Note: This post will stay at the top today. The picture was obtained from this Mark Finkelstein tribute at NewsBusters.

_________________________________

White House statement:

Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of our dear friend, Tony Snow. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Jill, and their children, Kendall, Robbie, and Kristi. The Snow family has lost a beloved husband and father. And America has lost a devoted public servant and a man of character.

Tony was one of our Nation’s finest writers and commentators. He earned a loyal following with incisive radio and television broadcasts. He was a gifted speechwriter who served in my father’s Administration. And I was thrilled when he agreed to return to the White House to serve as my Press Secretary. It was a joy to watch Tony at the podium each day. He brought wit, grace, and a great love of country to his work. His colleagues will cherish memories of his energetic personality and relentless good humor.

All of us here at the White House will miss Tony, as will the millions of Americans he inspired with his brave struggle against cancer. One of the things that sustained Tony Snow was his faith – and Laura and I join people across our country in praying that this good man has now found comfort in the arms of his Creator.

I was honored to see Snow speak in person in April and to have a few words with him. We jousted a bit over the early-1970s St. X-Princeton football rivalry, when we were at those respective high schools. As radiant and positive as he came across on TV and over the air, he was even moreso in person. Godspeed, Tony and family.

All I can say (that is fit to publish) in response to this AP story (saved here for future reference) is “Douglass Daniel and Jennifer Loven, you are so classless. How dare you?” More on that is here, if you can stand it.

Note: This was originally posted at Pajamas Media on Thursday.

______________________________________________

Remember the grief Dick Cheney received in late 2000, and then President Bush in early 2001, when they were accused of “talking down the economy”?

In Summer 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, presidential candidate Barack Obama, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid aren’t merely talking the economy down; they’re taking it down.

They have created what I am calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy. Businesses and investors are responding to their total lack of seriousness by battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst.

Businesspeople now face ugly realities. Their full ugliness has only come to the fore in the past month or so, as energy prices have reached record highs, and as the clamor for Washington to act has grown.

The POR response to the clamor has been shockingly out of touch:

• Pelosi continues to insist that “we can’t drill our way out of our problems” — so the US shouldn’t expand drilling at all, while other countries continue to drill merrily away.
• Reid claims that we have to get away from using coal and oil as soon as possible because they’re “making us sick.” It seem that if Harry had his way, we wouldn’t drill at all, or, for that matter, even dig at all.
• Obama thinks it’s okay that energy prices are at record highs; he just wishes that the increases had been more gradual. What a guy.
• Obama also wants a windfall profits tax on the energy sector, which in real world would redirect money to the government that would largely have been used for exploration and expanding production.
• The courts also pitched in. Expanding the scope of a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that forced the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate CO2 emitted by cars as a pollutant, a Georgia court stopped a coal-fired plant from being built. Gleeful environmentalists are demanding “an end to conventional coal.” Expecting Pelosi or Reid to stop this madness is a pipe dream.

Each and every one of the above is a callous, “let them eat cake” response to a serious problem. We can debate from here to eternity when and whether alternative fuels and energy sources will ever become viable, but right now you can’t power most existing cars, trucks, or fleets with any of them. If fuel and energy become prohibitively expensive for businesses, it will be that much harder for them to be profitable, perhaps even to remain viable. Who would have thought that the three stewards of the POR Economy would be so indifferent to the further suffering they have inflicted on their party’s union base at Detroit’s already-struggling Big Three?

Who can be surprised that businesses are reluctant to hire more people, or to replace them when they leave?

Pelosi-Obama-Reid’s energy irresponsibility has been a major contributor to the stock market’s recent swoon. The Dow Jones Industrial Average posted its worst June performance since 1930. Earning estimates are being lowered en masse.

Investors also face the real prospect of brutal tax increases:

• Beginning in 2009, the Bush tax cuts will begin to expire unless Congress acts to extend them. Obama has stated that he will “only” impose pre-Bush tax rates on the highest earners, thereby sucking about $160 billion a year out of the economy. Republican presidential candidate John McCain supports extending the Bush cuts; how he would get them through the Democratic Congress it seems he will face is not known.
• Obama further wants to siphon even more money from the economy ($40 billion or so) by imposing the Social Security payroll tax of 12.4% on all wage and self-employment income above $250,000.

Make no mistake: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama are the people who are making the economy sick. I don’t see how anyone can push this off on George Bush; the economy was picking up some steam, despite the housing industry and mortgage credit problems, until the Pelosi-Obama-Reid triumvirate made clear its intentions to put an energy choke-hold on the economy.

These three, and their party, appear not to care one whit about the damage ever-higher energy prices and the prospect of punitive taxes are doing, right now, to both the economy and the stock market. They have set a reached a new low in legislative negligence, one that I believe took businesses and investors by surprise.

The only things that could mitigate the negative growth that I’m afraid has begun are whatever juice is left in President Bush’s supply-side tax cuts and the positive impact of the economic stimulus checks. I believe that they will, at best, keep growth barely positive. I don’t see them doing much for employment.

This POR Economy is an advance demonstration of what an Obama administration would be like. Democrats hope that they can lay the blame for the sputtering economy on George Bush and John “McSame.” Will enough voters recognize this cynical gambit and reject it at the polls?

At long last, has the Associated Press lost all sense of decency?

The AP’s story (saved here for future reference in case the wire service is embarrassed into revising it; you might consider saving it too as Exhibit A on how far over the cliff the dinosaur media has driven itself) by Douglass K. Daniel, with Jennifer Loven contributing (I might have known), gets in at least three cheap, fundamentally untrue, and totally uncalled-for shots at Tony Snow, who died earlier this morning.

I won’t sully my front page with any of them. They follow the jump:

(more…)

From Dublin, Ireland:

Monday July 07 2008

THE parents of baby twins who defied death due to groundbreaking surgery in the womb have thanked the hospital that saved them.

Fidelma and Paul Greene, from Swords, Dublin, said yesterday their daughters, Lauren and Sophie, were thriving three months after being born.

Their unborn children had been given almost no chance of survival when Rotunda Hospital medics discovered they suffered from a rare medical condition.

Doctors diagnosed them with Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS) when their mother was 21 weeks pregnant.

The condition means one baby gets too much blood and the other too little. In almost all cases it leads to death of both twins, if it’s not treated.

Consultant obstetrician, Professor Fergal Malone, decided the foetuses had to be operated on while they were still inside their mother’s womb if they were to have any chance of surviving.

He performed the life-saving procedure in the hospital’s new foetal operating theatre on January 10 this year. The operation involved the obstetrician and his team inserting a camera, less than an eighth of a inch thick, and other tiny surgical instruments, into the womb.

The camera helped the team identify abnormal blood vessels, which were then repaired using laser therapy.

The girls were born by caesarean section three months later on April 7.

Radical

Lauren and Sophie are among the first children in Ireland to survive the pioneering surgery. It also saved the lives of twin boys Ryan and Dylan Kershaw, who were born in March last year.

The radical surgery was previously available in only a handful of clinics in Europe and North America.

Mr and Mrs Green said their babies would not have survived without Professor Malone and his team and thanked them for their care. “Paul and I are absolutely delighted that this story has had such a happy ending,” said Mrs Green (43). …..

Go here for the rest of the story.