Quick, would someone please tell the Democrats that we're not in a recession?

I don't know who the candidate will be (and God help us if it's Hillary, because I'm not convinced McCain can beat her), but both Hill and O take it as an article of faith that we are in a recession, that it's all doom and gloom, that it's All Bush's Fault, that it's All Because of Iraq, and that therefore it All Boils Down To this rather silly "equation":

McCain = Iraq = Bush = Recession!

I put "equation" in quotes, of course, because emotions are neither facts no numbers.

While I wouldn't expect news which is emotionally unsatisfying to reach the front page of the paper, the business section of today's Inquirer.....

Sorry there.

I was just about to supply a link to some good economic news, but I can't. For whatever reason, today's otherwise normal-looking article by Mike Armstrong does not appear online, at least, not in any form I can locate.

According to the headline, it's good news:

Regional Data point upward

At least, I think that's good news. So where the hell is it? Today's column doesn't show up on the front page of the business section, nor not in Mike Armstrong's blog. Nor can I find it if I search the Inquirer.

And in specific searches, neither the first sentence -- "To the vast majority of people, it doesn't matter whether the United States is in a recession or not" -- nor the last -- "The recent data sure don't indicate a recession" turn up in the online edition of the paper.

Nor do they seem to appear online anywhere. A Google News search for "To the vast majority of people, it doesn't matter whether the United States is in a recession or not" yielded nothing, and similarly, a Web search failed.

Ditto the last sentence -- "The recent data sure don't indicate a recession." Nothing in News nor in a general Web search.

[If anyone else can find this stuff, please let me know. I couldn't. However, I don't have Lexis Nexis search capability.]

What gives here? Is there such a thing as selective news?

Do I have to constantly photograph or scan my newspaper to discuss what's in it? I mean, I will, but this sometimes gets to be a bit of a pain in the ass.

Anyway, here's the scan:

And while my OCR software recoils at the task of pulling out words from gray text boxes, I was nonetheless able to convert the text, which appears below in full.

I'm no economist, but if "the good news" is that "the recent data sure don't indicate a recession," it ought to be reported.

I'm thinking, might there be a problem with the stubborn refusal of the economy to behave as it should and go into a recession in time for the election?

Is that why Armstrong's column is playing hide and seek?

I don't know, but the column reminded me of some gently sarcastic puzzlement expressed by leading economist Greg Mankiw the other day, when he linked the following chart:

That shows that the industrial production (a key measure of recessionary cycles) simply does not indicate a recession. If it did, we'd be in one of the gray bars.

Noted Mankiw (in what I think is a delicious understatement),

Someone forgot to tell the IP data that we're in a recession.

I don't see why I should have to go into full teeth-pulling mode in this blog, but I will. I wish I could do this by means of a normal news link.

But what I'm having to do seems more like a news leak.

The worst thing about this is that I'm no more an economics blogger than I am a war blogger. However, I'm noticing a similar rule of reporting in both.

Bad news is good and good news is bad.

Oh the irony.

MORE: I am not arguing that the Philadelphia Inquirer (or any other newspaper) has a duty to make their stories available online. (Under the First Amendment, they can do whatever they want.) However, I think that when a highly relevant story about the economy appears in the print edition in a newspaper which is generally available online, it would be fair to treat it the same way other news stories are treated.

In any event, I thought it was highly newsworthy. So much so, that I decided to "report" it on my own.

UPDATE: Yay!

At 1:07 p.m. today, Mike Armstrong's column was posted, and it now appears in the Inquirer as a blog post titled "Could states' economies predict national recession?."

(Not the same title as "Regional Data point upward," but at least it's there....)