The WAWG Blog

Joe Wilson: Pro-Swine Flu, Anti-Obama – In a June congressional vote on a supplementary appropriations bill , Rep. Joe Wilson joined 95% of Republicans and voted against the bill, which contained special funding to combat the H1N1 virus. However, in a new interview with the conservative-leaning CNSNews.com, Wilson says the Obama administration is “solely responsible” for the H1N1 vaccine shortage. Hey Joe, “You Lie.”

David Vitter: Pro-Rape, Anti Obama – Confronted by an impassioned rape survivor at a town hall Saturday night, Sen. David Vitter tried everything from sympathizing to deflecting blame onto the Obama administration for his decision to vote against an anti-rape amendment. Finally, amid shouts from protesters, the Louisiana Republican simply walked away.

Vitter was one of 30 Republican senators who voted against Sen. Al Franken’s amendment, passed in the Senate last month, that would de-fund government contractors who prevent employees from seeking justice when they have been raped.

At the town hall meeting Saturday, a woman identifying herself as a “rape survivor” confronted Vitter and asked him why he voted against the amendment.

“I’m a rape survivor, and it meant everything to me to put [away] the person who attacked me,” she told Vitter.

Vitter responded, “I’m absolutely supportive of any case like that, that they are prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.” (I guess he means as long as the law is very limited.)

“But there are rape victims that are being silenced,” the unnamed woman responded. “How can you support a company that tells a rape victim that she does not have a right to defend herself?”

“Do you realize President Obama was against that amendment, and his administration was against that amendment?” Vitter asked.

“But I’m not asking Obama, I’m asking you, senator,” the woman said.

At that point, Vitter walked briskly away from the woman and out of the town hall.

“What if it was your daughter that was raped, would you tell her to be quiet?” the woman shouted as Vitter walked away. “Would you tell your daughter to be silent?”

Vitter’s assertion that the Obama administration opposed the amendment is misleading. The Pentagon opposed the amendment because it argued it would be virtually impossible to enforce. The White House stated that it supported “the intent of the amendment,” but wanted to see it re-worked “to make sure it is enforceable.”

John McCain’s Former Health Care Advisor Having a Hard Time Finding Health Insurance – One year after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lost the presidential election, the man who was by McCain’s side as the campaign’s top health-care guru remains unemployed — and his COBRA health coverage is running out.

Irony of ironies, it gets worse. Holtz-Eakin, who is about to start shopping for insurance on the individual market, is 51. And he has one of those pesky “preexisting conditions” that insurance companies often cite in denying coverage.

“A right renal autotransplant,” he said, pointing to his abdomen as he described the 1990 transplant surgery he went through after one of his kidneys was damaged in an accident. “They got rid of the artery, moved my kidney and rebuilt me for the 21st century. If you look at my file, any insurance company would go, ‘Hmm . . .’ ”

Good luck.

Republican Health Proposal Will Not Prevent Health-Insurance Companies From Denying Sick People Coverage – Republicans are preparing to unveil their own health bill in the next few days. Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) said Monday that the plan wouldn’t seek to prevent health-insurance companies from denying sick people insurance — a key plank of the Democrats’ legislation.

GOP Holds Up Unemployment Extension, Nearly 200,000 Lose Their Benefits – In the world outside the Senate, time is money; inside it, time is everything. Senate Republicans are taking full advantage of that reality, using every parliamentary device at their disposal to slow down an extension of unemployment insurance benefits — even after Democrats added billions for big business to sweeten the pot.

The saga is both a case study in the difficulty of passing even popular legislation in the Senate and the lengths to which the GOP is going to slow down the process.

The extension overwhelmingly passed the House 331-83 in late September. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made a motion to pass it by unanimous consent in early October; it was blocked by GOP objections.

After negotiations, Reid filed for cloture on Oct. 21 to break a GOP filibuster. On October 27, the Senate voted 87-13 on a motion to proceed to consider the bill, breaking the filibuster.

But under Senate rules, the GOP is still allowed 30 hours of “debate.” There actually isn’t much debate, but the clock is ticking while senators take to the floor to make speeches about whatever they like.

To get things moving, Democrats sweetened the pot, adding in billions in tax breaks for business — a net operating loss carry-back provision that the GOP has long favored — and an extension of the home-buyers tax credit. Reid introduced the goodies in a substitute amendment along with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), a champion of the business tax break.

“The two were put together as a means of greasing the skids. You know how things work around here,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). “Could we have gotten UI through otherwise? Yes, we could have, but it would have taken us several days. And we don’t have that kind of time. And the minority is then able to, because of the time, demand certain things.”

The skids properly greased, Reid filed for cloture again on Oct. 29th. It came to a vote Monday night, Nov. 2nd, where it passed 85-2.

Still, the GOP fights, requesting that the 30 more hours of “debate” elapse. That’ll take the Senate to late Tuesday night. If Reid invokes cloture again to proceed to the underlying bill, another 30 hours would take the Senate to Thursday morning at the earliest for — at last — a vote on the bill itself.

Bobby Jindal Crippled Louisiana’s Ethics According to Chairman of Ethics Board – Louisiana’s ethics system has been “crippled” as a result of legal changes made during Gov. Bobby Jindal’s 2008 special session on ethics, the chairman of the Louisiana Board of Ethics said Monday.

“This is a convoluted and crippled ethics system we have today,” Ethics Board chairman Frank Simoneaux said. “It does not make sense. It does not work well.”

Simoneaux said the main culprit is a law that moved judicial power from the Ethics Board to administrative law judges, called ALJs. The ALJs are hired by an appointee of the governor.

Last Saturday, Fox News Reminded its Viewers to Turn Their Clocks Back 400 Years 😉

Regards,

Jim

GOP Using Bad Math to Create Bogus Stimulus Figures, AP Says – Some Republican lawmakers critical of President Barack Obama’s stimulus package are using grade-school arithmetic to size up costs and consequences of all that spending. The math is satisfyingly simple but highly misleading.

It goes like this: Divide the stimulus money spent so far by the estimated number of jobs saved or created. That produces a rather frightening figure on how much money taxpayers are spending for each job. By the critics’ calculations, that’s over $246,000 a job. The reality is more complex.

First, the naysayers’ calculations ignore the value of the work produced. Any cost-per-job figure pays not just for the worker, but for material, supplies and that worker’s output – a portion of a road paved, patients treated in a health clinic, goods shipped from a factory floor, railroad tracks laid.

Second, critics are counting the total cost of contracts that will fuel work for months or years and dividing that by the number of jobs produced only to date. A construction project, for one, may only require a few engineers to get going, with the work force to swell as ground is broken and building accelerates. Hundreds of such projects have been on the books, in which the full value of the contracts is already counted in the spending totals, but few or no jobs have been reported yet because the work is only getting started.

Regards,

Jim

Lack of Health Care Led to 17,000 US Child Deaths – Lack of adequate health care may have contributed to the deaths of some 17,000 US children over the past two decades, according to a study released by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. The research, to be published Friday in the Journal of Public Health, was compiled from more than 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1988 and 2005.

Insurer Informs Customers of Rate Hike — Then Asks Customers to Oppose Reform – Customers of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina are up in arms about a flier the company sent out urging their clientele to oppose health care reform — shortly after sending out a notice informing them their health insurance rates would go up an average of 11 percent.

“Indignant Blue Cross customers have rebelled against the insurer’s message, complaining that their premium dollars have funded such a campaign,” reports the Raleigh-Durham News & Observer.
Over the past few days, Blue Cross customers have started a Web-based campaign to smother the insurance company’s message. In its flier, Blue Cross had included a form letter to North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan, asking Hagan to “please oppose government-run health insurance.” Customers have taken to marking up the form letter and using Blue Cross’ pre-paid postage to ask Hagan to do the opposite:

Christian Broadcasting Network Warns Against ‘Demonic’ Halloween Candy – Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network posted a blog by Kimberly Daniels recently that warns Christians to forgo celebrating Halloween because of its evilness. Daniels specifically calls out candy as a source of soul-molestation:

“During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.”

Pat Robertson Falsely Claims Hate-Crimes Bill Doesn’t Cover Religious Bias – Pat Robertson, at The 700 Club, ripped into the new hate crimes law both yesterday and today on his show. His basis for opposing the law, however, is completely detached from reality. For instance, Robertson argues:

You know, there’s a law – what about a law that says it’s a federal crime to attack somebody because of his religious beliefs? Not a chance!

Robertson seems completely unaware that in fact religious bias is one of the categories of bias crime covered by hate-crime laws — and it has been from the very start, since these laws were first enacted on the state level in the early 1980s!

GOP to Protest Mom and Apple Pie – First, we saw Republicans upset that the President of the United States told school children to study hard and stay in school. Then we saw them angrily deploring that the American President won the Nobel Prize for peace. And now, we see conservatives topping even themselves, as they actually complain about the President calling for Americans to volunteer and do good acts for others.

If this keeps up, they are going to put The Onion out of business. We’re reaching the point where it’s becoming impossible to know whether a headline about the GOP is real or a parody.

Mind you, none of this even includes things like claiming the President is a secret Muslim, an actual terrorist, a socialist, fascist, a Nazi, was born in Kenya, wants to kill old people, and criticized the U.S. Constitution in his senior thesis.

But this is no accidental twist in the space-time continuum. This is the pattern of conservatives in American history. Railing against pretty much all things that are basic to human dignity and decency.
Against Social Security. Medicare. Civil Rights. Raising the minimum wage. A 40-hour work week.
When you look at this larger perspective, then suddenly their being against studying, helping others, peace, and good health for everyone no longer seems so surprising. It’s just all part of a long, established pattern. Part of what “I’ve got mine, you’re on your own, bucko” conservatism is, at heart. (If I can be so bold as to use the word, “heart.”)

There are times it’s appropriate to be conservative. There are conservative issues that have been beneficial. (Enterprise economic zones, for one.) As a personal standard, being conservative often offers important guideposts.

But as a core political philosophy for the benefit of mankind, it is a disaster.

Government exists for one reason: protecting the common good. Conservatism, however, as they show time and again, exists to protect those who have theirs.

When George W. Bush (the second one) ran for president, he hoodwinked a portion of the gullible public into believing that he was a “compassionate conservative.” For all the proper things that a conservative outlook can bring, “compassion” is not one of them.

Compassionate conservative. The expression is one of life’s great oxymorons.

With emphasis on the last two syllables.

Obama’s Declaration Of Swine Flu Emergency Prompts Pro-Swine-Flu Republican Response 😉 – Claiming that the president was preying on the public’s fear of contracting a fatal disease last week when he declared the H1N1 virus a national emergency, Republican leaders announced Wednesday that they were officially endorsing the swine flu. “Thousands of Americans—hardworking ordinary Americans like you and me—already have H1N1,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said during a press conference. “Now Obama wants to take that away from us. Ask yourself: Do you want the federal government making these kinds of health care decisions for you and your family?”

Nation’s Morons March On Washington State 😉 – OLYMPIA, WA—With random cries of “Enough is enough,” “Do something now,” and “Huh?” thousands of the nation’s biggest morons descended on Washington State this week, some 3,000 miles from their intended destination of the nation’s capital.

The march, which had no discernable goal or message began at approximately 8:45 a.m. in front of what the morons called the National Mall, but was actually the courtyard outside the Olympia Public Library.
While authorities maintained that the gathering was largely peaceful and most of the fires were set purely by accident, demonstrators appeared visibly angry about a range of topics. “No Social Security for Medicare!” Michigan idiot Kevin Liston added. “Not in my backyard!”

Throughout the day, the number of protesters grew to include not just morons, but more than 6,000 nimrods, 3,500 dunderheads, and approximately 12,000 of the biggest dips@#ts known to man.
In all, 75,000 of the simpletons turned out, though dozens were killed after walking out into traffic, and hundreds more were lost after wandering into nearby Trillium Park.

“I’m against things,” longtime North Carolina resident Pam Beucher said. “I’m for things.”
“America!” she added.

Regards,

Jim

Republican National Committee Left Disgusting Posters on Their Web Site for Nearly a Week – The Republican National Committee’s web site included a poster showing Mother Teresa feeding a poor, thin child with a caption underneath that read, “Enabling scab-eating mouth breathers will do them no good. How do we expect them to take care of themselves?” It was posted to the site by someone calling himself “Gee Dub,” as in G.W. Bush. It was finally taken down after the news forum Democratic Underground complained.

The site also had a other controversial photos, including one where it appears that John Kerry has a rifle pointed at his head.

Conservatives Misrepresent Global Climate Data – Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians.

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

The trick in trying to convince people that there has recently been global cooling is to compare some recent year to 1998, which was unusually hot. But even that trick doesn’t work if you use 2005 as the comparison year, because 2005 was even hotter. Looking at all the data shows a definite upward trend in temperature.
Saying there’s a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers. “Identifying a downward trend is a case of “people coming at the data with preconceived notions,” said Peterson, author of the book “Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists, which said the book mischaracterizes climate science with “distorted statistics.”

“To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.

Ben Santer, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab, called it “a concerted strategy to obfuscate and generate confusion in the minds of the public and policymakers” ahead of international climate talks in December in Copenhagen.

Supreme Court Justice Scalia Says He Would Have Voted to Keep Segregation – In an appearance at the University of Arizona College of Law, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that if he were on the court in 1954, he would have dissented in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision that ended school segregation based on race.

Appearing on stage with Justice Stephen Breyer, Scalia cautioned against “inventing new rights nobody ever thought existed.” Scalia said he advocates an “originalist” approach to the Constitution, warning against an “evolutionary” legal philosophy that he described as, “close your eyes and decide what you think is a good idea.”

Lieberman Says He’d Filibuster A Health Care Reform Bill With A Public Option – Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) told reporters today that he would in fact filibuster any health care bill he doesn’t agree with–and right now, he doesn’t agree with the public option proposal making its way through the Senate.

Conservative Ad Spreads Rumor About Medicare – A health care ad from the conservative group, Americans for Prosperity, claims that “Medicare will be bankrupt in eight years.” That gives a false impression. The program does have huge financial problems, but there’s no reason to think it’s going out of business as the word “bankrupt” implies.

Republican National Committee Ad Makes False Claims About Health Care Reform – The Republican National Committee claims in a Web ad that Democratic health care plans propose taxes on “charities and small businesses. A doctor’s tax. Taxes on your health insurance. Even a tax on medical supplies.” But the ad exaggerates and misleads in a number of ways:

· It makes a downright false claim that ordinary wheelchairs would be among “medical supplies” subject to a proposed tax on manufacturers and importers. That’s not true: Wheelchairs and roughly half of all other medical devices would be exempt. (When we pointed this out, an RNC official said the ad would be modified, however.)
· It features a proposed tax on medical laboratory services, but that provision has already been dropped.
· The alleged tax on “charities” is actually a proposed limit on federal income tax deductions for charitable gifts by individual taxpayers in the highest brackets, not a tax levied directly on the charities themselves.
· Similarly, the “small business” tax also refers to a proposed tax increase on individuals making more than $280,000 a year ($350,000 for families), only some of whom own small businesses. The vast majority of small-business owners don’t bring in enough to be affected.

The ad claims “your health insurance costs will skyrocket,” but independent experts disagree. The head of the Congressional Budget Office says the biggest tax proposed in the Senate Finance Committee plan, for example, would reduce health care spending, because it cuts a tax incentive that encourages spending.

Regards,

Jim

Wingnuts Quote Satire Piece As Obama ‘Thesis’ – Looks like the wingnuts are so eager to find “proof” for their theories about Obama, they don’t even bother to check the source.

Right-wing pundit Michael Ledeen published an item this week on Barack Obama’s “college thesis,” which Obama allegedly wrote as a student at Columbia 25 years ago. Leeden cited some website, which ran a piece in August.

The paper was called “Aristocracy Reborn,” and in the first ten pages (which were all that reporter Joe Klein — who wrote about it for Time — was permitted to see), the young Obama wrote:
“… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

That’s quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate…. Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write.

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh picked up on Leeden’s report, blasting Obama for the alleged paper.
The first sign of trouble was when Joe Klein noted that he’s never seen or written about Obama’s college thesis, and has “no idea where this report comes from.”

The second sign of trouble was when one stopped to notice that Obama didn’t write a senior thesis (though he did write a thesis-length paper on Soviet nuclear disarmament).

The third sign of trouble was when one clicked on the link that Leeden provided as support and found the word “satire.”

Yes, Leeden and Limbaugh got all worked up, trashing the president for a paper he didn’t write in college 25 years ago, relying on a satirical blog post. And for real entertainment value, notice what Leeden and Limbaugh did when they realized they’d fallen for a dumb joke — they blamed Obama anyway.
Leeden conceded he was wrong and apologized, but added, “It worked because it’s plausible.” Limbaugh said the text he touted was fake, but it didn’t matter because, “I know Obama thinks it.”

John McCain Takes a Lot of Money From Telecom Companies, Then Wants to Give Them the Internet – The “Maverick” just played his hand on Net Neutrality, and the cards reveal a man who’s outsider image doesn’t quite add up.

On Thursday, Sen. John McCain introduced legislation to kill the open Internet, the deceptively named “Internet Freedom Act.” The bill would stop all FCC efforts to have an open and public discussion about proposed Net Neutrality rules.

Study Shows Fox News Bias – Researchers at George Mason and Chapman universities analyzed coverage of President Obama on the first 30 minutes of Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier” because that segment most resembled a network newscast. They found that 77% of the coverage of the president was negative, and only 23% was positive.

The researchers found that news coverage of the president , in general, to be 43% positive (v. 57% negative) from May through mid-August.

Conservative George Will Claims Health Bill is Not Online That’s Been There For Almost a Week – On “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” George Will said in reference to the Senate Finance Committee Health Care Bill, “although they could put this on the internet in 10 minutes, they haven’t put it on the internet, this 1502 pages, because people might discover what’s in there.”However, the bill has been on line since Oct. 19th. Anyone can go read all 1504 pages here. Stephanopoulos did not question Will about his statement.

Current Healthcare System Wastes Up to $800 Billion a Year – The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.

The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.

“America’s healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars, and the opportunities to slow the fiscal bleeding are substantial,” the report reads.

“The bad news is that an estimated $700 billion is wasted annually. That’s one-third of the nation’s healthcare bill,” Kelley said in a statement.

“The good news is that by attacking waste we can reduce healthcare costs without adversely affecting the quality of care or access to care.”

Republican Malpractice Myths

1. An Explosion of Malpractice Litigation
2. A System Plagued by Frivolous Lawsuits
3. Rising Damage Awards Key to Higher Malpractice Premiums
4. Rising Malpractice Insurance Rates Driving Doctors from Practice
5. Medical Malpractice Reform Would Save U.S. $200 Billion Annually
6. Defensive Medicine Costs $200 Billion a Year

Taking Preventive HIV Drugs ‘Pre-Existing Condition,’ Report Says – A woman who took anti-HIV medication after believing she was raped was turned down by multiple insurance companies because she had taken a drug to fight HIV, according to an investigative report Wednesday.

Christina Turner said that she took anti-HIV drugs after believing she was sexually assaulted outside a bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Months later, after losing her health insurance, she was denied coverage by several insurance firms due to the fact she had taken a drug suggesting treatment for HIV.
She never developed an infection, she said, but the drugs taken as a precaution flagged her as a bad insurance risk.

Dallas Cop Tickets Woman for Driving While Not Speaking English – A Dallas rookie police officer erred when he cited a woman earlier this month for being a non-English speaking driver, police said. Seems to me the problem is not merely with Officer Bromley’s assumptions about Driving While Mexican, but those of his training officer, who presumably oversaw the citations as Bromley was writing them up. Now the Dallas police chief is admitting that there have been dozens of such tickets. Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle said this afternoon that his officers have written at least 39 citations to people over the past three years for not speaking English.

Fox News Makes False Claim About Obama Pay Czar Interview – On Fox News, Chris Wallace criticized the Obama administration for “trying to exclude Fox from interviewing pay czar Ken Feinberg” — even though that claim has been debunked. Fox News reported last week that the White House had attempted to keep the network away from Feinberg by refusing to grant Fox an interview with him. But subsequent investigations have found that it was the Treasury Department, not the White House, that arranged the interviews, and that Fox was initially not listed for an interview because they hadn’t requested one.

Bush Administration Only Spent One Hour on Afghanistan Report According to Podesta – John Podesta, now president of the Center for American Progress, said the Bush administration spent only one hour on a report on Afghanistan before handing the issue over to the incoming Obama administration. Podestra also pointed out that the Bush administration sat on Gen. [David] McKiernan’s request for more troops for eight months.

Burning Coal And Oil Kills 20,000 Americans A Year – The burning of coal and oil is killing 20,000 Americans each year, a new Congressional report has found. The National Research Council (NRC), an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, recently found that the United States is paying a heavy price in health and lives lost for its dependence on fossil fuels. In the newly released report, “The Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use,” the NRC explores the “externalities” of energy use, costs that are not factored into its market price. Requested by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the report monetizes these unseen energy costs at $120 billion annually by tracing the full cycle of our energy use—extraction, development, deployment, and waste.

After Twitter shuts down GOP accounts impersonating Dems, party complains of ‘free speech’ infringements – Twitter has shut down 33 fake accounts created by Connecticut Republicans meant to impersonate Democratic state representatives. According to the Hartford Advocate, the GOP scheme was designed “to send out posts under the Democrats’ names mocking the liberal tax-and-spend bastards.” Twitter strictly forbids impersonation “intended to mislead, confuse or deceive others” on its site. However, the state GOP chairman is now complaining that Republicans’ “free speech” rights are being violated.

Regards,

Jim

Glenn Beck’s Idea of ‘Freedom’: Letting Corporations Control What You Read on the Internet – Net neutrality is the fundamental openness principle of the Internet. Whenever you connect to the Internet, net neutrality makes sure that you can connect to everyone else who’s on the Internet. And this has been a tremendous engine for free speech, for economic innovation, for equal opportunity.

But, we are now fighting with some very prominent Internet service providers, very powerful companies, to try to preserve that fundamental openness. These companies want to control where you can go, what speed you can use, and how much they can charge for these special privileges.

Glenn Beck is now pushing the notion that somehow, regulating Internet providers so that they cannot determine or limit public access is the same thing as communism. He says it’s an attack on “freedom of speech” — when it obviously is precisely the opposite. Indeed, his argument boils down to a simple proposition: “Freedom” means letting powerful business interests control the public’s access to the internet.

Beck’s discussion featured a guy named Phil Kerpen from Americans For Prosperity, which has a long history of shilling for whatever right-wing corporate agenda it can suck out money for: tobacco interests, health-insurance companies, corporate polluters have all pitched in money so that AFP can variously promote tobacco, lobby against health-care reform (it was one of the original promoters of the Tea Parties) and push the idea that global warming isn’t really happening. Nice company.

Rush Limbaugh Tells Environmental Reporter to Kill Himself – Rush Limbaugh said of Andrew Revkin, The New York Times’ lead environmental reporter:

“This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin,” Limbaugh quipped. “Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?”

Of environmentalists in general, the conservative heavyweight declared they’re really just would-be suicide bombers.

Goldman Sachs’s Griffiths Says Inequality Helps All – A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.

“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said yesterday at a panel discussion at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The panel’s discussion topic was, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?”

Yes, remember, the only way for everyone to advance is to give more to the people already on top. Huh?

Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus Says, “We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats” – Rep. Gregg Harper, a Mississippi Republican, had a jocular interview with Politico’s Anne Schroeder Mullins and popped out this little knee-slapper:

Mullins: What in the world does the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus do?
Harper: We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition.

Fox News Shows Just Just How far They Will Go – Fox & Friends hosts Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy were gabbing away with Bush-era Press Secretary Dana Perino about how wrong they think it is that the Obama administration is finally standing up against the numerous falsehoods and manipulations aired by Fox News. Doocy says that an article in Newsweek states that the critisism of Fox News is un-American.

The Newsweek article actually states the exact opposite – that Rupert Murdoch and Fox News are un-American. Doocy showed that he couldn’t even correctly read the title of the article, “The O’Garbage Factor. Fox News isn’t just bad. It’s un-American.”

The Ten Most Egregious Fox News Distortions (Videos) – Fox News has defended itself against administration criticism by saying the White House has confused its pundit shows with its news programs. But the network constantly, misleadingly disparages Obama and his administration in its supposedly straight reporting. At the link are videos of ten of the worst examples; there are many more.

Hypocrisy Alert: 67 House Republicans Take Credit for the Economic Bills They Opposed – Here is the House Republicans Hypocrisy Hall of Fame, which has now grown to 67 Members. These Republicans have been caught trying to celebrate the benefits of projects they opposed in President Obama’s recovery bill, the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations bill, and the Omnibus Public Land Management Act.

A few of the entries:

· Representative Pete Olson (TX-22) – Representative Pete Olson showed his hypocrisy after asking the Obama Administration for three billion in funds for NASA from the economic recovery act, which he voted against. Members of the Texas delegation signed the letter, including two Republican Senators and 19 House Republicans who all voted against the recovery act in February. [Texas delegation wants stimulus money for NASA, Houston Chronicle, 10/5/09]
· Representative Eric Cantor (VA-07) – The Culpeper Star-Exponent (Allison Brophy Champion) reports that Democrats are calling out Republican Whip Eric Cantor for what they claim is contradictory support of federal funding for high-speed rail in Virginia. The funding would be part of President Barack Obama’s stimulus package – the same stimulus package Cantor vehemently opposed earlier this year. [Dems: Cantor a hypocrite on high-speed rail, Culpeper Star-Exponent, 6/24/09]
· Representative Aaron Schock (IL-18) – “The biodiesel plant is ready to go. I want to call for a meeting with the state to guarantee $20 million in loans for the building of the plant. This could produce real jobs and a real stimulus in the next 30 days.” [Peoria Journal Star; 2/17/09]
· “Last week, U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock was in East Peoria to award the city’s Police Department a $410,000 federal grant to update its aging in-car video camera systems and portable radios… that money was included in the FY 2009 Omnibus Spending Bill that Schock, a Peoria Republican, voted against. [Peoria Journal Star; 6/29/09]
· Representative Bill Young (FL-10) – Rep. Bill Young of Florida’s congressional Web site contains a page with dozens of links to help Floridians “take advantage of federal stimulus money.” [GOP opposes plan then seeks money, AP, 8/27/09]

Regards,

Jim

Republican Congressman Used Scholarship Charity to Fund His Golf Trips; No Scholarships Ever Awarded – The biggest accomplishment so far of U.S. Rep. Steve Buyer’s scholarship foundation has been to send the Indiana congressman to play golf with donors at luxury locales such as the Bahamas and Disney World.

The fundraising golf outings have raised more than $880,000 for the Frontier Foundation that Buyer founded in 2003. Almost all the contributions are from 20 companies and trade organizations that have interests before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on which Buyer serves.

The foundation has yet to award its first scholarship, and it has handed out only $10,500 in charitable grants.

Of those grants, $4,500 went to a cancer fund run by the chief Washington lobbyist for Eli Lilly and Co. That lobbyist, Joe Kelley, said he is refunding the money because Lilly is among the groups that have supported Buyer’s foundation.

In addition, the foundation gave $1,450 in 2008 to the National Rifle Association Foundation.
The foundation is at the same Monticello address as Buyer’s campaign office. From its inception until August, when a new person was hired, the only paid staffer was Stephanie Mattix, who works on Buyer’s campaign and also is paid by his political action committee, Storm Chasers.

Buyer said the board is made up solely of people with close ties to him, including his daughter, Colleen, who was president until 2008 but who remains on the board; son Ryan; Maria Vandersande, a former press secretary in his congressional office; and Sandra Danford, who joined in August as the lone paid staffer and replaced Mattix. The foundation’s 2003 tax filings show a $2,250 payment to Colleen Buyer.

His defense? Buyer said that given his frequent travel as a member of Congress, jetting to these golf outings is “not fun for me. I know someone else may look at that and go, ‘Wow, he got to go on trips. He got to go to great places other people don’t get to see.’ But for me? It’s work.”

Should You Trust Your Health Insurance Company? The Story of Ian Pearl (as told by himself)

Soon after I was born in 1972, I was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. By the time I was six years old, I was confined to a wheelchair. Doctors doubted I would survive, but I inherited my parents’ determination, and I proved them wrong.

I entered college in 1990 with plans to work in politics and patient advocacy, but at 19, I had a severe setback and I was confronted with a stark choice. My survival would require a machine to breathe and round-the-clock nursing care. A breathing machine usually means life in a nursing facility. But my father’s small business had health insurance from Guardian Life Insurance Co., which promised “Solutions for Life.”
[Later,] Guardian had compiled a “hit list” of its costliest members, including patients with muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, brain injury, and paralysis. Guardian executives referred to us all as “dogs” and “trainwrecks,” and they debated how and when to dump us from the rolls. Laws prohibited the cancellation of the individual members with serious chronic health problems, so Guardian opted to cancel the plan for all members of this specific health plan in New York, an action that violates federal law.

Although my medical costs constituted a minuscule fraction of Guardian’s profits, the company had been trying for 15 years to sidestep its obligations to me. The insurer hired private investigators who searched in vain for evidence to justify canceling the policy. Guardian had similarly targeted the other “dogs” without success. Finally, Guardian launched the unprecedented strategy of withdrawing an established plan throughout an entire state in order to discontinue a few costly members.

Without stricter enforcement of existing laws and the creation of a public health insurance option to keep private insurers honest, it’s only a matter of time before you or someone you love will become the next victim.

Glenn Beck Thinks That Volunteering in Your Community = Communism – The Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), a Hollywood charitable organization, has helped to organize a push in the television industry to encourage volunteerism among the citizenry. The support for volunteerism will be spread across 60 shows, and in some cases woven into the plot lines.

Enter Glenn Beck, who reads in this yet another conspiracy theory that President Obama is using Hollywood in an attempt to turn American in a communist nation: “Well, this is fantastic. It’s almost like we’re living in Mao’s China right now.”

Beck seems worried that by encouraging more volunteerism we’re creating a problem, or a crisis, that will be exploited later, but it is difficult to follow the logic. Basically, Beck’s main point is that President Obama and Hollywood and the media are colluding to control your lives by promoting more community service and civic participation.

Chamber Of Commerce Spends $34 Million On Lobbying In Three Months – The US Chamber of Commerce reported that it spent a mind-boggling $34.7 million lobbying Congress in the third quarter of 2009 — far surpassing the $10 million it spent in the first quarter and the $7.4 million spent in the second.

The National Journal reports that the Chamber’s aggressive lobbying efforts have placed it firmly in opposition to the Obama administration’s first-year priorities. The business association earned the top spot on the Journal’s “Top Health Care Players” list for the first half of the year and has stirred up controversy amongst its own membership due to its strict stance against climate change legislation.

Wall Street 40% Bonus Rise Feeds Spending on $43 Steak, Co-ops – New York investment houses will dole out $26 billion in bonus checks (a 40% increase from last year) by the end of March, said Alan Johnson, president of compensation consultant Johnson Associates Inc. The money will probably boost sales of multimillion-dollar co-op apartments. Delmonico’s, the landmark steakhouse a few blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, sells prime New York strip for $43 and has seen traffic pick up and its catering business improve as firms start to take clients out in bigger groups, said managing partner Dennis Turcinovic, 31, after overseeing a lunch for 150 people last week.
Meanwhile, the city’s unemployment rate is 10.3 percent, the most since 1993.

Obama Wins Family Monopoly Game: Sparks Right Wing Outrage 😉 – Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced this morning that the President and his family played a game of monopoly in the White House kitchen this past Sunday, which the President won. Reaction from the right was instantaneous and vitriolic.

Bill O’Reilly decried the callousness with which the President of the United States would treat the real estate crisis as “just some game.”

Similarly outraged, Glenn Beck demonstrated on a blackboard how the President’s buying Short Line, Pennsylvania, B & O Railroads and the Electric Company were a clear indication of his Socialist plot for a complete government takeover of industry, not to mention the obvious land-grabbing in the game itself.

Sean Hannity questioned the President’s victory in the game, itself, insinuating that perhaps it was indicative of shady financial dealings, particularly in the purchase of Illinois Avenue, which is “of course, the result one would expect when you’re dealing with Chicago politics, payoffs, bribes and cronyism.”

Lou Dobbs proceeded to rant about the dangers of illegal aliens getting out of jail free and draining the Community Chest.

Regards,

Jim

Senator Kyl Doubts People Die From Lack of Health Insurance; But Harvard Study Shows They Do – Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) told NBC’s David Gregory that the war in Afghanistan is a “necessity” but health care reform is not as important. [For conservatives without conscience, there is little difference between battling a mortal enemy and not caring for others not like them – both are enabled by an “empathy deficit.”]

“And is it a necessity to tackle the fact that there are more and more Americans who die because they don’t have access to health insurance?” asked Gregory.

Kyl disagreed with the premise of the question. “I’m not sure that it’s a fact that more and more people die because they don’t have health insurance. But because they don’t have health insurance, the care is not delivered in the best and most efficient way,” said Kyl.

A Harvard study released last month said that 45,000 deaths are linked to lack of health insurance coverage each year — and that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher death risk than their privately-insured counterparts.

Finance Unleashed: It’s Wonderful Effect on the Financial Sector and Its Terrible Effect on Us – From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

Because everyone was getting richer, and the health of the national economy depended so heavily on growth in real estate and finance, no one in Washington had any incentive to question what was going on. Instead, Fed Chairman Greenspan and President Bush insisted metronomically that the economy was fundamentally sound and that the tremendous growth in complex securities and credit-default swaps was evidence of a healthy economy where risk was distributed safely.

The response so far is perhaps best described as “policy by deal”: when a major financial institution gets into trouble, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineer a bailout over the weekend and announce on Monday that everything is fine.

Some of these deals may have been reasonable responses to the immediate situation. But it was never clear (and still isn’t) what combination of interests was being served, and how. Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and claimed it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and simple.

Click on image for details.

Goldman Sachs’ Magic Trick – A huge amount of taxpayer money was given to Goldman Sachs at the apex of the crisis — which they then use to borrow against at $20 or $30 for every $1. Which at 30x equals $2.1 trillion in available capital.

As one of the only banks in the world with money at the time, Goldman Sachs was able to buy billions in distressed assets around the world at record low prices — only to watch $23.7 trillion in US taxpayer money be deployed during the past year to re-inflate the asset’s values that Goldman had purchased with our tax money.

The question is not why did we bail out the banks.

The question is why did we give the banks billions of our money so they could then buy assets by the trillions with our money and they keep the profits?

The answer is Henry Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO who ran the US Treasury, and Tim Geithner, current Treasury Secretary who at the time ran the New York Federal Reserve, willingly delivered Goldman Sachs the $70 Billion — with no strings attached.

So what can we do?

1. We must demand the return of those investment gains made with America’s money – it was stolen from us and we can get it back. Demand Claw Backs – and not from the future but from the past – That is where our money is.

2. We must have an exchange for all credit derivatives — the current version is riddled with loopholes that let banks avoid transparency by mobbing offshore and prohibiting government regulators from being able to force the use of the exchange by the banks.

How Moody’s Sold Its Ratings – and Sold Out Investors – As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody’s Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody’s punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.

Instead, Moody’s promoted executives who headed its “structured finance” division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors. It also stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that soon were downgraded to junk. Such products have another name now: “toxic assets.”

Pennsylvania Republican Party Uses Hammer And Sickle Symbols For Obama – Some of 55 years after the vicious, Red-baiting tactics of Joseph McCarthy were repudiated by America’s better angels, the state GOP is picking up the tattered banner of McCarthyism and running with it — literally, in fact, with this banner ad (top) on a popular political Web site. In this case, it’s hard to say what is more appalling — equating the sitting president of the United States with the Soviet dictators who slaughtered their political enemies and sent others to brutal gulags, or the cause this ad is promoting: The election of a judge to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Republicans Just Leaning on Their Mops – Obama’s come up with political gold to counter any attempt to pass a Republican mess off as his own, or criticize him for not cleaning it up fast enough. And we need to repeat it ad infinitum and scream it from rooftops. This needs to become the political catchphrase of the next year.

President Obama speaking in San Francisco Friday said, “I’m busy and Nancy busy with our mop cleaning up somebody else’s mess –- we don’t want somebody sitting back saying, you’re not holding the mop the right way. Why don’t you grab a mop, why don’t you help clean up. You’re not mopping fast enough. That’s a socialist mop. Grab a mop –- let’s get to work.”

It’s an inspired three-word challenge to the GOP. Devastating, actually – because it both reminds people of the damage the GOP did while not seeming to dwell on the past or to score partisan points (while actually doing both).

Now, understand here, I’m not trying to head off legitimate, substantive criticism of the president or his policies, be they from the left or the right. There’s plenty of that and no three-word catch slogan could or should diminish those. But as a counter to the brain-dead, disingenuous, hypocritical, and often baseless criticism from the people whose messes he is cleaning, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Republican Party Chairmen Say DeMint is Like A Jew “Watching Our Nation’s Pennies” – Two South Carolina County Republican Party chairmen stepped up to rebut criticism of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) in a newspaper editorial Sunday. But their defense of the senator might be overshadowed by their use of an anti-Semitic stereotype to praise him.

After a Democratic state senator wrote in The State that DeMint didn’t bring enough money back home, Bamberg County GOP Chairman Edwin Merwin and Orangeburg County GOP Chairman James Ulmer responded that he was just looking after the nation’s pennies — like a Jew would.

Whatever Bad Deed You Need, There’s a Rep for That – “If you want to heckle the president during his address to the nation, there’s a Rep. for that.”

That’s the opening of a new ad created by a blogger attacking House Republicans using the language and style of Apple Computer’s iPhone ads. Detailing outlandish statements made by Republicans in Congress, the announcer — whose tone and intonation closely mirrors that of the iPhone pitchman — substitutes the word “Rep.” (for representative) instead of “app.”

“If you want to suggest that smacking around your wife doesn’t truly count as assault, and neither does killing homosexuals, there’s a Rep. for that,” he remarks.

“Whether you want to refute scientific research by quoting biblical prophecy,” he continues, “declare that wives should be submissive to their husbands or pass laws to establish the bible as the word of God for all Americans, we’ve got the Reps. you need.”

Republican Reaction to Barack Obama Winning Nobel Peace Prize 😉 – “It still doesn’t live up to the time George W. Bush caught a seven-and-a-half-pound perch in his own private lake. Seven and a half pounds!”

Regards,

Jim

Derivatives Reform Weakened By Two Little-Noticed Amendments – Two little-noticed amendments inserted Wednesday into legislation seeking to strengthen regulation of derivatives will allow private industry to continue to set rules and largely self-regulate, tying the hands of regulators who want more say in how these exotic financial instruments are traded.

Offered by Rep. Judy Biggert, an Illinois Republican, the provisions take away power the Obama administration proposed giving to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the regulator in charge of policing most types of derivatives. Rather, the power to supervise how derivatives are traded will rest with the clearinghouses and exchanges that house them. Furthermore, when the exchanges and clearinghouses change or offer up new rules, the CFTC will not be able to review them before they are finalized to ensure, for example, that they comply with existing law. Instead, the rules proposed by private industry will immediately go into effect.

“It’s a return to the regulatory environment that led us into the meltdown,” said Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland Law School and former director of trading and markets at the CFTC. “It would tie the hands of effective regulation by the CFTC to the detriment of economic recovery. The [Obama] administration had it completely right in its proposal.”

CFTC’s lack of power in this area can be traced back to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000. That bill, pushed by Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, whose wife once headed the agency, deregulated derivatives trading and officially sanctioned what had been until then the legally murky world of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, which are privately-negotiated derivatives contracts.

Banks Continue to Steal From the Taxpayers Who Bailed Them Out – In a world where real competition, modern technology and lack of special government standing means most American businesses have no choice but to adapt and innovate — Wall Street’s wimps only apparent skill is rigging the game.

While things like stock and bond trading became a very low margin business because of modern information — the legalization in 2000 of a secretive market for crooked insurance with no transparency or accountability has been an absolute boon.

They called it credit derivatives — where banks and insurers offer to effectively “insure” financial assets. For instance, they were used to insure much of the real estate and pension liabilities in America the past 10 years.

To make money, the banks exploit two loopholes. The first — overcharge customers by depriving them of the type of competitive pricing only possible on an exchange like the New York Stock Exchange or Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

And the second, exploit the lack of transparency to hide the fact that you are keeping little or no money to pay claims while selling insurance and collecting fees on every house and pension payment in America.
The key to success here is that when there is a default or claim against that so-called credit insurance — the banks keep all the past payment — and the taxpayer under threat of collapse pays off the claims while getting nothing in return.

This quite simply, is a brilliant way to steal our money.

Now this method of “business” is only possible if the government continues to allow these crooked insurance contracts to be written in secret, allows them to hold little or no money in reserve for payment and allows them to sell enough coverage on enough vital national assets that if there is a default — the taxpayer has no choice but to pay.

Tell your congressman.

Insider Trading for Illegal Profits – One of America’s wealthiest men was among six hedge fund managers and corporate executives arrested Friday in a hedge fund insider trading case that prosecutors say generated more than $25 million in illegal profits and should be a wake-up call for Wall Street.

Raj Rajaratnam, a partner in Galleon Management and a portfolio manager for Galleon Group, a hedge fund with up to $7 billion in assets under management, was accused of conspiring with others to trade based on insider information about several publicly traded companies

Fox News Host Tries to Credit President Bush for Economic Recovery – Fox News host Neal Cavuto appears to think that the United States is enjoying an economic recovery. Perhaps more surprisingly, he’s talking up the idea that former President George W. Bush is somehow responsible for it. Cavuto made his claims after a Wednesday segment seeming to celebrate the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s return to 10,000.

However, William K. Black, a professor of economics and law with the University of Missouri, would likely disagree. He told PBS host Bill Moyers during a televised interview in April that at the epicenter of the financial collapse were a spate of what he called “liars loans,” effectively creating a black hole of unfettered, unmeasured risk to which all else was drawn. The “liars loans,” thanks to regulators during the Bush years who essentially abandoned their jobs, were packaged with triple-A ratings and repeatedly resold as exotic securities, effectively creating a financial vacuum.

“Now, a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk — that’s why it’s toxic — and you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise,” he said. “And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it’s scandalous what came out.

Also, see this recounting of Bush’s Budget Blunders.

CNN Pundit’s Firm Bought Anti-Health Reform Ad Time – One of CNN’s regular commentators is Alex Castellanos, who often speaks out against health insurance reform on the network. He has now been shown to be associated with an advertising campaign by America’s Health Insurance Plans, an association of about 1,300 insurers. AHIP opposes a government-run plan. CNN only identifies Castellanos as a Republican strategist and has not disclosed his association with AHIP in the past.

Castellanos — best known as the creator of the racially-charged “Hands” advertisement — was hired as a CNN contributor three days after the New York Times reported that he was part of John McCain’s “panel of outside advertising consultants.” CNN subsequently failed to disclose Castellanos’s connection to the McCain campaign while he was, for instance, applauding the McCain campaign’s ads.

Republican Senator Misinforms and Makes Threat – Republican Senator Orrin Hatch is not taking too kindly to having his office protested by MoveOn.org for being in the pocket of the health care industry. Hatch said this on MSNBC:

“Now by the way MoveOn.org is a scurrilous organization. It’s funded by George Soros. He’s about as left wing as you can find in this country. And they’re up to just one thing, and that is to smear good people. And frankly, they’re not gonna smear me without getting kicked in the teeth by me.”

Stay classy there Hatch. MoveOn’s primary source of funding is its members. MoveOn.org raised nearly 60 million dollars in 2004 from its members alone, with an average donation of $50. They received only 2.4 % of their funds from George Soros.

US Pays $400 per Gallon for Gas in Afghanistan – Pentagon officials have told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee a gallon of fuel costs the military about $400 by the time it arrives in the remote locations in Afghanistan where U.S. troops operate. The Pentagon comptroller’s office provided the fuel statistic to the House Appropriations Defense panel staff when it was asked for a breakdown of why every 1,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan costs $1 billion.

Republican Senators Demand That Net Neutrality Rule Making Must Be Bipartisan (Meaning Non-Existent) – Now out of power, the Republican party is preaching the virtues of bipartisanship. A new letter from 18 Republican senators to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski opens with a line of congratulations but moves quickly to the real business at hand: telling Genachowski that he had better not plan on moving forward with his ambitious net neutrality agenda unless he has bipartisan support.

The two Republican Commissioners on the FCC are patently skeptical of the need for net neutrality, however. When Genachowski unveiled the general principles that would guide his decision making, Commissioners Meredith Baker and Robert McDowell issued a statement of their own in response:
“Of the only two Internet-related disputes to date cited in your speech, one occurred five years ago. Our view is that it is harmful for the Commission to impose industry-wide rules based upon speculation about what may occur in the future.”

By definition, if it has happened in the past it isn’t just “speculation about what may happen in the future,” but the point still stands. In the US, there have not been many documented instances of neutrality violations—though the Comcast P2P throttling case last year was quite significant.

The issue is also complicated by the fact that the worries of the net neutralists didn’t arise from fever dreams but from the public pronouncements of people like former AT&T boss Ed Whitacre, people whose stated goal was to charge content providers more money for faster access to customers because Internet companies were somehow “using my pipes for free.” While this didn’t happen, it certainly wasn’t because carriers didn’t want it to happen.

Regards,

Jim

North Carolina Church to Burn ‘Satan’s Books,’ Including Works of Mother Teresa – A Baptist Church near Asheville, N.C., is hosting a “Halloween book burning” to purge the area of “Satan’s” works, which include all non-King James versions of the Bible, popular books by many religious authors and even country music.

Church leaders deem Good News for Modern Man, the Evidence Bible, the New International Version Bible, the Green Bible and the Message Bible, as well as at least seven other versions of the Bible as “Satan’s Bibles,” according to the website. Attendees will also set fire to “Satan’s popular books” such as the work of “heretics” including the Pope, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and Rick Warren.

“I believe the King James version is God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant and infallible word of God,” Pastor Marc Grizzard told a local news station of his 14-member parish.

The event also seeks to destroy “Satan’s music” which includes every genre from country, rap and rock to “soft and easy” and “Southern Gospel” and” contemporary Christian.”

“They are burning so much stuff I’ve dubbed them the hypocritical Christian Taliban,” said David Lynch, a resident of nearby Asheville, N.C.

Republican Leader’s Spokesman Says Religion is Not a Choice But Being Gay Is – The spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) says you were born a Christian, not born gay. He says religion is not a choice. Questioned about why the House’s top Republican opposes a hate crimes bill penalizing violence against gays, his spokesman said he “supports existing federal protections (based on race, religion, gender, etc) based on immutable characteristics,” just not protections for things like being gay — which conservatives occasionally claim is a choice. “He does not support adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes,” Boehner spokesman Kevin Smith added. The statement was made in an email to CBS News.

Lou Dobbs Promotes Hate by Telling Lies According to Latino Activist Group – In a three-minute ad it posted to YouTube on Tuesday, BastaDobbs.com, put together by the Latino advocacy group Presente.org and numerous local activist groups across the US, accuses the host of Lou Dobbs Tonight of “promot[ing] hate by telling lies,” and points out that the CNN anchor has spread misinformation about America’s undocumented immigrants.

The ad links Dobbs’ coverage with growing violence against the Latino minority in the US, pointing to an FBI statistic that shows ethnically motivated violence against Latinos in the US jumped by 40 percent between 2003 and 2007. Lou Dobbs Tonight began airing in 2003.

The BastaDobbs ad refers to the shooting death of 10-year-old Brisenia Flores, of Arivaca, Arizona, for which three people involved in the Minuteman movement were arrested. It then cuts to a shot of Dobbs declaring: “I support the Minuteman project and the fine Americans that make it up, and all they’ve accomplished, fully relentlessly and proudly.”

The ad also shows Dobbs claiming more than once that one-third of the US prison population is composed of illegal immigrants, only to be corrected — six percent of the prison population is made up of foreign nationals, meaning that fewer than six percent are illegal. Another segment shows Dobbs linking illegal immigration to tuberculosis, leprosy and malaria.

Joe the Heart Patient 😉 –

I want to keep the health insurance I have—which is no health insurance. I was dropped when I had a heart attack. My insurance company called it a preexisting condition, and they were right. Heart attacks have been around a very long time. The important thing is that I treasure my insurance company’s free market right to maximize profits at all moral and ethical costs. I would willingly die defending that right. And now, finally, I may get that chance.

I try not to worry about my needless impending death. I don’t lose sleep over the pointless suffering between now and then, and I refuse to get down about leaving my wife and children behind without any health care of their own. What I do worry about is the prospect of private insurance juggernauts experiencing a ten to fifteen percent decline in annual gross revenue due to the availability of a public option. Now that’s scary.

I don’t have a doctor. But if I did, I wouldn’t want some bureaucrat coming between me and him. Like Sarah Palin, I am against Obama’s death panels. I prefer Liberty Mutual’s death panels, because at least they’re American.

I am dead set against government sponsored preventive care. Preventive care not only weakens our natural defenses against disease but also casts our government in the role of parent. My own parents had a different approach to medical concerns. When my right foot hurt, Dad would stomp on my left foot, and vice-versa. Mom said he picked this up while watching old episodes of The Three Stooges, proving once again that we can certainly learn a lot from our forefathers.

The fact is, the misguided outcry for a public option—or any sort of healthcare for that matter—represents a serious threat to intelligent design. Intelligent design is a constitutionally guaranteed right granted by our nation’s founders. Under intelligent design, we evolve into a superior civilization as the strong survive, the weak perish, and the really weak run Blackwater.

I believe the Earth was created in six days by an all-powerful benevolent God and that on the seventh day He created our current healthcare system in His own image. Tampering with the Lord’s healthcare system is heresy and will surely bring the wrath of nations down on this once great land. When that day comes, we owe it to ourselves to bleed to death and resist the evil temptation to show up at a free clinic.

Has the Military Mission in Afghanistan Become Lost? – By Senator Robert Byrd

Few subjects weigh more heavily upon a president than the decision to send our sons and daughters to war. Such a commitment demands the clearest of clear thinking, including a thoroughly dispassionate assessment of goals, risks, and strategies. This is difficult terrain for any American president, especially when faced with conflicting views from advisors, Congress, and the American public.

I have become deeply concerned that in the eight years since the September 11 attacks, the reason for the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan has become lost, consumed in some broader scheme of nation-building which has clouded our purpose and obscured our reasoning.

General McChrystal, our current military commander in Afghanistan, has requested 30,000-40,000 additional American troops to bolster the more than 65,000 American troops already there. I am not clear as to his reasons and I have many, many questions. What does General McChrystal actually aim to achieve?
So I am compelled to ask: does it really, really take 100,000 U.S. troops to find Osama bin Laden? If al Qaeda has moved to Pakistan what will these troops in Afghanistan add to the effort to defeat al Qaeda? What is really meant by the term defeat in the parlance of conventional military aims when facing a shadowy global terrorist network? And, what of this number 100,000? Does the number of 100,000 troops include support personnel? Does it include government civilians? Does it include defense and security contractors? How many contractors are already there in Afghanistan? How much more will all this cost? How much in dollars; how much in terms of American blood? Will the international community step up to the plate and bear a greater share of the burden?

…

Regards,

Jim