Car Carnage in May:
- GM - down 28%.
- Ford - down 16%.
- Chrysler - down 25%. Has Bob Nardelli beaten Chrysler down to the point where nobody will want it?
- Toyota - down 4%. Even with the slide, the company came within 9,300 vehicles of beating out GM for #1 in unit sales.
- Honda - up 16%.
- Nissan - up 8%.

If you think this is bad, see what will happen if Chris Pummer of MarketWatch gets his wish and gas goes to $8 a a gallon. Chris says we should rejoice if that happens.

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This got lost in the shuffle last week, but it deserves a mention (HT Say Uncle via Instapundit):

Police: 3 dead in Nevada bar shooting that may have stemmed from feud
May 25, 2008 9:15 PM ET

WINNEMUCCA (AP) - Police say three men were fatally shot and two other people were injured early this morning at a bar in Winnemucca, and the shootings may have stemmed from a longstanding feud between several local families.

Winnemucca Police Chief Bob Davidson says a man entered Players Bar and Grill and fatally shot two members of a rival family before he was shot and killed by a patron. All three were pronounced dead at the scene.

Better headline: Possible Massacre Averted.

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Here’s another one of those “unexpected” good-news econ reports:

April U.S. factory orders unexpectedly jump 1.1%

U.S. factory orders unexpectedly jumped 1.1% in April 2008, the U.S. Commerce Department announced Tuesday, primarily due to increased prices for gasoline and other petroleum products.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected April 2008 factory orders to decline 0.1%. Factory orders increased 1.5% in March 2008.

Excluding a 7.9% decline in transportation goods, factory orders rose 2.6% April 2008.

The Census Bureau’s original is here.

Related, from AP’s Martin Crutsinger:

Orders for iron and steel were up by 5.5 percent. Orders for mining and oil field equipment jumped 48.6 percent and orders for electrical equipment and appliances surged 28.1 percent.

Orders for nondurable goods rose by 2.8 percent.

If you go to Crutsinger’s second paragraph at the link, you’ll see a drop-dead obvious mistake:

The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that orders were up 1.1 percent in April following a 1.5 percent increase in March. Those gains followed big declines in January and March that raised concerns …..

Zheesh.

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California also had a primary yesterday for all relevant offices except president.

Good news for fiscal conservatives: It looks like Tom McClintock, “admired for his unyielding opposition to tax hikes,” is going to be a congressman.

Cindy Sheehan? Not so much (HT Instapundit).

To be fair, Sheehan is running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi as an Independent and wasn’t on yesterday’s ballot. Trouble is, as the link indicates, she needs 10,198 signatures, presumably of people in the congressional district, to get on the ballot in November. Rots of ruck, babe.

If she were serious instead of grabbing for one last shot at relevance, Sheehan would have run against Pelosi as a Democrat in yesterday’s primary, where she might have had a chance in a far-far-left district in a very low turnout election with a strong grass-roots/nutroots effort. Now, even if she miraculously collects enough signatures to qualify in November, she’ll get clobbered.

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Per a tip from reader Dan — RomneyCare’s fines hit home:

Nearly 100,000 Massachusetts taxpayers have been fined for failing to obtain health insurance, even as a major survey concludes the effort to create near-universal coverage in the state is meeting key goals.

Five percent of taxpayers failed to obtain health coverage last year, and more than half of those - about 97,000 - were forced to forfeit their personal exemption - worth $219 - after it was determined they could have afforded health care.

Do the math: That’s $21.2 million.

This year (collected on tax returns to be filed next year) the fines will increase to as much as $912. I would expect that one other thing will increase: the number of people leaving the People’s Republic of RomneyCare.

Here’s a site to check out – UCC Truths.

The United Church of Christ is the supposedly “mainstream” denomination the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) is a part of. TUCC is the church which the objectively unfit presidential candidate (second item at link) I refer to as BOOHOO (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama) insists he and his family will continue to attend, despite its new pastor’s refusal to renounce Wright’s extensively documented poisonous rhetoric and “black liberation theology” beliefs.

So why anyone be surprised that, at the national level, UCC isn’t really “mainstream”? At least the last time I checked, promoting FALN terrorists as freedom fighters (the Puerto Rican group’s name is translated as “Armed Forces of National Liberation”) was not a “mainstream” cause.

Here’s an “oh by the way” from Wiki which makes the FALN a twofer, as it also negatively affects the other Democratic presidential aspirant (paragraphing added by me):

On August 11, 1999, Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of sixteen members of FALN that set off bombs several times in New York City and Chicago, convicted for conspiracies to commit robbery, bomb-making, and sedition, as well as for firearms and explosives violations.

None of the sixteen were convicted of bombings or any crime which injured another person, and all of the sixteen had served nineteen years or longer in prison, which was a longer sentence than such crimes typically received, according to the White House. Clinton offered clemency, on condition that the prisoners renounce violence, at the appeal of 10 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, President Jimmy Carter, the Cardinal of New York, and the Archbishop of Puerto Rico.

The commutation was opposed by U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons and criticised by many including former victims of FALN terrorist activities, the Fraternal Order of Police, and members of Congress. Hillary Clinton in her campaign for Senator also criticised the commutation, although she had earlier been supportive.

In other words, the presidential candidate I refer to as HR4C (Hillary Rodham Cackling Crying Complaining Clinton) was for it, before she was against it.

This UCC Truths link describes those activities of those whose sentences were commuted, and claims that they did not really renounce violence as a condition of their release.

Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator has more.

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A lot of people don’t want to think about planning for retirement:

Planning for retirement is only slightly higher on the groan scale than dieting or starting a workout routine, according to findings from a survey of 1,000 Americans released April 1, 2008.

Whether it’s financial or physical fitness, it’s tough getting started.

Only one in three people surveyed is on track with retirement planning, and about one-fourth haven’t started planning at all. Nearly one-third view retirement planning as slightly more difficult than starting a workout regimen (29 percent) or a diet (28 percent).

….. Obstacles to retirement planning for many Americans, the survey found, include the following:
• Difficulty knowing what types of investments they should make, 42 percent.
• How much they will need to retire comfortably, 40 percent.
• When to retire, 33 percent.
• Where to begin in the planning process, 32 percent.

The federal government, which is in the process, like it or not, of trying to “get by” on a shrinking annual surplus from Social Security that it has become accustomed to gobbling up to paper over more serious deficits than those reported, doesn’t help in the retirement planning department. It’s way too late for anyone over 50 or so without a big stash to think about getting by with a much lower level of Social Security benefits than today’s retirees are receiving. Yet, despite all the denials made by politicians, the possibility exists that they will have to figure out how to do just that — if not during their early years of retirement, then in their later years, when it will be too late for many to even think about going back to work.

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Enviros are unhappy with the World Bank:

Developing countries and environmental groups accused the World Bank on Friday of trying to seize control of the billions of dollars of aid that will be used to tackle climate change in the next four decades.

“The World Bank’s foray into climate change has gone down like a lead balloon,” Friends of the Earth campaigner Tom Picken said at the end of a major climate change conference in the Thai capital.

“Many countries and civil society have expressed outrage at the World Bank’s attempted hijacking of real efforts to fund climate change efforts,” he said.

….. developing countries want climate change cash to be administered through the existing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), which they feel is much less under the control of the Group of 8 (G8) richest countries.

Likely translation: We’re really mad that the World Bank won’t just give the money to the corrupt kleptocrats at the UN, so they can give some of the money to corrupt governments in the developing world.

(Aside: What in the bleep is Reuters doing quoting a spokesperson for far-left eco-harrassers and possible terrorist collaborators [scroll down to “WALHI’s Strange Bedfellows” at link] like Friends of the Earth?)

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Karl at Protein Wisdom caught the so-called “Moderate Voice” blogger calling Phil Gramm a terrorist (sorry, no link to garbage such as that), because Gramm supported financial deregulation in the late 1990s. Far-lefties are very good at ruining words with plain meanings, aren’t they?

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This is really over the top (HT Hot Air Headlines):

DURHAM - Members of the 2006 Duke University lacrosse team are objecting to the city’s request to shut down a Web site that chronicles the legal proceedings in the players’ federal lawsuit.

….. Lawyers for Duke and the city claim the statements could prejudice a jury.

The more Duke and Durham lawyers keep this kind of arrogance up, the more likely it is that 2006 lacrosse team members will own the school and the town lock, stock, and barrel.

Since I’ve been blogging, the foreign transplant car companies’ sales performance has consistently outperformed Detroit’s Big Three.

The first two months of this year of 2008 continued that trend. Here are the six largest companies’ January (Big Three; other three) and February sales results –
- General Motors: +2.8%, -12.9%
- Ford: -4.1%, -6.6%
- Chrysler: -12.1%, -14.0%
- Toyota: -2.3%, -2.8%
- Honda: -2.3, +4.9%
- Nissan: -7.3%, +1.2%

Every company is clearly struggling to make headway in the current economic environment. But as usual, GM, Ford, and Chrysler are having the toughest time.

GM clearly has serious challenges. Ford continues to court corporate suicide by ignoring a boycott that is cutting the company off from 10%-15% of its US customers. The fact that its sales are “only” down by a little bit more than GM’s during the first two months of this year is scant cause for comfort. Because Ford’s sales have declined in 21 of the past 24 months, its base, which was already smaller, has shrunk considerably more than has GM’s during that time.

But it appears that Chrysler may be quickly turning into the Big Three’s biggest problem child.

I wonder why?

Well, no surprise here. Home Depot plunderer Bob Nardelli, who took over Chrysler in August, has been getting congratulatory write-ups such as this one for bullying, cutting costs — and, from all appearances, doing nothing else. Big whoop, Bob. That course of action, and doing nothing else, is what caused Home Depot to underperform while you were there.

Where’s the innovation and creativity? The answer is in the linked Fortune article — absolutely nowhere:

Chrysler’s New York-based owners should also be pleased. Nardelli’s unspoken mission all along has been to get Chrysler in shape for sale to another buyer - likely another auto company. With its strongest brands and models all for sale under one roof - and hopefully profitable - Chrysler will look a lot more attractive to potential suitors.

Here we go again. I see another massive severance payment in Bob Nardelli’s future. But his slash and burn strategy is on a collision course with cratering sales. If January and February are harbingers for where Chrysler is heading this year, Chrysler’s private-equity owners are going to have to sell in a hurry before the deterioration becomes too obvious.

Now that the “unspoken” has been spoken, I’m sure Chrysler’s rank and file employees are soooo motivated to keep up appearances until that day comes.(/sarc)

I don’t want to claim any special insight into things like this, but the claims about the product Enzyte always seemed bogus to me. The fact that so many people were clearly willing to spend money on the stuff bordered on astonishing. Now the company’s president has been found guilty “of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, bank fraud and money laundering.” It could not have happened soon enough.

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If I were from New Orleans or the Gulf Coast and had gone through the devastation of the 2005 hurricane that struck there, I’d be insulted by those characterizing the subprime lending and foreclosure problems in Northeastern Ohio as “Cleveland’s Katrina.” For cryin’ out loud, 1,836 people died in the real Katrina.

Oh, NEO’s problems are partially George Bush’s fault too. Zheesh.

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On Hillary’s sinking campaign:

• If you have to deny that your campaign is in trouble, it probably is.
• The superdelegate bleed continues. On Friday the 15th, Hillary was ahead of the candidate I often refer to as BOOHOO (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama) 242-156. Tuesday the 19th (first item at link), it was 239-168. Now a February 23 AP story puts things at 241-181. Obama has picked up 25, and she has lost 1, in just eight days. At that rate, her “superdel” lead will be will be gone within about three weeks.
• Speaking of bleeding, the campaign has bled green, as in money, ever since it began. January was no exception.
• This poll, showing Obama up 57-43 in Texas, would appear to mean that the Lone Star State is lost to her. I believe that an Ohio poll with Obama on top, but by a smaller margin, will appear shortly.
• Terrier Ted Strickland, according to Robert Novak, has his doubts about whether she can win Ohio.
• The final insult — The print edition of the Sunday New York Times had the picture at the top of this story covering at least half of the territory above the fold. Ouch.

Update: Going after this, which even troubles hard-core Democrats, is — correction, WAS — Hillary’s Hail Mary pass. Problem: “Clinton’s husband pardoned more than a dozen convicted violent radicals, including a member of the same group mentioned in the Obama stories.”

Mrs. Clinton could still conceivably risk the hypocrisy charge and bring Obama’s cozy ties with 1960s radicals up at the debate in Ohio this week. I don’t think she will do it, because the spotlight might be turned back to her own radical past. Can you say “Black Panthers“?

Update 2: Her recent mocking of Obama is clever (HT Darke County GOP), but probably not enough to matter. She needed to hammer this for about three weeks for it to have significant impact, and, again, bring it up herself in a debate.

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Obama does have seem to have a certain glow about him. But its source may be nuclear in origin. Given the bogus charges thrown at Jean Schmidt in October 2006 in Ohio’s Second District, the Obama-Exelon situation needs to filed away for future reference, especially if Victoria Wells Wulsin Whatever gets too close to the Obama glow.

As we head towards Christmas, don’t forget that Christmas 1944 was dominated by news of the Battle of the Bulge. Imagine if we had second-guessing like this during that time. Yes, in hindsight we weren’t very smart. But someone, who should have been Time’s Man of the Year, figured it out, and was heeded. I’d say the glass is mostly full, not partially empty.

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Underappreciated tech development of the year — Inkjet all-in-one units (print-copy-scan) are virtually the same price as inkjets that only print. Standalone printers may become obsolete very soon. Of course, the need to print may be obsolete sooner than we think.

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There’s a really bizarre thing in this article about payday lending:

Critics liken payday lending to legalized loan sharking, and many at the hearing wore badges with a shark biting large wads of cash. Supporters sported yellow “I support payday lending” stickers; a group of about a dozen - many of whom were payday lender employees - approached during a break declined to comment.

“I love payday lending” stickers? What, no room for pom-poms? I’d decline to comment too if I was wearing something that dumb.

I also note that this guy wasn’t around.

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Does anyone remember “The Angela Merkel I Know” web site? Who thinks that Mrs. Thatcher would ever have set up a “The Maggie I Know” site? Then why is there a need for The Hillary I Know? (no, I’m not linking)

Can there be anything more trivial? Oh yeah, news coverage that takes it seriously.

Update: Owe, Brother. Cries of foul are totally empty, given this.

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Cynthia McKinney has declared for the Presidency. I can see her peeling off a couple of points in certain states, and possibly having an impact (thank you, Ralph Nader, for Florida 2000). The dream ticket: Two Cindys, with Mama Moonbat Cindy Sheehan as Veep.

Note: This post has been moved to the top because of the importance of the topic.

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I received this e-mail from several people this morning:

I am jaw-drop stunned that an allegedly Republican governor has allowed what’s in the red box above to become law in this country’s birthplace of freedom.

And what’s this about $50 co-pays for abortions? Really?

Really (pic is from the Commonwealth Care [i.e., RomneyCare] web site; original PDF document is here):

As stated previously, I believe that Romney and his supporters, whom Gregg Jackson has taken to calling Romniacs, aren’t attempting to rebut Jackson’s detailed criticisms (here and here) of the former Massachusetts governor, because they can’t.

And now (I can’t believe I’m typing this) — Not only do the Romniacs cluelessly wonder why National Right to Life didn’t endorse their guy, they have the further gall to “speculate” that the guy NRTL did endorse paid them off (HT Life News):

Paul M. Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, said the endorsement “makes no sense,” and speculated that it had been motivated by money.

“I think in all probability the Thompson people were engaged with the National Right to Life people in financial dealing,” said Mr. Weyrich, who has endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination.

Look, if you’re a Romniac, you can disagree with NRTL’s decision and point out reasons why, especially if you believe that a Human Life Amendment (HLA), which Thompson opposes, is the way to go (Fred wants Roe v. Wade overturned, and the states to decide individually at that point; I think the HLA should be tried, but only after Roe v. Wade goes away). It may very well be that its Thompson endorsement is not the smartest move NRTL has ever made. But raising the possibility of a payoff without a shred of evidence is a breathtakingly irresponsible move by people who should and do know better. If Weyrich et al have some kind of evidence, they’d better come out with it, right freaking now.

Meanwhile, Gregg Jackson’s, and others’, solid points about Romney’s campaign positions and performance as governor, backed by real evidence, stand unrefuted. We’re still waiting for something other than character assassination in response.

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UPDATE: Sally Pipes has more in a read-the-whole thing column on what’s really happening on the ground in the Bay State –

It’s one thing to pass a law, hold a press conference, and boldly declare to have solved an intractable public policy problem, such as the lack of universal health insurance. It’s quite another to actually have the so-called solution deliver as promised.

….. It’s now crunch time in Massachusetts. The estimated 500,000 residents who still haven’t purchased health insurance must sign up by November 15th or risk being fined $219 when tax time rolls around in April. Compared to the premiums, the many may elect the fines. But they all won’t do so quietly.

….. The plan doesn’t contain any meaningful cost-control mechanisms. The bureaucrats managing the new health care agency are expressing concern about cost trends. People purchasing the insurance are older and sicker than projected, resulting in losses to the insurance carriers. Outside of the plan, Massachusetts health insurers have projected increased health premiums of 8 to 12 percent. The plans for which the taxpayers are subsidizing will likely require similar increases in cash.

At this point, it seems smart for Mitt Romney to run from his plan and distance himself from its design even as Hillary Clinton and other Democrats embrace it.

Say what? I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea to elect someone who has to run away from what he at the time considered his centerpiece accomplishment as little as a year ago. What happens if the centerpiece accomplishment of a President Romney doesn’t work out? Does he then run to Mexico?

Stealth operating system updates, from Microsoft:

Microsoft caught doing stealth updates

files on both Windows XP and Windows Vista without displaying the usual notification or permission dialog box – even if the user had previously disabled automatic updates. Microsoft, however, calls it built-in behavior and no cause for alarm.

Scott Dunn of “Windows Secrets”, reports nine files in XP and Vista have been altered by Windows Update in what he calls a stealth move by Microsoft. The updates are upgrades to the Windows Update service itself, and are not harmful to the system. However, the tactics used by Microsoft to perform them are comparable to those used by spyware companies, thus raising some concerns among the privacy minded.

Look, in the real world, 99% of us don’t understand or care what Microsoft, Apple, or others are doing to our OS’s in their updates, as long as our routines aren’t disrupted. Most of us, for better or worse, probably wouldn’t object to automatic updates after being asked the first time if they’re okay. It’s the mixing of announced updates and stealthy ones that raises suspicions that either someone is trying to cover for previous mistakes or invading our privacy, and puts commentators like this one, who makes great points about network administration problems, into high dudgeon.

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At OpinionJournal.com, “Borking Ted Olson” reveals the laughable reason why the former Solicitor General will not get support from the current Senate majority:

“Ted Olson will not be confirmed,” declares Senate Majority Leader Reid. “He’s a partisan, and the last thing we need as an Attorney General is a partisan.” That standard could certainly stand some fleshing out. As “partisans” go, Mr. Olson doesn’t come close to Bobby Kennedy, the brother of JFK; or Griffin Bell, close friend of Jimmy Carter (and a fine AG); or for that matter Janet Reno’s Justice Department, which was run for years not by Ms. Reno but behind the scenes by close friend of Hillary Clinton and hyper-partisan Jamie Gorelick.

Mr. Olson remembers who killed his wife, and would likely not cut her killers’ fellow-traveling sympathizers, disrupters, and legal gameplayers any slack. THAT’s what they don’t like about him.

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Memo to Darryl “That’s Entertainment” Parks of WLW (700 on the AM dial in Cincinnati): This is NOT “entertainment.” Nor is this. This weekend, I endured the fateful podcast of September 7. The Bill Cunningham-Seg Dennison dust-up is contrived nonsense unworthy of what used to The Nation’s Station.

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In a column hyping Alan Greenspan’s “I should have done more” appearance Sunday on CBS’s 60 minutes, the Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa asserts that “A meltdown in that (subprime mortgage) market has rocked Wall Street.”

Really?

The S&P 500 is less than 5% off its all-time high, and is up about 6% in the past 5 weeks while much of the hyperventilating over the “meltdown” has occurred.

If this is “rocked,” Jeannine, I say “rock” on.”

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Speaking of which, Ken Fisher has a response to the subprime situation at TCS Daily:

TCS: Let’s talk about the current status of the subprime mortgage market. Are you worried?

KEN FISHER: The only thing I fear about the subprime mortgage market is what politicians might do, because fundamentally everyone gets this backwards.

TCS: You don’t see major long-term economic consequences?

KEN FISHER: I think intuitively everybody knows that in the long term, this is not a big deal for the economy and the stock market. I don’t think it’s big enough to matter.

I’m not as sure as Mr. Fisher is. He mistakenly mixes in subprimes with all teaser-rate mortgages at the end (some teaser-rate mortgages were subprime, but most were not), the whole thing is still worth a read.

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I pray that the Army is wrong about the likelihood of Matt Maupin still being alive, but fear that they are not.

From Reporters without Borders (HT BoingBoing via Instapundit):

Government gets blog service providers to sign “self-discipline” pact to end anonymous blogging

Reporters Without Borders condemns the “self-discipline pact” signed by at least 20 leading blog service providers in China including Yahoo.cn! and MSN.cn. Unveiled yesterday by the Internet Society of China (ISC), an offshoot of the information industry ministry, the pact stops short the previous project of making it obligatory for bloggers to register, but it can be used to force service providers to censor content and identify bloggers.

Google isn’t mentioned. This RConversation link from earlier this month indicates that Google is as censorious as it has ever been. So on anonymous blogging, maybe the ChiComs didn’t feel they even needed an agreement from Google.

“The Chinese government has yet again forced Internet sector companies to cooperate on sensitive issues - in this case, blogger registration and blog content,” the press freedom organisation said. “As they already did with website hosting services, the authorities have given themselves the means to identify those posting ‘subversive’ content by imposing a self-discipline pact.”

Reporters Without Borders added: “This decision will have grave consequences for the Chinese blogosphere and marks the end of anonymous blogging. A new wave of censorship and repression seems imminent, above all in the run-up to the Communist Party of China’s next congress.”

And in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.

It Looks like the BizzyBlog Internet Wall of Shame isn’t going anywhere soon.

From the Empty Words Department:

China should not punish people for expressing their political views on the Internet, Yahoo! Inc. said Monday, a day after the mother of a Chinese reporter announced she was suing the U.S. company for helping officials imprison her son.

Yahoo! criticized China in a brief statement that didn’t specifically mention the case of jailed journalist Shi Tao, whose mother visited Hong Kong on Sunday. Shi was sentenced to 10 years in 2005 after sending an e-mail about Chinese media restrictions.

The company has acknowledged sharing information about Shi with Chinese authorities.

Memo to Yahoo!ers — Then don’t help people get found so they can be caught and imprisoned. That’s why you’re on BizzyBlog’s Internet Wall of Shame.

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Phyllis Schafly adds another great reason to the gazillion already on the table for preventing the shamnesty bill from passing:

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, please call your boss and urge him to read your May 9 speech to the National Summit on America’s Silent Epidemic in Washington, D.C. Your eloquence in describing the silent epidemic was exceeded only by our shock at the facts you described.

“The dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students approaches 50 percent. … Every year nearly a million kids fail to graduate high school …. The United States has the most severe income gap between high school graduates and dropouts in the world.”

….. Right on, Secretary Spellings. But your own boss must be one of those in a state of denial. At the same time you were delivering your call for action, President George W. Bush was demanding passage of the Senate immigration bill that would dump many more millions of high school dropouts in your lap.

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Ho-Hum Hiring Headline:

DirecTV to add 1,000 jobs in Colorado
June 7, 2007

Satellite television company DirecTV Group Inc. plans to add as many as 1,000 Denver-area jobs at the company’s new, 256,000-square-foot operations hub it opened Thursday in Centennial, Colo.

El Segundo-based DirecTV’s (NYSE: DTV) call center management, information technology and data center, retail services support and other functions will be based at the center, which occupies a six-story Inverness Business Park building formerly home to defunct telecommunications company ICG.

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Planned Parenthood in California hoards taxpayer money. So much for being a “non-profit.”
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John Lennon was prolife. Sean Lennon should be glad that he was.

Kimberley Strassel’s OpinionJournal.com column about coal-mine operator Robert E. Murray of Murray Energy is important on a number of levels.

You haven’t heard of Robert E. Murray? That’s not surprising.

If there were an open dialog instead of continual blather about “settled science” when it comes to supposedly human-induced “climate change” and “global warming” (two concepts I like to collectively refer to as “globaloney”), Murray would have visibility. But, as Strassel writes, a different “climate,” the political one, appears to be keeping him largely out of the public eye, despite his best efforts to break through.

You see, Robert Murray is a coal-company executive who has first-hand experience with what will happen on a much broader scale if the radical changes envisioned by Al Gore and others (whom I like to refer to as “globalarmists”) ever get enacted:

….. (Murray) employs about 3,000, although he estimates that if you look at all the secondary jobs created to provide goods and services for miners, his company has helped create some 36,000 jobs.

Those jobs are top of Mr. Murray’s list of concerns, and he’s been determined to make people hear about them. At a recent speech to the New York Coal Trade Association ….. Mr. Murray recalled what happened in his region after the 1990 Clean Air Act, which imposed drastic reductions in coal production: “In Ohio alone, from 1990 to 2005, nearly 120 mines were shut down, costing more than 36,000 primary and secondary jobs. These impacted areas have spent years recovering, and some never will. Families broke up, many lost homes, and some were impoverished . . .” He finishes the thought by noting that a global warming program would make those prior coal cuts look like small potatoes.

The attempts to marginalize Mr. Murray are all too real:

….. it’s a measure of just how big an irritant he’s become to global-warming politicians and their new buddies in the energy industry, that when Mr. Murray was invited to impart his wisdom to Congress at a hearing in March, Democrats tried to keep him from testifying. They later gave in, although Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee Chairman Jim Costa pointedly left the room when it was Mr. Murray’s turn to testify.

Had Mr. Costa bothered to stay, he’d have heard a useful, and irrefutable, analysis of just what today’s legislative proposals for a global warming program would mean to the economy, including the nation’s many miners. “Some 52% of this country’s electricity is generated from coal,” Mr. Murray says. “Global warming legislation would place arbitrary limits on the use of coal, yet there’s nothing to replace it at the same cost. There’s nuclear, but the environmentalists killed it off and aren’t about to let it come back. There’s hydro, but we’re using that everywhere we can already. There’s natural gas, but supply and pipeline capacity is limited, and it’s three times the cost of coal. Politically correct–and subsidized ‘alternative energy’ is very limited in capability and also expensive.

“So what you are really doing with a global warming program is getting rid of low-cost energy,” he says. The consequences? Americans have been fretting about losing jobs to places such as China or India, which already offer cheaper energy. “You hike the cost of energy here further, and you create a mass exodus of business out of this country.” Especially so, given that neither of those countries is about to hamstring its own economy in order to join a Kyoto-like accord.

“Inconvenient truths,” indeed, whether Mr. Costa wants to hear them or not. You will not be surprised to learn that I have found no “Congressman Walks out of Hearing” story about Costa’s rude behavior.

But Murray criticism isn’t only aimed at the politicians and the scientific herd:

….. his favorite subject …..(is) his fellow energy executives and the role they are playing in encouraging a mandatory C02 program. “There is this belief that since even some in the energy industry are now on board with a program, that it must be okay. No one is looking at these executives’ real motives.”

(Carbon trading ….. has nothing to do with creating ‘regulatory certainty,’ which is how they like to sell their actions. This has to do with creating money, for their companies, off the back of an economy that will be paying more for its energy.”

Mr. Murray reserves special criticism for those companies that have joined the high-profile U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition pushing for mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions. “Some of them see profits ….. But none of it is good for America.”

He says that if these companies think the good times will last, they’ve been smoking their own products. ….. They are focused on short-term profits, and maybe it’s true that a cap-and-trade program will help them with their next earnings statement. What they won’t acknowledge is that, once a cap-and-trade program is in effect, the politicians will want to keep lowering, lowering, lowering the cap. That means fewer and fewer allowances. In the long term, this will starve American energy–though that isn’t something they are telling their shareholders.

Despite his congressional testimony, frequent TV and radio appearances, and critical letters to other energy-industry executives, Mr. Murray is an Old Media non-entity. Google News searches tell the tale (all typed as indicated):

• “Robert Murray” coal
• “Robert E Murray”
• “Murray Energy”

The only relevant results returned are Strassel’s column, a May 15 guest column by Murray (”The Human Impact of Anti-warming Legislation”) at Wall Street Journal affiliate MarketWatch.com (requires free registration), and a reasonably balanced article on Murray with statements from both sides of the debate in Southeastern Ohio’s twice-weekly Athens (OH) News.

Robert Murray’s invisibility indicates that Old Media is more interested in foisting globaloney on the public than it is in presenting all sides of the debate — particularly those that involve what the full globalarmists’ agenda would really cost if it were ever implemented.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Kevin at Pundit Review has a tremendous, must-read post on this, which heated up in a major way yesterday when former Apple CFO Fred Anderson released a statement blaming Apple CEO Steve Jobs for 2001 stock options backdating.

Since Al Gore is on Apple’s board, and because Gore led an internal investigation of Apple’s stock options practices and history that did NOT criticize Jobs, Kevin asks:

Did Al Gore help cover up for a corporate fat cat who was ripping off shareholders? Was he part of the problem in corporate board rooms? How does this square with his boilerplate speech about shameless corporate corruption? Or his role as Chairmen of Generation Investment Management, a company that is “Dedicated to thought leadership on sustainability and capital markets”?

My chad isn’t hanging, I vote YES.

It may be that Jobs will skate, and that the SEC won’t have the stomach for a protracted legal battle against a tech legend. Gore probably isn’t vulnerable to any legal sanctions, but the Apple situation surely will surely should come up early and often if he decides to enter the presidential sweepstakes.

Walt Mossberg, as he test drove his new Sony VAIO, got, uh, hacked off (HT Techdirt) at PC makers in general:

….. I’m talking about two main problems. One is the plethora of teaser software and advertisements for products that must be cleared and uninstalled to make way for your own stuff. The second is the confusing welter of security programs you have to master and update, even on a virgin machine.

I’m also referring to how slowly a new Windows Vista machine starts and restarts, even if you haven’t yet loaded or launched any of your own software.

I am not singling out Sony here. I would have had a similar experience if I had chosen, say, a Hewlett-Packard laptop. Most major PC makers feature the security programs and trial software and offers I encountered on my new Sony. They are not part of Vista itself.

The problem is a lack of respect for the consumer. The manufacturers don’t act as if the computer belongs to you. They act as if it is a billboard for restricted trial versions of software and ads for Web sites and services that they can sell to third-party companies who want you to buy these products.

I’m distinguishing these programs, sometimes called “craplets,” from the full-featured, built-in Sony software meant to enhance the computer, or from entire, useful programs Microsoft builds into Windows, such as music and photo organizers.

On my new Sony, there were two dozen trial programs and free offers. The desktop alone contained four icons representing come-ons for various America Online services, and two for Microsoft. The start menu and program menu had more items that I neither chose nor wanted. Napster, a music service I don’t use, was lodged at the lower right of the screen.

The worst was a desktop icon called “Watch Hit Movies Now!” This turned out to be four full-length films from Sony’s movie studios, which the company had preloaded onto my computer at the cost of more than four gigabytes of precious hard-disk space. But they aren’t a gift. If you want to play them, you have to pay Sony.

Then there was the security-software mess……

I also was shocked at how long this machine took to restart and to do a cold start after being completely shut down. Restarting took over three minutes, and a cold start took more than two minutes. That suggests the computer is loading a bunch of stuff I neither know about nor want. By contrast, a brand new Apple MacBook laptop, under the same test conditions, restarted in 34 seconds and did a cold start in 29 seconds.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Mossberg didn’t note that newer Intel-based machines, in combination with Vista, enable a very deep sleep mode that, as I understand it, is withing striking distance of being a reboot, and that a PC can awaken from very deep sleep in just a few seconds. That “should” mean less frequent need to shut down or restart the machine.

But Mossberg’s point about craplets and trial-software overkill is a good one — so good that Microsoft openly worried when Vista was launched that craplets would hold back new system sales or cause system malfunctions.

It would appear that the best solution would for consumers to insist on getting craplet-free machines, but it seems that it will will take thousands of walk-aways before anyone would do something about it.

Back on March 3, Townhall’s Tom Borelli got in some good whacks at the “Corporate Social Responsibility” movement and one of its craven collaborators that will not go unnoticed at this blog:

Karl Marx once remarked, “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” However, Marx had no idea the rope would be corporate social responsibility (CSR) and not greed.

In keeping with CSR doctrine, CEOs are opening their doors to activist groups with great fanfare in hopes of maximizing both “the social good” and corporate profits. Regrettably, these CEO’s are maximizing neither.

Social activists are not concerned with corporate profits, shareholder returns or economic growth. Their sole mission is to transform corporations into agents to advance their social and political agenda.

By allowing social activists to influence business decisions, CEOs are choosing socialism over capitalism and by doing so; they are undermining the very foundations of our free society.

….. Not taking any chances with the free-market system, (General Electric CEO Jeff) Immelt wants government regulation to guarantee (GE’s “green” subsidiary) Ecomagination’s success. GE is a member of the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) – a coalition of corporations and environmental activist groups “that have come together to call on the federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Immelt’s rent seeking math is simple: limits on carbon dioxide will drive sales for his products and the Left will adore him like Al Gore.

So now Inmelt has joined the globaloney chorus for cravenly obvious reasons, giving it an aura of legitimacy it doesn’t deserve. Borelli properly notes that any gains GE achieves by allowing itself to be co-opted by the enviros will first, hurt many of its other businesses (Borelli believes this is already occurring), and second, hurt corporate economic performance in general — leading to yet more temptations of CEOs at other companies to sell out for short-term PR gain.

The tradeoff is a stark one — short-term acclaim for the cynical few in return for longer-term stagnation — or worse. Frankly, Jeff Inmelt has no moral right to make that deal.

From the Associated Press on Tuesday, March 20 — It’s out of Salt Lake City; considering the amount of time this dragged on, the coverage of this event was, to me, surprisingly quiet:

Procter & Gamble Co. has won a jury award of $19.25 million in a civil lawsuit filed against four former Amway distributors accused of spreading false rumors linking the company to Satanism to advance their own business.

The U.S. District Court jury in Salt Lake City on Friday found in favor of the Cincinnati-based consumer products company in a lawsuit filed by P&G in 1995. It was one of several the company brought over rumors alleging a link with the company’s logo and Satanism.

Rumors had begun circulating as early as 1981 that the company’s logo - a bearded, crescent man-in-moon looking over a field of 13 stars - was a symbol of Satanism.

The company alleged that Amway Corp. distributors revived those rumors in 1995, using a voice mail system to tell thousands of customers that part of Procter & Gamble profits went to satanic cults.

….. The former Amway distributors thought they’d be exonerated and were shocked by the jury’s verdict late Friday, said Randy L. Haugen, one of the defendants.

“It’s hard to imagine they’d pursue it this long, especially after all the retractions we put out,” said Haugen, a 53-year-old Ogden, Utah, businessman who maintained P&G was never able to show how it was harmed by the rumors. “We are stunned. All of us.”

Only a long-time Amway Independent Business Owner Distributor top-of-the-heap exploiter would be “stunned” at the obvious. No wonder this guy didn’t want voters to know anything about his Amway connections (scroll to fifth item discussed) when he ran for Congress in Ohio’s Second District in 2005 and 2006.

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UPDATE, April 2: Okay, this is bizarre, and it may not be over.

Megan McArdle, one of those sitting in for Instapundit for a few days, calls attention to this stunner (I/B/E/S is the “Institutional Brokers Estimate System“):

Comparing two snapshots of the entire historical I/B/E/S database of research analyst stock recommendations, taken in 2002 and 2004 but each covering the same time period 1993-2002, we identify tens of thousands of changes which collectively call into question the principle of replicability of empirical research. The changes are of four types: 1) The non-random removal of 19,904 analyst names from historic recommendations (“anonymizations”); 2) the addition of 19,204 new records that were not previously part of the database; 3) the removal of 4,923 records that had been in the data; and 4) alterations to 10,698 historical recommendation levels. In total, we document 54,729 ex post changes to a database originally containing 280,463 observations.

Maybe there’s a perfectly acceptable explanation for an after-the-fact alteration rate of almost 20%, but until I hear it, it’s hard not to think that there is quite the contingent of “grown up” David Lightmans (the main character in the 1983 movie “War Games,” played by Matthew Broderick, who, among other things, hacked into his high school’s computer system and changed his grades) systematically rewriting their history. And I’d not only like to ask the Watergate question (”What did they know and when did they know it?”) of industry CEOs during that period, I’d like to know (again, if this really is abusive history rewriting) what they’re going to do to stop it now — AND to put things back to where they were.

From Bloomberg:

Citigroup Ends ‘Universal Default’ on Cardholders (Update3)
By Justin Baer

March 1 (Bloomberg) — Citigroup Inc., the biggest U.S. financial-services company, will stop raising interest rates on credit-card customers who fail to repay loans from other banks, ending a practice that’s drawn scrutiny from Congress.

In addition to revising its policy on so-called universal defaults, Citigroup also will no longer raise rates and fees on customer accounts “at any time for any reason,” the New York- based bank said today in a statement.

Say what you will about the change in control of Congress that took place in November (and yes, this blogger has said plenty), the above move shows that Republicans utterly failed on their watch to rein in abusive lending practices, while at the same time putting the squeeze on consumers by passing “Bankruptcy Reform” (let it not be forgotten, with the help of more than a few Democrats).

“B-R” could have been defended had curbs on outrages like universal default, doubling-up on over-the-limit fees (even if you pay the balance below the limit almost immediately, you still get socked with another over-limit fee on the next statement), ridiculously high “mistake” fees in general, and other reprehensible practices (like this one) been put in place. But apparently the campaign contribution money was too good to pass up.

Now that the Democrats are in charge, financial services firms appear to be reluctantly getting religion. This is no accident. It is occurring because when it had the chance, the supposed party of Main Street gave too much slack to the moneychangers on Wall Street.

__________________________

UPDATE, Mar. 10: From Jeff at Credit/Debt Recovery — “Don’t let them fool you… Citibank is still evil… Inside the industry, we know that Citibank is the big bully.”

When you’re fined for employing deceptive business practices, the response should not be simply to pay the fine involved and to keep on doing it (HT Techdirt) — especially if you’re one of the three major credit bureaus. But that’s what Experian is doing, and apparently intends to keep on doing, with its freecreditreport.com efforts.

Media outlets carrying commercials for this disgraceful and apparently ongoing enterprise should seriously reconsider doing so.

Consumers need to know that, as noted here two years ago, the only site where you can get an annual, no-strings-attached free copy of your credit report is annualcreditreport.com.

This is IP Imperialism (HT Coyote Blog via Hit and Run via Techdirt).