Bad Deeds for 8-3-2010

In Rick Perry’s Texas, There is Only One Inspector for Every 4,586 Oil and Gas Wells – In Texas, there are 86 inspectors for 394,365 oil and gas wells, including 282,150 active wells. As of May 28, 2010, these included 740 bay and 341 offshore wells in state waters, which extend about 10 miles offshore. Overall, that makes the inspector/wells ratio about 1-to-4,586. That makes it impossible to inspect each well once per year. Due to state budget problems, there is a hiring freeze on inspectors.

10 Republican Lies About the Bush Tax Breaks for the Rich

· Lie #1: Democrats Plan Across the Board Tax Hikes on January 1st
· Lie #2: Democrats Want a $3.8 Trillion Tax Increase
· Lie #3: Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves
· Lie #4: The Bush Tax Cuts Didn’t Add to the Deficit
· Lie #5: Expiring High Income Tax Cuts Will Hurt Small Business
· Lie #6: The Estate Tax Devastates Small Businesses and Family Farms
· Lie #7: The Bush Tax Cuts Helped All Americans
· Lie #8. Extending Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy is the Best Way to Stimulate the Economy
· Lie #9. Bush Tax Cuts Produced 52 Straight Months of Job Growth
· Lie #10: The Rich Pay Too Much in Taxes Already

Taxes under Bush and Obama are compared in the table below.

Notice that if every family making less than $300,000 will have lower taxes under President Obama’s proposal.

Two Republican Senators Continue False and Misleading Attacks on Recovery Act – This morning two senators — John McCain and Tom Coburn — released their third report critiquing 100 Recovery Act projects. And just like the last two, this one was an inaccurate and misleading attack on programs that are putting Americans to work across the nation.

Just last week two prominent, independent economists released a rigorous study on how actions by the government (and the Federal Reserve), including the Recovery Act, helped to end the Great Recession. One of the authors — Mark Zandi — was one of McCain’s top advisers during his presidential bid. He and Alan Blinder (a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve) found that the Recovery Act has created or saved about 2.7 million jobs so far, and shaved about a point and a half off of the unemployment rate.

These jobs are the result of over 70,000 projects in action around the country, of grants to states supporting jobs of teachers, police, and firefighters, of tax cuts for working households, loans to small businesses, and investments in innovative new industries producing advanced batteries, clean energy, and much more. They’ve helped reverse a situation where last year, we were losing millions of private sector jobs; in the first half of this year, we’ve added 593,000 private sector jobs.

Republican Says News Should be Reported the Way They Want it Reported – A Republican has admitted that they are not interested in seeing the truth reported on the news. During yesterday’s Fox News Channel’s special elections show on primaries and midterms around the country, Sharron Angle had the following exchange with an incredulous Carl Cameron about her media strategy so far:

Angle: “We needed to have the press be our friend.”
Cameron: “Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend…?”
Angle: “Well, truly–”
Cameron: “That sounds naive.”
Angle: “Well, no. We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported.”
Cameron: [speechless, laughs]

Angle then goes on to repeat a statement she has made in the past, that she wants to be able to mention her website during interviews so she can ask viewers to donate money.

Republicans Win! (In List of Crooked Candidates for 2010) – Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has released their list of Crooked Candidates 2010 to shine the spotlight on some of the lousy politicians vying for federal office in 2010. In compiling the list, CREW left aside all incumbents. CREW’s research team pored over news articles, blogs and public records to find those candidates who have engaged in criminal or unethical conduct. The list includes 8 Republicans, 3 Democrats and 1 Independent candidate.

· Roy Blunt (R) U.S. Senate, MO
· Charlie Crist (I) U.S. Senate, FL
· Jeff Denham (R) U.S. House, CA
· Alvin Greene (D) U.S. Senate, SC
· Jeff Greene (D) U.S. Senate, FL
· Timothy Griffin (R) U.S. House, AR
· J.D. Hayworth (R) U.S. Senate, AZ
· Ed Martin (R) U.S. House, MO
· Kendrick Meek (D) U.S. Senate, FL
· Dino Rossi (R) U.S. Senate, WA
· Marco Rubio (R) U.S. Senate, FL
· Allen West (R) U.S. House, FL

Fox News is Inciting Violence – On Fox News, Glenn Beck demonizes and scapegoats the Tides Foundation. Then, one of his viewers engaged Oakland police in a massive shootout that wounded two police officers, en route to a planned terrorist attack on Tides’ Bay Area offices that no doubt would have left a number of innocent people dead had he not been apprehended beforehand. Then, Beck pretended that the shootout hadn’t even happened, refusing to even mention it in segments featuring Netroots Nation panel remarks in which the planned terrorist attack was the de facto context. On Wednesday, he continued to smear Tides’ work by claiming it promotes an ideology identical to that held by the Weather Underground. Then on Friday, he made up his own “facts” in order to compare it to a sniper shooting in Oakland that had no known political component.

Make no mistake: Fox News has been inciting acts of terrorist violence. It in fact was preceded by several similar cases in which the dehumanizing rhetoric, scapegoating and conspiracist smears promoted by Fox clearly played a powerful role in the violence that ensued:

• Jim David Adkisson’s shooting attack on a Knoxville Unitarian church. Adkisson left behind a manifesto that repeated numerous right-wing talking points generated by Fox commentators and specifically cited a Bernard Goldberg book. His library at home was stocked with books by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.
• Richard Poplawski’s shooting of three Pittsburgh police officers, because he believed a conspiracy theory that President Obama intended to take Americans’ guns away from them, and he reportedly believed the cops had arrived to carry it out. Poplawski, a white supremacist, liked to post Beck videos about FEMA concentration camps to the Stormfront comments board.
• Scott Roeder’s assassination of Dr. George Tiller. Roeder was heavily involved in Operation Rescue and avidly read its newsletters — which featured weekly pieces from Bill O’Reilly, including several attacking Tiller as a “baby killer” — and its website, which liked to feature O’Reilly videos attacking Dr. Tiller. Indeed, O’Reilly had indulged a high-profile and unusually obsessive (not to mention vicious) jihad against Tiller, resulting in 42 such attacks on Tiller.

Conservatives Outraged Over Chelsea’s Wedding, But Forget Their Own Lavish Lifestyles – Some conservative critics have shown outrage over Chelsea’s big fat Liberal wedding, and its estimated price tag of $2-3 million. For shame! Never mind Rush Limbaugh’s $54 million Gulfstream jet, Mitt Romney’s $42 million donation to his own presidential campaign, John McCain’s seven or eight houses, the RNC’s vacations in Hawaii, or President George W. Bush once joking at a dinner about “the haves and the have-mores….Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”

Republican Officials Put Out False Reports About Illegal Aliens – The political rhetoric coming from some Republican officials right now on immigration might make one believe that skyrocketing crime rates are a direct result of [undocumented workers]. But as Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, not only are crime rates way down, but so too are the number of [undocumented workers] apprehended at the Arizona border. Maddow points out some specific reports that have spread around right-of-center websites that seem to be straight up lies. Yes, it’s yet another patented “Scaring White People” segment.

Right-Wingers Fabricate Mexican Drug Cartel Raid Story – According to anonymously-sourced reports pushed by right-wing blogs last weekend, members of Mexico’s notorious Zetas drug gang crossed the border into Texas and, “in what could be deemed an act of war,” seized two ranches near the border town of Laredo. The situation was dire, wingers warned, but a government enforced media blackout kept knowledge of the raid from the general public.

Not really. Here’s the thing: the “raid” never happened.

The story originated with Jeff Schwilk, the founder of the anti-immigration San Diego Minutemen.
The story spread. Conservative sites Michelle Malkin, Breitbart.tv and the Jawa Report picked it up, among others. The report raged on Twitter. The Laredo police department was flooded with calls.
But as local reports suggested and TPM confirmed, law enforcement in the area had no idea where the bogus story came from.

“Basically everyone was shrugging their shoulders,” Joe Baeza, an investigator and public affairs officer with the Laredo Police Department, told TPM. “There was no proof or evidence that was found.”
And furthermore, the ranches where the raid supposedly took place aren’t even within the Laredo police department’s jurisdiction, so there is no reason to believe department personnel would have responded to an incident there.

Florida Church Plans ‘Burn a Koran Day’ – Nowhere is it more in evidence that a wave of anti-Muslim activism among some conservative and religious groups exists than in a non-denominational church’s plan to hold a “Burn a Koran Day” on the next anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. “On September 11th, 2010, from 6pm – 9pm, we will burn the Koran on the property of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, FL in remembrance of the fallen victims of 9/11 and to stand against the evil of Islam,” says the church’s Facebook page. “Islam is of the devil!”

The church has drawn condemnation from the National Association of Evangelicals, which said in a statement that “Burn a Koran Day” shows “disrespect for our Muslim neighbors and would exacerbate tensions between Christians and Muslims throughout the world.”

“It sounds like the proposed Koran burning is rooted in revenge,” NAE President Leith Anderson said. “Yet the Bible says that Christians should ‘make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else’.”

Regards,

Jim