….. But I Don’t Have Any Time For:

• It’s good to see that that PUNK Previously Unaccomplished Nonsupporter of Kin) President-elect BOOHOO-OUCH (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein Obambi” Obama - Objectively Unfit Coddler of Haters) is remembering his middle name today.
• Gateway Pundit — “….. the only difference between Barack Obama and the Copperheads of 1864 is that this time the copperheads were voted in.”
• From the “Wouldn’t That Be Nice” Dept — “Bishops of Venezuela urge Chavez not to seek re-election for the good of the country.”
• Another “Name That Party” Failure — This time it’s the Associated Press, in a short write-up about Democrat Eric McFadden, formerly Director of Faith-Based Initiatives under Ohio’s Democratic Governor Ted Strickland.
• Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media — “Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and chief executive officer of NBC parent company General Electric (GE), is on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose president is Timothy Geithner. …. a subsidiary of GE, GE Capital, is getting some of the federal bailout money that Geithner, if he is confirmed, will have a role in managing. Conflict of interest, anyone?” Kincaid also has info on “The Group of 30″ that should be raising eyebrows, but isn’t.
• Noah Pollack at Commentary Magazine — “It is hard to envision how Israel will survive as a nation when its political leaders are more afraid of victory than of defeat.”
• This really does deserve a post of its own — “Protesters label Redford an enemy of the poor; Clergymen link famed moviemaker’s stance to racism.” Keeping fuel prices artificially high by prohibiting exploration and drilling disproportionately hurts the poor. Sadly, the poor are still disproportionately African-American and Hispanic. Hence, the result of carrying out Redford’s beliefs and policy prescriptions would be racist, regardless how pure he believes his intentions are. Sorry, Bob.
• If Chrysler sells all or part of itself, the taxpayers are first in line to get their money back …. Right?
• Michael Stokes Paulsen, in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, about Minnesota’s still up in the air US Senate race — “the only thing certain is that the present ‘certified’ result — which is that Mr. Franken won by 225 votes out of more than 2.9 million cast — is an obvious, embarrassing violation of the Constitution.”

From England:

Page last updated at 21:01 GMT, Thursday, 8 January 2009

A woman from Cornwall who gave birth to triplets 14 weeks early has described their survival as a “miracle”.

Martha, Evie and Harry Paciuszko were born at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth five weeks ago each weighing about 2lbs (900g) – similar to a bag of sugar.

At one stage they were being cared for at three different hospitals, with Harry in Cornwall, Martha in Bristol and Evie staying in Plymouth.

Their mother, Sam, said: “The fact that they survived at all is a miracle.”

The 35-year-old, who lives in Truro, regularly made 400-mile round trips with her husband, Andrew, to visit them in separate hospitals.

However, after receiving surgery at St Michael’s Hospital in Bristol, Martha has now been moved to the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Treliske where her brother is being looked after.

Mrs Paciuszko, a human resources manager, has praised staff at all three hospitals for helping care for the triplets who are growing stronger by the day.

“The nurses were amazing and the support we have had from our family and friends has really helped,” she said. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

Underlying story at National Review: “Geithner Can’t Explain His Failure to Pay Taxes”

Original lyrics to The Who’s “I Can’t Explain” are here.

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Previous Posts:

• Jan. 19 – NRO’s York: Geithner ‘Can’t Explain’
• Jan. 17 – AP’s ‘Q&A’ on Geithner’s Taxes Has Excuses Galore, No Mention of ‘Reimbursements’ Pocketed
• Jan. 16 – Geithner Must Go
• Jan. 15 — Tax ‘Goof’ Update: Geithner Was ‘Reimbursed’ for Taxes He Didn’t Pay; AP Story Buries, Then Deletes
• Jan. 14 — Geithner Update: AP’s Early-AM Revision Flushes Many Details, Calls His Tax Problems ‘Goofs’
• Jan. 13 — Treasury Nominee Geither’s Persistent Tax Problems Getting the Glossover Treatment; AP Coverage ‘Forgets’ at Least Chavez, Baird

From the AP’s Deb Reichmann:

In his final acts of clemency, President George W. Bush on Monday commuted the prison sentences of two former U.S. Border Patrol agents whose convictions for shooting a Mexican drug dealer ignited fierce debate about illegal immigration.Bush’s decision to commute the sentences of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who tried to cover up the shooting, was welcomed by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. They had long argued that the agents were merely doing their jobs, defending the American border against criminals. They also maintained that the more than 10-year prison sentences the pair was given were too harsh.

Rancor over their convictions, sentencing and firings has simmered ever since the shooting occurred in 2005.

Ramos and Compean became a rallying point among conservatives and on talk shows where their supporters called them heroes. Nearly the entire bipartisan congressional delegation from Texas and other lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle pleaded with Bush to grant them clemency.

Bush didn’t pardon the men for their crimes, but decided instead to commute their prison sentences because he believed they were excessive and that they had already suffered the loss of their jobs, freedom and reputations, a senior administration official said.

The action by the president, who believes the border agents received fair trials and that the verdicts were just, does not diminish the seriousness of their crimes, the official said.

That’s as much as the two men could have hoped for, though I believe a complete pardon would have been more appropriate.

From the National Review’s Byron York, who really needs to send a bill for services rendered to the Associated Press and other media outlets who are largely giving the most troubling aspects of Timothy Geithner’s tax problems (i.e., signing documents saying he would pay and pocketing partial reimbursements for taxes he said would pay and didn’t) the la-la treatment (documented here, here, here, and here):

….. according to sources close to the confirmation process, Geithner doesn’t have an answer to that most basic question (“What was he thinking?”) about his (non-compliant tax) behavior.

“His explanation was kind of, ‘I don’t know—it was stupid, obviously it was a mistake, and I don’t know why I did it,’” recalls a senator who was present during Geithner’s surprise appearance before a members-only meeting of the Senate Finance Committee last week. “What do you say to that?”

Easy answer: “Find work elsewhere.”

Read the whole thing.

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UPDATE: I join Michelle Malkin in being completely displeased and disgusted with alleged conservatives like Charles Krauthammer who want to wave the Geithner nomination through, and believe that his problem with tax compliance is a “trivial matter.”

Brickbats to Hugh Hewitt too. The unrepentant Mitt Romney excuse-maker says that “the Senate should move quickly to confirm Timothy Geithner. A president deserves his cabinet choices because he has won the election and been charged with executing the laws.” I dunno, maybe it would be nice if Obama would name people who have actually followed the laws, especially in a key arena they’re about to oversee.

Next up: A socialist who believes energy companies are evil, and that “excessive” energy consumption is immoral and dooming the planet, as energy czar. And on the state level in Ohio, a director of Faith-Based Initiatives who claims to be a Catholic but is strongly proabortion, and (I would hope, without the knowledge of the governor) doubles as a prostitution “guru” while holding that office.

Oh wait …. and wait.

Proof of how the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would have reacted to legalized abortion is in this key passage from his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (also found here):

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Happily, his invocations of Augustine, Aquinas, and natural law end any legitimate argument over whether Dr. King, who was assassinated five years after his Birmingham letter, and two years before the debate over completely legalizing abortion went national, would have opposed the grisly practice.

Dr. King’s citation of Aquinas relates to the philosophically pioneering saint who held that all abortions are gravely immoral (as did St. Augustine — see the last sentence at this link).

As to natural law, properly understood — and Dr. King, with his simultaneous references to Aquinas and Augustine, clearly had such an understanding — its principle of double effect explains why abortion is indeed gravely immoral:

The principle of double effect holds that it is morally allowable to perform an action that has a bad effect only under the following conditions:

1. ….. The action to be performed must be good in itself, or at least indifferent. This is evident, for if the act is evil of its very nature, nothing can make it good or indifferent. Evil would then be chosen directly, either as an end or as a means to an end, and there could be no question of merely permitting or tolerating it. If the action is fundamentally and inherently morally illicit, then it cannot be morally permitted regardless of any good intentions or goals, or under any good circumstances.Application: (Thus,) the act of abortion of its very nature is inherently evil, because it is the intentional and direct killing of an innocent human being. This would apply to all abortions, including those in the case of rape and incest (and to those involving human fetal and human embryo research, and human cloning). Therefore it is never morally permissible to undergo an abortion procedure. The principle of double effect as applied to the case of abortion renders abortion procedures morally illicit, since the action by its very nature is evil.
2. ….. The evil effect must not be directly intended for itself but only permitted to happen as an accidental by-product of the act performed. Application: In the case of abortion procedures, the death of the unborn child is directly intended, and therefore is morally illicit.
3. ….. The good intended must not be obtained by means of the evil effects. The evil must not be an actual factor in the accomplishment of the good.Application: In the case of abortion procedures, the death of the unborn child may not be used as a means of limiting family size, preventing birth defects, enhancing a career, etc. (all legitimately good or neutral ends or goals in themselves).
4. ….. There must be a reasonably grave reason for permitting the evil effect. If the good is slight and the evil great, the evil can hardly be called incidental. If there is any other way of getting the good effect without the bad effect, this other way must be taken.Application: In the case of abortion procedures, to maintain a slim figure, to have a child of a certain sex, to prevent the birth of a child with defects, or to evade social embarrassment would not be reasonably grave reasons for permitting the unintended and unavoidable death of the unborn child.

King’s clear prolife position desperately needs to be understood in the African-American community he gave his life fighting for, especially among the community’s modern leadership. African-Americans have been disproportionately decimated by legalized abortion. Though they make up roughly 12% of the USA’s population, 35% of abortions since Roe v. Wade have killed African-American babies.

Americans of all backgrounds must understand how horrified Dr. King would have been at our abortion-on-demand culture, and do everything they can not to merely marginally reduce it, but to totally eliminate it. That would include our president-elect, who tragically has been the polar opposite of Dr. King on this matter in his political life to this point.

____________________________________________

Also: There is no doubt that Martin Luther King Sr. opposed abortion, and applied that belief in his own family –

August 26, 2008 12:03AM

More than 2,000 people marched around a new Planned Parenthood Clinic in Denver tonight instead of following the Democratic National Convention.

Alveda King, a niece of the late Martin Luther King Jr., and Archbishop of Denver Charles Chaput spoke to the crowd before they lit candles and circled the gated clinic.

Alveda King’s mother conceived her daughter when she was a freshman in college. She had wanted to get an abortion, but Martin Luther King Sr. told her mother she could not abort her baby.

“This little baby human girl was allowed to live,” she said to the cheering crowd.

Elaboration: This December 2007 BizzyBlog post about Mitt Romney’s outrageously false characterization of Ronald Reagan as “adamantly pro-choice” when Reagan was governor of California makes it clear that the intent of the abortion laws passed in 1967 in several states, including California, was to legalize the practice in very narrow cases of rape, incest, and real threat to the life or physical health of the mother. Sadly, as noted at the post, proabortion medical practitioners abused these laws, and began routinely certifying the “need” for an abortion on the basis of the mother’s “mental health.”

The fact that this abuse was occurring, and that it had evolved into de facto abortion on demand, was not widely known until well after Dr. King’s assassination in April 1968.

_______________________________________________________

UPDATE: An e-mailer kindly forwarded a piece of evidence from 1966 that, at least on the surface, would argue in the opposite direction.

Dr. King was given the Margaret Sanger award by Planned Parenthood that year. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, actually delivered her husband’s acceptance speech on his behalf.

But part of PP’s award citation looked like a defense of human life:

“In the tradition of all great humanitarians who have seen that human life and progress are indeed indivisible, Dr. King has lent his eloquent voice to the cause of world-wide voluntary family planning.”

Additionally:

• “Worldwide family planning” at the time did NOT include access to abortion.
• The word “abortion” or any term that implies its acceptability is not in the speech.
• Though it probably supported the idea from its inception, PP more than likely did not publicly come out in favor of legalized abortion until at least 1968. Remember, it framed the California and other state laws as very narrow; Reagan was told it might apply to 1,000 cases a year, but it ended up leading to a half-million abortions annually. King was in many ways a great man, but he couldn’t read everyone’s minds.
• Likewise, Sanger’s pre-World War II advocacy of eugenics and of consciously limiting population growth in poorer communities was never widely known. Though it’s a historical fact, it still isn’t widely known.

My response to the e-mailer also made the following points:

• King was clearly pro-contraception, because that WAS an element of “worldwide family planning” at the time. But the speech has no indication that he was pro-abort. In the 1960s, King was not alone in failing to appreciate the abortifacient nature of many forms of contraception.
• All of that said, you can’t eliminate the possibility that King sold out a firmly grounded 1963 theology in the mid-1960s and later.
• You also can’t totally eliminate the possibility that he was a poseur in 1963. If so, that Birmingham letter puts on quite a theological act.
• King’s alleged record of extramarital affairs and his demonstrated history of plagiarism are grounds for at least mild discomfort on the previous two points.

UPDATE 2: There is other indirect evidence that King would have been prolife had he lived long enough to see legalized abortion.

Most compelling is the fact that King associate Jesse Jackson was strongly prolife until roughly the late 1970s or early 1980s. In January 1977, four years after Roe v. Wade, as shown in this footnote graphic taken from a book by C. Everett Koop, Jackson wrote the following in a prolife magazine:

Because of his longtime position of spiritual leadership in the African-American community, deserved or not, Jackson’s renunciation of his prolife values is perhaps the most deadly change of heart in US history.

Less compelling is the fact that Ralph David Abernathy, King’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, endorsed prolife Ronald Reagan in 1980 (a Washington Post article preview is here; NYT preview is here), and thus did not endorse proabort Jimmy Carter. To be sure, I see no evidence that abortion was mentioned as a factor, but Abernathy’s stated economy-based reasons for going against a tide of support for Carter from other black leaders don’t seem sufficient. That Abernathy had supported Ted Kennedy, who by that time was strongly proabort, in the 1980 Democratic Party, argues against taking his support for Reagan as a prolife position too seriously.

In between the two is Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who was one of King’s early civil rights agitators (in a positive sense), and one of the bravest. That Shuttlesworth held on to his natural law core is shown in his consistent opposition to attempts to equate the 1960s civil rights movement with the modern homosexual rights movement, and to same-sex “marriage.”

From eastern Cincinnati, and many other points:

January 18, 2009

Turn a 3-on-3 tournament into a benefit, add an auction, multiply by Facebook, and ….

The good thing about bad news is the caring that follows. Serious illness is an enemy that elicits many foes. The destruction it causes is no match for the love it provokes.

Chris Norwell has cancer. Burkitt’s lymphoma, to be precise. If you’d seen this kid at Anderson High (Class of 2003) or at the University of Illinois – 6 feet 6, 300 pounds, bench-pressing 405 pounds “in my prime,” as he says – you’d hardly believe it. But cancer doesn’t discriminate.

He went from starting four years at defensive tackle for the Illini, 49 games in a row, most at that position in school history, to spending 60 nights in the hospital between October and New Year’s. Big, strong, indestructible Chris, Anderson’s all-time leading scorer in basketball, 28-2 as a starter on the football team, losing his hair and 55 pounds, his life of possibilities defined by four white walls and an IV, dripping helpful poison into his body.

The chemotherapy stopped 13 days ago. Next is a barrage of tests to determine if the disease is in remission or in need of further destruction. The doctors call it “re-staging.” Chris doesn’t know when that life-turning day will come, only that it will be soon. So he waits. And learns how much love there is in the world.

They’re holding a 3-on-3, fund-raising basketball event for him at Anderson on Feb. 22. It’s just a little gathering of people who have heard about Chris Norwell and his illness. All that’s involved is 140 teams paying $25 apiece to hoop it up; a silent auction of stuff from Illinois, Ohio State, Anderson High and possibly the Reds; and a few hundred volunteers and a few thousand people coming to watch.

All it has taken is a couple Anderson teachers, one in particular, spending 101 percent of his free time monitoring a blog and a Facebook page and tracking down silent-auction items and marshalling an army of volunteers and wondering how he’s going to fit 140 teams onto five basketball half-courts in one day.

“It’s literally becoming the biggest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” says Justin Servis. He runs the marketing program at Anderson High. He’s marketing hope in his spare time. People seem to like it. “They’re coming out of the woodwork,” Servis says.

Here’s how it started:

Anderson has a 3-on-3, seniors-versus-faculty tournament every year at the end of the basketball season. Four student teams, one faculty squad, proceeds to charity. It’s a nice couple hours for a worthy cause. Servis and fellow teacher Stacey Bailey decided late last fall to send this year’s donations to Chris Norwell’s family, to help with his medical bills.

Chris had come home in early September. After graduating last spring from Illinois, he’d wanted to play in the NFL but hadn’t been drafted. His agent, Richard Katz, had gotten him tryouts with the New England Patriots and Minnesota Vikings. The Vikings released Chris just before the season.

All summer, Chris had suffered fatigue and a pain in his hip. He attributed the pain to a hernia operation he’d had last January. He attributed the fatigue to being out of shape. Only, the pain intensified and he started losing weight. “In hindsight I should have seen it coming,” says Vince Suriano, Chris’ coach at Anderson. Suriano saw Chris in mid-October, at a Redskins football game. “He told me he’d lost 25 pounds. I asked him his weight, because I’d heard through the grapevine that one of those NFL teams was an injury away from calling him back.”

The hip pain became so severe, Chris couldn’t walk for hours at a time. Doctors diagnosed him on Oct. 17. He started chemo three days later. Not long after, Stacey Bailey was talking to Justin Servis about the 3-on-3 tournament. “How can we make it bigger?” she wondered.

The power of the Internet was about to answer that question. Emphatically. …..

The event for Chris Norwell is Sunday, Feb. 22, from noon to 8 p.m. at Anderson High. Information can be found at oncearedskin.blogspot.com.

Go here for the rest of the story.

This is a hopefully good news, bad news post.

First, the bad news: James Hansen, head of NASA’s the Goddard Institute of Space Studies is still bloviating about the catastrophes that await us because of what yours truly and others refer to as globaloney (the belief that the earth is dangerously warming, that human activity is the cause of the warming, and that radical steps that would cause huge reductions in standards of living around the world are required to save the planet from extinction). Reporter Robin McKie carries Hansen’s latest “we’d better act or else” warning at the UK Guardian.

The hopefully good news is that Hansen’s warning is thus far getting very light press coverage. A 9:45 a.m. Google News search done on “Hansen climate” (not in quotes) for January 16-18 came back with all of 24 items (the first page of results says there are 267, but there are really only 24.

Here are the first five paragraphs of McKie’s article, if you can bear reading them (bolds after title are mine):

President ‘has four years to save Earth’
US must take the lead to avert eco-disaster

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama’s first administration, he added.

Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. “We cannot afford to put off change any longer,” said Hansen. “We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.”

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world’s greatest carbon emitter and the planet’s largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal – the world’s worst carbon emitter.

Hansen – head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of the WWF’s top conservation award – first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his views.

Space and time don’t allow me to correct every error or to debunk every shoddy argument being made, but here are three egregious busts:

• The US is not the world’s greatest carbon emitter. China became the biggest 18 months ago. This was noted in an article carried in …. the UK Guardian. A June 2008 article in the New York Times reported that China had increased its lead.
• Sea ice is back to 1979 levels.
• The alleged White House campaign to “silence” Hansen is an urban legend (scroll down a bit at link).

Of course, by posting on this I am giving Hansen’s global warming and “climate change” hysterics wider play. But I figure that commenters can offset the negative impact of the increased exposure with additional debunking of their own. So have at it.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

_______________________________________________________

UPDATE: Hot Air Headlines had picked up the NewsBusters version of this post.

Jan 14, 2009; 10:00 pm

A World Youth Day 2008 attendee was the only person in her class to graduate from a small Alaska high school.

Marchelle Renner was the only 2009 graduate of North Pole Christian School, which she attended since kindergarten.

Her final year marked the first time Renner was in a class of one.

“She’s awesome, and we’re totally proud of her,” said Renner’s mother, Rochelle, according to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

Eielson Church of Christ Minister Kevin Knight spoke during the graduation ceremony, giving Renner advice for her future.

Using American Express advertisements in which celebrities say their cards have given them things like freedom and independence, Knight told Renner, “You have something better than an American Express card — you have the God of the universe.”

Renner delivered her own reflections at the ceremony, saying that the most important thing she has learned was to think of God not only in the bad times, but also to remember Him in the good times.

She also noted the most memorable moments in her life, such as her five mission trips to Mexico.

“It’s seeing the children and the love they have for God, even though they don’t have much else,” Renner said.

She plans to take a sixth trip in January, the Daily News Miner reports.

Renner’s father Mark described his daughter as adventurous and determined. He said he saw her take charge in a thoughtful and caring way during her trip to World Youth Day in Australia.

“We’re so blessed to have her as a daughter,” he said. …..

The Associated Press’s record of running interference for Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner continues mostly unabated.

My chronicle of AP’s largely weak coverage, most of which has been previously detailed here at BizzyBlog, is at the end of this post.

No AP report I have seen has noted that Geithner applied for and merely pocketed partial “reimbursements” from the International Monetary Fund for payroll/”self-employment” taxes. He signed IMF forms saying that he had paid or would pay those taxes. He didn’t pay up for 2003 and 2004 until his returns were audited. He more than likely never would have paid up for 2001 and 2002 if he had not been nominated, even though a strong case could be made that he engaged in tax evasion.

These aspects of Geithner’s tax situation, if widely known, would, I believe, cause the average taxpayer to object strongly to the very idea of his nomination. AP’s alleged journalists appear to believe that this cannot be allowed to happen.

AP Personal Finance writer Dave Carpenter, in a mostly Q&A piece with a really weak title (“Meltdown 101: US tax laws can even foil the pros”), continued the silence on pocketed reimbursements yesterday afternoon (stored here for future reference). He also seems to have found every excuse for Geither except “the dog ate my W-2″:
(more…)

Note: This column originally appeared at Pajamas Media on Thursday.
_______________________________________________

The President-elect and his party have “succeeded” in taking down the economy. Now that no one knows what the rules are, how can it come back?
_______________________________________________

The country’s gross domestic product contracted for the first time in six years during the final quarter of 2007. After that, a bit of a recovery ensued. While official first-quarter growth was a paltry annualized 0.9%, the second quarter came in at a pretty decent 2.8%. Monthly economic growth estimates from Macroeconomic Advisers (MA) indicate that second quarter growth was much higher — a stunning 6.4%.

Besides giving rise to legitimate reasons to question the National Bureau for Economic Research’s assertion that the US has been in a continuous recession since December 2007, Uncle Sam’s and MA’s data show what the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy has been doing to us since last summer. Uncle Sam says that the economy contracted at an annualized 0.5% in the third quarter, while MA’s numbers for July through October annualize out to a mind-boggling -7.6% — and no one thinks that November and December were any better.

The POR Economy kicked in during the latter part of June, when its architects — Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid — decided that starving the economy of energy by refusing to allow more offshore drilling in the face of $4 gas prices was a winning political position. Pelosi claimed that because we couldn’t totally “drill our way out of this,” we shouldn’t increase drilling at all. Reid put an exclamation point on Pelosi’s stubbornness by insisting that fossil fuels are “making us sick.” Ed Morrissey at Hot Air properly characterized Reid’s statement as economic “surrender.”

Democratic presidential nominee Obama’s unique contributions, beyond pathetically insisting that proper tire inflation and tuneups would solve our energy problems, consisted of promises to radically raise Social Security and federal income taxes on the country’s highest earners, who also happen to largely be its most productive contributors to the economy’s growth.

I observed in July that as a result of these economy-hostile positions, “Businesses and investors are responding to their total lack of seriousness by battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst.”

Those preparations were justified. “The worst” arrived; the prospect of a government infected with permanent energy antagonism and profoundly punitive taxes was just the beginning.

Decades-in-the-making meltdowns at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, aided and abetted over the years by Democrat cronies like Frank Raines, exposed how those agencies and the Community Reinvestment Act ruined the mortgage-lending market by lowering industrywide credit-approval standards.

As the Fan-Fred poison spread to other lenders, Henry Paulson panicked, and decided that he needed a made-up amount of $700 billion to buy “troubled assets,” principally mortgage loans in delinquency and foreclosure. Though President Bush was among those who allowed themselves to be stampeded by the Treasury’s Secretary’s threats of financial Armageddon, don’t forget that all three POR Triumvirate members proudly championed it.

Instead of using the money as promised, Paulson “put a (figurative) gun to the heads” of the major banks and forced them to accept direct government investment. As anyone could have predicted, bailing out one industry has already led to another bailout (GM-Chrysler), and endless calls for more, even going beyond private businesses to the states, local governments, and other public entities.

Why is it any surprise that investors, entrepreneurs, and business managers are in no mood to invest or expand, and are shedding employees at a scary rate? Last Friday’s employment data showed that the economy lost over 500,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis for the second month in a row. The actual “on the ground” (not seasonally adjusted) numbers were worse. November and December 2008′s economy underperformed 2007 by almost 1.7 million jobs:

This turndown has been much more severe than it should have been because of a serious breakdown in “the rules of the game.” Why invest in, start up, or expand any kind of business if there’s a realistic possibility that the government will aid your direct or indirect competitors, or otherwise radically and whimsically alter the playing field? This uncertainty has also taken its toll on consumers. Despite having billions of extra dollars available thanks to energy price drops and lower interest rates, their spending appears not to be ramping up proportionally.

The solution from Washington? More bailouts, leading to more uncertainty across the board. Another, bigger “stimulus,” and a less effective one at that. While tax “rebate” checks such as those sent out last year are not as effective as across-the-board rate cuts, at least they put money into consumers’ pockets quickly. But the new “stimulus” package evolving in Washington is dominated by public “investments” that, even if justified, would take much longer to make their way into the economy.

Roosevelt tried massive public works programs during the Depression. All he did is prolong it for seven years. Japan tried government stimulus for 10 years running in the 1990s. It only resulted in “the lost decade.”

What Pelosi, Obama, and Reid should do is expand the tax cut element of the stimulus plan to include all incomes, ditch almost all of the alleged “investments,” open up oil and gas exploration, and, eventually, watch the royalty money pour in. I know; that’s way too much to “hope” for.

From IBDeditorials.com:

Posted Friday, January 16, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Heroes: The watery crash landing of US Airways flight 1549 with all 155 passengers emerging alive has been called a “miracle.” Miracle? We see something even better: True competence by a well-trained professional.

No doubt about it: US Airways pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, a former fighter pilot with more than 40 years of flying under his belt, had the right stuff.

After hitting a flock of geese in his Airbus A320 shortly after takeoff and stalling out, he dead-sticked the plane into the Hudson River. Within five minutes, all 155 passengers had exited the stricken jet safely in 20-degree weather.

Only one word for this: Fantastic.

The story has captivated people. Maybe it’s the happy ending. The last time this happened, in 1982, an Air Florida jet hit a bridge over the Potomac and tumbled into the water. Sadly, the outcome was typical of wet landings: Just five of the 79 passengers survived.

But another reason people found this story thrilling is that, at a time of national crisis, it’s wonderful to see a person who’s extremely good at his job. Pilot Sulley, a 57-year-old Californian, is the walking, talking embodiment of a simple, old-fashioned virtue that seems missing from American life these days: Competence. …..

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