On Wednesday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), in commenting on USA Today’s poor decision to quote a paragraph from a New York Times op-ed by former Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) — a bad decision because Kanjorski’s call for “civility” directly contrasts with his call for someone to shoot Florida gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott just a few months ago — I wrote that USAT Founder Al Neuharth’s “‘civility’ credentials are also suspect.”

Two days later, Neuharth, who claims to be “independent,” more than justified those suspicions. In a “Plain Talk” item in Friday’s paper (“Who shares blame in Tucson tragedy?”), Neuharth blamed a wide range of people for Jared Loughner’s actions. “Somehow,” he forgot to blame Jared Laughner. It’s not a stretch to assert that many readers would be justified in believing that Neuharth may not even want to see Loughner convicted of a crime.

Neuharth took shots at talkers on the right and left. USAT published an absolutely laughable counter-response from MSNBC President Phil Griffin. The other response (from the right? Are you kidding?) was from a psychiatry prof.

Here is Neuharth’s piece and its responses (published in their entirety because of their relative brevity; bolds are mine):

The killings in Tucson were committed by someone who has had trouble adapting to the rules or laws of life ever since he was a kid. But we need to examine what caused him to go completely crazy as a young adult.

Parents are most responsible. Then teachers. But so are others who influence thinking.

We don’t know what fed the rage of Jared Loughner, but we do know that many mental misfits like him are teetering on the edge. Vitriol on the air around the clock, mostly on cable TV, can stir the unstable mind while reinforcing its nutty notions.

Most media personalities who express opinions in print or on the air do so with some measure of common sense. But some don’t. Examples of those who deliberately agitate to irritate:

• Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, whose primary purpose is to arouse right-wingers.
• MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow who deliberately agitate left-wingers.
• Rush Limbaugh, who stirs up nuts of all sorts.

As a middle-of-the-road political independent, I make sure I have acquaintances, associates and friends with views — or prejudices — across the spectrum.

But I am frequently amazed or shocked at how otherwise intelligent persons buy the stuff that is peddled by media extremists or just plain prejudiced people.

With six young chosen (adopted) children ages 10 to 19, I also am shocked at how often they come home from school and talk about some nutty notions of classmates — often tolerated by teachers.

Media people and teachers have huge influence on young people — often more than their parents do. In the wake of the Tucson tragedy, those in both professions should re-examine their role and the job they’re doing.

Feedback: Other views on Tucson tragedy

“We all must do better. However, those that you compare us with are wholly partisan and assume everyone else is malevolent. MSNBC presents analysis and opinion based on fact. Distinctions matter, Al. Shame on you.” — Phil Griffin, president, MSNBC

Distortions of reality can be powerful drivers of behavior in troubled young people. Let’s go easy on parents, teachers, and even outlandish media personalities.” — Paul S. Appelbaum, MD, psychiatry professor, Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons

I’m not a big fan of the Rolling Stones, who have on balance been a very negative cultural influence, but one of their songs pegs Neuharth’s ignorance perfectly. In “Sympathy for the Devil,” Mick Jagger as the devil says (I don’t call what he does “singing”), “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys’ — When after all, it was you and me.”

Al, if everyone’s responsible, no one’s responsible, apparently in this case, based on your failure to specifically blame him, not even Jared Loughner, who pulled the trigger about 20 times.

Available information indicates that Neuharth’s entire premise concerning outside influences has little if any foundation, as a high school friend of Loughner’s relayed to ABC’s Good Morning America (HT Drudge archives):

He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio. He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right.

But silly things like facts and direct observations of those in a position to know didn’t stop know-nothing Neuharth from frantically fueling the fire of illogic. As a result, he once again utterly failed to live up to his own mission statement for his publication 28 years ago:

“USA Today hopes to serve as a forum for better understanding and unity to help make the USA truly one nation.”

Really Al?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Environmental Protection Agency, in an unusual move, revoked a key permit for one of the largest proposed mountaintop-removal coal-mining projects in Appalachia, drawing cheers from environmentalists and protests from business groups worried their projects could be next.

The decision to revoke the permit for Arch Coal Inc.’s Spruce Mine No. 1 in West Virginia’s rural Logan County marks the first time the EPA has withdrawn a water permit for a mining project that had previously been issued.

It’s also only the second time in the 39-year history of the federal Clean Water Act that the agency has canceled a water permit for a project of any kind after it was issued, according to the agency. (Note: It looks like they’re even bragging about it.)

The EPA said Thursday it revoked the permit, issued by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2007, because it concluded new scientific research on mountaintop-removal mining since then indicated the potential harm to streams and watershed areas surrounding the Spruce project could be significant.

A spokeswoman for Arch said the company was “shocked and dismayed” by the agency’s decision, which it said would block an additional $250 million investment that would create 250 jobs. The company said it would appeal to the courts.

… As the EPA stressed that the permit decision had no implications beyond the Spruce mine, business groups outside the coal industry said the government’s action raised questions about whether permits previously issued for other businesses could also be revoked, potentially stranding investments and costing jobs even as the economy continues to heal.

This sends the message to businesses that they can never feel comfortable that their permits will be honored. As if we needed it, the administration has introduced even more regulatory uncertainty. Once again, we see the dictionary definition of “tyranny” (“arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority”) in action.

In addition to the concerns about stranded investments and lost jobs, there will be certainly projects that will not be undertaken because the government has demonstrated that it won’t keep its word. Jobs which could have been created won’t be.

As I said yesterday in my Pajamas Media column:

Sadly, it’s not just the failed Keynesian stimulus that has held back the economy and employment. Despite the president’s positive rhetoric, his administration demonstrates its resistance to steps that would improve the economy and create jobs on a nearly daily basis.

Another day, another example.

From Rome:

Dec 20, 2010 / 05:02 pm

Dr. Carlo Bellieni, a neonatal doctor in Siena, Italy, is working tirelessly to change the way the world looks at unborn children.

In more than 20 years of work and study he has developed new channels of understanding the unborn and the newborn child and new methods of giving them medical assistance.

He is an avid researcher, often collaborating with other scientists and doctors internationally to produce books, scientific papers and new studies examining pre-born and newborn babies. The Italian Neonatology Society, the European Society for Pediatric Research and the Pontifical Academy for Life count him as a member. He is a frequent contributor to the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

His particular passion is researching the way an unborn or a newborn child feels pain and finding ways to alleviate it through pioneering medical methods and strategies that don’t use pharmaceutical drugs.

There are many things that go untold about neonatal medicine from the “horrendous” to the “beautiful,” the doctor told CNA in November.

His research has led him to make the “very strange” discovery that modern medicine has often created a harsh environment for the prematurely born child due to a lack of understanding and research.

In the 1990s, he found that sound levels and the strength of magnetic fields in incubators were off the charts, for example. Pain scales and pain relief measures for those premature babies needing surgeries were non-existent or inadequate, he said.

These and other examples led him to ask, “Why didn’t anyone realize this before?”

According to available research, the unborn child experiences sensations of pleasure, taste, hearing and pain. In a world where these possibilities are often neglected, these studies give the fetus “a human face,” said Dr. Bellieni.

At 20 weeks from conception the baby’s brain is developed to the point where it begins to process painful stimuli. The fetus responds to pain by releasing the same hormones and exhibiting changed heart-rate frequencies just as adults do in the presence of pain, said Bellieni.

One study has even recorded a baby crying in the womb.

Under normal development, by the time a baby is born, he can feel not only pain but has also begun to prepare for the outside world.

When a baby is born, he is already accustomed to the voice, cadence and even the language of his mother. Her diet will have influenced his food preferences and he will recognize the sound of his mother’s favorite sitcom, music and other common ambient sounds. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Two paragraphs don’t seem to belong together in Martin Crutsinger’s Associated Press dispatch on the government’s Monthly Treasury Statement for December. But there they are.

Here’s the first paragraph of interest in Martin’s missive (“Federal budget deficit narrows to $80B in December”):

Government spending during this period totaled $902.6 billion, an increase of 3.1 percent over the same period a year ago.

Now watch Crutsinger tell readers why spending should be down, perhaps without even realizing it (bold is mine):

The 2010 deficit was $1.29 trillion and followed an all-time high of $1.41 trillion in 2009. The government spent billions of dollars in that period to stabilize the financial system and try to jump-start the economy after the recession hit.

The operative numerical descriptor isn’t “billions of dollars,” it’s “hundreds of billions of dollars.”

In any event, if the described spending is no longer occurring during fiscal 2011, why is spending still up by roughly $28 billion? Inquiring minds want to know, but apparently Marty Crutsinger either doesn’t want to know, or doesn’t want us to know.

Here are a few, by no means all-inclusive reasons totally unrelated to stimulus explaining why spending has continued to sprout:

• Department of Defense, up $11.4 billion — This may be necessary in the circumstances, but the irony of ironies is that Crutsinger spent much of fiscal 2009 obsessed with how “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” were causing the deficit, when increases in spending on those wars couldn’t possibly have explained more than 5% of the reason why the reported deficit went from $455 billion in fiscal 2008 to 1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009. In fiscal 2011, a 6.5% DOD increase making up over one-third of this year’s increase in spending is somehow unimportant.
• Health and Human Services, up $14.9 billion (7%)
• Veteran’s Affairs, up $3.2 billion (10%)
• EPA, up $1.0 billion (53%, not a typo)

Crutsinger could have addressed these or several other spending increases (or decreases, for that matter) in the Monthly Treasury Statement. Instead, we got nothing but misdirection. We certainly didn’t get good journalism.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s not too difficult to determine where the sympathy of the Associated Press’s Christopher Wills resides in the aftermath of the Democrat-controlled legislature’s passage in Illinois of steep, “temporary” four-year income and corporate tax increases.

Wills cited neighboring states as “gleefully plot(ting)” to take business away from Illinois, claimed that the Illinois move “resolve(d)” its budget crisis (that remains to be seen), and asserted that “economic experts scoffed” at the idea that significant out-of-state business migration might occur. Oh, and he found one business threatening to leave not Illinois, but Wisconsin, because the Badger State’s governor wouldn’t accept deficit-generating light-rail money from Uncle Sam.

Here are the relevant paragraphs from Wills’s report (“Neighboring states gleeful over Ill. tax increase”; bolds are mine):

While many states consider boosting their economies with tax cuts, Illinois officials are betting on the opposite tactic: dramatically raising taxes [1] to resolve a budget crisis that threatened to cripple state government.

Neighboring states gleefully plotted Wednesday to take advantage of what they consider a major economic blunder and lure business away from Illinois. [2]

… But economic experts scoffed at images of highways packed with moving vans as businesses leave Illinois. [3] Income taxes are just one piece of the puzzle when businesses decide where to locate or expand, they said, and states should be cooperating instead trying to poach jobs from one another.

“The idea of competing on state tax rates is . . . hopelessly out of date,” said Ed Morrison, economic policy advisor at the Purdue Center for Regional Development. [3] “It demonstrates that political leadership is really out of step with what the global competitive realities are.”

By going where no other state dares to tread, Illinois could prove itself to be a policy pacesetter or the opposite – a place so dysfunctional that officials created a jaw-dropping budget crisis and then tried to fix it by knee-capping the economy.

… the Democrat-controlled General Assembly voted to temporarily raise personal income taxes 66 percent, from 3 percent to 5 percent. Corporate rates will rise, too – from 4.8 percent to 7 percent [4] - when Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn signs the measure.

The increase is expected to produce $6.8 billion a year for the four years it’s in full effect. [4] That should be enough to balance Illinois’ annual budget [5] and begin chipping away at a backlog of roughly $8 billion in old bills.

… Chicago Mayor Richard Daley predicted jobs will start trickling out of Illinois with little fanfare.

Notes:

• [1] — The relevant definition of “dramatic” is “highly effective; striking.” You’re kidding, right Chris?
• [2] — As a verb, “plot” means “to plan secretly, esp. something hostile or evil.” So trying to get business for your state is now hostile, or even evil?
• [3] — The “experts” who “scoffed” at the idea of competition between the states probably don’t have much to say about NCR’s move out of Ohio to Georgia that was announced in June of last year. Now that Illinois has negatively altered its tax structure, it will still compete, but now it will have to do so by increasing its dependence on special tax abatements and exemptions to lure new business and to keep existing businesses in the state (Rose, a co-blogger at my home site, noted the irony last year: “Democrats constantly stomp their feet about tax cuts/incentives not working and yet that is their first line of action” when a company threatens to leave). Crony capitalism will become even more prevalent in a state that already has far too much of it.
• [4] — “Temporary”? We’ll see. Also, Wills’s language seems to imply that that the taxes will remain partially in effect (i.e., not “in full effect”) after the fourth year. Maybe someone from Illinois could take a break from packing their bags and let me know if my suspicion is correct. Update: As suspected, and even worse than suspected — “The tax hikes, which will be retroactive to January 1, are suppose to be temporary for four years then slowly reduced until 2025.” More detail is at the link.
• [5] — “Should” balance the budget? Again, we’ll see. The list of states failing to raise receipts by as much as originally thought by raising taxes is long. Two recent ones: Oregon and Maryland.

Wills went on to compare the top income tax rate in other states, but that misses the point. What’s important are the overall comprehensive tax burdens on individuals and businesses compared to other states — and not just neighboring ones

As to businesses, Illinois had (emphasis “had”) the 23rd-best state tax business climate for fiscal year 2011, according to the Tax Foundation. That ranking will surely fall. In the same survey, Indiana was 10th, Wisconsin 40th, and Missouri 16th. Wisconsin new Republican governor Scott Walker appears determined to undo the damage done by the his Democratic Party predecessor. But in today’s economy, why wouldn’t an Illinois company also consider any one of the other states, as formerly Ohio-based NCR did with Georgia?

For individuals, this graphic at JSOnline (click on Illinois in the U.S. map to see description) says that Illinois “has high property tax offset by low income tax.” Uh, not any more.

But the AP’s Wills did find a business that was thinking about moving:

Train-maker Talgo Inc. is threatening to leave Milwaukee because Wisconsin rejected federal funds for high-speed rail. Talgo still considers Illinois a strong possibility for its new the company’s new home, despite the tax increase, said spokeswoman Nora Friend.

Congrats to Governor Walker for rejecting the high-speed rail funds, as did new GOP Governor John Kasich in Ohio. High-speed rail is such a deficit-generating loser that accepting the money would have cost far more long-term than rejecting it. A Kasich spokesman called Ohio’s project “a train that will cost taxpayers $17 million a year that will be slow and that very few people will ride.” Given the cost overrun history of such projects, the $17 million estimate was surely a low-ball number.

The AP’s Wills could at least have tried to be objective. Instead, his report describing neighboring state governors and governments as hostile and evil (he used the word “plotting,” not me) is an uncalled-for gratuitous dig at people who are only trying to make life better for their states’ citizens. There’s legitimate reason to question whether Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and his tax-happy band of Democrat legislators have similar wishes for their own state’s residents, or if their primary goal isn’t really to maintain business as usual in Springfield at any cost.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

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

____________________________________________________

Make sure to see the column’s key graphic.

The jobs scoreboard through 18 post-recession months (Reagan: October 1982 through March 1984; Obama: July 2009 through December 2010) reads as follows:

• Total non-farm jobs: Reagan – 4.240 million; Obama – 72,000 (seriously)
• Private-sector jobs: Reagan – 4.133 million; Obama – 378,000

This is even before considering today’s much larger potential workforce, and it glosses over the National Bureau of Economic Research’s contention that the country was still in a recession during October and November of 1982.

As I wrote yesterday in the pre-column tease about what this should mean to Keynesian clingers: “It’s embarrassing — no, make that humiliating.”

What follows are a couple of preemptive rebuttals.

One commenter yesterday tried to claim that the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy’s recession (he didn’t refer to it that way, but they own the recession, as I have demonstrated time and again during the past 30 months) was worse and/or presented more of a recovery challenge than the early 1980s recession.

Hardly. Reagan faced:

• Historically high Inflation: 13.3% in 1979, 12.5% in 1980, 8.9% in 1981.
• Historically high interest rates: The prime rate went as high as 21%.
• A Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker that was necessarily in relentless, inflation-taming tightening mode.

By contrast, under Obama, core inflation remains tame (though Ben Bernanke’s “quantitative easing” is running a huge risk of ruining that), and interest rates are almost at the “free money” level. Businesses and consumers aren’t reacting to these low rates because of pervasive administration-induced uncertainty, regulatory hostility, and, more recently, high oil prices, which are also an administration-induced phenomenon. The poor job growth in the first 18 months after the POR Recession ended, despite a supposedly stimulating debt buildup of more than $3 trillion that as of today is jeopardizing USA’s credit rating, is directly traceable to Obama administration policy choices.

The severity of the housing mess is the other attempted rebuttal. Putting aside that it’s really the Democratic-driven mortgage loan crisis resulting from frauds by design Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the whole thing could have worked itself out during the first half of 2009 if the administration had chosen the right policy prescriptions. It didn’t. Because it didn’t, we have a mediocre economic growth and a still-pathetic job market. It’s on them.

No wonder our current president (assuming it’s not a faux-triangulating pose) is reading up on Reagan. Although I suppose there’s always hope that a hardened leftist like Obama can somehow comprehend what made the Gipper so great, especially in this case his economic policies, I’m not optimistic.

From College Station, Texas (bolds are mine; dictionary and book links — #30 on Amazon at the time of this post — added by me):

Jan 13, 2011 / 06:05 am

Despite legal challenges and personal attacks from Planned Parenthood, Abby Johnson has published a new memoir explaining why she left the abortion industry to join the ranks of the pro-life movement. Going even further, she’s also rejected contraception, and decided to enter the Catholic Church.

Johnson’s new book, “UnPlanned,” hit stores on Jan. 11, 2011, one day after the Texas-based activist addressed more than 20,000 listeners in an online broadcast. The Catholic publisher Ignatius Press has released a special edition of the book, with extra material including a foreword by Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests For Life.

In the webcast, Johnson explained how she became involved in the abortion industry, despite her strongly Christian upbringing. She found Planned Parenthood’s booth at a job fair, she said, and embraced the group’s rhetoric about reducing the rate of abortion while making it available as an matter of “personal choice.”

But through her experiences at Planned Parenthood, first as a volunteer and eventually as a clinic director, Johnson came to see the organization quite differently. As a business, Johnson said, Planned Parenthood was primarily focused on providing its most profitable service –abortion– as often as possible.

Prior to the birth of her own first child, Johnson also had two abortions herself– something she had not discussed openly until the Jan. 10 webcast, although her former friend and Planned Parenthood colleague Laura Kaminczak had disclosed it to a reporter in January 2010 without her permission.

As Johnson secretly bore this grief, she also became disillusioned with pressure to meet rising monthly abortion quotas at her clinic. Neither of these factors, however, drove her to reject Planned Parenthood’s core ideology about abortion “rights.”

What finally did, was the experience of seeing an unborn child die before her eyes on an ultrasound monitor. Due to a personnel shortage, she was called in to assist in an ultrasound-guided abortion for the first time in September 2009. She was initially disconcerted to note how much the unborn child, after 13 weeks, looked like the image she had seen of her own living daughter while pregnant with her.

The next few minutes changed Johnson’s life irrevocably, as she watched the baby –whom she had believed to be incapable of feeling anything– squirming and twisting to avoid the tube into which it would be vacuumed.

“For the briefest moment,” she writes in her memoir, “the baby looked as if it were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then it crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes.”

“The last thing I saw was the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then it was gone.”

Although Planned Parenthood has denied that this abortion ever took place, their assertion conflicts with other comments from Laura Kaminczak, who said she spoke with Johnson shortly after it occurred.

Shocked by what she had seen, Johnson still initially continued her work running the clinic and promoting its work. Just a few weeks later, however, she was in the nearby office of the Coalition For Life, telling its director Shawn Carney –with whom she was well-acquainted, from his years of opposition to Planned Parenthood– that she could no longer continue helping women have abortions.

In an interview with CNA on Jan. 11, Johnson said she joined the pro-life movement to help women understand the truth about abortion, not to become a public figure. She explained that it was Planned Parenthood, not the Coalition For Life, that turned her departure into a public battle.

The organization preemptively sought a court order that would have prevented Johnson from discussing her past work. Because of the legal battle that ensued, she was not previously able to speak about many aspects of Planned Parenthood’s business model and its treatment of women. Much of the information in “UnPlanned” is reaching the public only because Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit failed. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

I’m going to link to Taranto’s Best of the Web for the pull paragraphs because Alter himself deserves no traffic for what he wrote Monday at Newsweek.

Here are the two evil paragraphs in question (and yes, evil is the right word), with Taranto’s excellent commentary bookending them:

For the “must have charts” crowd, here’s one whose data will be addressed further at my pending Pajamas Media column (Note: the following graph shows private-sector jobs, which was not specifically ID’d in an earlier version of the chart; stay tuned for total jobs when the PJM column appears, the contrast is even more stark):

If you’re wondering why the establishment press hasn’t done a lot of direct comparisons to the economy’s post-recession performance in the 1980s, the chart pretty much explains why. It’s embarrassing — no, make that humiliating.

More to the point: I would assert that almost 4 million people are out of work (more like over 5 million, if you consider growth in the potential workforce in the intervening quarter-century) because of deliberately chosen policy prescriptions proven not to work in the past (i.e., stimulus, government intervention; e.g., 1930s USA, 1990s Japan), and deliberately ignored policy prescriptions proven to have worked in the past (i.e., across-the-board and investment-targeting tax cuts, regulatory moderation; e.g., early 1960s USA under Kennedy, 1980s USA under Reagan).

“Party of Compassion” my a**.

Editor’s Note: This is the BizzyBlog debut column of Robert Roll, the blog owner’s nephew and a freshman at Ohio Northern University. Rob is a Finance major who has been writing columns for ONU’s student newspaper since last fall.

Oddly enough, the Ohio Northern Review stopped publishing its content over the Internet about two years ago, meaning that Rob’s columns to this point have not appeared online. Considering the quality of his work, that situation is unacceptable. Rob has an online outlet here as long as he wishes to utilize it.

_______________________________________

A Bad START to the New Year

It is a new year and that means it is a time for a few new starts. It is time for you to start that quarter-long project that you have not even thought about yet. It is time to start your new workout routine that you will maintain for one week, two tops. But just like that tofu-papaya-pea diet, there are some things that you should not start. Another example of this is the New START treaty. While most of you were home with your family and friends, a lame-duck United States Senate ratified the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The treaty is an agreement between the United States and Russia to decrease the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals.

The original START talks, which were highly successful and beneficial to America, occurred during the Cold War between President Ronald Reagan and counter-part in the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev. At that time, those were the only two true nuclear powers in the world. Today’s situation is very different. There are now ten nations that possess nuclear weapons, five of which are not exactly our friends (Russia, China, Syria and in all likelihood Iran and North Korea). Given the change in the geopolitical landscape, how can this disarmament not be taken as a sign of weakness, especially when the United States got the raw end of the deal?

When signing the New START treaty in Moscow, President Obama announced his vision for a “world free of nuclear weapons”. While that statement was great for a sound bite, it is incredibly destructive for a stable world. The reason that nuclear weapons are so vital for our national security is because they prevent other nations from using nuclear weapons on us. Why would a nation attack us if they knew that they would be obliterated from the face of the earth because of our retaliation? This is why nuclear weapons have been the greatest force for world peace ever.

Plus, if Obama really wanted to rid the world of nuclear weapons then why would he get rid of the one thing that could cause that to happen? According to the New START treaty, the United States will reduce its missile defenses. In addition, earlier in his term, Obama removed a missile shield from Poland. Both of these actions hinder our ability to defend ourselves from an attack and decrease the chances for a nuclear-weapon-free world. The best way to rid the world of nuclear weapons is to render them obsolete, which is what missile defenses do.

You are probably asking the question, “If this treaty is so detrimental to the United States, then why did Obama sign it?” Many people have put forth their answers to that question and most of them are just a bunch of psychobabble. The only logical answer that I can come up with is that Obama is just plain naïve. And naivety is the most powerful Weapon of Mass Destruction.

The folks at USA Today really ought to vet their candidates for the “Et Cetera — Smart insights on the news of the day” section of the print edition of its editorial page a bit more thoroughly.

Wednesday morning’s opener in that section (apparently not available online) featured two paragraphs from a New York Times op-ed by former Pennsylvania Congressman Paul Kanjorski, including this final sentence:

Therefore, it is incumbent on all Americans to create an atmosphere of civility and respect in which political discourse can flow freely, without fear of violent confrontation.

As I noted yesterday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog; original HT Mark Hemingway at the Washington Examiner), Kanjorski’s entitlement to lecture on civility is more than a little suspect, given what he said about Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott and the health insurance industry last year:

“That Scott down there that’s running for governor of Florida,” Mr. Kanjorski said. “Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he’s running for governor of Florida. He’s a millionaire and a billionaire. He’s no hero. He’s a damn crook. It’s just we don’t prosecute big crooks.”

In his op-ed, Kanjorski joined the pantheon of alleged journalists, editorialists, and others whose writings have appeared in the New York Times during the past several days who have all of a sudden discovered the need for “civility” in the wake of the Tucson murders while demonstrating little if any restraint previously.

It’s too bad that USAT let itself get suckered into giving Kanjorski's work more undeserved, response-free exposure. It’s definitely not consistent with the stated goal of Founder Al Neuharth (whose "civility" credentials are also suspect) for the paper "to serve as a forum for understanding and unity to help make the USA truly one nation."

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

John Nolte at BigJournalism.com (“New Media Soundly Defeats Left-Wing Media’s Political Witch Hunt”):

Those of you old enough to remember the assassination of President Kennedy also remember the media blaming a murder committed by an openly Marxist Castro supporter on right-wing anger.

… these last three days will rightly haunt the mainstream media for decades to come.

… Empty your soul of all that’s decent so that for just one moment you can imagine what it’s like to be a part of the mainstream media. Imagine what it was like as recently as 15 years ago to enter the field of “journalism” under the promise that if you were successful you’d have unlimited and, better yet, unaccountable powers to destroy whomever you wanted and to tell whatever lies necessary to further a personal agenda. Now imagine how frustrating it must be to have that promise almost completely evaporate with the rise of Citizen Media, New Media, and Fox News.

What we witnessed these past three days wasn’t just political partisanship, what we witnessed was the horror show of entitled and angry elitists desperate for that warm, nostalgic feeling of reaffirmation that comes with a successful character assassination and a death blow to their political enemies. Yes, the media made complete fools of themselves and further damaged what was left of their reputations, but the brass ring of a momentary return to the good old days was impossible not to reach for.

Now, refill your soul and imagine what the last three days would’ve looked like without New Media, without the ability of decent people to have a say in the ongoing narrative — a say that included logic, facts, truths, and humanity. Thanks to the power of New Media and the patriotic willingness of everyday Americans to take the time to utilize it, “The Three Days of the Krugman” ended up being another humiliating defeat for the left, a permanent black mark on their record every bit as black as RatherGate, only more sweeping.

… this past weekend mattered for reasons much more important than politics. Now that the indecent have retreated to the shadows to lick their wounds, this nation can finally unify and get on with the proper business of grieving for the victims of a monstrous attack on our country and democracy.

I’m not as convinced as Nolte that the pushback was as successful as he describes it, but there’s no doubt that it largely neutralized and exposed the worst excesses; CBS polling data cited at Hot Air somewhat confirms this. 57% aren’t buying the establishment press’s horse manure; it ought to be 97%.

And, as we’ll see shortly, they’re still pounding away. We should not forget who has revealed their fundamental ugliness over this.

___________________________________________________

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post doesn’t quite see it the way Nolte does, and gets the history wrong in the process:

The killer claimed he was inspired by an anarchist, not by Hearst – but that didn’t stop opponents from falsely claiming that Czolgosz had a copy of Hearst’s New York Journal in his pocket when he did the deed. Secretary of State Elihu Root later accused Hearst of driving the “weak and excitable brain of Czolgosz” to murder. The outcry against Hearst’s incitement – there were boycotts and a burning in effigy – dashed his presidential ambitions.

A similar, and long overdue, outcry has followed the Tucson killings.

Seriously, the melted-down mind of Milbank is celebrating the idea that a narrative known to be false ended someone’s presidential ambitions, and hopes that a similar false narrative involved in the Tucson murders might be successful.

W. Joseph Campbell at Media Myth Alert (HT Instapundit) agrees that Milbank’s column “suggests that using smears to batter foes into silence is somehow worthy or admirable.” Campbell also shows that Milbank got the history wrong:

Milbank’s column, moreover, erred in claiming the uproar that followed McKinley’s assassination “dashed” Hearst’s presidential ambitions.

Not so.

Hearst mounted a serious bid for Democratic nomination for president in 1904. He was by then a congressman, and his presidential bandwagon gathered some momentum during the first months of that year.

In the end, though, his candidacy was doomed–not by the smears and fabrications raised after the McKinley assassination but by the reluctance of William Jennings Bryan to embrace Hearst’s bid.

___________________________________________________

At Hot Air, Allah nukes a Newsweek premise that the Tucson murders show that Janet Napolitano was right to single out “right-wing extremists” like prolife protestors, and also outs the reporter (paragraph breaks added by me):

The first inkling you get that Jared Loughner might not, in fact, be a “right-wing extremist” comes … in paragraph 19 (of 20) …

Was ideological extremism even a minor driving factor? As far as I know, there’s still no reason to believe so, which means the entire premise of the piece ends up being detonated before it’s over. But then, they’re not expecting you to read to the end; the important information in a news article is always placed up front, so if you happen to be a Newsweek reader — and if you are, you really should ask yourself why — who’s not following the coverage of the shootings closely, you’re sure to come away with the wrong impression of Loughner if you quit reading halfway through.

Although if you do make it to the end, there’s a special surprise waiting for you: This story was written not by a Newsweek staffer but by a reporter from the “nonpartisan” Center for Public Integrity, which has been criticized for years for taking money from, among others, Soros’s Open Society Institute.

Specifically, here’s Newsweek’s description of their “reporter”: “Aaron Mehta is a reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative reporting organization in Washington D.C.”

Even Wikipedia can’t stomach the absurd notion that the Center for Public Integrity is operationally “non-partisan.”

Newsweek has dressed up a person from an clearly biased organization as a “reporter.” It’s not even worth the $1 its buyers paid to get it away from the Washington Post last year.

___________________________________________________

A couple of weeks ago, I demonstrated that the homebuilding industry is at its lowest level since World War II — even before adjusting for population.

Cindy Perman at CNBC has noticed what has happened to home values:

In the past few years, we’ve all been careful to choose our words carefully, not calling it a recession until it fit the technical definition and avoiding any inappropriate use of the “D” word — Depression.

Things were bad but the broader economy never reached Depression territory. The housing market, on the other hand, just crossed that threshold.

Home values have fallen 26 percent since their peak in June 2006, worse than the 25.9-percent decline seen during the Depression years between 1928 and 1933, Zillow reported.

This shouldn’t have happened. I predicted that it wouldn’t happen. But I, like millions of others, never dreamed that our next president, his party’s House Minority Leader, and his party’s Senate Majority Leader would keep the economy mired in recession followed by malaise for 2-1/2 years, while orchestrating what may be the most ineffective government market intervention into an industry (the HAMP effort) ever undertaken. Heckuva job, Barack, Nancy, and Harry.