Bad Deeds for 7-28-2011

 

Right-Wing Groups Seeking Weapons of Mass Destruction According to Alleged Norway Mass Murderer – The man who has acknowledged carrying out last week’s mass killings in Norway claimed in his online treatise that he was allied with other right-wight militant groups, some of whom he said were pursuing acquisition of unconventional weapons, the Federation of American Scientists noted on Wednesday (see GSN, July 27).

Anders Breivik, who has claimed responsibility for the Friday bombing of an Oslo government building and the subsequent shooting rampage on a nearby island, wrote in his 1,500-page manifesto that his associates “are already in the process of attempting to acquire chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear materials.” His document states. “Justiciar Knights and other European Christian martyrs can avoid the scrutiny normally reserved for individuals of Arab descent and we can ensure successful deployment and detonation in the location of our choice.”

In the event the 32-year-old Norwegian was not a lone-wolf terrorist, it is plausible that his compatriots possess the same if not deeper knowledge about the equipment needed for particular types of unconventional weapons, the release states.

“They may have access to the necessary biological agents and technologies necessary to actualize Breivik’s more ambitious plans for a CBRN attack,” Virtual Biosecurity Center manager Kelsey Gregg said in released comments (Federation of American Scientists release, July 27).

Breivik claimed to be a member of a group of new Knight Templars who seek to wage strikes against “cultural Marxists” and “multiculturalists” who they blame for allowing Islam to spread throughout Europe, according to the FAS report by Blair, Gregg and Jonathan Garbose.

 

Pete Olson Contradicts Himself on NASA – In his official post-shuttle landing statement Pete Olson says that this is “by no means the end of human space flight” and that exciting things lie ahead. A day later, in Politico, he (and Cunningham) put forth a contradictory claim that the Obama Adminstration has “shifted NASA policy away from human spaceflight.”

 

Rick Perry Contradicts Himself on NASA – Rick Perry criticizes the federal government for spending too much, then he criticizes the President for not spending enough on NASA in Houston.

 

Fox New Host Says Stop Spending on People So We Can Pay for Wars – Nothing illustrates Republican priorities more starkly than this little piece of video, where Fox News host Martha MacCallum opines that we’d have more of a solid fiscal position to pay for wars if we didn’t have Medicare and Social Security:

MACCALLUM: But I want to ask you one more question, because when I watched the president last night he talked about the things that have driven us to this situation, and he said two wars that we couldn’t pay for, a prescription drug plan that, you know, was way too expensive to pay for, and the financial crisis that followed and that was, you know, toward the beginning of his watch and overlapping the Bush administration.

But I couldn’t help thinking, well, if we weren’t in such a precarious situation and hadn’t overextended ourselves to such an incredible extent where we are sending out 80 million checks a month – the U.S. government – wouldn’t we have been able to handle those things like the two wars in a much better, stronger fiscal position, and isn’t that where we really want to be as a country, where a war doesn’t bust us because we’ve got good fundamentals?

(Making people suffer is good fundamentals? – JLV)

 

Republican Leadership Shows a Clip From a Movie About a Gang of Boston Sociopaths to a Gang of Washington D.C. Sociopaths – In order to win support for Boehner’s Hit on America deficit plan, The Washington Post reported that the GOP leadership yesterday played a clip from the Ben Affleck flick The Town. Here’s the dialog from the clip:

“I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is.
You can never ask me about it later. And we’re going to hurt some people.”
“Whose car are we going to take?”

The Republican Shock Doctrine will hurt a lot of people – just not any rich ones. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said if Boehner’s scam were to be enacted, “it could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history.”

 

Bachmann Borrowed From the Same Federal Home Loan Programs She Wanted to Shut Down – Despite the fact that she has spoken against loan insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Washington Post discovered that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) took out a mortgage totaling $417,000 to help finance her golf course home — backed by Fannie or Freddie.

Weeks later, the woman who would become the voice of the tea party and a serious contender for the 2012 GOP nomination railed against the federal home loan program.

 

New Study Links Mountaintop Removal to 60,000 Additional Cancer Cases – Among the 1.2 million American citizens living in mountaintop removal mining counties in central Appalachia, an additional 60,000 cases of cancer are directly linked to the federally sanctioned strip-mining practice.

That is the damning conclusion in a breakthrough study, released last night in the peer-reviewed Journal of Community Health: The Publication for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. Led by West Virginia University researcher Dr. Michael Hendryx, among others, the study entitled “Self-Reported Cancer Rates in Two Rural Areas of West Virginia with and Without Mountaintop Coal Mining” drew from a groundbreaking community-based participatory research survey conducted in Boone County, West Virginia in the spring of 2011, which gathered person-level health data from communities directly impacted by mountaintop mining, and compared to communities without mining.

Regards,

Jim