Bad Deeds for 7-14-2010

 

Butt-Biting Rick Perry Operative Working Dirty Tricks in Texas – Charles Hurth III has a long history of setting up under-the-radar groups to help Republican operatives game elections. But the most sordid thing about Hurth’s past is not his political scheming. He’s also what you might call a serial butt-biter, with a well-publicized track record of sinking his teeth into the rumps of college coeds. He recently struck again in Texas—not by biting derrieres, but by spearheading an apparent GOP dirty trick to derail Democrat Bill White’s gubernatorial bid.

Last month, Hurth and two other GOP operatives—one a former top aide to Texas Gov. Rick Perry—were implicated in a scheme to bankroll a petition drive to put the Green Party on the ballot. It is an apparent ploy to siphon votes away from Perry’s Democratic challenger, former Houston Mayor Bill White. He’s an appealing target: Tied with Perry in the latest poll, White’s the strongest gubernatorial contender that Texas Democrats have seen in years.

But Hurth’s first claim to fame was being sued in 1987 for approaching a fellow law student in a bar and biting her on the buttocks so hard that she required medical attention. During the trial, Hurth admitted that he’d used the same toothy overture to approach two other women at fraternity parties—and he said that his latest victim should have taken the gesture as a compliment. The jurors didn’t buy it, and Hurth was successfully sued for $27,500. Since then, he has dedicated himself to being a persistent pain in the butt for Democrats, setting up shop in a tiny Missouri town to create a clearinghouse for Republican electoral schemes.

 

Republicans Want to Keep Their Political Contributions Secret – According to The Center for Public Integrity, the pro-Republican American Crossroads 527 group is reaching out to powerful politicos such as ex-Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and aggressively using a new money-collecting entity that can give donors more privacy (secrecy). Lackluster fundraising in April and May pulled in only a total of roughly $1.25 million, prompting American Crossroads to recently set up a 501(c)(4) nonprofit arm that is also allowed to get involved in political campaigns, but is less transparent in reporting requirements. (It seems that the only way some people will donate to the crazy Republican party is to do it secretly. Or to put it another way, The Center for Public Integrity says Republicans lack integrity. – JLV)

 

The Corporatists vs. The American People – The authoritarian followers among our society need the world laid out in black and white terms to even begin to understand what is going on around them — now is the time to accommodate them. It’s quite simple(as they like it); are they for the American people or are they on the side of the corporatists?

Ask them to their faces. Every time you hear a self proclaimed conservative even hint sympathy in the direction of big oil, big banks, big insurance etc., point at them and yell “CORPORATIST!!!” Question your family and friends, strangers and acquaintances. The time for bashfulness is over.

We can no longer let the debate be muddled in a confusing sloth of bullshit if we are to win this battle. A line in the sand has to be drawn. We need a clear enemy on the other side. When I look across that line I see corporatists, who do you see?

The corporatists want us divided…let’s get divided…

 

Republicans Are Lying to You About the Stimulus and Jobs – House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) has been one of the Recovery Act’s most vocal critics, ignoring evidence that that the stimulus is helping to turn around the economy.

Despite his withering attacks on the stimulus, Cantor hosted two job fairs filled with employers hiring directly because of stimulus grants and programs. Cantor is again hosting a job fair stimulated by jobs made possible through the Recovery Act: According to a review of contracts from the Recovery.gov website, employers at the Cantor job fair tomorrow have received approximately $52,716,129 from the stimulus.

While Cantor has tried to score political points slamming the stimulus, he has relied on it as a crutch to bring both private and public sector jobs to his district. Cantor’s Republican colleagues — who helped him try to kill the stimulus — have similarly gone back to their district to claim credit for stimulus programs. A ThinkProgress report released on the one year anniversary of the stimulus highlights over half the Republican caucus, 114 lawmakers (of which, 113 are Republicans), who voted to kill the stimulus then took credit for its success.

 

More Truth About the Recovery Act – This month, the Department of Energy is awarding conditional commitments from the Recovery Act, which is an economic stimulus package enacted by the 111th United States Congress in February 2009.

One of the projects is to build one of the largest solar plants in the world in Arizona, that will create about 1,600 construction jobs. Another project is to build two new plants that will create more than 2,000 construction jobs, and over 1,500 permanent jobs.

Over 70 per cent of the components and products used in construction will be manufactured in the USA, boosting jobs and communities in states up and down the supply chain. A Colorado plant is already underway, and an Indiana plant will be built in what’s now an empty Chrysler factory. Once completed, this plant will be the first large-scale solar plant in the US to actually store the energy it generates for later use – even at night. It will generate enough clean, renewable energy to power 70,000 homes.

 

Republicans Are Lying to You About Shredding the Constitution – Have you heard Republicans complaining about “shredding the Constitution” lately? Well, they should know a lot about that. Here’s an interview segment with former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano where he is asked about George W. Bush throwing thousands of Americans in jail without charges:

Napolitano: Well that is so obviously a violation of the natural law, the natural right to be brought before a neutral arbiter within moments of the government taking your freedom away from you. And the Constitution itself, as the Supreme Court in the Boumediene case pretty much said, wherever the government goes, the Constitution goes with it and wherever the Constitution goes are the rights of the Constitution as a guarantee and habeas corpus cannot be suspended by the president ever. It can only be suspended by the Congress in times of rebellion which in read Milligan says meaning rebellion of such magnitude that judges can’t get into their court houses. That has not happened in American history.

So what President Bush did with the suspension of habeas corpus, with the whole concept of Guantanamo Bay, with the whole idea that he could avoid and evade federal laws, treaties, federal judges and the Constitution was blatantly unconstitutional and is some cases criminal.

…

They should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I’d like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you’re under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It’s a moral crime.

 

Republican House Leader Ignores Evidence – Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said this afternoon after the weekly GOP press conference, “That there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue.” However, the Congressional Budget Office said “The new CBO data show that changes in law [tax cuts] enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005. In the absence of such [tax cut] legislation, the nation would have a surplus this year. Tax cuts account for almost half — 48 percent — of this $539 billion in increased costs.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s budget calculator shows that the tax cuts cost $3.28 trillion between 2011 and 2018. And if you can’t handle words and math, how about this picture that shows the deficit with and without the Bush tax cuts:

Notice in the graph above that the part of the deficit due to the Bush tax cuts is the only part that keeps getting bigger.

 

Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Took Large Amounts of Money for Plagiarized Essays – Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis was revealed to be a plagiarist, and the state’s largest newspaper is calling for him to drop out of the race. As the Denver Post explains:

If you put your name on something and take money for it — a lot of money in this case — it is your responsibility to make rock-solid sure it is bona fide, original work that will stand up to scrutiny.
The state’s chief executive must be someone Coloradans can believe in as the state suffers a stretch of tight budgets and a struggling economy.

If Scott McInnis cannot be trusted to turn in what amounts to an overpaid term paper — without plagiarizing someone else’s work — there is no way he can be relied upon to guide Colorado through these complicated times.

Update: More cases of this have surfaced. It wasn’t a one-time deal.

 

Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Seaside Silliness – Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s theatrical deployment of trappings of leadership in the wake of the BP Oil Spill has been largely rewarded by favorable press coverage. But new revelations and a close inspection of the facts suggest that Jindal’s noise and fury is little more than political grandstanding for the Fox News set, and it serves to obscure Jindal’s own serious failings in the spill response effort. While Jindal has been relentless in attacking the federal government for dragging its feet, he has delayed the deployment of National Guard troops, led a crusade to build artificial sand berms that most experts say won’t work, and confused the planning of the spill response. Moreover, experts said his “antagonism could actually slow down that response.” “When that stuff happens, you actually take away the ability of the unified command to get their job done,” said former Coast Guard official Doug Lentsch.

Jindal has repeatedly blasted the federal government for being hesitant to approve his expensive sand berm plan, an offensive which Fox News has dutifully supported. As Mother Jones noted, “griping about the berms has…become Jindal’s plan to keep the spotlight on him and his criticism of the federal government, long-term damage to the state’s ecosystem be damned.”

There’s nothing fun at all about watching such an obvious waste of money and effort go down the drain, but it is captivating to see right-wing talking points literally disintegrate before your very eyes. I guess that these burms are what they call a “Conservative Common-Sense Solution.”

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the contract to build Bobby’s berms was awarded by Jindal to a large contributor to his congressional campaign.

 

Republican/Libertarian Rand Paul Hates Improvement – Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul says the poor in America are “enormously better off than the rest of the world,” citing an old Cold War film that showed even impoverished homes had color televisions. “They filmed a building in the poorer section of New York with some broken windows and they said, `Oh, this is how the poor in America lives,'” Paul said at last week’s forum. “But it backfired on them because the Soviet citizens looked at that video closely and they saw flickering color television sets in all those windows.”

So by Rand Paul’s logic:

1. We shouldn’t fix potholes because there aren’t even roads in many parts of the world.
2. We shouldn’t hold BP accountable for its oil spill because there have been worse spills in other countries.
3. We shouldn’t worry about our economy, because unemployment is worse in Africa.
4. After 9/11, New Yorkers should have been grateful because more civilians died in Great Britain during WWII.

 

Right-Wing Website Attacks Michelle Obama for … – The headline on Drudge Report was sinister:

Increase intensity? Oh no! Michelle Obama is telling African Americans to band together to fight white people! Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck were right! She’s coming to get us! They are coming to get us! And I’m scared!

I was so freaked out that I actually followed Drudge’s link. And it sent me to an ABC News story mentioning nothing about the First Lady telling blacks to “increase intensity.”

Huh? What was going on here?

It turns out that the comment to “increase intensity” was from a speech about childhood obesity. But why should that prevent the right-wing from misrepresenting it to try to scare you?

 

Crazy Republican Nonsense to Distract you From Real Issues – I don’t like repeating these stupid, free-from-fact Republican noises, but you need to know that these are being used to rile up the right-wing and distract people from real issues. The question is: Are you riled up enough to get the truth out? The only way to make the lying stop is to send the liars packing. Here are a few examples from just the past few days: Vitter Nonsense

While Louisiana families are suffering from the biggest man-made disaster in history, Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter is trying to score political points by perpetuating a completely debunked conspiracy theory. Even though Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed the president’s citizenship, and his Hawaiian birth certificate has been made public, along with newspaper birth notices published when he was born in 1961, Vitter said at a town hall-style event that he supports conservative organizations challenging President Barack Obama’s citizenship in court. Vitter could not explain how such a ridiculous lawsuit could have any standing in court.

 

Republican Hallucination – A Republican candidate in Missouri warned Monday that President Barack Obama and Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan were keeping people from finding the Lord. The Republican gave no explanation as to how this could be happening.

 

If It’s What I Want, It’s God’s Plan – Over the weekend, Republican Senate candidate Sharon Angle told the founder of the Christian Coalition that her campaign was part of God’s plan. Just two weeks ago, Angle proclaimed “God has a plan” for pregnant victims of rape and incest. Angle couldn’t explain the voices in her head, or why she’s said so many things that she now says she didn’t say, like wanting to privatize Social Security or eliminate Medicare.

 

Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann Totes That Barge – Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann spoke in Colorado at the Western Conservative Conference over the weekend, and said, We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves.” Bachmann couldn’t explain how anyone had become a slave, but she did admit to listening to old recordings of “Ol’ Man River” over and over the previous night.

Regards,

Jim