I am not fooling at all. It’s only one two posts so far, but hopefully the site re-design indicates that Fafnir, Giblets, and the gang are back.

Site is here, RSS feed (which is not listed on the Fafblog for some reason) is here.

All hail Fafblog!

With all of this election hoopla going around, all of the claims by candidates, debates, and invective, it’s difficult sometimes to figure out what candidates really represent.

Or, it was. All you have to do (assuming they already hold a political office) is check out Project Vote Smart.

Just punch in the name of the representative of interest, and you get a categorized list of their voting record, ratings according to various interest groups, campaign finance information, and more. Mysteriously-named bills are explained with summaries.

To get you started, here are some links directly to voting records and interest group ratings:

• John McCain: Voting Record – Interest Group Ratings
• Hillary Clinton: Voting Record Interest Group Ratings
• Barack Obama: Voting Record – Interest Group Ratings

As another blogger I know recently stated, this is not really a political blog. Nonetheless, this important enough that I need to bring attention to it.

The senate recently passed a new version of the Protect America Act that gives retroactive legal immunity to companies like AT&T for the illegal wiretapping of Americans that they have done in the past several years. The White House is pushing really hard for this to pass in the House now, because it grants immunity for their past illegal activity and that of their ‘friends’ at AT&T et al. However, if they were so desperate for continuous coverage, they would have accepted congress’ offer to extend the current PAA by three weeks, which they did not. Why? The extension did not provide immunity for the telecoms.

The EFF (to whom I donate regularly) has been pushing hard for over a year to get AT&T in the courts over this. This bill would totally halt their progress.

The Republicans in congress have walked out in protest, and are trying to say that the Democrats are compromising national security. This is nonsense. There are plenty of legal mechanisms for wiretapping with a warrant.

Please, take the time to call your representative’s office and let his or her staff know that you support their efforts to stop this bill. Or, if he or she is a Republican, a little chastisement might be in order. The list of representatives is here. It took me all of five minutes to find William Jefferson’s phone number and call his office.

As a guideline to help you, here’s a good basic framework of what to tell them, keeping it short and sweet:

• You support delays and even a stop in passing the new telecom act on the grounds that it includes immunity for illegal wiretapping.
• You don’t think that your representative will be endangering national security by not passing the bill.

Charles Darwin was born 199 years ago today. From the Darwin Day press release,

Recent Gallup polls show that 43 percent of Americans reject the theory of evolution and instead believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” And at least four 2008 presidential candidates have said they do not believe the theory of evolution.

“There is a continuous threat to evolutionary biology and to science in general that has been posed by fundamentalists who reject entirely a Darwinian worldview because they feel it threatens their religious beliefs,” said Massimo Pigliucci, Ph.D., a professor of evolutionary biology at the State University of New York-Stony Brook.

43% — Keep in mind that while these people think God created humans in the last 10,000 years, we have evidence that dogs were domesticated by humans some 4000-7000 years before that.

Adding to the never-ending adoration of His Noodliness, there is now an FSM hat.

Disclaimer: I am a cited supporter of the FSM agenda, as you can see on this page.