Item: “Calls For Dann’s Impeachment Soften”:

Lawmakers continued to threaten embattled Attorney General Marc Dann with impeachment on Tuesday, but the tone was distinctively softer as those same lawmakers determined how the process of impeachment would work.

Item: “Dann Cancels Appearances; Hires Consultant”:

Attorney General Marc Dann is gearing up for a fight to stay in office.

10 Investigates on Thursday learned that the embattled Attorney General has hired a political consultant from Texas who specializes in political counter-attacks.

It looks like Gunga Dann is gearing up to soldier on:

The Associated Press’s business writers just won’t let go of their claim (or is it audacious hope?) that we are in a recession — not heading towards one, but actually in one.

Wednesday, despite yet another decent economic report, this one on productivity, the AP’s Martin Crutsinger downplayed a significant beating of expectations, and continued to invoke the R-word (bolds are mine):

Worker productivity rose by a better-than-expected amount in the first three months of the year while labor cost pressures eased.

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that productivity, the amount of output per hour of work, increased at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the first quarter. That was slightly higher than the 1.5 percent increase that had been expected.

Analysts read the bigger-than-expected rise in productivity and the smaller increase in unit labor costs as a good sign that inflation pressures, at least on the labor front, are remaining under control and the country is not facing the danger of a wage-price spiral.

….. Many analysts think the country has already toppled into a recession. But overall economic growth, as measured by the gross domestic product, eked out a tiny 0.6 percent rate of increase in the first three months of the year, the same anemic pace as the final three months of last year.

I did the math just to make sure — 2.2% is 47% higher than 1.5%. Additionally, the 2.2% first-quarter performance was higher than the 1.8% reported for the fourth quarter of 2007, while expectations were that it would come in lower. “Slightly,” schmightly, Martin.

Consider the other economic news of the past week that Crutsinger had to blow past with his assertion that “many (unnamed) analysts” think that the US has “already toppled into a recession”:

• The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) Manufacturing Index released a week ago, covering about 15% of the economy — contracting, but barely, and holding steady.
• Last Friday’s Employment report — Unemployment rate down to 5.0%, seasonally adjusted job losses smaller than previous months.
• ISM’s Non-Manufacturing index, covering the remaining 85% of the economy, including the troubled housing and financial-services sectors — Moved significantly into expansion mode in April, blowing away expectations that it would further slip into contraction.

Topping all of that, the ISM issued its Spring Semiannual Economic Forecast Tuesday. The press release for the report had these headlines:

The weighted average of the expected 1% increase in manufacturing revenues and the 2.7% increase in non-manufacturing is about 2.4%. That’s not spectacular growth by any stretch, but it’s a far cry from negative growth.

Yet the AP’s Crutsinger and his unnamed analysts continue to “cling to recession.” Excuse me for believing that he, his business-reporting co-workers at AP, and their oft-unnamed agenda-driven “analysts” will continue their clinging until, oh, about early November.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE: Reuters looked at the ISM’s Spring Semiannual Economic Forecast and (of course) decided that the weak figure relating to 15% of the economy was more important than the better one about the other 85%. So this is the headline — “US Factory Growth Seen ‘Marginal’ in 2008: ISM.”

It’s here.

It will be posted at BizzyBlog on Saturday morning (link won’t work until then) under the title “The Economy Is Improving, While Old Media Remains Mired in ‘Recession’ Talk.”

Longtime readers here will recognize one of the column’s targets: Rex (”You can have a recession while the economy is growing”) Nutting (link is to a BizzyBlog site search on Nutting’s name).

From West Chester, Ohio:

Last Update: 5/04 1:09 am

We appreciate you, we love you and you’ll always be a part of our life.”

What do you say to a man who saved your daughter’s life? For Sonya Guthrie, the feelings are beyond words. But she tried her best Saturday when she met Will Corey, a U.S. Navy sailor, whose bone marrow was a match for her daughter, Trinity. Corey traveled to Cincinnati from Washington D.C. to meet Trinity this weekend.

Guthrie remembers well the day she first took Trinity to Children’s Hospital. “October 27th, 2002, I took her to the hospital; thought she was constipated and found out her kidneys and spleen had swelled from Leukemia.”

“Two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy, the cancer returned, then she had to have a bone marrow transplant or she wouldn’t live,” said Guthrie.

That’s where Corey comes in. The sailor from Alexandria, Virginia happened to be a match.

“Being a parent, having children myself, it was something I didn’t have to think about” said Corey.

Corey, who is a father of four, says he never thought twice. Now, two years after that life-saving surgery, he’s touched at seeing the bubbly girl with a big smile, knowing he had something to do with the life she’s so full of

“Just to see her running around and happy and smiling, it’s great, and to hear she’s ice skating and doing things my daughter’s do, so it’s a good feeling” Corey said. Guthrie and her daughter hugged Corey and called him their hero. “Words cannot express how I feel. I’m very thankful.” Guthrie said. “I appreciate him, he will always be family, he’s a part of my life, a part of my daughter’s life.”

Trinity was admitted, she began chemotherapy, and spent months in the hospital.

As for Trinity, she’ll always remember the first time she met Corey. “I just looked at him and I just smiled and he just laughed a little bit and I was just really happy; it was my moment.”

“Quite literally, Trinity won the lottery,” said Scott Carroll, President of the Southern Ohio Chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Trinity is also a hero for the Leukemia Society’s team in training. A group of runners running in the Flying Pig Marathon has raised nearly half-a-million dollars this year alone to fight leukemia.

In the past 20 years, Team in Training raised almost $900 million in the flight against blood cancers, and in those past two decades, incidents of death in childhood leukemias has dropped substantially. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.