Given the time frame, this is well-done (HT Conservative Blog Watch):

The long version, all 2,074 pages of it, is at this PDF link originating at this post at The Hill.

_____________________________________________

UPDATE: Nobody with a brain ever believed it anyway, but the core claim about cost savings at The Hill link just cited (“The Congressional Budget Office [CBO] has estimated that it will cost $849 billion over ten years, will reduce the deficit by $127 billion and would cover 31 million Americans”) has already been nuked by the CBO itself (HT Hot Air) –

CBO estimates that enacting both H.R. 3961 and H.R. 3962 would add $89 billion to budget deficits over the 2010–2019 period. That amount is about $12 billion less than the sum of the effects of enacting the bills separately.

It’s also a $216 billion swing (from +$127 to -$89).

I have a feeling Doug Elmendorf at CBO is just warming up.

Yes, the government thinks we’re that fricking stupid …

Stimulus Fraud Posted 11/17/2009 07:49 PM ET

The Economy: We knew something was funny when the White House claimed that 640,000 to 1 million jobs had been created from this year’s stimulus. What we didn’t know was that it would turn into a massive fraud.

Not only have 640,000 new jobs not been created from the stimulus — an absurd claim, given the economy’s loss of nearly 4 million payroll positions this year — but it now seems that even the jobs themselves are fictional.

Thanks to the digging of a number of data sleuths, it turns out that many of the jobs reported by states come from made-up congressional districts.

This would be funny if it weren’t a criminal waste of public funds. And yet, G. Edward DeSeve, who runs the government’s economic recovery program, says the errors are “relatively few” and “don’t change the fundamental conclusions one can draw from the data.”

Excuse us? The “relatively few” errors are in fact thousands in number. But that’s the pernicious place we find ourselves today — a public official defending shoddy accounting that looks an awful lot like fraud to the tune of billions of dollars.

One example: the 15th Congressional District of Arizona, where 30 jobs were salvaged with $761,420 in spending, according to Recovery.gov, the official government Web site. As ABC News reports: “There is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.”

States as diverse as Kansas, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Ohio, Minnesota and West Virginia also reported phony jobs.

Makes sense…Ted Strickland begged for $7 billion in “stimulus” money to plug the GAPING hole in Ohio’s budget. Didn’t “stimulate” one job.

…All told, according to the useful Web site Watchdog.org, some $6.4 billion was spent to “create or save” 30,000 jobs in phantom districts. That comes out to about $225,000 per nonexistent job. And that’s only what’s been found so far.

The Washington Examiner’s bogus-job count is even higher — at 75,343, a figure likely to climb as more are discovered.

Some cases were egregious. California’s state university system took in $268.5 million in stimulus funds, claiming it “saved” 26,000 jobs. It has since admitted that few, if any, jobs were really at risk.

The government’s response to all this? “Human beings make mistakes,” shrugged Recovery Board spokesman Ed Pound on Monday. But by Tuesday, as the furor grew, the board’s DeSeve was vowing to go through reports with a “fine-tooth comb.”

The entire post is here.

Sooooo, will the next wave of ACORN protests take place at the WH or at the homes of the thugs who have the “stimulus” money lining their freezers?

Eventually, even people who are dumb enough to believe a word Obama said/says, will figure out that by definition, the political left will always epitomize and advance the very conditions [they say] they want to eliminate.

The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut (saved here in case her report is modified or disappears) captured a comment Obama made to U.S troops at Osan Air Base in South Korea while heading back to Washington after his Asian trip. 

I believe that the comment (bolded) could be seen as shining a less than flattering light on the president’s mindset:

Obama arrived on the base 3:19 p.m. local time (1 a.m. Eastern Standard Time), and received a rousing welcome from 1,500 troops in camouflage uniforms, many holding cameras or pointing cell phones to snap pictures.

“You guys make a pretty good photo op,” the president said.

Does anyone think that a similar comment by Bush 43 (not that he would ever think to make it) would escape establishment media criticism? Let’s see if this Obamism slides by without criticism.

Earlier in the report, Kornblut noted that Obama’s Afghan dither continues:

President Barack Obama will not announce his decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan before the Thanksgiving holiday, senior aides said on Thursday.

….. Obama and his top military and diplomatic aides have been deliberating for months over how to proceed in Afghanistan, where the United States and its partners have sought for eight years to defeat the Taliban and deny al-Qaeda a safe haven from which it can plan and launch attacks.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has stated that without the deployment of up to 40,000 additional of troops within the next year, the mission “will likely result in failure.” But some aides are arguing for a much smaller troop increase, and the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, has questioned whether the Afghan government can be a reliable partner.

Obama said in interviews Wednesday that he would reveal his decision within the next several weeks. On Thursday, aides clarified that there would be no announcement before Thanksgiving, one week away. Senior administration officials said Obama intends to meet with his national security team again before going public with his plans.

My cynical and admittedly speculative take on the “photo-op” comment is that Obama’s far more cynical “senior aides” actually discussed the president’s visit to our soldiers as a photo-op. The president (to their probable horror) picked up on it, thinking that using the term would be cute. If so, the slip, if you will, is quite revealing.

Possible comment fodder: As to Afghanistan, hasn’t it been almost 100 days, if not longer, since General McChrystal made his request? And if I recall correctly, it was for 40,000 troops, not “up to” 40,000 as stated by Ms. Kornblut, which would give readers the impression that significantly fewer boots on the ground might be okay. I don’t think so.

Photo above is the right portion of an AP original found here.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Look in the mirror, pal — “US President Barack Obama warned that the US economy could head into a “double-dip recession” unless urgent steps were taken to rein in mounting public debt.” It’s been your guys’ POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy since the summer of 2008; we’re just living in it, and reacting to it as best we can.

_______________________________________________________

Fox’s “Fair and Balanced” tag line is valid, and so obvious because most of the rest of the establishment media outlets are so obviously biased.

Fox is also not afraid to point to the other guys’ warts when warranted, which must annoy the heck of them. Too bad, so sad.

For example, at its web site, Fox’s Robert Shaffer notes this about the Associated Press’s assignment of 11 reporters to participate in a fact-check of Sarah Palin’s new book:

Reviewing books and holding public figures accountable is at the core of good journalism, but the treatment Palin’s book received appears to be something new for the AP. The organization did not review for accuracy recent books by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, then-Sen. Joe Biden, either book by Barack Obama released before he was president or autobiographies by Bill or Hillary Clinton.

That is a fair and balanced observation about another news outfit that is anything but that.

_______________________________________________________

Memo to Eric Holder: When you’ve lost credibility with NPR, you’ve clearly run out of people who believe your indefensible garbage.

_______________________________________________________

Bad news for Nancy “Botox” Pelosi — The extensive list of taxes contained in the recently released 2,074-page Senate statist health care bill includes a “5% excise tax on cosmetic surgery and similar procedures – begins for surgery in 2010 – $6 B tax increase!” If Pelosi is hard to find during the last few days of 2009, we’ll know why.

From Miami, Florida:

Posted on Tuesday, 11.17.09

A University of Miami student battling a rare disease is in remission, thanks to a discovery made by the UM Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.

This summer, Steven Guarin had accepted his fate: The rare tumors ravaging his 21-year-old body would probably kill him within weeks.

The University of Miami student twice had received aggressive, traditional cancer treatment for a rare lymphoma at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the UM Miller School of Medicine.

Both times he recovered, only to have the killer tumors return with a vengeance, covering most of his body. But today, Guarin is in total remission, thanks to a medical researcher whom Guarin met for the first time Tuesday.

“I’m thankful you dedicated your life to research,” Guarin said, shaking Eckhard Podack’s hand. “There are many to thank, but you are the first. It feels good to not be sick.”

That wasn’t the case five months ago. Guarin, the son of Colombian immigrants who live in Kendall, was too weak for more chemotherapy. His doctors feared he would die within days. His mother and aunt kept vigil by his bedside at Sylvester, praying.

“He’s the baby of the family and my only boy,” his mother, Maria, said Tuesday. “Imagine the state we were in.”

Joseph Rosenblatt, his oncologist at Sylvester, said the outlook was bleak. “We had run out of options.”

But Guarin was at an academic medical center, where physicians and researchers work together to develop and test new therapies for patients. Rosenblatt was testing a new drug to seek out and kill cancer cells — a drug that was developed in a Sylvester lab almost two decades ago.

Podack, now a distinguished Sylvester professor and chair of the department of microbiology and immunology, sold the first incarnation of the drug to Seattle Genetics Inc. in the early 1990s. The company spent years and millions of dollars testing and refining the drug, adding a powerful chemotherapy to create SGN-35.

GUIDED MISSILE

The result: a guided missile that carries chemo directly to the cancer cells, avoiding healthy tissue.

The problem was Guarin was too sick to be considered a candidate for the promising therapy.

“We had to figure out a way to get Steve into the trial, even though he did not meet the criteria. He was just too sick by then. He had a raging fever, his liver was failing and his blood count was horrible,” Rosenblatt said.

Rosenblatt convinced Seattle Genetics to accept the communications student as the first patient to enroll in the trial.

The gamble, so far, has paid off. Within two days of his first infusion, Guarin’s tumors, which were once hot and visibly growing under his skin, had vanished.

“Within a day and a half, I went from fevers and pain and lymph nodes everywhere to walking,” Guarin said. “For me, it’s a miracle drug.”

An added benefit of SGN-35: no side effects.

Guarin would soon learn that the drug that is still keeping him alive had been developed in a laboratory just a few hundred yards from his hospital bed — by a researcher who never had met a patient who his research has helped. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Yost, at his web site (excerpted; read the whole thing; bold after title is mine):

Lowering the Price of Perfidy

The taxpayer-funded defense of three rogue state workers who invaded Joe the Plumber’s privacy sends the wrong message to other state workers: don’t worry, we’ll take care of you if you get caught. It’s more than just an individual wrong: it degrades our government and encourages bad behavior.

…. The attorney general has a duty to defend state workers who are sued.

…. But the law lets the attorney general off the hook when state workers go rogue. When the worker is doing stuff that’s not part of the job – say, searching for politically embarrassing material in confidential government databases – the attorney general “shall not” represent them. The same rule applies for workers who act with malice, or recklessly. No free legal defense.

“Shall not” is not my phrase – it’s what the law says.

When a state worker makes a mistake, the government should defend them. Mistakes happen — but what happened to Joe the Plumber wasn’t a mistake. It was a deliberate act, with an attempted cover-up.

…. The threat of big trouble and legal bills is a deterrent to such bad behavior, and it should be. A free, taxpayer-funded defense lowers the price of perfidy for others who would loyally do the dirty work of their political masters. That price doesn’t need to be lowered — it’s low enough already.

DeWine, at his web site:

….. ….. ….. …..

The story’s three days old. Where’s Mike?

Yeah, he commented on Cordray’s move in the DDN article:

“These people violated the privacy of an Ohio citizen and they did it, it would appear, to advance a partisan political campaign, and I think taxpayers will be shocked to find that their tax dollars are going to defend them,” said Mike DeWine of Cedarville, the former U.S. senator and Greene County prosecutor.

But so did Yost:

“It’s an outrageous use of taxpayer money to defend the invasion of a citizen’s privacy.”

Yost even does the sound-bite thing better than DeWine, who supposedly has had years of practice.

DeWine has begun the process of receiving what from all appearances will be serial spankings at county endorsement meetings; the first of what I expect will be many was administered by Butler County last week (BizzyBlog coverage and commentary is here). Yost got the county’s endorsement by a 68%-32% margin.

DeWine’s virtual non-presence on the web (a home page, a bio, and a PDF of his candidacy announcement) contrasts sharply with Yost’s frequently-updated, well-presented effort.

Yost has been following the state employee-orchestrated Joe the Plumber perfidy almost since it began and campaigning aggressively while carrying out his prosecutorial duties in Delaware County. DeWine has been virtually silent and schmoozing big-bucks people (not very successfully, as I understand it) while teaching a college course or two. I think that’s a precursive indicator of who will work harder as a sensible, principled conservative representing the interests of the Buckeye State’s citizens.

As to Cordray, an opposition party with spine would be pursuing impeachment, or at least censure, or at least a legislative resolution, or …. at least issue a press release …. or even put up a blog post. But in this state, there’s only ORPINO, the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only. Thus, there has been no response.

From Pristina, Kosovo:

Nov 18, 2009 / 12:50 am

On Nov. 11 the National Council of Kosovo met for the first time to organize the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of Blessed Mother Teresa’s birth.

The Italian bishops new service (SIR) reports that the meeting took place in the Culture Ministry’s palace and was attended by Culture Minister Valton Beqiri, the president’s delegate Xhavit Beqiri, Ali Podrimjia of the Academy of Science and Art of Kosovo and Jusuf Bajraktari of the History Institute of Kosovo.

Fr. Lush Gjergji, a biographer of Mother Teresa, represented the Church in Kosovo at the meeting.

“This special year will open on December 10th 2009 on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of her Peace Nobel Prize,” Fr. Gjergji told SIR News.

Mother Teresa, whose birth name was Gonxha Bjoaxhiu, was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopjie in what was then the Ottoman Empire. Today, the city is capital of the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia.

Her parents, of Albanian descent, were born in Kosovo and she often visited the land in her youth.

According to SIR News, she had a special bond with the Marian Sanctuary of Letnica on the Kosovo-Macedonia border. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

I noted this briefly this morning at Lickety-Split Links (“Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don’t exist“), and it has caught the attention of several SOBers:

• Maggie Thurber — “Bogus jobs numbers in the stimulus & Ohio phantom congressional districts”
• Normal at Collecting My Thoughts — “Bogus jobs numbers in the stimulus & Ohio phantom congressional districts.”
• Alo at Brain Shavings — “Ohio Porkulus Data.”
• Freedom’s Right — “It turns out that Obama’s incredible mathematical formula was tough for most of us to figure out for a good reason. The numbers were made up. They were lies.”

Leftists including those in the White House who presumptively and obsessively attack Fox News will not be pleased with this.

At Forbes (HT Hot Air Headlines), S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs, asks the question, “Fox News: Fair And Balanced?” — and answers in the affirmative. In the process, the GMU Professor of Communications also makes a number of interesting points about Fox’s competitors, discusses the convergence of news and analysis, and provides useful historical context.

Using a methodology that would be difficult to refute, Lichter’s work relating to campaign 2008 is in sync with what CMPA found in late 2007 (noted at the time at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) during the opening stages of the presidential campaign.

Here are key paragraphs from Lichter’s commentary (bolds are mine):

Fox News has become embroiled in a nasty controversy over its ill treatment of President Obama. But are the charges true?

What if I told you that Fox gave Obama his worst press and John McCain his best press of any network during last year’s presidential election? If you work for the White House, you’d probably take this as proof that Fox is just a mouthpiece for the opposition. Now what if I told you that Fox had the most balanced coverage of any network during the same campaign? If you work for Fox, you’d probably say we told you so.

But what if I told you that both scenarios are true?

While it seems unlikely, that conclusion is precisely the case, based on an ongoing study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA). That both these seemingly contradictory scenarios are true tells us something important not only about the war between Fox and the White House, but about the changing nature of television news in America.

…. The CMPA study compares ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows and the first half hour of Fox News Channel’s Special Report, which most closely resembles its broadcast news counterparts.

…. So how could Fox have both the most balanced and the most anti-Obama coverage? Simple. It’s because the other networks were all so pro-Obama. CMPA analyzed every soundbite by reporters and nonpartisan sources (excluding representative of the political parties) that evaluated the candidates and their policies. On the three broadcast networks combined, evaluations of Obama were 68% positive and 32% negative, compared to the only 36% positive and 64% negative evaluations of his GOP opponent John McCain.

In fact, Obama received the most favorable coverage CMPA has ever recorded for any presidential candidate since we began tracking election news coverage in 1988. The totals were very similar–within a few percentage points–at all three networks. (These figures exclude comments on the candidates’ prospects in the campaign horse race, which obviously favored Obama.)

Meanwhile, Fox’s Special Report was dramatically tougher on Obama, with only 36% favorable vs. 64% unfavorable evaluations during the same time period. But McCain didn’t fare much better, garnering only 40% favorable comments vs. 60% negative ones. So the broadcast networks gave good marks to one candidate and bad marks to another, while Fox was tough on both–and most balanced overall.

Other points Lichter makes:

• The historical pattern during a president’s first year in office is that the establishment press tends to go negative. Lichter interestingly asserts that all networks have done so this year, with the Big 3 nets tallying 35% favorables for Obama vs. 27% for Fox on Special Report. Lichter’s take is that “Fox’s coverage has gone from being the worst of all to merely the worst among equals.”
• The White House claim that Fox “really isn’t a news organization” is risible, given that in Special Report the channel at least runs “nightly news modeled on the broadcast networks.” MSNBC and CNN don’t even try.
• Longtime NewsBusters and BizzyBlog readers will probably have a hard time with the final sentence of this assertion — “Obama differs from his predecessors mainly in the false hopes generated by sometimes fawning campaign coverage from jaded journalists who temporarily let themselves get carried away by his eloquence and the historic nature of his candidacy. When politics returned to normal, their coverage returned to form.” I definitely disagree, especially if you include the Big 3′s morning shows, which attempt to position themselves as every bit as objective as their evening news counterparts. But if anything, they’re worse. Perhaps a gravitation back to the norm has begun more recently, as the continued decay in the economy as people are experiencing it and the awful results of the administration’s attempts to do something about it become ever more obvious.

Leftists who will predictably howl that CMPA is conservatively biased (because SourceWatch says so, as if that proves anything beyond paranoia) are going to have to explain what is wrong with CMPA’s scorekeeping methodology, which appears to be relatively immune from partisan slant, even if one had that as an objective. In any event, the footage is out there, and they are free to try to replicate and poke holes in what CMPA did any time. I bet they won’t; whining is so much easier.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

That Associated Press’s basement-level poll-cooking and poll-reporting standards are quite low, and quite agenda-driven, might as well be an article of faith by this time.

But the wire service-commissioned poll on health care, and Erica Warner’s report on it (saved here for future reference, fair use, and discussion purposes; HT JammieWearingFool via Instapundit; the full poll report in PDF format is here) plumbs new depths of partisanship while making errors of both omission and commission.

Warner and AP want the big takeaway to be that taxing “the rich” is the idea the public overwhelmingly favors to pay for ObamaCare — never mind that the same public also opposes the plan itself.

What follows is a graphic containing selected paragraphs from Werner’s report:

Werner’s excerpted text compared to the actual poll betrays a fundamental misunderstanding that sadly permeates most discussions of income taxation:

• Werner and AP turned the actual poll question about income taxes, which involved “increasing income taxes paid by people who earn more than $250,000 a year,” into “Tax the Rich.” It’s really “Tax the Incomes of Anyone Who Happens to Have a Very High-Earning Year.” It only coincidentally has something to do with going after those who are actually wealthy, i.e., “the rich.” It’s not exactly a secret that quite a few high-earners are anything but rich, for a variety of reasons.
• Of course, the “objective” Warner somehow couldn’t restrain her enthusiasm in how her misstated finding “will be welcome news for House Democrats.” This Erica gal is really talented; her ability to wave pompoms and type at the same time is a sight to behold.
• Werner compounded her obvious conceptual misunderstanding of the difference between income and net worth by highlighting the quote from Ms. Rondthaler, who seems to believe that anyone with very high earnings has a whole bunch of cash just lying around doing nothing that could be sent to Uncle Sam with no personal consequences, and no effect on the overall economy.

As to more important findings in the poll — all totally ignored by Werner — here is some of what JammieWearingFool noted:

Of course what the Associated Press does not even mention in their story is probably the most relevant part: “In general, do you support, oppose or neither support nor oppose the health care reform plans being discussed in Congress? (IF SUPPORT/OPPOSE Is that strongly support/oppose or somewhat support/oppose?” To no surprise that’s opposed by 43-41%. Eleven percent neither support or oppose and 4% “don’t know.”

Also conveniently left out of their story is the response to whether people should be penalized if they do not buy the government-run health care: Sixty-four percent oppose. Why do you suppose that was left out?

Also left out was of the respondents, 37% are unemployed or retired. No wonder they want someone to pick up the tab.

Forty-two percent think the economy will get worse if this scam is shoved down our throats, while 28% think it will improve. Again, this is left out of the story.

….. Another question left out: “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right – just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?” A total of 24% said all or most of the time. And we’re going to trust them?

Fans often complain about “home cooking,” where the referees’ calls seemingly tend to favor the home team over its opponents. In this case, Werner’s and AP’s home-cooking nullified the effect of every play it didn’t like.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Good thing they spent $18 million on the web site revamp — “Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don’t exist.”

_________________________________________________________

Maybe we should hold the congressional elections on April 16, 2010 — TaxProf Blog has a roundup of establishment press items reporting that 15 million taxpayers “could unexpectedly owe taxes” on April 15, 2010 when they file their 2009 returns because of the stimulus plan’s “Making Work Pay Credit.”

_________________________________________________________

“N.A.A.C.P. Prods Obama on Job Losses” — and proposes doing more of the things that have accomplished the opposite.

_________________________________________________________

From the “We apologize, until the next time we’re caught” Dept. — “MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan apologized on Monday for using photoshopped images of Sarah Palin firing a gun while wearing a bikini.” Separately, but not really, it’s clear that the establishment media believes that opportunistic sexism is okay any time it involves Palin, but heaven forbid you pull similar stunts on anyone else.. Good on Sarahcuda for calling it out (HT Hot Air Headlines).

_________________________________________________________

Speaking of Palin, as Mark Steyn noted at the Corner on Saturday, the Associated Press had 11 reporters assigned to fact-check her new book. To call their objections specious is to give them too much credit. “Lame,” the adjective John at Powerline uses, is better.

_________________________________________________________

Ted Kennedy was “a man of his Church“? If the “church” Nancy Snyderman was referring to was one other than the Catholic Church, and that “church” is okey-dokey with feticide, and a member whose reaction to a companion of his drowning in a car he was driving is, “What am I going to do, what can I do?”

_________________________________________________________

“Instapundit Channels BizzyBlog” Quote of the Day, in response to news that Congressman Jim “Earmark the Sh*t Out of It” Moran will have a challenger — “No incumbent should go unchallenged, in primary or general.”

It starts today at IBDeditorials.com.

Here are his first two paragraphs:

The new and risky methods of financing home purchases that rose to dominance in the early years of the 21st century could not have replaced more traditional rules and standards for granting mortgage loans unless those who regulated banks and other lending institutions had agreed to such changes.

In reality, government agencies not only approved the more lax standards for mortgage loan applicants, government officials were in fact the driving force behind the loosening of mortgage loan requirements.

Those “government agencies” happened to be the Democrat-crony companies known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose actions were promoted by members of their party and tragically acquiesced to and occasionally promoted by the opposition.

Read the installments as they appear. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to excerpt from Sowell’s series as that occurs.