From Crescent Beach, Florida:

Woman’s vehicle sank in Intracoastal Waterway
Posted: February 15, 2010 – 12:12am

If two local men fishing off Crescent Beach had not acted with the speed of heroes, witnesses said a woman would have drowned after she drove her Mazda SUV into the chilly waters of the Intracoastal Waterway late Sunday afternoon.

Mary Romer, vacationing from New York saw the rescue from the porch of a motel room she is renting at Devil’s Elbow.

“If it wasn’t for them she wouldn’t have gotten out,” Romer said. “The car was up in the air and then there was a big splash. The two men went over to the car. They told us to call 911. They tried beating on the side windows before they broke the back window. All of a sudden, I saw someone and the car went down. I just yelled at them that they did a good job.”

The two men were identified by St. Johns County Sheriff’s Deputy J.C. Anderson as Steven Solana and Lewis Platt. They were not at the scene by the time a wrecker arrived to pull the car out of the water about 200 yards south of where it entered.

“They definitely saved her life,” said witness George Collins. “They broke open the back window. One guy grabbed her by the hair and by the shoulder and as soon as he yanked her out, the car was gone.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

In his report (“Federal deficit at $430.69 billion through January”) following yesterday’s snow-delayed release of Uncle Sam’s most recent Monthly Treasury Statement, the Associated Press’s Martin Crutsinger informed readers that through the first four months of the fiscal year, “outlays total $1.12 trillion, down 3.9 percent from the spending through the same period in 2009.”

He further explained that:

The huge deficits are being caused by the impact of a severe recession, which has trimmed the government’s tax receipts and raised spending on such programs as unemployment insurance and food stamps. The deficits also reflect the billions of dollars being spent from the $787 billion stimulus program passed in February 2009 and the $700 billion financial bailout program Congress passed in October 2008 to stabilize the banking system.

The items I bolded in the excerpted paragraph are far from the only ones showing big increases. More to the point, two vaguely described spending line items in the report showing huge year-over-year spending decreases are masking big increases at many federal agencies.

Here is a rundown of the major offenders and line items through the first four months of the current fiscal year (from Page 2 of the Monthly Treasury Statement; percentage increases are derived from unrounded figures):

• Department of Education — Up almost $10 billion (49.8%) to $32.7 billion.
• Department of Labor — Up $24.7 billion (74.4%) to $58.0 billion.
• Health and Human Services — Up $18.7 billion (7.3%) to $276.7 billion.
• Social Security Administration — Up $16.3 billion (7.1%) to $246.6 billion.
• Interest expense — Up $25.8 billion (18.6%) to $164.2 billion.

It’s a lot more than “unemployment insurance and food stamps,” Martin.

The items just listed increased by a combined $95 billion compared to fiscal 2009. Most other agencies and operational areas also showed increases.

So how did Uncle Sam manage to present a lower total of “outlays” compared to last year? Well, I can identify the line items, but won’t pretend to understand what they are:

As the graphic above shows, when you subtract two vaguely labeled line items from total “outlays,” the picture changes radically. What was a 4% drop dutifully reported by Crutsinger turns into an 11% increase.

The “other independent agencies” spending line item swung over $62 billion in fiscal 2010, from $24.6 billion the previous year to a negative $37.8 billion. This year’s number seems to have gone the other way thanks largely but clearly not entirely to a negative $41.4 billion line item called “Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.”

There is no detail in the report explaining either this year’s $38.9 billion or last year’s $135.9 billion obliquely described as “Dept. of the Treasury — Other,” let alone why this year’s amount is a whopping $97 billion lower than last year.

As seen in the “Adjustments” line in the graphic, the two line items came in a combined $159 billion lower than last year.

So what are these things, and why have they swung so wildly? I don’t know. It’s supposed to be Martin Crutsinger’s and the AP’s job to find out and tell us. If any company CEO were to receive a similar report from his or her CFO with such large unexplained and fluctuating items, you can guarantee that the CFO would be called on the carpet to tell the boss what the heck they are and what has happened with them. The news-consuming public deserves the same answers.

It seems less than forthright to exclude the two items just noted from a press report supposedly meant, among other things, to describe to readers what’s actually happening with federal spending. Unless their role has changed to that of government stenographer, the “Essential Global News Network” known as the Associated Press owes it to us to find out what these things are, instead of allowing the government to present them as regular “outlays” and make it appear as if there is some kind of real control over federal spending. As just shown, there basically isn’t any in day-to-day operations.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The Associated Press has done another story on Amy Bishop’s past in Massachusetts that refers to Bay State Congressman William Delahunt’s role:

Since the shooting, other disturbing behavior from Bishop has come to light.

In 1986, she killed her 18-year-old brother with a shotgun blast in Braintree, Mass., then demanded a getaway car at gunpoint from an auto dealer, authorities said. She claimed the gun went off accidentally, and she was never charged.

Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., the district attorney at the time, said Wednesday he has limited memory of the case. He spoke with The Associated Press in Israel, where he was traveling.

“I understand I haven’t had a real opportunity to get into the details of the case, but I suspect when I return I’ll have an opportunity to become debriefed,” the congressman said.

Bishop and her husband were also scrutinized in 1993 after someone sent pipe bombs to a Harvard professor with whom she worked. The bombs did not go off and no one was ever charged.

In 2002, Bishop was charged with assault, battery and disorderly conduct after a tirade at the International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. Police said Bishop became incensed when she found out another mother had received the restaurant’s last booster seat.

Bishop began shouting profanity and punched the woman in the head while yelling, “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” according to the police report. She admitted to the assault in court, and the charges were dismissed six months later after she stayed out of trouble.

As reported in the Boston Globe (here and here, and several others), new disclosures about the investigation of Bishop’s 1986 shooting of her brother appear to point to a failure to appropriately prosecute.

“Somehow,” as is the case with previous AP stories that referenced Delahunt’s involvement in the Bishop case, this one doesn’t show up in a search on his last name at the AP’s main site, even though a different story yesterday refers to Delahunt’s outrage over being snubbed by Israeli government officials. The Bishop story is not a local one, given that it had contributions from writers in Israel, Massachusetts, and Alabama. So how can this be?

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This quote (HT Instapundit) from Bill Quick over the weekend shouldn’t go by without notice, given that it serves as a de facto warning to the scaredy-cats at ORPINO (the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only):

If the GOP cannot find some way to align itself with the Tea Party and its ethos, then it will be swept away.

In the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, Instapunditeer Glenn Reynolds noted the existence of Ohioans with broomsticks at the ready:

Cincinnati tea-party activists are running candidates for Republican precinct executive in every precinct in their area—if elected, these candidates will help set policy platforms within the GOP and have sway over which candidates the party endorses. Activists in other states are doing the same. Adam Andrzejewski, who ran in the Republican primary for governor in Illinois, told me he will run candidates in each of Illinois’ precincts, and Utah activists are turning that state’s convention-based nominating system into a trial for incumbent Republican Sen. Robert Bennett. Plus, tea-party activists used their convention to launch a political action committee.

If 2009 was the year of taking it to the streets, 2010 is the year of taking it to the polls.

Michael Shawn McCabe (HT fellow SOBer Matt Hurley at Weapons of Mass Discussion) relays a further Buckeye State-related development:

Currently in Butler County, Ohio, just a few days prior to the May Primary candidate petition filing deadline, over 50 Central Committee seats within the Republican Party are being challenged. Virtually none of them are members of the Republican Party yet nearly all of them voted Republican or Independent in the recent past.

ORPINO’s top leadership continues to thwart Tea Partiers’ will at its grave peril.

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From the incomparable Victor Davis Hanson (“The Greek Lesson”) — “Greece is the canary in the mine of the impending crack-up of the modern welfare state.”

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Peak Oil, Schmeak Oil Update (“Exxon Hits Peak Oil… Reserves”) — “Exxon, who has been accused in the past of being too conservative in terms of exploration and development, has been finding more oil than it produces for each of the last 16 years.”

A concise 100-year-plus rendering of wrong predictions about available oil supplies is here.

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There’s little doubt that homelessness (i.e., living in shelters or on the streets) is growing, as an AP report notes, but this doesn’t count:

When families lose their homes and relocate, their children’s schooling can be disrupted. Some move into extended-stay hotels that cost about $175 a week, but that sometimes exposes them to criminal activity like prostitution and drug deals, Bus said.

Being a “transient” is stressful, but unless the goal is to ruin the word’s meaning, it is not “homeless.” Shoot, under this definition a well-off family staying in a hotel during the time between moving out of one home and into another would be considered “homeless.”

From Omaha, Nebraska:

Posted: Feb 6, 2010 08:48 PM
Updated: Feb 9, 2010 08:45 PM

Grasping onto the arm of one of the men who helped save her life, Dorothy McLean says she won’t let go.

“I think they’re all Angels,” says the 82–year–old.

McLean and her family spent Saturday afternoon at Omaha Fire Station 34. It was just another opportunity for Dorothy to thank the firefighters who saved her from her burning home nearly three weeks ago.

“Boy, when I felt that fresh air, that was good,” she says.

During the night of January 16th, firefighters rushed to the McLean’s burning house near 52nd and Poppleton.

Fire candidate Matt Fadell was one of the first men into the house, and helped pull McLean from the fire.

“When you hear there’s somebody inside. That raises the level,” he says. “”We pulled her out and set her in the driveway.”

Dorothy was bruised and covered in smoke, but alive.

She still can’t believe what she saw inside of her living room of more than 50 years that night.

“I looked through the living room it was bright orange. It was all on fire,” she says.

Firefighters cooked Dorothy and her husband Motto, a well–known local, hockey legend, a special lunch Saturday.

Go here for the rest of the story.

Note: This post went up at BigJournalism.com and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Monday evening.

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It’s not exactly surprising to see a writer for the Apparatchik Press — er, the Associated Press — compose an in-the-tank item sympathetic with the Obama administration.

But Ben Feller’s unlabeled analysis Monday morning (“Obama’s challenge: Anger is replacing hope”; saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) is so over the top and totally backwards that it may merit its own place in the journalistic Hall of Shame.

Feller’s fantasizes that the problem Obama faces is not that his policies and proposals are unpopular. No-no-no. Instead, the president merely has to overcome a “complex communications challenge” to deal with the growing anger out here in the real world and get people over his side.

Here are key execrable excerpts:

Thrust into office on the veracity of hope, President Barack Obama is trying to get himself on the right side of a remarkably different national sentiment these days: anger.

Obama’s expansive domestic goals are largely the same, but his message is changing, now constructed around a concession that the public is disillusioned and wanting results. If he cannot show people that he understands their frustration and is working to fix it, the risks are real.

All that angst that Obama wants to harness as a force for change – as he did in his campaign – will turn against him. That means eroding public support for his agenda and potentially big losses for his party this year in congressional midterm elections.

So it was telling when Obama offered this take on Republican Scott Brown’s Senate win in Massachusetts last month, one that weakened the president’s hand: “The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry, and they’re frustrated.”

A new White House talking point was born, and it was hardly hope and change.

… The Obama response has come in two parts. One is to try to get better about communicating to people that he is fighting to address exactly what angers them. The other is to put the onus on whomever he deems is getting in the way of progress, hoping to shift the heat onto them.

… And with people fed up about so many things at once – stubbornly high unemployment, partisanship, big government, banker bonuses – Obama’s communications challenge is complex.

He must connect to people’s bitterness without becoming exactly the person he warns about, politicians who exploit anger.

Seldom has anyone packed so much rubbish into so little space.

Ben, Obama’s problem has nothing to do with some kind of “communications challenge.” It has everything to do with his “expansive domestic goals,” which haven’t changed one bit.

Disgust, outrage, and flat-out fear of the long-term implications of those “expansive domestic goals” are the things that drove Scott Brown’s election victory. What drove Obama’s election was his mostly effective and totally false presentation as some kind of third-way moderate — aided and abetted heavily by the AP and the other organs of establishment journalism — when at bottom he is by leaps and bounds the farthest-left president ever.

Feller only got two out of his four identified “fed-ups” right. The problem is that they are direct results of Obama’s decisions and policies:

• Unemployment, and people are fed up with it, is high because at crunch time Obama and his party chose historically proven ineffective, corrupted-by-cronyism “stimulus” over historically effective tax cuts.
• Government is bigger, and people are fed up with it, because Obama and his party opened up the federal spending spigots to an unprecedented degree, because Obama has chosen to surround himself with so many czars you need a scorecard to keep track of them, and because he decided that owning two of the nation’s three domestically-headquartered automakers and running roughshod over certain classes of their creditors in bankruptcy was good public policy.

The other two “fed-ups” — partisanship and bankers’ bonuses — are inventions of Ben Feller’s fevered mind. If voters in reliably Democratic Massachusetts wanted to end partisanship, they would have elected Martha Coakley in a landslide and given the Democrats in Washington a 12-month rubber stamp. They didn’t. As to the bankers’ bonuses, Feller “somehow” forgot that just last week Obama did not object to two multimillion-dollar whoppers, demonstrating that neither party is in a position to capitalize on whatever executive pay-related anger that might exist.

The Associated Press is a wire service that expects its subscribers and ultimately its readers to believe that it is an objective disseminator of news. That expectation is more than a little hard to take seriously when one of its more experienced writers outs himself as a shameless, truth-distorting, illogical apologist for a failing administration.

Coming from Breitbart.

Anyone who really followed the 2008 election and investigated Obama’s background and acquaintances already knew this. Anyone who has followed his conduct since taking office knows that at bottom he hasn’t really changed.

Yet occasional reinforcement is helpful.

Referring to something I touched on in an item at yesterday’s Lucid Links (third item) about the decision by the New York Times to withhold publication of the military operation that led to the capture of the Taliban’s top military commander in Afghanistan — while deciding to go ahead over Bush administration objections with disclosures about the SWIFT financial surveillance program in 2006 — Lachian Markley at NewsBusters writes:

For the Time, political differences were the key determinant (in the differing decisions), not an apolitical and absolute reverence for the First Amendment, the public’s right to that information, or the paper’s right to print it.

The Times pretended it was the former in 2006.

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From the “We’re Not That Stupid” Dept., in what’s left of Time Magazine — “Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change” (HT BigJournalism, whose Lance Fairchok finds the Defense Department treating climate change as a national security threat; I wish I were making it up).

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Keith Hennessey shreds Obama’s bogus “we inherited this” crap (“Ten Years Ago? Seriously?”).

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Globaloney tear-apart of the day (HT to a Wes Pruden WashTimes opinion piece; bolds are mine):

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

… The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

Where do we send the bill for all the time “deniers” — who have been completely and utterly vindicated — have spent that should not have needed to be spent debunking and discrediting this garbage?

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Meanwhile, as Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters noted, the members of the fantasyland known as the U.S. establishment press have almost totally ignored the latest damning ClimateGate admissions by Phil Jones.

So as a very slight offset, I’ll re-post yesterday’s headline and subheadline pic from the UK Daily Mail:

From Rome:

Feb 15, 2010 / 05:34 pm

Cardinal William Joseph Levada celebrated Mass for the 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of Croatian Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac last Wednesday at the church of St. Girolamo in Rome. In his homily, Cardinal Levada spoke of the fortitude and heroism of the 20th century martyr.

According to an article in L’Osservatore Romano last week, Cardinal Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, preached at the Mass on the importance of staying true to the essence of the Gospel which, while it may not be easy, “doesn’t discourage,” as evidenced in the life of Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac.

Cardinal Levada said that although the martyr was never able to wear the insignias of the cardinal because he was in prison, “he lived what they stand for… sacrificing his own life for the truth and the unity of the Church in Croatia with the Successor of Peter.”

He described the Croatian cardinal as a “hero, and something more” for his refusal to give in to the “farse” of a legal process that took his liberty but wasn’t able to take his honor or dignity.

He was “a man who loved justice, detesting every falsehood” and was thus “persecuted, slandered (and) tested but didn’t fold,” declared Cardinal Levada.

Cardinal Stepinac, who was made Archbishop of Zagreb in 1937,was imprisoned in 1946 by the ruling communist regime for alleged collaboration with the fascist Ustasa regime during World War II.

After five years in a Yugoslav jail, he was given the option of seeking refuge in Rome or be confined to house arrest in his home parish of Krasic. He opted for the latter.

In 1953, Pope Pius XII made him a cardinal, although he was never allowed travel to the Holy See to be officially elevated.

He died in 1960 of a blood disorder, which was said to have been caused by the conditions he endured in jail.

After the fall communism in Yugoslavia, the original court decision of 1946 was overturned and Pope John Paul II beatified him as a martyr for the faith in 1998.

Go here for the rest of the story.

Perhaps the Ohio Republican Party, affectionately known to yours truly as ORPINO (Ohio Republican Party in Name Only) thought that it had settled matters by intervening in the primary contests for Attorney General and Auditor.

The Auditor’s slot in the primary became vacant after current Auditor Mary Taylor, whose term expires in January, decided to be gubernatorial candidate John Kasich’s running mate.

Seth Morgan declared his candidacy shortly after Kasich and Taylor formalized their announcement.

Then ORPINO, particularly its Chief Kevin DeWine, intervened. ORPINO officials convinced Delaware County Prosecutor Dave Yost, who had been running against former U.S. Senator Mike DeWine (second cousin of Kevin) and appeared to have the enthusiasm of grass-roots voters locked up, to switch to the Auditor’s race. Though Yost has served as a county auditor, the move made sense for only one reason: to protect Mike DeWine from a challenge. Now Yost and Morgan are in a dogfight, with ORPINO support and resources firmly in Yost’s corner.

So it appeared that ORPINO held all the cards, and that DeWine and Yost would be AG and auditor shoo-ins in May’s primary.

Somebody forgot to tell Brown County Republicans. In their endorsement exercise, as Weapons of Mass Discussion blogger Mark Garbett reports, they had a very different take on the situation, and delivered a clear message to the hidebound ORPINO establishment — what I like to call “The Shot Heard ‘Round Ohio”:

The people of Brown County told Kevin and Co. that they don’t agree with backroom deals and trying to take away the choice of the people. Tonight in Georgetown, in 2 of 3 key races with Kevin DeWine’s pawprints all over them, the people of Brown County started telling Columbus thanks but no thanks.

… (Mike) Dewine failed by double digit percentage points to win the endorsement, despite his 2nd cousin clearing the field for him. Wonder what Dave Yost was thinking as he prepared to discuss the auditor’s race?

… Seth Morgan took the podium and was electric. He discussed his humble beginnings as an outsider council member in Huber Heights and how he fought against incumbents and worked his way to the Ohio Statehouse. … While Dave Yost discussed experience as an auditor, Seth Morgan said he has experience standing up under pressure and doing what is right, and that is what Ohio need more than someone who could be charged with bowing to political pressures on backroom dealing. He discussed how he forced transparency in education in Ohio as well as taking on his own party to do not what was safe, but what is right, adn that we need more transparency and someone who will not bend to political pressure and his record has shown that.

… Seth Morgan won the endorsement with 75% of the vote, while Dave Yost garnered 13%.

… I hope other county parties continue to send the message that the Ohio Republican Party should stand for something other than expediency and backroom dealing.

So do I.

Oh, and if Mike DeWine thinks the coast is clear … maybe not. Hardin County attorney Steven Christopher is saying he’ll run “as a Tea Party Republican” against Dewine. Based on information I have learned, Christopher will likely be able to gather the signatures necessary to get on the primary ballot by Thursday’s deadline.

Don’t discount the idea that even an underfunded ABM (Anyone But Mike) could pull off what would be a monumental upset.

In a story primarily about President Obama’s plan to campaign on behalf of incumbent Democratic senators in Nevada and Colorado, Washington Times reporter Joseph Curl did not name Colorado Senator Michael Bennet’s opponent.

That oversight would ordinarily be defensible if the Bennet’s primary competitor were polling weakly. But he is most decidedly not, at least where it ultimately counts — in general election match-ups against the current Republican primary front-runner.

Former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, who claims to have the support of “a majority of the Democrats in the state legislature,” is that competitor.

Here are the paragraphs from Curl’s report germane to the Colorado situation (bold is mine):

Mr. Obama on Thursday will head to Colorado to deliver remarks at an event for Sen. Michael Bennet, who is trailing both Republicans vying for their party’s nomination. Mr. Bennet, 45, took office in January 2009 when Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. appointed him to fill the seat of Ken Salazar, whom Mr. Obama appointed to his Cabinet as secretary of the interior.

Mr. Bennet trails Jane Norton, a former lieutenant governor and state representative, by 14 percentage points, and Ken Bush, a district attorney and former congressional aide, by four percentage points, according to the most recent Rasmussen Reports survey.

The president’s appearance likely will help Mr. Bennet survive the Democratic primary because he “is still very popular with base voters,” said Ms. Chadderdon. “But will Obama’s numbers have rebounded enough in the general [election] not to be an albatross?”

… Mr. Obama is aware of voter dissatisfaction, and two weeks ago took the extraordinary step of allowing embattled Democrats to sternly question him about his policies. During a televised policy conference of Senate Democrats, he took questions almost exclusively from those locked in tough re-election campaigns – Mr. Reid, Mr. Bennet, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, California’s Barbara Boxer and Mr. Bayh.

The only direct poll result I could find for Bennet v. Romanoff goes back to September, and shows the incumbent with a 41%-27% lead in a Tarrance Group survey (PDF here).

But, ominously for Bennett, according to the very Rasmussen survey Curl cited (HT Real Clear Politics), Romanoff currently matches up better against the GOP’s front-runner, former Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton. In the February 2 poll, Norton leads Romanoff by 7% (45%-38%), but leads Bennet by twice as much (51%-37%). What’s more, Romanoff has closed on Norton a bit in the past three weeks (from 12% to 7%), while Bennet’s position has deteriorated (from 12% to 14%).

Bennet and Romanoff are having a debate tonight.

It seems odd that Curl would miss this significant news, especially as the damage to President Obama within the Democratic Party would be significant if Romanoff were to pull off what seems to be an at least conceivable upset in the wake of Obama’s personal effort to help Bennet. Even if Curl believed that a Romanoff win isn’t going to happen, the fact that he does better head-to-head against Norton would seem to have been worthy of at least a mention.

Ultimately, Curl’s report provides a degree of protection to an incumbent liberal — something not usually seen at the Washington Times.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Wow–Phil Jones cops a plea:

The occasion of the above set of items appearing all in the same place is as good a time as any to link back to some relevant BizzyBlog posts from the current and not so current past:

• Nov. 27, 2009 — Deconstructing ClimateGate’s Smoking-Gun E-mail
• Oct. 11 — Conveniently Incomplete: Gore Claims British Court Vindicated School Showing of Movie, ‘Forgets’ It ‘Violated Laws’
• Oct. 10 — BBC Climate Correspondent Opens Eyes, Starts Walking Back Global Warming Baloney
• Sept. 26 — NRO: ‘The Dog Ate My Global Warming’; Underlying ‘Support’ For Climate Claims May Be Gone
• July 26 — Reuters Chooses Environmental Sides
• June 26 — House Passes Cap and Trade Crap, 219-212: Votes/Non-Votes to Remember
• June 13 — AP Reporters Conned by Pew ‘Green Jobs’ Report
• Jan. 28 — Former Boss Rebukes NASA Global Warming Alarmist Hansen, Is AGW Skeptic
• Jan. 24 — Longtime Enviro Activist: Carbon Trading, Wind Farms ‘Verging on a Gigantic Scam’
• Jan. 18, 2009 — Hysterical Hansen Hype: Obama ‘Has Four Years to Save Earth’
• Dec. 29, 2008 — Globaloney ‘I Told You So’ of the Day: ‘2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved’
• Nov. 2 — January 2008 Audio: Obama Promises Cap-And-Trade Will Bankrupt New Coal Plants (and SF Chron’s Coverup)
• Oct. 5 — Billions of Barrels Could Mean Trillions of Government Dollars; Media AWOL
• June 10 — Dirty US Media Secret: ‘Rest of the World’ Rebels Against Climate Taxes
• June 7 — $8 Gas a Good Thing? I Don’t Think So
• May 11, 2008 — Column of the Day: Walter Williams on Historically Nutty Enviro Predictions
• Nov. 8, 2007 — Weather Channel Founder: It’s All Globaloney
• Aug. 10 — Rush’s (and BizzyBlog’s) See I Told You So: GLOBALONEY Exposed
• March 21 — Globaloney: No Wonder They Want to Say ‘The Debate Is Over’
• March 7 — One Way or Another, the Globalarmists Are Determined to ‘Cap’ the US
• March 4 — Globaloney and Globalarmism: Consensus, Conschmensus
• Feb. 21 — Human-Hating Enviro-Pessimist Letter of the Day
• Jan. 15, 2007 — Paragraph of the Day: Reisman on ‘Green Japan’
• Nov. 27, 2006 — Excerpt of the Day: George Reisman on Environmentalism as Misanthropy
• Dec. 3, 2005 — Margaret Beckett of Great Britain Deserves a Major Promotion
• Oct. 10 — OpinionJournal.com’s “Peak Oil” Rebuttal

From the Boston Herald, on Amy Bishop:

A family source said Bishop, a mother of four children – the youngest a third-grade boy – was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed” with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.

This of course means that she’s a typical Obama supporter.

…

…

Of course it doesn’t mean that, but this is the kind of implied, media-driven guilt by association all too often applied to murderers who have far-right views and who more often than not don’t even support specifically named politicians.

So I wanted to have lefties experience how it feels.

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AP Watch: As was the case on Sunday when I first noted it, a search on “delahunt” at the Associated Press’s web site has no link to an Amy Bishop-related article, even though WBUR’s version of the wire service’s report on Bishop’s 1986 shooting of her brother still contains these two paragraphs:

Polio said Amy Bishop was taken into custody as “a safekeeping thing” to question her but was not arrested. The head of detectives eventually recommended the office of then-District Attorney William Delahunt, now a U.S. congressman, hold an inquiry into the shooting, Polio said.

A March 1987 report by Delahunt’s office determined the cause of death was “accidental discharge of a firearm,” based on interviews with Bishop and her parents. It didn’t mention an argument between Bishop and her brother.

Did the AP briefly include the paragraphs about Delahunt and pull them? If so, why?

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Taliban’s top military commander captured — The Associated Press report contains this final paragraph:

The (New York) Times said it learned of the operation against Baradar last Thursday but delayed reporting it at the request of White House officials who argued that publicizing it would end a valuable intelligence-gathering effort by making Baradar’s associates aware of his capture. The newspaper said it decided to publish the news after White House officials acknowledged Baradar’s capture was becoming widely known in the region.

Would the Times have demonstrated the same forbearance with a Republican in office? We know that the Old Gray Lady didn’t care about the Bush administration’s pleas not to compromise anti-terror financial surveillance activities and exposed them in great detail — an arguably illegal move by the paper that its public editor eventually came around to denouncing.

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Can a state recall a wayward senator?

In New Jersey, where voters voted to permit it in 1993 (sadly, Ohio is not among the 18 states where recalls are possible), defenders of New Jersey’s Robert Menendez are arguing that the U.S. Constitution says that only the Senate can “expel” a member.

As I see it, a “recall” isn’t an “expulsion,” it’s an “order rescinding the six-year conditional permission to serve granted by the people when they cast their ballots.” Those who want to recall Menendez are saying that their First Amendment rights will be compromised if their efforts are thwarted. That doesn’t seem like as clean an argument as the one I just made. The matter bears watching.

Maybe Brian at Repeal the 17th has knowledge of whether a state legislature ever recalled a sitting senator before the 17th was “ratified.”

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Buh Bayh — Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh’s announced departure from the Senate is bringing on the usual whining about “excessive partisanship.” This AP report says that Bayh was known for his “moderate tone.”

Moderate, schmoderate. Bayh’s grades from the Club for Growth during the past four reported years are as follows:
- 2008 — 11%
- 2007 — 9%
- 2006 — 1%
- 2005 — 2%

Lest anyone think that the above constitutes anything resembling real improvement — especially because Bayh might be positioning himself for a 2012 primary run if President Obama’s popularity crash continues, note that in 2009 Bayh went the wrong way on two key votes: “stimulus” (in fact, Bayh’s vote was number 59, ahead of Sherrod Brown’s decisive #60) and statist health care. The second vote is simply unforgivable, and I believe Bayh and his advisers figured out that Hoosier voters share that sentiment.