Fwd: Bad Deeds for 1-29-2011

 

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly Lies About Use of Nazi References on Fox News – Fox News’ Megyn Kelly claimed last week that her network doesn’t use Nazi references.
Since that’s just flat out wrong, the ball was in Jon Stewart’s court to call her out. Stewart showed example after example of Fox News hosts and guests (including on Kelly’s own show) doing what Kelly claimed never happens on Fox. Watch the video at the link.

 

Tea Party-Backed Governor Plans to Use Government Workers to Help Get More Republicans Elected – Dan Demerritt, the communications director for Gov. Paul LePage, may have called for a violation of the law when he reportedly announced in an email to the governor’s closest advisers that “once we take office, Paul will put 11,000 bureaucrats to work getting Republicans re-elected.” Using taxpayer-funded public employees for political campaigns is illegal under Maine law.

Gov. LePage has been attracting national attention since his colorful campaign last year, in which he reportedly swore at a reporter and vowed to tell President Obama to go to hell.

His national media attention crested this month, when he rejected the NAACP’s invitations to attend Martin Luther King Day events, and invited the civil rights group to “kiss my butt.”

 

Republican Party Trying to Narrow the Definition of Rape – Rape is a simple concept: It is any instance when sex is not consensual. That includes when someone drugs a victim or gets him or her drunk, and when someone has sex with a minor.

But not according to the Republican Party, which is seeking to legally change the definition of rape.

These new Republican “definitions” of rape and incest are a dirty trick by anti-choice proponents to restrict abortion access. For decades, the ban on federal funding for abortions has included exceptions for victims of rape and incest. But if the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” passes, only women who are raped by force would qualify to use federal funds to end the resulting pregnancy. It also would limit the incest exception to girls under 18.

 

Cruel, Unjust Punishment for Mom Who Tried to Help Her Kids Have a Better Life – Kelley Williams-Bolar is a single mother of two daughters, and she is a teacher’s aide in Akron city schools who has been studying to become a teacher. According to Williams-Bolar, after their home in a housing project was burglarized, she decided to protect her daughters’ safety by sending them to school in neighboring Copley Township, where her father lives — and she went to jail for it. Williams-Bolar claims that she maintained a part-time residence at her father’s home, but the school district didn’t see it that way. Neither did County Prosecutor Sherri Walsh, who charged Williams-Bolar with grand theft and falsifying records — a third-degree felony. The judge presiding over the case recognized the harshness of the felony charge and encouraged Prosecutor Walsh to offer a plea bargain for a lighter charge — but Walsh flatly refused.

Williams-Bolar was convicted on the felony charge, and sentenced to 5 years in prison. The judge suspended all but 10 days of the jail time, instead ordering 2 years of probation and 80 hours of community service. She’s out of jail now, but the repercussions could last a lifetime: unless the felony is eliminated from her record, Williams-Bolar may be unable to earn her teaching certificate under Ohio law. Williams-Bolar is only a few classes away from earning her teaching certificate. Now, as a convicted felon, helping her children will be even harder — her dream to become a teacher may have ended as well.

Real justice requires that the punishment fit the crime; by any measure, this is cruelly unjust. Please join us calling on Governor Kasich to take a public stand and do everything he can to right this injustice (including making sure that Williams-Bolar has the opportunity to become a teacher in Ohio).

 

Chinese CCTV Broadcaster Uses ‘Top Gun’ Footage In Military Drill – Broadcast by China Central Television, the footage was said to have been passed off as an air force training drill showing a Chinese J-10 fighter plane firing a missile and destroying a rival aircraft. Eagle-eyed movie buffs were reportedly able to detect distinct similarities between the aired footage and the climactic aerial combat sequence of Top Gun, the 1986 blockbuster that starred Tom Cruise.

It’s not the first time the Chinese media have re-used Hollywood images without authorization for use in a news broadcast. In 2007, the state-run Xinhua news agency used an X-ray image of Homer Simpson’s head to illustrate a story about the genetic link to multiple sclerosis.

 

Michele Bachmann Proposes “Don’t Add, Don’t Spell” – In her official Tea Party response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) offered a bold new policy initiative she called “Don’t Add, Don’t Spell.” Rep. Bachmann called the proposal “a reflection of core Tea Party values” and said it would “deliver the American people from the tyranny of arithmetic, spelling, and punctuation.”

In addition to “Don’t Add, Don’t Spell,” Rep. Bachmann suggested slashing the Federal budget by eliminating nine of the first ten Amendments to the Constitution. “I think you know which one I’d keep,” she chuckled, miming a Western gunslinger with her index fingers.

Rep. Bachmann’s odd onscreen appearance, in which she seemed to be staring off-camera for the duration of her speech, was initially blamed on “a squirrel that got into the studio and distracted her,” said one Tea Party official. But the Minnesota congresswoman offered her own explanation: “I was looking off to one side because I was trying to read off Sarah Palin’s hand.”

Regards,

Jim