the Dead of Night Awards!

Steve Upham of Screaming Dreams Press, publisher of my novel The Dragons of Manhattan and some other books, has announced his annual Dead of Night Awards for stuff that's appeared in his excellent ezine Estronomicon.

And YOU can vote! To quote Steve:

To vote, simply e-mail me at the usual address with your choices. The
deadline is 1st March 2009 and the winners will be announced shortly
afterwards.

AUTHOR NOMINEES
(please choose ONE only)

Michael Kelly
Bob Lock
Ian Hunter
Charlotte Bond
Marie O'Regan
Paul Kane
David A. Sutton
Stephen Bacon
Chris Morris
A.J. Brown
S. Copperstone
Sean Woodward
Joseph Freeman
Tony Richards
Charles Black
Neil Davies
Lee Moan
Mark Howard Jones
Hugh MacDonald
Mark Brassington
Paul L. Mathews
Mark Lewis
John T. Carney
Andrew Marshall
Chris Morris
Neil Burlington
Robin James Hutton
David Gatward
J.W. Bennett
Gregory Hall
Sean Parker
Ian Cordingley


ARTIST NOMINEES
(please choose ONE only)

Alan M. Clark
Ben Baldwin
Vincent Chong
Anne Stokes
David A. Hardy
Marilynn Flynn
Joe Tucciarone
Les Edwards
Edward Miller

The "usual address" Steve mentions is given here (click "Contact" at top right).

If you haven't been receiving Estronomicon, subscription and back issues are FREEEEEEE. Go here again but this time select "Estronomicon eZine" from the column on the left.

a letter to Governor Perdue

I've just been writing an e-mail to Governor Perdue of Georgia. Georgia, you'll recall, is the state that's planning to put to death a prisoner called Troy Davis for a murder that no one any longer believes he committed. You can find a video about the case here, as well as a blank form in case you, too, would like to contact Mr Perdue.

This is the e-mail I sent to Georgia's governor:

Dear Governor Perdue

If you permit the execution of Troy Davis to go ahead on the grounds that killing him is legally permissible and easier than stirring a finger, you (and your staff) will be guilty of murder.

Not, perhaps, in strictly legalistic terms, but in every ethical sense.

You will have to live with the taint of "murderer" attached to your name for the rest of your life.

And then your Maker will pronounce it too.

So why not give your conscience a break, spare your family the disgrace of having to live with a murderer, and pardon this innocent man?

Sincerely --

Paul Barnett

You may be asking why the case hasn't featured much, if at all, in your newspaper or TV news (although some of the foreign newspapers are carrying the story). Well, Mr Davis is black and poor. Otherwise, I'm convinced, there'd be blanket coverage in the news media and consequently national outrage on a deafening scale.

 

why the Rush Limbaugh Party wants to make sure the economy they destroyed stays that way

Wonkette summarizes (for her full post see here):

So, here are some specific things the GOP will not condone, in this bill they’re not going to vote for, anyway:

• A billion dollars extra for the 2010 U.S. Census, which is going to pay good money to many jobless people in every American town — and shore up Lockheed-Martin, which is getting $500 million to build the data systems and run the machinery.
• $75 million for FBI employee salaries, because why would you want to pay America’s top cops to do law enforcement and investigations, in America?
• $500 million for Mississippi River flood control projects, which would employ thousands of laborers and keep dozens of construction companies in business, because nothing makes Republicans happier than seeing a Katrina repeat on the teevee every other hurricane season.
• $200 million for green vehicles on U.S. military bases and $600 million to replace the federal fleet of cars with hybrids, because only a gay communist could see the economic benefits of $800 bmillion in sales for U.S. auto manufacturers while simultaneously cutting the government’s gasoline bill by billions per year.
• $1.4 billion for rural garbage-disposal and recycling programs, because who but an Islamo-Fascist would want to provide much-needed jobs for the Red State countryside while keeping toxic garbage out of those people’s drinking water?
• $125 million to rebuild the broken, rotten, third-world sewer system of our Nation’s Capital. You give the blacks this, and who knows what they’ll want next! And by “give,” we mean “pay a decent wage to laborers in D.C., to rebuild their sewers.”
• $6 billion to pay dozens of big regional contractors, hundreds of local businesses and tens of thousands of American workers to retrofit federal buildings so that they’ll be energy efficient
• $200 million for computer centers at community colleges, because if poor unskilled workers want to “learn the computer,” they should just go to Stanford instead of complaining. 
   

I cannot tell you how angry I am that these bozoes are still playing partisan politics when people's lives depend on concerted action.

Limbaugh has actually been honest enough to say, on air, that he hopes the stimulus package fails -- with his millions, why the hell should he care, so long as the oxycontin and bile supplies hold up?

But it's depressing that those members of the GOP elected supposedly to serve this country and its people should have the same attitude. They should at least have the integrity and guts to explain to their consituents that this is the case.