If this is the only political article you read all year...

Actually, let me rephrase that.

If this is the only article you read all year that isn't from a conservative paper, like one owned by Richard Mellon Sciarfe or the Reverend Moon or Murdoch... If this is the only article you read that hasn't been vetted by the hosts at Fox News...

Please, read this, gacked in its entirity from Al Franken's blog:

About a week ago on Hannity & Colmes, Sean Hannity spewed a litany of lies about John Kerry being a flip-flopper and tax raiser, lies that came directly from the Bush campaign. Oddly, Alan Colmes did not respond. So we will. Hannity said:

Here’s a guy that supported gay marriage, now against it. Here’s a guy that by my count has had six separate different unique positions on the war on Iraq. Here’s a guy that voted for the $87 billion to fund the war before he voted against it. Here’s a guy that was for the Patriot Act. Now against it. No Child Left Behind, for it, now against it. Here’s a guy that supported -- was against the death penalty for terrorists who kill Americans. Now he’s for it. The only thing he seems consistent on is that, throughout the 19 years he was in the Senate, he voted to raise taxes consistently 350 times. What does that tell us about a man that has no core values or principles?

Let’s take these one at a time.

Here’s a guy that supported gay marriage, now against it.

This is a lie. Kerry’s position has always been consistent on this. I disagree with him, but Kerry has always been against gay marriage. He is for civil unions. What Hannity is doing here is taking Kerry’s vote against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and deliberately misrepresenting it as a declaration in favor of gay marriage. But let me read you what Kerry said on the floor of the Senate about that vote.
“I will vote against this bill, though I am not for same-sex marriage, because I believe that this debate is fundamentally ugly, and it is fundamentally political, and it is fundamentally flawed….the results of this bill will not be to preserve anything, but will serve to attack a group of people out of various motives and rationales, and certainly out of a lack of understanding and a lack of tolerance, and will only serve the purposes of the political season.”

And on that, I totally agree with him. So, for the record: Kerry has been totally consistent on this. He has never flip-flopped. Sean Hannity is lying, and he knows it.

Next.

Here’s a guy that by my count has had six separate different unique positions on the war on Iraq.

Okay. This is just stupid. Kerry’s position on Iraq has been totally consistent. Yes, he voted to authorize the president to use force against Iraq. But voted for that in order for Bush to go to the UN and get the inspectors back into Iraq, which was a genuine triumph. But, the president acted in bad faith. Here is what Kerry said about it on Face the Nation on September 14, 2003:

“The president promised he would go to war as a matter of last resort. He didn’t. The president promised he would build a coalition and work through the United Nations. He didn’t. We’re paying the price for the reckless way in which this president approached this. It’s a failure of diplomacy, and today it’s a failure of leadership.”

Kerry was entirely consistent, and not only that, he was right.

Next.

Here’s a guy that voted for the $87 billion to fund the war before he voted against it.

This is correct, but it’s not a flip-flop. Kerry voted for an amendment to the Iraqi appropriations bill that would have paid for the $87 billion by taking it out of the tax cut for the extremely rich. That amendment lost, 57-42, because Bush insisted that the $87 billion be added to the deficit. As we discussed with Paul Krugman last week, never in the history of this country have we had tax cuts while we were at war. Not only that, but Paul Krugman told me that he has yet to find any civilization in the history of this planet that ever had a tax cut during a war.

After the amendment went down, Kerry did vote against the final $87 billion supplemental appropriation, as a protest against the way Bush got us into the war and is conducting it. But he knew that the troops would have the support, because the bill passed 87 to 12.

You can support our troops, and still protest the president. If you can’t hold those two ideas in your head, you won’t enjoy my show, and I suggest you switch over to Rush right now.

Next.

Here’s a guy that was for the Patriot Act. Now against it.

Well, here’s what Kerry said:

“I voted for the Patriot Act right after September 11th – convinced that – with a sunset clause – it was the right decision to make. It clearly wasn’t a perfect bill – and it had a number of flaws – but this wasn’t the time to haggle. It was the time to act.

"But George Bush and John Ashcroft abused the spirit of national action after the terrorist attacks. They have used the Patriot Act in ways that were never intended and for reasons that have nothing to do with terrorism. That’s why, as President, I will propose new anti-terrorism laws that advance the War on Terror while ending the assault on our basic rights.”

In other words, he voted for the Patriot Act after 9/11, although he objected to parts of it. Bush has abused it in ways that were never intended by Congress when it was passed. If you can’t hold that in your head, you will love Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

No Child Left Behind, for it, now against it.

This is an easy one. On this one, like all the others, Kerry’s position is consistent, and principled, and Hannity’s is dishonest. Kerry voted for the bill, which the president promised to fund. The president didn’t fund it, which created unfunded mandates on states and school districts across this country. As a result, classroom sizes are getting bigger, after-school programs are being dropped, teachers are being fired, and education is getting worse. Everyone in education across this country will tell you that. No Child Left Behind is the most ironically named piece of legislation since the 1942 Japanese Family Leave Act.

Next.

Here’s a guy that supported -- was against the death penalty for terrorists who kill Americans. Now he’s for it.

Actually, Sean’s right on this one. Kerry was against the death penalty before 9/11. And after 9/11, he now supports the death penalty for terrorists. Now, Bush—before 9/11, wanted to invade Iraq. And after it, wanted to invade Iraq. So maybe he was more consistent. Kerry was affected viscerally by 9/11. I’m not sure I’d call that a flip-flop.

Next.

The only thing he seems consistent on is that, throughout the 19 years he was in the Senate, he voted to raise taxes consistently 350 times.

This is a disgraceful lie. It is a distortion of a phony statistic put out by the Bush campaign. The Bush campaign lists 350 of Kerry’s votes for, quote, “higher taxes.” Almost all of these are votes Kerry cast to leave taxes unchanged, such as a 1987 vote against a repeal of the “windfall profit” tax on oil. Taxes would have remained the same if his side had prevailed. In other words, this was a vote against an irresponsible tax cut for the rich.

Let me make a side note. We need to pay for the government. Someone’s got to pay for it. And if you cut taxes for the rich, the burden gets shifted to everyone else, or their children.

Bush’s list even includes votes that Kerry cast in favor of alternative Democratic tax cuts. On Bush’s list, there’s only one actual tax increase that Kerry voted for, which incidentally is counted twice. It’s his vote for Clinton’s 1993 Deficit Reduction Act, which raised taxes on the top 1% and cut taxes on people at the bottom, and was followed by eight years of unprecedented growth.

What does that tell us about a man that has no core values or principles?

The man who has no core values or principles here is a man named Sean Hannity. And you know who came up with all these lies? The campaign of a man named George W. Bush.

Look. The reason I took the time to go over all of this is you’re going to hear this garbage repeated over, and over, and over again from now until November. And we are not going to let them do it. We are not going to let them do to John Kerry what they did to Al Gore.

Kerry is not a flip-flopper. But Bush is a liar. And his shills in the media, like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh—they’re liars too.

If you're watching the dnc tonight...

Check out my friend Alice's brother in law, Martin O'Malley, the mayor of Baltimore, who'll be speaking about the need for more local funding and involvement in homeland security issues.

The Nimbus - 2003 proceedings in book form have been delayed...

And I am enraged.

Some of you may already know that the initial plan for Nimbus had been to have CafePress print the books on a print-to-order basis, but because of the length of the thing, it would've cost over $30 for the paperback, and we wouldn't've been able to sell it via anything but CafePress, or in eBook form, so we started to look into other options in the self-publishing zone.

We had decided to take the self-publishing route because it was the speediest thing to do, and also because none of us had the time, this past spring, to find a traditional publisher with an interest in publishing the wide range of papers and panels presented at Nimbus - while we probably could've found someone to publish the more academic papers, we didn't want to leave things like the ship debate, the fanwords and fandom history panels, etc., off to the side; we wanted a comprehensive record of as much Nimbus as we could.

Of course, there are some papers we couldn't include. kitsune13 is putting one of her papers into a book already, for example, so we couldn't put it into the compendium - same with Phil Nel and Roger HIghfield (although he gave us an article to use instead).

But as those of you with the CD-Rom already know, there's over 40 papers and panels in there, and we were looking forward to them being available in book form.

And they will be, but there's been a delay.

A while ago, we contracted with iUniverse, a self-publishing house, to put the book together and put it out. Clearly, they were paying no attention to what they were doing when they put the first draft of the book together - they left the author names out of the table of contents, they didn't bold or center the author names at the top of each paper, and they did disasterous things to ajhalluk and wendywoowho's footnotes, among others (although they said, when we sent the correction sheet back, that these things would all be corrected).

But the dealbreaker came in the past two days, after gwendolyngrace, tea_and_toast and I had spent probably 30 person-hours proofing the book.

On the proof, their copyright notice, which is their standard, said:

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

I asked them to add in "... and the copyright holder" after "publisher" in the last line. I told them it would be a dealbreaker, and we would have to cancel publication and get a refund, if they refused.

They refused.

They actually said, "In most cases iUniverse will bring requests to reproduce portions of the work to you, as representative for the book, but we reserve the rights as indicated on the copyright page." They also said that per section two of their agreement, we had given them the rights they were claiming on the copyright page.

Here's what section two says:

AUTHOR grants to PUBLISHER the non-exclusive, worldwide license to publish the WORK in print, in the English language. The AUTHOR also grants to PUBLISHER the right to make the WORK viewable on the PUBLISHER's website or partner web sites that have entered into agreement with the PUBLISHER in order to facilitate sales of the WORK.

We're groovy with section two. We are not, however, groovy with permitting a copyright notice which implies to the public that iUniverse has any right to grant any reproduction rights to any third party without the consent of the copyright holder. Arguably, having such a copyright notice may even cause HPEF to "inadvertently" appoint iUniverse as HPEF's agent for such purposes; per our contract with them, they actually do not have the right to give anyone else the opportunity to reproduce or transmit the works, and here they are, trying to make it appear to the public that they do. And in most cases they'll bring reproduction requests to us? In what cases won't they?

So the contract was disolved this afternoon. And the work we've put into getting the proceedings published by them this summer is more or less for naught.

I had a long conversation with xlibris.com today - has anyone used them? - about having them do the proceedings, in which case they'll be available via Amazon and elsewhere this fall, about 6-8 weeks after we expected they would be.

We really are sorry to everyone who wanted the book (and any teachers who'd hoped to use it in classes this fall) regarding this delay, but they were trying to act in violation of the contract we'd entered into with them, and we could not go forward that way.

We'll keep everyone posted about how the proceedings-publication is going!