From Cambridge, England (underlying UK Telegraph article, “Richard Rudd blinked to save his own life,” is here):

Jul 16, 2010 / 06:11 am

A paralyzed man in England who had once said he would never want to be kept alive were he severely disabled narrowly escaped death when doctors were about to withdraw treatment. Though previously unresponsive and in a “very bleak” condition, he communicated that he wanted to continue to live.

Richard Rudd was paralyzed and brain damaged after being injured in a motorcycle accident last October and suffering subsequent medical complications. Treated in Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, England his family thought they knew he would not want to live.

“We said that knowing Richard, there was no way in a million years that he would want to live with his injuries,” his father told the Daily Telegraph. Rudd had told his daughter that if he suffered a severe injury in an accident like a car crash, he “wouldn’t want to go on,” Rudd’s father reported.

Rudd’s father gave permission for treatment to be withdrawn. As hospital staff gathered around Rudd’s bed, they noticed he was able to blink his eyes for the first time in several weeks.

The doctors asked Rudd three times whether he wanted to continue to live. He blinked “yes” in reply to each of their three questions.

“… his doctor asked him three times if he wished treatment to continue, and each time he moved his eyes to the left, the signal for ‘yes’,” Rudd’s father reported.

Rudd was not “brain dead” but had been aware of his situation, the Telegraph reported. In his October 23 accident, a car pulled in front of his motorcycle and the collision threw him 20 feet into a ditch. He could still talk and move his arms immediately after the crash, but after complications in surgery he was brain damaged and completely paralyzed.

“He had severe injuries to his brain and we could not communicate with him. The outcome was thought to be very bleak indeed,” Prof. David Menon, who was in charge of Rudd’s care, told the Telegraph.

“In fact, Richard was in a locked in state where people have relatively normal cognitive processes in the brain but are only able to allow you to know about that by movement of the eyes or eyelids,” he continued, saying “everything changed” when Rudd showed voluntary eye movement.

Though Rudd will require round-the-clock medical care for the rest of his life, he hopes to learn to communicate using his tongue, eyes and facial muscles.

Rudd has two daughters, 18-year-old Charlotte and 14-year-old Bethan.

“His daughters are certainly glad that he’s alive. They joke around in front of him, he smiles and that lifts him for ages,” Rudd’s father said. He added that Rudd’s long-term memory is intact and he can make facial expressions, “but physically he’s gone.”

“It might not be the same Richard that we started out with, but at least he’s still coping because he still smiles when we talk about the past or when he sees his children.”

Rudd’s father said he was glad his son has been given “the chance to survive and to have a say.”

The Christian Institute, based in the U.K., noted that Rudd’s story is echoed in many other severely ill or disabled people who thought they wanted to die but changed their minds.

Go here for the rest of the story.

It’s bad enough the federal government’s official budget deficit has topped $1 trillion for the second year in a row, according to the just-released June 2010 Monthly Treasury Statement. But, focusing only on receipts for the moment, a closer look makes it obvious that the situation is even worse than it appears. Don’t expect the establishment press to take any interest in the annoying but revealing details that follow.

Here is what Martin Crutsinger of the Associated Press wrote about federal collections in his Tuesday report on Uncle Sam’s current month and fiscal year deficit:

Through the first nine months of the current budget year, government revenues have totaled $1.6 trillion, up 0.5 percent from the same period a year ago.

True enough, but look at the components:

Every major component except corporate income taxes is down substantially. But it’s the last item that deserves some attention. What are these "miscellaneous receipts," and why are they up by so much (take them away, and year-to-date receipts have declined by about 1.8%).

Answer: Over $54 billion of it is from the Federal Reserve. As best I can tell, it represents dividends and interest on TARP lending and investments. This component of miscellaneous receipts is up by a factor of about 2.7 from fiscal 2009′s comparable year-to-date amount of $19.9 billion.

So the only reason receipts are up is that the Fed got into the direct lending and investment business. Tax collections that are indicators of the health of the overall economy are still down from last year, which was in turn down about 18% from the same period in fiscal 2008.

That’s not much comfort, is it?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

For about seven weeks, the New York Times has ignored fast-breaking developments in the saga of the proposed 15-story mosque planned for the site of a currently standing historical structure that suffered collateral damage in the 9/11 attacks.

A Times search in descending date order on “ground zero mosque” (not in quotes) shows that the last time the paper directly covered the story was in a May 25 item (May 26 print edition) by Javier C. Hernandez with a saccharine title (“Vote Endorses Muslim Center Near Ground Zero”). When’s the last time that a Catholic cathedral was called a “Christian Center”? Hernandez himself never referred to the proposed building as a mosque; three others quoted in the story did.

On June 6, a group led by Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and others that included many family members of 9/11 victims held a protest against the mosque in Lower Manhattan. Roughly 5,000 attended, as seen in the pictures carried at this BizzyBlog post (some of what little press coverage there was ridiculously claimed that the crowd was only a few hundred). The Times search above, along with on Geller’s name (in quotes) and “ground zero protest” (not in quotes), demonstrate that the paper gave it no coverage. But on June 3, it did give over 1,000 words to letter-writer Richard Bernstein, who ripped Geller for “Demonizing Adherents of Islam” and strangely decided that publishing her age was important (from here, Pamela, you look at least 20 years younger).

On Tuesday, the folks at the Old Gray Lady finally decided that the controversy was worthy of renewed coverage (“Planned Sign of Tolerance Bringing Division Instead”). It would appear that the wake-up occurred because the number of bad guy vs. good guy story lines has reached a critical mass, and now includes politicians who are weighing in.

Let’s see, there are “Muslims against Christians, Tea Partiers against staunch liberals, and Sept. 11 families against one another.” There are also Democrats, genuine Republicans, and a mayor who was a Republican of convenience but is now an independent involved. You don’t need a scorecard to see on whose side the sympathies of Mr. Hernandez, who also wrote Tuesday’s story, reside:

… what began as a gesture of combined good faith by Muslims and non-Muslims has turned into a familiar game of New York City political football.

The bellicose discourse was on full display on Tuesday in an auditorium at Hunter College in Manhattan as the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission considered whether to grant one of the buildings that would be torn down for the project, at 45-47 Park Place, status as a protected landmark. The entire center would occupy 45-51 Park Place.

Let’s pause for just a moment. It should be noted that there was once considerable sentiment for protecting “45-47.” It seems to have vanished into thin, politically-correct air.

Resuming the story:

In a city where the memorial to those killed on Sept. 11 is only now taking shape, it is perhaps not surprising that the idea of a mosque near the ruins of the World Trade Center would stir such passion.

Sally Regenhard, whose 28-year-old son, Christian, a firefighter, died on Sept. 11, said in an interview that the center would amount to “sacrilege on sacred ground.”

… In recent days, politicians have called for an investigation of the group’s finances and expressed concerns about the views of its leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has held services in a small mosque in TriBeCa since 1983.

… With a November election approaching, politicians have latched onto the issue as a high-profile platform to attack their opponents.

On Tuesday, Rick A. Lazio, a Republican running for governor, urged the landmarks commission to protect the building, constructed in the late 1850s in the Italian Renaissance palazzo style; this would effectively halt the plans for the Muslim center. The commission expects to vote on the issue in August.

“This is about getting questions answered,” Mr. Lazio told reporters. “This is about transparency. This about the safety of the people of New York.”

…. Representative Peter T. King, a Republican, joined Mr. Lazio in calling for an investigation into the financing of the project. But Andrew M. Cuomo, Mr. Lazio’s Democratic opponent and the state’s attorney general, has rebuffed those requests.

The limits of excerpting prevent me from including Mayor Bloomberg’s particularly odious position.

Hernandez never told readers that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has refused to disclose the sources of their funding, or that there is plenty of controversy (HT to Pamela’s Atlas Shrugs blog) about the legitimacy of Rauf’s claims to be moderate.

All in all, it comes off as mean non-Muslims being unfair to peace-loving people who just want to practice their faith and mean no harm to anyone.

This contentious story quote story from “Yvonne Haddad, a professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University,” leaves me with lots of doubt:

“But building mosques makes a statement that ‘we are here and we are here to stay,’ and some people would like to wish them away.”

When’s the last time anyone building or advocating a chapel, church, cathedral, or temple whose mission is supposed to be private religious worship made such an in your face statement?

I haven’t commented in the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan or the recess appointment of Donald Berwick to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, largely because the reasons they are disqualified to serve are so evident, and partly because others have done a good job of enumerating them.

In each case, the nominees have disqualified themselves with their own words.

Kagan demonstrates her clear ineligibility to serve in this exchange with Senator Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma:

Coburn: Do you believe it is a fundamental, pre-existing right to have an arm to defend yourself?

Kagan: Senator Coburn, I very much appreciate how deeply important the right to bear arms is to millions and millions of Americans. And I accept Heller, which made clear that the Second Amendment conferred that right upon individuals, and not simply collectively.

Coburn: I’m asking you, Elena Kagan, do you personally believe there is a fundamental right in this area? Do you agree with Blackstone [in] the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defense? He didn’t say that was a constitutional right. He said that’s a natural right. And what I’m asking you is, do you agree with that?

Kagan: Senator Coburn, to be honest with you, I don’t have a view of what are natural rights, independent of the Constitution. And my job as a justice will be to enforce and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

Coburn: So you wouldn’t embrace what the Declaration of Independence says, that we have certain God-given, inalienable rights that aren’t given in the Constitution that are ours, ours alone, and that a government doesn’t give those to us?

Kagan: Senator Coburn, I believe that the Constitution is an extraordinary document, and I’m not saying I do not believe that there are rights pre-existing the Constitution and the laws. But my job as a justice is to enforce the Constitution and the laws.

Coburn: Well, I understand that. I’m not talking about as a justice. I’m talking about Elena Kagan. What do you believe? Are there inalienable rights for us? Do you believe that?

Kagan: Senator Coburn, I think that the question of what I believe as to what people’s rights are outside the Constitution and the laws, that you should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief.

Coburn: I would want you to always act on the basis of the belief of what our Declaration of Independence says.

Kagan: I think you should want me to act on the basis of law. And that is what I have upheld to do, if I’m fortunate enough to be confirmed, is to act on the basis of law, which is the Constitution and the statutes of the United States.

As Joe Farah at WorldNetDaily noted: “This woman apparently thinks our rights descend from our Constitution, which is crazy,” said Farah. “The Constitution is there to protect our unalienable, God-given human rights – not to define our rights or to invent them.” Bingo. Ring the gong.

Meanwhile, in today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger also lets Dr. Berwick nuke himself:

Dr. Berwick’s ideas on the design and purpose of the U.S. system of medicine aren’t merely about “change.” They would be revolutionary.

One may agree with these views or not, but for the president to tell the American people they have to simply accept this through anything so flaccid as a recess appointment is beyond outrageous. It isn’t acceptable.

“I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.”

“You cap your health care budget, and you make the political and economic choices you need to make to keep affordability within reach.”

“Please don’t put your faith in market forces. It’s a popular idea: that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can.”

“Indeed, the Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs.”

“It may therefore be necessary to set a legislative target for the growth of spending at 1.5 percentage points below currently projected increases and to grant the federal government the authority to reduce updates in Medicare fees if the target is exceeded.”

“About 8% of GDP is plenty for ‘best known’ care.” (currently it’s about 16% — Ed.)

“A progressive policy regime will control and rationalize financing—control supply.”

“The unaided human mind, and the acts of the individual, cannot assure excellence. Health care is a system, and its performance is a systemic property.”

“Health care is a common good—single payer, speaking and buying for the common good.”

“And it’s important also to make health a human right because the main health determinants are not health care but sanitation, nutrition, housing, social justice, employment, and the like.”

“Hence, those working in health care delivery may be faced with situations in which it seems that the best course is to manipulate the flawed system for the benefit of a specific patient or segment of the population, rather than to work to improve the delivery of care for all. Such manipulation produces more flaws, and the downward spiral continues.”

“For-profit, entrepreneurial providers of medical imaging, renal dialysis, and outpatient surgery, for example, may find their business opportunities constrained.”

“One over-demanded service is prevention: annual physicals, screening tests, and other measures that supposedly help catch diseases early.”

“I would place a commitment to excellence—standardization to the best-known method—above clinician autonomy as a rule for care.”

“Health care has taken a century to learn how badly we need the best of Frederick Taylor [the father of scientific management]. If we can’t standardize appropriate parts of our processes to absolute reliability, we cannot approach perfection.”

“Young doctors and nurses should emerge from training understanding the values of standardization and the risks of too great an emphasis on individual autonomy.”

“Political leaders in the Labour Government have become more enamored of the use of market forces and choice as an engine for change, rather than planned, centrally coordinated technical support.”

“The U.K has people in charge of its health care—people with the clear duty and much of the authority to take on the challenge of changing the system as a whole. The U.S. does not.”

In each instance, read the whole thing.

From New York:

Jul 14, 2010 / 08:26 pm

The present and former Archbishops of New York have commented on the death of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, remembering his “generosity” and his help in securing Yankee Stadium for two papal Masses.

Steinbrenner died of a heart attack on July 13 at the age of 80.

“I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mr. George Steinbrenner today. My sincere condolences go to Mrs. Steinbrenner and the entire Steinbrenner family,” commented Archbishop Timothy Dolan. “When I was a young boy and budding baseball fan growing up in Saint Louis, everybody knew of the great New York Yankees. Even when they were your opponent, they were a team to be admired and respected.”

In a Tuesday statement, he recalled his “joy” at being invited to Steinbrenner’s box for the April 2009 grand opening of the new Yankees Stadium and also for a World Series game in October.

“They were experiences I’ll never forget. Mr. Steinbrenner and his family were very warm and welcoming to me, the new kid in town,” commented Archbishop Dolan, who was installed in New York in April 2009.

“I’ve since learned that such acts of kindness were very much in keeping with the Steinbrenner tradition,” he continued, noting that Catholic agencies in New York and Florida were often “the beneficiary of his and the Steinbrenner family’s generosity.”

He noted that the Steinbrenners and the New York Yankees responded to the January earthquake in Haiti with a $225,000 donation to Catholic Relief Services. He then praised Steinbrenner’s “tremendous goodness” in arranging Yankee Stadium as a papal Mass venue for Pope John Paul II in 1979 and for Pope Benedict XVI in 2008.

Cardinal Edward Egan, Archbishop Dolan’s predecessor, in a Tuesday statement noted that he had recently written Steinbrenner to wish him a happy 80th birthday.

“I thanked him once again for his extraordinary kindness and generosity to the Archdiocese of New York on the occasion of the Pastoral visit of Pope Benedict XVI to our City two years ago,” the cardinal wrote. “Thus it is with the deepest sadness that I learned this morning of the passing of this great New Yorker.”

He praised the Yankees owner as a “marvelous leader” and “an exemplary citizen.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

It’s from Instapundit and it’s about the President, but it could be about any of the three progenitors of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy as it gets further into its third year:

when people say “Obama’s Katrina,” it’s a contraction, not a possessive . . . .

The line could really apply to the entirety of the administration’s non-performance … except that in the case of Katrina, Bush 43 was “assisted” by a incompetent governor and mayor from the other party. Obama has no such fall guys and gals now, though he’s continually tries to invent them.

In October 2007, I put up a BizzyBlog post (also cross-posted at the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s short-lived Wide Open Blog) about William Garner (pictured at right), the Ohio man who killed five children (three of them and the lone survivor also pictured at right) to cover up a burglary in 1992.

At the time, it appeared that Garner’s date with the executioner had been indefinitely called off, for specious Miranda-related reasons that you have to read to believe (and even then, it will be difficult).

On Tuesday, Garner’s attempts to avoid his death sentence ultimately failed. Sadly, the Associated Press’s unbylined coverage of his execution by lethal injection Tuesday allowed Garner and his lawyers to put forth one final batch of half-truths and untruths that require refutation (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

An Ohio man said he was “heartily sorry” for his carelessness (1) before he was executed Tuesday for the murders of five children in a 1992 Cincinnati apartment fire he set in an attempt to destroy evidence of a burglary. William Garner, 37, died at 10:38 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, 18 minutes after the lethal injection began.

As he lay on the execution table, Garner held a dreadlock of hair from a female friend and read a mostly inaudible lengthy final statement from notebook paper held by the execution team leader. He thanked several people as well as the state of Ohio. “I’m heartily sorry,” he said. “God bless everyone who has been robbed in this procedure. I thought I’d never be free, but I’m free now.”

Garner was sentenced to death for the Jan. 26, 1992, pre-dawn deaths of the children in the apartment of Addie Mack, who was in the emergency room of a nearby hospital. Garner had stolen keys from her purse while she received care and took a cab to the apartment to steal a television, radio, VCR and telephone. Four girls and two boys, ages 8 to 13, were at the apartment alone, and Garner knew they were there when he threw a lit match onto a couch. Garner has admitted setting the fire but said he thought the children would escape (2). Only one, 13-year-old Rod Mack, made it out alive.

… Because so many people wanted to witness the execution on behalf of the young victims, the prison opened a second viewing room, prisons spokeswoman Julie Walburn said. Six witnesses for the victims and Garner’s niece and legal team were accommodated in the witness room facing the execution chamber, and another three victims’ witnesses watched on closed-circuit TV in the spillover room, she said.

… Garner had said a secondary motivation for setting the fire was to draw attention to the children’s squalid living conditions (3). He told police that he had noticed the bedroom “full of girls” and that one of them had asked him for water, which he provided, according to a report by the Ohio Parole Board. He also said he had been in another bedroom where the two boys slept.

His lawyers had argued that the death sentences be set aside because Garner had developmental disabilities, a limited IQ and a violent, abusive upbringing (4) that caused him to function on the level of a 14-year-old at the time of the deaths.

How is this AP story incomplete and wrong? Let’s count the ways. But first, brace yourself for the horror that follows.

A Cincinnati Enquirer report that is no longer available but is excerpted at the October 2007 BizzyBlog post shows that Garner was a cold-blooded, calculating burglar who did everything he could not to leave any tracks, even if it meant killing six children who were sleeping (as noted earlier, one got out alive):

Hours before the fire, Garner slipped into University Hospital, looking for an easy mark. There, he found (apartment unit residents Marshandra) Jackson and Addie Mack, who had fallen and hurt her wrist.

Garner snatched up Mack’s purse when she wasn’t looking, stealing money and her apartment keys.

He took a taxi to the English Woods apartment, telling the driver to wait while he retrieved his belongings. He carted out electronic equipment, at one point waking up one of the children.

Garner spun a tale about her mother sending him to check everyone and sent her back to bed with a glass of water.

Before leaving, Garner set three fires in the apartment.

Then, he grabbed the phone and smoke detectors and left …

Now let’s get to the bolded and tagged items in the AP excerpt.

(1) – “Carelessness”? The Enquirer excerpt, which originates in Garner’s original police questioning and confession, thoroughly discredits that risible claim.

(2) – He “thought the children would escape”? He set three fires, plural (i.e., earth to AP, he did a lot more than throw “a lit match on a couch”). He removed the landline phone and the smoke detectors. How were these children supposed to call for help? How were they going to escape if they weren’t going to wake up until the flames were already out of control?

(3) – He wanted “to draw attention to the children’s squalid living conditions”? Mr. Garner had a sick way of demonstrating his concern. The original Enquirer article gave no indication that Mr. Garner had such “noble” thoughts, and I daresay you won’t find any such thoughts expressed in police or legal documents relating to the original arrest and trial.

(4) He had “developmental disabilities, a limited IQ and a violent, abusive upbringing”? Gee, he was clever enough to sneak in and out of a hospital; patient enough to wait for the right moment to snatch a purse; cool-headed enough to keep one of his victims calm, giving her a drink of water before sending her back to bed; and sufficiently forward-thinking to disconnect the children’s two best defenses against getting burned alive.

Nobody had the slightest reason to believe that Garner was disabled or mentally challenged in 1992 when he was arrested and confessed, or when he was tried and convicted. There’s plenty of reason to believe that his lawyers’ contention while Garner was on Death Row was a fundamentally dishonest, after-the-fact concoction with no basis in fact whose only purpose was to prevent the state from carrying out its sentence.

The AP’s weak coverage of Garner’s heinous crime is perhaps instructive to all who read future establishment press dispatches concerning death-penalty executions. The lesson is that the true story and full circumstances of what the killer did may be much worse than what the press chooses to tell readers on Execution Day.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Outstanding — From Washington (bolds are mine):

July 14, 2010 / 06:03 am

Drawing on the Freedom Rides of the civil rights movement in 1961, Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., is promoting an event called Pro-life Freedom Rides in Alabama and Georgia. The reason for the event, she explained to CNA, is that the focus of the new civil rights movement is the defenseless unborn child.

The Freedom Rides will begin with an assembly at Birmingham, Alabama on July 23. After a Saturday morning prayer vigil at a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, participants will caravan to Atlanta, Georgia for a pro-life service at the grave of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In a Tuesday phone interview with CNA, Dr. Alveda King recounted the civil rights era and its connection with the pro-life movement.

“We went through a lot of dramatic experiences on behalf of human dignity, and love for humanity,” she said. “Back in those days we were primarily fighting against oppression on color of skin. Now in the twenty-first century the focus is on the babies in the womb.”

Though she noted the disproportionate number of black babies killed in abortion, she emphasized that the effort to end abortion is “about all humanity.”

“We are fighting for dignity, for justice, for compassion for all people.

“Today, the little baby in the womb appears to his or her mother very much like a little slave. He or she cannot decide whether he or she will live or die, but the mother, sometimes the parents, the medical providers (though I say that cautiously because it is not a medical procedure to kill a person) … those decisions are made without the baby having a lawyer to defend his or her human life.

“He or she is just like a slave at mercy of slave owners,” Alveda King told CNA.

Asked about the original Freedom Rides, she explained that in 1961, laws were passed on behalf of black people so that they could stay in hotels, ride the bus, and have “the same rights that all people had.”

“There were students in 1961 who boarded the bus to test those laws. Those were very tumultuous times, and people lost their lives. Not just black people, but all people of goodwill who were involved in that.”

Alveda King explained that she, Priests for Life head Fr. Frank Pavone, and many pro-life leaders from across America, will take the bus to Atlanta and pray at the tomb of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

She said she looked forward to “the whole experience” of the Pro-Life Freedom Rides Campaign, especially “revisiting another time period that was very important to me.” She also thought she would enjoy being with pro-life leaders from across America and joining in prayers with “many, many people who are praying for life.”

Jim Pinto, the Birmingham-based organizer of the Pro-Life Freedom Rides, in a separate phone interview told CNA that the original freedom rides faced “great resistance,” including the burning of one of the buses in Birmingham.

“Those who stood up for the rights of human beings, and the violence and brutality they suffered, were portrayed for all the country to see,” he explained. “In a few moments, the civil rights movement impacted this nation in a way that may be unprecedented.”

He noted that as a child Alveda King’s house was bombed in reaction to her family’s civil rights work.

The Birmingham events were one of the reasons the Pro-Life Freedom Ride Campaign chose Birmingham, Pinto continued, because it is “synonymous” with the civil rights movement that “changed the nation forever.”

“The whole idea is to say that every human being is endowed with liberty and freedom by God to be the human beings that God has called them to be.

He explained that Alveda King emphasizes that the pro-life movement is “the civil rights movement of our time.”

“The foundation of the civil rights movement, the foundation of the pro-life movement, is one foundation: the sacredness and dignity of the person, the inviolable right to life, the equality of all people inside and outside of the womb,” Pinto said.

The unborn “are people, they are persons, even though this nation is denying their personhood … We are sponsoring the Pro-life Freedom Ride Campaign to declare their liberty, their freedom, their personhood.”

He said organizers had no estimated number of participants, as there was no registration process. However, he predicted “quite a big response.”

Pinto reported that the campaign has the “full support” of both the Catholic Bishop of Birmingham Robert Baker and the Archdiocese of Atlanta. The campaign also has support from Protestants including Pentecostal and Evangelical churches. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The website of the Pro-Life Freedom Rides is at http://www.priestsforlife.org/action/pro-life-freedom-rides.htm

Related: In January 2009, I did a post on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s likely stance on abortion (“Martin Luther King Was Outspokenly Prolife in 1963 Letter”). Abortion didn’t become a nationally contentious issue until shortly after his assassination, but the preponderance of the evidence, particularly his strong belief in natural law as explained by St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the beliefs and actions of other family members, and his civil-rights successors’ prolife views in the early years after his death, all support the belief that MLK would have been strongly prolife, and would certainly have been horrified at the abortion-on-demand culture that permeates so much of the African-American community.

Once again, it’s clear that reading editorials and op-eds at publications like the Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily becomes a requirement to be truly informed when a Democratic administration in power.

On July 6, Peter Ferrara at IBD noted that the annual report from the trustees of the Social Security and Medicare system is long overdue, and wondered why:

Are Overdue Reports Concealing ObamaCare Impact On Medicare?

Every year, the Annual Report of the Social Security Board of Trustees comes out between mid-April and mid-May. Now it’s July, and there’s no sign of this year’s report. What is the Obama administration hiding?

The annual report includes detailed information about Social Security and its financing over the next 75 years, produced by the Office of the Actuary of the Social Security Administration.

The Congressional Budget Office reported last week in its Long Term Budget Outlook that Social Security was already running a deficit this year. According to last year’s Social Security Trustees Report, that was not supposed to happen until 2015, with the trust fund to run out completely by 2037.

With the disastrous Obama economy, the great Social Security surplus that started in the Reagan administration is gone completely.

Every year, the federal government has been raiding the Social Security trust funds to take that annual surplus and spend it on the rest of the federal government’s runaway spending, leaving the trust funds only with IOUs backed by nothing but politicians’ promise to pay it back when it’s needed. Now even that annual surplus is gone. How soon will the trust funds run out completely now?

… (But) The implications for Social Security aren’t what the Obama administration is hiding by delaying the annual trustees reports. Those annual reports also include information regarding Medicare over the next 75 years. What the administration is trying to hide are sweeping draconian cuts to Medicare resulting from the ObamaCare legislation, which the annual report will document.

The administration is trying to delay the report until mid-August, when it’s hoping the country will be on vacation and won’t notice. Or maybe the delay is because the White House is trying to bludgeon the chief actuaries for Medicare and Social Security into fudging the numbers.

The Social Security “IOUs backed by nothing but politicians’ promise to pay it back when it’s needed” are from a government that itself has well over $10 trillion dollars in other debt, before counting Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and a host of other off-the-books liabilities. Then there are the additional tens of trillions in actuarial liabilities.

Ferrara didn’t note that the administration announced a delay until June 30 back on April 5, “so that the new report can reflect the impact of the recently passed health care overhaul.” But they’re now almost two weeks late. What are they waiting for? A really, really busy news day? A Friday night midsummer doc dump?

Meanwhile, no one in the rest of the press appears to be the least bit curious.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Yes, it is (direct YouTube link):

Yours truly can’t stay up with all things all the time, but the offensive plan to build a mosque on the site of one of the buildings collaterally damaged in the 9/11 attacks demands notice, so that anyone who might be in a position to help stop this will be aware, and can act. The building to be torn down is one preservationists once wanted to save. Now they now they have “somehow” lost interest in the idea.

Hats off to the heroic Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs for taking up the cause (her latest related posts are here, here, here, and here; her complete archive on the topic is here).

Hats off to Pamela and all who organized and attended the “Stop the $100 Million Mega Mosque” rally (my name for it) on June 6 in Lower Manhattan — an event that the establishment press either totally ignored or downplayed to an insulting level. Two examples:

• You’ll see from this New York Times search that the Old Gray Lady didn’t cover the protest or anything else related to the Ground Zero mosque between June 3 and July 12, when Rep. Peter King started asking questions about its propriety.
• This CNN iReport claimed that only a few hundred attended, when anyone looking at the pictures below will see that the numbers were clearly in the thousands).

Oh, and thanks to my Chicagoland newswatcher, who finds things I’ll never otherwise find, who e-mailed me the photos of the “few hundred” that follow (click on each image for a larger view):

“Recovery Summer” Watch — Small business isn’t buying what the administration is selling, because its customers aren’t buying enough of what small businesses are trying to sell:

Small businesses grew more pessimistic about their economic outlook in June in the face of weak sales and political uncertainty, the National Federal of Independent Businesses said on Tuesday.

… “The performance of the economy is mediocre at best, given the extent of the decline over the past two years,” the NFIB survey concluded. “Pent-up demand should be immense, but it is not triggering a rapid pickup in economic activity.”

Very few small businesses plan to create new jobs, according to respondents. The survey showed that only 10 percent of firms plan new hiring, that is down 4 points from May, the NFIB said. About 8 percent of firms plan to reduce their workforce, up one point from the previous month, the group said.

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Recovery Summer Watch II – Clear thinker Michael Barone on what consumers are doing in the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy:

Obama economy sends Americans to their mattresses

… I call it the mattress economy.

People seem to be following this investment strategy. Step one: Go to Mattress Discounters and buy the biggest mattress you can find. Step two: Take it home and stuff all your money in it. Step three: Lie down and get some rest.

This hurts the economy, but it’s a rational response to the Obama Democrats’ public policies.

It almost makes you wonder if there’s a baby boom on the way. :–> Although it wouldn’t really help for a couple of decades, Social Security and Medicare could use one.

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If the Republicans somehow pull off the feat of achieving a Senate majority, the party should give serious consideration to naming Tom Coburn its majority leader. That would make too much sense, so I don’t expect it.

Although I don’t agree with 100% of what he says in this interview (HT Instapundit), the clear articulation of his view exemplifies why he would be such a good fit.

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Institutionalized Gangster Government Watch (original column here) — The Obama administration apparently doesn’t care that its drilling moratorium has now been slapped down twice in court. Instead it has, as it promised after its first court loss, created a fresh new ban that apparently requires a fresh new legal action to be stopped.

This is what authoritarians who don’t respect the legal process and rule of law do.

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The myth of “The Population Bomb” is hopefully beginning its long-deserved journey to the ash heap of history.

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A WaPo-ABC poll says (HT Hot Air), among other things, that “nearly six in 10 voters (i.e., nearly 60%) say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country.”

(My opinion) About 15% know he isn’t making the right decisions for the country, and are perfectly satisfied with that, because they believe, as does the president, his 20-year preacher (until he was thrown under the bus, sort of), and so many of his other associates, that America deserves a comeuppance, and that they’re just the ones to deliver it.

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Leftists love to call conservatives “mean-spirited.” I’ll show you mean-spirited.

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Here’s a three-word suggestion to Newt Gingrich, who “said Monday he’s seriously considering seeking the Republican presidential nomination and will announce his decision early next year”: Please, please, don’t.

Michelle Malkin nuked Newt in October of last year, and examined the “baggage” in 2007.

I share her one-word reax to the possibility of a Newt nomination: “Gag.”

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Yeah, this move (“NAACP To Condemn Tea Party For Racism”) (HT Sister Toldjah via Dan Riehl) is disgusting, and it does “rise to the level of evil.”

The assertion is obviously, obviously, obviously false. And they have to know it.

Related: So now there’s racism in Cleveland Cavaliers’ owner Dan Gilbert’s reaction to LeBron James’s departure? Careful now, Jesse, Cavs’ fans of all colors are as angry at James as they’ve been at anyone since Art Modell. Are they all racists too?

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Speaking of obvious things, it’s been about a year since Al Franken, the illegitimately elected Senator from Minnesota, stole his U.S. Senate seat (second item at link).

This (“Felons Voting Illegally May Have Put Franken Over the Top in Minnesota”) is merely further confirmation.

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Yeah, there’s been some reaction to this (“Most Transparent Administration Ever Makes Effective Reporting from Gulf a Felony,” “punishable by a fine of up to $40,000″) in the establishment press. But if Bush 43 had done it, the news would have led all three evening newscasts and made every front page in America.

From Brooklyn, New York:

Jul 13, 2010 / 06:14 am

The Diocese of Brooklyn has officially opened the Cause of Canonization for Msgr. Bernard J. Quinn, a 20th century priest known for fighting bigotry and reaching out to the community’s African American population.

Born in Newark in 1888, Msgr. Quinn later realized as a young priest that African American Catholics were being neglected in his diocese and sought the permission of the local bishop to begin as “apostolate to Blacks.”

After serving as an army chaplain in France during WWI, Msgr. Quinn returned and with diocesan support bought a former Protestant church in Brooklyn. The church was blessed and dedicated to St. Peter Claver on February 26, 1922.

In an effort to help children orphaned by the Great Depression, Msgr. Quinn also began Little Flower Children Services. He publicly opposed the Klu Klux Klan when they allegedly burned the orphanage to the ground on two separate occasions.

According to the Diocese of Brooklyn, when the priest died at the age of 52 in 1940, over 8,000 people attended his funeral.

Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, the current Bishop of Brooklyn, recognized the saintly witness of Msgr. Quinn, and on June 24, 2010, he officially opened the diocesan phase of the cause for the canonization of the much-loved priest, during a Vespers service at St. Peter Claver parish.

“Almighty God blessed the Diocese of Brooklyn by sending Father Quinn to minister among us,” Bishop DiMarzio said. “That ministry did not end upon his death but has continued to grow and take root in the hearts and souls of the faithful and clergy of this church in New York, which has continually ministered to the poor and oppressed.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.