…. on its perfect regular season.

What an incredible game.

UPDATE, Dec. 6: Dang (Texas 13, Nebrasksa 12).

The BCS’s mucked-up system is really, really, reeeeeeeally lucky that Texas won, because I suspect that it would still have rated Texas #2 if the ‘Horns hadn’t made that 46-yard field goal as time expired against a 9-3 team ranked #22 in what was practically a home game (UC, on the other hand, beat the #15 team on the road). That would have pitted an undefeated team against one with a loss, while shutting out three undefeateds (UC, TCU, and Boise St.). As it is, Texas belongs in the championship game — but by only by the length of a longhorn’s nose.

The idea of keeping undefeated teams out of a national championship game while letting a team with a loss in because of its allegedly tougher schedule would have been absurd and outrageous. Which one of the three other undefeateds would have most deserved a title berth if Texas had lost would have been a furious debate, but one worth having.

For those who think that being in a big, bad, oh-so-powerful conference should be an automatically trumping consideration, even if the team involved has lost, I have two responses:

• January 2, 2009 — Utah 31, Alabama 17
• January 1, 2007 — Boise State 43, Oklahoma 42

Item: “Medal of Honor recipient draws support in fight for flagpole”

That emailer writes:

If this were a Muslim being told that his star and crescent weren’t displayed “properly,” the ACLU would run the HOA out of town, the homeowner would be given police protection, an honorary flag pole and their faces would be plastered above the fold with a “RACIST, BIGOTED, HOMOPHOBIC AMERICA. STINKS” story on every rag in the nation….

Amen, sister.

Home Owner’s Associations everywhere, not just Virginia, think they are a flipping politburo. Here in Cincinnati they are the worst. We purposely looked for a neighborhood without one and you can find many that are just as nice, neat and “classy” without all the harrassment, oppressive policies and outrageous, annual fees.

________________________________________________

UPDATE, Dec. 9 (from Tom): The HOA has backed down (HT Hot Air) without comment. Mark Levin has lots to say at this YouTube about Mr. Barfoot’s Medal of Honor and awesome heroism here.

Normally, it’s news when a leading politician in a country hosting a summit expresses harsh dissent against that summit’s agenda — or at least it is when a leftist is the dissenter.

But I doubt that what Thor Pedersen, Speaker of the Danish Parliament, has to say about the upcoming COP15 Climate Summit will get much if any play in U.S. network newscasts or in the nation’s establishment media publications of record.

As reported in Politiken.dk, self-described here as “one of Denmark’s largest newspapers and has been published since 1884,” Pedersen pushes back against the global warming pap:

The Speaker of the Danish Parliament has issued a damning criticism of the climate debate, saying politicians gullibly turn theories into facts.

As the world prepares to converge on Copenhagen for the COP15 Climate Summit, Denmark’s Speaker of Parliament has expressed serious doubts as to the way in which the climate debate has developed.

“The problem is that lots of people go around saying that the climate change we see is a result of human activity. That is a very dangerous claim,” Parliamentary Speaker and former Finance Minister Thor Pedersen (Lib) tells DR.

“Unfortunately I seem to experience that scientists say: ‘We have a theory’ – then that crosses the road to the politicians who say: ‘We know’. Who can be bothered to hear a scientist who says ‘I have a theory’ when politicians go around saying ‘I know’” Thor Pedersen says.

Thor Pedersen adds that the temperature has not risen in the past decade.

“I’m not saying that in the decade that the temperature has fallen or stagnated is enough to evaluate developments. But one should only say what one knows,” the Speaker adds.

“You should say that although we believed in our models, that the temperature would rise from 1998 to 2008, we have to admit that it has not risen. We cannot explain why it has not risen, but we believe we still have a problem. I’m just asking that people say what they actually know,” Pedersen tells DR.

Given what has been exposed in ClimateGate, Pedersen is actually giving climate change scientists more of a break than they deserve. It’s clear from the e-mails exposed that many of these scientists have made up their minds and have in many cases been pretending to know what they don’t really know.

Nonetheless, a Danish voice of dissent is quite welcome in advance of Copenhagen’s Conference of Denialists, i.e., those who are denying that the ClimateGate scandal exposes the utter lack of scientific support for the conference’s topic.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Hermon, Maine (video is at link):

A young woman is thankful to two good friends who saved her life when her car went off the road into a stream last week.

Johnna Kenney was driving home from work last Friday afternoon when she fell asleep at the wheel. Her car went off the road and into a stream. The drivers side completely submerged in water and Kenney was trapped in the car. Her friend Jacob Dorr was driving behind her when the accident happened. He immediately went to a house next to the stream to get more help. Kenney’s and Dorr’s other friend Justin Choiniere, who is training to be an EMT, pulled Kenney out of the car and checked her vitals while Dorr called 911. Kenney said she has a whole new appreciation for the two friends she has known since childhood.

“I definitely look at them completely differently,” Kenney said. “I am lot more happy to see them. I’m happy to see everyone, but it’s more like an adoration now.”

Kenney walked away from the accident with only minor cuts and bruises. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Kristof’s column about a patient who can’t get treatment is best described as a pack of lies from beginning to end.

Michelle exposed it, and doubled down (with additional links; just go there), by doing something Kristof apparently wasn’t interested in doing: research.

If Kristof’s piece is the best argument for ObamaCare, there is no argument for ObamaCare.

Of course, Kristof thinks that Mao wasn’t such a bad guy, so his promotion of statism and his lack of interest in the truth shouldn’t exactly be a surprise.

Nick Kristof was scammed just as surely as his fellow journalists have been scammed for years by the perpetrators of what is now known as Climategate. That they won’t own up to having been played doesn’t change the fact that they have been.

Run-up: ADP reported 169,000 jobs lost in the private sector during November in the national employment report it released Wednesday.

• This quickie note at a local Fox station predicts the unemployment rate will be unchanged at 10.2% and that 130,000 seasonally adjusted jobs will be lost.
• That same prediction is in this AP report from yesterday on the worsening employment situation in many metro areas.
• Forbes columnist Joshua Zumbrun, claiming that the “turning point is near,” has the rate staying the same and 125,000 lost.

The report comes out here at 8:30 a.m.

Here it is:

The unemployment rate edged down to 10.0 percent in November, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-11,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. In the prior 3 months, payroll job losses had averaged 135,000 a month. In November, employment fell in construction, manufacturing, and information, while temporary help services and health care added jobs.

The Forbes guy may be right.

If you look at the following graphic which has the seasonally adjusted and raw rates, it looks like the rate may indeed stay at 10% or even decline slightly in the coming months:

The actual on-the-ground rate went up from October to November in each of the past five years, but went down this time. That’s a pretty good thing.

One takeaway from this is that BLS probably overshot reality a bit in October when it showed a 0.4% increase in the unemployment rate, but that the rate might actually be stabilizing and headed slightly downward.

The open question is whether the rate dropped because fewer people are working and/or looking for work according to the Household Survey. I’ll be back with that shortly.

UPDATE: The workforce situation is a mixed bag –

The bad news is that the civilian labor force continues to shrink while the number of people who currently want a job continues to increase. The good news is that more people were working in November than in October, and fewer were unemployed.

“Luckily” for the calculation of the unemployment rate, a lot fewer people are participating in the workforce. If the participation rate had been the same as a year ago (65.8%), 1.9 million more people would be showing as unemployed (65.8% times 236.743 million is 155.777 million; 155.777 million minus the current civilian labor force of 153.877 million is 1.9 million right on the button), and the unemployment rate would now be 11.1% (17.275 million unemployed because of the additional 1.9 million unemployed in the labor force divided by 155.777 million) instead of 10.0%.

I would suggest that it’s at least as important for long-term economic growth for the administration to figure out a way to get as many of those who have withdrawn from the workforce back into it as possible as it is to help those who are currently looking. Doing that would involve lifting the pervasive, government-induced uncertainty that hangs over the entire economy. It would not involve increasing transfer payments beyond what is needed, as has clearly been done in the Food Stamp program.

Here’s an obvious idea, given that so many have withdrawn from the workforce by retiring early for the purpose of collecting Social Security benefits: Repeal the punitive Social Security earnings penalty.

It’s here.

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

_______________________________

The three disappearing acts cited in the column are:

• The $80.7 billion in “reorganization gains” (i.e., gains resulting from the fleecing of taxpayers and creditors) recognized by “old” General Motors during the final days of its bankruptcy proceedings in early July. The earliest AP breakers after GM’s release of financial info on November 16 mentioned it. Subsequent reports, including this one, have not.
• During Thanksgiving, barely covering the homelessness situation, which is almost certainly worse nationwide and is definitely worse in certain parts of the country, and never, as far as I could tell, putting it into the context of the awful national economy.
• Trying to put a smiley face while hiding a thus far mediocre at best Christmas shopping season.

A fourth more important disappearing act is the one where the establishment media, particularly non-Fox network TV, has been trying to make Climategate disappear. Kyle Drennen at NewsBusters yesterday noted that it’s Day 13 of the steadfast refusal by ABC, CBS, and NBC to substantively cover the exposure of “scientists” who have come perilously close to reordering the world’s economic and political systems in the name of globaloney as a collection of data-manipulatiing, info-hiding, enemy-attacking charlatans. For cryin’ out loud, Jon Stewart has done more with the story than have the Big 3 nets.

Because of this see-nothing, hear-nothing, speak-nothing approach to an objectively important story, TV viewers who learn about it from alternative media and word-of-mouth will probably continue to perform their own disappearing acts and decide to go elsewhere for actual news.

From D’Iberville, Mississippi:

Posted: Dec 02, 2009 9:31 AM
Updated: Dec 02, 2009 1:07 PM

A 19-year-old girl is lucky to be alive after her car ended up at the bottom of the Tchoutacabouffa River Wednesday morning. A D’Iberville Police officer happened to be on Lamey Bridge Road checking the river stage when her car spun out of control and into the water.

Officer Michael Knapp watched in horror as the scene unfolded in front of him.

“I was praying it wouldn’t go into the water,” Officer Knapp remembered. “And the next thing you know, the front end of the car, I saw the bumper rip off and the car goes into the water.”

Moments later, Officer Knapp saw Carrie McGill climb out of her window.

“She started screaming, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ First thing I thought of was my life jacket.”

Knapp grabbed the life jacket from his car and carefully tossed it down to the girl. He said it’s a miracle the wind didn’t blow it away first.

“It just dropped right in her arms. And she grabbed it, wrapped her arms around it. That’s when the car went under,” Knapp said.

But Carrie McGill’s legs were still in the car, so she went down with it.

“I was praying that she would come up. I was hoping the water wouldn’t take her under. I was thinking about jumping in right after that. Then she popped up,” Knapp said.

That’s when Officer Chris Roberts arrived. He immediately got in the water.

“The first thing I thought when I stepped into the water was hypothermia on her part, because she had been in there for an unknown amount of time before I arrived,” Officer Roberts said.

“Once I got about 50 feet into the water there, she began to paddle towards me. Once she got to me, I grabbed her and pulled her to the shore.”

Both officers are being hailed as heroes for their quick actions.

“But that’s what we’re trained to do. We’re trained to react and help people and that’s what we’re out here for,” Knapp said.

“This makes it worth it, to be able to do this,” Roberts said. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

The coverage yesterday by the Associated Press’s Stephen Bernard of payroll and human resources giant ADP’s monthly jobs report for November focused on a relatively small reduction in the size of the decline in jobs lost and not on the fact that continuing to lose jobs is a bad thing.

That rhetorical sleight of hand enabled the AP reporter to tell us that ADP’s reported private sector job loss during the month of 169,000 — down from 203,000 in October — was actually good news, because even though it was a decline in the number of people working, the decline of the decline "was not as much as forecast." The forecast was for 160,000 jobs lost.

Readers of a previous version of this post will note that I allowed myself to believe that Bernard had erred when he did not. I apologize for not getting that right. And here I thought I would make it through the whole year without a mistake. :–>

What follows is a graphic of the first few paragraphs of Bernard’s report:

Having disposed of that confusion, let’s move on to the incredible bar-lowering in the final excerpted paragraph. Since when is "stabilization in cuts" part of what "is considered vital to a strong economic recovery"? Since when is "stabilization in cuts" part of a recovery at all? If the cuts "stabilize" at 150,000 – 200,000 a month, will we really be "recovering"? That would be roughly 2 million jobs lost per year, and we still supposedly be in the process of a "recovery." I suppose they could "stabilize" at a higher number and still be okay by Bernard’s definition.

Bernard’s bobble could be excused as an isolated incident if other similar mistakes weren’t so rampant in other AP business reports. But they are. Just off the top of the head, their journalists think that:

• The national debt is the sum of Uncle Sam’s reported annual deficits. We should be so lucky, but that’s not the case.
• That the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were major contributors to the $962 billion increase in the reported fiscal 2009 deficit vs. fiscal 2008. As seen here (go to Page 2 at link), the entire Defense Department’s year-over-year spending increase of $42 billion was less than 5% of that total, so the wars themselves couldn’t possibly have been a major factor in the overall year-over-year increase.
• Seasonally adjusted job losses, which is what the government reports each month, represent real jobs lost in the real world. They don’t. For example, job gains on the ground in October (subject to adjustment tomorrow) were 641,000:

  

  But because the reported on-the-ground gain was less than the gains in most previous years (the 2004-2007 average gain was a bit under 800,000), that led to a reported seasonally adjusted job loss of 190,000.

This level of ignorant and biased reporting from AP is why people are proactively seeking alternatives. As they should.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

In their report on Ford’s November sales results, the Associated Press’s Tom Krisher and Dee-Ann Durbin seemed to downplay the company’s pretty decent month, and definitely downplayed the company’s better near-term prospects compared to its principal rivals. Additionally, despite the report’s Wednesday time stamp, the pair didn’t update the item’s content to compare Ford’s performance to its competitors.

Via the Wall Street Journal, here is the detail for Ford and the others:

• General Motors — 150,305 units sold, down 1.5% from November 2008.
• Toyota — 133,700 units, up 2.6%.
• Ford — 118,215 units, down 0.1%.
• Honda — 74,003 units, down 2.9%.
• Chrysler — 63,560 units, down 25.5%.
• Nissan — 56,288 units, up 20.8%.

Here are excerpts from Krisher/Durbin’s work; wait until you see what the Krisher and Durbin saved for their last paragraph (bolds are mine):

Ford’s November sales steady
1 day ago

Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday U.S. sales held steady in November as buyers snapped up fuel-efficient cars and crossovers, a sign that the market for new vehicles remains on a path to recovery.

Ford’s sales were essentially flat compared to last November, at 122,846. But sales of crossovers rose 26 percent and sales of cars rose 14 percent. Trucks and SUVs saw double-digit declines. Other automakers are reporting sales on Tuesday.

…. But carmakers continued to rely on discounts and other incentive spending to move inventory. Sales incentives rose 2 percent in November to $2,713 per vehicle, according to the auto Web site Edmunds.com.

Small monthly auto sales increases are likely as the economy continues its slow improvement, but larger auto sales gains will not happen until the unemployment rate drops substantially, and people feel confident spending money on big-ticket items, said Martin Zimmerman, a former Ford Motor Co. chief economist who now teaches at the University of Michigan.

…. Ford said its hybrid sales increased 73 percent, to 2,361, as buyers gravitated toward gas sippers. At about $2.65 per gallon, regular gasoline is up around 50 cents over November of last year.

The Ford Fusion sedan, which leads the mid-size category in fuel-efficiency at 34 miles per gallon, posted a 54-percent increase from last November, shattering its previous record for full-year sales.

…. Ford showed some optimism for the coming year, increasing first-quarter production plans by 58 percent to 550,000 vehicles. Its fourth-quarter production plan is unchanged.

Points:

• The fact that about 900 buyers “gravitated” towards hybrids at a company that sells over 100,000 vehicles a month is hardly worth reporting.
• The incentives figure cited is for all companies. The incentives at Ford were actually about 15% higher, which despite the generally good news out of Dearborn is probably not a good thing.
• Here’s a question no one seems to be asking — Are buyers going to fuel-efficient cars and crossovers because of gas prices, or are they hurting so badly financially that they can’t afford anything better?

Finally, when’s the last time you saw a planned 58% increase in production described as an expression of “some optimism”? If Ford keeps that up during all of 2010, it will produce about 1.9 million units after taking shutdowns and holidays into account. That would lead one to believe that Ford is anticipating double-digit increases in unit sales next year, which starkly contrasts with the overall “on the path to recovery” picture painted by Krisher and Durbin.

Does anyone think that government/union-controlled GM or Chrysler are planning big production increases next year?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Great catch by Taranto at the WSJ’s Best of the Web on Obama’s Afghanistan speech:

Little wonder Obama also said in his speech that “the wrenching debate over the Iraq war is well-known and need not be repeated here.” That’s easier than admitting that he has changed his mind and now regards Iraq as having been an al Qaeda safe haven and source of international terrorism.

This is yet another in a long, long line of instances where the Left casually discards what it once considered core arguments when it becomes convenient and/or expedient to do so. That’s what happens when your real core values consist only of power and control.

The hope is that the rest of us will forget their previous contradictory dictums. That worked pretty well 20 years ago. Taranto has demonstrated that it doesn’t work any more.

______________________________________________________

Hapless Hannity — I thought that Sean Hannity would stop going after Alicia, one of his assistants who recently got married, once she tied the knot. Before she got married, up to just days before her wedding, Hannity wasted precious broadcast minutes seemingly every day trying to talk her out of marrying her beau.

I was wrong. He was after her yet again yesterday about some kind of argument the now-married couple may or may not have had.

Hannity obviously thinks this is entertaining. Maybe it was, for five minutes on one day, many months ago. But now this non-stop harassment is enough to make you wonder if he believes in what he says about family values.

Sean, leave the couple alone.

Heaven help us if Rush ever goes off the air and Hannity is considered conservative talk’s leading light.

Hannity at least seems to have stopped trying to push “the new GM” onto his listeners. The sad thing is that in my opinion he had to hear from listeners and read posts from bloggers (or more likely to have his peeps do it for him) before he figured out that supporting a bailed-out, state-run company betrays sensible conservatism.

______________________________________________________

Quick Climategate Update, from James Delingpole at the UK Telegraph — “It’s All Unravelling Now.”

While on the subject, it’s interesting how the press continues to characterize the information taken as “hacked,” as in obtained in an electronic break-in by outsiders, when the evidence points to at least an equal chance that it was surreptitiously spirited away by an insider. If it’s the latter, the person who did is this decade’s Daniel Ellsberg, in a heist with far more valuable substance than Ellsberg’s purloined Pentagon Papers ever revealed.

_______________________________________________________

Speaking of the AP article linked in the previous item, there’s this gem at the end:

The chairman of the Academy of Science panel, Texas A&M University atmospheric scientist Gerald North, said even if (Climategate e-mail authors/data cookers) Jones, Mann and others had done no research at all, the world would still be warming and scientists would still be able to show it.

I read the bolded text as an admission that “we can’t show it now.”

In other words, there’s no other convincing evidence. In other words, nothing’s “settled.” In other words, Copenhagen is a pointless waste of time and money.

_______________________________________________________

Speaking of Copenhagen and Denmark — “Denmark rife with CO2 fraud”:

Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.

Denmark’s quota register, which the Energy Agency within the Climate and Energy Ministry administers, is the largest in the world in terms of personal quota registrations. It is much easier to register here than in other countries, where it can take up to three months to be approved.
Ekstra Bladet reporters have found examples of people using false addresses and companies that are in liquidation, which haven’t been removed from the register.

One of the cases, which stems from the Danish register, involves fraud of more than 8 billion kroner.

At roughly 5 kroners/dollar, that’s about $1.6 billion, which is roughly $300 for every man, woman and child in Denmark.

The Danish debacle is a prelude of things to come on a much larger scale if the “trade” part of cap and trade ever becomes a worldwide reality.

From New York:

Dec 3, 2009 / 05:25 am

Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan will celebrate a special St. Patrick’s Cathedral Mass on Dec. 9 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Archbishop Fulton Sheen. The Mass will be broadcast live on the Catholic television network EWTN.

Archbishop Sheen was a radio host and bestselling author who also hosted the popular 1950s television series “Life is Worth Living.” He served as the Bishop of Rochester, New York from 1966 to 1969.

He died on Dec. 9, 1979.

In 2002, Archbishop Sheen was declared a Servant of God. In 2008, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints opened his cause to consider his beatification and canonization.

Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan will be the main celebrant and homilist at the memorial Mass.

The archbishop has told EWTN host Raymond Arroyo that he had the chance to meet the famous prelate several times. However, he only became interested in him during his graduate work on the history of the Catholic Church in the U.S. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.