Voting Record for the 109th Congress

Click here to see the Voting Record for 109th Congress. Checking how your senators and house reps voted on key issues this past Congress is the most accurate way to determine how you’ll vote in a few weeks. After checking the recent vote on the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (aka the torture/enemy combatants bill), I was very disappointed to see Senator Bill Nelson vote to approve it. This doesn’t mean I’ll vote against him in November, given that his opponent is, well, Katherine Harris crazy.

Also curious enough is the fact that our House Representative Ric Keller actually didn’t vote. I wrote letters to all three of our Congressional representatives expressing my concerns about the potential implications of that bill, and only Senator Mel Martinez’s office wrote a letter back. The letter was actually quite well written, and though it didn’t change my mind, it certainly made me appreciate the job Martinez and his staff are doing in the Senate. Now if only we could get him to not pander to the Christian conservative base.

Anyway, check out the voting record, get informed on the issues, and vote in November. Its the least you can do as a citizen of these United States. And quite frankly, given the way things are going, we need all the informed voters we can get.

Write Your Representative/Senator

If you live in Florida, here’s who you should talk to about issues up for vote in the Congress.

Your Local House Representative - http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Senator Mel Martinez - http://martinez.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactInformation.ContactForm

Senator Bill Nelson - http://billnelson.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm

Please write to them about your concerns, whatever they may be.

Links for Friday UPDATED

• “Torture’s Long Shadow” by Vladimir Bukovsky
• The Gothic Archies sing music for Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events
• My Way News - Church to Fight IRS Demand for Documents
• Marvel’s hillarious NextWave comic written by Warren Ellis
• Jedi Stephen Colbert against the battle droids
• Gay couple almost cause a plane to be diverted

Shadow of the Torturer

Our President is currently demanding legislation that would prevent individuals accused of terror-related crimes from seeing classified evidence against them and would allow the US to “specify” its understanding of the definitions of torture as found by the globally accepted Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Three leading Republican Senators, former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, and former Regan Secretary of State George Schultz, among others, are standing up to these demands. Watch our petulant Commander-in-Chief responding to these Republicans below.

“It is unacceptable to think…,” he said. Should any leader of the United States ever utter such words that seem to question someone’s very right to have or express thoughts with which they disagree? Do we really think that we have the moral high-ground to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions for the rest of the world without a reratification of those conventions? After the horrors of Abu Graib and some of the alleged abuses at Guantanamo Bay, can we really be trusted to change our laws related to torture to potentially forgive some of the torturers that our leaders have authorized and payed for?

Torture is immoral. Torture has been shown not to produce reliable intelligence. Jack Bauer might make it look heroic, but remember that he is only a fictional character. Torture should not be made legal, acceptable, or laudable in our world. President Bush must be stopped, and I can only be thankful that John McCain is one of those Senate Republicans brave enough to risk political peril to take a stand.

Breaking up is hard to do (but only if you’re the one doing the breaking)

No, no, Patrick and I are not breaking up. We recently celebrated an important birthday for Patrick out at Disney’s Fort Wilderness, and apart from some rain on Saturday evening, a good time was had by all (that let themselves). For this post, I’m going to open up just a bit about my recent work-related struggles. I’m compelled to stay murky about some things, but I’ll try to give you at least a high level idea of why the last few weeks have been scary/sad/confusing/exciting/and quite mad.

As some of you may or may not know, I work as a contractor for government-related training activities. Nothing dangerous or remotely connected with any of the contractor nastiness you’ve undoubtedly heard about on the news, but government contractor none-the-less. A contracted employee works for a company that has had a task or series of taskings contracted to them from the government. Thus as contracted employees, we work from contract to contract without much of a guarantee of permanence. Having said that, I have worked for the same company with much of the same people on the same general tasking for the last almost 6 years. Quite a pleasant oddity.

Several weeks back, we were told by our company that our current contract was running out, and that the government had not yet announced the new contract award. As such, our company would be forced to lay us off as of a week from this past Friday. Then, true to their word, we all turned in our badges and other necessary items and were laid off as promised.

Almost an entire week passed by without any word, many of us just hanging out waiting to find out when we’d be returning to work. This was fine for me since I returned from camping that Sunday before with quite a nasty sore throat/fever that is still plaguing me somewhat as I write this. I pretty much spent the whole week in and around my bed (with a break for teaching at SCC), anxiously awaiting the official award. Finally, on Thursday, we got word that a different company won the contract but would be hiring us all on immediately to begin work that next day!

This afternoon, we met with some reps from that company, and what an awesome feeling. None of us were exactly pleased with our previous employers, but I can honestly say that all of us are thrilled with pretty much everything about our new ones. We start back on Monday, picking up exactly where we left off two weeks before.

I’m excited by the raw potential that now exists where once murky sameness pervaded. I’ve never really been dumped before by an employer, but this break-up is probably one of the best I could have ever hoped for. For now, that is all.

In Memory of Steve

I first happened upon Steve Irwin back in 2000. He was a curious fellow with the utmost respect for the natural world. His intense curiosity inspired us to learn more about the animal world around us, and thus fear it less. Our thoughts are with his family at this terrible time. Steve may be gone, but his legend will burn on longer than most of our’s. Crikey, and good’day, mate!