Doubling Down on Deception — From Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters –

On Sunday, ESPN host and sportswriter Michael Wilbon said conservative talk radio personality Rush Limbaugh is “univerally reviled by African-Americans.”

As amazing as it may seem, this was at least the second time Wilbon made this statement on national television.

Uh, not exactly, Mikey. Watch this O’Reilly Factor segment guest-hosted by Juan Williams:

As you’ll see, Williams first had some choice words for a previous guest who aimed an Uncle-Tom barb at him (“you can go back to the porch”). Williams also noted that DeMaurice Smith of the NFL Players Association, one of the most outspoken critics of Limbaugh’s potential involvement in NFL team ownership, has strong ties to the Obama administration.

Here’s the relevant portion of the transcript that nuked Wilbon at least 36 hours before he repeated his lie (internal link added by me):

Williams: Joining us now from Seattle, Washington is Reverend Ken Hutcherson, a former NFL linebacker and a personal friend of Rush Limbaugh. …. If you’re a black man, and you stand up and say something that’s not politically correct, defend a Rush Limbaugh, and you’re his friend, you see what they did to me. You must know what they will do to you.

Hutcherson: Well you’ve got to understand something, Juan, and it’s very important for everyone listening to understand this. I want to be extremely clear on this. This is extremely personal to me. You see, to you Juan, this is a news story, a big news story. …. This is more than a news story. Rush and I are friends, close friends. And when you talk about being close friends, I don’t see Rush as a white man. He’s my friend. I don’t see him as a talk show host, a very famous talk show host. He’s a very close friend. That overrides my political views and everything. So this attack is about a friend of mine who has been lied upon, and I don’t care what others think about it.

…. I’m a Christian. I’m a pastor. I lead a very large church. And what they’re doing to Rush? This isn’t about just Rush. It’s about attacking conservative values in America. I’m not going to put up with it because he’s a friend ….

The Williams segment aired Friday evening. Michael Wilbon nonetheless repeated on Sunday what had by then been objectively proven to be a flat-out, total lie.

The Williams segment vindicates my Thursday characterization of the whole sordid episode as Stalinist, and expands its scope well beyond the “hard-news” press.

My guess is that Rush had no idea that Rev. Hutcherson was going to go on Fox to defend him, or that if he knew, he tried to talk him out of it. But what Hutcherson did is what real friends do. Well done, Reverend.

Shame on you, Michael Wilbon.

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Today’s Positivity post is yet more proof that adult stem cell research (ASCR) is making far, far more progress than the embryonic variety (ESCR). ASCR also happens not to take human life in the process, while ESCR does.

In a March post, I noted that President Obama issued an Executive Order that not only opened up federal funding to ESCR but also revoked President Bush’s Executive Order that encouraged the pursuit of ASCR.

The practical effect of the EO is that the Obama government is betting on the wrong horse. The political point is that this is yet another in a long, long line of examples where the President and his supporters proactively favor measures that make the taking of innocent human life easier, while opposing laws that would make it more difficult. The moral point is that this administration is clearly in the camp of those who have no problem taking human life in the name of supposedly “higher” values.

Obama himself even opposed the Illinois equivalent of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act when he was an Illinois senator …. FOUR times (HT Pro Ecclesia):

All of this shows that giving these people the kind of control they they want over the day-to-day administration and provision of health care is far too dangerous to even contemplate.

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Meanwhile, Obama’s Afghanistan dither continues.

Gateway Pundit, who has just moved to First Things, contrasts the current limbo with what Obama said while campaigning last year:

“His plan comes up short. There’s not enough troops, not enough resources and not enough urgency. What President Bush and Senator McCain don’t understand is that the central front in the War on Terror is not in Iraq and never was. The central front is in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the terrorists who hit us on 9-11 are still plotting attacks seven years later.”

So why the holdup on what McChrystal wants?

From LifeNews.com (paragraph breaks and internal links added by me):

Scientists are a big step closer to their long-term of goal of creating patient-specific stem cells that are safe to use and don’t require the destruction of embryos.

Induced pluripotent stem cells – also known as iPS cells – are all the rage in the nascent field of regenerative medicine. Like embryonic stem cells, they have the potential to become any type of cell in the body and could be used to grow replacement parts, such as insulin-producing beta cells for diabetes patients or nerve cells for repairing spinal cord injuries. Even better, they can be made by reprogramming skin or other cells from the patients who need them. That not only eliminates the need to use embryos, it ensures that the replacement tissues made from iPS cells are genetically matched to patients and won’t be rejected by the body’s immune system.

But there’s still a big catch: In order to rewind adult cells to a pluripotent state, researchers have to turn on a set of dormant genes that have the potential to cause tumors. So do the viruses they use to activate those genes. So researchers have been looking for ways around this problem.

One approach is to snip out the genes and viruses once the reprogramming is complete. Another is to use DNA sequences called transposons in place of viruses, then delete the transposons after they’re no longer needed. One group of researchers has even used genetic engineering to modify the key genes so that they can enter the skin cells without requiring viruses or transposons.

But many scientists think the safest approach is to replace the genes altogether with so-called small molecules. In a study published online today in the journal Cell Stem Cell (abstract here), researchers from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute report that a single compound they dubbed RepSox can replace two of the four key reprogramming genes. “We’re halfway home, and remarkably we got halfway home with just one chemical,” senior author Kevin Eggan, a professor in Harvard’s department of stem cell and regenerative biology, said in a statement.

The Harvard Science and Engineering announcement is here.

This is the trailer for Phelim McAleer’s documentary, “Not Evil Just Wrong”:

McAleer is the journalist and filmmaker who challenged Al Gore in Wisconsin a week ago at a conference of environmental journalists. As noted here, Gore grievously dissembled in his response to McAleer about the nature of a British judge’s declaration that showing Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth documentary (as reported by ABC News) “violated laws barring the promotion of partisan political views in the classroom” unless it was accompanied by nine corrections to incorrect assertions in the film.

Gore claimed that “the ruling was in favor of the movie.”

Given the world depopulation goals of many enviros (here, here, and here, for starters), I’m not at all convinced that the using the word “evil” is out of line. Behold the compilation that follows:

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To remove any doubt that greenies want you dead, let these environmentalists/monsters speak for themselves:

• Jacques-Yves Cousteau, environmentalist and documentary maker: “It’s terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized, and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.”
• John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal: “I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University population biologist: “We’re at 6 billion people on the Earth, and that’s roughly three times what the planet should have. About 2 billion is optimal.”
• David Foreman, founder of Earth First!: “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
• David M. Graber, research biologist for the National Park Service: “It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”
• Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”
• Merton Lambert, former spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation: “The world has a cancer, and that cancer is man.”
• John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club: “Honorable representatives of the great saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty!”
• Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund: “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
• Maurice Strong, U.N. environmental leader: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
• Ted Turner, CNN founder, UN supporter, and environmentalist: “A total population of 250–300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
• Paul Watson, a founder of Greenpeace: “I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.”

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More eco-nonsense, not all relating to depopulation, is here.

The incomparable Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics George Reisman makes an important point about the enviros’ outrageous statements:

There is no negative reaction from the environmental movement (to statements advocation radical depopulation) because what such statements express is nothing other than the actual philosophy of the movement. This is what the movement believes in. It’s what it agrees with. It’s what it desires. Environmentalists are no more prepared to attack the advocacy of mass destruction and death than Austrian economists are prepared to attack the advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism and economic progress. Mass destruction and death is the goal of environmentalists, just as laissez-faire capitalism and economic progress is the goal of Austrian economists.

And this is why I call environmentalism evil. It’s evil to the core. In the environmental movement, contemplating the mass death of people in general is no more shocking than it was in the Communist and Nazi movements to contemplate the mass death of capitalists or Jews in particular. All three are philosophies of death. The only difference is that environmentalism aims at death on a much larger scale.

Despite still being far from possessing full power in any country, the environmentalists are already responsible for approximately 96 million deaths from malaria across the world. These deaths are the result of the environmentalist-led ban on the use of DDT, which could easily have prevented them and, before its ban, was on the verge of wiping out malaria. The environmentalists brought about the ban because they deemed the survival of a species of vultures, to whom DDT was apparently poisonous, more important than the lives of millions of human beings.

…. If and when the environmentalists take full power, and begin imposing and then progressively increasing the severity of such things as carbon taxes and carbon caps, in order to reach their goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 90 percent, the number of deaths that will result will rise into the billions, which is in accord with the movement’s openly professed agenda of large-scale depopulation.

As Reisman says, at some point “evil” is an apt descriptor. Who can say we’re not at that point?

This won’t surprise anyone who reads this blog regularly, but it needs to get on the record nonetheless: The airing of a June video showing interim White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Mao and  Mother Teresa as “two of my favorite philosophers” to a group of high school students is barely news in the establishment press.

In an August 2008 report on the Obama campaign, Anne E. Kornblut of the Washington Post also described Dunn as “as senior adviser” who had joined the campaign “in the spring.”

Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media has the video. Jeff Poor (covering Glenn Beck’s original broadcast that broke the story) and P.J. Gladnick (on Dunn’s pathetic attempt to excuse herself) at NewsBusters have previously dealt with Dunn’s speech.

Here are the Mao-relevant portions of the speech excerpt:

…. the third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers – Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled with each other but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is you’re going to make choices.

…. In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-Shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army. They had the air force. They had everything on their side, and people said how can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this? Against all the odds against you, and Mao Tse Tung said, you know, you fight your war, and I’ll fight mine, and think about that for a second.

“Mao: The Unknown Story” is probably the most thorough compilation of Mao’s destructive legacy. Authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday contend in an interview carried at the Amazon link that “Mao was responsible for the deaths of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime.”

What follows is a round-up of the establishment media’s reaction to the Dunn revelation.

Here is what I found in a search on “Anita Dunn” (typed with quote marks at the Associated Press:

At the New York Times, the same search request came back with two relevant results:

• First, there’s a ridiculously biased “Week in Review” piece (“The Battle Between the White House and Fox News”) that appeared in that section’s front page in today’s print edition by David Carr that is dated October 17 online. Though the story more than likely went to print 36 hours or more after Glenn Beck aired the Dunn speech excerpt Thursday evening, Carr made no reference to Dunn’s Mao-is-a-fave speech.
• Then there’s a Friday afternoon Caucus Blog post (“White House Vs. Fox: Chairman Mao”). The post does refer to Dunn’s speech, carries the YouTube vid, and also carries Dunn’s shameless “Lee Atwater also quoted Mao” justification attempt. That’s nice, but in my opinion keeping the news at the Caucus Blog with a with a conveniently uninformative “this is nothing” headline is a “clever” way for the Times to claim “See, we covered it,” while ensuring that print edition readers, most of whom will never see the blog entry, don’t see it.

Now let’s get to the the Washington Post. A search on Dunn’s name in quotes at about 10:15 a.m. came back with two relevant items.

Readers will love the first one. At the end of a “Live Fix” online exchange with readers on Friday, the Post’s Chris Cillizza had this testy exchange with “Dunn Loring VA”:

Dunn Loring, VA: Questions about Rak Goyle, ok, questions about Anita Dunn, avoided. Isn’t the WH communications director and her crusade against Fox more newsworthy? Are you afraid of what she might do if you address her admitted love of Mao in your chat?

Chris Cillizza: HMMM. No.

I think the WH made a strategic move to publicly hammer FNC and they used Anita Dunn to do it because she is a veteran communicator who also happens to be the White House communications director.

Happy now, Dunn Loring?

The other item is Kathleen Parker’s Sunday syndicated column, where the faux conservative’s predictable reaction to the escalating fight between the Obama administration and Fox News is to “Let the little dogs yap, Mr. President.” Parker’s column first appeared on Friday at other outlets, so it’s probable that she prepared it before Beck’s program appeared.

Otherwise there is no straight-news coverage of Dunn’s Mao reference in the Post.

A search on Dunn’s name at the Los Angeles Times returns one item from yesterday noting that “Dunn’s criticism of Fox News” will be a subject of conversation on CBS’s “Sunday Morning” show.

After sorting by date, a Google News search covering October 15-18 on ["Anita Dunn" Mao] (typed as indicated between brackets) at about 10:45 this morning came back with 77 results. U.S. establishment press outlets make a up a precious few of those results. The ones I found came from:

• A blog post at the Chicago Tribune by Steve Chapman, who mostly makes excuses for Dunn.
• A Charleston Daily Mail blog item by Don Surber, who generally seems to have a stronger bond with the blogosphere than the media establishment.
• Kansas City Star columnist Yael T. Abouhalkeh.
• CNN International’s coverage of Dunn’s pitiful response, even more pitifully headlined (“Obama aide fires back at Beck over Mao remarks”).
• A Christian Science Monitor item by Patrik Jonsson that obsesses over “irony.”

Lynn Sweet at the Chicago Sun-Times put up the transcript of a press briefing by White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton, which includes this priceless Q&A (bold is mine):

Q. One more question — have you — do you any comment on Anita Dunn’s belief that Mao is one of her favorite political philosophers?

MR. BURTON: I caught some of that from the Glenn Beck show yesterday, but I don’t think anybody takes it — takes his attacks very seriously. We’re just — you know, we go day to day in this White House trying to ensure that people know the truth about the policies and programs and positions that the President holds, and we’re going to continue to do that.

They take Beck sooooo not seriously, yet they’re watching him. Sure, Bill.

Several other items that appear to represent establishment media coverage of the situation only appear because commenters at the respective links brought up the topic. Thanks to those commenters for literally doing the press’s work for them. It’s a shame that those commenters can’t receive rewards for their efforts.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

An all-time record deficit fails to deter those who may really want to make it worse.

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Note: This item went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Friday. Update: The final deficit was released Friday afternoon two days after I submitted the column to PJM and about 18 hours after the column appeared there. The final deficit was $1.417 trillion. Total receipts from economic activity at $218.9 billion, were higher than I anticipated, while outlays came in about $15 billion higher than the Congressional Budget Office anticipated. Those changes don’t have a material effect on the analysis in this column.

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While we wait for the finalized deficit numbers from the Treasury Department, what we already know about the results of the past fiscal year should be enough to make anyone sick.

The Congressional Budget Office last week estimated that Uncle Sam’s deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 was “about $1.4 trillion.” You know that things are out of control when the word “about” precedes a figure that large which only goes out to one decimal point.

That $1.4 trillion is more than triple last year’s deficit of $455 billion, and almost nine times the $162 billion recorded in the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2007.

Well over half of the “about” $945 billion increase in the reported deficit ($1.4 trillion less $455 billion), or roughly $520 billion, is due to decreases in receipts from economic activity:

On a quarter-by-quarter basis, the decay in collections has mostly accelerated. Here’s the year-over-year change in receipts from economic activity by quarter for the past two years:

+5.7% — Quarter ended December 31, 2007
-1.4% — Quarter ended March 31, 2008
+5.1% — Quarter ended June 30, 2008
-2.8% — Quarter ended September 30, 2008
-9.3% — Quarter ended December 31, 2008
-18.0% — Quarter ended March 31, 2009
-30.9% — Quarter ended June 30, 2009
-16.2% — Quarter ended September 30, 2009

You might think that the September 30, 2009 results are cause for cheer. Think again:

These results, based on looking at the sum of all daily receipts and refunds during the two quarters, show that serious current shortfalls have spread to the “withheld” category. By stark contrast, withheld income and employment taxes were actually 2.8% higher during the September 30, 2008 quarter than they were in the same quarter of 2007.

This is important, and very problematic. Withheld receipts primarily consist of federal income and Social Security taxes taken out of employee paychecks. You would not expect that an increase of “only” 3.5% in the average seasonally adjusted unemployment rate during the quarter (from 6.1% in July-September of 2008 to 9.6% during the most recent quarter) would cause receipts from withholdings to dive by 10%. But they have. I believe this is because:

• Many formerly high earners are earning much less in this dismal economy.
• Those still working are working fewer hours (government reports confirm this).
• (Probably less important, and not directly related to labor) Many investors taking retirement plan distributions are having less money withheld from them because of other financial setbacks.

Both employment itself and the utilization of those currently employed are not expected to pick up significantly any time soon. Given that probability, someone needs to explain to me how Uncle Sam’s collections are going to recover significantly. Though there appear to be differences between how Treasury and CBO define “receipts,” CBO’s June 2009 analysis projects that total receipts will go up by about 10% during fiscal 2010 compared to the almost-final result shown earlier, and by an astonishing 40% to an all-time high of over $2.9 trillion by fiscal 2012. On what basis?

On the spending side, year-to-date outlays of $3.27 billion through August 2009 were a breathtaking 18% higher than the previous fiscal year’s first eleven months. CBO estimates that the difference narrowed slightly during September. Big deal; the increase is by far the largest ever in dollar terms, and on a percentage basis makes the worst years of Republican-controlled Congresses look positively tame.

Even beyond that, the current year’s reported spending spree doesn’t even include the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Beginning with the release of its April statement, Treasury decided that TARP “investments” would be treated on a “net present value” (NPV) basis. Even though the cash had obviously been disbursed, Treasury’s change had the effect of reducing reported outlays through March by about $175 billion.

Since then, the government has “invested” billions more in General Motors and Chrysler, both during and afte their respective bankruptcies. Just this month, both GM and Chrysler announced management shuffles in response to their deteriorating marketplace performances. Any accurate NPV accounting should carry these government “investments” at amounts much, much lower than the total of all funds disbursed. Doing so would, and should, add tens of billions to the final reported deficit. One would expect the necessary NPV accounting to be done before the government releases its final results. But this is the Obama administration we’re talking about. Who expects them to admit that these two companies are already teetering?

Having gone through what has to be the worst non-wartime fiscal year in American history, Obama and the geniuses running Congress want to impose de facto energy taxes euphemistically referred to as “cap and trade” on almost anything that emits carbon, take over the health care system (because they have done so well with Social Security and Medicare), and impose a frightening array of tax increases and new taxes that will almost definitely not yield the amounts predicted. All items noted would further pummel an already staggering economy.

We’re either surrounded by fools, or knaves.

The support for the “knave” alternative is becoming more compelling. People who are serious about their desire for an economic recovery simply don’t do the things they have done, and don’t propose the things they are proposing. What they want are things you would expect from the government of a banana republic, not the supposed leader of the free world.

When is someone going to ask Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, or Harry Reid, the folks who first gave us the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy during the summer of last year, why they won’t put a halt to what has brought down the economy, and why they seem so grimly determined to keep it down?

From Washington:

Oct 17, 2009 / 08:03 am

A former abortionist has said he believes that Our Lady of Guadalupe enlightened him about the destructive nature of his work, adding that Jesus’ mercy has affected and forgiven him. Devotion to The Divine Mercy, he said, is an answer to the pessimism, skepticism, relativism and cynicism of the world.

Dr. John Bruchalski, who founded the pro-life Tepeyac Family Center in Virginia in 1994, performed abortions before his return to the Catholic faith.

He is a speaker at the upcoming North American Congress on Mercy and discussed his conversion in an interview published at the Congress’ website.

The doctor recounted that in 1987 he was a “typical gynecologist” who believed that contraceptives would liberate women. On a visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, he said, he “very distinctly” heard the words “Why are you hurting me?”

“It was an internal voice. It was a woman’s voice — very loving, very non-threatening. It was very clear, but I didn’t entirely understand it. I believe that voice was Our Lady of Guadalupe trying to make me see what I was doing. But it would be years before I fully understood the message.”

For his residency, Bruchalski worked at an in-vitro fertilization center that was also a contraceptive research and development center. His mother took him on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje in Yugoslavia, where he said the nature of his actions became very clear to him.

Even though he built contraceptive devices and performed abortions, he insisted that God “can save any one of us.”

“None of us are too far away. None of us are too lost,” he told the Mercy Congress organizers.

“Yes, Jesus’ mercy affected me. Christ doesn’t look back on my past. I have been forgiven. ‘Repent and believe.’ The Chaplet [of The Divine Mercy] is so important to me — I have to say it over and over again for me to believe it.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

It was bad enough almost exactly four years ago when supposedly respectable columnist Nick Kristof of the New York Times sought to essentially excuse the over 70 million dead bodies mass murderer Mao Tse-tung left in his wake during his brutal reign over Communist China:

I agree that Mao was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects …. But Mao’s legacy is not all bad. Land reform in China, like the land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today. The emancipation of women and end of child marriages moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea. Indeed, Mao’s entire assault on the old economic and social structure made it easier for China to emerge as the world’s new economic dragon.

…. Mao’s ruthlessness was a catastrophe at the time …. and yet there’s more to the story: Mao also helped lay the groundwork for the rebirth and rise of China after five centuries of slumber.

Y’know, the dead millions were just collateral damage, eggs broken to make omelets.

The corpses of the 50 million “missing girls,” victims of the country’s current one-child policy, would surely dispute whether they have “more equality than in Japan or Korea.”

Bad as Kristof’s willful blindness is, it’s much worse to have someone supposedly respectable in an important position inside the Obama White House who doesn’t just makes excuses for Mao, but considers him a kind of role model and a “favorite philosopher”:

The third lesson and tip actually come from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Teresa. Not often coupled with each other. In 1947, when Mao Tse-tung was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, the Nationalist Chinese helped the cities, they had the army, they had the Air Force, they had everything on their side. And people said, “How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this? Against all the odds against you?” And Mao Tse-tung said, “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine,” and think about that for a second.

The inclusion of and comparison to Mother Teresa adds insult to already grievous injury. Bleep you, Anita Dunn.

The real “wingnuts” are in charge. They deserve no quarter, and no benefit of the doubt. Ever.

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UPDATE: Clarity — As long as real “wingnuts” like Anita Dunn, Kevin Jennings, John Holdren, and so many others populate responsible positions in this administration, this administration deserves no quarter, and no benefit of the doubt. A full-broom housecleaning could conceivably render things differently. Fat chance.

As I suspected yesterday (“There’s also the possibility that the final statement will be issued late this afternoon in hopes of getting light weekend press coverage of the full-year deficit”), the Treasury Department released the government’s final Monthly Treasury Statement for the fiscal year ended September 30 late yesterday afternoon.

The $1.417 trillion deficit is slightly higher than that predicted by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) earlier this month.

CBO’s receipts estimate of $2.106 trillion was about $1.4 billion higher than actual. Its “outlays” estimate of $3.515 trillion was $6.7 billion too low. “Outlays” is in quotes because many disbursements the government makes, most notably those related to the Troubled Assets Relief Program, are treated as “investments,” and their Net Present Value (NPV) is excluded from “outlays,” even though by any sane reckoning the money involved in these “investments” has been “laid out.”

Though this move by Treasury conveniently serves to make what used to be mostly routine reporting on the deficit nearly indecipherable, we do know that when the conversion to NPV accounting took place, the government’s “outlays,” and therefore the reported deficit, went down by over $175 billion. There have been additional TARP “investments” made in General Motors and Chrysler since then. It’s pretty obvious that the reported deficit if computed handling TARP on a cash basis would be much higher than the officially reported $1.417 trillion. Based on the detail in Trea

Because of the march to indecipherability, reporting the changes in the national debt (which one would expect to be the sum of accumulated reported deficits but isn’t, as you’ll see) is going to become a habit around here.

Thus, based on the final Treasury Statement’s release, the following slightly revises what I noted yesterday.

Using the TreasuryDirect tool found here, after the close of business on September 30, 2009, the national debt was $11,903,588,660,952.03.

On September 30, 2008, the national debt was $10,024,724,896,912.49.

The comprehensive (i.e., actual) deficit for the entire government of the United States of America during the fiscal year ended September 30, 2009 was therefore $1,878,863,764,039 — and 54 cents.

The difference between the reported deficit and the comprehensive deficit is “the hidden deficit,” or (this is probably the term I’ll stick with) the “unreported deficit.” The past fiscal year’s unreported deficit was $471 billion ($1.878 trillion minus $1.417 trillion).

From South Berwick, Maine:

October 05, 2009 2:00 AM

In the wake of a tragic fire which claimed his home, one teenager was recognized this weekend for his bravery during the blaze.

The South Berwick Fire Department on Sunday made 13-year-old Max Willette an honorary firefighter after he awoke in a house on fire and got himself and his mother to safety shortly before the home became fully engulfed in flames.

South Berwick Fire Chief George Gorman presented Max with a plaque and praised his “outstanding valor” in the ceremony, which the teenager in his Boy Scout uniform quietly accepted.

The Willette family home burned to the ground in September following a fire that raced through the house, engulfing the frame within minutes. Max was sleeping on the couch and woke up shortly before 12:15 a.m. on Sept. 22 to find flickering lights and fire. He ran upstairs and knocked on the wall of his sister’s room to wake her, though she was not home, and woke his mother, Alice, as the two ran out of the building after grabbing a phone in order to dial 911.

Gorman showed the Herald a picture of the home on fire that he said was taken about five minutes after the building ignited, shortly before South Berwick companies arrived to battle the blaze. Flames could be seen coming out of every window and even the shingles on the roof were burning, and Gorman said that Max’s quick thinking and fast response were the only things that saved him and his mother.

“The actions that he did probably saved both their lives,” Gorman said. “Another minute and they would not have made it out of the building.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

(This post, originally published at about 8:30 this morning, was carried to the top after the Update below was completed.)
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It’s here.

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

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UPDATE: I made some key points in the second and third Lucid Link items earlier this morning.

What follows extend what I addressed in the column about the decline in withholdings.

Let’s first go back to the origins of the overall slide in collections.

Corporate tax collections were the first to decline. This actually began happening to a relatively modest degree during the fourth quarter of 2007, when such collections decreased 6.3% from 4Q06. Even during 2Q08, a quarter that included April’s all-time collections record (which I have been calling the “Supply Side Stunner” since just before it became official), year-over-year corporate collections were down 14.1%. In the most recent two quarters, they’re down year over year by 57.3% and roughly 38% (pending issuance of the September 2009 Monthly Treasury Statement, which is officially very late), respectively.

Individual payments of estimated taxes, up year-over-year by over 5% in 2Q08, are what drove the “Supply Side Stunner” referenced in the previous paragraph. These didn’t actually begin to decline until 4Q08, and then only by less than 2%. But they cratered during the first half of this year; 2Q09, by far the biggest quarter for this category, came in a shocking 35% lower than 2Q08.

That brings us to withholdings. They shouldn’t decline, as long as people stay employed and are getting at least modest pay increases, so they were the last to go negative. Here is their track record for the last eight quarters (these percentages, including 3Q09′s, are sourced to the Daily Treasury Statements, and shouldn’t be subject to any surprises that might appear in September 2009′s monthly statement):

+8.8% — Quarter ended December 31, 2007 (4Q07)
+1.8% — Quarter ended March 31, 2008(1Q08)
+2.7% — Quarter ended June 30, 2008 (2Q08)
+2.8% — Quarter ended September 30, 2008(3Q08)
-2.0% — Quarter ended December 31, 2008 (4Q08)
-5.8% — Quarter ended March 31, 2009 (1Q09)
-9.3% — Quarter ended June 30, 2009 (2Q09)
-10.1% — Quarter ended September 30, 2009 (3Q09)

The PJM column covered the decline in the most recent quarter, but as you can see, the one before it was almost as bad. You would not expect such steep year-over-year declines to happen when the year-over-year average quarterly unemployment rate has “only” increased by about 3.5%.

But, as stated in the column, these declines are happening, for three reasons:

• Many formerly high earners are earning much less.
• Those still working are working fewer hours.
• Probably less important and not directly related to labor, many investors taking retirement plan distributions are having less money withheld from them.

The positive percentages for withholding collections through the third quarter of 2008 also happen to support my long-held contention that we were NOT in a recession until real GDP began a string of consecutive declines in the third quarter of 2008.

Both the CBO and the White House seem to think that collections will rebound to large degrees in the coming years, and will actually reach $3 trillion by 2012. As long as unemployment stays where it is (most observers both within and outside the Obama White House think it will either do that or get worse for quite a while), and as long as this administration lets taxes increase next year while attempting to impose cap and trade and statist health care, I don’t see how that will happen.

Given the policies this administration is pursuing, I think it’s more likely that collections will continue to decline further by relatively small percentages, and that we’ll have to be quite lucky to see them stay the same or increase slightly.

Sorry Rick Sanchez: Broadcasting lies about what Rush Limbaugh has said from your perch on CNN to millions (oops, I meant “hundreds of thousands“), and then “apologizing” on Twitter doesn’t cut it. What a weasel. Update: Sanchez has apologized; text is at the NewsBusters link. My guess is that a sobering talk with CNN’s legal counsel had some effect. Update 2, Oct. 18: There are lots of commentators correctly pointing out that Sanchez’s apology is inadequate, in that it leaves viewers with the impression that while he (Sanchez) erred in airing a quote that didn’t exist, Rush is still a racist — even though of course there is no evidence of that, because he isn’t. Did I forget to tell everyone that Rush’s call screener is African American?

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It’s the morning on October 16. The Monthly Treasury Statement, normally issued on the eighth business day of the month, is still not out. Today is either the 11th or 12th business day, depending on whether this past Monday was a federal holiday. Fiscal year-end verification sometimes delays the final September statement, which wasn’t released until October 15 last year, the 10th or 11th business day.

The Monthly Treasury Statement is, or was, supposed to be a simple list of monthly receipts and disbursements (i.e., a cash flow statement). But beginning with April’s statement, along with retroactive changes made to previous months, the Obama Treasury decided to corrupt it with “Net Present Value” (NPV) accounting for its “investments” in banks, GM, Chrysler, and other entities. I covered the details of the potential effects of that decision back in May. NPV accounting is important and necessary, but it doesn’t belong in a cash-flow statement.  I believe it’s in there for the sole purpose of reducing the reported deficit by potentially hundreds of billions.

At the moment, the important point to make is that determining the NPV of the government’s “investments,” which should be an accounting decision based on objective judgments concerning the recoverability of the monies “invested,”may have become a political decision. I hope I’m wrong, but it would not surprise me if the delay in getting out September’s statement is due to some squabbling inside the Treasury, perhaps also involving the Congressional Budget Office, over what NPV should be (that’s a hint to AP and others looking for a possible real story). The lower NPV goes, the higher the reported deficit will be. There’s also the possibility that the final statement will be issued late this afternoon in hopes of getting light weekend press coverage of the full-year deficit. CBO says will be “about $1.4 billion.”

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Since there are already so many differences between the reported deficit and the change in the national debt, it may be time to put more emphasis on the monthly growth in the national debt. In fact, I will start doing that now and in future months.

As noted above, the reported deficit is “about $1.4 trillion.”

Using the TreasuryDirect tool found here, I found that after the close of business on September 30, 2009, the national debt was $11,903,588,660,952.03.

On September 30, 2008, the national debt was $10,024,724,896,912.49.

The comprehensive (i.e., actual) deficit for the entire government of the United States of America during the fiscal year ended September 30, 2009 was therefore $1,878,863,764,039 — and 54 cents.

The difference between the reported deficit and the comprehensive deficit will henceforth be referred to as “the hidden deficit.” The past fiscal year’s hidden deficit was roughly $478 billion ($1.878 trillion minus $1.4 trillion).

Anyone who thinks I’m a convenient late arriver to the topic needs to go here.

From Zaragoza, Spain:

Oct 14, 2009 / 10:08 pm

Officials in the Spanish town of Zaragoza confirmed this week that Monday’s celebration of the feast of Our Lady of the Pillar was the largest in history, with some 450,000 faithful passing before the venerated statue that represents the country’s most popular Marian devotion.

The Spanish newspaper La Razon quoted city official Jeronimo Blasco, who said, “The traditional flower offerings to Our Lady of the Pillar were the longest and largest in history: they lasted eleven hours, from seven-thirty in the morning to six-thirty at night, with some 450,000 who came to place flowers before the monument.”

Good weather and the long weekend made the large numbers possible, the newspaper reported, adding that many immigrant groups, from Africans to Japanese, also came to express devotion to the Blessed Mother.

“More than 400 groups took part in the procession, with some 25,000 people moving through the line per hour, leaving more than seven million flowers at the feet of the patroness of Spain. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.