In separate editorials today, the Wall Street Journal addresses yesterday’s 11th Circuit Court ruling declaring Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional and the ongoing fallout from the National Labor Relations Board’s ruling (originally addressed here at BizzyBlog) that Boeing can’t open an already-constructed plant in South Carolina.

In the latter instance (“The NLRB Fear Factor”), it directly addresses how the NLRB’s authoritarian ruling is hurting the economy:

Some 60% (of those surveyed by the National Association of Manufacturers) said the government’s case already has—or could—hurt hiring. Sixty-nine percent said the case would damage job growth. And 49% said capital expenditure plans “have been or may be impacted by the NLRB’s complaint.” Around 1,000 of the association’s 11,000 members contributed to the survey. That’s a lot of lost jobs.

Some might dismiss these results as self-interested, or predictable given the general business distaste for regulation. But that ignores the role that confidence plays in reviving the animal spirits essential for economic growth. When CEOs or entrepreneurs fear political intervention that might impose higher costs, they are more reluctant to invest or to hire new employees. That’s especially true when the economy is already growing slowly, or emerging from recession.

… President Obama has refused to say a word of reproach to the agency. This is how you get economic growth of 0.8%.

As noted yesterday (first item at link), we’ll be very lucky if first-half growth is as “high” as 0.8% by the time the revisions come in. If President Obama was really interested in economic growth, he as Chief Executive would at a very minimum insist that the matter get resolved as quickly as possible; at a max, he’d haul out one of those Executive Order memo pads and resolve it himself. He’s done neither. The only reasonable conclusion to reach is that he doesn’t care about NLRB v. Boeing’s clearly damaging impact on the economy.

The other Journal editorial quotes yesterday’s Obamacare ruling (“Breathtaking in its Expansive Scope”), and only hints at the impact the legislation is having on the economy right here, right now:

Though the commerce power “has since come to dominate federal legislation,” as Judges Hall and Dubina note, the Court has always maintained that it “is subject to outer limits,” as the 1995 Lopez decision affirmed.

It is a measure of ObamaCare’s overreach that throughout this history, the government has never claimed a power like the individual mandate. “Even in the face of a Great Depression, a World War, a Cold War, recessions, oil shocks, inflation, and unemployment, Congress never sought to require the purchase of wheat or war bonds, force a higher savings rate or greater consumption of American goods, or require every American to purchase a more fuel efficient vehicle,” the majority writes.

Judge Hall (a Bill Clinton nominee) and Judge Dubina (a George H.W. Bush nominee) have delivered one of the most persuasive and tightly reasoned deconstructions of the mandate’s supposed constitutional logic, though of course the fate of the mandate lies with the Supreme Court. The new split among the appellate circuits ensures that one case or another will land in Washington—perhaps as soon as next spring.

“Perhaps as soon as next spring”?

Businesses considering expansion and the hiring that might go with it don’t have 8-10 months, “perhaps” more, to live in uncertainty as to what their costs of employment will be. Many if not most of them are pulling backin RIGHT NOW, as a result.

As with the NLRB situation, if President Obama and his administration really cared about growing the economy economy, he would ensure that Supreme Court review of Obamacare gets expedited and resolved. Again, the only reasonable conclusion to reach is that the Obama administration doesn’t care about NLRB v. Boeing’s clearly damaging impact on the economy.

The Journal today identified just two of a myriad of matters (add EPA regs on cars, trucks, power-plant emissions, unnecessary withholding of drilling permits, pervasive overregulation in general, etc.) which make it a wonder that businesses are hiring anyone at all. We’re condemned to a mediocre economy if these authoritarian barriers aren’t removed. If they’re not, only one administration will be to blame, and it’s not that of George W. Bush.

From Atlanta:

Posted: 5:27 pm EDT August 5, 2011
Updated: 7:15 pm EDT August 5, 2011

A man rescued from a burning car at a DeKalb County gas station is back home and speaking out about his ordeal and the man who saved him.

A crash at the intersection of Briarcliff and Clairmont Thursday morning sent John Catana’s car spinning out of control.

Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Aaron Diamant spent Friday working the phones trying to track down Catana. Diamant found Catana grateful for the man who saved his life.

“I couldn’t control my wheel,” Catana said Friday at his Gwinnett County home. “I couldn’t control my brakes.”
Catana said he remembers the impact and the explosion.

“I was scared to death,” Catana said.

Catana’s burning car became pinned against the Chevron station’s gas pumps. He had no way out as the fire raged.

“When I was 20 [years old], I gave my life to the Lord,” Catana said. “I knew that in every situation, He will control my life.”

That’s when bystander Eddie Evans rushed in to help.

“I seen the guy struggling and realized his door was jammed,” said Evans in an interview shortly after the crash. “I ran to try to get him out, and his seat belt was holding him.”

Evans eventually pulled Catana to safety through a blown-out window.

“Without his help, [there] was no way to be alive today,” Catana said.

Catana and his daughter, Andrea Gruian, now call Evans their angel.

“To me, it says a lot about him as a person, so it’s pretty amazing,” Gruian said.

However, Evans says he’s no hero.

“I would hope that somebody else did the same for me if I was in the same situation,” Evans said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The next time I plan to escape reality for an extended time, I won’t go to the trouble of forwarding the phones to voicemail and swearing off the Internet and TV for a few days. I’ll just take whatever the Associated Press’s Martin Crutsinger must be consuming.

Crutsinger’s 11:45 report this morning claims that “The better-than-expected retail sales report is the second strong signal on the economy in as many days.” Strike 1: It was far from unanimously considered better than expected. Strike 2: It wasn’t that strong regardless, considering that it was likely achieved on borrowed money. Strike 3: The report that he thinks was strong yesterday wasn’t strong either. You’re out, bud. Oh, and there’s Strike 4 in reserve: Though he referred to consumers being “a little more confident,” Crutsinger “somehow” ignored (and AP on the whole almost completely ignored) a devastating report showing consumer sentiment at a three-decade low released well before the time stamp of his report.

Here are several paragraphs from Crutstinger’s creative excess (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Retail sales rose 0.5 percent in July

Consumers spent more on autos, furniture, clothing and gas in July, pushing up retail sales by the largest amount in four months. The gain signaled that Americans are a little more confident [1] in the economy and could helped (sic) dispel fears that the country is headed for another recession.

Retail sales rose 0.5 percent last month, the Commerce Department said Friday. It was the best showing since March. The government also revised sales higher in the previous two months.

Even after excluding sales at gas stations, which were influenced by an increase in gas prices, sales rose 0.3 percent last month.

The better-than-expected retail sales report [2] is the second strong signal [3] on the economy in as many days. Stocks rose in early trading. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 120 points.

… “Don’t write off the American consumer or economy just yet,” said Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets. “The solid July retail sales report should help allay recession fears.”

… data for July suggest the economy may be in better shape than some had feared. Layoffs are down [4], retail sales are up and gas prices are falling. Employers added 117,000 net jobs last month. That’s not enough to significantly lower the unemployment rate [5], but it was a notable improvement after two dismal months of hiring.

Notes:

• [1] — How interesting that Crutsinger would mention confidence so early in his report, especially since its time stamp was well after the morning release of the latest Thomson/University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey. Consumer confidence fell to its lowest level since May of 1980, some of the worst days of the Carter administration. That was the 40th full month of Jimmy Carter’s presidency; we’re only on Month 31 under Obama.
• [2] — Though the positive number was nice and the prior-month revisions were also helpful, the report was not clearly “better than expected.” My Business Insider e-mail this morning carried a prediction of +0.6%. After the report’s release, MarketWatch said that expectations had been 0.7%. Last time I checked, +0.5% is not as good as +0.7%. The Wall Street Journal’s coverage described the report as “positive,” which it was (which is not the same as “strong”), but didn’t state what expectations were. Another reason to temper the enthusiasm is that the gains in retail sales may have been achieved on borrowed money. Last week, Crutsinger himself (not kidding) reported that consumer borrowing in June was up by the most in four years.
• [3] — Showing that fudged media reports on the economy have a cumulative effect, Crutsinger seems to think, though he didn’t cite it specifically, that yesterday’s report on initial unemployment claims from the Department of Labor was “strong,” apparently because AP colleague Daniel Wagner said so (covered at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog). If there’s another report from yesterday besides that one which was positive enough to matter, I don’t see it here. Unrevised claims dropped by only 5,000, or 1.25%, from the previous week’s unrevised claims, and it a near certainty that yesterday’s number will be revised upward as has been case in 21 of the past 22 weeks. The change is in the right direction, but calling it “strong” is absurd.
• [4] — If Crutsinger is referring to unemployment claims as a proxy for “layoffs,” as just noted, the improvement isn’t impressive. If he’s thinking of some other metric, possibly related data that I was able to locate was either unconvincing or contradictory.
• [5] — Crutsinger is mixing apples and oranges. The 117,000-job July improvement, obtained from the Establishment Survey, is unrelated to the unemployment rate, which is determined from the Household Survey. According to the Household Survey, the number of people employed went down by 38,000. The unemployment rate did tick down, but only because the labor force shrunk by 193,000.

Not only did Crutsinger ignore the consumer sentiment report, but AP on the whole almost completely did the same. Though the report was covered in dedicated articles at Bloomberg and Reuters (which changed its initial headline from “Consumer Sentiment Tumbles to Historic Low” to “Consumer Sentiment Tumbles in August”), the AP as of mid-afternoon had only mentioned it in a single paragraph in a much longer report on today’s stock trading.

This is another in a long list of examples of the approach of much of the establishment press towards economic news during a Democratic presidential administration: Maximize (or create) the good news, and minimize the bad.

Memo to Marty: Please let us know what you’re taking that enables you to avoid reality so successfully. I’m afraid we’re all going to need a lot of it to get through the time between now and January 20, 2013.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

We’re there, much earlier in Obama’s term than under Carter:

U.S. Consumer Confidence Drops to Three-Decade Low Amid Economic Headwinds

Confidence among U.S. consumers plunged in August to the lowest level since May 1980, adding to concern that weak employment gains and volatility in the stock market will prompt households to retrench.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary index of consumer sentiment slumped to 54.9 from 63.7 the prior month. The gauge was projected to decline to 62, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.

The biggest one-week slump in stocks since 2008 and the threat of default on the nation’s debt may have exacerbated consumers’ concerns as unemployment hovers above 9 percent and companies are hesitant to hire. Rising pessimism poses a risk household spending will cool further, hindering a recovery that Federal Reserve policy makers said this week was already advancing “considerably slower” than projected.

“The mood is very depressed,” said Chris Christopher, an economist at IHS Global Insight Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts. “Consumers are very fatigued and very uncertain. In the short term, people are going to pull back on spending.”

A review of 1980 data at the related web site indicates that the values from March through June of that year were 56.5, 52.7, 51.7, and 58.7 — an average of 54.9, exactly where the August 2011 number came in.

I blame Bush, Republicans, and the Tea Party (/sarc).

As to the Carter comparison, I don’t think we’re going to be that “lucky.”

Zero Hedge yesterday had two downward takes on the direction of second-quarter GDP revisions. One was from Goldman Sachs, which thinks the current reading of an annualized 1.3% will come down to 0.9% because of disappointing exports in both May and June. The other came from SMRA (Stone McCarthy Research Associates), which thinks it will be +0.5%, where the lower number seems more of a hunch than something firmly quantitative.

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Huffington’s Heist Update: The stock of AOL, which paid $315 million for the hard-left Huffington Post in February (“paid in cash funded from cash on hand”), sunk to 48% below its early February price on Wednesday before recovering a bit yesterday.

Even after yesterday’s recovery, AOL has lost over $1 billion in market value since the purchase. As I said in my February column, “They sure know how to pick ‘em.”

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I’m not buying this — How in this economy can Microsoft possibly be having problems finding qualified people among the U.S. unemployed? The company claims that the IT unemployment rate is only 4%, but I suspect that there are thousands of IT folks around the country who are no longer considered IT people because they had to move on to lower-paying gigs after being let go by their IT employers, or because they’re still really unemployed but not considered among the “officially” unemployed.

Or it may be that MS is like a lot of other employers who won’t consider hiring anyone who is currently unemployed. I get the logic, but if Microsoft is saying that it’s too much work to find qualified and eager but currently unemployed citizens vs. hiring thousands of non-citizens through H-1B visas — well guys, too bad, so sad.

Update: Further, as shown here several months ago, the presumption implied that the “millions of new tech workers in just the past few years” coming out of India and China are appropriately qualified is, at least in the case of India, very suspect.

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Over at Legal Insurrection, a hope that the public-sector unions and leftists will go all-in for a recall attempt on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker:

Walker will win the recall, but more important, it will set a nice stage for the 2012 presidential election with the relative good fortune of a business friendly conservative Republican administration in Wisconsin contrasted with the dismal performance of Obama and national Democrats.

Wisconsin-based Steve at No Runny Eggs has posted his analysis of Tuesday’s recall results and this coming Tuesday’s attempt to unseat two Badger State fleebagging Dems. Key point: It was “far closer to being only a 1-seat gain for them (Dems) than a 3-seat gain.”

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The House-Senate 12-person supercommittee’s membership would appear to virtually guarantee a deadock.

GOP Senate members Kyl, Portman, and Toomey *should* hold firm on taxes (though a talk radio sub for Savage yesterday pointed out that Kyl is retiring, which leads to fears that he will go the “statesman”/sellout route, and I have well-known and justified reservations about Portman’s firmness). The House GOP’s contingent (Hensnarling of Texas, Camp of Michigan, and Upton of Michigan) is okay but not exceptional.

The Dems’ choices are the expected extremists. On the Senate side, there’s John F-in’ Kerry, who doesn’t even think the Constitution-adhering Tea Party point of view on fiscal matters should be covered by the media, let alone considered in deliberations. Patty Murray of Washington is actually worse than Kerry (Update: Michelle Malkin devotes her column today to Pathetic Patty). One question on the third Senate member Max Baucus is whether he’ll show up sober. As to whether he’s a “moderate,” well, given his willingness to have his name on one version of the nightmarish Obamacare, I don’t think so.

Two of Nancy Pelosi’s three House choices (African-American James Clyburn and Hispanic Xavier Becerra) and are specifically designed to enable Dems to bring out the race and ethnic cards when things go south. Chris Van Hollen is also way left of anything resembling mainstream. Their Club for Growth scores (2010, lifetime): Clyburn: 0%, 5%; Becerra: 5%, 7%; Van Hollen: 0%, 6%. Steven Hayward at Powerline predicted that Pelosi would pick “radical nutcases or bare-knuckled partisans.” He was right.

The “Tea Party Downgrade” slander cannot stand.

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Note: This column first appeared at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Wednesday.

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I apparently don’t understand the superior “logic” of leftists and Democrats.

Let’s set up what transpired during and immediately after the debt-ceiling dramatics of the past few weeks.

There have been six primary players:

1. President Barack Obama.
2. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
3. Unhinged leftists, whose primary goal is headlong expansion of the welfare state and stifling the dissent of anyone who opposes it.
4. Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner.
5. Tea Party activists, whose primary goals are constitutional adherence, fiscal sanity, and a better world for current and future generations.
6. The ratings agency people at Standard & Poor’s (S&P), who entered the fray after the legislative dust had settled.

President Obama’s role consisted of utterly failing to present a plan, pretending that the unsustainable wreckage he presented in February was still a viable plan (even though the U.S. Senate voted it down by a shocking 97-0), and insisting on a “balanced approach.” Translated into harsh experience, a “balanced approach” is defined as: “I get new taxes now for promised cuts later which never materialize,” or in short form: “Business as usual.”

Harry Reid’s role was to offer up nothing substantive until the final days (even that’s being generous), and to ridicule anything passed or under consideration by Boehner’s Republican House majority.

Unhinged leftists jerked around Obama during his alleged negotiations with Boehner, leaving everyone trying to bargain in good faith completely flummoxed.

Boehner’s role was to resist tax increases at all costs, and to put up with Obama’s noncommittal, goalpost-moving method of “negotiating.” Eventually, he threw up his hands, walked away from Obama, and initially tolerated the passage of “Cut, Cap and Balance” (CC&B). If it had become law, CC&B would have reduced projected spending against the Congressional Budget Office baseline by the $4 trillion S&P said was necessary as a demonstration of both political seriousness and long-term financial viability. “Tolerated” may have seemed like a harsh word two sentences ago, but Boehner was recently quoted as saying that he got 98% of what he wanted in the legislation which passed. This is interesting, because tax increases arising from the so-called “supercommittee” are still not out of the question, and the $63 billion in reductions against the CBO baseline supposedly achieved in fiscal 2012 and 2013 are so puny. Am I to believe he’d be completely satisfied if he had gotten $65 billion?

Tea Party activists championed CC&B. For holding out for a better deal than Boehner’s watered-down rewrite, they were demonized by so-called “friends” at The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and don’t-get-it types like John McCain. Many activists were and still remain seriously displeased that Boehner — admittedly stabbed in the back by microphone hogs in the Gang of Six and by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — so quickly discarded the only coherent plan which had a chance of enabling the country to avoid S&P’s otherwise promised downgrade.

S&P’s role was to review the post-law, post-squabble financial condition of the U.S. and to evaluate its financial viability. Even after “correcting” for an alleged $2 trillion assumption error (which wasn’t), S&P concluded that the nation’s public debt-to-GDP ratio, currently at about 68%, would hit 85% by 2021 using the CBO’s assumptions. The trouble is, those assumptions, which include no substantive interest-rate hikes and economic growth rates of 3% or more in all future years, are wildly optimistic, and S&P knows it — especially given who’s currently running the White House and the Senate. S&P could fairly conclude that if nothing further of a serious nature is done, we’ll be well above the 90% “Maxed Out America” threshold well before 2021. In fact, after it downgraded America’s debt from AAA to AA-plus on Friday, the agency warned that another downgrade might be necessary in the next six months to two years.

Now that I’ve laid out what happened, I’m trying to get my arms around the “logic” that Obama, Democrats, the unhinged left, and their media mouthpieces have unleashed, namely:

• Openly and unprofessionally whining about S&P’s decision.
• In a classic case of obviously orchestrated groupthink featuring David Axelrod, Howard Dean, John Kerry, Moveon.org, and certainly others, referring to S&P’s decision as “The Tea Party Downgrade.”

If given half a chance, the left may start calling the recent double-digit stock market drop “The Tea Party bear market.” Monday evening, Mike Ivey at Madison.com’s Cap Times may have previewed a part of this potential meme when he wrote: “Perhaps the only solace in this latest round of global financial meltdown is that Tea Partiers are losing money, too.”

Of course, the downgrade more than likely would not have happened if Tea Party activists had really gotten their way — which, except perhaps for avoiding tax increases, they mostly didn’t. But it could have been much worse. As Rick Santelli said on Monday after the market’s close: “If it wasn’t for the Tea Party, they’d have passed the debt ceiling thumbs-up, (and) we’d have been rated triple-B.”

You would think that such an obvious pack of lies from the left would have no chance of gaining traction. Think again: According to Rasmussen, they already have 29% of Americans believing that Tea Party members are “economic terrorists.”

This cannot stand. We know who started the fire, we know who fed and worsened it with their failed “solutions,” and we know who is utterly out of ideas. Incredibly, fewer Americans are working full-time now than were when the recession technically ended. Democrats and all too many RINO accomplices have had their way for 30 months, and all they can show for it is a frightening trail of misery.

Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said not long ago that her party owns the economy. They still do: lock, stock, and barrel. The Tea Party must focus its attention on limiting the damage during the next 17-1/2 months, educate-educate-educate the public, recruit solid candidates who can chase as many hard-leftists and RINO poseurs out of office as possible, and hope against hope-and-change that we really can survive until January 2013.

From Metro San Diego, California:

Judith Mack Went Into Cardiac Arrest At College Grove Walmart

POSTED: 7:28 pm PDT August 1, 2011
UPDATED: 9:20 pm PDT August 1, 2011

A Normal Heights woman is searching for a mysterious couple that saved her life.

Judith Mack, 51, was shopping at the Walmart in College Grove when she suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. Her heart stopped beating for 20 minutes.

An unknown couple saw Mack collapse and one of them began performing CPR to revive her. The other person called 911.

Mack was taken to the Sharp Grossmont Hospital, where doctors revived her. During the past week, Mack has been in and out of hospitals and had a defibrillator implanted in her chest.

Mack and her mother Lucille Jenkins are hoping they can meet Mack’s anonymous saviors.

“I just want to tell them thank you,” said Mack. “I can see another day.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

If we’re to believe Associated Press reporter Daniel Wagner, this morning’s report from the Department of Labor on unemployment claims revealing that initial claims during the week ended August 6 fell to 395,000, was “good news.” Why, according to Wagner, that drop, all by itself, it was “enough to catapult stocks,” pushing the Dow up by 423 points in Thursday’s trading.

Uh, not exactly, Daniel. First, though the decline in initial claims was in the right direction, it was only 5,000, or 1.25%, less than last week’s original number of 400,000 (naturally revised up to 402,000 this week), and an even tinier 3,000 fewer than the initial number two weeks ago. If (more like when, given the track record of previous weeks) it’s revised up by 3,000 or so, it will be even less impressive. Huge advances in the Dow do not arise from such tiny improvements.

At The Street.com, Chao Deng had a more measured take on today’s market results, but his attempted explanation didn’t make a lot of sense either:

Stocks soared Thursday, extending this week’s dizzying up-and-down action, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average retraced much of its recent decline with help from modest improvement in employment data and a strong quarterly report from Cisco.

Though AP’s Wagner didn’t identify Cisco in his report, that’s actually okay, because the markets had plenty of time to digest Cisco’s strong earnings result as well as the unemployment claims report before the opening bells rang. At 8:45 a.m., 15 minutes after the unemployment claims report’s release, Dow futures were down 48.

CNBC’s Bob Pisani identified three items influencing the markets’ good day which at least had some potential to make sense:

The stock market moved because there are some data points surfacing that things might be changing.

1) announcement of a Sarkozy-Merkel meeting next week reversed the downward trend prior to the open. The perception: they’re going to address the possibility of an EFSF bailout of every country.

“If Merkel comes out to support the EFSF, or a eurobond, then that’s all you need,” one trader told me. “She likely has enough to jam it thru Parliament.”

2) Rumors of European short selling ban surfaced, particularly in Italy. Hopefully this will turn out not to be true.

3) Insider buying, corporate buybacks jump. This was widely discussed on trading desks today. How do you know when you’re at a bottom? It’s hard to tell, but when insiders and corporations show signs of buying, that’s at least a good starting point.

Sorry, Daniel Wagner, I’m not buying what you’re selling on today’s marginal improvement in DOL’s unemployment claims report moving today’s markets — nor should any of your wire service’s readers, listeners, or viewers. Unfortunately, many will, because they don’t follow the news that closely, and subscribing outlets will mostly not have the time to determine that the info you provided is pap and not fact.

This shows once again how poorly we are served by the self-described Essential Global News Network.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

First, to be fair to Associated Press reporter Christopher Sherman, because there is no such reference in the 3:34 p.m. version of his report on Rick Perry’s immigration positions, the headline which follows does not appear to be of his doing.

But whoever at the wire service decided on the headline to use at Sherman’s piece definitely has a problem with anyone who questions the need for illegal-immgrant amnesty, is against the granting of in-state tuition for college students who are illegal immigrants, or supports robust border enforcement:

One supposes that cooler heads might prevail at the AP in due course. But in the meantime, a Google News search on the exact headline in quotes done shortly after 4 PM ET indicates that it has already appeared in 102 places.

Here are several paragraphs from Sherman’s report:

For all of his rock-solid conservative credentials, Texas Gov. Rick Perry may have an Achilles’ heel: immigration.

If Perry runs for president, as is widely expected, he will undoubtedly focus on Texas’ relatively healthy economy and its low taxes and his record in creating jobs in the 11 years he’s been governor. What he may have to explain on the stump is how illegal immigrants have contributed to that success, adding as much as $17.7 billion a year to the state gross product and enjoying such benefits as in-state tuition at public universities.

… “Gov. Perry is very eager to appear tough on illegal immigration, but upon closer inspection he’s part of the problem,” complained William Gheen, who runs the North Carolina-based political action committee Americans for Legal Immigration. The group intends to educate conservative groups about candidates’ positions on that issue.

… Texas remains welcoming to immigrants in ways some other states are not.

Illegal immigrants can get in-state tuition at Texas universities. Neither employers nor state agencies are required to run job applicants through a federal database to determine their legal status. Illegal immigrants have access to services for drug treatment, mental health and children with special health care needs.

The fact is, despite the pronouncements from Democrats in Washington, illegal immigration is deeply opposed by at least a significant pluralities of Democrats and moderates as well as a majority of conservatives. One small example which shows majorities across the board comes from from May of last year:

A strong majority of Americans support Arizona’s controversial new immigration law and would back similar laws in their own states, a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll found.

Sixty-one percent of Americans — and 64 percent of registered voters — said they favored the law in a survey of 1,016 adults conducted May 6-9.

Strikingly, nearly half of Democrats like the law, under which local law enforcement officers are tasked with verifying people’s immigration status if they suspect them of being in the country illegally. While the Democratic Party generally is regarded as more sympathetic to illegal immigrants’ plights, 46 percent of Democrats said they favored the law for Arizona and 49 percent said they’d favor the law’s passage in their own states.

More than 8 in 10 Republicans and 54 percent of independents favor the law.

Given that so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” aka amnesty was rejected by the Senate in 2007 after a wave of public pressure, maybe the AP’s headline writer delusionally believes that the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body is also dominated by the far right. Zheesh.

I wonder how many times the term “far left” has ever appeared in an Associated Press headline, at least in the past decade?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

About the only “good” thing you can say about the Associated Press’s coverage of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella is that they have been consistent. That is, the wire service, led by reporter Michael Rubinkam, up to and including today, has consistently and disgracefully failed to tag the infamous “Kids for Cash” jurist and his judicial colleague in crime Michael Conahan as a Democrat.

The consistent failure is all the more unforgivable because, as shown here, one the earliest AP reports on the topic clearly stated that “Both are Democrats.” Shortly thereafter, the sentence disappeared. Since then, to my knowledge (shown here and here), in the 2-1/2 years since the story first broke, no AP report on what the it has described as “one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record” has tagged either judge as a Democrat.

What follows are excerpts from Rubinkam’s report on Ciavarella’s sentencing. Those who are unfamiliar with the case should brace themselves for the scope of the cruelty inflicted on juvenile first-time and light offenders:

Pa. judge gets 28 years in ‘kids for cash’ case

A longtime northeastern Pennsylvania judge was ordered to spend nearly three decades in prison for his role in a massive juvenile justice bribery scandal that prompted the state’s high court to toss thousands of convictions.

Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced Thursday to 28 years in federal prison for taking $1 million in bribes from the builder of a pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as “kids for cash.”

… In the wake of the scandal, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed about 4,000 convictions issued by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008, saying he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.

Ciavarella, 61, was tried and convicted of racketeering charges earlier this year. His attorneys had asked for a “reasonable” sentence in court papers, saying, in effect, that he’d already been punished enough.

“The media attention to this matter has exceeded coverage given to many and almost all capital murders, and despite protestation, he will forever be unjustly branded as the ‘Kids for Cash’ judge,” their sentencing memo said.

… Ciavarella, speaking before the sentence was handed down, apologized to the community and to those juveniles that appeared before him in his court.

“I blame no one but myself for what happened,” he said, and then denied he had ever incarcerated any juveniles in exchange for money.

… Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella and a second judge, Michael Conahan, of taking more than $2 million in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centers and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities’ co-owner.

Ciavarella, known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom demeanor, filled the beds of the private lockups with children as young as 10, many of them first-time offenders convicted of petty theft and other minor crimes.

Short of doing things to him that would themselves be illegal and therefore out of bounds, I don’t see how this man or his colleague can ever be “punished enough.”

That the AP has been “successful” in its party-ID coverup is pretty clear. An August 10-11 Google News search done at 12:40 PM ET today on Ciavarella’s last name (sorted by date with duplicates) returned 590 items (the first page says it’s 615, but it’s really 590. The number will likely grow throughout the next couple days, as the sentence story is only about 2 hours old. An identically designed search done at the same time on “Ciavarella Democrat” (not in quotes) came back empty.

Don’t try to tell me the judicial pair’s party affiliation is irrelevant. There’s little doubt that a pair of Republican judges engaged in such a pervasive, corrupt, and cruel conspiracy would have been properly tagged as GOP members all along. And besides, as noted earlier, AP did the right thing in its earliest report(s), and then stopped. The burden of proof is on AP, especially in light of its clear policy on party identification which would dictate that it should have been happening all along, as to why it didn’t. “Because we could” is not an answer.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From the Department of Labor:

In the week ending August 6, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 395,000, a decrease of 7,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 402,000. The 4-week moving average was 405,000, a decrease of 3,250 from the previous week’s revised average of 408,250.

… The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 351,370 in the week ending August 6, an increase of 10,267 from the previous week. There were 425,471 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

If it holds after revisions (based on the track record, it probably will), this will be the first week to come in under 400,000 since the week ended April 2:

Not impressive, but at least a tiny improvement.

_______________________________________

UPDATE: My Business Insider email predicted 405K.

From Long Beach, Washington:

12-year-old boy alive and recovering after drowning in ocean

Posted: Tuesday, August 9, 2011 4:24 pm | Updated: 10:50 am, Wed Aug 10, 2011.

In what some describe as a flat-out miracle, a 12-year-old boy who drowned in the surf off Cranberry beach approach Friday began speaking in a Portland hospital Monday, amazing his doctors.

Dale Ostrander was at the beach enjoying a picturesque day trip with the Bethel Baptist Church group from Spanaway. The surf was violently agitated and chaos was about to erupt as Dale and another boy got into deadly danger. They are alive today thanks to instantaneous heroism by a visiting girl, her dad and surf-rescue volunteers.

“They just went for a day and were just getting in ankle- and knee-deep … it wasn’t a swimming activity — but he got sucked in,” said Denise Minge, daughter-in-law of Bethel Baptist Pastor Terry Minge.

Less than an hour later, as nearly two dozen other church members prayed, cried and hugged one another on the beach, Dale was in a speeding ambulance being rushed to Ocean Beach Hospital. He wasn’t breathing, had no pulse and was unresponsive for as much as 20 to 30 minutes. He was, by many definitions, dead.

Kissels to the rescue
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