I don’t know why I’m relaying this to readers. After all, according to former White House Communications Director Anita “Mao Inspires Me” Dunn, it’s not coming from a real news organization. Her successor, Dan Pfeiffer, agrees. So does David Axelrod.

But on the off chance that what follows might actually mean something, here is an excerpt from a lengthy piece of investigative journalism from Fox News’s James Rosen (HT to an e-mailer):

Obama Administration Steers Lucrative No-Bid Contract for Afghan Work to Dem Donor

Despite President Obama’s long history of criticizing the Bush administration for “sweetheart deals” with favored contractors, the Obama administration this month awarded a $25 million federal contract for work in Afghanistan to a company owned by a Democratic campaign contributor without entertaining competitive bids, Fox News has learned.

The contract, awarded on Jan. 4 to Checchi & Company Consulting, Inc., a Washington-based firm owned by economist and Democratic donor Vincent V. Checchi, will pay the firm $24,673,427 to provide “rule of law stabilization services” in war-torn Afghanistan.

…. The legality of the arrangement as a “sole source,” or no-bid, contract was made possible by virtue of a waiver signed by the USAID administrator. “They cancelled the open bid on this when they came to power earlier this year,” a source familiar with the federal contracting process told Fox News.

“That’s kind of weird,” said another source, who has worked on “rule of law” issues in both Afghanistan and Iraq, about the no-bid contract to Checchi & Company. “There’s lots of companies and non-governmental organizations that do this sort of work.”

…. Asked if he or his firm had been aware that the contract was awarded without competitive bids, Checchi replied: “After it was awarded to us, sure. Before, we had no idea.”

…. Asked about the contract, USAID Acting Press Director Harry Edwards at first suggested his office would be too “busy” to comment on it. “I’ll tell it to the people in Haiti,” Edwards snapped when a Fox News reporter indicated the story would soon be made public. The USAID press office did not respond further.

…. As a candidate for president in 2008, then-Sen. Obama frequently derided the Bush administration for the awarding of federal contracts without competitive bidding.

“I will finally end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all,” the senator told a Grand Rapids audience on Oct. 2. “The days of sweetheart deals for Halliburton will be over when I’m in the White House.”

…. The records show Checchi has given at least $4,400 to Obama dating back to March 2007, close to the maximum amount allowed. The contractor has also made donations to various arms of the Democratic National Committee, to liberal activist groups like MoveOn.org and ActBlue, and to other party politicians like Sen. John F. Kerry, former presidential candidate John Edwards and former Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont.

I seem to recall that the “sweetheart deals” for Halliburton were often sole-sourced because Halliburton was the only company that could credibly claim to have the capabilities required. Rosen’s report indicates that this clearly isn’t the case with the work awarded to Checchi (home page; “about” page; “scope of services” page).

So …. will the rest of the establishment press risk the tattered remnants of its credibility, follow the White House’s suggestion, and ignore the story because it’s coming from Fox? Stay tuned.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

This goes back a couple of weeks, but Michelle Malkin’s point about Flight 253 being a repeat of history is too good to let slide by without notice:

Like Abulmutallab, not a single one of the unmarried, rootless, Muslim male nomads who secured student and business visas to commit mass murder on American soil should have ever obtained a temporary visa in the first place.

To be clear, this seems to be an ongoing problem no matter who is president, and no matter who is Secretary of State. The dangerously “accommodating” mindset of careerists at State is infuriating, and no amount of tragedy or near-tragedy seems to matter. But, since Obama and Hillary Clinton are in charge, it’s up to them to try to stop this nonsense before more innocent people die in bunches. It’s on them if they don’t.

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This item from the “Pass the Smelling Salts” file goes back to December.

Buckeye Firearms Association Vice Chairman Chad Baus gave Associated Press reporter Colleen Long props for her treatment of gun crime in her “Number of Officers Killed by Gunfire Increased 24 Percent in 2009” story.

I’m not kidding:

(Long writes that) “The availability of guns compounds the problem, criminologists say. But Pennsylvania, the state with the most gun-related officer deaths so far this year, has among the strictest gun laws in the country, according to a ranking by the pro-gun-control Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Other states, like Louisiana, Oklahoma and Kentucky, have very little oversight and had few, if any, officer gun deaths this year.”

Amazing! This is the type of analysis that is completely absent from the vast majority of gun-related reports in mainstream media. Pro-gun advocates often point out that the Brady Campaign gives better grades for having tough gun control laws to states that also have the highest gun violence, but the point is rarely repeated by media who dutifully publish the Brady bunch’s grade card press release each year.

… I’m not sure how Colleen Long’s story made it past the biased editors at the Associated Press, but I’m glad it did.

It is indeed refreshing to see a piece that isn’t reflexively anti-gun.

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This one, from the “you think you’re funny, but you’re really sick” file, goes back to just after the first of the year:

Hey, Rich People: Drop Dead. And I Do Mean Now.

No, seriously. If you’re possessed of a fortune and of a certain age, you really should think about the advantages of kicking off in the next 12 months.

You see, the federal estate tax—which can snatch a sizable chunk of your ill-gotten hoard—went out of effect just as the ball dropped and the horns started to blow.

… (But) The estate tax will (probably, in all likelihood, with any luck) go right back into effect January 1, 2011.

… That’s why you need to die. For the sake of the children. And the grandchildren, those adorable little tykes.

Besides, if you don’t hasten your extinction, they may.

So the wealth of the rich is undeserved, and some of their heirs want to take advantage of the fact that there is no death tax this year to kill them. What a comedian.

There’s a perfect solution to the latter problem: Permanently repeal the death tax, which only generated $23.5 billion in the last fiscal year (see second page at link), or barely 1% of all federal receipts.

I non-humorously weighed the costs and benefits of death tax repeal back in April 2005. Also located there is this quote about how dumb the tax is: “For every dollar of tax revenue raised by the estate tax, another dollar is squandered in the economy simply to comply with or avoid the tax.” That’s not funny.

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This winning streak goes back five weeks. Go here (first item at link) for the qualifiers and the recitation of those who have earned yours truly’s continuing gratitude.

Update: Keeping things in perspective, click here to see proof that there was only one blog in Ohio that mattered last week.

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This one about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s taking office for his third term goes back a few weeks. The relative media silence over Bloomberg’s scheme to get around the voter-approved two-term limit with a City Council vote is all the more outrageous given the hue and cry that greeted Rudy Giuliani when he foolishly mused about wanting a third term in 2001, or even extending his final term by a few months, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

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This great column (“ClimateGate: You should be steamed”) by Neil Frank, a meteorologist and former director of the National Hurricane Center, goes back to January 2. It contains this succinct three-paragraph summary of the case against globaloney:

What do the skeptics believe? First, they concur with the believers that the Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic a la Al Gore.

Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor. If you are going to change the temperature of the globe, it must involve water vapor.

Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly overpredicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world.

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Speaking of ClimateGate, there’s an utterly fantastic poster that goes back to late December chronicling the decades-long manmade disaster known as ClimateGate, from the earliest “recognitions” (i.e., story planting) at the New York Times through the November 2009 e-mails. It’s so good I have it at my host, where readers can download it (800k PDF).

An interesting think tank or foundation project would be to mail a full size poster to each and every elementary and secondary school in the country, demanding that this history be included in any discussions of climate science, while chronicling the responses.

From Rick Reilly at ESPN:

Updated: January 15, 2010, 12:01 PM ET

Hey, Baltimore fans, this might make you spit out your crab cakes.

You realize who’s been calling the first play of Ravens’ games lately? Like the one that went for an 83-yard touchdown against the Patriots?

If you said head coach John Harbaugh, you’d be wrong.

Offensive coordinator Cam Cameron? Wrong again.

QB Joe Flacco? Strike three.

The guy who’s been calling the first play lately isn’t a guy at all. It’s a 14-year-old Baltimore kid. His name is Matthew Costello, he’s got an inoperable brain tumor and he’s on a lucky streak.

“You gotta meet this kid,” says Cameron.

This all started when Matt, a third baseman and pitcher for Loyola Blakefield Middle School, was hit in the eye with a pitch that tipped off his bat. He ended up with double vision. A few dozen doctors later, they found a malignant tumor. Now his days are mostly going to chemo sessions and wondering if he’s ever going to get back to playing any of the three sports he loves.

Cameron’s son, Danny — Matthew’s classmate — told his dad about him, how he lives for the Ravens. Next thing you know, Cam Cameron was driving through the biggest snowstorm to hit Baltimore in years — getting stuck three times — with a Flacco-signed football, a signed hat and glad tidings for Matthew.

Why? Maybe because Cameron survived serious melanoma cancer at age 28.

Matthew’s dad is a morning news anchor at WMAR in Baltimore and he was on the air, live, when his phone spit out this befuddling text from his wife, Donna: Cam Cameron is on his way.

“I’m like, ‘What?’” Jamie Costello recalls. “‘In a driving snowstorm?’”

Yep. Cameron talked with Matt for 20 minutes, and then, as he was leaving, turned and said, “Hey, Matthew, whaddya wanna call for our first play Sunday?”

Mouth open. Eyes not blinking.

“Seriously,” Cameron said.

Since Matt played QB for the school team, he knew when it was time to audible. “Play-action pass,” he said. “Be cool if you could get it to Todd Heap.”

Sure enough, first snap against the Chicago Bears in Week 15 — with the Ravens trying to make the playoffs — Flacco fakes the handoff and drops back to pass. Only he bounces the ball off the turf for an incomplete pass. But later in that series Cameron looks at his play sheet. Scrawled on the side, he’s written Matthew Costello. So he calls Matt’s play again and it goes for a 14-yard touchdown to Heap, the tight end. Ravens win, 31-7.

End of story, right? Except, three weeks later, the night before the Ravens’ playoff game with New England, Cameron calls again.

“OK, Matt, whaddya wanna do Sunday?”

“Run the ball,” pronounced Matt. “Ray Rice. He’s hot.”

So, first play against the Patriots, Flacco hands to Rice. There’s a hole and Rice is through it like he’s being chased by a bear.

“And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Don’t tell me this is going to go all the way,’” Cameron remembers. It does — 83 yards, untouched, for a touchdown. “The whole way, I’m thinking of Matthew,” Cameron says. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

It’s amazing how Bernard Condon and Tim Paradis of the Associated Press managed to hang the same label on totally opposite political positions in their report on the situation in the stock market late this afternoon.

According to the AP pair, Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate win in Massachusetts was due to a “wave of populism,” at the same time as President Obama is supposedly planning to use “populist attacks” to save his party’s congressional majority in the fall elections. One of those employments of “populism” has to be wrong.

Additionally, they write that it’s Scott Brown’s type of populism that caused investors to sell heavily in the middle of last week, but that it’s Barack Obama’s type of populism that caused it to plunge even further during its remainder.

Got that?

Look at the bright side: As you’ll see, the wire service at least got the headline right.

Here are the first five paragraphs of the AP pair’s schizophrenic report, followed by a few later ones (bolds are mine):

Obama share scare: Market drop shows vulnerability

It was the fat cats’ fault before. But now it’s becoming Obama’s.

With the unemployment rate stubbornly high, people were already shifting blame for their economic woes to President Barack Obama one year into his presidency. Last week, investors joined them.

For 10 months, the stock market climbed at breathtaking speed. But the Dow Jones industrial average suffered its worst week since dropping to a 12-year low in early March. It fell 552 points Wednesday through Friday, including 216 on Friday.

One big reason investors scrambled to sell: Fear over a wave of populism that swept a Republican to an upset victory in the Massachusetts Senate race on Tuesday. When Obama responded on Thursday with a broadside against big banks, the market plunged. On Friday, investors feared mounting opposition in the Senate could derail Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s reappointment. Disappointing corporate earnings and concern that China will slow its economy added to the jitters.

The question now: If the bad news continues, will Obama, who is trying to win votes in the fall elections with his populist attacks, end up losing them instead? Put another way, can Obama win over Main Street by vilifying Wall Street if people fear opening their 401(k) statements again?

Last Tuesday after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the indexes hit 18-month highs in anticipation of Republican Scott Brown’s likely victory in the race to replace the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. Health insurance and pharmaceutical companies led the gains because a Brown victory endangers the massive health care bill favored by Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress.

But stocks began falling fast on Wednesday when China announced plans to slow its economy. They fell again the next day after Obama’s speech calling for limits on the size of banks and their risk taking.

The coup de grace for the market came Friday. In a nod to voter anger at Wall Street, a few Democrats said they wouldn’t vote to reappoint Bernanke, whose term ends Jan. 31. But many investors have faith that Bernanke has the tools, the know-how and the political backbone to reel in the unprecedented amount of money pumped into the economy during the financial crisis and avoid a crushing round of inflation.

How Condon and Paradis can alternatively blame Brown for both the market’s Tuesday rise and its fall during the remainder of the week (strongly implied in the fourth excerpted paragraph) is quite a mystery.

How the pair can call both the Brown campaign’s positions (which included a ringing denunciation of the “Bank Responsibility Fee” the president proposed the previous week) and Obama’s attacks on the banks “populist” at the same time. My suggestion: Brown reflects a genuine form of populism that wants the states and the people to have more control over their lives, and the federal government to have less, while Obama’s “we want our money back” rhetoric and his desired limits on what banks can do and how big they can be — limits that can’t be imposed on the rest of the world and would likely make U.S. banks less competitive in the world marketplace — is sheer demonization and demagoguery that has nothing to do with genuine populism.

The “blame Ben Bernanke” gambit being undertaken by some senators has little or nothing to do with “voter anger at Wall Street”; if there’s major evidence of that, I haven’t seen it. It is instead an attempt to distract the public from the truth about who is really responsible for the housing, mortgage-lending, and general financial services messes that came to a head in the summer and fall of 2008. That list of the blameworthy, not necessarily in order, would include Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Timmy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the Congressional and Senate majorities, and Democratic Party-inspired legislation going back decades such as the Community Reinvestment Act. If Big Ben even belongs on the list, he would be at or near its bottom.

Towards the end of their report, Condon and Paraidis threw out this howler:

The vote in Massachusetts scared all incumbents. It’s now every man and woman for himself or herself in Washington.

Give, me, a, break. All incumbents? Who can possibly believe that sensible, principled conservatives like Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn have been quaking in their boots during the past week because of Scott Brown’s win?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

At NewsBusters last night, Noel Sheppard posted about a UK Daily Mail report that “A scientist responsible for a key 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warning Himalayan glaciers would be completely melted by 2035 has admitted that the claim was made to put political pressure on world leaders.” Noel also noted that U.S. media coverage of this damning admission has been sparse.

The basis for the now-discredited claim was “a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF (World Wildlife Fund).” Further, the WWF report contained a basic math error causing it to assert that “one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres.”

The Daily Mail reported that “Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.”

The statement must be humiliating, because if its text is anywhere on a WWF web site, it seems to be well-hidden, and perhaps deliberately so. (See Update below)

The most recent entry at WWF-US’s Climate Blog is an announcement that “Earth Hour” is returning this year in March (oh boy) dated January 21 at 6:55 a.m.

As you’ll see from the left side of the graphic that follows, the list of Recent Blog Posts shows that four other posts have been created since the Earth Hour post. The right portion of the graphic shows what happens when you click on the “After Slipping on Himalayan Glaciers, IPCC Reaffirms Commitment to High Standards and Thorough Review” in the Recent Blog Posts list:

I even became and then logged in as a registered user in an attempt to work around the access denial. Nothing changed.

Now it’s true that two of the other three more recent posts are also inaccessible. But the “National Scientist Telepresser Audio MP3″ link works fine, as does the audio when you go there. I did not get access denials on several older posts I clicked on at the WWF’s Climate blog.

Multiple attempts to search the WWF’s UK site for anything relevant to the statement of regret using various word strings came up empty. (See Update below)

A Google search on ["regrets any confusion caused" glaciers] (input as indicated between brackets) came up with no WWF links, nor did a similar search using “glacier” in singular form or replacing “glacier” with “WWF.”

It seems more than a little convenient that WWF’s “humiliating” statement of regret is inaccessible. I wonder if and when it will ever reappear? Further, I wonder how the establishment press would handle a conservative organization that had a humiliating statement acknowledging its mistakes hidden from view?

Maybe they should rename it the Worldwide Weasels Fund.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

UPDATE: NB commenter Locutus has located WWF-UK’s statement. I was unable to locate it earlier today because my searches at the UK site used the word “regrets” instead of “regret” based on the Daily Mail’s reported quote.

WWF’s U.S.-based Climate Blog still denies access to its related Himalayan glacier post, supporting the notion that it would prefer that as few people as possible in the U.S. learn of their grievous error. With the help of the U.S. establishment press, they will probably largely get their way.

From Biloxi, Mississippi and Port-au-Prince, Haiti:

Jan 23, 2010 / 07:58 am (CNA).- An American volunteer in Haiti has stepped up to the challenge of helping the country cope with the aftermath of the massive earthquake that flattened the city of Port-au-Prince last week. Elissa Kergosien, of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, returned to Haiti just before the earthquake hit and feels herself to be “in the center of God’s will.”

Kergosien, a recent college graduate, was interviewed by the Diocese of Biloxi’s Gulf Pine Catholic just days before the 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti.

She told the newspaper that her decision to spend a year at the Louverture Cleary School as a volunteer teacher wasn’t a difficult one. Her parents had involved their family in missionary work for a long time, from countries in Eastern Europe to the Dominican Republic.

Though she had worked with the poor before, “It was still kind of shocking to see the poverty that exists in Haiti. It was shocking to see all the malnourished children in the neighborhood surrounding the school. They’re happy children, but they have bloated stomachs and it was shocking to know that it’s just a 90-minute plane ride from Miami and people are dying from malnutrition.”

During a brief visit to the U.S., Elissa spoke at her home parish and raised $1,500 for the school in Haiti. “It’s a school that completely supported by U.S. parishes and donations and it’s doing incredible work in Haiti,” she said. “It’s raising up a generation of leaders in Haiti who are going to help to rebuild the country. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the recovery this week: The U.S. Department of Labor reported on Thursday that Initial claims for unemployment benefits jumped “unexpectedly” by 36,000 to 482,000, when analysts had predicted a slight drop.

What’s more, it turns out that data reported in previous weeks was understated because of “administrative issues” relating to paperwork processing during the holidays. In other words, things have been a bit worse than originally portrayed during the past several weeks.

Not unexpectedly, Reuters seized on the “administrative issues” excuse in an attempt to minimize the damage. Reuters’ primary headline (“Jobless claims rise on administrative issues”) seemed specifically designed to tell readers that “Hey, it’s really no big deal.”

The headlines and excuse-making are all the more galling because the same administrative problems occurred at the same time last year — and almost no one in the press headlined it.

Let’s start with Reuters’ report from January 22, 2009 (i.e., a year ago), starting with its excuse-free headline (bold is mine):

Jobless claims increased sharply last week

The number of workers filing new claims for jobless benefits rose by a more-than-expected 62,000 last week, government data on Thursday showed, as a year-long recession continued to chill the labor market.

Initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits increased to a seasonally adjusted 589,000 in the week ended January 17 from a revised 527,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.

It was the highest level of initial claims since a matching reading in the week of December 20. The last time claims were higher was in 1982, when they notched a weekly rise of 612,000. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast 540,000 new claims versus a previously reported count of 524,000 the week before.

A Labor Department official said administrative delays in reporting claims during the year-end holiday season by some states may have contributed to the large increase in claims.

The large volume of new jobless claims as companies lay off workers has strained the capacity of some states’ employment centers.

A Google News Archive search on “initial jobless claims delays” (not entered in quotes) for January 15-31, 2009 came back with eight primary results, only two of which are relevant to this post. One of them does link to an Akron Beacon Journal item headlined “Jobless Claims Up More Than Expected, Analysts Partly Attribute Increase to Holiday Delay.” But the other primary link goes to 35 related articles, none of which cited the delays in their headlines.

This year, the story is different. Here is the primary headline and first few paragraphs from the January 31, 2010 Reuters report. Note how the emphasis is on how the problem “was administrative and not economic”:

Jobless claims rise on administrative issues

The number of U.S. workers filing new applications for unemployment insurance unexpectedly rose last week as claims delayed from the year-end holidays were pushed through, government data showed on Thursday.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 36,000 to a seasonally adjusted 482,000 in the week ended January 16, the Labor Department said, rising for a third straight week.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims dipping to 440,000 from a previously reported 444,000. The weekly claims data covers the survey week for the Labor Department’s January payrolls report, which is scheduled for release February 5.

A Labor Department official said the rise in claims was administrative rather than economic as claims that were not processed over the holidays were now being attended to.

In addition, because of Monday’s Martin Luther King holiday, some states had failed to meet the deadline to submit their estimates, resulting in the department having to make estimates for some states.

“There is a bit of a backload from the prior weeks. There were more claims than expected, it’s not an economic thing, but an administrative thing,” the official said.

You would think the administrative problems might not be as significant this year because the volume of claims is 15% or so lower than they were in 2009. But it seems that making that inconvenient point would have distracted from the “admin issues” narrative.

A Google News Search on the first clause of the Reuters report (“The number of U.S. workers filing new applications for unemployment insurance unexpectedly rose last week”; entered in quotes, sorted by date with duplicates included) came back with 49 results. 17 of them use the headline noted above, including the Washington Post, the Financial Post, and Canada.com. The most telling evidence of the wire service’s intent is that its PR release of the report through U.S. Daily contains the “administrative issues” headline.

Though the Associated Press has shown a bit of improvement in its business coverage this month (examples here and here at NewsBusters; here and here at BizzyBlog), it was still a bit of a surprise that the third paragraph of Christopher Rugaber’s report on the topic actually handled the “administrative issues” matter properly:

Rise in jobless claims signals bump in recovery

WASHINGTON – A surprising jump in first-time claims for unemployment aid sent a painful reminder today that jobs remain scarce six months into the economic recovery.

The surge in last week’s claims deflated hopes among some analysts that the economy would produce a net gain in jobs in January and help fuel the recovery.

A Labor Department analyst said much of the increase was due to holiday-season-related administrative backlogs at the state agencies that process the claims. Still, economists noted that that would mean claims in previous weeks had been artificially low. Those earlier declines had sparked optimism that layoffs were tapering and that employers would add a modest number of jobs in January.

Finally, even given the 15% or so drop in claims from a year ago, I’m wondering why the analysts who watch these things closely didn’t anticipate the possibility that similar administrative issues might be occurring this year when previous weeks’ numbers came in unexpectedly better. After all, we haven’t seen a lot of “unexpectedly better” news for quite a while.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From fellow SOBer Matt Hurley at Weapons of Mass Discussion, reacting to the disgraceful attempt by ORPINO (the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only) to rig the GOP primary ballot as they see fit:

We need to save the Republican Party from themselves.

Sadly, the situation of pathetic candidates backed by the entrenched and manipulative GOP machinery seems to be the norm instead of the exception in state after state. Here are just two examples:

• Illinois — Congressman Mark Kirk wants to be a U.S. Senator and is the party establishment’s fave, despite voting for cap and trade.
• California — Carly Fiorina wants to be a U.S. Senator despite a record of almost ruining HP, walking away with undeserved millions after doing so, and most importantly having a nonchalant record of carrying out her voting duties as a citizen.

Michelle Malkin has many more examples in her column from yesterday. Update: She has more on Carly Fiorina (“McCain-backed GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina hearts Jesse Jackson — and radical gender politics”). Zheesh.

There is a reason why the GOP has so often been referred to as the Stupid Party. What’s happening now is colossally stupid.

Note: This post originally appeared early this morning, has been carried to the top, and will stay at or near there until this evening.

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In a Page C1 column in Friday’s Washington Post about the National Enquirer’s plans to apply for a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair and love child, Howard Kurtz delivers a completely inexcusable pass to his fellow alleged journalists in the establishment media (bold is mine, internal link is in original):

When the Enquirer first reported in 2007 that Edwards had had an affair with Hunter, the former North Carolina senator dismissed the account as tabloid trash. The rest of the media, having no independent proof, steered clear of the story, even as Edwards, aided by his cancer-stricken wife Elizabeth, was mounting an aggressive campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Howard’s “no independent proof” statement is a howler on one of two possible levels. It’s either false on its face (i.e., one or more establishment media reporters had the proof and suppressed it), or it reflects a complete and journalistically negligent lack of interest in a story about a man who, if things had broken differently, could conceivably have become his party’s presidential nominee or even the country’s chief executive. Either way, Kurtz is unforgivably easy on his fellow “professionals,” especially because I have learned that one of his fellow “professionals” had plenty of clues that something was amiss even before the Enquirer’s October 2007 story broke.

Readers can arrive at their own conclusion as to whether it’s Door Number 1 or 2 by reading what follows, starting with the book excerpt published at New York Magazine (printer-friendly version here) from Game Change, the John Heilemann/Mark Halperin book that has garnered so much attention in previous days for other revelations.

I found two passages from that excerpt quite telling:

The Enquirer story didn’t come completely out of left field. Back in the spring, there had been whispers that Hunter had reappeared, with sightings of her at hotels where Edwards was staying. Then, over the summer, a reporter from the Huffington Post began digging into the sudden disappearance of the (Rielle Hunter-produced) webisodes from the (Edwards) One America site. The HuffPo story, published in September, was mild—full of insinuations but no direct allegations.

There was little that was elliptical about the Enquirer story that hit the streets on October 10, however. “Presidential candidate John Edwards is caught in a shocking mistress scandal that could wreck his campaign,” was the lead, and the article went on to cite a “bombshell email message” in which the other woman “confesses to a friend she’s ‘in love with John,’ but it’s ‘difficult because he is married and has kids.’ ”

… Out of view, the Edwards campaign was in damage-control mode, going into overdrive to dissuade the mainstream media from picking up the story, denouncing it as tabloid trash. Their efforts at containing the fallout were remarkably successful. The Enquirer’s exposé gained zero traction in the traditional press and almost none in the blogosphere.

Edwards’s relief was palpable, as was his gratitude to the small coterie of aides who had corralled the story. “It’s John,” he began in a voice-mail to one of them. “I just wanted to call and thank you for everything you’ve done in the past few days. It hasn’t been easy, I know that, and I want you to know how grateful I am for everything you’ve done.”

It turns out that the HuffPo reporter Heilemann and Halperin chose not to name is Sam Stein (yeah, that Sam Stein, but let’s not digress). Stein’s bio tells us that “he has worked for Newsweek magazine, the New York Daily News and the investigative journalism group Center for Public Integrity.” That is, he’s a bona fide establishment media guy.

The “insinuations” Heilemann and Halperin referred to in Stein’s story (“Edwards Mystery: Innocuous Videos Suddenly Shrouded In Secrecy”) included these:

In the summer of 2006, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards commissioned a series of web-based documentary shorts for his pre-announcement leadership PAC, the One America Committee. Within political circles, the videos were regarded as innovative, having successfully painted Edwards in a sympathetic, down-to-earth light.

Now, however, nearly all traces of the webisodes – as they became known – are gone. Links to them on the Internet no longer work. The Edwards campaign won’t release the videos, and the production company behind the films is citing confidentiality agreements in refusing to talk.

This closed-off approach naturally aroused my interest. In the world of politics, rare is the candidate who passes on a chance for publicity. The campaign’s explanation for stonewalling, moreover, struck me as dubious and at times evasive.

… A search for the filmmaker, Rielle Hunter, proved that Google does, in fact, have its limitations.

… Who is Rielle Hunter? The Newsweek item said Edwards met the aspiring actress and filmmaker in a New York City bar.

… oh, how the story and my interests have changed. No longer am I working on a piece about new media and politics – boring! Now, I just want to know why these webisodes are shrouded in such mystery.

Stein got even closer on October 10, the same day that the Enquirer broke its story (“Scrubbed: Edwards Filmmaker’s Deleted Website Raises Questions”):

A set of short documentary film “webisodes” made for former Sen. John Edwards prior to his presidential candidacy continues to weave a curious web, this time involving the filmmaker.

The videos, which cost Edwards’ One America Committee $114,461, were produced in 2006 by an aspiring actress/producer named Rielle Hunter, who proposed the idea to the senator in a bar in New York City. The objective was to give viewers – and presumably voters – an authentic look at the North Carolinian. But shortly after Edwards declared his White House aspirations, the footage all but disappeared from public view.

… So why was Hunter’s website – which had no material related to her work with Edwards or the Edwards’ campaign – taken down? Emails and calls to Midline Groove Productions went unanswered.

Moreover, why did Edwards choose someone with limited film experience to document his behind-the-scenes campaign presence – “the real John Edwards”? The Senator’s campaign, likewise, did not return calls requesting comment.

Stein’s reports, coupled with the National Enquirer’s first story, which did not identify Hunter, could have led to any number of opportunities for “independent proof.”

Stein’s October 10 time stamp is 10:52 a.m.; the Enquirer’s October 10 report is not time-stamped. It seems likely that the Enquirer story appeared after Stein’s, perhaps even late that evening, as the first indication of reaction to the Enquirer story at the Drudge Report came at 9:30 p.m. EST on October 11. Even though he appeared to be in a position to put the pieces together, Stein did absolutely no follow-up in the ensuing couple of weeks. Stein’s “oh my” interest somehow became disinterest. Even though HuffPo was by October 2007 an established favorite of establishment journalists, no one seems to have taken heed of Stein’s Hunter-related work.

Stein and anyone who might have been following his work should have realized that they were inches away from flagging Hunter as the subject of the Enquirer’s story and probably derailing Edwards’s campaign well ahead of the earliest primaries and caucuses. Stein and others seemingly just dropped the ball. They should also have taken a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” cue from what must have been shrill denials from Team Edwards.

Alternatively, it also seems more than a little possible that Stein or someone else in the media really did figure out that the Edwards affair story was real and learned of Hunter’s identity, and simply buried it.

Sorry, Howard. I’m not buying the breezy “no independent proof” excuse. The establishment media’s failure to take the initial Enquirer story further was inexcusable. In fact, in August 2008, you in essence said so yourself:

The Enquirer’s standards aren’t my standards, and I still believe that paying sources, as it did in the Edwards case, taints a story. But the paper knows how to conduct an investigation for certain kinds of stories.

That means that what the Enquirer did was worthy of follow-up. It either didn’t occur or its results were buried. Inescapable conclusion: Epic fail.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Washington:

Jan 22, 2010 / 03:21 pm

Hundreds of thousands of people are gathered in the nation’s capital today to mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and protest abortion in the annual March for Life. Gathering from all over the country, protesters of all ages first heard from prominent pro-life, political and religious leaders before beginning the march.

Congressman Chris Smith (R-N.J.) was among the politicians who addressed the crowd on Friday, saying, “Thank you one and all for being an important part of the greatest human rights struggle on earth – the right to life movement. By the grace of God, we stand behind, with and unabashedly for both victims of abortion – women and children.”

The sheer number of people has caused a traffic advisory to be issued for the District. The volume of protesters has also allowed for two separate marches to take place. The first route will proceed East on Constitution Avenue to First Street, NE, then South on First Street, NE, to the United States Supreme Court where they will rally and then disband.

The second march route will proceed West on F Street to 10th Street, NW, south on 10th Street to Constitution Avenue, NW, West on Constitution Avenue to 12th Street, NW, then South on 12th Street to the National Mall, where pro-life marchers will also rally and eventually disband.

CNA contacted the D.C Metropolitan Police Department for a crowd estimate but was told that due to disputes in the past between the city and protest organizers over the amount of people gathered, they have stopped giving estimates. However, police said that the march has progressed peacefully and without indecent thus far.

According to EWTN, 300,000 demonstrators are estimated to be taking part in the March for Life. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Copenhagen comedy (HT Reason via Instapundit), from the New York Times:

The United Nations will hold President Obama to his promise that the United States will reduce carbon emissions even if the Senate cannot pass climate legislation, U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said this morning.

Or what, Yvo? Obama’s “promise” means nothing without 60 senators ratifying a treaty.

A different NYT item notes that “Facing a Jan. 31 deadline, major countries have yet to submit their plans for reducing emissions of climate-altering gases ….” Why should they, when the alleged “science” behind the need for CO2 reduction has been proven to be a bunch of globaloney?

Update: At FT.com –”UN abandons climate change deadline.” Awww.

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RIP, Air America (HT Michelle Malkin and Mark Levin on the air). Guess they ran out of Boys and Girls Clubs to rob.

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More review is needed, but my general reax to yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on campaign finance is that it’s victory for freedom (What part of “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” don’t they understand?) and a setback for the Washington incumbent-protection racket — just in time to rattle a lot incumbents during primaries and in November.

Though it would be easy to find examples of where I have objected to big contributors swaying elections by exploiting election law loopholes or knowingly violating them in the name of victory and worrying about sanctions later, I’ve always generally thought that the idea expressed roughly as “oh, you have free speech, but only a limited right to put your money where your mouth is” more than a little offensive.

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For those who are wondering, a comparison of this to this (both dates are Wednesdays) indicates that Uncle Sam’s year-over-year tax collections are still plummeting. Specifically:

With seven business days remaining, the die is pretty much cast for January, as most of the collections relating to the January 15 due date for individual estimated payments have probably been posted. It looks like the year-to-date collections shortfall thus far (October through January) will be about $90 billion.

The Congressional Budget Office is supposed to issue revised estimates of annual deficits over the next 10 years before the end of the month. The last one CBO did was in August, at which time it estimated that receipts for fiscal 2010 would be about 7.5% higher than fiscal 2009. Barring something I’m missing, that CBO report going to be ugly, and the “blame Bush” argument just won’t wash.

There can be no credible claim of recovery until they can show us the money. Rebound? What rebound?

From New Haven, CT:

Jan 21, 2010 / 07:44 pm

Just one day before the March for Life in Washington D.C. and the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a new survey shows that the number of Americans who say they are pro-life is continuing to grow. Members of the Millennial generation say abortion is “morally wrong” at a rate of 58 percent.

The survey, which was conducted between December 2009 and January 2010, was co-sponsored by the Knights of Columbus and the Marists. It asked, among other things, if abortion was “morally wrong.”

Fifty-six percent of Americans said they thought that abortion was indeed “morally wrong.”

The survey shows that Americans are becoming more pro-life, but more importantly, it showed that the upcoming generations are more pro-life than those nearing retirement.

The “Millennials,” as the generation of 18-29 year-olds is called, responded that abortion is morally wrong at a rate of 58 percent. Sixty percent of those belonging to “Generation X,” or people between 30 and 44, also fell in the pro-life camp.

“Americans of all ages – and younger people in even greater numbers than their parents – see abortion as something morally wrong,” said Supreme Knight Carl Anderson. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.