Say Anything Blog

By Selwyn Duke

This is Jeremiah Wright-style racism at its best.

The May 9 edition of the New York Post carries a short article by an Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis student named Keith John Sampson. He tells a story of how he was charged with “racial harassment” simply because he was “caught” reading an anti-Ku Klux Klan book. I’m not kidding.  Sampson tells his story:

The book was Todd Tucker’s ‘Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan’; I was reading it on break from my campus job as a janitor. The same book is in the university library . . . .

But that didn’t stop the Affirmative Action Office of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis from branding me as a detestable Klansman.

They didn’t want to hear the truth. The office ruled that my ‘repeatedly reading the book . . . constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers.’

The affirmative-action officer—who draws a salary of $106, 000 a year to perform her crucial role and is obviously a woman of inestimable intellect—neither examined the book nor spoke with Sampson. He wasn’t guilty before proven innocent. He was just guilty.

To make a long story short, the charges were only dropped months later after the institution of lower learning came under pressure from the media, the ACLU (hey, even a blind squirrel… ) and a more obscure group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Since Sampson works as a janitor to, I would assume, help finance his education, he obviously wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Perhaps he was assumed to be one of those bitter working class people of whom Barack Obama spoke. Anyway, it’s good to see he is getting something for the many thousands of dollars he is paying to attend his illustrious Indiana university.

[...]

For many years now we have heard about data used to justify charges of racial profiling. It will be determined that an inordinate percentage of blacks are pulled over by police in a given area, and that alone is viewed as sufficient cause to change law-enforcement procedures. Even more to the point, many claim that since blacks constitute a percentage of the prison population greatly exceeding that of the general one, it’s evidence of systemic “racism.”

So here is a study I’d like to see conducted. Let’s ascertain the racial composition of those who have charges of racial harassment brought against them—and of those punished for same—on college campuses. Call me crazy, but I have a sneaking suspicion that virtually all those targeted are white.

Oh, yeah, I overlooked something. Only white people can be racist.

Let’s just forget the whole thing.

Racism is racism, no matter who practices it.
Let’s have the PC police telling us what to read and when and where to read it.  Right out of the leftie playbook for “change” in America.

By Mark Finkelstein

[...]

You’ve probably seen those phone-message forms with check boxes in ascending order of urgency from “FYI—no need to return call” all the way up to “the future of civilization hangs in the balance.” We might see that last category as light-hearted exaggeration, but it’s no laughing matter to McKibben. In his jeremiad in today’s LA Times literally entitled “Civilization’s last chance,” McKibben solemnly declares that “the world looks a little terminal right now” and “it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.” OK. Just so long as it’s nothing serious.

McKibben’s lament is based in important part on a paper that James Hansen and several co-authors have submitted to Science magazine which concludes that “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

Hansen holds the impressive title of chief NASA climatologist. But as Jeff Poor has pointed out in an article at Business & Media Institute, an NB sister publication:

Hansen’s scientific claims were recently called into question at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 4 in New York. Famed hurricane forecaster William Gray said he believed the earth would experience a cooling period in 10 years. He said the models Hansen used to forecast drastic increases in the earth’s temperature due to carbon in the atmosphere were flawed because they included too much water vapor, the most abundant greenhouse gas.

“[S]o he puts that much vapor in his model and of course he gets this,” Gray said. “He must get upper troposphere where the temperature is seven degrees warmer for a doubl[ing of] CO2. Well, the reason he got that was – why this upper-level warming was there – was he put too much water vapor in the model.”

In any case, here’s what McKibben, who has started 350.org in an effort to get us down to Hansen’s allegdly crucial cut-off point, claims is necessary to stave off doom:

* No more new coal-fired power plants anywhere.
* Quickly close the [coal-fired power plants] already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.)
* Making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II.
* Making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

[...]

Oh, and by the way, we have to do this almost immediately. McKibben approvingly cites Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPCC, as saying “if there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”

Got that? We’ve got four years, after which we’ll be on an inexorable path to doom in which those who survive “will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.”

Have a nice day!

Phony data + alarmism?  Hello, Dan Rather.

Jerome J. Schmitt

‘Won’t we eventually stop the Earth from rotating?’

Imagine a concept for the perfect “green”, safe, sustainable, zero-emissions, invisible (literally) energy technology with potential for limitless power.  Radical environmentalists will still object!

This is what I learned when I perused the website of Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Center of Excellence for Ocean Energy Technology, which is pursuing R&D on innovative technology to anchor buoy’s 500 meters deep in the gulf stream equipped with turbines to harness the slow but powerful, steady, ocean-current for generation of electricity. At the depth proposed, the turbines will be insulated from damaging surface waves and storms; they will also be deeper than almost all marine life, except whales.  As a practicing engineer, I personally think that the idea has tremendous potential. My own assessment is that the most difficult problem to overcome will be protection of the moving parts and high-voltage power transmission cables from the notoriously corrosive effects of salt-water.  Nonetheless, here are the practical and green attributes of this proposed concept:

1. Sustainable—no fuel whatsoever
2. Zero emissions
3. Invisible (literally submerged far off-shore) so it overcomes “not in my back yard” ((NIMBY)
4. Safe - no radiation or spent fuel rods to store for millennia

An environmentalists dream right?  Wrong!  Check out the comments from this environmental website in an article that reports on FAU’s project, where they compete with each other to devise objections, such as:

[...]

- In my humble opinion it looks like that the installation of these underwater turbine will create an ecological disaster! Based on the 3D rendering above it looks like one would have to destroy the ocean floor to build and erect these
monstrosities.

- Actually, the Army Corp of Engineers studied this in the 50s and 60s and found that if you slow down the gulf stream, you not only disturb marine life but the entire climate! The gulf stream brings warmer weather all the way to Europe. Sorry guys, this is not our solution for energy

And my favorite:

- If we adopt too many of these systems to supply our electricity, won’t we eventually stop the Earth from rotating?

How about the “NIMBY” benefit?  Wrong again:

- One final point, when we hide the means of production of energy, we allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring its impact. Since we cannot, as a species, trust ourselves to act in the best interests of the planet upon which we depend, we should be designing systems that are absolutely “in our faces”, NOT hidden away. Perhaps, then, we would resort to the ultimate (albeit non-"design") solution: drastically reducing consumption of power, and limiting our own numbers.

Now it may be unfair to judge a website by its commenters—and in truth there were also many very positive comments, as well as corrections to the inanities in the comments reproduced above—but I believe that the sheer ignorance revealed about the enormous expanse of the ocean, the miniscule affect that any man-made activity can have on the gulf-stream—never mind the earth’s rotation—is very indicative of eco-activists in general.  They betray their radical urban roots in this regard with little knowledge of the outdoors, the ocean, the atmosphere, the solar system and science in general.  Yet they have no fear of pronouncing on and denouncing subjects that are beyond their ken.  Rather than seek meaningful solutions, they always resort to “object! object! object!” to whatever is proposed even on the flimsiest of grounds, even if it contradicts their previous objections. Keep this in mind the next time radical environmentalists protest an industrial project in your region.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Find it here

The latest battle in the war on illegal immigration isn’t over the smuggling of undocumented workers, it’s over the trash they leave behind.

Government officials and border activists say the garbage dumped in the desert by illegal immigrants and their smugglers is staggering.

And the cleanup is costing taxpayers millions.

In 2006 alone, more than 1.18 million pounds of trash was collected along southern Arizona border, many in the meeting spots where immigrants rest, change clothes and wait to hitch a ride further north with a smuggler.

“You can find everything,” said Shela McFarlin, special assistant for international programs at the Arizona Bureau of Land Management. “Blankets, airline tickets, Bibles, wedding pictures, photos of children, school reports, because clearly people don’t tend to throw away everything they’ve brought with them — they’re forced to.”

Arizona officials have spent approximately $4.4 million over five years to clean up the mess, that continues to build with each crossing. Nearly $1 million was spent for 2007 from a base BLM appropriation.

[...]

The trash is a problem that activist groups, like the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, say will not stop until the nation’s southern border is secured.

“It’s just like a flood,” said Chris Simcox, the president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. “You can’t clean up the floodwaters until you stop the flood and fix the dam.”

[...]

Since 2003, the Arizona BLM has run a project to mitigate the damage caused by the migration of illegal immigrants along the state’s border with Mexico.

“What we’re beginning to wonder is how extensive is the problem?” McFarlin said. “How many millions of pounds of garbage? How many roads are really damaged? How many miles of illegal trails?”

McFarlin’s agency works with local government, student volunteers and civic groups to bag trash in wilderness areas frequented by immigrants. The BLM also disguises smuggling roads by planting new vegetation over the desert tracks carved by smugglers.

[...]

“We recently cleaned up one location with almost 4,000 backpacks left behind,” she said.

Simcox said his group cleans up the private lands of ranchers who help them on their quest to monitor the border.

“We’ve seen it time and time again, where we go in and clean up these areas and within months they’re just filled again with the same debris,” Simcox said.

The Arizona BLM and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps do not work together on cleanup efforts.

Both groups say it may take years to correct.

“Truly, it’s a national disaster of our cherished outdoor areas,” Simcox said.

Where is the environmental lobby on this?

By James Lewis

This is just too good.

White Guilt is the locomotive propelling the Obama campaign. Without it the Junior Senator from Illinois would be just a skinnier Bill Clinton. American kids are being guilt-tripped in all the public schools today, from grade school to graduate school.  By the time they get to voting age, they feel so bad about the slave trade and Jim Crow that they are ready to pay up for forgiveness. That’s Senator Obama’s Youth Vote.

I’m a big fan of black radio personalities Ken Hamblin and Larry Elder. Ken Hamblin called himself “the Black Avenger,” not because he hates anybody, but because he was so enraged by the con artists who have taken over so much of the “racial Left,” leaving devastation in their wake. Because the race industry is fueled by White Guilt, Hamblin decided to hand out absolution certificates—he’s a black guy, after all, and therefore naturally authorized to forgive white folks, just as much as the Three Revs (Jesse, Al, and Jeremiah). Hamblin still has his official Certificate of Absolution for White Guilt on the web.  You can print it out, signed by Mr. Hamblin, and post it on your wall. Look at it whenever you feel that dreaded clutch of guilt. It’s free.

But Ken Hamblin is missing a big opportunity here. What a race entrepreneur needs is a way to monetize White Guilt, to turn that craving for absolution into cold hard cash. As Chaucer’s Pardoner understood so well, once you can offer forgiveness for sin, you get a market, just like hog bellies or soda pop. It’s supply and demand. Guilt-tripping preachers and politicians make you feel terrible about black suffering and oppression, and you have to pay what the market will bear to shrug off that burden.

The Democrats have monetized White Guilt in a fashion by turning forgiveness into a government franchise.

But there is a free market solution. The key is to understand that any black person can dispense personal forgiveness. You don’t have to go to Obama or the Black Caucus. What we need is competition between suppliers. You can choose between up-market dispensers of forgiveness, like Senator Obama and Oprah Winfrey, or down-market ones like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. And for all you cheapskates out there, just print out Ken Hamblin’s Certificate of Absolution. There. Feel better now?

[...]

PS. I just found out about Dr. Walter Williams’ “Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to All Persons of European Descent.” Maybe we should all go around granting pardon and amnesty to everybody we meet for everything their ancestors either did or suffered from all of our ancestors. The Hindi salute “Namaste” is said to mean “I salute the soul in you.” Our new American greeting could be: “I pardon you!” It’s just as good a way to start a conversation as any other.

This is a great illustration that there is a free market solution to just about everything.
It’s time for the race hustlers and guilt-trippers to move on.

Thomas Lifson

Why is Barack Obama so comfortable with so many Marxists? The question has long intrigued me. Despite being repudiated by history, Marxism remains powerful in the halls of elite academic institutions, where Obama imbibed so much of his worldview. Investor’s Business Daily today connects some dots.

Obama himself began his career as a Chicago community organizer and worked on projects there influenced by Saul Alinsky. The Marxist Machiavellian of the Chicago scene advised budding revolutionaries in his 1971 book “Rules For Radicals” to conceal their radical affiliations to attain greater power. That works well for Marxists.

Wright is an adherent of black liberation theology, an explicitly Marxist interpretation of the Bible whose aim is to stir up class and race hatred to advance communism.....

Ayers has since lectured the Marxist dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, on using public education as an instrument for advancing “revolution.” Meanwhile his stepson, Chesa Boudin, has gone to Caracas as an “adviser” to the anti-American Chavez. [....]

When an Obama precinct captain in Houston flew a Cuban flag bearing Guevara’s likeness, Obama said only it “disappointed” him and “does not reflect (his) views.” He never publicly ordered the flag down, nor rejected Guevara’s blood-soaked communism.

Obama himself has promised to meet with the hemisphere’s Marxist dictators who have systematically dismantled or are in the process of dismantling democracy all across our hemisphere.

In addition to the points IBD identifies, I would add that Obama’s father, whose name he bears and whose dreams informed the title of his first autobiographical book, was a fairly out-of-the-closet Marxist. If Obama has ever bemoaned his father’s Marxism, I have never heard of it.

[...]

We already have an example of what the combination of black nationalism and Marxism will do to a country:  Zimbabwe.  We don’t need that here.

by Benjamin Wiker

As David Berlinski recently noted, “the thesis that there is a connection between Darwin and Hitler is widely considered a profanation.” But striking an indignant pose—feathers in full ruffle—is not an answer to such a serious charge, especially when the words of both Darwin and Hitler speak otherwise.

Those defending Darwin cannot have read his Descent of Man, wherein he applies the principles of natural selection to human beings—a thing he prudently avoided in his earlier Origin of Species. In the Descent, the eugenic and racial inferences are clearly and startlingly drawn by Darwin himself.

Darwin understood the eugenic implications of his own theory, and warned his readers against imminent evolutionary backsliding. “It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Insert a few terms like “Aryan” or “Jew” and that could be in any Nazi screed.

“If … various checks … do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule.”

While Darwin tried to soften the hard implications (by suggesting that we not kill the rogues; rather, we should just keep them from breeding), the eugenic edifice was his.

And the racial thing? Evolution is driven by competition, and competition brings extinction. Darwin notes, matter-of-factly in the Descent, that one tribe extinguishing another is the very engine of human evolution. In his words, “extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, race with race,” allowing the victorious tribe or race to pass on their superior endowments.

That is not a moral complaint; it is a detached scientific description uttered by Darwin entirely without angst. As the engine of evolution is never idle, it is also a prophecy. Again, his own words:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous [i.e., most human-looking] apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Get it? Ranking the human races, we find the Caucasian at top, and down at the bottom, dangling at the edge of humanity, “the negro or Australian” who is just an evolutionary hair’s-breadth away from the anthropomorphous gorilla. In pushing upwards to the über-Caucasian, evolution also exterminates all the “intermediate species,” so that natural selection will do away with the Negro, the aboriginal Australian, and the gorilla.

Like it or not, Darwin’s eugenic and racial ideas spread from him, and infected both Europe and America.

Now for Adolf. I suspect that, just as a lot of folks haven’t read Darwin’s execrable Descent of Man, so also they feel free to enter the debate without having read Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

It is inaccurate to blame the entire of Hitler’s evil on anti-Semitism precisely because his anti-Semitism was part of a larger biological vision. “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology,” said the deputy Party leader of the Nazis, Rudolf Hess.

As Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf, the fundamental political category is biological.  Consequently, “the highest aim of human existence is not the maintenance of a State or Government but rather the conservation of the race.” This aim accords with Hitler’s larger Darwinian view of the cosmos, wherein the “fundamental law of necessity” reigning “throughout the realm of Nature” is that “existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife….where the strong are always the masters of the weak and where those subject to such laws must obey them or be destroyed.” Survival of the fittest.

[...]

All this doesn’t mean that Darwinism was the sole cause of Hitler’s barbarism. But it does make clear that Darwinism must shoulder its share of the moral burden, because the connection is undeniable.

I guess this explains all the “death to Republicans/conservatives” talk on the leftie hate blogs, as well as the so-called “Fairness Doctrine”.
Of course, the American version of “survival of the fittest” is the free market, which explains the decline and fall of Air America and the NYT.

by Daniel Pipes

As Barack Obama’s candidacy comes under increasing scrutiny, his account of his religious upbringing deserves careful attention for what it tells us about the candidate’s integrity.

Obama asserted in December, “I’ve always been a Christian,” and he has adamantly denied ever having been a Muslim. “The only connection I’ve had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father’s side came from that country [Kenya]. But I’ve never practiced Islam.” In February, he claimed: “I have never been a Muslim. … other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for 4 years when I was a child [Indonesia, 1967-71] I have very little connection to the Islamic religion.”

“Always” and “never” leave little room for equivocation. But many biographical facts, culled mainly from the American press, suggest that, when growing up, the Democratic candidate for president both saw himself and was seen as a Muslim.

Obama’s Kenyan birth father: In Islam, religion passes from the father to the child. Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (1936–1982) was a Muslim who named his boy Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Only Muslim children are named “Hussein”.

Obama’s Indonesian family: His stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was also a Muslim. In fact, as Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng explained to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: “My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.” An Indonesian publication, the Banjarmasin Post reports a former classmate, Rony Amir, recalling that “All the relatives of Barry’s father were very devout Muslims.”

Barack Obama’s Catholic school in Jakarta.
The Catholic school: Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports that “documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim” while at a Catholic school during first through third grades. Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune confirms that Obama was “listed as a Muslim on the registration form for the Catholic school.” A blogger who goes by “An American Expat in Southeast Asia” found that “Barack Hussein Obama was registered under the name ‘Barry Soetoro’ serial number 203 and entered the Franciscan Asisi Primary School on 1 January 1968 and sat in class 1B. … Barry’s religion was listed as Islam.”

The public school: Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times learned from Indonesians familiar with Obama when he lived in Jakarta that he “was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended.” Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star visited the Jakarta public school Obama attended and found that “Three of his teachers have said he was enrolled as a Muslim.” Although Siddiqui cautions that “With the school records missing, eaten by bugs, one has to rely on people’s shifting memories,” he cites only one retired teacher, Tine Hahiyari, retracting her earlier certainty about Obama’s being registered as a Muslim.

[...]

Obama’s having been born and raised a Muslim and having left the faith to become a Christian make him neither more nor less qualified to become president of the United States. But if he was born and raised a Muslim and is now hiding that fact, this points to a major deceit, a fundamental misrepresentation about himself that has profound implications about his character and his suitability as president.

Very interesting.  Read the whole thing.  Do we really want a Muslim President, especially one who is also a black separatist?

Thomas Lifson

Anatole Kaletsky of the Times of London heralds a recession in predictions of a recession in the US economy.

[Warren] Buffett, having speculated against the dollar for years and declared that credit derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, has finally begun to find attractive opportunities to invest his money and told his shareholders last week that the worst of the credit crisis was probably over. Mr Soros, in his forthcoming book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, states unequivocally: “We are in the midst of a financial crisis the likes of which has not been seen since the Great Depression.” But after making $3 billion for Quantum Endowment Fund by anticipating last year’s bear markets, he is now hedging his bets, as is only to be expected from the world’s most successful hedge fund manager. “I may well be proven wrong,” he told The New York Times last week, adding that he might yet again turn out to be “the boy who cried wolf”.

[...]

Indeed, the Bank’s calculations suggest that present pricing of mortgage-related bonds in financial markets has probably overstated the future losses on US sub-prime lending by about double.

It is true we are not out of the woods yet, but with stimulus checks arriving, interest rate cuts taking effect, the run on the dollar abated, and oil prices weakening, there are reasons for optimism. Of course the MSM will continue to peddle doom and gloom, even as canny liberal investors like Buffet and Soros prepare to profit from the upturn.

This is not news to those who know about economics, but it’s good to hear it in the MSM.
BTW, why aren’t the lefties hating on Soros, who is an evil hedge fund manager?  Double standard?

By Bo Nielsen and Ye Xie

May 2 (Bloomberg)—Futures traders are betting for the first time since December 2005 that the dollar will gain against the euro.

The difference in the number of wagers by hedge funds and other large speculators on a decline in the euro compared with those on a gain, known as net shorts, was 21,315 on April 29, compared with net longs of 18,907 a week earlier, figures from the Washington-based Commodity Futures Trading Commission show.

``The dollar has already turned against the euro,’’ said Benedikt Germanier, a currency strategist at UBS AG in Stamford, Connecticut. ``The dollar will go to $1.52 in a straight line.’’

The dollar increased 0.3 percent to $1.5424 per euro at 5 p.m. in New York, from $1.5474 yesterday. It touched $1.5361, the highest level since March 24.

The dollar rose 1.3 percent against the euro this week, its biggest rally since March, and has appreciated 3.6 percent from a record low of $1.6019 reached on April 22. It’s the first time the dollar has posted two weeks of gains since December.

[...]

More good economic news, despite all the doom and gloom propaganda from the lefties.

By Ken Shepherd

Big bad oil company ExxonMobil is “on the defensive in the face of consumer ire and congressional indignation” as it raked in a “huge” first quarter profit, Washington Post’s Steven Mufson informed readers of his front page May 2 article.

Mufson later noted that “[d]espite Exxon’s colossal profit, the company’s stock fell yesterday.” Mufson blamed investors “shift[ing] gears” to turn to other stocks and pull out of commodities. Yet Mufson made no attempt to explore how “new congressional vows to come up with legislation” to tax oil company profits might play into investors being skittish about the company, a favored bogeyman of left-wing populist politicians in election years marked by high gasoline prices.

By contrast, the May 2 Financial Times took a less political, business-oriented look at ExxonMobil with a front-pager by Sheila McNulty and Carola Hoyos entitled, “Exxon oil production struggles for growth”:

ExxonMobil, long regarded by its peers and investors as the most successful interational oil company, is beginning to show signs of weakness, revealing on Thursday that it is struggling to increase oil production and to squeeze profit out of its refining business.

[...]

Of course, finding and using more oil reserves and boosting domestic refining capacity are two non-starters for the same liberal politicians clamoring for new windfall profits taxes. What’s more, liberal conspiracy theorists often posit that oil companies game supply, keeping it artifically low to jack up prices and profits. Yet as the FT reports, it’s the drop in oil production and tight refining capacity that are pose potential long-term threats to the oil company.

More agendized political opinion from the MSM.
How insane is it to want to penalize a company for making a profit?  Only in a topsy-turvy socialist mind is that a bad thing.

By Jeff Poor

Although the economy is showing only a slow rate of growth, consumer spending actually showed an increase for the month of March. But, don’t be fooled - that’s a bad sign, according to “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric.

[...]

However, crediting consumer spending growth, up 0.4 percent according to the Commerce Department, to food inflation is not accurate, according to economist Dr. John Lott.

“The first notion that somehow you could explain the entire increase in consumer spending is due to higher prices - if you double consumer spending, the only way that statement would make sense is if the price level doubled in a month,” John Lott told the Business & Media Institute on May 2.

Couric also cited a Labor Department statistic that food prices have increased 5 percent annually. But, CBS correspondent Mark Strassmann reported only on food items with much more significant increases in prices.

“Just in the last year, prices of America’s food staples have skyrocketed,” Strassmann said. “Flour now 49 cents a pound, is up 36 percent; eggs at $2.20 a dozen, up 35 percent; milk - $3.78 a gallon, up 23 percent; and pasta at $1.08 a pound, up 19 percent. Fruits and vegetables are also up double digits.”

As Lott pointed out - the segment didn’t look at the whole picture and that distorts what the reality of the food inflation is.

“When you’re talking about all food, you’re not spending it all on pasta,” Lott said. “Some portion of it is going up, but oranges have fallen by like 35 percent. You have drops in the price of lettuce and other things, too. An the average on the course of a year is going up about 5 percent - that’s the relevant number, what’s happening overall with the cost of food, not particular parts of the basket because nobody goes and spends on just those things that are going up.”

More agendized “reporting” of economic news by the MSM.
Why don’t they just give us the numbers, and let us decide if prices are “skyrocketing”?
This isn’t news, it’s political opinion.

By Noel Sheppard

Oops: Employment Numbers Better Than Expected, Unemployment Drops

Despite all the gloom and doom, the employment picture in April was much better than economists had expected, and, maybe more important, quite different than the Hooveresque, Depression Era picture media members have been painting for months.

Makes you wonder if in press rooms all around America, as well as in Democrat campaign headquarters across the fruited plain, there was a huge sigh of disappointment at 8:30 AM EDT when the Labor Department released the data.

Critical updates at end of post including FAR better-than-expected factory orders report!

As such, without further ado, here’s the news most people in the nation actually hoping for a good economy will be glad to hear:

Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed in April (-20,000), following job losses that totaled 240,000 in the first 3 months of the year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The unemployment rate, at 5.0 percent, also was little changed in April.

To put this in some perspective, both numbers are far better than what analysts were predicting. As reported by Bloomberg moments before the data was released:

Payrolls shrank by 75,000 workers after decreasing by 80,000 in March, according to the median estimate of 82 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News before the Labor Department’s report. The jobless rate rose to a three-year high of 5.2 percent, the survey also showed.

Hmmm. So this was MUCH better than expected, for not only did the economy shed less jobs than predicted, but also the unemployment rate DROPPED to 5.0 percent instead of rising to 5.2.

It’s going to be delicious to watch how all the liberal media members trying to convey Depression-like conditions in the nation in order to get a Democrat in the White House are going to negatively spin this one.

Stay tuned.

*****Update. Since it seems a metaphysical certitude media will, once again, refuse to give any historical reference to the jobs losses we’ve been seeing so far this year, here are the payroll declines in the first four months of the previous four recessions:

* 1980: 1,159,000
* 1981-82: 914,000
* 1990-91: 484,000
* 2001: 578,000

This means the average four-month loss of jobs at the beginning of the previous four recessions was 783,000. By contrast, we’ve lost 260,000 non-farm workers since December, or exactly one-third the recent average.

I’m sure media will inform the citizens of this.

[...]

*****Update III: Factory orders for March were just released, and the data is stunning—up 1.4 percent. Estimates were for a 0.2 percent rise. WOW!!!

I guess the economy didn’t get the Dem talking points.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has a wonderful little snippet up at The Hill’s Congress Blog, As Gas Prices Rose, Democrats Ignored Opportunities to Help Production:

Gasoline today at the pump is $1.25 more, on average, than it was when the Democrats took over Congress. Why is that a good place to measure? Because during that period, we’ve had an opportunity to build more refineries, and the Democratic majority voted it down. We’ve had an opportunity to open up additional parts of the Outer Continental Shelf and the Democratic majority voted it down. It’s clear that on the production side of the equation, this new majority is not interested in doing anything.

He’s right. In addition, what we have today is exactly what the Democrats and the environmentalists have wanted for years - high gas prices that should, by their very nature, reduce demand. The only thing that the Democrats would like more is if a few U.S. oil companies were going bankrupt at the same time, but unfortunately for them you can’t have both things at the same time.

Remember, it was just last July that Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan announced that he wanted to increase the gas tax by 50 cents, as a punitive measure that he believed would cause consumers to drive less, thus reducing “greenhouse gases.” You’d think that the recent rise in gas prices, and the subsequent howling from the Democrats about how awful the rise is for the average voter (err, consumer), would cause the Democrats to reconsider any increase in the gas tax. On the contrary, Dingell is still pushing the issue, even though polls are showing that Americans are against such a move.

There are many issues affecting the rise in oil and gasoline prices, not the least of which is open-market speculation by entities unrelated to the oil companies. But you have to look at the underlying fact that is part of the basis for such speculation - the oil producing countries have the United States by the short hairs.

The world knows that with the power structure in Congress that’s been in place since long before the Democrats took over the majority, the Dem will fight against and, in fact, will not allow 1) any more domestic oil production; 2) any more domestic refining capacity; and 3) the further development of any existing technology, such as nuclear, that could have an immediate and significant impact on our domestic energy production. Couple that with domestic policy thrusts that are designed to increase the price of gasoline at the pump...you get the picture.



Imagine sitting at a negotiation table, and you already know that your opponent will not take any positive steps to help him or herself out. They’ve also been upfront and open about the fact that they have no secrets up their sleeve. Your opponent is just going to sit there and wait for you to dictate to them your terms—terms that they will have to accept.

That’s the position that oil-producing nations have us in. And that’s the position that the Democrats want us to be in, and are doing everything in their power to make sure we will always be in.

[...]