Topside Update, August 23: With Drudge having this as his top story since last night (and likely much of today), and an astounding 5,400-plus comments (as of 7:30 a.m.) at the AP story below as carried at Yahoo!, I get the sense that this story may be a wake-up tipping point.

Can anyone reasonably doubt after reading about the nationwide school construction cost excesses described below that Tea Partiers’ concerns about dangerously out-of-control government spending are valid?

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Call it “No Contractor Left Behind.”

The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles, apparently opening soon, will serve roughly 4,200 students in grades K-12. Its cost is coming in at $578 million, or over $140,000 per student ($2.8 million per 20-student classroom).

This is the LA Unified District’s most flagrant example of its Taj Mahal obsession, and it is far from the only one. Also, as the Associated Press’s Christina Hoag reported early Sunday evening, LA is not the only place where the Taj Mahal complex is in vogue:

The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of “Taj Mahal” schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.

“There’s no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the ’70s where kids felt, ‘Oh, back to jail,’” said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. “Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.”

Not everyone is similarly enthusiastic.

“New buildings are nice, but when they’re run by the same people who’ve given us a 50 percent dropout rate, they’re a big waste of taxpayer money,” said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution who sits on the California Board of Education. “Parents aren’t fooled.”

At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex’s namesake, a manicured public park, a state-of-the-art swimming pool and preservation of pieces of the original hotel (where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated).

Partly by circumstance and partly by design, the Los Angeles Unified School District has emerged as the mogul of Taj Mahals.

The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other LA schools among the nation’s costliest – the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School that debuted in 2009.

The pricey schools have come during a sensitive period for the nation’s second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation’s lowest performing.

Los Angeles is not alone, however, in building big. Some of the most expensive schools are found in low-performing districts – New York City has a $235 million campus; New Brunswick, N.J., opened a $185 million high school in January.

Memo to Mr. Agron: We’d be more impressed with these ultra-costly “impressive environment(s) for learning” if there was tangible evidence that an impressive amount of learning was actually taking place.

Somehow, it seems that we get to hear about these price tags in the media only after the schools are finished or nearly finished.

It would be interesting to know what the cost of maintaining these Taj Mahals will be. My, uh, educated guess is “really excessive.”

Let’s make that Ms. Hoag’s homework. Unfortunately, these costs will become a permanent burden on already beleaguered taxpayers.

Let’s also find out if part of the Taj Mahal motivation around the country is the desire, with the help of apparently limitless tax dollars (readers here know better; school officials apparently don’t), to put even more pressure on private schools by making them appear relatively unattractive, even though on balance more real learning takes place inside of them.

Please — Can we dispense with the claptrap about the “under-resourced” and “starving” public sector once and for all?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE, August 23, 6:55 a.m. — Recall that about six months ago, yours truly posted about a Taj Mahal high school in the Chicago suburb of New Trier, Illinois. This Wikipedia entry describes New Trier as “known for its large spending per student, academic excellence, and its athletic, drama, visual arts, and music programs.” The school was originally brought to my attention almost a year ago by a reader who was outraged about its Obama-obsessive indoctrination.

Since freshmen go to a separate facility, New Trier’s proposed new high school was for about 3,100 students, or 3/4 of the high school’s 4,129 enrollment.

The price tag for New Trier’s proposed Taj Mahal was “only” $174 million. That’s about $56,000 per student, or $1.1 million per 20-student classroom. The per-student cost of LA’s RFK schools is 2-1/2 times larger.

At the time TV station CBS2 in Chicago ran a report on New Trier’s proposed high school. Their question was, “Are you kidding me?” Voter agreed, rejecting it by 62%-38%.

No doubt many LA residents who are learning about the cost of the RFK schools are substituting a less than clean word for “kidding.”

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UPDATE 2, August 23, 7:45 a.m.: Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner, on LA schools’ performance (links were in original) –

And bear in mind that they are building this school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) which has serious problems that have been largely unaddressed. Earlier this year, L.A. weekly reported that in the last decade “officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each.” The Los Angeles Times also reported in July that one in three high school students in the district drops out — and the LAUSD has the second worst high school graduation rate in the country. Of the 39 worst schools in California, LAUSD has 23 of them.

But I’m sure blowing $578 million on a single school is going to fix all this, right?

The price tag would be unacceptable even if LAUSD was the best school district in the country. That this kind of money is being wasted in one of the worst is really almost too much to bear.

File this under “Fascinating Things You Learn When Researching Other Things.”

The Associated Press’s infamous memo huffing and puffing about how it will henceforth describe the 13-story mosque/community center/kumbaya center that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf would like to have built on a site two blocks away from where the World Trade Center Towers once stood opened with this sentence:

We should continue to avoid the phrase “ground zero mosque” or “mosque at ground zero” on all platforms.

Obviously the publicly announced editorial decision was news, but how about the lack of uppercase letters in “Ground Zero”?

It turns out that both the AP and the New York Times routinely do not capitalize “Ground Zero,” making them grammar outliers. Here was one grammarian’s take on the matter in 2007 (bolded in final sentence is mine):

Today’s topic is capitalizing tricky nouns like Ground Zero, Internet, and Earth.

Ground Zero

Since we’re coming up on September 11th, I was thinking about Ground Zero, and I realized that sometimes I see the words ground zero capitalized and sometimes I don’t. Back in 2001, it seemed as if the name Ground Zero got assigned to the site of the World Trade Center in New York almost immediately. Traditionally, ground zero means the site of a nuclear explosion, and sometimes it is used to refer to the site of a more general explosion or an area where rapid change has taken place. In those general instances, ground zero would be a common noun and wouldn’t be capitalized. On the other hand, although there are a few dissenters, most notably the New York Times, most people agree that Ground Zero is the name of the specific site of the former World Trade Center, and therefore it’s a proper noun that needs to be capitalized when it is used in that way.

Besides the Times, the AP is not in the grammarian’s roster of “most people” who correctly capitalize “Ground Zero” as a specific place in Lower Manhattan. Perhaps they would prefer to be described at “the nyt and the ap.”

This past Monday, referring back to something he wrote in 2002, the guy who runs TestyCopyEditors.com remined readers he doesn’t like the use of the term “Ground Zero” in uppercase or lowercase:

“Ground zero” has a long history as a cliché but was occasionally useful in its original sense, meaning the point at which a nuclear explosion is triggered. To apply the term to the World Trade Center is to be needlessly vague about the nature of the attack. It also makes the term useless in its original sense, particularly in reference to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Ngasaki, Japan, in 1945.

That’s interesting. Maybe the term’s use first became popular in the establishment press once it was coined as a convenient shortcut to avoid using the the “T-word,” as in “the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” or even to describe what occurred as “attacks” at all. If it was a strategy, it didn’t work out particularly well. Virtually everyone knows that “Ground Zero” in a story about New York City is where the terrorist attacks occurred.

Here is the collection of current raw headlines found at the wire service’s main site at 5:20 p.m. in a search on “Ground Zero” (not in quotes, but capitalized):

I count eight headlined instances of lowercase use of Ground Zero (the AP uses sentence case for its headlines). With the exception of one link to a multimedia item (“Plans for Ground Zero”) and links to two videos (“Obama backs mosque near Ground Zero” and “Obama Supports ‘right’ for Ground Zero Mosque”), “Ground Zero” is in lowercase format at all relevant underlying AP items listed above.

So determined is the AP to keep “Ground Zero” in lowercase format that it revised the words in two paragraphs it directly quoted from a Rochester New Democrat and Chronicle editorial. The relevant paragraphs originally read as follows:

The controversy over building a community center and mosque near Ground Zero cuts so deeply to the core of this country’s founding that President Barack Obama was right to weigh in.

… That’s the rub. Many Americans view Ground Zero as hallowed ground, and building a mosque nearby seems beyond insensitive.

In a roundup of editorials on various topics, the AP de-capitalized both uses of the term.

This after-the-fact revision of another publication’s work seems to reflect a grim resolve that goes beyond the normal policing of grammar. If so, what’s the source?

You’ll have to excuse me for believing that business arrangements similar to those described here four years ago might have influenced the AP’s original decision-making process:

Arab states have for decades paid substantial sums for control over content and other news-management privileges that I daresay would be refused at any price (with the mere request being treated as an earth-shaking scandal) if asked for by representatives of any Western country.

Say it ain’t so, AP.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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Even the clown princes and princesses who defend the indefensible from the establishment press and who don’t get linkage around here understand basic grammar, unlike the, uh, nyt and ap:

The Theater of the Sherrod(s) is apparently not over.

At AL.com last night, Mike Tomberlin of the Birmingham News reported the following:

Former USDA employee Shirley Sherrod says she will meet Tuesday with agriculture secretary

Shirley Sherrod, the former USDA rural development director for Georgia, said today she plans to meet Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to discuss a new job offer.

… Sherrod today spoke in the Sumter County town of Epes at an event hosted by the Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. Ben Jealous, executive director of the NAACP, shared the stage with Sherrod during a panel discussion.

Sherrod said she had no ill feelings toward the NAACP or President Barack Obama.

It the meeting does indeed occur, it will be an interesting test of establishment media credibility, given the accusations leveled at Ms. Sherrod and her husband by Ron Wilkins at the leftist publication Counterpunch several weeks ago.

Here are some of the specifics:

The Other Side of Shirley Sherrod

… The swirling controversy over the racist dismissal of Shirley Sherrod from her USDA post has obscured her profoundly oppositional behavior toward black agricultural workers in the 1970s. What most of Mrs. Sherrod’s supporters are not aware of is the elitist and anti-black-labor role that she and fellow managers of New Communities Inc. (NCI) played. These individuals under-paid, mistreated and fired black laborers–many of them less than 16 years of age–in the same fields of southwest Georgia where their ancestors suffered under chattel slavery.

… Mrs. Sherrod says she began to see poverty as more central than race. So, should indigent black child farm laborers warrant less reflection by Mrs. Sherrod? What lessons does she have to share from her tenure as management when she had power over her own people working under deplorable conditions at the same New Communities, Inc.(NCI) identified in the current issue? Shirley Sherrod could have included this chapter of her history in the same confession speech. Justice and integrity require at least as much accountability from Mrs. Sherrod to the poor black farm workers of NCI as to the white farmers she came to befriend. This lack of full disclosure of the whole truth is a “sin of omission” that trivializes the suffering of poor black farm workers and exacerbates the offenses of NCI.

Shirley Sherrod was New Communities Inc. store manager during the 1970s. As such, Mrs. Sherrod was a key member of the NCI administrative team, which exploited and abused the workforce in the field. The 6,000 acre New Communities Inc. in Lee County promoted itself during the latter part of the 1960s and throughout the 70s as a land trust committed to improving the lives of the rural black poor. Underneath this facade, the young and old worked long hours with few breaks, the pay averaged sixty-seven cents an hour, fieldwork behind equipment spraying pesticides was commonplace and workers expressing dissatisfaction were fired without recourse.

… Worker protest at New Communities eventually garnered some assistance from the United Farm Workers Union in nearby Florida in the person of one of its most formidable organizers, black State Director, the late Mack Lyons. The September 28, 1974 UFW newspaper El Malcriado, page two, reported on the worker’s strike (“Children Farm Workers Strike Black Co-op”) and the UFW stepped in to protect black farm workers from exploitation by NCI. Fearful of both UFW efforts to unionize NCI’s labor force and scrutiny by the Georgia State Wage and Hour Division, the Sherrods and NCI management hastily issued checks in varying amounts to strikers to makeup ostensibly for minimum wage differentials. It is bitter irony that the Sherrods have succeeded in being awarded $300,000 following a discrimination lawsuit, while Mrs. Hawkins and other impoverished NCI black laborers whom NCI exploited were never adequately compensated for their “pain and suffering”.

In addition to the “pain and suffering” payments Wilkins noted, NCI “won a thirteen million dollar settlement in the minority farmers law suit Pigford vs Vilsack.” This occurred in late July of last year, just a few days before Sherrod was hired by Vilsack to be the USDA’s Georgia Director for Rural Development.

A graphic of the full article to which Mr. Wilkins referred is here.

The two most damning paragraphs are these, which directly relate to Charles Sherrod:

Your eyes are not deceiving you. The UFW accused the Sherrods of using scab labor.

Wilkins wrapped up his Counterpunch column with a challenge:

Ask Shirley Sherrod about this part of her history. I know this story well, for I was one of those workers at NCI.

Will the establishment press follow up? Based on the non-coverage of Wilkins’s accusations during past three weeks, the prognosis is: “Very doubtful.”

A Google News search on “Ron Wilkins” (in quotes) returns all of 10 items, eight of which relate to the Cal State professor’s accusations. Three of those eight cover two items authored by yours truly, including this August 8 NewsBusters post. Of the remaining five, three are posts at center-right blogs (NCPPR, American Thinker, Patriot Post). There is also an excerpt at the Daily Caller, plus an item at Digital Journal.

A search on “Ron Wilkins” (not in quotes) at the New York Times returns nothing relevant.

It’s virtually inconceivable that such damaging baggage would be ignored if a conservative, Republican, or important businessperson had been similarly accused of worker exploitation.

The Associated Press has picked the Birmingham News item, which is on the wire service’s raw national feed. There are now no valid excuses for ignoring what Wilkins has alleged.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Important to remember, including the heroism:

Aug 22, 2010 / 05:03 am

On Monday, August 23, the European Union will mark its second annual “Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism,” honoring those who suffered or lost their lives under the totalitarian regimes. Millions of Catholics, along with those of the Eastern Orthodox churches and Protestant denominations, are among the victims to be remembered.

Dozens of victims of both the Nazi and Stalinist regimes have been beatified or canonized by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, both of whom personally experienced life under totalitarian governments.

A cardinal archbishop of the Polish church, Augustine Hlond, described the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939: “The Cathedral has been turned into a garage at Pelplin; the Bishop’s palace into a restaurant; the chapel into a ballroom. Hundreds of churches have been closed. The whole patrimony of the Church has been confiscated, and the most eminent Catholics executed.”

Terese Schwartz, a Jewish researcher, estimates that three million Polish Catholics died at the hands of the Nazi regime. Heinrich Himmler, who oversaw the Nazi SS during World War II, had called for the “elimination of all Polish people.” His strategy explicitly targeted the country’s leaders and central institutions, including the Catholic Church.

The author and publisher Thomas Craughwell, in a 1998 article on non-Jewish victims of Nazism titled “The Gentile Holocaust,” described the concentration camp at Dachau as “the Calvary of at least 2,600 Catholic priests from 24 nations.” A full reckoning of Catholic suffering at Dachau, he said, “would fill volumes.” Priests, in particular, were starved and worked to death, and singled out as the victims of medical experiments.

The recently inaugurated European holiday’s implicit comparison of the Soviet Union with the Third Reich provoked controversy in contemporary Russia last year, according to AFP reports. Nevertheless, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 20 million Russians and other citizens of the Soviet empire died in government detention or through famine and executions under the regime of Joseph Stalin. During his leadership of the Soviet Union, 14 million people were confined to the system of work camps known as the Gulag.

Catholics living in Soviet territories were singled out for persecution by authorities, because of their faith and the Church’s consistent stance against atheistic Communism. Fr. Christopher Zugger, a Byzantine Catholic priest who has written extensively about Catholics under Communism, described how prisoners in the Gulag “were interrogated, tortured, put into solitary confinement, experimented on, and sent to work in factories.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Well, well, from the New York Daily News:

They won’t build it! Hardhats vow not to work on controversial mosque near Ground Zero

A growing number of New York construction workers are vowing not to work on the mosque planned near Ground Zero.

“It’s a very touchy thing because they want to do this on sacred ground,” said Dave Kaiser, 38, a blaster who is working to rebuild the World Trade Center site.

“I wouldn’t work there, especially after I found out about what the imam said about U.S. policy being responsible for 9/11,” Kaiser said.

The grass-roots movement is gaining momentum on the Internet. One construction worker created the “Hard Hat Pledge” on his blog and asked others to vow not to work on the project if it stays on Park Place.

“Thousands of people are signing up from all over the country,” said creator Andy Sullivan, a construction worker from Brooklyn. “People who sell glass, steel, lumber, insurance. They are all refusing to do work if they build there.”

“Hopefully, this will be a tool to get them to move it,” he said. “I got a problem with this ostentatious building looming over Ground Zero.”

A planned 13-story community center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, Park51 has exploded into a national debate.

… “It’s a very difficult dilemma for the contractors and the organized labor force because we are experiencing such high levels of unemployment,” he (Louis Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers’ Association) said. “Yet at the same time, this is a very sacred sight to the union guys.”

“There were construction workers killed on 9/11 and many more who got horribly sick cleaning up Ground Zero,” Coletti said. “It’s very emotional.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press, in a story about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is in full protection mode, using a classic disinformation technique. This is all the AP’s Rachel Zoll had to say about Rauf’s checkered history in a story yesterday:

Some critics have accused Rauf of quietly harboring extremist views.

No, you jerks, Rauf has expressed extremist views, including the following on 60 Minutes just three weeks after 9/11:

BRADLEY: Are — are — are you in any way suggesting that we in the United States deserved what happened?

Imam ABDUL RAUF: I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.

BRADLEY: OK. You say that we’re an accessory?

Imam ABDUL RAUF: Yes.

BRADLEY: How?

Imam ABDUL RAUF: Because we have been an accessory to a lot of — of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, it — in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.

It isn’t about “some critics,” Ms. Zoll. It’s as if she thinks the guys in hardhats are just making it up.

It’s about what this guy has actually said — and the people with whom he has actually associated over the years.

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UPDATE: If you go to Ms. Zoll’s AP report, you’ll note that the wire service doesn’t capitalize “Ground Zero,” even though it is (duh, obviously) a proper noun. This treatment is consistent throughout recent AP stories I have seen. Why would they deliberately do this?

As seen above, the Daily News gets it right.

File under “Words Fail” — From Breitbart’s BigPeace.com (HT Instapundit):

Related: From a Gold Star Mom — “Code Pink Tells Gold Star Mom: Your Son Deserved to Die”

Also related: “Stars Come Out for Saturday’s Jerry Brown Fundraiser Hosted By Hamas-Supporting Code Pinkster Jodie Evans”

BizzyBlog Flashback: I propose a toast –

“… to Old Media’s — and Old Medea’s (i.e., Medea Benjamin of Code Pink’s) — defeat in Iraq”

Excellent and accurate take:

General Motors’ Stage-Managed IPO

The GM initial public offering filed Wednesday was hailed as a victory for an Obama administration that wants Americans to see the auto bailouts as a success. But that’s just what’s wrong with it.

… At a minimum, an IPO at this time of market volatility means GM will raise less capital than otherwise. Yet GM hopes eventually to raise up to $20 billion. Even if successful, that’s far short of what taxpayers have put in. So why now? Only when you consider the upcoming November election does GM’s puzzling timing make sense.

… Obama’s media cheerleaders have been happy to follow that story line, with Agence France-Presse hailing the IPO as a “welcome victory” for Obama, and gushy headlines like the Economist’s “Rising from the ashes in Detroit” suggesting happy days are here again.

But because the market isn’t driving this IPO, investors are wary:

Peter Flaherty at the National Legal & Policy Center notes GM couldn’t assure the accuracy of its financials in its 500-page filing because its internal controls remain weak. “How can GM offer and price shares if it cannot even attest to its own financials?” he asked.

… The Economist points out that investors are also wary of GM’s Opel unit in Europe being a money pit with $4.6 billion in restructuring liabilities, and GM’s $27 billion in unfunded pensions, brought on by bloated union contracts that don’t expire till 2015.

Dennis Virag, president of Automotive Consulting Group, told Bloomberg Television on Thursday that a GM management shakeup is exactly what you don’t want to see before an IPO. (Note: The reference is to CEO Ed Whitacre’s announced departure effective September 1 — Ed.)

“I think the IPO is more political than practical at this time,” he said. As evidence of that, GM plans another IPO tranche just before November’s election — suspect timing, to say the least.

… Had GM been permitted to go bankrupt like any other company, it might have reorganized — or its assets been sold to those who could use them profitably — and GM’s unsustainable practices discarded.

Here’s something GM could have considered doing in bankruptcy and didn’t dream of doing because of the government’s involvement: Truly restructure some or all of its dealer network.

Over four years ago (“The Car Dealer-State Government Racket”), I wrote: “Auto dealerships and the state franchising laws that protect them are Model T relics of a different world that pass on billions of dollars of unneeded costs to cay buyers every year.” So why not do something about it?

As I understand it, state franchise laws would not have prevented such a move during bankruptcy. GM could have arranged an emergence involving a reasonable payoff to dealers for their properties and the values of their businesses (they wouldn’t have had to do anything, but they would have needed the old owners’ expertise to get things going). They could then turn the ones they wished to keep into company stores, with the old owners staying on as facility managers for a time. Some of the larger, better-run dealers might have remained in place, but under brand-new, less complex, and more rational agreements.

This would have been difficult, but the payoff — and pressure on other competitors to rationalize their distribution network — would have benefited consumers immensely.

As it is, GM’s IPO is as IBD describes it, with one additional consideration: the amount of pressure the Obama administration might place on Wall Street to play along with a deal that is short on economic substance and viability, given all the new regulatory powers the recently-passed “financial deform” law gave to the star chamber known as the “Financial Services Oversight Council.”

The excessive pay and benefits are outrageous, and unaffordable.

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Note: This column first appeared at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Wednesday.

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It’s safe to say that the disconnect between the resourceful, wealth-producing private sector and the resource-draining, wealth-destroying public sector has never been greater. In his seminal, insightful essay at the American Spectator, Angelo M. Codevilla of the Claremont Institute characterizes the former as “the country class” and the latter as “the ruling class.”

To see that the ruling class currently has the upper hand, one need look no further than an August 10 USA Today report covering federal, state, and private sector compensation filed by Dennis Cauchon.

Here’s the rundown in round numbers:

• The average civilian federal worker earns — I’m sorry, “gets paid” — over $81,000 a year. After adding in almost $42,000 for benefits, he or she receives total compensation of over $123,000.
• For state and local government employees, the analogous figures are a shade over $53,000, almost $17,000, and nearly $70,000.
• Private sector workers average about $50,500 in pay, $10,500 in benefits, and just over $61,000 in total comp.

For those keeping score, the average federal worker — oops, “employee” — is paid 60% more than his or her private sector counterpart, receives bennies that are four times greater, and a total compensation package that is more than twice as high.

You know things are out of whack when including UAW workers at government-controlled General Motors in the federal government’s numbers (they aren’t; GM — get ready for this — calls itself “a private company” in its regulatory filings) would more than likely bring those averages down.

According to Cauchon, the status quo’s defenders claim that “the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs and the government contracting out lower-paid jobs to the private sector in recent years.” I don’t think so, because USAT’s reported figures are averages, not medians. While there are upper limits on what federal workers can be paid, a relatively small but numerically influential group of extremely productive and successful private-sector participants makes quite a bit more. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the federal-private differentials using medians are even greater than those seen above using averages.

Regardless, Cauchon in effect reports that for the time being the differentials, no matter how calculated, are on track to grow:

Last week, President Obama ordered a freeze on bonuses for 2,900 political appointees. For the rest of the 2-million-person federal workforce, Obama asked for a 1.4% across-the-board pay hike in 2011, the smallest in more than a decade. Federal workers also would qualify for seniority pay hikes.

So there will be a drop-in-the-bucket freeze accompanied by pay hikes for everyone else. Big deal.

There’s more. Those “seniority pay hikes,” known as “steps,” which typically average about 1.5% according to a related USAT report in December, will remain untouched. Thus, a typical federal employee will make almost 3% more in 2011, while the cushy benefits march merrily on. This is what the ruling class wants us to believe constitutes “austerity.” It’s nothing of the sort. How many country class readers are counting on a 3% raise next year, or for that matter got 3.5% this year, as federal workers did (2% across the board plus the 1.5% “step”)?

Oh, there I go again. I meant “federal employees.”

I deliberately included the three little digs above at our federal workforce to set the stage for a few important points.

The ruling class wants us to be believe that they and most federal workers are among the best and brightest society has produced. In many instances this is true, but Claremont’s Codevilla tells us that this is very often not the case in executive positions — in contrast to, of all places, France (italicized text is in original):

(In France) people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France’s ruling class are bright people — certifiably.

… While getting into … France’s ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in.

One of two things results from this overabundance of arrogant mediocrity. Some mediocre execs never figure out how ineffective they really are, and run things poorly. Others quietly figure out that they really are in over their heads, and end up either finding a smart but non-ambitious assistant who will make them look good, generally hiring line employees who won’t be threats, or both. In either case, the result is far less than optimal.

Of course, all of this can and does happen in the private sector, with one important difference: It can’t and doesn’t last. Private-sector entities which let mediocrity run rampant eventually find themselves run over by competitors who haven’t. This forces them to rid themselves of the mediocre or die. An exec who resists doing what must be done will usually be replaced by one who will.

In the federal government, that doesn’t happen. The absence of competitive pressures enables managers to take the easy way out. Thus, the mediocre hang around. Some of them figure out that they can get away with being virtually nonproductive. Others figure out that the best route to job security lies in being “productive” in really destructive ways. These are the people who go crazy writing rules and regulations. Add in unionization accompanied by a built-in reflex to defend even their most obnoxious members, and out-of-whack pay and benefit levels which make even looking at private sector employment seem foolish, and you have a recipe for organizational inefficiency and bloat unlike any other.

Because they also lack direct competitive pressure, organizational ineffectiveness often reigns supreme in state and local governments. But at least state and local pay and benefits are much closer to the private sector’s than they are to Uncle Sam’s. That’s because of the nearly universal requirement that these governments must balance their annual budgets. If the states or locals want to pay more or hire more, they have to collect more in taxes. Though there are far too many glaring exceptions, e.g., Bell, California, it’s still generally the case that the taxpaying public will tend to resist unreasonable attempts at expansion and unreasonable pay scales, and will often vote politicians who have supported or implemented such efforts out of office.

The federal government has no such fiscal constraint. When its budget doesn’t balance, it simply prints more money.

The only remaining potential check on the out-of-control growth in federal pay, benefits, and spending in general lies in the electorate exercising its power at the ballot box. For decades, the country class has generally stood by while the ruling class, its servants and dependents have grown in number, wealth, and influence, regardless of which political party has controlled the Executive Branch and Congress.

Will this time finally be different?

From Berlin:

Aug 19, 8:55 AM EDT

Police say a Dutch man braved an angry bear to defend his three-year-old daughter after the girl climbed a fence in a German zoo and tumbled into the animal’s pen.

Trier police said Thursday the girl scrambled into the enclosure and fell into a moat during a visit with her family Wednesday at the Luenebach zoo in southwest Germany.

Police say her 34-year-old father quickly climbed after her, but the Asiatic black bear managed to first hit her forehead and hurt her.

They say the father succeeded in saving his daughter and escaping, but not before the bear also injured him on his leg.

Both were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

Go here for the rest of the story.

Really bad reporting that is actually unfair to Team Obama makes pretty bad news look a lot worse:

Employers appear to be laying off workers again as the economic recovery weakens. The number of people applying for unemployment benefits reached the half-million mark last week for the first time since November.

It was the third straight week that first-time jobless claims rose. The upward trend suggests the private sector may report a net loss of jobs in August for the first time this year.

Initial claims rose by 12,000 last week to 500,000, the Labor Department said Thursday.

No they didn’t:

• ACTUAL initial claims were 401,856.
• That was a drop of 22,650, or 5.33%, from the previous week.
• Looking at the comparable weeks in 2009, actual claims dropped 5.10% from 482,590 to 457,985 (go to this interactive link to confirm).
• After seasonal adjustment, the Department of Labor came back with a psychologically damaging 500,000.

There’s no sugar-coating the poor data, but it’s not as bad as the Associated Press’s Chris Rugaber has presented it. This year’s percentage drop-off from the previous week is a bit higher than last year’s — not much to get excited about, but it is what it is.

As of his 10:27 a.m. rendition, Rugaber makes no reference to seasonal adjustment in his report. That’s really weak. Maybe he or someone else at AP will read this post and revise accordingly.

There are, as would be expected, several examples of bias in the other direction. Here’s one:

Jobless claims declined steadily last year from a peak of 651,000 in March 2009 as the economy recovered from the worst downturn since the 1930s. After flattening out earlier this year claims have begun to grow again.

“Recovered”? In the past tense? As if it’s over and done? Zheesh.

It has been 3-1/2 months since the May 4 primary. We’re only about 45 days away from the beginning of the travesty known as early voting, and about 75 days away from Election Day in November.

The home page at ORPINO (the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only) still hasn’t changed in any meaningful way during that time:

After 3-1/2 months, if you didn’t know better, you would STILL think that that Golden Boy Jon Husted and Auditor candidate Dave Yost are the party’s most important candidates.

Josh Mandel and Mike DeWine are STILL nowhere to be found (the latter is a bit of a blessing, but I digress).

We STILL don’t know why that lovely couple is taking up space on the bottom right.

Oh, here’s an “improvement”: Rob Portman finally makes an appearance. Well, actually, three-quarters of one his campaign signs does, in the item about Democratic outsourcing of work to Central America.

While a sensible, Constitution-based conservative wave continues to build throughout the rest of the nation, ORPINO remains AWOL. When last seen engaging in real activity, it spent large amounts of money and on-the-ground resources — even enlisting help from out of the state — to thwart candidates who were on board with that wave.

Supply your own adjectives.

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UPDATE: It’s official.

With the appearance of the BlogAd at the top of its strip, people have seen more of Rob Portman’s picture at BizzyBlog than they have at ORPINO’s home page in the past 3-1/2 months — and as readers here know, I’m not exactly a Portman fan.

I guess Team Portman had to find an alternative outlet, any alternative outlet. Apparently, they’ve figured out that they’ll grow old waiting for any real help from ORPINO.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorialists are pleased today:

Barney to Fannie: Drop Dead
Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.

Barney Frank has been all over the airwaves this week with a clear and—we never thought we’d say this—perfectly sound message about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “They should be abolished.”

Well, praise be. Two years ago next month, then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson put the two government-sponsored mortgage-finance giants into conservatorship, and Congressman Frank declared himself pleased that there was a good chance, according to government bean-counters, that the rescue wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime. Also at the time, Mr. Frank scoffed at the Bush Administration’s view that Fan and Fred should be wound down, saying it would never happen. One and a half trillion dimes ($149 billion) later, Mr. Frank appears to have seen the light.

Recall that in 2007 Mr. Frank had complained that the reason Fannie and Freddie hadn’t been reformed earlier was “the insistence of some economic conservative fundamentalists in the Bush Administration who, to be honest, don’t think there should be a Fannie Mae or a Freddie Mac.” Welcome aboard, Barney.

In another sign that he’s an avid reader of these columns, Mr. Frank even told Fox Business, “If we want to subsidize housing then we could do it upfront and let the budget be clear about that.” That is certainly a more honest way to subsidize housing and makes us think we don’t write in vain.

This is nice, but Captain Ed at Hot Air says we shouldn’t forget the history. He is of course correct (bold is mine):

That’s … a sea change for Frank. While he nearly dislocates his shoulder attempting to pat his own back by claiming that he has said this all along, it’s simply not true. Frank, in his role on the House Financial Services Committee, played a huge part in creating and maintaining the government intervention that severely distorted the lending markets. Whether or not he ever uttered a comment along the way about overdoing home ownership, Frank’s actions helped to create and maintain those policies, and he defended them repeatedly over the last twelve years.

… Just last year, Frank and his allies were busily claiming that the free market caused the collapse, and that only government intervention could restore American prosperity. Eighteen months into the Obama administration, Frank now wants to sound like a born-again acolyte of Adam Smith, or at least as close as Frank can approximate such a pose.

My theory: Barney “I Really Like the Free Market” Frank is frightened that Sean Bielat actually has a shot at pulling off the supposedly unthinkable — taking his congressional seat.

Here’s more from Bielat (bold is mine):

… Now, amid a heavily anti-incumbent election year, Frank has suddenly changed his tune on Fannie and Freddie, telling Fox News the companies should be “abolished”. Massachusetts voters should not be fooled by Frank’s election year conversion. He risked every hard working American’s economic well-being when he endorsed and protected Fannie and Freddie’s loaning practices.

“It’s pure election-year politics,” said Bielat, a Marine and successful businessman. “The voters are on to Congressman Frank. He is scared and knows Fannie and Freddie are a huge albatross around his neck going into November. Sub-prime mortgages were a primary reason our economy collapsed and why so many people are out of work. Nobody pushed harder to increase Fannie and Freddie’s stake in sub-prime mortgages than Barney Frank.”

This is Barney’s big, fat, fear-driven political ploy. No one in his district should even think about buying what he’s selling.

Other than the apparent need for an on-board grammarian (“loaning policies”?), Bielat looks like the real deal.

Impossible? Yeah, that’s what they said about Scott Brown.

The larger message is that this may be the first true “no incumbent in the president’s party is safe” election since the 1974 post-Watergate ballot box massacre. Pass the popcorn.

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UPDATE, August 20: Robert Snider at Pajamas Media analyzes the situation, and find a Bielat blockbuster difficult but doable.