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Topics:

• Gunga Dann — Will the Dems actually carry through with impeachment?
• The 57 states of the presidential candidate I refer to a BOOHOO-OUCH (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama - Objectively Unfit Coddler of Haters).
• Barack Obama’s people are trying to pretend that he never said that he will meet Ahmedinejad unconditionally, while it’s right there on his web site, right now.
• Hamas favors Obama for Prez. Of course it’s John McCain’s fault for pointing this out when an interviewer asks him about it.
• Economy not in recession.
• Obama doesn’t know much about history.
• The Barack Obama lapel pin.
• Happy Mother’s Day to all moms, grandmoms, and wives.

Note: This was originally posted at Pajamas Media Thursday morning under the title “Economy Improves, Old Media Ignores.”

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Those who are rooting for the economy to go into a tailspin cannot be pleased.

First, the government told us that the economy grew 0.6% in the first quarter.

I wasn’t happy, because I’d like to see the economy get back to at least the 3.2% average growth it experienced from the second quarter of 2003 through the third quarter of 2007.

But many in the business press seemed displeased for the opposite reason — that the number wasn’t negative. Since the everyday working definition of a “recession” is “a decline in GDP for two or more consecutive quarters,” it meant that there is no solid evidence of a recession.

Nevertheless, the Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa insisted that “A growing number of economists believe the economy is in a recession and is indeed contracting now.”

Rex Nutting at MarketWatch.com went way over the top, as you can see from these article excerpts:

U.S. could have recession without drop in GDP
Analysis: Growth isn’t everything; jobs and incomes count more

….. the economy may be on track for the first recession in U.S. history without any quarterly decline in growth.

….. GDP is a pretty crude measurement of economic well-being.

….. GDP is a quarterly accounting gimmick that may not be an accurate reflection of the economic reality.

….. With GDP showing a small positive number in Wednesday’s report, no doubt many people will cheer that the economy has therefore avoided a recession. But that’s not what the other economic numbers show.

Nutting, MarketWatch’s Washington bureau chief, quoted no outside economist, analyst, government bureaucrat, think-tank researcher, or anyone else to back up his extraordinary claims. I have never seen anyone call GDP a “crude measurement” or an “accounting gimmick.” If I were working at Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, I’d feel insulted.

Fortunately for the rest of us, the “other economic numbers” that followed last week’s GDP report do not support Nutting’s peculiar notion of “recession with growth.”

On Friday, the government’s employment report showed that the economy added over 700,000 jobs in April.

That’s right. Here’s the proof:

As you can see, government’s best estimate is that 703,000 more real people were actually working in April than were in March, and that 1,810,000 more were really doing so in April than in January.

If you’re surprised, I don’t blame you. Rex Nutting may be too.

That’s because the “official” jobs increase or decline and the unemployment rate are both adjusted for seasonality, or changes in real employment levels that have occurred in previous years. The fact that the number of jobs added in April 2008 was less than the number added in previous Aprils goes a long way towards explaining why the most recent seasonally adjusted jobs change was a loss of 20,000.

The business press has abused the seasonally adjusted job-loss numbers for the past three months by pretending that they represent actual people thrown out of work. They do not.

The AP’s Aversa was a primary offender last Friday, as she wrote:

Employers eliminated 20,000 jobs in April …..

….. It was the fourth straight month that employers cut jobs — bringing total losses to 260,000.

….. Businesses are handing out pink slips as they cope with an economy that is teetering on the edge of a recession, or possibly in one already.

….. On the employment front, construction companies, manufacturers, retailers, mortgage brokers and temporary help firms were among those shedding jobs in April.

Almost none of what Aversa cited above happened in the real world. Except for manufacturing, every major sector of the economy had more workers in April than in March.

To be clear, compared to previous years, April’s jobs increase was not as great as one would hope to see. But it was at least closer to the previous two Aprils (within 157,000, on average) than January’s decrease or February’s and March’s increases were to their comparable 2006 and 2007 figures. More improvement is needed, but April at least headed in the right direction.

Oh, and April’s unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, fell 0.1% to 5.0%; the unadjusted rate fell from 5.2% to 4.8%.

Finally, the recent news from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) has been very good.

Last Thursday, ISM reported that manufacturing’s 15% of the economy, while still slightly contracting, held steady. Its Manufacturing Index came in at 48.6% (any reading above 50% indicates expansion; below 50%, contraction).

On Monday, ISM’s Non-Manufacturing Index, covering the remaining 85% of the economy, including the troubled housing and financial services sectors, leaped into expansion mode with a reading of 52%. That was up 2.4% from the previous month and confounded the “experts,” who had predicted that it would go down.

Then on Tuesday, ISM had the nerve to issue its Spring 2008 Semiannual Economic Forecast, which said: “Economic Growth to Continue Throughout 2008.”

If you think you heard “How dare they!” murmurs from the business press, you may be right.

Though more easily comprehensible, the comical error (or is it what he truly thought?) in Barack Obama’s “57 states” statement (HT Newsbusters’ John Stephenson) is nothing compared to the dangerously wrong “history” he recited in his North Carolina Primary victory speech Tuesday night.

Friday, at Real Clear Politics, Jack Kelly recounted the Illinois Senator’s egregious error, and its frightening implications (bolds are mine throughout):

Obama Needs a History Lesson

In his victory speech after the North Carolina primary, Sen. Barack Obama said something that is all the more remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon.

In defending his stated intent to meet with America’s enemies without preconditions, Sen. Obama said: “I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.”

That he made this statement, and that it passed without comment by the journalists covering his speech indicates either breathtaking ignorance of history on the part of both, or deceit.

Then Kelly recited how wrong Obama was about Roosevelt and Truman:

FDR talked directly with none of them (our enemies) before the outbreak of hostilities, and his policy once war began was unconditional surrender.

….. Truman did not modify the policy of unconditional surrender.

….. Harry Truman also was president when North Korea invaded South Korea in June, 1950. President Truman’s response was not to call up North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung for a chat. It was to send troops.

….. When Stalin’s (post-World War II) designs became unmistakably clear, President Truman’s response wasn’t to seek a summit meeting. He sent military aid to Greece, ordered the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, and sent troops to South Korea.

….. The closest historical analogue to Sen. Obama’s expressed desire to meet with no preconditions with anti-American dictators such as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the trip British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Eduoard Daladier took to Munich in September of 1938 to negotiate “peace in our time” with Adolf Hitler. That didn’t work out so well.

Kelly also quoted a historian who told of how John F. Kennedy’s decision to meet with Kruschev enabled the Russian premier to evaluate him as someone “who would shrink from hard decisions. (Kruschev) came to believe that Americans are ‘too liberal to fight.’” He also quoted journalistic icon James Reston of the New York Times, who once wrote that “when Kennedy was rash enough to strike at Cuba but not bold enough to finish the job, Khrushchev decided he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed.”

Kelly’s wrap:

The lack of historical knowledge among journalists is merely appalling. But in a presidential candidate it’s dangerous. As Sir Winston Churchill said:

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Is the Obama campaign going to pass off their candidate’s misguided rendition of history as yet another error resulting from being “tired”? Will Old Media journalists covering him let it slide? Or is Kelly’s suspicion that they didn’t even recognize Obama’s error correct?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It must be nice to be on Old Media’s “free pass” list.

For years, Apple Computer has been on that list (disclosure: yours truly is a 23-year Mac user). Apple has been the cool, innovative tech darling, the noble foil of big, bad monopolist Microsoft.

Another free-pass beneficiary is Al Gore, who sits on Apple’s Board of Directors.

Wait until you see what ClimateCounts.org thinks of Apple’s record on “fighting global warming,” especially in comparison to its industry peers (HT InfoWorld via Kevin at Pundit Review):

( Links: Sector Company Scores; Apple’s Overall Scorecard)

According to Apple’s detailed scorecard (PDF), the company scored a zero in 18 of the 22 measurement criteria. Some of them include (bold is mine):

• Item 13 — Has the company achieved emissions reductions?
• Item 5 — Is there external, qualified third party verification of emissions data, reductions, and reporting (where applicable)?
• Item 18 — Does the company require suppliers to take climate change action or give preference to those that do?
• Item 19 — Does the company support public policy that could require mandatory climate change action by business?

In 2006, Apple’s score was “2.” I doubt that ClimateCounts.org has set aside a “most improved” award for the company’s 9-point 2007 pickup.

Note that I do not subscribe to any of this nonsense. “Climate friendliness” is part of the broader, dangerous notion of “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR). As I have noted before, companies that embrace CSR, or cynically give into it in the name of appeasement, are engaging in an an economic and ideological sellout to groups who are, at bottom, hostile to capitalism. The late Milton Friedman was and still is right when he wrote that CSR is a “fundamentally subversive doctrine,” and that “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.”

But, though he is careful about when and where he talks about it (note that his Nobel Prize acceptance speech makes no direct reference to business), Al Gore does subscribe to CSR.

Here’s an interesting possibility: One of the reasons Apple is financially outperforming its peers under Gore’s “oversight” may be that it’s not allowing itself to be overly distracted by CSR, and that Gore’s mere presence on the Board is enabling the company to escape activists’ wrath. If so, how “convenient.”

You would think that journalists who have swallowed whole the gospel of globaloney (my term for the mistaken beliefs that catastrophic global warming is taking place, and that it’s largely caused by human activity) to be giving Apple and Gore some, uh, heat over the company’s “disgraceful” (as ClimateCounts.org defines it) record of environmental stewardship.

But it appears that when you’re on the “free pass” list, all is forgiven.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

A construction company owner who lost two homes in Hurricane Katrina claimed a $97 million Powerball prize, a jackpot won off a ticket he bought at a convenience store where he stopped to buy his wife a gallon of milk.

When he turned in the winning ticket, Carl Hunter became the largest Powerball winner in Louisiana’s history. He won the jackpot in January, but the 73-year-old small businessman waited nearly four months to claim the prize.

An avid lottery player, Hunter said he already had bought a Powerball ticket on Jan. 16 at the gas station less than two blocks from his home in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. But he stopped at the station again that day to buy milk — at the request of his wife, Dianne — and got a second “quick pick” ticket.

“I had some change, and one dollar was used to buy this ticket,” Hunter said Thursday at the Louisiana Lottery Corp. headquarters in Baton Rouge, where he claimed his prize.

“It’s all about milk,” his wife said, smiling.

The couple, surrounded by cameras, was decidedly low-key about the multimillion dollar win, saying they didn’t have specific plans for the money — besides retirement and the rebuilding of a camp lost to Katrina.

“I’m retiring, you know, naturally,” Carl Hunter said.

Hunter took a lump sum payment that will give him $33.9 million after taxes, according to lottery officials. Asked why he waited so long to turn in the winning ticket, Hunter said he wanted to wrap up some of his construction work and finish his outstanding contracts. In fact, Hunter’s wife Dianne said he was still at work this week.

“I don’t think about buying elaborate cars or homes,” Carl Hunter said.

Hunter said he owned two homes that were destroyed in 2005 by Katrina, and he and his wife moved into a Metairie home she owned after the storm, the home that was near the gas station where he bought his winning ticket.

Go here for the rest of the story.