Bad Deeds for 7-29-2008

 

McCain (Who Thinks He is Best Qualified to be Commander-in-Chief) Doesn’t Know Who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U. S. Military – McCain said this to George Stephanopoulos in his interview on Sunday :

I believe that, when he said that we had to leave Iraq, and we had to be out by last March, and we had to have a date certain, that was in contravention to — and still is — the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus.

Of course, Gen. Petraeus is not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Mike Mullen is.

 

Dick Cheney Thinks Disabled Veterans Should Wait on Him for Two Hours Without Restrooms (and Then Wait Through His Speech) – Vice President Cheney’s invitation to address wounded combat veterans next month has been yanked because the group felt his security demands were Draconian and unreasonable. The veep had planned to speak to the Disabled American Veterans at 8:30 a.m. at its August convention in Las Vegas. His staff insisted the sick vets be sequestered for two hours before Cheney’s arrival and couldn’t leave until he’d finished talking, officials confirmed. “Word got back to us … that this would be a prerequisite,” said the veterans executive director, David Gorman, who noted the meeting hall doesn’t have any rest rooms. “We told them it just wasn’t acceptable.”

 

Houston Resists Recycling – While most large American cities have started ambitious recycling programs that have sharply reduced the amount of trash bound for landfills, Houston has not. It is the worst recycler among the United States’ 30 largest cities. Houston recycles just 2.6 percent of its total waste, according to a study this year by Waste News, a trade magazine. By comparison, San Francisco and New York recycle 69 percent and 34 percent of their waste respectively. Moreover, 25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as 10 years to get recycling bins from the city.

 

EPA Tells Its Staff: Don’t Answer Watchdogs’ Queries – The Environmental Protection Agency has told its staff not to answer questions from the agency’s internal watchdog, news reporters or the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, according an internal memo that an environmental group released Monday. The June 16 memo to the staff of the EPA’s enforcement division told them that if they’re contacted by the EPA inspector general’s office, an independent internal watchdog that monitors the agency, or by the Government Accountability Office, the investigators who work for Congress, they’re to forward the call or e-mail to a designated person. John Walke, a former EPA air pollution attorney, said the inspector general’s office ordinarily has unfettered access to agency employees so they can speak candidly and anonymously.

 

Bush Leaving Next President Record Federal Budget Deficit – The government’s budget deficit will surge past a half-trillion dollars next year, according to gloomy new estimates, a record flood of red ink that promises to force the winner of the presidential race to dramatically alter his economic agenda. The deficit will hit $482 billion in the 2009 budget year that will be inherited by Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain, the White House estimated Monday. That figure is sure to rise after adding the tens of billions of dollars in additional Iraq war funding it doesn’t include, and the total could be higher yet if the economy fails to recover as the administration predicts.

 

Attorney General’s Aides Hired Less-Qualified Applicants Based on Political Ideology – Senior aides to former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broke Civil Service laws by using politics to guide their hiring decisions, picking less-qualified applicants for important nonpolitical positions, slowing the hiring process at critical times and damaging the department’s credibility, an internal report concluded on Monday. A longtime prosecutor who drew rave reviews from his supervisors was passed over for an important counterterrorism slot because his wife was active in Democratic politics, and a much-less-experienced lawyer with Republican leanings got the job, the report said. Another prosecutor was rejected for a job in part because she was thought to be a lesbian. And a Republican lawyer received high marks at his job interview because he was found to be sufficiently conservative on the core issues of “god, guns + gays.”

The pattern appeared most damaging in the hiring of immigration judges, as vacancies were allowed to go unfilled — and a backlog of deportation cases grew — while Mr. Gonzales’s aides looked for conservative lawyers to fill what were supposed to be apolitical jobs. (And tell me again why immigration cases aren’t being handled? – JLV)

 

Man Kills Two at Church Because of its Liberal Teachings – Police found right-wing political books, brass knuckles, empty shotgun shell boxes and a handgun in the Powell home of a man who said he attacked a church in order to kill liberals “who are ruining the country,” court records show. Jim David Adkisson allegedly entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and killed two people and wounded six others during the presentation of a children’s musical. Adkisson was subdued by several church members after firing three rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun into the congregation.

Adkisson targeted the church, Knoxville Police Department Officer Steve Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.” Adkisson told Still that “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office.”

Inside the house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.

The church’s Web site states that it has worked for “desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women’s rights and gay rights” since the 1950s. Current ministries involve emergency aid for the needy, school tutoring and support for the homeless, as well as a cafe that provides a gathering place for gay and lesbian high-schoolers.

Is there really a call to violence against liberals? Here are some samples:

Rush Limbaugh: “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus — living fossils — so we will never forget what these people stood for.”

Stop the ACLU: Rope + Tree + ACLU Lawyer = Pinata

Ann Coulter: “Some liberals have become even too crazy for Texas to execute, which is a damn shame. They’re always saying — we’re oppressed, we’re oppressed so let’s do it. Let’s oppress them.”

Melanie Morgan: “A great deal of good could be done by arresting Bill Keller having him lined up against the wall and shot.”

Lee Rogers: “[T]he day will come when unpleasant things are going to happen to a bunch of stupid liberals and it’s going to be very amusing to watch.”

RedState contributor “Thomas Crown”: “I repeat: Should the entire American Left fall over dead tomorrow, I would rejoice, and order pizza to celebrate. They are not my countrymen; they are animals who happen to walk upright and make noises that approximate speech. They are below human. I look forward to seeing each and every one in Hell.”

Bill O’Reilly: “And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you [San Francisco] up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

Rep. Peter King: “And Joe Wilson has no right to complain. And I think people like Tim Russert and the others, who gave this guy such a free ride and all the media, they’re the ones to be shot, not Karl Rove.”

Michael Reagan: “Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!”

So how should we respond to such ugliness? As an example, let’s look at an excerpt from a blog post by one of the members of the Unitarian Church to the violence committed ageist his church members:

“… I feel sorry for Adkisson, even as his actions are clearly unforgivable. He was, like all of us, a soul cast upon this world, looking for direction and purpose. Had he found himself a more stable, more honorable set of influences, he may have found himself happier and saner, at least enough so that he did not feel the need to murder others in order to find meaning in his existence. He went looking for answers, and the right gave him instead a scapegoat, an over-arching group to place all his self-hatred onto, all his anger, all his rage, all his uncomprehending fury. And then he acted.

He is as lost and broken as anybody involved in this, and my heart goes out to him. Hatred does not just push people to destroy others; it destroys those that hate, as well.

None of us know what lies beyond the end of our time on this Earth. All we know for certain is that we have this time to live, and this short time to find our own meaning to our existence. Adkisson thought he had found his meaning, that he was a means to the destruction of the enemy — the enemy being his fellow humans. But his fellow humans refused to turn on him, refused to harm him, refused to kill him, refused to view him as he viewed them. In all the righteous anger and fury and pain of the moment, the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church did not seek revenge. Two lives ended the day of Adkisson’s attack, but they did not die without meaning. In that moment, the UUs of that congregation did what all of us in the church hope we can do — they fought back with tolerance, compassion, and self-sacrifice, not with anger, bitterness, and vengeance. …”

Regards,

Jim