So quaint, but so good:

… I’m going to save the best stuff for Monday.

But for now, here’s just a bit of the news from BizJournals.com (HT Doug Ross):

S&P upgrades Ohio rating, warns on U.S. debt

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services upgraded Ohio’s debt rating just one day after it put the United States on “creditwatch negative” on what it calls a rising risk of policy stalemate in the debt limit negotiations.

For Ohio, the rating was revised from “negative” to “stable” after Gov. John Kasich signed a new budget the ratings agency says will essentially balance the state’s finances for the next two years. S&P also said Ohio is experiencing a modest economic recovery which has stabilized revenue.

In making the upgrade, the agency also assigned a “AA+” long-term rating to Ohio’s $416.75 million general obligation bonds.

“After a significant decline through the recession, Ohio’s economy is steadily recovering,” according to S&P’s statement issued Friday.

… It is that move in Ohio and the massive spending cuts signed into the new budget by Kasich that have given the state a more positive outlook from the S&P. However, those political actions have been controversial, and led to massive protests throughout Ohio and around the country.

Of course, the sour grapes from BizJournals reporter Joe Cogliano about “massive spending cuts” is a bunch of baloney, as will be demonstrated on Monday, along with an absolutely brilliant punch line from another media source.

Stay tuned.

Per Reuters blogger James Pethokoukis, Goldman Sachs, demonstrating Democratic-friendly timing similar to that seen at the New York Times a month or so ago, published an extraordinarily gloomy economic forecast last night.

Here are some of the details he quotes:

“Following another week of weak economic data, we have cut our estimates for real GDP growth in the second and third quarter of 2011 to 1.5% and 2.5%, respectively, from 2% and 3.25%. Our forecasts for Q4 and 2012 are under review, but even excluding any further changes we now expect the unemployment rate to come down only modestly to 8¾% at the end of 2012.”

“The main reason for the downgrade is that the high-frequency information on overall economic activity has continued to fall substantially short of our expectations …”

“… the slowdown of recent months goes well beyond what can be explained with … temporary effects. … final demand growth has slowed to a pace that is typically only seen in recessions …”

Pethokoukis also quotes Goldman saying that, though they’re not predicting it, a return to recession is “clearly a possibility given the recent numbers.”

James P., who correctly notes that Goldman’s Democratic-friendliness, calls the report “an economic bomb on President Obama’s chances for reelection.” No wonder Goldman threw it out there on a Friday night.

Buttressing Goldman’s gloom, Thursday night, in an interview I heard on the Simply Money program on 55KRC in Cincinnati (unfortunately, the podcast found here is garbled with dual audio streams), Ed Farrell, who directs the Consumer Reports Research Center, publisher of the widely read Consumer Reports Index, stated his belief, based on the underlying indicators in the index, that seeing the unemployment rate go up to 9.6% in the next several months “is not out of the question.” Farrell reminded listeners that many other indicators which were positive in March and April “gave back” much of their gains in June. Further, in a supreme but sad irony during an administration which is all about class warfare, Farrell noted that those in the bottom half of the economy in earnings are struggling mightily, as evidenced in continued weakness in retail sales at discount stores, while those in the upper half are holding their own.

Additionally, as I noted on Thursday — in something Chris Rugaber of the Associated Press conveniently missed, even though his report was supposed to be about the results of the June Monthly Treasury Statement — year-over-year growth in federal collections seriously stalled in June.

The administration is attempting to buck up its position by overhyping polling data supposedly showing that Americans want the federal budget problem addressed with a “mix” of tax increases and spending cuts. Even the Associated Press’s Calvin Woodward has conceded that “Obama stretches poll findings” in making such claims. Unfortunately, the poll questions never seem to ask what the mix of tax increases and spending should be, and, more fundamentally, don’t ask whether respondents would still support tax increases if they increased the chances of slower economic growth — which history demonstrates they most likely would, particularly in an economy which is already decelerating.

Pethokoukis wraps his piece by opining that “cutting tax rates and regulation … may be the only way Obama can win another term.” Good luck with that.

It will be interesting to see whether Goldman’s predictions even make it into establishment press reports, and whether any will carry over into Monday morning’s news shows and broadcasts. My guess: Very little, if any. That’s why the report came out on Friday evening.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

___________________________________________

UPDATE, 11:45 P.M.: If Goldman is right about 2Q11, it will be the worst quarter since the recession ended, as seen in this rub-it-in Reagan vs. Obama graphic also seen in the far right column —

From Somersworth, New Hampshire:

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Amanda Farnum still can’t believe her 31⁄2 year old daughter possibly saved her life by making a phone call.

Farnum has Type II diabetes and when the time came for her daughter, Autumn, to act and help her, she did.

“I remember I felt tired,” Farnum said, recalling how she had sat down on the couch to rest a bit on Tuesday evening.

It was when she began to feel thirsty and continued to feel sluggish that she headed into the kitchen to grab a piece of watermelon.

The next thing she remembers is Autumn standing next to her with Pepsi as Farnum lay on the kitchen floor.

“She had grabbed the home phone and dialed her Memere (Amanda’s mother),” Farnum said.

The spry little girl had climbed on top of her plastic kitchen set, reached up to the phone and used speed dial to reach her grandmother, who lives in Lebanon, Maine.

Autumn said exactly what her mother had practiced with her, “Mommy is sick and she needs help now.”

Farnum was having a hypoglycemic episode with a low blood sugar reading under 20. At some point, she said she believes she lost consciousness. She had been tired, shaky, confused, weak and sweaty.

She tests her blood sugar level two hours after her meals daily. She never made it to test before falling down.

Farnum’s mother, Diane Boire, drove down from Maine and took her to Frisbie Memorial Hospital where Farnum received fluids, more food and treatment. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

I’ve been trying to resist taking satisfaction in David Cay Johnston’s utter humiliation in his first assignment at Reuters. Y’know, there but for the grace of God, etc. I do wish him well, though I question whether the feeling is mutual. More important, I hope he recognizes the need to go into journalistic rehab. My guess is that he doesn’t.

The former New York Times journalist/reporter (whatever, David) and yours truly had an extended online dustup four years ago when I demonstrated Johnston’s in my view sloppy, foundation-limited, and biased reporting at the Old Gray Lady (graphic of first few paragraphs as originally presented; current link) in an item about what had happened to Americans’ incomes between 2000 and 2005 (errors summarized here in “Top Six Errors Committed by David Cay Johnston and/or the New York Times in Their Income Growth Report”; I noted a seventh later).

Let’s go through the development and destruction of Johnston’s maiden effort at Reuters.

Johnston believed that he, unique among all human beings on earth, had found that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., while earning billions, was not only not paying income taxes, but somehow “making money off the tax system.” As excerpted from the TaxProf blog (Reuters has pulled Johnston’s original story; the headline is apparently the one Reuters used), Johnston’s anti-Murdoch, anti-Fox animus could not be more obvious:

It Pays to be Murdoch. Just Ask US Gov’t

Rupert Murdoch may not garner as much attention for his financial savvy as he does for his journalistic escapades, which last week led to the shuttering of Britain’s oldest tabloid. But that doesn’t make his money management any less impressive.

Indeed, when it comes to taxes, instead of rendering unto Caesar, Murdoch has Caesar rendering unto him.

Fox News, the editorial pages of his Wall Street Journal and other Murdoch outlets often rail against taxes. Their attacks on government benefits for the elderly, the sick, the jobless and children focus attention on the uses of tax dollars and away from his aggressive efforts to enjoy the benefits of civilization without paying for them.

Many other companies may follow similar practices but most of corporate America doesn’t own one of the country’s most powerful newspaper editorial pages.

How does Murdoch make money off the tax system? There are three basic elements, disclosure statements show.

One is the aggressive use of intra-company transactions that globally allocate costs to locations that impose taxes — and profits to areas where profits can be earned tax-free.

… Buying companies with tax losses is a second way Murdoch can pocket, rather than pay, taxes.

Third, Murdoch’s tax lawyers are expert at maximizing the benefits of deferrals. Incurring a tax today, but paying it by-and-by can be profitable.

Imagine how well Jesus might have done if he had put a corporate jet at Caesar’s disposal. Or if he had a tabloid like the News of the World to put Caesar in fear of him.

Keep in mind that this is the same David Cay Johnston who, in 2007, in comments at BizzyBlog (here and here) and in e-mail exchanges, in essence insisted that he plays it straight and lets the data lead him to his conclusions.

This is the same David Cay Johnston who, after he took a buyout from the Times in 2008, continued to in essence insist that he plays it straight and lets the data lead him to his conclusions even after he agreed in August of that year to appear with an “all star and diverse line up of progressives, labor, and working class speakers” at the “BuzzFlash Sep. 27 Philly Conference.” Also addressing the group: Richard Trumka, then second in command at the AFL-CIO, now its head. In January of this year, as reported at the Blaze, Trumka asserted that, in the Blaze’s words, his “main goal is using unions to fundamentally change American into his progressive vision — not (to) negotiate member salaries.”

Now, the same David Cay Johnston who likes to think he’s an “investigative reporter” (or “investigative journalist”; whatever, David), when confronted with what he should have been seen as likely nonsensical information, has admitted that he didn’t actually contact someone at News Corp. to make sure his revelations, unique among all human beings on earth, were correct (in his mea culpa, he writes that he tried but got no response) before releasing his report.

Finally, this is the same David Cay Johnston who has been forced to admit (and to his partial credit, has done so forthrightly) that he was completely and utterly wrong. News Corp. didn’t “make money on taxes”; rather it paid in billions in U.S taxes from 2007-2010. First there was an Atlantic item by Adam Martin, followed by a lengthy apology and explanation by Johnston which appeared later at Reuters after the wire service’s official withdrawal of the story:

(From The Atlantic’s write-up)

… Because of a change News Corp. made in its annual reports during the seven year period Johnston reported on, his calculations on Rupert Murdoch’s tax bills showed a negative number where there should have been a positive one. “This is particularly painful,” Johnston told The Atlantic Wire via telephone. “I have been at this for 45 years. I have never, until now, had to do anything like this. I am assiduous about correcting the record.”

… “I probably read that disclosure and just didn’t realize what it was reporting,” Johnston said. “This is very finely detailed stuff. I missed that they switched the number. It isn’t common practice, and I shouldn’t have missed it. At the end of the day, the fact is, I shouldn’t have missed it.”

(from Johnston’s retraction and apology column)

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp did not get a $4.8 billion tax refund for the past four years, as I reported. Instead, it paid that much in cash for corporate income taxes for the years 2007 through 2010 while earning pre-tax profits of $10.4 billion.

For the first time in my 45-year-old career I am writing a skinback. That is what journalists call a retraction of the premise of a piece, as in peeling back your skin and feeling the pain. I will do all I can to make sure everyone who has read or heard secondary reports based on my column also learns the facts and would appreciate the help of readers in that cause.

No excuses.

… The other facts I reported remain:

* Among the 100 largest companies in the United States, News Corp has the third largest number of subsidiaries in tax havens, a Government Accountability Office study found in 2009.

* On an accounting basis, which measures taxes incurred but often not actually paid for years, News Corp had a tax rate of under 20 percent, little more than half the 35 percent statutory rate, its disclosures show.

* Murdoch has bought companies with tax losses and fought to be able to use them, which reduces his company’s costs.

* News Corp lawyers and accountants are experts at making use of tax deferrals, though the company’s net tax assets have shrunken from $5.7 billion in 2007 to $3.3 billion last year as the benefits were either used or expired.

In other words, Johnston is admitting that News Corp’s tax peeps are aggressively doing their jobs within the laws as they exist, from all appearances without violating them.

In other words, there was no story here — only a “reporter” who thought he could make a big initial splash by piling on a company tainted by a hacking scandal at its (now former) News of the World publication. Face it, David: You wanted to believe, and let that desire get in the way of your supposed pursuit of the truth. I maintain that it’s far from the first time you’ve let this happen — just the most obvious.

The big story here, besides the obvious journalistic failure (my opinion, of course), is that David Cay Johnston can no longer pretend that he plays it straight and lets the data lead him to his conclusions. Those days are over, pal.

Oh, I almost forgot — According to the Atlantic, part of Johnston’s apology tour apparently includes an appearance on NPR and the issuance of a statement on The Ed Show. Really venturing into the lion’s den, aren’t you, David?

I seem to recall that a reporter named Terri Cullen wrote an item for Reuters in February 2010 about the impact of tax laws which the White House jawboned the wire service into retracting. A few days later, Cullen “resigned,” which for those who don’t know it is corporate-speak for “told to leave to avoid getting officially fired.”

I’m not a big fan of people having to leave their jobs because of a mistake, but if Cullen “resigned,” shouldn’t David Cay Johnston? Just askin’.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Can anyone in Midway, Georgia take money for or even borrow food without risking arrest?

If you’re in Midway, you’d better not let your neighbors reimburse you for any homemade food you cook or grow, or you might get busted for not having “a business license, peddler’s permit, and food permit to set up shop, even on residential property.” Heck, you may have to worry about even giving your output away.

That’s where you have to go with the “logic” of a story from Maura Kennedy at TV station WJCL (HT AP; bolds are mine; video is at link, where, in an unusual choice of priorities, this was apparently the lead story):

Midway Police Shut Down Girls’ Lemonade Stand

Midway police bust none other than a lemonade stand, because the three girls running it didn’t have a business license. The three girls thought if they sold enough lemonade, they could make money to go to the water park Splash in the Boro. Well they thought wrong. Midway police say, they’re breaking city law and have to go.

“It’s kind of crazy that we couldn’t sell lemonade. It was fun, but we had to listen to the cops and shut it down,” 14-year-old Casity Dixon said.

The girls had only been opened for one day before Midway’s police chief and another officer cruised by and saw the stand.

“They told us to shut it down,” 10-year-old Skylar Roberts said.

“We had told them, we understand you guys are young, but still, you’re breaking the law, and we can’t let you do it anymore. The law is the law, and we have to be consistent with how we enforce the laws,” Midway Police Chief Kelly (actually, Kelli — Ed.) Morningstar said.

By a city ordinance, the girls must have a business license, peddler’s permit, and food permit to set up shop, even on residential property. The permits cost $50 a day and a total of $180 per year. City officials said it’s their job to keep everyone safe and healthy, and there can be no exceptions to the rules.

“We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance,” Chief Morningstar said.

… So the law wins, and what started out as three girls’ dream of a fun summer business is now just a piece of plywood.

Since the lemonade stand was shut down, the girls have been doing extra chores and yard work to make money for the water park.

(more…)

In a Thursday editorial:

Even after fudging numbers and ignoring the huge subsidies, a liberal think tank reports that growth in the alternative-energy sector lags the rest of the economy.

… Brookings Institution with a report touting the fact that nearly 2.7 million people brought home paychecks in 2010 working in the “clean economy.” That’s a 3.4% increase in “green jobs” since 2003, and it sounds terrific until you realize the economy as a whole grew at a 4.2% rate over the same period.

As the folks at HotAir.com duly note, Brookings got to its conclusions by including, for example, all mass transit workers regardless of the actual energy source. They also lump in people such as organic farmers and nuclear energy workers, though the greenies have never touted nuclear energy as “clean” or nuclear jobs as “green.”

… A 2008 report by the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration reported that in 2007, while the average subsidy per megawatt hour for all energy sources was $1.65, the subsidy for wind and solar was about $24 per megawatt hour. On the nonelectricity generating side, ethanol received a subsidy of $5.72 per million British thermal unit.

… energy policy … is based not on the free market and supply and demand, but on ideology and crony capitalism. Energy prices then “necessarily skyrocket,” causing job loss and consumer pain as money that might be spent to buy stuff goes just to keep the lights on.

As we have noted, the focus on green jobs comes at the expense of other jobs. An oil industry study says that 190,000 jobs could be created by 2013 if offshore development permits in the Gulf of Mexico were returned. Just finishing the Keystone XL pipeline to bring Canadian tar sands oil to Houston-area refineries could net hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Alternative energy cannot survive without mandates and subsidies, and cannot compete in the free market with proven and plentiful sources like petroleum.

The Brookings report may have been meant to tout the green economy, but it only serves to underscore its failure and the opportunity costs it imposes on the American people and economy.

If President Obama and his administration really cared about an economic recovery, they would abandon this green madness. The administration from the President on down is dominated by true believers who think they can eventually will a genuine recovery on their authoritarian terms. They can’t.

Going further, it is clear that, like FDR in the 1930s, they won’t accept an economic recovery which isn’t achieved on their statist terms. Advancing their statism more important than the well-being of the American people. FDR never achieved a genuine economic recovery until World War II came along. The overwhelming odds are that this bunch won’t ever take us to a genuine recovery.

From Madrid, Spain:

Jul 14, 2011 / 06:15 pm

A recent study in Spain showed that nine out of every ten young people who participate in a World Youth Day believe the event “is an experience that changes lives.”

The results of the poll were published July 11 by WYD 2011 organizers and features responses from 1,800 young people under the age of 30 from all five continents who are following the event.

Analysis showed that 92 percent of respondents said the main reason for attending a WYD is to spread the message of Jesus Christ. Ninety-three percent of young people said they’re attending to have a new experience with 90 percent saying their attendance will express their commitment to the Church. Eighty-eight percent said it was to be with other people who think like them.

The poll also showed that one out of every four young people interviewed has already attended a WYD. Of these, 61 percent attended WYD in Cologne, Germany, in 2005. Forty-four percent attended WYD in Sydney in 2008. Eighty percent of those who attended both events said the experience was very positive. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

As Clay Waters at the Media Research Center’s Times Watch reported earlier today (“One of Obama’s Emotional Arguments for Obama-Care Proven Wrong in NYT Staffer’s New Book”), the New York Times’s Kevin Sack ran a story yesterday which “reflects badly on Barack Obama and how he misled people in his campaign for Obama-care.”

I’ll say. As reported by Sack (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Book Challenges Obama on Mother’s Deathbed Fight

During his presidential campaign and subsequent battle over a health care law, Mr. Obama quieted crowds with the story of his mother’s fight with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage.

In offering the story as an argument for ending pre-existing condition exclusions by health insurers, the president left the clear impression that his mother’s fight was over health benefits for medical expenses.

But in “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” author Janny Scott quotes from correspondence from the president’s mother to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.

Ms. Scott took a leave from her job as a reporter for The New York Times to write the book and has not returned to the staff.

… “We have not reviewed the letters or other material on which the author bases her account,” said Nicholas Papas, the (White House) spokesman. “The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than 15 years ago.”

… “As Ms. Scott’s account makes clear, the president’s mother incurred several hundred dollars in monthly uncovered medical expenses that she was relying on insurance to pay,” Mr. Papas said. “She first could not get a response from the insurance company, then was refused coverage. This personal history of the president’s speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs.”

Disability insurance, which primarily replaces wages lost to illness, was never at issue in the legislative debate over the Affordable Care Act.

… According to Ms. Scott’s book, Ms. (Ann) Dunham’s problem with Cigna started after she left Jakarta, Indonesia, where she had recently taken a consulting job with an American firm, and returned to Honolulu for treatment of abdominal pain that had been diagnosed as appendicitis. After being told she had uterine and ovarian cancer, she underwent a hysterectomy in February 1995 and then six months of chemotherapy, according to the book.

The Cigna disability policy, according to Ms. Scott, allowed the company to deny a claim if a patient had seen a doctor about the condition that caused the disability in the three months before employment.

Seriously now, in the sixth excerpted paragraph Mr. Papas seems to be making a case that one should be able to qualify not just for health insurance coverage but also disability insurance coverage (which, by the way, is meant to cover lost income and living expenses while disabled, and is not specifically designed to cover medical expenses) even if at the time you apply for it you already have a disabling condition. Next up: Auto insurance people can buy after they’re in a crash.

The Times’s Sack left an important additional contradiction in Barack Obama’s narrative out of his coverage. While Sack notes that Ms. Dunham “had recently taken a consulting job with an American firm,” that is not how Barack Obama described her situation at the February 2010 Healthcare summit just one month before the final House vote in which Obamacare passed. Specifically, as Christopher Santarelli reported at the Blaze on Tuesday afternoon (video is at the link; bold is mine):

Barack Obama at the February 2010 Healthcare summit (said): “My Mother, who was self-employed, didn’t have reliable healthcare, and she died of ovarian cancer. There probably is nothing modern medicine could have done about that, it was caught late and thats a hard cancer to diagnose. I do remember the last six months of her life, insurance companies threatening that they would not reimburse her for her costs. And her having to be on the phone in the hospital argueing with insurance companies when what she should have been doing is spending time with her family.”

Scott’s investigation however shows that in 1994 Dunham took a job with an American company called Development Alternatives, which had a contract with the Indonesian State Ministry for the Role of Women. Dunham returned to Jakarta to work where Scott reports the job provided Dunham with health insurance, a housing allowance, and a car.

Even though it punches a hole a mile wide in the President’s personal narrative justifying the passage of Obamacare, I don’t hold out much hope for seeing what Sack reported at the Times or Santarelli’s addendum elsewhere beyond the usual burial grounds at ABC’s Political Punch and the Politico, where stories the establishment press would rather not widely distribute seem to go and die. The Times itself carried Sack’s story on Page A16 of Thursday’s print edition. A search on “Dunham” at the Associated Press’s main site just before 10 p.m. returned nothing relevant. If anyone sees this mentioned at the Big Three networks, let me know.

This morning, Ann Althouse was a bit more blunt about all of this in her headline and brief commentary:

Obama lied about a central fact about his own life which he used — powerfully — to push health care reform.

… “Lied” is my paraphrasing. The NYT wrote “mischaracterized.”

Meanwhile, I recall a (discredited) attempt to discredit President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard Service — which was never used by Bush to prop up a public policy initiative — getting wall-to-wall press coverage in September 2004. No double standard there (/sarcasm).

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Last night (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted that the State of Minnesota, where the government is shut down but spokesman for the Department of Public Safety Doug Neville is somehow still working, is demanding that MillerCoors pull its products from Gopher State store shelves within days, and identified a number of questions non-inquisitive Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Eric Roper should have asked and didn’t.

One of the questions which didn’t make my list, which wasn’t intended to be comprehensive, is: “How much money is involved?” As seen in the headline, the answer is so trivial that it almost costs more to think about it than to say what it is. The potential embarrassment over this matter may partially explain why Democratic Farm Labor Governor Mark Dayton appears to have sued for peace this morning (covered later in this post). Readers will also have a hard time believing the penny-ante amount over which retailers whose “buyer’s cards” have expired will from all appearances be prevented from buying alcoholic beverages for resale.

(more…)

The good news, relatively speaking: Initial unemployment claims per the Department of Labor for the week ended July 9 dropped to 405,000, beating expectations (according to Zero Hedge) of 415,000.

The bad news: The upward revision to the previous week was an unusually high 9,000 (from 418K to 427K), and it was the 14th straight week over 400,000.

Here’s the history of the past 19 weeks:

The suspicions here:

• Next week will show a big upward revision to this week.
• Next week itself will come in higher because the previous week was holiday-shortened.
• Or both.

We’ll see.

Not seasonally adjusted (NSA) claims were 471,000, down about 9% from the same week a year ago.

_____________________________________________

UPDATE: In a complete non-surprise, the Associated Press in its unbylined 8:52 a.m. report (is that you in there, Chris Rugaber?) not only failed to note the size of the revision to the previous week, it failed to note the existence of a revision to the previous week.

Barely scratching the surface …

_______________________________________

Misleading headline Wednesday at CBS News, via Corbett B. Daly: “Obama says he cannot guarantee Social Security checks will go out on August 3.” Given Daly’s bogus attempt a week ago to claim that anyone who believes that Obama administration policies lengthened the recession and made it worse is being “factually inaccurate” (shattered by yours truly), this is no surprise. More correctly stated at Hot Air: “Social Security chief actuary confirms a decision to withhold checks would come from the Treasury.” In other words, the decision to delay or not issue Social Security checks would be a political call by the President, and would not be a necessity brought about by lack of funds. James Pethokoukis at Reuters has the numerical proof. Barack Obama is the person willing to throw seniors under the bus to accomplish his political goals. Party of compassion my a**.

_______________________________________

At the Washington Post’s Checkpoint Washington blog, based on an IBOPE Zogby poll — “In most (Arab) countries surveyed, favorable attitudes toward the United States dropped to levels lower than they were during the last year of the Bush administration.”

_______________________________________

Muslim outreach failure, part 429, from the underappreciated Patrick Poole — “Somali-Americans from Minnesota Leave to Wage Jihad with Al-Shabaab Terror Group.” Money quote: “… the U.S. government continues to conduct “outreach” to the very individuals responsible for radicalizing these youths and recruiting them for jihad.” We couldn’t do worse if we were screwing up on purpose … or maybe we are. Poole’s output at Pajamas Media during the past three months reveals a government bent on giving jihadist Muslims a pass at seemingly every turn.

_______________________________________

Patrick Richardson at Pajamas Media — “Gunwalker: Smoking Gun Email — An internal ATF email seems to support the assertion that Fast and Furious was a PR stunt for gun control.” Some “stunt”: People are dead. There’s also this, from Katie Pavlich at Townhall: “Operation Fast and Furious: Designed to Promote Gun Control.” The no-sense-of-shame Department of Justice is working on gun-restricting rules which they believe would not require legislation. I know the debt-ceiling is tying up a lot of everybody’s time, but somebody besides Darrell Issa (read: John Boehner and Mitch McConnell) needs to start making the DOJ-FBI-ATF self-inflicted tragedies and the gun-regulating attempts more widely known. In terms of Fast and Furious, they need to start calling for heads to roll, a special prosecutor, or both.