May he rest in peace.

May his legacy be properly stated. He wrote a great Econ 101 textbook, but his record in influencing public policy for the good is decidedly mixed.

At Investors Business Daily, Brian Domitrovic gets it right about JFK’s reaction to Samuelson’s early 1960s suggestions to increase taxes and expand the money supply in his column’s title — “JFK Defied Samuelson, Setting Off Boom.”

Domitrovic’s wrap on Samuelson is, uh, dead-on:

The world lost its greatest Keynesian in Paul Samuelson last Sunday. But the historic runs of growth that the United States posted during his career did not derive from his economics.

I’ll have more on this tomorrow.

Follow-up: Oh well it took four tomorrows, but here it is: “NYT Heaps Praise on Late Economist Samuelson, Distorts His Kennedy Tax Cut Legacy.”

From an IBD editorial (“Dither, Then Duck”) on Iran:

Our policy against a regime of would-be nuclear terrorists has degenerated into “duck and cover” atomic attack scenarios, as the secretary of state admits diplomatic failure. Welcome to Appeasement, U.S.A.

As usual with IBD, read the whole thing.

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It pains me to criticize a guy who almost singlehandedly took down Canada’s corrupt Liberal Party government a few years ago, but Ed Morrissey at Hot Air missed the mark in this post titled “Gallup: Christmas spending still 20% down from 2008.”

Unfortunately:

• It’s acknowledged as self-reported. Given the cultural shift towards frugality and the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy-driven conditions that surround us, it would be remarkable if anyone admitted to a pollster that they were increasing their spending on Christmas.
• There’s this statement from Gallup — “For the third week in a row, consumer spending has trailed last year’s anemic spending levels by more than 20%. While it remains unclear how consumers’ spending is being divided between Christmas gifts and other discretionary spending for such things as travel, entertainment, and eating out, consumers are reporting a significant decline in their perceived spending during recent weeks.” Though the picture is not pretty in any sense, it takes a quantum and quite inaccurate leap to get from that quote to Ed’s headline.
• The Christmas shopping season will probably come in with retail sales below those of last year, but only by 1% according to a trade group’s estimate (which Ed saved for a later excerpt), not 20%.

Additionally, A December 15 item at Mediapost’s Marketing Daily notes that, while results may ultimately turn out differently, things aren’t quite as bad as thought a short while ago:

Although forecasts have been predicting a downbeat performance for consumer electronics this holiday season, shoppers may be proving them wrong: Best Buy reported stronger results, and revised its earnings projections. And a new survey shows an unexpected jump in consumer electronic sales in all stores.

The new survey, from America’s Research Group and UBS, reports that a sudden stampede toward flat-panel TV sets may buoy overall holiday results. As a result, ARG is now projecting that holiday sales will fall just 1.2% this holiday season, versus the earlier prediction of 2.9%.

The article’s title (“With Electronics A Bright Spot, Best Buy Shines”) even indicates that one of the brighter spots is at a company headquartered in Ed’s home metro area of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

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Direct Intergenerational Theft Update — The Associated Press’s initial item on the City of Pittsburgh’s impending tuition tax, captured at this post yesterday, was a bit vague as to what the money would be used for, calling it a way “to remedy the city’s pension woes.”

Today’s updated item as of 9:09 a.m. is a bit more specific:

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl says the measure could generate $16.2 million in annual revenue to help pay for pensions of retired city employees.

It sure looks like the city is on the verge of taxing mostly-young students to pay the pensions of older city employees who are already retired (the Steel City’s pension system must be one royal mess).

There is no conceivable provable benefit to the students in this arrangement. Thus, it’s direct, undisguised intergenerational theft.

One thing you can say is that Pittsburgh’s proposed tax, which AP reports that the City’s Council will consider today, is that it is at least more honest than the nation’s Social Security system. Social Security uses the pretense of a “Trust Fund” — whose assets consist almost entirely of trillions in IOUs from a government that is $12 trillion of dollars in debt and counting — to obscure the fact that today’s workers and taxpayers are directly paying the Social Security benefits of today’s retirees.

This is a very nicely done report with outstanding on-the-scene photos (one is on the right) about a rescue in Escambia County, Florida (scroll down if the story doesn’t appear at the top of the page):

December 15, 2009

Four people were rescued in dramatic fashion Monday night after their vehicles were swept off Deere Creek Road by raging flood waters from a swollen creek.

They were rescued by a man that many are calling a hero — Mike Allen of Atmore. Allen, a private citizen, used a jet ski to rescue the four from a flooded Brushy Creek, hours after their vehicles were submerged in the rising flood waters.

The first reports of the submerged vehicles were received about 9 p.m. Initial reports indicated that as many as eight people might have trapped in the raging waters of Brushy Creek. When emergency workers arrived at the scene, the were unable to reach the victims due to the high water. Firefighters believed that they had persons trapped on a vehicle in the water, and they knew they had a man who had climbed into a tree to escape drowning. The creek was swollen so wide that the powerful spotlights of several emergency vehicle were unable to provide enough light for firefighters to determine exactly what situation they were facing.

“Help me! Help me!” A faint voice could be heard calling for help from creek. “You’ve got to come get us.”

Firemen first used a human chain — walking out into the flood water in an attempt to reach the victims. That effort failed, and the emergency workers retreated. About 10:30 p.m., they attempted to use a boat to reach the victims. Shortly after entering the raging water, the boat capsized, putting two firemen into the water. They were able to reach the shore unharmed.

“I can’t hold on any more,” one of the victims, presumably the man in the tree, yelled.

The next plan at that point, according to Atmore Fire Chief Gerry McGhee, was to wait for U.S. Coast Guard helicopter dispatched to the scene. He said the helicopter would be able to provide enough light over the scene for firefighters to determine how to make the rescue. McGhee said that the helicopter would be unable to rescue the victims from the air, because they were located directly beneath high voltage power lines. The Escambia County (Ala.) Sheriff’s Department was also working at that time to get jet skis to the scene to be used in the rescue.

The man who had been up in a tree disappeared from the view of rescuers. He then reappeared, attempted to reach dry land by walking in neck deep water while holding onto bushes. Rescue workers screamed frantically at him to stop before he reached the open waters of Brushy Creek, fearing that he would be swept downstream.

At about 11:00 p.m., Allen arrived on the opposite side of the creek from rescue workers. He deployed his jet ski and quickly rescued the first victim, who was reportedly his niece. He transported her on the jet ski to rescue workers where she was rushed to a waiting ambulance.

“He looks like a cowboy, smoking that cigarette,” one rescue worker said of Allen as he went about rescuing the victims one by one on his jet ski. He could be seen puffing away on a cigarette the entire time as he fought to keep control of the jet ski in the raging water. The last victim was rescued about 11:10 p.m., over two hours after the flood waters of Brushy Creek pushed their vehicles off the road.

In all, Allen rescued four victims – two adult males and two adult females. The four were transported by ambulance to Atmore Community Hospital for evaluation. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Additional photos from the rescue are here.

Longtime readers of Associated Press dispatches have long since learned that many of the most important facts of a story — especially facts that put the government, bureaucrats, and leftists in a bad light — are often found in its final paragraphs. This is a way for the wire service to boast that it really did report all important facts while usually ensuring that harried broadcasters and other users of AP content who attempt to digest it down to a couple of sentences will probably will leave the meaty and incriminating stuff on the cutting room floor.

Such is the case with a report on the arrest of dozens of Medicare ripoff artists in various US cities. While the details of the arrests are indeed important, the final three paragraphs of AP writer Kelli Kennedy’s report are the real jaw-droppers, especially in the context of the president’s and Congress’s dogged determination to set a statist takeover of the entire health care system into motion before the end of this year (bolds are mine):

32 accused of $60M in Medicare fraud in 3 states

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Federal agents arrested 26 suspects in three states Tuesday, including a doctor and nurses, in a major crackdown on Medicare fraud totaling $61 million in separate scams.

Arrests in Miami, Brooklyn and Detroit included a Florida doctor accused of running a $40 million home health care scheme that falsely listed patients as blind diabetics so that he could bill for twice-daily nurse visits.

The U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the indicted suspects lined up bogus patients and otherwise billed Medicare for unnecessary medical equipment, physical therapy and HIV infusions.

Indictments were issued for 32 people in all, but the status of the other suspects wasn’t immediately known.

(Final three paragraphs)

Including Tuesday’s arrests, a Medicare Fraud strike force formed by the Justice and Health departments has now charged suspects accused of bilking Medicare of more than $1 billion in less than two years.

The pilot strike force, which started in Miami in 2007, has indicted more than 460 suspects in Medicare fraud scams. The program is now in Los Angeles, Houston and Detroit. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also announced Tuesday the operation will expand to Tampa, Fla., Baton Rouge, La., and Brooklyn.

Cleaning up an estimated $60 billion a year in Medicare fraud will be key to President Barack Obama’s proposed health care overhaul. HHS and DOJ have promised more money and manpower to fight the fraud.

So of all the fraud that is occurring, the feds have caught less than 1% of it ($1 billion divided by 2 years divided by $60 billion equals 0.83%).

Beyond that, Kennedy also avoided giving that $60 billion any context. That $60 billion in fraud represents an almost impossible to fathom 12%-plus of all Medicare spending, based on these references:

• The 2009 Medicare Trustees’ Report said that total Medicare spending in 2008 was $468 billion. $60 billion is 12.8% of that amount.
• A May 2009 report (PDF) from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation predicts that Medicare spending in 2009 will be $484 billion. Applied to this number, the fraud rate is “only” 12.4%.

Heck, $60 billion is over 0.4% of the entire country’s gross domestic product of $14 trillion or so.

It is highly unlikely that the fraud rate in the private sector, where losses such as these would reduce business income, hurt returns to shareholders, and likely bankrupt any business with controls as apparently sloppy as Uncle Sam’s, is anywhere near 12%.

And Medicare is what Democrats and other program advocates cite as the exemplar of why a so-called “public option” would be soooooo beneficial. Yikes.

Hopefully readers will pick up and pass on the lesson: In an AP report, after the headline and the first couple paragraphs, go to the final few paragraphs for the items you need to know, but which most casual news consumers will never read or hear.

Graphic was found at the EverythingHealth blog.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

A breaking dispatch from the Associated Press sure makes it look like Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl (picture at top right is from his Wikipedia entry) is engaging in extortion directed at the institutions of higher education that happen to be within the city’s borders. The ostensible reason for the stickup is to shore up the city’s foundering pension system.

It will be interesting to see how or if the AP develops this story in the coming day before the possible Wednesday vote.

Also, the “first-of-its-kind” tax that Ravenstahl wants to impose has gotten surprisingly little national notice since he first proposed it in mid-November.

Anyway, here’s a graphic capture of the AP item:

If this isn’t extortion, someone will have to tell me what it is.

It will surprise no one that the tax-creative Ravenstahl is a Democrat. Though the situation may change in future updates, it will further surprise no one that the AP didn’t name his party.

A deeper look into his record gives indications that the 29 year-old Ravenstahl appears bound and determined to make us forget about the up-to-now worst big-city “boy mayor” in American history, Cleveland’s Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich, now an Ohio congressman and a comic sideshow Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008, brought his city to the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1970s, barely surviving a recall vote.

As to the tuition tax, though the best tax is usually one that doesn’t exist, this particular assessment might have a backhanded benefit. A levy so visible and so onerous might make collegians a bit more skeptical of the non-stop statism so many of their profs promulgate.

Commenters surely will have other thoughts on this, so have at it.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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BizzyBlog Update: From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review –

Ravenstahl pushes vote on tuition tax
Mayor sees ‘no commitment’ from university leaders on city’s finance effort

With a tenuous City Council majority willing to vote for a proposed tuition tax, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl wants to see the levy tentatively approved tomorrow, despite the pledges of university leaders yesterday to work with the city on its finances if the tax is dropped.

“What we heard clearly was really no commitment from the nonprofit community to commit to anything tangible, or real,” Mr. Ravenstahl said, following a 2 1/2-hour public meeting that featured five higher education leaders and all 11 elected city officials. No one pledged to come up with the $5 million a year he has requested to avert the tuition tax, he said.

“One does not negotiate with an ax hanging over your head,” said Chatham University President Esther Barazzone, while joining her peers in calling for “a big-tent coalition to help to lead the city to a different future.” One caveat: “We cannot give up our nonprofit status.”

The 1 percent tuition levy is expected to raise slightly more than the $15 million a year the administration has said it needs to right the pension fund. The mayor said last week he would settle for one-third of that, plus an agreement with the universities to seek help in Harrisburg to cover the balance.

Yeah, it’s extortion.

If there’s any ironic satisfaction in this, it’s seeing the city’s elitist Democratic politicians acting like the authoritarians (Chavez, Castro, etc.) so many university profs so seem to love — but going after the institutions more than likely containing many of their mentors in the process.

By the way, has anyone attempted to explain that the tuition tax — if the money is actually used as intended, which I realize requires a willing suspension of disbelief — would constitute direct, undeniable intergenerational theft? The tax would largely be paid by young students. It would go directly to older retirees. That’s about as clear a case of legalized larceny as I’ve ever seen; and unlike Social Security and Medicare, there’s no pretense of a “Trust Fund” in between.

Whether the downturn is a still a recession is apparently a debatable matter in Liberal Land, and even within the Obama administration.

As I noted a few days ago (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), an Associated Press item by Martin Crutsinger last week was written as if the recession, which as normally defined ended in the third quarter (the fact that it was artificially influenced by excessive government largesse doesn’t change the fact that growth was positive), is still around and negatively impacting federal receipts five months later.

Obama economic adviser Larry Summers told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Sunday that “everyone agrees that the recession is over.”

Meanwhile over at NBC, Christine Romer, another administration economic heavy hitter, told NBC’s David Gregory that “of course (it’s) not” when asked if the recession is over.

As easy as it would be to ridicule the inconsistency, the more important point is that the current Obama-media muddle shows why having an objective standard is necessary. The “normal people” definition of two or more consecutive quarters of negative economic growth is crystal clear. Subjective evaluations like the one done by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which still believes that a recession began in December 2007, aren’t. That’s why NBER should never have been named the official determiner of when a recession begins and ends, and the dictionary definition should rule.

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As I have watched the his Chevy ads, I can’t help but wonder what in the world Howie Long has been thinking.

Long has been a guest on Bill Bennett’s talk show, and this commenter at FreeRepublic in 2006 says that Long is a self-described conservative Republican. So I don’t get it, unless he’s locked into a contract that was inked well before GM became a ward of the state.

Every commercial for a GM or Chrysler product or service should carry a prominent disclosure that it was financed by taxpayer dollars.

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From the “Keep Your Kids Out of Public Schools” file (HT Michael Graham via Michelle Malkin), there’s this report from eponymously named in the circumstances Taunton, Massachusetts:

A Taunton father is outraged after his 8-year-old son was sent home from school and required to undergo a psychological evaluation after drawing a stick-figure picture of Jesus Christ on the cross.

The father said he got a call earlier this month from Maxham Elementary School informing him that his son, a second-grade student, had created a violent drawing. The image in question depicted a crucified Jesus with Xs covering his eyes to signify that he had died on the cross. The boy wrote his name above the cross.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re violating his religion,” the incredulous father said.

…. The student drew the picture shortly after taking a family trip to see the Christmas display at the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette, a Christian retreat site in Attleboro. He made the drawing in class after his teacher asked the children to sketch something that reminded them of Christmas, the father said.

This isn’t just some isolated rogue teacher with hostility towards religion. Several school officials had to agree before the kid was sent home.

There’s a bitter irony at the school district’s web site, noted by Graham (bold and italics are the district’s) — “Nickname: The Christmas City due in large measure to elaborate annual Christmas displays.”

From Madison, Wisconsin, as relevant today as it was in July:

Jul 21, 2009 / 08:33 am

As President Obama urges Congress to pass health care reform legislation by August, a medical clinic in Madison, Wisconsin is offering a novel way to address medical needs by offering free care for the uninsured. Patients with insurance only pay a single yearly fee for their care at Our Lady of Hope Clinic.

When Drs. Michael Kloess and Anne Volk Johnson became unhappy with the medical system in which they worked, they decided to found Our Lady of Hope Clinic. Their goal was to start a clinic where they could minister to the poor while being free to practice their Catholic faith fully.

Our Lady of Hope Clinic is “totally pro-life and totally Catholic,” developmental director Steven Karlen told CNA. “So they don’t have to dispense birth control, they don’t have to refer for sterilizations or in-vitro or abortion or anything of that nature. They can practice in complete accordance with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

The ability for doctors to freely practice their Catholic faith is currently being challenged throughout the country as lawmakers debate whether or not to exempt workers from performing abortions, prescribing contraceptives, or participating in other activities that violate their consciences.

At Our Lady of Hope, Kloess and Johnson are able to live out their faith by practicing the corporal works of mercy and providing free care for the uninsured, particularly the “working poor,” those who are employed but do not have insurance through their jobs and cannot afford it on their own.

According to their by-laws, at least 50% of the care given at Our Lady of Hope will go to the uninsured, who can come in on a day-by-day walk-in basis and will receive no billing or other charges.

Go here for the rest of the story.

If there’s a Ground Zero for America’s foreclosure mess outside of much of California and metro Las Vegas, it’s probably Cleveland, the Northeast Ohio city known in most of the rest of the state as the Mistake on the Lake.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Mark Gillespie got out from behind his desk, committed some good old-fashioned journalism, and went looking for the mistakes that exacerbated the town’s breathtaking home foreclosure rate. Lo and behold, he found that city government itself contributed mightily and extraordinarily negligently to the debacle. Go far enough into Gillespie’s report, and you will also find an implicit admission that the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) also played a pivotal role (bold is mine):

How Cleveland aggravated its foreclosure crisis

The city of Cleveland has aggravated its vexing foreclosure problems and has lost millions in tax dollars by helping people buy homes they could not afford, a Plain Dealer investigation has found.

The city provided mostly low-income buyers with down payment loans of up to $20,000 through the federally funded Afford-A-Home program, but did little to determine whether the people could actually afford to keep their homes.

That lack of oversight persisted for years, even as hundreds of loan recipients defaulted on mortgages, many within two years, the newspaper found by analyzing property and loan records covering the period between 2000 and 2007.

For example, nearly half of 584 homes sold by the top three for-profit companies that tapped into the program over the eight years have gone into foreclosure. More than one-third of those homes have sold at sheriff’s sale or sit abandoned because banks did not take them back.

….. The loss in Afford-A-Home dollars from failed purchases from Cresthaven Development Corp., Rysar Properties Inc. and Pebblebrook Properties Inc. thus far totals more than $2.3 million.

Presented with the newspaper’s findings, city officials acknowledged problems with the Afford-A-Home program and ordered tighter eligibility standards for buyers and sellers.

….. The program is primarily driven by companies that buy, renovate and resell houses. The companies typically seek city approval to sell properties using Afford-A-Home loans before renovations are completed. They are responsible for sending the buyers’ Afford-A-Home applications to the city.

A Plain Dealer review of more than 50 Afford-A-Home files found borrowers who, according to their applications, earned as little as $15,000 a year when the city — and mortgage lenders — gave them loans.

One woman, according to a letter in her file, was homeless and living in a car with her children when she got $10,000 from the city. Another couple received food stamps and were jobless when they got an Afford-A-Home loan.

Through 2004, the first-lien mortgages for Afford-A-Home buyers typically came from local banks fulfilling federal requirements to lend money in poorer neighborhoods. The loans carried low interest rates.

Read the whole sickening thing.

The final bolded sentence in the excerpt shows that the CRA was a key element in Cleveland’s catastrophe. CRA mandated that banks originating first-lien mortgages extend them to undeserving borrowers, or face brutal challenges to their ability to continue in business during regulators’ audits and to other business moves such as mergers and acquisitions. As would be expected, short-term survival instincts overcame sound underwriting. Now, according to leftists, it’s the banks’ fault for doing what they were intimidated into doing.

But then, proving again that the term “government oversight” is usually an oxymoron, the city agency, even with no similar level of threat looming in the background, doubled down. Even if the apps were submitted by development companies who should have known better or were lying about certain key information (that appears to be the case in two sidebar stories Gillespie relates), that doesn’t excuse the complete failure of oversight, and absolutely doesn’t justify the program’s continuance on auto-pilot for many years despite obvious early-stage problems.

Many in Cleveland still persist on blaming someone else for why the city’s foreclosure situation is much worse that the vast majority of other cities in the US. Look in the mirror, guys. Every city’s bankers faced similar CRA problems, and to the extent they did what first-lien lenders in Cleveland did, you can hang the blame on Uncle Sam and CRA. But it’s Cleveland’s residents who elected the people who created the agency that threw federal second-mortgage money at people with apparently little if any concern over whether it would be repaid, ultimately turning entire city blocks into barren wastelands. Though it’s a popular claim among lefty bloggers in and around Metro Cleveland (maybe “Metro Mistake” is a more appropriate term), George Bush and the evil Republicans sure as heck didn’t do this.

The establishment media-related question is this: How many other cities became similarly involved with this disastrous second-mortgage effort, with similarly disastrous results? I daresay Cleveland’s mistakes have been made elsewhere, and more than once. My early nominees for PD-like investigations are Detroit and Chicago. Journalists there ought to get to work.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

In a Washington Post opinion piece published on December 6, longtime expansionary entitlement program apologists Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich ripped into the 1996 welfare reform law and its alleged effect on the poor during the struggling economy of the past two years.

In the course of their rant, Edelman and Ehrenreich told readers something that the rest of the press has largely ignored since Barack Obama took office in January: Homelessness is up, as in way, way up:

According to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (NLCHP), the number of homeless Americans is up by 61 percent since the recession began in December 2007.

In fact, a new report from a source normally favored by the press tells us that new “tent cities” have sprung up, and that others in existence a year ago have grown. Does anyone think these facts would remain so well-hidden if Bush 43 were still in office?

Interestingly, it seems that Edeleman and Ehrenreich appear to have misinterpreted their information source. An NLCHP report that appears to have been released on December 4, 2008 is where I found a stat matching the pair’s claimed increase. But it was very differently phrased (bold is mine):

Reuters has reported that local and state homeless groups have seen a 61 percent rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007.

What the media has described as “the foreclosure crisis” actually began in late 2006 or early 2007.

Edelman and Ehrenreich erroneously presented their stat as if it’s a 2007-2009 figure. So their stat doesn’t contribute to proving that homelessness has increased significantly this year. Oh well, that’s okay, because the U.S. Conference of Mayors just did so, even if you have to dig a bit to get to the confirming info.

Perhaps in a bid to protect their Dear Leader in Washington, the headline in the mayors’ press release (PDF; “U.S. Cities See Sharp Increases in the Need for Food Assistance; Decreases in Individual Homelessness”) makes it appear as if homelessness might be less of a problem than it was a year ago.

Uh, not exactly, as this detailed look at the 27 cities described in the actual report (PDF) shows:

As you can see, 15 of the 27 reporting cities showed increases. Some were slight, but more than a few were quite significant. Only five cities had clearly reported or determinable decreases. The situations in two other cities seemed to indicate an overall increase, while the situations in five others were unclear (a couple of the unclear ones seem to indicate increases, but I’m being conservative in my evaluations).

Of course, the above list does not include many of the country’s largest cities, including 17 of the top 30 in population. But in short order, I was able to determine that homeless during the past year has gone up significantly in at least these four other cities based on articles I found relating to the situations in New York City, Baltimore, and (anecdotal) Houston. An interactive map produced by another advocacy organization shows that family homelessness in Indianapolis increased by 78%.

Enough already. That homelessness is up significantly in the past year should at this point be beyond reasonable dispute.

That press coverage of the phenomenon has been weak is also pretty obvious, but in case there is need for reinforcement, consider the following:

• A search on the word “homeless” at the Associated Press’s raw feed page comes back with nothing relating to the overall homelessness situation in the nation or individual cities. The AP thus appears to have totally ignored the mayors’ report released last Tuesday.
• The same search at the AP’s home page comes back with the same non-results.
• Even when noticed, the reporting seems grudging. Reuters’s coverage of the mayors’ report is a case in point. Though the headline is strong (“Hunger, family homelessness on rise in U.S. cities”) it’s less than 300 words, and contains this amazing statement: “Only 10 cities reported having so-called tent cities or other concentrations of the homeless.”

“Only” 10 “tent cities”? “ONLY” 10?

Though “only” is a word the mayors’ report used (more Dear Leader protection, it would appear), that doesn’t excuse the wire service from missing this “little” tidbit in that same report:

Detroit, Los Angeles, Nashville, Charleston, and Providence all reported that new tent cities or other large homeless encampments have arisen over the past year. Des Moines, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Seattle all report that their existing tent cities or homeless encampments have increased in size over the past year.

Wow. Five new Obamavilles, and four others getting bigger, and it’s not news. Imagine that.

Meanwhile, I publicly thank welfare nostalgics Edelman and Ehrenreich for inadvertently nudging me to look into all of this.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Cincinnati:

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Angela Dornbach didn’t hear her full name spoken until she was in first grade, but she understood a spiritual message loud and clear at a very young age.

Born on Christmas Day 1937, Dornbach was called “Angel” by family and friends as a child. Raised by deaf parents, she became familiar with seeing an angel performed in sign language to identify her.

Dornbach’s late parents, Edmund and Stephanie Brooks, weren’t able to speak, so she and her three siblings — all of whom can hear — learned to sign at an early age.

As a youngster, Dornbach was immersed in the deaf culture, once believing that every family had a deaf person. Now, she believes her parents taught her the primary form of family communication — American Sign Language — probably when she was seven or eight months old.

“I loved the language,” Dornbach said.

That admiration continues today for the Milan, Ind., resident. Dornbach, 72, can often be found interpreting for the deaf at several area Catholic parishes, including St. Jude in Bridgetown, Good Shepherd in Symmes Township and St. Teresa Benedicta in Bright, Ind.

Greg Williams, music director at St. Jude for the past 10 years, said Dornbach provides an important service for up to five deaf parishioners at the church. He said the parishioners enjoy the fellowship and often communicate with Dornbach after Mass.

“The clients really appreciate her,” said Williams, who has worked with Dornbach for about seven years. “She is absolutely what the clients need.”

Go here for the rest of the story.

The last two times I remember this happening — with Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s and New York City Mayor David Dinkins in the early 1990s — it at least took a few years for exasperated establishment media liberals to blame the system for a favored politician’s difficulties in achieving his agenda, and to call the country and Gotham, respectively, “ungovernable.” Afterwards, Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani proved the whiners spectacularly wrong.

Matt Yglesias at Think Progress is years ahead of those prior hand-wringers. A bit less than 11 months into the Obama administration, the Think Progress blogger considered by many to be one of the far left’s opinion leaders is moaning about how tough it has recently become to get anything done. Poor baby.

As Obama’s poll numbers plunge, and statist health care comes down to final pre-Christmas votes, Yglesias reprises the lament that the system is the problem (HT Instapundit and Ed Morrissey at Hot Air):

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable.

…. We’re suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure. It’s insane, and it needs to be changed.

Yglesias’s claim is a real hoot, given that 60 Democratic senators can basically do whatever they want if they all manage to agree. Yet he vents his spleen in unexcerpted material over Mitch McConnell’s behavior.

On a historical note, progressives, the precursors of today’s liberals, got their way a century ago when they said that the Senate needs to be changed. The Founders’ design of the Senate as representatives selected by state legislatures was superseded by the 17th amendment, which mandated their direct election. This eventually resulted in the nationalization of nearly every senatorial election, as interest groups outside senators’ home states largely became their election financiers. It’s hard to see how this has been an improvement over the Founders’ original set-up.

Regardless of one’s view of the 17th Amendment, Yglesias’s angst over how it’s working now is more than a little tiresome. The difficulty of getting things done didn’t seem to bother Yglesias when Bush 43 was trying to get judges confirmed, or when initiatives Yglesias more than likely opposed like drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve failed. But now that things aren’t going his way automatically, “smart elements,” a term which apparently include arrogant elitists like him and excludes anyone who doesn’t simply roll over to their obvious intellectual superiority, have decided that the way things are set up needs to change. Oh the humanity.

What Yglesias is missing, of course, is that during the presidential campaign Barack Obama attempted to position himself as a moderate to the general public while mouthing far-left articles of faith when out of earshot. Thanks to a compliant press, which ignored overwhelming evidence of radicalism in so many areas, from his voting record to his cast of mentors and sponsors, a large enough portion of the general public never got past the David Axelrod-created image to get Obama across the finish line a year ago in November.

Yglesias apparently expected the radical transformation of government that Obama promised true believers on the left without a meaningful challenge. Even though he won’t acknowledge it, what he wanted is largely what we’ve gotten until very, very recently — trillion-dollar debts, private company nationalizations, and all.

Now that the bloom is off the president’s rose, it looks like Obama’s success and the electability of members of his party may very well depend on whether they start doing what the American people want them to do, and stop trying to force things the people don’t want down their throats. The president and the Democrats in Congress seem congenitally unable to do that, and could face dire electoral consequences if they don’t. No wonder Yglesias is so bothered.

It will probably not be long before we see sentiments like Yglesias’s make their way into establishment media commentary, news analysis, and even hard-news reporting.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s from David J. Bellamy at Pajamas Media:

Climategate: One Must Ignore 200 Years of Observations to Believe in AGW

Al Gore used …. ice core data to claim that carbon dioxide made the temperature of the world rise, threatening life on earth, because there was a correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and the world’s average temperature. Yet the data from the much-celebrated Vostok ice cores paints a very different picture: Up goes the temperature, followed by a rise in carbon dioxide.

Effectively flattening Gore’s dreams of hedging his funds.

More troubles lie ahead for the warmists. Independent researchers have pointed out that crucially important pieces of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) evidence were based on false statistical analysis. For starters, take a look at historical evidence from the last 1,000 years. There was a worldwide Medieval Warm Period — no, not just in Europe — and a few centuries prior to that period it was warm enough for the Romans to produce red wine on the borders of Scotland.

…. Over the past 5,000 years? There was not just one, but three periods when it was warmer than today. And yet life on Earth survived. Climate change is natural, and warmer periods occur without human CO2 emissions being the cause. Just looking at the last decade, world temperature is falling as CO2 rises — big emitters China and India have been stocking up their coal sheds. Increases in CO2 rarely coincide with rises in the Earth’s temperature — so how can CO2 be the driver of global warming, let alone climate change?

…. We have had at least 75 major temperature swings in the past 4,500 years — all in great part explicable by solar cycles, volcanic activity, and those little rascals El Nino and La Nina. Those “warming” oceans? The recent trend is one of cooling, not the warming predicted by legions of modelers and their models. Since 2007, the Arctic ice cap has been increasing in area, heading back towards the norm again. Yes, the Northwest Passage was navigable this year — but it has been that way on a number of occasions, just since 1850. Thanks in great part to prevailing winds changing direction, as they are wont to do.

…. There are now more polar bears dining on seals in the Arctic than when I was filming there some 30 years ago, thanks to good wildlife management. So good, in fact, that the global warmists did their best to lock out the lead manager on that project from an important meeting discussing polar bear population — a matter that Al Gore would use to falsely frighten children across the world.

Sea levels have been behaving themselves, slowly rising ever since the end of the Little Ice Age. However, much to the chagrin of the warmists, they have remained stationary since 2006 — against all their predictions.

…. Today, children are taught that carbon dioxide is a poison. No — it is odorless, colorless, and non-toxic. We drink it in fizzy drinks and lager, and it puts the rise in our daily bread. Most importantly, it is one of the most important components of all life — photosynthesis converts CO2 into oxygen and carbon, life’s main building blocks. As long as plants have sufficient water and nutrients, their growth is enhanced by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. CO2 is the free airborne fertilizer of the world.

Many experiments prove this fact of a carbon-rich atmosphere, experiments corroborated by millions of farmers across the world who cash in on the use of enhanced carbon dioxide in their greenhouses. Many even burn fossil fuel to boost production. Carbon dioxide plays a vital part in providing the 18 billion daily meals that do their best to feed the growing number of people across the world.

…. This August, right in the middle of the BBC’s promised barbecue summer (which didn’t come to pass), the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit disclosed that it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature records. Despite the fact that they own some of the most powerful computers in the world, the reason they advanced was “an alleged lack of storage space.” The very foundation of the global warming argument was gone forever. Draw your own conclusions — sabotage or desperation? (see “The Dog Ate My Global Warming” — Ed.).

…. Earth’s climate has remained within the limits tolerated by life for several billion years. During this time, the planet has experienced unimaginable volcanic events which liberated huge amounts of CO2. It has collided with extraterrestrial objects, triggering either an increase or decrease of temperature. Even the energy flow from the sun has varied over such a span of geological time.

And yet — here we are! Life remains.

Read the whole thing.

Repeat: “The very foundation of the global warming argument was gone forever.” With the foundation gone, warmists have no credible scientific argument. Period.