From Toronto (HT Daryn Kagan):

Posted: Oct 16, 2011 5:59 PM ET Last Updated: Oct 16, 2011 10:26 PM ET

Fauja Singh, 100, finished Toronto’s waterfront marathon Sunday evening, securing his place in Guinness World Records as the oldest person — and the first centenarian — to ever accomplish a run of that distance.

Singh, a British citizen, was the last person to complete the race, crossing the finish line just before 6 p.m. ET with a time of 8 hours, 11 minutes and 5.9 seconds.

Although event workers were dismantling the barricades and taking down sponsor banners as he made his way up the final few hundred metres of the race, a throng of media, family, friends and supporters were there when Singh made marathon history.

Singh, who only speaks Punjabi, said through his coach and translator Harmander Singh that he had set a target time of nine hours.

“He’s absolutely overjoyed. He’s achieved his life-long wish,” his coach said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

From MInnesota Majority via Powerline (direct YouTube):

(Warning: Some foul language and disturbing pictures)

Exactly.

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UPDATE, Oct. 23: Don Surber — “Our president supports this.”

(Moved to the top for most of Saturday)

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder is below. Other topics are also fair game.

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AP (“Iraq PM: Immunity issue scuttled US troop deal”) — “Iraq’s prime minister said Saturday that U.S. troops are leaving Iraq after nearly nine years of war because Baghdad rejected American demands that any U.S. military forces to stay would have to be shielded from prosecution or lawsuits.” Not noted: As I understand it, that would have included the possibility of war crimes charges in The Hague.

Smart Money — “A Look Inside Gadhafi’s Portfolio; Dictator had stakes in sports teams, media outlets, and real estate.”

Bill Gertz at the Washington Times (“Cybercommand chief opposes U.N. net control”) — Geez, this never goes away. The latest: “The commander of the U.S. Cyber Command said Thursday that he does not favor giving the United Nations the power to regulate the Internet. … Last month, Russia, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan submitted a resolution to the U.N. General Assembly calling for giving individual states the right to control the Internet.” As if China’s not doing that already. (BizzyBlog Blasts from the Past: here, here, here, here)

AP: “Obama signs 3 trade deals, biggest since NAFTA” — with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.

At PJ Tatler: “Big Government: EPA to Implement New Coal-Killing Rules 13 Days Before FERC Hearing on Their Potential Effects.”

“Cain tops field again in Nevada GOP straw poll” — but by only 2% over Mitt Romney.

$10 million guy (hey, that makes him a 1%-er) Keith Olbermann’s Current TV nightly audience is about 30,000.

Reuters: “Years after NAFTA, first long-haul Mexican truck enters U.S.” — “The move was praised by business leaders on both sides of the Rio Grande, while sign-waving Teamsters Union members in Laredo jeered.” That included Jimmy “Son of a B*tches” Hoffa Jr.

News Item: “All U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011″

In November 2008, Zombie reminded us whose victory Iraq was (PJ Tatler xref).

In December 2008 (PJM, BizzyBlog), I reminded readers whose defeat it was: “A Toast to Old Media’s — and Old Medea’s — Defeat in Iraq,” and that in 2002 I informed Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, who worked tirelessly for our defeat, that things weren’t going to work out like they did in Vietnam.

They didn’t. I was right, babe. The U.S. won. You lost. So did Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Harry “The War Is Lost” Reid, the vast majority of the Democratic Party, and the antiwar left — all of whom rooted for our defeat, and all of whom predicted/hoped that General David Petraeus’s troop surge in 2007-2008 would fail.

If Friday’s decision to completely withdraw backfires — and, sadly, there is reason to believe it will — the consequences will be completely on Barack Hussein Obama — mmm, mmm, mmm.

The full December 2008 column follows after the jump.
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From New York City:

Last Updated: 3:16 AM, October 11, 2011
Posted: 1:49 AM, October 11, 2011

A veteran NYPD detective who helped rescue two women from the East River after last week’s helicopter crash was a hero once again yesterday after he helped resuscitate an elderly man who was in cardiac arrest at the Columbus Day Parade.

Calisto Lenarduzzi, 85, who came from Canada for the event, collapsed shortly before 3 p.m., cops said.

A patrol cop had been doing chest compressions when Detectives Ben Kalinsky and Robert Chocallo arrived.

“We got there and he is in full cardiac arrest, he had no pulse,” recalled Kalinsky, with the Emergency Service Unit.

He and his partner then used a defibrillator.

“We shocked him three times in the street and shut down the parade for 20 minutes.”

“I was so happy that the equipment worked,” added Kalinsky, who has been on the police force 20 years.

Go here for the rest of the story.

The easy catch in former Obama administration economic adviser Austan Goolsbee’s Thursday interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” as reported by the Politico’s Tim Mak, is that he believes that “if given a second chance he would not have backed the Cash for Clunkers program or the home buyer tax credit.” Goolsbee’s excuse for his changed position — that the administration didn’t think the recovery would take so long, when the administration’s policies have primarily explain why the recovery has taken so long — is characteristically lame.

Something else Goolsbee said is far more surprising — so surprising that one wonders if famed supply-side economist Arthur Laffer somehow temporarily took over the former Obama adviser’s mind and body. One also wonders why Mak saved what Goolsbee said for his report’s final two paragraphs instead of headlining and leading with it.

Here they are:

Goolsbee also disagreed with Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said Wednesday that “private-sector jobs have been doing just fine” and that the focus should be on saving public sector jobs.

“I guess I would disagree a little. I think at this moment, the government still has an important role to play, it’s to get the private sector going, and we can do that with tax cuts and incentives,” he said.

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In June, when yours truly last blogged on a Glenn Kessler piece (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” was calling Barack Obama’s claims about the accomplishments of the auto-company bailouts “one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech.” He gave Obama’s claims three Pinocchios (“Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions”).

Today, Kessler went to four Pinocchios (“whoppers”) on Vice President Joe Biden’s claims about the prospects for a rise in rapes and murders if the $35 billion section of Obama’s “American Jobs Act” devoted to “saving” public-sector jobs doesn’t pass. NB’s Noel Sheppard did a great job on the “macro” aspect of Biden’s bogus claim this morning. Kessler’s clean-up has to do with Biden’s supposed exemplar, the city of Flint Michigan, where the Vice President claims that murders have doubled and rapes have tripled in the past year (bolds are mine):

Biden’s absurd claims about rising rape and murder rates

In the battle over the administration’s jobs bill, Vice President Biden this week has been making the startling case that more people will be murdered or raped if the legislation is not passed. His argument is that in cities such as Flint, Mich., the murder and rape rates have soared as the police force has been cut back for budgetary reasons.

When challenged by a reporter from a conservative publication about his charge (see video below), Biden stood his ground and said without more money, “murder will continue to rise, rape will continue to rise, all crimes will continue to rise.” As he put it, “Go look at the numbers.”

Okay, challenge taken. What do the numbers show?

… Murder did go up—though the rate did not double from 2009 to 2010, as Biden claimed. But rape has gone down. Biden actually asserted it had tripled.

… Interestingly, Flint Police Chief Lock has repeatedly asserted that cuts in staffing had little effect on the crime rate.

As the Flint Journal reported in May: “Officials said the fact that 46 police officers were laid off last year had little to do with the escalating crime. Most of the crimes were between people that knew each other. ‘No matter how many officers we have, we can’t stop disputes between two people in their own homes,’ Lock said.”

… the vice president should know better than to spout off half-baked facts in service of a dubious argument. Even if one believes there is a link between crime and the number of police—which is debatable and subject to many caveats—there is no excuse to make the dramatic claim that more people will die or be raped without additional funds for police. When making such a breathtaking charge, you had better have your facts straight.

Four Pinocchios.

The press has had over a week to report on and investigate the veracity of Biden’s assertions, the likes of which would almost certainly be far more prominent news if a conservative or Republican had said something similar. So here’s a roundup of coverage:

• The “as expected” news is that WaPo itself referred to Kessler’s work in two other places. But Erik Wemple also accused Human Events videographer Jason Mattera of a “sneaky little maneuver” for daring to ask if threatening an increase in rapes if a bill doesn’t pass is appropriate behavior for a Vice President. At the paper’s Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent tersely noted Kessler’s work and FactCheck.org’s Biden takedown.
• At the Associated Press’s main national site — searches on “Biden rape,” “Biden rapes,” “Biden murder,” and “Biden crime” (not in quotes) return no results.
• The same four searches done on the past 30 days at the Los Angeles Times (“rape,” “rapes,” “crime,” “murder“) return either no results or no relevant results.
• At the New York Times yesterday (on Page A27), Robert Pear avoided Biden’s specifically mentioned locale by writing: “Mr. Biden said that because of police layoffs, ‘murder rates are up, robberies are up, rapes are up’ in many cities.” What about Flint, Robert?

Thus far, with some Democratic defections, hasn’t passed. WaPo’s Sargent is all hot and bothered that the media isn’t universally denouncing Republicans for being in the way, when the fact is that a few Democrat defections made the vote 50-50.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

… blogged on it — Two years ago, at BizzyBlog and NewsBusters.

And ABC is acting like it deserves props because it’s just now discovering it (“Car Company Gets U.S. Loan, Builds Cars In Finland”)?

Meanwhile, as Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters has noted, the network has avoided any mention of connected individuals involved in Democratic Party campaign fundraising.

To be fair, my post was occasioned by the Wall Street Journal’s excellent write-up, which noted at the time Fisker’s plans to make these incredibly expensive toys for the politically correct wealthy in Finland (i.e., hint to ABC, this means that the plans to manufacture overseas have been knowm for a long, long time). Meanwhile, the rest of the press, in typical fashion, studiously ignored the WSJ report and those who blogged on its significance.

One of my comments from two years ago:

It’s reasonable to ask whether Congress in 2007 expected that the program would take on the self-evident default risks of lending to a start-up and a very early-stage company, respectively, or if it expected that the funds would be accessed by already well-capitalized companies.

When are people going to figure out that “lending” is not for speculative ventures? That’s why they call equity investments in such enterprises “VENTURE capital.” It’s the type of capital meant for such ventures.

A Thursday evening editorial at Investor’s Business Daily explains the differences between the two movements. Quite oddly, it critically misreads President Obama’s public pronouncement to ABC’s Jake Tapper in its opening paragraph, but gets it right in latter ones:

Sliming The Tea Party

The president makes an odious comparison between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, unable to tell the difference between those who work to change the system and those who would destroy it.

No.

Barack Obama thoroughly understands the difference between the two. He needs to legitimize OWS by attempting equivalence with the Tea Party movement because, even though he is the most “successful” president in a generation in milking Wall Street for campaign contributions, he shares OWS’s hostility towards capitalists and capitalism.

The rest of the editorial gets it right, up to and including correctly making the parallel between Obama’s and OWS’s goals. Excerpts:

While described as angry mobs at the time, the Tea Partyers who peacefully assembled and showed up at town hall meetings to confront the career politicians who claimed to represent their views left these meetings quietly to organize and rock the vote, to coin another phrase, in November 2010.

Voices were raised, to be sure. Unlike in New York (and many other locales — Ed.), we can find no reports of Tea Partyers being arrested, individually or en masse, at the thousands of tea parties with millions of attendees that have taken place across the country. After the massive Tea Party march on Washington, D.C., in 2009, not so much as a paper cup was left behind on the Mall. There was no attempt to shut down the city or its commerce.

If nothing else, the beating of one Kenneth Gladney by people wearing the purple shirts of the Service Employees International Union outside a Missouri health care town hall meeting in 2009 should underscore the difference between the Tea Party and the mob on the left. Gladney was a capitalist trying to sell “Don’t Tread on Me” shirts. Occupy Wall Street hates capitalists and capitalism.

The Tea Party is vastly different in its methods and goals. It shares Thomas Jefferson’s belief that the government that’s best is the one that governs least. It wants to limit government and get it out of their wallets and daily lives. It believes that “we the people” defines who is master and who is servant.

It believes government should work for us, not the other way around. The OWS mobs believe government owes them and should take from those who earned and give to those who want. Redistribution of wealth is as much their mantra as it is the mantra of the occupant of the White House.

The Tea Party wants government to leave them alone. OWS wants government to take care of them.

To a former community organizer and Alinsky disciple like Obama, the mob action known as Occupy Wall Street is a dream come true. It is a textbook example of demonizing your opponent, in this case capitalism, while distracting people from your own failures.

It’s the same type of mob action used by Acorn, which a young Barack Obama worked with, and others to pressure banks to issue the bad loans under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that ultimately led to the excesses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the financial meltdown, the effects of which still fester in the body politic.

Exactly.

CRA, Fan, and Fred were — and, if the administration continues to have its way, will continue to be — the Cloward-Piven strategy, the goal of which “is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands,” applied to home lending and ultimately the financial system. They, with latter-stage help from private-sector financial institutions, have virtually destroyed the homebuilding industry, which is a mere shadow of what it once was, with activity at Depression-era levels in a country that is three times as large.

Expanding Cloward-Piven’s application to “overthrowing capitalism by overwhelming the private sector and bankrupting the government,” the administration’s deliberate spending ramp-up can similarly be seen not merely as in sympathy with OWS — and hostile to the Tea Party — but as carrying out its more radical leaders’ fondest wishes.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder may follow later. Other topics are also fair game.

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From Denver:

Oct 14, 2011 / 06:14 am

The Vatican’s adult stem cell venture with a U.S. biopharmecutical firm continues to gain momentum since the partnership between the two was announced in June.

The move shows how “the Catholic Church is not against science, that we support ethically acceptable research, and that we want to foster this knowledge and spread it globally,” Father Tomaz Trafny of the Vatican’s Council for Culture told CNA on Oct. 12.

“We also want people to understand that in joining forces, we can really bring benefit to humanity,” he said, noting that the endeavor “is the first time we’ve entered into so deep a collaboration with an outside company.”

On June 16, the Vatican announced before the global media in Rome that it was partnering with NeoStem, a public firm pioneering new medical research with adult stem cells.

Stem cells are the body’s master cells from which all of the body’s 200-plus types of tissue ultimately grow. Their versatility allows for potential in providing replacement tissue to treat countless illnesses and disorders.

The Catholic Church approves of stem cell research but disapproves of those cells being drawn from human embryos—a process that involves their destruction.

Fr. Trafny explained that the new venture is creating a hub for scientists, academics, policy makers and Church leaders to discuss moral and ethical advancements in bio-medicine.

“All of these groups very often work and act separately and in isolation and bringing them together to create a network of collaboration and hotspots for exchanging their opinions, experiences, and knowledge,” he said.

Dr. Robin Smith, CEO of NeoStem, added that the adult stem cell research field is growing rapidly—from around 500 clinical trials in the U.S. five years ago to over 4,000 today. …

Go here for the rest of the rest of the story.

Simplicity:

A few points:

• “Cain’s proposal takes us in the right direction.”
• “It’s the simplicity that makes it so attractive.”
• “We don’t need … 59-point plans and all the rest of it.”

Levin also points out that “simplicity” was one of the main bogus criticisms of Reagan.