Absolutely brilliant, and at bottom, what this election is all about — Elitism vs. people power (HT Instapundit):

Ben Lieberman (HT Gus Van Horn at Pajamas Media: “An Annoying Regulation for Every Room in the House.”

Example:

The Basement — new standards are in the works for water heaters and furnaces. In the case of water heaters, the Department of Energy estimates price increases ranging from $67 to $974 depending on size and type.

Leave it to Uncle Sam to make one of the most elegantly simple things ever ruthlessly expensive.

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At Real Clear Politics via Hot Air — “Massachusetts Dem (Congressman Jim McGovern) on campaign finance law: ‘I think the Constitution is wrong.’”

Then work on amending it, sir. In the meantime, please remember that you swore an oath to uphold it.

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Howler of the day, from the Associated Press’s Martin Crutsinger, on the roughly $2.8 trillion in deficits run up during the past two fiscal years: “So far, the huge deficits have not been a threat to the country.”

Marty, Marty — They’re a huge underlying component of the “It’s the Uncertainty, Stupid” atmosphere that has permeated the economy and frozen entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and investors in their tracks. As long as we continue to run deficits of this size, economic growth is likely to stay mediocre, and the unemployment rate is unlikely to come down much. That’s not a threat?

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Confirming the previous point, from Larry Kudlow:

A survey conducted by Citigroup Global Markets of 100 mutual-fund, hedge-fund, and pension-fund managers finds that institutional investors fear a government policy mistake far more than inflation, terrorism, a housing double-dip, poor earnings, or any other potential risk to the economy. (Hat tip to CNBC producer John Melloy.) One-third of the survey’s participants list government policy missteps as their biggest worry, ahead of the more than 15 percent who cite protectionism.

The reason for the fear is that the government has made so many policy mistakes during the past two years — basically starting with TARP, and definitely including choosing to run trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.

Kudlow writes that Obama is “utterly alien … to the investor class.” That’s because, as Stanley Kurtz outlined at National Review earlier this week, “the president’s socialist past is still very much alive in the governing philosophy and long-term political strategy of the Obama administration.”

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Noted at Drudge — “First lady Michelle Obama appears to have violated Illinois law — when she engaged in political discussion at a polling place!”

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Michelle Malkin (“Doddering Reid wilts in debate with Angle”) — “In style and substance, Lady in Red Sharron Angle trounced the four-term Democrat Senate incumbent and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at tonight’s Las Vegas debate.”

At this video clip, Reid claims we don’t have problems in Social Security for the next thirty-plus years. Angle says he need to “man up” and recognize that there is a serious problem now.

You go girl. There is a serious problem right now. Social Security is running cash deficits right now — that is, it is already being propped up by other tax dollars and government borrowing. There is no “Trust Fund” — unless you consider a “fund” containing virtually nothing but IOUs from the rest of the government that is $13.6 trillion in debt overall, including $9 trillion to the public, and heading towards insolvency a “trust fund.” The train wreck is at the station right now.

From Vatican City:

Oct 14, 2010 / 11:06 am

This coming Sunday Pope Benedict XVI will raise six Catholics, all consecrated religious, to the ranks of sainthood. The canonizations will take place in a ceremony presided over by the Holy Father in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday. In keeping with tradition, the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica will be draped with gigantic banners featuring depictions of the new saints.

The six come from five nations. Polish Fr. Stanislaw Soltys of the Order of Canons Regular of the Lateran, Canadian Br. Andre Bessette of the Congregation of the Holy Cross and Italian Poor Clare Sr. Camilla Battista Varano are among them.

These three will be joined by three foundresses of orders during the same ceremony. Spanish Sr. Candida Maria de Jesus Cipitria y Barriola of the Congregation of the Daughters of Jesus; Australian Sr. Mary of the Cross MacKillop of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart; and Italian Sr. Giulia Salzano of the Catechist Sisters of the Sacred Heart, will also be canonized.

On Oct. 17, after prayers, hymns and the reading of short texts written by the six, the Holy Father will preside over their Rite of Canonization.

The rite includes the reading of the official biographies of each, the recitation of prayers, the litany of the saints, and finally, the Pope pronouncing the formula of canonization, thereby declaring them saints.

Mass will follow the rite, with hundreds of cardinals, bishops and priests, representatives of the causes for canonization of each, and thousands of faithful in attendance.

A number of Australian flags were already present in St. Peter’s Square during Wednesday’s general audience, showing a formidable presence even from the distant island continent, which will receive its first saint. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Even some lefties can’t handle Kevin Boyce’s “Meet the FOKkers” (Friends of Kevin) cronyism and corruption. Some of them are even specifically saying that Josh Mandel would be a better choice for Ohio State Treasurer. Well, of course he is.

Examples follow (HT to an e-mailer).

* * * * * * * *

At Daily Kos (diarist Mike Stark):

When progressive Democrats should vote for the Republican – or the Corruption of Kevin Boyce

… It would be wrong for progressive to toe the party line and give Boyce a pass for his rank corruption and cronyism.

… with Ken Boyce, the more substantive kind of corruption runs to the bone…

… cronyism, corruption, nepotism…maybe small potatoes in the big picture, but those are some pretty hefty salaries, which I’m guessing virtually any of the 200,000 individuals who lost jobs during Kevin’s Boyce’s tenure would have love to gotten. Specifically, the scores of people with state government and financial experience, who obviously suffered from not going to the right church or high school.

… this progressive is joining the Editorial Boards of the Cleveland Plain Dealer (endorsed Barack Obama), Toledo Blade (a paper with a lefty reputation that was the only major Ohio publication to endorse progressive Sherrod Brown in 2006), and The Dayton Daily News (center-left by reputation) to tell you you absolutely should not vote for the corrupt pro-corporate Democrat, Kevin Boyce for Ohio Treasurer. You should support Republican Josh Mandel, or if you can’t stomach voting for a Republican–particularly after some of his despicable ads in this race–vote for the Libertarian candidate Matthew Cantrell.

At myDD (diarist Texas Nate):

Elect Good Progressives, Not Corrupt Pretenders Like Kevin Boyce

While Ohio was losing jobs by the boatload, he filled many of the few good state jobs available with his high school, political and church cronies.

At Down With Tyranny (“Ohio Treasurer Kevin Boyce: Corrupt, Cowardly & Incompetent“):

… But I’d like to talk about another terrible, corrupt Democrat today, one who has not received the attention he deserves. I am speaking of Appointed City Councilman/Appointed Treasurer Kevin Boyce. I wouldn’t be surprised if Boyce agrees with right wingers who want to repeal the 17th Amendment (direct election of US Senators) as he can’t seem to actually get himself elected to anything, unless you include a 2-3 person ballot of insiders who know they can count on him to do whatever they want.

But Boyce’s record goes well beyond just his ability to hold office without running for it. Boyce is as corrupt as a Democrat gets, hiring his high school buddies, church friends and political cronies to fill key positions in Ohio’s Treasury, while wasting thousands upon thousands of taxpayer dollars to put his name on things like water bottles and hand sanitizer (which might be necessary for absolution after shaking his hand).

… Additionally, I have heard some even more distressing stories about Boyce’s intolerance. He once sat in a senior staff meeting while one of his staffers made a comment about “working harder than a Hebrew slave,” and when other senior staffers expressed dismay, simply chose to ignore it. He also once referred to his opponent at a fundraiser, Josh Mandel (another loser), as a “rich Jew,” after making sure there were no Jews in the room.

Members of the gay community have told me of his disgust for them and unwillingness to reach out, and he was even caught referring to one of his female staffers as a “loud, white woman.”

* * * * * * * *

Chris “The F***ers” Redfern has apparently been unavailable for comment.

This paragraph from an Associated Press report by Christopher Rugaber on today’s economic news should at a minimum strike readers as odd:

A third report noted that prices at the wholesale level remained tame outside a sharp rise in food and energy costs. Excluding those two volatile categories, core wholesale prices rose just 0.1 percent, the Labor Department said.

So we’re left hanging. Gee Chris, what was the overall change in the Producer Price Index? He never says, at least not in the 11:44 a.m. version of his report.

For the record, overall wholesales prices in September increased by 0.4% for the second month in a row. Since September 2009, the overall indices for finished goods and intermediate materials have increased by 5.6% and 4.0%, respectively.

Why is Chris Rugaber hiding the overall rise in prices, particularly in the past month? Could it be that he doesn’t want the world to hear the larger number, lest people start thinking that in addition to economic malaise and unemployment, we now need to start being concerned about inflation?

If that’s his concern, based on the radio news I’m hearing, Rugaber’s gambit is working. Radio news readers, who largely rely on AP reports for the business news they relay to their audiences, are telling us that ex-food and energy, wholesale prices barely budged. Nice job, Chris. Way to under-inform. You get your “I Protected Barack Today” sticker.

Finally, does anyone think that Rugaber would have held back on reporting the final number if it had been 0.1% or negative?

Cross-posted at NewBusters.org.

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BizzyBlog Update: Here’s a Reuters contrast carried at CNBC —

At the same time, record-high imports from China helped push the U.S. trade deficit wider in August, while rising food and energy prices pushed inflation at the wholesale level up twice as fast as expected last month.

In a separate report, the Labor Department said U.S. producer prices rose 0.4 percent in September and the core index, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.1 percent in the month.

See Chris, that wasn’t so difficult.

Don’t know why doing worse than anticipated is “unexpected” any more, but it is:

Weekly initial unemployment claims jump unexpectedly

Economists who expected a decrease in the weekly initial unemployment claim numbers released today by the U.S. Labor Department were disappointed. The weekly report showed that initial jobless claims rose 13,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 449,000 to 462,000.

Bloomberg had been expecting 445,000.

Here are two more sober-ups:

• The 449,568 not seasonally adjusted (NSA) number for the past week (w/e Oct. 9) was over 20% higher than the previous week’s raw number (373,654).
• The dive during the two analogous weeks last year was to 451,860 from 508,659, or about 13%.

I want to be wrong about this, but don’t be surprised if next week’s raw number exceeds last year’s 460,269.

At a time when clueless people like Chris Mathews and Richard Trumka are using the Chilean mine rescue as an opportunity to bash freedom-loving people and the system which developed the technology that gave the pair the ability to air their ingratitude, Daniel Henninger’s Wall Street Journal op-ed has arrived in the nick of time (bolds are mine; internal links added by me):

Capitalism Saved the Miners
The profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at the mine rescue site.

It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.

Amid the boundless human joy of the miners’ liberation, it may seem churlish to make such a claim. It is churlish. These are churlish times, and the stakes are high.

In the United States, with 9.6% unemployment, a notably angry electorate will go to the polls shortly and dump one political party in favor of the other, on which no love is lost. The president of the U.S. is campaigning across the country making this statement at nearly every stop:

“The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.”

Uh, yeah. That’s a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that’s right. Ask the miners.

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

… the reality behind the miracles is the same: Someone innovates something useful, makes money from it, and re-innovates, or someone else trumps their innovation. Most of the time, no one notices. All it does is create jobs, wealth and well-being. But without this system running in the background, without the year-over-year progress embedded in these capitalist innovations, those trapped miners would be dead.

… The miners’ rescue is a thrilling moment for Chile, an imprimatur on its rising status. But I’m thinking of that 74-person outfit in Berlin, Pa., whose high-tech drill bit opened the earth to free them. You know there are tens of thousands of stories like this in the U.S., as big as Google and small as Center Rock. I’m glad one of them helped save the Chileans. What’s needed now is a new American economic model that lets our innovators rescue the rest of us.

Read the whole thing, as Henninger makes other important points about who performs better in disasters, and notes some of the items integral to the miners’ survival until the Center Rock-driven breakthrough occurred. A more detailed look at some of those technological marvels is in a September 30 WSJ report (“Inventions Ease the Plight of Trapped Miners”) by Matt Moffett.

I’d put money on the idea that innovators like those who saved the miners and made their survival possible while they were trapped have a better chance of rescuing our economy than a government that arrogantly ridicules them and spends vast amounts of time, money, and energy seemingly doing everything it can to get in their way.

At the Anchoress, an excerpt:

Obviously, we are all watching the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners–Operation San Lorenzo–and it is so moving and inspiring – a rare moment when the world can rejoice together. Heroes from all over the world have gathered and drilled as millions throughout the globe prayed and hoped, and then, finally, we watched that exquisite moment when the first miner to ascend, Florencio Ávalos Silva and his wife and son embraced. Chills.

And then, after a brief wait, the second miner emerges from the rescue capsule with great joy; he embraces his wife and then opens a bag to retrieve…gifts.

For others. …

Read the whole thing.

New York Times commenter “gram missery,” upon learning, in a Times tease of an upcoming Sunday magazine portrayal of Barack Obama, of the President’s astonishing admission that he, according to the paper, “realized too late that ‘there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects’”:

Actually everything Obama has said for the last two years is “shovel ready”

Previous Related BizzyBlog post:

• April 13, 2009 — Pencil-Ready Projects: Ohio Is Spending $57 Million of ‘Stimulus’ on Highway Studies, Including a Long-Discredited Metro Cincy Idea (I guess this makes Ted Strickland a visionary [/sarc] –Ed.)

It’s as if Team Obama and the establishment press (but I repeat myself) want us to believe that oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico will be back to the level it was before the BP oil spill.

Heritage says it isn’t so, and far from it:

The White House got the headlines they wanted today. … While yesterday’s announcement does remove one legal barrier to the resumption of energy investment in the Gulf, the Obama administration still retains full discretion over whether or not any new permits will be issued. And all indications are that those new permits will not be coming any time soon.

President Obama’s legal ban on deepwater projects has also meant a de facto ban on all energy investment in the Gulf. Since the April 20 Deepwater Horizon spill, Interior has issued only 10% of shallow water permits that they normally do. Institute for Energy Research senior vice president Dan Kish tells Politico: “I don’t know what business can run at 10 percent of what it normally does.” Pressed for details on when Interior will actually start issuing new permits, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement director Michael Bromwich told reporters: “It will clearly not be tomorrow and it will not be next week. My sense is we will have permits approved by the end of the year, but how much before the end of the year I can’t say and how many before the end of the year I can’t say.”

Energy companies who want to wait for the Obama administration to allow oil and gas investment to begin again do so at their own peril. As The Washington Post details today, White House policy on drilling in the Gulf is driven by politics, not science. And the President’s political views on domestic oil and gas development are clear. In 2004, then-Senate candidate Obama told the League of Conservation Voters: “I believe that existing policies are imbalanced in favor of new and increased [oil and gas] extraction. . . . Reduced energy demand would eliminate the need for new production on federal public lands, and I would oppose such production in any event.”

So there you have it. President Obama’s preferred policy is reduced energy demand, and even if he can’t accomplish that, he still would oppose the development of our country’s energy resources.

Far-leftists like Obama and his administration have no remaining rational defense for such an approach (not there ever really was one):

• Global warming. Baloney, I mean, globaloney.
• “We’re running out of energy resources.” What about shale oil, North Dakota’s deposits, Iraq’s new estimate — oh, and 60 centuries of minerals on the ocean floor — don’t you understand?

Also at Heritage: “Good-Bye Job Killing Moratorium, Hello Job Killing Regulations.”

Michelle Malkin picked up on this vibe yesterday, and it has become more obvious in the intervening day: The establishment press, or at least parts of it, are downplaying the American exceptionalism — and the exceptional Americans — involved in the Chilean mine rescue.

Reports early this morning at the Associated Press and New York Times exemplify the point. Times reporters Alexei Barrionuevo and Simon Romero even chose to deliberately cast the rescue in brazenly cynical political terms.

First here are a few paragraphs from the AP’s Frank Bajak and Vivian Sequera (saved here at host for current and future reference and for fair use and discussion purposes, since the current report will probably be revised throughout the day; bolds are mine throughout this post):

… The capsule – the biggest of three built by Chilean navy engineers – was named Phoenix for the mythical bird that rises from ashes. It was painted in the white, blue and red of the Chilean flag.

The miners’ vital signs were closely monitored throughout the ride, given a high-calorie liquid diet donated by NASA, designed to prevent nausea from any rotation of the capsule as it travels through curves in the 28-inch-diameter escape hole.

… U.S. President Barack Obama praised rescuers, who include the team from Center Rock Inc. of Berlin, Pennsylvania who built and managed the piston-driven hammers that pounded open the hole.

The above is the only mention of NASA in the AP report. Not to understate the importance of the rations, but it seems to me that readers would be pleased to know that NASA engineers — led by one exceptional American engineer — did something infinitely more important: They designed the capsule the Chilean navy engineers built, as described in this AOL News Report:

Clinton Cragg is a NASA engineer on a troubleshooting safety team set up in the wake of the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. He had spent much of his professional life in the Navy, where he served as a submarine captain, accustomed to living in confined space.

So when the Chilean rescue authorities settled on a plan for reaching the 33 miners trapped 2,400 feet below a desolate desert, but needed a contraption to bring them to the surface, Cragg would become the perfect man to pitch in.

It had to be the smallest possible vehicle for the job, a capsule that would fit into a hole the size of a bicycle tire, with no wasted space for luxury, no elbow room for comfort.

When Cragg turned over the design elements to the Chilean navy, which refined them and built the capsule, the rescue craft that emerged looked as if it belonged on a science fiction movie’s drawing board. Shaped like a cigar canister, with a drop-through escape hatch at the bottom, the capsule is designed to bring all 33 men up, one at a time, on a 20-minute ride from the hellhole where they have been trapped since Aug. 5. It is 13 feet long and weighs 926 pounds.

“NASA is in the business of building unique, one-of-a-kind vehicles,” Cragg told AOL News. “I thought we could help.”

Read the whole thing.

As startling as AP’s NASA oversight was, the avoidance of credit given to U.S. involvement and the deliberate injection of politics into the rescue story by the New York Times’s Barrionuevo and Romero are simply inexcusable:

The race to save the miners has thrust Chile into a spotlight it has often sought but rarely experienced. While lauded for its economic management and austerity, the nation has often found the world’s attention trained more on its human rights violations and natural disasters than on uplifting moments. [1]

But the perseverance of the miners, trapped so far underground in a lightless, dank space, has transfixed the globe with a universal story of human struggle and the enormously complex operation to rescue them.

It has involved untold millions of dollars, specialists from NASA and drilling experts from a dozen or so countries. [2] Some here at the mine have compared the rescue effort to the Apollo 13 space mission, for the emotional tension it has caused and the expectation of a collective sigh of relief at the end.

… The decision by Mr. Piñera, Chile’s first right-wing leader in 20 years, to stake his young presidency on an unbridled push to rescue the miners was an extraordinary political calculation. [3] But it has paid big dividends, bolstering his popularity at home and propelling him onto an international stage often dominated by other large personalities in the region.

After a cave-in trapped the miners on Aug. 5, their fate was uncertain, at best. Advisers to Mr. Piñera counseled him not to raise expectations that they could be found alive. Laurence Golborne, the mining minister, said publicly that their chances of having survived were slim, comments that bothered many Chileans.

But Mr. Piñera, who was in Ecuador when the news came of the lost miners, argued differently. “I had a strong conviction, very deep inside of me, that they were alive, and that was a strong support for my actions,” he said in an interview in late August. [4]

Notes:

• [1] – Imagine a mining rescue of this nature in mainland China. Would anyone in the press write that “While lauded for its economic management and austerity, the nation has often found the world’s attention trained more on its human rights violations and natural disasters than on uplifting moments”? Neither can I. The Chilean human rights violations under Augusto Pinochet ended over two decades ago. Routine Chinese human rights violations continue to this day.
• [2] – There may have been “experts from a dozen or so countries,” but it is as clear as can be that Yankee involvement and Yankee ingenuity have been among the key factors in the rescue’s success. To its credit, the AP separately did a story yesterday on expert driller Jeff Hart, whose boss described him as “‘simply … the best’ at drilling larger holes with the T130′s wide-diameter drill bits.” Malkin correctly noted: “In a different day and age, Jeff Hart would be the most famous American in our country right now.” But not today.
• [3][4] – My God, does anyone besides these two ultra-cynical, insulting New York Times writers (and, I suppose, certain elements of the paper’s audience) believe that Piñera’s actions have been based on “political calculation” and not a human desire to save lives, which the final paragraph amply demonstrates?

As the press minimizes the heroic role of NASA and American engineers, workers, and their employers, it can count on one thing that will keep a lid on the full story — Yankee humility. The folks involved will soon be back at their regular gigs, secure in and proud of the knowledge that they made a difference. That’s enough for them. This writer salutes and thanks all of you for what you did during the rescue, and for what you do every day.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From the San Jose Mine in Chile:

The miners emerged like clockwork, jubilantly embracing wives, children and rescuers and looking remarkably composed Wednesday after languishing for 69 days in the depths of a mine that easily could have been their tomb.

The anxiety that had accompanied the final days of preparation melted away at 12:11 a.m. when the stoutest of the 33 miners, Florencio Avalos, emerged from the missile-like rescue capsule smiling broadly after his half-mile journey to the surface.

In a din of cheers, he hugged his sobbing 7-year-old son and wife and then President Sebastian Pinera, who has been deeply involved in an effort that had become a matter of national pride.

The most ebullient of the bunch came out second, an hour later.

“I think I had extraordinary luck. I was with God and with the devil. And I reached out for God,” said Mario Sepulveda as he awaited the air force helicopter ride to a nearby hospital where all the miners were to spend 48 hours under medical observation.

The miners have survived more time trapped underground than anyone on record, and the world was captivated by their endurance and unity as officials carefully planned their rescue.

Chile exploded in joy and relief at the first, breakthrough rescue just after midnight in the coastal Atacama desert.

In the capital, Santiago, a cacophony of motorists’ horns sounded. In the nearby regional capital of Copiapo, from which 24 of the miners hail, the mayor canceled school so parents and children could “watch the rescue in the warmth of the home.”

… The entire rescue operation was meticulously choreographed, with no expense spared in bringing in topflight drillers and equipment – and drilling three separate holes into the copper and gold mine.

Mining is Chile’s lifeblood, providing 40 percent of state earnings, and Pinera put his mining minister and the operations chief of state-owned Codelco, the country’s biggest company, in charge of the rescue. It went so well that its managers abandoned what a legion of journalists had deemed an ultraconservative plan for restricting images of the rescue.

A huge Chilean flag that was to obscure the hole from view was moved aside so the hundreds of cameras perched on a hill above could record images that state TV also fed live.

That included the surreal moment when the capsule dropped into the chamber for the first time where the bare-chested miners, most stripped down to shorts because of the subterranean swelter, mobbed the rescuer who emerged to serve as their guide to freedom.

“This rescue operation has been so marvelous, so clean, so emotional that there was no reason not to allow the eyes of the world – which have been watching this operation so closely – to see it,” a beaming Pinera told a news conference after Avalos was brought to the surface.

… The operation commenced just before midnight when a Codelco rescuer made the sign of the cross and was lowered to the trapped men. A navy paramedic went down after Avalos came up – a surprise improvisation as officials had said the two would go down to oversee the miners’ ascent before the first went up.

The last miner was slated to be shift foreman Luis Urzua, whose leadership was credited for helping the men endure 17 days with no outside contact after the collapse. The men made 48 hours’ worth of rations last before rescuers reached them with a narrow borehole to send down more food.

Go here for the full story, which is probably going to be updated throughout the day.