… Elizabeth Edwards.

There are many areas where the establishment press’s terminology preferences are significantly out of sync with everyday usage by the general public. To name just two examples, the ever so PC press routinely replaces publicly favored and more informative terms such as “illegal immigrants” and “Muslim terrorists” with “undocumented workers” and “militants.” And of course, we can’t forget the press’s affection for “a certain late-term pregnancy-ending procedure,” when it’s really “partial-birth abortion.”

Though the disconnect I’m about to describe isn’t as serious as the ones just noted, there is another area where press terminology is at wide variance with the public’s preferences. That would be in how to describe the shopping season that occurs from Thanksgiving until the end of the year.

For a while, the press’s terminology choices seemed to be winning over retailers. But at least this year, that isn’t so, as noted in an item at Advertising Age (HT to Tim Graham at NewsBusters, who tweeted on this about 10 days ago):

The War on Christmas may be in its final days.

This season, merry Christmas — not happy holidays or season’s greetings — will dominate retailer’s marketing messages. There will be Christmas sales and Christmas trees and Christmas carols galore.

… This year’s NRF (National Retail Federation)/BigResearch survey found that 91 percent of consumers plan to celebrate Christmas, compared with 5% for Hanukkah and 2% for Kwanzaa.

A cynic might observe that a desperate need for sales in this so-called recovery, over and above the laudable work the American Family Association has done to stamp out the worst anti-Christmas offenses over the years, might be driving the change in mindset.

There’s also this item:

According to the most recent Rasmussen Poll on the subject, 72 percent of all Americans prefer the greeting “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays,” the greeting of preference for just 22 percent of us. This is up four percent from last year.

In the just-provided context, it’s worth noting how radically out of step the business press is with the public’s identified seasonal celebration choices and stated word usage preferences. The searches that follow represent the second round of my sixth annual set of Google News searches looking into the press’s tendencies.

Here are the results of Google News searches done at 2:15 p.m. this afternoon:

• “Christmas shopping season” (in quotes) — 1,270 (10.8%)
• “Holiday shopping season” (in quotes) — 10,500 (89.2%)

Nine out of ten Americans celebrate Christmas, while almost nine out of ten news stories about the shopping season avoid the word. How obvious is that?

Now let’s look at the other element of my six years of review, namely the press’s choices on what terms to use in stories involving layoffs:

• Christmas layoffs (not in quotes, also excluding the word “challenger” to ensure that about 30 items relating to the mass layoffs report issued by Challenger & Christmas were exluded) — 261 (14.1%)
• Holiday layoffs (not in quotes) — 1,030 (55.7%)
• Holidays layoffs (not in quotes) — 557 (30.2%)

As I have consistently found in the six years I’ve looked into this (go here for capsule results), the press overwhelmingly prefers the use of the word “holiday” in describing the shopping season.

Compared to past years, the press doesn’t seem as receptive to using the word “Christmas” in stories about layoffs, but has seemingly moved its Christmas emphasis to the perils of not extending unemployment benefits ad infinitum. Though I don’t have five years of comparative results, a Google News search done at about 2:30 p.m. on [Christmas "unemployment benefits"] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets) comes back with 1,570 items, which strikes me as quite a few, especially in comparison to the layoff numbers just noted. Unfortunately, further comparison is difficult, because searches substituting the word “holiday” and “holidays” are skewed by unrelated uses of the words in continually breaking news about next year’s tax structure (e.g., the proposed payroll tax “holiday” and the snarky “happy holidays for the rich” discussions).

The results described here dramatically demonstrate how out of touch the press is with what readers say, do, and wish to see in connection with the, ahem, Christmas season.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

A few weeks ago, just before GM’s initial public offering went to the market (at the Washington Examiner; at BizzyBlog), I noted that Multi-Government/General Motors had spent the past several months shipping more cars than its dealers were selling, to the point where dealer stocks represented an unusually high number of days of dealers’ sales.

GM’s December 1 press release made that trend even more obvious, as month-end dealer inventory rose to 536,000 units, about 30% higher than May’s level.

As seen below, the trend was already pretty obvious in October, and a vigilant press should have been alert enough to notice it and attempt to gauge its financial impact:

Mickey Kaus at Newsweek linked to Zero Hedge, which picked up on the point last week. Kaus’s caustic comment:

General Motors’ cars are piling up on dealers’ lots again, the result of an apparent production surge designed to force sales during September and October in order to make the numbers look good for GM’s November IPO … sorry, I mean in order to maximize shareholder value!

That is indeed the important takeaway, which Zero Hedge, in erroneously claiming that dealer sales to consumers have been misstated, strangely missed.

Kaus is right when he asserts that overstuffing dealers with vehicles improves GM’s (but not dealers’) “numbers,” namely sales, gross profit and earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), as I noted in mid-November:

… once a vehicle is on the truck and leaves the (GM) factory, it’s a sale (on GM’s books).

… You might be surprised at how much maximizing product shipped out the door — to heck with the long-term consequences — enhances reported profits. That’s because the variable costs associated with producing a vehicle are fairly low when compared to its selling price.

The only truly direct costs involved in vehicle production are materials, direct labor, and directly-consumed energy. Virtually everything else is at least in the short run essentially fixed, i.e., they are costs that will be incurred anyway regardless of the level of production. For example, you’re going to have a certain level of supervision no matter what; the costs of supervision don’t increase much, if at all, if production increases within a certain range. Pretty much the same number of workers will be involved with maintenance whether you’re producing 60 cars an hour or 80. Many fringe benefits, particularly health care costs, aren’t affected by production levels. You’re going to have to keep your factories’ lights on no matter how many cars they produce. Property taxes don’t change. Depreciation charges are fixed in the short run.

… in 2007, Forbes Magazine (reported that) “Strategy consultant AlixPartners estimates a manufacturer earns $8,000 to $14,000 variable profit on each pickup it sells, but zero to $6,000 on each car.”

Thanks to cost reductions achieved in its encounter with bankruptcy, GM’s variable profit is probably near the high end of both ranges; it wouldn’t surprise me if its variable profits are even higher. But to be conservative in the accounting sense, let’s assume that the variable profit numbers are $12,000 each for pickups (light trucks) and $5,000 for cars.

… (Considering that) GM’s domestic product mix is currently about 36% cars and 64% light trucks … about $663 million of … sent-ahead profit has occurred since May’s trough in dealers’ days sales in inventory … Serious talk of the company going public began at about that time. Coincidence?

Shipped-ahead EBIT during the last four reported months (August, September, October, and November) has amounted to a similarly estimated $1.06 billion, which is surely a very significant percentage of the company’s EBIT from its North American operations during that same period (since the analyzed months cross over quarters, it’s not directly estimable):

To be fair to GM, Ford’s days of sales in dealer inventory, based on data available in its quarterly 10-Q filings, has been as high as 85 days. But that was in June, ahead of plant shutdowns; GM made a big deal during the summer that many of its plants weren’t shutting down. The number of days of sales in dealer inventory at Ford as of September 30 was about 75.

Ford has one other thing going for it which would justify higher dealer inventories, namely a defensible expectation that sales will continue to boom. Ford’s U.S. year-to-date unit sales are up 21% through November, while GM’s are up only 7%.

Memo to Tom Krisher and Dee-Ann Durbin, who are supposed to be covering the car industry beat at the Associated Press, along with many other potential establishment media reporters: A government-controlled car company overstuffing dealer inventories for the apparent purpose of goosing reported sales and profits to make its books look good just before and after its IPO is what people in journalism used to call “a story.” Where have you been?

Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot:

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Today, in 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, causing the U.S. to enter World War II.

The History Channel’s presentation is here. Never forget.

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Immediate reaxes to the tentative tax deal:

• A two-year extension of the tax system that has essentially been in place since 2003 is somewhat helpful, but to have a meaningful impact on business planning, it needs (or needed) to be five years or more, and preferably permanent. A two-year extension will not significantly break open the cloud of business uncertainty that hangs over everything, and in and of itself won’t help the economy that much. Five years or more would have.
• The unemployment benefits extension threatens to make the program the new welfare, if it isn’t already, and bears watching. Certain system-gamers, if they start believing that the benefits will never go away, will figure out how to make their participation in them permanent.
• The 2% Social Security tax cut, which I’ll bet only affects employees and not employers who also pay 6.2% into Social Security, is also nice, but it makes an already woefully insolvent program that is currently running monthly cash deficits even moreso, and continues the philosophical decoupling of the program from the inconvenient need for it to be fully funded and stand on its own. The left has wanted to turn this into an unlimited entitlement (i.e., to partially or fully pay Social Security benefits out of “general revenues” instead of via payroll taxes) for decades. This move helps them get there.
• I predict that the press’s smart-alecky “How are you going to pay for it?” question that arises every time someone wants to cut taxes or spend more money on something it doesn’t like will come up rarely, if at all. Based on $631.7 billion in SocSec collections during fiscal 2010 (see the link’s second page), tax collections will go down by about $102 billion ($631.7 x 2% divided by 12.4%), unless economic activity picks up as a result of the cut. But as noted in the next item, it probably won’t accomplish that aim. The unemployment benefits extension will probably cost another $25 billion or so.
• This gets to the heart of the misunderstanding. The SocSec tax cut is a one-year deal that is mostly demand-side stimulus; as with the mere two years involved with the federal income tax, it won’t influence business planning, except perhaps at the top end, where a few well-off  entrepreneurs might find economy-growing uses for the couple of thousand bucks they’ll save. This assumes that there isn’t some kind of phase-out, a favored Washington trick, involved. If there is, it’s entirely temporary demand-side stimulus, and will have the same mediocre results of the trillions in demand-side stimulus that preceded it.
• The immediate expensing of capital investments is a good move, especially for manufacturers.
• The reinstatement of the death tax, despite the fairly high limit before it kicks in, is good news in the sense that a lot of the time-wasting estate planning industry will have to find alternative work. It’s bad news, because there is no defensible moral justification for the tax’s existence; thus it shouldn’t have been reinstated in any form. “That’s where the money is, and it can easily be plundered” is not a moral justification. The money and other accumulated wealth belong to decedents’ heirs, not the government.

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Deluded true believers in globaloney should be more upset that the rest of us over the party-hearty atmosphere at the U.N. Cancun climate summit. After all, according to them, conference participants are fiddling while the earth is burning. To me, it’s just another in a long list of disgraceful wastes of taxpayer resources.

From Washington:

Dec 7, 2010 / 12:46 am

The U.S. Catholic bishops have joined other American religious leaders in signing an open letter reaffirming their commitment to the protection of marriage as “the permanent and faithful union of one man and one woman.”

“As religious leaders across different faith communities, we join together and affirm our shared commitment to promote and protect marriage as the union of one man and one woman,” the Dec. 6 letter notes. “We honor the unique love between husbands and wives; the indispensible place of fathers and mothers; and the corresponding rights and dignity of all children.”

The letter, titled “The Protection of Marriage: A Shared Commitment,” notes that marriage is fundamental not just to the well-being of religious communities but to the well-being of “all of society.” Marriage is a “great good” in itself and serves the good of society in “innumerable ways,” the leaders say.

“The preservation of the unique meaning of marriage is not a special or limited interest but serves the good of all. Therefore, we invite and encourage all people, both within and beyond our faith communities, to stand with us in promoting and protecting marriage as the union of one man and one woman,” the letter concludes.

The letter was released on the same day that oral arguments on the Proposition 8 federal lawsuit were set to begin. In August, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled the California ballot measure to be unconstitutional, claiming that the definition of marriage as a union of a man and a woman lacked any rational basis and reflected religious-based hostility to homosexuals.

“Today is the moment to stand for marriage and its unchangeable meaning. We hope this letter will encourage just that,” commented Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) and a signatory to the letter.

He said the letter reflects a “broad consensus” across religious divides. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Here’s something from Innocent Bystander, apparently distributed by Texas Tea Party groups, that basically says it all:

If there’s anything left over to say, it’s in this chart found at the UK Daily Mail, to which I have added the start point of when things really got bad, i.e., when the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy began, namely around June of 2008:

Readers should note that well over 90% of the employment damage was done after Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid set the wheels in motion to take down the economy during the summer of 2008. Readers should also note that in 2-1/2 years, the comeback has only been about 10% of what was lost.

Friday was indeed the day Obamanomics and Keynesianism went down with a loud thud. In typical punk fashion, in my opinion, our president timed his surprise trip to Afghanistan to deflect attention from the news, and to leave his pathetic Vice President there to face the music. What a guy.

Christopher Booker at the UK Telegraph:

What we are seeing here is one of the greatest collective flights from reality in the history of the human race. As western Europe shivers to a halt and our energy bills soar through the roof, the time has come when we should all start to get seriously angry with our politicians for being carried away by all this claptrap.

… The global warming scare may have been fun for the children while it lasted. But the time has come for the joke to be declared well and truly over.

That’s also true for the U.S., where all too many of the jokers occupy comfortable perches within the Obama administration.

____________________________________________

In a Wall Street Journal editorial:

The Walking Death Tax
Without Congressional action, it returns with a 55% rate vengeance in 26 days.

… At least 10 Senate Democrats have campaigned at one time or another for death tax repeal or relief. The next few days will determine whether they were telling the truth. The result will tell us if Congress is turning to a tax agenda rooted in growth and fairness, or sticking with the policy of government greed and envy that has defined the last four years.

It would be nice to have those 10 names, if anyone has them.

I laid out my take on the death tax in 2005:

It’s a good idea simply because:

• It eliminates a lot of the costly machinations of the estate-planning industry accountants and lawyers, whose members can mostly move on to other, more value-creating endeavors.
• It will eliminate many of the games families play in the final years of a person’s life to empty as much as possible out of a person’s estate.
• It has the potential to end the creation of new foundations whose missions often begin well, but which all too often end up being self-perpetuating bureaucracies working against the intentions of their original creators.
• It will prevent forced liquidations of valuable properties at fire-sale prices. These forced sales occur not for any sound economic reason, but only because the families involved didn’t feed the estate-planning industry and spend many hours of time and thousands of dollars on what, in a rational world, would be nonproductive time building an estate tax-minimizing labyrinth.

It’s not the panacea its proponents anticipate, or the disaster-in-waiting opponents fear, because:

• Many states will still have estate taxes.
• … Charity-minded heirs will still be able to donate money to causes they like without feeling compelled to create foundations to shelter very large amounts of money. They may of course choose to create foundations to focus their charitable efforts, but the super-rich won’t have to do it as a mechanism merely to keep large amounts of wealth away from the tax man.
• Most importantly, at least as attempts at total repeal have been legislated in the past (this could change), capital gains taxes will be still be assessed when property is eventually sold by heirs, based on the ORIGINAL buyer’s ORIGINAL cost.

Because of the final point, it’s even possible that permanent estate tax repeal might actually lead to an increase in capital gains tax collections that would largely or completely offset the estate taxes no longer collected.

__________________________________________________

At the Washington Times:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is poised to add the Internet to its portfolio of regulated industries. The agency’s chairman, Julius Genachowski, announced Wednesday that he circulated draft rules he says will “preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet.” No statement could better reflect the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of Obama administration policies.

… Freedom and openness should continue to be the governing principles of the Internet. That’s why Mr. Genachowski’s proposal should be rejected and Congress should make it even more clear that the FCC should stop trying to expand its regulatory empire.

The statist’s impulse is to regulate and control. When, as is the case here, 15-20 years of mind-boggling advances in communication and productivity fail to dampen a guy’s enthusiasm for government control, you know that it’s really only about control.

Let’s also not forget that another threat to Internet freedom continues to lurk in the background.

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There’s a lot of competition, but here’s Business Insider’s nominee for “The Scariest Thing Ben Bernanke Said Last Night” in his 60 Minutes interview:

The worst part was when Ben Bernanke was asked how confident he was that he could stave off inflation when and if it came to that.

Bernanke’s answer was that he was 100% certain he could.

100%? Really? This represents a frightening belief in his own power and the effectiveness of monetary policy. One of the big knocks on Bernanke is that he’s an academic who’s convinced he can manage the economy via model, and frankly this kind of comment only confirms it.

Seriously, 100%?

That’s really bad, but this description relayed by the Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa is at least as bad, if not worse, as is her party-line defense of the indefensible:

Critics who fear the Fed’s bond purchases are raising the risk of inflation have complained that the purchases mean the Fed is, in effect, printing more money. In the interview, Bernanke called that a “myth.” He insisted the Fed isn’t printing money when it buys Treasurys and said the program won’t expand the amount of money in circulation in a “significant way.”

Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP, said Bernanke is right that the Fed’s purchases won’t significantly change the amount of money circulating in the economy. That’s mainly because banks aren’t lending most of the money they already hold in reserve. When the Fed buys Treasurys, it increases the reserves in the banking system. For those reserves to actually “create” money, the banks would have to lend it.

Still, Crandall suggested that the bond-buying program creates the appearance of printing money, something that could put the central bank’s credibility at stake.

O … M … G.

Just because he doesn’t have to run printing presses any more doesn’t mean that Ben isn’t creating money from nothing. He is. To call such a contention a “myth” is blatantly dishonest misdirection.

Until now, I’ve seen Bernanke as a relatively helpless guy who has been forced by the irresponsibility of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congresses of the past four years into doing things he’s rather not do. But with these two statements, Ben has officially lost me. He has become as much a part of the problem as anybody, and it appears that he may have been all along.

From Washington:

Dec 5, 2010 / 05:52 pm (CNA).- A “Bill of Rights” for women veterans will help ensure their comprehensive and effective treatment while being “absolutely clear” that abortion is not health care, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said this past week.

On Nov. 30 the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5953, the Women Veterans Bill of Rights, by voice vote. It responded to recommendations to improve Veterans’ Affairs hospitals by expanding its gender-specific workforce to handle “the unique challenges that women face when transitioning to civilian life,” Rep. Smith explained.

“Every American has a duty to respect, honor and support our Veterans,” he stated in Nov. 30 comments on the House floor.

The congressman had successfully requested the addition of language clarifying that the legislation’s definition of a “medical benefits package” did not include abortions and abortion counseling, in vitro fertilization, gender alterations, and membership in spas and health clubs.

“Because abortion methods dismember, decapitate, crush, poison, starve to death and induce premature labor, pro-life Members of Congress, and according to every reputable poll, significant majorities of “Americans want no complicity whatsoever in this violence,” Rep. Smith said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

At the Associated Press late Sunday afternoon, reporter Paul Wiseman, who may have the most inappropriate last name in the history of business journalism, engaged in a brazen “It’s really not that bad” excuse-making exercise on behalf of the economy Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Ben Bernanke have created. In the process, he joined a Reuters reporter in questioning the validity of the information Friday’s Employment Situation Report.

Other than essentially asserting that he and others don’t like what it said, and muttering about “the government’s difficulty in adjusting the figures for seasonal factors,” Wiseman presented no tangible evidence as to why Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Labor Statistics might have been more off the mark than usual for an initial release. On Friday, Reuters reporter Lucia Mutikani relayed the same assertion on Friday (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), calling the BLS report an “outlier.”

As I noted on Friday, I don’t ever recall an establishment press reporter questioning the underlying validity of the Employment Report. Now at least two have done so. I hope readers don’t mind my wondering if they’re doing so on someone’s instructions. Wiseman’s weirdness is particularly important because it will drive much of Monday’s business coverage at news outlets which subscribe to AP’s pablum.

Here are several paragraphs from the AP reporter’s rendition:

Economy is making steady gains despite weak hiring

The economy is starting to fire on almost every cylinder these days but the one that matters most: Job creation.

Factories are busier. Incomes are rising. Autos are selling. The holiday shopping season is shaping up as the best in four years. Stock prices are surging.

And many analysts are raising their forecasts for the economy’s growth. Goldman Sachs, for instance, just revised its gloomy prediction of a 2 percent increase in gross domestic product in 2011 to 2.7 percent and forecast 3.6 percent growth for 2012.

If only every major pillar of the economy were faring so well.

Despite weeks of brighter economic news, employers still aren’t hiring freely. The economy added a net total of just 39,000 jobs in November, the government said Friday.

That’s far too few even to stabilize the unemployment rate, which rose from 9.6 percent in October to 9.8 percent last month. Unemployment is widely expected to stay above 9 percent through next year, in part because of the still-depressed real estate industry.

… The meager job gains for November confounded economists. They’d expected net job growth to reach 145,000 and for the unemployment rate to stay at 9.6 percent.

Some economists dismissed the November data as a technical fluke, a result of the government’s difficulty in adjusting the figures for seasonal factors. They think the number will be revised up later.

… “Which are you going to believe,” O’Sullivan asks, “one month of payrolls or all the other data?”

If O’Sullivan thinks we should be impressed by “all of the other data, he’s got another thing coming:

• Elsewhere in the report, Wiseman cited improved consumer confidence, and applauded its “highest level since June.” The trouble is, that result — 54.1, with a dismal current conditions assessment of 24.0 — is miles away from the reading of 90 that is consistent with healthy economy.
• Wiseman also claims that the Christmas shopping season “got off to a buoyant start” (of course, he used the term “holiday”; Christmas is my substitution). Excuse me, but the predicted 2.3% rise he cites, if it indeed materializes, is about the same as inflation, and hardly makes up for the dismal numbers of the three years that preceded it.
• The supposedly acceptable rate of economic growth isn’t at all acceptable coming out of a serious recession, even if the improvement Goldman Sachs expects materializes. This past quarter’s 2.5% annualized growth rate in the fifth quarter since the recession ended is a puny shadow of the 8.5% achieved during the same quarter of the Reagan recovery in 1984. In the next five quarters, the economy under Reagan grew at annualized rates of 8.0%, 7.1%, 3.9%, 3.3%, and 3.8%. This towers over even the improved predictions for the Obama economy during the fourth quarter of 2010 and all of next year — and the so-called Obama “recovery” has been marked by frequent “unexpected” disappointments.

As to the impugning of the Employment Situation Report, I’ll repeat what I posted Friday in reaction to Lucia Mutikani’s Reuters report:

Lucia’s lament that about “some economists” questioning the seasonal adjustments doesn’t fly. Referring to what has actually happened (i.e., the not seasonally adjusted numbers) clearly demonstrates this:

Translation:

• For all nonfarm jobs, the last time November’s actual number was close to this month’s 217,000 was in 2004, when it was 251,000. You’ll notice that after seasonal adjustment, 2004′s number was added was 64,000. That’s pretty consistent.
• For all private-sector jobs, the comparison is even more obvious, because in both 2010 and 2004 the number of jobs actually added was 101,000. This year’s +50,000 after seasonal adjustment is a bit better than the 28,000 in 2004, so if anything, Ms. Mutikani’s weak attempt at a complaint goes in the wrong direction, and November 2010 got a bit of a break relative to November 2004.

For the seasonally adjusted numbers to change meaningfully next month (i.e., by 50,000 or more in each case), the actual numbers in the not seasonally adjusted tables above will have to go up by about 100,000. It could happen, but it doesn’t seem likely — and again, where’s the evidence that this might happen?

I finished Wiseman’s write-up telling myself that maybe “AP” really stands for “Another Planet.” On Earth, in the United States of America, the economy is at best plodding along; at worst, if Ben Bernanke overdoes it with the can of worms known as quantitative easing — which, by the way, may be the only reason why the the stock market is “surging” — the whole thing could careen out of control and implode.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

I do hope that Associated Press reporters Arthur Max and Charles J. Hanley are finding some recreational time while they are reporting from Cancun about what’s happening at the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

The pair’s bosses ought to be asking them how much real attention they are paying to the festivities since they began. For example, as far as I can tell from two reports by Mr. Max (here and here), he seems to have missed the opening prayer to the pagan goddess Ixchel; Ken Shepherd at NewsBusters took note of it from thousands of miles away.  We’d understand if you were really at the beach, Arthur.

Hanley’s report early this morning also seems quite oblivious to what’s really going on in Cancun:

Plodding climate talks stepping up to higher level

The slow-moving U.N. talks on combating global warming took a step forward Saturday with revised proposals for a $100 billion-a-year climate aid fund and other issues for debate by the world’s environment ministers this week.

Despite that advance, the chairwoman of key closed-door negotiations warned the open conference that obstacles remain to what delegates hope will be a package of decisions next Friday on financial and other side matters under the U.N. climate treaty.

“Progress has been made in some areas,” Zimbabwe’s Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe said. But she said the talks were “going backwards” on important issues. “We need to redouble our efforts.” [1]

Environment ministers began flying in Saturday for the final days of the annual two-week climate conference, hoping to put new life in the U.N. talks. [2]

… Some parties, for example, want the world to reduce emissions of global warming gases so that temperatures don’t rise more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above preindustrial levels, beyond which scientists say serious damage from climate change would set in. Others want to aim even lower, at 1.5 C (2.7 F) above preindustrial levels – a position favored by island states and others most threatened by warming’s impacts, such as sea-level rise. [3]

The Zimbabwean’s revised text eliminated the 1.5-degree option, drawing an immediate protest from the Bolivian delegation at Saturday’s open meeting, a sign of the contentiousness sure to mark the coming days.

… At last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, richer nations promised $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change by, for example, building coastline protection and shifting crops to cope with new precipitation patterns. [4]

… Firmly establishing a green fund at Cancun is a priority for developing-world delegations, who generally want a U.N. body overseeing disbursement of climate funds, rather than, for example, the World Bank, which is controlled by developed nations. [5]

Notes:

• [1] — Yo, Charles. If you’re going to get a quote from someone, I would suggest you consider getting it from someone not representing an authoritarian regime whose economy is such a basket case that its residents have often been reduced to eating cow dung to survive.
• [2] — Do I dare ask how these “environmental ministers” flew in? Commercial or private jet? What’s the carbon footprint of a privately-jetted passenger compared to someone who flies commercial? And where is Webex when we need it?
• [3] — Gosh, where to begin? Let’s leave it at this: The earth isn’t warming, and the seas aren’t rising. Though there is no shortage of competition, Christopher Booker characterizes the latter as “the greatest lie ever told.”
• [4] — Sorry, Charles. Last year in Copenhagen, “richer nations” promised nothing meaningful. What about “Non-binding accord” (from the UK Guardian, no less) don’t you understand?
• [5] — I know it’s way too much to ask, but Hanley should have reminded readers of how well the last major “U.N. body overseeing disbursement” of funds performed. That would be Oil for Food, where untold billions (this CFR report claims that it’s about $12 billion) disappeared down an unaccountable rat hole. The idea that at U.N. fund for climate change would be any different is utterly lacking in evidentiary support.

News consumers would probably have been better off if Max and Hanley really had spent their time at Cancun’s beaches all week. At least we’d have been spared the pretense packaged as objective reporting.

Cross-posted at NewBusters.org.

From a Friday IBD editorial (“Keynesianism, RIP”), reacting to the awful employment report earlier in the day:

President Obama may have pulled “the car out of the ditch,” but he left the jobs engine behind, judging from November’s weak jobs report. Yet he remains wedded to a job-killing tax hike?

The Labor Department report confirms not only a jobless recovery, but the failure of Obama’s neo-Keynesian economic policies. It’s time to give them up, and gracefully negotiate with Republicans over more effective alternatives.

The president’s stubborn pride is prolonging the agony of 15 million Americans still out of work (not including discouraged workers who no longer show up in the numbers).

We interrupt this excerpt to repeat the editorial’s salient point about the so-called party of compassion:

The president’s stubborn pride is prolonging the agony of 15 million Americans still out of work (not including discouraged workers who no longer show up in the numbers).

Unlimited Keynesian “stimulus” isn’t working; the uptick in the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate during the past few months proves it.

Speaking of proof: The longer they continue to pursue it, the more clearly they prove that they don’t really care about the people affected by the economy they worked to create — which is why I have called it the Pelosi-Obama-Reid Economy for the past 2-1/2 years. Because it has been, and still is.

Back to IBD:

Last month’s anemic 39,000 payroll gain shocked economists who had expected 150,000. With hiring so weak, the jobless rate rose to 9.8%, marking the 19th straight month above 9% — the longest stretch on record.

… Seventeen months into this recovery, private-sector job growth is decelerating when it should be galloping ahead. Despite rosier economic news, companies are still unwilling to boost hiring. Why? There’s nothing incentivizing them to risk it.

Obama’s answer is more social spending and gerrymandered tax credits, combined with a tax-rate hike on many small businesses — the very jobs engine still stuck in his famous “ditch.”

Please, Mr. President, you and your economic team of born-again Keynesian central planners have had your chance.

Maybe we should call advocates of Obamanomics “Weekend at Bernie’s liberals.” In the movie, “A pair of losers try to pretend that their murdered employer is really alive, but the murderer is out to ‘finish him off.’” In 2010, a bunch of bitter clingers are dragging a dead Keynesian carcass around, pretending that it’s still alive, and claiming that that someone else (Bush did it! The GOP minority did it! Evil employers won’t voluntarily lose money and/or go under!) is trying to kill it and the economy they have ruined.

It’s so bad that the administration is having a recruiting problem among the still somewhat sane:

Dismal Jobs Numbers Expose a Leaderless White House on Economic Policy
The president’s “dream team” of economic advisors is mostly gone and no one is stepping forward with any idea on how to get the economy moving again.

… The word on the street is that no economic stars with real business experience are interested in joining the Obama White House. Two Clintonites, investment banker Roger Altman and numbers cruncher Gene Sperling, have been publicly courted but have not decided to share Obama’s bed. That appears to be the best the president can do.

No one is being sought who has any experience running a 21st century corporation and who actually knows how to produce jobs. This is what happens when you declare war on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and your closest business ally, the Business Roundtable, excoriates you as they did this summer, saying you have created an “increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation.”

And Jack Lew, the new Office of Management and Budget director, who is in charge of spending priorities for the federal government, has been operating without a deputy since he was confirmed.

Michael S. Barr, the assistant Treasury secretary who shepherded the new federal regulations for the financial industry through Congress, has departed. Diana Farrell, the deputy director of Mr. Obama’s National Economic Council and another architect of the regulatory legislation, will leave at the end of the year. The team is breaking up.

In August, Robert Gibbs explained to reporters that Obama’s economic team was “exhausted.” The only ones left from the original team are Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the sclerotic Paul Volcker, chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board and Federal Reserve chairman under former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

… The mainstream media’s spin of the Democratic drubbing last month was that it was only due to unemployment and not a reflection on the president’s policies. A larger issue the media has all but ignored is that there is no one at the White House directing economic growth policies. And today’s horrible jobs numbers shows it.

Cue the sardonic “the country is in the best of hands” meme.

From Vatican City:

Dec 2, 2010 / 05:57 pm

The president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care noted this week that respect for human life is what fosters the comprehensive development of nations.

Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski made his comments during a conference on Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Caritas in veritate.” The event was organized by the Political Charity International Association and held at Rome’s Sacro Cuore University.

Archbishop Zygmunt said the Church’s social doctrine pays special attention to the protection of human life. Since the 1970s, he explained, the threats to human life have increased as laws that protected the right to life against abortion, euthanasia, artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization began to be undermined. Such actions led to the human embryo being “reduced to a mere thing,” he added.

These problems constitute “major challenges for Christian social teaching and demand an adequate response,” he added, pointing to John Paul II’s encyclical “Evangelium vitae” and Benedict XVI’s “Caritas in veritate” as cornerstones for addressing them.

Archbishop Zimowski warned against “an anti-life mentality” whose advocates attempt to pass it off to other countries as “cultural progress.” “This mentality has increased because of laws contrary to life that have been enacted in the most economically developed countries,” he continued. These laws end up defending attacks on human life, such as abortion, as if they constituted “rights of individual freedom.”

The task for believers who deal with a society on these terms is “to develop an ethos capable of presenting arguments in psychological and socio-cultural terms about the meaning and value of the norms that respect human life,” the archbishop continued. “We must overcome very abstract or formal arguments that do not lend themselves to an adequate approach to the present experience,” he said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.