Assuming Gallup is back to doing things and/or disclosing things consistently, something which wasn’t the case with a different poll discussed yesterday, this finding is stunning:

Shoot, if you take the Beltway area residents and federal employees out of the sample, the result is probably in single digits.

What’s at least as important is another finding in the survey of “Confidence in Institutions” – Confidence in “the presidency” dropped 15 points from 51% to 36%, more than double the six-point drop of Congress.

Related: “A nine-point swing in two months.”

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PC Gone Mad: “Obama’s Electronic Health Records Czar: HIV Status and Abortions Need Not be Included.”

Uh, it’s sort of helpful for a physician to know whether or not his/her patient is HIV positive in any number of medical situations, including an emergency where the patient might be unconscious or unable to communicate, doncha think? This would appear to seriously endanger care providers and the patients themselves if the doc provides or prescribes treatments that would be fine for non-HIV+ patients that would clearly be dangerous to those who are.

Whether or not a woman has or hasn’t had an abortion is also relevant to a number of potential medical diagnosis and treatment issues.

Apparently, not “stigmatizing” someone with information about them that is factual is more important than keeping that person and those who might treat him/her safe.

But these same electronic records MUST have everyone’s Body Mass Index.

This is madness.

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A picture of how dark life really is under communism.

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You don’t say: “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress Wednesday the economic outlook remains ‘unusually uncertain …’”

As noted Sunday in discussion of the economy, which Mort Zuckerman calls “Obama’s Katrina,” it’s been that way since the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy began in June 2008. What the Fed has been doing for almost two years has largely added to it.

Related — “Increased housing commitments swelled U.S. taxpayers’ total support for the financial system by $700 billion in the past year to around $3.7 trillion, a government watchdog said on Wednesday.”

Also related (I only heard this on a radio news report and haven’t found online corroboration) – Bernanke said the Fed may resort to buying stocks if the recovery doesn’t recover as quickly as desired. At a minimum, this would be serious line-crossing with a massive potential for manipulation and insider dealing. At worst, it would end up being a form of backdoor nationalization. Once the Fed gets in, can it really get out?

Also, also related: “Lie Du Jour: ‘No More Taxpayer Bailouts.’”

Proof that the Lie Du Jour is the Lie Du Jour — “In An Attempt To Reliquify Economy, FDIC Starts To Retroactively Pay Tens Of Thousands Of Dollars To Depositors In Failed Banks.”

From Rome, and Malawi:

Pope Benedict XVI officially erected a new diocese in the African nation of Malawi on Wednesday. According to the bishop who has overseen the area until now, the announcement represents a “moment of grace.”

The Diocese of Karonga, in northern Malawi, was created from a third of the land previously contained within borders of the Diocese of Mzuzu. It separates 61,000 people in five parishes from what was the Diocese of Mzuzu’s Catholic population of 400,000.

Along with the announcement of the new diocese came the appointment of its bishop. Fr. Martin Anwel Mtumbuka, who will soon be ordained to lead the faithful of the diocese.

Bishop Joseph Mukasa Zuza, who currently heads the Diocese of Mzuzu, told CNA on Wednesday that creation of the new diocese and the appointment of the bishop-elect “means quite a lot” to the area.

He explained that the addition was “necessary, because it is quite taxing to travel to some places from headquarters.” The bishop described difficult travel on poor roads in all-terrain vehicles to parishes as far as 250 miles (400 kilometers) away.

This announcement, he said, “is a moment of grace,” adding that “the care of the parishioners will be easier because the bishops will not have to move as far.

“We will be more available,” he said in the phone interview. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

UPDATE, 11:30 P.M.: Gallup has changed the language describing the July 12-18 poll and says it really sampled “registered voters” instead of “adults,” and has included an Editor’s note saying that the original description of having used “adults” was wrong.

(Original Post)

There are lots of “creative” ways to generate an artificial sense of momentum for a foundering political party.

Based on information provided at its own report, it appears that the Gallup polling organization may have come up with a new one. Gallup didn’t merely play with percentage of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents between poll dates. In the case of a generic Congressional poll done on July 12-18, the organization switched to a significantly different sampling base. Whereas previous efforts on the topic sample registered voters, the July 12-18 poll sampled all adults.

RedState’s Neil Stevens notes that in the transition, what was a one-point generic ballot lead for Democrats a week earlier using registered voters zoomed to six points in the July 12-18 tabulation of “all adults.”

Stevens posted on this yesterday (HT HyScience), and benchmarked the latest poll to one done from May 24-30 (bolds are mine):

Remember on June 2 when Republicans took a big lead in the Gallup generic ballot? I used it to project conservatively a 45 seat Republican gain in the House. This was a poll of registered voters, according to Gallup’s Survey Methods notes:

Results are based on telephone interviews conducted May 24-30, 2010, with a random sample of 1,594 registered voters, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using a random-digit-dial sampling technique.

But now on July 19 that Democrats are showing a big lead, despite the fact that Gallup’s pretty graph now is titled Candidate Preferences in 2010 Congressional Elections, Among Registered Voters, the sampling is different:

Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking July 12-18, 2010, with a random sample of 1,535 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling.

Catch the difference? The Republicans lead with a sample of Registered Voters, but the Democrats lead with a sample of Adults. Someone who trusted Gallup’s pretty, but lying, picture would never have noticed.

It is terribly dishonest for Gallup to string together two different polls as one series, as Gallup does not only in their graphs, but in their write-ups as well.

Assuming all is as Stevens details, poll cooking doesn’t get much more blatant than this.

I suppose it’s conceivable that Gallup’s disclosure is in error, but in the current political and economic environment, it’s more than a little hard to take that Democrats have achieved significant generic Congressional ballot gains in the past week. Gallup’s post implies that the improvement occurred because “the U.S. Senate passed a major financial reform bill touted as reining in Wall Street.” Paraphrasing tennis great John McEnroe in one of his less than perfect moments: They cannot be serious.

It will be interesting, and telling, to see if Gallup sticks with the much less predictive “all adults” metric in future reports on the topic, switches back to registered voters, and/or quietly flushes its latest effort down the memory hole at some future point.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Housing starts: The seasonally adjusted news is bad enough (“June Housing Starts Hit 8-Month Low”), but as I’ve noted so many times before, looking at the raw data is important, especially in turbulent times.

Here, from the related Census Bureau report (11-page report; go to pages 10 and 11), are the raw housing start numbers for the past seven Junes:

June 2004 — 172,300
June 2005 — 192,800
June 2006 — 170,200
June 2007 — 137,800
June 2008 — 102,500
June 2009 — 59,100
June 2010 — 54,200

Even those figures don’t do justice to the full historical context: Scroll through all 11 pages of the report and you’ll find that only one June between 1963 (the earliest date reported) and 2008 had fewer than 100,000 starts (June 1982 — 91,100). Adjusted for population, the June figures of the past two years are the lowest on record by more than 50%, and are still headed downward.

This “Recovery Summer” thing is just a late April Fool’s joke, right?

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As explained here, the Financial “Deform” bill the president is signing today is another weapon in the arsenal of tyranny.

Meanwhile, Fan and Fred, the Frauds by Design, continue to bleed us dry, and the mortgage-mod program is experiencing failure on an unprecedented scale:

Bailout watchdogs Wednesday continued to blast the Obama administration’s flagship program to assist struggling homeowners, saying the Treasury not only isn’t doing enough for borrowers but also isn’t being honest with taxpayers.

The “growing public perception that this program is a failure will continue,” Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general watching over the government’s financial rescue programs, said at a Senate Finance Committee hearing.

He faulted the Treasury for failing to meet a “simple recommendation” that it put forth a realistic number of people it expects to help with the program.

The Obama administration has pledged aid for up to 4 million borrowers by 2012 through its Making Home Affordable mortgage-modification effort, expected to carry a price tag of $50 billion. But the program is so far providing long-term assistance for only a few hundred thousand borrowers.

The newest data available show almost 521,000 of the nearly 1.3 million modifications started have been canceled since the program began last March. Only 398,000 modifications are underway on a permanent basis.

Elizabeth Warren, who heads a separate Congressional Oversight Panel, noted that “for every family that Treasury has helped into a sustainable mortgage modification, 10 other families have lost their homes to foreclosure.”

It isn’t just a perceived failure. It is a failure.

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One suspects that the Ted Strickland administration might tout yesterday’s announced reduction of Ohio’s unemployment rate to 10.5% in June from 10.7% in May as good news.

It beats the seriously deteriorating situation of a year ago, but it’s not a sign of real improvement. On a seasonally adjusted basis from May to June:
- The state’s total labor force dropped by 15,200 (from 5.9851 million to 5.9663).
- The number of unemployed dropped by 15,700 (from 640.8 thousand to 625.1).
- Thus, total employment increased by 500.
- The rest of the drop in the number of unemployed occurred because people either gave up looking for work or left the state.

The raw numbers from June 2009 to June 2010 tell a worse story:
- The state’s workforce shrunk by 72,800 during the intervening 12 months.
- The number of unemployed dropped by 29,300.
- Thus, total employment dropped by 43,500.
- Where did these people go? They either gave up or moved out.

All the presidential visits in the between now and November that attempt to prop up Turnaround Ted Strickland will only serve to remind Buckeye State voters that the state’s decline has been a four-year group fail by Democrats in Washington and Columbus.

It’s here.

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

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So many chokepoints, so little space: Here are a few other leftist chokepoints and potential chokepoints I didn’t get to in the column –

• Broadcast licenses. This is particularly germane at the moment, given that certain lefty journalists at the Journolist, as reported this morning at the Daily Caller, openly discussed how to go about having Fox News’s broadcast license pulled, and made it clear that if they had such power they would exercise it.
• Political contributions. You want to try to effect political change? Well, you can’t just write a check in any amount to your favorite political candidate, as you could only 40 years ago (e.g., Gene McCarthy, whom George Will reminded us in 2005 “was utterly dependent on large early contributions from five rich liberals” in his 1968 campaign). No-no-no. You can only give a candidate so much. This works to make challenges to incumbents difficult.
• Work during retirement. Do you want to earn more than about $14,160 per year after you retire and begin receiving Social Security benefits? From age 62-66, you’ll lose a dollar in benefits for every two dollars you earn about that threshold amount. This is a chokepoint legacy of FDR, who thought that getting seniors to stop working (the earnings penalty used to be dollar for dollar) would reduce unemployment among young people.

There are surely many other examples of chokepoints besides the ones cited here and in the PJM column.

But in at least three areas, where there is a legitimate need for chokepoints, leftists work to undermine or eliminate them:

• Illegal immigration. Leftists undermine efforts to keep illegals from coming in, and work to thwart attempts to expel those who are caught.
• Incarcerating criminals who deserve it. Leftist lawyers work to set them free on technicalities, regardless of whether or not the cretin involved actually did the crime.
• Voting. The ballot box should be a chokepoint, in that only citizens without felony criminal records and who are actually alive should have a right to vote. Leftists up to and including the Obama Department of Justice are working to undermine the integrity of that chokepoint by not enforcing laws on the books requiring that voter rolls be cleaned up, and insisting that requiring ID to be able to vote is somehow discriminatory (it only “discriminates” against those who wish to vote illegally).

From Akron, Ohio:

The mailman finished his afternoon deliveries in an unassuming way, betraying no sign that anything out of the ordinary had occurred save for the blood on his uniform and the cut on his lip. Back at the post office, his actions were greeted with cries of disbelief: “Did you hear? Keith saved another life today.”

Such is a day in the life of Keith McVey, the postal worker with the bronzed skin and the alert blue eyes who can’t walk down the street without being honked at by passing cars filled with his admirers – or, apparently, without saving a life.

“He’s a rock star in our eyes,” says Tina Starosto, a receptionist at King Apartments, where a sign declaring “Keith Our Hero” is prominently tacked to the office wall.

Over the years, McVey, 53, has helped save three people while on his mail route, earning a reputation as the humble superhero of this small neighborhood near a lake. Last week, he threw aside his bundle of mail to perform CPR on an unconscious man on the side of the road. Two years ago, he pulled a drowning girl from the lake. And nearly 20 years ago, when a teenager tried to take his life by jumping off a bridge on a snowy winter day, McVey, unable to stop him from jumping, covered the teen with blankets and helped keep him alive until an ambulance arrived.

McVey was embarrassed about displaying the many awards and newspaper clippings that showcase his acts of derring-do for fear of, as he put it, “tooting my own horn.”

It usually starts, as most feats of heroism do, with a cry for help.
(more…)

The Washington Examiner OpinionZone post is here.

Go there, and you’ll see that this woman is far more than a USDA bureaucrat with a racist attitude, and that her resignation may have occurred very quickly for reasons that have little direct relationship to what she was caught saying on video.

____________________________________________

UPDATE, July 21, early AM: Now the NAACP says it was snookered. Well then, I’m assuming that Tim Vilsack will reinstate Ms. Sherrod immediately, right?

Not if the real reasons she “resigned” from USDA relate what I posited at my WEOZ post, namely that there are problems with “Ms. Sherrod’s previous background, the circumstances surrounding her hiring, and the USDA’s agenda” that threaten to gain unwanted visibility thanks to Andrew Breitbart’s exposure.

If she doesn’t come back even if somehow legitimately vindicated by the full vid (which seems doubtful), I believe that these problems will represent the rationale as to why.

____________________________________________

Update, July 21, 10:45 a.m.: (HT to frequent commenter dscott) — “‘President’ Was in Attendance at Sherrod’s Speech.”

Sherrod doesn’t name ‘the president’ in her speech. Whether it’s Ben Jealous or not isn’t clear. I think the NAACP gives that title to the person in charge of each major chapter. This unrelated link would support that contention.

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UPDATE, July 21, 11:00 a.m.: Sherrod says the White House forced her resignation –

The Department of Agriculture employee who resigned after a controversy erupted over recent remarks she made is now saying that the White House forced her resignation.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, however, is taking responsibility for the resignation, and the White House reportedly says it had no part in his decision.

Shirley Sherrod, the USDA’s former director of rural development in Georgia, said USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook called her Monday and said the White House wanted her to resign, the Associated Press reports.

“They called me twice,” Sherrod told the AP, noting that she was driving when she received the calls. “The last time they asked me to pull over the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that’s what I did.”

That’s a pretty detailed remembrance.

So the White House decides that someone is expendable. Sherrod, if we are to believe her, doesn’t get a chance to explain herself to Vilsack or anyone else. They just cut her loose.

Isn’t this treatment of a black woman r-r-r-r-r … raaaaaacist?

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UPDATE, July 22: Concerning the accuracy and relevance of the WEOZ post in light of other Sherrod news during the past two days, here’s my comment at WEOZ –

This post is about “(her) previous background, the circumstances surrounding her hiring, and the USDA’s agenda.” The questions about them remain legitimate.

Let me start by noting that there’s no substitute for reading the whole piece by Jonathan Strong at the Daily Caller (HT Big Government, where Andrew Breitbart describes the report as “running the obituary” for American journalism).

Strong’s report is an “argument over” vindication of the claim that establishment press journalists are agenda-driven, are not truth-driven, and coordinate their agenda-driven efforts. But what should not be forgotten (and I will get to after excerpting) is that in historical context the Journolist enterprise is just another chapter in a long history of establishment media coordination.

Here are some of the key paragraphs from Strong’s piece (bolds are mine):

… According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

… Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, “why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” Schaller proposed coordinating a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.

… The members began collaborating on their open letter. Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones rejected an early draft, saying, “I’d say too short. In my opinion, it doesn’t go far enough in highlighting the inanity of some of [Gibson's] and [Stephanopoulos’s] questions. And it doesn’t point out their factual inaccuracies …Our friends at Media Matters probably have tons of experience with this sort of thing, if we want their input.”

Jared Bernstein, who would go on to be Vice President Joe Biden’s top economist when Obama took office, helped, too. …

… Columnist Joe Conason weighed in with suggestions. So did Slate contributor David Greenberg, and David Roberts of the website Grist. Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, helped too.

Journolist members signed the statement and released it April 18, calling the debate “a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world.”

… The Wright controversy, (the Nation’s Chris) Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, “It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.”

… “Part of me doesn’t like this sh*t (getting involved with such a project–Ed.) either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

They indict themselves. But as I noted in the intro, Journolist is not the first example of establishment media coordination, or even the most influential.

Several weeks ago, I reminded BizzyBlog readers about an establishment media cooperation arrangment that was exposed in 2005, and that for all I know may still be taking place. It was based on this excerpt from a long since archived Editor & Publisher item:

When The New York Times on July 16 broke the story of a 2003 State Department memo that had become a key element in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, the paper scored a major exclusive. But when The Washington Post hit newsstands that very same Saturday, it had its own version of the same story. It even credited the Times for the same-day scoop.

Welcome to life under the Washington Post-New York Times swap. As part of a secret arrangement formed more than 10 years ago, the Post and Times send each other copies of their next day’s front pages every night. The formal sharing began as a courtesy between Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld in the early 1990s and has continued ever since.

“It seemed logical, because for years we would always try to get a copy of each other’s papers as soon as they came out,” Downie tells E&P. “It made sense to both of us to make it simpler for everybody.” Lelyveld, who left the Times in 2001, declined comment.

At the time, Mark Tapscott, who is now at the Washington Examiner, noted that “In any other industry, this would be called “collusion” and the Times and Post editorial pages would be in high dudgeon, demanding anti-trust investigations by the Department of Justice.” Tapscott also reasonably wondered whether the cooperative arrangement went further.

Given the lack of shame, absence of ethics, and the intensely agenda-driven nature of the Journolist campaign to stifle the legitimate debate about the relevance of Jeremiah Wright’s two-decade relationship with Barack Obama as his pastor, it’s reasonable to wonder if “the WaPo-NYT swap” remains onging, and who else might be involved.

Cross-posted in shorter form at NewsBusters.org.

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BizzyBlog Update: More from Breitbart at BigGov –

What The Daily Caller has unearthed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is Journolist, or are guilty of sitting back and watching Alinsky warfare being waged against all that challenged the progressive orthodoxy. The scandal predictably involves journalists posing as professors posing as experts. But dressed down they are nothing but street thugs. They deserve the deepest levels of public consternation. We must demand that they do.

The only way that the media will recover from the horrifying discoveries found in the Journolist is to investigate and investigate until every guilty reporter, professor and institution is laid bare begging America for forgiveness.

From St. Louis:

Jul 20, 2010 / 05:57 am

Last Friday an evening prayer service marked the Archdiocese of St. Louis’ official closure of its investigation into an alleged miraculous cure attributed to Bl. William Chaminade, founder of the Marianist order.

The archdiocesan tribunal, established by Archbishop Robert J. Carlson to investigate the claim, will now send its findings to the Vatican.

The claim concerns area resident Rachel Lozano, who since her sophomore year of high school has been diagnosed with cancer three times. As treatment, she underwent three different therapies including chemotherapy, radiation, a stem cell transplant and surgery. Doctors told her that no one ever survived her type of cancer after a stem cell transplant.

After joining a group of St. Louisians who attended the year 2000 beatification for the Society of Mary founder Fr. William Joseph Chaminade, Lozano began to pray for his intercession. The first miracle needed for the Marianist founder’s beatification was an Argentinean woman’s healing from lung cancer, according to the Archdiocese of St. Louis.

But in the months after Lozano returned from her pilgrimage, her cancer aggressively came back.

After doctors told her that her situation was terminal, she had surgery to remove the third tumor but doctors found it was dead. They told Lozano there was no medical explanation for the reversal.

If the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints declares the cure to be a miracle, Blessed William Chaminade can be recognized as a canonized saint, pending Pope Benedict XVI’s approval. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The truth comes out. Okay, it was always out there. It’s just that the Barack Obama and the folks in his administration were denying it.

The issue in question is whether the individual mandate and penalties for not purchasing health insurance in the statist health care legislation commonly known as ObamaCare should rightly be considered taxes, or if they are something else.

In a report dated Friday that appeared in the paper’s print edition at Page A14 on Sunday, Robert Pear at the New York Times noted that in legal proceedings, in response to litigation brought by state attorneys general, the administration is now characterizing the mandate and penalties as taxes. Note the subtle water-down that occurred between the web page’s title bar and the published article’s headline:

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Under the legislation signed by President Obama in March, most Americans will have to maintain “minimum essential coverage” starting in 2014. Many people will be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay premiums.

In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.

Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.

While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.

“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”

When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”

Now that the legislation has passed, Team Obama has clearly changed its tune. What a surprise (not).

As a refresher, what follows is the excerpt from the Obama-Stephanopoulos “spirited exchange” to which Pear referred that I posted last year (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog). In his annual exercise in legitimate journalism (the one that preceded it was when he moderated an April 2008 Democratic presidential debate and gave then-candidate Obama grief about his relationship with Jeremiah Wright), Stephanopoulos maneuvers an arrogant President into a de facto assertion that Barack Obama’s take on a word’s meaning is more important than the one found in the dictionary:

STEPHANOPOULOS: …during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?

…. OBAMA: No. That’s not true, George. The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.

People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy…

OBAMA: No, but — but, George, you — you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase. Any…

…. STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what…

…. STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.

OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that.

Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it’s a tax increase?

OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion.

At time, I reacted by writing: “If you don’t think we have a problem of Orwellian proportions with Barack Obama, I’d suggest you re-read the excerpt. He thinks he’s above the dictionary, that words mean only what he says they mean.”

It turns out that I understated the extent of the Orwellian problem. Not only does Team Obama want words only to mean what they say they mean, they want to be able to change the meaning of words at will to suit their purposes.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Andrew Breitbart’s smoking gun (direct YouTube):

Transcript:

Narrative: On July 25, 2009, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack appointed Shirley Sherrod as Georgia Director of Rural Development. USDA Rural Development spends over $1.2 billion in the State of Georgia each year.

On March 27, 2010, while speaking at the NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet, Ms. Sherrod admits that in her federally appointed position, overseeing over a billion dollars, she discriminates against people due to their race.

Sherod: The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing.

Audience member: That’s right.

Sherrod: But he had come to me for help. What he didn’t know was he was taking all that time to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide how much help I was going to give him.

(Audience laughs)

Sherrod: I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farm land. And here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So … I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do.

I did enough so that he — I assume the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me — either that, or the Georgia Department of Agriculture — and, uh, he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him.

So I took him to a white lawyer that had attended some of the training we had provided, because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farm.

So I figured that if I take him to one of them that his own kind will take of him. That’s when it was revealed to me that it’s about poor, versus those who have, not so much about white — it IS about white and black, but it’s not, you know, it opened my eyes. Because I took him to one of his own. …

The rest of the vid has an NAACP denial of racison to Geraldo Rivera at Fox, and a replay of the bolded paragraph above.

No elaboration is necessary. Sherrod indicts herself. She deserves to be out of a job.

It is the once proud NAACP, not the Tea Party movement, that officially sanctions and condones racism in its ranks.

_____________________________________________________

UPDATE: Sherrod has resigned (HT Hot Air) —

The Agriculture Department announced Monday, shortly after FoxNews.com published its initial report on the video, that Sherrod had resigned.

“There is zero tolerance for discrimination at USDA, and I strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a written statement. “We have been working hard through the past 18 months to reverse the checkered civil rights history at the department and take the issue of fairness and equality very seriously.

My guess is that Sherrod is going to try to audition for a pity party speaking tour in leftist venues. It will be interesting to see if that’s what she does, and what kind of reception she receives.

_________________________________________________

UPDATE, July 21, 11:30 p.m.: Spot-on take at BigGov —

The problem for both the NAACP and the White House was that they took it out of context on their own and reacted as any victim of an Alinsky-style tactic might—by overreacting. However, in so doing, they also threw Shirley Sherrod under their bus. In other words, they got beaten at their own game, with their own bat, and they chose the politically expedient way out of it.
That was their fault, not Breitbart’s.

… The NAACP’s after-the-fact back pedaling can’t hide the fact that they knew there was a contextual problem and they still condemned her (and the audience) anyway, making her the roadkill on their path to demonize average Americans.

Exactly.

Yeah, this is “typical,” as Instapundit notes, but it’s especially odious in the circumstances:

In special deal, charity gives rationing advocate Berwick health coverage for life

Donald Berwick, recess-appointed by President Obama to head Medicare and Medicaid, is a well-known advocate of health care rationing and admirer of Britain’s National Health Service. Rising health costs and limited resources “require decisions about who will have access to care and the extent of their coverage,” Berwick wrote in 1999. Last year, he said, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” Of the NHS, Berwick says simply, “I love it,” adding that it is “one of the great human health care endeavors on earth.”

As it turns out, Berwick himself does not have to deal with the anxieties created by limited access to care and the extent of coverage. In a special benefit conferred on him by the board of directors of the Institute for Health Care Improvement, a nonprofit health care charitable organization he created and which he served as chief executive officer, Berwick and his wife will have health coverage “from retirement until death.”

PJM’s David Catron:

In other words, Dr. Berwick has made sure that he and his wife will never be subjected to the tender mercies of Medicare, the health care program for seniors over which he now has control. Thus, even after he has implemented rationing programs modeled after those of NICE, he won’t have to worry about his wife suffering for lack of drugs deemed too pricey by some obscure comparative effectiveness calculation. You and I, on the other hand, won’t be so lucky once we’re on Medicare. If we contract deadly diseases requiring treatment that costs more than our lives are “worth,” we’re toast.

No wonder Obama recess-appointed Berwick. I’d love to know (we probably never will) whether the administration was blind-sided by Byron York’s finding at the Washington Examiner.

With stories such as these, it takes all the forbearance I have to stick to this site’s no-profanity rule. I suspect readers face a similar challenge.

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Speaking of reasons to consider getting rid of the no-profanity rule, here’s Trent Lott, as quoted in the Washington Post:

“We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”

Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner has it partially right: “Lott confirms he’s a paid tool of the Washington Establishment.”

Two further points about Lott are important to know and recall:

• He has, as seen above, been all too often possessed of unfathomable stupidity — Even if you believed as he does, why would you ever say such a thing to a reporter, unless you’re so dense that you really don’t comprehend how poorly it would be received?
• From all appearances, he is utterly without guiding principles. This is a man who unforgivably betrayed his country, the Constitution he swore to uphold, and the rule of law in 1998 and 1999 in his mishandling of the House’s impeachment of Bill Clinton by not insisting on a legitimate trial. What about “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments” didn’t he understand?

The damage done as a result of Lott’s “leadership” when he was Senate Majority Leader is incalculable.

Lott illustrates exactly why the electorate needs to support sensible conservatives like Jim DeMint whenever possible this fall. By this time, it should be perfectly obvious that this isn’t the same thing as electing Republicans.

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President Obama, as well as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, used to be pretend to be big fans of “PayGo.” The truth is that PayGo has always been a ruse designed to create an impression of fiscal responsibility where none actually exists.

The true attitude of the three is “Paygo, Schmaygo.”

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Totally predictable (HT Hot Air):

The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget.

The truth is that statists in Massachusetts and in Washington consider this a feature, not a bug.

Never, ever forget that Objectively Unfit Mitt Romney enabled all of this, and that yours truly (not that it required any great gift of insight) predicted RomneyCare’s implosion in October 2007 (fourth item at link).