Read the whole thing.

Here’s a passage that particularly stands out, followed by his conclusion:

…. Obama offered Muslims a careful admonition about women’s rights, noting how denying women education impoverishes a country — balanced, of course, with “meanwhile, the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life.”

Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women’s softball team has received insufficient Title IX funds — while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays, as well — but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who’s to judge?

That’s the problem with Obama’s transcultural evenhandedness. It gives the veneer of professorial sophistication to the most simple-minded observation: Of course there are rights and wrongs in all human affairs. Our species is a fallen one. But that doesn’t mean that these rights and wrongs are of equal weight.

A CIA rent-a-mob in a coup 56 years ago does not balance the hostage-takings, throat-slittings, terror bombings and wanton slaughters perpetrated for 30 years by a thug regime in Teheran (and its surrogates) that our own State Department calls the world’s “most active state sponsor of terrorism.”

….. Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He’s showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.

Distorting history is not truth-telling, but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership, but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one’s own country.

My only disagreement with Krauthammer is with the term “soft lies.” When an American president distorts history, millions will accept the distortion as the truth. That’s anything but “soft.”

This manifestly demonstrates why Lou Pritchett, God bless him, is understandably and justifiably scared.

From Temecula, California:

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Rabbi Yitzchok Hurwitz of Temecula’s Chabad Jewish Center distributed tissue boxes to the approximately 200 people gathered to hear Holocaust survivor Leon Leyson’s memories of the man who saved his life.

“We have a tradition that one person can save the whole world,” said Dina Hurwitz as she welcomed the audience of all ages, seated in the Yula Ballroom at Temecula Creek Inn last Sunday.

Audience members’ attire, including yarmulkes and cross necklaces, gave testament to the religious diversity of the crowd. “Our purpose is to educate Jews about their heritage and the community about Judaism,” Hurwitz stated.

Leyson, 79, who was the youngest person on Schindler’s list at age 13, spoke about life during the Holocaust, the surprising accuracy of the 1993 film and the many ways Oskar Schindler saved his life.

Before World War II, Leyson had an idyllic childhood in a Polish country town surrounded by relatives and family friends. His family moved to Krakow when he was nine.

After the Nazi invasion, Leyson lost his rights to ride public transportation and go to school. His family was confined to a ghetto, where Leyson remembered being constantly hungry and terrified.

“Everything changed, everything. I went from being an innocent 10-year-old to being an enemy of the state,” said Leyson, who recalled being shot on the street, seeing neighbors beaten and being saved from deportation to two death camps by Schindler.

“He was an amazing human being and you could tell just by looking at him,” Leyson said. “The Nazis looked at us with blank, soulless eyes but he had a twinkle of humanity in his eyes and spoke with us like human beings.”

Leyson remembered standing on an overturned box in the factory in order to reach the machine levers.

Schindler, who knew him and his family members by name, spoke with Leyson in the evenings and gave him extra rations of food.

When Nazi officers rounded up male factory workers to be deported to a camp, Leyson yelled out for Schindler, who insisted that he and his family be returned to work.

“He saved many lives but he saved our lives directly, individually,” Leyson added.

Leyson taught for 39 years in the Los Angeles School Districte after immigrating to California.

….. Another brother chose to stay with his girlfriend on a camp transport when Schindler came to rescue him at the train station. He and his girlfriend died in gas chambers soon after their arrival at the camp.

Leyson didn’t speak of his experience publicly until after the release of the acclaimed film “Schindler’s List.” He speaks now in the hopes that people will remember the price of intolerance. ….

Go here for the full story.

Some of us have speculated that many newsrooms in America are so hell-bent on maintaining their supposedly hallowed positions — and that by their way of “thinking” they are exempt from the normal laws of economics — that they will have be dragged kicking and screaming from their keyboards when the repo men come around to turn out the lights. This week’s events at the Boston Globe give validity to that theory.

Let’s take it on faith that the Globe, the onetime New England jewel of the New York Times, really has been losing money at the rate of $1 million a week, that the Times really does need to seriously cut costs, and that all of the Globe’s unions have to make concessions if the paper is to either survive within the Times, or as rumored, be salable to whatever outside entity might be brave enough to take it off the Old Gray Lady’s hands.

Six of the Globe’s seven(!) unions have agreed to accept concessions. They include “drivers, mailers, pressmen, electricians, machinists and technical-services workers.”

Which one do you think turned the Times down? Do you even have to ask?

Why, it’s the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents “more than 600 writers, editors and advertising and marketing staff members, as well as some administrative workers.” It appears they would rather maintain their incomes for only a short while longer and force the Times to close it instead of making the concessions everyone else has made to keep it viable.

Even though there is a report today that there may be parties interested in purchasing the Globe (or taking money from the Times to get it out of their hair), a Globe story yesterday reports that — surprise, surprise — it’s tougher to sell a paper that’s in the middle of what looks to be a protracted labor dispute:

The latest contract dispute between The New York Times Co. and The Boston Globe’s biggest union could drag on for several months, if not years, complicating the potential sale of the newspaper, according to legal and business analysts.

The Globe reported yesterday that the Times Co. is seeking bids on the newspaper it has owned since 1993, less than a day after the Boston Newspaper Guild filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board. The Guild is challenging the company’s decision to declare an impasse in negotiations and impose a 23 percent wage cut on the union’s members.

Globe spokesman Robert Powers said, “We’ve been in touch with the NLRB and are in the process of responding as appropriate.”

It gets better. Globe reporters’ beloved president and his party represent one of the hold-up points in eventually resolving any labor dispute involving potential government intervention:

In the best of circumstances, the process is slow as a charge moves through NLRB investigations, hearings, and appeals, then the federal court system, labor law specialists said. But the process could slow further because the five-member NLRB has three vacancies, and a federal Appeals Court in Washington recently ruled that two sitting members are not enough to make decisions.

The NLRB has petitioned the court to reconsider that decision. President Obama has named nominees for two of the vacancies. The nominations must be confirmed by the Senate.

But the prospect of a long labor dispute could make the paper less attractive to buyers, analysts said. If the case is eventually decided in favor of the Guild, a new owner could face a huge bill for back pay and interest, said Thomas Kohler, a Boston College law professor.

“Anybody who buys it, buys it with the liabilities,” Kohler said. “Unless the board and courts make fast decisions, there’s ongoing liabilities, and that makes the paper less attractive.”

If you’ve ever wondered why the news from so many establishment media outlets is often one-sidedly sympathetic with labor, antagonistic towards management, and dismissive of economic realities, you often need to look no further than the militance of the unions representing their writers and others involved.

Collectively, among the others involved in producing the paper, these guys and gals are supposed to be the smartest people in the room (just ask them). Even when faced with the death of their employer (there’s no guarantee that their will be buyer interest once the tires get kicked, and the Times’s threat to shutter the paper has to be taken seriously), they concede nothing. Why should we surprised that they almost never concede their errors, omissions, and blatant biases, even when caught red-handed?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

It will go up Sunday morning here at BizzyBlog (Link won’t work until then) when the blackout expires.

(image is from OrangeJuiceBlog.com)

__________________________________________

Backstory: I first became interested in welfare reform in the mid-1990s upon learning of Tommy Thompson’s successes in Wisconsin since the late 1980s in reducing welfare rolls and putting people to work.

Welfare reform is probably the Gingrich Congress’s last and greatest accomplishment (sadly, after John Kasich & Co. righted the ship and balanced the federal budget for the first time in decades, it mostly coasted or went the wrong way during Bill Clinton’s second term).

I vividly remember the hue and cry from opponents about how millions of people would be thrown out on the streets if welfare reform passed. Charles Grodin, who at the time was a host on MSNBC, was particularly over the top on this topic.

Obviously, doomsday didn’t happen. Instead of being thrown out on the streets, millions threw themselves into work — or got thrown into it, and learned to deal with it, as everyone else who works must.

I think most people expected welfare reform to reduce rolls to a certain level, and then to hit a wall. Remarkably, that hasn’t happened yet (though, as I understand it, certain provisions in the Obama-Democratic mislabeled “stimulus” package may end the remarkable progress made, and perhaps even reverse some of it). Yes, the most dramatic drops occurred in the first 4-5 years after the legislation passed. But even after 2002, the welfare caseload in all states excluding California dropped by over a third, to the point where less than 1% of the population in the 49 states and the District of Columbia is on the dole.

The rest of the country’s success in implementing welfare reform makes California’s failure to get behind it glaringly obvious. Proportionally, Sacramento has wasted tens of billions of dollars over the past 12-1/2 years on a welfare population that is, proportionally, almost 3-1/2 times higher than the national average. After all these years, based on the rest of the country’s experience, it has over 850,000 more of its residents on the dole than it should. The column shows that there is no justification for this. The press in California consistently refuses to notice this outrageous situation.

Beyond that, the column doesn’t get into the Golden State’s handling of entitlement problems that extend beyond traditional welfare: Food Stamps, housing subsidies, Medicaid, etc. California is also more than likely worse at running these programs than the rest of the country.

The state’s financial mess is a problem its residents and leaders should be solely responsible for fixing. It should offend everyone in the rest of the U.S. that California’s mishandling of entitlement programs not only continues to drain the federal treasury disproportionately, but that it is also demanding — and getting — billions in federal bailout (oh, I forgot – “stimulus”) money.

Finally, adding insult to injury, California’s state and national politicians have, largely unilaterally, hurt the rest of the country by doing everything they can to obstruct energy exploration and production, offshore and elsewhere.

Maybe instead of a secession movement, there should be an ejection movement. California would be high on my list as the first to get the boot.

___________________________________________

Previous Related Posts:

• Dec. 22, 2008 — CA and National Press Ignore State’s 12-Year Failure to Get with the National Welfare Reform Program
• May 24, 2008 — California Draggin’: Its Basket-Case Economy and Bloated Welfare System Are Holding Back the US Economy
• Dec. 19, 2007 — Cali’s Budget Crunch Commentators Avoid Looking at the Welfare Rolls
• Oct. 17, 2007 — Update: Welfare Rolls Still Plunging After All These Years, and Still Underreported
• Sept. 17, 2006 — Underreported Fact: Welfare Rolls are STILL Plunging
• Aug. 28, 2006 — Editorial of the Day: Remembering Who Is Responsible for Welfare Reform

Mmmm-boy, nothing like competing for the gay lobby donations…

From the Dispatch:

Both Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate in 2010 now support gay marriage after Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher changed his opposition to it.

Fisher has joined Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner in supporting marriage equality for gay couples. Fisher previously had supported government recognition of civil unions but opposed granting gay couples the right to marry.

Fisher’s Senate campaign confirmed yesterday that he had switched his position and now supports gay marriage.

“The government should be focused on creating jobs, lowering health-care costs and moving us to alternative energy, instead of trying to stop individuals who want to be in a committed relationship and take responsibility for each other,” Fisher said in a statement.

Read the whole thing here.  Evidently, as recently as April, Fisher said he was opposed gay “marriage.” Guess that plan has been, dare I say “outed?”

What do they do…get up in the morning and flip a coin?  “Heads, I’m for gay marriage; tails, I’m against it.”

Best part about this is that I don’t see a problem for Portman or Ganley (who apparently does not have an official website).

It’s pretty hard to dress up a disaster as something less than that, but the Associated Press’s Martin Crutsinger gave it his best shot in his report yesterday about Uncle Sam’s the May Monthly Treasury Statement, in effect understating the amount and significance of federal government’s rapidly deteriorating financial situation.

With the help of dubious handling of last year’s stimulus payments in May 2008′s Treasury Statement, Crutsinger ignored serious declines in tax receipts from economic activity (over 30% in each of the past three months) that are, if anything, accelerating. I covered that problem in Part 1.

Additionally, after only briefly mentioning it last month (noted at the time at NewsBusters and at BizzyBlog), Crutsinger grievously erred in his explanation of how a convenient “accounting change” Treasury implemented in April relating to accounting for its Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) has affected the reported year-to-date deficit. He claims that it contributed to it, while in reality the accounting change reduced it by about $180 billion. That is the subject of this post.

Here are key background and accounting change-related paragraphs from Crutsinger’s report:

The federal budget deficit soared to a record for May of $189.7 billion, pushing the tide of red ink close to $1 trillion with four months left in the budget year.

The rising deficit reflects increased government spending due to the recession, and billions of dollars spent on bailouts for banks and other troubled companies.

(more…)

Chuck Norris rocks, and his most recent article at Human Events is spot on about John Kasich:

Unfortunately, too many of our public representatives have been corrupted by power and greed or have been pleasing the masses instead of upholding the Constitution and our Founders’ vision for America. That is why Gore Vidal once quipped, “Politics is made up of two words: ‘poli,’ which is Greek for ‘many,’ and ‘tics,’ which are bloodsucking insects.”

… Three more amigos who fight for America and have proved their commitment to the red, white and blue are John Kasich, Bob Vander Plaats and Judge Roy Moore, all of whom presently are running in gubernatorial races in different states.

John Kasich is running for governor of Ohio. As his Web site conveys, Kasich is the son of a mailman and grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Pennsylvania. His values are rooted in faith, family, community and common sense. John was elected to the Ohio Senate at the age of 26 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, at the age of 30. As a nine-term congressman, John led the way in a variety of groundbreaking achievements, including constructing and implementing plans to balance the federal budget, create new jobs, reduce taxes, minimize the roles of government and other critical issues important to America’s Founders. John is also well-known as the host of a national weekly news show, called “Heartland with John Kasich.” Newsweek magazine named him one of its “100 people for the 21st century.”

… I encourage you to spread the word about these gentlemen and patriots, learn about their platforms, support their campaigns, and see to it that they are elected in their gubernatorial races. Theirs is leadership we can trust. I’m convinced that if we are to win back America, it’s going to start in the heartland and spread out from there because of the influence of leaders like them.

Don’t like what you see in government? Tired of incumbent lethargy and inactiveness? Does a political issue grind on you like fingernails on a chalkboard? It comes down to this: Either you will change our country or your opponents will, and if you let them change it, you might not like the outcome.

Amen, brother…from your keyboard to God’s ears inbox…

Listen to “Objectively Unfit Mitt” talk about how the universal healthcare he forced on, bankrupted, I mean “implemented” in the [nearly bankrupt] Massachussets could go national (HT: David Jeffers):

Unbelievable.

I’m shocked.  Oh, not that the AMA opposes this disastrous plan, but that the NY Times actually reported it (albeit mixed with gratuitous digs and counter-arguments that they never seem to afford like-minded views).

WASHINGTON - As the health care debate heats up, the American Medical Association is letting Congress know that it will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan, which President Obama and many other Democrats see as an essential element of legislation to remake the health care system.

…While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be “provided through private markets, as they are currently.” It is now reacting, for the first time, to specific legislative proposals being drafted by Congress.

…Until now, stakeholders in the health care industry have generally muted their criticism of Democratic proposals. But as details of the legislation have emerged, the criticism has become more pointed.

America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobby for insurers, said Tuesday that the government plan proposed by some Senate Democrats could “dismantle employer-based coverage and significantly increase costs for those who remain in private coverage.”

…The medical association said it “cannot support any plan design that mandates physician participation.” For one thing, it said, “many physicians and providers may not have the capability to accept the influx of new patients that could result from such a mandate.”

Oh c’mon AMA, look at how successful the government has been at managing Amtrak, Social Security, Medicare and let’s not forget Education…

It’s pretty hard to dress up a disaster as something less than that, but the Associated Press’s Martin Crutsinger gave it his best shot in his report yesterday about Uncle Sam’s the May Monthly Treasury Statement, in effect understating the amount and significance of federal government’s rapidly deteriorating financial situation.

With the help of dubious handling of last year’s stimulus payments in May 2008′s Treasury Statement, Crutsinger ignored serious declines in tax receipts from economic activity that are, if anything, accelerating. I’ll cover that problem in this post.

Additionally, after only briefly mentioning it last month (noted at the time at NewsBusters and at BizzyBlog), Crutsinger grievously erred in his explanation of how a convenient “accounting change” Treasury implemented in April relating to accounting for its Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) has affected the reported year-to-date deficit. That is the subject of Part 2.

Here are key background and receipts-related paragraphs from Crutsinger’s report:

(more…)

Noteworthy Net-worthies:

The coverage of the news that the oh-so-benevolent government will permit some banks to repay their TARP money is really offensive to those who remember the full story. The money was forced on the banks with “a (figurative) gun pointed at their heads,” yet they have to get permission from Big Nanny to give it back? Any coverage of TARP and the banks that doesn’t mention October’s coercion is by definition incomplete.

There are only so many things you can track daily, and the hateful Playboy blog post targeting 10 female conservatives (since taken down, but preserved by list member Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs) was one of them. The backstory is the apparent banishment of a lefty blogger at AOL’s Political Machine who dared mention the Playboy post. That in turn has given more exposure to the AOL site’s dismissive treatment and dismissal of longtime “non-journalist” bloggers and the fundamental dishonesty of the high and mighty “journalists” now running it. NixGuy, who blogged at AOL for over two years, is mostly on self-imposed hiatus, but emerged to post interesting background and insights here and here.

Liberal men write hate-filled posts about conservative women they can only dream about. Meanwhile, a conservative man demonstrates how to wipe the floor with an MSNBC reporterette who thinks that David Letterman’s “jokes” about Sarah Palin (i.e, that she dresses like a “slutty flight attendant,” and that her daughter was recently “knocked-up by Alex Rodriguez” during a New York Yankees game) are no big deal.

This is from a couple of weeks ago, but it shouldn’t be missed — Dick Morris’s “The Incredible Shrinking Clintons.” It looks like Barack Obama suckered Hillary into becoming Secretary of State, and has now essentially marginalized her.

Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has something called a “birth/death model” that it uses to estimate jobs gained and lost from new business start-ups and business closures. Every month, that estimate is built into the job gain/loss statistics. As seen here (page changes every month), that model’s +220,000 and +226,000 jobs made up the vast majority of May and April 2009′s on-the-ground (i.e., NOT seasonally adjusted) additions of 319,000 and 271,000 jobs, respectively. To be clear, the impact on any given month’s seasonally adjusted jobs number isn’t huge. But if the monthly birth/death estimates are off repeatedly, that’s another story. I’m sure that the BLS’s birth/death model works as well as something inherently imperfect can in normal times; but these aren’t normal times. The POR Economy has imposed an atmosphere of uncertainty (e.g., energy, taxes, regulation) and threat (Chrysler debt, GM debt, TARP) in the private sector the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1930s. I believe that the general atmosphere of uncertainty is holding back new start-ups, and restraining those who nonetheless take the plunge from taking on employees. If the birth/death model is overstating net gains, as I believe it is, we will see the reported jobs numbers come down significantly when BLS does its annual comprehensive revisions next year.

The 2012 Pelosi GTxi SS/RT Sport Edition (HT: Emailer)