Bad Deeds for 3/26/2010

But, first a thought on the future:

Voting is like driving a car …
Choose (D) to move forward,
Or (R) to go backward.

The above is from a bumper sticker I saw.

And now, the Bad Deeds:

 

Lousy School Lunch Bill is One Step Closer to Passage – Blanche Lincoln is the author of the Senate child nutrition bill that just passed out of the Senate Agriculture Committee yesterday. Barack Obama called for $10 billion in new money over 10 years for child nutrition, a number Lincoln reduced by more than half.

To put that in easier to understand terms, Obama’s proposal would have given up to 18 cents in additional funds to each child’s school lunch. Lincoln’s bill gives each lunch 6 cents. Compare that to the School Nutrition Association’s request to raise the current $2.68 “reimbursement rate” (the amount the federal government reimburses schools for each free lunch served to a low income child) by 35 cents just to keep the quality of the lunches the same and make up for schools’ current budgetary shortfall. School lunch reformer Ann Cooper calls for an extra $1 per lunch to actually make lunches healthy. So any amount under 35cents is no reform at all, and Lincoln gave us 6 cents.

Please write or e-mail your senators about this.

 

Tea Party Hypocrisy – Tea Party activists want the federal government out of their lives, but 70% of them want a federal government that fosters job creation, fewer than 10 percent say the Veterans Administration is definitely socialist, only 12 percent identify management of national parks and museums as socialist, and only 36 percent say expanding Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and Social Security amount to socialism

 

More Tea Party Hypocrisy – The Tea Party leader and former militiaman, the one who urged people to break Democratic party office windows, is calling for an armed march on Washington for April 19 – a favorite of extremists because in addition to being the date of the first shots fired at Lexington in the Revolutionary War, it’s also the anniversary of the last day of the government siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

And in the final irony, of COURSE he’s on government disability. [RWAs just want to defeat anyone who does not agree with them – regardless of the conflicts with their personal lives. Their brains are blinded by their fear.]

 

Finally- A Real Case of Election Fraud, and It Involves Republican Officials – All eight defendants in Clay County, Kentucky’s election fraud trial have been found guilty today by a federal jury. Six of those eight were high-ranking election officials, including the county clerk, a circuit judge and the school superintendent. The conspirators were charged with having manipulated federal elections in 2002, 2004 and 2006 by buying and selling votes and manipulating electronic voting machines.

In additional to federal racketeering, several of the defendants were also convicted of charges that included mail fraud, extortion and laundering money used to buy votes. The conspirators were originally arrested in March of last year, and as details of the election officials’ manipulation of ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines has emerged.

One of the witnesses in the case described how she was trained by the county’s chief election official, Clerk Freddy Thompson (one of those convicted today), to change votes cast by voters on the county’s ES&S touch-screen voting systems after they’d left the voting booth. The witness, Wanda White also detailed how she was instructed to change her own voter registration from Republican to Democratic so that she could serve as a Democratic precinct official.
And, just for good measure, we’ll take this opportunity to remind readers, yet again, that the community organization ACORN — who has long been used as a red-herring by the Republican Party to suggest the existence of massive Democratic “voter fraud” — has never been charged with, or found guilty of aiding in the illegal casting of a single vote. Ever. Anywhere. No actual evidence has ever been presented in support of such a charge either.

 

Compare the Above Case to The Wild Goose Chase by Texas Atorney general Greg Abbott – The Austin American-Statesman reported, “After a two-year investigation of voter fraud, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has only 26 minor cases of voting irregularities to show for his expenditure from a $1.4 million grant.” (Source: Austin American-Statesman, Texas AG’s wild goose chase, Thursday, May 22, 2008) Abbott used extensive resources to intimidate minority voters, including sending AG investigators to an elderly woman’s house. The investigators peeped into the woman’s bathroom window as she exited the shower. (The Houston Chronicle, September 19, 2006).

 

What Happens to People at Conservative Think Tanks That Actually Think? They Get Fired. – David Frum, who wrote a widely-circulated blog post Sunday suggesting passage of the health care bill amounted to “Waterloo” for the Republican Party, has apparently been forced out of his fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Frum posted a resignation letter on his blog following a conversation with AEI President Arthur Brooks announcing that his position is “terminated.” [RWAs must adhere to the conservative world view or become an enemy who must be severely punished.]

In the Waterloo post, Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, wrote that the GOP and conservatives “suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.”

“A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves,” he wrote. “At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing.” [Enemies of the RWAs must be ddefeated at all costs – shame and contradiction be damned.]

 

Rep. Eric Cantor Blames Democrats for the Shot Fired at His Office; Except There Was No Shot Fired at His Office – All of Fox News was atwitter yesterday morning with the big break news that someone had taken a shot at the office of Republican Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Minority whip. Cantor himself went on TV and pronounced:

CANTOR: “Just recently I have been directly threatened. A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week.”

Moreover, he blamed all of this violent behavior breaking out everywhere on the Democratic congressmen who are standing up to violence and calling it out.

But then the whole story came out:

In a news release Thursday, police said the bullet struck at about 1 a.m. on Tuesday. The preliminary investigation showed that “a bullet was fired into the air and struck the window in a downward direction, landing on the floor about a foot from the window. The round struck with enough force to break the windowpane but did not penetrate the window blinds. There was no other damage to the room, which is used occasionally for meetings by the congressman.”

Richmond police spokesman Gene Lepley told CNN Friday that it was the result of “random gunfire.”
Gee, sounds awfully familiar. This is just like Lou Dobbs’ attempts to gain martyrdom.

Meanwhile, none of the right-wing bloggers who raced to get this story up — folks like RedState, Gateway Pundit, Schmuck of Spades, and Daily Caller — have bothered to update their posts and correct the record for their readers. [RWAs are never wrong – even when they are.]

 

KBR Mechanics Worked as Little as 43 Minutes a Month; KBR Sent Bill for 150 Times Greater Than Time Worked – Defense contractor KBR, a former unit of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, had a contract worth $4.6 million to repair military vehicles at a base outside Baghdad. For the job, they employed 144 mechanics. The 144 KBR mechanics worked as little as 43 minutes per month, on average. Just 6.6 percent were being used at any given time, on average. Worker utilization rates ranged from 3.97 percent in April 2009 to 9.65 percent in September 2008. This means that, of the more than 200,000 hours they billed for, fewer than 15,000 hours were actually used.

Regards,

Jim