Bachmann Votes–2007

While looking into Bachmann’s health care voting record (still ongoing), I discovered that she has a tendency to vote in the minority. Frequently, she’s even voting in the minority among Republicans. Here’s what she did in the first half of 2007. I’ve left out bills on Iraq, where her record of voting with the president is well-known, and appropriations bills, which are generally messy affairs.

January 9, 2007
Bachmann voted against H.R. 1, the bill implementing the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations on information sharing, cargo inspections, infrastructure protection, etc. She later voted for the compromise bill on July 17, 2007.

January 10, 2007
She voted against H.R. 2, the bill to raise the minimum wage.

January 17, 2007
She was in the minority among Republicans, voting against H.R. 5, which would lower interest rates on student loans.

March 1, 2007
She voted against H.R. 800, which would make it easier for employees to unionize.

March 14, 2007
She voted against H.R. 985, which would expand the list of retaliatory actions that may not be taken against whistleblowers. She was in the minority even among Republicans.

March 26, 2007
She was one of only 48 to vote against H.R. 802, which provided for pollution control in international shipping.

March 27, 2007
She voted against H.R. 1401, which would direct Homeland Security to develop a security plan for over-land transportation.

April 17, 2007
She was one of only seven to vote against H.R. 1677, the Taxpayer Protection Act of 2007. Seven.

April 25, 2007
She was one of only 45 to vote against H.R. 1332, the Small Business Lending Improvements Act of 2007, which among other things, improves lending in rural areas and to veterans.

May 2, 2007
She was one of only 48 to vote against H.R. 1429, the Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act of 2007, which improves teacher training, mandates that programs be based on education research, and improves disclosures and oversight to avoid abuse of funds.

May 15, 2007
She was in the minority among Republicans, voting against H.R. 916, which provides for repayment of a portion student loans for attorneys who agree to serve at least three years as a prosecutor or public defender.

May 22, 2007
She voted against H.R. 1427, the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2007, which would establish oversight over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among others.

May 23, 2007
She voted against H.R. 1252, which would disallow price gouging on gasoline and other fuels.

June 7, 2007
She voted against S. 5, which would have allowed research using human embryonic stem cells.

June 20, 2007
She was in the minority among Republicans, voting against H.R. 2284, which would encourage small business development among native Americans.

That’s it for the first six months of her term. I can’t decide whether she’s a maverick (or extremist) or she just likes to say, “Nay.”

To be continued….

Bachmann Votes–2007
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McCain Palled Around With Keating

And when I say, “palled around with,” I don’t mean they served on a board together or one of them reviewed the other’s book or they lived in the same neighborhood. I mean that McCain vacationed at Keating’s place in the Bahamas. I mean that Keating and Cindy McCain were in business together. I mean that McCain intervened to get regulators off Keating’s back while Keating was busy defrauding his company.

That’s what palling around is. That’s what made McCain part of the Keating Five and responsible for the Savings and Loan Crisis twenty years ago.

Now, twenty years is a long time, longer than many first-time voters are old, but it’s not long enough ago to forget about if McCain wants us to trust him to be president. To remind us, the Obama campaign has put together a video. Here’s a preview, or you can just view the whole thing.

Don’t want to watch? At least read.

McCain Palled Around With Keating

Palin on Afghanistan

Today:

Three days after a mostly gaffe-free debate performance, the Alaska governor fumbled during a speech in which she praised U.S. soldiers for “fighting terrorism and protecting us and our democratic values”.

“They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan,” she told several hundred supporters at a fundraising event in San Francisco.

Sorry, no video available yet.

I guess it’s not too surprising. Previously, she thought that sharing a border automatically meant knowing something about the other country. Now she’s just turned that logic around.

When do I get to vote against her already?

Palin on Afghanistan

Protecting Americans’ Speech, Internationally

It’s been a busy week, so I’m just catching up on my publishing news today as I nurse the sniffles. The Association of American Publishers put out a press release about a week ago, lauding the passage in the U.S. House of H.R. 6146 “to prohibit recognition and enforcement of foreign defamation judgments.”

AAP President and CEO Pat Schroeder expressed thanks on behalf of the publishing industry to members of Congress for focusing attention on the serious problem of libel tourism, and called passage of H.R. 6146 a “strong and encouraging step forward.” “Libel tourism is an insidious threat. It seeks to intimidate and silence American authors and deprive us of vital information on issues of public concern. I hope we can build on H.R. 6146 with hearings in the new Congress that will shine a light into this dark corner,” Mrs. Schroeder said.

Libel tourism is the practice of filing a libel suit in a country with very strict libel laws (generally England, Wales or Australia) against a party in a more permissive country on the basis of work published in the more permissive country. Internet distribution or small batches of imported materials are being used to establish jurisdiction.

The most well-known cases involve celebrities going after gossip mags. However, the practice has recently been applied to a number of scholars writing about the spread and funding of terrorism. Some authors have seen their books pulled from publication; others have had substantial monetary judgments entered against them in foreign courts.

The fighting back has begun, however. The American Library Association has laid claim to the copies of one recalled book that are in library possession. One author, Rachel Ehrenfeld, countersued in a New York court to determine that the British ruling in her case is void in the U.S. because it interferes with her First Amendment rights. “Rachel’s Law” was passed in New York state in March, stating that First Amendment rights supersede the practice of comity, or legal reciprocity with other countries.

In passing H.R. 6146, the U.S. House of Representatives has said it agrees. However, for all of us to receive the same guarantee from the federal government that New York citizens have been given by the state, the Senate needs to vote on S. 2977, the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008. Then the differences need to be ironed out in committee and the compromise bill passed. All that before the end of the year and in the midst of election season.

So contact your senators and tell them to get on this now. It shouldn’t be that hard a decision. Sure, the celebrities may suffer a little, because you know that without the British courts, everyone believes everything they read in the National Enquirer. Besides, one of these days, Adnan Oktar is going to get bored filing libel suits to keep the population of Turkey off the internet (here’s one way around that, by the way), and he’s going to come after all the U.S. scientists/bloggers who have dared to call his brand of creationism complete hooey.

Let’s get the law in place before then.

Protecting Americans’ Speech, Internationally

Bachmann on Health Care

Michele Bachmann’s position on health care recently came to my attention when she voted against mental health parity in health insurance. The mental health parity law says that insurance companies may not set lower caps for payment for treatment of mental illness, including addiction, and must treat services for these illnesses the same way services for things like sinus infections and sprained limbs are treated. It’s a measure that has the potential to improve the productivity and general health of millions of Americans, as untreated mental illness has a broad impact on the rest of a person’s life.

The measure had broad bipartisan support, with Bachmann being only one of 47 Representatives to vote against it. That indicated to me that there was probably more in her health care record worth looking at. I started with her policy statement:

American healthcare is the best in the world, but rising costs make it inaccessible to many. In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 2000 and 2006, premiums for family coverage increased 87%, making the average annual premium for families more than $12,000.

A big part of the problem has roots in the Tax Code, which favors employer-provided health insurance. My Health Care Freedom of Choice Act would provide full tax deductibility for individual medical expenses, including medical care, dental care, long-term care and insurance premiums.

The Health Care Freedom of Choice Act
What is this bill? It was introduced in the House on January 23, 2007 and referred to the Ways and Means Committee. Aside from its description, it isn’t necessarily a bad little bill. It removes the provision of the code that says only expenses over 7.5% of adjusted gross income are deductible. However, it also greatly broadens the description of a dependent for purposes of these deductions, to those disallowed by the Code for other purposes. No further action was ever taken on the bill, which makes it appear that it was an attempt by the 64 Republicans who sponsored it to be able to say, “I did too do something on health care.”

As an aside, signing on to a Michele Bachmann-sponsored bill is a great way to state a position without having to worry about being responsible for it later. The only two bills she’s sponsored that have passed the House have been symbolic.

The Minnesota Expanded Health Care Practices Act
Bachmann also sponsored a health care bill while she was in the Minnesota legislature. The Minnesota Expanded Health Care Practices Act protects a health care provider’s “[r]ight to provide expanded health care.” Expanded health care, in this case, is:

[H]ealth care and healing methods, modalities, treatments, procedures, or protocols that have not been generally adopted by a profession, or that are not generally considered to be within the prevailing minimum standards of care of a profession, or that are not standard practices of a profession in a particular community.

In other words, woo. Not only would the bill have created a right for your doctor to practice woo, but it would have limited those who could give evidence on how well the woo is being performed to:

[E]xperts who have specialized knowledge, training, and clinical competence in the practice method or treatment used by the professional being investigated. The majority of the expert’s practice must be the same as that of the professional being investigated.

So, if you’d gone to a regulatory board to complain that the crystals and enemas you were treated with did nothing to improve your impotence but cost an awful lot, the only person who could have talked about whether you were treated appropriately would have been someone who also wanted to treat you with crystals and enemas.

This bill also died. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to determine whether Bachmann’s conflict of interest played any part in that death. By the way, the Christian counseling business she and her husband own doesn’t provide its employees with health care.

More to Come
I wanted to dive further into her voting record and public statements on health care, but this post is already long enough. Next time.

Of course, if that’s already quite enough for you, you can always make a donation to her opponent. His statement on health care is somewhat more comprehensive.

Bachmann on Health Care

Palin Loses Facebook

I’ve heard a number of people complaining about the new Facebook, but after last night, I’m perfectly happy with it. Status updates are always fun, but last night, they told me who would be watching the debate with me.

I turned off the analysts almost immediately afterward, because they were waffling. “Oh, did Palin suck little enough that people still liked her? We’ll have to wait and see.” Blegh.

Nobody was waffling on Facebook. We had Biden love, to Ifils hating, to grudging recognition of Palin’s improvement, to frustration over her inability to answer questions as asked, to fear of her inappropriate toothiness (okay, that was me).

Then the fun started. The new Facebook allows people to comment on, oh, everything. So the next couple of hours were a wandering set of discussions across about half a dozen profiles. Snark and cattiness abounded. It was beautiful.

But that wasn’t the best part. I have conservative Christian types in my friend list too, people I knew in high school, so I got to see what their reactions to the debate were.

They weren’t.

None of these folks had anything to say about the debate. The women who were all gung-ho in early September about how they adored Alaska’s governor were doing very good cricket impressions last night. I don’t know that any of them have changed their intended votes, but the enthusiasm has evaporated. Poof.

I couldn’t ask for more. Well, except this.

Palin Loses Facebook

Palin Didn’t Lose, But Biden Won

So Palin didn’t embarrass her party tonight as much as she has recently. Sure, she spent precious minutes babbling random catch phrases as she tried to figure out what the answers should be. Sure, she still had the pageant trick of smiling no matter what she was talking about, like dead soldiers and nukular threats. Sure, you could see the angry, vindictive inside crack through the pancake whenever Biden pointed out that she was wrong.

Still, she did manage to string multiple sentences together occasionally, which made me worry. I know talking points are as a window to me (did she really dare talk about the Founding Fathers again?), but I already knew who I was voting for before the debate. What about the all-critical undecideds?

Here’s the early answer:

Forty-six percent of the uncommitted voters surveyed say Democrat Joe Biden won the debate, compared to 21 percent for Republican Sarah Palin. Thirty-three percent said it was a tie.

Eighteen percent of previously uncommitted percent say they are now committed to the Obama-Biden ticket. Ten percent say they are now committed to McCain-Palin. Seventy-one percent are still uncommitted.

Yes.

Palin Didn’t Lose, But Biden Won

ScienceOnline’09

I just signed up for a new con. This one’s a conference, though, not a convention and not my usual thing. In January, I’ll be attending ScienceOnline’09.

When I first read the description, I thought, Sounds interesting but not for me, I’m afraid. See, it used to be called the NC Science Blogging Conference. And while I blog, and I’m interested in science, support good science education, read science blogs, etc., I’m not a science blogger. I’m a…I’m…I don’t know what kind of blogger I am. If you figure it out, let me know.

Then half my blogroll registered–the half I haven’t met.

That was when the stray enabling thoughts started popping up. I have done a guest post on ScienceBlogs, about science blogs. My blog does have a strong anti-woo undercurrent. All my friends are doing it. As a science fiction writer, I have a vested interest in promoting a love and understanding of science.

If it hadn’t been for All my friends are doing it, I could have talked myself into it eventually. Sometimes I mistrust my own motives.

Then, today, they released Program v1.0.

Science Fiction on Science Blogs?
Science Fiction was the original source of excitement for many a scientist. How can a science blogger use Science Fiction to draw the readers in and explain the actual science?

Okay. I’m going. There are other sessions I want to attend, but that one, alone, sold me.

I’ll see a bunch of you guys in January.

Update
So much for impostor syndrome. I’m now moderating the science fiction session. Feel free to share ideas on what you want to see there.

ScienceOnline’09

What Is the Difference?

Like any good narcissist blogger, I like to see what search terms people are using to find my blog. The most common are “perfect margaritas” and “stereotypes in comedy.” I got a new one yesterday, though, a good one.

“What is the difference between Palin and Bachmann?”

What an excellent question. I could talk about the similarities from now until the election (and be warned, I may), but differences? Huh. Well, here goes.

  • Sarah Palin hunts wolves from helicopters. Michele Bachmann hunts queers from the bushes.
  • Palin tries to deny using a teleprompter. Bachmann makes it all too obvious she’s just reading something she doesn’t understand.
  • Palin’s never snogged a leader of the free world, at least not on camera. She may have winked at Putin from her kitchen window, though.
  • Palin’s hair and wardrobe only admit to being a few years out of date. Bachmann’s are screaming that Reagan is still president, damnit.

Okay, this is harder than it looks. The similarities are so much easier. Want to help in the comments?

Alternately, you could send a few bucks to Bachmann’s opponent and make sure Bachmann doesn’t go back to Washington where she can do more harm. That would be a similarity worth seeing.

What Is the Difference?