Noteworthy Net-Worthies:

Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, at the on-a-roll Wall Street Journal, reinforce one of three points yours truly has been making for four years in their “Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich” column. Some chilling stats for high-tax states: “…. we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.” Ouch. Sadly, the authors’ inclusion of Ohio further proves the contention I made here last fall and here two weeks ago that the Buckeye State has been governed economically like a blue state since the mid-1990s. In light of Laffer’s and Moore’s stats, and as we in Ohio continue to watch the moving vans depart, John Kasich’s apparent intent to phase out Ohio’s income tax starts looking ever more reasonable with each passing day.

Besides taxes, the other two key elements in the “voting with your feet” equation are lousy schools and crime. All three — taxes, lousy schools, and crime, in different order in different places — serve to retard economic growth or cause it to contract, often leading ultimately to urban job losses, and an even further reason to leave. Focusing on metro areas instead of the states, you will usually find that the cities that have experienced the biggest population declines, including those in Ohio, didn’t start losing jobs until well after people started leaving to flee taxes, lousy schools, and crime. In fact, you may even find that a one or more of the Ohio cities involved has higher employment within its borders now than it did during the 1970s, when their population was much higher; I believe that this is the case in Cincinnati, where the population has declined by about 30% since 1970. But yes, eventually, a lot of jobs did migrate to the suburbs. These businesses ended up fleeing the same problems, but they have been last in the chain of flight because relocating a business with employees is a relatively costly proposition. In the affected areas, you’ll find that metro-area employment continued to grow through most of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, while the core cities’ populations consistently plummeted. In a given metro area, within a reasonable commuting distance, where to live and where to work are usually separate decisions. Even if the jobs had left for the suburbs independently, most of those who fled the core cities for the reasons identified wouldn’t have done so if they thought urban living conditions were acceptable.

The constitutional case against Sarbanes-Oxley will be heard by the Supreme Court — “Specifically, the lawsuit brought by free-market think tanks challenges the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), which was created by Sarbox to police the auditing of public companies.” Congratulations to the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Free Enterprise Fund for their persistence, and brickbats to the Wall Street Journal for failing to name them in their editorial. Even beyond the billions in mostly unnecessary out-of-pocket costs for accountants and lawyers, the sand Sarbox throws in the economy’s wheels on a daily basis has cost us probably a half-point of growth each year during the six-plus years it has been in effect. All the conditions were there from early 2003 to late 2007 for a prosperous economy’s 3.5%-4.0% growth, yet it came in at just under 3.0% for the 19 quarters ended 3Q07. The economy grew by hundreds of billions of dollars less than it should have during that time, in my opinion primarily because of Sarbox-imposed busywork. In the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy, now known as the POR Recession As Normal People Define It, that we have had to endure since June of last year, Sarbox is literally a fixed-cost millstone around struggling public companies’ necks.

We’re supposed to be soooooo impressed that Barack Obama’s speech at Notre Dame’s graduation ceremony, and his call for “dialogue” on abortion, got a standing O. How many people in the audience even knew that Mr. Reasonable’s real documented position is, as Rush reminded us yesterday (link will be available until next Monday or Tuesday), that “a baby that survives an abortion is fair game to be killed, and the doctor should have legal protection”? And that “(Obama’s) excuse at the time that he advanced this barbaric argument (in the Illinois legislature) was that it was necessary to protect a woman’s right to choose”? Andrew McCarthy’s recap of the infanticide saga last year provides the supporting proof (“Infanticide is a bracing word. But in this context, it’s the only word that fits. …. When it got down to brass tacks, Barack Obama argued that protecting abortion doctors from legal liability was more important than protecting living infants from death.”). The fact that most voters knew nothing of this last fall, thanks to the lapdog establishment media (Michelle Malkin dissects the worst single example, what many consider to have the potential “Game Changer,” here), is yet another in a long list of reasons why last year’s presidential election was a referendum on almost nothing. The fact that an evil practice has on its side a skilled teleprompter reader who gets cheered at yet another compromised Catholic institution doesn’t make it good. The truth and natural law aren’t up for a vote. No amount of “dialogue” will change them. Abortion is, and always will be, objectively evil.

William McGurn at the WSJ recounts the history of previous Notre Dame proabort speakers, observing that “It seems that whenever Democratic leaders find themselves in trouble over their party’s abortion record, some Notre Dame honor or platform will be forthcoming to provide the needed cover.” True enough. The Obama invite and honor are only the latest and most outrageous stains on a university that has so clearly lost its way that it doesn’t mind periodically serving as an accessory to an objectively evil practice.

From Northern Virginia:

Published: May 16, 2009

Alex Boehme stood on the Forest Park soccer field under the lights awaiting the start of the Bruins’ first game of the year.

It was a moment he’d been anticipating for more than two years. He played the scenario in his head for months, wondering what his reaction would be—whether he’d cry or smile, or whether it would register that it was actually happening.

Boehme’s presence on the pitch was nothing short of a medical miracle and a testament to both biolomechanical repair and personal perseverance. Just 28 months and 21 surgeries ago, Boehme lay in a Maryland hospital, his right leg as shattered as his soccer career appeared. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

America’s leading and most prolific intellectual necessarily and succinctly debunks the convenient Beltway mythology:

…. The idea is that it was a lack of government supervision which allowed “greed” in the private sector to lead the nation into crises that only our Beltway saviors can solve.

What utter rubbish this all is can be found by checking the record of how government regulators were precisely the ones who imposed lower mortgage lending standards.

It was members of Congress (of both parties) who pushed the regulators, the banks and the mortgage-buying giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into accepting risky mortgages, in the name of “affordable housing” and more homeownership. Presidents of both parties also jumped on the bandwagon.

Most people don’t have time to spend digging into the Congressional Record and other sources to find out the ugly truth being covered up by the blizzard of lies coming out of Washington and echoed in much of the media. But my research assistants do that for a living, and it is all presented in a book of mine titled “The Housing Boom and Bust” that has just been published.

When the housing boom was going along merrily, Rep. Barney Frank was proud to be one of those who were pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into more adventurous financial practices, in the name of “affordable housing.”

In 2003 he said:

“I believe that we, as the federal government, have probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable goals.”

He added:

“I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”

In other words, when things were looking good, he was happy to acknowledge the role of the federal government in pushing the housing market in a direction it would not have taken on its own.

But, after the risky mortgage-lending practices fostered by government intervention led to massive defaults and foreclosures that caused financial institutions to collapse or be bailed out, Frank changed his tune completely.

….. Although this is the biggest housing disaster the government has ever produced, it is by no means the first. Republicans intervened in the housing markets to promote more homeownership in the 1920s, Democrats in the 1930s, and both parties after World War II. All of these interventions led to massive foreclosures.

Don’t politicians ever learn? Why should they? What they have learned all too well is how easy it is to get credit for promoting homeownership and how easy it is to escape blame for the later foreclosures and other economic disasters that follow.

Sowell is right that too many Republicans went along for the Fan and Fred ride. But that correct assertion doesn’t change the fact that the Community Reinvestment Act was an “inspiration” of Jimmy Carter and a post-Watergate Democrat-controlled Congress, or that Fan and Fred’s loosening of credit standards occurred during the Clinton Era while those two entities were run by Democratic cronies who were as corrupt as they come.

This is the last paragraph from Will’s “Tincture of Lawlessness” column on May 14 at Townhall.

Substitute “government’s” for “administration’s” in the last sentence, which I have bolded, and you have as concise a statement as you’ll ever see explaining why the market’s allocation of resources, while of course imperfect, is superior to that of a government’s.

As is, the bolded statement also would work pretty well in the short-term as a campaign slogan:

The Obama administration’s agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of “economic planning” and “social justice” that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

It is indeed.

Noteworthy Net-Worthies:

Add the Economist to the list of the “Shocked” that Barack Obama is a far-left, class-warfare, redistributionist demagogue — On October 30, 2008, it endorsed Obama over John McCain, saying in what has in retrospect turned out to be a long list of howlers that “His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation.” But on May 7, in “Barack Obama and the Carmarkers,” the magazine decried the fact that “America’s government, keen to protect workers …. has vilified creditors and ridden roughshod over their legitimate claims over the carmakers’ assets.” Imagine that. Even if they ignored his associations with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, the ACORN lawlessness carried out in Obama’s name should have clued them in that this guy would ignore the law if he thought he had the ability to impose his will instead. More to the economic point, the coercive nature of cap and trade, captured in this November 2 BizzyBlog post (“January 2008 Audio: Obama Promises Cap-And-Trade Will Bankrupt New Coal Plants”) and his take on the 1960s civil right movement’s supposed failure to achieve “economic justice” (as defined by Obama, noted in this October 29 BizzyBlog post) should have had them running away from Obama months earlier.

Kyle-Ann Shiver’s May 15 item at American Thinker is a must-read — “Defeating Political Ridicule.”

Why the New York Times can’t die soon enough — “NYT Finally Admits It Spiked Obama/ACORN Corruption Story.” The more quickly it shrinks, the less interested Google, which has been in relationship discussions with the Old Gray Lady, will be in anything the Times has beyond its archives.

From the Detroit suburb of Troy, a supposed model “green” home has turned into a monument to environuttiness — “It was supposed to be a shining example of the green movement — a completely independent solar-powered house with no gas or electrical hookups. Seven months ago, officials gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the $900,000 house owned by the city of Troy that was to be used as an educational tool and meeting spot. But it never opened to the public. And it remains closed.” But it remains a very useful educational tool about the unhinged nature of so much of the green movement. Read and shake your head at the whole thing.

Finally, I would suggest that Washington’s elites, especially those whose status depends on being reelected, not ignore this:

From South Bend, Indiana:

May 17, 2009 / 04:18 pm

Although he had initially planned to stay away from campus today as President Barack Obama was honored at Notre Dame, Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana changed his mind and spoke at a campus pro-life rally.

According to the Fort Wayne News Sentinel, the bishop spoke in front of 2,500 people protesting the university’s award to pro-abortion President Barack Obama.

Initially Bishop D’Arcy had planned to boycott the graduation festivities, however he decided to appear on campus due to the school’s pro-life undergraduates.

“It is certainly the place for the bishop to be here,” D’Arcy said. “John D’Arcy’s not important, but the office of bishop if very important and it must always be like Pope John Paul II to stand up for life all the time, everywhere without exception.”

Go here for the rest of the story.

Those who believe that the Politico is a hangout for former establishment media journalists who want to recreate a combination of the New York Times and Washington Post on the web — complete with the insufferable biases of those two publications — can look to the disparate treatment of two challenges to party congressional leaders as affirmative evidence.

In a search on “Cindy Sheehan” at the Politico, I found that in covering the congressional candidacy of former media darling Cindy Sheehan in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district, the online news site carried two tiny items. Only one of them was originally produced there.

The first, carried at its Crypt blog in July 2007, noted in a that the anti-war activist was planning to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as an independent — “unless she introduces legislation to impeach President Bush within the next two weeks.” The second was a five-paragraph Associated Press item noting that Sheehan had qualified to run as an independent against Pelosi in the general election. Sheehan was runner-up to Pelosi on November 4, with 16.2% of the vote, even though the U.S. military victory in Iraq was self-evident by that time.

But on May 11, the Politico’s Josh Kroushaar posted a two-page, 887-word treatise about a less well-known though colorful county sheriff who is thinking — only thinking — about running against House Minority Leader John Boehner in the 2010 GOP Primary.

As you’ll see, the Politico even interviewed the challenger, Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones:

Even before Jones explored the race, his penchant for attracting headlines earned him the nickname “Spotlight Jones.” A conservative with a populist streak, he regularly appears on Cincinnati conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham’s radio show to speak out against illegal immigration, and Jones has attracted attention for refusing to evict homeowners facing foreclosure.

In an interview with POLITICO, Jones said he is thinking seriously about running against Boehner because he’s been dissatisfied with Republican congressional leadership.

“The party is in the toilet and in the wilderness. I don’t know where they’re going. Being an incumbent in Washington is not really the best thing right now,” Jones said.

“Remember David and Goliath? It sounds like [Republicans] are saying: ‘How dare he challenge someone who’s so powerful?’ Well, I’m not a person who’s intimidated,” said Jones, who was first elected sheriff in 2005. “I always do what I believe is the right thing to do. I don’t have any lobbyists who control me. I try to do the right thing, and I’ve never forgotten that.”

Jones, once described by the Dayton Daily News as a “cross between John Wayne and Rush Limbaugh,” said he would focus on immigration as a major theme if he runs. As sheriff, Jones has posted billboards in the county warning employers not to hire illegal immigrants and has lobbied for local law enforcement officials to crack down on immigration violations. During the presidential campaign, he bought an ad in the Cincinnati Enquirer accusing Republican presidential nominee John McCain of being weak on immigration.

….. “Politics is a contact sport. It’s not for sissies,” Jones said. “I don’t want to get into something I’m going to lose. I’ve got to have the resources and the support. And at this point, that’s something I’m trying to garner.”

….. To illustrate his conservative credentials, Boehner spokesman Don Seymour cited his leadership against President Barack Obama’s stimulus legislation, his long-standing refusal to accept earmarks for the district and his high-profile opposition to former President George W. Bush’s comprehensive immigration reform bill.

Seymour noted that Jones requested millions in stimulus money to help refurbish his sheriff’s office, which could undermine his attempts to win over conservative primary voters.

As one of the party’s top fundraisers, Boehner will have little trouble mounting a defense of his seat.

Though Jones is conservative on many issues, the Politico “somehow” missed Jones’s announcement late last year (link is to a blog post; original story was in the Cincinnati Enquirer, whose original link no longer available) that, until winter ended, he was “ordering his deputies to disregard eviction orders when people have nowhere else to live.”

Yes, Jones is an elected official, and Sheehan never has been, but no one can credibly claim that Jones is more well-known in John Boehner’s entire congressional district, which includes part or all of five other counties in the Dayton media market, than Sheehan was in San Francisco last year.

By devoting so much attention to Jones, who again is only thinking about a challenge, the Politico appears to be giving away its interest or hope that Boehner will have to deal with a viable challenger. Regardless of whether that’s the case, the fact that it virtually ignored the real candidacy of much better-known Pelosi challenger Sheehan, whose sentiments against the Iraq war were arguably more in line with the far-left views of voters in California’s 8th Congressional District than some of Jones’s positions are in Ohio’s 8th, is a pretty clear example of a double standard.

Thus, the Politico seems well on its way to achieving its goal of becoming a NYT-WaPo online clone. Coverage disparities such as the one demonstrated here may also lead it to clone the two print publications’ shrinking popularity and lack of profitability.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Ottawa, Canada:

May 16, 2009; 10:16 am

An estimated 12,000 Canadians gathered on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday to rally and march against legalized abortion in Canada.

The participants, part of the Canadian 2009 March for Life, included 18 Members of Parliament. Their numbers exceeded last year’s record-setting turnout of about 8,000.

Jim Hughes, president of the Campaign Life Coalition which organizes the march, said the turnout was “a real blessing,” especially in the crowd’s “growing number of young people.”

The March has taken place annually for 12 years, LifeSiteNews.com reports. Events began with interdenominational prayer services at the Canadian Reformed Church and St. George’s Anglican Church, while Masses were celebrated at Notre Dame Basilica and St. Patrick’s Basilica.

About 900 people attended the Mass at St. Patrick’s Basilica, while over 1,100 crowded into St. Patrick’s Basilica. About 200 additional people watched each Mass from the basement of each church due to lack of space.

According to LifeSiteNews.com, Hughes said he was “especially pleased” by the show of support from the Canadian Catholic bishops, with at least 12 bishops celebrating the Masses. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

“Resigns” is a dubious word, given that Mark Barbash is going back to his old job. “Won’t be promoted” would be a more accurate description of what has happened (bolds are mine):

Mark Barbash, interim Ohio development director, resigns over tax problems

May 15, 2009 21:45PM

Mark Barbash’s resignation Friday, May 15, as Ohio’s top development official was sudden, but the personal financial troubles that chased him from the job were no surprise to the governor’s administration.

Barbash quit as interim development director after a media report revealed his federal tax debts and court filings showed that his Columbus-area home is facing foreclosure.

He owes the Internal Revenue Service $146,313 in back taxes, penalties and fees for personal tax returns dating to 2000, according to court filings.

Barbash was hired in March 2007 as chief economic development officer by Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, who was then the director of the Ohio Department of Development, even though Fisher knew of Barbash’s tax troubles, the governor’s office confirmed.

Gov. Ted Strickland promoted Barbash in February to the top development post when Fisher gave it up to concentrate on seeking to become the Democratic Party’s U.S. Senate nominee in 2010.

Barbash had told the governor’s chief of staff, John Haseley, about the tax problems, but neither Haseley nor Fisher shared the information with the Democratic governor before he gave Barbash the Cabinet-level job, said Strickland spokeswoman Amanda Wurst.

….. Barbash told (Columbus) Business First (which broke the story) that the discrepancies center on his claiming a “married filing separately” status while the IRS says he should have claimed single status.

Barbash …. will return to the Development Department in the job he held before becoming director, chief economic development officer. His annual salary will remain $128,357.

….. The governor found out about Barbash’s troubles this week when Barbash told the administration he received the foreclosure notice, Wurst said.

….. But Wurst could not answer why no one told the governor about the problems before Barbash was promoted.

Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine isn’t buying that Strickland was unaware.

If Strickland was truly kept unaware, he should fire John Haseley and publicly rebuke Lee Fisher for failing to inform him, because they clearly owed him the relevant info on Barbash. As noted, this is a Cabinet-level position. Haseley’s and Fisher’s keeping Strickland in the dark, if that is what happened, is the rough equivalent of Rahm Emanuel withholding info from Barack Obama about Tax Cheat Tim Geithner’s problems until the day of Geithner’s nomination hearings (That Obama knew and promoted Geithner’s nomination anyway, and that he was still nominated, has already been identified as a disgrace).

If Strickland does neither of the two things just mentioned, you have to assume one of two things:

• He really knew, but won’t own up to it.
• He is not carrying out his executive duties at even the most minimal level — which would make accusations that Strickland is a caretaker governor almost seem like a compliment.

_________________________________________________

UPDATE: Hmmm (HT to PD commenter INDEP1) –

This is a bit of a close call — But given Barbash’s serious financial difficulties, does anyone else think that PD reporter Reginald Fields should have reported this?

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

_________________________________________________

They thought they were investing in a charismatic left-of-centrist. They were wrong. They should have known.

_________________________________________________

It would be funny if the stakes — the future direction of this country for many years to come — weren’t so high.

It’s still hard not to feel just a bit of schadenfreude watching many of Barack Obama’s supporters, particularly those who are among the well-positioned or financially well-off, fidget, whine, and moan as they discover what those of us who actually researched and studied the guy before the election knew about him.

Slowly but surely it is dawning on many of these elites that Obama is exactly what he was in rare unguarded moments during his presidential campaign, during his brief US Senate career as its most liberal member, during his time as an Illinois senator, and, to the extent we were able or allowed to learn it, during his life up to that point: a far-left, class-warfare, redistributionist demagogue. They are also learning that he is bound and determined to impose a radical agenda on the rest of the country, and that he has little interest in making exceptions for those who thought they were buying protection or favors with their campaign dollars.

To an extent, the fact that those affected have been caught flat-footed is understandable. Bill Clinton, the last Democratic President, was a draft-dodger and overseas war protester in his youth. Clinton’s campaign rhetoric had much of the class-warfare nonsense and ridiculous hyperbole — including calling the economy “the worst in 50 years” during a year when it grew by 3.3% — that has been the foundation of Democratic Party presidential campaigns for decades.

Though Clinton ultimately governed largely from the center, at least in appearance, it’s easy to forget that during his first two years, he reneged on his core promise of a middle-class tax cut; passed what still is, at least for the moment, the largest tax increase in history; and clumsily attempted, thankfully failing, to nationalize the healthcare industry. The Gingrich Revolution brought this nonsense to an abrupt halt, after which Clinton’s most important concern became remaining popular and in office at whatever financial, ideological, or national-security cost.

But the heavy hitters who thought that Barack Obama would end up being the second coming of Bill Clinton should have known better. First, due to large, unaccountable flows of money and an ideological determination not seen 16 years ago, the formal and informal organizations Obama and his handlers (not necessarily in that order) have built and maintained are far more sophisticated than anything Clinton, James Carville, and his other advisers ever assembled. More important, Obama’s core radicalism far exceeds that of even Clinton’s wife Hillary on her worst day. The fact that the media mostly covered up Obama’s extreme positions and associations to dumpster-dive in Alaska may excuse the ignorance of the masses; but it doesn’t excuse them.

Perhaps they thought they could go further in beginning, but the Clintons’ overall goal became to change the system and make it more “fair.” But Obama and his most dedicated acolytes don’t want an improved system; they want a different system.

Some of Obama’s supporters are just now recognizing this dreadful situation. They’re not liking what they’re seeing — and experiencing.

The UK Telegraph reported on May 10 that “Some of Barack Obama’s richest supporters fear they have elected a ‘class warrior’ to the White House, who will turn America’s freewheeling capitalism into a more regulated European system.” You don’t say. In fact, Obama has said that he wants the financial sector to play a much smaller future role in the economy. He actually wants to take government intervention further than European countries ever have. It looks like $3 million in campaign contributions doesn’t buy what it used to.

Tom Lauria, the lawyer who properly complained that Obama and his car guys used threats and intimidation to trample on the first-lien contractual rights of the non-TARP lenders he represented in Chrysler’s bankruptcy negotiations, gave $10,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Too bad for Mr. Lauria that there isn’t a lemon law for political contributions.

High-tech company execs, whose contributions to Obama and Democrats were far higher than those made to John McCain and Republicans, thought that their campaign money might cause a President Obama to let them do their innovative thing. After all, tech is the future growth engine of a struggling economy, right? Forget it. Obama’s proposed taxation of corporate profits on overseas operations would, if enacted, hurt them, and the economy, severely.

Now advertisers, a largely liberal bunch who named the Obama campaign Advertising Age’s 2008 Marketer of the Year, and who admired how he “killed Election Day,” are feeling the wrath of Dear Leader. You see, government-run Chrysler is spending too much on something, and it needs to be cut in half. That “something” is advertising. Telling Obama & Co. every day that they’re cool and hip didn’t work out too well.

These and many of the other elites who have thus far been affected, or soon will be, have plenty of excuses, but no valid justifications, for why they are where they are. They are supposed to be among the engaged. They have a vested interest in paying close attention to reality and getting past the campaign hype. Instead, they fell for it all, hook, line, and sinker.

Now the game has changed to “How can we play along with this guy and not get hurt, or at least not get hurt too badly?” Sadly, the only reason they may be spared is that they’re  lucky, not smart.

From Independence, Missouri:

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Car mechanic Michael Satterwhite stands in a garage beside a blue 1980 Chevrolet Malibu, with its hood up and engine exposed.

Mr. Satterwhite frowns, holds up his left arm and reaches for the tool-cluttered wall for balance. With his other hand, he walks his fingers over a worktable searching for a bolt rack, eyes closed. He doesn’t know why he closes his eyes – maybe to concentrate.

Open or closed it doesn’t matter; he can’t see in either case.

Mr. Satterwhite, 48, was born with retinitis pigmentosa,a type of hereditary retinal disorder that leads to progressive visual loss. By the time he was 16, he could not see well at night. Today, he no longer sees out of his left eye. His right eye can detect only various shades of gray, depicting a shadowy world where everything swims before him in a fog.

“Where’d I put those sockets?” he asks himself.

He pauses and considers. A large man, Mr. Satterwhite wears muddy work boots, jeans and a black T-shirt. Since 1994, he has worked by himself in his pastor’s garage getting jobs from friends and through word of mouth. He long since stopped looking for work. No shop wants a blind car mechanic, Mr. Satterwhite says, adding that he assumes it comes down to liability. They think he will hurt himself.

He had his own shop once when he was 23. But three weeks after he opened, he was robbed and lost all his tools. He closed and worked for other people until he lost his vision completely, in 1984.

Now these many years later, he still has all his fingers and toes. Front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, he can do it all, detecting problems through touch and sound.

A click, clack or knocking sound can mean anything from a dropped valve to a rod out of place. Cars can be tricky: A cracked flex plate makes the same sound as a rod knocking. He listens carefully, head down and cocked to one side.

He feels for problems with his fingertips performing a slow delicate ballet turning his hands this way and that as he feels around an engine. He recently worked on a 1991 Ford F-150 four-wheel-drive pickup. The clutch no longer worked, and bolts had backed out of the crankshaft.

Mr. Satterwhite pulled the motor out and placed it on an engine stand. He put a new crankshaft in it and oil pump, no problem. Like two plus two. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Imagine if in December George W. Bush and his administration had:

• Decided to issue the initial bailout billions to General Motors but not Chrysler, thereby forcing Chrysler into bankruptcy.
• Had his advisers get on the phone with elected officials in towns and states where Chrysler has plants and told them that the bankruptcy was about to happen.
• Said that the Chrysler bankruptcy “will not disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or the communities that depend” on them.

Now imagine if, 24-36 hours later, Bush’s advisers disclosed that many Chrysler plants would close.

Does anyone reading this think that such an obvious betrayal would have gone unreported by the major TV networks or newspapers of record?

Well, on Wednesday and Thursday, April 29 and 30, Barack Obama and his administration did exactly what I described above. Then, on May 1, Obama’s car guys and Chrysler announced the closings of plants in Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Michigan. Yet this shocking deception, acknowledged as such by well-known names in both major parties, has only been news in the metro areas affected.

In a May 10 column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, reporter Stephen Koff did a fine job of laying out the details of the story. It’s a definite read-the-whole-painful-thing piece, but here are some of Koff’s key paragraphs (bolds are mine; the Plain Dealer has a separate detailed timeline here):

Late in the morning on Thursday, April 30, three officials serving under President Barack Obama got on a telephone conference call with members of Congress and Capitol Hill staffers. ….

These are smart people, and they listen carefully. They all took notes on what was said by Larry Summers, Ed Montgomery and Ron Bloom, three of the advisers Obama had tapped to rescue the American auto industry. And what these and other Congress members heard in this private telephone conference was consistent with the message that President Obama publicly made a few minutes later in the White House grand foyer: Chrysler, the storied American automaker, was entering a short, government-assisted Chapter 11 bankruptcy and would merge with Fiat, the Italian car maker.

But this “will not disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or the communities that depend on it,” Obama said.

That seemed straightforward enough, and it mirrored the statements the Congress members had just heard from the top task force officials — that there would be no plant closings and no layoffs, with only short-term plant idling to restructure and move excess inventory off the lots. It also followed a telephone briefing with reporters little more than an hour earlier, in which a senior administration official was asked about the potential loss of Chrysler “head counts.” The administration official, talking with reporters on the condition that he and others not be named, responded that “there are no plans to have any immediate plant closings or major white- or blue-collar head-count reductions.”

Maybe someone should have asked what the White House meant by “no plans” and “disrupt.”

Congress members say they were blind-sided by the news the next day, May 1, that Chrysler in fact intended to permanently shutter five plants: one each in Ohio, Wisconsin and Missouri, and two in Michigan.

The news was embarrassing as well as shocking, since many members, like LaTourette, had issued statements applauding, for instance, the report that no jobs would be cut at the 1,250-worker Twinsburg Stamping Plant. Candice Miller, a Republican congresswoman representing Sterling Heights, Mich., home of a 1,400-worker Chrysler plant, even went on the House floor soon after Obama’s announcement, saying it meant, “most importantly, no plant closures or new job losses.”

Wrong. Sterling Heights, like Twinsburg, would be sucker-punched the next day with news of a plant closing.

Were Congress members duped? If so, by whom and why?

The short answers appear to be yes, by both Chrysler and the White House.

Koff’s very plausible theory is that the administration made its risible claims early Thursday that jobs would be saved to get all-day TV and online media plaudits and no blowback from localities they knew darn well would be affected. Then it sent Chrysler into bankruptcy on Thursday afternoon to ensure that the press didn’t have enough time to adequately scrutinize the voluminous filing ahead of their Friday print runs. Koff says that only the Detroit Free Press was able to beat their print deadline. By the time anyone caught on to the ruse, the slow-news weekend arrived, while the attention of the national press went on hiatus.

As Koff says, “If it was, in fact, a media strategy, it worked.”

A further appalling aspect in all of this is the unwillingness of virtually every Democrat involved except Dennis Kucinich to go on the record to criticize the administration’s self-evident deception. Read the rest of the story, and you’ll see pathetic cop-outs or stone silence from the likes of Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, Ohio Congressperson Betty Sutton, and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm.

After the fact, the Obama administration is trying to claim that the closure of the affected plants was already envisioned in Chrysler’s February viability plan. That doesn’t even pass the stench test, let alone the smell test. A different Plain Dealer reporter and Ohio Republican Congressman LaTourette have separately shown that “Chrysler’s Feb. 17 restructuring proposal never mentioned plans to close additional plants, whether unidentified or not.”

A May 6 Plain Dealer story notes that “Chrysler acknowledges it failed to inform Twinsburg and other communities of imminent plant closures.” I’m not aware of any such acknowledgment by the government, let alone anything resembling an apology from President Barack (“[it] will not disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or the communities that depend on it”) Obama.

I wonder how the employees affected feel, knowing that they’re being left jobless while their union’s health plan controls half of the new company, and that they were further treated like mushrooms (kept in the dark and fed horse manure) until the attention of the nation’s press disappeared?

If the national establishment media are offended at being used, and duped, I sure haven’t seen it. I don’t expect that I ever will.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.