In the span of a mere 50 seconds on Thursday’s NBC Nightly News, Andrea Mitchell managed to apply a conservative ideological tag four times to Pat Toomey, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, yet she failed to issue even a single label for liberal Democratic candidate Joe Sestak.
Sitting at the anchor desk with Brian Williams, Mitchell made clear Toomey “is a Republican fiscal conservative who was fiscally conservative before the Tea Party was cool,” soon repeating, in the narration for her story, how “Toomey is a former Congressman and a fiscal conservative” – all before driving home his ideology once more as she recalled that he “led a conservative Washington interest group.”
The US Civil Rights Commission has concluded in an extensive report that the strange decision to dismiss a case the Department of Justice had won by default against a New Black Panther Party activist for voter intimidation came after the involvement of political appointees. Furthermore, and most embarrassing, the 131-page report accuses the Department of Justice of attempting to cover up that involvement, and that the cover-up came from “high-level” officials in the DoJ. The USCRC concludes that the Civil Rights Division is “at war with its core mission”:
The Justice Department has tried to hide the involvement of high-level political officials in the dismissal of a controversial voter-intimidation lawsuit against members of the New Black Panther Party, a federal commission concluded in a draft report.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said the department’s reversal in the case, which drew criticism from conservatives, indicates that its Civil Rights Division is failing to protect white voters and is “at war with its core mission of guaranteeing equal protection of the laws for all Americans.” …
The commission’s draft report said the department’s “repeated attempts to obscure” the involvement of political appointees in the dismissal “raise questions about what the Department is trying to hide. ”
The report accuses the Justice Department of stonewalling the commission’s investigation and of failing to turn over key documents and make witnesses available. Schmaler disputed that, saying the department provided more than 4,000 pages of documents.
The report covers some $7.5 billion spent to create about 27,400 jobs — as best as can be gleaned from the report, including giving the projects the benefit of doubt when the jobs figures are unclear.
That works out to about $273,723 per job.
The top ten egregious projects described in the report are:
$4.38 million/job to build an elevated highway in Tampa, Florida. (Project #14 in the report)
$3.67 million/job to rehabilitate the 107-year old Atlantic Avenue Viaduct in New York City. (Project #27)
$2.91 million/job to provide broadband service in western Kansas. (Project #38)
$1.87 million/job to seismically retrofit the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. (Project #37)
$1.46 million/job to rehabilitate the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. (Project #19)
$1.39 million/job to install smart meters in Chattanooga, TN. (Project #51)
$1.02 million/job to conduct cancer research. (Project #2)
$985,000/job to install solar panels at the Denver Federal Center. (Project #41)
$967,000/job to build houses/roads in Nevada County, CA. (Project #30)
$940,000/job to widen I-94 in Wisconsin. (Project #10)
Applying the outrageous average cost/job for these 100 projects to the $787 billion stimulus plan means that the Recovery Act should have produced 2.88 million jobs. However since the Recovery Act, we’ve actually lost about 2.5 million jobs.
Recovery Act? Indeed. The nomenclature is reminiscent of Chairman Mao’s own “recovery” program — the Great Leap Forward.
Lost in all of the attention paid to the heavy spending by Republican-oriented independent groups in this year’s midterm elections is that Democratic candidates have generally wielded a significant head-to-head financial advantage over their Republican opponents in individual competitive races.
Even with a recent surge in fund-raising for Republican candidates, Democratic candidates have outraised their opponents over all by more than 30 percent in the 109 House races The New York Times has identified as in play. And Democratic candidates have significantly outspent their Republican counterparts over the last few months in those contests, $119 million to $79 million….
