In the process of putting together my latest Pajamas media column, which will come out later this week and be about last week’s tobacco tax hikes, I came across this 2000 item by Walter Williams.

Williams’s seemingly unrelated work ties in to this Wall Street Journal story about how a 38 year-old punk (appropriate, given that we’re currently enduring the Punk Presidency), whom Don Luskin correctly calls a “swaggering bastard,” is ordering bank and car-company CEOs around. If bankers ever used these tactics on their lending clients, they’d either be prosecuted or sued into oblivion.

The tie-in is to the two bolded sentences in this excerpt from Williams:

The first thing we should acknowledge is that we live in a world of harms. The secondhand smoke from my cigarette might harm you. However, your being able to prevent me from smoking harms me; I have less enjoyment. We cannot say which person’s harm is more important and should take precedence. The reason why is that it is impossible to make interpersonal utility comparisons. In other words, there is no scientific way of deciding whose well-being is more important: whether the harm you suffer from my smoking is more important than the harm I suffer from not being permitted to smoke.

…. In a socialistic society, conflicting harms are resolved through government intimidation and coercion. In a free society, conflicting harms are settled through the institution of private property rights. Private property rights has to do with rights, belonging to the person deemed owner of property and protected by the state, to keep, acquire, use and dispose of property as he deems fit so long as he does not violate the property rights of another.

Therefore, in a free society, whether smoking harms others or not is irrelevant. The relevant issue is who owns the air? It is clear that if you own the air, it is your right to decide how it is used. If you do not want tobacco smoke in your air, that is your right that government should protect. By the same token, if I own the air, I have rights just as you do to decide how it is used. If I want to have tobacco smoke in my air, I have every right to do so and the government should protect my property rights just as it protects yours.

….. A majority of Americans agree with laws prohibiting smoking in restaurants, bars, airplanes, factories and offices and other “public” places. But why should their wishes be indulged through force of law? Are restaurants, bars, airplanes, factories and offices publicly owned places? No. For the most part, restaurants, bars, airplanes, factories and offices are private property simply doing business with the public. As such the institution of private property rights should resolve any conflict over smoking. The owner of a restaurant or bar should have the right to decide whether smoking is permitted on his premises or not. Customers have the right to decide the terms on which they patronize the restaurant. If the owner does not permit smoking, then people who wish to smoke during dinner can decide not to patronize that restaurant. Similarly, an employer who wishes to permit smoking in his offices should have the right to do so. People who wish to work in a smoke-free office environment can simply choose some other place of employment where the owner does not permit smoking.

There is absolutely no moral argument for people to use the power of the state to force a restaurant owner who does not want smoking in his establishment to accommodate smokers. Just as there is no moral argument for people to use the power of the state to force a restaurant owner who permits smoking to prohibit smoking. That would be the moral values in a free society; however, so much of mankind exhibits a generalized contempt for the principles of liberty. We succumb to the temptation of using the power of the state to forcibly impose our preferences on others.

We’re seeing early and current signs that Williams’s characterization of socialism is as correct here as it has been elsewhere. When in doubt, this heading-towards-socialist administration plays the intimidation/coercion card. One example of many besides the items the Journal cites at the link above is its refusal to accept repayment of TARP loans made to larger banks, and threatening regulatory grief if one dares to try it:

(Fox News’s Andrew) Napolitano said this bank “has no subprime loans, it has no bad debts, wasn’t involved in credit default swaps. It didn’t need any money. It didn’t ask for the money and didn’t want it. … officials from both the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Treasury said if you don’t take this money, we will conduct a multi-year public audit of you.”

The Fox News analyst said the bank’s “board was forced to issue a class of stock just for the federal government. The federal government owns 2% of this huge bank.”

That was done under the Bush administration. Enter the Obama White House. Last month, Napolitano said, Treasury told the bank “we own 2%, we’re going to tell you how to run the place.”

“As a result of that minority ownership, they now want to control salaries. They want to see his books, and they want to tell him who he can do business with,” Napolitano reported.

The quasi-nationalization of GM also probably crosses the line into state-sponsored coercion. It is without a doubt extra-constitutional.

These guys are beginning to employ tactics the previous administration never dreamed of. To the extent the previous administration did similar things in its final months, we are learning that President ‘Prompter’s current peeps probably instigated them. Tax Cheat and Proven Liar Tim Geithner is the most likely behind-the-scenes suspect in encouraging Hank Paulson in mid-October to force the large banks to take TARP money with a (figurative) gun pointed to their heads, including the situation described above.

Republic Window and ACORN’s occupation of foreclosed homes are two other off-the-cuff examples of the culture of extra-legality this administration and its members have fostered and encouraged.

Williams got it right nine years ago, on a scale that goes way beyond smoking.

Noteworthy Net-Worthies:

It’s getting chilly, and it’s not the weather — The AP seems to be signaling that it will use legal intimidation to curb fair use of its content for discussion purposes when it has no legal leg to stand on. Also, part of fair use, properly applied, is analyzing wire service reports as they evolve for evidence of story slanting after initial raw reports. That means saving them. Sorry, AP (not). Also: The public discussion of media bias requires comparing AP reporters’ varying interpretations of similar events depending on who is involved. That’s another reason to excerpt and save articles, and another reason AP should back off.

Related — A NewsBusters commenter at Warner Todd Huston’s post on this topic reminds me of a Michelle Malkin item from June of last year. Michelle pointed out that AP has frequently lifted blogger content without attribution. I would add, based on experience, that AP and the press in general is bound and determined not to name “bloggers” who break stories, while subscribing newspapers and other publications constantly complain about AP’s lifts of their content.

President ‘Prompter is full of globaloney — “I think it’s important.” It’s a load of rubbish — sloppy, manipulated rubbish.

Not news to those who followed him during the presidential campaign — Obama wants to unilaterally disarm to set a “moral example.” In the same linked editorial, the Wall Street Journal reminds us that “the world’s most conspicuous antiproliferation victories in recent decades were the Israeli strike against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear plant at Osirak, and the U.S. toppling of Saddam and the way it impressed Libya’s Moammar Ghadafi,” and notes that “Obama’s ‘moral authority’ won’t deter Tehran or Pyongyang.” 2-1/2 months into President ‘Prompter’s predominance, the world is clearly a more dangerous place. Update: Doug Ross reinforces.

The travel industry is in the tank because of the administration’s and Congress’s demonization of business conferences. This has spread far beyond DC’s original bailout targets to businesses in general who are afraid to be seen as even a little extravagant. Hawaii, a favorite rewards destination for successful sales groups, is begging President ‘Prompter to do something about it. Taking back TARP money that certain banks want to repay instead of refusing repayment, and then staying the heck away from them after they break free, would be a nice start. Alas, I fear that suppressing commercial activity in any way possible, including tourism, is part of the plan — at least until it’s time to credit the POS (Pork Over-Stuffed) stimulus for any economic uptick. Never mind that an awful lot of little people have lost their jobs, and will continue to. Collateral damage in pursuit of la causa, I guess.

Catching up: The Institute for Supply Management’s monthly indices for Manufacturing (from 35.8% to 36.3%) and Non-Manufacturing (from 41.6% to 40.8%) both stayed in the doldrums in March. The architects of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy were remarkably adept at taking the economy down. Now they’re applying their skills to keeping it down, apparently effectively. Never mind those hundreds of thousands of little people losing their jobs every month. Again, anything for la causa.

From Jacksonville, Florida:

POSTED: Sunday, April 5, 2009
UPDATED: 12:00 pm EDT April 5, 2009

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A 27-year-old Jacksonville woman is lucky to be alive, after being pulled from a burning home on the north side.

Jacksonville firefighters said someone pulled the woman through a window and out of her burning home in the 6000 block fo Heckscher Drive early Saturday night.

Investigators said a fire broke out while the woman appeared to be asleep inside the home. They said that before firefighters arrived, at least one person went inside to rescue the woman. Fire crews aren’t certain if more than one person aided in the rescue, but whoever is responsible left before they could be interviewed.

Go here for the rest of the story.

At an April 4 news conference in Strasbourg, France (White House transcript here), President Obama referred to a language that doesn’t exist (bold is mine; HT to DrewM at Ace of Spades):

It was also interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate. There’s a lot of — I don’t know what the term is in Austrian — wheeling and dealing — and, you know, people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics.

Apparently none of Obama’s 12 teleprompters (their existence was cited a week ago at the UK’s Evening Standard, and noted yesterday at NewsBusters and BizzyBlog) were able to guide Obama’s dialect-challenged utterance in time.

Amazingly, Tom Raum of the Associated Press in effect made the same mistake (HT to an e-mailer) when he cited the above Obama quote and failed to note that there isn’t an Austrian language. Raum and who knows how many editors surely had several hours to get it right, and didn’t.

For the record, Austria’s languages, according to Wikipedia, are “German, locally also Slovene, Croatian and Hungarian.”

This is either an example of the lengths to which the press will go to cover for their dear President ‘Prompter, or an example of how ignorant the press covering Barack Obama really is. Or a bit of both.

Does anyone think that the establishment media would have let this slide if George Bush had been the one who made this mistake?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Noteworthy Net-worthies:

From LifeNews.com — “President Barack Obama’s Pro-Abortion Record.” It only covers the period from Election Day last year through March 17. Based on his record before the election, up to and including his opposition to legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist’s unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability, his antilife record should surprise no one, including faux prolife congressmen Steve Driehaus and John Boccieri.

At RedState, on the Kos children — “Calling conservatives Nazis isn’t even hyperbole to their minds. But calling Obama’s socialist policies socialist is an incitement to murder.”

Related — The New York Times’s David Leonhardt has never retracted his erroneous claim in February 2007 that manufacturing was in a recession (the day after his claim the group that most closely tracks the sector said that manufacturing was growing, and it continued to grow for the next nine months). Last week, he held up Nazi Germany as the best example of where economic stimulus worked. I kid you not. You see, FDR in the 1930s and Japan in the 1990s just didn’t do enough. Zheesh.

Best-kept secret in America, as reported by the Financial Times — “President Barack Obama’s plan to push through climate change legislation as part of his $3,600bn (£2,508bn) federal budget appeared all but dead on Thursday after the Senate ruled out fast-track action on the issue. A Republican-sponsored amendment passed on Wednesday night (April 1) ruled that Congress should not try to set up a cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as part of the budget “reconciliation” process.” May it stay that way.

Second-best-kept secret in America, via CNSnews.com, from (European Union President Mirek) Topolanek, who is also the president of the Czech Republic, on Obama’s non-stop “stimulus” — “All these steps, these combinations and permanency, is the road to hell …. We need to read history books and the lessons of history, and the biggest success of the EU is the refusal to go this way.”

Eweek’s Roy Mark, who, based on his archive, appears to lean left: “The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced in the Senate would allow the president to shut down private Internet networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to demand security data from private networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.” Reaction is mostly muted. What if Bush had proposed this?

Hmm — “The New York Times sharply criticized Bill Clinton for a mere inclination of his shoulders towards Japanese Emperor Akihito in 1994.” Yet, as Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey notes, “So far, the media has remained entirely silent on Barack Obama’s deep-waist bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.”

At the Wall Street Journal — “The (employment) numbers are even drearier when you notice that only the government seems to be hiring these days.”

Barack Obama, in his Sunday newspaper column — “if you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired, just like always. Your warrantee will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than ever because it will be guaranteed by the United States government.” Uh-huh. Just like Social Security, which has almost no real assets (just IOUs from the rest of the government, which is over $11 trillion in debt), and which is on track to begin running deficits in 2011, if not 2010. Read the whole thing, as it reveals quite a bit of the statist’s mindset.

Elaborating — Obama seems to assume that people are just going to start buying GM and Chrysler cars because he intervened. I don’t think so. I think we’re going to see the two companies’ sales go into the tank in April and May more, perhaps far more, than they already did during the first full quarter since their bailouts commenced. I don’t have to encourage this trend, though I feel even more strongly than I did a few months ago that it would be a very good thing. As I said then: “Consumers with long-term concerns about their pocketbooks (and everyone else’s) should not buy GM or Chrysler vehicles.” Now such a decision would also be soundly based on concern for the future of economic freedom.

From Fayetteville, North Carolina and San Antonio, Texas:

March 29, 2009

Sgt. 1st Class Peter Rohrs has been put on display for his heroism so much that he calls himself the “prize pig.”

The Silver Star — the Army’s third-highest decoration for valor — was pinned on his chest by then-President George W. Bush in a ceremony on Fort Bragg last year. Rohrs was honored for his actions as a flight medic on Nov. 19, 2007, in Afghanistan.

That was when Rohrs, 33, of San Antonio, was lowered from a hovering helicopter to treat and rescue wounded soldiers who had been ambushed. They were scattered between a ridge line and a valley.

“I could not have done anything I did that night without my crew chief putting me down the hoist, my pilots flying me there, my pilots coming back to pick me up, my crew chief picking up all the medics — me and all the patients,” he said.

During the mission, he was under fire and working in the green moonscape of night-vision goggles. There was the urgency of knowing wounded soldiers needed immediate help and the helicopters on which he depended were limited by fuel in how long they could stay.

“It was a little messy, but then between the mortar, the RPG and then the guys shooting at us, it didn’t make for a fun environment,” he said.

According to his award citation, Rohrs was responsible for the rescue of 12 critically wounded soldiers.

He said what he had done did not sink in on him until he got back to safety. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

On Monday, the UK’s Evening Standard, at its “This Is London” site, matter-of-factly noted the following in the final sentence of its report about President Obama’s upcoming European trip (bold is mine):

Accompanying the party will be a total of 500 officials including kitchen staff, 35 vehicles in all, four speech writers and 12 teleprompters.

This more than vindicates yours truly’s “President ‘Prompter” appellation.

It is beyond me how comedians can still claim, as many apparently did after the election, that they have little raw material to work with for poking fun at this guy.

They could even tell good jokes and break news at the same time. As has so often been the case with Obama’s gaffes and myriad foibles, the US media establishment has been nearly unanimous in ignoring the Standard’s teleprompter tidbit.

A Google News Search on “12 teleprompters” (not in quotes) from March 30 – April 5 came back with all of 15 results (Google’s total results returned claim of 24 at the link is incorrect).

A Scripps Howard News Service editorial makes up half of the results other than the original from the Evening Standard. That editorial wryly notes that “For sure, our president is not going to be at a loss for words.” It also makes a more serious point about the size of Dear Leader’s entourage, a point that I believe would have been widely touted had President Bush ever gone overseas with “with 500 staff in tow, including 200 Secret Service agents, a team of six doctors, the White House chef and kitchen staff with the president’s own food and water”:

The president is entitled to all the security, communications and support he feels necessary to do his job but surely, when we’re trying to project a more restrained, humble image to the world, the president’s huge retinue could be scaled back to something less than the triumphal march from “Aida.”

I also did a Google News search on “twelve teleprompters” (in quotes) for the same date range and got one result, a First Read Blog item at MSNBC. There was no ‘prompter reference in the post. The only reason it appeared in the search was because of a reader’s comment.

To prove the obvious, I searched on “teleprompters” at the New York Times. Of course, there was no reference to the procession of ‘prompters. But the first result has a knee-slapper from writer Peter Baker:

Mr. Obama can be an exceptionally careful public speaker, to the point that he uses teleprompters more often than past presidents have ….

Oh stop it, Peter, you’re killin’ me.

Here is why he uses them, Peter, straight from John Crace at the UK Guardian (of all places; HT to NewsBuster commenter motherbelt). Crace whimsically probed Obama’s mind as he delivered a nails-on-the-blackboard response to a softball question from the BBC’s Nick Robinson.

Read the whole uproariously funny thing. It proves that there’s more than enough grist for the humor mill. The problem is a clear lack of willingness to swim against the PC tide on the part of the comedic wing of the supposed “truth to power” crowd.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Note: This post originally went up at Pajamas Media on Friday.

___________________________________________________

Remember how the left said there was no crisis?

___________________________________________________

A year ago, I wrote:

Think Social Security will be solvent until 2041? Think again. The next president will face rapidly growing problems by the end of his or her first term.

At the time, the concern was that the substantial Social Security surpluses we experienced during the past 22 years would begin to shrink.

An updated version of a Congressional Budget Office chart I presented last year shows that the shrink has indeed begun (information is at the “Data” link at this CBO page):

Social Security’s surplus for the year ended September 30, 2008 fell to $180.2 billion, reducing its subsidy to the rest of the government.

What? That’s right; I said “subsidy to the rest of the government.”

Social Security’s surpluses have been raked off by Uncle Sam and have subsidized the rest of the government since 1968, when President Johnson began “including Social Security and all other trust funds in a ‘unified budget.’”

At that point, as I wrote last year, “Social Security’s Trust Fund, instead of being a separate, untouchable stash of cash and investments (i.e., instead of being run like a normal pension plan), thus became money that the rest of the government could raid.”

And raid it they have, as you can see above. Since 1986, Social Security surpluses have subsidized the rest of the government to the tune of over $2.3 trillion, enabling reported deficits to be lower than they really have been. Social Security’s so-called “Trust Fund” consists of a stack of IOUs from Uncle Sam, who is now over $11 trillion in debt.

A year ago, the annual Social Security surpluses were expected to shrink to zero by 2017. That’s because, starting last year, the annual demographic wave of millions of Baby Boomers reaching the system’s minimum age of 62 for collecting began to hit. This wave will continue for the next two decades.

I wrote about that 2017 estimate two months or so before Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Harry Reid brought us the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy. That Democratic-driven downturn began during June. I recognized what was happening in early July, and a week later observed that “businesses and investors are responding to their total lack of seriousness by battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst.”

In June, Pelosi, presidential nominee Obama, and Reid drove the POR Economy’s initial dive, which is now a recession as normal people define it, by clearly telling investors, entrepreneurs, and business owners that an Obama administration and the congressional majority would starve the nation of energy and massively increase taxes on the productive once in power. Then their party’s decades-in-the-making disaster in the housing sector came to a head in September. Initially fueled by the collapses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Democratic-driven housing and lax credit mess ultimately led to what has been a seemingly endless string of bailouts of the financial and then other sectors. The economy has seriously retreated and continues to perform poorly, as has the stock market.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that, as a result of all of this, Social Security’s fiscal situation has headed downhill at breakneck speed. Tanking the economy (possibly deliberately?) has consequences.

In a mini-preview of things to come, Social Security went negative in February for the first time in decades. Outgo exceeded income by over $1.2 billion:

February was a bit of a fluke, because there were only 28 collection days to offset a full month’s payments. But according to the CBO, per Heritage, “the Social Security surplus will only be $16 billion this year, and only $3 billion next year”; it will show a deficit, or “go negative,” in 2011.

How can this be happening? I thought Pelosi, Reid, and the Left all assured us several years ago that there was “no crisis.”

That they did. In May 2005, during the Bush administration’s weak attempt to build support for partial privatization of the system, “Pelosi accused President Bush of creating a crisis and manufacturing an issue.” Before that, in late 2004, as it became clear that Bush would try to mount such an effort, the pair jointly said that, “We cannot support any plan that relies on massive and irresponsible increases in debt, which could destabilize financial markets and lead to large tax increases.” The current irony of that joint statement is provided at no extra charge.

The fact is that a crisis has been building for decades. It has seemingly come out of nowhere only because the POR Economy’s recession has sharply reduced Social Security tax receipts. Any recovery in collections arising from an economic comeback will necessarily build on a smaller base. That is why Social Security is on track to go negative six years earlier than was anticipated just a year ago. If February’s monstrous stimulus package doesn’t reignite job growth, it will probably go negative in fiscal 2010. The “save” part of Team Obama’s risible “save or create jobs” goal will do nothing to increase Social Security tax collections.

Once Social Security goes negative, we will have come to the point so many have long feared we would reach. To cover the system’s cash drains, the government will have to, in some combination, raise taxes, borrow more, or reduce benefits, year after year after year.

More importantly, and tragically, the “no crisis until 2040 or so” crowd, which has been lying all along, will have accomplished what I believe has been their long-term goal, which is making even partially privatizing Social Security politically and financially unachievable. It appears that they’ve “won.” The economy, and personal liberty, have lost. Pelosi, Obama, and Reid deserve the blame for the statists’ early “victory.”

From Hull, Mass.:

They were a typical American couple: They got married, raised two daughters, and then, finding themselves squabbling over money and other issues, had a typical American divorce. Then Jim Tobin fell desperately ill with kidney disease that only a transplant could cure. His ex-wife, Bernadette Tobin, asked to be tested and found she was a perfect match.

Here’s what the experts say you can do to keep your marriage healthy and happy.

And so, she gave him her kidney and he gave her back his heart.

Thanks to that gift of life, the couple who had fallen out of love fell back in again. And on Sunday, they married each other again in their Hull, Mass., home — 17 years after their divorce and 10 years after the kidney transplant that saved Jim Tobin’s life.

On Wednesday, the couple sat down in New York with TODAY’s Ann Curry, who asked them what changed in their relationship and made them want to resume their marriage interrupted.

Older and wiser
“You grow wiser; you know a lot more,” Bernadette, 63, replied. “You’ve gone through a lot of things, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. You’ve already gone through ‘in sickness and in health,’ so you know each other a lot more.”

“And you don’t want to lose each other again,” her 64-year-old husband added, turning to her. “I’m here today because of your compassionate heart.”

The decision to remarry wasn’t made in a day; it’s been a process that began 10 years ago, when Jim Tobin was battling the polycystic kidney disease that had been destroying his heart and kidneys for years. He had gone through his first single bypass operation when he was 34 and went through five more operations over the years. By 1999, he had been on dialysis for three years and needed a kidney to survive.

Although both Jim and Bernadette had moved into separate homes and dated other people, they had remained on good terms. Bernadette said one of the reasons she volunteered a kidney was because she wanted Jim to live so he could enjoy their grandchildren. The couple had raised two daughters, who today have five daughters between them.

The couple recuperated together after the surgery in the home of one of their daughters. That’s when they began to realize they still liked each other. Two years later, to save money, Bernadette moved out of her apartment and back into Jim’s home in Hull.

Getting it right

They’ve had plenty of time to think about what went wrong during their first marriage, which lasted 27 years. A big problem, Jim said, was that he was working two and three jobs so that his wife could stay home with their daughters, and he never really got to know either his wife or his children.

“I think when you’re working so hard and trying to bring up a family, you sort of drift apart,” Jim told Curry. “You have arguments about money and things like that. I think once the children grow up, you don’t have much left.”

“We were young when we got married. We were right out of high school. You’re living with each other but you really don’t know each other,” Bernadette added. “You grow older, and you know more.”

Go here for the rest of the story.

Tax Cheat and Proven Liar Tim Geithner, per IBDeditorials.com:

In excusing the creeping federal takeover, Geithner said the government has had to do “exceptional things.” What it’s doing has gone beyond exceptional and entered into the outer sphere of tyranny and possible illegality.

“Outer sphere” is appropriately space-based.

And I’m so sure that Timmy and President ‘Prompter will tell us, like the mythical Palpatine, that “Once this crisis has abated, I will lay down the powers you have given me!”

Oh sure.

Evidence: Banks are volunteering to give back their TARP money, which you must recall was “given,” while Geithner was “only” Hank Paulson’s top adviser, with a (figurative) gun pointed to CEOs’ heads. But now, if the banks are “too big” as Timmy and President ‘Prompter define it, Treasury The Empire won’t let them.

So this is how the leaders of our Founding Fathers’ Republic plan to make it die ….

Clearly, the latter.

From Ipswich, Massachusetts:

Wed Mar 25, 2009, 02:24 PM EDT

Seven-year-old Cam James may not have known he was saving his father’s life. But, that’s just what he did.

On Feb. 3, Paul James, a diabetic, went into cardiac arrest. While James’ wife, Christine, performed CPR, Cam searched for and found the phone and then called 911. He then opened the door for Police Sgt. Peter Nikas and Officer Ted Galvin when they arrived at the house on Maple Avenue.

Christine James said she had heard her husband scream. When she got to him, he was lying on the floor. The whole family had been sick, she said, and when James’ blood sugar and potassium levels elevated, his heart stopped.

“I yelled for Chris,” James said. “I didn’t know I was dying.”

Christine performed CPR on her husband, who gasped but quickly became unconscious again.

When Nikas and Galvin arrived, they performed CPR, but eventually had to use the defibrillator to revive James, who was then transported to Beverly Hospital, where he lay in a coma for two days.

James, who also has a 4-year-old daughter, Lexi, said he didn’t know what had happened when he first woke up in the hospital. But, he remembers vividly that his brother-in-law was joking with him, trying to cheer him up. James said he was asking, “What’s going on” and “Where am I?” His brother-in-law, he said, told him he’d been unconscious for a bit and added, “But, don’t worry. The kids are fine. Cam’s graduating high school and Lexis’ getting married.”

Heroes recognized

Cam James, a first-grader at the Doyon School, received an award from the Fire Department for his role that day in saving his father’s life. In a short ceremony at the Fire Station, firefighter Keith Carlson gave him the award in the presence of his family and Fire Chief Art Howe.

Go here for the rest of the story.