From Seattle (video is at link):

Aug 7, 2009 / 03:15 pm

CNA recently published a story about Gloria Strauss, a young girl whose struggle with cancer and her reliance on her Catholic faith during her illness, is leading people to the faith.

Her short life also inspired the creation of an organization to reach out to families with a loved one facing a chronic illness. Today, we take a look at the stories of two families who have been touched by the efforts of Gloria’s Angels.

Gloria’s story begins with her being diagnosed at the age of six with a form of cancer called Neuroblastoma.

Amazingly, she witnessed to her Catholic faith constantly during her struggle with the disease.

Her father, Doug, told CNA that Gloria had a beautiful gift: she was able to draw people to Christ through her cancer. “She taught us all how to carry a cross. Her gift to us was her living example of her commitment to a relationship with God through constant prayer. She always said, “Yes.”

“From shots to sickness it always began and ended with the sign of the cross,” Doug continued. “Often doctors would have to stand and wait as she made the sign of the cross and prayed. Amazing to watch!”

It wasn’t just her actions that drew people to Christ. Doug recalled how everyone spoke of Gloria’s presence. “She had this presence that allowed people to want to be with her and pray for her.” Even at the age of seven, “she knew her calling to bring people to God through her cancer.”

After Gloria passed away on September 21, 2007, the Strausses, together with Seattle businessman Bob Turner, founded Gloria’s Angels to assist families in caring for their loved ones who are diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses.

Matt Miller was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma at the end of February 2008, leading him and his wife KyAnne to ask the Lord for assistance.

When they first met with Gloria’s Angels, it was at a time when the family “couldn’t keep all the balls up in the air anymore,” KyAnne told CNA. With five children between the ages 26 and 6, including one with Autism, it was difficult for the Millers to keep up with meals, yard work, babysitting and chores around the house.

Gloria’s Angels stepped in to help the family optimize their ability to care for Matt.

“First off, they organized a meeting with our family and friends that were on an email group I had set up,” KyAnne explained. “They presented a template in a Power Point presentation” which “showed different areas of service that we needed including, yard work, housecleaning, meals, babysitting and especially prayer.”

“Within a very short period of time we had three meals a week being delivered, our yard and hedge whipped into shape, landscaping done by a man we didn’t even know. It did Matt a world of good to see the yard looking so great. There were groceries delivered and babysitting outings that our kids thoroughly enjoyed,” she continued. “We had the Rosary being said for us by people we didn’t even know.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Barry Casselman has a piece on Josh Mandel here.

An excerpt:

…Watching Mandel perform as he tours the country to raise funds for his next race (his goal is to raise a million dollars one year before the treasurer’s race begins in earnest), there is no question that he is already something of a political presence. Bright, aggressive, quite articulate and seemingly fearless, he leaves his audiences with a sense they have met a future political superstar. He has a story to tell, and he knows how to tell it. including about two grandfathers who were the greatest influence on his life, one a Holocaust survivor from Poland, and the other a World War II veteran. Proudly Jewish, Mandel pointedly cites how the Italian Jewish side of his family were saved from the Nazis by the Catholic Church.

These are not good times for the Republican Party in Ohio and the nation. Only a few years ago, Republicans were in charge almost everywhere. Now they are in minorities, and struggling to redefine conservatism for the years ahead. Young talented persons in both parties seem more and more reluctant to enter public service with the brutal state of election campaigns, the preoccupation with fundraising, and the severe restriction on privacy and personal lives.

Josh Mandel is, for now, a contrarian phenomenon, already a model of political energy and conservative pragmatism, with accomplishments way ahead of his years, and a young man apparently going someplace, and soon.

I couldn’t agree more…as long Josh remembers who/what got him to each step and doesn’t end up like our other politicians who ultimately sell their souls for a seat at the trendy table of the day.

That should be our prayer for everyone running in any election cycle.

…. which is why those who want to fudge, obfuscate, pretend and hide what they’re really up to, and what they’re really all about, hate her so deeply.

From AP via Breitbart:

In her first communication since leaving office, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin described in an Internet posting Friday that President Obama’s plan to overhaul the health care system was evil.

“Who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course,” the former vice presidential candidate wrote on her Facebook page.

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil,” Palin wrote.

For those who really don’t yet get it, the PJM column put up today at BizzyBlog, which immediately follows below if you’re on the home page, explains it. See the three point-making paragraphs at the end. You’ll get it after reading them; the only question is whether you have the integrity and perhaps courage to admit that those points, and of course Palin, are right.

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UPDATE: Michelle Malkin piles on, God love her (“Death panels? What death panels? Oh, those death panels”) –

• Elderly left at risk by NHS bidding wars to find cheapest care with reverse auctions
• Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections
• Elderly suffer in care shambles
• Twisted priorities that let the elderly suffer
• NHS neglects elderly depression
• NHS failure on Down’s screening kills healthy babies
• ‘I said to the nurse, please feed her’

The moral arguments against it are overwhelming, and need to take center stage.

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Note: This column was published at Pajamas Media and teased here at BizzyBlog on Friday.

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Slowly but surely, the nation is waking up to the likelihood that the unwieldy state-run health care concoction known as ObamaCare will likely not achieve the cost savings the President and his supporters have promised.

That’s a nice development, but it’s not enough. In fact, at some point, and I believe we are there, it becomes a distraction.

Though a relevant consideration, cost is among the least of ObamaCare’s problems. Leading the argument against ObamaCare with cost considerations sells the American people short, and betrays a moral insecurity that, if not addressed, will cause some future form of ObamaCare to sneak in — if not now, in the not very distant future.

ObamaCare’s supporters would love opponents to stay focused on cost, because, despite plentiful help from the Congressional Budget Office debunking the administration’s weak claims, the absence or presence of potential savings is not directly provable. As long as the focus remains on cost, important points about fundamental human rights that would be stripped away and handed over to the tender mercies of the state won’t get heard. That must change.

The moral insecurity emanating from ObamaCare’s Washington-based opposition (vs. many of us in the heartland, who see evil’s attempt to visit itself upon us for what it is) seems to revolve around two bogus ideas.

The first is that Obama and the statists in Congress somehow occupy the moral high ground because they promise to “insure” everybody.

But ObamaCare isn’t about insurance. If it were, every American would be insured shortly after it takes effect. But The CBO estimated that even when implemented, only 16 million more Americans would be insured, barely a third of the alleged total of uninsured. ObamaCare, as IBD and many other editorialists have noted, is really about (eventually) eliminating insurance and devolving the entire system into a single-payer arrangement — something Obama himself enthusiastically supported in 2003 before he became concerned with electoral viability.

Health care should first and foremost be about whether those who need treatment get treatment. And guess what? In this country, those who need treatment not only almost always get treated, but they also almost always get treated timely. It is against the law for hospitals to turn away patients requiring emergency medical treatment regardless of whether they can afford to pay.

Yes, there are many who are not insured and who cannot afford medical care. And yes, they often delay doing something about very real medical problems until they become more serious. That is a real problem. But the answer, while elusive, most certainly should not involve jeopardizing the viability of everyone else’s medical coverage and access to care, as ObamaCare indisputably does.

The second explanation for Beltway opponents’ moral insecurity is that our conservative elites seem not to believe that the American people will respond to moral arguments.

If they’re taking their cues from alleged religious “leaders,” their reluctance is understandable. Many Catholic bishops appear to support state-run care as long as abortion services are somehow excluded. Even worse, sadly and scandalously, many Catholic organizations which should know better, including Catholic Charities USA, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and the Catholic Health Association, have been outspoken campaigners for ObamaCare, even as it appears that abortion coverage remains in the statists’ plans.

But the moral arguments against ObamaCare are so easy, and so easily understood, that I can summarize them in the three points that follow.

First — Virtually without exception worldwide, state-run health care has led to rationing of care and long waits for even critical services. This has led to many needless deaths and disabilities, along with greatly diminished quality of life for many who eventually do receive care. Obama and the Congressional majority have presented no evidence indicating that serious rationing will not occur under its plan. In fact, under its progenitor known as CommonwealthCare aka RomneyCare in Massachusetts, serious rationing under the guise of fixed per-patient budgets is already on the horizon. How can any compassionate person claiming to have his or her moral bearings even consider supporting this almost certain result?

Second — Virtually without exception worldwide, state-run health care has led to denial of care on age-based and so-called qualify of life criteria. The Obama administration and Congress already opened the door for this abomination in the stimulus bill passed in February when it included funding for “comparative effectiveness research.” Michael Barone has accurately portrayed this attempt at final solutions that override doctor-patient decisions as “worse than junk science—it’s inherently deceptive.” How can someone claiming to have his or her moral bearings even consider supporting this?

Finally — The Obama administration is stacked with czars, Cabinet officials, and others who are enthusiastic supporters of the first two items, and who have frighteningly ghoulish outlooks on life and humanity. Take John Holdren (please). Many of these same people and others with similar “philosophies” would take responsible positions within ObamaCare’s maze, and would no doubt stay on as long as possible regardless of who controls the White House or Congress. How can someone claiming to have his or her moral bearings even consider allowing these people anywhere near the nation’s health care system?

That wasn’t difficult, was it?

If ObamaCare is opposed on clear moral grounds, it could go down to a crushing, argument-over defeat. If argued on cost alone, it will more than likely be back to haunt us. I say we bury it once and for all.

From Washington:

Washington D.C., Aug 9, 2009 / 04:04 am

A new documentary tells the stories of Greek and Roman Catholic women religious who lived their faith under communist harassment and persecution in Eastern and Central Europe.

The one-hour documentary, “Interrupted Lives: Catholic Sisters Under European Communism,” will be distributed to ABC television stations and affiliates on September 13. It will be scheduled at the discretion of local stations.

Between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many women religious endured imprisonment, exile to Siberia, forced farm and factory labor, deportation, seizure of their schools and hospitals and even expulsion from their convents.

Some sisters were nurses or educators while others cared for orphans, the elderly and the mentally ill, a Friday press release from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) says. “Interrupted Lives” tells their stories and interviews the “secret sisters” who joined religious life during the Communist period and lived their vocations in the underground.

The sisters and European scholars interviewed offer a “powerful testimony to the faith, courage and endurance of these religious women,” the USCCB says. “Their own stories raise awareness of those who still today undergo persecution for political or religious beliefs.”

The documentary was filmed on location in Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and the United States. It tells the sisters’ stories, taking viewers to the apartments, prisons, concentration convents and seized properties where Communism affected the sisters’ lives.

Sr. Margaret Nacke, a Sister of St. Joseph, was one of the executive producers of the documentary.

“We are inspired and strengthened by the faith and commitment of these sisters who endured over forty years of oppression under communism,” she said. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

On July 23, a spokesperson for state-controlled General Motors, following up on an inquiry I had made earlier in the day, informed me of the following in an e-mail:

Relative to your question regarding GM’s intent to report financials …..

GM plans to remain transparent regarding status on our business, including sales results and financials. As in the past, the sales and financial results have been reported in separate communications and we will continue with that practice. A date for reporting GM’s Q2 financial results has not yet been determined.

Yesterday, GM filed an 8-K report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s an 8.9 mb behemoth (available here) that will crash your Adobe Acrobat if you’re not careful. Among other things, it has 11 pages discussing risk factors, including an astonishing admission that the company’s “lack of effective internal controls could materially affect our financial condition and ability to carry out our business plans”; over 30 pages of minutiae relating to executive compensation; detailed information about unit sales; and over 3,000 pages of exhibits, including various agreements between the company and the United States Treasury.

But there are no second-quarter financials. Not even revenues.

Perhaps it’s my background, but I tend to have more patience than most for financial reporting issues and difficulties. But not in this case — especially given the promises of transparency.

A “New GM” didn’t emerge from bankruptcy until July 10, after the quarter ended. The original GM, now commonly referred to as “Old GM,” though in bankruptcy, was and still is a public company. After the shuffling of assets and liabilities in bankruptcy, “New GM” in essence got all the ongoing goodies, while “Old GM” got stuck with the dregs.

The formal name of “Old GM” is now Motors Liquidation Company. Its stock trades under the symbol MTLQQ. According to the 8-K “New GM” just filed, Motors Liquidation owns 10% of “New GM.”

Since it is still alive, “Old GM” aka Motors Liquidation would ordinarily be expected to file second-quarter financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 40-45 days of the end of the quarter, i.e., between August 9 and 14. Apparently, that’s not going to happen for quite a while. Dow Jones reported yesterday that:

In a regulatory filing, the auto maker said it will file quarterly reports as if it were still public. But rather than announcing April-through-June performance midyear as is customary, those figures will come out sometime after Sept. 30.

At that time, GM will make two separate reports: one for the so-called “old GM,” now being liquidated in bankruptcy court, and another for the GM created July 10 when a bankruptcy judge approved the sale of GM’s viable assets to the new company.

I would not be surprised if we never see a “clean” second quarter report for “old GM,” which may decide to report for April 1 through July 10. In any event, we now know that by the time we do see any full-fledged financials for either entity, it will be early- to mid-November. That’s pretty convenient for a company that is hemorrhaging market share and otherwise putting off a boatload of mostly bad news.

Contrary to what the GM spokesperson asserted, what is transpiring is not exactly “transparent.” Even if cost and profitability details were elusive in bankruptcy (and I tend to doubt it; many publicly-held companies in bankruptcy have issued complete financials), it should have been a piece of cake for “Old GM” to at least disclose revenues. I have little doubt that the Obama SEC would have issued a partial financial-statement waiver if needed and desired.

I suspect that the real reason we’re not seeing revenues is that, as was the case in the first quarter, GM’s revenues again trailed Ford’s.

Oh, and there’s this, also from the 8-K (bold is mine):

We are a private company and are not subject to the filing requirements of Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. We are a voluntary filer with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Okay, technically, GM is a “private company” (“A company whose shares are not traded on the open market”). But it surely isn’t “private” (“Personal or restricted”). US taxpayers own 61% of GM. It shouldn’t be too much to ask a majority taxpayer-owned entity to stop hiding behind legalese that was never intended to cover state-controlled enterprises.

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UPDATE, August 10: A close reading of the last two paragraphs of this AP report would indicate that we’re never going to see the second quarter broken out separately:

The company also disclosed Friday that it would not report second-quarter earnings this year, but it will disclose its performance for the three- and nine-month periods before Sept. 30. Those reports will come after the third quarter closes, and the company said they will not comply with general U.S. accounting principles. GM, however, will file reports that meet the accounting standards in 2010.

Spokeswoman Renee Rashid-Merem said GM won’t file the second-quarter earnings because of the extensive work still needed to set up the books for the new company. The new company also needs to finish accounting changes made necessary by selling its good assets to the new company.

I have to assume “would not report second-quarter earnings this year” in the first paragraph and “won’t file” in the second really mean “won’t ever file, period.” Of course, really enterprising financial statement readers might be able to piece the second quarter together by piecing “Old GM’s” first quarter and “new GM’s” third quarter from what the AP says will be a statement for the first nine months. But:

a) One of the reasons financials get released is so that stakeholders, in this case including the taxpaying public, don’t have to do that.
b) Depending on how they are presented, the reverse engineering may not be doable.
c) Based on the maneuver just pulled, I’ll believe it when I see it.

What follows is not meant in any way to make light of a literally life-and-death issue. It is instead meant to perhaps (we can always hope) drill a little truth into the thick heads of the establishment media’s alleged “journalists” who continue to refuse to see what’s right in front of them in ObamaCare (or in many cases to even read the legislation in the first place).

You see, abortion coverage in ObamaCare is analogous to the pasta afficionado’s expected set of ingredients in Prego Spaghetti Sauce, as presented in this popular 1984 commercial — that is, “It’s in there.”

On Sunday, in an alleged “Fact Check” piece on ObamaCare, the Associated Press tried to pretend abortion coverage isn’t in there. Two days later, prodded by Steven Ertelt at LifeNews.com and others in the pro-life community, the wire service specifically backtracked and admitted that yes, it’s in there (“Gov’t insurance would allow coverage for abortion”).

Now it’s Stephanie Condon of CBS who is pretending that abortion coverage is not in there in ObamaCare. LifeNews.com and pro-lifers are once again out there pushing back, while deliciously reminding the network of a 2004 story that wasn’t all there — or was only there in the vivid, anchor-ending imagination of Dan Rather (link to CBS story within excerpt added by me):

CBS News has become the latest mainstream media outlet to come under criticism from pro-life advocates for covering up the abortion funding tucked away in the government-run health care plan. The Associated Press had covered up the abortion funding but recently flip-flopped and admitted it exists.

In a Thursday news article posted on its web site titled “10 Health Care Reform Myths,” CBS News lists number five as “Health Care Legislation Mandates Taxpayer Dollars Pay for Abortions.”

“Nothing in the legislation, however, has ‘mandated’ that abortion services be included in the benefits package,” CBS News claims.

CBS News contends the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved an amendment by pro-abortion Rep. Lois Capps, a California Democrat, “that would prohibit taxpayer dollars from funding abortions.”

….. The “factcheck” concludes by saying that Congress “has yet to determine” how the abortion funding issues will be resolved.

Referring to the infamous Bush Air National Guard memos CBS published that later turned out to be fake, Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee says the new factsheet “demonstrates that their analytic and forensic skills have not improved much since that episode.”

Johnson tells LifeNews.com that CBS News’ analysis of the Capps amendment is off base.

….. “In reality, under the Capps Amendment, the federal government would run a nationwide insurance plan that would cover abortion on demand,” he explained. “Abortionists would perform elective abortions on government-insured clients, send the bill to the government plan, and get checks from the government to pay for the abortions.”

This surreal and contradictory sentence is in Ms. Condon’s report:

It (ObamaCare) requires at least one plan from the federal health insurance exchange in each region of the country to cover abortion, and at least one of the plans to not cover abortion.

So according to CBS and Ms. Condon, if you stir in a abortion coverage ingredient in the left section of the pot, and put in an abortion-free ingredient in the right section of the same pot, and then mix it all up, voila! — suddenly it’s not in there. Give me a break.

Maybe the I-see-nothings at CBS should ask the Associated Press why eating crow wouldn’t be such a bad thing (though even AP has never formally corrected its original “Fact Check” story). While not pleasant, chowing down on blackbird pie is still preferable to losing whatever shred of credibility one still might have. Because if the network doesn’t pull back, its credibility on anything relating to ObamaCare is one thing that will definitely not be in there.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

About the only thing you can conclude about the Agence France-Presse wire service’s August 4 “news” item about a health care poll result (“Majority back Obama on health care reform: poll”) is that they couldn’t find anything more recent than three weeks old to provide the result they were looking for. So AFP went back to a poll done between July 9-13 — an online one no less. As NewsBusters colleague Noel Sheppard would say, “I kid you not.”

The House Democrats’ 1,018-page health-care plan wasn’t even released until late in the day on Tuesday, July 14. To say that the AFP report and its related poll results are worse than worthless to any current discussions is almost to praise them too much.

Here is a mini-pic of the first several paragraphs presented for fair use, discussion, and repudiation purposes:

More recent data indicates that opposition to ObamaCare is growing, and that the alleged support cited by AFP was disputable even at the time its poll was commissioned. CNS News reported the following on Thursday (links to polls added by me):

Last month, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that 46 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of health care reform, while 41 percent approved. A Rasmussen poll last month showed 53 percent opposing the Obama-backed plan, up from 45 percent opposed in June, and the 49 (percent) opposed two weeks earlier.

Rasmussen’s polling was done July 20-21 (go to the very bottom at link), meaning that the “two weeks earlier” 49% level of opposition was present a few days before the Obama-supportive poll cited by AFP took place. The Journal’s poll was taken July 24-27. The Rasmussen result represents an astonishing 30-point swing from what AFP touted (AFP was +22; Rasmussen is -8).

A better AFP headline would have been, “Americans Liked Dems’ Health Care Plan Before They Learned What Was In It.”

There are still lingering strengths in ObamaCare’s support, as noted in a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday. Yes, it shows that “American voters disapprove 52 – 39 percent of the way President Obama is handling health care, down from 46 – 42 percent approval July 1.” But, among several troubling things, “62 – 32 percent (are) in favor of giving people the option of a government insurance plan,” and “61 – 36 percent (are) for higher taxes on high income earners to pay for health care reform.”

The “public option” result, though eight points lower than AFP, shows that ObamaCare opponents have not persuaded enough of the American people that the public option’s purpose is be the flypaper that attracts those who either won’t be able to find any private insurance due to a life event like a job change, or who will lose their company-provided coverage when their employers figure out that off-loading their employees onto the government is a cost-saving (and perhaps even survival) strategy. The “public option” is the roach motel of heath care; once you go in, the intent is you will never come out.

The tax-related Quinnipiac result demonstrates two things:

• That not enough of the public understands the draconian nature of two-tiered tax federal income tax increases currently on the table. First, there’s restoration of the higher rate structure that was in effect before 2001. Second, there will be additional taxes of up to 5.4% of income on top of that. As shown here, these would increase the taxes paid by those affected by up to 31%.
• That not enough of the public understands that the increases proposed, even if somehow collected (i.e., naively assuming no legal tax avoidance actions by those who do not wish to pay more), are not enough to fully fund ObamaCare’s ambitious and costly plans.

I would suggest that ObamaCare will have a chance of passage if the true statist intention and the fundamental immorality of the “public option” aren’t both fully exposed. Time is shorter than one might think.

In the meantime, the establishment media, as AFP, has shown it will tout alleged support for ObamaCare, even if it has to dig into ancient history to do it.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The key seasonally adjusted numbers: The unemployment rate is 9.4% (down by 0.1%), and 247,000 jobs were lost.

That beat expectations of 9.5% or 9.6% and 320,000 jobs lost.

When I heard the White House and I believe even Obama himself start on Sunday and Monday with the “it’s going to get worse” stuff, I had a suspicion that they either had an idea what the real result was going to be, or that they looked at last year’s on-the-ground number and said “no way that happens again.” They created low expectations and either bet (or knew) that the result wouldn’t be as bad.

Of course, they’re not supposed to have this info; in fact, I’m pretty it’s illegal to get it in advance, because those who possess such advance information have the ability to take financial advantage of it. So let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.

I didn’t think the job-loss number would be worse than June’s revised -443,000 (it was -467,000), and I’m not surprised that it went down. That’s simply because when you look at the on-the-ground not seasonally adjusted numbers, you realize that for things to have gotten worse, a lot more than 1.4 million jobs would have had to go away in July:

The raw numbers above led to this seasonally adjusted result, including revisions to May and June:

Thus, in the 13th full month of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy (which actually began during June 2008), now the POR Recession/”Repression” As Normal People Define It, what the administration will more than likely cite as a sign that things are getting recognizably better is in reality only a result that is 50% or more worse than any full month before the the POR economy began (the lowest ratio is July 2009′s 247K divided by April 2008′s 160 = 1.54).

We’re supposed to be impressed?

Looking ahead to the rest of the year, it’s obvious that for the monthly job-loss number to get to zero or to go positive, a lot of real net hiring is going to have to talk place on the ground. That will be the acid test of whether any recovery in the job market is really taking place. Never discount the American people’s ability to work around government-imposed barriers, but this administration has put so much FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) into the system that we shouldn’t be at all surprised if little if any net on-the-ground hiring takes place. Obviously, I hope that’s not the case.

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Update: Joe C, in his comment below, had me look into the government element of the jobs change. It turns out that government dominates the traditionally largely negative on-the-ground July number, meaning that the White House could be pretty confident that the overall number wouldn’t get worse, and might get better.

Update 2: By the way, the assertion I made after June’s report that it was the worst June on the ground (not seasonally adjusted) since BLS has been keeping monthly records is still true. The 69,000 jobs lost as seen above is both the largest, and the largest as a percentage of the workforce, during June during all of that time.

Update 3: In the Something’s Gotta Give Dept. — The combined seasonally adjusted jobs-lost number for June and July , based on calls to employers, was 690,000, or about 0.44% of the workforce. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rates for May and July were both 9.4%. These two trends can only continue if a lot of people are on net leaving the workforce. Two months does not a trend make, but it bears watching. A couple more similar months and the conclusion that the workforce is shrinking will be pretty hard to escape. We may find that “going Galt” is not just a high-producer/high-earner phenomenon.

It’s here.

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

The column, in less faith-specific terms than the excellent post Carol McKinley of Voting Catholic/Lead Us Not Into Temptation generously provided on Monday (mirrored here at her place), makes the case that ObamaCare shouldn’t be primarily opposed because of its cost, though that is of course a very relevant consideration. It should be opposed because it is fundamentally immoral. It is fundamentally immoral even if abortion coverage were somehow miraculously excluded from it (which it isn’t anyway; even the AP admits it’s in there).

The best that can be said about the alleged Catholic and other supposedly religious organizations placing themselves behind ObamaCare is that they, like Obama himself, who recently said that he’s not familiar with a core provision of the bill, haven’t read it and therefore don’t understand what it is really all about. Sadly, I believe that assessment is in too many cases too kind.

Instead, these organizations are indefensibly supporting Obama’s version of state-run health care despite proof almost everywhere else that:

• Statist health care systems cruelly ration care to the point where real flesh-and-blood people suffer and die — not by accident, not because of individual situational disputes, but by virtually irrevocable design).
• State control of health care eventually, inevitably, and unconscionably subjects the continued existence of the weakest among us to cost-benefit analysis that denies the existence of basic human dignity.
• State-run systems allow people who are at best indifferent to moral and ethical medical practices, or who are at worst imbued with philosophies straight from hell, including the one described here, to take ironclad control of the provision of medical care to a nation’s entire population, which then in all but the rarest of individual circumstances has virtually no recourse but to accept it. This is sadly and clearly the case in the Obama administration. Exhibit A of examples that probably go all the way to Z would be John Holdren.

Carol McKinley was right Monday when she wrote that too many of our alleged religious leaders, both Catholics and others, are by their silence or support committing the sin of scandal (paragraphs 2284-2287 at link).

From Brevard County, Floriday:

Updated: Thursday, 23 Jul 2009, 4:11 PM EDT
Published : Thursday, 23 Jul 2009, 3:27 PM EDT

Eight days after being shot over and over again a brave Florida Wildlife and Fish Conservation Commission Officer Spoke to the media Thursday to share hear his story on how he survived an awful attack thanks to a lucky coin.

Officer Vann Streety says he remembers trying to arrest Christopher Eddy, chasing him to the front door of his car which is where he saw the suspect pull a gun. Streety says the first shot went through his right hand. “Which left me unable to draw my weapon and fight back. Then I just started running, creating distance between me and him…he continued to shoot at me.”

He got hit seven times: two bullets shattering his left shoulder, two in the back of his bullet-proof vest, and one in the wallet, where he always carries a coin representing fwc’s special operations group. It’s now bent, but the coin may have saved his life. “Between the coin and the other things in my wallet and my badge, it stopped that 45 caliber round. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

Kudos to Steve Ertelt at LifeNews.com (the source of the graphic at the right) and to others in the pro-life community for getting the notoriously stubborn Associated Press to effectively back down on a false claim it made about the availability of abortion services in the version of the health care bill passed by a House Committee last week.

On August 3, Ertelt wrote the following (link to AP story added by me for fair use, discussion, and refutation purposes):

The Associated Press is coming under criticism from pro-life advocates who say its recent wrap-up article on the health care debate is misleading.

AP writer Charles Babington wrote a “fact check” story attempting to make the case that abortion is not included in the health care bills and that President Barack Obama doesn’t want it to be included.

But Douglas Johnson, the legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, says that’s not the case.

AP claims that “Obama recently told CBS that the nation should continue a tradition of not financing abortions as part of government-funded health care.’”

“If Obama had actually said that, it would have been a very newsworthy statement indeed. But Obama didn’t say it. AP has grossly distorted what Obama actually said,” Johnson tells LifeNews.com.

….. (In an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric on July 21), Obama added, “I’m pro-choice, but I think we also have the tradition in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government-funded health care.”

Johnson said Obama’s remark was an observation and not an endorsement of keeping abortion out of health care, as the Associated Press reported.

“Contrary to the AP account, Obama did not in any way endorse this ‘tradition’ and he did not say that the ‘tradition’ should be continued,” Johnson noted. That is “not surprising since Obama consistently has opposed limits on funding abortion during his time in the Illinois state senate and the U.S. Senate, and he reiterated his flat opposition to the Hyde Amendment when he ran for President.”

….. “We respectfully ask that AP retract this distorted rewrite on what Obama said on an important public policy issue,” Johnson said.

On August 5, in commenting on an AP follow-up report, Ertelt noted that AP had in effect corrected itself:

Two days after LifeNews.com exposed an Associated Press article that mislead its readers on the abortion funding contained in the government-run health care plans, AP has backtracked. The news service is now reporting that the bills Congress is considering will result in taxpayer-funded abortions.

AP features a new article today with the headline, “Gov’t insurance would allow coverage for abortion.”

Reporter Ricardo Alonsozaldivar writes, “Health care legislation before Congress would allow a new government-sponsored insurance plan to cover abortions, a decision that would affect millions of women and recast federal policy on the divisive issue.”

That’s a far cry from the weekend story where AP writer Charles Babington wrote a “fact check” that claimed it is “not clear” if abortion funding is included in the legislation.

The Babington story was so bad that Douglas Johnson, the legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, told LifeNews.com, “We respectfully ask that AP retract this distorted” article.

While the first AP piece claimed the health care bill “could create a government-run insurance program, or insurance ‘exchanges,’ that would not involve Medicaid” that could involve abortion funding, the new piece says that is now the case.

AP admitted that the Capps amendment a House committee adopted last week “would allow the public plan to cover abortion” with “dollars from beneficiary premiums.” It added, “Likewise, private plans in the new insurance exchange could opt to cover abortion.”

Johnson told LifeNews.com today that the AP piece “confirms what we’ve been saying: Under both Obama-backed bills, House and Senate, the federal government would run a huge system of subsidizing elective abortion.”

This is all to the good, but the fact remains that Babington’s bogus take — in a “Fact Check” report, no less — is still out there, uncorrected. A review of the latest list of AP corrections, which includes items going back into July, shows no indication of an admission that Babington was wrong. He was, and the fact that AP won’t correct or pull his report — while tacitly acknowledging in a separate report that he was indeed wrong — is yet another disgraceful episode in the annals of the self-described “Essential Global News Network.”

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.