The WAWG Blog

Putting the Relationship Between Americans, Muslims, and Al Qaeda into Perspective – Should we blame everyone in the big green circle for the actions of those in the little black dot?

Fox News Jumps to Conclusions, Then Tells Others to Not Jump to Conclusions – While reporting on the stabbing of a Muslim New York City cab driver, Fox News host Alisyn Camerota maintained anti-Islamic rhetoric had nothing to do with the crime. But the New York Daily News reports that there is even more evidence that says Enright was harboring anti-Muslim feelings. When he was arrested Tuesday in midtown, Enright had a personal diary filled with pages of “pretty strong anti-Muslim comments,” a police source said. The source said Enright’s journal equated Muslims with “killers, ungrateful for the help they were being offered, filthy murderers without a conscience.”

Fox News anchor Brian Kilmeade said he was aware of the diary, but he seemed to dismiss that it could be related to opposition to the Park51 cultural center, an Islamic center and mosque planned near Ground Zero. “He has kept a diary with some anti-Muslim phrases and beliefs but let’s not everyone jump to conclusions and immediately tie his actions to the mosque,” said Kilmeade.

But, it seems OK to jump to conclusions that anti-Islamic rhetoric had nothing to do with the crime?

Ben Quayle Made Posting to a Dirty Web Site, Then Said He Didn’t, Then Admitted He Did, Then Said He Has Been Consistent – Republican candidate Ben Quayle has made postings to the racy web site DirtyScottsdale.com. That site is no longer available but its successor The Dirty still has some of as they call it Ben Quayle’s “best work” posted — Ben Quayle Is Brock Landers (warning, may not be safe for home or work).

Five of nine questions Quayle took at a victory press conference on Wednesday were about the website controversy, including ones on how his involvement would play with conservative Christian voters and on his varying answers about the extent of his involvement.

“I’ve been consistent from the very beginning on this issue and I’ve answered questions from numerous people,” he said to the latter.

That’s not true. Quayle first denied then admitted writing for the website.

Former Republican Governor Lies About the Cause of the Deficit – Republicans have been trying very hard to blame President Obama for the nation’s deficit (which he largely inherited from his predecessor), but former Gov. George Pataki (R-NY) today may have gone to the most absurd lengths yet. On MSNBC, Pataki said that the health care reform bill that became law this year is “one of the reasons we have this deficit”:

Pataki made no attempt to explain how a law that was passed this year and has yet to be implemented could have possibly caused this year’s deficit. Here’s a handy chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explaining where the deficit actually comes from:

See health care on there anywhere? No. The deficit was caused by the Bush’s economic downturn (and the drop in tax revenue that came along with it), Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush-era tax cuts that turned a record surplus into a deficit, and Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Regards,

Jim

Rick Perry’s Bomb about Bombs: Perry Lies or He Doesn’t Know Where the Border Lies – In an interview about border security, Texas Gov. Rick Perry told Fox News that bombs exploded in El Paso. “You’ve got bullets hitting the city hall in El Paso. You’ve got bombs exploding in El Paso,” said Perry. “The border with Mexico is a war zone.”

Perry was likely referring to last month’s deadly car bombing in Juarez [Mexico], not El Paso.

El Paso Mayor John Cook said Perry’s verbal flub doesn’t help the Sun City’s image. “It’s like an uphill battle almost, swimming against the tide, trying to convince people that the violence hasn’t spilled over,” said Cook. And Cook said those perceptions of El Paso are hurdles to overcome when trying to attract business to the region. “It doesn’t help when the governor comes out and adds to that perception that the violence has spilled over,” said Cook.

Cook said city leaders will continue to spread the message that El Paso is a safe community, the second safest city in the nation.

Rick Perry Wants Help From the Federal Government That He Doesn’t Want to Be a Part Of – Of all people, Governor Rick “Let Us Secede From the Union” Perry is losing his cool and is calling for the federales to come save him from the border war. No, it’s not that simple, Gov. Perry. You don’t get to bad-mouth the federal government only when it’s politically convenient. You don’t get to refuse federal stimulus funds and make wild statements about “state rights” and then turtle up when the shots start firing. As governor, you have the ability to move National Guard troops down to the border – go do it. Send some Tea Party militias and Minutemen people, too. Make sure they’re well-armed – well, I guess you don’t need to do that, they already are. Are you running a self-sufficient Republic or is Texas actually part of the Union?

Texas Textbook Massacre Leader Gives Speeches to Neo-Nazi hate Groups – David Barton, who runs an outfit called WallBuilders out of Aledo, Texas, led the recent effort to rewrite Texas textbooks. Barton has twice addressed white-supremacist organizations with ties to neo-Nazis, but both times has done so accidentally, he says. Accidentally addressing a neo-Nazi hate group can happen to even the best of folks. But doing it twice?

Barton has also been a leader in the movement to rewrite American history to remove Civil Rights leaders and knock down the wall separating church from state, arguing that it is a myth.

Absurd and Illogical: Republican Representative Says Building the NY Community Center is as Offensive as the N-Word – Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who is running for the state’s U.S. Senate seat against Democrat Robin Carnahan, yesterday went on The McGraw Show on St. Louis’ KTRS and condemned plans to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero by saying it was “just as inappropriate” as the racial tirade that recently cost Dr. Laura her radio show.

John Boehner’s Economic Plan Would Increase Deficit By $3.781 Trillion, Think Tank Finds – House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) was short on specifics during his much-touted economic address in Cleveland this week. A subsequent report analyzing his suggestions, the progressive think tank NDN estimates that the plans could exacerbate the deficit by roughly $3.7 trillion over the next ten years.

Boehner Lies About the Recovery Act – On the very same day that House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) declares in a major speech that the Recovery Act has “gotten us nowhere,” first, the nonpartisan CBO announces that the Recovery Act has created as many as 3.3 million jobs nationwide and lowered the unemployment rate by as much as 1.8 percent through March of this year, and then the Ohio (Boehner’s home state) Department of Transportation announces that nearly 9,500 construction workers were on the job on Ohio Recovery Act transportation projects in July, the highest monthly total since it began.

I suspect those nearly 9,500 Ohio construction workers and 3.3 million Americans at work thanks to the Recovery act would disagree with Rep. Boehner’s statement that the Recovery Act has “gotten us nowhere.”

And then to make his dance even more complicated, leading economist Mark Zandi said today that the Congressman from Ohio was “just wrong” that the Recovery Act has “gotten us nowhere:” Asked about Rep. Boehner’s claim that “all of this ‘stimulus’ spending has gotten us nowhere,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics said “that is just wrong, the stimulus has been very helpful.”

Katrina Re-Development Money Ended Up Going to Oil Companies – Standing in a generator-lit French Quarter square 17 days after Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush ended his first major prime-time address in the post-catastrophe city with a call for reinvestment in the battered region. Speaking in a dark, mostly empty New Orleans, he described a business-incentive program that would lure people and commerce back to devastated Gulf Opportunity Zones in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Within these GO Zones (also known as disaster areas), subsidies would “create jobs, and loan guarantees for small businesses, including minority-owned enterprises, to get them up and running again,” Bush told an audience still wide-eyed from endless newsreels of poor black people stranded on waterlogged rooftops.

But five years after Congress passed the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, more of the tax-free benefits have gone to the state’s powerful oil industry than to development in hard-hit areas. New Orleans has so far received a total of $55 million in bonds shared between eight projects—or less than 1 percent of the more than $5.9 billion issued statewide. None of the bonds issued for New Orleans projects went to development in hard-hit and still-struggling areas like the Lower Ninth Ward.

Instead, the federal largesse has been poured into oil companies operating far from New Orleans. Since Congress’s unanimous approval of the GO Zone Act, Louisiana officials have issued nearly $1.7 billion in tax-free bonds—about one third of the total issued—for projects that contribute to the production of oil. Preliminary approval has been secured to tap millions more.

New York City Cab Driver Slashed for Being Muslim – A college student who did volunteer work in Afghanistan was charged Wednesday with slashing a taxi driver’s neck and face after the driver said he’s Muslim. A criminal complaint alleges Michael Enright uttered an Arabic greeting and told the driver, “Consider this a checkpoint,” before the brutal bias attack occurred Tuesday night inside the yellow cab on Manhattan’s East Side. Police say Enright was drunk at the time.

Another Brazen Anti-Muslim Attack – In another brazen anti-Muslim incident, a man wandered into a mosque in Queens Wednesday night, shouting racial slurs and urinating all over prayer rugs. According to police, a drunk Omar Rivera shouted “terrorists” before relieving himself in the Iman Mosque. He stuck up his middle finger and cursed at everyone.

The Summer of Republican Race-Baiting – Earlier this year, Republican Party chairman Michael Steele admitted that the GOP has engaged in Southern Strategy politics: employing racial, anti-minority code language and fear-mongering as a means of energizing the party’s white Christian base.

This is a fact. The Southern Strategy is real, though it’s no longer exclusively “southern.”

Fact: the Republican Party routinely tweaks white fear, paranoia, prejudice and resentment in order to win votes and score political points at the expense of demonized minority groups. They engage in stereotyping and misinformation and they rarely, if ever, use the “n-word” these days, though they might as well. After all, as the Strategy goes, blacks and minorities aren’t voting Republican anyway, so… let fly.

And it works. So well, in fact, that it’s still actively used on AM talk radio and on Fox News Channel as a ratings-grabber, not to mention as a recruitment tool for the various tea party groups. If you can effectively convince the majority race that they’re being somehow victimized by the significantly smaller minority, you have a seriously powerful (and clearly immoral) psycho-weapon in your arsenal.

The Republican Party machine does it all the time and is still taken seriously as one of our two major parties. This is unacceptable. And so we have to keep talking about it and exposing anyone who plays this terrible game, while underscoring why it’s such a stain on our politics and values. We have to prevent our discourse from moving beyond that point of no return — to make sure that the exploitation of racial intolerance at the highest levels of politics and the media doesn’t become just another accepted facet of the American debate.

More Republican Hypocrisy – Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck had requested at least $5 million in earmarks for projects in the county where he served as attorney general. On the campaign trail, Buck has railed against pork-barrel projects including signing a pledge to refuse earmarks in the next session of Congress.

In Wisconsin, Republican Senate candidate Ron Johnson received a $2.5 million government-issued loan in the 1980s to expand his factory. Like Buck, Johnson has made railing against government spending a main feature of his run for office.

In Indiana, Republican Senate candidate Dan Coats has run on a platform of preventing a government takeover of private enterprise, only for it to be discovered that he lobbied the Senate on the TARP for a company he represented.

Also in Indiana, Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels reversed course this week on a pledge he had made to reject federal aid for teachers and Medicaid. Daniels had actually been supportive of the aid before he came out against it during a national television appearance.

TennesSee No Evil (nor Reality) – On the Daily show last night, Aasif Mandvi visited Murfreesboro, Tennessee, site of a planned mosque, and met with Laurie Cardozza-Moore, the leader of the mosque opposition. Mandvi sat back and listened as Cardozza claimed her opposition had “nothing to do with religion” before she listed a slew of “facts” about Islam ranging from what they eat to how it is a actually a “political system of global domination.”

“You do know I’m Muslim,” Mandvi said at the end of her lengthy rant, to which Cordozza replied: “Nobody’s perfect.” Then it gets crazier and funnier. Watch the video at the link.

Regards,

Jim

Rick Perry: University Regents Jobs Open to the Highest Bidders – Over the past decade, the men and women chosen by Rick Perry to serve as regents of the state’s universities have given his campaigns a total of at least $5.8 million, according to a Texas Tribune analysis. Using the Texas Tribune’s data application, you can search and rank every current and former regent who gave to the governor – by university, by amount, by city.

Beware the Republican Budget Proposal – Paul Ryan (R-WI) is the point person for House Republicans on the budget committee. He designed a budget proposal that he says would bring the nation’s books into balance, without raising taxes, within 10 years. Contrary to Democrats’ claims that Republicans have “no solutions”, the Republicans will point to this budget proposal on the campaign trail as proof that they can do it–this time. [Ryan’s entire exercise, by the way, was to concoct a scheme so Republicans could preserve tax cuts for the wealthy–that’s their core value!].

Of course, they will not talk about the details of that proposal, such as privatizing social security and turning Medicare into a voucher program with vouchers that will increasingly not meet the costs of medical care for the elderly. Remember Newt Gingrich’s reverie, “social security and medicare will be left to wither on the vine”? What will be the cost of your private insurance if the elderly are added to private insurance rolls? It will make taxes no longer seem so uniformly “evil.”

Co-Chair of the Deficit Commission Has No Heart – Alan Simpson co-chairs the deficit commission, which is considering various proposals to cut Social Security benefits. He believes that Social Security is “like a milk cow with 310 million tits,” according to an email he sent to the executive director of National Older Women’s League Tuesday morning. In the e-mail, Simpson also said to the head of the National Older Women’s League, “Call when you get honest work!” It’s bad enough that Obama staffed the commission with so many Republicans, Alan Simpson has shown that he doesn’t have the temperament, the aptitude or the class to be so influential in the lives of seniors for decades to come.

Simpson is the one who should be sent to look for “honest work.” There is a petition online calling for Simpson’s resignation. Please sign the petition: Remove Alan Simpson
Call the White House and let them know we want Alan Simpson’s resignation:
202-456-1111

The Government Can Come Onto Your Property and Plant a GPS, Except if You’re Rich – Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich. Your driveway is not private, the court ruled, because it is open to strangers such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. However, people who have the money to protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

And if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state.

Republicans Have Been Lying About the Stimulus Program – The massive U.S. stimulus package put millions of people to work and boosted national output by hundreds of billions of dollars in the second quarter, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday. CBO’s latest estimate indicates that the stimulus effort may have prevented the sluggish U.S. economy from contracting between April and June.

CBO said President Barack Obama’s stimulus boosted real GDP in the quarter by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent, adding at least $200 billion in economic activity. It raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of this year, CBO estimated. Measured another way, CBO said the stimulus increased the number of full-time equivalent jobs by up to 4.8 million, as part-time workers shifted to full-time work or employers offered more overtime work.

Don’t Blame the “Stupid” People, It’s the Propaganda Machine, Stupid – Last week, a Pew Research Center poll was released that showed an increase in the proportion of Americans who falsely believe President Obama is a Muslim. The conversation since then has largely focused on the failings of the public. Don’t these people read newspapers or watch TV? As a matter of fact, many do. According to the poll, 60 percent of those who believe Obama is a Muslim also told the pollsters that they learned it from the media. Go to the link to see the many examples of how people have been influenced by false accusations from the WorldNetDailys, tabloids, Drudge Reports, Fox News, Washington (Moonie) Times, Weekly Standard, and other right-leaning media.

Yes, people do tend to believe silly things, but it’s not silly when there is a deliberate effort to misinform people at our nation’s expense. Fight the darkness with light. Speak out with truth.

Republicans Wrong About Effects of the Deep Water Drilling Moratorium – When the Obama administration called a halt to virtually all deepwater drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon blowout and fire in April, oil executives, economists and local officials complained that the six-month moratorium would cost thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in lost revenue. However, unemployment claims related to the oil industry along the Gulf Coast have only been in the hundreds. Only 2 of the 33 deepwater rigs operating in the gulf before the BP rig exploded have left for other fields.

Oil companies used the enforced suspension to service and upgrade their drilling equipment, keeping shipyards and service companies busy. Drilling firms have kept most of their workers, knowing that if they let them go it will be hard to field experienced teams when the moratorium is lifted. Oil companies have shifted operations to onshore wells, saving industry jobs. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the agency was “ahead of schedule” in drawing up new rules to allow drilling to resume and suggested that the moratorium could be eased as early as next month for certain types of rigs.

Fox News Proves They Are Either Evil or Stupid (or Both) – Fox News often plays a dangerous game of association based on speculation. This week, Fox continued to mention a nameless man with ties to Imam Rauf (of the proposed Muslim community center in New York City) through the “Kingdom Foundation.” It turns out the man they are referring to but never name is Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Talal just happens to be one of the biggest shareholders of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (parent of Fox News).

That’s right, the guy they’re painting as a sinister money force owns part of Fox News. So, using their own logic, if we want to cut off funding to the “terror mosque,” we must stop watching Fox.

Did Fox actually not know the name of the Kingdom Foundation leader or that he is a News Corp owner? Or did they purposefully cover it up because it didn’t help their fear-driven narrative?” Stupid or Evil?

Fox News Scrubbing Wikipedia Entry About $1 Million Donation – As you probably know, Fox News parent News Corps donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association back in June…one of the largest donations in history by a media organization.

Not only does this put a cloud on their slogan “fair and balanced” when covering the upcoming gubernatorial elections, it is made worse by the fact that, to date, Fox News has YET to cover the controversy. Even though every other major media outlet has.

It is no secret that Fox News spends a lot time scrubbing thier own Wikipedia articles, but several editors have managed to get some issues on the page “Fox News Controversies”. Now Fox News has been busy scrubbing entries about the donation.

At Ground Zero Anti-Islam Rally, Man Harassed for Looking Vaguely Muslim – At an anti-Islam rally at Ground Zero, a person of color wearing a skull cap and wandering through the crowd was targeted with insults and nearly attacked by protesters for the offense of looking vaguely Muslim. It turns out he is not Muslim, his name is Kenny, and he is a union carpenter who works at Ground Zero.

Regards,

Jim

There’s a commercial where citizens are complaining about taxes on energy and how that will “kill jobs.”

That may be true or just rhetoric. But if these taxes cause the long term reduction in pollution of our air, land and water, and, as a side effect, saves the lives of fellow humans and other animals, then why shouldn’t the energy industry be taxed to promote converting to nonpolluting forms of energy generation?

Which is better: many citizens and others around the world dying from pollution, or unemployed living people that can be retrained for new jobs in new energy industries?

Poor Corporations – They Just Can’t Get a Break

RE: Ron Paul to Sunshine Patriots: Stop Your Demagogy About The NYC Mosque!,  

Representative Paul,

I think John Dean, former counsel for Richard Nixon’s White House, best described those inflicting this insult on the nation as “Conservatives WIthout Conscience” – also the title of one of his books.    These conservatives not only include the war mongering neocons you mentioned but also the evangelical social conservatives.  These conservatives exist mostly as Republicans, especially in our Senate, but some are Democrats, and a libertarian or two.   

Professor Robert Altemeyer, referenced extensively in John Dean’s book, has referred to them as “right-wing authoritarians” (RWA) and has developed a personality test to empirically identify the authoritarian personality.    His research is one in a long line of efforts since WWII to figure out what factors contributed to the evils perpetrated by some Germans and Italians on others.

Professor George Lakoff, has studied linguistics and how the brain works.   His research relates the RWA to the strict father family model, where severe punishment is used to teach ‘right’ from ‘wrong.’  Thus many RWAs are quite aggressive in expressing their opinions and public display of their favorite weapon.  They also believe “you are on your own” and there is no such thing as systemic causation.  They believe you deserve what you get, even if what you get was beyond your control.  They believe if you are not like me, you are wrong:  ‘You’re not Christian?  Well, you’re wrong and need to be tortured until you ‘believe’ my world view.’

Thank you for your intelligent comments on the NY Islamic civic center with prayer rooms and calling out the RWAs.  The law is what matters and public opinion, or a mob, does not make law.

Rick Perry’s Habitual Secret Keeping – As you probably know, Texas Governor Rick Perry’s schedule for the first six months of 2010 showed an average of seven hours of state work per week and 38 weekdays with “no state scheduled events.” In the absence of such records, there’s no objective way of knowing what he does.

“The governor’s explanation sounds to be a candid admission that he’s leaving stuff off the schedule,” says Ken Bunting, the executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and the onetime Capitol bureau chief of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “If there’s a schedule, it’s a public record. If it’s incomplete, then it’s a deception the people ought to be concerned about. … [A] document that gives a false impression is not a good practice.”

“It’s one thing to say you believe in transparency and it’s another thing to demonstrate it,” says Keith Elkins, the executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. “If you’re putting in a full day’s work, put it in the schedule to show us. The taxpayer should not be left to guess if you are working on their behalf. They should be able to see for themselves how much or how little he’s working.”

“This is a governor who’s in constant re-election mode, and they’re trying to present themselves in the best possible light,” says Andrew Wheat, research director of Texans for Public Justice. “That does not mean a free flow of information.”

Case in point: Perry’s office maintains a policy of deleting its e-mails every seven days, a shorter retention period than almost all other state agencies and major cities. It also allows staffers to decide which e-mails involve state business and thus must be retained, leaving open the possibility that individual employees who aren’t well-versed in the law are innocently but irrevocably destroying public records. Perry’s aides have defended the retention policy by saying it simply follows that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. But the destruction of documents can make it difficult, if not impossible, to piece together what happens inside the governor’s office. In 2007, for example, reporters were unable to determine what Perry knew about systematic abuse inside juvenile jails, and when he might have known it, because his office deleted e-mails long before the scandal broke.

“The fact that there are so few records regarding his schedule is related to the deletion of emails,” says Houston attorney and longtime open-government champion Joe Larsen, who has formally complained about the e-mail policy to the Travis County District Attorney’s Office, which has jurisdiction over ethics matters involving state officials. “It reduces the amount of information that’s available to the people of Texas. If it’s a decision to minimize records of his activity, what that means in the end is that people just don’t know what he’s doing — and people need to know what the governor’s doing.”

Perry’s office has also restricted the release of information related to the death penalty case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Corsicana man executed in 2005 despite a capital murder conviction won on the basis of what a state panel has admitted was “flawed” arson evidence. On the day of the execution, Perry’s office got a faxed clemency report about the Willingham case. But it is not known if the governor read it, as his office has declined to release any of his or his staff’s comments or analysis of the reprieve request.

The Houston Chronicle has filed suit in an effort to get access to the report. “When it comes to human life, there is no place the governor should be more transparent in his decision-making,” said Jonathan Donnellan, an attorney for the Chronicle and its corporate parent, Hearst Newspapers, when the suit was filed.

Earlier this year, Perry’s office was found to be ignoring state law that requires all state agencies to be “accountable and transparent” by posting their stimulus spending reports on their websites. Only after an Austin American-Statesman reporter’s inquiry did the governor’s office begin posting the reports, many of which were months old. According to the Statesman, the governor’s spokeswoman would not elaborate on why Perry chose not to follow the law that other state officials were expected to follow.

Do-Nothing Governor Rick Perry Complains About Others – After a single bullet believed to be from a gun battle in Mexico struck a building in El Paso, Texas Governor Rick Perry complained that “It’s time for Washington to stop the rhetoric and immediately deploy a significance force of personnel and resources to the border.” Perry did not mention that he (Perry) did nothing to stop this incident despite having the Texas Nation Guard at his disposal. I suggest that Perry use some of that spare time in his schedule to go to El Paso and stop those stray bullets.

If Republicans Win in November, Don’t Get Sick – House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said that if Republicans win the U.S. House in November, a House Republican majority will work to defund the agencies responsible for implementing health care, they will end the building of bike paths, and may roll back their ban on earmarks.

“One thing is we have, in the last 20 months, shown that we’ve gotten serious about spending,” Cantor said. (And they don’t care who they hurt in the process. They plan to withhold funds from health care to prove that the new health care provisions don’t work. Too bad for you if you get sick. – JLV)

George W. Bush’s Chief of Staff for NASA Guilty of Conspiracy Involving $600,000 – Courtney A. Stadd, who previously served as NASA Chief of Staff and White House Liaison under George W. Bush, has entered a guilty plea to conspiracy charges in connection with actions he took to obtain and receive funds from a $600,000 sole-source contract from John C. Stennis Space Center to Mississippi State University (“MSU”) on a remote sensing study.

Stadd also attempted to stop the NASA Office of the Inspector General from continuing to investigate his activities. Stadd admitted that, to further conceal the conspiracy, he created false documents in response to a Federal Grand Jury subpoena.

Regards,

Jim

Tax Cuts for the Super Rich – Republicans and conservative Democrats have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy, but are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country, otherwise known as extending the Bush tax cuts for the super rich.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

Who are these lucky few? Read the next Bad Deeds entry below to find out about two of them.

The Billionaire ‘Kochtopus’ Brothers Who Bankroll Tea Party Groups – David and Charles Koch own virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune is thirty-five billion dollars.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. From 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Over the July 4th weekend, the advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004, held a summit called Texas Defending the American Dream in a hotel ballroom in Austin. Koch did not attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused by a series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. The summit served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. However,he pitch made no mention of its corporate funders.

Republicans Defend The Constitution — Except The Parts They Don’t Like – A hot-and-cold take on the Constitution is surprisingly common within the Republican Party, particularly among those who portray themselves as strict Constitutionalists and who frequently accuse Democrats of twisting the document to serve political aims.

Republicans have proposed at least 42 Constitutional amendments in the current Congress. As an example, Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia won his seat in Congress campaigning as a strict defender of the Constitution. He carries a copy in his pocket and is particularly fond of invoking the Second Amendment right to bear arms. But it turns out there are parts of the document he doesn’t care for — lots of them. He wants to get rid of the language about birthright citizenship, federal income taxes and direct election of senators, among others. And, he would add plenty of stuff, including explicitly authorizing castration as punishment for child rapists.

Other widely supported Republican amendments would prohibit government ownership of private companies, bar same-sex marriage, require a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise taxes, and — an old favorite — prohibit desecration of the American flag (forget the First Amendment).

During the health care debate, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, D-Mich., introduced an amendment that would allow voters to directly repeal laws passed by Congress — a move that would radically alter the Founding Fathers’ system of checks and balances.

The problem with such a view, says constitutional law scholar Mark Kende, is that divining what the framers intended involves subjective judgments shaded with politics. Virginia Sloan, an attorney who directs the nonpartisan Constitution Project, agreed. Sloan said that while some proposals to alter the Constitution have merit, most are little more than posturing by politicians trying to connect with voters. “People are responding to the politics of the day, and that’s not what the framers intended,” she said. “They intended exactly the opposite — that the Constitution not be used as a political tool.”

Un-American and Un-Christian Behavior – We started this great nation with values that did not exist anywhere else in the world. We have stumbled, we have made mistakes and we have faltered along the way, however we live another day with the hopes of perfecting our union. Yet here we are once again, at a defining moment that will test the strength of our freedoms and our commitment to our founding principles.

What people like Michelle Malkin, Andrew Breitbert and countless other conservatives have made their money on, is the ability to distract their audiences from the real issue, by focusing on the most insignificant portion of the opposing argument.

It seems that it might be easier for Ms. Malkin and her friends to just kick all of the Muslims out of the country. And why not follow it up with the Jews and then maybe they can send black people back to Africa, too? (Or all the brown-skinned people to Mexico? – JLV)

Even though the American White supremacy movement was founded in Christian fundamentalism, and even though George W. Bush claimed to have “visions” from his Christian God to go to Iraq and kill over 100,000 INNOCENT Iraqis, even though Timothy McVeigh was born into the Christian faith, we would never think for a millisecond that Jesus Christ or any verses of the bible were the cause of these horrendous, stupid acts of men. Therefore it is un-American and against everything that we believe in as a country to associate the 1.6 billion Muslims or 23% of the world’s population with the acts of a few, very evil men. I pray that all of the Muslims who might hate Christians because of George Bush’s actions, or the blacks or Jews or non-Whites who might hate Christians because of the historical genocide of their people, or the Christians who might hate Muslims for the acts of Osama bin Laden and his culprits, I hope they know that the overriding theme of Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Abraham and Lord Buddha was to love all people of all races and all religions.

The Republican Strategy for Victory this November is to Stall Economic Recovery at Your Expense – Republicans are rooting against the American economy and American workers. They believe that they will do better politically in the 2010 midterm elections — and the 2012 presidential — if the economy does worse. And for the last twenty months they have done everything they can to assure that outcome.

Generally their view is that whatever is in the short-term interest of the big Wall Street banks, insurance companies, big oil and their wealthy donors is what is “good for the economy.” They implemented their program of tax cuts for the rich and allowing the reckless Wall Street banks to do whatever they pleased for eight long years. The result was a $2,000 decrease in real income for most Americans, a massive increase in incomes for the top two percent of the population, zero net private sector job creation, and the collapse of our economy.

But it’s not just their commitment to “trickle down” economics that has caused them to do everything in their power to block economic recovery. They believe that their political fortunes will rise if the fortunes of the rest of us decline. We can’t let them be right. We have to show them that those who sacrifice the economic well-being of their fellow Americans for partisan political gain will not ultimately be rewarded with political success.

When Americans See Through the Political Posturing

Regards,

Jim

The population of Lebanon is 95 percent Arab and is mostly of the Muslim faith with a large Christian population, but only around 200 Jews:

Muslim 59.7% (Shia, Sunni, Druze, Isma’ilite, Alawite or Nusayri), Christian 39% (Maronite Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Chaldean, Assyrian, Copt, Protestant), other 1.3%

While we Americans are feuding over converting an old building last used by Burlington Coat Factory into a Muslim community center with prayer rooms, Lebanon is allowing the restoration of a Jewish synagogue in Beirut.

If Muslims are allowing this in the capitol of Lebanon, why can’t ‘Christian’ Americans allow Sufi Muslims to finish their community center in New York?

Rick Perry’s Revolving Money Door – Rick Perry says as governor, his job is to make life better for Texas families. One family that’s done well is the Sullivans of Austin, Ray and Leslie, whose political ties to Perry over the past decade have paid big dividends. Ray has shuttled between top jobs on Perry’s staff and as a lobbyist representing interests with business before the state. His wife has directed the governor’s political fundraising. They’ve made between $4 million and $5.7 million since Perry’s been governor, according to campaign reports, lobby filings and state payroll records.

Perry’s 10-year tenure, the longest of any governor, has attracted long-standing loyalists who have benefited from his years atop state government.

Ray Sullivan became the governor’s chief of staff in June 2009. Before that, he was a lobbyist. And before that, he worked in the governor’s office. Sullivan’s lobby clients have included energy, beer, financial and highway interests, some of which have found an active ally in the governor.

For example, the toll-road engineering company HNTP Corp. has benefited from the governor’s advocacy of the Trans-Texas Corridor.

Another Sullivan client, the Swiss financial-services giant UBS, pushed the state to privatize the lottery. Perry advocated the idea in 2007, but the Legislature turned thumbs down.

Sullivan’s clients have also been campaign contributors — among them, Houston beer distributor John Nau, who has given $327,000 to Perry and periodically ferries the governor on his corporate jet. Nau was among those who persuaded Kay Bailey Hutchison not to challenge Perry four years ago, saying he was told that Perry wouldn’t run yet again in 2010. When Perry did, Nau backed Hutchison in the primary, but he returned to the governor for the general election with a check for $50,000 in June.

As a lobbyist, Sullivan earned, on average, between $250,000 and $500,000 annually, according to lobby reports that list earnings in ranges. When Sullivan rejoined the governor’s office last year, his state salary was $179,000. Perry’s political campaign supplements that, so he makes about $254,000 a year as the governor’s chief of staff. Many elected officials use such an arrangement to boost their top staffers’ pay.
As the governor’s political fundraiser, Leslie Sullivan has made as much as $398,000 a year tapping donors — in some cases, her husband’s clients — for Perry’s campaign account. Now, she has a new job. She left the governor’s campaign payroll this summer — with a check for $221,000 — and has begun fundraising for the Republican Governors Association[, which just got $1,000,000,000.00 from Rupert Murdoch]. That’s the group Perry used to lead and that gave him $1 million for his last election. And odds are, if he needs it, money raised by Sullivan could find its way to the governor again this year.

In Rick Perry’s Texas, Many Creeks and Streams are Too Polluted to Swim In – About one-third of our state’s creeks and streams are too polluted to swim in — and state regulators have approved new rules to keep it that way.

Earlier this summer, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality weakened the standards for water quality. No longer do all waters have to be clean enough to swim in. Now, some waterways will be allowed to have 16 times more E. coli — bacteria that can be life threatening to children — than is currently allowed.

Manure and other waste from corporate poultry, dairy and other farms routinely wash into our waterways. This pollution has rendered many Texas waters, including portions of the Colorado, San Marcos and Brazos Rivers, unsuitable for recreational uses. Now, if a stream isn’t used much by the public (possibly because it’s polluted), the TCEQ wants to allow it to stay polluted.

We can’t let this happen to our favorite swimming holes. Add your name to our petition calling for the cleanup of all Texas waterways. Then, evict Rick Perry.

Regards,

Jim

Governor Dean,

Your optimism is admirable relative to achieving a compromise between those that have such strong ‘feelings’ over the civic center in NY. However, history shows that right-wing authoritarians (RWA), not just their leaders, don’t compromise. They do not come from a diverse or disobedient background and if you aren’t like them, you are wrong and there is no room for compromise – unless you convert to their views.

If you took two groups on each side of the issue from those who lost family members on 9/11/2001, and asked them to compromise on this controversial NY facility, I don’t believe it would happen. If you then took this same group of family representatives and added those trying to finish the Islamic center, there would still be no compromise.

I spent 10 years as a union rep. We could and did compromise with the company over benefits. However, these compromises were not about religion or politics. Take a look at Israel and the Palestinians. We’ve had 62 years for compromise in that relationship.

The south didn’t compromise over slavery and we know the blood that was shed over that issue. That same southern attitude is still at war with the federal government and the RWA followers and leaders will not compromise on this either – no checks and balances on private enterprise, no safety net, nothing for those who can find a job, and more tax breaks for the mega and ultra rich.

The southern attitude didn’t compromise over school desegregation. Federal troops made that happen.

The RWA opposition is all fear based and you can’t reason with fearful people. Physically, their brains are unable to reason/compromise.

This issue is not just about one facility in NY. It’s about other Muslim facilities around the country. It’s a slippery slop and only the Muslim’s will lose – compromise or not.

The only compromise acceptable by those in opposition to the civic center would be the interment of all Muslims and the destruction of their religious facilities. The crusades are being “born again.” It needs to be nipped in the bud.

Since feelings are so strong. The only solution is the law. If there is no legal reason to stop it, then let it go.

Unfortunately, that won’t be the end. If you don’t compromise to their wishes, some RWA domestic terrorist will resort to violence.

The community center will need protection from the growing Islamaphobia and it may have to be provided by the federal government.