Prominent conservative attorneys are going after Liz Cheney's "Keep America Safe," the witch-hunt group that she's started to keep her father out of jail. The group's thesis is that any attorney who has represented a Guantanamo detainee is an enemy of the U.S. That's some of the most heinously anti-American conservative bullshit that's been served up in the past eight years. I'd thought that Republicans had wised up as to the foolishness of this argument, but apparently not everybody has gotten the memo.
The president has named Edward Tufte as the guy in charge of quantifying economic recovery spending for public consumption. This is six kinds of awesome. I own all of Tufte's books on displaying data visually, and I'm a big fan.
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.
Virginia's attorney general is arguing that the state's colleges and universities lack the authority to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and demands that they rescind such non-discrimination statements immediately. Recently-retired long-time Republican Delegate Vince Callahan put it best: "What he's saying is reprehensible. I don't know what he's doing, opening up this can of worms."
This handy graph shows what bullshit it is when Senate Republicans complain about Democrats passing healthcare reform via reconciliation. Right up through 2005, when they lost power, Republicans were all *about* passing big, contentious bills via reconciliation to avoid a filibuster.
The Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy has a relatively new blog that's gotten really engaging and interesting, focusing on the overlap between policy and politics in Virginia.
Scientific American has a long, wide-ranging blog entry about, of all things, pubic hair. It's simultaneously disturbing and fascinating, touching on evolution, lice, gorillas, and shaving. Somebody e-mailed this link to me, and I didn't know whether to be grateful or offended.
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?
Grist magazine ran a great six-part series about school lunches in January, based on spending a week in a Washington D.C. school. Unfortunately, they've got no navigation to move from one installment to the next, so here, instead, is a link to its appearance on the author's blog. (It occurs to me that there are two kinds of people: Those who hear the phrase "school lunches" and have no reaction; and those, like me, whose interest is immediately piqued.)
These accusations made against Sen. Charlie Rangel are pretty serious, and the evidence pretty damning so far. I don't know why he hadn't already stepped down from his chairmanship.
"Keep American Safe," run by Liz Cheney, is accusing Department of Justice attorneys of being sleeper agents for Al Qaeda, because some of them may have once worked for groups who advocated that Guantanamo detainees have any the legal rights that they're entitled to. She and Sen. Chuck Grassley want them purged from the DoJ. This is exactly—*exactly*—like McCarthyism.
A pro-athiesm student group at University of Texas at San Antonio is giving out porn to anybody who turns in a Bible or Koran. They call it a "Smut for Smut" exchange. Re-re-reading Genesis, I think they might be onto something—it's filthy!
Sen. Lindsay Graham points out that there's simply no debate about climate change among folks of my generation, and that "when you say that those who believe it are buying a hoax and are wacky people you are putting at risk your party’s future with younger people." Yup. Gay rights and climate change are two key issues where Republicans are look like troglodytes to younger demographics.
I recently learned about Russia's series of Venusian probes, which was news to me. So what other missions to other plans have there been? Turns out, a lot…although, disappointingly, nearly all have been to Venus and Mars.
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.
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.
National Journal’s annual congressional vote rankings are out, and I think it’s interesting that all of their math has simply confirmed what GovTrack.us already demonstrated: that Rep. Tom Perriello is a solidly centrist member of congress. He votes more liberally 47.2% of the time, and conservatively 52.8% of the time. In fact, as it turns out, if you simply wanted to apply a dichotomous label to him, “conservative” would be the necessary word. Every other congressman in Virginia is way out in the wings (Eric Cantor, 88th percentile of the conservatives; Bobby Scott, 83rd percentile of the liberals; Bob Goodlatte, 85th percentile of the conservatives; Gerry Connolly, 72nd percentile of the liberals, etc.), with two exceptions: Glenn Nye votes are in the 55th percentile of conservatives, and Rick Boucher is in the 55th percentile of liberals.
So when you hear Republicans claim that Boucher or Perriello (or Nye) take marching orders from Nancy Pelosi or vote lockstep with Democrats, this is how you can know that they’re either ignorant or liars.
02/27 Update: I’ve changed a few words here to reflect the actual methodology used in the analysis. See my comment for details.
This Albemarle County-sized chunk was knocked loose by another enormous iceberg. The potential environmental impact from this one calving turns out to be considerable: colder winters in the northern hemisphere, loss of sea life from deoxygination, and harm to a big colony of penguins nearby.
I like this interview with Congressman Perriello, but I particularly like how he has zero patience for the bullshit of politics. Sample answer to a relatively arcane question: "That’s more insider baseball crap. I don’t really care. I’m sick of starting with what can we get through the Senate; let’s start with what solves the damn problem."
Our governor had a brilliant idea: VDOT should fill potholes created over the winter! No doubt this stroke of brilliance will redefine VDOT's mission for the weeks ahead, as they had not previously considered such a clever gambit.
I'm just bookmarking this to read later, but with Boing Boing describing it as "a brief, comedic monologue about the people who expect us to fix their computers while they patronize us and ignore our explanations," I'm looking forward to it.
I like this visualization of which health supplements are (likely) beneficial. So many axes of data all fit into one image, thanks to clever use of interactivity. Turns out green tea is good for cholesterol, but probably not useful for cancer. St. John's Wort can help with depression, but acai is totally useless for anybody except spammers.
That symbol of a decade of wretched excess and stupidity, the Hummer, is being discontinued. GM can't find a buyer. It existed only for the '00s, and for the second half, barely so. Trying to explain the Hummer to my grandkids will be like trying to explain Sarah Palin—you just had to be there.
The next major Virginia political event is redistricting. Officially, this will be done by the legislature next January, but in reality, incumbents are already measuring for the drapes. Although the governor talked a good game about bipartisan redistricting during the election, I’d bet dollars to donuts that he was lying. I see no way around it: we’re going to have the same lousy redistricting process we’ve long had.
So the Republican-led house will carve out better districts for themselves and worse districts for Democrats—just like they did a decade ago—and the Democratic-led senate will carve out better districts for themselves and worse districts for Republicans. Using advanced demography mapping software like Caliper’s Mapitude (which has the notable feature of calculating the district boundaries to exclude the incumbent), they’ll have Virginia carved up like a Christmas ham.
Of course, officially, it won’t be anything like that. House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith might, in a moment of candor on the floor, say that they’re just doing exactly what Democrats did in 1991, but the general story line will be that they’re just updating the district boundaries to reflect the 2010 census, and even if it does wind up benefitting Republicans, well, that’s only fair. Ditto for the senate.
Griffith said he would not move from his Salem home to run, partly because Salem may well become part of the 9th District after the General Assembly reapportions districts next year. Griffith’s House of Delegates district includes part of Roanoke County and overlaps Boucher’s congressional district.
What Griffith is saying, implicitly, is that he can just redistrict himself into the 9th if he needs to. And he’s right, he can. And this exposes plainly the bullshit that is our redistricting process.
Legislators get to pick their constituents, rather than vice versa. Rather than getting competitive districts, compact districts, or geographically sensible districts, we’ll get districts tailor-made to be safe for incumbents, sprawling comically between unrelated areas like 3CD or the 25th senate district. Many legislators will be able to rest easy for the next few election cycles, knowing that their new supermajority of likeminded voters assure them reelection, and some others will be forced to retire or face impossible odds, their district redrawn around them to include a majority of voters from the opposing party to assure a challenger’s victory.
I guess the good news is that, thanks to Griffith, we can stop pretending that this might work in any other way than the worst possible way. The bad news is everything else.
Paste in huge piles of ASCII text, receive a cleaned-up version—double hyphens converted to em dashes, inch marks converted to quotation marks, foot marks converted to apostrophes, and presumably some other nice transformations take place. Handy.
Remember all the Republican fussing about how the healthcare bill was just so durned long? Well, now they're upset with the White House plan because it's too short. And after insisting that such proposals had to be online for 72 hours for public review before voting on it, John Boehner complained that doing so indicated that the president wouldn't be willing to cooperate. This sort of nonsense makes as clear as possible that Republicans have zero interest in participating in meaningful dialog about improving healthcare, and are just looking to waste a lot of time and energy.
State government hiring freezes and furloughs have rendered ineffective President Obama's federal winterization program. Even though the feds are offering the money to cover the cost of the positions, in the name of economic stimulus, states have eliminated the people who know how to do the work, and they've got neither the capacity nor the apparent willingness to hire people. I'd like to hear some 'splaining from Virginia about this. How much money were we offered? How many jobs would have been created? Why didn't we follow thorugh?
Democrats need to man up, put their huge majority in both chambers of Congress to work, and pass healthcare reform. Republicans have no choice but to suck it up and take it, what with being a small minority of this country. If (when?) that happens, Republicans are going to be confused, distraught, and angry, because they've already written healthcare reform's epitaph.
Well, Del. Bob Marshall is in trouble again. Media outlets across the country are covering the remarks he made at a press conference he held last Thursday about defunding Planned Parenthood:
The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children.
This tidbit was first reported by the student-run Capital News Service, by VCU student Kelsey Radcliffe. I have no idea how many reporters attended that press conference, but the event itself was well-covered in the media, so credit is due to Radcliffe for calling attention to this. (Or, depending on how you look at it, blame should be provided to the reporters or failed to call attention to this, or their editors who chose not to include coverage of that remark.)
Now, I read this quote and I think yup, that’s Bob Marshall. I’ve followed this guy’s ridiculous beliefs for years: I first wrote about him seven years ago. This is entirely consistent with his beliefs. Marshall believes in an Old Testament God, an angry, bearded old man in the sky throwing thunderbolts at those he doesn’t favor. Jesus isn’t really in the picture. Marshall also views pregnancy as a punishment for sex, and sees birth control as a perversion of God’s will that sex equal procreation. So the fact that he said something this stupid isn’t even something I was going to bother to write about, what with the legislature being in session (thus keeping me busy with Richmond Sunlight), being busy building our new house, being sick right now, etc. This kind of shit from Bob Marshall is exactly what he’s been saying for years and years. The voters of the 13th District, repeatedly having been presented with excellent alternatives at the ballot box, have returned him to office by a large margin every time. He won with 63% of the vote in 2001, without opposition in 2003, 55% of the vote in 2005, 58% of the vote in 2007, and 61% of the vote last November. It’s clear that they agree with him, and no number of signatures demanding his resignation will change that.
No, I think the newsworthy bit here is that Marshall is backpedaling, which is a first for him. He’s issued this statement:
A story by Capital News Service regarding my remarks at a recent press conference opposing taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood conveyed the impression that I believe disabled children are a punishment for prior abortions. No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion. I have devoted a generation of work to defending disabled and unwanted children, and have always maintained that they are special blessings to their parents. Nevertheless, I regret any misimpression my poorly chosen words may have created as to my deep commitment to fighting for these vulnerable children and their families.
Blaming CNS here is shameful. Marshall’s comments—at his own press conference—were very clear.
There is one difference this time around, and I think it provides a clue as to Marshall’s attempt to distance himself from his own remarks: The pro-life crowd is all about mentally retarded babies, especially post-Palin, largely because a supermajority of Downs pregnancies are aborted by the mother. The dominant concept among activist parents of such children is that they’re “angels” (e.g. Band of Angels, Angels with Special Needs, Anna’s Angels, even a sixteenth-century Flemish painting), and angels are precisely the opposite of the religious and logical prerequisites of Marshall’s statement. While Marshall normally pisses off Democrats across the country, in Virginia, and sometimes in his own district, his base—hard-core Republicans—just adore his fringe views. But not this time.
I can’t claim to have the faintest idea whether this is going to impact Marshall at the ballot box in 2011, or what his base is going to make of either his statement or his retraction. But I do think that this is the most serious self-inflicted wound—the only kind Marshall has ever experienced—in his political history.
"Red Dawn" is being remade, due out in November. Fun fact: The original was the first movie to receive the PG-13 rating, and was, in terms of deaths per minute, the most violent film ever made, at the time of its release.
Jupiter is a planet without a surface. The gas giant has a 700 mile gradient that begins with 40 miles of cloud cover, followed by hydrogen gas that gradually becomes denser, until it's liquid hydrogen. At some arbitrary boundary along there, one may consider the surface of the planet to have begun. But even that liquid hydrogen gradually becomes denser, until it becomes metallic hydrogen. It's only the very core of the planet that is rocky, a planet as we think of it. Jupiter might be interesting to scientists, but to the rest of us, it's barely a planet. Which makes sense, since Jupiter is basically a failed star.
