A sweet Tea Party triumph:

Earth to USA Today: It is NOT up to Ms. O’Donnell to mend fences, as the small-print caption claims. The GOP party establishment has to mend fences with her. That’s how it is when you lose, and the other person wins.

Good ol’ boys Mike Castle, Tom Ross, and others have been beaten fair and square, and should — no, must — grow up and acknowledge it. If they don’t, if they pull a Charlie Crist, if they pull a (rumored still, I think) Lisa Murkowski, we’ll know that their power is more important than any principle.

Given the seriousness of this country’s situation, voters in the state that gave us William Roth of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts during the Reagan years can certainly be persuaded that Obamanomics must be stopped. On to November — with or without the establishment.

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UPDATE: O’Donnell’s victory margin was 6.2%. That’s no squeaker. Pay attention to how many news outlets report that victory margin. My bet? Very few.

UPDATE 2, Sept. 15: At the WSJ — “Long-shot U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware rode tea-party momentum Tuesday to the most unexpected upset of a tumultuous political year, soundly defeating Republican Party fixture Mike Castle in a bruising primary.” I didn’t think an O’Donnell victory was that unexpected, as Mike Castle was about as close to Lincoln Chafee as one can get without actually being Lincoln Chafee. But the “soundly defeating” part is sweet, sweet music.

Establishment RINOs, establishment media types, and leftists: Underestimate and ridicule at your peril.

I tried to find a nicer way to put it in the headline. But I can’t.

At the Associated Press, Economics Writer Martin Crutsinger’s apparent plug-and-play report less than an hour after the issuance of Uncle Sam’s August Monthly Treasury Statement on Monday (his item is time-stamped at 2:56 p.m., which follows the Treasury Department’s 2:00 p.m. release by less than an hour) contains three obviously false statements that a news organization which really subscribes to its own “Statement of News Values and Principles” would retract and/or correct.

The specific AP standard in question is whether it has violated its promise not to “knowingly introduce false information into material intended for publication or broadcast.” The only conceivable excuse at this point is that Crutsinger and his employer don’t realize what they have done. The three falsehoods involved are not arcane or open to interpretation. Rather, they are significant, obvious, irrefutable, and in need of correction.

What follows are the three statements, the first of which contradicts itself in the report’s own subsequent sentence:

1. “Deficits of $1 trillion in a single year had never happened until two years ago. The $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009 was more than three times the size of the previous record-holder, a $454.8 billion deficit recorded in 2008.”

The fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2008 was “two years ago.” The reported deficit that year was $454.8 billion, as reported. $454.8 billion is less than $1 trillion. There was not a $1 trillion deficit “two years ago.”

2009 was one year ago. That’s the year the deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time.

There is no way to twist the meaning of the bolded statement above to make it true, because it’s false. Is this breathtaking carelessness, or an indicator that AP is bent on assigning any and all economic blame to the previous administration?

2. “Through August, government revenues totaled $1.92 trillion, 1.6 percent higher than a year ago, reflecting small increases in government tax collections compared to 2009.“

Tax collections have not increased, as shown in the following graphics:

The first graphic comes from Page 2 of the Monthly Treasury Statement, and identifies the major sources of federal receipts. The second contains the August 2010 detail of the August 2009 Monthly Treasury Statement (there is a $235 million difference between the two reported “Miscellaneous Receipts” amounts that is not relevant to this post). The third boils things down, and proves that tax collections have declined.

Even if one dubiously considers every line except “Deposits of Earning by Federal Reserve” to be “taxes,” those Federal Reserve Deposits are not. Don’t take my word for it. Here is how the Congressional Budget Office described these deposits in its Monthly Budget Review last week:

In case the AP and Martin Crutsinger need to be reminded: “Profits” are not “taxes.”

Thus, as seen in the final graphic above, deposits from the Fed must be excluded when comparing year-over-year tax collections. When one does that, the result is that tax collections are down from a year ago by over $9.5 billion, or about 0.5%.

Crutsinger’s statement that the overall increase in federal receipts “reflect(s) small increases in government tax collections compared to 2009″ is false.

3. “Spending has totaled $3.18 trillion, down 2.5 percent from the same period a year ago.”

Yes, reported “outlays” — a contrived term the government uses as a proxy for “spending” (but is not the same thing) — are down. But Crutsinger wrote that “spending” is down. The definition of “spending,” taken from the word “spend,” involves “pay(ing) out, disburs(ing), or expend(ing) funds.”

As described back in April (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) after it occurred in March, Uncle Sam’s reported “outlays” were reduced by means of a $115 billion non-cash entry to reflect the government’s revised estimate that it will ultimately lose less on its Troubled Asset Relief Program “investments” than originally thought. This entry did not involve “spending,” nor did the extra identical amount incorrectly added to “outlays” last year. As I wrote in April:

In essence what happened is that the administration pushed as much “bad news” (asset writedowns) as it could into last year’s (i.e., fiscal 2009′s) financial reporting, since last year was going to be a disaster no matter what. But since they overdid it with the writedowns last year (”Gosh, how did that happen?”), they can make this year (fiscal 2010) look better than it really has been. Good old Martin played along by calling it “dramatic.”

As noted, Crutsinger and AP should know about this $115 billion item. After all, the AP reporter discussed it in his April report on the March Monthly Treasury Statement.

After appropriately adjusting for the non-cash item, “spending” (the word Crutsinger chose to use) has not totaled $3.18 trillion; it has really been $3.29 trillion. Last year’s “spending” wasn’t the $3.26 trillion shown in Table 3 of August 2010′s Monthly Treasury Statement; it was $3.15 trillion. “Spending” is not “down 2.5 percent from the same period a year ago,” as the AP reporter claimed. “Spending” is up by $.14 trillion ($3.29 tril minus $3.15 tril). That’s a 4.4% increase ($.14 tril divided by $3.15 tril). Since “spending” means what the dictionary says it means, Crutsinger’s statement about federal “spending” is false.

As seen in the graphic at this link, which shows Monthly Treasury Statement data comparing 2010 and 2009 spending in all major functional areas, spending is up in the large majority of them.

The following is supposed to represent what the Associated Press does when it commits errors of fact in its reporting:

CORRECTIONS/CORRECTIVES:

Staffers must notify supervisory editors as soon as possible of errors or potential errors, whether in their work or that of a colleague. Every effort should be made to contact the staffer and his or her supervisor before a correction is moved.

When we’re wrong, we must say so as soon as possible. When we make a correction in the current cycle, we point out the error and its fix in the editor’s note. A correction must always be labeled a correction in the editor’s note. We do not use euphemisms such as “recasts,” “fixes,” “clarifies” or “changes” when correcting a factual error.

A corrective corrects a mistake from a previous cycle. The AP asks papers or broadcasters that used the erroneous information to use the corrective, too.

For corrections on live, online stories, we overwrite the previous version. We send separate corrective stories online as warranted.

The three demonstrably false statements described here have misled and will continue to mislead readers and other news consumers into erroneously believing that trillion-dollar deficits go back to 2008; that fiscal year-to-date tax collections are greater than last year; and that federal “spending” in 2010 is down from 2009.

AP has “introduced false information into material intended for publication or broadcast” — something it says it won’t “knowingly” do.

Your move, guys and gals. You know what you should do. Will you do it?

If you choose to do nothing, could you guys at least spare us the sanctimony and remove your “Statement of News Values and Principles” web page?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

In a WSJ editorial this morning, we learn that the White House opposes repealing the onerous 1099 rules in ObamaCare, and notes that the revenue-raising arguments of its supporters aren’t even supported by the IRS:

You might not have seen it reported, but the Senate will vote this morning on whether to repeal part of ObamaCare that it passed only months ago. The White House is opposed, but this fight is likely to be the first of many as Americans discover—as Nancy Pelosi once famously predicted—what’s in the bill

… But this “tax gap” of unreported business income is largely a Beltway myth, and no less than the Treasury Department’s National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson says the costs will be “disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvements in tax compliance.”

Meanwhile, small businesses are staring in horror toward 2013, when the 1099 mandate will hit more than 30 million of them. Currently businesses only have to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase from vendors and the like. Under the new rules, they’ll have to report the value of goods and merchandise they purchase as well, adding vast accounting and paperwork costs.

Think about a midsized trucking company. The back office would have to collect hundreds of thousands of receipts from every gas station where its drivers filled up and figure out where it spent more than $600 that year. Then it would also need to match those payments to the stations’ corporate parents.

Most Democrats now claim they were blindsided and didn’t understand the implications of the 1099 provision—which is typical of the slapdash, destructive way the bill was written and passed. As the critics claimed, most Members had no idea what they were voting on.

Do the math: If each of the 30 million small businesses cited issues only 35 extra 1099 forms over and above the very few they are already generating, that’s over a billion new multi-part forms (or, in some cases, transmissions — ADP and other service providers are probably the only people lovin’ this), accompanied by a billion transmissions to Uncle Sam done by paper or electronically. That’s before we get the mountain of paper and transmissions larger companies will generate, or the new generators dragged into the system for absolutely no reason (e.g., small self-employed businesses that don’t generate income, hobbies that break even or lose money, etc.).

If you get the impression that yours truly believes that “most Members had no idea what they were voting on” is a Hall of Shame outrage, you have the correct impression. But as bad as it is that most didn’t read it, it’s even worse for the few than might have known that the 1099 crap was in there and STILL voted for it. Either way, this is yet more proof, as if any more were needed, that anyone who voted for ObamaCare deserves to be voted out of office. There are no excuses.

Note: Cassy Fiano at David Horowitz’s NewReal Blog “I wanted to spotlight just a few of the incredible heroes of that fateful day.” This is the third (go there for the full story) of five such tributes.

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Tom Burnett

Tom Burnett was the COO and vice president of Thoratec Corporation, a medical devices company. He had a wife, Deena, and three daughters. On September 11, he was on United Airlines Flight 93. After the plane was hijacked, he called his wife and found out about the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Mr. Burnett phoned his wife Deena four times. In the first call he told her about the situation on the plane and asked her to call authorities. The second time he phoned, he told her that he believed their captors were going to fly the plane into the ground. “The next time he called,” Mrs. Burnett said, “I could tell they were formulating a plan.” In the last call, he reportedly said, “I know we’re going to die. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it.”

Rather than just accept his fate, Burnett decided to act. He, and a small group of other passengers, decided to fight back against the hijackers. While the plan had been to regain control of the plane, they all ultimately perished when the plane crashed in that rural Pennsylvania field. Burnett knew that this was likely to be his fate, and chose to fight back anyways. …

Don’t know what has happened, but the “Leave a comment” form after each post doesn’t work right now. The pop-up comment form still works, so if you would like to leave a comment, please use that mechanism. To do so, click on the “Comments (moderated)” link at the bottom right of any post where you wish to put up a comment, and the pop-up will, uh, pop up.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I’m looking into the problem, which is proving elusive. Fortunately, issues that may have been broader in scope seem to be under control now.

Note to readers: Please use the “Comments [moderated]” pop-up link at the bottom right of each post if you wish to comment. Your comment will post to the entry, even if it isn’t visible in the pop-up after you enter it

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(Posted early AM, moved to near the top.)

I guess CNBC now stands for Can Not Be Critical.

Watch the vid that follows from late last week (direct YouTube), and you’ll see CNBC moderator Erin Burnett (in my opinion) decide that she doesn’t like what she’s hearing. She then plays the “boo hoo, you’re being rude” card to cut off Europac’s Michael Pento, the person delivering the unpleasant perspective:

If or when (that’s the really big question, isn’t it?) the Fed’s unprecedented attempts to use monetary policy and aggressive market interventions to keep inflation in check and interest rates low run out of steam, credibility, or both, largely because fiscal policy has been so unbelievably reckless, what will happen?

Whether or not Pento is right about where rates are going, I believe he is absolutely right, in light of the facts and lessons of history, to assert that the burden of proof is on those who believe that rates and inflation can be forced to stay low indefinitely.

Pento had more to say about this exchange and the matter under debate at KingWorld News on Saturday, including some “what will happen?” thoughts that are quite unpleasant but sadly plausible.

Note to readers: Please use the “Comments [moderated]” pop-up link at the bottom right of each post if you wish to comment.

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From an item posted online on Saturday and placed in the Times print edition at Page A25 on Sunday:

Many Democrats have joined Republicans in pushing for the repeal of a tax provision in the new health care law that imposes a huge information-reporting burden on small businesses.

To improve compliance, the law requires businesses to file a 1099 tax form identifying anyone to whom they pay $600 or more for goods or merchandise in a year. Businesses will also have to send copies of the form to their vendors, suppliers and contractors.

Oh, I get it now. It’s a way to keep the Post Office in business.

Back to the Times article:

Under the law, businesses will be required to report purchases of items like office equipment, food and bottled water, gasoline, lumber and plumbing supplies if payments to any vendor in the course of a year total at least $600. They will, in many cases, also have to report payments for things like travel and telephone and Internet service.

The annual reports must include the vendor’s address and taxpayer identification number.

Note that the Times never tells readers that businesses will have to generate hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of these busywork documents — not to mention spend millions of hours of personnel and programmer time — generating these 1099s.

But here’s the punch line:

The reporting requirement was in the health care overhaul bill unveiled in mid-November by the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada. But it drew little attention at the time — it was one of more than 15 revenue-raising measures in the bill — and many lawmakers were apparently unaware of it when they voted for final passage of the legislation.

Well golly, how could that be, Robert Pear, New York Times reporter extraordinaire?

Could it possibly be because, well, uh, they never read the bill in the first place and had no idea what they were voting for? Nancy Pelosi infamously said, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

We wouldn’t want to give anyone the idea that Democratic lawmakers didn’t carry out their most basic duty to read legislation before whipping through statist health care now, would we?

A related entry is at NewsBusters.org.

Note to readers: Please use the “Comments [moderated]” pop-up link at the bottom right of each post if you wish to comment. Your comment will post to the entry, even if it isn’t visible in the pop-up after you enter it

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Properly so (bolds are mine):

Gangster government stifles criticism of Obamacare

“There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.”

That sounds like a stern headmistress dressing down some sophomores who have been misbehaving. But it’s actually from a letter sent Thursday from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans — the chief lobbyist for private health insurance companies.

Secretary Sebelius objects to claims by health insurers that they are raising premiums because of increased costs imposed by the Obamacare law passed by Congress last March.

… Ignagni, the recipient of the letter, says, “It’s a basic law of economics that additional benefits incur additional costs.”

But Sebelius has “zero tolerance” for that kind of thing. She promises to issue regulations to require “state or federal review of all potentially unreasonable rate increases” (which would presumably mean all rate increases).

And there’s a threat. “We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: Those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014.”

That’s a significant date, the first year in which state insurance exchanges are slated to get a monopoly on the issuance of individual health insurance policies. Sebelius is threatening to put health insurers out of business in a substantial portion of the market if they state that Obamacare is boosting their costs.

… The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone’s business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration’s transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government.

The silence of the left and the establishment press (but I repeat myself) as the thuggery progresses is deafening. The Associated Press’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar can only bring himself to call all of this a “war of words.” Horse manure.

One can reasonably assume, in the absence of objection, that any Democrat not speaking out against this is fine with it.

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UPDATE: A reminder — “Dems Deserve No Distance.”

Note to readers: Please use the “Comments [moderated]” pop-up link at the bottom right of each post if you wish to comment. Your comment will post to the entry, even if it isn’t visible in the pop-up after you enter it

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I meant to get to this sooner, but maybe it’s just as well, since the school is officially opening today.

Following up on an item first covered here a few weeks ago, OpinionJournal.com assistant editor Alyssia Finley let fly in a target-rich environment:

Broke—and Building the Most Expensive School in U.S. History
Benches that talk, a Cocoanut Grove auditorium, and a marble slab engraved with quotes from Ted Kennedy.

At $578 million—or about $140,000 per student—the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city’s Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.

The K-12 complex isn’t merely an overwrought paean to the nation’s most celebrated liberal political family. It’s a jarring reminder that money doesn’t guarantee success—though it certainly beautifies failure.

… Set to open Sept. 13, the school boasts an auditorium whose starry ceiling and garish entrance are modeled after the old Cocoanut Grove nightclub and a library whose round, vaulted ceilings and cavernous center resemble the ballroom where Kennedy made his last speech.

… Talking benches—$54,000—play a three-hour audio of the site’s history. Murals and other public art cost $1.3 million. A minipark facing a bustling Wilshire Boulevard? $4.9 million.

The Kennedy complex is Exhibit A in the district’s profligate 131-school building binge. Exhibit B is the district’s Visual and Performing Arts High School, which was originally budgeted at $70 million but was later upgraded into a sci-fi architectural masterpiece that cost $232 million.

Even more striking is Exhibit C, the Edward Roybal Learning Center in the Westlake area, which was budgeted at $110 million until costs skyrocketed midway through construction when contractors discovered underground methane gas and a fault line. Eventual cost: $377 million.

… The Roybal center now ranks in the bottom third of schools with similar demographics on state tests, while Belmont High ranks in the top third. But even though many Roybal kids can’t read or do math, at least they have a dance studio with cushioned maple floors and a kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven.

Expect more such over-the-top and inefficient building projects in the future. Los Angeles voters have approved over $20 billion of bonds since 1997 and state voters have chipped in another $4.4 billion of matching funds. Roughly a third of the cost of the Kennedy complex will be shouldered by state taxpayers.

It’s reasonable to question if some federal funds made their way into that $4.4 billion.

As I wrote at the end of my post several weeks ago:

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

Note: Cassy Fiano at David Horowitz’s NewReal Blog “I wanted to spotlight just a few of the incredible heroes of that fateful day.” This is the second (go there for the full story) of five such tributes.

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Welles Crowther

It was not Welles Crowther’s job to save anyone’s life on September 11. He worked for Sandler O’Neill and Partners on the 104th floor of the South Tower as an equities trader. At about 9:00 in the morning, he was on the phone in his office. His body would be recovered from the lobby along with NYFD firefighters. Having worked as a volunteer firefighter as a teenager, when disaster struck, Welles Crowther sprung into action.

They sat bloody and petrified — the lights out, smoke engulfing the room and pain searing through their bodies. There was no escape from where they were in the South Tower, in pieces after being hit by United Airlines Flight 175 as far as they could tell.

Then out of nowhere, a young man burst in and took control. In a strong, authoritative voice, he directed them to the stairway — which was veiled by darkness, wreckage and haze — telling the injured to get out and the healthy to help them down.

“I see this incredible hero, running back and forth and saving the day,” recalled Judy Wein. “In his mind, he had a duty to do — to save people.”

“He’s definitely my guardian angel — no ifs, ands or buts — because without him, we would be sitting there, waiting [until] the building came down,” echoes Ling Young.

Wein and Young were separated by a few minutes and a few floors that day, but they share a similar story and a single hero: Welles Crowther.

Both women credit the equities trader and volunteer firefighter with saving their lives and dozens of others on September 11.

Crowther has been credited with saving at least 18 lives that day, if not more. One of the people he helped escape, Ling Young, keeps a framed photo of him in her home. …

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

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Yesterday’s release of the Congressional Budget Office’s “Monthly Budget Review” covering the first eleven months of Uncle Sam’s current budget year is an ideal time to preview what I expect will be the Obama administration’s and the establishment business press’s three big fiscal fables going into this fall’s elections.

Fable 1. The annual budget deficit is down.

This is true only if one ignores the impact of a mighty convenient $115 billion non-cash accounting entry made back in March. There’s more background here for those who are interested in the nitty-gritty, but my in-a-nutshell, plain-English assessment made at the time it was disclosed will suffice for now:

… the administration pushed as much “bad news” (TARP asset writedowns) as it could into last year’s financial reporting, since last year (fiscal 2009) was going to be a disaster no matter what. But since they overdid it with the writedowns last year (“Gosh, how did that happen?”), they can make this year (fiscal 2010) look better than it really has been.

That the entry had to be made in fiscal 2010 essentially proved that fiscal 2009 outlays were overstated by $115 billion. At the same time, the entry worked to reduce current year outlays by the same amount.

Here is how the first eleven months of fiscal 2009 and 2010 would have looked if TARP asset writedowns had been properly estimated last year and had not required offsetting correction this year:
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Though its true nature was largely ignored by the local media at the event (noted on Tuesday at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Ted Strickland’s unhinged Labor Day speech at the AFL-CIO’s annual picnic at Cincinnat’s Coney Island has, with the help of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), garnered quite a bit of statewide attention.

During his rant, Democrat Strickland:

• Denounced the Republican Party as “overtaken by the zealots, by the extremists, by the radicals.”
• Claimed that “they don’t seem to like Ohio very much, and quite frankly, they act as if they don’t like America very much,” in essence questioning their patriotism.
• Asked the audience to help him fight “the Tea Party radicals.”

The fallout has apparently been so severe that ever-helpful veteran Columbus Dispatch reporter, senior editor, and columnist Joe Hallett felt compelled on Thursday to try to help the Governor walk it all back. In an exchange that can only be seen as Hallett begging for Strickland to give him something, anything to work with, Strickland wasn’t very helpful, bogusly played the “out of context” card, and in a very real sense doubled down on his disrespect for those who oppose him. He even went into a riff on how opponents (in context, “Republicans,” not just “some Republicans”) want to repeal the 14th amendment (huh?).

The full 11:36 video of Strickland’s discussion with reporters is here (originally posted at the Ohio Capital Blog); the RGA’s 2:04 excerpt featuring Hallett is here (HT RightOhio). What follows is a transcript of the excerpt:

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