First, a belated welcome back to Rose after a curricular and extracurricular hiatus.

In her first post back over the weekend, she, as she so often does, went to a place where the daily news-obsessed yours truly neglected to go, namely the 35th anniversary of when the helicopters left the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

The reax to that post was strong, and compelled me to look up the late Tony Snow’s classic from 10 years ago on the same topic.

Very few could pack as much into 800+ words as Tony. In the column that follows, thankfully archived by the indispensable Binyamin Jolkovsky at Jewish World Review (and nowhere else that I could find without heading to the library databases), Snow capsulized everything one needs to know and remember about that bitter chapter in American history.

I’ve heavily excerpted, but go to JWR for the whole thing (some paragraph breaks and quote marks added by me):

Prevailing myths of the Vietnam War
May 1, 2000

THE VIETNAM WAR marked the first time in American history that we waged war not only against a foreign enemy, but against ourselves.

Truth was the first casualty of that internecine fight, which means that now, on the 25th anniversary of our departure from Vietnam, many younger Americans know little about the war other than the grim idiocies passed on by the professors and the press.

Let’s refute some of those popular myths.

“Vietnam was an unjust war.”

Members of the self-described New Left argued in the ’60s that the people of Vietnam loved communism and that the South Vietnamese hungered for the ministrations of Ho Chi Minh. That proved thumpingly untrue. Within weeks of the American withdrawal from Vietnam, the Vietnamese people expressed their feelings about communism by crafting crude boats and trying to drift to freedom — much as Cubans do today.

“We had no reason to enter the battle.”

Vietnam differed from previous wars in that the Vietnamese could not conceivably bring the fight to American shores. But John Kennedy, the architect of the war, perceived a different reason for engagement. He was deeply anti-communist and believed in the “domino theory” — that if one nation in the region were to fall to communism, others would follow. Although college students of that era jeered at the notion, it turned out to be true. After Vietnam fell, so did Cambodia and Burma (now Myanmar). Millions subsequently died in communist “liberations.”

“The United States was an imperialist aggressor.”

Just the opposite was true. The United States, like France before it, was attempting to prevent communist imperialism. Like France, it failed. The Johnson and Nixon administrations, following the lead of Truman and Eisenhower in Korea, refused to call the war a “war,” designating it a “conflict” instead. …

“Vietnam War protests set off an age of youthful idealism.”

Vietnam War protesters — of which I occasionally was one — began their opposition to the war in earnestness and ended it in fecklessness.

Most protesters got involved not because they had lofty feelings about war and peace. They joined in because they were bored, because disobedience was exciting, because the movement provided the next best thing to a dating service and because they wanted a high-minded way to dodge the draft.

In retrospect, the tactics were wonderfully stupid.

… The boat people proved beyond all reasonable doubt that the Vietcong were peddling death and misery — and yet, left-wing commentators refused to acknowledge the fact. Many still do. Only communism could have turned the Vietnamese people into paupers. Here in America, Vietnamese immigrants have demonstrated their entrepreneurial and economic genius.

“We’re finally giving Vietnam veterans their due.”

Although Ronald Reagan and subsequent presidents have lavished Vietnam vets with praise, we can never give them what they deserve, which is their youth.

… Young people were instructed to fight, but not given the means to win. And when they stumbled home from the hell of jungle warfare, they had to endure taunts from a protest movement that viewed its cowardice as a form of nobility.

This sorry legacy does, however, permit us to formulate a pithy summary of the “lessons of Vietnam.”

First, if you enter a war, declare war and build popular support. Second, fight to win. Third, honor those who serve. And fourth, remember: A strong military is necessary not just to fight wars, but to prevent them. No sane outfit will mess with a superpower that not only has the means to fight, but the will to punish aggressors.

Ronald Reagan first and famously characterized Vietnam as a “noble cause” during the 1980 presidential campaign. The left and the media howled. The American people elected him, and reelected him, by convincing margins, both in the popular vote and the Electoral College, that have never been seen since.

Here is Reagan’s succinct statement on the cause’s nobility in 1988:

And yet after more than a decade of desperate boat people, after the killing fields of Cambodia, after all that has happened in that unhappy part of the world, who can doubt that the cause for which our men fought was just? It was, after all, however imperfectly pursued, the cause of freedom; and they showed uncommon courage in its service. Perhaps at this late date we can all agree that we’ve learned one lesson: that young Americans must never again be sent to fight and die unless we are prepared to let them win.

That final statement is worth noting at a time when we have a president for whom “victory” is unfortunately the virtual equivalent of a four-letter word.

This is a long, read-the-whole-thing piece. Have a hanky at the ready.

From Manassas Park, Virginia (HT Michelle Malkin):

There are mothers who will spend today missing sons and daughters fighting overseas. There are women who have lost children in those wars, for whom Mother’s Day will never be the same.

And then there is Eva Briseno.

Joseph Briseno Jr., Eva’s 27-year-old son, is one of the most severely wounded soldiers ever to survive. A bullet to the back of his head in a Baghdad marketplace in 2003 left him paralyzed, brain-damaged and blind, but awake and aware of his condition.

Eva takes care of “Jay” in her suburban Virginia home where the family room has been transformed into an intensive care unit, with the breathing machine and tubes he needs to stay alive.

Try to imagine this life.

Each day starts with two hours of bowel care, an ordeal as awful as it sounds. She labors over his body, brushing his teeth, suctioning fluid from his lungs, exercising his limp arms and legs, and turning him every other hour to prevent bedsores.

She sleeps a few hours at a time, when the schedule says it is her turn, often slumped in exhaustion by his side. …

On Friday, in the course of a general complaint about the relative lack of coverage of the flooding in Nashville and much of Tennessee, the Associated Press received a deserved compliment for its coverage from Investors Business Daily, which correctly implied that AP can’t make its subscribers publish its output.

But IBD missed one item, and understandably so. On Wednesday, the AP ran an article whose purpose seemed to be either to arouse class envy at a time when people should be pulling together, or to criticize the state and federal relief effort’s priorities. That article is no longer present at AP’s main web site. Why?

The item can still be found in about 150 places as of 11 p.m. Eastern time. (That may seem like a lot, but in context it isn’t.) Once you see the tenor and tone of the coverage, you’ll understand why the wire service might have wanted to pretend it never published the coverage of reporters Sheila Burke and Travis Loller.

Unfortunately, since I didn’t do a screen grab, I’m not sure of the exact title AP used at its main site. But here are examples of headlines employed at subscribing sites, one of which is probably the one the AP’s main site also used:

• Dubuque Telegraph Herald — “Flood Swamps the Poor”
• Salt Lake Tribune and most others — “Flood recovery worries poorer victims in Nashville”
• WCBS in New York — “Poor Appear Harder Hit By Flooding In Tenn.” (oddly, the window title is “Crews Search for Bodies and Waters Recede in Tennessee After Deadly Flooding”
• Dallas Morning News — “Residents feeling slighted in flooded north Nashville”
• Northwest Herald — “Victims feel alone in Nashville”
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch — “Flood response bypassed some”
• Deseret News — “Flood recovery worries less-affluent victims in Nashville”
• At several TV stations — “Nashville’s honky-tonks quieted by deadly flooding”
• About a dozen CBS-affiliated outlets (example here) reworked the headline that appears at Google to “Dozens Killed Across South After Severe Flash Flooding” without changing the underlying report. But when one visits the actual report, the title is “Poor Appear Harder Hit By Flooding In Tenn.”
• The Washington Examiner reworked the headline, which is consistent between Google News and the Examiner’s web site, to “Nashville’s famed music quieted by flooding.”

Here are key paragraphs from the longer version of Burke’s and Loller’s report (bolds are mine):

Raging torrents had shot furniture through walls and pushed houses into the street near Nashville’s historically black Fisk and Tennessee State universities. Only a few tents tops poked above the floodwaters on Wednesday where dozens of homeless once lived along the still-swollen banks of the Cumberland River.

As the city’s vibrant country music scene gets the attention, less affluent victims wondered Wednesday how they will recover from the deadly floods.

“Being a minority we’re the last on the list. That’s just the way it is,” said Troy Meneese, a 47-year-old custodian, as he aired out water-logged shoes, a couch and chairs in his yard in front of his brick one-story home in north Nashville.

… The flooding caused by record-breaking rains of more than 13 inches in two days sent water rushing through hundreds of homes, forcing thousands to evacuate — some by boat and canoe — affecting both rich and poor in this metropolitan area of about 1 million.

In Meneese’s neighborhood, some residents and community members said they felt neglected, especially compared to the attention they believed country music attractions and more affluent neighborhoods were receiving.

… Police conducted house-to-house searches in some parts of north Nashville on Wednesday, but some wondered if they should have come earlier.

“Search and rescue teams seem like they just got here. It’s a little late,” said Howard Jones, 47, a pastor who came to the area to see if he could help. He said the neighborhood was particularly vulnerable because many elderly residents lived there.

… Nashville’s mayor and other officials visited a relief center in the north Nashville where food, water, tetanus shots and recovery information are available. The mayor, who has identified the area as one of the hardest hit, said it was important for officials to be on the scene checking on the response effort.

Searches on key word strings in the article at AP’s main web site (all without quotes) comes up empty (“Raging Torrents”), empty (“As Nashville’s Cumberland River continued to recede Wednesday”), and empty (“some residents and community members said they felt neglected”).

There seem to be only two plausible possibilities as to why the article has disappeared at AP’s main site, neither of them complimentary:

• The better explanation would be that the wire service was embarrassed by the bitter comments it reported. It’s perfectly understandable that people who have just lost everything might lash out and say things they would never ordinarily say; it’s another thing to opportunistically report them to create more generalized resentment and anger. But such reporting should never have occurred in the first place, and as noted in the list above, AP can’t just close Pandora’s box and pretend it never happened.
• The worse explanation would be that comments such as those reported bear an eerie resemblance to some of the understandable but overheated rhetoric that came out of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The anger quickly got directed at President George W. Bush, even though local and state authorities were primarily responsible for poor preparedness and early lack of response. Perhaps AP higher-ups saw some potential for blowback into the Obama administration, and put the kibosh on Burke’s and Loller’s work to minimize that possibility.

Neither explanation is acceptable. What AP published is part of the historical record (the “first draft of history,” if you will), and should stay out there. The wire service has no good justification for trying to make it disappear.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The editorialists at Investors Business Daily are not pleased with the values on display in the relative importance given to three major stories: the deaths of 11 oil rig workers off the Gulf Coast, the oil spill that resulted from that rig’s collapse, and the historic flooding in Tennessee that has taken at least 30 lives.

Here’s the newspaper’s take:

What does it say when 11 men who perish on an exploding oil platform, or 30 poor souls who die in a 1,000-year Tennessee flood, get less coverage than two oil-soaked birds? It says news is driven from the left.

It is to the credit of the one media outlet that reported the paparazzi-like scrums of reporters trailing rescue workers as they tried to clean off one oil-soaked gannet caught in the oil spill off Louisiana waters after a rig exploded in the Gulf on April 20. Not only did the U.S. and European media obsess breathlessly about the bird, and later about a brown pelican that followed, they seemed to be panting for more.

That’s because birds are convenient tools for driving the radical green agenda to halt all oil drilling. TV media and the national papers pounded the bird story because it served a political purpose.

… A look at the Los Angeles Times’ oil spill coverage, for one, shows birds featured daily in its blog and paper while the 11 oil platform workers have barely registered. On the blog, the news of the deaths wasn’t acknowledged until May 5 …

… The bird obsession looks even worse when one looks north to the flooding that’s engulfed two-thirds of Tennessee and its neighbors in a natural environmental disaster.

… The Associated Press has done some excellent team coverage of these events, but it hasn’t been featured much in national news, nor in major newspapers.

News searches done at about 11:00 a.m Eastern Time reveal the following:

• A Google News search on “Nashville flood” (not in quotes) comes back with “about 6,780 results.”
• A Google News search on “gulf oil spill” (not in quotes) comes back with “about 17,400 results,” or about 2.5 times as many.
• A seven-day search at the IBD-complimented Associated Press’s main site on “Nashville flood” (not in quotes) returns 11 stories (with one interesting omission, which I’ll get to this evening).
• A seven-day AP search on “gulf oil spill” (not in quotes) returns 116 stories. Only a few of them are unrelated.

I’d say IBD’s contentions are pretty solid, and their explanations a great deal more credible than the one offered by Newsweek’s Andrew Romano as noted Friday by NewsBuster colleague Noel Sheppard.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

This one will not be filed under “Mother’s Day Role-Modeling Behavior.”

In this story, it’s hard to figure out what’s more outrageous: The willful defacement of property — in this case, a brand-new $5 million pedestrian bridge by an alleged adult in her mid-40s who is the mother of a teenaged son — or the near non-reaction to wanton vandalism perpetrated in broad daylight by her and others on what is supposed to be a source of pride in Detroit.

That’s even before getting to the news that one of the vandals, Oneita Jackson, is a copy editor at the Detroit Free Press who has her own Freep blog called “O Street.”

On March 21, Ms. Jackson, from her establishment media perch, admonished readers to “Agree or Disagree, Just Be Civil.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Here’s part of the story at the Detroit News (bolds are mine; HT the BlogProf via Instapundit; video is at the link; the bridge opened on Wednesday, May 5):

Vandals mar new pedestrian bridge in Detroit
$5M pedestrian link in Mexicantown open for less than one day

Less than a day after it opened, the Mexicantown Bagley Avenue Pedestrian Bridge was vandalized, Michigan Department of Transportation officials said.

… In fact, an MDOT employee’s video camera caught one woman as she used a colored pen to scrawl on a bench in the middle of the 400-foot-long bridge.

“Yes, it was me,” said Oneita Jackson, a copy editor at the Detroit Free Press and author of Sunday’s “O Street” blog.

“I did it. If you see a person with a green pen … dressed in black slacks and a red top, that’s me. I was excited about the event and wanted to put my name on it.”

Jackson eventually put away the marker and said “Oh, I guess I shouldn’t be doing this,” the tape showed. As a blogger, she has written about her efforts as a mom to raise her 16-year-old son and encourage citizens to be more patient and civil.

… A bridge engineer also caught three young women in the act of vandalism early Thursday afternoon, said MDOT chief engineer Victor Judnic.

“They were carving up the wooden bench,” Judnic said.

Judnic said MDOT had no intention to take legal action against the vandals.

“We don’t do that,” Judnic said.

Well sir, as long as you “don’t do that,” don’t be surprised if the vandalism continues.

Civilization circles the drain, and those who could and should be defending it just stand by.

As to Ms. Jackson, on this Mother’s Day I would suggest that she refer back to a quote in her March 6 blog post (“Hey Detroit, Pay Attention to Newark”), wherein a high school principal reacts to the shooting of a student there:

“What kind of sickness have you learned? This is not normal. I want you to know it’s not normal.”

In case you missed it, and you must have, ma’am, it’s also not “normal” for a mid-40s adult in a responsible position in the community to want to “put my name” on someone else’s property and deface it.

Ms. Jackson should be fearing for her job. After her Saturday morning apology, which seems mostly sincere, my guess is that she’s not. Her observation that her handiwork is gone (“Wednesday’s rain probably washed it away”) will probably save her.

Instapundit makes a media-related point: “If she were a Tea Partier, it would be a sign of incipient fascism or something.” And her employer might have relieved her of her duties by now.

I’d better stop right here. Heaven forbid that I write something Ms. Jackson might characterize as “uncivil.”

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From my friend Dan Bare, Executive Director of Clermont County Veterans Commission. Dan and his fellow warriors continue to fight the good fight today through outreach and education; spearheading the effort for more & more accurate teaching of American History in our schools, to name one example.

35th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War
Dan Bare
Friday, May 7, 2010

This past Friday, April 30, 2010 marked the 35th anniversary of the Communist victory of the Vietnam War.

In my opinion, our military men and women did not lose the war but were actually prevented from winning by our own politicians, the media and many United States citizens and protesters that did not have the stomach for war.

…I can’t change history but I would like to offer some myth-busting facts and statistics about the Vietnam Veteran.

Myth: The United States lost the war in Vietnam

Reality: The American military did not lose a battle of any consequence. This included the Tet Offensive in 1968, which was a major military defeat for the Viet Cong (VC) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

The fall of Saigon happened on April 30, 1975, two years after the American military left Vietnam. How could we lose a war we had already stopped fighting?

Myth: Most Vietnam Veterans were drafted

Reality: Two-thirds of the men who served in Vietnam were volunteers. In contrast, two thirds of the men who served in World War II were drafted.

…Hollywood movie producers and most of the media did great harm to the Vietnam veteran by always portraying them in a very negative way that was just not true! Jane Fonda was a traitor in 1972 and in 1999 was profiled by ABC’s “100 years of great women.”

Final thought: War is brutal, very unfair and innocent people will get killed. Once engaged, always let the military do their job and self-serving politicians should stay out of the way. If we get in it, we should only be there to win it! Anything else does even more damage, just ask a Vietnam veteran.

Amen, brother, and thank you for your service. The entire piece is here.

Make no mistake, the efforts of men & women across this nation like Dan are as crucial to the correction of this country as Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine were to its founding.

If a genuine, sustained economic recovery is truly underway, why can’t the government show us the money? This would appear to be a question the establishment press has no interest in answering.

As seen in the graphic at the right (HT to an e-mailer), when the government’s Monthly Treasury Statement is released next Wednesday, anticipation is that it will show an April deficit of $85 billion. That estimate comes from the Congressional Budget Office, which released its Monthly Budget Review yesterday.

The government almost always runs an April surplus because it’s the biggest month for tax collections. Individual filers have to settle up what’s left of their previous year’s liabilities with Uncle Sam on April 15, and the first installments of current-year individual and corporate estimated taxes are also due.

But as seen in the chart that follows, April receipts have cratered during the past two years by stunning amounts compared to April 2007 and 2008. The April 2010 plunge continues a nearly unbroken trend of year-over-year declines in monthly receipts going back almost two years:

(Sources: last Daily Treasury Statements issued in April 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, saved at web host; Monthly Treasury Statements for April 2007, 2008, and 2009)

The main reason April has turned so ugly during the past two years isn’t spending (though that has of course increased significantly). The $158 billion reduction in receipts explains almost 65% of the $244 billion two-year swing (from +$159 to -$85). The 46% drop in the “Direct Paid Income and Employment Taxes” line item is the primary culprit, accounting for $119 billion of the $158 billion collections reduction. Closely-held corporations and the self-employed are not generating nearly as much taxable income as was the case two years ago.

Associated Press searches on “CBO” and “Congressional Budget Office” at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time returned nothing relevant and nothing relevant, respectively. A Google News search on “Congressional Budget Office” returned four items. One item from the AP is literally a data dump of information that is mostly from March. Two of the other three items are a brief report from Dow Jones and a Buffalo News column by Robert Murphy of the Pacific Research Institute that analyzes the country’s dismal long-term financial outlook while it stays on its current trajectory.

The final item at the Hill is a probable preview of the press spin when the Monthly Treasury Statement comes out next week: “Oh boy, the deficit’s not so bad.” Entitled “Budget deficit about $800 billion, unlikely to hit projected levels,” here’s the money paragraph:

Record deficits of more than $1.5 trillion for this year were estimated by the Office of Management and Budget and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget. But with only five months left in the fiscal year, shortfalls are unlikely to reach those levels.

Well of course not, as I explained early last month when the administration manipulatively threw a $115 billion non-cash item into March’s reported results that created a supposedly “dramatic” deficit reduction:

In essence what happened is that the administration pushed as much “bad news” (asset writedowns) as it could into last year’s financial reporting, since last year was going to be a disaster no matter what. But since they overdid it with the (TARP-related) writedowns last year (”Gosh, how did that happen?”), they can make this year look better than it really has been.

Until the monthly reports show us consistently increasing amounts of money coming in from economic activity and genuine attempts at controlling spending, any evidence presented that Uncle Sam’s fiscal situation is improving will be illusory.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

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

______________________________________________

Related: When I submitted the column, I had lost track of where I found the link indicating that there was concern during the fall of 1938 over coercion of those “receiving relief” in the upcoming November off-year elections. Here it is, from the New York Times on Election Eve (article text here and below obtained from ProQuest library database):

“Relief workers” were those who were doing jobs at FDR-created entities like the WPA (Works Progress Administration). “Relief recipients” were those also referred to as being “on the dole,” a predecessor of the system that turned into “welfare” (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) in the 1960s.

RNC Chair Hamilton’s concerns about WPA-related coercion were not without foundation:

More generalized vote fraud was also a legitimate worry:

The only difference in the Democratic Party’s electoral conduct seven decades later is in its degree of sophistication. Just because ACORN isn’t officially around any more doesn’t change the party’s primal impulse towards coercion and fraud to retain its power.

Columbus Bureau Chief Jim Provance at the Toledo Blade is a one-man “Name That Party” creativity machine:

• In March of last year (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), in a story about late financial reports from Ohio’s state government, Provance identified State Auditor Mary Taylor, who criticized Governor Ted Strickland’s administration for being so tardy with the numbers that they could not be audited in time for biennial budget deliberations — but never identified Strickland or anyone else involved in the snafu as a Democrat. NewsBusters commenter “Hoosierem reported that Provance, in response to a subsequent e-mail, had stated that “I should have taken the next step of noting the governor’s party.”
• Then in May (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the slow-learning Blade reporter, in a story about the indictment of Anthony Gutierrez, a former aide to disgraced Democrat and former Attorney General Marc Dann (pictured at top right in a Blade photo), never named Guttierez’s party — but did name the party of the county prosecutor who indicted him.

Provance’s latest exercise in Name That Party creativity (HT to Maggie Thurber in an e-mail) revolves around Dann’s guilty pleas on Thursday to ethics violations. This time, he got in a “clever” dig about Republican scandals going back a half-decade in his opening sentence, but never specifically ID’d Dann as a Democrat, referring only to “a Democratic wave” and “fellow Democrats” — in Paragraph 11.

Here are the relevant excerpts from Provance’s presumptive prose:

Ex-Ohio Attorney General Dann admits guilt on 2 counts

Marc Dann, who rode Republican scandal into statewide office four years ago, stood before a judge himself Friday and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor ethics violations that will keep him from holding a public job for seven years.

The usually defiant and combative Mr. Dann, who resigned in disgrace just 16 months into his tenure as Ohio attorney general, told the judge he accepted responsibility, but outside the courtroom he questioned the resources put into the two-year investigation of him.

“As you can see from the types of things that I was ultimately charged with, certainly the expenditures on the investigation were out of proportion to the alleged conduct,” Mr. Dann said. “But I do take responsibility. I should have exercised better oversight and stronger oversight, and I didn’t.”

He was fined a total of $1,000 for the two charges and ordered to pay court costs and serve 500 hours of community service for improperly providing money from his campaign and inaugural committees to two aides and friends for unofficial use and for filing a false financial disclosure report that omitted additional sources of income.

(Skip to Paragraph 10)

… Now Mr. Dann is worried about losing a law license at a time when he is trying to re-establish a private practice and is facing a very public divorce.

He had said previously that he even surprised himself when he defeated veteran Republican Betty Montgomery in 2006, riding a Democratic wave that washed the GOP out of every statewide executive office save one. A year and a half later, he was pressured by Republicans and fellow Democrats to resign after Mr. Gutierrez was accused of sexual harassment by two female employees, allegations largely substantiated by an internal investigation.

When the results of that investigation were announced, Mr. Dann confessed to having had his own consensual, extramarital affair with his office scheduler, an affair that he said may have set a poor example for others in his office.

Provance’s claim that Dann’s victory in November 2006 was the result of “Republican scandal” is extremely shaky, given that 2006 was generally a good year Democrats. Strickland defeated GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, who had been a maverick in Bob Taft’s administration while serving as Secretary of State and was not tainted by the Taft’s ethical violations, by over 20 points. Dann won by 5. It’s highly doubtful that Dann’s promises to be clean and ethical were anywhere near as important as the Strickland campaign’s promises to “Turnaround Ohio,” meaning the state’s then suffering economy. After three years with Strickland, that economy is now seriously ailing.

Speaking of Strickland, his name (naturally) never comes up in Provance’s piece.

Anyway, heckuva Job, Jimbo. You’ll have to excuse me if I have a hard time believing that you’re even trying to play it straight.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Catch-up:

• The Institute for Supply Management’s indices had another very good month overall, with the Manufacturing Index (roughly 15% of the economy) coming in at 60.4% (up from 59.6% the previous month) and the Non Manufacturing Index (NMI, the other 85%) recording a 55.4% (the same as March). Any reading above 50% indicates expansion. The Manufacturing Index’s empoyment component was solidly in expansion mode, while the NMI’s employment component was still barely in contraction, and has been in that mode for 28 months.
• Vehicle sales were up almost 20% in April 2010 over April 2009, but it’s easy to forget that last year was exceptionally awful (down 34% from April 2008). Doing the math shows that April 2010′s results were over 20% lower than April 2008 (April 2009′s .66 times 1.2 equals .792, or a 20.8% drop from ’08).
• Durable goods news was upbeat, especially looking at the not seasonally adjusted numbers.

Employment report run-up:

• ADP’s report came in at +32,000 private sector jobs added. Thanks to revisions to previous months, ADP has shown modest increases for three consecutive months (+3K for Feb., +19K for March).
• This WSJ report carries a prediction of 180,000 jobs added, with the unemployment rate staying the same at 9.7%; it says a 0.1% uptick to 9.8% “cannot be ruled out.”
• This Bloomberg report at Business Week has a wide range of predictions (between +75K and +300K for jobs, and 9.5% to 9.8% for unemployment), and a consensus of 100,000 private-sector jobs added.

Readers here know that I think focusing on the actual (not seasonally adjusted, or NSA) job changes is where the action really is, so stay tuned for that later this morning after the government’s report, which focuses on seasonally adjusted (SA) figures, comes out at 8:30.

The News:

Well, this is the classic mixed bag:

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 290,000 in April, the unemployment rate edged up to 9.9 percent, and the labor force increased sharply, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in manufacturing, professional and business services, health care, and leisure and hospitality. Federal government employment also rose, reflecting continued hiring of temporary workers for Census 2010.

… The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for February was revised from -14,000 to +39,000, and the change for March was revised from 162,000 to 230,000.

So we have a depressing higher unemployment rate accompanied by impressive (seasonally adjusted) cumulative job gains of 411,000 (April’s 290K plus Feb. and March’s changes of +53K and +68K).

As noted, more will come later.

_________________________________________________

UPDATE: Thanks to rounding in different directions, the unemployment rate increase is not as bad as it seems. Using the figures at the bottom of this table, the rate went from 9.749% in March to 9.863% in April, a net change of .114%. Also at the same table, the number of people working as used in the unemployment rate calculation (seasonally adjusted) since December’s absolute bottom has increased by a very strong 1.66 million.

As to the job adds from the Establishment Survey used in the official jobs added/lost data, that info is pretty strong too, and is basically back to where it was during the mid-2000s:

The only caution is that the BLS’s birth/death model generated a pretty high 188,000 of those 1.158 million jobs.

So it may be that the damage wrought by the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy since June 2008 has ended. But if so, what horrific and mostly avoidable damage it has been.

There is one considerable fly in the ointment here: The jobs added during April didn’t generate as much of an increase in tax receipts as one might expect. Given that federal withholdings from paychecks are mostly due within mere days of when people are paid, that seems out of sync. Additionally, total tax receipts in April, particularly what I have been calling “receipts from economic activity,” came in below April 2009, and wayyyy below April 2008 and 2007 (more details later). Again, that seems out of sync with reported employment and GDP growth.

From Philadelphia:

May 7, 2010 / 01:06 am

His daughter with trisomy 18 is a loving child at the center of his family’s life, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum has said. Though she has taught character and virtue to everyone he meets, he lamented that so many children with her condition are aborted or face doctors with a “negative perception” towards the severely disabled.

In a Wednesday column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Santorum told of how he and his wife were aggrieved when doctors told them their newborn child, Isabella Maria, had a condition which was “incompatible with life.”

Their eighth child, Bella was born with trisomy 18, 90 percent of whose victims die before or during birth and 90 percent of survivors die within the first year. Most of those diagnosed in the womb are aborted.

The infant was baptized the same day she was born. Rick Santorum and his wife Karen then spent “every waking hour at her bedside, giving her a lifetime’s worth of love and care,” the former senator wrote. “However, not only did she not die; she came home in just 10 days.”

Bella was placed on home hospice care, but the hospice doctor graphically described how Bella would die. He claimed the best Bella’s parents could hope for was that she would die of the common cold.

The Santorums discontinued hospice care so that they and their doctors could focus on Bella’s health, “not her death.”

Santorum praised his wife’s “night and day” care for Bella and her fight with health care providers and insurance companies to secure care for Bella.

“Being the parent of a special child gives one exceptional insight into the negative perception of the disabled among many medical professionals, particularly when they see your child as having an intellectual disability,” he explained in his Philadelphia Inquirer column.

They had difficulty finding doctors who were both experienced in treating trisomy 18 and who saw Bella not as a fatal diagnosis but as “a wanted and loved daughter and sister, as well as a beautiful gift from God.”

At the age of three months, Bella needed minor but “vital” surgery. Some doctors said she wouldn’t survive surgery or said it was “not recommended” because of her genetic conditions.

“In other words, that her life wasn’t worth saving,” the former Senator interpreted.

The Santorums found Dr. Thane Blinman, who has had several trisomy 18 patients who did well.

Former Sen. Santorum said that Bella’s second birthday will come next week. Despite the “constant anxiety” of two close brushes with death and many sleepless nights, he said his family has been “inspired by her fighting spirit.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Go here for Santorum’s original Philly Inquirer column.

Consistency, thy name is AP.

The Associated Press’s story roll-out on former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann’s anticipated guilty pleas to ethics violations followed the usual script:

• The initial report, carried here at Cleveland.com, failed to mention Dann’s Democratic Party affiliation.
• A later extended report breaks down and reveals Dann’s party membership in its ninth of eleven paragraphs.
• Meanwhile, the local Columbus Dispatch, which would be less obligated to reveal Dann’s party affiliation because its readership is more likely to already know it, told readers Dann is a Democrat in the second paragraph of its coverage.

The name of Ohio’s governor, Ted Strickland, doesn’t show up anywhere in either entity’s coverage.

Here is most of the AP’s brief initial story by reporter Andrew Welsh-Huggins:

The former Ohio attorney general who resigned after a sexual harassment scandal is expected to plead guilty to ethics violations involving improper payments to staff.

A law enforcement source familiar with the investigation tells The Associated Press that Marc Dann will plead guilty in Franklin County Municipal Court Friday to two misdemeanors.

The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the charges had not been formally filed.

The charges involve payments Dann made from his campaign fund to staff members for living expenses and a $5,000 loan he made from his elected office’s transition account to a staffer.

In his longer story, Welsh-Huggins did the party avoidance dance until Paragraph 9, missing several obvious opportunities that arose before then:

Dann, a former Youngstown lawyer and Democratic state senator, was elected in 2006 as part of a Democratic sweep of four of five statewide offices. He beat former Attorney General Betty Montgomery, who was trying to win back her position after serving as state auditor for four years. Montgomery, a popular Republican, was historically the top vote-getter in statewide elections.

Dann admitted having an affair with a subordinate and later resigned in May 2008 following a sexual harassment scandal in his office.

At the time the scandal became known, (Leo) Jennings and (Anthony) Gutierrez were sharing the condo with Dann. Investigations found evidence that the three men hosted young female staffers on the premises, sometimes for alcohol-laced pizza parties. One of the alleged harassment incidents took place there.

Meanwhile, James Nash at the Dispatch got to party affiliation pretty quickly:

Former Attorney General Marc Dann is expected to plead guilty Friday to two misdemeanor counts of illegally padding the income of two aides and failing to report some of his own income on disclosure forms.

Dann, a Democrat who resigned after a scandal in his office two years ago, could face as much as a year in prison and $2,000 in fines. He also would be barred from state office for seven years.

The AP story is likely to be read outside of the State of Ohio, which would seem to dictate that it would want to inform readers who otherwise wouldn’t know what party Dann represents. But the wire service has been doing the opposite for so long that one almost can’t help but conclude that it’s deliberate, and that there is not intent to ever change — which mandates that it be exposed here so that at least a few readers outside of Ohio get the full truth.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.