From Rochester, Minnesota (HT Catholic News Agency; related Mayo Clinic blog post is here):

‘Landmark work’ moves beyond the bench
Monday, August 16, 2010

Mayo Clinic investigators, with Belgian collaborators, have demonstrated that rationally “guided” human adult stem cells can effectively heal, repair and regenerate damaged heart tissue. The findings — called “landmark work” in an accompanying editorial — appear in today’s Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Stem cells isolated from patients have normally a limited capacity to repair the heart. This innovative technology boosts the regenerative benefit by programming adult stem cells to acquire a cardiac-like profile. Primed by a cocktail of recombinant cardiogenic growth factors, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) harvested from the bone marrow of a cohort of patients with coronary artery disease showed “superior functional and structural benefit without adverse side effects” over a 1-year follow-up in a model of heart failure according to the study.

Significance of the Findings

“These findings provide proof-of-principle that “smart” adult stem cells have added benefit in repairing the heart, providing the foundation for further clinical evaluation,” says Andre Terzic, M.D., Ph.D., Mayo Clinic researcher and senior investigator of the study. “The successful use of guided “lineage specified” human stem cells is based on natural cardiogenic cues” adds Atta Behfar, M.D., Ph.D. first author of the study. The pre-clinical data reported in this seminal paper have cleared the way for safety and feasibility trials in humans, which were recently conducted in Europe.

In their editorial, Eduardo Marban, M.D., Ph.D., and Konstantinos Malliaras, M.D., of Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, in Los Angeles describe the Mayo approach as a “boot camp” for stem cells and also write that the study “& provides the first convincing evidence that MSCs, at least in vitro, can in fact become functional cardiomyocytes (heart cells) &”

The long-term potential of the findings include development of an effective regenerative medicine therapy for patients with chronic heart failure.

How It Was Done

Researchers obtained bone marrow-derived stem cells from heart disease patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery. Testing of these stem cells revealed that cells from two of 11 individuals showed an unusual capacity for heart repair. These rare cells demonstrated upregulated genetic transcription factors that helped identify a molecular signature identifying highly regenerative stem cells. The cardiogenic cocktail was then used to induce this signature in non-reparative patient stem cells to program their capacity to repair the heart. Mouse models with heart failure, injected with these cells, demonstrated significant heart function recovery along with improved survival rate after a year, compared to those treated with unguided stem cells or saline.

Specifically, researchers found that the heart tissue healed more effectively; that human cardiac and vascular cells were found participating in the regeneration, repair and strengthening of heart structures within the area of injury; and that scars and vestiges of heart damage appeared to fade away.

Go here for the rest of the news and other links

Here’s how the Associated Press’s Martin Crutsinger and Daniel Wagner reported the housing portion of their Tuesday report on the day’s economic news (“Factories aid bumpy recovery, housing still weak”):

Single-family home construction, which represented nearly 80 percent of the market, fell 4.2 percent. And requests for building permits, considered a good sign of future activity, slid 3.1 percent.

… The July increase in housing construction pushed total activity to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 546,000 units. Building activity in June was weaker than first reported. It fell 8.7 percent to an annual rate of 537,000 units, the slowest pace since October of last year.

“The bad news is that activity is likely to remain depressed for several years,” said Paul Ashworth, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. “The good news, however, is that housing is so depressed it is hard to see activity falling much further from such a severely depressed level.”

Well, okay, but the situation is already closer to a zero-out than it is to the levels we were seeing just a few years ago–or any time in the 50-plus years such records have been kept. Looking at the raw data on a historical basis, one finds that July 2010 was the worst July on record for the both stats the AP pair cited:

This is on top of the worst June ever last month for housing starts and new home sales (noted on July 27 at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog; new home sales haven’t been released yet). And note that June 2010 was revised down even further with the release of the July data.

It doesn’t matter how much you season (i.e., seasonally adjust) the raw data before presenting it to the public; the raw data still stinks like it never has before. Both stats, which happen be identically awful, are even worse than July of last year, when the economy (but apparently not the housing market) bottomed out. There aren’t a lot of compelling reasons to believe that the housing situation is going to get much better any time soon — at least as long as “An explicit federal guarantee of a large portion of the mortgage-backed securities created to finance American’s home mortgages” is considered a key linchpin of housing policy. The “implicit” guarantees of the debt government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became explicit as soon as they imploded in September 2008. From all appearances, they’re ready to do what caused that to happen all over again.

You don’t get the impression that things are as bad as they really are from the AP pair’s reports. That doesn’t change the fact that things really are that bad, and unprecedentedly so.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Just to be clear, I don’t think an FDA panel’s preliminary Avastin revocation decision is Exhibit A demonstrating the imminent arrival of ObamaCare’s death panels, as discussed in an e-mail I sent on the topic a couple of days ago:

I think it’s an unclear and borderline call at this point, and while making the accused political connection is convenient, it isn’t yet proven.

The FDA turndown recommendation for Avastin occurred on July 20, according to WaPo. Berwick was appointed on July 7.

I’m not clear on when CMS (the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) suggested that Medicare not cover it. If it’s later than July 20 and there’s no collusion, CMS is just following normal procedure saying it won’t cover something FDA doesn’t approve. One of the Hot Air posts indicates that it’s July 22 for the Provenge and August 13 for Avastin. Don’t know when or even if Provenge got the FDA un-approval recommendation. …

But I DO think that the FDA’s by its decision has arrogated to itself the power to serve as a de facto death panel.

In an editorial today, the Wall Street Journal elaborated (bolds are mine):

The FDA allowed the use of Avastin for metastatic breast cancer in 2008, under the “accelerated approval” program for drugs that show promising evidence against life-threatening diseases. Avastin’s dispensation came in spite of a negative 5-4 ruling in 2007 by the board known as the Oncology Drug Advisory Committee, or ODAC.

ODAC decided that Avastin did not meet what the FDA considers its acid test: Patients did not live longer—that is, the overall survival rate did not improve in a statistically significant way. Yet a clinical trial showed a 52% median improvement in “progression-free survival,” which measures the time women live without their disease spreading or worsening. In practice, this means delaying the growth of tumors by about 11 months in combination with chemotherapy—five and a half months longer than chemo alone.

ODAC met again in July to consider Genentech’s request for conversion from accelerated to full approval, with new data at its disposal. Astonishingly, it ruled again, this time 12-1, that Avastin’s progression-free survival advantages are not clinically meaningful.

… The median overall survival benefit for one subgroup of 496 patients between the ages of 40 and 64 was an additional 5.7 months of life. Some individuals gain years. At any rate, even the 31% reduction in the risk of disease progression or death is better than the status quo.

… So here we have government-anointed medical patriarchs substituting their own subjective view of Avastin’s risks and costs for the value that doctors and patients recognize. If Avastin is rescinded, thousands of dying women will lose more than proverbial false hope in the time they have left. They will lose a genuinely useful medicine.

… The Avastin mugging is really an attempt to undermine regulatory modernization like accelerated approval that offends the FDA’s institutional culture of control and delay. It is also meant to discourage innovations like Avastin that the political and medical left has decided are too costly, with damaging implications for the next generation of cancer drugs.

… ODAC’s advice is not binding, and the FDA will deliver its final judgment in September. It would be a hideous injustice if the agency came down once more on the wrong side of a life-and-death question.

Ann Althouse is correct in calling out FDA’s approach for what it is: “They don’t want to be seen as death panels, because to be seen as death panels will undermine their relentless, bureaucratic work.”

But that’s what this is.

In terms of ObamaCare, the Avastin decision may be a precursor to how decisions to deny patients the benefit of life-saving or (in the case of Avastin) life-extending drugs will be made under ObamaCare. The FDA will serve as the “bad cop” denying approval while Donald “About 8% of GDP is plenty (for all health care–it’s currently about 17%)” Berwick gets plausible deniability. In that sense, how this works out could be a dry run for a more habitual death-panel approach.

On December 8 of last year, at some point before hitting the “print” button, someone at the New York Times decided that a story about what has since become known as the Ground Zero Mosque needed to be reworked.

Earlier that day, the Times published an online powder-puff piece by reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Sharaf Mowjood about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s GZM plans. The pair’s story was revised before it went to print, and the online version was changed (“Muslim Prayers and Renewal Near Ground Zero,” with a web page title bar that reads “Muslim Prayers Fuel Spiritual Rebuilding Project Near Ground Zero”) to mirror it. It’s even puffier.

Several bloggers posted about the pair’s online original when it appeared. A few, including Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs and Ben Muessig at The Gothamist, excerpted some or all of the key paragraphs shown on the left below (bold in the third paragraph is mine). On the right is how that segment went to print on December 9 (link is to hard-to-read enlarged scan of that day’s front page, where the story’s opening paragraphs appeared near its bottom right), and how it currently appears online:

Putting aside the issue of whether previous online versions of subsequently revised stories should be retained and kept available to readers for future reference (I think they should; the Times, the Associated Press, and others clearly disagree), and even giving the paper the benefit of the doubt on the need to fit available print edition space, there’s plenty of reason to question the paper’s editing choices. The most important one is: “Why did the third paragraph disappear?” That disappearance raises at least these points:

• The imam describes the location as being “close to 9/11,” as if the fallen towers represent some kind of event and not an actual place. Is this imperfect English, or a slip of the tongue? Readers who know more about Rauf’s full background might be tempted to think he’s referring to something positive, especially given that he describes being so close to them as being “iconic.”
• Expanding on the Rauf’s use of “iconic,” the word “icon” in context means: “a person or thing regarded as a symbol of a belief, nation, community, or cultural movement.” So if the GZM’s proposed location is indeed “iconic,” it’s far, far more than a nice community center, isn’t it? Readers who know more about Rauf’s full background have legitimate cause for wondering what he believes the GZM really symbolizes.
• It’s also interesting how the phrase “a longtime critic of radical Islamists” fell off. It’s not like “Islamists” is a forbidden word at the Old Grey Lady — or even (though much more rare) “radical Islamists.” Perhaps Blumenthal or Mowjood found some contradictory information, like that 60 Minutes interview where Rauf told Ed Bradley less than three weeks after the 9/11 attacks that “the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened,” and that “in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.” It seems a bit more likely, at least before the GZM idea sprung up, that Rauf, based on his own words, had really been a longtime sympathizer with radical Islamists.
• Finally, it’s more than a little odd that the Times denied itself the opportunity, after originally claiming it, to brag about getting a scoop. Did the paper back away from seemingly valid bragging rights because of nervousness about being accused of proactively helping the project move along?

Given the facts and attitude clues washed out, the Times made some interesting editorial decisions indeed. When done, the presentation of Rauf is on balance became much more favorable, and there were no direct alerts that something might be amiss. Imagine that.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

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

______________________

UPDATE: Found this item yesterday (HT GovernmentExecutive.com) –

Many news organizations have reported that the average federal employee earns more than the average private-sector worker.[1] Is higher federal pay justified given that the federal government employs a more skilled workforce than the private sector? Detailed analysis shows that the size of the wage discrepancies is not warranted:

• The federal pay system gives the average federal employee hourly cash earnings 22 percent above the average private worker’s, controlling for observable skills and characteristics.
• Including non-cash benefits adds to this disparity. The average private-sector employer pays $9,882 per employee in annual benefits, while the federal government pays an average of $32,115 per employee.
• Overall, controlling for other factors, federal employees earn approximately 30 percent to 40 percent more in total compensation (wages and benefits) than comparable private-sector workers.
• Federal employees enjoy job security irrespective of the state of the economy. Since the recession began, federal employment has risen by 240,000—12 percent. The unemployment rate for federal employees has only slightly risen from 2.0 percent to 2.9 percent between 2007 and 2009.
• Federal employees demonstrate with their actions that they receive better compensation in the public sector than in the private sector: They quit their jobs at one-third the rate of the private employees.
• Bringing federal compensation in line with private-sector compensation would save taxpayers approximately $47 billion in 2011.

That’s even before eliminating positions that are redundant, unnecessary, counterproductive, and/or better off privatized.

__________________________________________________

UPDATE 2: More from Matt Welch at Reason.com.

__________________________________________________

RELATED: Via ABC (HT Dr. Helen) — “Civil Servants Find Themselves Cast in Unlikely Role — Fat Cats”

Here’s yet another example illustrating why one must treat the editorials at the Wall Street Journal as a primary source of hard news during Democratic presidential administrations.

On Monday, President Obama visited ZBB Energy Corp, a maker of high-tech batteries in Menominee, Wisconsin. Helene Cooper at the New York Times, where a larger version of the picture at the top right appeared, reported that “The company received a $1.3 million federal stimulus loan, which officials said would triple its manufacturing capacity and could lead to 80 new jobs.” Note the word “could.”

At least the Times mentioned the existence of ZBB’s stimulus loan. In three brief reports citing Obama’s visit during the past week, the Associated Press didn’t even do that.

The WSJ’s intrepid editorialists did everyone else’s work for them and peeked behind the curtain at ZBB. It is not pretty:

Uncle Sam, Venture Capitalist
Meet the battery company that Obama visited yesterday.

President Obama kicked off a five-state campaign swing yesterday with a stop at a “clean energy” plant in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. As it happens, Mr. Obama couldn’t have chosen a better company to demonstrate the risks that taxpayers are taking with their billions in green stimulus investment.

… Mr. Obama praised it for “pointing the country toward a brighter economic future,” but we’ll let readers decide if they’d write the same checks if they were investing their own money.

ZBB has been around for more than a decade, developing batteries and equipment to store energy from wind turbines and solar cells.

… last January, when the Department of Energy announced $2.3 billion in “clean energy manufacturing tax credits,” ZBB was one of 183 recipients—collecting $14 million.

We wonder who in government looked at ZBB’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since going public in June of 2007, ZBB has been hemorrhaging money. The firm lost $4.9 million in fiscal 2008 and $5.5 million in fiscal 2009. In its most recent filing, in May, it said it had lost $6.9 million for the first nine months of its current fiscal year. It explained it had a “cumulative deficit” of $44.1 million and informed shareholders that it “anticipates incurring continuing losses.” It acknowledged that its ability to continue as a “going concern” was predicated on its ability to drum up additional funds.

… Meanwhile, a review by the company’s audit committee last fall discovered that ZBB’s former CEO had been wrongly compensated as both an employee and an independent contractor, and that the company had failed to withhold his proper taxes. He stepped down, and the management team was reshuffled. ZBB was also forced to restate its financial results after a separate audit committee review found the company had recognized revenue from a contract in the wrong quarter.

The company also acknowledged in its May filing that the 72,000 square foot manufacturing facility it bought in 2006 is “currently producing at less than 10% of its expected capacity.” That means it can’t currently access the $14 million in federal tax credits, which were supposed to help with equipment for a new facility. Meanwhile, private investors have soured on some energy-storage companies. ZBB’s initial public offering was priced at $6 a share in 2007, and it closed yesterday at 70 cents.

A visit to the company’s quarterly income statements at NASDAQ.com reveals that sales during the four quarters that ended on March 31 were less than $2 million; the revenue line during the most recently reported quarter was a whopping $189,000. During that time, the company lost over $8 million. During the four years ended June 30, 2009, ZBB burned through well over $20 million.

You have to wonder how badly stimulus efforts such as these are going if a company in ZBB’s condition is considered worthy of a campaign stop. How bad are the situations at the ones that didn’t make the cut?

The Journal gives a partial excuse to the White House press corps for not doing its work: “It has been dragged to so many of these energy events that it has lost interest in looking at the companies it visits.”

Sorry, I’m not as forgiving. Allowing yourself to get scooped by a bunch of guys sitting in New York offices demonstrates how inexcusably lazy establishment press beat reporters following the president have become. That laziness would also appear to be influenced by the likelihood that if they really did their job, they’d have to report unpleasant things about their guy in the White House and the mostly accomplishment-free results of “clean energy” efforts thus far.

You’ll know that they don’t even care about being scooped if, as I expect, the WSJ’s editorial is the first and last you’ll see of ZBB’s BS in the establishment press.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Pinto argues that real reform isn’t where today’s photo-op disguised as a “Conference on the Future of Housing Finance” is going:

The Future of Housing Finance
We’ll never get a rational mortgage system until the government’s affordable housing mandates are ended.

… A consensus is building around a three-part grand bargain:

• An explicit federal guarantee of a large portion of the mortgage-backed securities created to finance American’s home mortgages;
• A tax on these securities to fund low-income housing initiatives; and
• A requirement that issuers of securities meet affordable housing mandates.

This is a dead end for two reasons. First, while supporters of an explicit federal guarantee tell us it will never be called upon, Americans have read this book before and know how it ends.

The second is much less well known but equally deadly: the central role in the recent real estate collapse that was played by the federal affordable housing policy created by Congress and implemented since the 1990s by HUD and banking regulators.

In 1991, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs was advised by community groups such as Acorn that “Lenders will respond to the most conservative standards unless [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] are aggressive and convincing in their efforts to expand historically narrow underwriting.”

Congress made this advice the law of the land when it passed the inaptly named Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992 (GSE Act of 1992). This law imposed affordable housing mandates on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Thus, beginning in 1993, regulators started to abandon the common sense underwriting principles of adequate down payments, good credit, and an ability to handle the mortgage debt.

… Compounding HUD’s forced abandonment of underwriting standards was a not-unrelated move to increased leverage by financial institutions and securities issuers. They were endeavoring to compete with Fannie and Freddie’s minimal capital requirements. The GSEs only needed $900 in capital behind a $200,000 mortgage—many of which had no borrower down payment. Lack of skin in the game promoted systemic risk on both Main Street and Wall Street.

… While the road to housing hell may have been paved by the government, the road back will be built by the private sector.

Pinto’s key historical point is that Wall Street became a negative influence only after the GSEs’ special status and the mandates imposed on them ruined the competitive landscape. Fan, Fred, and Congress’s determination to that they be run like candy stores handing out discount goodies instead of as real businesses set the stage for all that followed.

It should never be forgotten that while Fan and Fred handed out the goodies, it systematically misrepresented the quality of the mortgages underlying the securitized bonds it issued — for 15 years, to the tune of hundreds of billions and probably trillions of dollars. This problem gravely compounded what was already known about loosened lending standards.

Sadly, many Republicans who should have known better went along with much of this, because “affordable housing” sound so nice and consequence-free. But it should never, ever be forgotten that it was Democratic cronies like Franklin Raines — who not coincidentally walked away with millions himself — either sanctioned the systematic fraud perpetrated on bond rating agencies and investors, or conceivably were so detached from day-to-day operations that they let it happen.

The federal government should not even be in the home-lending business. The fact that it has been in the housing business and in the hands of a combination of allegedly high-minded and definitely not high-minded “progressives” explains why we are where we are. We should be undertaking the long and difficult process of extricating the government from the home-lending business. Instead, what the photo-op disguised as a “conference” will promote is heavy federal involvement into perpetuity. Down this road lies eternal housing hell.

On August 4, I e-mailed a set of questions to the Institute for Supply Management. Because of vacations and overly hungry spam filters, I was unable to get to the organization’s response until yesterday (thanks to all there for their patience and persistence, and for their responsive answers).

The questions arose because there is a significant divergence between ISM’s expansionary indices, especially in manufacturing, and the pretty consistently bad news contained in recent government reports. Another such example came in on Friday (HT to frequent commenter dscott):

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that the combined value of distributive trade sales and manufacturers’ shipments for June, adjusted for seasonal and trading-day differences but not for price changes, was estimated at $1,080.5 billion, down 0.6 percent (±0.2%) from May 2010, but up 9.2 percent (±0.5%) from June 2009.

This is yet more evidence, along with those cited here last week, why revisions to the annualized 2.4% growth in gross domestic product appear likely to be significantly downward, to perhaps as low or lower than 1%. by the time the last one is announced in late September, less than a week before early voting begins in many states.

What follows are the questions I posed, with ISM’s answers interspersed:

1. Has the design of the monthly surveys purchasing managers complete for either of these indices changed at all during the past two years? If so, how?

No, nothing has changed.

2. How would you characterize the make-up of the companies who report? Would you say they are predominantly large firms, a fairly representative sample of firms, or predominantly small firms?

We strive to maintain a mix of firm sizes. We check each responding company’s revenue, and match all company revenue within each industry to that industry’s contribution to GDP.

3. Is there a publicly available list of firms participating in each survey?

We guarantee confidentiality to the individuals and the companies responding to the survey. Therefore, names of companies or names of individuals are never disclosed by ISM.

4. (I believe this is an uncomfortable but necessary question) What assurance can you give the public that your organization’s chairman, Shelley Stewart, Jr., who donated $7,100 to various campaign committees supporting Democratic candidates in 2008, including $3,300 to funds supporting Barack Obama’s campaign, has had no influence on survey design, or the methods ISM is employing to obtain, compile, calculate, or present its indices?
5. If it is indeed the case, why was the ISM not concerned about Mr. Stewart’s political contributions when it named him chairman in February 2009?

ISM’s Board of Directors is led by leading supply management executives who volunteer to serve. Their charge is to lead strategy for the organization, but they are not involved in the day-to-day activities of the staff. ISM staff is responsible for managing the Report on Business. The Board of Directors is not in any way involved in the survey design, data collection, report aggregation, or analysis. Neither the ISM Board of Directors nor the Board chair have any knowledge of the information in the report before it is released to the public. The Report on Business process has been audited by an independent auditor.

6. What is the ISM’s explanation for the current difference between its expansionary indices, especially in manufacturing, and data from the government and other sources indicating that economic activity is at best recovering weakly and at worst contracting?

Norbert J. Ore, CPSM, C.P.M., chair of the Institute for Supply Management™ Manufacturing Business Survey Committee, responds to this question: The relationships between the ISM Report on Business data and the government data are noted for purely historical purposes. Over time, this has proved to be fairly accurate, but as with all other economic data, it is most suspect at turning points in the economy. The diffusion index methodology has remained unchanged since 1931. We make no representations other than the panel is selected based on the NAICS industry classifications, and that security is tightly controlled as respondents answer on a confidential basis and a security breach is not acceptable. If you choose to use the data to evaluate the current economy or build a forecast, recognize that a good evaluation or forecast should be built on multiple data sources.

So there you have it. Nothing has changed, and ISM’s responses are defensible and professional. In my opinion, Shelley Stewart’s political contributions present a problem with independence in appearance, but based on ISM’s answers, there is not a problem with independence in fact.

If one is going to try to explain the stark contrast between the relatively upbeat ISM indices and other economic indicators, you can rule out inconsistencies or changes at ISM, because they’re saying there haven’t been any. There’s no good reason not to believe them, and a long track record supporting the notion that one should.

Triticale, an early frequent commenter at BizzyBlog who passed away in 2007, would have reminded me that ISM is based on what’s really happening on the ground and is more reliable than other sources. I hope he’s still right. The alternative is not pretty.

Most readers here probably won’t recall James Kilpatrick because he’s been off the political beat for (OMG) two decades or more.

From the time he became syndicated in the 1960s until he stopped doing political commentary in the mid-1980s (it continued, but as a column on “The Writer’s Art” that was also extraordinary), he was an outstanding writer and a fine articulator of conservative values. He was also the conservative half of the “Point/Counterpoint” segment on 60 Minutes that was parodied on Saturday Night Live and was a more polite precursor of programs like CNN’s Crossfire.

RIP, sir.

Other tributes/obits:

• Richard Viguerie — “Kilpatrick was there at the beginning of the modern political era in the 1950s. For over 40 years, his voice helped pave the way for those who came after him in building the conservative movement.”
• American Spectator
• AP at NPR
• Tim Graham at NewsBusters
• Politico

From Old Lyme, Connecticut:

Published 08/14/2010 12:00 AM
Updated 08/14/2010 03:48 AM

Lyme-Old Lyme grad tells how he saved woman from fiery wreck on Route 156

There was no time to think.

A car on Route 156 was on fire, its hood completely engulfed in flames. An unconscious woman was behind the wheel, her head against the window, her seat belt starting to catch fire.

Jesse Matarazzo, 18, parked his truck a safe distance away in case the burning Subaru Forester blew up. Seconds earlier, he’d had little else to worry about other than drop his girlfriend off at her car in the commuter lot and catch his early-morning flight to Indiana the next day to visit family.

With his girlfriend waiting by the truck, Matarazzo, a 2009 graduate of Lyme-Old Lyme High School, ran to the driver’s side to try to save the woman he feared was already dead.

The woman, whom Old Lyme police later identified as 31-year-old Jocelyn Berg of Manchester, survived the accident late Wednesday and was still at Yale-New Haven Hospital as of Friday evening.

“I just ripped the seat belt somehow,” Matarazzo, reached on his cell phone in Morresville, Ind., said Friday. “I don’t know. I guess I got adrenaline or something, ’cause I wasn’t going near that, ’cause it was on fire.”

Matarazzo, who had been enrolled in the nursing program at Three Rivers Community College but said he planned to take some time off from school, carried the woman out of the car and laid her down on the ground behind his truck.

“I put her behind my car just in case that car blew up,” Matarazzo said. “At least she was protected by my truck.”

Berg had been driving north on Route 156 near Talcott Farm Road when her car veered off the right shoulder and struck a tree, police said.

Matarazzo was unhurt.

“I just lost a little hair on my arm, that’s all,” he said.

Berg regained consciousness before the emergency crews arrived, Matarazzo said. Reached Friday in her hospital room, Berg said only that she wanted to thank Matarazzo “for saving my life.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

From AP:

Reid against plan to build mosque near ground zero

The Senate’s top Democrat on Monday came out against plans to build a mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, moving away from President Barack Obama on the controversial election-year issue.

Locked in a tight race, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid became the highest profile Democrat to respond to Obama, who last week backed the right for the developers to build a mosque near ground zero. Since his comments Friday, the Democratic president and his aides have worked to explain the statement, which drew criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

“The First Amendment protects freedom of religion,” said Jim Manley, a Reid spokesman. “Senator Reid respects that, but thinks that the mosque should be built some place else.”

Critics have said the location of the mosque is insensitive because the terrorists who struck were Islamic extremists. …

Nice try, Harry, but it’s too late. As I explained two weeks ago, when it comes to Obama, “Dems Deserve No Distance.” Harry Reid of all people knew what the country was getting in 2008, and supported Obama anyway. You’re stuck with him, Big Guy.

Nevada voters should not be fooled.

For those who have followed blogs for a while, this guy’s name is especially rich.

Hardhats off (HT Family Security Matters) to Andrew Sullivan for his stance:

Guys like Andrew may be the last line of defense against this madness.

His blog is BlueCollarCorner.com.