Bad Deeds for 6-17-2009

“God Bless Charities”: A Fake Street Corner Charity Scamming City Residents – Calvin Tarver recruits workers, gives them T-shirts and loads them up in vans to collect cash all over Houston (including Clear Lake). God Bless Charities reports no taxes and does not have IRS 501(c) 3 status. In nine months, “God Bless” switched causes four times from AIDS and HIV to supporting youth, then collecting for a Hurricane Ike relief fund to now raising money for the homeless and hungry.

God Bless Charities does not house the public with HIV, nor is associated with any known AIDS agency or faith based AIDS org. in Harris County, TX., according to public statements from: the HIV funding source of the Ryan White Council, the AIDS Foundation Houston & AIDS Housing Coalition Houston.
In a financial report Tarver filed with the city, he claims from January to September 2008, God Bless Charities collected $45,000 (We don’t know how much they actually took in.). More than $19,000 went to pay stipends for the people who collected the cash. After rent, utilities and transportation costs, the group had less than $5,000 left for any cause.

Local 2 Investigates Charity Panhandlers

 

“Fire Letterman” Rally Organizer Greatly Exaggerates Number of Protesters – Reports indicate less than twenty showed up at the “Fire David Letterman” rally, along with at least thirty-five members of the press, although the organizer – perhaps delusionally – claimed on Fox News Wednesday morning that two hundred turned out (and, naturally, the Fox and Friends hosts left that figure unchallenged).

Now, just for entertainment, watch the ‘Top ten things overheard at fire Dave rally’ video from Letterman’s show at the link [above].

 

More Republican Hypocrisy on Family Values – Nevada Republican Senator John Ensign voted in the House to impeach President Bill Clinton over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinski and repeatedly called for the former president’s resignation. But now, Ensign has confessed to an extramarital affair. The affair took place between December 2007 and August 2008 with a campaign staffer who was married to an employee in Ensign’s Senate office. How does that square with Ensign’s statement made in 2004 regarding the sanctity of marriage:

“Marriage recognizes the ideal of a father and mother living together to raise their children,” Ensign said. “Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation. Marriage, as a social institution, predates every other institution on which ordered society in America has relied.”

 

Glenn Beck Can’t Remember What He Was Rooting For – Glenn Beck wants everyone to rest assured he’s not a complete nutcase. He says that he’s not a fan of state secession, after all!

BECK: Did you catch the New York Times this weekend? [Giggles weirdly.] They published the third — count it, three — the third op-ed in the New York Times blaming Bill O’Reilly and me, or Fox News in general, of spreading hate and inspiring people like the killer of Dr. Killer, uh, Tiller, in Kansas. Also, we were the inspiration apparently for the guy at the Holocaust Museum last week.

You know, there are groups out there that preach hate and violence and racial violence. There are groups out there so fed up they want to secede from the union. But we ain’t one of them!

Hmmmm. An interesting denial. There’s only one problem with it: Beck was downright enthusiastic about Texas secession two months ago when he interviewed Chuck Norris:

GLENN: Somebody asked me this morning, they said, you really believe that there’s going to be trouble in the future. And I said, if this country starts to spiral out of control and, you know, and Mexico melts down or whatever, if it really starts to spiral out of control, before America allows a country to become a totalitarian country, which it would have under I think the Republicans as well in this situation; they were taking us to the same place, just slower.

NORRIS: It was slower, yeah.

GLENN: Americans will, they just, they won’t stand for it. There will be parts of the country that will rise up. And they said, where’s that going to come from? And I said Texas, it’s going to come from Texas. Do you agree with that, Chuck, or not?

NORRIS: Oh, yeah. You know, Texas is a republic, you know. We could actually —

GLENN: It was a country before it was a state.

NORRIS: Yeah, we could break off from the union if we wanted to.

GLENN: You do, you call me.

NORRIS: Oh, yeah.

 

Forde’s Minuteman Spinoff Outfit Was About ‘Starting a Revolution Against the Government’ – Remember how all those right-wing pundits proclaimed the Minutemen as being just like a neighborhood watch? Michelle Malkin called it “the mother of all neighborhood watches.” Lou Dobbs labeled it “this country’s biggest neighborhood watch program”. Bill O’Reilly declared: “Talking Points applauds the Minutemen. They are in the great tradition of neighborhood watch groups.”
Boy, that sure is some neighborhood watch:

Accused ringleader Shawna Forde told her family in recent months that she had begun recruiting members of the Aryan Nations and that she planned to begin robbing drug-cartel leaders, her brother Merrill Metzger said Monday in a telephone interview from Redding, Calif.

“She was talking about starting a revolution against the United States government,” he said.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department arrested Forde, Bush and Arivaca resident Albert Robert Gaxiola on Friday and accused them of killing Raul Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia, 9, during a home invasion. Forde was the executive director of Minutemen American Defense, and she had named Bush the “operations director” for the group’s border-watch activities along the Arizona-Mexico border.

 

The Big-Lie Media Campaign About Health Care – The scare ads and op-ed pieces featuring Canadians telling us American how terrible their government health-care systems have arrived – predictably. There’s another, factual view – by Americans who’ve lived in Canada and used their system. It’s not broken – and what’s more, Canadians like and fiercely defend it as shown in the statements below:

“Our son was born at Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital. My wife got excellent care. The total bill for three days in a semi-private room? $21.”

“I’m 82, and in excellent health,” he told me this week. “It costs me all of $57 a month for health care, and it’s excellent. I’m so tired of all the lies and bullshit I hear about the system up here in the U.S. media.”

“I now have 20/20 vision thanks to Canadian eye doctors. And I haven’t had to wait for my surgeries, either.”

During a show about health care, scores of Canadians called the Canadian Broadcasting Company from across that vast country, from Newfoundland to British Columbia. Not one said he or she would change the system. Every single one defended it vigorously.

Further proof: Not long ago, the CBC asked Canadians to nominate and then vote for The Greatest Canadian in history. Thousands responded. The winner? Tommy Douglas. Who? Tommy Douglas was a Canadian politician – and the father of Canadian universal health care.

 

Time Warner Cable is Still Trying to Restrict Internet Use and Overcharge People Who Use the Web Every Day – Time Warner Cable’s Internet overcharging scam came crashing down in April after tens of thousands of you protested the absurdly high fees. Time Warner Cable backed off. But the company didn’t give up. Instead, the cable giant quietly launched a customer “re-education” plan, hiring PR experts and launching phony front groups to mislead people into supporting excessive charges. Time Warner Cable also hides the fine print in their “terms of service” allowing the company to disconnect users on a whim.

Now, other phone and cable companies like Comcast and AT&T are weighing similar schemes to hike prices, shut down the free-flowing Web and keep users in check.

But there’s a new bill in Congress and a plan to stop greedy phone and cable companies from padding their pockets by curbing our Internet use. New York Rep. Eric Massa promised to introduce a bill to stop this excessive price-gouging. Today, Massa delivered:

Tell Congress: Support the Broadband Internet Fairness Act

Regards,

Jim