(Image found at KMBZ.com; scroll down about halfway at link.)

Early this morning (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I posted on the Associated Press’s treatment of the firing of two employees at ACORN’s Baltimore office. These employees were successfully stung by undercover filmmaker James O’Keefe, who posed as a pimp (one who said he has plans to use the money from his “enterprise” to run for Congress), and Hannah Giles, who posed as a prostitute.

In a pair of videos (full script here) released on Thursday, viewers saw the two helpful ACORN Baltimore employees tell O’Keefe and Giles, among many jaw-dropping things, that:

• Giles should call herself a “freelance performing artist” for tax purposes.
• That they should claim three of 13 underage girls the pair planned to bring in from El Salvador to work as prostitutes as dependents.
• That the prostitute should also claim child tax credits for those declared as “dependents.”

O’Keefe and Giles piled on Friday morning by releasing a second pair of videos showing that they had pulled off a similar sting at ACORN’s DC office.

But if we’re to believe the Associated Press’s Hope Yen, Friday’s out of the blue decision by the Census Bureau to sever its ties with ACORN in connection with the 2010 census had nothing or at most very little to do with what O’Keefe and Giles pulled off. Instead, Yen portrayed the decision as a cave-in to the minority party in Washington known as Republicans. Uh-huh.

Here is a screen cap of most of Yen’s report (saved here in full for future reference, fair use, and discussion purposes):

Wow. That’s six references to the GOP or Republican Party members objecting to ACORN, and no references to any of the Democratic Party’s shrill defenders of the rogue organization.

Yen didn’t mention O’Keefe’s Baltimore sting video until paragraphs 10 and 11, and never mentioned the DC sting, even though its related videos were released at O’Keefe’s BigGovernment.com web site at about 7 a.m. Friday morning. Given the hubbub O’Keefe’s work has raised, it’s virtually inconceivable that Yen and AP didn’t know about the second sting. Yet Yen’s report repeated the contention of ACORN Maryland’s Margaret Williams that “undercover teams attempted similar setups in at least three other ACORN offices.” Note that Williams didn’t refer specifically to O’Keefe, because she obviously can’t fully truthfully do so. I would not be surprised if Williams knew that the second sting video was in the can, just waiting to drop.

By permitting Ms. Williams’s misleading statement to appear unchallenged, Yen left readers who even get that far with a clear misimpression that O’Keefe and Giles only pulled their stunt once.

So the Census Bureau, which as Yen acknowledged in an unexcerpted paragraph had “up to now” resisted GOP pressure for months, all of a sudden caves and dumps ACORN, and we’re supposed to believe that it’s all because of Republicans. Horse manure, Hope.

Cross-posted at NewBusters.org.

He gets thrown under the bus, while manifestly corrupt career politicians thrive. Also: See Update below.

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Note: This column appeared at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Thursday.

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You know, if I were Van Jones, I’d be pretty upset right about now, but for reasons other than the ones he is citing.

Don’t get me wrong. Jones had to go, for reasons somewhat known and others hardly known. At this point the somewhat-knowns are his consistent communism, his documented 9/11 “truther” beliefs (with a totally unconvincing “I never read it” denial), and his inability or perhaps unwillingness to specifically define what a “green job” is.

Okay, Jones tried to define a “green job” for the Washington Post, saying that, “A green job and especially a green-collar job is a blue-collar job that has been upgraded and up-skilled to better respect the environment.” Under that definition, it seems that if a guy or gal on the assembly line in the most stinking, rotten, polluting factory in America starts putting empty pop cans into the recycle container instead of the general trash, their job might count as “green.” Actually, I think Jones and other enviros touting “green jobs” are reluctant to define the term because “the green” involved relates to something, or I should say $omething, that has little to do with the environment.

The most important hardly known item in Jones’s resume is his truly disturbing “deserver” statement roughly 40 hours after the 9/11 attacks. At a gathering on the night of September 12, 2001 at Oakland’s Snow Park, Jones said that “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.” So we deserved 9/11. Move over, Jeremiah Wright. I’d say that if you’re looking for a reason why Jones resigned so suddenly in the dead of night Sunday morning, you need look no further than the fact that a link to a similar statement Jones allegedly made at the same event was posted at Powerline early Saturday evening.

All of that said, the fact remains that Van Jones has from all appearances not recently committed a crime, has apparently paid his societal penance for his past crimes, and has not committed an error of commission or omission during his brief tenure that would have justified a forced “resignation.” Shoot, if you look around at others in the administration like John Holdren, Zeke the Bleak Emanuel, Carol Browner, Eric Holder, and others, you could probably make a good argument that Jones’s beliefs are in the mainstream of Obama administration and Democratic congressional political thought.

So why is Jones gone, while the likes of Tim Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, and Charlie Rangel, to name just a few, are still footloose, fancy-free, and federally employed?

Treasury Secretary Geithner, whose purview includes the Internal Revenue Service, committed enough errors of omission and commission on his tax returns — errors way beyond “only” failure to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on his income while he was at the World Bank — that they could not possibly all have been innocent errors. Geithner didn’t merely avoid taxes; he evaded them. Last time I checked, tax evasion is a crime.

Geithner also lied to Congress about bonus payouts to those eeeeevil AIG executives. It’s on the record that he knew about them on March 3 (“Geithner was directly questioned about the specific bonuses”). But he later said through a spokesman that he “was not aware of the timing or full extent of the contractual retention payments or the other bonus programs until his staff brought them to his attention on March 10.” Horse manure. Geithner lied to Congress. Last time I checked, that’s still a crime.

Unlike Jones’s whopper about his Truther past, Nancy Pelosi has lied about events that have taken place while carrying out her official duties as congressperson, House Minority Leader, and House Majority Leader. Specifically, she claims not to have been briefed by the CIA about enhanced interrogation techniques employed in the years following the 9/11 attacks. Even the left-leaning FactCheck.org calls Pelosi’s various and changing claims made over the first half of this year “tortured denials.” To this day, she stands by her smear, and the accommodating media establishment in Washington has let it go. That doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t make it legal.

Then there’s Harlem Congressman Rangel, whose January 1971 arrival in office followed the baseball season of Gotham’s Amazin’ Mets by only 15 months. Rangel has so many problems it would probably take a full column just to enumerate them. The biggies are:

• Taking “a ‘homestead’ tax break on a Washington, DC, house for years while simultaneously occupying multiple rent-stabilized apartments in New York City, possibly violating laws and regulations in both cases.”
• Earning “more than $75,000 in rental income from a villa he has owned in the Dominican Republic since 1988, but never report(ing) it on his federal or state tax returns.”
• Failing to disclose a credit union account “worth at least $250,000 …. a retirement account worth at least $250,000, property in New Jersey and shares in two publicly-traded companies” on required financial disclosure forms.

In case you didn’t know, Rangel is Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the House’s chief tax-writing committee. The irony overflows.

Rangel’s responses thus far have been to play dumb; spread money around to other congressmen who may at some point be called on to evaluate his fitness to serve (that’s not apparently not bribery inside the Beltway; instead, it’s known as “standard operating procedure”); and play the racism-distraction card over the moral clunker known as ObamaCare.

None of this changes the fact that gaming the rent-control system and tax evasion are crimes, and incomplete financial disclosure is an illegal act.

But unlike Van Jones, Tim Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, and Charlie Rangel remain firmly ensconced in their positions of federal power, with most if not all of their accumulated wealth and power intact, and little if any prospect that they will ever have to face the music for their crimes or misdeeds.

On that basis, Van Jones has every right to be upset.

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UPDATE: Those who believe that my characterization of “green jobs” was a bit too snide haven’t seen how ridiculously wide the Pew Charitable Trusts’ definition of “green jobs” was in its POS (Pretty Over-the-top Stuff) report that I criticized in mid-June. This is the same report that told the public that job growth in “green jobs” was about triple that of the rest of the economy. Horse manure; as Pew crudely defined it, it was less.

As an example of bogus “green jobs,” and who Pew included in the mix, I give you Johnson Controls. The company has been designing energy-efficient buildings and improving the efficiency of existing buildings for decades. Now all of a sudden, Pew decides that anyone working in that part of the company is in a “green job.” Excuse the expression, but that’s garbage; those are “normal capitalist economy” jobs.

In case you missed this from Creators.com (HT Emailer):

Listening to a Liar: Part II
By Thomas Sowell 9/10/2009

“Hubris-laden charlatans” was the way a recent e-mail from a reader characterized the Obama administration. That phrase seems especially appropriate for the Charlatan-in-Chief, Barack Obama, whose speech to a joint session of Congress was both a masterpiece of rhetoric and a shameless fraud.

To tell us, with a straight face, that he can insure millions more people without adding to the already skyrocketing deficit, is world-class chutzpa and an insult to anyone’s intelligence. To do so after an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office has already showed this to be impossible reveals the depths of moral bankruptcy behind the glittering words.

…Obama can deny it in words but what matters are deeds— and no one’s words have been more repeatedly the direct opposite of his deeds— whether talking about how his election campaign would be financed, how he would not rush legislation through Congress, or how his administration was not going to go after CIA agents for their past efforts to extract information from captured terrorists.

President Obama has also declared emphatically that he will not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations— while telling the Israelis where they can and cannot build settlements and telling the Hondurans whom they should and should not choose to be their president.

Con men understand that their job is not to use facts to convince skeptics but to use words to help the gullible to believe what they want to believe. No message has been more welcomed by the gullible, in countries around the world, than the promise of something for nothing. That is the core of Barack Obama’s medical care plan.

…President Obama tells us that he will impose various mandates on insurance companies but will not interfere with our free choice between being insured by these companies or by the government. But if he can drive up the cost of private insurance with mandates and subsidize government insurance with the taxpayers’ money, how long do you think it will be before we have the “single payer” system has he has advocated in the past?

Mandates by politicians are what have driven up the cost of insurance already. Politicians love to play Santa Claus and leave it to others to raise prices to cover the inevitable costs.

Read the whole thing here.

Thomas Sowell is definitively on my “Top five people to have over for dinner” list.

Thursday night, the Associated Press reported on the Baltimore ACORN sting carried out by James O’Keefe of Andrew Breitbart’s new BigGovernment.com web site.A paragraph near the end of the report is virtually a de facto commercial for the controversial group.

As to the sting itself, in case you missed it — in two devastating videos originally posted here that you must see, O’Keefe and Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and prostitute  who, as summarized in original Fox News coverage, told officials at ACORN’s Baltimore office that they “wanted to secure housing where the woman could continue to maintain a prostitution business.”

ACORN said Thursday that it has fired the two employees who are seen on tape telling O’Keefe and Giles the following, among a host of sickening howlers:

• That the prostitute could list her occupation on tax forms as “freelance performing artist”
• That three of 13 underage girls the pair planned to bring in from El Salvador to work as prostitutes could be claimed as dependents (you see, trying to claim 13 dependents would “raise too many red flags”).
• That the prostitute should also call the girls claimed as dependents “relatives,” and also claim child tax credits for them.
• To stop using the word “prostitution,” and among 12 street-smart rules, train the underage girls to “keep their mouths shut.”

Here’s how AP covered the fallout from that story Thursday evening (saved here in full for fair use and discussion purposes):

The first sentence in the red-boxed paragraph is a blatant, one-sided commercial. AP doesn’t tell us that ACORN “says” it advocates for poor people; no-no-no, it acts as if that’s an established fact. The second sentence is an attempt to downplay known facts about the group’s widespread association with voter fraud. Concerns about ACORN not only coming from “conservatives,” but libertarians, liberals with a sense of fair play, and most importantly from county boards of elections, which ordinarily have equal representations of Democrats (not all of whom are liberal) and Republicans (not all of whom are conservative).

The ACORN link AP provides is to the group’s main home page, not ACORN Baltimore.

In an unexcerpted paragraph, the wire service labels O’Keefe a “conservative activist.” His views may or may not be conservative, but O’Keefe calls himself an “activist filmmaker.” By contrast, readers here will be totally not shocked to learn that in a roughly 550-word September 6 AP story about Michael Moore and his latest release (“Capitalism: A Love Story”), the wire service’s Colleen Barry never hangs any kind of judgmental label on Moore — not “liberal,” “leftist,” or even “activist.”

If you’re thinking that the AP is upset that ACORN got nailed, would rather not have to tell us what has happened, is bound and determined to salvage whatever shred of credibility it can for the outlaw group, and wants to minimize the negative fallout in reports its subscribers use, I would suggest that you’re in the right neighborhood.

AP didn’t handle ACORN’s Friday firing by the Census Bureau any better. I will address that story shortly.

UPDATE: Sting II — The AP report includes a claim by ACORN’s Margaret Williams that "undercover teams attempted similar setups in at least three other ACORN offices." Clever wording: She’s not saying that O’Keefe and Giles were the attempters in the other instances. The fact is, as revealed Friday, O’Keefe and Giles "attempted" to pull off their idea at the DC ACORN office. Oops, they "succeeded" again, and it’s also on video.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Note: This post will stay at the top today.

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I received this from Mr. Mandel yesterday in an e-mail:

This week, we will mark the eighth anniversary of the September 11th attacks that forever changed our nation. We will never forget those who lost their lives in that tragedy, nor will we forget those who have since paid the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe.

As a Marine serving in Iraq, I can tell you that I was inspired knowing that hard-working, patriotic Americans from across the nation were saying prayers, writing letters and flying their flags in support of all of our troops overseas.

It reminded me of the movement that spread like lightning through our country on 9/11 and the days to follow. We weren’t Republicans or Democrats…we were Americans.

September 11th might not be an official holiday, but I hope you will urge all of your family, friends and neighbors to fly their flag and tell their children and grandchildren what it means to be free.

As a great President once said, “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

On the eighth anniversary of these attacks, please take a moment to not only remember the lives that were lost, but the responsibility incumbent upon us to keep their memory, and the freedom for which so many have sacrificed, alive for future generations.

Reax will come later when more facts are in.

For now, here are links, probably dynamic:

• Life News — “Slain Pro-Life Advocate Jim Pouillon Known as the Peaceful Abortion Sign Guy” (home page)
• Detroit Free Press — “Owosso police look into two related murders”
• Associated Press via Chicago Tribune — “Activist slain outside school; 2nd man also killed”

Michelle Malkin will probably be staying current.

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UPDATE: Pouillon, who was African-American, was killed for standing up for his pro-life views. That would seem to make his murder a double-barreled hate crime.

UPDATE 2 (via Rose): From Operation Rescue

Pro-Life Activist Shot Down in Cold Blood

September 11, 2009

….. Owosso, MI – A pro-life activist gunned down this morning as he peacefully held a picture of a baby with the word “Life” outside a high school in Owosso, Michigan. The victim is Jim Pouillon, a well known activist in the Owosso area and a friend of Operation Rescue.

A suspect was arrested about 45 minutes after the shooting and is now in police custody.

“We are stunned by Jim’s murder. We extend our condolences to the family and share in their grief over his loss. His life was characterized by his love and concern of the vulnerable, and he will be greatly missed,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.

“We denounce this senseless act of violence in the strongest terms, and pray that this murderer will be swiftly brought to justice.”

This shooting comes in the wake of hundreds of death threats that have been received by Operation Rescue and other pro-life organizations over the past three months.

… “We have received literally hundreds of death threats in the past three months. Our office has been vandalized three times. Just yesterday, the FBI was in our office and picked up a stack of threatening letters that we received,” said Newman. “We denounce violence in the strongest terms. The bloodshed must stop both inside and outside of the abortion clinics.”

Read e-mailed death threats to Operation Rescue
Listen to a sample of telephonic death threats to Operation Rescue (Caution, strong and disturbing language.)

I like his response to this NY Times story about the conventional wisdom in New York City in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (“A Fortress City That Didn’t Come to Be”). The Times article includes this passage:

…. New Yorkers were introduced that day to irreducible presumptions about their wounded city that many believed would harden and become chiseled into the event’s enduring legacy.

New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.

His reax: “Gee, who should get credit for that?”

If your blood pressure can stand it, you can learn a lot about how the Apparatachik Press — er, the Associated Press — operates as you watch a news story evolve, or I should say devolve. The wire service often reworks adequately-written stories with no new developments for no apparent reason other than to add bias and/or remove inconvenient truths.

A classic example of this occurred in the situation involving Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, and Cambridge, Massachusetts police in late July (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog). AP reporter Nancy Benac’s headline went from “Obama Rushes to Quell Racial Uproar He Helped Fire” on a Friday evening to “Obama Moves to Dampen Uproar on Comment Over Race” on a Saturday morning, even though there had been no new developments in the story. The later story’s text was heavily revised, totally deleting an accurate opening paragraph about the president being “knocked off stride” and trying to “tamp down the controversy,” leaving readers of that version with the impression that Obama had become the conciliator in the controversy instead of the being its fueler.

Another AP devolution took place between Thursday afternoon and early this morning. An already pretty weak story that bordered on being a PR piece about a two-month new vehicle refund offer by Government Motors — er, General Motors — only got worse in subsequent revisions.

For starters, here are the respective headlines and first paragraphs from Thursday afternoon at 3:47 p.m., Thursday evening at 10:27 p.m., and Friday morning at 5:38 a.m., respectively (links are to full versions of articles saved at my host here, here, and here, for fair use and discussion purposes):

Note how the need “to regain consumers’ trust” and to “win them back” disappeared from Emily Fredrix’s initial paragraph. Though the next paragraph in the second and third renditions refers to how GM “aims to win back customers leery of GM since it filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year,” the word “trust” disappeared entirely. By Version 3, the words in the headline and first paragraph were predominantly positive.

In Versions 2 and 3, Fredrix did refer to importance of making customers “less reluctant to buy” — in the second-last paragraph out of 17 in each instance. She saved her last paragraph for a person labeled as coming from “a Web site that follows and is often critical of the auto industry and GM,” who characterized the company’s move as “a Hail Mary pass.” That’s nice, but many if not most readers won’t get that far, and subscribing publications and broadcasting outlets will often leave it on the cutting-room floor.

No AP report of the three ever tells readers that the federal government now owns the majority of GM. The fact that Versions 2 and 3 manage to mention in their second paragraphs that GM “needs to improve sales so it can repay billions in government loans and stay in business” is in a way helpful. But it also gives the impression, in the absence of an ownership disclosure, that lending represents the full extent of the government’s financial involvement.

No one who reads any of the three AP reports will learn how much money has been thrown into the company’s bailout by taxpayers and other unwilling parties (at least $49.9 billion, plus billions more in value obtained through contract law-violating disproportionate treatment of the company’s unsecured bondholders), or that the Congressional Oversight Panel on Wednesday predicted that it is “highly unlikely” that taxpayers will fully recoup their auto-bailout …. (excuse me, I had to pick myself up off the floor after breaking out in convulsions of laughter) …. “investments.”

Perhaps readers might excuse AP for not bringing up GM’s baggage in a marketing story. But in a report that is really about a company trying to regain its footing, Fredrix failed to note one of the main reasons — if not THE main reason — why GM’s sales have been falling. That reason goes well beyond the products, product quality, or even that GM went through a bankruptcy.

The fact is that enough consumers to matter have been shunning the company’s vehicles because they opposed its bailout by taxpayers —  either on principle, or out of concerns that a government-owned operation won’t keep its warranty and other promises. Further, the substantial number of people who feel this way aren’t likely to put their opposition aside any time soon.

I’m not saying this, pollsters Rasmussen and Gallup are:

• On June 8, Rasmussen reported that “only 42% of those who currently own a General Motors car are even somewhat likely to buy a GM product for their next car.” It further noted that “just 26% of Americans believe the bailout was a good idea, and nearly as many support a boycott of GM products.”
• On July 27, Rasmussen told us that “46% of Americans now saying they are more likely to buy a car from Ford because it did not take government money to stay in business.”
• Though it apparently didn’t attempt to dig into the whys, a June 9-10 Gallup poll said that “55% of Americans (are) saying they disapprove of the government’s investing $50 billion in General Motors to make the government the majority owner of that automaker.”

But in AP’s world, GM’s trust issue all but disappeared in the space of 14 hours. How did that happen?

In early May, AP reporters Kimberly Johnson and Dan Stumpf, in a nice bit of honest reporting, opened a story about April car sales by telling readers that “Detroit’s Big Three is becoming Ford and the other two.” Since then, the AP reports I have seen have largely glossed over the continuing market share declines at GM and Chrysler. Only the few who dig into the detail such as that found at the Wall Street Journal’s monthly auto sales report know that:

• In August, a month dominated by the Cash for Clunkers program, Toyota sold a whopping 31% more cars than GM.
• Nissan went from trailing Chrysler in total unit sales by 19% in July to beating it by 13% in August.
• GM’s position in the marketplace has deteriorated in the past 12 months by a shocking 22% (19.4% market share in August 2009 vs. 24.5% in August 2008).

Tidbits like these and other are virtually absent from AP reports, while the negatives coming out of GM and Chrysler are often minimized or described in vague terms. That now seems to include the monthly missives from Johnson and Strumpf (August example here).

As long as AP engages the kind of truth avoidance described here, and despite occasional heartening exceptions, including one cited here on a different topic yesterday by NewsBusters, calling the wire service the Apparatchik Press will be too close to the truth for comfort.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From New York City, in full, from the Catholic News Agency:

Sep 11, 2009 / 03:08 am

Thursday night, during the 2009 NFL season’s opening game between the Tennessee Titans and the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Knights of Columbus aired a 60-second 9/11 tribute promoting the importance and necessity of service.

The ad, which ran during halftime of the match up,reminded Americans: “we can still see the best in humanity today,” if we “give back.”

The commercial featured the story of Capt. Al Fuentes of the FDNY Marine Division. On 9/11 he was trapped beneath the World Trade Center debris for nearly two hours before being rescued.

“What I have been given is another chance,” Fuentes recalls in the commercial. “I need to, and I will, give back: that is what the Knights of Columbus have always shown me for 38 years.”

The commercial also directed viewers to www.servicetogether.org, a site with resources for volunteers set up by the K of C.

The commercial was aired in New York City, Washington, D.C., Dallas and Los Angeles. It will also be broadcast in the same cities during the NFL games on Sunday.

A related story is at Catholic Online.

It’s official (HT NewsBusters).

I’m sure the money’s good, and that John Stossel is more likely to see his work actually get on the air, which has not always occurred at his former employer of at least 28 years.

But my immediate reaction is that Fox’s gain is not as big as ABC’s loss, and that at least for now free-marketeers are net losers in the deal. That’s because Stossel’s national influence, especially on relatively casual viewers, on ABC’s programs was probably greater than it will be, at least in the beginning, at fair and balanced Fox. ABC will likely devolve into more of a lefty echo chamber than it already is. I wonder if Jake play-it-straight Tapper is starting to feel a bit lonely?

Of course, the hope is that Stossel will carry viewers over with him, gain Fox even more of a commanding lead than it already has, and even (dream of dreams) get into network primtime. So as far as I’m concerned , John, the sooner you prove my concerns wrong, the better.

…. you should watch the videos that follow by James O’Keefe of the newly-launched Big Government web site (Big Gov post; direct video Part 1; direct video Part 2; HT frequent commenter dscott).

It would be understandable, though, if after the first vid, you’re too angry or ill to deal with the second. That’s okay; you’ll get the point by then.

The setup:

Hannah Giles and I took advantage of ACORN’s regard for thug criminality by posing the most ridiculous criminal scenario we could think of and seeing if they would comply–which they did without hesitation.

Sickening comedy gold ensues (warning — if you haven’t figured it out already, R-rated content):

The full script of the vids is here at Big Gov.

These are the same people supposedly dedicated to affordable housing, cleaning up neighborhoods, registering new voters, and “social justice.”

Gag me:

Update: More comedy gold at the end of Ed Morrissey’s post at Hot Air with ACORN’s denial.

Ed’s vid reax:

Neither of the two bat an eyelash at human trafficking while advising them to evade taxes and prosecution for their crimes.

Despicable.

Betsy McCaughey has some suggestions for the Commander-in-Czars:

Rip up this awful plan & rewrite it in English
By BETSY MCCAUGHEY

When President Obama addresses Congress and the nation tonight, he should pledge to do three things.

First, he should announce that he will discard the 1,018-page health bill drafted in the House of Representatives and replace it with a 20-page bill in plain English. Twenty pages should be sufficient. The framers of the US Constitution established an entire federal government in 18 pages.

…Secondly, the president should announce that the purpose of his 20-page bill is to cover the truly uninsured. Period.

In these economically frightening times, let’s meet that urgent need, rather than embarking on a health-care overhaul and wild spending spree with unintended consequences.

…Who are the truly uninsured?

According to the US Census, 47 million people say they are uninsured. But 14 million are already eligible for government programs such as Medicaid or SCHIP (for children) and simply haven’t signed up. Another 10 million have household incomes over $75,000.

That leaves 23.7 million people who probably can’t afford insurance. However, an estimated 12 million of these people are newcomers to the United States, many here illegally.

…Thirdly, the president should announce that he will divert the unused stimulus funds to this purpose.

There’s enough in the pot — over $500 billion to cover these 12 million for the next decade.

More details are here.

For an America-hating elitest brat who basically got elected because he reads a teleprompter REALLY WELL (like with his chin up and everything), I bet it really hacks him off that even if the “Joe Six-Packs” of the nation give his “save face” propaganda the time of day, they will only do so while filtering the content through the “said vs. done” BS meter.

A friend reminded me that Obama once asked that we judge him by the people who surround him.

You sure about that, Barry?