Chris Ariens filed a report today at MediaBistro’s TVNewser that opened with a reader’s Tweet, which plaintively asked: “Did CNN really exclude Spitzer from Malveaux package on Sex Scandals & Politics? Hmm..”

Ariens responds:

The answer: yes it did.

Suzanne Malveaux‘s story, which aired at 2:30pm ET, made mention or showed images of politicians ranging from John F. Kennedy to John Edwards; also former Governors James McGreevey and Mark Sanford, and former Sen. Larry Craig and current Sen. David Vitter, former Pres. Bill Clinton, and 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — their private indiscretions made very public. But no mention of Eliot Spitzer who resigned as Governor of New York after it was revealed he had patronized a prostitution service. Spitzer now hosts CNN’s 7pm show “In the Arena.” We’ve learned the producer/editor on the story, who use their own judgment on what to use and what not to use, chose not to include Spitzer in the story.

CNNPolitics.com has a slideshow of 17 recent political sex scandals. On it, Spitzer is #10.

How considerate of that conveniently unnamed producer.

Spitzer’s picture is also on the front page of the slide show, which really only has 16 items (the first slide is the intro). But as readers will see, unlike in most other entries, Spitzer was not identified as a Democrat.

Their order of appearance of the scoundrels included in the slideshow, with more than a tinge of “name that party” bias, is as follows:

(more…)

Shortly after 8:30 this morning, I began thinking that my CNNMoney.com e-mail alerts had stopped arriving. So I went to the Census Bureau’s web site and learned that its monthly report on housing starts, building permits, and other construction-related news had indeed been released. The news for the already moribund industry was awful: Building permits in April fell by a seasonally adjusted 4% from March and by 12.0% from April 2010, while the comparable tumbles in housing starts were 10.6% and 23.9%, respectively.

Well, my opening and closing bell e-mails arrived as expected. So unless there was a technical glitch, this means that CNNMoney decided not to issue a post-8:30 alert for the bad housing news.

Let’s take a look at the two e-mails which did arrive. First, just after the opening bell:

Hmm. The housing news was still missing, as the e-mail assigned the opening sell-off to HP’s downbeat forecast.

Over at the Associated Press, Derek Kravitz the Creative was seeing things a little differently:

… through the first four months of this year, the pace of new-home construction is barely ahead of 2009′s — the worst year on records dating back a half-century.

The disappointing construction data contributed to a sell-off on Wall Street. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 110 points in mid-day trading.

In the closing-bell e-mail, CNNMoney at least acknowledged the existence of the bad housing news — barely:

Actually, guys, the “grim” news on housing consists of many “readings,” several of which include:

• Housing starts, as noted above. While in the neighborhood, so to speak, I should note that the raw (i.e., not seasonally adjusted data tells us that April’s 36,200 single-family starts came in a whopping 34.4% lower than April 2010′s 55,200.
• Building permits, also noted above. 36,000 actual single-family building permits were issued in April. That’s the lowest April on records going back to 1959, and 21.9% lower than April 2010 — just in time for what was known in pre-Obama times as “peak buidling season.”
• Homes under construction. That statistic, seasonally adjusted at 418,000, is the lowest on records going back to 1970, and, incredibly, the 21st consecutive record low or tying-the-record-low month. The lowest figure reported between 1970 and May 2009 was 629,000 in July 1992.
• Housing units completed. The raw data for April was 43,100 units, which trailed April 2010 and April 2009 by 25.3% and 34.2%, respectively.

CNNMoney’s apparent failure to issue a separate housing-related e-mail is pretty interesting, given that it had no problem getting the following out in April:

Excuse me for suggesting that CNNMoney doesn’t appear to mind alerting readers to good housing news but holds back on bad news. It would appear that they’re afraid of unduly alarming the relatively disengaged who rely on CNNMoney headlines for an accurate overview of financial news. Why, if they’re not careful, their email alert subscribers might start thinking that the housing industry is in its worst shape since World War II. We can’t allow that.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

One of the great advantages of finding a YouTube vid like the one which follows is that it spares me from having to comment extensively on a topic where the proper answers are so obvious.

This one doesn’t have the most impressive production values, but I’ll take it (HT Zero Hedge):

With Maxed Out America day rapidly approaching (it’s coming in six years on our current trajectory, and much sooner if the economy doesn’t begin to meaningfully expand), we can’t afford to raise the debt limit without ironclad spending controls which demonstrate to the world that our nation is still a worthwhile credit risk. If we don’t, whether or not we’re at the 90% ratio of debt owed to the public (currently about $9.7 trillion) to GDP (currently $15.0 trillion, leaving a ratio of about 65%) may not matter. The world’s lenders may either decide to stop lending to us or raise our interest rates before we get to that 90% threshold.

From Dubuque, Iowa (HT the Washington Examiner via Hot Air):

Iowan to Gingrich: Get out now before you make a bigger fool of yourself

Newt Gingrich got a not-so-nice welcome here today.

As he was getting ready to leave a speaking engagement Dubuque resident Russell Fuhrman approached him in the lobby of the Holiday Inn:

“Get out now before you make a bigger fool of yourself,” Fuhrman said directly to Gingrich.

Gingrich, visibly stunned, quickly moved forward to talk with other guests.

Fuhrman told The Register afterward that he just happened to be at the hotel. He said he’s upset with Gingrich’s disagreements with parts of the House Republican Medicare reform plan. …

It being the Des Moines Register, home base of USA Today founder and quiet radical Al Neuharth, the guess here is that reporter Jason Clayworth didn’t let Newt the newly-minted RINO off the hook by not reporting on the full nature of Gingrich’s “disagreements.” A Wall Street Journal editorial today elaborates:

Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday about Paul Ryan’s reform plan, Mr. Gingrich chose to throw his former allies in the GOP House not so much under the bus as off the Grand Canyon rim.

The Ryan program “is too big a jump,” he said. “I think what you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options. Not one where you suddenly impose upon you—I don’t want to—I—I’m against ObamaCare, which is imposing radical change. And I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.”

On that basis, Newt would have been against ratifying the Constitution at crunch time in the 1780s. After all, the 2011 Newt would have declared, even though the Articles of Confederation clearly weren’t working, the meaningful freedom-enhancing changes of the Constitution would would be too “radical.”

Similarly, Medicare isn’t working. It’s a runaway freight train which threatens to chew up the nation’s finances and spit it out into little pieces. It cannot survive as it stands. We can either go the statist Obamacare route, with its inevitable rationing and death panels, or put power into the hands of individuals and families to control costs. If you rule out the latter as “radical,” as Newt did, you’re inevitably condemning the nation to the former.

Gingrich’s assertion makes his candidacy even more objectively untenable than it already was. God bless Russell Fuhrman for calling him out.

From Fudai, Japan:

Published Date: 14 May 2011

WHEN the mayor of the Japanese coastal village of Fudai ordered a 51ft-high wall built in the 1970s to protect his people from the potential ravages of a tsunami, he was called crazy, foolish and wasteful.
But after Fudai survived the monster wave that followed the 11 March earthquake unscathed, he is now regarded as a saviour.

The 3,000 residents of Fudai, living between mountains behind a cove, owe their lives to the late mayor Kotaku Wamura, who saw the devastation of an earlier tsunami and made it the priority of his four decades in office to defend the village from the next one.

His floodgate between mountainsides took a dozen years to build and cost the equivalent £18 million today.

“It cost a lot of money. But without it, Fudai would have disappeared,” said seaweed fisherman Satoshi Kaneko, 55.

The project was criticised as wasteful. But the gate and an equally high seawall behind the community’s adjacent fishing port protected Fudai from the waves that obliterated so many other towns and killed more than 25,000 people.

“However you look at it, the effectiveness of the floodgate and seawall was truly impressive,” the current Fudai mayor, Hiroshi Fukawatari, said.

Towns to the north and south also braced against tsunamis with concrete seawalls. But none were as tall as Fudai’s.

In Fudai, the waves rose as high as 66ft, so some ocean water did flow over, but it caused minimal damage. The gate broke the tsunami’s main thrust.

And it was all down to Mayor Wamura, whose political reign began in the ashes of the Second World War and ended in 1987.

Fudai, about 320 miles north of Tokyo, has a pretty, white-sand beach that lured tourists every summer. But Mr Wamura never forgot how quickly the sea could turn. Massive tsunamis flattened the coast in 1933 and 1896. “When I saw bodies being dug up from the piles of earth, I had no words,” he wrote of the 1933 tsunami. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Martin Crutsinger’s Wednesday, May 11 coverage of that day’s release of Uncle Sam’s April 2011 Monthly Treasury Statement was such a train wreck that I had to turn away before I could get through it, hoping against hope that if I came back a few days later it wouldn’t seem so bad. Of course I was wrong.

How was Marty Crutisinger’s report erroneous, incomplete, misleading, and from all appearances politically-driven? Let me count just some of the ways, as I go through selected segments from his report:

1. Crutsinger’s opening paragraph: “The government is taking in more tax revenue as the economy improves, but not nearly enough to keep the federal budget deficit from exceeding $1 trillion for a third straight year.”

   Ah yes, it’s all because we’re not collecting enough in taxes. It couldn’t possibly be that spending is up 9% over last year (which Crutsinger finally acknowledges in Paragraph 15). As the Congressional Budget Office projected would happen on May 6 (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), from February through April, the government officially spent $1 trillion in a three-month period for the first time ever. If that pace continues for the rest of the year, total spending, already at $2.18 trillion at the end of April, will come in at $3.85 trillion, exceeding even the President’s “let’s dump it all into this year” February forecast of $3.819 trillion.

2. Paragraph 3, second sentence: “Tax receipts were up 45 percent last month compared to the same month one year ago.”

   Wrong. Individual income tax receipts were up 45% in April 2011 compared to April 2010, but overall tax receipts, at $289.5 billion compared to $245.3 billion, really rose by 18%. As I noted on May 10 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the improved collections in April 2011 still trailed April 2008, the alleged fifth month of the recession as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research but not as defined by normal people, by a whopping 29%.

3. Paragraph 6: “The White House and Democrats want to trim the deficit through spending cuts and also by ending tax cuts for the wealthy, which were first passed when President George W. Bush was in office and later extended by Obama.”

   Lord have mercy. Marty, this is a news report, not a DNC memo. The “tax cuts” were enacted eight long years ago. What you’re referring to is “the tax system we’ve all become used to.” Additionally, these are income taxes we’re talking about, not wealth taxes. Income tax rate changes for those with high taxable incomes affect those with high taxable incomes, who may or may not happen to be wealthy (in fact, I daresay, given the state of the economy and particularly the housing market, more than a few of those affected may have a negative net worth.

4. Paragraph 8: “A decade ago, it seemed the federal budget was heading in the opposite direction. The government had a surplus of $127 billion in 2001 when President George W. Bush took office and was projected to run surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion over the next decade.”

   Of course, those projections assumed that an unsustainable Internet bubble economy could somehow be sustained, even as the Clinton administration was trying to stifle high-tech growth by pursuing formal and informal antitrust actions against Micorsoft and Intel while the SEC let vaporware IPOs through by the dozens. Of course it wasn’t.

5. Paragraph 9: “But by 2002, the country was back in the red. The deficits grew after Bush won approval for the broad tax cuts, pushed a major drug benefit program for seniors – which wasn’t offset with revenue to pay for it – and entered the country into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

   Marty, this is a news report, not a Code Pink press release. The deficits grew because of the recession which followed the bursting of the Clinton-era Internet bubble and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Once Bush 43 got the full scope of the tax cuts he wanted, government receipts grew by 44% in a 4-year period (in case you’re not sure, Marty, receipts help a deficit to go down, not up), and the annual budget deficit narrowed to an almost tolerable $163 billion in fiscal 2007, the last fiscal year of a Republican-passed budget.

6. Paragraph 12: “And it (the deficit) grew even more this year after Obama and congressional Republicans signed off on a deal that extended the Bush tax cuts for two years and also reduced Social Security payroll taxes for one year.”

   I guess that’s why receipts are up, eh? C’mon, Marty. The seven-month fiscal 2011 deficit is $870 billion, $70 billion higher than last year’s comparable $800 billion. Reported outlays have increased by $180 billion, from $2.00 trillion to $2.18 trillion — and you want to say it’s because the “Bush tax cuts” were extended? Give, me, a, break.

That’s all I can stand for now. When they aren’t getting facts flat-out wrong, AP reporters like Martin Crutsinger seem to be doing everything they can to mislead news consumers about the nature and causes of the nation’s fiscal problems.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Wednesday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

______________________________________________

The column takes apart last week’s AP-GfK poll (home page; poll topline) purporting to show that President Obama’s approval rating in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden climbed to 60%, up from 47% in January and 53% in March. The only reason this occurred was because the polling partnership’s partisan breakdown moved from 42-36-6 Democrat-Republican-Independent in January to 45-33-4 in March to 46-29-4 in May. Anyone can eyeball the changes in the partisan breakdown (from +6 Dems to +12 Dems to +17 Dems) and realize in an instant that the vast majority of the improvement is due to the change in the partisan mix.

But it would appear that the folks at AP-GfK don’t care. All that matters is convincing the relatively disengaged who make up perhaps 80%-85% of the population that Barack Obama is as popular as ever. That will only remain the case if those who know better don’t work to make sure that others do.

_____________________________________________

UPDATE: The video which follows went up sometime on Friday. Given that its final portion explains how the poll was conducted, I would suggest that its posting is a defensive maneuver in response to the poll’s withering, richly deserved criticism.

Here it is:

Transcript, following the introductories:

Nearly 9 in 10 (86%) said they approve of the way the military and the CIA handled the raid, and 87% said U.S. forces were justified in killing bin Laden. Two in three Americans also agree the government has released enough information about the raid, and 2 in 3 also think the U.S. has made the right call by not releasing a picture of Osama bin Laden’s dead body.

One result of bin Laden’s killing has been a surge in President Obama’s popularity. 60% of Americans now approve of his performance, his highest rating in two years. Independent Americans — those who Obama must woo to his side in order to re-win the presidency in 2012 — in large part drove up President Obama’s favorability ratings. Among independents, Obama’s rating rose 13 points, from just 49% in March to 62% today. That’s about twice the amount Obama’s rating rose among the public in general, which was seven points.

Now a word about how we conducted the poll. Between May 5 and May 9, 2011, we interviewed on landline and cell telephones a nationally representative sample of 1,001 Americans age 18 and over. For more information about the poll findings and methods, please visit ap-gfkpoll.com or gfkamerica.com.

Thanks for watching, and see you again next time.

The bolded item is in my view an attempt to assert that the partisan breakdowns shown below (the three columns on the far right are the ones under discussion) didn’t matter:

Feinberg wants viewers to believe that Indies really drove the surge in Obama’s popularity. Nice try, kiddo. No sale.

Counting leaners, independents made up 27% of the May sample (12+11+4), and 34% of March’s (16+14+4).

Let’s say for the sake of argument — because the AP-GfK topline does not provide the specifics — that the 13% increase in approval was from 37% in March to 50% in May. Here are the estimated components of Obama’s approval in those respective months:

– March: 37% x 34% = 12.6 points out of Obama’s total of 53 points
– May: 50% x 27% = 13.5 points out of Obama’s total of 60 points

In other words, Geoff, despite the clever wording of your “explanation,” it would appear based on the samples you took that indies drove maybe one point of the overall seven-point pickup. Big whoop. The rest would appear to be the result of an increased component of moderate Democrats (by six points, from 15% to 21%), and a decreased component of strong Republicans (by three points, from 9% to 6%).

Geoff Feinberg’s claim that the samples involved in these AP-GfK polls are “nationally representative” is objectively false (an interesting attempt, though, given that AP’s officially published excuse was that the poll was “random”), and the polls themselves are inarguably unreliable.

In an unbylined report this morning on homebuilders’ continued pessimism, the Associated Press continues to mislead its readers and other news consumers about just how bad the market for new homes has been during the past two years.

The government has been reporting new home sales since 1963. The 320,000 news homes sold in 2010, which followed sales of only 375,000 in 2009, are the two worst performances on record. But that does not mean that they are the two worst performances in nearly a half-century, as AP continues to insist, as seen below:

There they go again.

For AP to claim that 2009 and 2010 were the worst years in almost a half-century, it would need to show that some year during the early 1960s came in with sales of less than 320,000. It can’t. The Census Bureau’s related info shows that total annual sales were over 550,000 during each of the first three years it tracked. It has no proof that any year prior to 1963 had sales as low as 2009 or 2010. Further, the Census Bureau began tracking housing starts in 1959, and those numbers are well above where they need to be to prove that annual sales from 1959-1962 were way about 2009 and 2010.

Additionally, for the AP to correctly defend its claim that 2009 and 2010 were the “worst” years in nearly a half-century instead of since World War II, it would need to show that sales of new homes were lower on a population-adjusted basis. Sticking to very round numbers, the AP would have to find:

• A year during the last half of the 1940s where sales were less than 150,000.
• A year during the first half of the 1950s where sales were less than 175,000.
• A year during the last half of the 1950s where sales were less than 200,000.

That’s not going to happen. As I demonstrated late last year, there is no reasonable doubt that 2009 and 2010 were the worst years for new home sales since World War II.

When will the Associated Press stop misleading news consumers about the true extent of the historically disastrous conditions in today’s housing market?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

An establishment media reporter actually found a disaffected lifetime Democrat who is abandoning her party (she would probably argue that it has abandoned her).

Somebody may take away Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Salena Zito’s media credentials for this (HT Instapundit), which violates the press’s two rules about disaffected voters, which are:

1. Only cover voters who claim they are leaving the Republican Party because it has become too conservative and reactionary.
2. If you find a Democrat who is disaffected over the party’s failures and far-leftism, refer to Rule Number 1.

Here are excerpts from Ms. Zito’s report:

Joyce McNears peers over her reading glasses and asks a question, expecting no answer: “Why is the president still not talking about jobs?”

Along with her son and grandson, the 66-year-old McNears matriarch is counting stock and rearranging shelves in the family hardware store that has seen good times and bad times in this Ohio River town.

… Joyce has lived in Belmont County and voted for Democrats all her life. Yet President Barack Obama and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, both Democrats, won’t get her vote next year.

Belmont went for Obama in 2008 but voted against his policies in 2010, when the Democrat-rich county went for Republican Rob Portman for U.S. Senate.

That’s a problem for Democrats going into 2012 because Ohio has supported the winner in 27 of the last 29 presidential elections. It is perhaps the nation’s most critical swing state.

“Democrats had an awful time in Ohio in 2010 and arguably did as bad there last November as anywhere in the country,” says Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

… Ohio was hit particularly hard when the recession barreled through in 2007. By 2009, after stimulus dollars failed to improve the state’s unemployment rate (higher than the national average), and after bailouts and spending issues raised concern about the nation’s future debt, Ohio became the first state to hand Obama chilling disapproval ratings.

… “I am not a forecaster,” says renowned economist Allan Meltzer, “but the standard forecast from many sides is for continued moderate growth.”

The problem, he says, is that “growth has had little effect on the unemployment rate.”

… He also blames the business community for its distrust of the administration’s tax policies, uncertainties over health-care costs, energy regulations and a housing glut.

The last paragraph shows that nobody’s perfect. Ms. Zito’s last excerpted sentence makes it look like Metzler is blaming the business community for all four listed items, when I’m almost certain that Metzler was only hitting the business community for item 1. Of course Metzler is wrong about that, as there’s plenty of reason to distrust the administration, because it continues to run mind-boggling deficits and to push at every opportune moment for tax increases.

Ms. Zito’s work from across the border in Pennsylvania is nonetheless a partial antidote to Ohio’s establishment press, which has somehow failed to find people like Joyce McNears for the past two-plus years, even though there are thousands of Democrats just like her who are beyond fed up with what this administration and Ted Strickland’s Ohio gubernatorial regime have done to the nation and the Buckeye State.

In further researching this post, I have learned that the Trib-Review is perceived as a conservative publication. In this case, I’d suggest that it has a reporter who has her eyes open. Ohio’s major papers seem to have a shortage of such people.

The opening paragraph of Saturday morning’s Associated Press report by Stephen Ohlemacher and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar on the state of Social Security and Medicare and an additional sentence from the third paragraph give away the fact that theirs will not be a missive that should be taken seriously (bold is mine):

The bad economy is worsening the already-shaky finances of Medicare and Social Security, draining the trust funds supporting them faster than expected and intensifying the need for Congress to shore up the massive benefit programs, the government said Friday.

… The Social Security trust funds are projected to be drained in 2036, one year earlier than the last estimate.

This post will concentrate on Social Security. By referring to the idea that its trust fund is being “drained,” the pair are perpetuating the myth that the Social Security system has a stash of cash and investments just sitting there ready to be redeemed and distributed as benefits when needed. This of course is false. What follows are four fundamental truths about Social Security.

First, for years, Social Security collected more in taxes than it paid out in benefits. A normal “trust fund” or investment account would invest these excesses and allow them to grow, so that funds would be there to keep paying benefits in years when taxes are lower than benefits paid (like now, thanks to the retirements of baby boomers).

Second, that is unfortunately not what happened. Since the 1960s, when President Lyndon Baines Johnson decided to present a “unified” budget which included Social Security instead of treating it as a separate, dedicated program, trust fund surpluses were lent to the rest of the government for the rest of its operations. The amounts involved didn’t become significant until the late-1980s. From 1986-2007, the rest of the government wrote over $2.3 trillion in IOUs (i.e., it issued “special bonds” to Social Security, routinely emptying its coffers annually.

Third, the annual surpluses, which peaked in fiscal 2007 and 2008 at about $186 billion each, started to rapidly shrink in 2008 as the recession hit. Now, quoting from this year’s Trustees Report summary, “Social Security expenditures exceeded the program’s non-interest income in 2010 for the first time since 1983.” That means tax collections aren’t covering benefits, meaning that the rest of the government is having to add to its already harrowing deficits to fund the annual shortfalls, which are forecast to continue and grow as far as the eye can see. Somehow, this isn’t considered news by the nation’s gatekeepers at the Associated Press.

Fourth, perhaps the AP pair’s excuse is that the rest of the government should have no problem paying back its IOUs when it has to over the next 25 years until 2036. Anyone even remotely aware of the $1 trillion-plus deficits run up during the past three years would have be asking: “Really?”

As I noted in a column I wrote several weeks ago:

… the nation’s “debt held by the public” — really amounts owed to individuals, corporations, and other countries — … is over $9.6 trillion, an amount that is roughly 65% of the nation’s annual output, or Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

… there is a consensus that a country reaches “a critical insolvency threshold” once its public debt hits 90% of GDP. At that point, lender cutoffs and interest-rate premiums become real possibilities.

How far are we from the 90% … threshold? Not far at all.

The Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections believe that unless there is serious reform, we’ll hit the 90% threshold in just 10 years, in 2021. Economist Larry Kotlikoff, however, noted in an April column that the budget deal made in late 2010, which extended the current tax system for another two years (the leftist press insists on referring to this as “extending the Bush tax cuts,” even though the current system is now in its ninth year mostly unchanged) and which lowered the employee portion of Social Security by two percentage points for calendar 2011, moved the 90% threshold date to 2017, just six years from now. If the economy doesn’t start picking up pretty soon, the government will cross the 90% threshold even sooner. Regardless for the exact crossover date, it’s obvious that the country has serious issues with Social Security right now because of its cash deficits and the rest of the government’s awful condition. Social Security’s deficits are hastening the day when either no one will want to lend to it or will start charging higher interest rates for doing so.

Only someone who is breathtakingly ignorant of Social Security’s and the federal government’s true fiscal situations or is engaged in deliberate deception would try to pretend that it will have no problem paying back its IOUs to the Social Security system for the next 25 years. Someone should ask Stephen Ohlemacher and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar a simple question: Which is it, guys?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

How is it that this White House can make a big hullabaloo over what it called a coup in Honduras in 2009, yet ignore last week’s news of death squads in Venezuela? Dictatorships and double standards, anyone?

– Opening of an Investors Business Daily editorial, May 13

Gosh, I thought only “right-wing repressive regimes” had death squads. It turns out that Hugo Chavez’s regime has been doing the death squad thing for almost a decade.

Unlike with Nicaragua and El Salvador, the press has almost never employed the term in connection with Hugo Chavez’s regime. It might as well be absolutely never, as seen in this Google News archive search, which informs searchers on ["death squads" Venezuela] (typed as indicated between brackets) that “Your search … did not match any news results.”

The IBD editorial elaborates:

London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) released a 300-page analysis of documents from the computer of FARC terrorist Raul Reyes, blown away in a Colombian army raid in 2008.

The report laid out patterns of activity showing indisputably that Venezuela’s dictator, Hugo Chavez, is running a death-squad regime.

The IISS’s report summary indicates that FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) is Chavez’s designated death squad.

______________________________________________

One thing we’ll say about federal bailouts—if you pay attention, you can usually see them coming a mile away. It was true of Fannie Mae and General Motors, and it’s increasingly clear that the next candidate will be the U.S. Postal Service.

– Opening of a Wall Street Journal editorial, May 13

The Postal Service faces projected losses of $42 billion in the next four years.

The Journal eventually gets to a useful private sector vs. public sector comparison:

If this were a private business, the obvious response to these losses would be urgent cost-cutting to avoid insolvency. Instead, Postal Service management recently concluded negotiations offering the 205,000-member American Postal Workers Union a new four-and-a-half-year contract that will provide a 3.5% pay raise over three years, dole out automatic cost of living wage hikes after 2012, and expand no-layoff protections.

Postal officials say this is the best deal they could get and that, had they not agreed to it, an arbitrator would have been even more generous to the union. But given that 80% of postal costs are for wages and benefits, this contract is unhinged from all fiscal reality.

That is, unless the real play here is a bet on a taxpayer bailout.

The Postal Service should long ago have been privatized. Instead, its latest contract is clearly working to cement its status as a permanent government millstone, no matter what the cost.

______________________________________________

Good.

– Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, reacting to Mike Huckabee’s decision not to run for President.

Agree.

Huckabee, and in case you missed it Chris Christie (I did, as apparently did Christie cheerleader Ann Coulter), can’t see through the statism in Michelle Obama’s so-called “anti-obesity” campaign:

“I’m just simply saying that what Michelle Obama is proposing is not that the government tells you that you can’t eat dessert,” added Huckabee, who lost more than 100 pounds before his 2008 presidential campaign–though he recently confessed to gaining some of the weight back.

… Without singling out Obama’s detractors by name, Christie called their brickbats “unnecessary” on “Face the Nation.”

“I think it’s a really good goal to encourage kids to eat better,” he said. “I’ve struggled with my weight for 30 years and it’s a struggle. If a kid can avoid that in his adult years or her adult years, more power to them.”

Christie added that “I don’t want the government deciding what you can eat and what you can’t eat,” but said ” I think Mrs. Obama being out there encouraging people in a positive way to eat well and to exercise and to be healthy – I don’t have a problem with that.”

Sorry guys, but Michelle Obama does want to interject the government into “deciding what you can eat and what you can’t eat.” There is never a co-equal relationship between the parties when the government makes “suggestions.”

Update: Not that the food thing is the most important reason to reject Huckabee. There are many others, not the least of which is the arrogance inherent in this post-gubernatorial exercise in Arkansas in 2006. It betrayed a breathtaking sense of entitlement. To say that we’ve had enough of that in the past two years and four months is a huge understatement.

From Rome:

May 11, 2011 / 01:24 pm

An Italian priest was posthumously awarded with a top honor for protecting a Jewish family from Nazi persecution in World War II.

Father Martino Michelone, who died in 1979, was declared “Righteous Among Nations” by Jewish leaders on May 8 for hiding four members of a family for nearly two years.

Fr. Machelone sheltered a young boy named Luciano Segre – as well as Segre’s father, mother and aunt – between 1943 and 1945 in the town of Moransengo in northwest Italy.

The “Righteous Among the Nations” recognition honors those who helped save Jews during the Holocaust.

According to Canadian paper The Edmonton Journal, the priest once went into hiding himself during the war to escape a patrol on the move.

Israel’s ambassador to Italy Ghideon Meir gave the medal for the award to Fr. Michelone’s surviving relatives at a ceremony Sunday in Moransengo. …

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