Bad Deeds for 7-31-2007

Giuliani Exaggerating Again – It is Rudy Giuliani’s favorite boast on the presidential campaign trail: “I cut taxes 23 times” as mayor of New York, he says, a claim inevitably met by applause. The impressive-sounding stat stars in radio ads this week in New Hampshire and Iowa, where the voiceover asserts that Giuliani “cut or eliminated 23 taxes.” Trouble is, it’s not really true, say tax-cutting allies of the former mayor, as well as experts at the city’s Independent Budget Office and elsewhere. To arrive at the number he likes to cite on the stump, Giuliani has to claim credit for tax cuts initiated by others, tax cuts he opposed, and in one instance, he counts one tax cut twice. Best of all, Giuliani includes a scuttled tax increase on his list (”We don’t consider not raising a tax a tax cut,” said Charles Brescher of the city’s Independent Budget Office).

Terrorist Dry Runs! … Never Mind! Just Kidding
CNN anchor T.J. Holmes, at the top of Saturday morning newscast: “Also, you should remember all that talk earlier this week about the terrorist dry runs at airports here in the U.S. Well, just kidding. It turns out it was all one big false alarm.”

CNN reporter Brian Todd: “In fact, a U.S. government official familiar with the investigation now says there were valid explanations for all four incidents in that bulletin and no charges will be brought in any of these cases.”

Those terrorist “dry runs” at airports that bumped a slew of bad news for President Bush off the front pages and scared a lot of summer vacationers in the process, were, as CNN itself confessed in a different report, “bogus.” CNN in particular, had run wild with the “terrorist dry runs” story last week, when a lot more people are watching than on a Saturday morning. Not only did CNN air it’s “just kidding” report over the weekend, when few folks are watching, but a search on the CNN web site finds the original scare story about terrorist “dry runs,” but no mention of the later story saying there was no threat.

Democratic Congressperson Says Alberto Gonzales Serves in a Non-impeachable Office – Sometimes Congresspeople don’t know what they’re talking about.

A View of How Bill O’Reilly Operates From Someone Who Knew Him Well– The following is from the sexual harassment lawsuit complaint filed by Andrea Mackris against Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly speaking to Mackris (April 13, 2004):

If any woman ever breathed a word I’ll make her pay so dearly that she’ll wish she’d never been born. I’ll rake her through the mud, bring up things in her life and make her so miserable that she’ll be destroyed. And besides, she wouldn’t be able to afford the lawyers I can or endure it financially as long as I can. And nobody would believe her, it’d be her word against mine and who are they going to believe? Me or some unstable woman making outrageous accusations. They’d see her as some psycho, someone unstable. Besides, I’d never make the mistake of picking unstable crazy girls like that. If you cross FOX NEWS CHANNEL, it’s not just me, it’s [FOX President] Roger Ailes who will go after you. I’m the street guy out front making loud noises about the issues, but Ailes operates behind the scenes, strategizes and makes things happen so that one day BAM! The person gets what’s coming to them but never sees it coming. Look at Al Franken, one day he’s going to get a knock on his door and life as he’s known it will change forever. That day will happen, trust me.

Mitt Romney Afraid of Snowmen – Mitt Romney said that, he was expressing his reservations about joining the next YouTube debate, “I don’t think candidates should have to answer questions from a snowman.” Well let me just say this to the former governor: how are you going to deal with Osama bin Laden if you’re afraid of that snowman?

Scientist Was Pressured by Administration to Support “1+1=3” – Testimony states:

My immediate supervisor advised me that she had been informed that Vice President Cheney had been briefed on our consultation, apparently with the intent of impressing upon me the importance of this consultation. … I realized that political pressure might be applied to my superiors, but I naively believed that I was shielded from such pressure. I thought that my analysis would, as is always required, be based on a logical analysis of the best available science, and have a logical outcome. I viewed it as a somewhat complicated case of 1+1=2. Regardless of what I found in my analysis, it would have to make sense and satisfy the legal requirements of the use of science under the ESA, and certainly no political pressure could magically change that. I never suspected that I would be asked to support the conclusion that 1+1=3, but I was.

U.S. Drops Baghdad Electricity Reports (Because No News is Good News, Especially When There’s No News of No Electricity)– As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on. Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only “an hour or two a day” of electricity. That’s down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year. But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly “status report” for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.

Stealthily Moves To Take Electoral Votes – Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes-votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union. It’s the lotusland equivalent of Tom DeLay’s 2003 midterm redistricting in Texas, except with a sweeter smell, a better disguise, and larger stakes.

Last week, the Democratic-controlled legislature of North Carolina, a state that has gone Republican in every Presidential election since 1976, enthusiastically took up a bill to do the same mischief as the California initiative. The grab would be smaller—it would appropriate perhaps three or four of North Carolina’s fifteen electoral votes for the Democrats—but the hands would be just as dirty.

Regards,

Jim