Bad Deeds for 10-9-2009

 

Rush Limbaugh’s NASA Conspiracy – In a breathless rant during Thursday’s show, Limbaugh claimed NASA’s mission in search of water on the moon is really a trial run for the 30,000-pound “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” bomb being developed by the Department of Defense.

Responding to one of his callers who suggested that bombing the moon may be viewed as an “aggressive” act by creatures potentially living there, Rush agreed and took the notion 10 steps further, half-way attacking President Obama in the process. At the end, Limbaugh suggests dropping the bomb on Iran.
Here is a transcript directly from Limbaugh’s Web site.

 

CIGNA Employee Flips Off Mother Of Dead Girl Denied Transplant – Hilda and Krikor Sarkisyan went to CIGNA’s Philadelphia headquarters, along with supporters from the California Nurses Association, to confront the CEO Edward Hanway over the death of her 17-year-old child.

In 2007, Nataline Sarkisyan was denied a liver transplant by the company, on the grounds that the operation was “too experimental” to be covered. Nine days later it changed its mind, in response to protests outside its office. It was too late: Nataline died hours later.

“CIGNA killed my daughter,” Nataline’s mother Hilda told security. “I want an apology.” Sarkisyan was not able to speak to Hanway; a communications specialist talked to her instead. After their conversation, employees heckled the group from a balcony; one man gave them the finger. CIGNA called the police and had the family and their friends escorted from the building.

 

Be a Good Deeder: Sign This Petition – “Any Democratic senators who support a Republican attempt to block a vote on health care reform should be stripped of their leadership titles. Americans deserve a clean up-or-down vote on health care.”

Over 38,300 people have signed — can we break 50,000 before we deliver signatures to Harry Reid?

 

Republicans Had Plenty of Time to Fix Health Care and Did Nothing – In an CNBC debate with Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) railed against a government takeover of health care until CNBC host John Harwood interjected and asked him, “Congressman, do you not agree that the private market is failing the American patient right now?” Paul agreed that we “do not have a market system working in health care today,” and said, “Let’s fix health care, let’s fix insurance, let’s make sure the uninsured get insured, let’s make sure we have a fix for people with pre-existing conditions.” Frank then interjected and called Ryan out:

FRANK: I just want to ask Paul one question. … When did you figure that out? Because apparently for the 12 years that the Republicans were in control — eight of which had a Republican president — that hadn’t occurred to you. So I’m glad you now understand that. Can you tell me at what moment the revelation occurred?

RYAN: First of all, I introduced on this subject about six years ago.

FRANK: You had control of the Congress. Why didn’t the Republican Congress fix it?

RYAN: I will have a moment of bipartisan agreement. We should have fixed this under our watch and I’m frustrated we didn’t.

 

Republican Candidate Shoots at Target with Democratic Opponents Initials – During a weekly GOP meeting held at a gun range, South Florida Republican candidate Robert Lowry shot at a target with the letters “DWS” – a not-so-veiled reference to Democratic U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Organizer Ed Napolitano defended the gathering, as well as the use of targets that appeared to be gunmen with traditional Arab head scarves.

“That’s our right,” said Napolitano, president of the Southeast Broward Republican Club. “If we want to shoot at targets that look like that, we’re going to go ahead and do that.”

 

Conservative Politicians Party With PACs – House Minority Leader John Boehner, Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr and Iowa Congressman Tom Latham were seen by ABC News at the famed Greenbrier resort in West Virginia for a July golf outing paid for by a PAC. Dubbed “Americans for a Conservative Course,” the event raised money for the lawmakers’ ‘leadership PACs’ – funds that are separate from politicians’ campaign committees. Campaign finance watchdogs say that politicians use the PACs as “political slush funds” – financing political ambitions and sometimes a lifestyle that is often otherwise beyond their means.

 

Derivatives Lobby Pushes New Democrats To Water Down Reform Bill – JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse lobbied New Dem Reps. Mike McMahon (D-N.Y.) and Melissa Bean (D-Ill.) “to expand the ways the legislation allows dealers and major investors to trade the contracts.” The result of the banks’ lobbying effort seems to be draft legislation that could actually exempt most financial firms from a wide swath of derivatives regulations. At stake in the legislation could be a significant portion of the tens of billions of dollars that commercial banks make in the largely unregulated derivatives market each year. U.S. banks made $5.2 billion in the second quarter of 2009, a 225 percent increase from the same period last year.

 

The Right-Wing Smear Campaign Against Kevin Jennings – The right wing has a new target: Kevin Jennings, whom President Obama appointed Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools (OSDFS). The Family Research Council (FRC) launched the “Stop Kevin Jennings” campaign this week. Here’s an example of their misinformation:

FRC CLAIM: “Jennings is viciously hostile to religion.”
FACT: Rev. Serene Jones, President of UTS, disputed any claims that Jennings was anti-religion:
In my role as the president [of UTS], and as pastor, I have met few people as deeply Christian and as deeply committed to the work of justice in the world than Kevin Jennings. He’s a man of enormous faith, and not just in terms of prayer and church attendance — both of which he does devoutly — but in terms of his care for the poor, the suffering, the children, the vulnerable in our society. […]
He’s an active member of the board at Union Theological Seminary and Kevin Jennings tithes, not only in terms of his use of money, but his use of his time and his values and I just wonder how many of the people who are attacking him have taken their own faith serious enough to make the kind of financial, moral, vocational commitment that Kevin Jennings has made with his life.

 

Republican Congressman Calls President Obama “an Enemy of Humanity” – Last week, Arizona Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) called President Obama “an enemy of humanity” in his speech at the “How to Take Back America Conference” (where one workshop was called “How to Recognize Living under Nazis & Communists”).

 

Obama Impeachment Suggested By GOP Dirty Trickster – A popular, ideologically extreme website has begun pushing the idea that President Obama should be impeached. And the person leading the charge is the notorious Republican dirty trickster responsible for the infamous (and racially explosive) Willie Horton ads that derailed the campaign of Michael Dukakis.

WorldNetDaily– the hard-right website that has trafficked the most outlandish rumors about the Obama presidency, including pushing the “birther” conspiracy — is now circulating an article suggesting that the president should be booted from office. The effort is being spearheaded by the longtime GOP operative Floyd Brown, who has launched his own online Impeach Obama Campaign.

 

Who is the Real Roadblock to Healthcare Reform? – Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans in Congress oppose healthcare reforms. They want, as Limbaugh proclaimed, the president to fail. But they aren’t the major roadblocks to the change we need. What stands in the way is the organized power of the entrenched lobbies that have a direct stake in limiting change, and are willing to spend hundreds of millions to obstruct it. Their legions are less angry citizens, than sophisticated lobbyists, increasingly Democrats, many of them retired legislators. They deliver campaign contributions, not votes. They threaten negative campaign ads, not authentic citizen uprisings.

With literally billions at stake, progressives will never be able to match the money of the industries fighting off change. Our only chance is to make their money toxic — to expose the contributions, the lobbyists, the inside deals — and to make legislators understand the president was right when he said we can’t let the permanent lobbies define what is possible in the nation’s capital.

The struggle over health care reform is now reaching its climax. The backroom struggle over energy and financial reform is already fierce. It is time for Democrats to unite to get these done. It is time for the two or three Senate Republicans with any iota of independence to put country over party and be part of the solution. But most of all, it is time for us to follow the money, to track the contributions, expose the lobbyists, and challenge the legislators in both parties who hope to benefit by serving special interests rather than representing their constituents.

Check out opensecrets.org where the Center for Responsive Politics tracks contributions. Take a look at their study with the Sunlight Foundation on the lobbyists undermining health care reform. Get angry, not cynical. Let your legislators hear from you — and join with your neighbors to demand that they represent you and not the interests that are writing campaign checks.

 

TV Media Cited Non-Existant CBO ‘Report’ At Least 81 Times In Past Six Days – Last Tuesday, the AP reported on a leaked Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “analysis” that had concluded that “it will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed” by President Barack Obama “will boost the economy.” Conservatives, such as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), quickly pounced on the story, claiming the CBO had proved that “government spending isn’t going to get our economy back on track.”

After the AP first wrote up the “report,” the rest of the media piled on the story. In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that since the AP’s report last Tuesday, the CBO report has been cited at least 81 times on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, the Sunday shows and the network newscasts in order raise questions about Obama’s recovery plan.

However, the CBO report being touted by conservatives and the media isn’t an actual report. “We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.

 

Tom DeLay Says, ‘I have no idea’ if Obama is US citizen – Tom DeLay, once known as the Republican House majority leader and now known for his illustrious turn on Dancing With The Stars, says he has “no idea” if President Barack Obama is a citizen of the United States.

DeLay, who has in the past made comments seemingly sympathetic to the “birther” movement trying to prove that Obama is not eligible to be president, made his statement in an interview with Newsweek on Wednesday.

Asked by Newsweek’s Ramin Setoodeh about an August interview at MSNBC in which he challenged the president to produce a birth certificate, DeLay said: “You have to show a birth certificate to play Little League baseball. It’s a question that should be answered. It’s in the Constitution that you have to be a natural-born citizen of the United States to be president.”

“Do you think he isn’t a citizen?” Setoodeh asked.

“I have no idea,” DeLay responded.

 

What the World Needs Now is Beer 😉 – Nobel insiders revealed that the President’s “beer summit” at the White House put him over the top to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

“The committee was definitely split down the middle right up until the end,” said Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician and member of the five-person Nobel committee. But, according to Ms. Valle, “someone brought up the beer summit, and we all agreed that that was awesome.”

Ms. Valle said she hoped that Mr. Obama’s victory would be seen not only as a victory for him, but “as a tribute to the healing power of beer.”

Regards,

Jim