Bad Deeds for 9-29-2010

 

Conservative Creep Tries to Pull Another Video Con; This Time on CNN – James O’Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORN with a heavily edited and misleading undercover video, hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session. O’Keefe called Boudreau on August 10, supposedly to discuss a documentary. During the conversation, he said he preferred that Boudreau meet him in person in Maryland and asked that she come alone. The phone call was recorded without Boudreau’s knowledge, but CNN obtained a copy of the recording after O’Keefe e-mailed it to friends and colleagues. Boudreau agreed to the meeting, which she understood would be in his office.

A co-worker of O’Keefe told Boudreau that O’Keefe planned to “punk” her by getting on a boat where hidden cameras were set up.

In a planning document from O’Keefe’s Conservative group, listed under “equipment needed,” is “hidden cams on the boat,” and a “tripod and overt recorder near the bed, an obvious sex tape machine.” Among the props listed were a “condom jar, dildos, posters and paintings of naked women, fuzzy handcuffs” and a blindfold. The document states they want to “burden her career with this video.” E-mails show they intended to try to embarrass both CNN and Boudreau.

The plan was thwarted after Boudreau was warned by one of O’Keefe’s co-workers.

 

Republicans Don’t Like Energy Efficiency – Three House Republicans, Joe Barton and Michael Burgess of Texas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, have introduced the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act, which would repeal the section of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that sets minimum energy efficiency standards for light bulbs.

 

When Republicans Are in Charge, Most Americans Suffer – The chart below shows that when Republicans are in charge, income growth rates are lower. They are much, much lower for the poor, not good for the middle class, and most of the income growth goes to the rich. But, when Democrats are in charge, everyone prospers.

 

Republican Candidate Repeatedly Lies About Attending Colleges – Another university is bringing Christine O’Donnell’s self-professed education history into question Wednesday, as Claremont Graduate University, a school that the Delaware Senate candidate claims she attended, has told Talking Points Memo that they have no record of her being there. She has now apparently lied her LinkedIn profile about attending several colleges.

 

China’s Big Projects vs. America’s Big Project – China has at least four big stimulus projects going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing project: fixing Afghanistan.

 

A Place No One Should Want to Go – Extravagant promises and bluster are the stuff of campaign rhetoric, but the House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” goes far beyond the norm. It is devoid of tough policy choices. This new “governing agenda” does not say how the Republicans would replace revenue that would be lost from permanently extending all of the Bush tax cuts, or how they would manage Medicare and Social Security, or even which discretionary programs would go when they slash $100 billion in spending. Their record at all of these things is dismal.

The best way to understand the pledge is as a bid to co-opt the Tea Party by a Republican leadership that wants to sound insurrectionist but is the same old Washington elite. These are the folks who slashed taxes on the rich, turned a surplus into a crushing deficit, and helped unleash the financial crisis that has thrown millions of Americans out of their jobs and their homes.

Not only are the players the same, the policies are the same. Just more tax cuts for the rich and more deficit spending.

The pledge takes the country backward — a place no one should want to go.

Regards,

Jim