Things I’d Like to Post About Today ….. (120608, Morning)

….. But I Don’t Have Any Time For:

• Great quote, from Z. Dwight Billingsley at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (HT Hot Air), who is African-American — “white people (have been) contacting me to say that I should be proud to see a black man become president. Could there be a comment that is more condescending, more insulting, than that? If I believed that in America a black man could not be president, then I would be proud to see any black man elected president. But because I always have believed that nothing in America prevents a black man from becoming president or anything else he wants to be, I can be embarrassed, not proud, to see someone as unqualified and inexperienced as Obama become president.”
• A number relating to the auto bailout you probably won’t see printed anywhere but this Wall Street Journal editorial — “Two economists testified that the ultimate cost of this bailout would certainly be much, much higher than $34 billion. Mark Zandi of economy.com put the number at up to $125 billion — and he supports the bailout.”
• Another quote, from the same WSJ editorial — “outside of bankruptcy there is no way to make these taxpayer loans senior to existing secured debt — meaning the government might never get paid back if the companies go bankrupt later.” Thus, they must go bankrupt to reset priorities before any bailout occurs (Which I would still oppose). I should note that lefties who have made a career of decrying “corporate welfare” are really quiet these days.
• Speaking of pretty quiet, has anyone heard Joe Biden’s name in about, say, the past three weeks?
• God love Fred Goldman (scroll down at the link). It would be really entertaining to hear from anyone who cheered the day OJ was acquitted more than a decade a ago who and isn’t ashamed that they did so.
• Wanna save $100 billion? John Arquilla at Forbes says we should stop building aircraft carriers. It looks like he wants to totally stop using them. The case seems pretty good, but I’d like to see other seasoned defense experts weigh in.
• Here’s Example Number We-Stopped-Counting of the Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa just breezily typing things she “knows” are true without bothering to check them out — She wrote the following in the 6:17 p.m. update to her employment story I commented on at NewsBusters yesterday: “Workers with jobs did see modest wage gains in November. Average hourly earnings rose to $18.30, a 0.4 percent increase from the previous month. Over the year, wages have grown 3.7 percent, but paychecks haven’t stretched that far because of high prices for energy, food and other items.” Assuming that “over the year” means the past 12 months, we only have data for 11 months (Dec. 2007 through Oct. 2008). That data tells us that inflation during those 11 months has been 3.05% (216.593 divided by 210.177 at this link) — and the smart money is on the Consumer Price Index barely budging or going negative when the November numbers come out in about 10 days.