Today, President Obama visited Master Lock, a company he cited in his State of the Union speech on January 24 using the following words: “But right now, it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China. Meanwhile, America is more productive. A few weeks ago, the CEO of Master Lock told me that it now makes business sense for him to bring jobs back home. Today, for the first time in fifteen years, Master Lock’s unionized plant in Milwaukee is running at full capacity.”

Now note how Ken Thomas’s report at the Associated Press originally described (since revised) what Obama supposedly said:

Before going on an extended West Coast fundraising spree, the president was visiting Master Lock, a Milwaukee maker of padlocks that was cited in his State of the Union address for bringing back 100 jobs to the U.S. from China in response to higher labor and logistical costs in Asia.

(UPDATE: Thomas revised his text to exclude the specific 100-job SOTU reference shortly after this post was prepared, and moved the 100-job pickup to a separate paragraph. The original mistake was nonetheless made.)

What Thomas originally wrote is not what Obama said. If he had cited a situation involving only 100 jobs as proof that a wave of jobs is coming back during his State of the Union speech, even his fellow Democrats might have laughed him out of the Capitol Building.

100 employees isn’t even a really significant number to Master Lock’s parent company, let alone the U.S. economy, as shown in the company’s self-congratulatory press release on the night of Obama’s speech:
(more…)

On Monday, Calvin Woodward, with help from Martin Crutsinger and Pete Yost, produced a “Fact Check” on the budget proposal the White House released earlier that day.

After properly criticizing the administration’s plan to use “about $850 billion in savings from ending the wars and steers some $230 billion of that to highways” (and actually quoting someone knowledgeable, who pointed out that “Drawing down spending on wars that were already set to wind down and that were deficit-financed in the first place should not be considered savings”), Woodward went off the rails:

President George W. Bush kept the cost of the wars out of his budgets, a contentious accounting maneuver that may have papered over the impact on spending projections but deepened the national debt as surely as if the price tag had been shown transparently. Taken together, the Bush and Obama budget tricks seem to suggest war costs nothing but ending it frees a ton of money.

Horse manure.

(more…)

Brilliant (HT to Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters; short ad will appear first):

While the vandals are on the street corners, the Tea Party conservatives, they’re working state houses, the governorships, the mayorships, the Senate, the House. See, they understand, they’ve read the Constitution. If you want to make a difference, don’t go break windows, okay? Break some phony arguments that things like austerity are going to put you in the hole. What put you in the hole is borrowing 38 cents of every dollar you spent. That’s what put you in the hole, pure and simple. Everything else is political spin.

It would appear that if Kevin Paul Dupont were king, he would be exploring how to send the Stanley Cup Finals exploits of Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas last year down the memory hole. Thomas “held the Canucks to eight goals in seven games” and became the first goalie ever to shut out his team’s opponent in a deciding Game 7 on the road, helping the Bruins win their first Cup in almost 40 years.

Since he can’t do that, the Boston Globe sportswriter appears to want to use Thomas’s absence from the team’s White House visit three weeks ago and subsequent Facebook postings as evidence that Thomas’s “legacy” is in danger (his article’s headline states that Thomas needs to “restore” it). In making his supposed case, the self-professed “confused” Dupont made and repeated a fundamental factual error. Those errors destroy any credibility he may have had in portraying Thomas’s decision and subsequent Facebook postings as somehow disrupting team unity:

Thomas skipped a White House visit, which was a mandatory team event.

… Skipping the mandatory team event could have prompted Chiarelli to fine or suspend him.

That’s strange, since New England Sports Network’s Ricky Doyle quoted a top Bruins executive as follows on the day of Thomas’s White House absence:
(more…)

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Friday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

The column’s core point, demonstrated by reference to the numbers: The Obama administration would like to see the government hit the $16.394 trillion debt ceiling before Election Day so it can create another orchestrated “crisis” it believes it will work to its advantage.

The numbers indicate that the government appears to be on track to do just that.

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

__________________________________________

From Northern Mississippi:

8:18 PM, Feb. 14, 2012

Single-engine aircraft runs out of fuel in north Miss

Injured and disoriented, a pilot was trapped upside down in his crashed airplane for several hours Tuesday but was able to make calls on his cellphone while rescuers searched the north Mississippi woods where he went down, authorities said after finding the man alive.

Monroe County Sheriff Cecil Cantrell said the pilot, who has not been identified, was taken to a hospital for treatment after crashing his single-engine Piper Cherokee Six when the plane ran out of fuel and went down near the border of Itawamba and Monroe counties. The pilot’s condition was not immediately available. He was the only person aboard.

“We got him out. He was living. He was shook up and cut up real bad, but he was coherent. What he’s been through, it was a miracle,” Cantrell said. “We don’t know his name. We tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t really say much.” The sheriff said the man appeared to be between 40 and 50 years old.

Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said the plane was about 18 miles southeast of Tupelo when the pilot reported a problem Tuesday morning. Bergen said an alert was sent to airports and authorities within a 50-mile radius of the plane’s last known location at about 7:45 a.m.

Bergen said she couldn’t say what kind of problem the pilot reported, but local authorities said he told air traffic controllers he was running out of gas while flying from Ocala, Fla., to Olive Branch. The plane is registered to Buccaneer Aviation Inc., a Delaware corporation, but the company appears to operate in Florida.

The pilot tried to give air traffic controllers his location before going down, the sheriff said. Residents in the area reported seeing a plane that appeared to be going down into the woods. Firefighters, law enforcement officers and others from Itawamba, Lee and Monroe counties joined in the search.

Cantrell said the pilot called someone on his cellphone and authorities used “pings” from cellular towers in the area to help narrow their search. Two Army National Guard UH-72 Lakota helicopters joined the search.

One of the helicopters spotted the wreckage about 12:40 p.m., said Guard spokesman Timothy Powell. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Tongue-in-cheek … barely (bolds are mine; links added by me):

And the beat goes on in the Republican primary, as Romney continues to pound his head against the 30 percent glass ceiling, unable to pull away from the pack because he just can’t rally the conservative base.

It leaves conservative pundits like Gregg Jackson and Steve Deace, coauthors of the new book “We Won’t Get Fooled Again,” with no other choice but to believe that, if voters weren’t being told Romney is the GOP’s best chance of beating Obama, the former Massachusetts governor would’ve been out of the race a long time ago.

And why? Because in this mock letter from Jackson and Deace to Mitt himself, the two authors outline why a general Obama–Romney election will be more like a liberal runoff.

Mitt, if you want to be President, we have some brief friendly advice for you…

Why are you going through all this trouble running as a self-styled “pro-life,” “pro-family,” “limited government” Republican, when your actual record clearly shows you are even further to the left than McCain…and nothing more than Barack Obama in a Reagan costume?

Hey, Mitt, why don’t you just challenge massively unpopular B. Hussein Obama to get the Democrat nomination and run as the Massachusetts liberal socialist Democrat you are?

Guaranteed, you would have no problem getting the pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, pro-socialist Democrat base to back you. And as you surely must know by now, you can’t win a national election (or even state primary/caucus for that matter) without your base on Election Day.

After all, not even Barry H.O. has been able to sign in free and $50 abortions and implement same-sex “marriage” as you have been able to do. He’s even tried to recently emulate your precedent of forcing Catholic hospitals to issue abortion pills.

But neither he, nor Hillary, nor any other potential rival you may have in the Dem Party has ever been able to force Catholic charities to place children with same-sex couples like you did as the governor of Massachusetts, falsely claiming you were legally obligated to do so—an argument that even arch conservative, former Massachusetts Governor, Mike Dukakis disputes!

Let’s face it. No Democrat has been able to achieve anywhere near the far left-wing social and fiscal record fully documented and never refuted by you in just four short years!

Can’t understand why you would be running away from it when it could be your strongest asset if you ran as a liberal Democrat.

Really, Mitt. Obama could have used a primary challenge.

Those who believe that the establishment press has gone completely to the dogs can cite support for that contention in an Associated Press story about an anti-Mitt Romney demonstration at the Westminster dog show in New York earlier today.

The story is about how “a dozen demonstrators … plus a few pooches” showed up to demonstrate against something Romney allegedly did 29 years ago. Really. This story is sooooo important that as of 2:46 p.m., it was the second item listed at AP’s Top Sports News (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes):

(more…)

This updates a finding two weeks ago by Alo at Brain Shavings.

A search a few minutes ago at the Weekly Standard on “Ameritopia,” the title of Mark Levin’s New York Times list bestseller (#2 this week after two weeks at #1) returns nothing. If there were results, they would be shown below the search after hitting the Enter key. There’s nothing.

There’s nothing in publication-specific Google and Google News searches either.

Alo: “The silence speaks volumes.”

Indeed. It’s hurting my ear drums.

Thanks to recent reports at The Daily Caller, anyone out there who still contends that the establishment press is fair and balanced — or even tries to be — can officially STFU, i.e., Stifle The False Utterances. Excerpts follow.
(more…)

Everybody, including yours truly, makes mistakes. But a major news organization should be able to catch whoppers like the ones readers will see shortly, or at least fix them in short order if they get posted.

A Google search on the title of an ABC report on gas prices (“Bumpy Ride Ahead: Gas Prices May Soon Hit $4 a Gallon”) at about 8:10 a.m. ET indicates that the story went up at about 6 p.m. last night, so the pathetic verbiage readers will see after the jump has gone unrepaired for 15 hours, and counting:

(more…)