Bad Deeds for 6-10-2009

Fox News Jumps to Conclusion on Shooting – At least three people were shot today at Washington’s Holocaust Museum. Fox News spent considerable time Wednesday afternoon speculating whether the shooter was of Muslim descent, but stopped soon after MSNBC reported the shooter was a white supremacist.

 

Right-Wing Radio Hosts Try to Destroy GM Workers and Families – A pair of right-wing radio hosts says there’s only one choice for conservatives angry about government involvement in the auto industry: Boycott GM. “Nobody wants to support an Obama company,” Rush Limbaugh told his audience Friday, citing a poll showing that 17 percent of Americans backed a boycott of GM. “Every dollar spent with GM is a dollar spent against free enterprise,” conservative talker Hugh Hewitt wrote online last week.

Why are Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh trying to destroy the American automotive industry? What about the families that need these jobs to survive? Will Hewitt and Limbaugh support all the families that this child-like boycott could affect?

 

Liz Cheney Defends Her Father’s Disavowment of Iraq-9/11 Link, Then Says It’s True – In an interview with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, Liz Cheney insisted that her father had always disavowed the notion that there was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda and September 11th (even though there’s plenty of video tape of him saying it existed). Then she said that the link actually existed! (even though there’s plenty of facts showing that it did not exist.)

 

What Sidearm Would Jesus Carry? – A Kentucky pastor is inviting his flock to bring guns to church to celebrate the Fourth of July and the Second Amendment. “We’re just going to celebrate the upcoming theme of the birth of our nation,” said pastor Ken Pagano. “And we’re not ashamed to say that there was a strong belief in God and firearms — without that this country wouldn’t be here.”

John Phillips, an Arkansas pastor who was shot twice while leading a service at his former church in 1986, said a house of worship is no place for firearms. “A church is designated as a safe haven, it’s a place of worship,” said Phillips, who was shot by a church member’s relative for an unknown reason and still has a bullet lodged in his spine. “It is unconscionable to me to think that a church would be a place that you would even want to bring a weapon.”

 

Jeff Sessions: Empathy-Free – During testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Shirley Tan, a Fillipino woman who has been with her American partner for 23 years, told about how they are raising twelve-year-old twin boys. She originally left the Phillipines after suffering a violent attack from a man who murdered her mother and sister (one of the reasons why Tan does not want to return to her native country, aside from the fact that her partner and children live in the U.S., is that the man who brutalized her has since been released from prison.). one of Tan’s children started crying within seconds of the start of her testimony. At the sight of this, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy stopped the hearing and asked Tan if her son might want to sit in another room, where presumably a Senate staffer would console him for the duration of what was clearly an emotionally fraught experience. But, at the sight of the weeping boy, according to a Senate staffer who was at the hearing, Jeff Sessions leaned towards one of his aides and sighed, “Enough with the histrionics (exaggerated emotional behavior).”

 

Fear mongering Against Labor Unions – The cast of Morning Joe was fear mongering about the Employee Free Choice Act by saying they can’t manage to name a single successful unionized company, even though they work for one. GE is one of the world’s largest companies; in 2006, its revenues were greater than the gross domestic products of 80 percent of UN nations.

 

Medical Bills Underlie 60 Percent of U.S. Bankruptcies According to Study – Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers said in a report. More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.

For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection,” said Harvard’s Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States.

The United States is embarking on an overhaul of its healthcare system, now a patchwork of public programs such as Medicare for the elderly and disabled and employer-sponsored health insurance that leaves 15 percent of the population with no coverage.

“Expanding private insurance and calling it health reform will fail to prevent financial catastrophe for hundreds of thousands of Americans every year,” Dr. Sidney Wolfe of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen said in a statement.

The researchers and some consumer advocates said the study showed the proposals under the most serious consideration are unlikely to help many Americans. They are pressing for a so-called single payer plan, in which one agency, usually the government, coordinates health coverage.

 

Still Digging Up Exxon Valdez Oil, 20 Years Later – Twenty years since the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground in southeastern Alaska on March 24, 1989, spreading an 11-million-gallon crude-oil inkblot into Prince William Sound, there is still oil just beneath the surface, close enough for animals to be affected by it.

 

Firms Hoarding Oil in Anticipation of Price Increases – The giant US bank JPMorgan Chase has reportedly hired a newly-built supertanker to store heating oil off the Mediterranean island of Malta. Other companies, including BP and a unit of Citigroup, have also hired ships to store either crude oil or oil products.

According to Bloomberg.com, “Traders were already using smaller tankers to store record volumes of jet fuel and heating oil in Europe as on-shore tanks filled up.” “I’ve never before seen storage demand on this scale,” a shipbroker told Bloomberg.

This latest move comes amid suggestions that recent increases in oil prices may be the result of speculators looking for a new financial bubble, prompting fears that increases in energy costs could stall any hope of an economic recovery.

According to MSNBC, “Even though most analysts say crude is still overpriced, the market has created its own momentum with an enormous amount of money fleeing equity and currency markets. … With so much money flowing into the market, prices are likely to hold close to where they are, until market fundamentals can take hold.”

 

How Are George and Barbara Bush Doing?

Regards,
Jim