The public learned on September 3 from William McQuillen at Bloomberg (and possibly earlier elsewhere) that now-bankrupt Soyndra’s private investors restructured the company’s finances in January by lending the company “$75 million.” As a condition of doing so, they convinced the government to give the new loan senior status over all other creditors. Now taxpayers face a likely loss of hundreds of millions in Department of Energy loans, perhaps over $500 million.

On September 7, Peg Brickley at the Wall Street Journal clarified that the amount involved was $69 million, and identified the names of the lending entities involved (HT to American Thinker for both stories).

But if you haven’t stayed with or are unfamiliar with the story and read the Associated Press report this evening by Matthew Daly and Jack Gillum, you would think that the wire service did all of the dirty work to learn these things (credit-hogging language in bold):

Obama admin reworked Solyndra loan to favor donor

The Obama administration restructured a half-billion dollar federal loan to a troubled solar energy company in such a way that private investors – including a fundraiser for President Barack Obama – moved ahead of taxpayers for repayment in case of a default, government records show.

Administration officials defended the loan restructuring, saying that without an infusion of cash earlier this year, solar panel maker Solyndra Inc. would likely have faced immediate bankruptcy, putting more than 1,000 people out of work.

Even with the federal help, Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month and laid off its 1,100 employees.

… the implosion of the company and revelations that the administration hurried Office of Management and Budget officials to finish their review of the loan in time for the September 2009 groundbreaking has become an embarrassment for Obama as he sells his new job-creation program around the country.

An Associated Press review of regulatory filings shows that Solyndra was hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars for years before the Obama administration signed off on the original $535 million loan guarantee in September 2009. The company eventually got $528 million.

… Under terms of the February loan restructuring, two private investors – Argonaut Ventures I LLC and Madrone Partners LP – stand to be repaid before the U.S. government if the solar company is liquidated. The two firms gave the company a total of $69 million in emergency loans. The loans are the only portion of their investments that have repayment priority above the U.S. government.

… The AP review also found that officials at Solyndra had been seeking a second round of loans from the Energy Department to expand the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. The request for a second loan was denied.

The news of the company’s second-round attempt was carried at L.A Observed on September 15 (HT Flopping Aces). Daly and Gillum did the Obama administration a huge undeserved favor by failing to tell readers that Solyndra wanted another $469 million (that’s not a typo) in Round 2 — and yes, that is a mark against Team Obama, because the company wouldn’t have bothered to apply if it didn’t think it had a chance of getting approved.

Readers should also take issue with the AP pair’s characterization of the Solyndra saga as an administration “embarrassment.” Sorry folks; given the campaign contributions, White House visits, and lobbying involved, this has all the characteristics of a sc-, sc-, sc- … scandal.

Nowhere in the AP report does anyone who has done the digging during the past two weeks while the Essential Global News Network hoped the story would go away get any credit.

Here is what the AP’s “Statement of News Values and Principles” says about giving credit:

An AP staffer who reports and writes a story must use original content, language and phrasing. We do not plagiarize, meaning that we do not take the work of others and pass it off as our own.

Also, the AP often has the right to use material from its members and subscribers; we sometimes take the work of newspapers, broadcasters and other outlets, rewrite it and transmit it without credit.

They’ll argue that they’re in a gray area, but when you’re nine days to two weeks behind everybody else, I would suggest that going to the regulatory files others have already combed through and making it appear as if you’re the first to have discovered what you’re reporting — as indicated in the bolded phrases and statements in the excerpt above — deliberately misleads readers, listeners and viewers of AP content into believing that the wire service did the heavy lifting. Shame on Daly, Gillum, and AP for failing to give any credit where credit is due, thereby in my view perpetrating a clear deception.

Part 2 (found here) looks at the AP report’s deceiving description of campaign contributions by Solyndra’s private investors.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

First the good news, from Ohio’s perspective: The government’s August jobs report by state shows that, on a seasonally adjusted basis, 3,800 more people were employed in the Buckeye State in July than were estimated to be working a month ago, while a visit to the BLS database tells us that 22,200 total seasonally adjusted jobs were added in June and July combined.

Now the not-so-good news: Establishment Survey-based job losses in August were a seasonally adjusted 700. Of course, the nationwide number was (ØMG!) zero, so the result isn’t a total surprise. The not seasonally adjusted figures, both overall (-1,100) and private (+2,300), were unimpressive compared to most years during the prior decade. Additionally, the Household Survey-based unemployment rate edged up to 9.1% from last month’s 9.0%, and now matches the national average. In August, the workforce declined, and the number of unemployed went up.

Still, Ohio was a middle-of-pack performer in August and not a laggard, which actually caused its standing in year-to-date job additions as a percentage of the workforce to improve to #6 from #9 in July:

It’s nice to see that Ohio and Michigan are in a contest where both sides are winning. Let’s hope it continues, and that for Ohio August was just a hiccough (or that August gets revised upward as July did).

Addendum to last night’s Kelo movie item: The New London Day, the home newspaper of the Connecticut town which gave us the Kelo ruling, was so happy about the Lifetime movie that is being made that it put up an item about it — at midnight on Sunday, September 11.

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At Time.com (“More Young Adults Are Poor, Live With Their Parents”; HT Instapundit): “In the spring of 2011, 5.9 million young adults aged 25 to 34 lived with their parents, up from 4.7 million before the recession. And these adult kids still at mom and dad’s make very little money: Over 45% have incomes that’d put them below the poverty threshold.”

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From a Thursday evening Investor’s Business Daily editorial (“Living Miserably”), on the “Misery Index,” the sum of the rates of inflation and unemployment: “(1) it’s higher than any time in the past 28 years, (2) it’s 36% higher than the post-World War II average of 9.5 and (3) there have been only nine years in the past 63 when the annual Misery Index topped 12.9 — all in the inflationary 1970s.” That 12.9 consists of 9.1% unemployment plus 3.8% inflation.

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So Michelle Obama has a major restaurant chain “voluntarily” kowtowing — at least for the cameras — to her “request” for healthier menus and portion sizes. The same chain currently is offering an “Never Ending Pasta Bowl” at its Olive Garden locations for $8.95. How’s that for a “portion size”?

On the one hand, I object to the authoritarian aroma of Ms. Obama’s effort. She knows as much as anyone that when the government and a business sit across the table from each other, even in a “friendly” discussion, the relationship is not equal. On the other hand, the chain’s ten-year promises give me the impression that management is really saying “Let’s humor her until she’s gone.”

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At Investment News: “Former LPL adviser: I was fired for running gun ad.”

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Another clear-cut example of tyranny (“arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority”) in New Hampshire: “Obama Forces New Hampshire to Fund Planned Parenthood.”

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Mona Charen at Townhall (“Dinner with Ahmadinejad”; paragraphs reordered from original):

… a group of students who are members of the Columbia International Relations Council and Association has been invited to attend a private dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he travels to New York for the United Nations General Assembly meeting next week. A student spokesman for the group, when asked whether the invitation had provoked controversy within CIRCA, seemed surprised by the question. “Everyone was really enthusiastic,” said Tim Chan. “They’re thrilled to have this opportunity.”

Ahmadinejad represents everything that campus liberals profess to hate. In order of importance, those things would be: 1) persecuting homosexuals; 2) cruel and abusive treatment of women; 3) brutal treatment of minorities; 4) shooting opponents of the regime in the streets; 5) restricting free speech; 6) building nuclear weapons; and 7) sponsoring terror worldwide.

Are leading American universities producing moral illiterates?

Yes.

From Washington:

Sep 14, 2011 / 05:10 pm

Catholic bishops and lay people gathered Sept. 14 in Washington, D.C. to remember the life of Archbishop Pietro Sambi, a man who was described as having Christ’s cross “engraved upon his heart.”

The memorial Mass for Pope Benedict XVI’s representative to the U.S. was held at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, was the principal celebrant of the Mass. He was joined by six cardinals and more than 60 bishops from across the country, in addition to several dozen priests.

The noon Mass, which was open to the public, was also attended by several diplomats and the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden.

In his homily, Archbishop Dolan noted that the Mass was being held on the Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross.

He said that Archbishop Sambi “knew the mystery of the cross” through his service to the Church.

“The cross of Christ, triumphant over Satan, sin and death, was engraved upon his heart,” the New York archbishop said.

Speaking on behalf of his fellow American bishops, Archbishop Dolan said that he will never forget the nuncio’s “warm, personable manner” and the “tender way in which he unfailingly responded to our own needs.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

This was going to be a quick post about the good news, as announced by the Castle Coalition in a Tuesday press release after being teased a few days earlier by “Little Pink House” author Jeff Benedict, that a Lifetime Channel movie is going to be made about the Kelo vs. New London eminent domain drama.

Then along came “culture blogger” Alyssa Rosenberg over at the hard-left ThinkProgress.

In a narrow sense, this Connecticut standoff culminated in a disgraceful 2005 Supreme Court ruling that governments can use their powers of eminent domain to take property from citizens for a “public purpose,” which includes conveying it to someone else for private redevelopment, instead of for a “public use” (roads, bridges, government buildings, etc.), which is the clear meaning of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

In a much broader sense, of course, the case has never really ended, because the “carefully formulated … economic development plan” the Court’s majority thought it recognized never materialized, and because the land upon which perfectly good homes once stood remains a vacant, media-ignored eyesore more than six years after the decision. As I noted earlier this month, New London’s Fort Trumbull area was recently used as a collection point for storm debris from Hurricane Irene-related winds and rain.

Ms. Rosenberg at ThinkProgress couldn’t resist taking a shot at the celebrity who is taking on the project not only as its lead actress but also, apparently unbeknownst to her (or at least unsaid in her post), as its executive producer, and at the channel on which the movie will appear. In the process, she also displayed complete ignorance of what the Kelo case was all about while predictably posing as a know-it-all (internal link is in original; bolds are mine throughout):

Brooke Shields Goes Anti-Eminent Domain For Lifetime

I’d had the vague sense that Brooke Shields’ career wasn’t in the best place (as Entourage tells me, if she’s involved in a project with Johnny Drama, that’s not a good sign), but I’m sort of depressed, both because of what it means for her talent and what it means for her politics, that she’s starring in an anti-eminent domain movie on Lifetime about the Kelo case. Speaking out about postpartum depression and the idea that seeking treatment for it isn’t shameful is really useful and important. Sparking fears that the government’s going to take your property is a lot less useful.

Is it even worth pointing out to Ms. Rosenberg that those of us who believe the Constitution’s original intent should be followed are not “anti-eminent domain,” but that we are instead against the use of eminent domain to force people to give up their property when a true “public use” is not involved? Oh well, I guess I just did.

Over at Forbes, E.D. Kain hit back (italics are in original):

Now, Lifetime movies are probably not a good sign for any actor’s career, but I think it’s great that a movie is being made about Kelo. Remember, this case was not just about the government taking property to expand much-needed infrastructure, or confiscating condemned, dilapidated property in order to fix it up or turn it into a library. This was about government allowing one private developer to confiscate land from another private party. The government wasn’t taking property for public use (a power granted in the Constitution) but for private development, in what some called a reverse Robin Hood move – robbing from the poor to give to the rich.

Progressives should be deeply bothered by a case like this, and should celebrate the fact that at least a television movie is being made about Kelo. Government should not be in the business of cronyism and theft, and liberals should be up in arms when government enriches private corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens.

With all due respect to Mr. Kain, I don’t believe he fully grasps the strictly opportunistic, utilitarian viewpoint of so-called “progressives,” or their frequent ignorance of what’s really at issue in eminent domain disputes. In separate updates, Ms. Rosenberg demonstrated that viewpoint, as well as her ignorance:

Update: Apparently, this post has given people the impression that I think the Kelo ruling was good. I don’t think it’s good that corporations can manipulate eminent domain for their own benefit. But I don’t think a Lifetime movie is going to differentiate between Kelo and eminent domain as it ought to function. Instead, I think it is likely to take a conservative, totally anti-eminent domain tack that will not further the conversation. I should have made the connection between those two points stronger.

Update: So, looks like this post has become a thing! Look, the original, which appears below, was not well-written or well thought-out, and I regret writing it. That said, I don’t think it’s exceptionally controversial to say that a company with a record of making deeply cheesy and unsubtle movies is perhaps not well-positioned to make a movie about an issue where the issue isn’t keep or ban but reform.

Kelo wasn’t about “corporations” manipulating eminent domain; it’s about governments manipulating eminent domain. It isn’t about “ban or reform”; it’s about banning the practice only when a “public use” under the Fifth Amendment is not involved. As to “how it ought to function,” that’s simple: If the government wants the property for something that doesn’t qualify as a “public use,” it should not be able to compel the property owner to sell — at any price. Attempting to pierce Ms. Rosenberg’s cliched incoherence, it appears that what she wants is really smart people with “the public interest” at heart to be able to use eminent domain when it involves causes she likes, and to prohibit the practice when it doesn’t. For her, the Constitution doesn’t even seem to be in the picture. Under such a purely political arrangement, fears that “the government’s going to take your property” aren’t paranoid. They’re legitimate; there’s nothing to stop them if your property happens to be in the way of (often urban, often Democrat-dominated) governments’ urban-renewal pipe dreams.

As to Ms. Rosenberg’s (and unfortunately, even Mr. Kain’s) cheap shots, let’s start with where the movie will appear. Lifetime’s ranking as the #16 cable network in 2010 isn’t stellar. But to consider Ms. Shields’s involvement as some kind of indication that she is in the twilight of her career verges on the ridiculous. Her latest career move — starring as Morticia in the Broadway musical “The Addams Family” – has received strong reviews, and has her booked until the end of the year. “Her talent” appears to be just fine, Ms. Rosenberg.

The fact that Ms. Shields is taking on the executive producer’s role in addition to starring as Susette Kelo would seem to indicate that this is a project she believes in, i.e., a movie she feels needs to be made regardless of the size of the dollar signs involved. Alyssa Rosenberg clearly has a problem with what Ms. Shields is doing because of what it says about “her politics.” I’ll bet that she never once criticized actresses like Reese Witherspoon or Meryl Streep when they starred in the anti-Bush “Rendition,” even though it failed to break even on production costs alone (i.e., marketing and distribution sent it deep into the red) and nobody ever thought it would make money. I’ll also bet that we never heard a peep from her when Brian DePalma dumped an estimated $5 million into “Redacted,” which grossed less than $800,000 worldwide. (I searched for evidence of either and found none. Ms. Rosenberg is free to let me know if I’m wrong.)

In the eyes of “progressives,” when Streep, Witherspoon, DePalma, and others dove into doomed-from-the-start antiwar, anti-Bush projects, they were dedicated idealists (I’ll leave the discussions about where their respective careers are going to others). But when Brooke Shields wants to make a film about how an authoritarian government which clearly didn’t know what it was doing was able to eject people from their homes, and about how those who are supposed to make sure our Constitution is followed utterly failed to carry out their constitutional duty to protect citizens against unlawful state encroachment, well, she’s an over-the-hill actress who’s engaging in an activity that’s “a lot less useful.” The double standard could hardly be more obvious.

I look forward to seeing the product of the efforts of Ms. Shields and others involved, and hope that it serves to get around the near-total establishment press blackout on post-Kelo developments during the past six years.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The Obama administration and the Obama campaign aren’t the only ones who should be embarrassed by the AttackWatch.com snitch site Obama for America recently created. As demonstrated last night in a series of Associated Press searches (not in quotes) which resulted in nothing relevant and still don’t (here on “attackwatch.com”; here on “Attack Watch”; here on “Obama campaign”; and here on “Obama for America”), the establishment press has mostly ignored Attack Watch and its authoritarian aroma.

When not ignoring it, the press has mischaracterized those who are ridiculing it. A particularly embarrassing case in point occurred yesterday at the Washington Post’s “Blogpost” blog. After posting an item by Elizabeth Flock headlined “Attack Watch, new Obama campaign site to ‘fight smears,’ becomes laughing stock of the Internet,” the Post replaced the headline’s last two words with “conservatives” — quite inaccurately, it turns out.

Evidence that “the Internet” was used in the original headline includes the fact that the word is still in the post’s URL, or web address:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/attack-watch-new-obama-campaign-site-to-fight-smears-becomes-laughing-stock-of-the-internet/2011/09/14/gIQAspHDSK_blog.html

At most blogs, a post’s URL is determined when the writer clicks on the “publish” button. At that point, the blog program creates a hyphenated string containing the key words in the post’s headline. Unless WaPo’s software is unique (highly doubtful), “Internet” was in the original headline.

Additionally, a Google Web search on the last five words of the “Internet” version of the headline returns a couple of items posted by people who saw and noted it in its original form at The Augur’s Well blog and at a tweet by LaborUnionReport.

Flock’s post shows that a more generalized description of critics was more appropriate:

As the 2012 presidential campaign heats up, President Obama’s campaign team has set up a new Web site, AttackWatch.com, to challenge negative statements about the president made by Republican presidential candidates and conservatives.

Obama for America national field director Jeremy Bird told ABC News that the site’s goal is to offer “resources to fight back” against attacks. Mostly, that means fact checking statements from the likes of GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Perry and conservative commentator Glenn Beck and offering evidence to the contrary. The site is designed in bold red and black colors, and uses statements like “support the truth” and “fight the smears.”

The response to the site has been less than stellar.

… Tommy Christopher of Mediaite noted sarcastically of the site, “Great. Sounds like a terrific content-generating resource for right-wing bloggers, too. Everybody wins!”

While the initiative is reminiscent of a similar online effort launched during the 2008 campaign, called Fight the Smears, the intimidating design and language of the new site seems to be what’s causing a bigger ruckus.

Fight the Smears looked and felt far less scary …

Last time I checked, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher was not anywhere near conservative. In fact, Christopher has come in for a bit of media bias-related criticism at NewsBusters.

As for the old “Fight the Smears” being “less scary,” that has less to do with the site having been designed differently than the fact that its beneficiary was a presidential contender, not the President of the United States. Though the old site betrayed the candidate’s authoritarian tendencies, which was scary in a very real sense, at least the candidate didn’t have the full scope of the federal government’s resources at his disposal. Now he does — and yes, humor and ridicule aside, the fact that he’s allowing his campaign to flaunt its intimidation, albeit ineptly, is indeed scarier.

It seems that the Post’s headline writers simply couldn’t stand the idea that Obama’s snitch has been attacked from all sides; so it wanted to pretend that it was only coming from conservatives. It’s not.

One of the commenters at the WaPo blog post had an even stronger point about the paper’s degree of interest in the story:

Pravda on the Potomac buries this story on a blog. If a Republican pulled this fascist sheet it would be front page news for months.

Exactly.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE, Sept. 16: Tommy Christopher contacted NewsBusters (effort appreciated), noting the following –

… the original version of the WaPo article did not contain that quote from me, it only sourced conservatives. The quote from my piece was added after the headline change. Second, while I was happy to get the link, that quote was not representative of my piece, which was a balanced take on the site’s merits, and was written before I’d seen any of the reactions to it.

Okay, so the WaPo item was conservatives-only when the title said “Internet,” and then had a non-conservative “balanced take” reaction when the title was changed to make the story about “conservatives.” “Gang that couldn’t shoot straight” comes to mind.

Additionally, non-conservative, usually plays-it-straight Jake Tapper has weighed in with “The Problem with the Obama Campaign’s ‘AttackWatch’ Website.”

From the Department of Labor — Ouch:

SEASONALLY ADJUSTED DATA

In the week ending September 10, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 428,000, an increase of 11,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 417,000. The 4-week moving average was 419,500, an increase of 4,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 415,500. …

UNADJUSTED DATA

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 325,999 in the week ending September 10, a decrease of 22,495 from the previous week. There were 341,791 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

More shortly.

UPDATE: Grim –

UPDATE 2: Expectations and media reax roundup –

• Business Insider’s email — 412K
• Bloomberg — 411K, with an “unexpectedly” sighting.
• Reuters — 410K, with an “unexpectedly” sighting, and a “surprise” headline (“Jobless claims post surprise increase last week”)
• AP’s reax — “It’s a sign that the job market remains depressed.” Ya don’t say?

But taxing “the rich” will solve all of this. (/sarc).

UPDATE 3: Blog reax –

• Ed Morrissey at Hot Air: ” I’d guess that the economy may have slowed even further in Q3 than Q2, and since we’re at 1% GDP growth in Q2, that’s bad news for the US and the Obama administration.”
• Zero Hedge (analyst’s reax to unemployment claims and other weak data coming out today): “We got a lot of data that cannot be spun in any way other than we are continuing to see weakness, we are continuing to see a complete dearth of growth and frankly, it’s not a surprise.”

It’s here.

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

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Left on the cutting-room floor: On the fraud front, the following Dayton Daily News excerpt expands on the point made in the column about the widespread “loss” of food stamp cards, except that the headline doesn’t really require a question mark –

Is Ohio replacing food stamp cards being sold or traded for drugs?
More than 200,000 electronic food stamps annually replaced by Ohio

In the last two years, nearly 51,000 electronic food stamp cards were reported stolen or lost in the Miami Valley area, reflecting a larger statewide trend of Ohio annually replacing more than 200,000 cards to recipients.

Authorities said the extent of food stamp abuse and the financial impact in Ohio is unknown because the activity often goes undetected. But they fear the behavior is widespread, and say that many cards are being trafficked or misused, resulting in the waste of taxpayer dollars.

One of the 26,224 electronic food stamp cards reported lost or stolen in the Miami Valley area last year belonged to Timothy Slusher’s sister. Slusher, 31, of Dayton, told the Dayton Daily News he illegally sold his sister’s Electronic Benefit Transfer card, or food stamp card, to a small store in exchange for $120 in cash — a common method used to defraud the assistance program.

The state replaced 485,880 food stamp cards that were reported stolen or lost in 2009 and 2010, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Of these, about 50,950 belonged to residents in Butler, Greene, Miami, Montgomery and Warren counties.

Ohio had 2.07 million active food stamp accounts in the last two years, including 211,275 in the five-county region. This translates into the state replacing one-quarter of EBT cards given to recipients.

… From January to April of this year, Ohio paid out about $986 million in food stamp reimbursements to grocery stores and other businesses that sell food products, according to the state. (Note: That’s an annual rate of just under $3 billion per year. — Ed.) On average, about 113,300 residents in Butler, Greene, Miami, Montgomery and Warren counties received food stamp assistance each month in 2010.

That there is widespread fraud is drop-dead obvious. Do people using other forms of plastic (credit cards, debit cards, gift cards) lose 25% of such cards in any given year? Of course not. The guess here is that it’s less than 5%. So it would appear that over 20% of Food Stamp cards are being used for transactions not involving food. Multiply that against Ohio’s annual food stamp expenditure of almost $3 billion, and that’s $600 million or more lost to fraud — even before looking at people receiving food stamps who really shouldn’t be because the program’s eligibility requirements have become too loose, allowing those with adequate resources to get through bouts of unemployment to qualify.

From St. Petersburg, Florida:

Sept. 14, 2011

Terri Schiavo’s Life & Hope Network, a foundation created by her parents and siblings following her death by starvation in 2005, announced today that country music star Collin Raye will serve as their national spokesperson.

“I am truly honored and humbled to be representing those who have no voice and appreciate the opportunity to help families and loved ones who are in similar situations like those of Terri Schiavo,” said Raye.

Collin Raye charted 16 #1 hits through the 1990′s and his career includes 24 top ten hits. Raye has sold over eight million albums and has been nominated five times as country music’s Male Vocalist of the Year. In 2001, he was presented with the Humanitarian of the Year award by country music legend Clint Black.

Bobby Schindler, the executive co-director of the Life & Hope Network and brother of Terri Schiavo is excited to have Collin Raye as their national spokesperson: “With Collin’s help, we hope to reach many more families in need of our network of attorneys and doctors who are dedicated to protecting the rights of vulnerable, disabled and elderly persons who are at risk of being denied the medical care that they deserve.”

Terri Schiavo was dehydrated and starved to death after her husband won the right in court to remove her feeding tube. In March of 2005, almost 14 days after the tube was removed and all legal options to save her were exhausted by her family, Terri passed away. Since the inception of the Life & Hope Network, over 1,000 families have contacted the group to ask for assistance and the group has brought their message to nine countries, 42 states and 30 universities.

“There has been a growing number of families faced with the same situations as Terri’s family in recent years and the number is sure to continue to grow as the passage of Obamacare takes away medical decision from families and doctors and put them into the hands of bureaucrats,” said Raye.

“This is about the future of what’s going on in this country and how we can help the disabled, the physically and cognitively impaired, and the elderly. Every life is precious,” Raye added.

Raye shares his own, personal family experience with end of life issues in the heartbreaking death of his 10-year-old granddaughter, who died last year as a result of an undiagnosed neurological condition.

“As Terri said when she was healthy, where there’s life there’s hope. In my granddaughter’s illness we were blessed to have the support and care of wonderful doctors and healthcare workers. It is my hope to be a voice for those who are suffering and need help obtaining the proper care and medical attention that every one of us deserves regardless of age, creed, color, or cognitive ability,” Raye said.

Terri’s Life & Hope Network has launched a nationwide effort to establish a “Safe Haven” network where hospitals and nursing homes pledge to never withhold medical care, food, or water from any patient. …

Go here for the rest of the announcement.

Darlene Superville’s Associated Press report earlier this evening on President Obama’s visit to North Carolina (“Obama touts jobs bill benefits for small business”) had an interesting final paragraph.

Concerning Obama’s openness to compromise on his “jobs plan” (otherwise known as “spend now, pay for with taxes later”), she wrote: “President Obama has made clear he’d sign a portion of the legislation if that’s all Congress could agree on, although he’s said he would continue to fight to pass the whole thing.”

Someone forgot to tell that to David Axelrod this morning, as Meghashyam Mali at the Hill reported (video is at link):

Axelrod: ‘We’re not in a negotiation’ on Obama $447B jobs package

Obama’s top political adviser David Axelrod said Tuesday that the administration was unwilling to break up the president’s $447 billion jobs plan if Republicans were only receptive to passing certain elements.

“We’re not in a negotiation to break up the package. It’s not an à la carte menu. It’s a strategy to get this country moving,” Axelrod said Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“The president has a package; the package works together. We need to do many things to get this economy moving,” Axelrod said.

Oh wait, I get it.

Superville was reporting on President Obama, not Campaign Obama.

President Obama is open to compromise, while Campaign Obama, represented by campaign bigwig Axelrod, isn’t.

So Superville can totally ignore what Axelrod said because she was only covering President Obama. Campaign Obama is a totally different and separate thing.

She (and the rest of AP, as shown in the following searches, all not in quotes, at the wire service’s main site which failed to find anything relevant: here on “attackwatch.com”; here on “Attack Watch”; here on “Obama campaign”; and here on “Obama for America”) can also totally ignore the odious Attackwatch.com site, where Obama supporters are supposed to go to inform on their fellow citizens who are supposedly twisting the facts and lying about Obama’s record.

Rush’s thoughts today on attackwatch.com were succinctly sarcastic:

Now you’ve got the regime announcing yesterday this thing called Attack Watch. Obama has now…? The regime has a website? This is straight out of the… I saw a funny tweet. Some babe calls herself Virginia Gal has a tweet on this new Attack Watch website, the White House, “Are we gonna be able to read this in the original German?” …

…Now, this Attack Watch thing (sigh), they’re very proud of this. They’re very excited. They’ve got this new tattletale site. And imagine, if it only had gone online sooner, then Obama would have won back Weiner’s seat! Yeah. Nobody was available to stop all the false attacks on the regime, like the “lies” about 9.1% unemployment, Depression era unemployment for blacks and young people, Obama’s tax increases during a recession. All those lies that we’ve been telling! His attempt to lessen the charitable donations deduction.

The lies about Fast and Furious, the attempt to undermine the Second Amendment in this country, the lies about Solyndra, the record levels of poverty and food stamp distribution, the home mortgage crisis. All those lies that have been told about Obama, if only Attack Watch had been up, all of those lies could have been stopped.

At some point, someone ought to break it to Darlene Superville and the AP that Campaign Obama and President Obama are really the same person — and that if they contradict each other, or if either one engages in authoritarian behavior, it’s news.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Robert Roll, a sophomore majoring in Finance at Ohio Northern University, wrote this column.

I will try to remember to keep this at the top for most of the rest of the day. — Tom

____________________________________________

This past Sunday the nation remembered the 10th anniversary of 9/11. While the entire country took the time to remember the events of that horrific day, I believe that this day has more significance to us, the members of the generation that have lived a majority of their lives in the post-9/11 world. It was our generation whose childhood innocence was shattered on that fateful day ten years ago.

I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that America had been attacked. I was in the fourth grade and we were on our way back from gym class. When we got back to the classroom, our teacher was watching the live coverage of the first attack on the World Trade Center. As soon as we had sat down, she got up and was about to turn the TV off so that she could begin teaching again. That is when my whole world changed. The teacher was about halfway to the TV when the second plane crashed into the South Tower. Like so many others did that day, we watched the attack happen in real time. I cannot help but think about how, in such a short amount of time, I went from being an innocent fourth grader playing dodge ball in the gym of an elementary school, to watching an act of indescribable evil happen right in front of my eyes. I can imagine that many of you had similar experiences. The moment that we watched the second plane hit, our world was turned upside down. We went from thinking that the most evil person in the world was Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants, to realizing that there were people who would actually fly commercial jet liners into buildings, just to kill Americans. Our innocence was taken from us by the attacks of 9/11.

In remembering how I felt at the moment, I cannot help but think of how the first responders must have felt. There were probably even more frightened than I was; they were there, watching this event in person. But somehow, they were able to overcome the fear that would have paralyzed lesser men. They picked up their equipment and ran into the burning buildings. They ran into the fire. They did it for one simple reason: it was their job. Stories of heroism abound from that day. Firefighter Oreo Palmer arrived on the scene, shed is heavy equipment and sprinted up to the plane’s impact point on the South Tower. As he radioed down for others to follow him up, the South Tower collapsed upon him. Another hero of that day was a firefighter whose name is still unknown. As survivors of the North Tower would later relate, this firefighter carried the injured from the smoke-filled lobby of the North Tower to safety, turned around and disappeared into the smoke to save more lives. This unnamed hero kept carrying others to safety until the tower collapsed on top of him.

Any discussion of the heroism of that fateful day would be incomplete without discussing the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93. It was on this plane that America’s retaliation against evil began. The passengers of Flight 93 stormed the cockpit and fought the hijackers for control of the plane. This struggle ended when the airliner, destined to destroy either the Capitol building or the White House, crashed into a field just outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

While the whole story of the bravery of Flight 93 would not be known for several days, the rest of the nation followed their example of unity and determination. That night, on the steps of the capitol, members of a divided congress held hands and sang “God Bless America” together. In the days that followed, every street in the United States was adorned with American Flags. Firehouses all over the country become impromptu shires to the victims of the attack. The evil men who attacked this country had hoped America would be too weak to recover from this sort of attack; they could not have been more wrong. The greatness of American lies in her people and their ability to come together in times of crisis.

My life changed that day, as did the lives of all Americans. As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 fades into the background, let us never cease to be inspired by the countless examples of heroism that day. Let us never forget that there is true evil in this world and, if given the chance, it will kill more innocent people. Finally, let us never forget the innocent lives that were ended at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvnia. May they rest in peace and may God continue to bless America.

Last night at 11:31 p.m., as shown here at the Columbus Dispatch, the Associated Press’s Beth Fouhy was treating the special congressional electoral contest in NY-09 as if Democrat David Weprin would likely fend off the challenge from Republican Bob Turner.

The 11:31 p.m. time stamp appears to be accurate, since only about a half-hour earlier, at 10:56 p.m., Fouhy put up a brief item at an AP-hosted site about how the ballot counting was proceeding slowly.

Twenty-six minutes later, at 11:57 p.m., as seen in this tweet, foolish Fouhy called the race for Turner.

Here are the first few comedic paragraphs from Fouhy’s 11:31 p.m. dispatch. Note how it is written from Weprin’s point of view as the presumptive front-runner, how Fouhy waits until the second paragraph to note the lastest results, and how in the third paragraph treats Turner’s (not mentioned until the 16th paragraph) six-point poll lead as “slight”:

Democrat David Weprin faced an unusually tight race against Republican Bob Turner in a special election Tuesday in New York’s heavily Democratic 9th Congressional District, where voters unhappy with President Barack Obama could elect a Republican for the first time.

The contest to replace disgraced Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, who resigned in a sexting scandal, had become too close to call, with public opinion polling showing a slight edge for Turner, a retired media executive with no previous political experience.

Polls closed at 9 p.m., and results trickled in slowly. With more than 30 percent of precincts reporting late Tuesday night, Turner held a slight lead over Weprin.

Towards the end of her report, there’s a Fouhy paragraph which almost seems to be written to keep her own spirits up in full realization that she would soon have to face the inevitable:

On Tuesday, Weprin said the polished Democratic machinery would get people to the polls.

Note how what Weprin “said” is not in quotes. I think “polished” is Beth Fouhy’s own word — a last-ditch attempt to say “I know those Democratic votes are out there. I just know it.”

Too bad, so sad, Beth.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.