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Here's a word which the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger only used once in his coverage last Thursday of Uncle Sam's April 2012 Treasury Statement: "debt." And when he did, he was quoted someone about Europe's situation.

To his credit, the AP reporter wasn't particularly impressed with the fact that the government was able to run a single-month surplus of $59 billion in April. To his detriment, he didn't note that somehow, the national debt also went up by $110 billion:

The interactive model used to get the above information is here.

That's a $169 billion difference which requires an explanation; but a totally incurious press isn't supplying one. Even if one ignores intergovernmental holdings (which in my opinion one shouldn't), the $69 billion increase in "debt held by the public" (which is really "debt held by anyone who isn't part of the federal government") is a $128 billion swing from the reported surplus.

If the national debt is increasing for "off-budget" reasons, what are they, and will such differentials continue? Because if they do, the nation, which was about $700 billion away from its $16.394 trillion debt ceiling on April 30, is going to hit the limit before Election Day, no matter what kind of evasive maneuvers Tim Geithner might deploy in the meantime (if he even really wants to, of which we can't be sure; a pre-election "crisis" might come in handy for his boss's reelection chances). The additions the the national debt caused by monthly "budget" deficits alone (in quotes because the government hasn't had a real budget for three years and counting) will probably add at the very least another $300 billion. Today's statement by House Speaker John Boehner about his posture in future debt-ceiling negotiations, which otherwise seemed to come out of nowhere, may be rooted in the belief that the administration is evaluating hitting the limit before Election Day as a campaign strategy.

Crutsinger also didn't provide readers with the two key components of the Treasury Statement. Receipts were $319 billion, the highest in four years, but more than 20% below the $404 billion officially collected in April 2008 (you remember, during that absolutely awful Bush economy). Outlays were a ridiculously low $260 billion, about $110 billion less than March. If we're to believe that spending is coming down to the level consistently for the foreseeable future, it might be cause for celebration. Dream on.

Crutsinger was far from alone in ignoring the large April debt increase. So did Reuters, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal in their related reports.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Hours after New York blogger Christian Browne wrote on his blog, “The New York Conservative,” that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be quickly executed, Google shut down his blog, which was hosted on Google's free Blogger service.

While the blog – including the post that appears to have triggered its deletion – have since been restored, the circumstances of its deletion by Google remain murky – and raise a serious issue both for Google and for conservatives who use the web to spread conservative ideas and messages.

Writing on Breitbart.com, Browne explains what happened – and what Google isn't saying about it:

On Monday, the pro-U.S. security group Secure American Now posted a link to my KSM piece on its website. The link received numerous hits and generated multiple comments on the Secure America Now page. However, a few hours after Secure America Now linked to the New York Conservative, I received a form email, no reply possible, from Google Blogger informing me that the New York Conservative had been deleted. The email classified my blog as “spam” in violation of Google’s terms of service. There was no further explanation. My URL was dead; all of the content, everything I ever posted, was gone.

---

I made two telephone calls to Google to protest and demand a reason for the deletion of my blog. The Google representatives told me that Google does not provide “live support” for Google Blogger, meaning you cannot speak with anyone at all about the deletion. The representatives directed me to the Google Blogger website, where the company extols its commitment to free speech and its great reluctance to censor its bloggers.

Obviously, I do not know why Google deleted my blog, but it's awfully odd that The New York Conservative was summarily executed after a post in which I called for the summary execution of KSM. Could it be that Google found the post politically incorrect and therefore offensive? Could it be that Google thought the post was dangerous because it had potential to incite Islamists? Given the company’s self-proclaimed devotion to free speech, I think Google ought to explain why it deleted the blog. If calling for the legal execution of the confessed mastermind of the murders of 3,000 people on American soil is too controversial a topic for Google Blogger, perhaps the famously progressive company should re-think its proclamation of support for the free exchange of ideas on its platforms.

Browne raises good points about Google, but the episode also raises an important point for conservatives: Depending on Google, Facebook and Twitter as the primary method of disseminating information online puts your message at risk of being deleted by automated filters triggered by the abuse of “flag spam” tools, and technology companies that rely too heavily on automated systems to keep out spammers who try to create fake blogs or social media profiles to promote junk websites.

Unfortunately as I've documented here at NewsBusters repeatedly, there are groups of malicious internet users who have figured out how to target political content with which they disagree and get it removed (usually only temporarily) by "flagging" it as spam or obscenity enough times such that the profile gets automatically deleted by Google, Twitter, etc.

It's time that Google and other user-generated content websites wise up and realize the sad reality that liberals and radical Muslims have no problem abusing the companies' rightful desire not to subsidize speech that is obscene or pure unsolicited advertising. Considering how sophisticated their text analysis software already is, I'm sure a way can be found to protect legitimate websites from being targeted by the online speech police.

Fresh off his humiliating defeat on Jeopardy! Monday night, MSNBC's Chris Matthews actually introduced a pair of guests Tuesday as "two of the most smartest people."

Almost as funny, "two of the most smartest people" in the Hardball host's opinion are Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Coming up, JPMorgan lost a whopping two billion bucks just in the last couple of days. That’s got a lot of people saying, “Told you so.” Barney Frank’s coming here along with Robert Reich, two of the most smartest people in the progressive side to talk about why we need more regulation on banks so taxpayers don’t have to bail them out. They’re both coming here, Reich and Frank. And this is Hardball, the place for politics.

And you wonder why this guy thought the six-letter capital of Russia was Istanbul.

Even worse, despite his intellectual challenges, Matthews is still one of the most intelligent people on MSNBC.

There's a joke in there if you ignore how sad a statement it is about this so-called "news network."

New York Times columnist (and former White House correspondent for the paper) Frank Bruni gets nasty and personal again in his Tuesday column "The Right's Righteous Fraud," picking on 21-year-old Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah, for blogging about gay marriage, even throwing out a date rape reference. Judging by the time stamps at Bristol's blog, Bruni has stirred up another round of hateful lefty comments to Palin's original May 10 blog post, some of them simply regurgitating Bruni's bile.

In March, Bruni devoted a column to a former classmate providing a pat liberal morality lesson that seemed a lot like an invasion of doctor-patient privacy, then attacked Newt Gingrich and insulted Gingrich's wife. Today Bruni, who is openly gay, goes after Palin's oldest daughter for hypocrisy and being a bad mother, after Bristol had the audacity to blog her opinion on gay marriage (she's against it):

Say what you will about Bristol Palin, she’s a quick study. It didn’t take her long to master the ways of her elders on the censorious right and decide that personal circumstance and past error needn’t prevent someone from claiming righteous leadership. Uncle Rush must be proud.

Soon after President Obama stated support for same-sex marriage, Bristol publicly weighed in. Because, you know, the world was on tenterhooks.

In a blog post she focused on the reference that Obama made to his daughters — and to the same-sex parents of some of the girls’ friends.

“It would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends (sic) parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage,” wrote Bristol, making her heady debut as the new Dr. Spock for a nascent millennium. She added that “in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.”

Fathers like…Levi Johnston? It’s with him that she conceived her child — out of wedlock, at the age of 17 — and by most accounts, his relationship with her and the Palin family isn’t any warmer than Juneau in January. A mother/father home is not what he and Bristol have succeeded in creating.

What’s more, she has made sure that their son, Tripp, will at some point be treated to a worldview-shaping image of Dad as something akin to a date rapist. That’s the description of him immortalized in her memoir, one of her many efforts to monetize her surname. It recounts the loss of her virginity as a result of getting drunk and blacking out in the company of Levi, who pounced. What a gift that narrative is to Tripp, now being hauled into a TV reality show, “Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp,” already in production. Little children are known to thrive in such environments.

I hesitated before picking on Bristol because she’s an easy target. It’s like shooting moose from a helicopter flying low over the tundra.

But she so perfectly distills the double standards and audacity of so many of our country’s self-appointed moralists and supposed traditionalists: hypocrites whose own histories, along with any sense of shame, tumble out the window as soon as there’s a microphone to be seized or check to be cashed.

….

Within its uppermost ranks are many champions of small government who squirm at the small-mindedness of the scowling theocrats in an increasingly uneasy coalition. These fiscal conservatives take advantage of the religious right’s political muscle but have reservations about its hectoring piety, and their own views on social issues are often moderate or somewhat liberal. Recall that Republican money played a pivotal role in the successful campaign for same-sex marriage in New York.

In his latest column, Jonah Goldberg argues that the Cranbrook-bullying “scoop” at The Washington Post may not have been the right occasion, but that Mitt Romney needs to get “very angry” soon with the pro-Obama news media. After all, “the mainstream media are so deep in the bunker for Obama, they could ride out a nuclear war without having their Jenga tower fall over.”

"The Post's decision to play up the [haircut] story as if it were major news — front page, thousands of drably dull self-serious words piled high to elevate and justify the one buzzy nugget — is an embarrassment," he wrote. "It was clearly intended to link Romney to the new progressive cause: fighting anti-gay bullying, in the context of President Obama's "sudden" support for gay marriage. It was naked advocacy gussied up as journalistic due diligence."

I'm not sure Romney will go all Spiro Agnew on the media. George W. Bush never did. In a strange way, attacking the media is probably seen as something that makes you look more "ultraconservative." But it's true that a Republican cannot simply accept the tilted templates the media employ. But often, a Republican has to choose which way to be attacked. Romney would have been attacked if he had directly admitted the haircut incident, and attacked for his don't-really-remember answer. Pick (a) or pick (b). They'll slam you either way.

Goldberg also mocked the whole gush over Obama’s gay-marriage proclamation, starting with the "First Gay President" cover of Newsweek:

Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, may be a genius. No doubt it has gotten boring saying Obama's opponents are racist. Now the press can treat his critics as homophobes, even the ones holding the same position on gay marriage that Obama (publicly) held for the last decade — until last week.

The Obama campaign's rationalization for the president's decision to drop what most knew was a calculated political lie is that it would "fire up" his base among rich liberal donors and college students. It did that.

But it also fired up his base in the press corps, enabling writers to rekindle their obsession with the "historic" nature of the Obama presidency.

As the London Telegraph blogger Tim Stanley writes, everything the president does is cast as part of history. The president could go "seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. 'Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under One Minute,' the New York Times would proudly report."