Bad Deeds for 12-15-2011

 

Republican Operative Guilty of Voter Suppression – A jury has found a former aide to Gov. Bob Ehrlich guilty of conspiring to suppress the black vote by using robocalls during last year’s gubernatorial election. The robocalls went out to about 112,000 Democratic voters in Prince George’s County and Baltimore City — largely black jurisdictions — on Election Day 2010, suggesting that the election was over before the polls closed and that Gov. Martin O’Malley had already won.

 

Mitt Romney Says He Doesn’t Need to Know Anything to Make a Decision – When asked about his views on climate change at a campaign event, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney replied that although he did not know enough, he had already made up his mind about what his policy would be.

“I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know the answer to these things,” he told the questioner. “I think the earth is getting warmer. May be wrong. I think we probably contribute something to it, but I don’t know if we contribute a little or a lot. And therefore, when I come to the policies I’d put in place, I do not support cap and trade policies, which raise the cost of energy.”

“Scientists will figure that out ten, twenty, fifty years from now,” he concluded.

In sharp contrast with Romney’s suggestion that the question of climate change can be deferred for another fifty years, however, the majority of scientists have already concluded that man-made global warming is real, has already contributed to an unprecedented number of climate disasters, and will be irreversible unless significant changes are made within the next decade.

 

Wall Street Received Loans at as Low as 0.01 Percent… Could You? – The GAO’s main report on its audit of the Federal Reserve exposed who received the trillions and trillions of dollars in Fed bailouts. But the GAO report wasn’t very specific about the terms of those bailouts. For that, we have the Freedom of Information Act records obtained by Bloomberg News, which Bloomberg wrote about last week. Among other things, Bloomberg reported that the Fed lent out this cash to Wall Street at rates “as low as 0.01 percent” t

o such worthy recipients as Bear Stearns, AIG, the Royal Bank of Scotland, etc., etc.
If you do that math, you’ll see that when the Fed gave Citigroup the money for a $200,000 mortgage, at 0.01 percent, Citigroup had to pay less than $2 each month for that money. Citigroup then lent that money to you – if it deigned to lend you anything – for maybe $1,000 a month, maybe more.

And that $40,000 credit card balance? Citigroup paid the Fed less than a dollar a month for that money. And you pay $1,000.

Citigroup pays $1. You pay $1,000.
Citigroup fell into such a deep hole that it had to borrow a “term-adjusted” $58,000,000,000 from the Fed, according to Page 132 of the GAO’s audit report.

And what would you get from the Fed, if you fell into a deep hole? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Diddly-squat. Zero.

You wouldn’t get jack. If you lose your home, you can sleep in your car. If you lose your car, you can sleep under a bridge. Unless, of course, you’re a Wall Street banker.

 

Tea Party Insults the President – Patriot Freedom Alliance, the Tea Party of Hutchinson, Kansas, carries a picture of a skunk on its website and explains the skunk has replaced the eagle as the symbol for the president. “It is half black, half white, and almost everything it does, stinks,” it states.

 

Bill O’Reilly Lies About Man Who Asked Him Questions – Fox News host Bill O’Reilly claims he was accosted by a “screaming” man “armed with a cell phone camera” on December 7 while walking to a media party at the White House in Washington, D.C. On his show the next night (O’Reilly Factor, 12/8/11), O’Reilly explained, I told the guy to get lost, but he came closer and closer, armed with a cell phone camera. When he was about a foot away, I turned to shield myself and my assistant with an umbrella. At this point, we were just a few feet away from the White House gate.

According to O’Reilly, at the White House gate he tried to get the Secret Service and the D.C. police to arrest the man, but was told by a police officer that according to the law, no assault had occurred. Claiming the police had also told him that his tormenter was a member of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Fox News host concluded his commentary with an attack on OWS.

The problem with O’Reilly’s account is…just about everything. As the videotape posted by interviewer Branden Lane shows, he was not screaming, he was much more than a foot away when O’Reilly opened his umbrella at him (apparently hitting his camera in the process), and did not appear threatening as he straightforwardly asked O’Reilly if he was returning from a fundraiser for Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich.

One could argue that the man was less threatening and intrusive, and more professional, than the video teams O’Reilly sends to ambush subjects while they are at their homes or on vacation or when they are with their young children. In fact, O’Reilly’s producers have actually physically interfered with subjects on some of their ambush stakeouts.

 

Fox New Trying to Send a Message to Their Radical Base?
Does Fox News think that Mitt Romney is not radical enough and is too much like President Obama? Look at this screen shot:

Regards,

Jim