…. with State Central Committee member John Becker as our special guest.
Listen over at Weapons of Mass Discussion.
A primary topic will be this WMD post about the goings-on at Brown County on Thursday.
…Or are they just “spooning?”
Used to be that all pro-life candidates, regardless of party primary contenders, were endorsed by Ohio Right to Life. This year, it appears as if they’re only endorsing the ones chosen by the ORP and rubber-stamped by their State Central Committee (there were primary contenders who were either ignored or told not to bother).
If this pattern continues, I can’t imagine why in the world they would they put the legitimacy of their organization in jeopardy. More to the point, why follow the “worst practice model” of the ORP? Lastly, it would be interesting to know whether or not they do this for both parties…be selective – and political – in their cause that is. A candidate is either pro-life or not, and if they are pro-life, then they deserved to be recognized by an organization who claims that issue as its utmost priority, period.
If ORTL can endorse Mike DeWine because of his “pro-life” record, and all the Democrats listed in the first link above, then they should absolutely be able to endorse just about everyone else running. Makes me wonder who’s texting tantalizing tidbits to the ORTL leadership and Board. With all that’s gone on lately, it wouldn’t suprise me in the least to find backroom (er, bedroom?) deals being made at this juncture. Pretty risky behavior from an organization that preaches abstinence.
Right now, I don’t know whether or not ORTL is “in bed” with the ORP, only time will tell. I do know that if they are, it’s getting awfully crowded in there…
In late August 2009, Toyota announced that it would close its New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) factory in Fremont, California at the end of March. The plant had been a joint venture of the company and General Motors until June, when GM withdrew.
Almost six months later, in the wake of a series of Toyota product recalls, and roughly seven weeks before the plant’s scheduled shutdown, the UAW and the AFL-CIO on Friday began an attempt to gin up a campaign to convince the company to reopen the plant, and to encourage the public to refuse to buy its products it if doesn’t.
Since there is virtually zero chance of the plant remaining open (the company said at the time of the closure that “it will close the plant, regardless of financial incentives offered by the state”), you’ll have to excuse me if I question the overall timing, and even if there might be just a wee bit of government and union coordination going on here — especially given some of the people involved and some of the statements made at a rally outside the plant and at the UAW’s nearby union hall yesterday.
In terms of press coverage of yesterday’s events, you have to wonder if Brooke Donald of the Associated Press and George Avalos of the Oakland Tribune were actually in the same place. Donald’s AP coverage made what was going on appear relatively benign, while Avalos included important details to the contrary.
Here are key paragraphs from the AP’s Donald:
Amid Toyota recalls, workers rally to save CA jobs
Dozens of workers rallied Friday to save a Northern California auto plant where more than 4,600 people could lose their jobs if Toyota stops production at the end of March.
Labor leaders said closing the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant – the sole remaining automobile assembly plant in California – would be the worst thing Toyota could do while it struggles to regain consumer confidence after several recalls.
“Killing American jobs won’t help Toyota regain public support or revive its sales. Toyota must reverse its decision,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
In recent weeks, Toyota’s reputation has been hurt by the global recall of 8.5 million vehicles and questions about how quickly the giant automaker responded to safety problems.
…. The demonstration kicked off a nationwide campaign urging the Japanese carmaker to save the plant, said Bob King, vice president of the United Auto Workers. The rally was held inside a nearby union hall.
At the rally, Lockyer announced the formation of a commission to study the impact of the pending closure on California’s economy.
Two quick points:
Avalos’s Oakland Tribune coverage, unlike Donald’s, pointed out several more confrontational elements at the event and in Big Labor’s plans (bolds are mine):
Union workers rally to save NUMMI plant
Hoping to cajole Toyota into a rescue of the imperiled NUMMI auto factory here, union leaders launched a nationwide effort Friday that will include picketing at the embattled manufacturer’s auto dealers.
The new campaign by members of the United Auto Workers and other labor groups comes as Toyota is reeling from multiple safety and quality miscues.
A crowd that crammed into a big union hall across the street from the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant in Fremont chanted and cheered a series of speakers, including Sergio Santos, president of United Auto Workers Local 2244, which represents UAW members at the NUMMI complex.
“We want the company to review and reverse its decision to close our factory,” Santos said.
Others who spoke included top officials from the UAW, the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters Union.
… “We will take this fight to every Toyota dealership in California,” Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said via a videoconference link. “Our message is that Toyota kills American jobs. This comes at a time when Toyota can ill afford another black eye.”
The union leaders unveiled a banner that morphed the Toyota symbol into a skull.
“If they close the NUMMI plant, we union people will not buy another Toyota,” said Bob King, UAW vice president.
… “You are going to see an attack on Toyota that is unprecedented,” said Rome Aloise, a top Teamsters official.
I guess Brooke Donald just didn’t have it in her to report the truth about what the thuggish side of how organized labor acts when it doesn’t get its way, and apparently believes that readers and listeners at her organization’s subscribing outlets should be shielded from learning about it. Fortunately, Mr. Avalos didn’t report things that way.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
The subhead:
Government and left-wing conflicts of interest get yawns, while conservatives must be unrealistically pure.
It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Monday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.
From Columbus, Ohio (bolds are mine):
Feb 13, 2010 / 07:20 am
The Ohio House Speaker decided on Wednesday to finally allow a pro-life teen to be honored for winning a national oratory competition with a speech on what she called the “truth” about abortion. House Speaker Armond Budish (D-Beechwood), a known supporter of abortion, had previously blocked the legislative honor from being awarded to her.
Elisabeth Trisler, an Ohio senior and former homeschooler, won the National Right to Life oratory contest in June of last year. Trisler told CNA that local state Representative John Adams (R-Sydney) had contacted her shortly following her victory and said that he would like to honor her in a resolution. “You can receive a proclamation for something you did that they think is commendable,” Trisler explained on Friday.
Though Trisler was initially “thrilled” to hear that she would receive this honor, she still hasn’t received it.
Despite Rep. Adam’s attempt to schedule the award presentation before the summer session ended in 2009, it was blocked and eventually canceled on every subsequent month. “I said, ‘I’m tired of trying to plan around this,’” laughed Trisler. “They can just send it to me in the mail.”
What Trisler didn’t know until recently, however, is why her ceremonial honor kept being canceled. Ohio Right to Life, who first drew attention to the issue last Monday, sharply criticized House Speaker Budish for preventing the proclamation, saying that his actions set a “troubling precedent.” The American Civil Liberties Union as well as a General Assembly lead by Rep. John Adams also urged the House Speaker to reconsider.
“Blocking speech because you don’t like what someone is saying or what they stand for goes against the very fabric of who we are as Americans,” argued Ohio Right to Life executive director Mike Gonikadis in comments to the Columbus Dispatch on Wednesday.
Although Rep. Budish has changed his mind and will permitted Trisler to receive the proclamation, he will not allow the presentation to take place on the house floor due to what believes to be the controversial nature of Trisler’s speech. The Columbus Dispatch reported that the House Speaker does not want anything politically divisive associated with the honor as its generally given in response to sports teams victories, individual achievements and the like.
When CNA asked Trisler on Friday what her speech addressed, she replied, “Truth.”
“What is the truth about abortion?” she continued. Looking at “the hard, cold facts” demonstrates that abortion is “dangerous,” said Trisler.“That’s what I wrote about.”
Go here for the rest of the story.
Poor Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press.
Since the AP science reporter wrote his December 12, 2009 defense of the alleged scientists who have promoted the alleged perils of human-caused global warming, the scandal known as ClimateGate has inexorably widened. It has deeply tarnished never-deserved reputations; revealed the entire premise to be based on fraudulent, corrupted, manipulated and/or nonexistent data; and taken the entire enterprise to the point where it is utterly without objective credibility.
Thus, it would be understandable if poor Seth might be looking for some way, any way, to inject in his two cents yet again without being forced to defend the indefensible.
He found a bit of an outlet on Friday in his coverage of this year’s virtually unprecedented U.S. snowfalls. How unprecedented? This may be the first time 49 out of 50 states have snow on the ground at the same time.
Here are key factual paragraphs relating to the U.S. situation in Borenstein’s report, followed by his veer-off into global warming near its end (bolded by me):
49 states dusted with snow; Hawaii’s the holdout
Forget red and blue (AP) — color America white. There was snow on the ground in 49 states Friday. Hawaii was the holdout. It was the United States of Snow, thanks to an unusual combination of weather patterns that dusted the U.S., including the skyscrapers of Dallas, the peach trees of Atlanta and the Florida Panhandle, where hurricanes are more common than snowflakes.
More than two-thirds of the nation’s land mass had snow on the ground when the day dawned, and then it snowed ever so slightly in Florida to make it 49 states out of 50.
… Snow paralyzed and fascinated the Deep South on Friday. Snowball fights broke out at Southern Mississippi University, snow delayed flights at the busy Atlanta airport, and Louisiana hardware stores ran out of snow supplies. Andalusia, Ala., shut down its streets because of snow. And yet, Portland, Maine, where snow is usually a given, had to cancel its winter festival for lack of the stuff.
Weather geeks turned their eyes to Hawaii. In that tropical paradise, where a ski club strangely exists, observers were looking closely at the islands’ mountain peaks to see if they could find a trace of white to make it a rare 50-for-50 states with snow. But there was no snow in sight.
… The idea of 50 states with snow is so strange that the federal office that collects weather statistics doesn’t keep track of that number and can’t say whether it has ever happened. The office can’t even say whether 49 out of 50 has ever taken place before.
… The all-time record (for U.S. snow cover) is February 1978, with 7.31 million square miles. There is a chance this February could break that. There is also a chance that this could go down as the week with the most snow cover on record, (head of the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University David) Robinson said.
… As long as this pattern persists we have potential for additional storms,” said Dan Petersen, lead winter weather forecaster at the National Weather Service prediction center in Camp Springs, Md.
… A snowy winter doesn’t disprove – or prove – global warming, Petersen and Robinson said. This is weather, which is variable, not long-term climate, and there is a huge difference.
“This has nothing to do with long-term trends,” Petersen said. “This is just a several-week period.”
Hey Seth, if you already knew the answer to your question, and you knew that that answer to be “it’s irrelevant,” why did you even bring it up?
In reaction to his December piece, the folks at the Watt’s Up With That? blog took the reporter and his employer to the woodshed for a drop-dead obvious conflict of interest. AP was apparently okay with assigning Borenstein to the ClimateGate story even though he had been a de facto part of that story, as an involved party in several ClimateGate-related e-mails.
Looking at the bright side, at least Borenstein didn’t come out and try, as did the News York Times (HT NewsBuster Martin Finkelstein), to tie some kind of generalized increase in weather extremes to global warming.
Have some compassion for Seth (but not too much). It must not be easy having been conned by greens.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
Ohio has the DeWhine Dynasty with which to contend, the nation has Willard “Mitt” Romney (as goes Ohio…).
From the Boston Phoenix:
The New and Improved Romney
He’s more fiscal, less social. And he’s got millions. But will GOP voters give a Mitt?
By DAVID S. BERNSTEIN | February 10, 2010Scott Brown’s unexpected victory in last month’s special US Senate election captured the attention of the country — and particularly of core Republican voters, who huddled eagerly before their TV screens to watch their hero du jour give his acceptance speech. But even in the midst of his moment in the sun, Brown made sure to thank the other handsome, well-coifed man on the stage, Mitt Romney — who, as it happens, would very much like the votes of that national Republican audience in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries.
Granted, it’s very early in the 2012 presidential cycle, and if you ask the Romney camp, they’ll profess him to be focused exclusively on helping GOP candidates this November. But make no mistake: Romney is in the process of re-launching himself for 2012.
…From the looks of it, the 2012 version of Romney will be somewhat different than the one that lost in 2008. In that campaign, Romney tacked hard to the right — where Romney and his strategists perceived an opening as the conservative alternative to front-runners John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.
…”He was a Massachusetts moderate who tried to be a hard-right conservative,” says one Republican strategist. “It turned out he probably would have been better off sticking with what he was — Mr. Fix-It.”
…As a result, the new Romney is now de-emphasizing social issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and illegal immigration. He has made no public comment, for instance, about last week’s announcement that top military leaders intend to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, has scrupulously avoided association with the Tea Party movement, and has refrained from backing conservatives that other presidential hopefuls have endorsed, such as Doug Hoffman in New York or Marco Rubio in Florida.
…Interestingly, this latest incarnation is probably the closest we have seen to the “real” Mitt Romney — who close observers believe doesn’t care much about social issues, isn’t very ideological, and revels in applying management skills to large organizations to help them achieve their goals and functions.
Several Republicans, including some who know Romney well, say that, if he runs in 2012, it will be much more as his true self than what he presented in 2008.
Really? Good luck with that…
Interesting read. Although those of us who vetted Romney early on knew from the beginning that there was one major obstacle the campaign would not overcome…the candidate himself.
Press reports about the prediction by President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers that the economy would add an average of 95,000 jobs per month during calendar 2010 weren’t exactly overflowing with praise, but were lacking in something one would have expected: historical context.
Philip Elliott’s Associated Press report provided none. Sewell Chan’s New York Times coverage at least pointed out that the promised level of job growth was “barely enough to keep up with the normal number of jobs the economy would have to create to meet the growth in the labor force and keep the unemployment rate steady.”
But how would what the administration predicts compare to previous recoveries? As seen in the following chart based on more detailed information here, all based on data from the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 95,000 per month performance in job growth following a breakout quarter after a recession wouldn’t exactly be impressive:
With Reagan, the question is whether you peg the economy’s breakout as the first or second quarter of 1983, when annualized growth was 5.1% and 9.5%, respectively. Regardless of which quarter you pick, the supply side tax cut-driven performance was spectacular. In fact, in one month (September 1983), the economy added almost as many jobs (1,114,000) as Team Obama predicts will be added during all of 2010 (12 x 95,000 = 1,140,000). Too bad it took the Gipper so long to get the cuts through Congress.
The performance after Bush 43′s breakout 6.9% second quarter of 2003 was far less impressive — but then again, so was the relative size of the 2003 income and investment-related tax cuts in comparison to Reagan’s. Nevertheless, what Democrats at the time were calling the worst economy since Herbert Hoover added 1,603,000 jobs during the next 12 months. That’s an average of 134,000 per month, which is 41% greater than the 95,000 per month Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers is predicting.
So what’s going on here? I would suggest that the administration, seeing mediocrity everywhere despite what is supposed to have been its own breakout quarter (5.7% in the fourth quarter of 2008) and despite their bitterly clinging to the supposed superiority of Keynesian stimulus over supply-side tax cuts, is lowering the bar to something that has at least an outside chance of occurring.
This bunch also hopes that historical reviews such as the one just done above exposing just how pathetic their expectations are won’t become widely known. Sadly so far, the press is cooperating to ensure that.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
Happy 201st, Abe.
_______________________________________________________
William McGurn, in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:
This weekend, Americans were treated to something new: Barack Obama defending his war policies by suggesting they merely continue his predecessor’s practices. The defense is illuminating, not least for its implicit recognition that George W. Bush has more credibility on fighting terrorists than does the sitting president.
15 months after his election, the guy’s still obsessed with his predecessor.
_______________________________________________________
Pamela Geller vs. three libs is an unfair fight — in Pamela’s favor.
_______________________________________________________
From the AP yesterday:
The University of East Anglia says it will conduct a new review of the science published by its scandal-hit Climate Research Unit.
The university says the presitigious Royal Society science academy will help find independent scientists to run the new inquiry.
The problem will be finding any scientific data that hasn’t been manipulated and/or corrupted.
_______________________________________________________
Robert Gibbs thinks he’s funny. Actually, he’s a jerk, and so unfunny that even apparatchik White House reporters aren’t laughing so much at his “jokes” any more.
All Gibbs and so many others at the White House are doing is feeding what Bill Whittle described here at PJM on Wednesday:
By calling us Tea Baggers, and racists, and Nazis, and rubes, and hicks… by pretending we’re just a fringe group of dangerous radicals, or saying — as the President did, twice, and apparently with a straight face — that he was unaware that tens or hundreds of thousands of hard-working American patriots were clogging the streets of the city he lives in — well all of these geniuses poured can after can of lighter fluid on to what might have been some old, wet charcoal — nearly impossible to light — and turned it into a wildfire that will likely remake the landscape of this country. That’s why there’s a Tea Party.
Thanks, Bob.
Feb 10, 2010 / 05:39 pm
At a recent Catholic Youth Organization basketball clinic in Pennsylvania, Bishop John Barres of the Diocese of Allentown gave young athletes a few pointers on improving their game and their faith life.
The Feb. 1 event, called “Buckets with the Bishop,” took place during Catholic Schools Week at the former Cardinal Brennan High School.
Bishop Barres, who played basketball for Princeton, spent time teaching the kids basic basketball skills, helped them make connections between sports and the Catholic faith and even took on Fr. Joel Kiefer in a three point shooting contest.
“I believe that a team sport like basketball teaches young people sacrifice, leadership and generosity – all qualities that are key to the building up of a vibrant Catholic Church,” Bishop Barres told CNA on Monday. “I found in basketball, when I dedicated practice, drills, basketball camps and games to Christ, the experience became so much richer.”
When asked how “Buckets with the Bishop” came about, the Allentown bishop explained, “At a Mass honoring Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J., at St. Casimir’s Church in Shenandoah, PA, two altar servers named Ian and Matt said that they heard that I had played basketball at Princeton and would I mind joining their CYO basketball teams at the Cardinal Brennan gyms in Frackville, PA to give them some tips.”
“They were so enthusiastic and I loved their initiative – there was no way I could say no!” he continued. “One thing led to another, the parents and coaches got behind it and we ended up having a packed gym for ‘Buckets with the Bishop.’”
“My sidekick in the video is Fr. Joel Kiefer, a 1992 graduate of West Point who served in the US Army in harm’s way in such places as Haiti and Somalia,” Bishop Barres explained in reference to a YouTube video of the event. “He is an inspirational young priest who will be the instrument of many young men coming to the priesthood in the Diocese of Allentown. He actually beat me in the 3 point contest!”
When asked how long he has played the sport, Bishop Barres responded, “I’ve been playing basketball since I was four years old when we moved into a new house and I discovered a basketball court in the backyard.”
“I played high school varsity basketball at Phillips Academy (Andover) – my teammates are still lifelong friends. I played three years of JV basketball at Princeton University during the Coach Pete Carril era. Coach Carril since his retirement at Princeton in 1996 has been an assistant coach for the NBA Sacramento Kings and we are still loyal friends. He was present at my ordination as a Bishop on July 30, 2009.”
“When my Princeton and Andover teammates saw the video of me draining some three pointers, they joked that they wished I had shot that well when I played with them at Andover and at Princeton!” Bishop Barres remarked.
Go here for the rest of the story.
On January 27, in the wake of Toyota’s gas-pedal recall, the Associated Press ran what might as well have been a free advertisement for a marketing effort by government-controlled General Motors:
Is there any substantive difference between the three paragraphs above and the text of a paid ad?
Today, they just did it again, this time for government-controlled Chrysler (what follows is most of the 12:18 p.m. version, which was revised 24 minutes later):
The wire service’s 12:42 p.m. revision (subject to further revision) is a bit more formalized, but in its own way just as humorous:
Oh, it’s last year’s financial troubles that are the problem, not this year’s. It couldn’t possibly be the assessments by industry watchers that the company is currently in serious trouble. And there’s no way customer unease could possibly have anything to do with the fact that the company barely sold 57,000 vehicles in January. No-no-no, it’s what happened almost a year ago.
Give. Me. A. Break.
When was the last time the AP, the other wire services, or the establishment media devoted a story exclusively to one of Ford’s, Toyota’s, Honda’s, or Nissan’s incentive programs?
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
Two think tanks, the Tax Policy Center and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), have done something the New York Times, the Associated Press, and other supposed leading lights of establishment media journalism should have done days ago.
As described in a Wall Street Journal editorial today, those two organizations have caught the Obama administration playing with the federal budget numbers, specifically the “baseline.” The editorial also makes two important points in its two final paragraphs (bolded by me):
… the White House is proposing to convert spending sold as a one-time economic boost into a permanent feature of future government growth. As both the Tax Policy Center and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have pointed out, supposedly temporary parts of the stimulus—expansions of the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit and Pell Grants for college students—have now found their way into the budget baseline.
True to the way Mr. Obama has honored his campaign pledge of transparency, this news was buried in a footnote on page 170 of the budget’s Analytical Perspectives.
The baseline normally reflects “current law,” but the White House argues that this is unrealistic because Congress is never going to allow, say, the Alternative Minimum Tax to hit the middle class. Fair enough. But it also chose to smuggle these stimulus items into its definition of the “current policy” baseline and hoped that no one would notice.
The Responsible Federal Budget folks estimate that this fiscal sleight-of-hand would cost about $266 billion over 10 years, which by itself almost cancels out the White House’s spending freeze.
… Mr. Obama likes to pretend that he is the victim of a budget hit-and-run, as if the projected $1.3 trillion deficit in 2011 is all the fault of his predecessor. But President Bush didn’t force the White House to request 1.8% of GDP more in new spending in 2011 than it did in 2010. Nor did Mr. Bush force the White House to assume that the stimulus transfer payments it created will be paid out into perpetuity.
What these budget details really show is that the stimulus was always more about promoting liberal policies than spurring economic recovery—which is why so many Americans are so angry.
The Tax Policy Center’s TaxVox Blog explains what happened with two particular tax items:
The CRFB’s blog paints the bigger picture, showing that the administration wants us to believe that if the government operates on autopilot — with no new congressional action of any kind — the 10-year federal deficit projection is over $10 trillion, when the reality is (based on the assumption used) that it’s barely half of that:
What’s really “transparent” about all of this is its motivation, which is to dishonestly move the goal posts. If future deficits come in below $1 trillion or so, the administration can claim that it achieved deficit reduction compared to what had previously been expected. But the Obamabots have stuffed what’s “expected” with items that don’t yet have any legislative authorization. It’s the vaporware of government budgeting.
The average person wouldn’t know any of this unless he or she were possessed of unlimited time and the ability to independently pore through hundreds of pages of documents (which would make then that person anything but average). Fortunately in this case, a couple of policy advocacy groups did it for us. Clearly, if you waited for the establishment press to find this, we would never have learned of it. A search on the word “baseline” at the Associated Press returns 32 items — all about sports. The best the New York Times can do at its Economix Blog is a link at “What We’re Reading” (i.e., “What We’re Not Reporting”) to a post called “Still Budgeting through Footnotes FY 2011″ — found at CRFB.
How many other budget tricks are being missed because the watchdogs can’t be everywhere at once?
I suggest that the WSJ editorial page (which during Democratic administrations morphs into a de facto source of news the establishment press, including all too often the Journal’s own writers, won’t touch), the Tax Policy Center, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget send the wire services and the supposed newspapers of record a symbolic bill for “journalism rendered.” The recipients may not have the money to pay a real bill.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
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