Bad Deeds for 2-17-2009

Conservative Columnist Makes Stuff Up About Global Warming – Syndicated columnist George Will presents only one piece of evidence in his Sunday piece denying global warming — and he gets it wrong. Will writes:

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

To which the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center replies:

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

 

Bank Run by Wife of Republican Representative Got $267.2 Million it Didn’t Need From Bailout – A bank that employs the wife of Republican Rep. Eric I. Cantor, R-Va., benefited from the $700 billion Wall Street bailout that Cantor helped steer through Congress last fall. Diana F. Cantor runs a Virginia-based subsidiary of New York Private Bank and Trust. The New York bank received $267.2 million from the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program Jan. 9. Hundreds of banks, financial institutions and auto companies have received funding from the Treasury program. The $267.2 million given to New York Private Bank and Trust is almost nine times the median amount received by companies participating in the program, a Media General News Service analysis of Treasury records found. In the American Banker article, New York Private Bank and Trust chairman and CEO Howard P. Milstein said he changed the bank’s tax structure to make it eligible for the bailout. The bank was not short on cash, but Milstein told American Banker, “We are in a season when you can’t have too much capital.” Cantor and other Republican leaders voted for the bailout.

 

More Conservative False Claims About Stimulus and Health Care – Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck further advanced the false claim that the economic recovery package will allow the federal government to control or interfere with doctors’ treatment decisions, echoing an assertion by Betsy McCaughey in a Bloomberg commentary. In fact, the provisions McCaughey referred to in her commentary address establishing an electronic records system such that doctors would have complete, accurate information about their patients “to help guide medical decisions at the time and place of care.”

 

We Need to Sacrifice More, Even at the Post Office; But Don’t Expect the Postmaster to Join Us – Postmaster General John E. Potter recently warned that economic times are so dire that the U.S. Postal Service may end mail delivery one day a week and freeze executive salaries. (OK, I can live with that if I have to.) But his personal fortunes are nonetheless rising thanks to 40 percent in pay raises since 2006, a $135,000 bonus last year and several perks usually reserved for corporate CEOs. The changes, approved by the Postal Board of Governors and contained in a little-noticed regulatory filing in December, brought Mr. Potter’s total compensation and retirement benefits to more than $800,000 in 2008. That is more than double the salary for President Obama. (Maybe Potter will still get Saturday mail too?)

 

We Need to Sacrifice More by Paying Higher College Tuition, But University Administrators Get Big Pay Raises – Executives at the University of Texas at Austin saw their take-home pay rise sharply along with steep tuition increases, with some salaries increasing by 30 percent or more in four years, according to an Associated Press analysis. The budget for administrative jobs that paid at least $200,000 or more at some point between 2004 and 2008 rose from $5.9 million to $8.2 million, or 40 percent. The increase came at a time when tuition and fees at Texas colleges and universities rose dramatically. At UT, the cost of education per semester, counting tuition and fees, rose 57 percent, from $2,721 in 2003 to $4,266 in 2008, officials said.

UT isn’t the only school that has seen big salary increases for its top administrators. Former Texas A&M President Robert Gates made $362,000 in 2004. The new A&M president, Elsa Murano, was making $525,000 in 2008, an increase of 45 percent, school records show. At the University of Houston, figures show a more modest 10 percent increase in the president’s salary, from $387,500 in 2004 to $425,000 last year. (How much was your raise?)

 

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison Misrepresents Statement made by FDR’s Treasury Secretary – In a recent column, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, stated her opposition to the economic stimulus bill being considered by the Senate. She began by writing “In one of history’s more candid reflections, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Treasury Secretary under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, confessed, ‘We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work.’ ”

Though Morgenthau was Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, he was an orthodox economist who opposed Keynesian economics and New Deal spending, consistently calling for a balanced budget and reducing the national debt, even during the depression. In 1937, Morgenthau and other conservatives, claiming that the country’s economic crisis had ended, convinced Roosevelt to cut many New Deal programs. As a result, the country fell into another recession, and unemployment rates, after falling rapidly for several years, began rising again.

Morgenthau also fought (unsuccessfully) against the veterans’ bonus (for World War I vets), the precursor of the World War II GI Bill. Considering that he was against the New Deal spending programs from the start, it’s not surprising that he would claim they hadn’t worked. His claim about unemployment was entirely incorrect. The unemployment rate in 1933, when Roosevelt took office, was 24.9 percent. By 1937, it had fallen to 14.3 percent. After the premature cuts in New Deal spending, unemployment quickly rose to 19 percent in 1938. Government spending was increased again and unemployment fell to 17.2 percent in 1939, when Morgenthau spoke, 14.6 percent in 1940 and 9.9 percent in 1941. The drops in unemployment rates were actually much larger than the numbers indicate, because in the 1930s, the millions of workers employed in rural electrification, highway construction and other federal projects were officially considered unemployed, since they did not work for private firms.

 

Republicans Tout ‘Pork’ In Stimulus Bill They Opposed – Rep. John Mica was gushing after the House of Representatives voted Friday to pass the big stimulus plan. “I applaud President Obama’s recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America’s future,” the Florida Republican beamed in a press release. Yet Mica had just joined every other GOP House member in voting against the $787.2 billion economic recovery plan.

But Mica wasn’t alone in touting what he saw as the bill’s virtues. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, also had nice things to say in a press release. Young boasted that he “won a victory for the Alaska Native contracting program and other Alaska small business owners last night in H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” One provision would have made it harder for minority businesses to win contracts, and Young explained that he “worked with members on the other side of the aisle to make the case for these programs, and was able to get the provision pulled from the bill.” Yet later in the day Young — who recently told McClatchy that he would’ve included earmarks, or local projects, in the bill if it had been permitted — issued another statement blasting the overall measure. “This bill was not a stimulus bill. It was a vehicle for pet projects, and that’s wrong,” he protested.

 

Only 23 Percent of Texas 8th Graders Achieved Proficiency in Science – The National Assessment of Education Progress revealed that only 23 percent of Texas 8th graders achieved proficiency in science, compared with 41 percent of students in the top-performing states — the states with which we compete for jobs. Why? The Texas State Board of Education continues to undermine high-quality science instruction, allowing our students to slip further behind. They have been engaged in narrow theological debate about the validity of evolution. If Texas schoolchildren are to succeed in the 21st Century economy, the SBOE must focus less on internal philosophical differences and more on improving science instruction. The board’s disregard for educators, instructional experts and scientists can’t continue. It’s time to take a closer look at the operations and policies of the State Board of Education.

 

Bush Administration Ordered a New Fleet of 28 “Marine One” Helicopters; Each Helicopter Costing More Than the “Air Force One” Jumbo Jet – Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card got upset waiting for a helicopter delayed due to mechanical problems, so he pushed the Bush administration to a new fleet of 28 Marine One helicopters that will each cost more than the last Air Force One. A six-year-old project to build state-of-the-art presidential helicopters has bogged down in a contracting quagmire. The price tag has nearly doubled, production has fallen years behind schedule and much of the program has been frozen until the new administration figures out what to do about it. The Bush administration awarded the contract to Lockheed-Martin, which had never built a helicopter. But the work is actually being funneled to Finmeccanica (a Italian and British company). All previous Marine Ones were built by Sikorsky Helicopter, an American Company.

 

Three Anti-Immigration Groups Share Extremist Roots According to New SPLC Report – The Southern Poverty Law Center is releasing a new report, The Nativist Lobby: Three Faces of Intolerance, examining the three Washington, D.C., organizations standing in the way of comprehensive immigration reform. The report shows that they are part of a network of groups created by a man who has been at the heart of the white nationalist movement for decades.

The Nativist Lobby describes how the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and Numbers USA were founded and funded by John Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist who operates a racist publishing company and has written that to maintain American culture “a European-American majority” is required. The report reveals that Tanton, who still sits on FAIR’s board of directors, founded the racist Social Contract Press and has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, white nationalist intellectuals and Klan lawyers for decades – correspondence documented by his own writings stored at a University of Michigan library.

 

Columnist Ann Coulter Defends White Supremacist Group – `In her latest foaming-mouth tome — Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, released on Jan. 6 — Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which The New York Times had described as a “thinly veiled white supremacist organization.” Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is “a conservative group” that has unfairly been branded as racist “because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group.” “There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” she says. “Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes — the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media — there is little on the CCC website suggesting” that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is “containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier.”

Coulter could hardly be more wrong. The CCC’s columnists have written that black people are “a retrograde species of humanity,” and that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a “slimy brown mass of glop.” Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes “forced integration” and decries racial intermarriage. It has lambasted black people as “genetically inferior,” complained about “Jewish power brokers,” called gay people “perverted sodomites,” and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.”

Regards,

Jim