… The choices are:

• The idea that protesters believe that “occupying” and disrupting a Wal-Mart store on Black Friday does anything to advance their cause.
• The mindless repetition of the protest leader’s chants by the sheep who follow him.

I can’t imagine grown independent “adults” doing the latter, but we’re seeing it all around the country. Think for yourselves, people.

Watch:

“Labor Union Report” at RedState notes that ten Occupy OKC protesters had the privilege of “occupying” handcuffs and were arrested for their actions.

From Dublin, Ireland:

Thursday November 17 2011

A MOTHER has told how her miracle twins defied the odds to survive after being born more than three months early.

Aisling Byrne only knew she was carrying twins after she had her first scan four and a half months into her pregnancy. Just six weeks later, the two boys arrived without a sound.

“There was no crying when they were born, nothing. We weren’t allowed to hold them, they had to be rushed to intensive care,” she recalled.

She and her partner Keith Corbally have come a long way since that rollercoaster day in June 2010 and are now busy trying to keep up with their 17-month-olds, Ben and Sam, as they crawl and climb their way about their north Dublin home.

Their story comes as the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street in Dublin today launches a new book for parents of babies in neonatal care.

Children now have better chances of surviving than ever before. Previously babies born weighing 2lb 8oz had a 90pc chance of dying — now, they have a 90pc chance of survival.

When they were born, Ben weighed 2lb 6oz, while his little brother Sam was 2oz lighter.

Aisling and Keith were eventually able to take them from the incubator for periods of ‘kangaroo care’ where they held them on their chests under their clothes for skin-to-skin contact.

Go here for the rest of the story.

Imagine if it were discovered that free-market think tanks were caught vetting scripts of Fox News programs, intervening to prevent free-market sceptics from receiving air time, and consulted with the network about how it should alter its programing in a free-market direction. The howls of outrage would be loud, long and unrelenting from other news networks, the wire services, and leading U.S. newspapers.

What I have just described, and more, characterizes a decade-long relationship between the British Broadcasting Corporation and UK-based climate scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) — except that the BBC is government-funded and disproportionately controls the flow of broadcast news in the UK. What the UK Daily Mail has revealed today as part of its ongoing review of the second set of Climategate emails released before Thanksgiving has caused Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation to write that the BBC is “in cahoots with Climategate scientists.” What follows are excerpts from the David Rose’s Daily Mail story (bolds are mine):

… The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade.

They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output.

… BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage.

‘Following their lead has meant the whole thrust and tone of BBC reporting has been that the science is settled, and that there is no need for debate,’ one journalist said. ‘If you disagree, you’re branded a loony.’

In 2007, the BBC issued a formal editorial policy document, stating that ‘the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus’ – the view that the world faces catastrophe because of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

The document says the policy was decided after ‘a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts’ – including those from UEA.

But although there is now more scientific debate than ever about influences on climate other than CO2, prompted by the fact that the world has not warmed for 15 years, a report from the BBC Trust this year compared climate change sceptics to the conspiracy theorists who blame America for 9/11, and said Britain’s main sceptic think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, should be given no air time.

Rose also reveals:

• That “in private some of those same scientists have had doubts about aspects of the global warming case. For example, Professor Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, admitted there was no evidence that the snows of Kilimanjaro were melting because of climate change, and he and his colleagues agreed there were serious problems with the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph.”
• An obsequious regard for Jones’s opinion of the network’s coverage which has to be read to be believed — and even then, readers may have a hard time believing it.
• That certain key players at the Beeb were keenly aware of the conflicted nature of their relationships.
• An insistence by the network in the wake of both Labor and Conservative pushback that “We would reject the claim that the Tyndall Centre influenced BBC editorial policy.” Gosh, why would anyone think otherwise?

Meanwhile, in the U.S. press, which knew this time around that ignoring the released emails wouldn’t work, the Associated Press’s coverage of Climategate II has, at least based on a search of its main site, been limited to a pathetic Thanksgiving Day (how convenient) story by Raphael G. Satter (“After new leak, climatologist takes case to public”) which reads more like a Phil Jones PR piece than a legitimate news report. The New York Times, in an story which appeared on Page A8 of the paper’s November 23 print edition, characterized the messages released as “remarkably similar” to the first round of Climategate emails in an earlier paragraph. The story’s reporters apparently hoped that readers would stop there, because in Paragraph 8, we find the following:

In one of the e-mails, Raymond S. Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, criticized a paper that Dr. Mann wrote with the climate scientist Phil Jones, which used tree rings and similar markers to find that today’s climatic warming had no precedent in recent natural history. Dr. Bradley, who has often collaborated with Dr. Mann, wrote that the 2003 paper “was truly pathetic and should never have been published.”

I don’t recall reading anything “remarkably similar” to Mr. Bradley’s contention in the original Climategate email release.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Isn’t it funny how the worst fears about news-coverage conspiracies ridiculed by the establishment media and its defenders are so often shown in fact to be quite justified? Thank goodness for the feisty UK press and the GWPF.

Noel Sheppard has previously posted on ClimateGate II here and here.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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

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Watch — HT Life News, whose intro reads as follows:

An astounding new video is drawing rave reviews from pro-life advocates around the world for its depiction of the fetal development of an unborn baby.

The new video on YouTube features Alexander Tsiaras, the author of From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, presenting a video he helped develop which shows a visualization of the unborn child’s development from conception to birth.

It seems that everyone in Washington believes that there is zero chance of any kind of economic calamity befalling this nation until January 2013, even though the government is on track to stay on self-destructive autopilot until then. I do not understand how or why anyone can be that confident.

Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press, almost gleefully participated in that denial on Thursday in presenting the following paragraphs (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Beginning in 2013, the federal government faces two oncoming trains. When the supercommittee was unable to find agreement by Wednesday, it triggered spending cuts of $1.2 trillion starting in January 2013 and extending over 10 years. Half of the cuts would come from defense spending, the other from education, agriculture and environmental programs, and, to a lesser extent, Medicare.

At the same time, tax cuts adopted during the presidency of George W. Bush will expire at the end of 2012, meaning an increase for every taxpayer.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said the cuts would “tear a seam in the nation’s defense.”

Meanwhile, the tax increases would hit a still-fragile economy, endangering a recovery and raising prospects of another recession.

Kuhnhenn pretends that the two jumbo-sized locomotives which are chugging merrily along and continually building up steam right now, namely the national debt and the nation’s budget deficit, aren’t even there. The word “debt” appears only once in his report, but only in reference to the “debt crisis this summer” without saying how big the debt is. While the word “deficit” frequently appears, the AP reporter never tells readers what Uncle Sam’s reported deficits have been ($4 trillion during the last three fiscal years) or what they’re projected to be, according to the Congressional Budget Office (Page XI at link; $973 billion in fiscal 2012, and a combined $3.7 trillion — in my view, a very unrealistically low figure — in the nine years which follow).

The national debt train is over $15 trillion and has been growing at a rate of at least $1.5 trillion per year. As noted, the CBO projects that the deficit train will accumulate $4.7 trillion in shortfalls over the next ten years.

But Kuhnhenn, like almost everyone else in Washington, appears to only want to talk about politics, coming down on the side of effectively complimenting President Obama for his noninvolvement. Really:

While Republicans have criticized Obama for not engaging directly in the supercommittee negotiations, his hands-off approach was calculated, coming in the aftermath of his own failed attempts to strike a deficit deal with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. In a gridlocked Congress, Obama is more likely to lose if he gets deeply involved.

The detachment allows him to set a clear dividing line for voters, one in which he can cast Republicans as protecting the rich. It’s a stance that for now has political appeal. A number of recent public opinion polls show that up to two-thirds of Americans support raising taxes on individuals earning more than $1 million, and about half favor raising taxes on families earning at least $250,000 a year.

Even if some Republicans were disposed to negotiate a new deficit-reduction plan, Obama’s sharpening of the lines between the parties could drive them away.

“If the president has decided that he is now in full campaign mode, that’s going to make things very difficult in terms of finding common ground,” said David Winston, a GOP strategist who advises House Republican leaders.

As I’ve noted and others have stated, the president and his team are deliberately endangering the country’s ability to survive its next 14 months solely in the name of achieving his reelection. That’s the real news, Jim — and shame on you for trying to make the unacceptable palatable by pretending we’re not in trouble in the here and now.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Josh Mandel for US Senate:

I thought you might want to see the video below that we just released about the massive job loss caused by Sherrod Brown’s failed and extremist policies.

From championing “Card Check”, to casting the deciding vote on the government takeover of health care, to refusing to support hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas exploration in the Utica shale, to increasing the EPA’s authority to over-regulate Ohio manufacturers, Sherrod Brown’s job-killing policies have put hundreds of thousands of Ohioans out of work.

Sherrod Brown likes to try to be one person in DC and a different person in Ohio, but the nice thing about video, is that he can longer get away with that.

Sherrod Brown’s been running for political office since Richard Nixon was President, has been in Washington for two decades, and simply put — it just ain’t working.

It isn’t working in Ohio where during Sherrod’s last decade as a DC politician, 1 out of every 4 jobs that has left America, left from Ohio. And it isn’t working in Washington, where Sherrod’s extremist policies have put Medicare and Social Security on the brink of bankruptcy.

As this video depicts, next November’s election will be about jobs. While Sherrod Brown and his ultra-liberal allies will attempt to convince the media to cover anything except Sherrod’s jobs record, we will speak directly to the people of Ohio and ask them a simple question:

If Sherrod Brown was the answer, wouldn’t the problem be solved by now?

Best regards,
Joe Aquilino
Political Director
Josh Mandel for US Senate

The video:

I’ll put it more succinctly: If you think that Sherrod Brown is the answer, then you’re [still] asking really stupid questions. Zheesh.

One of the underappreciated giants of business who built a Midwestern retail powerhouse has passed away.

How underappreciated? Read on (bolds are mine; a photo gallery and several other stories are at the link above):

Published: Friday, November 25, 2011, 11:16 PM
Updated: Saturday, November 26, 2011, 7:16 AM

Frederik Meijer, the Grand Rapids billionaire credited with inventing the supercenter store format in 1962 that made his Meijer chain a successful Midwest retailer and was copied by Sam Walton for his chain Wal-Mart, died Friday at age 91.

The Meijer family confirmed his death in a statement. He would have turned 92 next month.

“Fred Meijer, Chairman Emeritus of Meijer Corp., passed away Friday evening, November 25, 2011 at the Spectrum Health System in Grand Rapids, Michigan after suffering a stroke in his home in the early morning hours,” the statement said.

…. Mr. Meijer’s rise in the world of business began simply enough in Greenville during the depths of the Great Depression. When his father, Hendrik, a Dutch immigrant, couldn’t find a tenant for the space above his barber shop, he opened a small grocery there in 1934.

… In 1942, he and his father opened a second store in Cedar Springs, and a few years later, Mr. Meijer married Lena Rader, a cashier in the Greenville store. In 1949, they opened a third store on Fuller Avenue in Grand Rapids. The chain continued to grow, and, in 1962, father and son considered a venture unprecedented in the retail business: combining a grocery store with a general merchandise discount store.

On the verge of going ahead with it, Mr. Meijer asked his father, “What should we do?“
(more…)

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

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From Florence, Kentucky:

5:58 PM, Nov. 19, 2011

You never hear anyone say it, but Laci Davis’ parents have said it many times over the past week.

“Thank God for the pothole.”

Because it was a Cincinnati pothole that saved Laci’s life, said her mother Amanda Cullum.

Last week, while at school in the third grade at Collins Elementary in Florence, Laci says she was playing with her 2.5 cm-wide gold, heart-shaped locket. She took off the necklace, which she fumbled. The necklace fell into her mouth and went down her throat.

The school called Amanda, who rushed to the scene and took her daughter to St. Elizabeth Medical Center. Laci was already complaining that her chest hurt and she was finding it difficult to breathe. To make it worse she could only talk in a whisper. The officials there told her to go to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cullum said.

“Laci was crying, saying it hurt, and we had her spitting into a bucket because she said it hurt to swallow,” Cullum said. “I was freaking out.”

Then, as they drove to Children’s, the family ran over a huge pothole on Reading Road near the United Way store. The hole was massive, nearly taking up the entire side of the street.

The jarring caused the locket to discharge from Laci’s esophagus, forcing it to travel all the way down her throat.

At that moment, things began to change. “I feel better now,” Laci told her mother.

Laci said could swallow and the pain in her chest was gone. She could speak again.

Cullum had to focus. “I was so mad about that pothole I had to think about what was happening.”

Not wanting to risk anything more being wrong, Cullum took Laci to Children’s Hospital to make sure she was okay. Doctors told her the locket should now come out naturally.

Doctors confirmed the hole actually did something remarkable, and the family is now waiting for the ordeal to be over.

“That pothole – it saved her life,” Cullum said. “They may still have to go in there and get the locket out, but that’s better than what could’ve happened. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Listen:

Transcript of first half of audio, after brief introductories (HT Doug Ross):

Jeff: I heard you talk earlier about the government not knowing how to make pencils and you talked about brain surgeons. And I happen to be a brain surgeon, so I found your topic quite interesting.

I just returned from Washington, DC, where we were reading over what the Obama health care plan would be for advanced neurosurgery for patients over 70, which we all found quite disturbing. As our population gets older, the majority of our patients are getting over 70. They’ll require stroke therapy, aneurysm therapy, and basically what the document stated is that if you’re over 70 and you come into an emergency room… if you’re on government-supported health care, you’ll get “comfort care”.

Mark Levin: Wait a minute… what’s the source for this?

Jeff: This is Obama’s new health care plan for advanced neurosurgical care.

ML: And who issued this? HHS?

Jeff: Yes. And basically they don’t call them patients, they call them units. And instead of, they call it “ethics panels” or “ethics committees”, would get together and meet and decide where the money would go for hospitals, and basically for patients over 70 years of age, that advanced neurosurgical care was not generally indicated.

ML: So it’s generally going to be denied?

Jeff: Yes, absolutely… If someone comes in at 70 years of age with a bleed in their brain, I can promise you I’m not going to get a bunch of administrators together on an ethics panel at 2 in the morning to decide that I’m OK to do surgery.

ML: Is this published somewhere where the general public could get a hold of it?

Jeff: Not yet.

ML: So this was just discussed with your community of neurosurgeons?

Jeff: Yes, the AANS [Ed: the American Association of Neurological Surgeons] and the Congress of Neurosurgeons, because everybody knows that cuts are coming in Medicare and medical reimbursement. And we’re the most expensive out of all the fields in medicine. And we’re the smallest field. But at two, three, four in the morning, we’re the ones in the operating room. And we have to wait for an ethics panel to convene, which are not made of physicians — they’re made of administrators. To decide whether a patient should receive our care.

ML: So Sarah Palin was right. We’re going to have these “death panels”, aren’t we?

Jeff: Oh, absolutely. I’m German by heritage, and I’ve read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and — basically, they don’t call them patients, they call them units. And if you’re a unit above a certain age, you get comfort care instead of advanced neurosurgical intervention.

ML: You went to a seminar in Washington, DC?

Jeff: Yes. Where a few of my former partners, two of them, have gone to work… one for the Veteran’s Administration and one for the Congress of Neurosurgeons out of DC.

ML: And this information is based, you’re certain, on representations and information provided by HHS and other government officials?

Jeff: Yep.

ML: And when will the rest of us become aware of it? After the [presidential] election?

Jeff: Probably. I mean, there’s so many things that the government keeps under control that are used — things called H.U.D. devices — humanitarian use devices that we’re allowed to use now because they haven’t undergone full FDA approval. And they’re used in surgery because people know it’s the right thing to do. But the government can step in at any time, like they did two months ago with a device, and say, ‘this device hasn’t met what we want’ and there’s no exact criteria, and can therefore take it away from us.

ML: And the people telling you what to do — they don’t know how to make a pencil, do they?

Jeff: Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. You know, we always joke around — ‘it’s not brain surgery’ — but I did nine years after medical school, I’ve been in training ten years, and now I have people who don’t know a thing about what I’m doing telling me when I can and can’t operate.

As Doug indicated, it’s Politifact, which called “death panels” the “lie of the year” in 2009, whose pants are on fire, not Sarah Palin, who coined the term “death panels” (and used quotes, which everyone conveniently forgets), and could not be more right.

On November 15 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I compared how two of the leading wire services, Reuters and the Associated Press, covered the announcement by Geron Corp. of its decision to halt the first government-approved clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells. Reuters fairly noted that “teams working with adult stem cells — a less ambitious area — are making good progress.” While one could quarrel with the characterization of adult stem cell research as “less ambitious” (unless you throw in cloning, which is what sometimes seems to be embryonic researchers’ primary area of intrigue), its “good progress” descriptor was fair. Meanwhile, the Associated Press’s coverage of the same story failed to even recognize the existence of adult stem cell research.

Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and an influential prolife author, has observed that the establishment press has largely come down where AP did. A Friday Catholic News Agency item elaborates (bolds are mine):

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