Bad Deeds for 2-27-2009

Big Banks Try to Stop Help for Struggling Homeowners – Big banks, scrambling to prevent the government from forcing them to rewrite mortgages for struggling homeowners, are using their lobbying clout to press the Obama administration and Congress to scale back a key measure to rescue borrowers from foreclosures.

 

Rush Limbaugh Doesn’t Have a Clue (Why Women Don’t Like Him) – Women don’t really like Rush Limbaugh. On Feb. 23, Public Policy Polling released findings showing that only 37 percent of women hold a favorable opinion of the hate radio host. But Limbaugh says he can’t figure out why women don’t like him. So here’s his solution:

We’ll have a summit of all the women in this audience — or as many of them as we can get into breakout groups — and perhaps devote an hour in an upcoming program to calls only from women who genuinely want to talk to me. … I own the men, and what must I do now to own women? And who better to ask than women? Including some of those who may agree that that I’m unfavorable. So stand by for that.

Maybe it’s because women generally don’t like the sexist remarks that Limbaugh is so fond of.

 

Bobby Jindal is Falsely Portrayed as a Washington Outsider – Gov. Jindal is an outsider devoid of any connection to those unpopular Congressional Republicans. There’s one small problem with that description. It just isn’t true. If anyone in the media thinks for a minute that describing Gov. Jindal in this fashion is accurate, they should bear in mind the following:

Bobby Jindal was appointed by former President George W. Bush in 2001 to be Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Planning and Evaluation.

Bobby Jindal was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004 as a Republican, taking over for now-Senator David Vitter and serving until January of 2008. (Something even the right-wing Newsbusters felt important enough to point out, though they got the years of his service wrong.)
Bobby Jindal, upon coming to Congress in 2004, was elected Republican Freshman Class president by his GOP colleagues. How outsidery.

Bobby Jindal, while in Congress, voted with Congressional Republicans, the ones he is soooo far away from now, an average of nearly 89% of the time, according to Congressional Quarterly’s annual review (password required) of votes.

Bobby Jindal, while in Congress, collected campaign contributions from notorious sources like disgraced former Majority Leader and consummate GOP insider Tom Delay’s ARMPAC.

Bobby Jindal, as noted above, only left Congress last year when he became Governor of Louisiana — happy Mardi Gras!

With deep ties like these to Washington, former President Bush and Congressional Republicans, how anyone in the press could infer that Gov. Jindal is an “outsider” is beyond me.

 

Jindal’s Story About the Katrina Rescue Boats is Not True – Remember that story Bobby Jindal told in his big speech Tuesday night — about how during Katrina, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a local sheriff who was battling government red tape to try to rescue stranded victims? Turns out it wasn’t exactly true. Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone “days later.” The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

 

Secret Norm Coleman-Lawyer E-Mails Reveal Intentional Hiding Of Witness – On Wednesday, the Coleman team was caught having withheld notes given to them in early January by Pamela Howell, a Republican election worker in Minneapolis. (Note: Minnesota precinct workers are selected by partisan identification, and then buddied up across party lines to keep it running smoothly and honestly.) The court then struck the witness’ testimony, relating to double-counting of votes — but then turned around yesterday and reversed themselves, after the Coleman team said it had been an honest oversight — that there was no bad faith involved.

This morning, Franken lawyer David Lillehaug was restarting his cross-examination of Howell, and inquired as to whether there had been any further communications between herself and Coleman. The answer was yes — and Coleman lawyer Tony Trimble then had to cough up some private e-mails he’d sent to Howell in early January.

“Pam, the legal team and campaign have made a strategic litigation decision to hold off from having you sign and us file your affidavit at this time,” Trimble (or possibly his assistant, Matt Haapoja) wrote on January 6, saying this was being done “to avoid tying you down to any particular testimony and to avoid having to disclose your name and statement.”

 

Weighing Lives Against Money, Jindal Chooses Money – Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s swipe at federal spending to monitor volcanoes has the mayor of one city in the shadow of Mount St. Helens fuming. Jindal singled out a $140 million appropriation for the U.S. Geological Survey as an example of questionable government spending during the GOP response to President Obama’s address to Congress Tuesday night. The governor, a rising Republican star, questioned why “something called ‘volcano monitoring’ ” was included in the nearly $800 billion economic stimulus bill Obama signed earlier this month. “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington,” Jindal said.

But Marianne Guffanti, a volcano researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey, said, “We don’t throw the money down the crater of the volcano and watch it burn up.” The USGS, which received the money Jindal criticized, is monitoring several active volcanoes across the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Hawaii. One of those is Mount St. Helens, about 70 miles north of Vancouver, Washington, and neighboring Portland, Oregon. The volcano killed 57 people when it erupted in 1980 and sputters back into action periodically, most recently in late 2004 and early 2005, when it sent plumes of steam and ash thousands of feet into the air.

USGS researchers are also keeping a close eye on Alaska’s Mount Redoubt volcano, about 100 miles from Anchorage, which is predicted to go off again within a few months. Its last eruption, in 1989, disrupted air traffic and forced down a commercial jet that sucked ash into its engines. “If we can give good information about what’s happening, that system of diversions and cancellations all works much more efficiently,” Guffanti said. “And fewer people are delayed and standard business is resumed quickly.”

 

Growing Hate Groups Blame Obama, Economy – The number of hate groups grew by 54 percent since 2000, according to a study that identified 926 hate groups — defined as groups with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people — active in 2008. That’s a 4 percent jump, adding 38 more than the year before. What makes this year’s report different is that hate groups have found two more things to be angry about — the nation’s first African-American president and an economy that is hemorrhaging jobs. For the past decade, Latino immigration has fueled the growth of hate groups.

 

Burris’ Son Got State Job From Blago – The son of embattled Sen. Roland Burris is a federal tax deadbeat who landed a $75,000-a-year state job under former Gov. Rod Blagojevich five months ago, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned. Blagojevich’s administration hired Roland W. Burris II as a senior counsel for the state’s housing authority Sept. 10 — about six weeks after the Internal Revenue Service slapped a $34,163 tax lien on Burris II and three weeks after a mortgage company filed a foreclosure suit on his South Side house.

 

Alarm was Sounded About Stanford Financial Group in 2000, But was Ignored – When Federal agents raided the offices of Stanford Financial Group earlier this month, exposing a massive fraud and successfully preventing its perpetrator, Allen Stanford, from lamming it overseas, it was the culmination of more than an investigation into a despicable “mini-Madoff” Ponzi operation. It was also a neat little public relations moment for the beleaguered Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and their former head Mary Schapiro, who now heads up the equally beleaguered Securities and Exchange Commission. Despite what you may have thought about the way FINRA and the SEC seemed to be clueless to the ways of Bernie Madoff — and those agencies could have made use of both celebrated whistleblower Harry Markopolos and a timely article from Michael Ocrant at MAR Hedge — this new regulatory regime was serious about bringing scofflaws to justice, and those who were formerly asleep at the switch were going to get regular wake up calls.

It turns out that another forgotten reporter, in this case David Ivanovich of the Houston Chronicle, had raised some serious alarms about Stanford back in 2000. In an article entitled “Houston Banker Tries to Create Caribbean Empire, Runs into Problems with Feds” (July 16, 2000) Ivanovich chronicles Stanford’s wheeler-dealing in the nation of Antigua, painting a picture of Stanford that finds him waist deep in shadiness, even downright creepiness.

 

Most Iodine Supplements Mislabeled, Study Says – Most multivitamin supplements that contain iodine carry less — and sometimes far less — of the element than stated on the label, possibly putting newborns at risk for developmental delays, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. The American Thyroid Association’s recommended daily dose for pregnant and lactating women is 150 micrograms per day. Among the 44 products that claimed to deliver that amount, one third had less than half that amount. Iodine deficiency affects more than 38 percent of the world’s population and is the leading cause of preventable mental retardation. )And Republicans say there is no need for government monitoring?)

 

John Bolton Suggests Nuking Chicago – Former UN Ambassador John Bolton believes the security of the United States is at dire risk under the Obama administration. And before a gathering of conservatives in Washington on Thursday morning, he suggested, as something of a joke, that President Barack Obama might learn a needed lesson if Chicago were destroyed by a nuclear bomb.

 

Laura Bush Really Cares About America, But Just Totally Forgot to Watch the President’s Speech – Despite the lack of newspaper delivery at their new home, the former first lady said they are keeping up with the news back in the nation’s capital but they certainly are not operating on Washington’s clock.

In fact, Mrs. Bush said she did not watch President Obama’s address to Congress on Tuesday night because she “totally forgot about it.”

“The next day I thought it was so ironic that for eight years I would be a nervous wreck before the State of the Union, and for days before, as George would be preparing his speech, worried about it and thinking about what was going to be in the speech. And this time it came and went and I didn’t even think about it.”

 

The GOP’s Next Anti-Pork Rallying Cry: Blueberries! – On Friday, Minority Leader John Boehner attacked the omnibus spending bill currently heading through Congress by honing in one particularly odd-sounding earmark: federal money for “blueberry research.” Absurdity was the effect that Boehner was hoping for, and the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference ate it up (not literally). But there was, as usual, another side to story: without the money, experts say, the blueberry industry could fall by the wayside; hundreds if not thousands of jobs could be at risk, and the U.S. government could deny itself serious advancements in medicine and cancer research.

 

Chrysler, GM at Bottom of List of Reliable Vehicles – Chrysler and General Motors took the bottom two spots, respectively, in Consumer Reports magazine’s new automaker for reliability, even as the pair seek billions more in federal loans to stay afloat. The third of Detroit’s Big 3 automakers, Ford Motor, fared better at fourth from the bottom, also beating Suzuki.

First place went to Honda for the third-consecutive year, followed by Subaru, Toyota and Mazda. Next came a tie by Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Volkswagen and BMW, among the 15 makers rated. They were followed by Hyundai, Volvo and Mitsubishi.

 

Stonewalling in Style: Bank of America – On Thursday, the president of Bank of America, Ken Lewis, refused to provide a list of bonus payments to the New York Attorney General, after arriving in New York in his $50 million corporate jet.

 

Republican Statements That Stimulus Money Can’t be Spent Soon Shown to be False – Less than a week after President Obama signed the economic stimulus bill into law, some states are moving quickly to take advantage of transportation funding. Missouri had construction crews working on a bridge replacement within minutes of Obama signing the bill. Iowa awarded contracts Feb. 20 on 19 projects ranging from bridge replacements to resurfacing roads worth $56.6 million. In Utah, transportation officials solicited bids for six highway repavement projects. Contracts will be awarded in early March, said Nile Easton, a spokesman for the state’s department of transportation. “Every Tuesday and Thursday for the next six to eight weeks we’ll advertise chunks of projects,” Easton said. He said all of the projects will be awarded contracts by late spring and the state’s entire list will be completed by the end of the calendar year.

Regards,

Jim