Here’s Christie at a New Jersey Town Hall meeting (HTs to Anchoress, Hot Air, Wizbang):

Christie’s money line:

“The teacher’s union is about the accumulation and exercise of raw power … When they say it’s ‘for the kids’ — 4% to 5% increases, free health insurance for life ain’t about the kids.”

The factoid:

“(The New Jersey Teachers’ Union) collects $730 a year from every teacher and school employee in the union in mandatory dues. And if you don’t want to join the union, here’s your option: You can be out, (but) you pay 85% of that $730 to be out. It’s like the Hotel California, y’know. You can check in any time you like but you can never leave.”

Okay, the Eagles’ song’s last line is “You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave.” But what a ridiculous situation.

The Associated Press’s Karl Ritter clearly doesn’t recognize how close to parody his report (“Rightist group jolts Sweden’s tolerant self-image”) on the mini-rise of the right-leaning Sweden Democrats Party is (I’ll use “SD” as an abbreviation in this post).

Ritter is not afraid to label the SD, but won’t label others. He begins by telling us that the SD is “far-right” because it is “preaching sharp cuts in immigration and calling Islam the greatest threat to Swedish society” — conveniently, I believe, omitting the term “radical” in describing Islam. Other parties, of course, are “mainstream.”

The AP reporter describes Sweden as having “a self-image of being more tolerant.”

Self-image notwithstanding, a reader who gets as far as the nineteenth paragraph of Ritter’s report learns that “tolerance” is a decidedly one-way street (bolds are mine):

In some cities immigrants are nearly 40 percent of the population, and in certain neighborhoods nearly 90 percent.

What worries many Swedes is the clustering of immigrants in neighborhoods with nicknames such as “Little Baghdad.” Few native Swedes ever set foot in these districts, viewing them as dangerous slums infested with criminal gangs and Islamic fundamentalists.

Critics say the extent of those problems are often exaggerated by the Sweden Democrats, but there is no doubt that Sweden is becoming increasingly segregated.

In the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby, aka “Little Mogadishu,” a 20-year-old Somali woman in a black head scarf says: “Not even a non-Muslim dares to walk around with a short skirt in Rinkeby.” She doesn’t give her name for fear of neighbors’ reaction.

… (SD leader Jimmie) Akesson says he fears Sweden is adapting to the Muslim minority instead of the other way around and has written of Islam’s impact on Swedish society as “our biggest foreign threat since World War II.”

He mentions cases of public schools that have stopped serving pork and no longer celebrate the end of the school year in church.

Akesson also points to attacks against artist Lars Vilks, who drew the prophet Muhammad with a dog’s body. Last month furious protesters chanting “God is Great” in Arabic disrupted Vilks’ guest lecture at Uppsala University and vandals tossed firebombs at his home.

The party’s views have provoked fierce reactions. Some high schools have prohibited party members from handing out flyers on school grounds. In 2007 the party struggled to find a venue for its annual meeting when several conference centers turned it down, citing security concerns.

Police say the party is exposed to “systematic threats” from activists, and the it keeps the address of the Stockholm office secret.

Some of the SD’s “far-right” (by Ritter’s definition) positions include the following:

• “Immigration has become an economic burden, draining the welfare system and channeling jobs to newcomers who work for lower wages.”
• They are “convinced that a large part of the Swedish electorate believes that the immigration policies have been too lax and far too generous.”
• Akesson opines that “Swedishness is not in your skin color or in any part of the body. It’s in your values and how you behave.”

Isn’t it amazing how people who issue “systematic threats” can be described as “activists,” as long as they are either on the left or oppose the positions of a group that appears from here to be mostly interest in fiscal sanity, safety, and preserving a country’s national identity?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It went up here at the Washington Examiner’s OpinionZone Blog just before noon yesterday.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog early Sunday afternoon (link won’t work until then).

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Related: It didn’t occur to me until after I sent the post that the Associated Press headline involved (“Payrolls up 431,000, lifted by census hiring”) was probably written before the government’s Employment Situation report was released. The poor wretch who merely filled in the blank probably had no idea how weak the underlying news was despite the impressive-looking number.

But that’s okay. Neither did the President or his peeps, judging by the following:

Wow. The stock market begged to differ, big-time. The Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ lost, 3.15%, 3.64%, and 3.44%, respectively.

Interesting side observation: While I was doing the post, the 8:53 a.m. version of Jeannine Aversa’s AP report reverted to a two-paragraph 8:39 a.m. rendition.

I’ll reproduce, you decide. Here’s a graphic capture of that 8:53 report:

My suspicion is that AP found it too harsh to handle, and pulled it.

Readers can go to this final rendition by Aversa (saved here for future reference, fair use, and discussion purposes) and decide, other than moving to a reality-based headline, how much a of water-down occurred.

Finally: This poor sap at Daily Kos really had a bad day yesterday, after posting this on Wednesday:

From Los Angeles (saved here in full for future reference and inspirational purposes):

He was a coach when coaching meant something else, long before the job became a pathway to riches and fame.

A coach when student athletes were really students, and the thought of making millions of dollars rolling out basketballs in the gym seemed preposterous.

A coach when it meant more to mold the lives of young men than to proclaim his own greatness.

A coach who offered a new life lesson to his charges almost every day.

“Learn as if you were going to live forever,” he would tell his players. “Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.”

John Wooden didn’t live forever. His tomorrow finally came Friday, when he quietly passed away just months before his 100th birthday.

The end came, fittingly enough, on the same UCLA campus where he tutored a player then known as Lew Alcindor. The same place he seemingly couldn’t lose with Bill Walton.

The place where he dispensed wisdom that his players remembered long after they had forgotten the X’s and O’s.

“What you are as a person is far more important than what you are as a basketball player,” he would say.

His players listened. How could they not when the man giving advice lived by the same code?

He was born on a farm in Indiana without running water or electricity, and his values were as solid as the land his parents worked. He lived into a time he could never have imagined, but nothing changed.

The championships seemed to come as an annual rite of spring. There were 10 of them in all, an accomplishment so staggering that no other college coach will ever come close.

The other statistics blurred together over time, but they won’t be matched either. Still, it wasn’t the 88-game winning streak, four 30-0 seasons or even the 38 straight NCAA tournament wins that defined the humble Midwesterner who ended up at UCLA almost by accident.

He had the best players. They came because of him, and they came in spite of him.

Playing for Wooden, you see, was never easy. He was the boss, practices were brutal, and things were always done in his meticulous way.

The players who bought in would one day become his lifetime friends. Those who didn’t would never understand.

The first practice of every season began not with a midnight slam dunk contest, but a demonstration by Wooden on the proper way to put on shoes and socks. Wrinkles in the socks could lead to blisters, he explained, and blisters could lead to losing.

The fundamentals never went out of style, and Wooden never changed his approach.

His players learned, and they grew. He taught them how to win, but he also taught them bigger things, like his belief that a life not lived for others is a life not lived well.

He wouldn’t accept less than their best effort both on and off the court, and that’s usually what he got.

“Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but what you should have accomplished with your ability,” Wooden would warn them. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

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ADDENDUM: Here are a couple of little-known things about Wooden, including a Cincinnati area connection –

He coached two years at Dayton (Ky.) High School, and his 6-11 losing record the first season was the only one in his 40-year coaching career.

He spent the next nine years coaching basketball, baseball and tennis at South Bend (Ind.) Central High School, where he also taught English.

Wooden served in the Navy as a physical education instructor during World War II, and continued teaching when he became the basketball coach at Indiana State Teachers College, where he went 47-17 in two seasons.

In his first year at Indiana State, Wooden’s team won the Indiana Collegiate Conference title and received an invitation to the NAIB tournament in Kansas City. Wooden, who had a black player on his team, refused the invitation because the NAIB had a policy banning African Americans. The rule was changed the next year, and Wooden led Indiana State to another conference title.

To me, the thing to remember about Wooden is that it was a mind-boggling 17 years before his team won UCLA’s first NCAA title. In other words, his success wasn’t automatic; it required years of patience, persistence, continuous improvement, refinement, and surely many days and nights of setbacks and frustration. But once it all came together — wow.

ECON CATCH-UP

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) reports again came in strong. May’s Manufacturing Index was 59.7%, down only slightly from April’s 60.4%, while the Non-Manufacturing Index was 55.4%, the same as April. All are very firmly above the 50% threshold for expansion.

Vehicle sales in May were up a nice 19.1% over a year ago, but one has to remember how awful things were a year ago (the NYT link has a positive title, but that’s only because April 2009 was even worse) for most makers. So let’s look at the past two years for the Big 6:

- Government/General Motors: May 2009, down 30%; May 2010, up 17.5%; Two-year result, down 17.7%.
- Ford: down 24%, then up 23.4%; Two-year result, down 6.2%.
- Toyota: down 41%, then up 6.7%; Two-year result, down 37.0%.
- Chrysler: down 47%, then up 32.7%; Two-year result, down 29.7%.
- Honda: down 41%, then up 19.1%; Two-year result, down 29.7%.
- Nissan: down 33%, then up 24.1%; Two-year result, down 16.8%.

The Associated Press described overall and company-specific retail sales numbers for May as “tepid.”

THE EMPLOYMENT REPORT RUN-UP

ADP’s private sector jobs report yesterday came in with pretty good numbers. Their first take on May is +55,000; their April revision went from +32,000 to +65,000.

This Wall Street Journal article says that the employment increase should be significant, with a qualifier: “Yet the lion’s share of that headline increase—an estimated 417,000 jobs—should reflect government hiring of temporary census workers.”

ABC has a similar theme: “Although temporary jobs for the decennial census will account for more than two-thirds of the projected 513,000 payrolls gain.” That leaves about 170,000 for the rest of the economy.

John Crudele has reported at the New York Post about Census Bureau hire-fire shenanigans. At first glance, my reaction was that this wouldn’t affect the BLS jobs report because even the Bureau is engaging in serial hirings and firings, it all nets out anyway. True enough, but at any given point in time (i.e., month-end, at employment report time), if there are a lot of short-term hires subject to near-immediate let-gos outstanding, that could inflate the bureau’s job-increase numbers.

The report comes out at 8:30. As usual, yours truly will be looking at NOT seasonally adjusted numbers as well as the official (seasonally adjusted) figures.

THE REPORT (BLS link is here)

This looks like it will bring out the dreaded U-word (“Unexpectedly”):

Total nonfarm payroll employment grew by 431,000 in May, reflecting the hiring of 411,000 temporary employees to work on Census 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Private-sector employment changed little (+41,000). Manufacturing, temporary help services, and mining added jobs, while construction employment declined. The unemployment rate edged down to 9.7 percent.

The number of unemployed persons was 15.0 million in May. The unemployment rate edged down to 9.7 percent, the same rate as in the first 3 months of 2010.

… The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for March was revised from +230,000 to +208,000, while the change for April remained at +290,000.

If it weren’t for the Census component (which, as noted above, is more than a little suspect), the result would have been as flat as a pancake. Pending a closer look, this appears to be a significant regression in adding permanent and non-Census jobs.

More will come later.

UPDATE: The closer one looks at the long-form release, the less impressive things are.

On the unemployment side, from the Household Survey:

• The seasonally adjusted labor force dropped by 322,000, and the “not in labor force” number went up by 493,000. It would appear that many of those who dipped their toes in the job-market waters last month pulled back because it was too cold.
• The teenage unemployment rate hit 26.4%. If that isn’t an all-time high, it’s awfully close. We can thank minimum-wage laws for most of the spike.
• On the plus side, black unemployment dropped a point from 16.5% to 15.5%. African-Americans may be benefitting from the relatively decent situation in manufacturing.

As to jobs, from the Establishment Survey:

• Temporary help services added a seasonally adjusted 31,000 jobs. March’s and April’s numbers were similar, but were much smaller components of larger figures. Excluding temps, seasonally adjusted employment went up 119,000 in March, 195,000 in April, and only 10,000 in May. Ouch.
• The BLS’s Birth/Death model says that 215,000 jobs (not seasonally adjusted) came to exist in May. Though no one will ever be able to prove it, that seems out of proportion to what’s really happening on the ground in business formation and “invisible” business employment expansion. When Birth/Death is way off, as I believe it is (that isn’t to say it’s being done on purpose; it’s just lousy assumptions in, lousy results out), the next annual comprehensive revision is a major reduction of what was previously reported. In January, that reduction was over 900,000 jobs. At this rate, it seems that we’re on our way to creating another downward revision that might be just as big.

The Not Seasonally Adjusted (NSA) numbers, i.e., what really happened on the ground, in these selected industries (done via detailed look-ups started here), when compared to the average of the pretty good years of 2004-2007, show how weak most of today’s results are:

• Goods-producing is a relative bright spot. In May, 239K jobs were added, pretty close to the 2004-2007 average of +276K. But the April 2010 number (+280K) was actually greater than the May 2004-2007 average of 253K.
• The story was nowhere near as good in services. In May, 472K jobs were added, well below the 2004-2007 average of 593K. As with goods, the April 2010 services number (+775K) was actually greater than the May 2004-2007 average of 744K.
• In what I interpret to be a reluctance on the part of employers to take on permanent payroll additions (part of the FUD atmosphere of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt this administration has engineered), net NSA temp service workers have increased by 147K in the past two months (70K in April and 77K in May). May’s number was above the May 2004-2007 average of 63K (remember, this is while most other areas trailed).

At this stage of the recovery, the economy should be adding more jobs than the 2004-2007 average, not less. Further, while March and April looked fairly promising, one cannot say the same about May, which can be characterized in the word I used in my initial reaction: Regression.

From the South Atlantic Ocean, via the BBC:

Page last updated at 09:31 GMT, Tuesday, 18 May 2010 10:31 UK

A father whose family were rescued when their yacht hit an iceberg in the south Atlantic has described their survival as a “miracle”.

Carl Lomas, of Chelmerton, was sailing to Cape Town with partner Tracey Worth and their two teenage daughters when the boat hit a hidden mass of ice.

They were rescued by passing warship HMS Clyde as the boat began to sink and were taken to the Falkland Islands.

Mr Lomas said they would not have survived in their life raft.

He added: “We were very aware in the deep southern ocean there is no shipping, we were not expecting to find a ship to rescue us.

“We do believe in God and I think it’s a miracle there was an English warship on station within 300 miles of us.

“If the warship hadn’t been there the yacht would have sunk, we would have got in our distress life raft.

“But the reality we had to face is with the sea temperature -5 degrees in the sun to survive the cold for any length of time was very unlikely.”

The 60ft-long (18m) yacht Hollinsclough was 300 miles north-east of South Georgia when it crashed, started taking on water and suffered engine failure on 7 May. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The decline in private-sector wages is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media under a different title and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Monday.

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On May 25, Dennis Cauchon at USA Today had an insightful take on an economic release from the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Using BEA’s March 2010 Personal Income and Outlays report, he calculated that wages paid by private companies “shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year.”

Cauchon then unfortunately went to the prevailing media template, the one requiring that the Bush 43 Era be dragged into everything, regardless of relevance:

A record-low 41.9% of the nation’s personal income came from private wages and salaries in the first quarter, down from 44.6% when the recession began in December 2007.

Cauchon’s convenient timing ignores the fact that as late as the fourth quarter of 2008, the same calculation using numbers in the same BEA report he cited came in at 44.0%. In other words, over three-quarters of the decline (2.1 percentage points divided by 2.7 points is 78%) occurred after everyone knew that Dear Leader would be in charge.

As important as what Cauchon cited is (after the reality-based context yours truly has provided), the shrinkage in private pay only partially unmasks the much more broadly important story of rapidly advancing statism. Federal intrusion into the private sector and federal confiscation from it are accelerating. A tipping point may be near.

For items one could put hard numbers to with sufficient research, let’s start with entities still classified as “private” which Uncle Sam actually or substantively controls.

First, there are the two vehicle-producing wards of the state known as General Motors and Chrysler. These companies emerged from bankruptcy in their current forms largely as a result of extralegal maneuvers that shortchanged disfavored creditors during their respective bankruptcies, followed by excessive infusions of post-bankruptcy cash to ensure their multiyear survival even if they are run poorly or rejected by a nationalization-averse car-buying public.

Though majority-owned by the government, GM characterizes itself as a “private company” in its financial and other reports. While the government only has a minority interest in Chrysler, no one can honestly believe that it isn’t overseeing operational moves there. BEA includes the payroll of both companies in its “private industries” figure. You can knock off at least $5 billion in wages from BEA’s figures for GM and Chrysler alone.

Then there are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two entities that brought us the housing and mortgage-lending fiascos after 15 years of deliberately misrepresenting the quality of mortgages they controlled and securitized. Fan and Fred are also considered private firms, even though they have thus far siphoned off $145 billion in taxpayer bailout money. With $8.1 trillion in combined outstanding debt and trillions in “assets” that are of questionable value, there is no end in sight.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has taken over and is obviously dictating what goes on at more than 70 failed banks just this year, on top of over 130 takeovers in 2009.

Moving into the less quantifiable but still obvious, who can doubt that the entire financial sector is virtually under the thumb of the government? What else would you call it when the country’s Treasury Secretary can pull bank CEOs into a meeting and figuratively “put a gun to their heads,” thereby forcing them to “accept” government investment regardless of whether they wanted or needed it? This sad turning point in capitalism occurred even before the current administration took charge, shortly after the elites of both parties defied overwhelming public opposition to pass the October 2008 financial bailout bill.

If what is being called “financial reform” in Washington becomes law, there will no longer be any real doubt as to who controls financial services. The owners of supposedly private financial institutions will live in 24-7 fear that the bill’s new “Financial Services Oversight Council” will unilaterally fabricate a reason to take them over. The legislation’s authors have deliberately drafted it to give the Council’s victims no meaningful legal recourse. The SEIU’s “purple people beaters” will then be able to move on to other targets, as their “services” in the cause of intimidating bankers with illegal, police-escorted “protests” will no longer be necessary.

On the horizon, barring repeal, there’s ObamaCare, the de facto government takeover of the health care sector’s one-sixth of the economy. Beyond that, if it becomes law, there’s the extreme government micromanagement inherent in cap-and-trade. If both of these aren’t stopped, we will soon be in a place where no one attempting to do anything productive will be able to ply his or her trade without the government dictating the terms under which he or she can do business.

It’s not only about business; it’s also about day-to-day life. It may not even matter if cap-and-trade is stopped, as the government’s Environmental Protection Agency sees its court-sanctioned authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant as carte blanche to impose lifestyle-affecting mandates on everyone in every energy-consuming decision, personal or professional.

With intrusion comes confiscation. What they can’t confiscate, they pass on to future generations, unless the Federal Reserve chooses to inflate its way out of the problem — an action I would not rule out.

On May 27, President Obama’s “bipartisan fiscal commission” informed the White House and Congress — as if it was news — that the nation’s debt load is near a growth-stifling 90% of gross domestic product. They’re not listening. Intense lobbying has apparently begun for yet another bailout, this time of financially insolvent multi-employer (read: union) pension plans.

Stopping and reversing the statist steamroller will take a lot more than voting in November 2010. It will require a level of consistent engagement and activism by the sensible, constitutional center-right never previously seen in American history. Whether we’re up to it is an open question.

At the Christian Science Monitor (“Arizona immigration law prompts Mexico to extend repatriation aid program”), proof of our pathetic border control (bold is mine) —

Hilario Fuentes, a newspaper vendor in Mexico City whose daughter lives illegally in Los Angeles, says he thinks few migrants living in the US would agree to voluntary repatriation. “They wouldn’t accept it, because people go [to the US] out of necessity. They leave their families out of necessity,” he says. His daughter has been deported four times, but keeps returning to Los Angeles to be with her American-born children.

In the interest of emulating Oklahoma’s economic success in the 2-1/2 years since the state’s immigration law-enforcement reform measure became law, it might even be worth subsidizing repatriation if there was any real chance that those sent back wouldn’t just come back. But there isn’t.

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“The World Will Love Us If Obama Is President” Update:

President Obama took office with a mission to transform America’s image around the world. In particular, he was determined to extend the hand of friendship to Muslims whom he felt had been slighted during the George W. Bush administration.

Despite his best efforts, Mr. Obama has failed to woo the Muslim world. After an initial burst of enthusiasm in 2009, America’s favorability ratings sagged. A Gallup poll on opinions of the leadership of the United States released last week shows declines in each of six Muslim-majority countries surveyed. Approval in Lebanon is 25 percent, a 5-percent drop back to 2008 levels. Approval in Egypt fell by about half since last fall, from 37 percent to 19 percent. Approval in the Palestinian Territories is 16 percent, a drop of 4 percent and just three points better than it was under the Bush administration. In Iraq, approval is at 25 percent, compared to the 35 percent rating in 2008.

Polls in Israel show confidence in Mr. Obama’s policies in single digits, and American Jews are deserting him at a rate seldom seen for a Democratic president.

… The president’s weak response to the crisis over the boarding of the Mavi Marmara is symptomatic of the leadership vacuum Mr. Obama has created.

… Mr. Obama wanted the world to love him, and the world did, seemingly, for awhile. But love is turning to disappointment and contempt as the world realizes that Mr. Obama is just a charming empty suit.

Full context from Gallup requires noting that the question Gallup asked (“Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of the United States?”) was not Obama-specific (or Bush-specific in 2008, when the polling began, and that approval levels in all countries except one are higher than they were in 2008. That said, Obama has made this administration all about him, and the graph at the Gallup link indicates that he’s wearing very thin.

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Richard Fernandez at PJM’s Belmont Club: “Never mind what the press or the diplomats say happened, (this) is what happened“:

Continuing, he notes: “… nothing is more paramount either to the establishment nor to the politically correct sections of the media than the maintenance of a lie. For the lie is in the service of the greater good.” Though in this case, the lie is that this is Israel’s fault, Fernandez’s assertion has wide application.

From Cincinnati (video available at link):

Last Update: 5/25 7:32 pm

How do you thank someone who saved your life? A speeding pickup truck slammed into Larry Holt on Sunday as he was riding his bike at Reading and Burnett in Corryville. The truck never stopped.

But fortunately for Holt — a nurse did. Today, Holt got his chance to thank the woman. Local 12 Reporter Deborah Dixon was there for the reunion.

Holt says at 7:45 Sunday morning he was riding his bike going north on Reading. What he will never forget is the sight of a pickup going south, speeding.and swerving. “It’s about as close as you can get grill moving fast on a bike. I just said this is the way its going to be.”

The next thing Holt remembers is the calming voice of a woman who seemed to know what she was doing. She did. Nurse Shauna Helton had just gotten off work at University. But she forgot to clock out and was headed back into the building when she witnessed the incident.

Today, Holt asked to meet the woman who might have saved his life. “Hello are you Shawna? Nice to meet you. I worried about you. You were the voice of reason Sunday morning.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute’s Enterprise Blog, Steven Hayward had a great post about the history of electric cars, and the press’s unrequited love affair with electric vehicles (picture at right is of the $108,000 2010 Zedomax). Yum.

But first I’ll start with a bit of my own research. On May 7, 1994, Paul Feldman at the Los Angeles Times led with the following two paragraphs about a company that would begin producing electric vehicles:

Electric Cars Touted as Plant Opens

Environmentalists and businessmen used the dedication Friday of a Carson-area electric vehicle assembly plant to tout the fledgling industry the week before the California Air Resources Board votes on moving forward with its mandate for mass-produced electric cars beginning in 1998.

The opening of the U.S. Electricar plant, which can convert up to 60 cars a month, demonstrates that adequate technology is available for major manufacturers to build the mandated 20,000 to 25,000 emission-free cars yearly.

A visit to this web page at the “U.S. Electricar Store” informs us of U.S. Electricar’s status (bolds are mine):

Since the factory closed, U.S. Electricar.net gives you the long lost solution to the parts and hardware repairs that your vehicle may need. I am dedicated to the promotion and longevity of all U.S. Electricar S10 and Prism vehicles. These vehicles may be 15 years old, but they are marvels of technology. U.S. Electricar vehicles have features that even modern EV’s don’t have! All you need is an old laptop to access the datalogging with the factory software!

Unless I’m missing something, the U.S. Electricar model described hasn’t been with us since 1995. It would also be interesting to see how the Air Resources Board managed to claim victory and proved that their 1998 “mandate” worked.

Now let’s get to parts of Hayward’s electric history based on a recently released book (paragraph breaks added by me):

Robert Bryce’s new book, Power Hungry, includes a nice roundup of media enthusiasm for electric cars going back a long way.

Here’s the Los Angeles Times, May 19: “The electric automobile will quickly and easily take precedence over all other” types of motor vehicles. That appeared May 19 of . . . 1901. Or try the New York Times, which said in 1911 that the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution” because it “is cleaner and quieter” and “much more economical.”

Or this, from the Los Angeles Times again, this time in 1967: The Times quotes an executive from American Motors (didn’t some guy named Romney run that?) saying the company was on the verge of producing an electric car called the Amitron, powered by lithium batteries capable of holding 33 watt-hours per kilogram (that’s twice as much as today’s lithium-ion batteries, by the way). Said the executive: “We don’t see a major obstacle in technology. It’s just a matter of time.”

Did we miss the rollout of the Amitron, or did they decide the Pacer was just a better idea?

Earlier in his piece, Hayward noted a Chinese study indicating that “widespread use of electric cars in China would increase air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions,” and asserts that going from gas-powered to electric-powered vehicles on a large scale “is unlikely to be as bright green as everyone thinks/hopes.”

You probably won’t see any of this in the establishment press, where electric “zero emissions” (yeah, right) salvation is always just around the corner.

Of course it would be great if electric vehicles could deliver on their promise. But if they could, it seems that some enterprising entrepreneur would have made it happen in a free market a long, long time ago.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Most readers probably know that President Barack Obama decided not to, uh, preside over this year’s Memorial Day ceremonies at Arlington Cemetery. This is the first time since 2002 that the country’s president has not done so (George W. Bush made a Memorial Day speech in Normandy, France that year), and only the second time since 1992.

One possible motivation for the President’s decision to stay away may relate to a controversy manufactured last year involving a familiar radical Obama “acquaintance.”

In her May 25, 2009 coverage, Sheryl Gay Stolberg at The New York Times covered the quarrel’s “resolution”:

… a race-related controversy erupted over Mr. Obama’s appearance this year.

Last week, a group of university professors petitioned the White House to end a longstanding practice of sending a wreath to a monument to Confederate soldiers on the cemetery grounds. The petitioners, including William Ayers, the University of Illinois at Chicago education professor whose acquaintance with Mr. Obama has been controversial, said the monument was “intended as a symbol of white nationalism” and gave “encouragement to the modern neo-Confederate movement.”

Despite the professors’ call for him to “break this chain of racism,” Mr. Obama continued the Confederate monument wreath tradition. But he also started another, the White House said, by sending a second wreath across the Potomac River to the historically black neighborhood in Washington where the African American Civil War Memorial commemorates more than 200,000 blacks who fought for the North in the Civil War.

Stolberg also employed “clever” guilt by association, writing that “Presidents since Warren G. Harding have commemorated Memorial Day by visiting Arlington National Cemetery.” Harding was a Republican. The Times reporter conveniently “forgot” to tell readers that the “longstanding practice” originated with Harding’s Democratic predecessor. Stolberg did so even though, as Karen Travers at ABC News noted before last year’s holiday, the petitioners themselves identified when it started (full text of the letter is here):

“We ask you to break this chain of racism stretching back to Woodrow Wilson, and not send a wreath or other token of esteem to the Arlington Confederate Monument,” the letter states. “This monument should not be elevated in prestige above other monuments by a presidential wreath.”

In their letter to the president, the group says that the monument is a “denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates.”

A review of the letter’s list of signatories also indicates that several are clearly not “professors.”

After the petitioners’ efforts failed to sway Obama, Ayers tried to distance himself from the effort:

“I just signed it because I sign any petition that comes across my computer,” Ayers said. “I’ve gotten in the last two days, more hate mail on that than I’ve gotten on anything else, from people who say the Confederacy was a great time in American history.”

Sure Bill.

As to “neo-Confederates,” it appears that there are far fewer of them in real life than there are radical profs and leftist journalists searching under their beds for them.

An Archive.org search on an organization that is supposed to be among the movement’s mainstays indicates that its home web page hasn’t been updated since 2006. The paranoids at the Southern Poverty Law Center have had such a hard time finding real neo-Confederates that they have attempted to smear the term onto freedom-oriented organizations, including the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

A clear attempt is under way to tar the Tea Party movement with the term, as evidenced by the results of this Google web search for the past two months on ["Tea Party" "Neo-Confederate"] (typed as indicated between brackets) and this April rant by Frank Rich at the New York Times.

It seems more than a little likely that Obama wanted to avoid being on the receiving end of another round of grief from his Confederacy-obsessed radical pals in academia and the media. One clue that this is his real motivation will be if he continues to stay away next year, or if the Confederate wreath gets thrown under the bus.

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UPDATE: I found the following after I drafted the original post.

Marsha Mercer at the Winston-Salem Journal tells us that there was indeed another round of grief this year (full text of letter is here), with a bit of spite (bolded) added to the mix –

Last month, a smaller group of historians and scholars again wrote Obama, repeating their no-wreath request and asking that the federal government remove the Sons of Confederate Veterans as a recognized charity in the Combined Federal Campaign, the government’s equivalent of the United Way.

Memorial Day honors all who died in the military, but it began to honor the sacrifices of the Civil War. The first National Decoration Day at Arlington National Cemetery was in 1868, although more than two dozen cities, some in the North but more in the South, claim they put flowers on Civil War graves before that.

Arlington National Cemetery began on 200 acres once owned by Robert E. Lee, and, according to the cemetery’s website, “For many years following the war, the bitter feelings between North and South remained, and although hundreds of Confederate soldiers were buried at Arlington, it was considered a Union cemetery. Family members of Confederate soldiers were denied permission to decorate their loved ones’ graves and in extreme cases were even denied entrance to the cemetery.”

Over the years, Congress set aside an area for the Confederate dead and later approved the Confederate memorial.

Obama was right to send a wreath to the black memorial if he wanted to continue the Confederate wreath tradition. Others likely will disagree, but a calm discussion of the issues will be good practice for the Civil War sesquicentennial.

Given that the source of the cemetery’s original land was the Confederacy’s commanding general, a man who genuinely wished to see the Union endure once peace was made, the Confederate wreath tradition seems entirely appropriate. It’s also important to remember that the large majority of Confederate soldiers were not slaveholders.

The sending of a wreath to the African American Civil War Memorial & Museum is a gesture that loses sight of what Memorial Day is about, and is also in a sense redundant. There are no soldiers’ remains at the Museum, and there are hundreds if not thousands of African-Americans who gave their lives for the country they love already buried in Arlington, including many who lost their lives in the Civil War (see UPDATE 2).

Memorial Day is already about all U.S. soldiers who have given their all. God could care less what someone’s race is — or, more correctly, was — when He meets up with them at the end.

UPDATE 2: From the Cemetery’s web site —

About 1,500 United States Colored Troops are interred in section 27. The first black combat soldiers of the Civil War.

More about Section 27 is here.

From Anchorage, Alaska:

May 31, 2010 / 06:54 am

It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes. Indeed, facing mortal danger has long been a catalyst for faith — especially on the battlefield where life meets death every day. This is true now as ever. Soldiers facing death are still searching for and finding God.

Spiritually Shaken

On the Fourth of July, 2009, more than 200 Taliban fighters attacked a tiny, remote U.S. infantry outpost in the dusty mountains of Afghanistan. A hundred U.S. soldiers returned fire from the sand-bagged compound, about the size of the small chapel at Ft. Richardson Army Base near Anchorage.

Two days later, as the attacks continued, Father Jason Hesseling, 37, chaplain and major in the U.S. Army was helicoptered in, along with his assistant Sergeant Patrick Neal, 27.

By then, two soldiers were dead and others were spiritually shaken. But even in the suffering, God was at work, Father Hesseling observed.

He recently returned, along with Sgt. Neal and First Lieutenant Robert Doak, 25, of the Airborne’s 725th Brigade Support Battalion, from a year-long deployment to the Central Asia war zone.

Dressed in fatigues and sitting within the peaceful walls of Ft. Richardson’s chapel office, the men spoke to the Catholic Anchor on May 14.

Awakening Faith

“You’re not going to remain unchanged from combat,” Father Hesseling explained.

For a year, he ministered to soldiers at 13 military outposts across the Afghan combat zone. There, in the middle of war, he celebrated Mass, heard confessions, counseled soldiers and administered last rites to the dying.

In crisis, many soldiers immediately appeal to God, and they are desperate for a chaplain’s help, Father Hesseling observed.

Referring to the small insignia on the chest of a Christian chaplain’s fatigues, he said, “They’d see the cross, and that’s all they need to see.”

For Sgt. Neal — a Catholic — facing mortality inspired a greater trust in God.

As part of the 83rd Chemical Battalion, Neal spent six months in Kuwait during the invasion of Iraq, and another 14 months in Iraq with the 509th Infantry Battalion, which suffered a number of casualties. His latest deployment was Afghanistan, where he served as chaplain assistant to Father Hesseling.

For soldiers on the front lines, “the war is right there in their face. They see it every single day. They see the trauma, they can see all the devastation of it,” Doak added. “And I think it awakens more the need … for something.”

“I discovered that within a few trials, I had to rely more on God,” Neal said. “There’s no way you could ever do this by yourself.”

Indeed, Neal discovered, “(God is) right there, just staying right there with me.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.