politics

Quote of the Day

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Actually, two quotes:

“I would also point out that CO2, carbon dioxide, is not a pollutant in any normal definition of the term. … I am creating it as I talk to you. It’s in your Coca-Cola, you’re Dr. Pepper, your Perrier water. It is necessary for human life. It is odorless, colorless, tasteless, does not cause cancer, does not cause asthma.”

“If you think greenhouse gases are bad, life couldn’t exist without greenhouse gases. … So, there is a, there is a climate theory — and it’s a theory, it’s not a fact, it’s never been proven — that increasing concentrations of CO2 in the upper atmosphere somehow interact to trap more heat than the atmosphere would otherwise.”

— Representative Joe Barton (R-TX)

Quote from an everyday conservative:

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We weren’t happy with Bush, but every four years if you want your vote to count you have two choices, and in 2004 the two choices were between someone who wanted the US to win the war we were in, and someone who wanted the US to lose…

That’s a quote from one of the conservative commenters on John Scalzi’s blog, and it boggles me. Not “OMG SO CRAZY” boggle, but more of a “Really? You really believe John Kerry wanted the U.S. to lose a war? Really?”

Here’s the thing: I believe, honestly and forthrightly, that the militaristic voters in this country be they right, center or left (although most of them are very far right) actually put this country in danger. I believe that engaging terrorism primarily through bombs and waterboarding and dragging people from their homes in the middle of the night to humiliate them… I believe that makes us more likely to face another 9/11-type attack.

But I would never kid myself into thinking that’s what those militaristic voters actually wanted. I know they want U.S. citizens around the world to be safe, and they want the government to do what it has to do to ensure that.

I would never assume, though, that they were deliberately working against their own country. Misguidedly causing harm where they wanted to improve things? Yes. Trying to create defeat? No. I’m sorry. No.

If I ever start talking like this…

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… please, someone, anyone, kick me in the nuts and shut me up.

In my view the bias against science fiction exhibited by so many mainstream critics and authors doesn’t map vaguely onto racial bigotry — it maps precisely onto racial bigotry. The literati have prejudged the entire enterprise. They know in their gut that SF is worthless, all Buck Rogers and ray guns and Star Wars, so they needn’t bother to learn anything about it. Sure, the literati will acknowledge the occasional exception like Ray Bradbury — a real credit to his race, that man — but this “some of my best friends write genre fiction” malarkey only reinforces the prejudice.

My eyes, they can’t stop rolling.

Seen via bookslut

6 things make a post

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* Check out this short “video” which I guess is supposed to advertise a new TV. Actually, I probably shouldn’t have quote marks around that word, because this is a digital video at 30 frames a second, but it’s really more of a technical acheivement than a short film. Basically, it’s “bullet-time” on red kryptonite.

* Health care reform without a public insurance option=the German model. Money quote: “Finally, premiums for children are covered by government out of general revenues, on the theory that children are not the human analogue of pets whose health care should be their owners’ (parents’) fiscal responsibility. Instead, children are viewed as national treasures whose health care should be the entire nation’s fiscal responsibility.”

* Seven year old boys prefer store-bought lemon-lime soda to the homemade variety.

* On NPR this morning, the father of Roxana Saberi, the journalist sentenced to 8 years in prison in what appears to be an Iranian kangaroo court, has been trying to make waves by telling people that his daughter was tricked into confessing to spying. According to him, they promised to let her go if she admitted to the crimes, which he thought was illegitimate. I hope someone explains to him that this happens in the U.S.A. all the time–the teenagers wrongfully convicted in the Central Park “wilding” case were nailed because of exactly this tactic, and that the FBI wanted Richard Jewel to confess to the Olympic bombing as part of a “training video.” While the Iranian government is deeply fucked up and in desperate need of reform, there’s no point in criticizing them for doing the same thing we do.

* I don’t have whatever cable channel showed THE WIRE, but I know it has a lot of fans. If you’re interested, here’s the original pitch and series bible. (Warning, that’s a .pdf file) I haven’t looked at it myself, because I plan to watch the series someday.

* Finally, putting my wife on a bus for her second day at her conference pretty much wasted my writing time today. My son is up, too, and once that happens I’ll have no time to focus on the book at all. Which sucks, but hey, that’s what family is about. Now we’re off for our Saturday library run.

I have only two things to say about yesterday’s “teabagger” protests

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First: Yes, I giggled like the middle-aged schoolboy I am at the name.

Second: Remember all those anti-Iraq war protests from six years ago? All those giant puppets and silly costumes? Remember how many people(including me) thought they were a ridiculous freak show?

Those people were right.

And I was wrong not to see it. Sure, I looked at them and thought They don’t represent me, but they didn’t have to, and it was narcissistic of me to think they should. They were in the right, and we would be in a better place right now if we’d listened. I would be in a better place.

So, yeah, the tax protests yesterday (I passed a small one on my bus ride home yesterday) had a bunch of silly signs and whatnot, but I’m not going to assume that makes them wrong on the issues[1]. I’m not planning to make that mistake twice.

Having Glenn Fucking Beck on their side makes them wrong, but that’s a post for another time.

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Today, I pored over Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and accomplished nothing. Also, the book my wife gave me to read couldn’t be renewed. I had to strip out all her bookmarks and slip it into the conveyor belt at the library.

As for the LiveJournal feed for Nathan Bransford’s blog, it turns out that Mr. Bransford himself ask that it be suspended. I have no idea why; LJ syndication is just another kind of RSS, but whatever. No more “This Week in Publishing” I guess.

At work, I discovered that the intranet policy book pages I’d spent a good part of last week working on were completely useless now. The manager copy and pasted them into .mht files elsewhere on the network, breaking all the links. There were good reasons to move them to another part of the network–our system is criminally slow–but damn.

Finally, do you know what my company and I both pay, per month, for the basic health insurance my wife, son and I have? Not just what I contribute, but everything?

Over $1,600. Per month.

We need reform in this country, and we need it now.

Links! The Top 16 Worst Movie Quotes to Utter During Sex. Is it wrong of me to laugh so hard at this?

Next, another amazing animation, this one done with stop-motion. Sorta. Check it out.

Finally, tweenbots, a video art project via Jay Lake. His link described it as teh cute, but I think that misses the point. The really, really cool thing about this is that the robot is a cute, nearly helpless little thing that relies on complete strangers to help it get where it needs to go. Even if you can’t watch the video at that page, the write up is fascinating.

It seems that a lot of my posts lately have been straight link farms. I feel boring. Is there something I should post about? Something I said I would talk about but haven’t? Let me know.

I’m sure no one will find this the least bit upsetting…

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Texas state lawmaker Betty Brown (R), during a debate on a voter ID bill, suggests that Asian-Americans ought to change their names to something “simpler” so they will be easier to pronounce.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?”

Man, those Asian-Americans! Always making things hard for real Americans.

The video is here. Money quote! The expert’s response to a particularly dopey question: “Well, there aren’t a lot of elections in China.”

In defending Brown’s comments, her spokesman Jordan Berry blamed–who else?–Democrats. ““They want this to just be about race.”

Uncomfortable conversations at work, plus America enters the present

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Here’s a conversation I had at work this week:

Kindly co-worker: “So, when does your book come out?”

“September,” I say. “They had to push it back from May.”

“That’s a long time.” She is looking at me cautiously and I can’t figure out why.

“Yeah, but it’s for the best. Otherwise it would have competed with other books coming out at the same time. I’m told they’re going to be giving it a marketing push.”

“Okay. Um.” She looks around the room awkwardly, then turns back to me. “And, have you already paid them?”

Ah. She was worried about me. She thought I was being ripped off.

You guys know about Writer Beware, don’t you? And Yog’s Law?

I didn’t want to explain Yog’s Law to my very nice co-worker, because I didn’t want to talk about Yog Sothoth, but I did explain that the publisher was paying me for the book, because the book has value. She twigged to the truth of it very quickly.

And if you’re reading this on my LiveJournal (as most people are, I think) you can find a LJ feed of the Writer Beware blog on my profile page. Even if you don’t think you need to follow it yourself, it’s good to spread the word.

Also: IOWA! Maybe this is burying the lede, but Iowa is leading the other states into a future of fairness, family and love. I couldn’t be happier. Now I’m glaring at my own state government, tapping my foot impatiently.

It’s been a while since I talked about politics here

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I never even commented on Daschele’s withdrawal from the health care reform fight, even though the scandals he was facing seemed fairly minor and his loss hurt our chances of seeing decent health care reform in this country.

But I do want to post about two things, quickly. First, I hope everyone takes a couple minutes to read this op-ed in the Washington Post. It’s co-written by Nouriel Roubini, one of the few economists in recent years who publicly warned of the financial crash that hit us months ago.

He’s calling for the government to nationalize the banks put failing banks into receivorship. It’s worked in the past, and if the government acquires and then sells troubled assets after they aren’t so troubled any more, it would not be such a financial hardship on the tax payers.

It would also free up credit for businesses who are struggling to replace capital and reduce the size of institutions that are “too big to fail.” We really shouldn’t have those any more, and a little breathing space to let us regulate those would be welcome.

Check it out.

Next, I have leap frog over the Republican refusal to join Obama and the Dems on the stimulus package, bipartisanship, GOP discipline (message- and otherwise) enforced by hardcore conservative interests willing to put up ambitious conservative politicians in the upcoming primaries and talk about Betsy McCaughey.

In 1994, McCaughey was part of the political hit job against the Clinton health care reform plan. She wrote an article in which she said she read the whole thing and gave her thoughts–and stated that the plan would allow the federal government to block you from seeing a doctor of your choice.

This was reported widely by Republican opponents and in the press, and helped fuel public opposition to the bill. Nevermind that it was an outright lie. Clinton’s plan stated exactly the opposite. Explicitly.

Now she’s back, claiming that the stimulus bill has secret provisions that allow the federal government to decide what treatments you can get.

It’s all BS, but it’s all over Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the other usual suspects. See here for a small link farm (really more of a pea patch) of bloggers pointing out the outright deceptions in her remarks.

How does that rate a comment when the whole stimulus bill fight didn’t? Her lies this time around are an attempt to stifle means testing for medical treatment. What works? What doesn’t? What works best? What’s uselessly expensive? See, McCaughey is on the board of a medical device company, and works for a think tank funded by the pharmaceutical industry. She knows that one in five dollars in this country is spent on health care, and that a frightening percentage of that money is wasted on unnecessary treatments and name-brand drugs.

Very profitable unnecessary treatments and name-brand drugs.

It sounds crazy to say it, but some people think that gathering data on what treatments work best–saving lives–and which don’t is controversial. They’re afraid that letting Americans see the numbers will cut into their profits. And they’re right.

Watch out.

In happier news, I met my daily goal again today. I have a book to give my wife for VDay, and when I leave to write in the morning, I plan to have it waiting on the table for her along with a nice, fresh scone.

Cya.

Eight quick notes

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One: my back is much better than it has been the last few days. I’m at the day job, I can move around pretty well, and I’m mostly sitting without pain. Yay for healing.

Two: So much for the rowing machine. I’ve been planning to take the rowing machine out of the back room into the living room (which is the only space big enough for it) but we just don’t have room. Salad Eater has pushed the TV in front of the fireplace and set up her easel, which makes me wildly happy even if she only gets to paint once a week, maybe twice. But there’s no room for the rowing machine out there; I have to let that plan go and do something else for my health. Thanks for the reminder, back pain. Better you than a heart attack or letter from my doctor about diabetes.

Three: Once or twice a week isn’t really enough for her. Once some other crap gets taken care of, we’ll figure ways for her to get more painting time.

Four: Still haven’t heard back about my proposal for Man Bites World and I haven’t gotten my notes for Everyone Loves Blue Dog. For a while, I stressed about this stuff, but at this point I’m going to shrug it off and write book three. It’ll come when it comes.

Five: Last night we made Alton Brown’s ginger ale recipe. It should be ready for tasting Saturday night. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Six: You know how the economy slows down during a recession? It’s the same for doctors offices, too. The phones have been pretty slow–I guess people have been putting off their routine care.

Seven: On Tuesday, David Frum was on NPR (I know, I know, I forgot to post this earlier. Gimme a break!) to talk about Obama’s economic plan, the recession, and how conservatives can win back the majority in congress. His suggestion for regaining political power? Conservatives need to appeal to working class Americans again, and stop ignoring the wage stagnation of the past decade. His suggested fixes? Anti-immigration and deregulating health care Yeah, he wanted to deregulate. He said government over-regulation had made it impossible for a Sam Walton to create a nation-wide Wal-Mart of affordable health care.

These people are shameless. Worse, this sound bite of his was supposed to appeal to the working class, even though it’s the same old, same old. I guess it’s all about the marketing.

Eight: I’m reading one of Donald Westlake’s “Samuel Holt” novels, but mostly out of a sense of inertia. I’m in one of my book grouch phases; nothing satisfies me and nothing is interesting.