Day: August 3, 2009
Senate GOP to Oppose More Funding for Popular, Successful ‘Clunkers’ Stimulus Program
The “Cash for Clunkers” program has been a success by all metrics. Car buyers who traded in their older cars for up to $4,500 in downpayments for new, more energy efficent vehicles depleted the program’s $1 billion funding within the first week. As many as 250,000 cars were sold last week, according to government estimates.
These sales benefited the local economies in the hometowns of the dealerships as well as, ultimately, the auto industry.
So who would oppose adding another $2 billion to this win-win deal? You guessed it. The Party of No:
“My children and grandchildren are going to have to pay for these cars and we’re helping auto dealers while there are thousands of other small businesses that aren’t getting the help,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “The role of the federal government is not to run the used car business.”
“We’re definitely going to debate it and I’ve heard that John McCain is going to stand up and try to stop it and I’m going to work with him every way that I can,” he said. “This is crazy to try to rush this thing through again.”
“I just think this is a great example of the stupidity that’s coming out of Washington right now, and I think Americans realize the numbers that we’re throwing around don’t work,” DeMint added.
Unless these pols are looking at polling that shows that no Republican voters are taking advantage of this deal — and the chances of that are next to nil — this kneejerk opposition is even crazier than the rest.
Local Publisher Regrets Not Covering Hate Crime Murder of Ryan Skipper
Just ran across this item in the Daily City and had to pass it along. In an interview about the 15th anniversary of the founding of Watermark, a gay news source serving Tampa Bay and other Florida metro areas, publisher Tom Dyer acknowledged missing an important story in his market and to the nation:
In the final analysis, Ryan Skipper was assaulted twice — first, fatally by his homophobic killers and then in the media by the homophobic sheriff of Polk County.
[Daily City]: In 15 years of publishing Watermark, what has been your biggest regret?
Tom Dyer: We should have jumped on the Ryan Skipper story immediately. This young Polk County man’s murder just a few years ago was every bit as gruesome as Matthew Shepard’s, and every bit as telling about the persistence of violent homophobia in our area. There was almost no coverage in the mainstream press, and I let that influence my judgment. Big mistake, and I still regret it.
The fact that there was no coverage in the mainstream media about Ryan’s death in March 2007 is directly attributable to egregious malpractice by the top law enforcement official involved in the case, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.
At his first news conference about the case, four days or so after the murder and hours after the arrests of Joe Bearden and William Brown, a couple of young meth heads with criminal records, Judd presented the media with a tick-tock of events around the murder that was based entirely on accounts given to investigators by Bearden and Brown.
According to Judd, Ryan — a clean-cut, 25-year-old student — was out looking for rough trade that night and picked up Bearden in what was purported to be a known cruising area in the rural community of Wahneta. He then took Bearden home where, interestingly, they did not have sex but instead smoked pot and schemed to forge checks using Ryan’s computer.
That mistaken profiling of a gay victim would be bad enough, but the clincher came in Judd’s own take on what happened:
“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”
In other words, Ryan was asking to be murdered and got what he deserved.
Palin Threatens Blogger with Lawsuit over Divorce Story
It’s predictable that Sarah Palin would threaten to sue a blogger who posted a story claiming Palin and her husband Todd were divorcing. Palin has shown that she can’t let any slight or grievance go unanswered, no matter how small, and no matter how relatively insignificant the source.
She apparently has a bottomless supply of money to pay lawyers to address these sorts of things. But the fact that her lawyer threatened to serve the blogger with the lawsuit at the kindergarten where he or she works is a new low.
From Alaska Report:
Thomas Van Flein, Sarah Palin’s lawyer, threatened Saturday to serve libel papers at a kindergarten to the owner of the highly trafficked “ImmoralMinority” blog for a divorce story on the Palins. The blog was given until 3pm Saturday to remove the story and post a retraction. The blogger stands by the story…
“Gryphen”, the owner of the blog, laughed off the threat and told Alaska Report – “Nothing that I wrote in my post was meant to be malicious. I trust my source and simply reported what I had been told.
Threatening to serve legal papers to an educator in a room full of five year olds? Now that is malicious.”
Alaska Report says that this is the fourth threat of a lawsuits from Palin, but that none of the threats have been carried out so far.
Good politicians ignore stories like this, even if they’re true, because these sorts of stories, true and false, come with the territory and — especially when the stories are true — the politician’s efforts to stifle the stories are also news and only serve to perpetuate the story she’s trying to tamp down.
