The Associated Press’s Jim Kuhnhenn’s did some really heavy lifting this morning, carrying bucket after bucket of water for the White House and Barack Obama.

Wisconsin? Obama’s letting his spokesman handle it while his national party “has played down its role.” Death threats against Badger State GOP Senators? What death threats?

But Kuhnhenn’s keister-covering for the administration goes into the red zone on Libya (note the adjective used to describe the country’s murdering madman; bolds are mine throughout this post):

Some lawmakers in both parties want him to take a greater lead against Libya’s idiosyncratic strongman, Moammar Gadhafi.

But the White House sees no upside in outspokenness.

“There is a very strong gravitational pull in this town to try to drag the president to every single political skirmish and news story,” said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer.

Uh … (shaking head in astonishment) … what’s going on in Libya is not exactly a “political skirmish.”

Continuing to material Kuhnhenn held until the very end:

The bipartisan criticism of Obama on Libya has less to do with low profile rhetoric – the president has been vocal in his demand that Gadhafi step down – than with the direction of the president’s policy. [1] Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, Republican Sen. John McCain and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman have all called for the United States to impose a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace.

But administration officials have shown little enthusiasm for such a step. They don’t want to act unilaterally [2] and would only consider it if it had widespread international support. As important, they point out enforcing a no-fly zone would require military action, including attacks on Libyan anti-aircraft defenses.

Asked at his news conference if he would use any means necessary to force Gadhafi’s removal, Obama recited the steps already taken, including what he called “the largest financial seizure of assets in our history.”

As for military action, he said: “Anytime I send United States forces into a potentially hostile situation, there are risks involved and there are consequences. And it is my job as president to make sure that we have considered all those risks.

“It’s also important from a political perspective to, as much as possible, maintain the strong international coalition that we have right now.” [3]

Notes:

• [1] — Last time I checked, policy was a bit more important than rhetoric. Kuhnhenn seems to think that policy is a relatively trifling matter.
• [2] — They’re still relying on the Bush 43 era bromides.
• [3] — Strong international coalition? An editorial today at the Wall Street Journal describes a situation that doesn’t square with the President’s naive assertion:
  

  Three weeks into the Libyan uprising, here are some of the live action highlights from what Mr. Obama likes to call “the international community”:

  • The United Nations Security Council has imposed an arms embargo, but with enough ambiguity that no one knows whether it applies only to Gadhafi or also to the opposition. Even the U.S. State Department and White House don’t agree.

  • The U.N. has referred events to the International Criminal Court for a war crimes investigation. Mr. Obama said yesterday this sent a message to Gadhafi that “the world is watching,” as if Gadhafi didn’t know. But it also sends a message that leaving Libya without bloodshed is not an option, because he and his sons will still be pursued for war crimes. Had Reagan pursued this strategy in the Philippines, Marcos might never have gone into exile.

  • France has recognized the opposition National Council in Benghazi, though the U.S. is only now sending envoys to meet with the opposition for the first time. Dozens of Western reporters can get rebel leaders on the phone, an opposition delegation has visited French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris, but the U.S. is still trying to figure out who these people are. The American envoys better hurry because the rebels may soon be dead.

  • The French want a no-fly zone, but the Italians and Germans object. NATO is having “a series of conversations about a wide range of options,” as President Obama put it yesterday, but NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen emerged from a meeting of defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday saying that “We considered . . . initial options regarding a possible no-fly zone in case NATO were to receive a clear U.N. mandate” (our emphasis). The latter isn’t likely because both China and Russia object, but no doubt NATO will keep conversing about the “range of options” next week.

  • Even as opposition leaders were asking for help, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the world on Thursday that Gadhafi is likely to win in the long-term. The Administration scrambled to say this was merely a factual judgment about the balance of military power, but the message couldn’t be clearer to any of Gadhafi’s generals who might consider defecting: Do so at your peril because you will join the losing side.

  We could go on, but you get the idea. When the U.S. fails to lead, the world reverts to its default mode as a diplomatic Tower of Babel.

It seems from here that the administration, Democrats, their agitators and establishment media outlets like the Associated Press (but I repeat myself) have far more interest in overthrowing the government of Wisconsin than than they have in ousting Tripoli’s butcher.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Seville, Spain:

Mar 8, 2011 / 02:04 pm

A four-year-old girl has become the first patient in Spain to recover from brain cancer after being treated with stem cells from her own umbilical cord blood.

The announcement of the girl’s recovery came March 7 from the company Crio-Cord, a stem cell bank in Spain.

Alba was born healthy in 2007, but at age two she was diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer. Her treatment consisted of extracting the majority of the tumor from her brain. She was then given chemotherapy to reduce and eventually eliminate the remainder of the tumor.

Alba’s blood system was destroyed during the final round of chemo, thus requiring a transplant of cord blood stem cells.

The procedure was carried out in 2009 by Dr. Luis Madero of the Department of Oncology and Hematology at the Nino Jesus Hospital in Madrid.

Today, four year-old Alba is a healthy girl.

Periodic Reviews

Sixty days after the transplant, Alba was given new stem cells taken from her peripheral blood in order to accelerate the production of platelets. Fourteen months after the transplant, her blood system was completely restored, and she has since enjoyed a normal life.

Dr. Madero called her case unique in Spain. “The use of stem cells to regenerate the blood system is an extended treatment for this form of cancer,” he said. What makes her case unique, he added, “is that for the first time in our country, the stem cells came from a patient’s own umbilical cord, preserved from birth.”

“In recent years, transplants of cord blood stem cells have become increasingly common. In the case of siblings, these stem cells are the best therapeutic option that exists,” he said.

“Our best investment”

Alba’s father, Santiago, who is a computer engineer, and her mother, Teresa, a literature professor, agreed that keeping the blood from Alba’s umbilical cord was the “best investment” they ever made. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

As a lefty “philosopher” (HT Instapundit) fishes around for moral justifications for resorting to “acts of political violence,” Ann Althouse exposes the “New Civility” as a cynical leftist tact from the very start — and is totally correct:

It was always, obviously, a strategy to control conservatives (while liberals regrouped after the drubbing in the 2010 elections). Now that the Wisconsin protesters have gone so far beyond anything that could be attributed to Tea Partiers or to Sarah Palin maps-with-crosshairs, I suppose the MSM will act as if there never was a new civility movement at all. Suddenly, virulent dissent will be portrayed as noble.

Actually Ann, at least so far, they’re trying to pretend that the death threats (against legislators and their families; here and here), violence, atmosphere of intimidation, and “an unlawful invasion of (the) Wisconsin Capitol Building” either never existed and/or never happened. A search at the Associated Press’s main web site on “death threat” (not in quotes; “threat” in the singular forms detects uses of “threats”) comes back with one story relating to Wisconsin, and it only deals with “threats” of layoffs and a university prof early in March describing (figuratively, I presume) how the standoff was a “battle to the death.”

Wow (original New York Times story):

The sentence immediately preceding the one Bill Kristol cites is also revealing — about the New York Times:

How Mr. Obama manages to do that while also balancing American interests is a question that officials acknowledge will plague this historic president for months to come.

Oh, he’s “historic” all right. Historic deficits, historic financial danger, historic hostility to commerce and progress, historic loss of world prestige, historic destruction of human capital …

I have been meaning to comment on White House Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob (“Jack”) Lew’s disgraceful “rebuttal” a few weeks ago to a USA Today editorial calling for Social Security reform, but haven’t — which is okay now, because syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer got in his rips yesterday with far more devastating effect.

What I didn’t realize, and Krauthammer did, is that Jack Lew was telling USA Today the exact opposite of what he was telling the public 11 years ago when he was also — you won’t believe it (oh, yeah you will) — White House Office of Management and Budget Director.

Krauthammer’s column is so well done that I feel I must violate normal excerpting guidelines to make sure readers don’t miss anything essential (bolds are mine):

Et tu, Jack Lew?

Everyone knows that the U.S. budget is being devoured by entitlements. Everyone also knows that of the Big Three — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — Social Security is the most solvable.

Back-of-an-envelope solvable: Raise the retirement age, tweak the indexing formula (from wage inflation to price inflation) and means-test so that Warren Buffett’s check gets redirected to a senior in need.

The relative ease of the fix is what makes the Obama administration’s Social Security strategy so shocking. The new line from the White House is: no need to fix it because there is no problem.

As Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew wrote in USA Today just a few weeks ago, the trust fund is solvent until 2037. Therefore, Social Security is now off the table in debt-reduction talks.

This claim is a breathtaking fraud.

The pretense is that a flush trust fund will pay retirees for the next 26 years. Lovely, except for one thing: The Social Security trust fund is a fiction.

If you don’t believe me, listen to the OMB’s own explanation (in the Clinton administration budget for fiscal year 2000 under then-Director Jack Lew, the very same). The OMB explained that these trust fund “balances” are nothing more than a “bookkeeping” device. “They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.”

In other words, the Social Security trust fund contains — nothing.

… When you retire, the “trust fund” will have to go to the Treasury for the money for your Social Security check.

Bottom line? The OMB again (in 2000): “The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the government’s ability to pay benefits.” No impact: The lockbox, the balances, the little pieces of paper, amount to nothing.

… So that when Jack Lew tells you that there are trillions in this lockbox that keep the system solvent until 2037, he is perpetrating a fiction certified as such by his own OMB. What happens when you retire? Your Social Security will come out of the taxes and borrowing of that fiscal year.

… demography is destiny. The ratio of workers to retirees is shrinking year by year. Instead of Social Security producing annual surpluses that reduce the federal deficit, it is now producing shortfalls that increase the federal deficit — $37 billion in 2010. It will only get worse as the baby boomers retire.

That’s what makes this administration’s claim that Social Security is solvent so cynical. The Republicans have said that their April budget will contain real entitlement reform. President Obama is preparing the ground to demagogue Social Security right through the 2012 elections.

… With Lew’s preposterous claim that Social Security is solvent for 26 years, Obama is preparing to lead the charge against entitlement reform as his ticket to re-election.

Team Obama plans on continuing 75 years of government misinformation, fraud and deception, in the hope that enough of the voting public remains gullible and misinformed to carry their sorry butts across the 2012 electoral finish line.

Their actions, positions and (lack of) plans for Social Security are cynical, irresponsible — and all too typical.

John Boehner’s House needs to compel Jack Lew to explain himself in a hearing, under oath, so he can tell us whether he was lying in 2000 (he wasn’t), or is lying now (he is).

_____________________________________

UPDATE: Just to be clear, the “solutions” Krauthammer IDs in the first three paragraphs are not the best ideas out there — not by a long shot.  They would “solve” the solvency problem for a while without addressing the fundamental intergenerational immorality of demanding that current workers take money that they should be able to keep for themselves, their own children, and their own purposes to pay the retirement benefits of the nation’s elderly.

UPDATE 2: A related item is at NewsBusters.org.

From Los Angeles:

Mar 10, 2011 / 05:26 am

Dr. Christopher Kaczor’s latest book argues against abortion through reason alone, without reference to the author’s Catholic faith. But his inspiration in writing the book came from a canonized saint.

“Whenever St. Thomas Aquinas considered a question,” Kaczor told CNA, “he made sure to state the objections to his point of view as strongly as he could – so as to make his own answers even more compelling, even to those who initially disagreed.”

Kaczor, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, sought to do the same in his book, “The Ethics of Abortion: Women’s Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice.”

Many professional philosophers, he said, “are very clever, and have spent a great deal of energy and time defending the moral permissibility of abortion.”

Instead of appealing to religious authority or an instinctive sense of outrage, Kaczor has sought to examine the arguments for abortion with painstaking care – in order to point out flawed premises, logical inconsistencies, or absurd results.

“I appeal only to reason, science, and history in making a case that abortion is morally wrong,” he explained. “I’ve tried to be as comprehensive as possible. Over the course of about 10 years in writing this book, I tried to take into account every major argument given in favor of abortion and then to counter it.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

This evening’s report by the Associated Press’s Martin Crutsinger on the government’s February Monthly Treasury Statement, which shows the highest single-month deficit in U.S. history, has more spin in it than the complete library of this group’s songs.

A complete rundown would take more space than readers could stand, so let’s just concentrate on two paragraphs. Here’s the first:

The widening deficit reflects the impact of the tax-cut package President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans brokered in December.

Well yes, but it reflects higher spending to a greater degree.

Consider the results of the past two months, the only two affected by the “tax-cut package,” compared to January and February of last year:

Despite the “tax-cut package,” which kept income tax rates the same, receipts are up by $25 billion. They might be higher by about $22 billion but for the 2-point reduction in employee Social Security taxes this year. But since receipts are up anyway, how can one claim that they are “widening the deficit”?

But spending is up by more $33 billion, which, for Marty Crutsinger’s information, is more than the roughly $22 billion in foregone receipts. If anything, spending should be going down, because the “stimulus” spending of the past two years, which stimulated nothing, is supposed to be almost over. The bigger problem than the “tax-cut package” is that Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s last Congress left spending on auto-pilot when they failed to pass a budget. February’s total spending of $333 billion was also an all-time single-month record, something Crutsinger “somehow” forgot to tell his readers.

Speaking of the “stimulus,” that brings us to Crutsinger’s second putrid paragraph:

It’s unusual for an economy to be running record-high deficits this far into a recovery. The recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009. The problem is that the financial crisis and the recession that followed fueled explosive deficit growth.

(Aside: The recession as normal people define it began in July 2008 and ended in June 2009. No amount of propagandizing by the National Bureau of Economic Research will ever change that.)

What’s “unusual” is that instead of doing what works, i.e., cutting taxes and lightening up on oppressive regulation, the administration did the opposite, spending like mad and intervening in the economy on an unprecedented scale, thereby introducing massive uncertainty into the economy when it could least afford it.

Crutsinger acts as if the government and the administration had no choice, and as if “stimulus” and explosive deficit growth (try over $4 trillion in three years by the time we get to the end of the current fiscal year) was the only available solution. It wasn’t.

Beyond that, the ridiculous growth in spending in many areas of the government has nothing to do with either the “financial crisis” or the recession. Some specific examples through five months of the fiscal year compared to last year’s first five months (increases are calculated on actual and not rounded numbers):

• Dept. of Energy — $14.0 billion vs. $11.1 billion, a 26% increase
• EPA — $5.0 billion vs. $3.6 billion, a 37% increase
• Dept. of Agriculture — $63.3 billion vs. $59.0 billion, a 7% increase (with the unemployment rate declining, shouldn’t Food Stamp spending be stabilizing or going down?)
• HHS — $358 billion vs. $342 billion, a 4.7% increase (how much of this is illegal Obamacare implementation spending?)

One more mini-example: Crustsinger joins the “keep spending like mad or economic growth will stall” chorus when he writes that “Even if Republicans achieved their target for spending cuts this year, the 2011 deficit would still be on track to hit a record.” So I guess they’re supposed to decide that controlling spending isn’t worth the bother. Zheesh.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The instinct here is that an Associated Press “story” by Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, will get lots of radio and TV time tomorrow.

That would be a reasonable expectation, because what Bauer writes isn’t really a “story” as much as it is a free political announcement. I’m predicting that the establishment press will love it, especially the opening paragraph:

Wis. defeat could help launch counterattack on GOP

With the labor movement suffering an epic defeat in Wisconsin and perhaps other states, union leaders plan to use the setback to fire up their members nationwide and mount a major counterattack against Republicans at the ballot box in 2012.

Gosh, about the only thing Bauer’s lacking is a bullhorn.

Here are other choice, union activism-promoting excerpts, followed by the resurrection of an objectively incorrect term (in bold):

But labor leaders say the events in Wisconsin have helped galvanize support for unions across the country. They hope to use the momentum to help fight off other attacks and grow their membership.

Said the president of the AFL-CIO: “I guess I ought to say thank you particularly to Scott Walker. We should have invited him here today to receive the Mobilizer of the Year award from us!”

… The passage drew shouts of “shame, shame, shame” from protesters in the gallery and came only a day after dramatic action in the Republican-controlled Senate, which used a legislative maneuver Wednesday to quickly adopt the bill without any of the 14 Democrats who fled to Illinois three weeks ago.

Democrats said their counterattack efforts were already beginning to bear fruit in the form of donations: The party’s Wisconsin chapter said it raised $300,000 overnight and has collected $800,000 from 32,000 donors in just five days.

Party chairman Mike Tate said Senate Democrats have raised $750,000 over the past month alone.

Republicans said they were simply doing what voters wanted.

… Walker had repeatedly argued that ending collective bargaining would give local governments the flexibility they needed to confront the cuts in state aid necessary to fix Wisconsin’s deficit, which is projected to grow to $3.6 billion deficit over several years.

Lord have mercy.

Three weeks ago, Bauer himself wrote, in a piece which also claimed that the Wisconsin law involved “eliminating collective bargaining”:

Unions still could represent workers, but could not seek pay increases above those pegged to the Consumer Price Index unless approved by a public referendum. Unions also could not force employees to pay dues and would have to hold annual votes to stay organized.

Once again, Scott, if “Unions still could represent workers,” then some degree of collective bargaining still exists. You can’t write that the legislation is “ending collective bargaining” above (while “cleverly” stuffing words into Scott Walker’s mouth that he more than likely never said; if he did say them, why aren’t the words in quote marks?), or three weeks ago that it is “eliminating collective-bargaining rights” and still be telling the truth. Period.

Also, Scott, if you’re going to write about people who are “galvanized” by what has happened in Madison during the past three weeks, you might go out and interview some of the people who are upset that:

• GOP State Senators have received ugly death threats such as this one (HT NB’s Lachlan Markay), threatening not only them but also their families (other examples here).
• The atmosphere in the Capitol area was so hostile last night that GOP lawmakers had to leave under police escort and endured people who “were literally trying to break the windows of the cars we were in as we were driving away.”
• As the Badger 14 blog notes (HT Ann Althouse), “Democrat staff engineered mob’s unlawful invasion of Wisconsin Capitol Building” today.

They shouldn’t be too hard to find — but they would interrupt your free public-sector union political announcement.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Robert Costa at National Review runs it down (bolds are mine):

… though similar to Walker’s original outline, (the bill which passed last night) required a simple majority. It easily passed at around 6 p.m., with one only one member of the 19-strong GOP caucus, moderate senator Dale Schultz, objecting.

Mayhem engulfed the state capitol following the vote. Thousands of protesters streamed into the four wings of the historic white-granite building, screaming at the GOP lawmakers, who were quickly escorted out by police. College students from the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus mingled with union leaders, teachers raised fists with progressive organizers. Cries of “Shame!” echoed throughout the marble halls.

Senate Republicans were harried by swarming crowds. “We tried to get out of the building after the vote, because they were rushing the chamber, and we were escorted by security through a tunnel system to another building. But, after being tipped off by a Democrat, they mobbed the exit at that building, and were literally trying to break the windows of the cars we were in as we were driving away,” Republican senator Randy Hopper tells NRO. Such tactics, he sighs, were hardly unexpected. “I got a phone call yesterday saying that we should be executed. I’ve had messages saying that they want to beat me with a billy club.”

… “In 30 minutes, 18 state senators undid 50 years of civil rights in Wisconsin,” said Sen. Mark Miller, the Democratic leader, in an interview with the Associated Press. “Their disrespect for the people of Wisconsin and their rights is an outrage that will never be forgotten.”

No sir. What we won’t forget are the death threats, the utter disrespect for precious public property, and the personal abuse inflicted by Wisconsin’s pubic-sector unions and their supporters, and the cowardly abandonment of their legislative duties by Badger State politicians representing the “Party of Compassion My A**.”

Continuing:

Despite his misgivings, Miller acknowledges that Walker’s bill is now set to become law. “It’s a done deal,” he said. Republican Darling, however, remains worried about how the drama will unfold in Madison — especially if the protesters continue to occupy, and nearly control, the state capitol. “It’s like we are in a foreign country or in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s,” she says. “I have had death threats. I have had my home protected by our local police. That’s not the America I know.”

For now, state Republicans are optimistic. As the jeers increase and the recalls pick up speed, they are determined to pass Walker’s bill. “Look, from Day One, the [unions] have been threatening physical violence and political recalls,” Hopper says. “But it’s more important for us to do our jobs than keep our jobs. This is not something that we are going to run our next political campaign on. This is something that we are going to tell our grandchildren about, that we fixed the state for them.”

If there’s been a comment from the White House condemning the violence and death threats, I’ve “somehow” missed it. I certainly can’t find it, from the White House or Obama.

I would argue that the president is providing the protesters aid and comfort by remaining silent. After all, this is the guy who in late 2008 said that those who had occupied an employer’s factory were “absolutely right.” If I remember that, many of the protesters surely do, and absent contrary evidence, are justified in believing that he supports them in all they are doing.

__________________________________________________

UPDATE: Althouse asks the question no one in the establishment press will ask —

UPDATE 2, March 11, 12:30 a.m.: Well, the “White House” has spoken, per AP late this afternoon —

The White House is denouncing a vote by the Wisconsin Senate to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from government workers, calling it an assault on public employees.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said President Barack Obama believes it is wrong for Wisconsin to use its budget troubles “to denigrate or vilify public sector employees.”

Y’know, the public sector employees and their Organizing for America-driven supporters did a pretty good job of denigrating and vilifying themselves.

Here is everything Carney had to say on the topic in his Thursday press briefing:

Q And if I can, one more. Can you respond to Wisconsin, the vote in Wisconsin yesterday?

MR. CARNEY: Look, the President has said that we all need to come together at the federal level and the state level to deal with the budget issues we face. He’s very mindful of that fact that states have some serious budget problems and they need to address them. And in that process, he thinks everyone needs to share in the sacrifice, and that would include public sector employees as well as others. He also believes that it is wrong to use those budget problems to denigrate or vilify public sector employees. And he believes that the actions last night taken in Wisconsin violate the principles that he laid out about coming together and addressing these issues together, rather than pursuing partisan goals. And that’s his view on that.

… Q Does the President still view the Wisconsin legislation as a assault on unions? And would he concede that Scott Walker is trying to make sure people in Wisconsin still have jobs and that state employees still have jobs in the same way that he’s trying do nationally? Would he concede this is a good faith effort to try to keep state employees hired?

MR. CARNEY: I would say — I would point to my first answer on this question, which the President absolutely believes that it is not helpful to make the tough decisions that states face, as we face in Washington, on their budgets, to turn that process into an assault on public sector employees.

Q How is it an assault on –

MR. CARNEY: And then I will point now, in answering Perry, to the — to what I said before, which is the actions taken last night, which divorced the issue of the state’s budget problems from the issue of the rights of public sector employees I think pretty clearly showed that the actions were not following the principle that we need to all come together and work together and not denigrate or vilify public sector employees, but bring them into the process and make them part of the solution. Because everybody has to sacrifice and there are examples around the country where governors and legislators, state legislatures, have worked together with public sector unions and employees to address costs in an effective way, in a way that’s not partisan or divisive. And the President believes that that is a better path.

Note that there is no condemnation of the death threats, violence, or property damage.

The carried news from today’s DOL report is that seasonally adjusted claims were back to almost 400,000 again (397,000).

That’s bad enough, and you never want to read too much into a single week (good or bad), but the more troubling tidbit is that the actual number of claims (i.e., the not seasonally adjusted number) zoomed from 353,000 the previous week to 406,000 — a number that is only about 12% lower than the same week a year ago (vs. 25% lower last week).

Is this early evidence that administration-induced higher energy prices are going to choke off what has been looking like the beginnings of an almost-real recovery?

At the New York Post:

With the world’s attention focused on Libya and the events in the Arab world, it’s easy to forget that, back in Wisconsin, a group of 14 rogue state senators is still holding representative democracy hostage. Worse, the stunt has now morphed into an attack on the legitimacy of elections.

The 14 “fleebaggers” left the state in mid-February in order to stop an impending vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to defang the public-employee unions — a vote they were certain to lose.

Now, their supporters are organizing recall petitions for the governor and eight targeted Republican senators, and claim to already have reached 15 percent of the number of signatures they need. Yet the whole effort, at least as far as the governor is concerned, is illegal. Under Wisconsin law, public officials aren’t subject to recall until one year into the term for which they were elected. But the man leading the drive to recall Walker, ex-Rep. David Obey, doesn’t care: He argues that Walker’s desire to roll back collective-bargaining rights of public-employee unions is “abusive” and thus justifies ignoring the law.

Let’s call this what it is: a campaign to nullify the 2010 election, by a sore-loser party that doesn’t like the results.

… this fight is no longer simply about Walker’s attempt to balance Wisconsin’s wobbly budget, or even about whether public-employee unions ought to have the right to collective bargaining — they shouldn’t, and in fact they shouldn’t even exist, as FDR himself warned.

It’s now about whether we are to have an orderly democracy or legislative and executive anarchy, whether elections can be delegitimized and even overturned by the daily plebiscites of the polls, by the flouting of sacred oaths of office and by the trampling on the laws of the state.

It’s coming down to the rule of law vs. mob rule. Note whose side the Punk President is on.

From Vatican City:

Mar 9, 2011 / 08:00 pm

Pope Benedict XVI will participate in a first-ever question and answer session that will be televised Italy on Good Friday.

The program is one of several new initiatives aimed at bringing the image and words of the Pope into households around the world.

On March 13, Italy’s national RaiUno Television station will officially launch promotions for a program to be aired on the anniversary of Jesus’ death—Good Friday.

The special is set to begin at 2:10 p.m. so that it is playing at 3:00 p.m., when Jesus is traditionally believed to have taken his last breath. The show will feature the Pope, who will answer three questions posed by viewers.

People will be able to write to RaiUno’s “In His Image” (“A Sua Immagine”) program with suggestions for the three questions. All will focus on the life of Jesus.

Vatican Radio described the April 22 television event as “an absolute first.”

“In His Image” host Rosario Carello said that the idea is to bring “reflection” back to Good Friday programming.

“This sentiment has been lost,” he said. For most television stations, Good Friday is “a day like any other for all the channels, there are even quarrels, idle gossip and things like that.”

In an attempt to swim against the prevailing current, the crew from Carello’s program suggested reviving an old show that examined spectators’ questions about Jesus. They thought there would be no one better than the Pope to respond to them.

It seemed “crazy” to think about proposing the idea to the pontiff, but they saw “something in Pope Benedict’s style that caused them to at least propose this idea to him,” said Carello.

“We proposed it and here the Pope accepted.”

He called the opportunity to see and hear Pope Benedict through the program “extraordinary.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.