Bad Deeds for 10-4-2010

 

Rick Perry Trading Favors for Cash – Rick Perry has taken over one and a quarter million dollars ($1.266 million) in campaign contributions from donors who were significant investors or officers in companies that Perry chose to receive more than $16 million in TETF subsidies. Rick Perry and David Nance both say they are “big fans of each other.” Nance has taken Perry hunting, given him $80,000 in campaign contributions and Perry’s son even owned 100 – 499 shares of stock in Nance’s former biotech company, Introgen. n July and August of this year, tech fund awards of $6.5 million were made to companies founded or overseen by Nance. In December 2008, an organization founded by Nance received a two-year grant of $1.9 million from the Texas Workforce Commission. A commission spokeswoman said the grant was made at the direction of the governor’s budget office. The funds were awarded at the same time Introgen’s bankruptcy listed a debt of $50,000 owed to the governor’s economic development office. Introgen had pledged the money as part of a three-year, $150,000 donation to TexasOne Foundation, a non-profit Perry started to promote his primary business recruitment program, the Texas Enterprise Fund.

 

Rick Perry Continues to Hide Out – [Rick Perry’s] position to not visit with the editorial boards of Texas newspapers may be astute politically, but it demonstrates a disregard for newspaper readers and voters across the state, who deserve to hear substance rather than silence. We are facing what’s rumored to be the largest budget deficit and crisis in the history of our state – informed estimates of the budget shortfall range from $18 billion to $20 billion. Newspaper readers, whether Republicans, Democrats or Independents – deserve to hear your solutions to the staggering problems we will be facing as the legislative session begins. Instead, we’re confronted with an unacceptable and undeserved silence.

Signed by the editorial board and newsroom leadership of the Tyler Courier-Times–Telegraph.

 

Republican Senator Says Gays And Unmarried, Pregnant Women Should Not Teach Public School – Sen Jim DeMint (R-SC) said, “if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.” After significant criticism from LGBT groups, including the Log Cabin Republicans, DeMint apologized for saying “something as a dad that I just shouldn’t have said.”

 

Dirty Tar Sands Oil Coming to Houston Bay Area – Tar sands oil makes conventional oil look clean by comparison, as it produces 3.2-4.5 times more the carbon footprint than conventional fuel. If that weren’t bad enough cleaner fuels such as natural gas, which otherwise might be used to generate electricity, are wasted in the process of creating more dirty energy from tar sands.

There are 2.5-4 barrels of water dumped into these toxic lakes for every barrel of oil extracted. These toxic “ponds” are actually very large; some are even visible from space.

Needless to say these pools are quite harmful to surrounding ecosystems as well as ground water supplies. The land left behind from tar sands extraction is a barren wasteland lacking vegetation and dotted with these toxic waste pools.

Pipelines bringing this dirty oil to the United States have already been built, but TransCanada, an extractor of tar sands oil, has proposed to expand the pipeline system. Part of the proposed expansion will link to a current pipeline in Oklahoma and extend it into East Texas and the Houston Bay Area so that it might be refined there. These refineries will require expensive additions to handle this heavy crude. The pipeline is proposed to also travel near sensitive areas such as the Big Thicket National Preserve.

 

Republicans Have Been Lying about How Americans Feel About Health Care Reform – A new AP poll finds that Americans who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think the government should stay out of health care by two-to-one. The poll found that about four in 10 adults think the new law did not go far enough to change the health care system, regardless of whether they support the law, oppose it or remain neutral. Only about one in five say they oppose the law because they think the federal government should not be involved in health care at all.

 

Republicans Plans Will Kill Jobs and Growth in the Name of Austerity – Today there is a grave danger that the still-fragile economic recovery will be undercut by austerity economics. A turn by major governments away from the promotion of growth and jobs and to premature focus on deficit reduction could slow growth and increase unemployment – and could push us back into recession. The President and Congress should redouble efforts to create jobs and send aid to the states whose budget crises threaten recovery by forcing them to lay off school teachers, public safety workers, and other essential workers. It also makes sense to invest in public service jobs – and in infrastructure projects for transportation, water, and energy conservation that will make our economy more productive for years to come.

 

Fake News is Invading Your Home – It comes through your TV screen — corporate propaganda dressed up as real news.

Here’s the catch. It’s illegal, and the FCC needs to do something about it. paid spokespeople are hawking their wares on local news. The stations mislead viewers by presenting them as experts, and they’re getting away with it.

Aa an example, a “news” story about the “hottest cars of summer” only featured one manufacturer — General Motors. How’d that happen? GM paid a PR firm to produce the phony news segment and your local station ran it as objective reporting — without telling you where it came from. In another case,

a station was caught airing a “HealthWatch” segment from a local hospital that touted news of new cancer treatments to lure people in the door.

The FCC has hardly lifted a finger — and fake news is spreading.

Tell the FCC that it’s time to get tough on Fake News.

 

Some “Organic” Egg Farms are not Organic – A recent Cornucopia investigation revealed that conditions at many facilities that produce organic eggs are often just as crowded and industrial as those at conventional egg farms. And although US organic standards require outdoor access for laying hens, Cornucopia found that at many organic farms, “outdoors” often consists of nothing more than a tiny concrete screen porch adjoining the tenement-like henhouse.

Last year, twelve organic egg producers signed a letter to the National Organic Standards Board opposing the rule that mandates organic operations to grant their chickens outdoor access. Cornucopia rates major organic egg producers it investigated on this scorecard.