From Bellevue, Washington:

December 8, 2009

Up until Nov. 7, Eastlake senior and Running Start student Taylor Kowalski didn’t really believe in miracles. Up until that day she had never been late to class either.

But her experience on campus at Bellevue College as she ran to class that day changed her view on life.

Kowalski likely saved the life of campus police officer James McClung after helping him when he collapsed, according to the college and the McClung family. The family said doctors are still somewhat stumped as to what caused him to lose consciousness and fall, but they are leaning toward it being a sort of seizure.

At 70, McClung had spent more than two decades as a Colorado State Trooper and Bellevue College campus cop, and was wrapping up his graveyard shift, which would have ended at about 7 a.m.

Already 10 minutes late at about 6:40 a.m., Kowalski was rushing across campus to class.

“That day was the one day this year that I had overslept my alarm,” Kowalski said.

McClung was making his rounds and Kowalski was the only student outside when she said McClung screamed and fell to the ground, out cold.

“It was her day she was supposed to be late,” said Tina McClung, James’ wife. “It probably saved his life.”

Kowalski said she thought someone had hit him and run off, but instinctively, she rushed to him and called 9-1-1. As she waited for the paramedics to arrive, she turned him over so he could breathe.

Even though he was non-responsive, Kowalski held his hand and talked to him.

“At first I jumped into immediate action. In the moment, I was able to act really quickly,” Kowalski said. “I didn’t really think, I just kinda did.”

Timing was everything that day.

Officer McClung’s daughter, Angie McClung said the incident could have been worse.

It could have happened 15 minutes later, when he would have been driving home on the freeway.

“When we found out it was a student, I thought, ‘oh god love her,’” Angie McClung said.

Although she felt good about helping officer McClung, Kowalski said she hopes anyone would have done the same thing.

“I don’t believe what I did was above and beyond,” Kowalski said. “I believe it’s what any human should do in that situation.”

The McClung family said they had talked to Kowalski briefly after the incident, but have not met her in person.

“Thank you pretty much sums it up,” Tina McClung said about what she wants to say to Kowalski.
James McClung was released from the hospital Nov. 7 and he is recovering slowly but surely at home, the family said.

Tina McClung said according to the doctors’ prognosis, it looks like he will make a full recovery and be able to go back to work eventually. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

The astute editorialists at Investors Business Daily have clearly laid out the true intent of the one-world government types spouting nonsense and lots of their own carbon in Copenhagen, and have compiled a nice reference graph in the process:

The 16,000 delegates to the two-week-long orgy of self-flagellation known as the Copenhagen Climate Conference want to shrink global output of CO2 not because of hard science, but out of envy.

…. What goes little commented on, however, is the reason for the vehemence of these calls for CO2 sacrifice on the part of the U.S.: a desire to take our economy down.

Having decisively lost the great debate between capitalism and socialism, the only way the global warming socialists can do this is by imposing restrictions on U.S. output in response to the ginned-up “emergency” of global warming.

The dynamics of this can be readily seen in the chart (above right). It shows that, contrary to what you might have heard, America’s share of the world economy has remained remarkably stable over 40 years. The same can’t be said for the European Union’s.

…. The Europeans now know they can’t beat the U.S. So they want us to join them in their self-inflicted decline by hamstringing our economy with expensive regulations to slash carbon output and regulate businesses to death.

In this effort, Europe has engaged the developing world as its ally. Egged on by EU elites, the so-called Group of 77 of developing countries are urging the same thing as the EU — massive taxes and wealth transfers from the developed nations (mainly the U.S.) to the Third World to alleviate the alleged impacts of global warming.

Again, the bottom of the chart tells the tale. Most of the Group of 77 are poorly run, nondemocratic countries that have routinely and almost systematically ruined their own economies through war, socialist policies, oppression of minorities and government-led despoliation of their own environment.

Their only hope — global warming welfare.

Meanwhile, China, India, Russia and other countries that still hope to grow and expand their citizens’ standards of living are just saying “no” to Copenhagen.

…. it’s important for the U.S., like China and India, to stop playing along. The science is too dubious to put America’s economy and well-being at stake.

And the “science” is worse than “dubious.” It’s totally discredited.

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UPDATE: President Obama is on the same side as those who want to take us down. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have said the following last year during the presidential campaign:

We can’t drive our SUVs, and eat whatever we want, and keep our homes at 72 all the time, whether we live in the desert or the tundra, and keep consuming 25% of the world’s resources with just 4% of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead. We’ll be fine. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.

Peter Vadum at the linked article elaborates further:

Governments and the UN fiercely cling to global warming theory because it justifies massively increased power for them, including potentially world government powers for the UN. This is why global warming theory has become a religion for the worldwide left, including environmental extremists, who see in it the potential for achieving their dream of repealing the Industrial Revolution.

And in repealing the Industrial Revolution, the most radical enviros and most prescient among them know exactly what that implies — radical, rapid, depopulation. And they don’t care; in fact, they think it would be good. See the compilation at this October link.

UPDATE 2: Someone forgot to tell the world that we’re broke. I mean really, really broke ($106.4 trillion in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities). Oh, and it’s getting worse.

ISM catch-up: The Institute for Supply Management’s indices on economic sentiment released last week weren’t exactly cheerful, which is why you probably didn’t hear or see much about them in the establishment press.

When ISM’s Manufacturing Index went positive in August, President ‘Prompter’s teleprompter, in a hasty insertion at the opening of an unrelated speech, prompted him to tell America that:

For the first time in 18 months, our manufacturing sector has expanded, and the statistics used to measure manufacturing output is the highest it’s been in over two years.

The misinformed, grammatically-challenged teleprompter didn’t realize that the ISM index doesn’t measure output; it measures positive or negative sentiment. That said, the index has proven a very useful barometer of what’s going on in the economy.

Well, the Manufacturing Index is still positive and showing expansion, which is any reading above 50%. That’s a good thing, but in November it dropped to 53.6%. That was down from October’s 55.7%, and trailed expectations that it would come in at 55.0%.

The news about the Non Manufacturing Index, which covers the large majority of the economy (manufacturing is only about 15%), was much more troubling. It went into contraction, with a reading of 48.7%. That was down from the previous month’s 50.6%, and ended an expansion that lasted only two months. It also trailed expectations that it would increase to 51.5%. The Employment element of that index came in with a dismal reading of 41.6%, barely nudging up from 41.1%.

The news in Non Manufacturing is consistent with what the Wall Street Journal has called the Uncertainty Economy, and what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy since the summer of 2008. We will at best meander along in mediocrity, if not worse, until the uncertainty overhang caused almost entirely by Obama administration policies and initiatives significantly dissipates.

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An e-mailer has perceptively pointed out that the whole world has its terminology wrong on alleged human-caused global warming.

It’s not “man-made,” although some humans, mostly men, have posited and tried (failing miserably thus far, it turns out) to prove its existence.

Giving discredit where discredit is due, global warming is Mann-made, so named after Michael Mann, creator of the totally debunked “hockey stick” graph. That’s right, I said totally debunked, as in completely useless rubbish.

I would add that human-caused global warming, besides being a bunch of globaloney, is really Mann-made-up.

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Betcha the bolded figure won’t make the evening news:

The Obama Administration is touting that their stimulus program has saved or created 640,329 jobs since it was enacted back in February through the end of October. This number is updated and posted on the Administration’s recovery.gov web site. That amounts to $246,436 per job based on the $157.8bn that has been awarded so far!

As noted in mid-November, the entire basis for claiming 640,000 jobs “saved or created” is bogus. The claim is NOT based on going out into the real world and counting jobs (when that occurs, it’s only about 30,000, and even that is questionable).

At the time, I referred to the administration’s job-creation/saving exercise as “tokin’ on Okun,” which is worth a revisit. Here’s a brief statement of “Okun’s Law,” named after the late economist Arthur Okun (bold is mine):

Arthur Okun is known mainly for Okun’s Law, which describes a linear relation between percentage changes in unemployment and percent changes in gross national product. It states that for every percentage point that the unemployment rate falls, real GNP (GNP is now called “GDP” — Ed.) rises by 3 percent. Okun’s Law was based on data from World War II to 1960. He cautioned that the law was good only within the range of unemployment rates—3 to 7.5 percent—experienced in that time period.

The unemployment rate has never been below 7.5% since the stimulus passed in February (it was 7.6% in January). Additionally, Okun would have more than likely excluded growth temporarily induced by programs like Cash for Clunkers from any kind of estimated GDP growth considered to be driving increases in employment. On top of all that, there’s the dissembling fudge phrase “created or saved,” a term that was never used until after Election Day 2008.

The only thing more fraudulent than the administration “jobs created or saved” exercise is the globaloney CRUd.

From St. Paul, Minnesota:

Published: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 1:50 PM CST

“I was 33 when I died,” Natasha Fleischman said.

“I was 33. I was healthy. I ate well. I exercised. I did everything I was supposed to do.”

Fleischman was speaking at St. Peter Claver Church about a cardiac arrest that nearly killed her almost eight years ago. The Stillwater school board member has been an active heart-health advocate ever since that near-death experience. The church saw the fruit of those efforts Monday when Fleischman presented an automated external defibrillator (AED) that manufacturer Defibtech donated. For the first time ever, she also met with the St. Paul Fire Department crew that saved her.

“I’d be remembering her in the past tense were it not for the people who saved her life,” Father Kevin McDonough told the small group gathered at the church.

Fleischman’s story emphasizes the importance of AEDs. When the cardiac arrest occurred, she had just dropped off her two sons, then 3 and 6, with a babysitter and run in to the St. Paul school district office to meet with coworkers. She suddenly fell over, and no one knew whether she had choked on a carrot or had a heart attack.

One of her coworkers ran up four flights of stairs to find a colleague who knew CPR. He performed CPR on her until firefighters arrived. They had to defibrillate her heart five times to get it going again.

“(My husband) had only seen me an hour earlier, when I was bouncing out the door past him … and now I was being wheeled past him looking dead,” she said.

Fleischman, who now has defibrillator implanted near her heart, was lucky. Nationwide only about 10 percent of sudden cardiac arrest victims survive, although St. Paul’s rate is about twice that, said St. Paul Fire Chief Tim Butler. The longer the heart goes without beating, the more chance that the loss of blood flow to the brain will cause permanent damage.

“I was really very aware of the excellent job that went on there to sustain no damage to her brain,” said Mary Ann Jagodzinski, Fleischman’s mother and a retired nurse.

AEDs can increase that survival rate exponentially by shocking a person’s heart to get it working normally again. They’re like the paddle defibrillators seen in hospital dramas, but are designed to be used by ordinary people.

The user turns the machine on, sticks patches on a person’s chest as shown in a diagram and waits for the AED to read the heartbeat. The machine will then tell the person when to push a button that delivers the shock. An AED will not shock a beating heart.

The devices have increasingly been popping up in public places since high-profile deaths emphasized their importance a few years ago. St. Peter Claver Church is a particularly attractive place to put one because it has more 1,000 parishioners and is near a school, Fleischman said. It also serves as an overflow homeless shelter for two months of the year.

The site also has sentimental value for Fleischman. She still attends church there even though she lives in Lake Elmo.

“This is the church that prayed for me while I was in the hospital,” she said. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

The earth is burning, the earth is burning! And it’s all our fault!

That’s the essence of an editorial slated to appear in 56 newspapers worldwide today, including at least one in the U.S.

Michelle Malkin pointedly notes that we aren’t likely to see much interest in ClimateGate out of these “Chicken Little” publications.

Here are some paragraphs from the very deep, very wide fever swamp, taken from the web site of the UK Guardian, which to no one’s surprise spearheaded the collective effort:

Copenhagen climate change conference: ‘Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation’

This editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change is published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

…. The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

…. the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”

At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

…. Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions.

…. Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

…. Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

…. The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

Here is a graphic containing the mastheads of the 56 egregiously ignorant error emitters:

I probably don’t recognize all of them, but I see one U.S. publication, The Miami Herald. Readers with keener eyes are welcome to identify any more U.S. pubs if they’re in there.

Read anything these publications produce on Climategate specifically or on the environment in general from here on out at your peril.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Blogger Doug Ross got to the news of the Congressional Budget Office’s Monthly Budget Report (PDF) over the weekend, quite accurately observing that the establishment news coverage of its content barely existed.

The results of searches at the Associated Press’s raw feed page on “Congressional Budget Office” (not in quotes) and “CBO” confirm Doug’s observation, as no result returned relates to the CBO’s report.

The virtual non-coverage of the report may be due to the dire, dour news contained therein, as noted by Reuters, which at least had a story:

U.S. already $292 bln in the red this year – CBO

The U.S. government racked up a gaping shortfall in the first two months of this fiscal year after posting a record budget deficit last year, congressional analysts said on Friday.

In October and November, the government spent $292 billion more than it took in, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said.

That was even worse than the same period last year, when the government was on its way to posting a record $1.4 trillion deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

A look at the cash collections detail shows just how dire things are on the receipts side (the incorporated November total matches CBO’s; current year info is from the final Daily Treasury Statements for October 2009 and November 2009; prior year info can be found searching the Daily Treasury Statement’s archives here):

Keep in mind that CBO’s August projections assumed that Uncle Sam’s fiscal 2010 collections will be $2.264 trillion (PDF; go to Page X at link), or about 7.5% higher than fiscal 2009′s $2.105 trillion. To get there given October’s and November’s actuals, receipts during the rest of fiscal 2010 will have to be 11.1% higher than the last ten months of fiscal 2009. Putting it very politely, that seems quite unlikely.

It’s too early to say that this will happen, but if full-year receipts for fiscal 2010 come in 10% lower that fiscal 2009 — even that would be an improvement on the 13.7% decline posted thus far — the resulting $1.895 trillion in collections ($2.105 trillion x 90%) will be a whopping $369 billion short of what CBO projected ($2.264 trillion less $1.895 trillion).

On the spending side, CBO says that outlays through the first two months are $559 billion, meaning that the government has thus far spent more than double what it has taken in.

CBO’s monthly advance estimates usually closely track the actual Monthly Treasury Statements, which are released on the eighth business day of each month.

Meanwhile in Washington:

• The Senate is trying to push through a statist health care bill that would more than likely add trillions to future deficits.
• Nancy Pelosi want to redirect Trouble Asset Relief Program repayments to other items — in effect turning it into a permanent revolving slush fund.
• John Kerry says that President Obama needs to put up a few billion dollars of good-faith money at Copenhagen to “jump start” the talks and show the world that we’re serious about supporting the worldwide carbon emission reductions to support an idea (human-caused global warming) that in the wake of Climategate has no convincing scientific basis.
• The incredible shrinking revenue base is a virtual non-story.

Words fail.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

68 years ago today was “the day that will live in infamy.”

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Two separate and independent sources claim that Air Tran Flight 297 out of Houston in mid-November was a terrorist dry run or at least a test of security seriousness. Given the common elements present in the renditions, the claim seems credible.

Another reason the claim seems credible is that the Associated Press’s rendition is so not credible (“a crew member asked a passenger to turn off his phone. [AirTran spokesman Christopher] White says that after several failed attempts by the crew member to end the conversation, the captain returned the plane to the gate.”). Sorry, I refuse to believe that the pilot aborts a flight because one guy is on his cellphone, or that the crew or another miffed passenger wouldn’t at some point take the phone and turn it off for him.

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The ClimateGate hits and other items making mincemeat of the idea that anyone has any real proof that the earth is unnaturally warming because of human-based causes keep coming, and the establish press largely continues to ignore them.

What follows is a small sample; it would take days to catalog all of it:

• Researcher: NASA Hiding Climate Data. This is about far more than one country’s scientists.
• From New Zealand (HT Watt’s Up With That via NewsBusters) — “NZ’s NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) accused of CRU-style temperature faking.” Quick hit: “The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.” Money quote at Watt’s Up — “We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.” It’s actually much more than that.
• BBC (see the vid at the link) — “the source code used in the CRU’s computer files is below commercial software standards, according to software engineer Dr John Graham-Cumming. From the vid: The source code is “not clearly documented, there’s no clear audit history of what’s happened to it,” and there’s an error in the code that will cause the program to “skip over data without any warning to the end user.” In other words, until comprehensively review line by line to prove otherwise, it’s rubbish.
• From England — “Met Office to re-examine 160 years of climate data.” Key item: “The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.” I like the timing. Logic and intellectual honesty would dictate that even hardened alarmists wait until the results are released before attempting to change the entire world’s economic and political order in Copenhagen. Alas, neither is present as 1,200 limos and 140 private planes and their accompanying carbon footprints converge on the city, and Dear Leader has deigned to delay (HT RWV) his departure for Denmark until December 18, in an attempt to force some kind of closure at the end of the conference.
• A Dutch Treat — “Gore Wrong on Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Conclusions: 1) “The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of ‘a natural process of dry and wet periods.’ The present melting is not the result of ‘environmental damage caused by man.’” 2) “DOSR (the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research) calls Al Gore’s iconic use of the melting cap of Kilimanjaro ‘unfortunate’ — since it now seems to be mainly the result of “natural climate variations.’” Just another inconvenient truth.
• A small concession, with much more required — “UN climate chief: hacked e-mails are damaging.” He should have said “damning.”
• Marc Sheppard at American Thinker — “Understanding Climategate’s Hidden Decline.” It’s a read-the-whole-thinger. There are two key graphs. The first shows the previous millennium as commonly accepted until 1990 –

  

  The second shows varying results of fudging by separate but apparently conspiring people to pretend that the historically chronicled Medieval Warming Period noted in the first graph never happened –

  

Had enough yet? U.S. readers should be getting on the phones and filling the e-mail boxes of their representatives in Washington asking them how they can possibly believe anything about claims of human-caused global warming when the underlying data has been so compromised and so many of those involved have been shown to be utterly lacking in personal and scientific integrity. It might be a good idea to post any quotes obtained in whatever forums are available, especially from those who still insist on defending this nonsense.

UPDATE: From Charles Hurt at the New York Post —

Some 40,000 tons of carbon will be spewed getting this crowd (in Copenhagen) together and keeping them in comfort.

That is the amount of carbon dioxide produced by more than 60 of the world’s smaller countries in an entire year — combined.

Despite the globalarmists’ claims, that in and of itself won’t do the world any real harm, but it is a pretty impressive display of hypocrisy.

What may do real harm is anything the attendees agree on that is considered binding.

From Elkhart, Indiana:

A local teen is being hailed a hero for her life-saving actions at a bowling alley.
Posted: 10:42 PM Dec 1, 2009

A local teen is being hailed a hero for her life-saving actions at a bowling alley.

Sixteen year-old Bethanie Riley is a junior at Northridge High School. She goes to the Elkhart Area Career Center for a few hours everyday. One of the program requirements was to be certified in CPR and first-aid. She never thought she’s be forced to take action two months later.

It’s always nice to learn some tricks from teammates who are a little bit more experienced but,14 year-old Victoria McCourt learned another unexpected lesson from Bethanie Riley at the bowling alley.

Victoria says, “She just knew what to do. She was there and just took her. She did a good job.”

Bethanie helped save Victoria’s mom’s life at a recent practice.

Lori says, “ I was watching them bowl. They were on their third game and that’s all I remember and the next thing I know I had someone in an ambulance asking me if I knew where I was.”

Lori McCourt has heart arrhythmia and has passed out several times before. Bethanie happened to look up when she saw Lori’s son panicked hovered over his mom.

Bethanie says, “I kind of tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she was okay and I asked twice and no response, so I lifted up her head and it was kind of turned blue and she was really red and hot, so I lifted her head back and opened up her airway.”

A week later, Lori is still bragging to everyone about how Bethanie saved her life and how knowledgeable she is about first-aid and CPR.

Lori says, “From what Bethanie told me, I was actually skipping beats when she was taking my pulse.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Update: In the end…the CBC gets what they want to the tune of $6 billion. Sad that they continue to enslave their own communities to the government plantation.

Or the other way around?

Looks like the Congressional Black Caucus is moving their own king into check…”we want more money or else.”

From Dick Morris and Eileen McGann:

A civil war is breaking out within the left of the Democratic Party pitting the Congressional Black Caucus against the first African-American president.

The battle began when California Congresswoman Maxine Waters complained publicly about the Administration’s failure to do more to help minority-owned businesses in the current recession. (Translation: In the new Stimulus of “Jobs” Bill making its way through Congress, they want a larger take). It continued yesterday when ten members of the Black Caucus refused to participate in a meeting of the House Banking Committee which was considering the bill to restructure financial regulations forcing Chairman Barney Frank to push the bill through by the uncomfortable margin of only 31-27.

The latest shot in the battle was fired by Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss) a card carrying regular of the Black Caucus. Faced with the need to investigate the gate crashing at the White House during the recent state dinner for India, he chose to embarrass the Administration by subpoenaing White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers rather than quietly negotiating for her appearance.

…The merits of the controversy are obvious. What possible reason would a Social Secretary, for goodness sakes, have for the assertion of executive privilege that is usually reserved for issues of national security? Obviously, none. But Thompson chose his target well. He struck at the social core of the Chicago Mafia that runs the White House, probably striking within the Obama family as well.

Read the whole thing here. Interesting move…threatening to take down your own king.

How media magicians have made $80 billion, the homeless, and a thus far marginal Christmas shopping season disappear.

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Note: This items was posted at Pajamas Media and teased here at BizzyBlog on Friday.

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Have you heard about the $80.7 billion “reorganization gain” General Motors posted in its recent release of financial information?

I’ll bet not. Specifically, that gargantuan sum is the positive portion of a net amount of $79.672 billion that “old General Motors” — now known as Motors Liquidation Company — recognized as “special items” during the first nine days of July. You read that right.

To reach the details of this most extraordinary gain, the company forces you to download and open a 14-page Word document; I guess the news about that marvelous invention known as Portable Document Format (PDF) has yet to reach Detroit. Finally, the reader sees the line-by-line treatment on Page 6:

Allow me to translate:

• After writing off $53.639 billion in “loans,” the federal government has a majority stake in “new” General Motors supposedly valued at $2.505 billion. The difference of $51.134 billion represents the direct amount U.S. taxpayers have lost thus far as a result of bailing the company out.
• The third item is the total of the debts and other general obligations the bankruptcy court in essence allowed GM to walk away from.

This astounding and precedent-breaking set of transactions is news by any reasonable definition of the word. At first, the Associated Press treated it that way. Relatively brief versions of AP reports issued during the first hour or so after GM’s early morning November 16 release noted the $80 billion pickup (pun not intended). But by 9:30, the $80 billion disappeared and never returned; it is nowhere to be found in the final version of the wire service’s coverage. The focus in later revisions moved to further discussion of the “new” GM’s reported “managerial net loss” of $1.2 billion, and to the company’s intention to begin repaying some of the additional money that Uncle Sam lent to it after it emerged from bankruptcy. To be clear (which AP wasn’t), the loans targeted for payback are over and above the $50-plus billion already written off.

Although it doesn’t involve huge sums of money, a second recent establishment media disappearing act involves hundreds of thousands of Americans who have always received prominent mention in the run-up to Thanksgiving whenever Republicans have occupied the White House. I am of course referring to the homeless.

Let’s see. Is the economy worse or better than it was two Thanksgivings ago? October 2009′s unemployment rate of 10.2% was 5.5 points higher than October 2007′s 4.7%. The U.S economy in the third quarter of 2009 was smaller than it was two years earlier, and home foreclosures have dominated the economic news for quite some time.

Given the obviously worse and still deteriorating employment and housing situations, one would think that to the extent the homeless problem is truly serious, it has almost certainly gotten worse overall, and definitely so in certain parts of the country. One might therefore conclude that homelessness would have received more media coverage just before and after this year’s Thanksgiving than it has in previously years, and that enterprising reporters would have rushed out of their comfortable offices to breathlessly tell their audiences how awful the plight of the homeless has become.

That didn’t happen. A Google News search I did on November 29 on “homelessness rising” (not in quotes) returned all of 22 unique listings. I repeated that search on December 2 and got the same results. As far as I could tell, none of the listings were from national establishment media sources, and virtually none of them addressed overall national or local trends. Similar searches done two or more years ago while George W. Bush was president would certainly have retrieved far more results.

A third disappearing act has to do with Christmas and Christmas shopping, and has two aspects. Since 2005, I have chronicled the decline in media use of the term “Christmas shopping season” in favor of “holiday shopping season” (typed in quotes in each case). Four years ago, in searches done just before Thanksgiving, “Christmas shopping season” references made up about 15% of the total results of all “shopping season” searches. This year, those references were only 6% of the total. At that rate of shrinkage, we won’t see any references to the “Christmas shopping season” within three or four years.

The other angle disappearing from journalists’ Christmas reporting lists is the one where they go all gloomy telling us what a mediocre selling season retailers will have, are having and finally did have. This commonly played out at the New York Times during the Bush 43 years of 2001-2007.

This year, it seems that they’re turning into Pollyannas. In Tuesday’s Times, reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom waited until her 15th and final paragraph to tell us that two retail associations predict that overall Christmas shopping season sales will come in 1%-2% below last year’s objectively dreadful, bailout blues-induced result.

As I prepared this column, it seemed that the establishment media’s dogged effort to keep Climategate under wraps was starting to unravel. But if they can successfully hide $80 billion, ignore hundreds of thousands of homeless, make the Christmas shopping season disappear, and pretend that Christmas retail business really isn’t that bad, I wouldn’t bet against them on Climategate just yet.

Well, you can’t say they aren’t consistent.

Two brief AP dispatches from December 2 and December 3 about Michael Toole, a Pennsylvania judge who has agreed to plead guilty to corruption-related charges, fail to mention that Toole has at least been a contributor to the Democratic Party, and appears very likely to have been a party member.

This see-no-party treatment parallels local media coverage of Toole’s situation (four of many examples are here, here, here, and here). As far as I can tell, no one has directly identified Toole’s party affiliation.

It wasn’t easy to ascertain that Toole is a more than likely a mule. The best online evidence of his party affiliation consists of a March blog post at Sights on Pennsylvania identifying contributions by Toole to the Luzerne County Democratic Party in 2003. Whether Toole is actually a registered Democrat, or was until shortly before his legal troubles began, is supposed to be AP’s and other journalists’ job to determine — and report.

The wire service refers to Toole as a “third judge” to be hit with corruption charges. As previously noted several times at NewsBusters and BizzyBlog, the other two, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, are definitely Democrats. The AP actually said so in an early dispatch about the pair’s indictment in February, but removed mention of their party membership a short time later; graphic proof that this occurred is at the earliest related post at (here and here) at each blog. As far as I can tell, the pair’s party affiliation has not since been mentioned in an AP report.

Here is the full December 2 AP dispatch, followed by an excerpt from December 3:

(December 2)

A third judge in northeastern Pennsylvania has been charged with corruption on the bench.

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday filed fraud and tax charges against Luzerne County Judge Michael Toole. Court documents indicate he will plead guilty.

Prosecutors say Toole “corruptly abused” his position by concealing his financial relationship with an attorney who appeared before him in court. They say the 49-year-old judge “improperly ruled” in the attorney’s favor in an arbitration case.

Two other Luzerne County judges were charged in January with accepting millions of dollars in kickbacks to place youth offenders in privately owner detention centers.

A total of 20 people have been charged this year in a wide-ranging federal corruption probe in Luzerne County.

(December 3)

Pennsylvania’s highest court says a Luzerne County judge can no longer take any official action a day after he was charged in a federal corruption probe.

The state Supreme Court on Thursday relieved Judge Michael Toole of all judicial and administrative duties. His salary and benefits aren’t immediately affected.

The best evidence that only Democratic Party officials and members are involved in the apparent cesspool of corruption in Luzerne County is this paragraph from a pre-election report at CitizensVoice.com in October 2009:

The Republican Party’s campaign theme – that the corruption scandal is a symptom of longtime one-party Democratic rule in the county – could resonate with independents and disaffected Democrats. Conahan, Ciavarella and the five other elected officials charged in the probe are registered Democrats.

All told, 20 people including those not in public office have been charged thus far, according to this party ID-free list compiled by TimesLeader.com.

Perhaps NB and BizzyBlog readers more familiar than yours truly with the goings-on in Northeast PA can serve the cause of public knowledge by identifying in the comments, preferably with supporting links, the party affiliation of those on the list who have not already been clearly ID’d (i.e., all except Ciavarella and Conahan, whose offenses involve placing juvenile offenders into detention centers in return for millions in kickbacks). The AP and the local press in that area apparently can’t or won’t do it, so someone will have to do it for them.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Primarily from Sacramento, California:

Dec 5, 2009 / 12:28 pm

Craig Manson, Distinguished Professor and Lecturer in Law at the University of the Pacific, has recently written about how the South in the U.S could be regarded as the “birthplace of black Catholicism.”

Explaining the historical context, Manson told CNA that “evidence suggests that the first black Catholics in America were those in Florida as early as 1565. They came with the Spanish explorers. Some were slaves; others were free Africans.”

“As for slaves, we know that the Spanish baptized their slaves and treated them like human beings, not property,” continued Manson. “Black people did comparatively well under Spanish rule in Florida, as opposed to, for example, South Carolina. In the late 1600s, slaves from the Carolinas began escaping to Florida, where one condition of their sanctuary there was baptism.”

Manson also told CNA that “there exists in St. Augustine a baptismal record for a black child dated 1606. Some scholars believe there were Catholic child baptisms in Florida earlier than that, but the records just haven’t survived.”

“A great many black Catholics have roots in Louisiana,” explained Manson. “The reason is similar to the other situation: the French who governed Louisiana originally required slaves to be baptized and encouraged the preservation of family structures among slaves. They required slave marriages to be consecrated by the Church.”

“Additionally,” said Manson, “the French were quite a bit more liberal than the British when it came to interracial marriages.”

When asked about the significance of these findings, Manson told CNA that he believes that “understanding history gives us a perspective on the present. It explains why we are where we are and how we got there. As a life-long black Catholic myself, I didn’t know much about the history of black Catholics until recently.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.