Note: This went up at the Washington Examiner’s OpinionZone blog and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Thursday.

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The picture seen here from yesterday’s news speaks volumes about the presumptive ignorance of the open-borders crowd. I first saw it at an Associated Press story which has since stopped using it. It’s still present at this story at the Arizona Republic.

Its caption:

Daniel Ortega (from left), a Phoenix lawyer and immigration advocate; Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox; and the Rev. Warren Stewart are among speakers at a Tuesday news conference discussing the federal suit challenging Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070.

In the background is a painting (probably a reproduction) of Martin Luther King. For those who question the resemblance, look here.

I suppose the law’s opponents carried on underneath the King’s image to not so subtly assert that King would have supported their drive and the Department of Justice’s lawsuit attempting to overturn Arizona’s immigration enforcement measure if he were alive today. What they’ve really revealed is their historical ignorance.

There is no doubt about the following three things:

• United Farm Workers lead Cesar Chavez was opposed to illegal immigration, particularly the illegals in the late 1960s who were crossing the border, working for subsistence wages, and undermining his efforts to unionize grape pickers in California.
• King’s successor, Ralph David Abernathy, agreed with Chavez.
• In 1969, according to this chronology of events found at a UCLA web site, both men, along with then-Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, led “a march through the Coachella and Imperial Valleys to the United States-Mexico border to protest grower-use of undocumented immigrants from Mexico as strike breakers.”

All three men clearly opposed illegal immigration over 40 years ago. The only remaining question is whether King himself would have opposed it. Those who want to claim that he would have been okay with it have a heavy burden of proof. I believe they can’t meet it.

In 1966, as detailed here, after Chavez’s group won an organizing election and turned back the Teamsters, “Martin Luther King sent them a congratulatory telegram, saying, ‘The fight for equality must be fought on many fronts.’” The likelihood is that King was aware of Chavez’s position on illegal immigration, that he agreed with it, and that Abernathy inherited that agreement.

At a more practical level, it’s hard to imagine that King would have been okay with millions of illegal immigrations competing with lower-skilled American workers, many of them black, and either driving citizens to accept unacceptable wages and working conditions, or driving them out of work entirely.

If Arizona 1070′s opponents’ are using King’s image to pretend he would have supported them, they simply don’t have history on their side.

From Olympia, Washington:

Jul 8, 2010 / 08:20 pm

In a major reversal of their previous position, attorneys for the state of Washington have acknowledged the right of local pharmacies not to stock or dispense the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B.

On July 7, the state’s attorneys told a federal judge that the Washington State Board of Pharmacy would begin revising its rules, to allow pharmacies to act on their conscientious objections to the controversial drug.

The state attorneys’ new position may signal an end to a legal battle between the State Board of Pharmacy and owners of the local drugstore Ralph’s Thriftway.

In 2006, the board initially granted all pharmacies the right not to stock or prescribe medications to which they objected on religious or moral grounds. However, the board later changed these rules after publicly coming under fire from Washington’s governor, Christine Gregoire.

The subsequent change in policy attempted to force pharmacies to stock and dispense Plan B or other drugs regardless of religious or moral objections, prompting a legal challenge from Ralph’s Thriftway. Its owners sued the state of Washington in 2007, asserting that their right to refuse to sell Plan B, in accordance with the state’s original rules, was a matter of religious freedom.

In 2009, a federal judge sided with the store’s owners, but had his ruling struck down on appeal.

On Wednesday, however, the board’s lawyers acknowledged that pharmacies with religious or moral objections could refer those seeking Plan B to another drugstore, without interfering with patients’ “timely access” to a “lawfully-prescribed medication.”

Eric Rassbach, the National Director of Litigation for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the firm representing Ralph’s Thriftway, interpreted the reversal as “a clear signal to Governor Christine Gregoire that her bullying tactics are not acceptable.”

“First,” Rassbach reported, “she threatened to fire the members of the State Board of Pharmacy if they did not agree with her; then, she tried to pressure the pharmacy by joining a boycott against Ralph’s Thriftway.”

“It may come as a surprise to her, but conscientious and principled people like the owners and pharmacists of Ralph’s Thriftway are the backbone of this country,” he said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

I was quite surprised to see the difference in tone between two different Associated Press reports on retail sales Thursday.

The earlier article, unbylined and time-stamped at 10:43 a.m. at MSNBC (HT Hot Air), has the headline “Nation’s retailers post tepid June sales” and this subheadline: “Concerns about back-to-school shopping, health of recovery.” It is decidedly downbeat.

The later AP item, with Anne D’Innocienzio’s byline and time-stamped at 4:59 p.m. at the AP’s main site, is headlined “Retailers post choppy June, deepen discounts.” Compared to the morning story, this account is largely sanitized of macroeconomic negativity and dour words.

Imagine my surprise when I found a bylined version of the earlier report — time-stamped at 9:37 a.m. Mountain Time (11:37 ET) at an Idaho TV station’s web site — and learned that Ms. D’Innocenzio also wrote that report. Who fed this woman happy pills during the afternoon?

Here are some key paragraphs from the AP retail writer’s morning offering (bolds and number tags are mine):

Americans didn’t go on many shopping sprees in June, resulting in sluggish sales [1] for many retailers. It often took deeply discounted clothing to get shoppers to spend – and then only if they needed it.

The lackluster performance [1], being compared with a weak June 2009, is raising concerns about the back-to-school shopping season [2] and the health of the economic recovery [3].

The International Council of Shopping Centers’ index of June retail sales saw a 3 percent increase, the low end of its growth forecast that ranged from 3 to 4 percent. But that’s compared with a 5.1 percent decline in the year-ago period.

The figures are based on revenue at stores open at least a year and are a key indicator of retailers’ health.

… After ramping up spending surprisingly in the first quarter, shoppers have hunkered down since April. Some worry they’ll continue to be tight-fisted through the holiday shopping season [2].

… June is a time when stores clear out summer goods to make room for back-to-school merchandise. But analysts say discounting was heavier than expected as stores had to work hard to pull in shoppers continuing to grapple with a deluge of financial issues [4]. Such deeper-than-planned discounting resulted in some stores, including American Eagle Outfitters and Wet Seal, trimming profit forecasts Thursday.

… Uncertainty is growing as evidence mounts – from disappointing housing data to sluggish hiring – that the recovery is stalling heading into the second half of 2010 [5]. And that is when the benefits of most of the government’s stimulus spending will begin to fade.

Now compare the previous excerpted verbiage to what follows from D’Innocenzio’s afternoon item:

Stores deepened discounts more than planned in June to draw recession-scarred shoppers to buy summer tops and other merchandise. But shoppers bought mostly items they needed, resulting in small revenue gains.

The mixed results [1] from June, released Thursday, are raising concerns about the back-to-school season [2] and consumers’ ability and willingness to hit the accelerator on spending.

… The third straight month of modest sales gains [1] after a surprisingly solid start to the year underscores the choppiness of the economic recovery [3] and puts more pressure on retailers to come up with innovative tactics to get shoppers to spend in the critical months ahead, instead of just resorting to price slashing.

… Merchants’ come-ons are great news for deal seekers – if they have the means to spend. [4]

… After ramping up spending surprisingly in the first quarter, shoppers have hunkered down since April, going out to stores only to buy necessities. The volatile economic environment has made business uneven from week to week, and economists don’t see that changing until American businesses start making significant hiring.

Uncertainty is growing as evidence mounts – from disappointing housing data to sluggish hiring – that the recovery is stalling heading into the second half of 2010 [5]. And that is when the benefits of most of the government’s stimulus spending will begin to fade.

Here’s how the tagged items compare in the two reports:

[1] – D’Innocenzio went from “sluggish sales” and “lackluster results” to “mixed results” and “modest sales gains” with the same information. That’s a pretty good trick.

[2] – The AP reporter’s concerns went from being concerned about the back-to-school and holiday (really “Christmas”) shopping seasons to only back-to-school.

[3] – She went from being worried about “continued health of the recovery” to merely noting “the choppiness of the recovery,” which implies that there’s little if any doubt about is continuance.

[4] – Going from “shoppers continuing to grapple with a deluge of financial issues” to “if they have the means to spend” is a significant water-down. The latter description also ignores the fact that a lot of shoppers, specifically the 20% of affluent folks who do 40% of the spending, have “the means to spend,” but are holding on to their money because of economy- and government-induced uncertainty. How do I know this? An AP report on July 7 — also written by D’Innocenzio (“New retail data: Luxury shoppers pull back in June”) — told me. Seriously. Those happy pills must do something to short-term memory.

[5] – Give the AP reporter props for keeping this accurate verbiage consistent and its placement (from paragraph 12 of 22 in the earlier reports to 16 of 24 in the latter) reasonably equivalent.

All in all, it’s clear that D’Innocenzio’s reports on the same news went from decidedly downbeat to mixed in a matter of less than seven hours. As is typically the case at the AP’s main site, the latter report survives, and earlier ones go down the memory hole.

How convenient.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office released its Monthly Budget Review for June. It estimated that June’s deficit was “only” $69 billion, down from $94 billion last year, and that the deficit through nine months of the current fiscal year is $1.005 trillion, down from last year’s $1.087 trillion.

June’s single-month improvement — or more properly stated, its less disastrous result — is probably legitimate, because collections have picked up a bit. But, as I noted in April (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the reported year-over-year deficit reduction, such as it is, has nothing to do with anything resembling control of government spending.

This was my explanation at the time, which still holds, and which you will more than likely not see in any media coverage of the government’s financial situation when the Treasury Department releases its official monthly statement next week:

Most of the general public believes that the government is reporting its results on a cash basis, i.e., that “receipts” means “money that came in” and that “outlays” means “disbursements.” Until early last year, with one very small exception, that was the case.

But that’s so pre-Obama. Since Treasury converted TARP and other bailout programs (with the exceptions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) to Net Present Value accounting last year, this is how things roll:

• When the government “lends or invests” in banks and auto companies, the monies disbursed are treated as “investments,” and are included in “outlays.”
• Assuming no impairment in value or collectability, there are no receipts when the original amounts “invested” are repaid. Interest or dividends received are treated as “receipts” (euphemistically called “transfers from the Federal Reserve” by our oh-so-transparent Treasury).
• But if it looks like some of the “invested” funds won’t be repaid, the government will write down the value of those investments to what it thinks will be repaid.
• If it overestimates the impairment, it revalues its investments upward, and reduces reported “outlays.” This is what happened in March, to the tune of $115 billion.

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

With that explanation as background, here is a comparison of what CBO presented with what things really look like when the $115 billion above is put in its proper place, i.e., last year (changed line items are in red boxes):

Real spending is over 6% higher than last year’s already ridiculous total. The adjusted deficit after putting the accounting estimate described above where it belongs, has increased by over 15%.

This will be important to remember, because if the Obama administration continues to suffer from its “Recovery Summer” delusion, you can expect to hear the President and his apparatchiks claim that they are already starting to reduct the deficit, and their statist-compliant establishment media buds to relay the “news” without skepticism. The truth is that they’re reducing nothing — except, the longer their fiscal mismanagement goes on, our capacity to respond to their continually building disaster.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Readers here will say, “What else is new?”

What’s new is that a lot of people who should have known better — and would have known better, had they paid attention to the myriad warnings from the center-right new media for almost two years before the 2008 presidential election (or perhaps their hubris led them to believe “we can work with him anyway”) — have figured it out (internal links are in original):

It looks like the Obama spin machine is at it again, this time launching a concerted effort to rebut reports this week that President Barack Obama is anti-business. But given Obama’s record of stoking government intervention in the private sector and creating an environment of uncertainty poisonous to business growth, hiring and expansion, it’s no wonder the President is branded with an anti-business scarlet letter.

The storyline began in The Washington Post, where columnist Fareed Zakaria endeavored to find out why America’s 500 largest nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, rather than spending it on expansion (which would mean new jobs). Business leaders told Zakaria that it comes down to economic uncertainty surrounding new laws, regulations and taxes; the expansion of federal agencies’ authority; and the unknown implications of Obamacare, financial reform and cap-and-trade. And the kicker? Zakaria notes that most of them had voted for Obama yet all of them now believe he is “at his core, anti-business.”

Others joined the chorus, too. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said, “By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life, government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses.” And then there’s Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric, who reportedly said of Obama, “business did not like the U.S. president and the president did not like business.” The only surprise here should be how long it’s taken business leaders to speak out about Washington’s runaway train intervention in the marketplace, all in the name of creating new jobs.

Under President Obama, that intervention began with an $862 billion stimulus, and it was joined by a failed Cash for Clunkers program, a government takeover of the domestic auto industry, a bailout of Fannie and Freddie that may hit $1 trillion, a visceral attack on private sector compensation, a government takeover of health care and, now, financial regulation reform which is said to be riddled with unintended consequences. What next? Cap-and-trade hangs heavily on the horizon, as does the prospect of a value added tax, which Heritage’s J.D. Foster says will “recast the nation into a full state of dependency on Washington.”

The whining from GE’s Inmelt is particularly risible, given his 12 visits to the White House and his attempts to make his company perhaps the largest beneficiary of the Obama regime’s crony pseudo-capitalism. What he’s really saying is that he’s upset that everyone else isn’t willing to play along like GE so obviously is, and that maybe our Punk President and his Institutionalized Gangster Government would treat business better if they did. Sure Jeff.

Let’s just hope that for the rest it’s not too little too late, that it’s sincere, and that they can’t be bought off by ever more opulent de facto corporate welfare. All three items are in doubt.

It’s here.

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

The column explores some of the causes of the current 2.1-point unemployment gap between men (a reported seasonally adjusted 9.9% for 20-and-overs) and women (7.8%), and suggests several solutions.

The gap got significant (over a half-point) in July 2008, the first full month of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy and of the recession as normal people define it. It has been as high as 2.5 points — far higher than during any previous recession or downturn in the six-plus decades of available records — and seems to be getting worse again.

The May-June increase in the gap from 1.7% to the just-mentioned 2.1% may foreshadow the double-dip recession more people are beginning to see on the horizon.

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Related Good News for (Mostly) Men:

A federal appeals court yesterday rejected the Obama administration’s effort to reinstate a deepwater drilling moratorium while it challenges a ruling halting the ban.

The decision, by a three-judge panel of the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, opens the door to resumed drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while the legal fight continues.

Though some damage to our offshore drilling capabilities has already occurred since the moratorium was impoed, the ruling means that many affected oil industry workers, most of them men, won’t be losing their jobs.

It’s here.

It deals with the apparent presumption by open-borders and “amnesty” advocates that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be on their side if he were alive today. The evidence points strongly in the opposite direction.

It will go here at BizzyBlog on Saturday afternoon (link won’t work until then) when the blackout expires.

The post has some interesting history, especially for those who don’t already know it.

Last week, Matt Robare at NewsBusters noted the fact that the Big 3 networks’ combined year-over-year audience fell by a bit more than 1 million during the second quarter.

Last week’s showing appears to be to a slight pickup over the previous week, but it may have been much worse.

Here, per Media Bistro, is how the the week of June 28 as reported by Nielsen compared to the week of June 21, the last reporting week of the aforementioned dismal quarter:

June 21 — NBC – 7,190,000; ABC – 6,740,000; CBS – 5,230,000; Total – 19,160,000.

June 28 — NBC – 7,800,000; ABC – 6,740,000; CBS – 4,970,000; Total – 19,510,000.

So how did NBC attract over 600,000 additional viewers during the week of June 28, increasing its audience by over 8%? The answer, according to Media Bistro’s Kevin Allocca, is that the network probably didn’t:

On Thursday and Friday, “NBC Nightly News” was coded as “Nitely News” in the Nielsen ratings (similar to last summer) and the newscast was therefore excluded from the average over those two lower-rated days heading into the holiday weekend while Brian Williams was out. ABC and CBS averages are based on all five days.

Clever, eh?

In his coverage of last year’s NBC similar trick during the week of June 29 — a week where the reported combined audience was 20,180,000 — Media Bistro’s Chris Ariens observed that “The practice, however, is within Nielsen’s guidelines.”

Some “guidelines.” That’s like a baseball team getting away with excluding its worst two innings, or an NBA team unilaterally deciding that the second half didn’t count.

Given that one of its competitors lost ground week to week while the other just stayed even, it’s reasonable to believe that NBC’s June 28 full-week performance was no better than June 21. If so, the total audience at the Big Three networks really fell below 19 million.

Oh, how the formerly mighty in the statism-compliant establishment media have fallen, and continue to fall.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From John Fund in today’s Wall Street Journal (bold is mine):

J. Christian Adams,, a former career Justice Department lawyer who resigned recently to protest political interference in cases he worked on, made some news yesterday in testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

As expected, he claimed that Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, an Obama appointee, overruled a unanimous recommendation by six career Justice attorneys for continued prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party on charges of voter intimidation in an incident I detailed here yesterday. But Mr. Adams leveled an even more explosive charge beyond the Panther case. He testified that last year Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes made a jaw-dropping announcement to attorneys in Justice’s Voting Rights section. She said she would not support any enforcement of a key section of the federal “Motor Voter” law — Section 8, which requires states to periodically purge their voter rolls of dead people, felons, illegal voters and those who have moved out of state.

According to Mr. Adams, Justice lawyers were told by Ms. Fernandes: “We’re not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it.”

If true, Ms. Fernandes was endorsing a policy of ignoring federal law and encouraging potential voter fraud. Ms. Fernandes was unavailable for comment yesterday, but the Justice Department has issued a statement accusing Mr. Adams of “distorting facts” in general and having a political agenda.

… there is some evidence backing up Mr. Adams. Last year, Justice abandoned a case it had pursued for three years against Missouri for failing to clean up its rolls. When filed in 2005, one-third of Missouri counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents. What’s more, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who this year is her party’s candidate for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, contended that her office had no obligation to ensure individual counties were complying with the federal law mandating a cleanup of their voter rolls.

… The more this story develops, the more it appears Justice is engaged in a massive coverup of its politicization of voting rights cases.

The travesty of early voting only increases the potential for fraud.

From Godfrey, Illinois:

July 07, 2010 7:01 PM

The Village Board of Trustees honored hero Anthony “Tony” Sparks for his bravery and selflessness in jumping into the Mississippi River and saving a woman’s life.

Mayor Mike McCormick choked up when he read aloud a proclamation praising Sparks at Tuesday night’s regular Village Board meeting. Sparks, 26, witnessed Barbara Nowack, 65, of Grafton lose control of her vehicle on the Great River Road (Illinois Route 100) near Clifton Terrace Road in Godfrey, causing Nowack to drive into the Mississippi River during high water June 27.

McCormick actually saw Sparks as he pulled Nowack from the swollen Mississippi River after McCormick turned onto the Great River Road from Clifton Terrace Road between 9:45 and 10 p.m. that Sunday.

“When I got parallel with (the scene), the car was partially submerged,” McCormick recalled. “By the time I stopped and pulled over, he already had her pulled up on the shore.”

Sparks stood modestly, head bowed with his hands folded in front of him, facing the mayor as he read the proclamation for Sparks. Those assembled and all present village officials gave Sparks a standing ovation after the presentation.

“No doubt, he saved her life, because she wouldn’t have been able to get out of there without his help,” McCormick said during the board meeting.

… Sparks and his girlfriend, Amanda Moxey of Alton, were driving the Great River Road toward Grafton about 9:40 p.m. Sunday, June 27, hoping to get a nighttime photo of the flooding on the river. About 300 feet east of Clifton Terrace Road, they saw rocks and logs that had spilled onto the road from the nearby bluff, washed out by a torrential rainstorm that had just passed through.

Sparks said he was circling back to pull some of the debris out of the road when he saw the approaching, westbound 2004 Chrysler Sebring convertible driven by Nowack. He watched as the vehicle struck the debris, blew a tire and caromed across the eastbound lanes and into the river.

“It was crazy – like watching a movie,” he recalled to The Telegraph the following morning, June 28.
(more…)

Rush has spent a considerable portion of today’s broadcast ripping into this article by Christine Stapleton of Cox Newspapers, and rightly so, for the first three of the four opening paragraphs that follow:

Despite the warnings of Dick Cheney, George Will, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, the Russians are not drilling for oil off Cuba. Neither are the Chinese. In fact, no one — not even Cuba — is drilling for oil off Cuba.

The pesky and persistent rumor, bubbling back up with the Deepwater Horizon disaster, is still nothing more than a pesky and persistent rumor — aired in 2008 by former Vice President Cheney (who got the misinformation from conservative columnist Will), repeated on Fox News and recently revived by conservative radio commentator Limbaugh, who told his listeners 10 days after the spill: “The Russians are drilling in a deal with the Cubans in the Gulf. The Vietnamese and Angola are drilling for oil in the Gulf in deals with the Cubans.”

However, as oil from BP’s exploded well continues surging from the Gulf floor and washing onto Panhandle beaches, the rumor is poised to become fact.

Repsol, a Spanish company, expects to begin drilling off Cuba in 2011, according to published reports and oil-industry analysts. Companies from at least 10 other countries, including Russia and China, are negotiating or already have signed lease deals to drill off Cuba.

It’s as if Cheney, Limbaugh, and Will have been making things up out of thin air all along, nothing at all has happened until now, and they’re all of sudden just getting lucky. Horse manure.

Stapleton’s comeback would more than likely be, “I’m right, because no one is drilling right at this very moment.”

Well, ma’am, if you’re going to get that technical, I will too. This Wall Street Journal story notes that Repsol did some drilling in 2004, and then stopped after results were disappointing. So the Spanish company isn’t about to “begin” drilling, it’s going to “resume” doing so.

And while we’re at it, Ms. Stapleton, a person doesn’t issue “warnings” about what is happening, they do so about what’s coming. So when you try to claim that the conservative trio was claiming that substantial drilling was already occurring two years ago, anyone reading and listening in context knew that they meant that the Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Angolans — and for that matter, Petrobas, the Brazilian-owned oil company in which George Soros has hundreds of millions of dollars invested (how did she miss that?) — are attempting to work out and in several cases have worked out arrangements with the Cuban government that would or will lead to drilling operations.

The linked article also notes that:

Cuba’s portion of the Gulf of Mexico has been divided into 59 blocks, of which 17 have been contracted out to companies including Spanish oil giant Repsol and its partners, Malaysia’s Petronas, Brazil’s Petrobras, Venezuela’s PDVSA and PetroVietnam.

Shazam! They already have contracts (for what that’s worth in dealing with Fidel Castro’s communist workers’ paradise).

Rush also pointed to this Associated Press item from July 2006 carried at the Washington Post.

From here on out, say a growing chorus of experts, America will pay a price for maintaining its 45-year trade ban with the communist nation — a strategic and economic price that will have negative repercussions for the United States in the decades to come.

What has changed the equation?

Oil.

To be more specific, recent, sizable discoveries of it in the North Cuba Basin — deep-water fields that have already drawn the interest of companies from China, India, Norway, Spain, Canada, Venezuela and Brazil.

This, in turn, has reheated debate in the U.S. Congress and the Cuban-American community on an old question:

Has the time finally come to shelve the embargo — given America’s need for more sources of crude at a time of rising gas prices, soaring global demand and the outbreak of war in the Middle East?

Thus, there has been interest in Cuba’s oil for four years. This, along with the contractual arrangements cited above, makes the existence of plans to drill in Cuba far more than the “pesky and persistent rumor” Ms. Stapleton cited.

Ms. Stapleton should have put a hold on the bashing and stuck to reporting the relevant facts. Instead she chose to insult informed readers’ intelligence by taking cheap and ineffective shots at people who have been proven right time and time again — including this time.

Your loss, ma’am.

Graphic found at the Palm Beach Post.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

June 28, 2011, 2:00 p.m. Note: Photobucket, my photo/graphics storage provider, took it upon itself sometime early this afternoon Eastern Time to delete a photo which originally appeared in the original post below. The company did not contact me it did move the pulled graphic to the front of my album so I would be aware of its deletion.

Fortunately, I was able to find the original of this post at archive.org, and have added a portion of it at the top of this post. This time, I’m storing the graphic at my web host, so that Photobucket can’t purge it.

Because its web page layout has until recently been much narrower, this post’s cross-post to NewsBusters never included the graphic Photobucket has deleted.

Absent satisfactory resolution, if it’s technologically feasible, I’ll be looking for another photo storage provider at anniversary time.

June 29, 2011, 3:00 p.m. Note: Photobucket’s ultimate response, when prodded, is as follows — “The other image was a violation of our terms of use and will remain removed. The image contains hateful content that we do not allow.”

Those who believe that dhimmitude isn’t a problem had better wise up.

________________________________________

________________________________________

(Original post, with censored graphic at right)

(Graphic via Moonbattery)

At the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog (HT Instapundit), Byron York documents the results of some Lexis Nexis searching:

• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the New York Times: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the Washington Post: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on NBC Nightly News: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on ABC World News: 0.
• Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on CBS Evening News: 0.

As a supplement, here are the results of a search on “Charles Bolden” (not entered in quotes), NASA’s Director, done at 9:00 a.m. ET at the Associated Press’s main site:

Additional AP site searches on “NASA” and Bolden’s last name only return nothing relevant to the controversy described at this Monday Fox News story (bolds after headline are mine; internal links are in original):

NASA Chief: Next Frontier Better Relations With Muslim World

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.

Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA’s orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.

“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering,” Bolden said in the interview.

The NASA administrator was in the Middle East last month marking the one-year anniversary since Obama delivered an address to Muslim nations in Cairo. Bolden spoke in June at the American University in Cairo — in his interview with Al Jazeera, he described space travel as an international collaboration of which Muslim nations must be a part.

For all the new media controversy Bolden’s outreach remarks have generated — which, by the way amounts to about 130 items in a Google News search on “Charles Bolden” (in quotes) done at 9:20 a.m. ET — this later paragraph in Fox’s report is in its own way even more offensive:

He said the United States is not going to travel beyond low-Earth orbit on its own and that no country is going to make it to Mars without international help.

Apparently, that would be too “unilateral” or something. Maybe one of the early “beyond low-Earth” missions will be to the moon to remove that offensive American flag that Neil Armstrong’s crew planted there.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.