I had no idea the financial situation at the New York Times was so desperate.

Somebody, anybody — Please spring for a $3.49 calculator like the one pictured at the far right for Times reporter Matthew Saltmarsh. And if you’ve got another few bucks, pass them on to the Times’s home-page headline writers, so they can present something more understandable to US readers than what you see to the left of the calculator.

Saltmarsh reported all first quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contraction figures from Euro-zone and European countries on a “from the previous quarter” basis (a longstanding EU custom), and presented the first quarter 2009 GDP contraction in the U.S. as “annualized” (which is our custom).

But Saltmarsh and Times headline writers never converted the U.S. result to make it comparable to that of European countries — hence the urgent need for the calculators.

Here are most of the relevant paragraphs from Saltmarsh’s report:

Euro-Zone Economy Shrinks 2.5% in Quarter

….. Gross domestic product (in the Euro-Zone) declined by 2.5 percent during the first quarter from the previous quarter in the 16 nations that use the euro currency and the 27-country European Union, according to an initial estimate from Eurostat, the E.U.’s statistical office. Both regions had seen their economies decline 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.

In Germany, the largest European economy, gross domestic product plunged 3.8 percent in the first three months of the year from the fourth quarter, when it fell 2.2 percent, the German Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said. Economists had forecast a 3 percent decline.

…. The French economy also shrank for the fourth straight quarter as companies cut investments and exports plunged. The economy shrank 1.2 percent from the fourth quarter, when it slipped 1.5 percent, the French statistics office Insee said. Insee also revised earlier data, revealing that France has been in a recession since the third quarter of 2008.

In Italy, the economy also contracted for a fourth straight quarter in the three months through March. The Italian economy shrank 2.4 percent from the fourth quarter, when it contracted by 2.1 percent, Istat, the statistics office in Rome, said. It was the biggest decline since the agency began publishing data in 1980.

Spain released data Thursday showing its economy shrank by 1.8 percent during the first quarter compared to the fourth quarter.

…. In the United States, gross domestic product shrank at an annual rate of 6.1 percent from January through March, its third straight quarter of decline.

…. The Hong Kong economy shrank 4.3 percent in the first quarter from the previous three months, the worst performance since records were first compiled in 1990 as plummeting exports hurt investment and consumption, Reuters reported from the city Friday.

Performing data conversions that Saltmarsh and the Times either can’t or won’t do, here is how the U.S. economy’s dismal performance in the past six months compares to the Euro-zone as a whole, and to the other countries identified (pending revisions in first quarter 2009 data):

Where comparisons are possible, only France(!) fared less poorly than the U.S. during the six months ended March 31.

Many Times readers likely will come away from Saltmarsh’s work thinking that the Euro-zone’s economy, those of most of its individual countries, and perhaps many of the rest of the world’s economies, aren’t performing nearly as badly as ours, when the fact is that they are largely performing even worse. The majority of those who only see the Times’s home-page headline will probably also believe that the Euro-zone is outperforming the U.S.

Readers of this post will have no such problem.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

What a difference a radical, in your face, abortion-promoting president makes.

Pro-lifers can savor this graphic for a few minutes before returning to the trenches to work on persuading what Gallup says is, for the first since it began surveying the question, a clear minority of Americans who are still euphemistically “pro-choice” on the question of abortion. I have posted it here because the chances of seeing it or something similar in establishment media reports is somewhere between slim and none:

The 15-point swing from “pro-choice” to pro-life (from -6 to +9) in the past year is nothing short of dramatic; only the 1996-1997 narrowing looks to be about the same.

Digging deeper, self-identified Catholics — as opposed to real Catholics, who by definition must be 100% pro-life (see Paragraph 2271 at link; Catholic vote-related responsibilities are outlined here) — are now 52% pro-life (up from 45% a year ago), but still trail Protestants (59% pro-life, up from 52%). 31% of all others (up from 27%) are pro-life.

Gallup’s “Bottom Line” is not bad, but it obscures an important point (bold is mine):

With the first pro-choice president in eight years already making changes to the nation’s policies on funding abortion overseas, expressing his support for the Freedom of Choice Act, and moving toward rescinding federal job protections for medical workers who refuse to participate in abortion procedures, Americans — and, in particular, Republicans — seem to be taking a step back from the pro-choice position. However, the retreat is evident among political moderates as well as conservatives.

It is possible that, through his abortion policies, Obama has pushed the public’s understanding of what it means to be “pro-choice” slightly to the left, politically. While Democrats may support that, as they generally support everything Obama is doing as president, it may be driving others in the opposite direction.

I’m not buying the bolded statment (and yeah, I know that Gallup’s descriptions of becoming pro-life as “as a step back” and “a retreat” are obviously biased).

Instead, I believe that the ascendance of Dear Leader Barack Obama has unmasked what being “pro-choice” on abortion is all about. What I believe has really happened is that many of the switchers, with some help from Catholic and other clerics who have finally found their too-long-lost tongues, have learned that being “pro-choice,” though a nearly sure bet for avoiding arguments at PC cocktail parties, has real-world consequences that have nothing to do with “choice.”

To refresh, examples of Obama’s appalling abortion-supporting record, campaign statements, campaign promises, and campaign tactics up to his election included the following (Sources – Princeton Professor Robert P. George’s Public Discourse essays, “Obama’s Abortion Extremism” and “Obama and Infanticide,” excerpting with some paraphrasing from what was assembled in this brilliant post at Pro Ecclesia, who also excerpted from George):

• Obama expressed support for legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions, and which has been credited with saving over a million lives.
• Obama, unlike even many allegedly “pro-choice” legislators, opposed the ban on partial-birth abortions when he served in the Illinois legislature and condemned the Supreme Court decision that upheld legislation banning this heinous practice.
• On the campaign trail, Obama referred to a baby conceived inadvertently by a young woman as a “punishment” that she should not have to endure.
• Obama has stated that women’s equality requires access to abortion on demand.
• Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party, did not and has not endorsed or offered support for the Pregnant Women Support Act, the signature bill of Democrats for Life, meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies.
• Obama, as an Illinois state senator, opposed 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. The Obama campaign lied about his vote until critics produced documentary proof of what he had done. In fact, Obama continued to lie about his inhuman voting record in regard to the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, and even stooped so low as to run a disgusting television ad attacking the disabled survivor of a botched abortion.

A complete compilation of Obama’s complete abortion-supporting record during transition and since his inauguration up to May 11 is here at LifeNews.com. Lowlights include:

• January 23, 2009 – Forces taxpayers to fund pro-abortion groups that either promote or perform abortions in other nations. Decison to overturn Mexico City Policy sends part of $457 million to pro-abortion organizations.
• February 27, 2009 – Starts the process of overturning pro-life conscience protections President Bush put in place to make sure medical staff and centers are not forced to do abortions.
• March 9, 2009 – Obama signed an executive order forcing taxpayer funding of embryonic stem cell research.
• March 11, 2009 – Obama signed an executive order establishing a new agency within his administration known as the White House Council on Women and Girls. Obama’s director of public liaison at the White House, Tina Tchen, an abortion advocate, became director of it.
• March 11, 2009 – Obama administration promotes an unlimited right to abortion at a United Nations meeting.
• March 17, 2009 – Obama makes his first judicial appointment and names pro-abortion federal Judge David Hamilton to serve on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
• March 26 – President Obama announced $50 million for the UNFPA, the UN population agency that has been criticized for promoting abortion and working closely with Chinese population control officials who use forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations.
• April 23 – Refused to appeal a ruling requiring the FDA to allow 17-year-old girls to purchase the morning after pill without either a doctor visit or parental involvement beforehand.
• May 5 – Details emerge about a terrorism dictionary the administration of President Barack Obama put together in March. The Domestic Extremism Lexicon calls pro-life advocates violent and claims they employ racist overtones in engaging in criminal actions.
• May 8 – President Obama releases a new budget that allows the Legal Services Corporation to use tax dollars to pay for pro-abortion litigation.
• May 8 – President Obama’s new budget calls for taxpayer funded abortions in the nation’s capital, and eliminates all federal funding for abstinence-only education.

But Obama the presidential candidate also promised that “the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA),” which would create a federally guaranteed “fundamental right” to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including “a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for undefined ‘health’ reasons”, and would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry.

Perhaps the focus-group obsessives at Team Obama detected a few weeks ago what Gallup has just reported, because the President switched gears in his April 29 press conference, saying that “The Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority.”

If the administration and Congress are waiting for public sentiment to return being euphemistically “pro-choice” so they can push FOCA through without fear of electoral consequences, they may have a long wait. I would suggest that it is just as likely that the pro-life margin will increase in the coming years.

If establishment media reports concentrate on anything, it will be a potential “male chauvinist pig” angle. There is a 10-point difference between men, who are pro-life by 54-39, and women, whose pro-life margin is 49-44.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Cincinnati:

May 9, 2009

Tom Siemers’ doctor pulled him aside 20 years ago and told him he should be dead.

The doctor, a neurosurgeon, said every attempt he’d made to fix a massive hemorrhage in Siemers’ brain in 1989 had failed. Surgery. Drugs. Cutting-edge technology.

Nothing seemed to work.

Despite his grim prognosis, Siemers not only survived but fully recovered.

“So what happened?” Siemers asked.

The doctor just shook his head and pointed heavenward.

A team of investigators from the Catholic Church now is trying to determine whether divine intervention is indeed the most likely explanation for Siemers’ recovery from a ruptured aneurysm, which left him unconscious and near death for more than a month.

Siemers, the chairman of Franklin Savings, is the star witness in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s first-ever investigation into a possible miracle attributed to someone under consideration for sainthood.

The prospective saint is Blessed Sister Frances Schervier, founder of the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor and the person Siemers’ family credits for his survival.

“It’s just a strange sensation,” said Siemers, who is convinced a miracle saved his life. “It’s spooky when I think about it.”

The challenge to church investigators is to gather evidence, listen to testimony and review medical records that may or may not support the family’s claim.

Their mandate is not to debate whether miracles happen, because the Catholic Church presumes that they do. The task before them is to find out whether a miracle occurred in this case and, if so, whether Frances Schervier, who died almost 133 years ago, is responsible for it.

The investigators will turn for answers to doctors grounded in the scientific world, and to true believers convinced the hand of God touches lives every day.

They then will send their findings to Rome, where a small group of religious scholars at the Vatican will try to answer a question that is daunting even to the faithful:

Did a 19th century German nun intervene with God to save the life of a middle-aged businessman from Cincinnati?

“The faithful have a right to know the truth,” said the Rev. Chris Armstrong, a Cincinnati priest and a member of the tribunal investigating the claim. “As far as humanly possible, we have to be sure.” …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

In early March (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Toledo Blade Columbus Bureau reporter Jim Provance named the party of Ohio’s Republican State Auditor Mary Taylor, who sharply criticized Democratic Governor Ted Strickland’s serious lateness with the state’s financial statements — so late that they couldn’t possibly be audited until after the Ohio General Assembly passes the budget for the two-year fiscal period that will begin on July 1.

Provance never named Strickland’s or any other Democrat’s party.

After that episode, NewsBuster commenter HoosierEm reported that Provance responded as follows to an e-mail complaint about his coverage of the Taylor-Strickland story:

I should have mentioned that the governor is a Democrat. I mentioned Ms. Taylor’s party affiliation because she is of the opposite party of the person she is criticizing. Just a fact that should be put out there. I should have taken the next step of noting the governor’s party.”

Lesson learned, right?

Hardly.

In a story in Thursday’s Blade, Provance did it again. This time he identified a Republican prosecutor while failing to specifically identify the party of a former high-level assistant of disgraced former Democratic Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann.

Here are the key paragraphs from Provance’s story (HT Maggie Thurber):

Former aide to Marc Dann indicted on 10 counts

Anthony Gutierrez, the man at the center of a sexual harassment scandal that helped drive former Attorney General Marc Dann from office, faces theft and fraud charges for allegedly using his ties with his long-time friend to benefit himself financially.

Franklin Country Prosecutor Ron O’Brien Thursday announced a 10-count indictment — six felonies and four first-degree misdemeanors — against Mr. Gutierrez one year to the day after Mr. Dann left office just 16 months into his term.

Mr. O’Brien, a Republican, said the timing was not scheduled to coincide with the anniversary.

….. Mr. Gutierrez was the target of a pair of sexual harassment allegations that were settled earlier this year by the attorney general’s office. Allegations are still pending in Trumbull and Mahoning counties that Mr. Gutierrez padded bills paid by Mr. Dann’s campaign committee for security windows at Mr. Dann’s Youngstown area home and then redirected the extra money to three businesses to which Mr. Gutierrez’s private firm, MTV Construction, owed money.

Mr. Gutierrez is expected to turn himself in on Monday.

If convicted on all charges, Mr. Gutierrez faces a maximum of eight years in jail and $20,000 in fines, said Mr. O’Brien.

….. Mr. Dann has so far faced no criminal charges. In March, he was fined $1,000 and given a public reprimand by the Ohio Elections Commission for illegally mining campaign funds to finance a $40,000-plus security system for his home as well as personal cell phone use for him and his family.

The panel chose not to refer the case to Mr. O’Brien for possible criminal prosecution, but it is expected next month to examine more serious allegations of misspent funds against Mr. Dann, his wife Alyssa Lenhoff, former press secretary Leo Jennings, and campaign committee Deputy Treasurer Mary Beth Snyder.

Mr. Dann resigned last year under pressure from Republicans and fellow Democrats alike in the wake of the harassment scandal. Mr. Dann admitted at the time that he feared his own extramarital affair with his office scheduler may have set a poor example.

The allusion to Mr. Dann’s “fellow Democrats” in the story’s final paragraph above is the only reference to the Democratic Party in the entire story. Provance never specifically identified the indicted Mr. Gutierrez or any of Dann’s assistants as Democrats.

If Mr. Provance believes this is a “next step” improvement, he has a very steep learning curve to climb.

Meanwhile, the Toledo Free Press reports that the Blade continues to bleed readers:

Blade circulation numbers down 42,700 since 2004

ABC (the Audit Bureau of Circulations) reported The Blade has dropped from 178,274 Sunday circulation in December 2004 to 135,567 in March 2009.

Its combined Monday through Friday numbers have dropped from  131,117 in December 2005 to 110,728 in March 2009.

….. The Blade’s Director of Circulation, Dick Fuller, did not return repeated phone calls or e-mails by press time.

It could not happen to a more deserving and slow-learning bunch.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

_______________________________________________

UPDATE: I enhanced a chart, also available as a PDF at the Toledo Free Press, of the Blade’s circulation bleed during the past four-plus years to strengthen its points (the Free Press’s “Pct.” changes are really decimal reductions):

In Part I (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) of my coverage of Martin Crutsinger’s Associated Press report about Uncle Sam’s Monthly Treasury Statement and the Obama administration’s deficit projections, I noted that the government “miraculously” shrunk the deficit through March, the first six months of its fiscal year, by $175 billion, by employing an “accounting change.”

Even though this “accounting change,” which does not report TARP disbursements as outlays because they are considered “investments,” violates fundamental cash-flow reporting principles, Crutsinger gave the change an unskeptical treatment. He also failed to tell readers whether the administration used the old or new method in calculating its latest full-year deficit projection of $1.84 trillion. If Team Obama used the new method to determine it, the deficit under the old and more correct method will more than likely be over $2 trillion.

Crutsinger also failed to report the steep dive in federal receipts that took place in April, which is the government’s highest month for collections, compared to last year’s all-time record April haul, which I referred to as the “Supply-Side Stunner,” and which Crutsinger and others also failed to report when it occurred last year (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog).

Here is how April 2009 collections compared to April of 2008:

(Sources: Monthly Statements – April 2009, April 2008; Daily Statements – April 30, 2009; April 30, 2008)

Here is all Crutsinger had to say about federal receipts in his report:

The government normally runs surpluses in April as Treasury’s coffers swell with people paying their annual tax bills by the April 15 deadline. But the deficit is being driven higher by the billions of dollars being spent to rescue the financial system from its worst crisis since the 1930s and deal with the worst recession in decades.

The recession also has boosted government outlays for benefit programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps while slashing tax revenues.

….. Through the first seven months of this budget year, the government has collected $1.26 trillion in receipts, a drop of 18.9 percent from a year ago.

That’s it. He was right there, and refused to tell us how much April’s drop was.

By doing so, Crutsinger conveniently ignored the bigger receipts story. Here is how collections during the first seven months of fiscal 2009 compare to fiscal 2008:

It is at least as important for readers to know that April continued a steady and alarming downward trend in receipts that actually begin a bit less than a year ago as it is for them to know the fiscal year’s overall result thus far.

April is supposed to be a strong month for receipts not only because of April 15 payments, but also because the first quarterly installment for individuals who pay estimated taxes is due on April 15 — something Crutsinger “somehow” forgot to tell his readers. Those who make estimated payments are largely the self-employed and those who are required to report income from partnerships and corporations on their individual returns. Receipts from those individuals are on the third and fourth line items in the first chart above.

As you can see, they’re drying up, as are collections from corporations, by far more than one would expect as a result of the 3.3% non-annualized contraction that has occurred during the past three quarters.

I attribute at least part of the decline to the much-discussed “going Galt” phenomenon, which really began last summer, as businesspeople, investors, and entrepreneurs began discerning the true nature of the administration that was the media favorite to gain power. “Going Galt” is yet another very real development that Crutsinger and the establishment media refuse to acknowledge.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

The subheadline is “Business bigwigs thought they were investing in a charismatic left-of-centrist. They were wrong and should have known better.”

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Saturday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

Left on the cutting-room floor: In April of last year, business bigs and monied contributors in the San Francisco Bay Area heard Obama describe small-town Pennsylvanians and Midwesterners thusly:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

This is a man with a deep well of condescending contempt for everyday people. Yet he is said to be their champion.

Maybe the trust-fund trolls in attendance found this amusing, but the business bigs should have been asking themselves, “What does he think and say about us when we’re not around? And what will he do to us if he gains power?”

Now they’re learning.

From Cincinnati:

Last Update: 5/08 6:40 pm

If you don’t believe in miracles, this next story might have you thinking a little differently. Even doctors at University Hospital say a man found unconscious by a stranger on the side of the road got a little help from above.

Local 12 Medical Reporter Liz Bonis has the story.

As pictures show, by the time Jeffery Koeller finally made it to the hospital, he was in pretty bad shape. His wife was stunned by what she saw.

Jayna Koeller, Wife: “It was something I don’t ever want to see again.”

A team of specialists led by Doctor Lori Shutter eventually discovered he’d had what’s called an aneurysm in his brain.

Dr. Lori Shutter, UC Neuroscience Institute: “It had ruptured, it had bled around his brain, that causes the brain to release all sorts of chemicals that shut down the rest of his body.”

“They said his heart was very bad, it wasn’t working, and his lungs were not good.”

According to what his family can piece together from witnesses and emergency medicine reports, it had all started on the side of a busy highway hours earlier. Jeffery Koeller stopped to help a motorist change a flat tire, something he wasn’t even supposed to do in a company vehicle. Apparently, right after the motorist left, Koeller headed back toward his vehicle and keeled over. A nurse found him, tools still in hand. She started emergency care, and called for help. This is Jeffery Koeller today. He has never met that nurse, but credits her with helping to save his life.

Jeffery Koeller, Patient: “What made me do it? I don’t know. I think that’s the way God kept me from injury and that way I was also there where the nurse was going to find me.”

From there, the Koellers say the best medical experts in the world and the power of prayer seemed to continue this miracle chain of events. His wife says her faith never waived. “I knew it wasn’t his time. I knew God had a plan for us.”

This specialist got to him in time to drain the blood off his brain. Doctor Shutter coordinated care to get him out of what she calls a continual heart attack. Eventually even an Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist helped repair what could have been permanent respiratory damage. His wife kept track of every person that entered his room and prayed for them all. She also wrote every one of them thank you notes for saving her husband’s life.

For 19 days, Jeffery Koeller hung in the balance, so to speak, where the experts admit:
“That’s where you still say there are forces we don’t understand.”

Koeller’s family says that force is a constant presence in their lives:
“When you pray to God, he’s going to answer your prayers.”

Go here for the rest of the story.

You have to see this to believe it, and even then you’ll have a hard time believing it. It’s the Obama administration’s deficit reduction program, otherwise known as “change the accounting.”

Here is what the Monthly Treasury Statement (MTS) from Uncle Sam looked like in March:

Here is the report for April:

Shazam! The government just made about $175 billion in deficits disappear (March’s reported $956.8 billion compared to April’s $781.4 billion through March).

Surely they jest, right? Nope.

Surely this manipulation of the government’s cash reporting is front-page newsworthy, right? Not at all.

Tuesday, the AP’s Martin Crutsinger gave it the “no big deal” treatment, virtually ensuring that broadcast and news outlets who rely on AP reports would pay it little heed. The AP reporter also left readers hanging as to whether the White House’s predicted deficit of $1.84 trillion is before or after an “accounting change,” one that will leave many readers here shaking their heads:

Gov’t runs April deficit for first time since ’83

The federal government ran a deficit in April for the first time in 26 years, pushing the red ink so far this budget year to a record $802.3 billion.

The Treasury Department said Tuesday the deficit for April was $20.9 billion, a sharp contrast from the surplus of $159.3 billion in the same month last year. It also was slightly more than the $20 billion deficit economists had expected.

For the budget year that began Oct. 1, the imbalance totals $802.3 billion, keeping the country on track to register the first $1 trillion annual deficit in U.S. history. And the Obama administration made an accounting change on bailout payments or the deficit already would have been at nearly $1 trillion.

The administration on Monday raised its deficit estimate for the year to $1.84 trillion, from the $1.75 trillion it estimated less than two months ago.

The administration made revisions to the deficits reported from October through March to reflect a change in how it was accounting for the bailout payments. The Bush administration recorded each payment to a bank or auto company getting bailout support on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

However, the Obama administration said it was changing the accounting process to a “net present value” basis, which means it assumes that the government is getting an asset when it provides loans to the banks and auto companies. Based on the new accounting method, the size of the deficit from October through March fell about $175 billion.

Three quick points:

1. Crutsinger had nothing to say about what the April deficit would have been under the prior accounting method, whether the government even disclosed it, or even intends to disclose it for April or future months.
2. The Monthly Treasury Statement has always been a cash flow statement. Excluding real outlays because their purpose was to buy assets (very questionable ones, but that’s beside the point at the moment) profoundly violates cash-flow reporting principles. If you have $21,000 in your checking account and pay cash for a $20,000 car, you can’t run around pretending you didn’t spend $20,000 to acquire the car. That’s exactly what Treasury is doing with its TARP related adjustment.
3. The AP reporter did not tell us whether the administration’s revised deficit forecast of $1.84 trillion uses the old method or the new method. If it uses the new method, that would mean that the deficit using the more conceptually correct old method will be well over $2 trillion, a huge jump from the prior $1.75 trillion. Crutsinger leaves us totally hanging, and seems oddly incurious.

Even calling this Treasury maneuver an “accounting change” overdignifies what is being done. It’s a gimmick that threatens to turn this and other routine reports into indecipherable gibberish.

Maybe that’s the point.

Part II (“The Invisible April Receipts Dive”) is here.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From the Wall Street Journal (bolds are mine):

Court cases get dismissed all the time, but rarely are dismissals as significant as the two lawsuits against Dole Food and other companies that were tossed recently by a California judge. Among other good things, the ruling is a setback for tort lawyers who troll abroad seeking dubious claims to bring in U.S. courts.

The allegations against Dole, the world’s largest fruit and vegetable producer, involved banana plantation workers in Nicaragua who alleged that exposure to the pesticide DBPC in the 1970s left them sterile. The only problem is that most of the plaintiffs had not worked at plantations and weren’t sterile. In fact, there’s no evidence that farm workers at Dole facilities were exposed to harmful levels of the chemical — which was legal and widely used at the time — or that the level of exposure they did experience even causes sterility.

“What has occurred here is not just a fraud on the court, but it is a blatant extortion of the defendants,” said Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney in her oral ruling. More than 40 related cases involving thousands of plaintiffs from Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama and the Ivory Coast are pending in her court. And the ruling puts in doubt some $2 billion in judgments that plaintiffs lawyers have already obtained in Nicaragua.

Judge Chaney dismissed the cases “with prejudice” to prevent the plaintiffs from filing again on the same claims, and she denounced the lawyers who hatched the scheme. “This is a very sad day for me to be presiding over such a horrific situation,” said the judge, who described a “pervasive conspiracy” involving U.S. plaintiffs lawyers and corrupt Nicaraguan judges.

….. “There have been groups of medical personnel providing sham laboratory reports indicating sterility where none really exists; groups of fathers denying paternity of their own children, posing as lonely men coming into the court, saying that they had no solace in their old age because they have no children,” said the judge.

…. The ruling is especially useful as a rebuke to the torts-for-import business, whereby U.S. tort lawyers travel abroad, join with local lawyers to manufacture claims, and then engage in client recruitment practices that are blatantly illegal in the U.S. In essence, the tort bar’s goal is to import lawsuits from foreign countries where it’s nearly impossible to challenge claims on factual grounds because evidence is hard to come by.

It is no accident that this orchestrated fraud originated in Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua. In Danny’s world, capitalism is apparently so evil that blatant theft disguised as reparations is apparently acceptable.

Yesterday, the ever-myopic and conveniently anonymous Modern Esquire, who has apparently kissed and made up with whoever happens to be running Buckeye State Blog at the moment, wrote what he must have thought was a “brilliant” take-down of yours truly (link is to a pic of most of the post; this will spare readers who wish to avoid the root canal-level pain the need to visit BSB; but if you think you can stand it, the BSB post is here).

Its title is: “Yep, BizzyBlog is still insane…”

Note how a far-lefty invokes his dream of a return to Stalin’s psych wards for political dissidents at the slightest imagined provocation. ModEsq has a particularly bad strain of this common far-lefty disease, having stated recently at his own place (link again is to a pic, again in the name of pain avoidance) that perhaps yours truly “ought to be declared mental incompetent for his own protection.” Yes, he wrote “mental incompetent,” not “mentally incompetent.” This pathetic grammar comes from someone who is allegedly a lawyer.

ModEsq was attempting to critique a detailed, perceptive, and thorough BizzyBlog.com fisking of ABJ editorial writer Steve Hoffman’s pathetically ignorant column about the state of the Ohio Repubican Party and the apparently impending gubernatorial candidacy of John Kasich.

As he rumbled, bumbled, stumbled, and fumbled his way through over 1,350 words (a bit under 1,200 excluding quotes), ModEsq hilariously cited “Laffner” as the founding father of supply-side economics three times. Although ModEsq’s post was indeed a real laugher, the name of the economist in question is Arthur Laffer.

More incredibly, ModEsq wrote his lengthy screed without recognizing that the composer of the detailed, perceptive, and thorough BizzyBlog fisking was Rose, and not yours truly.

As Rose said in her response post last night:

…. exactly how do you expect anyone to “buy” the crap you’re writing  when you get THAT wrong right off the bat? Zheesh. If you went to public screwal, I want a refund.

Rose, even I couldn’t believe I was seeing this at first, but here it is: The guy’s “About” page (a pic, again) says, “I’m a product of public education, and it shows.”

It’s as if to this day, at age 34 (according to the “About” page), ModEsq bears no personal responsibility for his poor grammar and spelling. He’d be a completely literate guy, if it weren’t for the fact that the evil government of the State of Ohio denied his poorly-funded school district the money they needed to properly educate him. It’s all on them, and it’s apparently too late to do anything about it.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

I suppose he’ll find it impolite to point this out, but if he is indeed 34, most of ModEsq’s elementary-school education and perhaps a year or two of high school apparently took place while Democrat Dick Celeste was the Buckeye State’s governor.

Now ModEsq’s post has created a “problem” here at BizzyBlog.

You see, Rose is proving that she is at least as adept at driving far-lefties batty with reasoned, thorough, accurate, witty, and pointed discourse as yours truly.

Word will spread, and quickly, that Rose is a good writer.

Pretty soon, some readers seeking thoughtfulness in the blogosphere will be coming to BizzyBlog just to read Rose’s posts.

Then “some” might become “more.” “More” might turn into “many.” Who knows, maybe “many” will turn into “most.”

Wait a minute — In the bigger-pie real world of sensible conservatism, that’s a good thing.

Because of ModEsq, Rose-related growth here at BizzyBlog will likely occur faster than it otherwise would have.

Thanks, ModEsq …. I love you, man.

(but you still owe me and my readers a boatload of apologies for accusing one of my best commenters of posting a racist comment and questioning my sanity and mental competence)

Noteworthy Net-Worthies:

Worse than presented — The Social Security and Medicare crises (y’know, the ones that didn’t exist in 2005 but “somehow” do four years later) are even worse than the Social Security Administration portrayed yesterday. The Trustees’ report, according to this AP item, said that Social Security will go negative in 2016. We should be so lucky. As I noted in early April, unless economic growth comes back, and quickly, it’s going to happen in fiscal 2011, and conceivably fiscal 2010. Even if it limps to 2016 with annual surpluses, they will be so relatively tiny that they’ll do virtually nothing to shore up the rest of the government, which has been spending those surpluses for decades. As recently as a year ago, the total 2009-2016 surpluses were supposedly going to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The creation by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid in June of last year of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy, now also known as the POR Recession as Normal People Define It, has had many horrible consequences, but this one may be the most dangerous.

With the obvious help of the SocSec trustees, the AP’s coverage of the Social Security situation perpetuates the “Trust Fund” myth. There is no Social Security “Trust Fund” with a stash of cash to pay benefits. The $2-plus trillion Social Security “Trust Fund” has virtually nothing in it besides IOUs from the rest of the government, which is itself $11 trillion or so in debt, and growing. All that matters is that in 2011 or 2010, and probably not 2016 as the Trustees predict, the government is going to have to raise taxes, cut benefits, or borrow more money to keep Social Security going. My late father predicted in the 1970s that Social Security’s fall-apart would occur in about 2050. He underestimated the Baby Boom generation’s irresponsbility.

A fairly easy prediction is that the Obama administration, one way or another, will try to “solve” the Social Security crisis by turning the program into an open-ended entitlement program where the 75-year link between what a person pays in and the benefits they collect is broken. This will “justify” the “need” to hit all income earned above $250,000 with Social Security’s 12.4% tax (6.2% from the employer, 6.2% by the employee) without increasing benefits for those paying the extra taxes. Obama pushed this hard during the presidential campaign, and can now frame it as a way to “save” the system. This was done with Medicare with Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increases. Medicare’s 2.9% (1.45% employer, 1.45% employee) applies to all earned income. Note how the extra billions raised by that tax solved nothing.

First, the good news — Banks are attempting to flee the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP by racing to raise capital, perhaps as much as $58 billion, to pay back the money that was forced on them. Whether Tax Cheat Tim Geithner will allow it to happen is, as far as I can tell, still not clear. Now for the bad news — Tax Cheat Tim is not going to use the returned TARP money to reduce the monstrous national debt that TARP has helped to significantly increase. No-no-no. James Gattuso at Heritage’s Foundry Blog reminds us that Geithner intends to recycle it, as the legislation whooped through in early October of last year sadly allows. Though Geithner’s financial recycling program apparently won’t involve buying actual “toxic assets” (they created a separate program, i.e., slush fund, for that purpose in March) Geithner is otherwise doing exactly what I feared Treasury would do in the latter part of this column written just after TARP was passed. It would appear that the Obama administration’s intent is to make TARP a permanent fixture of the financial landscape that is outside the scrutiny of Congress and, of course, the people.

Roger Simon prescribes a cure for atheism — See Ahmadinejad in person.

From Sioux Falls, SD (bold is mine):

May 9, 2009

As police seek driver, jogger just happy to be alive

Nestor Ramos
nramos@argusleader.com

Lying in the road as she regained consciousness, Amy Osborne thought of her two children and wondered who – or what – had saved her life.

Osborne, 33, was on her regular run along 41st Street at about 7:50 p.m. Thursday when a car struck her and sped away as she crossed Meadow Avenue, just west of Interstate 29. Police still are searching for the man who hit Osborne.

Jogging up to the intersection, Osborne said she made eye contact with the driver, who was stopped and set back from the intersection. She began running across the street, and the driver of the blue-gray four-door car – witnesses described him as white and in his mid-20s – sped up and swerved toward her.

Osborne said she slammed her hands against the hood.

“I guess my hands on the hood kind of made it real that this guy was planning on running me over. He yelled something and sped up even more.”

She couldn’t make out what the man yelled but said he wasn’t someone she knew.

Police retrieved a video recording of the incident from a nearby gas station surveillance camera. “The angle is a little tough,” police spokesman Sam Clemens said, “but it looks like he didn’t even stop for the stop sign.” Witnesses said the man was stopped well short of the intersection and sped up when Osborne jogged into the street.

….. From her hospital room Friday at Sanford USD Medical Center, Osborne said her injuries could have been far worse. She has no broken bones and no major internal injuries.

“For what happened, and for how far I’m told I was thrown, I was lucky,” Osborne said. “All I had on was a pair of running shorts and a tank top.”

Osborne said the last thing she remembers is somebody pulling her up by the shoulders, saving her from being pulled under the car and from injuries that would have been far worse. The next thing she remembers, she said, is “looking into a bald firefighter’s eyes.”

But witnesses said there was nobody there, a fact confirmed by a video police retrieved from a nearby gas pump. Only after the car was gone and she was lying in the street did a small group of witnesses race over to stop traffic and stand guard as paramedics came.

Osborne said she couldn’t quite explain it.

“If there was nobody there to pull me up,” she said, and paused. “I didn’t come up on my own. And if that was my guardian angel, then that’s great.”

Go here for the full story.