Cheer An Olympic pool-sized cheer for Camryn Forbes. The 16-year old resident of Penn Township has qualified for the Summer Olympic Trials, to be held in June 2016 in Omaha, Neb. She will swim the 100 and 200-yard backstroke events.Camryn trains with the Butler YMCA swim team. She’s been swimming competitively since the first grade.YMCA Coach Alex Fertelmes says Camryn has worked hard since she set her sights on the trials about three years ago. “She has made a commitment to her goals and works extremely hard. If she really wants to do something, she does it.”She qualified for the Omaha trials last summer at the YMCA Long Course National Championships in Indianapolis. Since then, she has won state YMCA titles in the 400 individual medley and 200 freestyle at Penn State University. Last week at the at the YMCA Short Course National Championships in Greensboro, N.C., Camryn captured 5th place in the 100 meter backstroke with a personal best time of 54.60 seconds. She placed 7th in the 200 meter backstroke.That’s world-class performance.Cheers also to the rest of the Y swim team and coaching staff. Camryn credits them with her success. “I’ve had great coaches and great teammates,” she says. “If it wasn’t for them, it wouldn’t have been as fun for me.”

JeerIt becomes ever more apparent that Washington makes economic data the way Chicago makes sausage — nobody knows (or wants to know) all the ingredients; and at least some of it resembles baloney.Take for example the employment report for March, which was released Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor.Economists had expected nonfarm payrolls to rise by 245,000 in March; instead, just 126,000 jobs were created, they said.But the disappointment didn’t end there. There were revisions made to the jobs figures for the previous two months. February’s numbers, originally set at 295,000 new jobs, were revised lower to 264,000, while January’s number fell from 239,000 to 201,000. That’s a big drop: 69,000 jobs total.To put it another way, the data makers were off by nearly 11 percent in January and 16 percent in March. No sausage makers would stray that far from their recipe.Somehow amid all the uncertainty, the national jobless rate held steady at 5.5 percent. Economists say it’s because so many jobless baby boomers are stuck in a statistical limbo between looking for work and retiring early. Meanwhile, wages are failing to increase as expected and 6.5 million part-time workers are seeking full-time employment.It’s hard for most Americans to trust the labor figures; or to see politics pulling on the strings of statistical fluctuation when the fluctuations don’t jibe with their commonsense observations. And the revisions seem always to move in an unfavorable direction.Figures don’t lie, the old saying goes, but liars figure.

Cheer Sometimes it’s best to keep tradition; other traditions should evolve over time. In the case of its annulments policy, the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh got it right.The Diocese has eliminated fees for marriage annulments in keeping with recent comments by Pope Francis that the church should make it easier for some divorced Catholics to remarry and receive other church sacraments.Traditional Vatican teaching forbids divorce but provides the opportunity for annulment — a church ruling that a marriage was invalid from the start — at least spiritually. There are several possible reasons for annulling a marriage, including that one or both spouses were too young to understand the full meaning of marriage or were unprepared to take on full marital commitment.In Butler County and the five other counties that make up the diocese, the fees ranged from $50 to $650 depending on the complexity of the case. To many faithful Catholics undergoing the stress of a divorce, the fees represent a penalty they must pay to restore their access to church rites, or a sort of abandonment by their church family, or both.For these Catholics, elimination of the fee removes some of the stigma related to a divorce over which they might have had little control.Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik is glad to see the fees go. In a letter this week to the diocese’s 633,000 members, Zubik said: “My staff and I have long dreamed of this move. Our dear Pope Francis inspired us to act now.”A recent fund drive by the diocese will provide funding for the costs of annulment.For a diocese committed to its flock, this is money well spent.