Bad Deeds for 7-28-2009

Conservatives Lie About What They Said (Again) – When the Dow was down below 7,000, Republicans couldn’t stop citing it as ‘proof’ that President Obama’s economic plans had failed.

Now that the Dow is in 9,000 territory — up well over 10% since inauguration day — right-wing pundits like J.P. Frere are trying to pretend conservatives never attacked Obama on the stock market.
Well, as Faiz Shakir of Think Progress and David Shuster and Tamron Hall of MSNBC reminded Frere, that’s exactly they did — and as the clip at the link shows, the videotape doesn’t lie.

 

The Republican Phantom Health Care Bill – Questions swirl around the phantom Republican bill on health care reform … is it so good that it will never see the light of day?

Our bill is never going to get to the floor, so why confuse the focus? – Roy Blunt

… or has everyone already seen it?

Our reform plan to lower costs, increase access, and improve quality was released weeks ago and it is well-known. – Roy Blunt

… or, is it a work in progress?

We’re continuing to put the final touches on our bill as the Democrats are continuing to put the finishing touches on their bill – John Boehner

Confused? You should be because all three statements were made on the same day.

 

Inhofe: If GOP Can ‘Stall’ Or ‘Block’ Health Care Reform, It Will Be ‘A Huge Gain’ for Republicans in the 2010 Elections (But Not for Americans) – Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) isn’t shying away from revealing his honest feelings. Appearing on Janet Parshall’s radio show yesterday, Inhofe argued that the defeat of President Clinton’s health care reform “started the demise of Bill Clinton that led to the 1994 Republican takeover of the House and the Senate.” He then added that he is now “tracking the demise” of Obama’s health care plans and it is making him “optimistic”. It doesn’t make Americans in need of health care optimistic, but that’s not what’s important to Inhofe.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) released this statement:

Slowly but surely the Republicans are revealing their true strategy on health care: partisans gamesmanship comes before getting something done. If Republicans believe doing nothing will ingratiate themselves with the American people, they have not learned a single lesson from the last two elections. Their do nothing approach is why health care costs have skyrocketed, and it’s why Republicans are in such a bad place today. This strategy is bad politics, but it is also a deeply troubling way to govern.

Sign the petition for a not-for-profit public option on health care

 

Tell Congress to Pass Health Care Legislation Now! – Americans United for Change just put out a new ad. The Republican tactic to stall the bill is their idea on how to destroy it. The ad is quite good and falls in line with what I’ve been saying. To stall the bill is an attempt to kill the bill. Say No to the August Recess if Congress can’t get their act together.

 

Republican Congressperson: We’re Not Going To Cry “Emergency” Every Time There’s a Katrina! – Marsha Blackburn (Oblivious-TN): “Let’s agree that we’re going to have PAYGO enforcement. That we’re not going to cry ‘emergency’ every time we have a Katrina, every time we have a Tsunami, every time we have a need for extra spending, that we don’t go call for a special appropriation that allows us to circumvent the PAYGO rules.”

Well, I’m sure Blackburn will hold herself to that. I’m sure that any time a disaster threatens her state of Tennessee, she won’t cry emergency and bother to get federal funding to help people in need. Unless …

WASHINGTON, D.C. U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and U.S. Representatives Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn. 4), Bart Gordon (D-Tenn. 6), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn. 7) have joined Governor Phil Bredesen in requesting that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack issue a federal disaster declaration for five counties in Tennessee “to help farmers who have suffered crop losses and damage to farm equipment and structures as a result of excessive rain and extensive flooding that occurred in May.”

Or when …

Title: Letter to The Honorable Mike Johanns, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Date: 07/12/2007
Alexander, Corker Join Tenn. Delegation In Requesting Disaster Declaration For Drought
from the Office of Senator Bob Corker
U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker joined other members of the Tennessee Congressional Delegation Tuesday in asking U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns to issue an agricultural disaster declaration for all 95 Tennessee counties due to the results of the ongoing drought.
Marsha Blackburn
Member of congress

Well, I must admit, those are not another Katrina.

Republican Hypocrite!

 

The Great Tax Con Job – Republicans are using the T-word – taxes – to attack the Obama healthcare program. It’s a strategy based in a lie.

A very small niche of America’s uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions – and will continue to be.

Billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.

Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding “conservative” media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato?
The answer is pretty straightforward. They do it because it buys them respectability, and gets their con job out there.

 

Lies About Global Cooling – You won’t find links to actual climate data, or even the original “scientific” works in the “global cooling” writing on Right Side News. Instead, you’ll find links to other rants on other right-wing websites like World Net Daily that also contain the same quotations, also without links to either original scientific works or actual climate data.

There’s a reason that these rants don’t link to original scientific work or actual climate data: actual climate data show that the globe is warming.

In a Washington Times column, Wesley Pruden falsely claimed that “the earth has been measurably cooling for the last decade, despite everything [former Vice President] Al [Gore] and his followers have done about it.” In fact, the United Kingdom’s Met (Meteorological) Office lists as a “fact” that “[t]emperatures are continuing to rise” and states that “temperature change over the latest decade (1998-2007) alone shows a continued warming of 0.1° C per decade.”

 

The Secret Evidence of Global Warming That Bush Tried to Hide – Photos from US spy satellites declassified by the Obama White House provide the first graphic images of how the polar ice sheets are retreating in the summer. The effects on the world’s weather, environments and wildlife could be devastating. Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months. The pictures, kept secret during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week.

 

What do you get when you get rid of the elite left? – In 1963, the U. S. backed a coup against the government of Iraq headed by General Abdel Karim Kassem, who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. The CIA helped the new Baath Party government led by Abdul Salam Arif in ridding the country of suspected leftists and Communists. In a Baathist bloodbath, the government used lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the CIA, to systematically murder untold numbers of Iraq’s educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein is said to have participated. The victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures. According to an op-ed in the New York Times, the U.S. sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the U.S. supported against Kassem and then abandoned. American and UK oil and other interests, including Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum, were conducting business in Iraq.

References:

1. “A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making”. New York Times. 2003-12-15. Retrieved on 2007-09-18.

2. “The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq”, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978; Peter and Marion Sluglett, “Iraq Since 1958” London, I.B. Taurus, 1990

3. Regarding the CIA’s “Health Alteration Committee’s work in Iraq, see U.S. Senate’s Church Committee Interim Report on Assassination, page 181, Note 1

 

TVA Lawyers Limited Coal Ash Spill Report per Auditor – The Tennessee Valley Authority failed for more than 20 years to heed warnings that might have prevented a massive coal ash spill in Tennessee, then allowed its lawyers to stifle a $3 million study into the disaster’s cause to limit its legal liability, an inspector general’s report said Tuesday. The breach of 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic-laden coal ash from the earthen dams and holding ponds at TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant into the Emory River and lakeside homes has raised questions about the risks and lack of regulation of hundreds of similar sites around the country.

 

Sarah Palin Makes Stuff Up, Then Tells the Press to Stop Makin’ Stuff Up – At her farewell speech, Sarah Palin said that it gets 150 degrees hotter in the summer in Alaska. Then she chastised some members of the press for “makin’ stuff up.”

If you can’t stand to listen to Palin, here’s William Shatner reading Palin’s speech.

 

 

She would be right if she finished her statement by saying, “And I’m talkin’ about you, Hannity and O’Reilly.” (except they don’t qualify as members of the press.)

Regards,

Jim