Financial markets brace for crunch Greek election

NOT only Greece but also Europe braced today for an election that polls indicate will decimate the two main parties and fail to produce a clear winner, sparking market fears about fresh eurozone turmoil.

In comments widely quoted by Greek newspapers on the eve of Sunday's vote, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that if Greece's new government deviated from its commitments the country would have to "bear the consequences."

"Membership of the European Union is voluntary," the minister from the eurozone's chief contributor to Greece's 240 billion euros ($314.0 billion) in bailouts and the main proponent of European belt-tightening was quoted as saying.

Greece has written off a third of its debts, is in its fifth year running of recession, one in five workers is unemployed, its banks are in a precarious position and pensions and salaries have been slashed by up to 40 per cent.

With Portugal and Ireland also getting aid and Italy and Spain on shaky ground as well, last year there were worries of some sort of break-up of the eurozone. These fears have subsided in recent months but have not completely disappeared.

For markets, it is Greece's vote rather than France's presidential decider, also on Sunday, that "weighs heavier" in investors' minds, said Valerie Plagnol, director of research at the Credit Suisse bank.

Holger Schmieding, economist at Germany's Berenberg Bank, said there was a 40-percent risk of Greece leaving the eurozone this year, with a "high" chance that no stable government willing to implement more reforms can be formed.

Europe's press shared these worries, with Germany's Spiegel saying Greek politicians were behaving like "alchemists", while Belgium's Le Soir said it was "vital" for the eurozone that a new government is formed soon.

Germany's centre-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily said that efforts throughout "southern Europe" to cut spending and implement reforms must continue, otherwise "the crisis could escalate badly."

Election campaigning has been marked by voter anger with Greece's two main parties over the cuts that the country has been forced to promise in return for its bailouts. In June new savings of 11.5 billion euros have to be found.

"People are spending half what they used to," Panos Ioannidis, 41, the owner of a flower shop in an up-market area of Athens, told AFP. "If in June wages go down another 30 percent, we are expecting the worst."

The two main parties, the socialist Pasok and the conservative New Democracy, want to be cut more slack on the terms of the bailout, and many of the smaller parties want to tear up the agreement entirely.

"We need to break from this corrupt political system of lackeys of foreign imperialism," Petros Alachmar, 31, an activist from far-left Syriza party, one of several expected to steal votes from Pasok, told AFP late Friday.

"We have had enough of austerity measures."

Voters are also fed up corruption and cronyism, while immigration has also been an issue. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, completed with swastika-like emblem, may enter parliament for the first time in nearly 40 years, polls show.

The election is being fought over "a mixture of economy, immigration and national humiliation," said analyst George Sefertzis.

New Democracy is expected to win the most votes but not enough to govern alone, forcing leader Antonis Samaras into a coalition with smaller parties. If no coalition is formed, new elections could be called.

"Our place in Europe and the euro will be decided on Sunday," Pasok leader Evangelos Venizelos, 55, told a rally in Athens' central Syntagma Square, the focal point of sometimes violent protests in recent years, late Friday.

True love gets burns victim Turia through hell

  MICHAEL Hoskin looks at his partner, Turia Pitt, and says: "She's beautiful."

Don't call her a survivor because she is doing more than "surviving", he says.

She is living every day, every moment at their home on the NSW south coast.

Trapped by a bushfire during an ultra-marathon in the Kimberley last year, Ms Pitt's burns were so bad she was told by doctors she might not make it.

The 24-year-old's fitness, age and incredible will to live got her through those early days and weeks.

It is her love for Michael Hoskin that continues to carry her through her recovery from shocking burns to 64 per cent of her body.

"She doesn't want people to feel sorry for her. She just wants to get on with her life," he said.

"She's beautiful, you know. She's amazing."

Last week, Turia was forced to relive her ordeal when she gave evidence to the West Australian parliamentary inquiry examining what went wrong in the Kimberley wilderness on September 2 last year - when the Race the Planet's 41 competitors were just hours into what was supposed to be a 100km race over seven days.

The inquiry has heard chilling claims that RTP's organisers in Hong Kong were hopelessly under-prepared for such an emergency.

There were communication blackspots because they did not have the proper satellite phones.

WA's Fire and Emergency Services Authority said it was not notified of the race until it was too late, contradicting RTP's claims that all relevant services were given the "necessary approvals".

The authority said that in the middle of a worse-than-normal bushfire season, it would have had the race moved, or even cancelled - had it known about it.

Competitors were briefed about the dangers of snake bite and crocodiles - but not bushfires. Yet organisers knew there were fires on or near the course.

Course director Carlos Garcia Prieto had been out replacing pink plastic tape marking some of the route after it was burnt.

"The risk of harm to competitors in these circumstances is submitted to be simply overwhelming," solicitor Greg Walsh, acting for Ms Pitt and four other runners, said in his submission.

Turia knew little of this when she got off the plane at the Emma Gorge landing strip at the El Questro station at 7.50am that morning with the other runners.

She had the world at her feet. Born in Tahiti, she grew up in Ulladulla, on the NSW south coast, where she met Michael at school. They hooked up three years ago.
Turia Pitt at the West Australian parliamentary inquiry.

TURIA paid her way at university to qualify as a mining engineer doing odd jobs including modelling.

Michael quit the police before they moved to WA last year, where both worked in the mining industry.

He said his super-fit girlfriend wanted to take part in the RTP ultra-marathon but couldn't afford the $1600 entry fee.

The day before the event, organisers contacted Turia and some others and let them enter free because there were not enough competitors and the race was to be filmed.

The inquiry heard from Mr Pietro that about 11am on race day, he was told there was a fire coming towards them and it would reach the second checkpoint within two hours.

Despite this, no runners were warned or held back at the checkpoint.

Competitors recall Turia being "chirpy, happy and talkative" as she left checkpoint two.

Soon after, about 1.30pm, when she and five others reached the top of Salerno Gorge, they heard what was described as the roar of a road train.
Turia Pitt's burns were so bad she was told by doctors she might not make it.

TO their horror, they realised it was a massive fire with the wind behind it. They couldn't outrun the flames or climb to safety.

A "really scared" Ms Pitt began to cry. She stopped and covered her head with her jacket because there was "nowhere else to go", she told the inquiry.

"It just got hotter and hotter and hotter, and I couldn't stand it any more so I jumped up and tried to run and that's when I got burnt," she said.

Fellow competitors heard her scream, including Kate Sanderson, who was already badly burnt. Ms Sanderson, 35, had huddled in a crevice but was burnt when she stood up to try to put out the flames on her jumper.

It took almost four hours for a helicopter to arrive and the other four runners - Michael Hull, 44, Shaun Van Der Merwe, 30, his father, Martin, 56, and Hal Benson, 37 - have been credited with saving the two lives.

They used their jackets and space blankets to shield them from the sun and pooled their water. But the only painkillers they had were paracetamol.

Turia was flown to a Sydney burns unit, lost her fingers and thumb on her right hand, spent five months in hospital and will need at least 10 more operations.

But Mr Hoskin, 27, who left work to care for her because she cannot dress, wash or feed herself, says she feels lucky because she still has the fingers on her left hand.

"She's got crazy energy," Mr Hoskin said.

"She loves the outdoors, she loves the ocean."

Solicitor Mr Walsh, who is preparing to sue RTP, says Turia Pitt is one of the bravest people he has met.

With huge medical bills, the only support Turia and Kate Sanderson received from RTP was a card, some emails and chocolates.

"The degree of negligence is simply overwhelming," Mr Walsh said.

'Too fat to fly' passenger sues airline

  * A PASSENGER who was told she was "too fat to fly" has announced is suing the airline that told her she would have to buy a second seat.

Kenlie Tiggeman, from the US, said Southwest Airlines’ controversial "Customers of Size" policy is discriminatory towards the obese and claims the airline ignored her “constitutional rights”.

She’s not after a payout but wants an industry-wide standard to be put in place.

“'We need to know if we need one seat or two, because this eyeballing happening at the gate is incredibly discriminatory, and it's so unnecessary,” she said.

Ms Tiggeman and her mum Joan Charpentier were waiting during a stopover at Dallas Airport last year when she claims they were singled out by a Southwest Airlines employee because of their weight.

"I asked him what the weight restrictions were and he said that he didn't know, just that we were too heavy to fly,” Ms Tiggeman told MSNBC. “Too fat to fly."

She said that she was humiliated by the incident, which developed into a 45-minute confrontation over the airline's weight restrictions in front of other passengers.

The women say during the public stoush with the Southwest employee he even told them they could board the plane but only if they sat next to a third overweight person in a row.

Ms Tiggeman claims she can fit comfortably into airline seats.

A supervisor eventually intervened and they were able to board their flight without any special conditions. They also received flight vouchers and an apology, which Ms Tiggeman has recorded on her blog.

Southwest has already taken flack over the policy with high-profile and sizeable film director Kevin Smith also told he was too fat to fly.

Fergie's secret film could land her in jail

Sarah Ferguson tried in absentia in Turkey
* Charges relate to secret film of orphanages
* Maximum sentence is 22 years in prison

A TURKISH court has begun a trial against Britain's Duchess of York for allegedly taking part in the secret filming of orphanages in the country, the state-run news agency says.

The Anadolu Agency says Sarah Ferguson, who is being tried in absentia, faces charges of going "against the law in acquiring footage and violating privacy" of five children. If convicted, she could receive a maximum sentence of 22 years in prison.

Ferguson, the former wife of Prince Andrew, allegedly made an undercover trip to Turkey in 2008 during which two state-run orphanages outside Ankara were secretly filmed for the British ITV program Duchess and Daughters: Their Secret Mission.

Anadolu quoted Ferguson's lawyer Cansu Sahin as saying the duchess is seeking an out-of-court settlement.

Teen drowned in Bali 'wanted just one last swim'

THE grief-stricken family of drowned Central Coast teenager Jack McCabe tearfully told how his quest to dive "as deep as he could go" cost him his life in Bali.

On a family holiday, they left their hotel for a day trip snorkelling in a remote bay off the island of Nusa Penida.

"We were having such a beautiful time," said Jack's mother. "We had all been snorkelling around for an hour together. He knew his stuff, had done marine studies and was always in the water with his friends at home.

"He knew the safety procedures and we discussed them when we were all out together. Jack kept showing us how deep he could go. He just wanted one last swim.

"We were all watching him and then took our eyes off him for a couple of minutes and the next we knew some local divers who were in the bay brought him up.

"He just went too deep, there was no sign he had hit his head or anything," she explained, dismissing reports that he was knocked out after hitting his head against a boat.

"They couldn't get him on the boat so I jumped in," explained Jack's father John McCabe. "His mum started CPR and I was doing compression but there was no one to help us, no one spoke English and our 12-year-old, daughter who had seen it all happen, was screaming."

After about 30 minutes of trying to revive their son with CPR with no assistance from the local boat operators, they took him to the beach and continued to try everything to bring him back.

"I kept telling my husband, he's gone,'' said Mrs McCabe. "We couldn't communicate with anyone, there was no one to help us. When we took him to the local clinic it was filthy and there were no facilities,'' she said.

Now, the family are planning to return home with their beloved son's body.

"We are not leaving without him, we don't know when his body will be released and we are not leaving without him, we just want to go home,'' said Mrs McCabe from her hotel in Legian Bali.

Trapped on the island for four hours before transport could be arranged to take them back to Bali, they finally arrived at Bali's Sanglah hospital seven hours after the accident.

Jack was a popular boy and keen on his sports.

"He really knew what he was doing. He was always watching those shows on television and would come down at night with his laptop and show me things he had found on the internet about diving and underwater studies. He knew and we knew what to do and how to snorkel safely, how to equalize, we think he just dove down too deep and couldn't get his air.''

"The family's nightmare continues as they battle with their UK based insurance company who told them it was Friday afternoon in the UK when they called and they would not be able to provide immediate assistance.

"The Australian consulate is trying to help but we still don't know when we will be able to take him home and we are not leaving," explained his grieving father.

The couple spoke of the pain their twelve-year-old daughter suffered watching the whole thing unfold, losing her brother in a remote island bay. Their older daughter waits at home, distraught.

"We just want to be together and we can't get him home.''

The medical examiner at Sanglah made a statement that the boy's injuries were consistent with drowning.

The family says he never surfaced and waved, he had no injuries apart from the scratch on his nose. They spent seven long hours with him before finally reaching the hospital in Bali far too late to change the outcome and save their beloved son.

Local divers claim he may have been a victim of shallow water blackout, a syndrome that often affects experienced divers when they free dive and take in too much air before going down.

"Technically it is like hyperventilating, when the body has too much carbon dioxide and the brain doesn't register. It can cause a black out and results in drowning,'' said Dewi Kartika, a local dive expert yesterday.

The family agree this is probably what happened. They have not requested an autopsy, they simply want to go home with their boy and grieve together with their family.

"We can't leave the room, we can't stop crying, our daughter is not okay, she saw it all.''

Jack McCabe lies waiting in the local morgue while consular officials attempt to sort out the red tape so that the family can finally return from the Bali holiday that started so well and ended in tragedy.

I'm so sexy I can still pull $100,000 on runway

CANADIAN supermodel Linda Evangelista has told a court she can still command about $100,000 to walk a runway, though her career has slowed since its 1980s and '90s heyday.

In an unusual peek into high fashion in Manhattan Family Court, Evangelista took the witness stand to begin telling her side of her child support standoff with French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault.

But their five-year-old boy didn't come up in Evangelista's brief testimony; she's expected to continue testifying on Monday.

Rather, answering questions from her lawyer, the high-flying model who once famously said she and her peers "don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day" sketched a portrait of herself as a woman whose first job - harvesting cherries on a farm in her Canadian hometown - paid $10 a day. She did that work at the age of 12 to earn money for a bicycle, she said.

She said she had pounded the pavement in two continents to get her start in modelling and felt pressured into getting her now-signature haircut, she said.

When she first got her famous cut in the late 1980s on advice from some fashion heavy-hitters, she said she cried and organisers cancelled 16 of about 20 fashion shows she was about to do. But soon, she added: "I had every Vogue cover around the world ... and then people came around and decided they like the short hair."

Asked about her career now, the 46-year-old model paused.

"I'm active," she said in a calm, careful voice.

"I would like to work."

Evangelista is on the latest cover of Italian Vogue, recently did a roughly $US90,000 ($88,000) advertising shoot, and still gets some runway requests, including a 2010 Paris show she had to turn down for a court date - ultimately cancelled - in the custody battle, said Evangelista, dressed for court in a tailored white skirt, stylishly boxy grey linen jacket with tan collar and cuffs, and tan spike-heeled pumps.

But her lawyer, William Beslow, has said Evangelista's roughly $1.8 million-a-year income took a dive last year after a contract with L'Oreal ended, and that's why she's asking a court to order Pinault to chip in for son Augustin's expenses. She says she spends $46,000 a month on bodyguards, 24-hour-a-day nannies and other care for the boy, known as Augie.

Pinault, who is CEO of luxury-brands powerhouse PPR and now the husband of actress Salma Hayek, says he has offered for years to pay Evangelista child support, but she responded with the lawsuit. His lawyer, David Aronson, has termed the possibility of a $46,000-a-month child-support bill "just ridiculous".

Pinault was grilled earlier on Friday about his own spending, including the roughly $62,000 in clothes, $100,000 on a watch and half-share in a $250,000 sports car he bought himself in 2010. Holidays cost him $200,000 that year, and upkeep on the garden at his Paris apartment about $45,000, he said.

His testimony pulled back a curtain on personal difficulties, as well as financial details. He said he had postponed formally recognising Augie as his son for some months in 2007 because he and Hayek were caught up in concern about her own pregnancy with their daughter, Valentina. For a time, they were told the baby would have Down syndrome, he said.

"The situation was very, very complicated. We almost lost the baby," he testified.

Pinault, now 49, and Evangelista dated over about four months in 2005 and 2006. He said they spent only about seven days together in all. Augie was born in October 2006.

Pinault also has two children by a previous marriage.

PPR owns Gucci, Yves St Laurent and other high-end brands. Forbes recently estimated his family's net worth at $13 billion.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/evangelista-sues-billionaire-for-child-support/story-e6frfmqi-1226347546703#ixzz1u05oEYty

Three Diggers wounded by bomb in Afghanistan save

THREE Australian soldiers have been wounded by a roadside bomb in southwest Afghanistan.

The special operations soldiers were wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED), which detonated midway through a mission on Thursday in northern Helmand, the Defence Department said.

Two of the soldiers suffered serious blast and fragmentation wounds in the incident.

Chief of Joint Operations Lieutenant General Ash Power said the men were in a satisfactory medical condition.

The third soldier suffered minor wounds and is likely to return to full duties soon.

The two seriously wounded soldiers will return to Australia in the coming days, possibly through the Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany.

Two coalition soldiers were also wounded in the attack.

Two youths charged over tourist rape attack

POLICE have now charged two more youths over the alleged rape of two tourists in Alice Springs.

The 17-year-old youths were caught  yesterday, one in Alice Springs and the other in Hermannsburg, about 120km west of Alice Springs, the Northern Territory News reports.

Police this morning laid charges against them over Wednesday's shocking attack of two women, aged 21 and 28, who were asleep in their car at Mount Johns in Alice Springs when the vehicle was broken into and three men allegedly forced them to have sex.

Detective Acting Superintendent Travis Wurst said one of the youths was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, acts of gross indecency, deprivation of liberty, assault and threaten with a firearm along with numerous other offences.

He said the other youth has only been charged with unlawful use of a motor vehicle, but that police expect to lay further charges as the investigation continues.

A third 17-year-old youth was charged yesterday and has made his first appearance in Alice Springs Magistrates Court on sexual assault charges over the attack.

BY CROOK: Abbott hooks recluse MP to outnumber Labor in parliament

    * Tony Crook will now sit and vote with Coalition
    * Gillard controls parliament with help of Greens
    * Crook strongly criticised the carbon and mining taxes

OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott's parliamentary numbers have won a boost, with Nationals MP Tony Crook formally joining the Coalition.

The West Australian MP, who has been on the cross benches, will sit with his party's colleagues in parliament from Tuesday, The Nationals say.

The move by Mr Crook, who has voted with Labor more than 30 times in the lower house since the last election, puts the Coalition's numbers at 72 members to Labor's 71.

While Prime Minister Julia Gillard still controls the house through her deals with the independents and Greens, Tony Abbott now has bragging rights for which major party has more members, and more discipline over Mr Crook's vote.

Nationals Leader Warren Truss welcomed Mr Crook's move today following the WA Nationals' central council meeting in Perth.

"After extensive consultation with his constituency and his Nationals WA colleagues, Tony has made a decision that I am certain is in the best interests of his electorate of O'Connor and the nation," Mr Truss said.

Mr Truss said Mr Crook's decision to sit on the crossbenches after the 2010 federal election had "raised a few eyebrows", but that the party understood he was simply trying to get the best possible results for his electorate.

Read more: ht

Mourdock up 10 over Lugar, 48/38, four days before Indiana primary

Indystar calls this latest poll result a “dramatic slide,” and is it ever. Incumbent Senator Dick Lugar led the race in the last iteration of the Howey/DePauw poll by seven points. Today, he’s trailing by ten, and Lugar has only four days to turn it around:

The Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll, conducted by two prominent Republican and Democratic pollsters, shows Mourdock with a 48 percent to 38 percent lead over Lugar. …

The poll shows a dramatic slide for Lugar, who in his last election in 2006 won with more than 80 percent of the vote after Democrats considered him so unbeatable that they didn’t field a candidate against him.

Only about a month ago, a Howey/DePauw Battleground poll showed Lugar leading Mourdock 42 percent to 35 percent.

When voters who were not solid in their support for a candidate yet and were merely leaning in one direction or the other are removed, Mourdock is still leading 43 percent to 35 percent over Lugar.

Just a month ago, the Howey/DePauw survey was good enough to get analysts believing that Lugar could hold serve on Tuesday:

U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar is in the most precarious position of his political career since autumn 1974 when he unsuccessfully challenged Democratic incumbent Birch Bayh. A Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll released today reveals Lugar with a 42-35% lead over Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock, with the two evenly splitting the vote among the 72% of primary voters identifying with the GOP. It has prompted HPI to move this race into “tossup” from “Leans Lugar.”

The poll by Republican pollster Christine Matthews of Bellwether Research and Democrat pollster Fred Yang of Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, was conducted March 26-28 of 503 likely Republican primary voters and March 26 -27 of 503 likely Indiana general election voters. It has a +/-4.5% margin of error
.

The polling came after Lugar had experienced a terrible week. He took broadside headlines related to the residency issue in the week before the polling, with the Democratic Marion County Election Board denying the voting address he had used since joining the Senate in the late 70’s. The three days of polling coincided with the beginning of a statewide Club for Growth TV assault ad branding Lugar as a big tax and spender who loves earmarks.

That’s a seventeen-point turnaround for the six-term incumbent, which is dramatic indeed. Now it looks like Lugar might make history in an entirely negative way:

Indiana’s primary will be held next Tuesday in a race where ads sponsored by a pro-Lugar PAC have recently been pulled – suggesting the intraparty coup many have suspected would befall the longtime member of the Senate will indeed come to fruition.

In the 2010 cycle, Republicans saw three-term Utah Senator Bob Bennett and two-term Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski fall in the GOP convention/primary process, while five-term Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter switched parties knowing full well that he would lose his primary to eventual general election winner, Pat Toomey. (Murkowski ultimately retained her seat through a write-in campaign).

But if Senator Lugar loses next Tuesday, he’ll join an exclusive club with a current membership of just one.

A Smart Politics review of U.S. Senate election data finds that if Dick Lugar loses the Indiana Republican primary election on May 8th, he will become just the second six-term U.S. Senator – and the first Republican – to fail in his renomination bid in the direct election era of the past 100 years.

Be sure to follow the link to learn the trivia answer as to who the other club member would be.

If Lugar loses by this kind of margin on Tuesday, he won’t be the only one embarrassed by the loss. Outgoing Governor Mitch Daniels has campaigned for Lugar, especially over the last few weeks, cutting TV ads for Lugar’s campaign. A loss would also be a rebuke to Daniels, and could hurt his standing in the GOP down the road with the grassroots and the establishment. Gubernatorial candidate Mike Pence was smarter, refusing two months ago to endorse anyone in the Senate primary:

“I’ve known both men and respected both men for more than 20 years, and I think that when you have two good choices in a primary, you ought to let voters decide,” he said. “I consider Richard Lugar a mentor and a friend, and Richard Mourdock is someone I have admired as well.”

A Mourdock victory would be a triumph for the Tea Party, which also forced Orrin Hatch into a primary in Utah, if only barely. That would belie the media narrative these days that the Tea Party has run out of gas. They obviously haven’t in Indiana.

Attention, nerds: Real lightsabers now available

Via Gizmodo, a palate cleanser in honor of Star Wars Day. The good news? Real lasers are involved and they are, apparently, spectacular to behold — so much so that you need special shades to be in close proximity to this thing. The bad news? The exciting fight scenes in the promo are somewhat undercut by the voiceover insisting that you’re … not supposed to fight with the saber. Yeah. Extremely dangerous. So what you have here, apparently, is (a) a display piece that can’t be safely displayed without proper eyewear for the three percent of consumers who use it as intended and (b) a formidably risky weapon for the 97 percent who don’t.

On the upside, fellas, lady nerds are bound to be impressed, especially if you wear an old gray muscle shirt while wielding it like the dude in the clip to look extra bad-ass. Exit question: What’s the over/under on casualties at the next “Star Wars” convention?

Audio: Michael Moore covers “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the new “Occupy” benefit album

Via CNS. Reasons to believe that this is real: The “Occupy This Album” benefit project has been in the works for months, with reports that Moore would sing on it surfacing as far back as last November. A news release about it appeared on the wires just this afternoon. And let’s face it, the voice does sound like his.

Reasons not to believe this is real: If you were going to parody the idea of Michael Moore singing for “Occupy,” this is precisely the song you’d choose and this is exactly how it would sound. It’s like a lost track from “A Mighty Wind.” Trey Parker and Matt Stone would reject it on grounds that it’s too far over the top as a goof on the hippie nostalgia that runs through the movement.

And yet, here we are.

Two clips for you, one of the track and the other via the Washington Free Beacon of select occupiers expressing their feelings about Obama. Given public reaction to OWS these days, their reaction to him must be music to The One’s ears. No pun intended. Content warning.

Video: “The Amazing Spider-Man” trailer

This trailer is better than the last one was, so it’s got that going for it. It also looks more like a video game than any movie trailer I’ve ever seen, I think.

How much more of this? Maybe a lot more, says Ross Douthat:

This was exactly the reaction I had to the original “Iron Man,” whose success enabled Marvel to set in motion the multi-movie build-up to Whedon’s “Avengers.” It, too, was a well-written, well-directed blockbuster, but one that filled me with a kind of creeping despair — because its success guaranteed that the superhero era in American cinema, which then seemed to be waning a bit as lesser franchises failed to do Superman-Batman-Spiderman business, would continue as long as studio executives had semi-well known properties to greenlight (or, in the case of this summer’s completely unnecessary “Spiderman” movie, reboot). If “The Avengers” hits as big in the United States as it’s hitting overseas, its influence will doubtless be even more enduring, guaranteeing us superhero sequels and prequels and reboots and re-reboots as far as the eye (wrapped, of course, in 3-D glasses) can see.


Yeah, if you’re sick of superhero movies, “The Avengers” is a special threat because it’s bound to lead other studios into making multi-film serials. A “Super Friends” package now seems like a fait accompli, with the “Legion of Doom” characters possibly getting their own movies too. Superheroes unto cinematic death. Maybe it’ll be worth watching the same basic story with the same basic F/X told over and over again to reach the point where ambitious directors start reinventing the genre by playing with the conventions of the standard “superhero movie.” That should take, what, another 20 years or so?

Video: Dark Knight says Occupiers are jokers, too

I asked the question yesterday as to whether the Occupy movement has become a joke. Today, the Dark Knight answers — and provides a little research, too. Not surprisingly, Batman has some pretty kind words for Bruce Wayne and Wayne Enterprises (say …. he does look familiar), but more importantly, points out who pays the taxes in the country — and who uses their dollars to influence politics and elections. Needless to say, the answers might surprise some Occupiers, and perhaps dissuade them from being Jokers:Yes, this is a palate-cleaner from Steven Crowder, but one that reminds us that the unions and the Occupiers are pretty much joined at the hip. To what extent? This report from KALW gives us a hint:

Tuesday’s May Day protests marked the re-emergence of the Occupy movement with coordinated protests around the Bay Area. But May Day—known around the world as International Workers Day—is traditionally a day when union members mobilize around labor issues. In San Francisco, those are ongoing.


The Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition – which represents 14 unions – and the Golden Gate Highway and Transportation District – which oversees the bridge, Golden Gate Transit buses – have been in contract negotiations since last year. At issue are healthcare premium costs, pay raises, and retirement benefits.

On May Day, union members and Occupy protesters joined forces—causing the Golden Gate Highway and Transportation District to cancel ferry service between Marin County and San Francisco for eight hours.

What a coinky-dink! Occupy protests just happened to shut down the transportation services that are at issue in a public-sector labor standoff.

Of course, the news isn’t all good for Big Labor these days:

In the latest sign of the fast-shrinking Big Labor movement, the National Labor College established in 1969 by AFL-CIO icon George Meany to teach new labor organizing tactics and management to new generations of activists is selling its sprawling Silver Spring, Md. campus.

The reason: they just can’t afford to keep the facilities housing the academic arm of the labor movement open anymore. “The cost to operate and maintain a large campus in such an expensive metropolitan area is exorbitant,” said the college. No other college in the Washington area has closed or is planning to close because of costs.

Instead of teaching students at the facility just off New Hampshire Avenue at the Capital Beltway, online courses will be offered. Once the 47-acre facility is rezoned and sold, student housing will disappear. Instead, new students will get to live in union halls. Some 200,000 union leaders have passed through the college which offers undergraduate degrees at community college prices.

The 99% are the taxpayers, folks. The 1% are unions trying to protect their sinecures, and Occupiers are just their pawns on the chessboard.

Video: Why does our military need the best, really?

President Obama certainly likes to talk a big game about “investing” in our national future, but, in his infinite magnanimousness, he seems more inclined toward a particular type of government “investment.” The green jobs, bailouts, and food stamps that he supports (on behalf of Americans’ welfare, of course!) are more high-risk political gambles on the taxpayer dime than safe bets with reliable returns. Conspicuously absent from the president’s “winning the future” rhetoric is our military — at least, in the context of funneling them free money on behalf of special interests. Instead, the President has decided that a ‘leaner, more efficient, more agile’ military is in the United States’ best interests… rather than, you know, a leaner, more efficient Department of Agriculture or Education or Energy, because heaven knows there’s no waste, fraud, nor abuse to be had in those departments, right?

While total defense spending has been steadily increasing for over a decade, defense spending as a portion of the federal budget and as a percentage of GDP has been buried under the ongoing explosion of entitlement spending. But, of course, instead of bravely confronting the incoming debt crisis by attacking the core problem–by reforming the entitlement and welfare programs that consume that vast majority of our budget–defense spending instead became a political football subject to Congressional whimsy, and those “automatic cuts” are already taking place:

The Defense Department’s core fiscal 2013 budget at $525.4 billion reflects the already announced one percent reduction from the current year, which comes from reducing Army and Marine personnel and ending or limiting purchases of expensive new equipment. It spells out in more detail the how the administration plans to cut future expenses related to the personnel reductions, by establishing commissions to take on the controversial tasks of reducing or closing military bases and updating military retirement programs.

One percent might not seem like much, but, in the first of a three-part video series, the Heritage Foundation provides an eye-opening, technical lesson as to why it would be a wise move for the government to focus a little more of its “investing” prowess into maintaining and bettering the most elite fighting force in the world. Our troops face real, evolving challenges every day, and unlike Congress, terrorists don’t mess around:

Vault Green Room Ed Morrissey Show The most pro-White House U.S. media outlet according to Al Qaeda is…

A limited series of writings from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad were declassified and released today by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. You can peruse the entire release here, but Byron York on Twitter flagged what is likely to garner the most attention in conservative media circles. With their top leadership holed up in compounds and caves throughout Pakistan, I guess they have a lot of time to watch and analyze the news. This doesn’t appear to be from Bin Laden, but rather an Al-Qaeda media flack preparing analysis for “the Shayk”. But whoever he is (Adam Gadahn maybe?) he seems to have a pretty decent understanding of the U.S. media landscape.

From the professional point of view, they are all on one level-except (Fox News) channel which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks neutrality too.

As for the neutrality of CNN in English, it seems to be in cooperation with the government more than the others (except Fox News of course). Its Arabic version brings good and detailed reports about al-Sahab releases, with a lot of quotations from the original text. That means they copy directly from the releases or its gist. It is not like what other channels and sites do, copying from news agencies like Reuters, AP and others.

I used to think that MSNBC channel may be good and neutral a bit, but is has lately fired two of the most famous journalists –Keith Olberman and Octavia Nasser the Lebanese – because they released some statements that were open for argument…



CBS channel was mentioned by the Shaykh, I see that it is like the other channels, but it has a famous program (60 Minutes) that has some popularity and a good reputation for its long broadcasting time. Only God knows the reality, as I am not really in a position to do so.

ABC channel is all right; actually it could be one of the best channels, as far as we are concerned. It is interested in al-Qa’ida issues, particularly the journalist Brian Ross, who is specialized in terrorism. The channel is still proud for its interview with the Shaykh. It also broadcasted excerpts from a speech of mine on the fourth anniversary, it also published most of that text on its site on the internet.

The bit about Fox News leaked out a month or so ago, but as far as I know the rest of this is new. Something tells me the folks over at Fox don’t mind that they are media enemy number one as far as Al Qaeda is concerned, nor do they probably mind that they aren’t perceived as “in cooperation” with the U.S. government. That glorious distinction belongs to CNN, which is embarrassing enough. But perhaps even more troubling is Al Qaeda’s praise of their Arabic language channel for essentially re-broadcasting Al Qaeda press releases. Well, they are the “Worldwide Leader in News”…and Al Qaeda propaganda probably draws high ratings in some corners of the world.

ABC was also singled out for a bit of praise, but for the general quality of their journalism. At least that’s how I read this, so they earn a pass in my book.

The real loser of course is MSNBC, which has worked so very hard to align themselves with this Administration. “Cooperation” is not a strong enough word to describe the amount of water-carrying they do for the White House, and the President even swiped their tagline for his re-election campaign. This news must be absolutely devastating for them, but then I guess that’s what they get for firing the most important person in the history of news reading.

Go west, young man, go west! …Unless you’re into being successful

I seem to recall, not too long ago, California Governor Jerry Brown saying that his state’s policies were about “California leading the country,” which, in turn, could serve as a model for “America potentially leading the world.” Yet again, Gov. Brown has provided an all-too-apt example of how these United States could indeed lead the world: by doing the precise opposite of whatever it is California is doing.

It’s a darn good thing California has all of those beautiful vistas and fantastic recreation to recommend itself, ’cause it doesn’t seem to have much else going for it. In an annual survey, business executives have ranked California as the absolute worst state in the country for doing business for the eighth year in a row:

The survey considered responses from 650 business leaders, who graded states on factors such as taxes, regulations, living environment and more. …



California narrowly edged out New York in what the survey called “the ninth circle of business hell,” sharing the bottom five spots with Illinois, Massachusetts and Michigan. …

Its 10.9% unemployment rate is only lower than Nevada’s and Rhode Island’s. A third of U.S. welfare recipients live in California, the report noted. High state taxes and bundles of red tape make operating a business in the state unaffordable to many companies, critics say.

Last year, 254 California companies moved some or all of their work and jobs elsewhere — 26% more than 2010. Most chief executives in Silicon Valley said they won’t expand in the state, according to the survey.

Once the Golden State of opportunity, businesses and residents have more recently been fleeing California’s legislation-happy climes in droves. More than 1.5 million jumped ship between 2001 and 2009, instead moving to more business-friendly locales like the survey’s number-one state, Texas (where unemployment currently sits below the national average — don’t mess).

Try as they might, what with their well-touted forays into subsidized green energy, spectacular feats of nanny-statism and the like, California remains an example of the havoc that ideological mismanagement and over-regulation can wreak on a regional economy. While their heavily left-leaning policies might be able to eke out an existence while dragging down the rest of the nation, their habits aren’t sustainable in the long term, and they’ve got the debt and deficit woes to prove it.

This is exactly why federalism is so brilliant — and why we should cut down on the federal bureaucracy and make better use of it.

New media gets results: police arrest violent occupier featured in video posted at Breitbart

Kudos to my former co-blogger John Sexton over at Breitbart for flagging this senseless act of violence yesterday morning by an occupy protester in Los Angeles. The protester was caught on tape whacking a female police officer on the back of her head with a drum (video embedded below), and now he’s going to pay the price for his stupidity.

Early Wednesday morning Breitbart News posted a video of an Occupy protester in LA smashing a drum into the head of a female LAPD officer. At the time the video had fewer than 25 views. Within hours the video began to spread around the web on blogs and social media sites. Just over 24 hours later it has been viewed more than 200,000 times.

Yesterday afternoon, KTLA reported that a suspect in the attack had been detained and was being questioned. This morning, the LAPD announced the arrest of Brian Mendoza age 23. Sources say Mendoza is “6 feet tall and weighs 280 pounds.” By contrast, the officer he attacked is said to be 5’1″ and just over 100 pounds.

This isn’t the first time new media has played a role in highlighting threats and acts of violence on the part of occupy protesters which would have otherwise gone unnoticed…and punished. It’s encouraging to see interest on the part of the local media at least to cover a story like this, even if I don’t expect MSNBC to ever give much air time to the darker side of the occupy movement.



Ultimately I think the occupiers are going to have an uphill battle maintaining whatever level of public support they still have, thanks primarily to the efforts of the conservative new media. While only a small number of occupiers may actually commit acts of violence, incidents like these occur with frightening regularity, and they aren’t just isolated to one or two locales either. While no movement should be judged entirely on the basis of its worst elements, these acts are to be expected from a movement whose core membership includes large numbers of anarchists, communists, and other radical leftists agitating against the police. I’m pretty certain most of the 99% they claim to represent are as disgusted by this as we are, and any after-the-fact condemnation by other occupy participants rings hollow with this sort of thing happening over and over again.

Retail sales slow, service index drops

All eyes will focus tomorrow on the April jobs report, but two more economic indicators hit today that underscores the weakening of the American economy in the spring. Retail sales slowed down, perhaps thanks to a warm winter that shifted demand:

With the early start of spring and Easter behind us, retail sales slowed in April, with many large U.S. retailers falling short of analysts’ estimates.

The Thomson Reuters same-store sales index showed a rise of 0.8 percent for April sales at stores open at least a year, short of analysts’ estimates for an increase of 1.5 percent. Sales in March had risen 4.3 percent.

Retailers were up against tough comparisons last year, when retail sales jumped 9.0 percent, according to Thomson Reuters. Last year, April benefited from Easter, which fell in late April.

Easter didn’t fall all that early in April, though. The holiday hit on the 8th, about midrange for the holiday, and certainly late enough to have pulled most Easter shopping into the same month. Reuters suggests that a better analysis of April would be to include March in the calculations, and that may be true with individual retailers, but less so in the meta-economic sense. March did better than expected at a 4.3% rate of increase, but considering the two together would show a much more tepid rate of increase in the economy — and would tend to obscure the fact that demand has fallen off.

The slowdown extended to the service sector, according to the Institute for Supply Management:

U.S. service companies, which employ roughly 90 percent of the work force, expanded more slowly in April. Companies saw less growth in new orders and hired at a weaker pace.

The Institute for Supply Management said Thursday that its index of non-manufacturing activity dropped to 53.5 last month from 56 in March. Any reading above 50 indicates expansion.



The report contributed to a raft of mixed data that suggests the economy is growing only modestly. …

The latest reading was slightly below the long-run average for the index of 53.9. Still, economists pointed out that the reading showed service companies expanded for the 28th straight month. And the ISM’s manufacturing index, released Tuesday, showed that U.S factory activity grew in April at the fastest pace in 10 months.

The ISM index on manufacturing doesn’t match up to the data in yesterday’s ADP private-sector jobs report. Manufacturing employment dropped by 5,000 jobs, the first time in seven months that happened. We won’t get the April manufacturing reports until later this month, but the March reports on both durable-goods and overall factory orders were abysmal — the worst in three years.

As for 28 straight months of service-sector expansion, that’s better news than the alternative, of course. However, we aren’t seeing the kind of expansion that creates jobs in significant numbers, as I noted earlier in the post on weekly jobless claims and in my column at The Fiscal Times. This is the weak kind of stagnation that has characterized the Obama recovery, and it’s not likely to change while Obama’s policies remain in place.

Elizabeth Warren: I listed myself as minority in order to make friends “with people who are like I am”

Why didn’t she just say so in the first place? After all, who among us hasn’t wildly exaggerated his/her ethnicity for social purposes? Just last week, I joined an Eskimo book club by claiming that I’m 1/512th Inuit.

By “people who are like I am,” I take it she means … people who are 1/32nd Cherokee?

“I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off,” said Warren…

“The only one as I understand it who’s raising any question about whether or not I was qualified for my job is Scott Brown and I think I am qualified and frankly I’m a little shocked to hear anybody raise a question about whether or not I’m qualified to hold a job teaching,” she said, pushing to put Brown on defense. “What does he think it takes for a woman to be qualified?”…

“Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born,” said Warren, who never mentioned her Native American heritage on the campaign trail even as she detailed much of her personal history to voters in speeches, statements and a video. “These are my family stories, I have lived in a family that has talked about Native American and talked about tribes since I was a little girl.”

The baseless accusation of sexism against Brown is a nice touch. I thought she’d leave it to her campaign spokesman to shovel shinola like that, but it’s better that she does it herself. If you’re willing to exaggerate your ancestry to claim vicarious racial victimhood, why wouldn’t you smear Scott Brown to claim gender victimhood too?

Riddle me this. If it was all about making Native American friends in order to get in touch with her roots, why’d she keep up the “minority” listing in that professional directory for fully nine years (1986-1995)? She says she stopped checking it off because the hoped-for socializing never happened, but that’s not a conclusion that should take nine years to arrive at. Also, if she was serious enough about discovering her Cherokee ancestry that she’d describe herself as minority in a faculty listing, she must have been reaching out to the Cherokee community in her spare time too. Makes no sense that the professional listing would be her only attempt to befriend this group of people. So what else did she do in that vein? If the answer’s “nothing,” then it becomes awfully hard to believe this was anything more than her way of adding a diversity credential to her CV.



Second look at Martha Coakley?

Video: Romney rips Obama for handling of Chen standoff

Via the Examiner, if it were anyone else I’d say this is a simple case of a pol from party A putting the screws to a president from party B over a difficult international incident, but with Mitt I’m not sure. He’s been confrontational towards China throughout the campaign. Whether that’s because he sincerely believes confrontation is the way to go to contain Chinese ambitions or because he thinks standing up to the commies (and the post-commies in Moscow) will give him a little Reagan-esque credibility with the base, I don’t know. I’m not knocking him for hitting O on this — any nominee would — but I find it hard to believe he’d have done anything starkly different than what The One did. A president’s not going to let one gutsy dissident jeopardize his entire foreign policy on Asia.

Speaking of the gutsy dissident, here’s what he said early this morning:

Q: If you knew everything you know now, would you have left the U.S. Embassy?

I don’t think I would have.

Q: Do you feel that U.S. officials put pressure on you to leave the embassy as early as possible in order that today’s talks should be a success?

I think that was a factor.

And here’s a more hopeful-sounding Chen this afternoon:

“I hope the Sino-US agreement can be implemented,” he said. “I am not disappointed in the US government. They made such a great effort. I am very grateful. It was under their great efforts that I got this important agreement.”…

Some media reports have suggested he was unsatisfied with the deal. Chen called it a “breakthrough” in his conversation with USA TODAY.

“The Chinese government has promised to guarantee my civil liberties. Is this not a breakthrough? But its implementation is very important. It must be fully implemented and this has not happened yet,” he said.

What happened in the interim to brighten his mood? No way to know for sure, but he told the Daily Beast that a U.S. official had come to the hospital this morning to try to see him (and had been refused). Knowing that the State Department hasn’t abandoned him entirely means he can rest easy that Chinese goons won’t drag him and his wife into a back alley and beat them to death — yet. As his lawyer said, with dark understatement, “The Chinese government has made many promises on many things, but they never keep their promises.” (In that case, why did Chen believe that they’d uphold their end of the deal with the U.S. to let him attend law school?)

Hillary’s playing this close to the vest so far in her official remarks, presumably in order not to further inflame the situation, but she and O are now in a nasty bind. Chen insists that the only way he’ll be safe is if he’s given asylum in the U.S.; the ChiComs, I assume, will refuse that categorically for fear of losing face. What would Mitt Romney do? As further reading on this, check out the NYT’s account of how this guy, blind and injured during his escape, somehow made it to the U.S. embassy. He didn’t show up at the gate begging to be let in, as I think most people assume. The State Department was contacted by his allies after he escaped and the U.S. sent a car to pick him up. Allegedly they were tailed by Chinese security and a full-fledged car chase ensued on the way back to the embassy. All of which is to say, the U.S. was a more willing participant in guaranteeing his safety than might at first appear, which is to O’s credit but also makes this standoff even more tense. Stay tuned. Exit question: Does the State Department now regret its initial decision to help? From the Daily Beast:


Fu had spoken by phone with Chen shortly before I had. “He was very heavyhearted,” Fu said. “He was crying when we spoke. He said he was under enormous pressure to leave the embassy. Some people almost made him feel he was being a huge burden to the U.S.” Chen decided to leave, Fu confirmed, because he was told “he would have no chance of reunification with his wife and children if he didn’t. The choice presented to him was walk out—or stay inside and lose his wife and kids. Chen had no choice but to go.”

Update: High drama: Apparently Chen himself called into today’s emergency committee hearing on Capitol Hill about his fate.

Alec Baldwin: Let’s face it, it looks like Obama has this election in the bag

Via Newsbusters. New poll out from PPP: With Gary Johnson running as a libertarian, Romney’s lead over Obama is down to two — in Montana. Meanwhile, over at Survey USA, Obama’s got a cushy four-point lead against Romney — in North Carolina.

Alternate headline: “Blogger drinking in the daytime again.”

ALEC BALDWIN: Well, you know, things for these guys aren’t going that well. You know the, the economy may stumble. It probably won’t stumble that badly between now and the election. For those people who look at these very handy benchmarks like the Dow, the Dow is still staying pretty well above 13,000. Which that kind of crowd of Romney’s really, really goes for. It’s the anniversary of this president getting Osama Bin Laden. And I think that the Republicans, I think that Romney, these guys are really, really getting scared. They really, they thought to themselves, after a tough primary – and they spent a lot of money on a bloody primary. It’s been a very ugly primary. I was one of the people that said very quickly that all Obama needs to do for the first month of the general election is just show clips of [Newt] Gingrich’s remarks about Romney. Just keep showing clips of Gingrich talking about Romney, in order to really, really get people off that.


Over at Nate Silver’s site, guestblogger John Sides has an interesting bunch of graphs suggesting that Obama’s more popular than he should be. What’s that mean? Well, they took 60 years of quarterly presidential job approval numbers, factored in economic data, scandals, wars, and time in office, and came up with a rough assessment of what any given president’s job approval “should” have been for a particular quarter. Funny thing about The One: Given the protracted crappiness of Obamanomics, he overperforms. A lot.

In fact, he is more popular than expected, and consistently so throughout these three years. His quarterly approval ratings are, on average, nine points higher than expected…

Only two other presidents have experienced a discrepancy between expected and actual approval in their first terms that was larger than the discrepancy in Mr. Obama’s first three years. One was George W. Bush, and this arises largely because the model doesn’t fully anticipate the quickness and size of the “rally effect” that took place after Sept. 11, 2001. The other was Ronald Reagan, whose first-term approval ratings exhibited more fluctuation than Mr. Obama’s but were about 10 points above the model’s expectations, on average.

Sides offers two possible explanations that I’ve flagged here before, more than once — personal likability plus the fact that, even now, a lot of voters out there still blame Bush for the state of the economy more than O. Some readers grumbled at me the last time I mentioned the likability gap between Obama and Romney on grounds that The One simply isn’t that likable and that personal appeal is wildly overrated when voters buckle down in October and do some hard thinking about whether they want four more years of this. I agree that few will vote for O simply because they like him more, but likability may skew their critical judgments of his policies just enough for swing voters to give him the benefit of the doubt on a second-term economic recovery, meaningful deficit reduction, etc. That is to say, likability and the “blame Bush” phenomenon aren’t completely distinct factors. Some people may be more inclined to blame Bush because they like Obama personally. Which, of course, is why his campaign is spending time doing moronic “slow jam the news” segments on Jimmy Fallon. No one with an ego the size of Obama’s wants to spend three minutes playing straight man to a late-night B-lister, but if it helps widen the likability gap, he’ll grin and bear it. (The Obama campaign’s obsession with the Seamus story is the flip side of this, of course.)

Exit question: Is that Survey USA poll trustworthy? Follow the link up top and you’ll find this in the crosstabs:

Chen: I can’t help feeling like the U.S. lied to me “a little”

I’ve been following this story all day since Ed’s post this morning and I still can’t keep straight what happened. According to Chen, the U.S. told him his wife would be beaten to death if he didn’t leave the embassy, which makes it sound like he was all but forced to go and left to the mercy of the ChiComs. According to the State Department, no such thing happened. Or did it?

An American official denied that account. The official said Mr. Chen was told that his wife, Yuan Weijing, who had been brought to Beijing by the Chinese authorities while Mr. Chen was in the American Embassy, would not be allowed to remain in the capital unless Mr. Chen left the embassy to see her. She would be sent back to Mr. Chen’s home village in Shandong, where no one could guarantee her safety.

“At no time did any U.S. official speak to Chen about physical or legal threats to his wife and children. Nor did Chinese officials make any such threats to us,” Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokesperson, said in an e-mailed statement. “U.S. interlocutors did make clear that if Chen elected to stay in the Embassy, Chinese officials had indicated to us that his family would be returned to Shandong, and they would lose their opportunity to negotiate for reunification.”…

“At no point during his time in the Embassy did Chen ever request political asylum in the U.S.,” Ms. Nuland said. “At every opportunity, he expressed his desire to stay in China, reunify with his family, continue his education and work for reform in his country. All our diplomacy was directed at putting him in the best possible position to achieve his objectives.”

That sounds like a distinction without a difference. If China was prepared to send his wife back to the village without security, that’s tantamount to saying her life would be in danger if he didn’t leave the embassy. Meanwhile, the NYT claims the deal reached between the Americans and Chinese would allow Chen to relocate to a port city east of Beijing with his family and enroll in school to study law. I’m not sure what the status of that is right now — did the Chinese really agree? is it still in the works? — but Chen himself is dubious enough about it that suddenly he wants out, out, out:

“The embassy kept lobbying me to leave and promised to have people stay with me at the hospital,” he said. “But this afternoon, as soon as I checked into the hospital room, I noticed they were all gone.”

He said he was “very disappointed” in the U.S. government and felt “a little” that he had been lied to by the embassy.

At the hospital, where he was reunited with his family, he said he learned that his wife had been badly treated after his escape.


“She was tied to a chair by police for two days,” he said. “Then they carried thick sticks to our house, threatening to beat her to death. Now they have moved into the house. They eat at our table and use our stuff. Our house is teeming with security — on the roof and in the yard. They installed seven surveillance cameras inside the house and built electric fences around the yard.”

He looked reasonably cheerful in photos with U.S. officials after the deal was made. Then, just a few hours later, he told CNN, “We are in danger. If you can talk to Hillary, I hope she can help my whole family leave China.” The most logical explanation for the sudden turnabout is that China reneged on its deal with the U.S. once they had Chen back in custody, but that would be a huge betrayal at a moment when Hillary’s in the country for talks on a variety of issues. I guess it’s possible that the State Department really did lie to him about the deal to get him out the front door of the embassy, on the theory that preserving good relations between the U.S. and China is more important than saving one dissident from Beijing’s police state. That’s hard to believe, though. If it’s true, it would destroy O’s credibility as a bulwark against China among the Far Eastern nations he’s been courting lately. And if someone in the Department leaked to the media about it, it’d be a huge domestic embarrassment for him and serious campaign artillery for Romney and the GOP. In fact, here’s Boehner’s statement this afternoon hammering O even at a moment when events are in flux:

“Like millions of other Americans, I have followed the story of Chen Guangcheng with admiration for his courage and concern for his safety and that of his family. I am deeply disturbed by the most recent report by the Associated Press, which suggests Chen Guangcheng was pressured to leave the U.S. embassy against his will amid flimsy promises and possible threats of harm to his family. In such a situation, the United States has an obligation to stand with the oppressed, not with the oppressor. Having handed Chen Guangcheng back over to the Chinese government, the Obama administration is responsible for ensuring his safety. While our economic relationship with China is important and vital to the future of people in both countries, the United States has an obligation to use its engagement with China to press for reforms in China’s human rights practices, particularly with respect to the reprehensible ‘one-child’ policy.”

Maybe the State Department calculated that, however horrible it might be to fool Chen into returning to Chinese custody, they had to do it to make sure there won’t be other episodes like this. Realistically, China’s not going to agree to let an infinite number of dissidents apply for asylum in the U.S. It’d be too embarrassing to the regime if its prominent critics started fleeing to its chief rival instead of embracing the ChiCom system. They don’t want to have to deal with this situation again and again and again. But then, neither does the U.S. — it’s too risky for relations with Beijing — and so maybe the terrible decision was made to dissuade other dissidents from thinking they could find safe haven at the embassy by making sure Chen didn’t come out too far ahead this time. I hope that’s not what happened, but I don’t know. Foreign policy is a slimy business.

Is Obama winning the election by feeding the media lots of dumb distractions?

Philip Klein says yes, Ace says he doesn’t know, I’m saying nope.

How did we reach the point where I’m the optimist in the righty blogosphere?

Since [April 10], three stories have dominated the political news cycle. The first came when Hilary Rosen, a Democratic operative, said Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.” The next came when the Romney campaign promoted a Daily Caller story recounting that Obama had eaten dog as a child in Indonesia. The most recent came as Obama decided to spike the football before the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s killing, releasing an ad suggesting Romney wouldn’t have made the same call.

In all of these cases, the Romney campaign has taken the bait, reacting to whatever Team Obama has decided to make an issue…

While these stories continued to dominate the political headlines, negative economic news poured in. Just in the past week, the Commerce Department reported that the pace of economic growth slowed to an anemic 2.2 percent in the first quarter and payroll processor ADP reported the private sector added just 119,000 jobs in April, far lower than expectations. The Labor Department releases its monthly report Friday…

If the campaign is about bin Laden, identity politics and silly controversies about dogs, an Obama victory is a lot more likely. To seize control of the campaign, instead of merely being reactive, Romney has to put Obama on the defensive about his own record.

Actually, it’s because I’m pessimistic about voters’ attention spans and ideological priorities that I’m optimistic about Romney’s chances in this dumb distraction derby that we’ve been having lately. My hunch is that the 10 percent of the public that’s going to decide the election doesn’t start paying attention until the conventions in late August and then doesn’t really buckle down until the first presidential debate in early October. All of this crap about Hilary Rosen and the dog on the car roof may help very marginally — you never know what an undecided voter might pick up in his/her half-hour of news-watching per day — but I think it’s mostly makework for the campaigns and chum for political junkies. That’s why I go over the top with expressions of worry in my silly posts about early polls: Those polls are completely meaningless right now but they’re tasty chum so we have to pretend like they’re somehow worth talking about. Needless to say, the election will be decided by what GDP growth and the unemployment rate look like circa October 1, not by who’s leading by three points in Virginia today. In fact, I put so much stock in the economy as a deciding factor in the election that sometimes I think it almost doesn’t matter what Romney’s own economic message is. And maybe he thinks so too:


“My vision for America is very different than this president’s vision,” said Romney, who spoke on the floor of Exhibit Edge, a female-run company that specializes in making signage for trade shows.

“What he’s done over the last three and a half years is install a series of policies that have made it back-breaking for many small businesses,” said Romney. “And made it harder for our economy to reboot and put people back to work. What I would do, people ask me what would you to get the economy going and I say, well look at what the president’s done, and do the opposite.”

That’s a lame soundbite but it works as a summary of the “referendum” nature of this election: Do something different. If the economy looks sufficiently crappy five months from now that swing voters come to that conclusion, he’ll win regardless of whatever else is happening. To the extent any of the recent distractions matter, I think they matter chiefly in how they affect the “likability gap” between Obama and Romney. Rosen suggests that Ann Romney’s too rich to appreciate the hardships of raising a family; liberals make hay of Romney’s “weirdness” in putting Seamus in the kennel on the car roof; even O’s Bin Laden ad, which dealt with a bona fide policy matter, was chiefly about suggesting that Romney’s too gutless to make the call on OBL that Obama did. All of it’s aimed at creating a sour caricature of Romney for low-information voters which some of them may pick up on as a general impression of him, and which may end up informing their judgments of the policy merits of both sides later on when they start paying attention. That being so, Romney might as well fight back and try to turn the distractions against O. The Rosen attack quickly backfired and put her on the defensive; the Seamus thing became a springboard for righty jokes about Obama’s dog-eating; and the Bin Laden ad led to a round of criticism for The One about politicizing counterterrorism. By making these distractions about Obama and the left instead of Romney, it makes it less likely that the takeaway for low-information voters who are half-paying attention will be the caricature of Romney intended by the White House. And without that caricature, they’ll cast a less forgiving eye at bad economic news from Obamanomics a few months from now.

Obama on oil speculators: “That’s not the way the market should work.” Er, actually…

In all of his class-warmongering glory, President Obama is fond of perpetuating the (intellectually cheap, populist) notion that the activities of the financial class are somehow a zero-sum game. In his eyes, wily and undeservedly affluent business executives only secure their ill-begotten profits at the expense of the little guy, instead of the reality in which everyone is, in fact, better off as a result of the economic growth that comes part and parcel of their actions. Speculators, and oil speculators in particular, get the especially short end of the stick:The president’s painfully deliberate misrepresentations of his energy policy aside, his insistence that there is no “silver bullet” to bring down energy prices and that “drill, baby, drill” is a slogan only good for a bumper sticker… isn’t really accurate. No, approving the Keystone pipeline or immediately issuing more offshore drilling permits mightn’t flood the available supply with oil directly from those projects for several years to come, but it may result in speculators currently holding onto oil, in anticipation of higher prices later, to instead release it up for sale today.

Speculation is indeed a huge part of any commodities market, but hand-rubbing CEOs aren’t the only ones who benefit from it — even normal, everyday Americans like to grow their own personal wealth through investments in the futures market. The beauty of the free enterprise system is that it’s just a collection of information, translated into prices through trading, and speculators do their best to hedge risk and predict price movements — in the face of the global demand trends and the volatility in the Middle East that the president mentions. Really now, speculators ain’t all that bad, and frankly, targeting them as merely greedy capitalists for short-term political gain isn’t doing anyone any favors (note the president’s Enron reference, gently suggesting that all of this is illicit, eeevil activity).

The chairman of the world’s largest futures exchange recently had some choice words on President Obama’s crusade to punish oil speculation:

Two weeks after President Barack Obama blamed speculators, traders who wager on the future direction of commodity prices, for driving fuel prices higher and urged regulators to be tougher on them, Terry Duffy, the executive chairman of exchange operator CME Group Inc., hit back with a pointed explanation of investors’ role in financial markets.

“People need to study their facts before criticizing speculators,” Mr. Duffy, whose Chicago company is the largest futures exchange by volume, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Milken Institute’s Global Conference. He argued that speculators provide vital liquidity to a host of markets.

Last month, the president accused “speculators” of rigging the oil markets, pushing up fuel prices for ordinary Americans. “Rising gas prices means a rough ride for a lot of families,” he said in a speech at the White House. “We can’t afford a situation where speculators artificially manipulate markets by buying up oil, creating the perception of a shortage and driving prices higher, only to flip the oil for a quick profit.”

Mr. Duffy dismissed the criticism, saying that speculators play an important part in financial markets. “When the Dow goes above 13000, Google goes above $600 per share and everybody celebrates, who do you think did that? The U.S. equity market is 100% speculators,” he said.

Mr. Duffy pointed out that the derivatives markets also help the Treasury Department and American taxpayers to save money on the cost of sovereign debt by allowing traders to hedge risks on Treasurys.

Politicians targeting oil speculators is nothing new, just a popular theme that reemerges whenever gas prices start to rise. President Obama’s latest proposed crackdown on speculators is all just a part of the White House’s larger narrative that us dumb consumers need the federal government to “protect us” from the malfeasance of the big, bad financial class, re: Dodd Frank, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, etcetera. Oh, big government — whatever would we do without you?

Gallup: Catholic vote a tossup, 46/46

In 2008, Barack Obama won the Catholic vote by nine points, 54/45, over John McCain on his way to a seven-point victory in the national popular vote. Three months after announcing the HHS mandate that would force religious hospitals, schools, and charities to fund contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients, Obama has lost that edge among the tens of millions of Catholic voters. A new Gallup poll shows Obama in a dead heat with Mitt Romney, at just about the same level as McCain got in 2008:

Catholic voters in the United States are evenly split in their support for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney for president, mirroring the national trend. However, Hispanic Catholics — about 18% of the total group of Catholic voters — are overwhelmingly likely to support Obama over Romney, while a majority of non-Hispanic white Catholics support Romney.

Obama led Romney by one percentage point, 46% to 45%, among the more than 8,000 registered voters interviewed as part of Gallup Daily tracking conducted April 11-30. Among the 1,915 Catholics interviewed during that time, support for Obama and Romney was almost the same, with 46% support for Obama and 46% for Romney.

Catholics’ divided preferences at this point contrast with those of the largest religious group in the country, Protestants, whose support swings to Romney by 51% to 41%. The split in Catholics’ preferences also differs from the choice among those who identify with another religion or no religion at all, a group that clearly supports Obama, by 58% to 33%.

The Protestant vote is going to be a problem for Obama, too. He lost Protestants to McCain by the same numbers, 45/54. However, the difference in both numbers is that Obama is a known quantity this time, unlike in 2008. Those who remain undecided now are much less likely to break towards the incumbent. Romney already has a ten-point lead among Protestants, and could easily stretch it out to the mid-teens by Election Day. Protestants made up 54% of the electorate in 2008, and it’s probably a safe bet that they’ll turn out even stronger in 2012.

Obama won despite the disadvantage mainly because of his strength among Catholics. Gallup tries to soften the blow by noting that Obama does very well among Hispanic Catholics, 70/20, but they are only about 18% of the bloc. Obama is deeply unpopular among non-Hispanic Catholics, 38/55. Whatever else happens, the Catholic vote won’t come to Obama’s rescue in 2012 as it did in 2008.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops have not relented one iota on the issue of the HHS mandate, which means these numbers won’t be improving any time soon. That may even start having an impact on Obama’s lead among Hispanic Catholics. Obama will have to defend this intrusion on religious expression, thanks to the USCCB’s energetic attacks, but the administration will have to do better than this: In sworn testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that her general counsel did not write a legal memo explaining the religious freedom issues in the birth control mandate. During the same line of questioning, Sebelius also admitted to being unfamiliar with several important Supreme Court religious freedom cases.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said that he knew of only three tests that the Supreme Court has used to balance a constitutionally protected freedom against a policy goal. He described those three tests and then asked Sebelius last Thursday, “Which of those three constitutional balancing tests were you making reference to when you said you ‘balanced’ things?”

“Congressman, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t pretend to understand the nuances of the constitutional balancing tests,” Sebelius answered.

“Before this rule was promulgated, did you read any of the Supreme Court cases on religious liberty?” Gowdy later asked.



Sebelius answered that she did not.

Chris Cillizza and Rachel Weiner underscore the importance of this bloc:

As Gallup’s Frank Newport notes in a memo on the findings, Catholics have historically been a Democratic-leaning constituency — the party can thank John F. Kennedy for that one — but in recent decades have become more of a toss-up voting bloc.

The eight presidential elections reveal how up for grabs Catholics truly. The Republican nominee has carried Catholics four times, the Democratic nominee has carried Catholics four times. …

Keep an eye on the Catholic vote between now and November. How it goes will tell you a lot about who is going to be the next president.

And as long as the bishops maintain the fight against the Obama administration — and they defend the mandate so badly — it won’t be Obama who wins this bloc.