It would appear, based on the graphic tease reproduced at the right and the underlying content, that the folks putting together videos at the Associated Press didn’t get the memo that they should go as soft as possible on North Carolina Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge.

Etheridge arguably committed assault “last week” when approached on a public street. The description of what occurred and its aftermath at AP video is quite a bit stronger than what is found in AP Reporter Martha Waggoner’s Monday evening text report, as you will see shortly.

Despite having over 400 words with which to work, Waggoner also failed to record a comment — or even a “no comment” — from anyone else in the Democratic Party, or to give any indication that she or anyone else at AP tried to contact House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, any other Democrat in a leadership position, or anyone in the Obama administration.

Here’s what the video and accompanying description look like in the AP’s Raw Video report, which re-runs the original video without the original producer’s interspersed words:

Now let’s look how Waggoner chose to describe the physical actions that occurred (bolded), and how obsessed she is with the video’s origins:

A Democratic congressman apologized Monday after video posted online showed him swatting at the camera, demanding that two men taping him identify themselves and grabbing one of them by the wrist and neck.

“I deeply and profoundly regret my reaction and I apologize to all involved,” Rep. Bob Etheridge of North Carolina said in a statement. “No matter how intrusive and partisan our politics can become, this does not justify a poor response.”

The video was posted on websites owned by Andrew Breitbart, the conservative Web entrepreneur who also released video of workers for the community organizing group ACORN counseling actors posing as a pimp and prostitute.

It shows two men approaching Etheridge with a camera on a Washington street. He swats at the camera and repeatedly asks the men who they are. When they say they are students, he grabs one by the wrist and quickly by the back of the neck before pulling him against his side.

… In a telephone interview from London, Breitbart declined to name the students who recorded the video, saying he wanted to protect them. The two do not work for Breitbart and were not paid, he said.

A Breitbart employee found the video online, edited it and posted it, he said. A story accompanying the video on a Breitbart website says the video was recorded last week. Etheridge declined to say when the encounter occurred.

As was the case with the AP’s unbylined initial report discussed yesterday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Waggoner did not go to any legal experts to get their opinion as to whether Etheridge’s actions could be seen as an instance of criminal assault.

It’s not an argumentative leap to say that the if a Republican or conservative had committed such an action, the AP and other establishment media outlets would not be leaving the GOP leadership and other party members alone, would be giving the incident far more play than it has received thus far, and would likely be using stronger words to describe the physical aspects of what happened.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

“I Blame Bush” (/sarc): From the New York Times (yeah, that’s right; HT Tom Maguire, who also cites other sources) — “Efforts to Repel Gulf Oil Spill Are Described as Chaotic.”

There’s this little nugget in the Times piece from Democratic Senator Ben Nelson: “The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control.”.

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Investors Business Daily (as usual) nails it, especially in the item I have bolded:

We have the secretary of the interior caught in a lie about experts endorsing a six-month moratorium on offshore drilling that will do more damage to the Gulf economy than the Deepwater spill itself.

Has anyone seen the FEMA director in the Gulf or on the side of a milk carton? Where is Energy Secretary Chu? Off polishing a solar panel somewhere perhaps?

Speaking of the moratorium, the Obama administration now expects offshore oil rig workers who lose wages as a result of the administration’s moratorium on deep-water oil and gas exploration to be reimbursed by BP, White House spokeswoman Moira Mack said last week. That is just goofy. How is British Petroleum responsible for government-mandated layoffs?

You’d think the administration could have found out there is a company in Maine able to produce 90,000 feet of containment boom a day. Why was the incident commander, Adm. Thad Allen, unaware of that fact until ABC’s Jake Tapper made him aware of it in an interview?

We’ve referred to the Gulf oil spill as Obama’s Katrina, and the description grows more apt every day. We remember the school buses that could have evacuated thousands sitting idly in a flooded parking lot for lack of leadership.

Now we have perhaps hundreds of thousands of feet of containment boom sitting idle in a Maine warehouse.

Here’s an avenue of inquiry, especially given the absences of the top officials IBD noted: Is this whole saga being managed by czars like Carol Browner who are in effect bypassing duly confirmed Cabinet officials whose job it’s supposed to be to handle catastrophes like this, and who would ordinarily be in a better position than the czars to handle it?

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“(Tennessee) Democrat on GOP’s female lawmakers: ‘Lift their skirts to find out if they are women‘” (HT Michelle Malkin).

Hmm. Maybe the relevant landscape in the Volunteer State is different, but in general, starting with this comparison, it doesn’t seem wise for Dems to go there, the now-married Kirsten Powers (sorry, guys) constituting a notable exception.

From Mexico City:

Jun 14, 2010 / 04:04 pm

The spokeswoman of the Institute for the Formation of Family Values in Mexico, Claudia Simental Flores, called on Mexicans last week to vote for candidates “who see public office as an opportunity for real service to their constituents,” including the protection of life from the moment of conception. In an article published in El Grafico, Flores criticized Mexico City official, Leticia Bonifaz, who said there was a lack of “political will” for the legalization of abortion at the national level.

“There is a ‘lack of political will’ to attack human life, which is an inherent right that every human being possesses? Thank goodness this kind of will to attack defenseless human beings does not exist,” Flores said, noting that 17 Mexican states have enacted legal protections for the unborn.

She also stressed that those in public office are not there to take advantage of their posts and promote laws contrary to human dignity, but rather to work “for the defense of the rights of every human being, including the unborn.”

“How can we trust in those who commit themselves to defending those least protected, but as time goes on – hungry for votes and power – they act against innocent human beings, not even giving them the legitimate right to live?” she asked. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog early Wednesday afternoon (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

Related: I did not post this question at the WEOZ post, but it is one that demands an answer — If the “going Galt” phenomenon is really a figment of libertarians’ and free-market believers’ imaginations, why are federal collections after 11 months of positive economic growth only now beginning (maybe – we’ll see for sure in June and then September) to come in higher (and only slightly so, with help from items like interest from the Federal Reserve that has nothing to do with the condition of the economy) than a year ago?

A sitting congressman allegedly commits assault on a public sidewalk, is caught on video doing so (link is to the related Eyeblast.tv video and blog post), and “apologizes.”

Note that the incident took place “last week,” according to the linked BigGovernment.com post, which means that Etheridge didn’t see the need for an apology until the video went viral.

So … who does the intrepid Associated Press attempt to go to for comment? The Congressman? Apparently not, as you will see; the AP must see his “apology” as the end of the story. The person whom Etheridge arguably assaulted? Legal experts, who could weigh in on whether the congressman could be arrested and and charged? House or Democratic Party colleagues? No-no-no.

Get a load, in the final paragraph of what will probably end up being a brief initial report, of who the AP believes owes it a comment first and foremost:

Yeah, that’s right. Andrew Breitbart.

You have to wonder, especially since they felt compelled to bring up the ACORN sting videos, if the folks at AP check under their beds at night for vast right wing conspirators before turning in.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

If think frequent use of the A-word is offensive, even in a humor vid, don’t watch.

If you’re okay with it in context (i.e., the president using the word, thereby opening himself up to well-deserved ridicule), here it is:

I especially like how Matt Lauer is portrayed as the liberal lapdog he really is.

From the “We’re in the Best of Hands” Dept.:

• June 8, at Pajamas Media: “Miles of Oil Containment Boom Sit in Warehouse, Waiting for BP or U.S. to Use.”
• June 11, via Jake Tapper’s Political Punch blog at ABC (HT Hot Air, using Hot Air’s title): “Allen: Uh, no one told me about Maine boom company.”
• Then there’s Tapper’s June 13 follow-up (“Why Isn’t That Maine Boom Being Deployed to the Gulf?”), where the government’s/BP’s goal seems to be to figure out obfuscatory reasons why they shouldn’t buy it.

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In the course of doing other research, I came across this list of Obama’s Czars as of August of last year. Has anyone else noticed how the press has abandoned its use of the term?

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Kyle Ann Shiver, at PJM — “… when a president doesn’t even have the good sense or the backbone to have a face-to-face meeting with the BP CEO he is entrusting to fix a national disaster, then he’s not only in over his head, he is drowning.”

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Brian Wilson at Fox News has a great question (“Jones Act Slowing Oil Spill Cleanup?”), but in my view doesn’t really come up with a satisfactory answer.

There’s no love lost between me and thuggish unions, but I find it hard to take that unions would howl over a short-term Jones Act waiver in the name of cleaning up the Gulf. But if the administration is so intimidated by its union “friends” that it feels like it can’t even ask, that’s another matter.

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Compare/Contrast:

• From Richard Wolffe, at the Daily Beast (HT Hot Air) — “The president was not only briefed on the real-time events of the spill, but also on just how bad it would be—and how hard it would be to plug the hole.”
• From Rolling Stone — “Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption.”
• From the New Orleans Times-Picayune — “Oil spill command structure ineffective, officials across coastal Louisiana lament.”
• From Fantasyland, er, Charles Babington of the Associated Press — “Obama stand on oil spill is tough and temperate.”

Real Clear Politics currently has a video highlighting statements by Democratic Congressman James Clyburn Jr. of South Carolina. It teases the video with a question asked by Candy Crowley of CNN.

Once one sees the entire sequence, it’s clear that Clyburn really answered Crowley’s question before she even asked it.

Here’s the full transcript of the vid, which begins after Indiana Republican Congressman Mike Pence had apparently made some points about how steps taken by the Obama administration to revive the economy to the point where it generates meaningful job growth aren’t working. Clyburn’s answer to when his party will stop blaming Bush is in bold:

Clyburn: Uh, Congressman Spence, uh, Pence keeps talkin’ about, uh, the fact that, uh, we are, uh, failing in our approach. We all know exactly what this president inherited, and we will stop talkin’ about that inheritance, uh, when uh Congressman uh Pence and others stop talkin’ about takin’ us back uh to those failed policies.

We’re trying to correct some things that we had absolutely nothin’ to do with, and the American people know that. And I would wish that all of us would get on board this in bipartisan approaches to tryin’ and get our economy stabilized, tryin’ to get our children educated, tryin’ to get workin’ men and women back to, uh, on their jobs, and look for the future, look to the future with –

Crowley: Congressman?

Clyburn: — a little more, uh compassion and bipartisanship.

Crowley: Congressman, I think nobody disagrees with you on the goals. I think that one of the questions that’s cropping up now is, when does the statute of limitations run out on blaming the Bush administration and when is it on you all as the governing — really in the House and the Senate and the White House. When does the economy, uh, become your baby, so to speak?

Clyburn: The economy is our baby. But let’s stop talkin’ about cuttin’ taxes, cuttin’ taxes, cuttin’ taxes. That simplistic approach to tryin’ to get this economy movin’ again, it’s what got us in this, uh-uh, position in the first place. We just had an across the board cut on 95% of workin’ men and women, they got an across the board tax cut. You all know that.

Pence attempted to get in a word or two edgewise during Clyburn’s final two sentences and got nowhere, though Crowley got to him immediately after that. One can also hear Pence chuckling in the background as Crowley asks her “statute of limitations” question.

“Congressman Pence and others” clearly have no plans to “stop talkin’ about takin’ us back to those failed policies” — policies that worked reasonably well from 2003 to 2007, by the way, despite the sand-in-the-wheels impact of the Sarbanes Oxley law. Therefore, the short version of Clyburn’s answer to the question of when the Bush blame game will stop is, “When you guys shut up.” The one-word version is really, “Never.”

As to Clyburn’s contention that “We’re trying to correct some things that we had absolutely nothin’ to do with,” it’s time to remind him and everyone else of the true origins of the housing and mortgage lending bubble. They have everything to do with government-sponsored, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and nothing to do with George Bush, who tried — perhaps not hard enough, but genuinely tried — to stop the madness emanating from those two entities.

The full scope of what these Democrat crony-controlled perpetrated on the nation didn’t become fully known until late last year. It wasn’t “only” lax credit standards, which would have been bad enough. Beyond that, as I noted on December 31 (last item at link; a column with a more complete treatment of the topic is here), there was pervasively fraudulent loan packaging:

… it’s hard to overstate the relevance of this paragraph from Peter J. Wallison in the Wall Street Journal, because it should end the debate over who is primarily responsible for the housing and mortgage-lending messes:

“There is more to this ugly situation. 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.”

The two Democrat-crony government-sponsored enterprises created an artificial market for subprime mortgages by bilking investors for 15 years. If they hadn’t done this, subprimes would never have been able to expand to their mortally dangerous levels. Further, the victims of the misrepresentations logically would appear to include the rating agencies that some state attorneys general are going after as the supposed culprits.

Sorry, Mr. Clyburn, your party and its cronies had everything to do with it. The only reason much of the American public doesn’t know this is because reporters like Candy Crowley haven’t educated themselves about what Fan and Fred really did, and therefore won’t challenge your full-of-baloney assertions. Or worse, they know and let it slide.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

On Friday, Investors Business Daily (IBD) reported on leaked government documents identifying what employer-provided health plans can and cannot do if they wish to retain their “grandfathered” status under the statist health care legislation commonly known as ObamaCare that became law on March 23. One of the items in the government document (83-page PDF) is the following table, which estimates the percentages of large and small employers who will choose to (or be financially forced to) “relinquish” (i.e., give up) their grandfathered status:

In ironic timing, Walecia Konrad at the New York Times, in a personal finance column that appeared in the paper’s Saturday print edition and which was probably written shortly before IBD’s report, inadvertently revealed that ObamaCare itself may be a reason why employer “relinquishments” over the next three years come in well above the mid-range estimates in the table:

As in years past, employers are also grappling with how to offset rising health care costs. Recent years have brought an average cost increase of about 9 percent, said Tracy Watts, a partner at Mercer Health and Benefits. In most cases, companies have been able to absorb about 6 percentage points of those cost increases a year, passing the rest onto employees.

This year Ms. Watts estimates that changes made in response to the health law will add an extra 2 to 3 percent in cost increases, pressuring employers to engage in even more cost-sharing with employees — whether through higher premiums, co-payments or other out-of-pocket costs.

(Senior vice president at Fidelity Consulting Services Pearce) Weaver also reports increased interest by employers in high-deductible insurance plans. “They’ve been effective in managing costs,” he said.

The estimates tabulated above are based on a review of employer plan design changes made from 2008 to 2009. The government did not attempt to look at what might have happened if “an extra 2 to 3 percent” in ObamaCare-driven costs had been piled into the mix.

Facing a higher mandated cost structure even beyond increases in the cost of health care services, many employers will find themselves unable to redesign their plans within ObamaCare’s tight grandfathering constraints while remaining competitive (or possibly viable), and will choose to relinquish, i.e., “de-grandfather.”

The government’s document says that a de-grandfathered employer has two choices:

“Significantly change the terms of the plan or coverage and comply with Affordable Care Act provisions from which grandfathered health plans are excepted; or in the case of a plan sponsor, cease to offer any plan.”

To “comply with Affordable Care Act provisions,” an employer would have to offer a plan with ObamaCare’s specified minimum coverage levels, which are far higher and far more expensive than typical private plans, or, conceivably, offer coverage that is even better.

Left unstated by the government is the fact that employers above a certain very small workforce threshold who “cease to offer any plan” must pay a payroll-based penalty for not doing so.

Unless I’m missing something, the government’s grandfathering regs as drafted also close off the “high-deductible plan” option Konrad cited above. That’s because, as IBD reported, an employer plan will be de-grandfathered if:

• “It eliminates benefits related to diagnosis or treatment of a particular condition.”
• “It increases the percentage of a cost-sharing requirement (such as co-insurance) above its level as of March 23, 2010.”
• “It increases the fixed amount of cost-sharing such as deductibles or out-of-pocket limits by a total percentage measured from March 23, 2010, that is more than the sum of medical inflation plus 15 percentage points.”
• “It increases co-payments from March 23, 2010, by an amount that is the greater of: medical inflation plus 15 percentage points or medical inflation plus $5.”
• “The employer’s share of the premium decreases more than 5 percentage points below what the share was on March 23, 2010.”

Beyond that, the ObamaCare-driven “extra 2 to three percent” to which the Times’s Konrad refers above may be low. One mandate alone may (I would say probably will) cause costs to increase by about that amount. This was explained in a May 25 item found at the Society for Human Resources Management (bold is mine):

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released estimates in May 2010 of the costs and benefits of the requirement to cover adult children up to age 26, as part of a regulation directing employers and insurers on how to carry it out. The new benefit is estimated by HHS to cost $3,380 for each dependent, raising premiums by 0.7 percent in 2011 for employer plans, according to the department’s mid-range estimate. Some 1.2 million young adults are expected to sign up, more than half of whom would have been uninsured.

… there are concerns about the impact of adverse selection with this population. That is, prior to 2014 when all Americans must secure health care coverage, healthy young adults may chose to forgo coverage through their parent’s plan, while the estimated one in six young adults with chronic health issues would be the most likely to accept coverage under their parent’s plan. This self-selection for coverage by the least healthy could result in higher coverage costs than the estimates presented above.

… Bruce Davis, health and group benefits national practice leader at HR consultancy Findley Davies … said as of May 2010 his firm is forecasting an additional cost increase of 2 to 2.5 percent to account for the unknown cost of adding adult children, and an overall health care cost trend increase of around 11 percent for 2011.

Exit questions:

• What in this so-called “Affordable Health Care Act” is really “affordable”?
• Who else (if anyone) in the establishment press will meaningfully address how obviously and utterly untrue the president’s core promise to employees (“If you like your coverage, you can keep it?) has become less than 90 days since ObamaCare passed?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Irondale, Alabama:

Jun 11, 2010 / 08:15 pm

The president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications visited EWTN’s headquarters in Irondale, Alabama on June 1. He visited the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, where he met with EWTN foundress Mother Angelica and gave her a rosary from the Pope.

Michael P. Warsaw, president and chief executive officer of the EWTN Global Catholic Network, told CNA that Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli’s visit was “certainly a great honor” and a “tremendous boost” to the broadcaster’s efforts.

He reported that the archbishop visited Mother Angelica and presented her with a rosary “as a personal gift from the Holy Father.”

The prelate toured the EWTN Television Network, the EWTN Radio Network and the EWTN Religious Catalogue.

“The visit allowed the archbishop to see with his own eyes the incredible work that is done in the service of the Church each day by our dedicated staff,” Warsaw continued. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

‘Tis the “nothing to see here, move along” season.

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

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With one modification, the title of Nat King Cole’s 1963 smash hit (“Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer“) applies to the summer of 2010.

For lazy and hazy, we have a press corps that is being dragged kicking, screaming, and still resisting into critical controversies it should have been all over months ago. I’m referring to the situations of Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff.

With current Pennsylvania congressman and U.S. Senate candidate Sestak, it has been known since February that a job offer intended to persuade him not to challenge the now-vanquished Arlen Specter came from the White House.

Who said so? Sestak himself, time after time after time. Specter himself raised the issue to virtually deaf media ears in March, while resurrecting a term that should long ago have cut through the haze and reentered public consciousness: “Misprision.”

Specifically, from the U.S. Code:
(more…)

In mid-July of last year, the good folks on the editorial board at Investors Business Daily made the following observations about the version of ObamaCare then under consideration by the House:

… Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

… the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states:

“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.

So … Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

The leaked Treasury draft documents (83-page PDF) referred to in an earlier post this morning about employer coverage (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) go beyond vindicating IBD by applying the same prohibitions to group coverage, as the following language found at Page 14 of the document shows:

Therefore, effective March 23:

• Individuals seeking new or alternative coverage can only buy policies that “comply with Affordable Care Act provisions from which grandfathered health plans are exempted.”
• Groups seeking new or alternative coverage (obviously including new groups) are in the same boat.
• As shown earlier this morning, any changes beyond trivial to existing group or individual policies will cause those policies to lose their grandfathered status, forcing those plans to “comply with Affordable Care Act provisions.”

Thus, those looking to purchase new policies or who make even minor changes to existing policies that lead to de-grandfathering will have three choices:

• ObamaCare’s specified minimum coverage levels, which are far higher and far more expensive than typical private plans.
• Coverage that is more generous and therefore even more expensive than ObamaCare’s specified minimum — but not too generous. As commenter Gary Hall at the previous NewsBusters post noted, if one has coverage that is considered overly generous, it will run the risk of being considered a “Cadillac” plan subject to a 60% excise tax. By 2018, when that tax takes effect, the distance between ObamaCare’s high-threshold minimum coverage and where the “Cadillac tax” kicks in may not be very great. A majority of large-employer plans and plans at many small professional enterprises may end up being subject to the tax.
• Paying penalties as individuals for not buying insurance or as employers for not covering employees.

In other words, individuals can’t freely engage in commercial transactions with insurance providers to buy new policies with provisions tailored to their or their employees’ particular needs and circumstances. Entering into a contract that would do so is now illegal, as IBD observed last July.

In an editorial five days after its original, IBD stuck to its guns in the face of withering attacks from the establishment media outlets, “backed up” by the likes of FactCheck.org. Their common complaint was, “Well, they will still be able to buy individual insurance through the state-run ‘exchanges.’” But it was clear then and true now that they will only be able to buy coverage there that is at or above ObamaCare’s specified minimums, and in one so-called “marketplace.” In reality, the “exchanges” are the roach motels of health insurance; once you’re forced in, you can never get out.

It turns out that IBD was absolutely correct last year. For affected individuals and even groups, there is no real “market” for health insurance. There is only ObamaCare, or something even more expensive. Absent repeal, anything else is outlawed.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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BizzyBlog Update, 11:55 p.m.: IBD’s editorialists stood their ground last year under intense pressure. The truth-based community owes them a debt of gratitude for their persistence.

IBD’s vindication calls for a Tom Petty encore —