From Blackwood, Australia:

Oct 22, 2009 / 02:57 am

The Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion has responded to the Vatican’s announcement of a new provision for Anglicans who wish to convert to Catholicism, saying his church is “profoundly moved” by Pope Benedict’s generosity. He added that the provision will now be taken to the national synods of his Communion. In an Oct. 20 statement published on the website of the communion’s The Messenger Journal, Traditional Anglican Communion Primate Archbishop John Hepworth said he had been speaking with bishops, priests and lay people of the Communion in England, Africa, Australia, India, Canada, the U.S. and South America about the recent news.

“We are profoundly moved by the generosity of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI,” Archbishop Hepworth wrote. He said the creation of the canonical structure for Anglicans was an act of “great goodness” on the part of Pope Benedict and his “cause of unity.”

“It more than matches the dreams we dared to include in our petition of two years ago. It more than matches our prayers. In those two years, we have become very conscious of the prayers of our friends in the Catholic Church. Perhaps their prayers dared to ask even more than ours,” the Traditional Anglican archbishop added.

He praised the “pastoral nature” of the notes released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and also noted that his fellow bishops have signed the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In that 2007 event, Traditional Anglican bishops signed the Catechism and placed it on the altar of the historic National Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk, England in order to attest to “the faith we aspire to teach and hold.”

The signed Catechism was later presented to then-Fr. Augustine Di Noia, OP, the senior ecumenical theologian at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Di Noia has since been consecrated an archbishop and named Secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship.

Archbishop Hepworth also discussed the statement issued by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the most senior prelate in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.

The statement shows that Archbishop Williams does not stand in traditional Anglicans’ way, he said. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

I didn’t think the intrepid pair could top what they’ve done already.

Boy, was I wrong (direct YouTube):

ACORN Philly, ACORN’s top management, and all of the establishment media outlets and apparatchiks who parroted ACORN’s lies about what happened in Philadelphia when O’Keefe and Giles visited have been utterly humiliated.

It couldn’t happen to a better bunch.

I would say that it doesn’t get any better than this, but that’s what I thought a month ago.

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UPDATE: The clowns at Media Matters try and fail to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again with a “police report.”

UPDATE 2: See my related NewsBusters post for a full treatment.

Read up.

I’m looking at the detail behind this in my next Pajamas Media column. Stay tuned.

The recession is “obviously” over, according to this Reuters report and several others elsewhere, because GDP is projected to be positive in the third quarter.

But wait a minute:

The (National Association of Business Economists) survey predicted that the unemployment rate will rise to 10 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and edge down to 9.5 percent by the end of that year. The labor market was not expected to regain most of the jobs destroyed in the recession until 2012 or beyond

Pending revisions in the coming months, the economy lost 768,000 seasonally adjusted jobs during the third quarter, an average of 256,000 per month.

The recession, as defined by the pinheads at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), supposedly began in December 2007, during a quarter of 2.1% annualized GDP growth. It supposedly continued through the first and second quarters of 2008, even though second quarter growth was 1.5%. The NBER declared the period recessionary because its other metrics were supposedly sufficiently negative (they really weren’t, but stay with me on this). One of those metrics was job losses, which averaged 133,000 during the first six months of 2008.

So rather than wait for the NBER to decide whether the recession still exists while almost twice as many jobs are being lost as were lost during the early quarters of the NBER-defined recession (256k divided by 133k), the press is deciding that the recession is over because growth is going positive.

Can you say “double standard”?

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By the way, my quick eyeball review of BLS data indicates that if the NBER does decide that the third quarter wasn’t recessionary, it will be the first time it has done so during a period of so much quarterly job loss, even after adjusting for workforce size.

This illustrates yet again why the term As Normal People Define It — two or more periods of GDP contraction — should be the only acceptable definition.

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Since we’re on the topic of jobs — One can’t help but notice that the press is mighty tolerant of the high degree of economic misery these days. This link page at Time headlines a special report called “Out of Work in America” that is almost totally devoid of anger at the situation. The message is, “Oh well, it’s here, now shut up and deal with it.” This tone would not be present if George W. Bush were still in office.

This is especially ironic, given that the people who really bear the responsibility for starting all of this are in control, and are the very ones who are perpetuating the misery.

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Oh, and how much have you heard about the homeless population in the past 11 months? Do a Google News search on “homeless population growing” (not entered with with quotes), and you see no national establishment media interest.

But there is this item:

The number of homeless individuals and families (in New York City) is now higher than at any time since the 1930s, with 39,000 people—16,500 of them children—forced to sleep in the city’s shelters every night. This is before the onset of winter, when the demand for shelter surges.

Yes, it comes from the World Socialist Web Site, but that’s actually my point. In a Reagan or Bush administration, a paragraph such as this would have perked the interest of supposedly mainstream but actually socialistic-sympathetic reporters. With Obama in the White House, there’s nothing.

It will be interesting to see how the establishment press finesses its Thanksgiving ritual of highlighting the homeless this year.

Nice job by Reason TV:

As reported in Science Daily (HT Instapundit):

Oct. 19, 2009

A team led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute has developed a method that dramatically improves the efficiency of creating stem cells from human adult tissue, without the use of embryonic cells. The research makes great strides in addressing a major practical challenge in the development of stem-cell-based medicine.

The findings were published in an advance, online issue of the journal Nature Methods on October 18, 2009. The new technique, which uses three small drug-like chemicals, is 200 times more efficient and twice as fast as conventional methods for transforming adult human cells into stem cells (in this case called “induced pluripotent stem cells” or “iPS cells”).

“Both in terms of speed and efficiency, we achieved major improvements over conventional conditions,” said Scripps Research Associate Professor Sheng Ding, Ph.D., who led the study. “This is the first example in human cells of how reprogramming speed can be accelerated. I believe that the field will quickly adopt this method, accelerating iPS cell research significantly.”

In addition to its significant practical advantages, the development of the technique deepens the understanding of the biology behind the transformation of adult human cells into stem cells. ….

Go here for the full story.

Ohio’s Second Congressional District has been represented by Jean Schmidt since September 2005. Almost Over four years later, it appears that she finally has a worthy, serious, sensible conservative challenger (i.e., after the last time it happened, which was June 2005).

It’s worth recounting how Jean Schmidt got to this point to recognize just how many bullets she has dodged.

In June 2005′s special 11-candidate GOP primary to replace Rob Portman, she shrewdly/luckily stayed out of the intensely negative boxing match between perceived front-runners Pat DeWine, Bob McEwen, and Tom Brinkman.

In that primary, Pat DeWine spent about a million dollars to get less than 5,500 votes. DeWine was not seen as legitimately conservative, largely because his father Mike was so busy selling out sensible conservative principles and values in Washington during that time (think Gang of 14, ANWR). That result should have been, but wasn’t, a red-letter hint to U.S. Senator DeWine that he would be in serious trouble in his reelection campaign the next year.

Bob McEwen, despite deep-pocketed national support and testimonials from the likes of James Dobson and other supposed family-values leaders, was fortunately taken down in the final weeks by the Southwestern Ohio blogosphere. In retrospect, the fact that McEwen’s outside supporters were so willing to overlook his so many serious flaws was a troubling preview of the unforgivable passes those same people ended up giving Objectively Unfit Mitt Romney in the GOP 2008 presidential race.

Tom Brinkman, the candidate for whom I voted, was taken down by a last-minute ad blitz attacking his opposition to the death penalty.

Out of that dogfight, Jean Schmidt emerged the shrewd/lucky winner.

Then came the August 2, 2005 special election against Democrat Paul Hackett. Even Schmidt’s biggest fans have to admit that she ran an awful campaign marred by several serious gaffes. Meanwhile, Iraq War vet Hackett posed as a George W. Bush fan in his TV ads while running around the country telling his victory-starved leftospheric fans that our president was a “son of a b____” and “chicken hawk.”

Fortunately for Jean Schmidt, the establishment media, sensing an opportunity to delegitimize Bush and the war, uncharacteristically allowed Hackett’s incendiary quotes into their coverage. Because of that tactical error, Schmidt was saved once again, with yet another heavy assist from the Southwestern Ohio blogosphere. At literally the eleventh hour, our work was noticed by then-prominent video blogger Trey Jackson. His post was seen by Rush Limbaugh’s peeps, causing Rush to deliver Paul Hackett the relentless hammering he should have received all along from Schmidt during most of his broadcast on Election Day. Schmidt won by less than 4,000 votes.

The CQ Politics Eye on 2010 Blog does a pretty good job taking the Schmidt saga from there:

She had a rocky beginning to her tenure, in part for comments on the House floor that appeared to question the patriotism of Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. John P. Murtha.

In 2006, Schmidt beat former Rep. Bob McEwen in the primary by 5 percentage points, then edged Democratic physician Victoria Wulsin by 1 percentage point in the general election.

In 2008, Schmidt beat back a primary challenge from state Rep. Tom Brinkman, then won a rematch against Wulsin, albeit with just 45 percent of the vote in a three-way contest in which Wulsin took 37 percent and independent candidate David Krikorian won 18 percent.

Krikorian is running again in 2010, this time as a Democrat, though party officials have been promoting the candidacy of state Rep. Todd Book.

This brings us to Mike Kilburn. Where he hits Schmidt is a perfect fit (again from CQ’s blog):

“I don’t have anything against Jean Schmidt, but I think there’s a movement to elect more conservative politicians to Washington,” Kilburn, who serves in Warren County east of Cincinnati, told the Hamilton Journal-News late last week. “I have a burning desire to make sure this country won’t go broke.”

Kilburn, who is serving his seventh four-year term on the county commission, drew headlines this year when he opposed accepting some federal stimulus dollars for transportation projects on the grounds that it was “filthy money.”

…. Kilburn spoke with CQ Politics on Monday afternoon and emphasized restraint in federal spending. He said that Schmidt “doesn’t really have the most conservative spending record,” pointing to her vote for a $700 billion program to stabilize the financial markets.

“You’ve got to be able to say no. Government can’t be all things to all people,” he said. “The Republicans kind of lost their way — they thought that they would curry favor with their voters and their constituents if they could bring something back home for them.”

To be fair, Jean Schmidt has mostly not “lost her way.” But her financial bailout vote (what CQ Politics euphemistically calls the vote to “stabilize the financial markets”) cost her my presumptive support and I daresay that of thousands of others in this district. My vote is up for grabs, because at crunch time, she and many others who say they are conservative (sadly including House Republican leader John Boehner) sided with the Washington elites who don’t care what the people think or want.

I have never heard or seen a good justification from Team Schmidt about why she voted for the financial bailout. If she was blackmailed/fooled by threats that Second District employers would go under if their credit lines or loans went away, we deserve to know that, with specifics. (Given what Treasury Secretary Paulson actually did with bailout funds in the program’s early days, it’s very hard to believe that things were nearly as serious as advertised.) Absent any kind of valid justification, what we need to hear is a heartfelt “I was wrong. I am sorry.”

Schmidt also betrayed a weakness in her knowledge of how our government is supposed to work at the Voice of America rally in September. While listening to a broadcast of the event, I heard her give the courts credit for possessing far more power than they constitutionally have (if anyone has the specific quote, let me know, preferably with a link).

Mike Kilburn seems to have a record of standing up when it counts. He is right; stimulus money IS “filthy money” stolen from future generations by a government that is spending trillions more than it is taking in.

He’s also right about the now loophole-ridden (thanks to Washington and Ohio’s compliant Strickland administration) Food Stamp program:

Warren County commissioners are upset after learning about a loophole in Ohio’s public assistance plan that allows wealthy people to collect food stamps.

The commissioners met Tuesday after learning that a person with a paid-for $311,000 home, a new Mercedes and $80,000 in the bank is being given $500 a month in food stamps and $300 in cash assistance.

“This is absolutely ridiculous and the buck stops here,” Commissioner Michael Kilburn said.

Kilburn doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who will descend into the kind of stupid, sexist character assassination that other challengers have stooped to in past primary attempts to defeat Schmidt. If I’m correct, that will be a huge relief.

I’m sure we’ll hear whining from the Ohio Republican Party, which will until further notice go by the acronym ORPINO (the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only) around here, that “we shouldn’t have divisive primaries,” and “incumbents deserve the benefit of the doubt,” blah-blah-blah. Spare me. This illogic, and the accompanying failure to define oneself to the grass roots who must be motivated to do the grunt work of general-election campaigning, explains why mediocre, squishy GOP candidates in the Buckeye State get their hats handed to them in general elections far more than they should, given the sensible center-right beliefs of the vast majority of Buckeye state residents.

Apparently that’s not going to happen this time, and that’s a very good thing. Make Jean Schmidt defend her record. Make Mike Kilburn tell us and show us why he believes he’ll be better.

Let the games begin.

The New York Times is cutting 100 newsroom jobs sending 100 propaganda specialists packing (HT Hot Air Headlines). A sordid, blatant, obvious, proven example of apparatchik “journalism” at the Times in the wake of Chicago’s lost Olympic bid is here.

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Rick Moran at American Thinker catches the Times on the verge of declaring the recession over. Tell that to the 100 aforementioned journalists apparatchiks.

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Robert Tracinski at Real Clear Politics (HT to an e-mailer) –

…. for weeks now Britain’s newspapers have been filled with articles about the National Health Service pulling the plug on grandma.

…. (One elderly patient’s daughter describes the NHS system for dealing with very ill elderly patients as “a subterfuge for legalized euthanasia of the elderly.” In other words, a death panel.

Of course it is, as ours will be if allowed to become reality. It’s what Obama said he wants when he told the daughter of a 90-plus year-old woman that she should take the pill instead of receiving the pacemaker. It’s what Zeke the Bleak Emanuel has said he wants time and time and time again.

The dirty little secret is that even if euthansia-lite (or worse) isn’t what they want, the set-up of a statist health care system guarantees that it will eventually come to pass in any event. Almost no one envisioned death panels in the UK when health care was taken over by the state decades ago. But there they are. The fact that this administration clearly has people who are okay with that result means it would come faster while they are in control.

But even the most well-meaning conservatives forced to run such a system would be drawn inexorably into the death-panel web. You’ll notice that almost nothing has been done to change Canada’s odious system during the several years the country’s government has been allegedly right-of-center.

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Joe Biden tried to re-run the Reagan line (roughly, “when your neighbor’s out of work, it’s a recession; when you’re out of work, it’s a depression”), and botched the delivery so badly that he made it look like he’s declaring the entire country in a depression.

Not yet. It’s only the POR Recession/”Repression” As Normal People Define It so far. Just give ‘em time, and the legislation they want, and they’ll get us there.

Though its $1.4 trillion red-ink result was mostly known well ahead of its final issuance, the Treasury Department either conveniently got its year-end accounting work done in time for a Friday afternoon release of the final Monthly Treasury Statement, or held it until that time. Last year’s report was released on Wednesday, October 15.

The final statement shows receipts of $2.105 trillion, “outlays” of $3.522 trillion, and a “deficit” of $1.417 trillion. That is $962 billion higher that last year’s “deficit” of $455 billion.

The terms “outlays” and “deficit” are in quotes for reasons I will explain in this post.

There is good news and bad news about the reporting on the results by the Associated Press’s Martin Crutsinger. The good news is that after at least three months of obsessing over how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were contributing to the massive increase in this year’s “deficit” compared to fiscal 2008 when they have been almost completely if not totally irrelevant (here, here, and here at NewsBusters; here, here, and here at BizzyBlog), Crutsinger correctly dropped them from the discussion. Of course, that means he was repeatedly wrong to cite those wars or even defense spending as a whole as a contributing factor in the first place. But don’t wait by the phone for Martin’s apology.

The bad news follows.

First, Crutsinger didn’t explain that an accounting change having nothing to do with fiscal frugality was probably the major reason why the “deficit” came in lower than the $1.75 trillion he cited as the administration’s February prediction. Additionally, though it was an ideal opportunity to do so, he didn’t inform readers that the reported “deficit” is nowhere near the amount by which the national debt increased during the fiscal year.

Here are key paragraphs from Crutsinger’s report that apparently go final until Saturday morning:

The federal budget deficit has surged to an all-time high of $1.42 trillion as the recession caused tax revenues to plunge while the government was spending massive amounts to stabilize the financial system and jump-start the economy.

The imbalance for the budget year ended Sept. 30, more than tripled last year’s record. The Obama administration projects deficits will total $9.1 trillion over the next decade unless corrective action is taken.

As a portion of the economy, the budget deficit stood at 10 percent, the highest since World War II, according to government data released Friday.

President Barack Obama has pledged to reduce the deficit once the Great Recession ends and the unemployment rate starts falling. But economists worry the government lacks the will to make the hard political choices to cut spending and raise taxes to get control of the imbalances.

Administration officials noted that as large as the $1.42 trillion deficit was, it had been projected to be even higher. The administration forecast a $1.75 trillion deficit when Obama sent his first budget proposal to Congress in February, a figure that had been trimmed to $1.58 trillion in an administration update issued in August.

The lower figures reflected in large part the fact that spending from the $700 billion bailout package turned out to lower than originally anticipated.

…. Failure to curb runaway deficits could trigger a financial train wreck that would push interest rates and inflation higher, and send the dollar crashing if foreigners suddenly started dumping their holdings of Treasury securities.

I must cite a few things before getting to Crutsinger’s key omissions:

• Crutsinger’s first sentence acts as if the government really has given the economy a “jump-start.” American workers who have continued to lose jobs to the tune of hundreds of thousands per month are surely wondering where the evidence of a jump-start is.
• Note the reference to “the Great Recession,” capitalized, in the fourth paragraph. Though I have seen usage of the term pick up elsewhere since early this year, I believe this is the first use of the term at AP, and it certainly is by Crutsinger when covering Treasury’s monthly report. I believe this is an attempt to establish a historical marker, in the optimistic hope that it will be understood as the Great Bush Recession, especially if it is ultimately declared to have ended during the third quarter. Readers at BizzyBlog know that pinning the recession solely, or even mostly, on George W. Bush, who nonetheless contributed to it, is absurd. I have been saying so since July 2008.
• Also note the reference to “hard political choices” and “raising taxes” that same paragraph. I sense that the press is getting ready to tell us, “Oh gosh, he really hates to do it, but Dear Leader is going to have to raise taxes on everyone.”
• His opening mention of the year-over year decline in receipts understates its significance and incorrectly blames it entirely on the recession. Part 2 will deal with that matter separately.

Now to Crutsinger’s two big omissions.

The “deficit” is as “low” as it is because effective with April’s Monthly Treasury Statement, the government began accounting for its “investments” in financial institutions, General Motors, Chrysler, and other entities on a “net present value” (NPV) basis. In other words, even though lots of money has been laid out, that money is not part of “outlays.” At the time of the change, the impact was to reduce “outlays” through March 2009 by over $175 billion.

Since then, the government has laid out additional billions first to get GM and Chrysler to limp into bankruptcy, followed by even more billions to help the companies emerge from it. NPV accounting requires you to write down such “investments” to their realizable value. I haven’t seen any evidence that any such writedowns, which would serve to increase the reported deficit, have occurred, even though almost no one believes that Uncle Sam will ever see a full return of all of the money has thrown at the two companies. If someone is aware of a writedown, I’d like to know about it.

The bottom line is that, even after considering repayments of TARP funds made by some banks, the reported “deficit” would have been a lot higher than $1.42 trillion had the government not moved to NPV accounting. Though NPV has its place, it never belongs in what it supposed to be a cash flow statement.

The second omission has to do with a problem that I have begun calling the “unreported deficit.” It has admittedly been present for years, but it has ballooned to gigantic levels during the past two fiscal years.

In normal bookkeeping, you would expect the change in the national debt net of cash assets to be equal to the amount of surplus or deficit reported. But the U.S. government doesn’t do things the normal way, and hasn’t been since LBJ made Social Security part of a “unitary” budget in the 1960s. For the past 20-plus years, the reported “deficits” were lower than the increase in the national debt largely because the rest of the government has raided Social Security surpluses and spent the money on other things. This year, though, the Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP) and other items were added into the “off-budget” mix.

The past two years’ unreported deficits have been bigger than the reported “deficits” by stunning amounts (go here to verify the numbers that follow):

• During fiscal 2008, the reported “deficit” was $455 billion, while the national debt increased by $1.017 trillion ($10.025 trillion minus $9.008 trillion) — a $562 billion difference between reported and actual.
• During fiscal 2009, the reported “deficit” was $1.417 trillion, while the national debt increased by $1.885 trillion ($11.910 trillion minus $10.025 trillion)– a $468 billion difference between reported and actual.

These differences are now so big that they really shouldn’t be ignored by reporters genuinely interested in informing readers and viewers about Uncle Sam’s true fiscal situation.

Crutsinger, of course, did ignore it. I expect that he and the vast majority of his establishment media colleagues will continue to do the same. From this point on, I don’t plan to, especially given that even the reported national debt doesn’t fully reveal the true extent of this nation’s financial peril.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Nicely done, and at least as relevant now as it was in 1948 when it was originally made (HT to an e-mailer):

The Obama administration is apparently intent on partying with the Chinese communist government like it’s the pre-1999 Clinton administration.

Here’s Investors Business Daily, as usual reporting news that the establishment press must not have deemed important:

Selling China The Rope To Hang Us

National Security: On the eve of a visit by China’s No. 2 ranking military officer, the Obama administration loosens export controls on technology that will benefit Chinese missile development. It’s deja vu all over again.

The Pentagon has announced that Chinese Gen. Xu Caihou will visit the United States and meet with Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Oct. 26. Xu is vice chairman of the People’s Liberation Army Central Military Commission. While here, Xu will visit American military installations around the U.S., including the U.S. Pacific Command.

Perhaps Xu will bring with him a note of thanks for the administration’s decision to shift authority for approving sales of missile and space technology from the White House to the Commerce Department. As Bill Gertz points out in the Washington Times, the little-noticed “presidential determination” made Sept. 29 alters a key provision of the 1999 Defense Authorization Act.

That provision required that the president notify Congress whether a proposed transfer of missile and space technology to China would harm the U.S. space-launch industry or help China’s missile programs. It was enacted after a Clinton-administration scandal in which U.S. companies were allowed to transfer technology that jump-started a troubled Chinese missile program.

After the failed launch of a satellite built by Loral Space and Communications Ltd. and attached to a Chinese rocket in February 1996, Loral provided 200 pages of data to China’s Great Wall Industry Corp. to correct the guidance system problems of their “Long March” rockets, which blew up 75% of the time. Hughes Electronics was also involved in the technology transfers.

On March 14, 1996, the Clinton administration transferred licensing responsibility for technology exports to the Commerce Department from State and Defense and, as a result, our formerly strict export controls were effectively eviscerated. This transferring of licensing responsibility was made after a request from a man who would be the Democratic Party’s largest donor in 1996 — Loral Chairman Bernard L. Schwartz.

A May 1997 classified Pentagon report concluded that Loral had “turned over expertise that significantly improved China’s nuclear missiles” and that “United States national security has been harmed.”

So the mechanism is in place for the same thing to happen again. In the late 1990s, it helped make China a player. This time, it could easily make it an equal, or given the size of its population and our debtor status, a conqueror.

There IS something treasonous about giving technology capable of ultimately destroying us to an ideological enemy, isn’t there? Or maybe it’s that with Barack Obama, Anita Dunn, and others running, the show, this administration and congress don’t consider communists ideological enemies any more. Maybe we’re all comrades now.

Wanna bet?

It’s hard to underestimate the dangers if enviros get their way. Here’s a vid that does a great job in a relatively short amount of time (give it a few seconds to load):

Climate Chains from Vimeo.