk by. Sokol, 49, grabbed a revolver — he started keeping a gun in the home after it was burglarized 20 years ago — and went upstairs, Sokol said Thursday.

The burglar, who Sokol thinks was hiding behind a door, hit him in the forehead when he got upstairs. The gun went off, and the burglar flew back a few feet, landing on the floor, Sokol said.

“I held him at gunpoint, and I told him: ‘Do not move. Don’t you dare move — otherwise I will shoot,’ ” Sokol said. “He did not move.”

Police arrived and found a 31-year-old man who was feigning “unconsciousness but finally responded to police and said he had not been shot,” according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday against Michael Gregory Spencer, of St. Paul, by the Ramsey County attorney’s office.

Spencer was charged with first-degree burglary of an occupied dwelling and first-degree burglary with assault of a person. He had been convicted of a St. Paul burglary in October and sent to the Ramsey County Workhouse.

Sokol and his wife moved into their home, blocks from Concordia University, about 20 years ago. Soon after, it was burglarized while his wife, Joan, was home alone with their then-young children.

“Within the last five years, we just started feeling safe again,” he said.

Sokol got a gun for home protection after the first burglary.

“So many people are so against guns, and I’m not saying it’s the greatest thing in the world and you can conquer anything, but in this particular case I believe it saved Joan and my life,” Sokol said. “I don’t know what his true meaning was in this house. You read or see on the news about people getting shot and killed in their homes.

“The only thing going through my head was, ‘I need to protect us.’” …..

Go here for the rest of the story.