Though more easily comprehensible, the comical error (or is it what he truly thought?) in Barack Obama’s “57 states” statement (HT Newsbusters’ John Stephenson) is nothing compared to the dangerously wrong “history” he recited in his North Carolina Primary victory speech Tuesday night.

Friday, at Real Clear Politics, Jack Kelly recounted the Illinois Senator’s egregious error, and its frightening implications (bolds are mine throughout):

Obama Needs a History Lesson

In his victory speech after the North Carolina primary, Sen. Barack Obama said something that is all the more remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon.

In defending his stated intent to meet with America’s enemies without preconditions, Sen. Obama said: “I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.”

That he made this statement, and that it passed without comment by the journalists covering his speech indicates either breathtaking ignorance of history on the part of both, or deceit.

Then Kelly recited how wrong Obama was about Roosevelt and Truman:

FDR talked directly with none of them (our enemies) before the outbreak of hostilities, and his policy once war began was unconditional surrender.

….. Truman did not modify the policy of unconditional surrender.

….. Harry Truman also was president when North Korea invaded South Korea in June, 1950. President Truman’s response was not to call up North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung for a chat. It was to send troops.

….. When Stalin’s (post-World War II) designs became unmistakably clear, President Truman’s response wasn’t to seek a summit meeting. He sent military aid to Greece, ordered the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, and sent troops to South Korea.

….. The closest historical analogue to Sen. Obama’s expressed desire to meet with no preconditions with anti-American dictators such as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the trip British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Eduoard Daladier took to Munich in September of 1938 to negotiate “peace in our time” with Adolf Hitler. That didn’t work out so well.

Kelly also quoted a historian who told of how John F. Kennedy’s decision to meet with Kruschev enabled the Russian premier to evaluate him as someone “who would shrink from hard decisions. (Kruschev) came to believe that Americans are ‘too liberal to fight.’” He also quoted journalistic icon James Reston of the New York Times, who once wrote that “when Kennedy was rash enough to strike at Cuba but not bold enough to finish the job, Khrushchev decided he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed.”

Kelly’s wrap:

The lack of historical knowledge among journalists is merely appalling. But in a presidential candidate it’s dangerous. As Sir Winston Churchill said:

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Is the Obama campaign going to pass off their candidate’s misguided rendition of history as yet another error resulting from being “tired”? Will Old Media journalists covering him let it slide? Or is Kelly’s suspicion that they didn’t even recognize Obama’s error correct?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

I noted a few weeks ago (at BizzyBlog; at NewsBusters) that Mike Celizic at MSNBC couldn’t get though his article about Jenna Bush’s upcoming wedding without bringing up her misdemeanor arrests from seven years ago.

Julie Mason of the Houston Chronicle also went there in a late Thursday report. She also threw in a number of shots at Jenna’s father, his administration, and his hometown:

Saturday, in an Oscar de la Renta gown with twin sister Barbara at her side, Jenna Bush, 26, will marry 29-year-old business school student Henry Hager at her parents’ Central Texas ranch.

It’s probably as close as Oscar de la Renta will ever get to Crawford.

….. The wedding also is a last hurrah of sorts for Crawford. The town saw its fortunes and profile rise when Bush built his 1,600-acre ranch there. More recently, like the president’s approval ratings, Crawford has fallen on hard times.

….. The White House is being secretive about the ceremony, secretive even by the opaque Bush administration standards.

….. It’s all a far cry from “Jenna and Tonic,” the tabloid sobriquet she earned after two college-era busts for underage drinking. (Ohio University historian Katherine) Jellison said it’s clear Jenna has put some work into improving her public image.

Leanne Italie of the Associated Press (HT Captain Ed at Hot Air) also went to apparent go-to “expert” Jellison, who managed to tie a daughter’s wedding into the Iraq War:

“This is going to be such a different kind of situation,” said Katherine Jellison, an associate professor of history at Ohio University who chronicles the American obsession with marital pomp in her recent book, It’s Our Day.

“Jenna’s father is not running for re-election,” she said. “The frivolity of a big White House wedding in the middle of an unpopular war would have used up what little political capital he has.”

Since all sense of decorum has been abandoned, I hope it’s not too rude to point out that Ms. Jellison has a, uh, unique perspective on weddings, as this Editorial Review of her book, the full title of which is “It’s Our Day: America’s Love Affair With the White Wedding, 1945-2005,” explains (original had no paragraph breaks; bolds are mine):

Love may be the catalyst for the American white wedding, but hosting an elaborate celebration also demonstrates a family’s prosperity and material success, argues Jellison in her compelling economic and social history of how this ritual survived despite the major cultural and political changes of the 1960s and beyond.

Jellison, an associate professor of history at Ohio University, argues that while the white wedding of the 1940s may have celebrated youth, virginity and a patriarchal family structure, Americans have reinterpreted the symbolism of satin and lace: the 21st-century bride evokes the tradition of female-focused celebration and uses the elaborate and costly event as a display of her professional and social success as she marks a life transition.

With chapters on celebrity nuptials, silver-screen I-dos and the latest batch of reality TV brides, Jellison demonstrates how advertisers, media and brides themselves slowly reshaped the white wedding into an act of organized feminism.

Who knew that weddings, of all events, are now celebrations of the sisterhood?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Inflammatory rhetoric and other content in the weekly bulletins of the Trinity United Church of Christ have the credibility of the claims by Barack and Michelle Obama that they have not been aware of the objectionable beliefs of their pastor and of his theology for the 20 years they have been church members hanging by a thread.

Posts:

• (link) “The TUCC Bulletins: ‘European Dominance’ and the Church’s Black-Power Roots.” The quick answer to the question, “Is TUCC another mainline denomination with just a smidge of ethnic emphasis, or, as Mark Steyn described it today, the home base of a “a neo-segregationist huckster?” Uh, it’s the latter.
• (link) “Selected History and Economics Lessons from the Wright-TUCC Bulletins.” Highlights include “the most heinous act of terrorism since chattel slavery (was) the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” “Pat Buchanan’s ancestors did not build this country; they stole this country,” and other gems.
• (link) “MORE Selected History and Economics Lessons from the Wright-TUCC Bulletins.” Includes “lack of respect given to Black people is still America’s pastime,” “Since 1619 …. not much has changed either when it comes to the rights of Africans living in this country,” and much more.
• (link) “Selected Quotes from Others in the Wright - TUCC Bulletins.” Features “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” “the firestorm of racism is far from over,” and other choice items.

(If you are on the home page, click on “more” to get to the body of this post, which is about the motivation for it and provides some background.)
(more…)

Part of the May 5, 2008 series – “The Obamas and the TUCC Bulletins”

___________________________________________

Note: Some of these are repeats from previous posts, but are deserving of repetition.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright; July 17, 2005 (pictured here; opens in new window):

While you were looking the other way, Mr. Joseph C. Wilson IV, a good Republican, a man loyal to the “party,” and a man of integrity wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times. In his article he disputed George Bush’s administration’s claims about Sadaam Hussein’s nuclear program.

….. Because Mr. Wilson dared to tell the truth, the White House sought retribution! The Bush Administration publicly identified his wife as a CIA operative. The Bush Administration “leaked” information to identify his wife, Valerie Plane, as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. In other words, they “outed” her!

Wright called for George Bush’s impeachment in that same essay.

_________________________________________

Rev. Jeremiah Wright; August 7, 2005 (pictured here):

….. this weekend marked the 60th anniversary of the most heinous act of terrorism since chattel slavery – the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki …..

….. most Americans have no idea as to what we did in the terrorist act committed against the Japanese people.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also invoked in Wright’s infamous post-9/11 “chickens come home to roost” video.

_________________________________________

Rev. Jeremiah Wright; November 6, 2005 (pictured here):

“Both Washington and Jefferson were owners of Africans and fathered babies by African women.”

“(Thomas Jefferson is) the man who was a pedophile and raped the 15 year-old African girl, Sally Hemmings.”

As covered in this previous post, the claims are dubious at best, scurrilous at worst. This previous post notes that Wright made his Jefferson-pedophilia claim at funeral service several weeks ago.

________________________________________

Reginald Williams; November 20, 2005 — on that year’s riots in France (pictured here):

Young persons who are sick and tired of the government’s and society’s exclusive, supremacist, racist attitude toward them, are rising up and making themselves heard. It is easy to decry the riots as just troublemakers who are off on a tangent. However, when one reviews the history of how Arabs and other immigrants from North Africa have been treated since World War II, one may begin to understand the unrest a bit better.

….. It is a common occurrence for police to demand that they lower their eyes, as in the Jim Crow South, as if dark-skinned people are not even worthy to look in the eyes of white policemen who are supposed to serve and protect.

This shows us that racism is not just an American entity, but a worldwide occurrence. In fact, if names were switched, it could very well be America rather than France.

_________________________________________

Reginald Williams; December 17, 2006 (pictured here):

The truth of the matter is that Pat Buchanan’s ancestors did not build this country; they stole this country. It was the enslaved Africans, and Native Americans who built this country from sea to sea on their backs without the benefit of a paycheck. Moreover, they were immigrants themselves who were welcomed in, and deceived those who hosted them.

_________________________________________

History and economics lessons, TUCC-style, continue in the next post.

Note: For background on Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s previous appearances (Moyers, NAACP, and National Press Club), go here.

There’s been no shortage of follow-up commentary on the Barack Obama-Jeremiah Wright situation, but I can assure you that the matters discussed here have not been addressed by anyone else.

________________________________________________

Many of the comments made by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Senior Pastor at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) at his Washington National Press Club appearance — comments Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama denounced Tuesday as “divisive and destructive” at his press conference in Winston-Salem, North Carolina — have been visible and recurring themes in TUCC’s weekly church bulletins for at least several years.

Most controversially, a review of over 125 digital editions of the bulletins I have come to possess, representing about 60% of those I would expect have been issued in the past four years, shows that on at least two occasions Wright himself, and at least one writer whose work Wright reprinted in the “Pastor’s Page” section of the bulletin, have done what Obama expressed outrage over on Tuesday: “equate(d) the United States’ wartime efforts with terrorism.”

Though it is not known whether Obama has read, or remembers reading, bulletin content containing such material in the 20 years he has been attending TUCC, there are circumstantial reasons to believe that he would have come across it during that time.

The “wartime efforts” Obama referred to Tuesday extend back, in Wright’s view, over 60 years.

In the August 7, 2005 bulletin, TUCC’s pastor went back to World War II (bolds are mine; the related TUCC bulletin page is here), actually extending the the scope of the related well-known video clip on the same topic further:

Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Hiroshima

Just as most African Americans did not know that this weekend marked the 60th anniversary of the most heinous act of terrorism since chattel slavery – the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – most African Americans also did not know why the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition was having a march in Atlanta to gain support for the Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.

The primary reason most African Americans (and most Americans in general) did not know about Hiroshima is because of the suppression of all the film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. The U.S. Government did not want the American public to see the horror we created as we killed 300,000 civilians in an act of terrorism.

Wright’s related sermon video strongly criticizes the atomic bombings, but does not specifically call them out as acts of terrorism.

Referring to a more recent war, in the third page of an essay in the January 2, 2005 bulletin entitled “A New Year” (pictured here [Page 8] and here [Pages 9 and 10]), Wright wrote the following (bold is mine):

We have the challenge of explaining to our children why the sodomy and rape at Abu Graib (sic) committed by American troops and sanctioned by higher ups all the way up (higher) to the Pentagon and beyond is not defined as terrorism while what other people do to us is defined as terrorism. The challenges ahead of us are great.

Finally, another writer’s work, reprinted by Wright, sought to minimize the significance of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. compared to what this writer saw in many cases as equal or greater crimes.

The September 17, 2006 bulletin, issued shortly after the previous week’s commemorations of the fifth anniversary of the attacks, contains “September 11 — A Moment of Silence for All the Others,” a poem written in 2002 by Emmanuel Ortiz. Wikipedia describes Ortiz as “a Chicano/Puerto Rican/Irish-American activist and spoken-word poet.”

The poem recites Ortiz’s reactions on the first anniversary of the attacks.

Here are some excerpts from that poem (pictured in its entirety as it appeared in TUCC’s bulletin here and here):

A MOMENT OF SILENCE BEFORE I START THIS POEM

Before I start this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honour of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September 11th. I would also like to ask you To offer up a moment of silence For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared,
tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes, For the victims in both Afghanistan and the US

And if I could just add one more thing…

A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of US-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation. Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year US embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,

Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa, Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country. Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin And the survivors went on as if alive …..

….. If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence,
put a brick through
the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses,
the jailhouses, the Penthouses and
the Playboys.

….. You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all… Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we, Tonight we will keep right on singing… For our dead.

Barack Obama’s denunciation of Wright’s National Press Club comments might lead many that the Illinois Senator is not aware of any of the three terror-equating items just noted.

But, as noted in a previous report at Pajamas Media on TUCC and its bulletins, there is reason to believe that Obama may have been aware of the terror-equating positions of Wright long before his Tuesday denunciation of it:

• TUCC’s bulletins are distributed to attendees each week before services begin.
• Each bulletin contains one or more “Sermon Notes” page.
• “Sermon Notes” pages are usually no more than one or two turns of the page away from Wright’s “Pastor’s Pages” and other opinion-based content.
• Obama was seen taking notes during a Wright sermon by Ryan Lizza, then of the New Republic, who wrote a March 2007 profile of Obama. Whether Obama was taking notes in the page(s) provided in the bulletin or on separate paper is not known.

In the three instances just cited, the terror-equating content and the Sermon Notes appear on the following nearby bulletin pages:

• August 7, 2005 — Wright calls dropping of atomic bombs in World War II “terrorism” - Page 7; Sermon Notes - Page 5.

January 2, 2005 — Wright’s “A New Year” essay - Pages 8-10 (Abu Ghraib mentioned on Page 10); Sermon Notes - Page 5.

September 17, 2006 — Ortiz’s Poem - Pages 9-12; Sermon Notes - Page 6.

Moreover, there is the question of whether TUCC’s bulletin content has generally supported or mirrored sermons delivered at its services.

At many churches, it is not unusual for the cleric who gives the homily or sermon to work to ensure that the Saturday or Sunday bulletin content reflects or supplements what he or she will say from the pulpit. Based on my review of TUCC’s bulletin content thus far, if Wright made such an effort, the likelihood that Obama has heard objectionable sermons increases significantly, even if the Illinois Senator rarely looked at the potentially controversial sections of TUCC’s bulletins.

Even if Wright’s sermons were typically divorced from bulletin content, the fact (confirmed with a bulletin-involved person at TUCC) that the bulletins are distributed before services begin, and the high frequency at which potentially controversial content can be found in those bulletins, increase the likelihood that Obama became aware of items which he, based on the various statements he has made during the past few weeks, should have “vehemently condemn(ed).”

THE person involved with the publication of TUCC’s weekly bulletin whome I spoke with almost two weeks ago indicated that the church is no longer posting new editions of the bulletins at its web site, and that this practice will continue indefinitely. When asked, no reason was provided as to why recent bulletins have not been posted online. TUCC’s “Online Bulletin” page, as it appeared at press tim, contains no link to a published bulletin.

As usual, read the whole thing (bolds are mine; internal link added by me):

The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized:

“The production of biofuel is devastating huge swaths of the world’s environment. So why on Earth is the government forcing us to use more of it?”

You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in November 2005:

“At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies … . This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol.”

Etc. It’s not the environmental movement’s chickenfeedhawks who’ll have to reap what they demand must be sown, but we should be in no doubt about where to place the blame – on the bullying activists and their media cheerleaders and weather-vane politicians who insist that the “science” is “settled” and that those who question whether there’s any crisis are (in the designation of the strikingly nonemaciated Al Gore) “denialists.”

….. Whether there’s very slight global cooling or very slight global warming, there’s no need for a “war” on either, no rationale for loosing a plague of eco-locusts on the food supply. So why be surprised that totalitarian solutions to mythical problems wind up causing real devastation? As for Time’s (infamous Iwo Jima) tree, by all means put it up: It helps block out the view of starving peasants on the far horizon.

Never forget this:

On Aug. 4, 1994, Al Gore cast the crucial vote which set the United States on the road to taking food out of the mouths of millions, by using food for fuel.

….. Four years after the vote, Gore was still boasting about his central role in perpetrating the ethanol craze.

The inconvenient truth is that a fake crisis may be leading to a really serious one.

The repeated flubs by the candidate I irreverently refer to as “Mr. BOOHOO-OUCH” (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama - Objectively Unfit Coddler of Haters) on the effects of the capital gains tax consistently ignore the fact that when it has been lowered, tax revenues have increased. One specific is that the 1997 cut that gave rise to almost three years of very good economic growth caused tax collections to explode, but more importantly, was a huge factor in venture capital increasing by a factor of 7:

In 1995, the first year for which these data are available, just over $8 billion in venture capital was invested. Venture capital is especially critical to a vibrant economy because high-risk/high-return investment permits promising new businesses to blossom, rapidly spreading new technologies and new ideas into the marketplace and across the economy. Such investments, when successful, generate returns to investors that are subject primarily to the tax on capital gains. By 1998, the first full year in which the lower capital gains rates were in effect, venture capital activity reached almost $28 billion, more than a three-fold increase over 1995 levels, and by 1999, it had doubled yet again.

($28 billion x 2 = $56 billion, which is seven times greater than 1995’s $8 billion. — Ed.)

The explosion in venture capital activity cannot be credited entirely to the cut in capital gains tax rates, as the cut fortuitously coincided with technological developments that gave rise to the Internet-based “New Economy.” However, the rapid development and application of these new technologies could not have occurred at such a rapid clip absent the enormous investment flows made possible largely by the reduction in the capital gains tax rate.

Obama either doesn’t get that, or believes it’s less important than an abstract concept of “fairness” — economic growth be damned.

Update: Obama is now saying — “I’m mindful that we’ve got to keep our capital gains tax to a point where we can actually get more revenue.” There’s one way that happens, pal — LOWER it.

___________________________________________

John Stossel, in the Orange County Register (bold is mine):

And are we really experiencing a mortgage-default “crisis”? No. The Mortgage Bankers Association’s 2007 fourth-quarter survey reports that foreclosures came to 2.04 percent of all mortgages. Many of those were speculators seeking flip profits rather than homeowners losing a dream house. During the quarter, 0.83 percent of homes entered the foreclosure process. It may get worse – in March, “foreclosure filings, default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions rose 5 percent,” Reuters reports. But let’s keep things in perspective: Ninety-eight percent of borrowers are not in foreclosure. Only a small percentage of them are even late in payments.

Politicians love a “crisis.” John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all think that the government should bail out homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages. When they say the government should do this, they mean the taxpayers, including those who are paying their mortgages. They also think the government should regulate the lending and investment industries further.

Why?

Because “crisis” justifies making big government bigger.

“The taxpayers” also including those who are paying rent.

_____________________________________________

The presidential candidate I irreverently refer to “JS3M3″ (John Sidney the Mad Maverick McCain III) has not been pleasing the people who are supposed to be his base lately. That would be conservatives, not Old Media.

But he got this right:

The GOP nominee-in-waiting rapped his Democratic rival for opposing his idea to suspend the tax on fuel during the summer. …..

“I noticed again today that Sen. Obama repeated his opposition to giving low-income Americans a tax break, a little bit of relief so they can travel a little further and a little longer, and maybe have a little bit of money left over to enjoy some other things in their lives,” McCain said. “Obviously Sen. Obama does not understand that this would be a nice thing for Americans, and the special interests should not be dictating this policy.”

Most spending on gas is a fixed cost, at least in the short run. The people who would benefit most from a summer bas-tax holiday would be those for whom gas is a higher pecentage of their total spending.

Here is a certain nationally-syndicated talk show host, commenting on the presidential candidate I refer to as BOOHOO-OUCH (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama - Objectively Unfit Coddler of Haters):

….. about Obama and the American flag lapel pin. The question came from Pennsylvania voter Nash McCabe, and it was on videotape. The question, “Senator Obama, I want to know if you believe in the American flag. I’m not questioning your patriotism, but all our servicemen, policemen, and EMS wear the flag. I want to know why you don’t.” Now, this is what I mean. The very fact this question has to be asked of somebody running for the presidency ….. to me tells me the guy’s not fit …..

Rush has a different reason, and has a lower fitness threshold, but has come to the same conclusion reached by yours truly on April 8, observing Obama’s 20-year association with a church that promotes the racist Black Liberation Supremacist Theology; his pledge to continue to attend it; and his refusal to categorically condemn those who promote that “theology” to varying extremes, including his 20-year now-”retired” pastor and that pastor’s successor:

A person who is without the judgment to run away from this garbage (and the breathtaking financial hypocrisy; Farrakhan’s too) as fast as he (and his family!) can, but instead hangs around for 20 years (just stop it already with the plausible deniability arguments), is …… (here we go) …… objectively unfit for the nation’s highest office and all that holding it entails.

Here’s yesterday’s headline, from the Associated Press’s Martin Crutsinger, in a report about the Producer Price Index:

Wholesale prices soared in March

Translation of AP/Crutsingerese: Everything but food and energy “soared” (oops, went up a bit) by a whopping 0.2%. On the whole, the result was a less-than-pleasing 1.1%, mostly due to energy.

Crutsinger also hilariously raised the specter of a long-ago ogre:

The inflation pressures are occurring at a time when the overall economy is slowing and many analysts believe may have toppled into a recession. That raises concerns that the country could be facing another bout of stagflation, the malady that last occurred in the 1970s when economic growth stagnated but inflation kept rising.

Stagflation? Based on the latest data, the sum of inflation (about 4.0%, with food and energy, as of February) and unemployment (5.1% as of March) is currently 9.1%.

In December 1980, thanks to our worst president ever, who now dabbles in terrorist coddling, it was over double that, at 19.7% (12.5% inflation and 7.2% unemployment).

Heck, the current “stagflation” number is barely higher than April 1995’s 8.8% (3.0% inflation and 5.8% unemployment), during a period the AP seems to regard as the Golden Age of Pericles because a Democrat was in charge at the White House. I don’t recall the business press worrying about stagflation then.

Chill, Martin.

Update: Granite Grok (HT Maggie Thurber) did a more comprehensive chart comparing the US labor market in March 2008 vs. March 1996. Guess which came out better (and it’s not even close, even without adjusting for population growth)?

_______________________________________

An example of why Pat Dollard is a national treasure (3:17 p.m. entry at link), as he reports from Iraq on what he sees happening with al-Sadr compared to what Time Magazine is telling its readers:

The guy’s unraveling and under siege from all sides, and the U.S. is doing all it can to keep Maliki from going nuclear on him, and he issued a laughable and meaningless demand to have his supporters returned to the Army, which everyone knows isn’t going to happen However, that’s a good news narrative that Time magazine isn’t interested in. Instead, they unabashedly lick his ass in a fantasy piece. The unabashed gall of these people is breathtaking.

Update: Oh, and it looks like Dollard, irritating liberally, always refers to Barack Obama using ONLY his middle name. You go, guy.

_______________________________________

Greg Ransom at PrestoPundit scooped the world (HT Michelle Malkin) by locating and reviewing “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” by Barak Obama, father of the presidential candidate I refer to as Mr. BOOHOO-OUCH (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama - Objectively Unfit Coddler of Haters).

It is, as Ransom describes it, “a paper which lays out the father’s socialist and anti-Western convictions.”

It is also something he provided to Politico.com, which proceeded to pretend that what the father wrote doesn’t mean what it clearly communicates. Ransom added this in a later post, which explains why I won’t link to the Politico piece:

The article attacks my headline unfairly, completely misrepresents what I said, and deals with none of the rest of the content of my article. Mugged by the bastards in the MSM, I guess. ….. None of what I said to (Politico reporter) Ressner is quoted in the article. Smith and Ressner go to a professor for pull quotes to attack me. It’s very clear that the good professor did not read my article.

It turns out that the pull-quoted prof is a major-league lightweight. Ransom: “When ….. (the reporters) went trolling for a friendly authority, they ended up scraping from the bottom of the academic barrel.”

Read Ransom’s critique and his reprint of the father’s essay. On the substance, it’s clear that if the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and Barack Obama wins in November, our economic freedoms are at significant risk.

From Westhampton Beach, NY:

April 6, 2008

In a sprawling aircraft hangar in Westhampton Beach yesterday, about 300 airmen in dress blues and 100 others gathered to honor a national hero - in a ceremony more than 40 years overdue.

Retired Chief Master Sgt. Dennis Richardson, 62, who exposed himself to enemy fire in a 1968 rescue effort near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, received cheers and standing ovations as he was awarded the Air Force Cross, the second-highest military honor in that branch.

“It was a long, hard day and very scary,” Richardson said at Suffolk’s Francis S. Gabreski Airport. “I don’t think I did anything different than the rest of the crew that day.”

Richardson was entitled to the medal but never received it for unknown reasons.

Richardson enlisted in the Air Force after graduating from high school in Elmhurst, Queens, in 1964. After serving in Vietnam, he settled in Amityville to start a family with his wife, Deidre, with whom he has five children, and begin a career with the Xerox Corp.

Seven years later, Richardson joined the 106th Rescue Wing of the New York Air National Guard, where he spent 30 years participating in rescue missions before retiring in 2005. Col. Michael Canders, commander of the rescue wing, who flew rescue missions with Richardson, relayed a story of Richardson’s professionalism.

“I came to appreciate his sense of humor and his crusty but special way of letting me know that there might be a better way to do this fly,” said Canders, 52. Then, he imitated Richardson’s deep, gravelly voice. “Listen up, sonny boy. Don’t be goofing off down there.

“We’re running out of gas.”

But, Canders added, local rescues were “a mere walk in the park” compared with Richardson’s time in Vietnam.

It was March 14, 1968, when Richardson, a door gunner on a rescue helicopter that flew to save downed pilots, protected his crew by leaning out of the door to fire his M60 machine gun at advancing enemies. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, California:

7:11 p.m. March 28, 2008

In all probability, Marine Sgt. Randy Roedema never would have met his daughter if not for another man’s bravery.

Roedema’s platoon – part of a quick-reaction force – was on patrol in the Iraqi desert south of Rawah on Aug. 2, 2007, when insurgents ambushed it with a hail of automatic weapons fire. Roedema, 25, was shot twice and collapsed to the ground.

A Marine tried to rescue him and was killed in the process, he recalled Friday. Then Lance Cpl. Moses Cardenas rushed to Roedema’s aid, dragging him 100 yards to safety while shooting at the insurgents. Cardenas suffered two bullet wounds in the process.

Roedema’s first child, Juliannah, was born just days after the ambush, and Roedema credits Cardenas with giving the girl a chance to have a father.

He gave the testimonial during a ceremony at Camp Pendleton in which Cardenas received the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest honor for combat valor.

Marine commanders awarded Cardenas the medal for his efforts to rescue Roedema.

Cardenas said he knew he had been shot, but didn’t really feel the pain until minutes after the rounds had stopped and all the insurgents were dead.

“It didn’t really register how dangerous it was with all the adrenaline going,” said Cardenas, 20, of Fullerton. “It’s either you kill them or they kill you.”

Cardenas and fellow members of his platoon now wear wrist bands engraved with the name of the Marine who was killed that day: Lance Cpl. Cristian Vasquez, 20.

Among the people who came Friday to congratulate Cardenas were his parents and his sister. Cardenas cried briefly as he introduced his family to some of his fellow Marines after the ceremony.

His platoon mates patted him on the back, shook his hand and offered praises such as “Oorah!” and “Good job, devil. We’re all proud of you.”

The Marine Corps’ citation notes that Cardenas “left his safe position behind a vehicle and fought his way across 50 meters of fire-swept, open desert against five armed insurgents to rescue the fallen Marine.”

“After sustaining a gunshot wound to the neck that knocked him to the ground. . . . Cardenas tenaciously rose to his feet, calmly reloaded his squad automatic weapon and continued his assault until he reached the wounded Marine.”

Roedema said Cardenas essentially shielded him with his own body.

Cardenas was on his first combat tour of Iraq at the time, and he will return there for a second tour in September. His enlistment with the Marine Corps will expire in two years, but he intends to re-enlist and remain in the service “until they kick me out,” he said. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

To refresh from what I posted on earlier this morning (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog [third item at post] — here’s the admission from New York Times reporter Qais Mizher, in his report from Basra in yesterday’s Times:

Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.

Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.

Yesterday, Richard Miniter at Pajamas Media pointed out that Mizher’s self-professed “experience” means that he “was an officer in Saddam’s army.”

A search on Mizher’s full name in quotes at the Times shows that it comes up in 313 stories, going all the way back to September 2004. Mizher’s regular reportorial contributions appear to have begun in late August 2005. He has rarely, if ever, had his byline alone on a story; the one excerpted above is either the first instance, or a rare exception.

Points/questions:

• Someone with more time than I have ought to go through the reports to which Mizher has contributed to see how a former Saddam officer might have colored them.
• How many other former Saddam officers are in Old Media’s employ over in Iraq?
• Those skeptical of the need for folks like Yon, Totten, Ardolino, Dollard, et al need to remind me again — Why should Old Media’s wire services and “newspapers of record” deserve the presumption of greater credibility than the milbloggers?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

I didn’t miss this item from a week ago, but haven’t blogged on it until now:

Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution.

Prosecutors say that trip was arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official, who was charged Wednesday with setting up the junket at the behest of Saddam’s regime. Iraqi intelligence officials allegedly paid for the trip through an intermediary and rewarded Al-Hanooti with 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil.

Now that it’s been over a week, I have three questions:

1. Isn’t it amazing that the duped (Congressmen “Baghdad Jim” McDermott of WA, Thompson of CA, and former Congressman David Bonior of MI) have, as far as I can tell, expressed absolutely no shame or regret over being duped by our enemy into being his puppet-spokesmen?
2. How typical is it for a congresscritter to just jump on a plane without vetting who is paying for the trip?
3. Isn’t it remarkable how quickly the story dropped off the radar?

________________________________________

I did miss this when it was first reported — from the March 22 Toronto Globe and Mail:

Taking Christ out of Christianity

That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah, this morning will rock the walls of Toronto’s West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country. But at West Hill on the faith’s holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”

Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity’s central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.

(There are ) No references to salvation, Christianity’s teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus’s death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.

….. Ms. (Rev. Gretta) Vosper does not want to dress up the theological detritus – her words – of the past two millennia with new language in the hope of making it more palatable. She wants to get rid of it, and build on its ashes a new spiritual movement that will have relevance in a tight-knit global world under threat of human destruction.

The entire article is no longer available. The first paragraph is at the link; the others were excerpted at The Anchoress, who got to the root of the problem (HT Sister Toldjah):

….. it takes a lot to offend my Christian sensibilities.

….. Do you know why these “progressive” Christians want to “progress” right through the tenets of Christianity into the grim world of neither-faith-nor-reason but self-actualizing instinct and “hopeful” feelings? Why they want Jesus with no Christ, God with a small g and all that? Can you take a guess?

If you said “it is the logical culmination of baby-boomer narcissism and that generations’ tireless effort to deconstruct the universe and put itself at the center of all things” then ding, ding, ding! You win the daily double!

….. Meanwhile - don’t let this freak you out. Don’t be afraid of children-of-all-ages playing dress-up, or the pranks and guffaws of those who are taking the wide road and pretending it’s a martyrdom. We live in an interesting age, where the meaning of things - even of martyrdom - is being muddied up. Nothing to fret about - it’s only what Jesus promised us, after all.

Well, yes and no, ma’am — I don’t freak over the adults’ self-delusion; I do worry about their kids.

________________________________________

Richard Miniter at Pajamas Media caught the jaw-dropping significance of these two paragraphs in a New York Times report by Qais Mizher out of Basra (HT Instapundit; bolds are mine):

Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.

Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.

Miniter, while noting how vapid and misleading Mizher’s reporting is, emphasizes the jaw-drop:

Got that? The New York Times reporter was an officer in Saddam’s army. Nice. ….. (Iraqi) Officers had to be selected and regularly vetted for loyalty and effectiveness. So Saddam decided that he could trust our intrepid correspondent and so did the New York Times.

Makes you wonder: Would the Times have hired former Nazi officers to cover the three-year insurgency against the American presence in Germany in the late 1940s? Even if they spoke the language, knew the countryside well and said they “never really believed” in that evil ideology?

My question: Who can be confident that the newspaper that gave us Walter Duranty didn’t do that?

Cross-posted in longer form at NewsBusters.org.

Liberal Fascism Lite (actually not-so-lite; HT Weapons of Mass Discussion) — As outrageous as this is, it has flown under way too far under the radar:

D.C. police are so eager to get guns out of the city that they’re offering amnesty to people who allow officers to come into their homes and get the weapons.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier announced yesterday the Safe Homes Initiative, aimed at parents and guardians who know or suspect that their children or other relatives have guns. Under the deal, police target areas hit by violence and seek adults who let them search their homes for guns, with no risk of arrest. The offer also applies to drugs that turn up during the searches, police said.

The program is scheduled to start March 24 in the Washington Highlands area of Southeast Washington. Officers will go door-to-door seeking permission to search homes for weapons.

I could handle this if parents voluntarily called the cops in themselves. But that’s clearly not what this is about. Instead, it’s about intimidation. In my opinion, it’s also a pre-emptive strike in advance of a Supreme Court ruling this summer that will more than likely declare DC’s gun ban unconstitutional, and that will hopefully (praying mightily), once and for all, establish that gun ownership is an individual right under the plain language of the Second Amendment.

A commenter at Weapons of Mass Discussion notes that Boston is undertaking a similar effort.

Is it a coincidence that Washington’s and Boston’s governments have been controlled by lib Democrats for decades? I think not.

_______________________________________

Speaking of flying under the radar, Debbie Schlussel has explosive info about the situation with Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (here and here) that should be getting more visibility, and isn’t.

_______________________________________

Powerline, which has been making hash of the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman for years, caught him repeating a howler about the Vets for Freedom (VFF).

On Thursday, supporting a Twin Cities high school’s last-minute revocation of an invitation to appear, Coleman wrote:

VFF says it is nonpartisan, but the liberal watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy said it began as a Republican front group managed by White House insiders.

Of course, Coleman never attempted to contact VFF officials, and just took the far-left “Center for Media and Democracy’s” word for it.

Star Trib columnist and blogger Katherine Kersten got it right:

If we were a White House front group, we should have been awash in cash in our infancy,” says (Vets for Freedom Director Pete) Hegseth. In fact, the group was started by a handful of vets and initially could hardly make ends meet. “We had one staff member, and he could barely pay his own salary,” says Hegseth. “He literally put down his own credit card to start the organization.”

To suggest that Vets for Freedom marches lock-step in support of the Bush administration is equally untrue. When Hegseth returned from his tour in Iraq in Oct. 2006, he slammed the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq in a high-profile piece for the Wall Street Journal.

Minnesota educators and BDS-infected libs (but I repeat myself) have a history of trying to keep mission-supporting vets’ views from becoming widely known — and Coleman has a history of cheering them on.

_____________________________________

Embarrassments like the aforementioned Coleman are part of the reason why the bad financial news just keeps on coming in the newspaper business (”NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years”). I’m not saying that media bias is the only reason for declines such as the one most recently reported at Editor & Publisher, but that it has served to accelerate those declines.

More importantly for their long-term future, if the public were satisfied with the quality of news delivered by print newspapers, they would have followed those publications to their web sites as the Internet took hold. Look at the numbers in the E&P article, and imagine how different things would be if the papers’ online readerships were 3-4 times what they currently are. Online ad gains would come close to making up for the print ad losses. But that’s not what’s happening, because now that the public has alternatives, it is abandoning the newspaper ship. Newspaper execs who don’t think that bias hasn’t been a major reason for that are whistling past the graveyard.

From ABC News (original HT to a caller; blog coverage first noted at Porkopolis):

The father of a soldier listed as missing-captured in Iraq since 2004 said Sunday that the military had informed him that his son’s remains were found in Iraq.

Keith Maupin said at a news conference in suburban Cincinnati that an Army general told him DNA testing had identified the remains of his son, Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin, or “Matt” as he was commonly known.

There’s much more coverage at the Cincinnati Enquirer, which updated with this news a short time ago:

Staff Sgt. Matt Maupin’s mother took a call from President Bush tonight extending his condolences after the Army identified the missing soldier’s remains in Iraq.

Bush has met several times with the Maupins during the past four years and pledged to them that everything would be done to find out what had happened to their son after he was captured by insurgents on April 9, 2004.

Carolyn Maupin took the President’s call on a cell phone at 9:45 p.m. behind the Yellow Ribbon Support Center in Batavia.

Carolyn Maupin’s friend, June Izzi Bailey, said she was told the White House had just found out about the DNA match and called the family as quickly as possible.

Comments from around the SOB Alliance and elsewhere (to be updated as more appear):

• Porkopolis, who kept up with developments better than anyone else in the Alliance — “Matt Maupin is no longer with us, but his patriotism and love of his country lives on.”
• Taxman Blog — “May God bless his soul.”
• Michelle Malkin — “Keep the Maupin family in your thoughts and prayers tonight ….. Let’s hope our troops find the animals who murdered Maupin and deliver justice.”
• LW at Blackfive — “May his family know peace from having him home, and may the light shine on them all the days to come.”
• Bill Keane — “Please pray that his parents have some measure of comfort going forward.”
• Others — Ben Keeler, Brian at One Oar.
• (March 31) Matt at Weapons of Mass Discussion — “The great sorrow that I feel for the Maupin family is tempered only by the relief in knowing that, like the Maupin family themselves have stated, the enemy can no longer harm him. I am also experiencing a renewed seething anger at our enemy.”
• (March 31) Excelsior’s comment at NixGuy’s place — “May God bless the Maupin family with peace and strength. And may God bless the United States of America, and give us the fortitude and determination to defeat the Islamist thugs and murderers in Iraq, in Afghanistan and wherever around the world we may find them.”

______________________________

UPDATE: I held off commenting until I learned that Cincinnati and the Cincinnati Reds would do the right thing and dedicate portions of Opening Day events to the Matt Maupin and his family. They will, and how fitting it is. It’s a great way for the Greater Cincinnati community to come together and honor their fallen hero. Rest in peace, sir.

It is so easy to get sucked in by context-free negativity, isn’t it?

If you looked at the home page of the New York Times a couple of hours ago, these items you would have among those seen in the (appropriately) far-left column:

• In This Shiite Battle, a Marked Shift From the Past (article link)
• Shiite Militias Cling to Swaths of Basra and Stage Raids (article link)

Top-of-hour network radio reports in the past few days, including Fox’s, have also “successfully” left the impression that there has been serious decay in the Iraq situation. Who could blame the average person reader/listener for believing that?

As Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey noted earlier this morning, not so fast. In fact, not at all:

Remind me again — who’s losing in Basra?

When the Iraqi government finally took the long-expected action to establish control of Basra after the British pullback left it in the hands of militias and gangsters, suddenly the media declared that the country had reached the brink of collapse. They highlighted stories of defections from the Iraqi military and opined that the surge had failed. Moqtada al-Sadr would finally achieve his goal of controlling the South and would expose the Baghdad government as a house of cards.

Guess which side just sued for peace?

Follow Morrissey’s link, and you’ll see that Old Media is still keeping hope (for defeat) alive in its headlines:

Al-Sadr offers to pull fighters off Iraq’s streets
Shiite cleric demands halt to raids against followers, freedom for prisoners

BAGHDAD - Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr offered Sunday to pull his fighters off the streets of Basra and other cities if the government halts raids against his followers and releases prisoners held without charge.

Morrissey gives the context that Old Media simply won’t:

Anyone who follows the news closely in Iraq knew this day would come. The British left a power vacuum behind in the south that the Baghdad government could not fill at the time, and Sadr and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council’s Badr Brigades filled it instead. ….. The Iraqi government had no choice but to challenge the militias for control of Basra and the surrounding areas, but they waited until the Iraqi Army had enough strength to succeed.

Did our media give anyone this context? No. They reported it as some kind of spontaneous eruption of rebellion without noting at all that a nation can hardly be considered sovereign while its own security forces cannot enter a large swath of its own territory. And in the usual defeatist tone, they reported that our mission in Iraq had failed without waiting to see what the outcome of the battle would be.

(What Sadr is doing) isn’t the action of a victor. Perhaps our media would like to explain that in the context of their clueless reporting so far.

Heaven knows where we would be without bloggers like Morrissey, who is a most welcome addition at Hot Air.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Pulse reported (HT Instapundit) in the McCain campaign: “McCain Asks When Hillary Clinton Will Apologize to Gen. Petraeus” — Actually a good move by the candidate I refer to as JS3M3 (John Sidney the Mad Maverick McCain III). Go to the link and you’ll see then (”willing suspension of disbelief”) and now (”an extraordinary leader and a wonderful advocate for our military”) vids.

HR4C’s (Hillary Rodham Cackling Crying Complaining Clinton’s) about-face was also noted here (fourth item at link) on Monday.

______________________________________

Too easy to resist (HT Taranto at Best of the Web):

No-show state rep from Manchester resigns
Tuesday, Mar. 25, 2008

In the 16 months since he was sworn in, state Rep. Michael R. DesRoches did not cast a single vote. Colleagues in the House say they have not seen him in Concord this session.

They won’t be seeing him in the future, either. DesRoches announced his resignation yesterday, explaining he was recently evicted from his apartment in downtown Manchester and no longer lives in the district he was elected to represent.

Gee, that never stopped Democrats Charlie Wilson (current congressman in OH-06) or John Boccieri (running for Congress in OH-16).

(By the way, other carpetbagging examples are welcome in comments or via e-mail.)

It’s also worth noting that the Union Leader, one of the few papers in the US that plays the news relatively straight (if somewhat right of center), didn’t play “Hide the Party ID” — and it went on:

Three other state representatives from Manchester — Sandra Smith, George Katsiantonis and Hector Velez — had yet to cast any votes this year, according to the House Web site. All are Democrats.

Brunelle, a Democrat, said absenteeism is a non-partisan problem that has flared in the past.

Color me skeptical, Mr. Brunelle.

__________________________________________________

Leftwing Cracker (HT Knoxnews.com) says, in the wake of the Hillary Clinton Bosnia “misstatement” (don’t you love how Old Media will never say that a Democrat “lied”?) that:

(Hillary is) more done than a two-hour steak at 500 degrees.

One problem: I think a steak that hot could catch fire, burn the house down, and take out everyone else inside.

LWC is on to something.

From Norfolk, VA:

March 23, 2008

A man thrown from the motorcycle he was operating after a high-speed wreck early Saturday was pulled ashore by two Navy men who jumped into the Hampton Roads Channel to rescue him.

A third sailor also assisted.

The cyclist, identified as Brian Anthony Davis, 22, of Grand Rapids, Mich., also is in the Navy, stationed aboard the carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Davis remains in critical condition at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.

The wreck happened about 3:45 a.m. Saturday on the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, said Sgt. Michelle Cotten, a State Police spokeswoman.

Davis was westbound on Interstate 64, allegedly “in excess of 100 mph,” Cotten said, when he apparently lost control as he approached the entrance of the tunnel.

The 2002 Suzuki he was on slammed into a wall. The impact flung him from the highway to the water alongside the bridge-tunnel complex.

Davis might have drowned if not for the fast action of three fellow service members who happened upon the scene.

They were identified as:

• Third class petty officer Edgar Ardon, 22, an aviation support equipment technician from Glen Oak, Calif.

• Third class petty officer Jason Murphy, 23, a fire controlman from Jacksonville, Fla.

• Third class petty officer Elisandro Leal, 22, a damage controlman from League City, Texas.

All three sailors are temporarily assigned to the Carl Vinson’s on-board security force, said Lt. j.g. Arlo Abrahamson, a public affairs officer for the carrier.

The ship is docked at the Northrop Grumman Newport News shipyard where it is undergoing a major overhaul and receiving upgrades as well as having its nuclear fuel replenished.

The three men “are assigned to a shift that normally works nights,” Abrahamson said. But, to Davis’ good fortune, they were off duty at the time of the incident.

The three men were returning to their residences in Newport News from Norfolk in the pre-dawn darkness.

Leal was driving when they saw the wreck happen and stopped to see what they could do to help.

He was the first to spot Davis, catching sight of the man’s motorcycle helmet, floating in water alongside the span.

“Once we saw him in the water, we knew we had to do something to help,” he said.

Leal stayed with his vehicle and used a cell phone to alert police while his buddies clambered over railings and down to the water’s edge to rescue Davis.

By then, Davis was “face down in the water,” about 25 feet from the span, Cotten said.

Ardon and Murphy ripped off their outer clothes, down to their skivvies, and jumped into the 52-degree water. They grabbed hold of Davis and brought him to the barrier of huge rocks that rings the southern island of the bridge-tunnel.

Davis had stopped breathing, so Ardon began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The man showed signs of life, coughing up water.

Soon after, paramedics and firefighters arrived and took over efforts to save and stabilize Davis who was revived.

Even then, his rescuers did not immediately leave his side.

“I just told him to keep breathing and to relax,” said Ardon. “We wanted to reassure him that everything was going to be okay.” The men said their military training made the rescue possible. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.