From Doug Ross, in an e-mail he received from a mergers and acquisitions specialist:

My clients are all entrepreneurs having built successful businesses with sales of $5 million to $50 million. My prospective buyers are typically companies with sales of $50 million to $200 million. Every one of these companies (buyers and sellers) today shares these common denominators:

1. Their businesses are down 10, 20% or more.
2. They have either laid off staff or have reduced hours to 4-day weeks trying to keep key staff.
3. They have reduced their own salaries and in many cases have implemented “cross the board” salary reductions.
4. They (for the first time in their lives) have no ability to forecast beyond 4 weeks.
5. They see nothing good on the horizon that would benefit them re: sales, cost reduction, efficiency, etc.
6. In other words, they are experiencing a loss of optimism and any positive outlook on the future.

….. I am so outraged as to what is happening to our country. This is no longer a political issue [because] we will all lose. We are all casualties of the new paradigm. There will be many more as we continue into a morass that will take generations to recover, if we can. Be it “Cap and Trade”; government-run health care; TARP; bailouts; “stimulus”; business takeovers, etc.; our future is being controlled by bureaucrats and politicians who never, ever, ever ran a business and knew the “gut-check” of filling out and paying their “941’s”.

How could they know how to create a job? Throwing billions at states and municipalities with payoffs to unions, lobbyists and partisan sectors? Sadly, the worst is yet to come with job losses, cost increases, inflation, etc.

Doug’s e-mailer describes the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid promised/threatened, and that yours truly was able to recognize (because I’ve worked with and for businesses like the ones Doug’s e-mailer described) over a year ago. Businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and investors who picked up on the possible extent of the horrors the trio were promising/threatening at the time began reacting preemptively in anticipation of the conditions just described, taking steps they normally take when signs of a serious recession as normal people define it begins before the serious recession actually began (though the third quarter of 2008 was negative at -0.5%, it didn’t get really serious until the fourth quarter).

The ones who caught it early are the lucky (actually, prescient) ones. Those who didn’t see it soon enough are much worse off, and are sorely regretting not paying attention more closely. Nonetheless, in Month 13 of the POR Economy, now the POR Recession — no, with credit to Mark Levin, make that the POR Repression — we’re all stuck in the horrid mess.

Doug continues with his own add-on:

Who could possibly hire in this environment? The economy is flat on its back because Obama and the Democrats put it there; and their policies continue to suck the life out of the most productive members of society.

New regulations, new taxes, new health benefit dictates, forced unionization… who could possibly be hopeful in this sort of environment?

….. I’ll say it for the record: Obama is a failed president and his is a failed presidency. His Statist ideology has failed in every place and every time it’s been tried. And it’s failing now, as anyone with half a brain knew it would.

…. and they think they’re just warming up.

Noteworthy Net-Worthies:

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If you thought Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s admission of previous and perhaps still-current sympathies with eugenics was bad, wait until you get a load of President Obama’s science czar John Holdren. Zombietime’s comprehensive review (HT Michelle Malkin) of a book Holdren co-authored with long since proven wrong population hysterics Paul and Anne Ehrlich. In the book, Holdren and the Ehrlich’s wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

There was actually a Senate hearing on Holdren, where he was ineffectively vetted.

I agree with Zombie that nothing short of the following would be grounds for Holdren’s continuations:

I challenge John Holdren to publicly renounce and disavow the opinions and recommendations he made in the book Ecoscience; and until he does so, I will hold him responsible for those statements.

Of course, we know Holdren won’t do that. And now, we know that President Obama doesn’t mind having a eugenics advocate as his most important “science” adviser.

I would suggest that Holdren’s presence puts some ugly context around Obama’s answer at ABC’s health care broadcast inside the White House to that woman who told the story of her 100 year-old mother who received a pacemaker because a doctor was impressed with the mother’s spirit. Obama’s response to this heartwarming story:

I don’t think that we can make judgments based on peoples’ spirit.

Translation: “Well then, die already, will ya?”

From all appearances, Barack Obama is an ideological soulmate of John Holdren.

This is the brave new world statist health care would give us, complete with people having the mindset of Obama and Holdren at the helm, no matter who happens to the President or in Congress at the time.

No thanks.

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Sonia Sotomayor’s hearings begin today. I’ve said all that needs to be said about her objective unfitness already, but part of what I wrote needs repeating:

This statement (“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life”) justifies — no, it actually demands — an instant rejection of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination. This woman clearly has a racist, sexist mindset drenched in a stereotype that is not and never has been true.

….. Sonia Sotomayor is objectively unfit to be a Supreme Court justice, or for that matter any kind of judge.

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A way-underestimated contributor to the rise in unemployment has been the rise in the minimum wage. Teen-aged unemployment is through the roof. The Wall Street Journal elaborates on the effects:

First, “a sizable majority of the studies give a relatively consistent (though not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects.” Second, “studies that focus on the least-skilled groups [i.e., teens, and welfare moms] provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects.”

Proponents argue that millions of workers will benefit from the bigger paychecks. But about two of every three full-time minimum-wage workers get a pay raise anyway within a year on the job. Meanwhile, those who lose their jobs or who never get a job in the first place get a minimum wage of $0.

….. (it’s estimated that) the 70-cent per-hour minimum wage hike this month would kill “about 300,000 jobs for those between the ages of 16-24.” Single working mothers would also be among those most hurt.

The mislabeled party of compassion strikes again.

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So predictable, from Tigerhawk (HT Instapundit):

Call me a cynic, but I am not in the least surprised that a couple of weeks after Barack Obama’s strong approval/disapproval ratings took a turn to the unfavorable and Obamacare is looking less like a lead pipe cinch it is suddenly time to investigate the Bush administration.

Of course. This is what authoritarians do when things start not going their way.

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Finally, on a sort-of lighter note:

The Chicago Cubs may become the first Major League Baseball team in 39 years to file for bankruptcy as Tribune Co. seeks to sell the franchise after months of negotiations.

Long-suffering Cubs fans, including yours truly, understand that this move is a mere formal confirmation of the reality we’ve been resigned to for over a century.

From Clear Lake, Iowa in the Diocese of Dubuque (original PDF is here; HT Catholic News Agency):

CLEAR LAKE — When Deanna Lingenfelter was born in January of 1952, doctors told her parents she would not survive. Deanna was born three months premature and weighed just three pounds. But Helen and Harold Lingenfelter were a strong Catholic couple and never gave up hope — not even one year later, when they learned their little girl had cerebral palsy. Doctors advised them to place Deanna in an institution, but they ignored that advice and brought her home where she was raised with her five siblings.

Click on the graphic below to see a JPG of the full article in a new window or tab.

At Rose’s suggestion, a good 6-month sober-upper:

An editorial in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal bemoaned the fact that the state-run health system in Massachusetts is failing, and that its implosion isn’t common knowledge.

Formally known as CommonwealthCare, the Massachusetts scheme has the political name of “RomneyCare,” in “honor” of the Bay State governor and former presidential candidate who championed its passage in 2006.

The Journal understands that the Bay State Blowup is one of the media’s least-covered stories because exposure of CommonwealthCare’s true results would make all too clear the awaiting disasters found in the various versions of ObamaCare Congress is considering for the entire country.

The Journal editorial yesterday primarily addressed what I’ll call the “free rider” problem (link to outside blog post added by me; bolds are mine):

In a rational world, the prognosis for ObamaCare would wait on the evidence in Massachusetts, given that the commonwealth’s 2006 program closely resembles what Democrats are trying to do in Washington. If the results were widely known, it might be dead on arrival.

The Massachusetts law, which was championed by former GOP Governor Mitt Romney, imposed an individual mandate, requiring nearly all residents to buy health insurance or else pay a penalty. (The exceptions are those who qualify for the state’s public program.) This was supposed to cover everybody and save money too. We’ve written before about how costs have exploded, but it also turns out that consumers have other ideas.

Well, the returns are rolling in, and a useful case study comes from the community-based health plan Harvard-Pilgrim. CEO Charlie Baker reports that his company has seen an “astonishing” uptick in people buying coverage for a few months at a time, running up high medical bills, and then dumping the policy after treatment is completed and paid for. Harvard-Pilgrim estimates that between April 2008 and March 2009, about 40% of its new enrollees stayed with it for fewer than five months and on average incurred about $2,400 per person in monthly medical expenses. That’s about 600% higher than Harvard-Pilgrim would have otherwise expected.

The individual mandate penalty for not having coverage is only about $900, so people seem to be gaming the Massachusetts system. “This is a problem,” Mr. Baker writes on his blog, in the understatement of the year. “It is raising the prices paid by individuals and small businesses who are doing the right thing by purchasing twelve months of health insurance, and it’s turning the whole notion of shared responsibility on its ear.”

Mr. Baker is right, though he underestimates the extent to which it is rational for people to do this, considering the government-mandated incentives. To one degree or another all insurance pools require the younger and healthier to subsidize the older and sicker, though part of the risk-sharing bargain is the hedge against unanticipated or future health problems — i.e., true insurance. The combination of guaranteed issue and community rating actively encourages parts of the healthier population to forgo coverage and thus blow up voluntary risk pools. No doubt our politicians will conclude that the solution is to raise the penalty for going uninsured, though it would be easier and more rational to let insurance markets function without mandates.

But the statist politicians who dominate the Massachusetts legislature didn’t want “easier” and “more rational”; they wanted “more controlled” and, with Ted Kennedy cheering them on (see picture above), “more national.” The failure to recognize this ultimate objective, and to thus get co-opted into concocting a scheme that he naively thought would be enough to appease the statists, is Mitt Romney’s most obvious economic policy failure as Bay State governor.

As to the media, almost nothing of what is going wrong in Massachusetts gets reported outside of New England. Even when problems do get noticed, newspapers like the Boston Globe persist in describing CommonwealthCare aka RomneyCare as a “grand experiment” and “trailblazing.” Rationing is already occurring; yet a Globe reporter recently described the 12% cost cuts necessary to stay within budget as mere “trimming.”

If the failures of state-run health care in Massachusetts were more widely known, the clear and imminent failure of what might become ObamaCare would be drop-dead obvious. That would seem to explain the statist solutions uber alles establishment media’s disinterest.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Note: This item originally appeared at Pajamas Media and was teased at BizzyBlog on Friday morning.
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Money flowing into the Treasury has been on a yearlong downward spiral.

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In much of the Midwest, 2009 thus far has been a year of record rains, lots of snow, and lots of record low temperatures.

The bad news is that this year’s weather has presented unwanted challenges to farmers attempting to get their planting done in time, and that flooding has caused terrible hardship in some areas. The upside, besides the fact that it’s yet another anecdotal nail in the coffin of global warming alarmists, is that 2009′s weather thus far has made keeping the grass green a much easier task for most homeowners. When they look outside, they see usually see healthy green growth, and would agree that this year’s climate, for all of its other problems, has been pretty good for growing a lawn.

What in the world does this have to do with government receipts? Plenty, in a metaphorical sense. You see, in the spring of 2008, U.S. government coffers, like this spring’s Midwestern grass, also experienced a lot of healthy green growth. That’s because, despite the fact that the alleged recession-deciders at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) still believe otherwise, the U.S. economy’s climate was pretty good. In fact, the results were so positive that the NBER’s apparent failure to consider federal receipt growth in their recession determination decision should be seen as almost negligent.

To appreciate just how good the supposedly recessionary second quarter was for Uncle Sam, it’s useful to look at the numbers in two ways. Here’s the first (the analysis excludes 2008 stimulus payments, which the government should have classified as expenditures; all figures are in millions):

The chart shows strong inflows in two of the three specific line items. First, taxes paid by employees basically kept pace with inflation excluding food and energy.

Second, confounding the alleged experts, taxes directly paid by individuals continued to soar in the year during which the effect of Bush 43′s supply-side tax cuts was supposed to wear off. April’s inflows in this category led to an all-time one-month record for federal receipts. What’s more (not shown), June 2008′s analogous figure, which consisted almost entirely of estimated payments, came in slightly above that of June 2007, indicating that entrepreneurs, investors, businesspeople and others who pay quarterly estimates remained mostly optimistic about the state of the economy — at least on June 16, when the payments were due. Additionally, collections from economic activity during June 2008 were an all-time record for that month.

A very likely explanation for the decline in corporate receipts, and their larger decline to be revealed shortly, is that companies could not increase prices for their goods and services fast enough to recover the 25%-plus increases they saw in gas and other fuel prices during the quarter.

Well, what about the lines for all other receipts and the refunds? That’s why there’s a second chart:

This chart shows even more convincingly that the treasury’s second quarter of 2008 was a large improvement over the same quarter in 2007, thanks to a boomlet in receipts from individuals. The 5.1% overall increase in collections makes absurd the claim that the second quarter’s annualized Gross Domestic Product growth of 2.8% (vs. 4.8% in the second quarter of 2007) – only 0.3% lower than the median GDP growth of the past 50 years (!) — was somehow “artificial” because of 2008′s stimulus payments (which didn’t affect tax collections at all) or the run-up in fuel prices.

Someday, the alleged gurus at the NBER will have to make a convincing case why they think the economy slipped into recession during the first half of 2008 with two quarters of positive GDP growth, lower job loss (as a percentage of the workforce) than any other recession on record, and a boom in receipts from economic activity that kept going strong until June. They haven’t done so yet. If they don’t, it’s looking ever more likely that history will have to ultimately rule that these elitist emperors had no clothes.

Sadly, the receipts boom ended in 2008′s third quarter. Since then, the economy has been heading downhill and has been in a recession as normal people define it, i.e. two or more consecutive quarters of GDP contraction.

Why this has happened is not difficult to understand. It can be summarized in one word: “scared.” As Investors Business Daily noted on July 2 after the latest horrid employment report, “The private sector — the real engine of economic and job growth — won’t hire because it’s scared of what it sees coming out of Washington.” They also won’t expand, invest, or take most risks. Some, including yours truly, have characterized the reaction as a form of “going Galt.” The year-old scared posture has nothing to do with cowardice, and everything to do with preservation and protection of the economic well-being of one’s self, family, employees, and other stakeholders.

The fright began with the inception of what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy over a year ago. That’s when Nancy Pelosi, Democratic nominee Barack Obama, and Harry Reid began advancing their energy-starving, high-taxing, business-blaming agenda in earnest. In capsule form, the Terrible Triumvirate promised to destroy the necessary conditions for economic growth. In doing so, they (conveniently?) forgot that the collective expectations of the marketplace are a necessary ingredient for healthy green growth. The metaphorical grass began to turn brown. In the very next quarter, Uncle Sam’s year-over-year collections haul went negative.

The collections situation has only gotten worse, as Pelosi, Obama, and Reid have done everything they can to inject intolerable uncertainty into seemingly every corner of the economy.

This, folks, is what a serious recession looks like from Treasury’s vantage point:

The earth is now indeed parched. The prospects of a return to healthy green growth appear very remote, especially since unaffordable energy taxes and statist health care are at the top of the elitists’ agenda. The more pertinent matter at the moment should be how to keep the grass from dying.

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UPDATE, July 15: The chart at the right in the final graphic above (“Monthly Receipts by Type — Second Quarter 2009 and 2008″) was updated here on Tuesday. June receipts per the Monthly Treasury Statement came in even $15 billion lower than I thought they would after reviewing the final Daily Treasury Statement.

Noel Sheppard has a post at NewsBusters with, among other things, the video of Tony’s speech at the MRC Gala dinner in April 2008. I was privileged to have attended that event, and to briefly speak with Tony after the event’s conclusion.

Sheppard also has videos and text of tributes from Fox New reporters and others.

Princeton High School, Tony’s alma mater, dedicated a memorial to him last year:

Tony’s successor as White House Press Secretary, Dana Perino, has a moving remembrance at Politico. Read the whole thing.

If you listened to any top-of-the-hour radio newscast yesterday, you probably heard that General Motors has exited from bankruptcy, with the company promising to really, really do better this time around.

You more than likely didn’t hear anything about how much government money it has taken to enable GM to survive and reemerge. That’s because original story sources like the Associated Press put off such troublesome disclosures until later in their reports.

In the AP’s case, even when writers Tom Krisher and Ken Thomas, assisted by three other contributors, finally got around to discussing taxpayer funding in the 25th paragraph of their 29-paragraph report, they understated the amount of government money expended. The pair also seemed to imply that creditors of the “old GM,” consisting of the parts the emerging company left behind, would be made whole, which is of course far from the case.

Here are the paragraphs from the story that relate to my observations:

General Motors completed an unusually quick exit from bankruptcy protection on Friday with ambitions of making money and building cars people are eager to buy. Once the world’s largest and most powerful automaker, new GM is now leaner, cleansed of massive debt and burdensome contracts that would have sunk it without federal loans.

….. At a news conference, CEO Fritz Henderson said the revamped automaker will be faster and more responsive to customers than the old one. It will generate cash and repay billions in government loans ahead of a 2015 deadline.

….. GM, in a viability plan presented to the government, said it would break even before interest and taxes next year, and be slightly above break-even for 2011 on a pretax basis.

“Sitting here today, I don’t have any reason to disbelieve those numbers,” Henderson said, giving no details of when the company would make a net profit.

….. He said the U.S. government, which owns a majority stake in GM, has vowed that it would not get involved in day-to-day decisions.

….. GM received $19 billion to $20 billion more in federal aid on Friday, the remainder of the $50 billion it will receive, Henderson said. A large part of the money will be held in escrow.

Turning a profit will not be easy. GM has piled up losses and survives only because of government loans.

Besides the U.S. government’s 61 percent controlling interest, the United Auto Workers union gets a 17.5 percent stake of the company through its retiree health care trust, and the Canadian government will control 11.7 percent. The remaining shares went to bondholders of the old company.

….. The parts of GM not moving to the new company will become part of “old GM,” a collection of assets and liabilities that will be sold to pay creditors.

That last sentence should end with “to partially pay creditors, if there’s any money available after administrative costs.”

“Break even before interest and taxes” probably means “will lose billions.”

But let’s get to the government-provided money. Straight from the relevant page at FinancialStability.Gov, here is the list of GM-related disbursements:

• Dec. 29, 2008; Purchase of Debt Obligation — $884,024,131
• Dec. 31, 2008; Debt Obligation with Warrants and Additional Note — $13,400,000,000
• April 22, 2009; Debt Obligation with Warrants and Additional Note — $2,000,000,000
• May 20, 2009; Debt Obligation with Warrants and Additional Note — $4,000,000,000
• June 3, 2009; Debt Obligation with Warrants and Additional Note — $30,100,000,000

The lists totals to $49,984,024,131.39 (just kidding about the 39 cents).

The “$19-$20 billion” (they don’t know?) mentioned in the article brings the grand total to just shy of $70 billion. The “$50 billion” the AP reporters refer to is the total of only the last line item above and the “$19-20 billion” that is not included in the above list. The first four line items have in essence been written off in exchange or the government’s 61% controlling interest in the company.

To get that controlling interest the government had to shortchange unsecured creditors who had much more skin in the game. The final line-up, which is a bit different than was anticipated at the time of the linked post, is 61% to Uncle Sam; 11.7% to the Canadian government; 17.5% to the United Auto Workers retiree health care trust; and the rest to unsecured creditors, who, under duress, “forgave” $27 billion of the $35 billion they were owed. By contrast, the government got control of GM in exchange for writing off the first four line items above amounting to just shy of $20 billion.

Beyond all of this, the related FinancialStability.gov page lists $12.5 billion disbursed to GMAC, and $3.5 billion to an entity called “GM Supplier Receivables, LLC.” The latter is meant to make GM suppliers whole for unpaid amounts the “old GM” never paid.

All of the disbursements identified add up to $86 billion (GM’s real total of $70 billion plus the two amounts in the previous paragraph). Combining them with the hard to estimate but very real uncompensated portion of the unsecured creditors’ “forgiveness” pushes the grand total of other peoples’ money and resources expended in the name of saving the company to the neighborhood of $100 billion.

Separately, the AP writers referred to a Treasury statement “crediting GM’s restructuring with saving both the automaker and ‘tens of thousands’ of American jobs.” Assuming the jobs saved number is as high as 50,000 (I doubt it), that would mean that this entire episode cost $2 million per job saved ($100 bil divided by 50,000). Even if GM somehow survives, or even thrives, how can anyone possibly think throwing all of that money and value at the problem was worth it?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Greater Cincinnati:

July 9, 2009

Shirley Marie Dietrich always excelled at math.

In fact, she made a career out of her proclivity with numbers, first at the Western and Southern Life Insurance Co. and then for 49 years as a Sister of Charity.

Sister Dietrich died Monday at the order’s Cincinnati Motherhouse at the College of Mount St. Joseph, Delhi Township. She was 79.

A native of Northside and 1947 graduate of the former Our Lady of Mercy High School, Queensgate, Sister Dietrich took her vows in 1959 and worked in finance and bookkeeping for the Sisters of Charity in the dioceses of Denver, Colo., Colorado Springs, Colo., and Cincinnati.

Away from work, she made friends easily.

“Shirl loved parties and fun times and visiting with friends,” said Sister S. Roslyn Hafertepe. “She was an excellent companion to our senior sisters, taking them to medical visits, social events and visiting with family and friends.

“She always brought happiness and joy in her sensitive and responsive manner wherever there was a need.” …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

Call it “Yankee Imperialist Corrupts Impressionable Iraqi Youth”:

Am I supposed to believe that USA Today had no other more relevant pictures they could have used? The fact that they went back to an AP file photo from 2007 is pretty strong evidence that USAT’s page-fillers were looking to make a point.

Here are selected paragraphs from the related report by Greg Zoroya:

Pentagon health experts are urging Defense Secretary Robert Gates to ban the use of tobacco by troops and end its sale on military property, a change that could dramatically alter a culture intertwined with smoking.

Jack Smith, head of the Pentagon’s office of clinical and program policy, says he will recommend that Gates adopt proposals by a federal study that cites rising tobacco use and higher costs for the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs as reasons for the ban.

The study by the Institute of Medicine, requested by the VA and Pentagon, calls for a phased-in ban over a period of years, perhaps up to 20. “We’ll certainly be taking that recommendation forward,” Smith says.

A tobacco ban would confront a military culture, the report says, in which “the image of the battle-weary soldier in fatigues and helmet, fighting for his country, has frequently included his lit cigarette.”

Also, the report said, troops worn out by repeated deployments often rely on cigarettes as a “stress reliever.” The study found that tobacco use in the military increased after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began.

Far be it from me to deny soldiers risking their lives for their country a bit of stress relief. But apparently the perfumed princes at the Pentagon can’t put themselves in the shoes of combat soldiers and imagine that for some of them a smoke break might be a useful tonic in very difficult situations.

Besides, a graphic at the USAT’s story shows that tobacco use by all veterans, at 22%, is barely higher than that of the entire population’s 20%. And guess what? If you take into account the fact that men greatly outnumber women in both the active military and veterans’ ranks, that 2% difference probably disappears. This American Lung Association Fact Sheet estimates that 17.4% of women smoke. So it appears that smoking is no more of a problem in the military than it is in the country as a whole.

So what’s the point? I’ll leave that to readers to think through and perhaps comment upon.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

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

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Related: Following up on Joe Biden’s appearance campaign stop yesterday in Cincinnati, the Washington Post’s Peter Slevin, who described the Vice President’s oration as “a campaign-style speech,” also observed/claimed that:

The aggressive tone and tempo of his speech came at a moment when the Obama administration is facing sustained criticism from the GOP amid worries that the recovery may stall. It also came near the end of a rough week for Biden, who said Sunday that the administration “misread the economy,” only to have Obama publicly disagree with him.

Last time I checked, for something to stall, it first has to “start.” There’s no indication that a recovery has started here, or here, or here, or here. In fairness, the final two items, which are the Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing and Non-Manufacturing indices, are showing less contraction. At 44.8% and 47.0%, both are above the 42.7% threshold ISM considers to be truly recessionary, yet below the 50% or more reading considered expansionary. So it it possible that a recovery might begin in a couple of months if the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy’s progenitors don’t screw things up any further.

Additionally, forecasts for second quarter 2009 growth are currently negative. Near the end of this article, Bloomberg reports that “Economists surveyed …. last month projected the economy would contract at a 2 percent pace from April through June and then expand in the second half of 2009.” Those predictions came before the last employment report showed much worse job loss than expected. GDP shrinking by less is not a recovery, which, if it has “started” at all, is at most 10 days old. The Post’s Slevin is not that clairvoyant, and is concocting the idea that the economy is currently recovering entirely in his vivid imagination.

The PJM column points to the importance of expectations, and how Pelosi’s, Obama’s, and Reid’s (deliberate?) dashing of expectations just over a year ago began the recession that they now own. If it begins to look like cap and trade or nationalized health care are actually going to make it in any form to President Obama’s desk this year, you’ll see another analogous reaction from investors, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople. If so, Joe Biden, Peter Slevin, and the rest of us will more than likely not see any kind of meaningful recovery for quite a while.

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Concise confirmation: Comment #6 at the PJM column –

….. I held on to my employees until it almost broke me. Across our great country there are tens of thousands of businesses like mine where people are going Galt because they have to. I will keep my business open but have to get another job. No whining here but the reality is we listened very closely to Obama/Pelosi/Reid. I would say that most of us are shocked at the arrogance and ignorance they have displayed. Whether incompetent or evil, we have made the decisions that are absolutely necessary to protect our families and businesses. If our country does not reassert itself against these untried and ignorant leaders, the next four quarters will make the first two quarters of 2009 look like the good ole times!

Something must be in the water at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

In the past couple of weeks, longtime columnist Connie Schultz, who happens to be married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, has come out in favor of changing copyright law to “save newspapers” (the relevant columns are here and here). Its Readers’ Representative has also jumped on board.

This hostility towards blogs and bloggers is not a one-off aberration at the PD. In November 2007, columnist Dick Feagler went off, asking, among other things, “Have they ridden (implied: off the record) with a candidate in the middle of the night?” Feagler’s cozy brand of non-objective “journalism” has been one of one-party, one-paper-dominated Cleveland’s biggest problems for decades.

More recently, in what I take to be his second related video chat (HT The Future of Journalism via Instapundit) on the copyright topic, Readers’ Rep Ted Diadiun, pictured at right, calls bloggers “a bunch of pipsqueaks out there talking about what real journalists do” (at 10:00 mark of video at link).

As a blogger, and especially as one who participated briefly with three other Ohio bloggers at the PD’s Wide Open blog experiment in the fall of 2007, this demands a response. In my brief association with the paper, I saw one horrid example of non-journalism and was able to do, if you don’t mind my saying so, “what real journalists do” to remedy it. What I saw later in a matter related to that incident, well after the Wide Open experiment ended, gives me no comfort that the situation involved has gotten any better.

The incident in question involved Ahmed Alzaree, an imam in Omaha who had accepted an offer to become imam at the Islamic Center of Cleveland (ICC). PD reporter David Briggs ignored a, uh, wide open clue that the situation might merit further inquiry when Alzaree told him that he “would not confirm his hiring, at one point saying he would not come to Cleveland because a reporter was inquiring about his background.”

Alleged “real journalist” Briggs did not pursue a clue dropped right in his lap, even though the ICC’s previous imam, Fawaz Damra, had been deported for, according to Briggs, “railing against Jews and raising money for Palestinian militant groups such as Islamic Jihad.”

Yours truly Googled Alzaree’s name and found a sermon he had delivered in Omaha. In it, among other things, he quoted a portion of the Qur’an that spoke of end times, when “The Muslims shall kill the Jews to the point that the Jew shall hide behind a big rock or a tree and the rock or tree shall call on the Muslim saying: hey, O Muslim there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Central Ohio blogger Patrick Poole dug further, and found that Alzaree had as guest speakers the likes of Wagdi Ghoneim, who had met with 2 of the 9/11 hijackers sometime before their terrorist attacks and was widely known before he “voluntarily” left the country for allegedly inflammatory terrorist-supporting speech.

That shook the PD’s Robert Smith to follow up on what Poole and yours truly had found. In doing so, “real journalist” Smith mentioned but did not link to my post on the PD’s web site, and did not identify me by name.

Almost a month went by. If there was any follow-up by the “real journalists” at the PD on Alzaree’s and his cohorts’ background and beliefs, none of it got to print or appeared online.

So “pipsqueaks” Poole and Blumer went to work again doing the work that the “real journalists” at the PD wouldn’t do. Poole plowed through the Internet Archive to find pages scrubbed from the web site of Alzaree’s Omaha mosque. These pages, put up at about the time Alzaree began his tenure there, referred to Israel as “the New Nazis,” called Israel’s treatment of Palestinians’ situation a second Holocaust, had links to a “charity” later determined by the government to be terror-funding front, and had coverage of the Iraq War delivered by the Revolutionary Communist Party. Yours truly found troubling evidence that many elders and other higher-ups at the ICC who had vigorously defended the dearly-deported Damra were still in very influential positions, creating an impression that Alzaree might be coming on board to start the terror-sympathetic cycle all over again.

Less than 18 hours after our “pipsqueak” posts appeared, “real journalist” Briggs  produced a piece (“New Cleveland imam hopes to ease Muslim-Jewish relations”) that was largely but not entirely defensive. It was clear that Briggs, though sympathetic, had done a fair amount of work fleshing out Alzaree’s biography, and had looked for varying viewpoints concerning the significance of the end-times hadith. Still, while crediting Poole, Briggs again failed to mention his then-associate at the PD’s Wide Open blog.

Three days later, Alzaree “resigned” before he even started. The headline from the “real journalists” at the Associated Press read, “Blog critics force imam to resign at Ohio mosque.” Yeah, as if two guys 150 and 250 miles away from Cleveland could do all that. Zheesh.

There is reason to believe Alzaree is no longer in the U.S.

If the “real journalists” at the PD felt any remorse at being scooped, a telltale sign would have been an improved performance on the ICC’s next imam candidate. Seven months later, shortly after that imam was installed, Poole, in his July 9, 2008 Pajamas Media column (“Cleveland’s New Terror Imam”) on Sayed Ahmed Abouabdalla, demonstrated that nothing had changed. Poole found, among other things, that Abouabdalla teaches at a Dearborn, Michigan university with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and has served on the Fiqh Council, described by Poole as a “‘Who’s Who’ of convicted terrorist leaders, terrorist fundraisers, unindicted co-conspirators, and terrorist associates.”

Poole noted in his column that coverage of Abouabdalla by the “real journalists” at the PD at that point consisted of “two glowing …. articles …. (with no) indication that background investigation was ever done.”

In all this time, not once has any “real journalist” at the PD assigned to the stories in question ever contacted Poole or me.

And Ted Diadiun and Connie Schultz want to embargo and/or charge for the PD’s content?

I’ve got news for you, guys and gals: If the experience yours truly and Poole had with the paper’s “real journalists” is any indication, the money should flow in the opposite direction. In the Alzaree case, the two of us did hours of work informing our readers that your town appeared to be getting an imam who might be just as bad as the one your paper did 45 stories on in the early 2000s. But we “pipsqueaks” can’t be everywhere; your “real journalists” did no better with the next guy. Now safely ensconced at ICC, Sayed Ahmed Abouabdalla’s presence may pose as much of a potential domestic threat as Fawaz Damra’s ever did, or Ahmed Alzaree’s would have.

While many other establishment newspapers are displaying links to blog entries that comment on their stories and pulling blog content such as this that they find newsworthy, many at the PD (thank goodness not all) are, as Glenn Reynolds observed on Thursday, stuck in 2002, trying to lock up its content instead of actively participating in the exciting free-for-all known as New Media. How absolutely pathetic.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE: The first comment at Poole’s PJM column on the new imam seems particularly pertinent –

I think the concept of investigative, honest, unbiased reporting is so foreign to most MSM types, they classify anyone who does it as a “blogger.”

UPDATE 2, July 14 — John Kroll, who is the P-D’s online New Impact Editor, had a follow-up video discussion with Ted Diadiun on the afternoon of July 10 (“Two Pipsqueaks Sitting Around Talking”) that can be found here. I think the end result is that Ted had to dial back his criticism based on real journalistic and analytical blogs John cited. But I think Ted is clinging to a “we’re the only ones really doing journalism” assumption that a) isn’t true, and b) is, as seen in the story told in the body of this post, sometimes not done particularly well at the P-D.

I will concede the concern Ted raised, and I have raised it myself in conversations, though not here at my blog until now (as least that I can recall), that if newspapers disappeared, the blogs would not be in a position to fill the “watchdog” void. Perhaps more properly stated, the void between the watchdog work that is being far less than perfectly done and what should be done would widen exponentially. I think mechanisms would spring up to fill the void over time, but it would take a while, probably several years. Given politicians’ and others’ ability to do mischief, the time until those mechanisms came into being might be a really ugly open season for corruption.