Bad Deeds for 10-1-2010

 

Republicans Pledge Would Slash Spending for Education, Cancer Research and Aid to Local Police and Firefighters – U.S. House Republicans’ pledge to cut $100 billion from the federal budget next year would slash spending for education, cancer research and aid to local police and firefighters. “This would have significant real-world consequences,” said Representative Rob Andrews, a New Jersey Democrat on the Budget Committee. “I don’t see any way there isn’t a hit on college students,” he said. “I don’t see any way there isn’t some hit on local police and fire.” Republicans have made their task even harder by taking military spending off the table.

 

Republicans Are Wrong About the Stimulus Act – President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is clearly a managerial success – on schedule, under budget, and according to independent investigators, remarkably free of fraud.

Yesterday, the administration met its self-imposed deadline of spending 70% of the Recovery Act, or $551 billion, by the end of the fiscal year. Almost all of the unspent stimulus money is already committed to specific projects, except for a few longer-range initiatives like high-speed rail and electronic health records. And the completed work has cost less than expected, so the savings have financed over 3,000 additional projects, from airport improvements in Atlanta to new child-care centers at military bases in Louisiana, North Carolina, Mississippi and Oklahoma, from a new five-lane road in Jacksonville to a $14.5 million transformation of a World War 2 ammunition factory into an eco-friendly government building in St. Louis.

Earl Devaney, the hard-nosed watchdog leading the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, recently testified to Congress that investigators “simply haven’t seen the kind of fraud that we would have imagined as professional law enforcement.” The board is using newfangled computer algorithms that can track suspicious spending patterns before there’s a complaint; the inspectors general of every major agency are bird-dogging the stimulus as well. Devaney likes to say that if you really want to steal, you’d be crazy to steal from the Recovery Act; it’s way too transparent, with every dollar traceable at www.recovery.gov, and there are way too many eyes on it.

 

Right-Wing White Supremacist Planned to Shoot Obama Advisor – James von Brunn, the white supremacist who officials say shot dead a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, last year, was planning to target senior White House adviser David Axelrod. Von Brunn reportedly said he wanted to draw attention to the notion that the Holocaust never happened.

After finding only disappointment in organized groups, Von Brunn retreated to his website and railed against passive comrades. “The American Right-wing with few exceptions … does NOTHING BUT TALK,” he wrote.

 

Republicans Still Thwarting Oil Spill Panel – The National Oil Spill Commission continues its investigation into the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill, but the president’s panel remains hampered by its inability to compel key witnesses to testify and turn over documents. Senate Republicans blocked a bill to grant the commission subpoena power in July. Now the Senate has gone home once without moving the measure forward.

The House passed the measure with nearly unanimous support in June, by a vote of 420 to 1. But the following month Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) objected to moving it forward, though he said he was just blocking it on behalf of another member of his caucus. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who has led the effort to get the bill passed in the upper chamber, tried to work out a way to get it through as a stand-alone measure before senators departed this week, but that didn’t happen. While Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said back in July that the Senate GOP would drop the objection, his spokesman told the Wall Street Journal this week that he had changed his mind.

The spill commission is supposed to deliver a report on the disaster and recommendations for the future of offshore drilling to the president by mid-January, but is significantly limited by the inability to force witnesses to appear before the panel or provide necessary documents.

 

Researchers Found 40-Fold Increase In Carcinogenic Compounds In Gulf – Researchers from Oregon State University say that a device taking samples just off the shore of Louisiana’s Grande Isle registered a 40-fold increase in PAHs between May and June.

What’s worse is that the sampling device was specifically designed to measure the fraction of PAHs in the environment that could make their way through a biological membrane. “This is a measure of what would enter into an organism,” said Kim Anderson, an OSU professor of environmental and molecular toxicology. There was a huge increase of PAHs that are bio-available to the organisms — and that means they can essentially be uptaken by organisms throughout the food chain.”

 

News Corp. Gave Another $1 million to Pro-Republican Group – News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, contributed $1 million this summer to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby that has been running an aggressive campaign in support of the Republican effort to retake Congress, a source close to the company told POLITICO.

It was the second $1 million contribution the company has made this election cycle to a Republican-aligned group. In late June it gave that amount to the Republican Governors Association.

 

Stealing From Bank Accounts Using Computer Viruses – More than 60 people have been charged in international schemes that used computer viruses to steal millions of dollars from bank accounts throughout America, state and federal prosecutors said Thursday in New York. The cyber attacks began in Eastern Europe and included malware known as the Zeus Trojan, which was typically sent in an e-mail to computers at homes, businesses and government offices in the United States. Once the e-mail was opened, the virus embedded itself in the victims’ computers, recording their keystrokes and capturing user names and passwords as they logged in to online bank accounts. Almost $4 million was stolen from victims throughout the United States.

Regards,

Jim