Crafting legislation is often compared to making sausage (both are grisly tasks, you see), so every once in a while you hear Congress being referred to as the
sausage factory. I must confess the analogy never struck me as particularly apt.
I suppose I could see it if the sausage factory was, say, only open two or three days a week. Or if any one employee of the sausage factory could put a blanket hold on the making of today's sausage, or tomorrow's, or next week's. Or if half the employees kept trying to put rat poison in the sausages.
But I guess where the analogy really breaks down for me is that I just can't see workers at an actual sausage factory having that kind of top-notch health insurance.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Science Friday: There is No Controversy:
| Ever since the terms "Climate Change" and "Global Warming" first made the news, the right has been engaged in an effort to ridicule the whole notion. Man could have an effect on the atmosphere? Pshaw! Okay, so Rush Limbaugh and the Fox airheads don't actually say pshaw. Instead, they've said that the idea of a human-caused climate change is "ridiculous," and "malarkey" and a "farce." (I'd give you links for those, but adding a link to Limbaugh and friends would give me a rash).
Most of all, they've pushed the idea that our increasing thirst for flammable hydrocarbons might just cause an eensy change in the environment is controversial. Sure, sure, we might be having a hot year -- or two, or ten -- but that doesn't mean people had anything to do with it. After all, we're so small and the atmosphere is just so big. How could a little old us possibly have more effect than volcanoes, or cyclical changes, or the bad old carbon fairy, or whatever cause the right wants to put forward this week? We changed the air? Huh, that's just controversial.
They've depended on paid shills to generate pop-science FUD, and like the mercenaries of ignorance who constantly try to make it seem as if there's some scientific debate around evolution, they've created smoke in the hopes of making people believe there's a fire. They've created fake organizations dedicated to spreading misinformation (current headline "Earth's plants tell us they're loving the CO2 increase!") They've even made a hero out of Michael Crichton (the one man whose ego might be larger than Bush and Rush combined) and his account of a Global Warming "conspiracy," frequently citing his poorly-researched fictional tome as proof of the evil left wing environmentalist attempt to strip away your Hummer.
The trouble with this notion is that the folks who stole the "it's only a theory" page from the whacko creationists are lying. There is no controversy. There's been none in scientific journals, and no, scientists did not think we were going to freeze just a decade ago, no matter how many times the shills say they did. With every passing day, the evidence becomes more compelling.
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Tweet of the Day:
A Senate staffer just hilariously called me "sweetheart" while trying to kill a story I'm writing. Massive error on his part.
— @LEBassett via web
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