The past week has brought forth a couple of items from the Associated Press’s — and for the most part the establishment press’s — special corner of journalistic unreality. It is an area where human-caused global warming is still a given, and where that the nastiness known as ClimateGate that exposed the entire global warming enterprise as entirely unsupported by verifiable scientific data doesn’t exist. Maybe we should refer to that special corner as “The Climate Zone.”

The reports each arrived via AP Writer Arthur Max. Mr. Max and conference attendees at climate negotiations in Bonn shouldn’t be mad about having the opportunity to spend time in West Germany’s former capital city. After all, the temperatures there, based on the current report for Tuesday and plus the three forecasted days in the graphic at the top right (seen currently at Google), are on track to be virtually identical to the city’s pleasant historical August average highs and lows of 73 and 54 degrees, respectively, for August.

But despite the reasonably pleasant atmosphere (yeah, I know temps and climate aren’t the same, so back off already), Mr. Max’s August 6 and August 8 reports tell us that discussions between “rich” and “poor” countries have been quite frosty. Meanwhile, reactions from the the supporters of international statist expansion in the environmental movement who are on hand for the festivities have been quite heated. Overall, everyone, including the clumsy Mr. Max, is making mince meat of President Barack Obama’s claim, occasionally echoed in establishment press outlets at the time, to have accomplished anything meaningful at last December’s Copenhagen conference.

First, here are the opening paragraphs from Max’s Friday missive:

Climate talks appear to slip backward

Global climate talks appeared to have slipped backward after five days of negotiations in Bonn, with rich and poor countries exchanging charges of reneging on agreements they made last year to contain greenhouse gases.

Delegates complained that reversals in the talks put negotiations back by a year, even before minimal gains were scored at the Copenhagen summit last December.

“It’s a little bit like a broken record,” said European Union negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger. “It’s like a flashback,” agreed Raman Mehta, of the Action Aid environment group. “The discourse is the same level” as before Copenhagen.

The sharp divide between rich and poor nations over how best to fight climate change – a clash that crippled the Copenhagen summit – remains, and bodes ill for any deal at the next climate convention in Cancun, Mexico, which begins in November.

“At this point, I am very concerned,” said chief U.S. delegate Jonathan Pershing. “Unfortunately, what we have seen over and over this week is that some countries are walking back from progress made in Copenhagen, and what was agreed there.”

Fortunately or unfortunately (I’m going with the former), there really wasn’t much that “was agreed there,” despite Pershing’s posing, as Max revealed in his Sunday submission (bold is mine):

Analysis: Climate talks stumble from Page 1

The new climate change treaty under negotiation for the past 2 1/2 years begins with a brief document called “A Shared Vision.” The problem is, there isn’t one.

The latest round of talks that concluded Friday showed that the 194 negotiating countries have failed to even define a common target or method for curbing greenhouse gases – just one example of the ongoing divide among rich and poor nations.

Talks began in 2007, with the aim of wrapping up a deal in Copenhagen last December. But that didn’t happen, despite the presence of 120 heads of state or government. It ended instead with a three-page statement of intentions brokered by President Barack Obama.

Though less than expected, the Copenhagen Accord scored some breakthroughs. It boiled down the core elements of a deal to 12 carefully worded paragraphs, and it inscribed hard-fought compromises by the main protagonists, the U.S. and China.

Details were to be filled in by the next major conference in Cancun, Mexico, starting in November.

But the accord was never formally adopted. … The paper was merely “noted” by the conference, stripping it of any legal force.

Now, much of the Copenhagen deal has been thrown open again.

As readers can see, Mr. Max couldn’t stay consistent in his musings even in the space of five paragraphs. In the third paragraph above, he notes that a deal “didn’t happen.” But in the seventh, he says that “the Copenhagen deal has been thrown open again,” as if a deal really was done.

What transpired in Copenhagen was not a “deal.” If “the paper” had no “legal force” and could only be “‘noted” by the conference,” it really didn’t rise even to the level of what most of us would consider a “memorandum of understanding.” In other words, there really never was a “deal.”

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2010/08/10/copenhagen-dashed-ap-reports-lament-bonn-talks-slip-backward-and-stumble#ixzz0wEAyrVrz

Then again, for journalists in “The Climate Zone” who have had years of practice presumptively insisting that human-caused global warming is settled science, when it’s not — not even the “warming” part, as one leading advocate admitted in one of the ClimateGate e-mails – making the leap from “no deal” to a pretend “deal” hardly causes them to break a sweat.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Hmm — “KKR Cancels Plans for $500 million stock offering,” citing “unfavorable market conditions.” There are unique circumstances (there always are). But in its planned IPO, Government/General Motors wants to raise $15 billion (for about 30% of the company) or $30 billion (for about 60%). Will the market be receptive to either? Or does the Obama administration have special forms of pressure it can apply against underwriters and market makers to force its acceptance?

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Howler of the Day — “(Michigan Democratic Congressman Sander) Levin: Democratic jobs bill push not union payback.” Nah, don’t let the fact that most of the money will go to union public employees sway you.

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AP headline in another story related to the previous item — “Obama to make another plea for relief funding.” You’d think from the headline that the story has to do with Haiti or some other natural disaster. Nope — it has to with the “jobs bill,” aka the aforementioned union payback.

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This earmark could make us forget the “Bridge to Nowhere,” which after was “only” $230 milllion — “Obama’s billion-dollar earmark for shady Illinois energy boondoggle.”

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On and on it goes — “Mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac (FMCC.OB) on Monday said it would need another $1.8 billion in aid from taxpayers, bringing its total request since it was taken over by the government two years ago to more than $64 billion.” With Fannie Mae, the total is almost $150 billion.

Even with the 15 years of systematic fraud by design, Fan’s and Fred’s losses and Uncle Sam’s cash bailout amounts might have been significantly lower had the Obama administration engineered a decent recovery with tax cuts instead of the clearly failed stimulus plan and its train wreck mortgage relief effort. Now it looks like we’re stuck with losses that seem virtually without end.

It’s here.

The sub-headline says:

Big and crony-connected businesses are doing okay. The small and non-connected? Not so much.

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

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Related: Here is what the National Federation of Independent Business had to say in mid-July about small business confidence (HT ZeroHedge):

The National Federation of Independent Business Index of Small Business Optimism lost 3.2 points in June falling to 89.0 after posting modest gains for several months. The Index has been below 93 every month since January 2008 (30 months), and below 90 for 23 of those months, all readings typical of a weak or recession-mired economy. Seventy percent of the decline this month resulted from deterioration in the outlook for business conditions and expected real sales gains. Owners have no confidence that economic policies will fix the economy.

“The U.S. economy faces hurricane force headwinds and the government is at the center of the storm, making an economic recovery very difficult,” said William Dunkelberg, NFIB’s chief economist.

… In June, 9 percent (seasonally adjusted) reported unfilled job openings, unchanged from May and historically very weak.

… The frequency of reported capital outlays over the past six months was unchanged at 46 percent of all firms, two points above the 35-year record low (reached most recently in December 2009).

… The percent of owners planning to make capital expenditures over the next few months fell one point to 19 percent, 3 points above the 35 year record low.

… “Owners do not trust the economic policies in place or proposed, and they are distressed by global and national developments that make the future more uncertain,” said Dunkelberg.

Also, there’s this from the survey’s archive page, which has an introductory tease for each month:

The Index of Small Business Optimism lost 3.2 points in June after posting modest gains for several months. The persistence of Index readings below 90 is unprecedented in survey history. The performance of the economy is mediocre at best, given the extent of the decline over the past two years.

I’ll try to be on the lookout for the July survey results, which should come out in a few days. I’m hoping that the on the ground (i.e., not seasonally adjusted) job gains that nobody cares about which occurred in July occurred at smaller enterprises and perhaps boosted confidence a bit.

From San Francisco:

Aug 5, 2010 12:00 PM ET

Tissue from the hearts of mice morphed into muscle cells with the ability to beat and form electrical connections, in an experiment that may lead to new therapy for more than 5 million Americans with heart failure.

Connective-tissue cells called fibroblasts make up about half the cells in the heart. Researchers led by Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, said they used a trial- and-error process to identify three genes able to turn fibroblasts into heart muscle.

The technique may enter clinical trials in as little as five years to test whether damaged areas of patients’ hearts can regenerate, Srivastava said. Heart failure has no cure and will cost the U.S. health-care system $39 billion this year, according to the American Heart Association, based in Dallas.

“It points to a whole new way of potentially doing therapy,” said Chad Cowan, an assistant professor in the department of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This gives you the idea that you can take those fibroblasts, re-educate them to become heart muscle and thereby repair someone’s heart.”

The research, published today in the journal Cell, follows work by Shinya Yamanaka, of Kyoto University in Japan, who in 2007 identified genes that transformed skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells.

Dying Cells

After a heart attack, the blood supply to the organ is cut off, leaving sections without the oxygen they need. Cells in the oxygen-starved areas die, form scar tissue and no longer contract properly, impairing the heart’s pumping. Patients with this kind of damage, known as heart failure, can become exhausted by walking or climbing stairs.

Damaged parts of the heart can’t regenerate because they have no ability to make new muscle cells, Srivastava said in a telephone interview on Aug. 3. Researchers have hoped that stem cells might regrow heart muscle.

Efforts to transplant adult stem cells into patients’ hearts have led to modest improvements at best because the stem cells failed to form new heart muscle, Srivastava said. His technique may provide an alternative to stem-cell transplants by tapping into and converting a supply of cells already in the heart.

“The ability to take cells that are already in the organ and harness them to generate new muscle has the potential for regeneration from within,” he said. “People living with heart failure would have a chance to lead better lives. People who can’t walk up a flight of stairs might be able to do that with ease.”

Most Advanced

Srivastava’s research is the most advanced example so far of a new approach to altering the function and destiny of cells, a process known as directed differentiation. Instead of getting cells to revert back to an immature stem-cell state, then converting them to a particular cell type, scientists try to turn one kind of mature cell directly into another.

Transplanting heart cells made from embryonic stem cells carries the risk that immature cells able to form tumors also may be transferred, said Kenneth Chien, director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. An advantage of Srivastava’s technique is that it eliminates the risk from the immature cells, Chien said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

A week ago, AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter committed a serious act of journalism by telling readers what is really going on in stem cell science. It ought to be required reading for the Obama administration, which seems to be making a crusade out of human embryonic stem cell research (hESCR) while acting to stifle what appears to be significant progress in adult stem cell research (ASCR).

The amazing title of the AP reporter’s article is “Adult stem cell research far ahead of embryonic.” Given the establishment press’s years-long favoritism towards hESCR going back at least to George W. Bush’s 2001 announcement limiting federal government involvement in that area, it’s enough to make you wonder if Ritter knew that his editors were on vacation or away on other business on August 2.

Here are just some of the exemplary paragraphs from Ritter’s long report:

… For all the emotional debate that began about a decade ago on allowing the use of embryonic stem cells, it’s adult stem cells that are in human testing today. An extensive review of stem cell projects and interviews with two dozen experts reveal a wide range of potential treatments.

… Adult stem cells are being studied in people who suffer from multiple sclerosis, heart attacks and diabetes. Some early results suggest stem cells can help some patients avoid leg amputation. Recently, researchers reported that they restored vision to patients whose eyes were damaged by chemicals.

Apart from these efforts, transplants of adult stem cells have become a standard lifesaving therapy for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people with leukemia, lymphoma and other blood diseases.

… Embryonic cells may indeed be used someday to grow replacement tissue or therapeutic material for diseases like Parkinson’s or diabetes. Just on Friday, a biotech company said it was going ahead with an initial safety study in spinal cord injury patients. Another is planning an initial study in eye disease patients later this year.

But in the near term, embryonic stem cells are more likely to pay off as lab tools, for learning about the roots of disease and screening potential drugs.

… Some of the new approaches, like the long-proven treatments, are based on the idea that stem cells can turn into other cells. Einhorn said the ankle-repair technique, for example, apparently works because of cells that turn into bone and blood vessels. But for other uses, scientists say they’re harnessing the apparent abilities of adult stem cells to stimulate tissue repair, or to suppress the immune system.

“That gives adult stem cells really a very interesting and potent quality that embryonic stem cells don’t have,” says Rocky Tuan of the University of Pittsburgh.

Though he alludes to the concept in the bolded sentence above, one word missing from Ritter’s report is “potency,” which in stem cell science refers to a cell’s ability to create unrelated types of cells. The Mayo Clinic describes the status of adult stem cells thusly:

… it was thought that stem cells residing in the bone marrow could give rise only to blood cells. However, emerging evidence suggests that adult stem cells may be more versatile than previously thought and able to create unrelated types of cells after all. For instance, bone marrow stem cells may be able to create muscle cells. This research has led to early-stage clinical trials to test usefulness and safety in people.

Mayo also notes that “Researchers have reported being able to transform regular adult cells into stem cells in laboratory studies. By altering the genes in the adult cells, researchers were able to reprogram the cells to act similarly to embryonic stem cells.”

There was a time when “pluripotency,” the ability of a stem cell to give rise to any kind of human cell, was thought to be the sole province of hESCR. That may still conceivably be true, but if enough adult cells of different types can be coaxed into creating other types of cells, they may be able to cover the gamut of human tissue even if none are ever induced into true pluripotency. Besides, some scientists are saying that true pluripotency from adult stem cells is not that far away.

So remind me, if hESCR has such limited use, why did President Obama make such a big deal of reversing President Bush’s Executive Order, thereby allowing federal funds to go into ESCR, while proclaiming that “ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda, and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology”? Perhaps he can explain to Malcolm Ritter how he knows that adult stem cells are Republican, and embryonic ones are Democratic.

Graphic found at the Stem Cell Blog.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

A Muslim victim of 9/11: ‘Build your mosque somewhere else’
By Neda Bolourchi
Sunday, August 8, 2010

I have no grave site to visit, no place to bring my mother her favorite yellow flowers, no spot where I can hold my weary heart close to her. All I have is Ground Zero.

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I watched as terrorists slammed United Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, 18 minutes after their accomplices on another hijacked plane hit the North Tower. My mother was on the flight. I witnessed her murder on live television. I still cannot fully comprehend those images. In that moment, I died as well. I carry a hole in my heart that will never be filled.

… I worry that the construction of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center site would not promote tolerance or understanding; I fear it would become a symbol of victory for militant Muslims around the world.

… a mosque near Ground Zero will not move this conversation forward. There were many mosques in the United States before Sept. 11; their mere existence did not bring cross-cultural understanding. The proposed center in New York may be heralded as a peace offering — may genuinely seek to focus on “promoting integration, tolerance of difference and community cohesion through arts and culture,” as its Web site declares — but I fear that over time, it will cultivate a fundamentalist version of the Muslim faith, embracing those who share such beliefs and hating those who do not.

… I know Ground Zero is not mine alone; I must share this sanctuary with tourists, politicians, anyone who chooses to come, whatever their motivations or intentions. But a mosque nearby — even a proposed one — is already transforming the site from a sacred ground for reflection, so desperately needed by the families who lost loved ones, to a battleground for religious and political ideologies. So many people from different nationalities and religions were killed that day. This site should be a neutral place for all to come in peace and remember. I believe my mother would have thought so as well.

… I do not like harboring resentment or anger, but I do not want the death of my mother — my best friend, my hero, my strength, my love — to become even more politicized than it already is. To the supporters of this new Islamic cultural center, I must ask: Build your ideological monument somewhere else, far from my mother’s grave, and let her rest.

Not much to add. The rest is here.

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Previous posts:

• July 15 — NYT: Ground Zero Mega Mosque With Undisclosed Funding Is ‘Planned Sign of Tolerance’
• July 13 — This Is One Insult Too Far

…but they may build a Christian Center next to your mosque. I think Bloomberg just fainted…

From WND:

Holy turf wars at Ground Zero
9-11 Christian Center planned as permanent protest to mosque

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Posted: July 12, 2010
8:25 pm Eastern
By Drew Zahn
WorldNetDaily

In response to the controversial plans to build an Islamic mosque in New York City near the place where Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001, an Internet evangelist is planning to establish what he calls the 9-11 Christian Center at Ground Zero.

Bill Keller of LivePrayer.com, an Internet ministry that claims over 2.4 million subscribers, is planning on opening the Center at a temporary location near Ground Zero this September before announcing a permanent home beginning in 2011.

…We are not starting a church,” Keller emphasized in an email to WND, “but this will be an evangelistic center reaching out to people who are searching, looking for hope and answers in their life.”

“The mission is simple,” Keller further explains on the center’s website. “Have a place at Ground Zero where people can come to hear the real, uncompromised Truth right from God’s Word and find the only true hope there is, faith in Jesus Christ. We will combat the lies of this world and Islam with the Truth. We will combat the hatred of this world and Islam with love. We will combat the violence of this world and Islam with peace. Finally, we will combat eternal death this world and Islam brings with life everlasting!”

…The goal of the airtime, Keller declares, is to “keep the daily flow of God’s truth regarding the issues of the day, to minister to people’s needs, to bring the lost to faith in Christ [and] to promote the 9-11 Christian Center at Ground Zero.”

More here. And the new center’s website is here.

Wonder what milquetoast Mayor Bloomberg will say about this? And how much more will CAIR slip him to shut it down thus continuing their mockery of 9/11?

That deafening silence you hear isn’t indifference or acceptance Mayor Mike, it’s people getting ready to rumble…

Stay tuned …

I intended to post on any response or non-response I might have received to the e-mail contained in this post from last Wednesday (“The Data vs. ISM: A Request for Answers”).

Because of time off taken by the addressee, I am delaying ISM’s opportunity to respond until Thursday, August 12.

On August 3 (“U.S. To Train 3,000 Offshore IT Workers”), InformationWeek.com’s Paul McDougall reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development is operating at cross purposes with the Obama administration’s stated goal to keep high-tech jobs in the U.S.

USAID has since attempted to do some backing and filling about the assistance it is providing in Sri Lanka, but its arguments may ring hollow, given McDougall’s report two days later that the agency is also helping to fund IT outsourcing efforts in Armenia.

Here are the first four paragraphs of McDougall’s original August 3 report:

Despite President Obama’s pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $36 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.

Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent’s low labor costs.

Under director Rajiv Shah, the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.

USAID is contributing about $10 million to the effort, while its private partners are investing roughly $26 million.

A short time later, Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld (“Basic skills, not enterprise Java, in Sri Lanka”), relayed USAID’s contention that relevance of java to the Sri Lankan effort would only be in whatever coffee might be used to keep students awake and alert (that’s my “clever” interpretation, not his). He also offered a humanitarian justification for the effort:

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is helping to fund development of Sri Lanka’s offshore outsourcing industry, says it made a mistake in announcing that it would provide training on enterprise Java as part of a basic IT work skills program, an agency spokeswoman said today.

… The inclusion of enterprise Java was curious because the USAID also said, in a subsequent follow-up blog post about this training, that the population in this area has “not been exposed to even basic IT technology.”

… A USAID spokesman wrote this: “USAID’s partner in the project, a Sri Lankan company, initially requested to teach Enterprise Java to students that may qualify. However, after conducting due diligence, the partner found that the training programs must focus on fundamental computer skills, as the majority of prospective trainees lacked even basic experience with computers.”

… The Northern area of Sri Lanka has seen much killing, including massacres. The war has been particularly brutal, with as many as 100,000 people killed over the course of the war and this in a country with a total population of just over 21 million. The war was settled last year and now the government is trying to stabilize this area with some economic development assistance.

A correct translation of the bolded paragraph would be: They really wanted to do it, but they couldn’t.

Even if the effort in Sri Lanka isn’t harmful to U.S. economic interests, the same probably can’t be said of what McDougall reported on August 5 (“Now It’s Armenia: USAID Funds IT In Eurasia”) about USAID’s involvement in Armenia:

Even as controversy mounts over its funding of IT outsourcers in South Asia, the U.S. Agency for International Development has announced a program under which it will partner with the government of Armenia—a nation anxious to lure computer work from American shores–to promote the development of the country’s information technology industry.

Jonathan Hale, USAID deputy assistant administrator for Europe & Eurasia, is on a four-day trip to Armenia to meet with government and private industry leaders in the country. On his agenda is a meeting with Armenian economic minister Nerses Yeritsyan.

“We look forward to partnering with USAID on the IT sector, which has great potential as Armenia has an advantage in this sector,” Yeritsyan said in a statement released by USAID. “We want companies to come to Armenia and create their innovative environments,” Yeritsyan said.

Among other things, Armenia is looking to establish itself as a center for low-cost IT and engineering work outsourced from the U.S. and other Western countries.

… USAID, a taxpayer-funded federal agency, did not disclose how much it’s contributing to Armenia’s efforts to become a global IT competitor. Among the U.S. companies participating in the project is Oracle’s Sun Microsystems unit.

Apart from what the Obama administration appears to be doing to ruin it, the more recent trend has been to pull call center work, much of which is related to IT support, back from overseas installations. I noted in a May 30 post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) industry reports that the call centers actually grew during the worst of the 2008-2009 recession as normal people define it. More tangible evidence of this trend is found at this link. Though it goes back to March of 2009, it cites eight specific and significant instances of companies each deciding to “onshore” hundreds of jobs in the U.S. that either had been outsourced overseas, or would have been in previous years. In the AT&T case cited at the link, thousands of jobs are involved.

Though there have been stories in other tech publications about the Sri Lankan and Armenian situations since McDougall’s reports, the U.S. establishment press appears to be disinterested. A Google News search on “Sri Lanka outsourcing” (not in quotes) comes up with few results. A deeper dig into those results shows no U.S. establishment newspaper coverage. There is a mention at a blog post at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but it turns out to be from a commenter. Associated Press searches on “Sri Lanka” and “Armenia” (neither in quotes) return nothing relevant.

Given “how American jobs disppearing overseas” was a popular establishment and sometimes valid media and Democratic Party theme during the Bush 43 years, it’s a little hard to handle any journalistic contention that a clearly proactive, government-sponsored effort to do just that isn’t sufficiently newsworthy.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Bets on whether or not any of the lamestream media harlots have the guts to ask Barry about this …

10 Christian aid workers slain in Afghanistan
6 Americans part of ambushed medical team.
By Kathy Gannon
Associated Press
Posted: Sunday, Aug. 08, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan They hiked for more than 10 hours over rugged mountains – unarmed and without security – to bring medical care to isolated Afghan villagers until their humanitarian mission took a tragic turn.

Ten members of the Christian medical team – six Americans, two Afghans, one German and a Briton – were gunned down in a gruesome slaughter that the Taliban said they carried out, alleging the volunteers were spying and trying to convert Muslims to Christianity. The gunmen spared an Afghan driver, who recited verses from the Islamic holy book Quran as he begged for his life.

…The bullet-riddled bodies – including three women – were found Friday near three vehicles in a wooded area just off the main road that snakes through a narrow valley in the Kuran Wa Munjan district of Badakhshan, provincial police chief Gen. Agha Noor Kemtuz told The Associated Press.

One of the Americans, Dr. Tom Little, a New York optometrist, had spent about 30 years in Afghanistan, rearing three daughters and surviving both the Soviet invasion and bloody civil war of the 1990s that destroyed much of Kabul.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told the AP that they killed the foreigners because they were “spying for the Americans” and “preaching Christianity.” In a Pashto language statement acquired by the AP, the Taliban also said the team was carrying Dari-language bibles and “spying gadgets.”

…Team leader Tom Little, 61, of Delmar, N.Y., had been working in Afghanistan for about 30 years and spoke fluent Dari, one of the two main Afghan languages, Frans said. Little and other Christian aid workers were expelled by the Taliban government in August 2001 after the arrest of eight Christian aid workers for allegedly trying to convert Afghans to Christianity.

He returned after the Taliban government was toppled in November 2001 by U.S.-backed forces. Known in Kabul as “Mr. Tom,” Little supervised a network of IAM eye hospitals and clinics.

…Little had been making such trips to Afghan villages for decades, offering vision care and surgical services in regions where medical services of any type are scarce.

…The driver, identified as Saifullah, told authorities that gunmen attacked team members as they returned to their vehicles following lunch in the Sharron valley Thursday, according to Kemtuz, the Badakhshan police chief. The volunteers were forced to sit on the ground. The gunmen looted the vehicles, then fatally shot them, Kemtuz said.

Other reports here and here reveal that IAM (International Assistance Mission), registered as a non-profit organization, has been serving Afghanistan since 1966.

So to sum things up: A group of Christians can go into a Muslim country to provide care for the poor, and to justify their murder, all the government has to say, is that they were suspected of carrying a Bible. Conversely, Muslims can come into America, kill 3,000 of our citizens and our government allows them to build a fricking mosque.

Paper tigers indeed.

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” ~Isaiah 5:20

Update: Michelle Malkin has more here.

From the “It’s Never Too Late to Learn the Truth” Dept. — At Heritage (HT Jeff Perren at PJM): “The Chrysler Bail-Out Bust.”

Did you know that “… the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979 that required creditors to make certain “concessions” to Chrysler … (enabled it) to pay off more than $600 million in debts at just 30 cents on the dollar”? Neither did I.

It turns out that what happened in the original Chrysler bailout was a model for the larger-scale ripoff of secured creditors that happened in an actual bankruptcy over 30 years later.

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George Voinovich wants a higher gas tax (HT to a commenter) to “to create jobs, improve our infrastructure and better our climate.”

Point by point:

• The visible jobs created would be offset, if not more than offset, by invisible jobs lost and/or people not hired who could have been at businesses facing higher fuel costs.
• Whether it would really “improve our infrastructure” would depend on whether the extra money would really be used for roads and bridges. Given Transportation Ray LaHood’s stated desire to “coerce people out of their cars,” I wouldn’t count on it.
• “Better our climate”? Even if you buy into the hoax known around here as globaloney — the blind acceptance of the ideas that a) the earth is warming, in spite of strong evidence that it really isn’t; b) humans are causing it, which over 31,000 scientists say isn’t the case; and c) that radical statist controls over all industry and commerce as well as our personal lives and massive redistributions of international wealth are necessary to stop it — the puny impact of reduced pollution because of fewer traffic jams will be wiped out by the rapidly growing greenhouse gas emissions in the “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). China passed the U.S. in emissions three years ago, and has almost certainly sprinted way ahead since then.

Voinovich will not be missed.

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Such a deal (“Why I’m Not Hiring”):

When you add it all up, it costs $74,000 to put $44,000 in Sally’s pocket and to give her $12,000 in benefits.

Employers might be willing to endure this anyway, as they have in the past, if there were clear prospects of real growth ahead. That’s not the case because of regime uncertainty.

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An August surprise? Given this development, it has already occurred in Ohio (HT RightOhio):

Ohio will get the largest chunk among five states splitting $600 million in foreclosure prevention money, the Obama administration announced Wednesday, Aug. 4.

The $172 million in federal rescue funds for Ohio will, during three years, assist 18,500 home-
owners who are unable to make mortgage payments because of unemployment, according to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency.

It might be one thing if this kind of effort worked. The evidence is in that it doesn’t, and hasn’t.

From Enfield, Connecticut:

Aug 7, 2010 / 12:58 pm

What started as a penance after confession has blossomed into long-term labor of love for a husband and wife who hope others will join their efforts. “To whom much is given, much is expected,” said Walter Seibert, by way of explaining why he and his wife Gesuina make up the Prison Ministry of Northern Connecticut.

For the past 15 years, the Seiberts, both septuagenarians, have been involved in prison ministry, which brings prisoners of different faiths together with volunteers. They travel to correctional facilities in Suffield and Enfield three times a week to share their faith with inmates.

Both products of Catholic education, Walter and Ges, as she is known, say the ministry has fortified their faith. Although they describe their sharing of the faith as “Catechism 101,” they are challenged by the questions inmates ask.

“We’ve had to answer questions that we never had to look at before because we just took things on faith. But a lot of these guys say, ‘I don’t want to know based upon faith, I want an answer to that,’” Walter said. “So we go back and look up the Church’s teaching.”

The Seiberts’ ministry is funded entirely by the Archbishop’s Annual Appeal.

“Last year we got a $2,500 grant from that, and thank God,” said Walter, adding that the money is used primarily to buy Bibles and catechisms in English and Spanish.

“We are so blessed,” said Ges. “If somebody had told me, ‘One day, you’re going to enjoy going to prison,’ I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind.’”The Seiberts, who have been married for 55 years, live at St. Joseph’s Residence, a home for the elderly run by the Little Sisters of the Poor.

They met on a blind date in college in the 1950s, were married in New York during a hurricane and “have done everything together ever since,” said Ges with an infectious laugh.

Walter said when he was in business as a certified public accountant and Ges was raising their three children, they often thought, “God wants us to do something with our faith because we had been given so much, and we kept asking, ‘Lord, what do you want us to do?’ And no matter what we put our hands to,” such as teaching religious education and other volunteerism, “nothing seemed to gel.”

In 1996, Deacon Rene Kieda, then the Catholic chaplain at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, put a notice into the St. Martha Parish bulletin for people to help with the prison ministries program

Walter said he thanked God for not calling him to that ministry.

Two weeks later, when the Walter and Ges were at Mass, Deacon Robert Bernd talked about his involvement with the ministry.

Walter said he again thanked God for not calling him to that ministry.

Shortly after that, Walter said, when he went to confession, the priest told him to read Matthew 25 as a penance. It was the line “[For I was] in prison and you visited me” that shaped the couple’s future. …

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