Bad Deeds for 1-11-2012

 

Rick Santorum Used $100,000 of Pennsylvania Tax-Payer’s Money to Home School His Kids in Virginia – Santorum has campaigned on the fact that his seven kids have been home-schooled. Between 2001 and 2004, a Pennsylvania cyber charter school allowed the Santorum family to live in Virginia, while sticking Pennsylvania taxpayers with a $100,000 bill.

In 2004, Santorum spawned a minor scandal when news broke that he was no longer residing in the state that sent him to Congress and was living instead outside the Beltway in Leesburg, Virginia. Santorum owned, and still does, a house in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, next door to his in-laws. The Santorums bought the three-bedroom house in 1997 for $87,800. But after Santorum got elected to the Senate in 1994, he bought a much larger home in Virginia that would accommodate his ever-growing family. Some relatives moved into the Penn Hills house, but Santorum continued to use it to claim residency in Pennsylvania, where he voted by absentee ballot.

Despite moving his family to Virginia, Santorum didn’t enroll his children in a local public school. Nor did the Santorums simply home-school the kids. Instead, in 2001, they enrolled five of their kids in the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. When Santorum enrolled his kids there, the local school district in Penn Hills was forced to pick up the tab for the cyber school, which cost the district $38,000 a year for the Santorum children (around $100,000 total).

 

Republicans Attempting to Shortcut Approval Process for Dangerous Medical Devices – Two years ago, metal-on-metal artificial hips manufactured by the DePuy division of multinational pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson were recalled because they carried the risk of releasing metal toxins into the hip tissue, which caused inflammation and serious internal damage. Just a few years after receiving the hips, which were implanted in 40,000 patients in the United States (and tens of thousands more worldwide), many patients required costly, painful and risky operations to replace the devices. (1)

This is just one of many examples of medical devices that fell through the cracks of our nation’s system for regulating medical devices, injuring or killing thousands of patients. Shockingly, lobbyists representing the powerful medical device industry are trying to persuade lawmakers to make the already-insufficient approval process even weaker than it is.

Their aim is to ram their products through a weakened process and get their products to market as quickly as possible, even without undergoing adequate testing to assure that they are reasonably safe for patients. In other words, profits first.

We’re up against a powerful industry with tentacles of influence that reach deep into Capitol Hill. But with help from activists like you, we can fend of the attempts to weaken medical device regulation.

Please tell your members of Congress that the device approval process should be strengthened to protect the public, not abbreviated for industry profits.

 

Republican Speaker of the Kansas State House Praying for Death of President Obama – The Republican Speaker of the Kansas State House is praying for President Obama’s death.

And he’s exploiting the Bible to do so, circulating an email that quotes Psalm 109: “May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.” O’Neal said of the violent Psalm “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president.”1

Sadly, it’s not unusual for Republican politicians to use hate-filled rhetoric when speaking about President Obama. But when they exploit religion to do so, people of faith have a moral responsibility to condemn it.

This isn’t the first time Speaker O’Neal has disgraced his office with his personal behavior. He already got in trouble for forwarding a racist email calling the First Lady “Mrs. YoMama” and making fun of her appearance, which he half-heartedly apologized for only after being confronted with public outrage.

 

Georgia School is Teaching Racism – In math class, third graders are supposed to learn addition and subtraction. In Georgia, they’re being taught blatant racism.

Does asking kids, “If 8 slaves pick oranges equally, then how much would each slave pick?” sound right to you?

Third grade students from Gwinnett County, GA were blind-sided with the promotion of racist ideas from their teachers. Students were given math problems that said things like “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”

The teachers in question claim that they were attempting to merge social studies and math together. But casually introducing slavery and violence without proper lesson plans doesn’t teach kids social studies or math — it just confuses them.

Worst of all, the school district is refusing to take this issue seriously.

Teachers can use social studies in math problems without invoking slavery or racist violence. Demand the suspension and re-evaluation of teachers responsible.

 

Is Rick Perry the Most Socialist Public Official in America? – In January he gave himself a $92,000/year pay raise by “retiring” so that he could start collecting retirement benefits while continuing to collect his government paycheck.

He’s virtually always been on government healthcare.

He cut $4 billion for public education funding even though his own education and flight training came via institutions funded by the government.

He also lives in $10k/month taxpayer-funded rental mansion, tried to use eminent domain to seize hundreds of thousands of acres of land from its rightful owners.

He wanted to inject all Texas schoolgirls with a vaccine with or without their parent’s consent.

Oh, and he somehow managed to get rich while drawing a government check.

And, as if Rick Perry didn’t have enough problems, he was greeted at a restaurant in Anderson, S.C., by a young woman who posed for a photo with the Texas governor while saying it is “good to see someone as homophobic and racist as you.”

Regards,

Jim