No commentary on this is really necessary.

Via Newsmax:

Commenters, of course, can chime in with their own thoughts and updates.

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UPDATE, March 10, Noon: Full text of a death threat letter relayed by Charlie Sykes at WTMJ in Milwaukee (bolds are mine; a few paragraph breaks added by me) –

From: XXXX
Sent: Wed 3/9/2011 9:18 PM

To: Sen.Kapanke; Sen.Darling; Sen.Cowles; Sen.Ellis; Sen.Fitzgerald; Sen.Galloway; Sen.Grothman; Sen.Harsdorf; Sen.Hopper; Sen.Kedzie; Sen.Lasee; Sen.Lazich; Sen.Leibham; Sen.Moulton; Sen.Olsen

Subject: Atten: Death threat!!!! Bomb!!!!

Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.

WE want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and the people that support the dictator have to die. We have tried many other ways of dealing with your corruption but you have taken things too far and we will not stand for it any longer. So, this is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records.

We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, we decided that we wouldn’t leave it there. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message to you since you are so “high” on Koch and have decided that you are now going to single handedly make this a dictatorship instead of a demorcratic process. So we have also built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you.

If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We Will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) you.

Please understand that this does not include the heroic Rep. Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. We feel that it’s worth our lives to do this, because we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. YOU WILL DIE!!!!

This is one time I hope that something I’ve copied from elsewhere is a hoax. I’m afraid that it’s not.

Here is how the Associated Press and reporter Scott Bauer headlined and opened their 10:09 p.m. report (saved here at host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) on the Wisconsin Senate’s collective bargaining-related vote tonight:

Wis. GOP bypasses Dems, cuts collective bargaining

The Wisconsin Senate succeeded in voting Wednesday to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from public workers, after Republicans discovered a way to bypass the chamber’s missing Democrats and approve an explosive proposal that has rocked the state and unions nationwide.

The graphic cap below from this post by Ann Althouse, who has been on the scene in Madison frequently during the past few weeks, says it all about the AP’s coverage:

Yep.

Since Scott Bauer has been so blatantly biased during these past few weeks (as seen here and here) and has made it abundantly clear where he stands on these matters — instead of doing his who-what-where-when-why job — maybe Ann should send her cameraman Meade out one final time to ask Scott how he feels about his three-week distortion campaign thus far going for naught.

If the nation had to solely rely on Bauer and his establishment press ilk for information about what has really been happening in the Badger State, the stalemate might be going the other way. Viva New Media.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

UPDATE, 11:30 p.m.: Revised “might have gone” to “might be going” in the last paragraph, and “having gone for naught” to “thus far going for naught” in the second-last paragraph.

BizzyBlog UPDATE, 11:45 p.m.: From a USA Today e-mail alert:

Apparently there is no word in the e-mail as to how firmly the Fleebaggers’ tails were tucked between their legs.

Via John Nolte at BigJournalism.com:

We Call On the MSM to Adopt the ‘Rose/O’Keefe Standard of Journalistic Transparency’

This is at least 10 years overdue. There is no technological, logistical, or cost-based reason why an establishment press outlet would not eagerly wish to adhere to the O’Keefe/Rose Standard. The only “justifications” that remain are an inherent unwillingness to be scrutinized and a dogged determination to manipulate. Those unspoken “justifications” will more than likely continue, and the establishment press will ignore Nolte’s call, while still claiming to be holier and more professional than New Media.

Surprise me for once, guys and gals. Let the raw footage be free.

The introduction at the post, which went up during a blearly-eyed period overnight:

Guess the Costs of Milwaukee School District’s Legal Defense Over an ‘Equal Rights’ Drug

On Monday, in a story I will link after the jump, the Associated Press reported that on March 1 the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA) dropped a lawsuit it initiated last year over the school district’s refusal five years earlier to cover a prescription drug the union described as “an issue of discrimination, of equal rights for all our members” (that link will also appear after the jump).

So the questions submitted for our readers to ponder are these:

1) What drug was involved?

2) How much has the district spent defending itself against the lawsuit?

No fair Googling. Answers follow.

Go there for the answers, and consider your engines started.

That is in essence what Betsy McCaughey, leading HillaryCare and Obamacare critic, says in her Newsmax column in the final paragraph of the following excerpt (bold is mine):

Judge Roger Vinson took the president to the woodshed last week for a lesson on which branch of government has the final word on the Constitution.

Twenty six states brought a lawsuit to a Florida district court challenging the constitutionality of the Obama healthcare reform law. On January 31, Vinson ruled the mandatory insurance provision unconstitutional and, going further, declared the entire law void. The White House brushed off Vinson’s ruling as “extreme” and an “outlier” and told the nation “implementation would proceed apace.”

Vinson clarified his ruling on March 3, warning the president’s lawyers that it was “not just a bit of friendly advice.” The administration suggests “that a single federal judge” cannot halt an entire regulatory scheme. Wrong, said Vinson. A court’s judgment is binding.

President Obama’s conduct is reminiscent of President Richard Nixon’s defiance of a district court order on the grounds that he interpreted the Constitution differently. In 1974, a federal district court had ordered Nixon to surrender recordings of conversations about the Watergate break-in. The president refused.

Chief Justice Warren Burger held firm, ordering the president to surrender the tapes, and repeating the words set down by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803): “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” including meaning of the Constitution. Burger explained that although “each branch of government must initially interpret the Constitution” to perform its duties, the Court has the final say in any legal controversy.

Nixon waited eight hours, then announced he would comply. Obama waited two and a half weeks before even requesting a clarification.

Based solely on the roughly 400 hours the administration allowed to elapse from Judge Vinson’s ruling to its request for clarification, Obama is 50 times more lawless than Nixon ever was. As to the argument that they’ve bought time, that doesn’t pertain to implementation. The administration, based on the judge’s order, was ordered to cease implementing the law; the judge’s current seven-day stay doesn’t somehow give them any kind of pass.

So the comparative clock continues to tick. Over 850 hours have passed since Judge Vinson’s ruling. The lawlessness quotient is now well over 100.

The administration’s continued implementation of Obamacare is lawless, contemptible, and deserving — no, demanding — of legally enforced contempt.

From Holland, Michigan:

Mar 8, 8:03 AM EST

In the end, it was a game that west Michigan’s Fennville High basketball players knew their fallen teammate would have been proud of.

The Fennville Blackhawks paid tribute Monday night to 16-year-old Wes Leonard on the eve of his funeral by continuing the undefeated season that Leonard had saved when he hit the game-winning shot last week before collapsing and dying.

Now the small community near Lake Michigan will come together again Tuesday to remember the 6-foot-2, 215-pound teenager known for his athletic prowess in basketball and football before he died from a heart ailment.

“I think he was watching down on us,” Fennville coach Ryan Klingler said after Monday night’s 65-54 win over Lawrence in an emotional first-round state tournament game before a crowd of 3,500. “This is a game he’d have liked.”

Leonard’s absence overshadowed the game, which was moved from Lawrence to Hope College in Holland to accommodate a larger crowd. After the final buzzer sounded, his teammates hugged and cried.

In tribute to Leonard, Fennville sent just four players onto the court before the opening tip. The fifth player took the court after a dramatic pause to wild cheering from the crowd. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Exactly (bolds are mine):

As the White House goes to court to defend its self-imposed drilling moratorium, it floats the idea of tapping our strategic petroleum reserve to lower rising prices. How about the oil offshore and in Alaska?

Listening to mainstream punditry, you’d think $4 gas is due solely to Mideast unrest and global demand. Those are factors, but so are our self-imposed restrictions on supply.

… “The issue of the reserves is one (option) we are considering,” (White House spokesman Bill) Daley said. All matters have to be on the table.” All options? Does that include opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, ending a de facto drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico and lifting a seven-year ban on drilling off our coasts?

We think not, for as Daley was uttering those words the administration was speaking out of the other side of its mouth by going to court to appeal a judge’s order to act on several Gulf of Mexico deep-water drilling permits. That appeal was made Friday, the same day the national average for a price of self-serve unleaded hit $3.51, up 32.7 cents from two weeks earlier.

… [I]t is we who have dug the hole we’re in. We could in the short term start issuing those drilling permits being held hostage and in the long term exploit the domestic oil and gas reserves that dwarf anything Saudi Arabia and OPEC may have.

As Jane Van Ryan of the American Petroleum Institute states, the SPR “was established to protect the United States against an interruption of petroleum supplies, such as occurred after the hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”

It was not established to respond to or mask the consequences of a deliberate administration policy to have energy prices “necessarily skyrocket” in a futile pursuit of so-called “green” energy, a policy designed to create an artificial shortage orchestrated by an energy secretary, Steven Chu, who once said gas should be at $8 a gallon.

It’s almost as if this administration thinks that the economy will somehow recover without its fossil fuel-based sustenance available at affordable prices — or that it doesn’t really want a strong recovery.

Related, at RedState (“The Seed Corn Is What’s For Breakfast”):

Just releasing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to temporarily knock down gas prices is akin to giving a cancer patient a couple of Advil so he won’t gripe so loudly over at the nurses’ station. It shows no regard for the future this administration supposedly has committed itself to winning. It shows an utter absence of regard for the people forced to live through this administration’s predictably dystopic future outcomes. It shows the utter absence of thinking we’ve grown to regard as typical from the man whose favorite solution to the crisis of the day is voting “present.”

It’s probably an editorial accident that the question at this Wall Street Journal editorial appears twice, but given what’s occurring, the utter incredulousness is understandable (bolds are mine):

Obama’s Libyan Abdication
Will the U.S. let Gadhafi slaughter his way back to power? Will the U.S. let Gadhafi slaughter his way back to power?

… Having loudly declared that Gadhafi “needs to step down from power and leave,” President Obama now seems to have retreated into a bizarre but all too typical passivity.

We say bizarre because the U.S. has already announced its preferred outcome, yet it is doing little to achieve this end. The greatest danger now to U.S. interests—and to Mr. Obama’s political standing—would be for Gadhafi to regain control. A Libya in part or whole under the Gadhafi clan would be a failed, isolated and dangerous place ruled by a vengeful tyrant and a likely abettor of terrorists.

… Ghadafi can also only prevail at this stage through a murderous campaign that will make U.S. passivity complicit in a bloodbath.

… We suspect the real reason for Mr. Obama’s passivity is more ideological than practical. He and his White House team believe that any U.S. action will somehow be tainted if it isn’t wrapped in U.N. or pan-Arab approval. They have internalized their own critique of the Bush Administration to such a degree that they are paralyzed to act even against a dictator as reviled and blood-stained as Gadhafi, and even though it would not require the deployment of U.S. troops.

Mr. Obama won’t lead the world because he truly seems to believe that U.S. leadership is morally suspect.

As far as I can tell, there is virtually no establishment press, leftist, or even Muslim pressure on the administration to do something about this.

Related, at the Weekly Standard: “Two Weeks Later, America Has a Plan: Do Nothing on Libya”

Also related, at Flopping Aces: “The Unholy Trinity: Obama, Wright-Farrakhan, Gadhafi”

And more, in today’s WSJ, via Bret Stephens: “If Gadhafi Survives; Other regimes in the region will wonder just what, exactly, are the benefits of an alliance with a diffident America.”

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David Steinberg at Pajamas Media (“What We’re Talking About When We Talk About Big Government”) makes an important moral point that bears repeating –

What is Big Government?

It is our time: It is oxidizing, the aging process applied to civilization and turning us to dust. Big Government is nothing less than the consumption of our very moment here on Earth, our lives spent creating and producing. Take our works and humanity, skim from the top, then the middle until we were not here.

It has been stealing our time without compensation for nearly 100 years. Presidents of both parties have failed to stop its economy-stifling growth. Instead, most presidents have thought to “leave their mark” by creating their own monstrosities, up to and including the big cahuna known as Obamacare.

You must scroll to the end to see Steinberg’s exhaustive/exhausting list of agencies. Tom Coburn’s estimate of $100-$200 billion in waste has to be low.

Steinberg’s parting question for so-called progressives should appear on the campaign trail in every debate where a leftist defends the indefensible:

Are you proud?

Because you seem to be proud. Conservatives did not want a government made of these agencies, you did, and we now have them, a hundred years of liberal lifetimes spent creating. It’s yours and we deserve to know if you are proud of this structure — not the principles behind the structure, the ideals, but the actual structure. This is the government, now, crushing and wasting us, and rational men cannot be proud of what you have done here.

Who said rationality had anything to do with it?

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Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web:

The top editor of the New York Times’s news pages is complaining about Fox News Channel again. At a New York Press Club question-and-answer session last week, Yahoo! News reports, Bill Keller “snarled” that “I think if you’re a regular viewer of Fox News, you’re among the most cynical people on planet Earth,” and that “I cannot think of a more cynical slogan than ‘Fair and Balanced.’”

When you run a newspaper whose slogan is “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” you open yourself up to ridicule by making fun of other news organizations’ slogans. Remember in 2009, when the Times was embarrassed by its torpid response to stories that embarrassed the Obama administration–the scandals involving Acorn and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the extreme views of Obama aide Van Jones?

… By putting down Fox viewers, he would appear to be engaging in an awfully odd marketing strategy. It’s normal to try to persuade consumers that a competitor’s product is inferior. Insulting the competitor’s customers, by contrast, seems an excellent way of ensuring that they stay away from your product.

Or at least staying away from paying for it, which is apparently on track to become a relevant matter (“New York Times online pay model details coming in ‘matter of weeks’”) shortly.

I would welcome locking up Paul Krugman, Mo Dowd, and the Times’s version of “journalism” behind a pay wall. This would necessarily mean less influence on the 2012 elections. My predix: They’ll try it for a year and drop it, especially if it appears that Dear Leader is in electoral trouble, just like they dropped TimeSelect in September 2007 in the interest of promoting Democratic Party interests in the run-up to the 2008 primaries and general election.

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At AP — Expect this story to stay relatively quiet:

United scraps expansion plans because of oil

United Continental Holdings Inc. is scrapping plans to add flights this year, and says it will drop unprofitable routes because of rising fuel prices.

… Frontier Airlines said it would reduce growth plans.

Properly worded, the headline would be “United and other airlines pulling back because of Obama administration-induced high oil prices.”

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If your far-left acquaintances are in a bad mood today, here’s why:

Obama Ratifies Bush
The Administration embraces military tribunals at Gitmo.

No one has done more to revive the reputation of Bush-era antiterror policies than the Obama Administration. In its latest policy reversal, yesterday Mr. Obama said the U.S. would resume the military tribunals for Guantanamo terrorists that he unilaterally suspended two years ago, and he may even begin referring new charges to military commissions within days or weeks.

If they’re not in a bad mood, they must not know about this. This is their equivalent of Bush 41 breaking his “no new taxes” pledge in the early 1990s. Update: Instapundit’s one-word reax: “Suckers.”

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Zero Hedge quotes Charles Biderman from a CNBC appearance:

When I was on your show a year ago I was saying the same thing: we can’t figure out who is doing the buying it has to be the government, and people said I was nuts. Now the government is admitting it is rigging the market.

Here’s another quote from the vid:

“You know, the Fed is supposed to, their task is full employment and stability of the money supply. It’s not to rig the stock market.”

Maybe it is if Team Obama says, “You’d better rig the stock market, Ben, or our guys in the press are going to make sure you get the entire blame for how the economy has gone during the past three years.”

Watch the vid, especially for the finding shown before the interview that 52% of hedge fund managers agree that “QE2 is responsible for (the) market’s rally.” English translation: “52% agree that the government is rigging the market.”

I wish I saw something that would refute Biderman’s and the hedge funds’ majority claim. I can’t.

ZH also deserves props for calling the manipulation when they saw it, and sticking to their guns (“this form of market manipulation by the Fed is precisely what Zero Hedge has been claiming since day one”).

From Yonkers, NY (though there is video at link, it did not work for me):

12:20 AM, Mar. 5, 2011

Firefighters executed a dramatic rescue 13 stories above Nepperhan Avenue on Friday night after a collapsed scaffold left two workers dangling.

The two were doing cosmetic work on the 27-story apartment building for seniors when the scaffold broke about 4:45 p.m.

It was 95 minutes until both were rappelled to the ground in two trips by Yonkers Firefighter Mike Giroux. The daring rescue was witnessed by hundreds of bystanders, and thousands on live television with news helicopters hovering overhead.

Giroux, who is in his 10th year with the department, refused to be singled out as a hero, instead focusing on the combined efforts of fire, police and EMS.

“Everybody who was here did their job the way they’re supposed to, the way they’ve been trained to do it,” he said after the rescues.

Giroux said he had no fear during the operation and described his two 27-story rappels as “pretty fun.”

“I like this stuff. This is what I thrive on,” he said. “It may seem like it takes us a long time to get down to them, but we have to take our time … this is a dangerous thing we have to do.”

When rescuers arrived on the scene, they found the two men, said to be Spanish-speaking and of Mexican descent, reaching the point of panic and beginning to turn hypothermic, officials said.

“They were both conscious. They were scared. They were in distress, but they were not in any immediate danger,” said Assistant Battalion Chief Roger Vitolo. “We immediately assessed the situation, checked our options out and determined the best route to go, which was to go up to the roof and lower them, via the roof, down to the ground.”

Rescuers then performed what is known as a “pick-off,” which entailed Giroux’s repelling down and stopping just feet above each victim before transfering them onto his harness.

Go here for the rest of the story.

The call at the Washington Times is a bit premature, but the subheadline is dead-on:

U.S. sets $223B deficit record; Dwarfs Hill’s cutting goals.

The current record for worst monthly deficit is $220.909 billion in February 2010.

Here’s the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate, which is NOT the final word:

The February deficit amount won’t be official until the Monthly Treasury Statement comes out on Thursday afternoon, and the numbers could change by enough for the Times to be wrong.

Nonetheless, 20 months after the end of a recession, these observations are germane:

• The lack of significant growth in receipts is disappointing (8% year-to-date; some of that may be due to receipts from Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing efforts, thus not reflecting a pickup in economic activity).
• Spending remains ridiculously high. If CBO’s $333 billion estimate for the past month is correct, it will be an all-time single-month record. If it’s not, it’s still ridiculously high.

But Goldman Sachs, Ben Bernanke and the Associated Press all agree that you don’t dare cut spending at the federal, state, or local level, because if you do, economic growth will stall.

Democratic Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia caused a bit of a stir last week when he said on CSPAN’s Washington Journal program that, as paraphrased by Daniel Strauss at The Hill, “lawmakers are getting around the new ban on earmarks by convincing Obama administration officials to fund their pet projects.”

Those who have followed Moran’s less than illustrious career recall something he said in 2006 that makes his determination to make earmarks happen by any means necessary not at all unexpected.

In June of that year, Scott McAffrey at Northern Virginia’s Sun Gazette reported on Moran’s intentions if the Demcrats were to win a Congressional majority the following November (one example of R-rated language follows):

Moran: Democratic Majority Means More Money for 8th District

If Democrats win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November, U.S. Rep. Jim Moran said he would use his position in the majority to help funnel more funds to his Northern Virginia district.

Moran, D-8th, told those attending the Arlington County Democratic Committee’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner on June 9 that while he in theory might oppose the fiscal irresponsibility of “earmarks” – funneling money to projects in a member of Congress’s district – he understands the value they have to constituents.

“When I become chairman [of a House appropriations subcommittee], I’m going to earmark the shit out of it,” Moran buoyantly told a crowd of 450 attending the event.

Colorful language and campaign hyperbole aside, Moran has a lot to gain if Democrats topple the GOP’s 12-year control of the House. His relative seniority of eight terms would make him a powerful member of any Democratic majority.

In early 2009, the Favor Factory section at the Seattle Times reported that Moran had kept his expletive-contaning promise, obtaining $40.6 million in earmarks in 2008, while receiving $890,000 in campaign contributions from the beneficiaries of those earmarks during the previous five years.

Thus, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Moran would openly boast of getting earmarks achieved in the underhanded manner described above. I thought that the Executive Branch was supposed to tell bureaucrats how to carry out their assigned duties. Silly me.

It also shouldn’t surprise anyone that Moran’s potentially controversial comment received virtually no coverage other than at the Sun Gazette in 2006, or anywhere else since then. A Republican making a similar comment would have caught a great deal more flak for such an utterance, and would still be hearing about it to this day.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Today’s history lesson explains what has transpired, and identifies where we are in the evolution of the historical relationship between individuals, families, and their societies:

One extended point: Certain of those described as late 19th century “robber barons” were the original practitioners of comprehensive crony capitalism (sentence amended at 7:40 p.m. from what was seen previously to reflect a commenter’s valid points). The Obama administration is best seen as a 21st century attempt to recreate their reign, this time with the federal government as their nexus of power. The current administration, contrary to its rhetoric of hope, change and transformation, really is the defender of the status quo. They wish to extend the status quo to virtually every aspect of everyday life. They are the reactionaries. They are the ones holding back the revolutionary progress and promise of the Information Age. It is clear that they won’t give up their centralized power without a ferocious fight.

I’m also heartened to see Whittle recognize the poison that the 17th Amendment (direct election of U.S. Senators) has represented in its nearly 100 years on the books. The Founders wanted the states to have a direct legislative place at the table; they no longer have one. This has served to exponentially enhance the power of the federal government.

Obamacare would never, ever have become law if Senators were selected by their state legislatures. That alone demonstrates what a huge mistake the 17th represents.