From Tucson, Arizona — and Leefdaal, Belgium:

Posted: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 12:00 am

Out of the Blue

After 89 birthdays, Henry “Jim” Latimore figured there wasn’t much left in life to surprise him.

But fate had other plans for the World War II veteran.

While he was quietly retired in Tucson, villagers an ocean away were on a mission to immortalize him, 66 years after he floated into their midst when his warplane crashed near a castle in Belgium.

Latimore is one of nine crew members – three still living – of a downed B-24 Liberator whose names will be inscribed on a new memorial in Leefdaal, population 4,000, about 15 miles east of Brussels.

He and the other survivors will be flying to Belgium for the dedication ceremony later this month.

“It just amazes me that they would do this,” said Latimore, 89, a retired Air Force colonel who lives on the east side with his wife, Patricia. “For me, (the crash) was a memory, but for the people there, I guess it was a really big thing.”

One of Latimore’s fellow crew members died in the incident on Nov. 26, 1944.

The rest parachuted to safety and went on with life, not realizing their brief brush with the denizens of Leefdaal had become a legend retold by generations of Belgian parents.

“As a child, my father often told me about the crash of the American bomber on the house of his aunt,” said Belgian Dirk Vander Hulst, 39, an amateur historian who has researched the crash. He shared his findings with the Patton Drivers-Leuven Centraal, a group of World War II history buffs in Belgium who are behind the tribute.

The Liberator that crashed in Leefdaal was one of 28 attached to America’s 491st Bombardment Group dispatched that day to bomb a German oil refinery near Hanover, Vander Hulst said.

Fifteen of the B-24s were shot down over Germany, where many U.S. crew members were killed. Luckily for Latimore’s crew, the pilot managed to guide the crippled craft into friendly territory that recently had been liberated by British forces.

… Among Leefdaal residents, especially the elderly, “appreciation for the sacrifice made by the Americans and the British is still evident today,” he said. “It is thanks to the sacrifice of Allied soldiers that we are able to live and enjoy a free and luxurious life.”

Go here to read the whole story.

The comparison of the results contained in the April 2010 Monthly Treasury Statement released this afternoon to April of last year is bad enough. But if the American people knew that April 2010 came in about a quarter-trillion dollars worse than both 2007 and 2008 with almost 40% less in tax collections, most of them would be appalled. Many more than are already doing so would be questioning what in the heck this administration and Congress are up to.

That’s why you probably won’t see establishment media outlets like the Associated Press go back more than one year in their detailed comparisons, even though during the presidency of George W. Bush, writers like the AP’s Martin Crutsinger and others frequently went back to fiscal 2000 and 2001 to remind readers of the surpluses that occurred during those fiscal years. The intent, of course, was to imply that things were just peachy keen under Bill Clinton until the eeeeevil Bush ruined everything. As noted later, that ain’t so.

Here is the AP’s Crutsinger on today’s Treasury Statement, blissfully pretending, with the exception of one cryptic reference, that the two high-collection Bush years neeeeeeeever happened:

The federal budget deficit hit an all-time high for the month of April as government revenue fell sharply.

The Treasury Department said Wednesday the April deficit soared to $82.7 billion, the largest imbalance for that month on record. That was significantly higher than last year’s April deficit of $20 billion and above the $30 billion deficit private economists had anticipated.

The government normally runs surpluses in April as millions of taxpayers file their income tax returns. However, income tax payments were down this April, reflecting the impact of the recession which has pushed millions of people out of work.

Total revenues for April were down 7.9 percent from a year ago, dipping to $245.3 billion.

… The trillion-dollar-plus deficits are being driven by the impact of the recession, which has cut government tax revenue while driving up spending.

Analysts estimate that roughly one-third of the increase in the deficits over the past two years came from lost revenue — the result of fewer people working and lower corporate profits. Another third is from increased government spending that normally occurs in a downturn, such as higher payments for unemployment benefits and food stamps. The final third reflects the added government spending on the $787 billion stimulus bill and the $700 billion financial bailout.

Crutsinger mentioned “the past two years” in the last excerpted paragraph and had a golden opportunity to tell readers the degree of the difference between this year and 2008, but did not. When you see how big the difference is, you’ll totally understand why:

Since Crutsinger has already used up the word “sharp” to describe April 2010′s collections decline vs. April 2009 of 7.9%, what adjective would he have employed to describe the 39.3% drop from April 2008, or the 22.6% decline in year-to-date receipts?

By far, the most troubling pair of numbers in what’s presented above is April 2010′s individual income tax collections ($107.3 billion) vs. April 2008 ($244.0) billion. That’s a 56% drop. It’s the most troubling because, as a BizzyBlog commenter pointed out earlier this evening, that April number includes two things besides withheld income taxes: “the 2009 tax settlement that occurs on April 15th for individuals” and “tax receipts from individuals … (for) the first installment of 2010 estimated taxes.” The commenter added that “Historically, individual estimated taxes are what drives the usual surplus months.” I should also note that the commenter saw no mention in media reports of the estimated-tax component.

What this means is that as a group, quarterly tax-filers (largely entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and investors) had such a bad 2009 that during 2010 they will mostly be making low required quarterly payments (generally 25% of last year’s liability each quarter). As a result, collections in June and September, which like April are usually months pretty flush, will more than likely also be weak.

One of two things could happen next with this group:

• Ultimately, if they really do have a good 2010, they’ll owe and pay in a lot of money in January and April of 2011.
• But if they do not have a good 2010, and if they continue to nowhere near the kind of money they were making in 2007 and 2008, the downward slide in collections from the economy’s most productive people will continue into 2011.

As much as I’d like to believe the former scenario, it’s hard to see it happening.

Now let’s take on Crutsinger’s read on the source of the annual deficit changes. The fiscal 2008 deficit was $455 billion, while the current-year deficit is on track to be roughly $1 trillion higher. Breaking that down:

• Lower receipts account for something between 40% and 50% of the difference, and certainly not “roughly one-third.” Fiscal 2008 collections were $2.523 trillion (that’s actually low, because in a bad accounting move about $90 billion in 2008 stimulus payments were subtracted from that, but we’ll stay with Treasury’s number anyway). Fiscal 2009 collections came in at $2.105 trillion, or $418 billion lower (that’s 41.8% of $1 trillion). As seen above, fiscal 2010 receipts thus far are running $57 billion behind fiscal 2009. If there is no further decay in the final five months, fiscal 2010 collections will trail fiscal 2008 by $475 billion (i.e., 47.5% of $1 trillion). Further decay in year-over-year collections could cause the 2010 v. 2008 gap to be $500 billion or more (i.e., 50%).
• We can only wish that Crutsinger’s claim that “another third” comes from “increased government spending that normally occurs in a downturn.” It just isn’t so. Food stamp and unemployment comp increases, though annoying in many ways, make up a small percentage of the Obama administration’s spending increases. For example, Health and Human Services is on track to spend $164 billion in fiscal 2010 than it did in fiscal 2008. Most of that has to do with Social Security and Medicare, and very little of it has to do with the recession (which Crutsinger refers to as if it’s still ongoing). Defense spending, however meritorious and of course unrelated to the recession, is heading towards a fiscal 2010 total that will be about $80 billion higher than fiscal 2008. Projected spending in smaller departments whose spending is not at all recession driven is on track for at least another $100 billion. I’m already at $344 billion, or over “another third” that has little or nothing to do with the recession. The problem is that the administration has ratcheted up spending almost across the board.
• TARP and other bailouts, as offensive as they are, make up a relatively small percentage of the total deficit change, and certainly not “a final third,” especially when their total costs are spread over two fiscal years.

Crutsinger also failed to mention that the Congressional Budget Office estimated last Friday that April’s deficit would be $85 billion and essentially nailed it. Why the AP’s consulted economists totally blew the call, as noted earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) is a mystery.

As to those 2000 and 2001 surpluses referred to earlier, the Clintonian mythology ignores the fact that the Republican Congress during that period, led by the likes of then-Congressman John Kasich, created the conditions for the late-1990s prosperity and the federal budget surpluses that eventually arrived in 2000 and 2001. In an unaccountable lapse, an unbylined May 2009 AP report (original saved here for fair use, discussion, and establishment media torture purposes) acknowledged this inconvenient fact.

Clinton’s “contribution” was to overheat the economy, as his Securities and Exchange Commission allowed start-up and mostly Internet-based companies that barely had a business plan and had never earned a dime of revenue to go public as if they were the type of company suited to ordinary investors instead of wealthy, accredited ones (yes, ordinary investors also deserve a healthy slice of the blame).

Two years after the “Supply-Side Stunner,” the name yours truly gave to the all-time one-month collection record of April 2008, a journalistically negligent one-year comparison window employed by the AP and Crutsinger enabled the wire service to avoid properly rendering just how awful the government’s financial situation is now compared to then. As bad as it looks as AP rendered it, it’s clearly much, much worse.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It doesn’t seem like this exercise should be that tough.

The government issues Daily Treasury Statements telling everybody what went in and out on a given business day. At the end of the month, the last Daily Treasury Statement has a record (admittedly jumbled and larded with lots of bureaucratic excess) of all receipts and disbursements for the month.

The folks at the Congressional Budget Office look over the final Daily Treasury Statement and estimate what the totals for receipts and disbursements (or “outlays”) will be. The difference, obviously, is their estimate of the month’s reported deficit. The only remaining items should be error corrections (if any), or accounting entries resulting from the government’s ill-advised choice to account for “investments” in banks, car companies, and other entities on a “net present value” basis.

On the eighth business day of the following month, the Treasury Department releases its Monthly Treasury Statement.

On Friday, the CBO estimated that the April’s deficit would be $85 billion. The press (as covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) virtually ignored its report. That’s bad enough, but when reporters went out to economists for deficit estimates, their predictions were significantly lower. For starters, here’s what the Associated Press carried this morning:

The AP’s $30 billion consensus sharply differed CBO’s estimate, yet the rest of the AP’s report failed to even acknowledge the existence of the variance, or for that matter of the CBO.

Other news sources also came in with lower April deficit estimates, but not by as much as AP’s:

• Bloomberg/Business Week had a median estimate of $57.9 billion, as “Projections ranged from deficits of $20 billion to $90 billion.”
• This Inside Futures post had an estimate of $59.8 billion.
• This Citizen Economists item claimed a consensus of $40 billion.

Well, here’s the relevant portion of April 2010′s Monthly Treasury Statement that was released today at 2 PM. We can see who was closest (figures are in millions):

CBO overestimated the deficit by only $2.3 billion.

As stated earlier, unless there are “net present value” entries, estimating the deficit shouldn’t be that tough, as CBO has just demonstrated. So why was there such an across-the-board lowball consensus among the economists consulted by the press?

All I’ll say is that it’s mighty, mighty convenient that the early morning drive-time, get-ready-for-work reports based on the AP item above told radio and TV audiences that the year-to-date deficit would come in “about 7% lower than a year ago.” The fact is that it has barely budged (the $799.7 billion above is only $2.6 billion lower than last year’s $802.3 billion). After considering the $115 billion non-cash item noted in the last paragraph of the AP excerpt above, the true cash spending deficit is about $915 billion, or 14% higher than last year’s year-to-date figure.

All of this is likely to get ignored in the rush of other afternoon and evening news, leaving many listeners and viewers believing that the government’s financial situation is improving. It isn’t. Again, how convenient.

Now that the Monthly Treasury Statement has been published, I’ll have more to say about the establishment media’s coverage in a later post.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Lucid Links:

_______________________________________________________

Apparently this is what passes for good news these days –

…. delinquencies on so-called ‘Alt-A’ residential mortgage-backed securities declined to 34.1 percent in April from 34.4 percent in March – marking the first month-over-month decline in that category since April 2006.

Here’s yet another reminder that will apparently need to be made from time to time for quite a while, or at least as long as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continue to receive relief without limits (from Petter Wallison in the December 29, 2009 Wall Street Journal):

New research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer for Fannie Mae and a housing expert, has found that from the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or Alt-A.

In general, a subprime mortgage refers to the credit of the borrower. A FICO score of less than 660 is the dividing line between prime and subprime, but Fannie and Freddie were reporting these mortgages as prime, according to Mr. Pinto. Fannie has admitted this in a third-quarter 10-Q report in 2008.

George W. Bush didn’t deceive the markets and the ratings agencies for roughly a decade and a half. (*) Democrat cronies Franklin Raines, James Johnson, and others did. The housing and mortgage lending messes are on them, and them alone.

(*) – to the tune of trillions of dollars

_______________________________________________________

Here’s the latest from the absolute propagandists at the Associated Press — “Political patience wanes as Gulf oil spill grows”. Its theme is that all of the pressure is on BP and other companies involved.

Nice try guys, but no sale. Blaming it all on BP and other private companies doesn’t change the fact, as noted yesterday (third Lickety-Split Link) and earlier (here and here), that the federal government was not prepared to do what it has been charged to do per its own National Contingency Plan. Maybe someone at AP should go and read it.

The government had the discretionary power to burn away the problem early, but either couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. That’s not BP’s fault.

___________________________________________________

The number of senior Democrats throwing in the towel or being ousted in primaries should properly be seen as the Party’s (and the party’s primary voters’) internal attempt at preventing a sinking ship from totally submerging by throwing any and all “excess baggage” overboard.

The latest “victims” are David Obey of Wisconsin, who “chose” to retire, and Allan Mollohan of West Virginia, who was defeated yesterday in that state’s Democratic Primary.

Inserting substitutes into vulnerable races where incumbents once seen as invincible appear to be in big trouble six months before the general election is clearly being done in the interest of preserving Nancy Pelosi’s majority at all costs, decades of party loyalty be damned. The newbies will, as did Ohio’s Steve Driehaus in 2008, pretend to be “moderate” when they’re substantively every bit as radical as the President himself (Driehaus isn’t genuinely prolife, voted for cap and trade, and voted for the non-stimulating stimulus, so where’s the difference between Driehaus and Obama?).

Which leads to the question: How many once secure Democratic incumbents should have been smart enough to realize that by supporting Barack Obama for president in 2008 they were signing death warrants for their own political careers?

Stated differently, the free media pass Obama’s hard-core radicalism received during the presidential campaign may have fooled more than the nation’s voters.

*******

Lickety-Split Links:

It will be interesting to see whether the federal budget deficit for April, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated will be $85 billion last week, comes in closer to that figure or the $30 billion that “Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters are predicting,” according to the Associated Press.

That’s a really big difference so close to the actual release. A link to the report can be found here at 2 p.m.

___________________________________________________

Minnesota Governor and potential presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty has vetoed a soak the rich income tax. As usual, the press coverage makes an unsupported assumption:

More than 122,000 high-income taxpayers would pay the new 9.1 percent tax, which would go away if the state started running a surplus. Democrats said it would stave off additional cuts to state services for vulnerable residents and ease financial pressure on schools.

The bolded statement acts as if the number who would pay the higher rate is an established fact. It’s not, because some of them, even in the Land of 10,000 Taxes, might very well vote with their feet and leave the state.

___________________________________________________

From the “You Can’t Make This Up” Dept. –The coverage is being really careful not to frame it so obviously, but the bottom line of stories such as this one (“Obama presses Spain’s Zapatero over economic reform”) is that the President of a country running trillion-dollar annual deficits (Obama, USA) is pressuring the leader of a country (Zapatero, Spain) whose entire gross domestic product is $1.5 trillion ($1.556 trillion at link less expected 2009 shrinkage of 4%) to cut its budget deficit by reducing spending.

*******

Lightning Links:

• Mr. Civility My A** — “President Obama: GOP Opposition to Stimulus ‘Helped to Create the Tea-Baggers‘”
• At BigJournalism.com — “Media Take Note: In Arizona County, Of 64 Highway Chases Last Month, Not One Perp (Was) a U.S. Citizen”
• At Powerline (“Don’t Leave It to Cleaver, Part 16″) — McClatchy’s official response to allegations that it reported something that never happened, naming the hurling of racial epithets at African-American House members on March 20, “appears (to be) nothing more than bravado and deception.” Well, that’s because it really is something that never happened.

From Rapid City, South Dakota:

Posted: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 5:00 am

Members of the Rapid City Rush made their best save of the year on April 24. And it was Jim Nolan’s love of the hockey team that saved his life

Early that evening, Nolan, who hadn’t been feeling well, decided to go to bed early. But the hockey fan in Nolan became restless; he just had to get out of bed to check the score of the Rush playoff contest with the Allen Americans.

It was then that he collapsed.

His wife, Bobbie, heard the sound as Nolan, 70, fell onto the desk, a chair and then crashed to the floor. She rushed to her husband side, called 911 and began cardiac pulmonary resuscitation. Nelson’s fall had wedged him between the chair and computer desk.

Jim’s son, Steve, is convinced that had his father remained in bed or out of the hearing distance of his mother, “it would have been fatal as it all would have been silent.”

“I think so,” Bobbie Nolan, said. “If he hadn’t gotten out of bed to check the score, I would not have heard him. That was the very fortunate thing.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Derek LeBlanc, Jamie VanderVeeken, and Luke Fritschaw of the Rush visited Jim and Bobbie Nolan at their home.

“That was exciting,” Bobbie Nolan said.

It was pretty special that they showed up today,” she said of the players.

“Wow,” Jim Nolan said of the visit.

The happiness brought by the visit by the Rush players was a far cry from the fear the family felt that night in April. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Five weeks ago (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the Big Three Networks’ combined evening news audiences dropped to below 20 million — an audience about 5% less than what Matt Drudge in the summer of 2006 headlined as “TV’s Lowest Week.”

Three weeks ago (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), their combined audience came in at 19.61 million, down over 12% from the previous year.

For the week of May 3, the combined total fell further, to the point where they’re one more really bad week away from hitting an all-time low — a low that was “achieved” in mid-June of last year (Source — Media Bistro, week of May 3, 2010; week of May 4, 2009):

The combined total audience is less than 2% higher than the 19.06 million of June 15, 2009. The 25-54 demo audience is less than 200,000 above that same week.

Those who properly point out that the audience figures cited here are much larger than seen on cable news networks can take some comfort and solace in the following:

• Just 10 years ago, the nets’ evening news audience was about 12 million larger in a country with a population that was about 9% smaller.
• At this point, it’s likely that many people who continue to watch these shows, other than the brave souls at the Media Research Center who do it so the rest of us don’t have to, are lost causes to conservatism. Otherwise, they couldn’t bear sitting through what Brian, Diane, and Katie constantly feed them. The fact that their numbers are shrinking may mean that more people are open to sensible conservative arguments.
• Though it’s difficult to gauge, it seems that right and center-right new media outlets are gathering a bit of a head of steam compared to the leftist counterparts.

Anyway, the regularly scheduled summer viewing slump is only a month away. Two words: Faster please.

If a conservative or Republican uttered the nonsense to be revealed shortly, we’d justifiably never hear the end of it on the late-night comedy shows and elsewhere. As it is, former car czar Steve Rattner’s “creative” term for fibbing has and probably will continue to get little coverage outside of Detroit.

Rattner’s risible rendition of reality spewed forth before he spoke at a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago-Detroit District conference. Here are excerpts from the coverage by the Detroit News’s Robert Snell (HT Laura Ingraham), with help from David “I think Toyota bragged about avoiding safety recalls, so they did” Shepardson (bolds are mine):

General Motors Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Ed Whitacre may have stretched the truth in a commercial saying the automaker had repaid its federal obligations, former autos czar Steve Rattner said today.

GM “may have slightly elasticized the reality of things,” Rattner told reporters ahead of a speech today.

But he also praised Whitacre. “We should all wake up and thank God we have him. The guy’s a hero,” Rattner said.

Rattner said GM has signaled to the market that it will report a profit for the first quarter next week.

GM touted its repayment of $6.7 billion in federal loans — but downplayed the fact that the taxpayers are still on the hook for $43 billion in aid that was swapped for a 61 percent majority stake in GM.

Downplayed? How about “didn’t mention”? Anyway, let’s resume:

Rattner, who was President Barack Obama’s auto czar last year, returned to Detroit on Monday a year after Chrysler’s bankruptcy filing, and talked about why the government saved the auto industry.

Rattner, who is writing a book on his work as auto czar due out in October, touted progress that GM and Chrysler have made following the government’s controversial $62 billion bailout.

Funny, the bailout price tag cited by the Time a year ago was “$80 billion and Growing” to a possible $100 billion. What happened? And from what I can tell, Time’s tally doesn’t even include anywhere near all of the potential losses at GMAC, which, at $17.29 billion and counting, is turning into a miniaturized version of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac sinkhole.

As to GM’s first quarter profit:

• The thing to watch for is whether it comes from domestic/North American operations or from elsewhere. My guess is “elsewhere.”
• The company sat on a hoard of cash from the government that overstuffed it so that (it is hoped) it can’t fail again. Tens of millions of dollars in interest income that have nothing to do with the profitability of operations might be what actually puts the company over the top.
• If GM were a publicly held company (as opposed to a government-owned entity), it couldn’t “signal the market” as described. There is no market for GM stock, as it isn’t traded. The company’s position is that it does us a favor by telling us anything at all about its finances, because as a “private entity,” it doesn’t have to reveal anything.

As to Steve Rattner’s “creative” new term “elasticized”:

• The Associated Press’s Tom Krisher and Tim Martin didn’t even mention the Whitacre ad controversy, let alone bring up the former car czar’s stretchy word.
• Relative bit player UPI.com did cover Rattner’s pre-speech statement, and brought out Rattner’s new E-word in its first two paragraphs.
• The Detroit Free Press’s Brent Snavely and Chris Christoff got to Whitacre’s whoppers in Paragraphs 7 through 9, and did quote Rattner’s use of the E-word.
• The New York Times has no coverage of Rattner’s appearance, nor does its DealBook Blog.
• Business Week didn’t bring up the ad matter at all, but did have an interesting quote about the prospect of first-quarter profitability from auto industry consultant Dennis Virag — “Whitacre has come out several times and said GM expects a profit for the year. … He didn’t predict a first- quarter profit, but I don’t believe he would be talking about profits if he didn’t expect to post one.”

Really, Dennis? Whitacre was perfectly willing to talk about a “bailout paid in full” when there wasn’t one.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Updating the Obama stimulus promise vs. performance chart through April 2010 (HT commenter dscott):

The light blue line is what Team Obama said would happen WITHOUT the stimulus. The dark blue like is what they said would happen WITH the stimulus. The maroon dots represent the actual unemployment rate.

Reality has proven that enacting the stimulus plan was WORSE than doing nothing.

Now the administration is saying that the unemployment rate won’t come down to 8% until the end of 2012.

This means that the unemployment will have stayed ABOVE what the administration says was the worst-case scenario if the stimulus bill passed for almost four years (March 2009 to Dec. 2012).

Heckuva job, Barry.

______________________________________________

From the “What a Guy” Dept., via the New York Daily News (HT BigJournalism.com) –

(Casey) Greenfield is a pretty, ginger-haired, Yale-educated lawyer and writer who last March gave birth to a love child. The baby’s father is married CNN star and best-selling New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin.

… He said he was going to leave his wife for her. But, by then, Casey had begun to distrust him. She suspected he had several other mistresses.”

In 2008, when Greenfield became pregnant, and when she told Toobin the news, he offered her “money if she’d have an abortion,” says a source. He also allegedly offered to pay for her to have another child later via a sperm donor.

“When Casey wouldn’t have an abortion, Jeff told her she was going to regret it, that she shouldn’t expect any help from him,” claims another source.

Greenfield underwent a risky DNA test while pregnant, but Toobin didn’t provide his sample and stopped talking to her, according to sources. On the day she gave birth, Greenfield e-mailed Toobin, inviting him to meet his son, Rory. A source says Toobin didn’t reply.

Toobin ultimately cooperated with a DNA test that proved he was Rory’s dad. In February, a Manhattan Family Court judge ordered him to pay child support. When he refused to pay the full amount, say sources, Greenfield’s lawyer threatened to notify his employers and garnish his wages; Toobin then paid up.

Toobin now sees the 13-month-old lookalike heir. “His wife, Amy, comes with them to the park,” says a source.

“The sisterhood” was apparently unavailable for comment.

______________________________________________

An interesting parallel found while reviewing Obama commencement speeches yesterday:

At Michigan on May 1:

At Hampton University on May 9:

Spontaneous? Or plants?

______________________________________________

Lickety-Split Links:

This item at the home page of the New York Times and the article behind it are intensely entertaining:

First, there’s the admission: No one currently on the Court has Scalia’s intellectual heft. Savor that.

Second, there’s the fantasy: Scalia’s intellectual heft is based in sensible, Constitution-based conservatism. Without that, no one, regardless of their basic intellectual firepower, can or ever will have Scalia’s intellectual heft.

______________________________________________

The establishment media/Obama administration mission has not been accomplished — “Toyota Posts $2.2 Billion Annual Profit.” Key sentence: “Toyota thwarted a third consecutive year in the red thanks partly to a strong performance in the three months through March.”

______________________________________________

The Associated Press does Absolute Propaganda (“Obama oil response: aggressive as crisis unfolded”) –

The AP review found that the administration – aware of the political scars left on the Bush White House over Katrina – moved early with rescue efforts. Also, the government knew within days that while no leak had been found, the potential for environmental harm existed.

Except for one “little” thing — there is conveniently no reference to the missed opportunity to do a controlled burn anywhere in the AP item. National Contingency Plan documents make it crystal clear that the responsibilities for this type of disaster preparedness and follow-through rest firmly with federal agencies.

This is a tacit admission that the federal response capability has been far less than perfect.

______________________________________________

Lightning Links:

• Awwww, too bad — “Expect no climate deal this year: Indian minister”
• A trillion-dollar bailout in Europe. As usual we’re involved, and nobody asked us for permission. “The Fed will provide the ‘full allotment’ of U.S. dollars as needed” — i.e., it has no limits.
• From Michelle Malkin last week — “Lester Kinsolving: White House press corps pit bull.” Most of the rest are lapdogs.

From Washington:

May 11, 2010 / 06:35 am

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has announced that the Postmaster General will dedicate its new stamp honoring Mother Teresa on Sept. 5 at a ceremony at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Post Office looks forward to a “very dignified and successful” ceremony, a spokesman said.

In a May 10 phone call, Roy Betts, a community relations manager with the USPS Stamps department, talked with CNA about the dedication of the stamp.

Reporting that the ceremony will take place at 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, he said that Postmaster General Jack Potter has been confirmed as the dedicating official.

However, nothing more had been planned to his knowledge and he did not know what Catholic officials were planning for the ceremony.

CNA asked about concerns about whether the stamp affects constitutional issues such as the separation of church and state.

Betts acknowledged there had been “a little activity, a little noise” about the issue when the stamp was first announced, but any controversy has since faded.

“In the past month or so, I’ve not received a single call or e-mail or anything about the concerns that others have raised,” he reported.

Initial complaints about the stamp were raised by the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation. People supportive of the Mother Teresa stamp sent a petition with more than 70,000 signatures to the Postmaster General this past February.

“The stamp program recognizes Mother Teresa for her work as a humanitarian. She was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, she was an honorary U.S. citizen. Her work on behalf of the poor is being recognized. And this honor is being bestowed on her, and it is well deserved.”

According to Betts, the U.S. Postal Service is not violating its own policy on the issue, which forbids singling out a religious organization for honors.

“This is recognition of a humanitarian who is world-renowned,” he explained.

Betts listed several religious figures honored by the USPS, such as a 1961 Mahatma Ghandi stamp and a 1979 stamp honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Yesterday, in the midst of the commencement address he delivered at Hampton University, President Obama made a startling “admission” (readers will see why “admission” is in quotes shortly):

And meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — (laughter) — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.

There are more troubling overtones inherent in the excerpt that many observers have already noted. I’ll stay away from them for the purposes of this post.

Those matters, aside, there are still a few pesky items that arise from the bolded portion of the excerpt.

If the President really doesn’t know how to “work” an iPod, which has been out since 2001, isn’t that just as bad or worse than the idea that President George H.W. Bush (Bush 41) supposedly marveled at the operation of a grocery scanner in 1992? (I say “supposedly” because snopes.com, which if anything tends to err to the left, has definitively labeled those contentions, which were made twice by writers at the New York Times — here and here — “false.”) Journalists leaped to their conclusions about Bush 41 based on jaded “observation.” Here we have a president admitting to technical ignorance with no equivocation.

But the truth appears to be that Obama knows darned well how to “work” at least an iPod. At CNN.com’s SciTech blog, John D. Sutter writes that “Given his apparent tech literacy, I wonder if Obama was kidding about not knowing how to work an iPod, iPad, Xbox or PlayStation. During the 2008 presidential campaign he told Rolling Stone his iPod contained songs by Bob Dylan, Jay-Z and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, among others. Presumably, his staffers didn’t turn it on and work it for him.” Just “kidding,” huh? How about “fibbing to ingratiate yourself with your audience”?

Further, Obama’s apparent belief that Xboxes and Playstations are commonly used as sources of “information” is pretty odd. Yes you can access the Internet with them, but the question is how many game console owners are doing so, and even if they are, whether it’s for playing games or to getting info. I’d suggest that to the extent game console owners are accessing the Internet, they’re usually doing so for gaming purposes, especially because the vast majority of households have computers with Internet access.

Press coverage of Obama’s “iPod moment” is pretty scarce.

Jackie Calmes at the New York Times dodged it. Her last paragraph’s quote begins in mid-sentence immediately after the iPod moment, but is presented as if a new sentence began instead. In her report at the Associated Press, Darlene Superville, last seen writing (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) that General Motors and Chrysler shed 400,000 jobs in 2008 when they didn’t have that many employees to lose, avoided the controversial commencement paragraph completely. UPI.com’s report did address the information-related items in Obama’s speech, but didn’t mention the President’s allusion to iPods and other gadgets. AFP’s coverage (“Obama bemoans ‘diversions’ of IPod, Xbox era”) was the sole exception.

It’s safe to say that the press would have jumped all over a Republican or conservative president claiming (or feigning) technical ignorance. Why? Because they uncriticially allowed the Obama campaign to do something very similar (actually, worse) to John McCain during 2008 the presidential campaign (noted at the time at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog).

The Obama campaign mocked McCain’s tech capabilities, saying that, “He (McCain) admits he still doesn’t know how to use a computer, can’t send an e-mail …” It turns out that “McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes.”

The question, “At long last, have you no decency?” springs to mind.

These people have no credibility when they lecture the nation about “civility” or “ranking high on the truth meter.”

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From LifeNews.com (emphasis mine):

Terri Schiavo’s Ex-Husband Michael Threatens to Sue Her Family Over Foundation
St. Petersburg, FL (LifeNews.com)

Terri Schiavo’s name could be back in court, but this time for a different reason. Her former husband says he is considering a lawsuit against her family because they started a foundation in her name to assist other disabled who may be deprived of their legal rights and medical care.

The foundation was once named Terri’s Fight and existed before Terri’s death, which saw Michael Schiavo starve and dehydrate her to death over 13 days after winning a court order to take her life.

The Schindler family — Terri’s mother and father and brother and sister — headed up the foundation to defray legal expenses and costs to provide Terri the rehabilitative treatment and medical care Michael deprived her when he gave up on her recovery.

Following Terri’s painful euthanasia death, the Schindler family change(d) the name to the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation and it has raised a modest amount of money — less than six figures — to provide help and support for disabled people like her.

But, Michael, who said he never wanted anyone to profit from the use of Terri’s name, claims the helpful nonprofit organization is doing just that.

Michael says a court document gives him rights to the name Terri Schiavo and he says it means no one can use her name without her permission. His attorney has written to the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation telling it that its use of the name violates that court order.

Schiavo’s attacks are ironic given that he attempted to profit politically from Terri’s death, by starting a political action committee that supported candidates until it closed down after the FEC repeatedly fined it for late reports and violating reporting guidelines.

The rest is here.

Sigh, I have sinned in my anger, so pardon me for a moment…

“Dear Lord, please forgive me for wishing this reprobate in front of a [speeding] Mack truck. Amen.”

It ended FDR’s rubber stamp. Is there a 2010 echo?

________________________________________________________

Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Saturday.

________________________________________________________

The past year’s tea party movement is not the first popular uprising against an overtaxing, encroaching, economy-stifling government. Though its past version seems not to have involved much in the way of street demonstrations, it may have been even stronger than the modern phenomenon, at least so far. As noted later, it will be difficult to exceed its electoral performance.

No less a luminary that Michael Barone rediscovered this largely forgotten history in the course of creating his latest book, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan. Barone, correctly described as “one of the most learned political observers of our time,” was the first person to characterize the Obama administration’s modus operandi as “Gangster Government” when he wrote in May of last year about how it bullied and shortchanged disfavored secured creditors during Chrysler’s bankruptcy proceedings. His April 21, 2010 column (“Gangster Government becomes a long-running series”) excoriates the so-called financial regulation bill currently under consideration in the Senate as “the channeling of vast sums from the politically unprotected to the politically connected.” One look at the expected workings and powers of the Financial Services Oversight Council the bill envisions confirms Barone’s assessment.

Visits to various items published during 1937 and 1938 reveal that the anti-New Deal sentiment Barone learned of had legs — and impact.

President Obama’s stimulus bill passed in February of last year is what ignited an initial storm of protest that has been followed by a growing wave of political activism. In 1937, the equivalent spark was newly reelected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s February 1937 proposal, buttressed by a March fireside chat, to pack the Supreme Court with six additional justices friendly to the New Deal’s statism and hostile to the original intent of the Constitution. The fighting words from his address were these: “We have, therefore, reached the point as a nation where we must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself.” He didn’t lack nerve, did he?

It wasn’t long before it became obvious that FDR had vastly overplayed his hand, as Obama would do 72 years later. After an initial lull, public reaction was furious. The proposal was denounced by much of the press, in letter-writing campaigns that ran 9-to-1 against, and even by Gallup polls that never showed majority support. This was a first for a president who had gotten his own way, except with the Court, during the previous four years. A formerly invincible politician had become a bit vulnerable, releasing more than a little pent-up frustration.

It’s virtually impossible without having been there to determine which outrages most set off anti-New Dealers — a group, by the way, that included plenty of Democrats as well as conservatives and Republicans. Here are a few that probably were near the top of the list:

• There was the utopian community of Greenbelt, Maryland, which was promoted as a place where “the profit motive does not exist,” and “Uncle Sam is everybody’s landlord.” In a foreshadowing of the current stimulus plan’s cost per job “created or saved” excess, spending on the supposedly “low cost” project worked out to be more than $16,000 per house, or $250,000 in what’s left of today’s dollars.
• The government had gone headlong into many industries, either co-opting or crowding out private players. A Victoria, Texas newspaper in June 1938 noted that “10,000 WPA (Works Progress Administration) units are making clothing, and … more than 100,000,000 garments have been produced.” It was also going to extraordinary lengths to prop up markets, buying “31,500 tons of dried prunes, 500,000 cases of grapefruit juice, and perhaps even enough wheat to cut down somewhat the tremendous surplus that looms.”
• You want corruption? Apparently there was plenty of it. A Google News Archive search on ["New Deal" corruption] (typed as indicated within quotes) for 1937-1938 returns 246 items, many with dozens of “related” items. The Day of New London, Connecticut carried an August 17, 1937 story by David Lawrence describing “‘The Teapot Dome scandal’ of the Roosevelt administration,” where “everything possible is being done by the Democratic chieftains to prevent an investigation of the ‘racket’ by which corporations were shaken down and forced to pay tribute to the Democratic national committee in violation of the corrupt practices act.”

As would be expected, the intellectual elitism used today to defend Obamanomics was also on display during the New Deal. After allowing that “there is a great deal more anti-New Deal sentiment among smaller business men than the President and his counselors have conceded in their public utterances,” a rabbi writing a February 12, 1938 column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette proceeded to characterize them as “little” businessmen “offer(ing) nothing constructive” while claiming, “There is no knowledge in them.” Echoing what we hear and see today directed at the financial and housing industries and George W. Bush, he also wrote that “the business world has developed no constructive program that will prevent a return to 1929-1932.”

Republicans led by New York gubernatorial candidate Thomas Dewey played up the corruption angle in the run-up to the November 1938 congressional elections and, in an ACORN echo, even warned that relief recipients were being cajoled into voting for Democrats.

On Election Night in 1938, an overwhelming Democratic majority (334-88 in the House, 76-17 in the Senate) shrunk considerably to 252-177 in the House and 69-23 in the Senate. The GOP gained 89 seats, while Democrats lost 82. After factoring in the considerable number of Democratic anti-New Dealers, it was clear that FDR’s rubber-stamp days were largely over. The New York Times, which had endorsed Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, blubbered about how “party control and party responsibility have been restored to a more normal place in American government.”

R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr. at the American Spectator summarizes Barone’s take on what became of the late-1930s pushback:

Barone now believes that had World War II not arrived this late-1930s Tea Party manifestation would have supported a stiff challenge to FDR’s precedent-breaking third term.

Indeed, despite the world war and the dangers it was posing here, Roosevelt’s 1940 winning margin of 55%-45%, while wide by modern standards, was far narrower than his victories in 1932 (by 17%) and 1936 (by 24%).

The strenuous objections manifested during the early stages of FDR’s second term to his and the federal government’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies explain an item of fallout from his administration that most people have never quite understood. Posed as a question, it is this: Why, if historians are correct about the population’s general reverence for Roosevelt when he served, did Congress pass the 22nd Amendment only 19 months after the end of World War II, thereby ensuring that no future president could ever run for a third term in office? Further, why was the amendment able to attain its required ratification by three-quarters of the states just four years later, proving that it was far more than mischievous Republicans and conservatives who supported it?

Answer: Roosevelt’s legendary popularity with the masses is a convenient urban legend not supported by history. Despite FDR’s generally fine leadership during World War II, few Americans at the time wanted to risk a future re-run of his New Deal statism.

Can the popular uprising of 2009-2010 known as the tea party movement outdo its 1930s counterpart? Perhaps, but the modern version will have to overcome two sets of enemies: The left itself, and the considerable collection of control-obsessed, counterproductive, go-along get-along dingbats on the right who would rather empty their treasuries than see genuine sensible conservatives prevail.