Teabaggers are upset because Congressman Perriello agrees with them. Seriously. He met with some of them, and told them of congress that “balanced budget acts or pay as you go legislation or any of that is the only thing, if you don’t tie our hands, we will keep stealing.” He figure if congress doesn’t limit themselves, then their spending will keep growing. And they’re angry that he said this! These people are breathtakingly dumb.
This is what the insulation in the walls of our new house looks like:
It’s euphemistically referred to as “blown cellulose,” but it’s really just shredded newspaper. If we look closely, we can read some words on it. The amount of newspaper used to insulate our house is as much as we’d go through in twenty years. (If, y’know, we read printed newspapers.) It’s a great insulator, but it uses a stunningly small amount of energy to create, when compared to fiberglass and other forms of insulation commonly used in contemporary houses. It’s sprayed with borate, so insects don’t want it, it’s fireproof, and it won’t mold. (Because it’s packed more tightly, preventing the flow of air within walls, it’s actually more fire resistant than fiberglass.) For you energy geeks out there, it’s an R value of 4.0, compared to fiberglass batts’ 3.2.
It’s a small thing, but it’s one of dozens of such touches that I really like about our new house. The drywall went up this week so, with any luck, we’ll never see our newspaper insulation again.
The Senate Rules Committee killed a bill today that would have put legislators’ voting records online. The House passed freshman Republican Jim LeMunyon’s HB778 overwhelmingly. But the Senate Rules Committee—overwhelmingly Democratic, incidentally—barely allowed it out of subcommittee, and then killed it on a 13-2 vote. Officially, they think it’d just be too darned hard to put that data on their website. Which, the Roanoke Times editorial board points out today, seems unlikely, given that I’ve provided that very data on Richmond Sunlight for several years now, in the form of spreadsheets downloadable from any legislator’s page on the site. Realistically, they likely killed this because they don’t want their voting records to be available for opposition research.
Anyhow, just to stick a thumb in the eye of Senate Democrats, this evening I put together an HTML version of the same data, making it easier for folks to access and for search engines to index. It took me—no kidding—about twenty minutes. (For example, here’s my senator’s 2009 voting record.) As always, every scrap of legislative data on Richmond Sunlight comes directly from the legislature’s website, so I don’t have access to any special fairy dust that the Senate doesn’t have. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t care who’s in charge of the legislature, transparency is essential. Any Democrats who thinks I’m going to go easy on them had best think again.
In today’s Daily Progress, they’ve talked with Laurence Verga about his remarks about President Obama:
Laurence Verga, one of the seven Republicans hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Ivy, has clarified recent remarks that he said have been “mischaracterized as racist.”
[...]
On Tuesday, Verga released a statement with an unedited transcript of his remarks at the debate. The transcript, he said, shows he meant that Obama’s foreign policy is “political correctness run awry” because it is too soft on terrorism.
[...]In Verga’s statement clarifying the remarks, he said the full transcript of his comments show he meant that political correctness has damaged the nation’s ability to fight “global war against jihad.”
To consider the veracity of his defense, let’s look at the text of his remarks, in the context in which he’s saying that they need to be placed:
The biggest threat to our country right now is ourselves. Not the people in this room, but the people that voted the current administration in are the biggest threats. And what that is, is political correctness run awry. We are in a war. There is a global jihad against the United States of America. This jihad wants to take away our freedom. They don’t like our freedom, they don’t like our religion, they don’t like anything about us. And what we need to do is stand up, forget the political correctness and fight this war. To win this war. And make sure that Americans on our soil and internationally are secure.
He goes on a little longer, about Israel and Iran.
Reading this over, one sees Verga’s trouble. He’s making two separate statements. The first is about politics:
The biggest threat to our country right now is ourselves. Not the people in this room, but the people that voted the current administration in are the biggest threats. And what that is, is political correctness run awry.
And the second is about war:
We are in a war. There is a global jihad against the United States of America. This jihad wants to take away our freedom. They don’t like our freedom, they don’t like our religion, they don’t like anything about us. And what we need to do is stand up, forget the political correctness and fight this war. And make sure that Americans on our soil and internationally are secure.
These are two barely related thoughts. The first is the patently stupid assertion that a majority of Americans hate America, led by the president, and that electing him is “political correctness run awry.” The second is the usual pap that terrorists hate us because they “don’t like our freedom,” that we have to “stand up” and “fight this war.”
Now, we’re fighting precisely as many wars as when George Bush was president, Guantanamo is open for business, the Patriot Act remains the law of the land, etc. Unless he’s advocating that we invade a third country, I can’t understand what he’s promoting here.
Verga’s difficulty here is that he’s claiming that his prior statement encompassed—beforehand—the seemingly unrelated one that he made a minute later. By way of comparison, imagine that he said this:
You can tell that President Obama is on the side of terrorists because of his race. We are in a war. There is a global jihad against the United States of America. This jihad wants to take away our freedom. They don’t like our freedom, they don’t like our religion, they don’t like anything about us. And what we need to do is stand up, forget the political races and fight this war. And make sure that Americans on our soil and internationally are secure.
Imagine that Verga said that, and then said “golly, I didn’t mean the president’s race, I was talking about political races, as I mentioned a minute later.” Yeah. Bullshit.
We’re left with two possibilities here. The first is that Laurence Verga was attacking President Obama along racial lines. The second is that Laurence Verga is perhaps the most incompetent public speaker that has ever graced a stage in the Fifth District, who made a gaffe of stunning proportions. I don’t know the man, I don’t know his character (other than that he’s publicly accused me of being the biggest threat to America’s national security), and so I figure it’s theoretically possible that he’s just accidentally said something enormously stupid. I think the evidence supports pretty strongly that he’s racist, but not being psychic, I can’t know his heart.
Best case, Verga (along with Jim McKelvey) merely accused half of the district’s voters of being America’s worst enemies. Worse case, he did that and he’s racist. Either way, with Bradley Rees out of the race, Verga’s now my man for the nomination. Whether racist or incompetent, this is definitely the guy I’d like to have as the face of Fifth District Republicans.
The L.A. Times reports on Orange County’s lawsuit against a couple who replaced their lawn with xeriscaping, dropping their household water usage by 80% by simply switching from grass to native ground cover. Under county law, at least 40% of a yard has to be covered in live plants. Never mind that the southwest is a desert, likely facing becoming a long-term dust bowl, and that a lawn is the most asinine use of water that one can envision for the region. (I have a friend who lived in Charlottesville who went around and around with the city for years over his lawn. His backyard was a wetland. The city wanted him to keep it mowed and dry. He figured nature knew best.) The excellent Elizabeth Kolbert had a brilliant story about laws and xeriscaping in The New Yorker in 2008. It’s a great example of how, at its best, The New Yorker can take a topic that seems terribly boring (a history of lawns) and turn it into something vital. If you’ve got even the faintest interest in this topic, I recommend reading Kolbert’s piece, then the Times piece. (Via Slashdot)
The RNC has been humiliated by the leak of an internal fund-raising slideshow that mocks their donors and promotes their plan to raise money based on fear. The part that stands out for me is the “Evil Empire” slide, in which they compare the three top Democrats to a trio of bad guys: Barack Obama as The Joker, Nancy Pelosi as Cruella DeVille, and Harry Reid as…Scooby Doo? WTF?
For the record, here is a video clip of congressional candidate Laurence Verga’s racist remarks about President Obama:
This doesn’t add new information, but it does prevent anybody from claiming that his remarks are being taken out of context, as I understand his supporters are claiming. This is an excerpt from the Lynchburg Tea Party’s video of the entire debate, provided by member Kurt Feigel. See it in a larger context still, if you’re interested.
For all the complaining I do about how building a house keeps me too busy to do all of the other stuff I used to have time for (and I’m not even swinging a hammer!), here’s a photo of where it’s at. The roof is on, the (unpainted) siding is on, all of the windows and doors are in, the porch is on, the plumbing and wiring is in, and the insulation is in. This week, drywall. Then we need Dominion to run power to the house (we’ve been waiting for months), the wood floors installed, a septic system, and fixtures, and we’ve basically got us a house. Move-in is in two months.
The Daily Progress reports on Republican candidate for congress Laurence Verga’s response to the question of what the biggest threat to U.S. national security is:
Verga said the biggest threat is the Americans who voted the Obama administration into office. “That was political correctness gone awry,” Verga said.
There are two gems in here. The first is that 157,362 Fifth District voters—48.29% of us—are the biggest threat to national security. The second is that voting for Barack Obama was “political correctness.”
Let’s just take a moment to consider that Verga meant by that. “Political correctness” is conservative-speak for “supporting minorities.” There are many types of minorities, of course, but President Obama is only one kind: black. So what Laurence Verga is saying is that Obama is only president because he’s black. 69,456,897 Americans—52.9% of us—tossed national security aside because we supported President Obama over Sen. John McCain merely because Obama is a black man and, therefore, not a real American, so he can be known to be secretly undermining national security. Obama lacks other qualifications, but 48.29% of Fifth District voters are such morons that we voted for the man because we are, at heart, racists. Verga is not a racist, of course, he’s just keeping it real.
When people talk about teabaggers being racist, this is exactly the sort of shameful horseshit that they’re talking about. Fuck this guy.
Waldo Jaquith (JAY-kwith) is a website developer and political pundit who lives in the vicinity of Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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