Bad Deeds for 4-5-2012

Supreme Court Rules That Routine Strip Searching Is Legal Even If You Haven’t Been Charged With Any Crime – No matter that you’re not actually guilty of anything, or that you haven’t even been charged. All they need to do is hold you. It doesn’t even matter that blanket strip-search policies are considered human rights violations in other, more civilized countries. The Supreme Court on Monday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband.

Rick Santorum Falsely Claims California Schools Don’t Teach American History – Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum claimed on Monday that most public universities in the University of California system do not offer American history courses.

That claim is false.

UC spokesperson Brooke Converse pointed out to ThinkProgress that every undergraduate at all 10 UC campuses are required to “study American history and institutions.” According to the UC website, each campus decides how its students may meet the requirement.

The only school in the UC system that does not offer American history courses is the San Francisco campus, which is a medical school.

Romney PAC Gave Money to Race-Baiting Anti-Gay Group – A state political action committee for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave $10,000 to the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay group who it emerged last week had used race-baiting tactics in order to fight marriage equality. The HRC notes that Romney’s PAC did not disclose the contribution in its Federal Election Commission filings.

The Human Rights Campaign secured unsealed documents from a court case into NOM’s campaign funding in Maine. NOM had stridently resisted releasing these documents, and it soon became clear why. Page 13 of the document showed NOM at its race-baiting worst, saying:

The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks–two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots …

Republican House Leadership Wants to Deny Lesbian Veteran With MS Full Disability Benefits – The Republican House leadership has announced it will intervene in a Defense of Marriage Act lawsuit that challenges the federal ban’s denial of full disability benefits for the spouse of a military veteran coping with MS.

Fox News Conducted Smear Campaign Against Chevy Volt Electric Car, Says … Fox News – Conservatives, led by Fox News, have been pushing a variety of lies about the Chevy Volt. They’ve falsely asserted that it is unsafe and a creation of the Obama administration, using absurd terms to discourage sales like, “exploding Obamamobiles.”

This relentless partisan campaign against American products and American jobs has been so successful that GM CEO Dan Akerson suggested it contributed to lower than expected demand, “We did not design the Volt to become a political punching bag and that’s what it’s become.”

Yesterday, in an astonishing burst of candor, Fox & Friends has set the record straight with its story, “Can the Chevy Volt help win the War on Terror?”

Their conservative guest, Lee Spieckerman, CEO of Spieckerman Media, a self-described “drill, baby, drill guy,” debunks every single right-wing myth about the Volt, noting:

“I love Fox news, and I feel like I’m kind of attacking my own family here. I love O’Reilly, I love Neil Cavuto, I love Eric Bolling, but like a lot of my fellow conservative, they seem to have kind of a fetish for demonizing the Volt.

They are perpetuating the myth that the Volt was some kind of Obama administration green energy fantasy that as you say was forced on General Motors during the bailout. It’d been in development two years before Obama was elected. And it was championed by … Bob Lutz, who is a conservative and a climate change skeptic. So you know it’s a myth. The tax break for buying the Volt was implemented by the Bush administration. It was not something that was implemented under the Obama administration. So unfortunately, there have been a lot of myths perpetuated.”

Fox debunking itself — now that is must-see TV, something I’m not certain you’re ever going to see again.

Republican Ryan Budget Gives to the Rich and Takes From Everyone Else – The Republican Ryan Budget provides an average cut for those with yearly incomes over $1 million (12.5 percent) six times greater than the cut for middle-income people (1.9 percent). The Ryan budget would also maintain current tax cuts only for high-income families; this plan would allow the tax cuts for working-poor and middle-class households to expire.

This budget imposes trillions of dollars in spending cuts, 62 percent of which would come from low-income programs that women and families rely on, like Medicare, Medicaid, and federal student aid programs.

Regards,

Jim