Speaking for myself.

Now normally I don’t get fired up over something unless it deals with Israel-Palestine or something similar, but Van Jones’ resignation struck a nerve in me, as I’m sure it did with others who follow Green Mountain Daily. I wrote something similar over at Blue Hampshire, but here’s what I wrote.

Van Jones was one of rare true progressives in the Obama Administration. He was one of the rare people I respected. Now he’s gone because he said something that politicians say all the time about the opposite party.  So where was Obama? Why didn’t he speak up? Where was the rest of the administration? Where was the rest of Democratic Party? Did they realize who they had on their side?

More below the fold.  

As for signing the petition on whether the Bush Administration had a hand in the 9-11 terrorist attacks, I don’t see anything wrong with that. I think there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered what happened that day. I don’t think there’s anything controversial with signing something like that. In fact, Jane Hamsher writes today that “35% of Democrats surveyed believed as of 2007 — that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11.” So it’s not like Jones is alone on this. There’s so much more Hamsher writes about this. I’ll leave it for you to check out.

John Nichols, of The Nation said it best today about Jones and the Democratic Party’s capitulation.

“President Obama and his aides let the right spin a fantasy about a man who led the highly-regarded Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and was recently listed as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential player’s of 2009.

In so doing, they allowed Glenn Beck to define the administration.

This won’t make the Obama presidency stronger; nor will it position the president to work more effectively with Congress on issues such as health care reform – let alone “green jobs” initiatives.

The right now knows they can make this administration blink. And they will keep poking and prodding White House aides and appointees until Obama and his inner circle push back.”

But the person who said it best today was a well-known anti-racism activist Tim Wise.

Tim Wise said the following about Jones’ departure.

“If you think it’s merely a coincidence that the right has sought to make [Van] Jones such an issue–rather than some of the other administration officials they are now threatening to “expose”; (two of whom are white)–then you haven’t been paying attention to Republican and conservative politics for the past forty years. This is what they do. It’s the only language they speak, at least fluently.”

Wise titled this article “The Afrikaner Party Draws First Blood: Van Jones, Barack Obama and the Audacity of Capitulation.” I think that title is 100% accurate about the state of the Obama administration today. The Obama administration seems to me like the party that is willing to throw  any respectable leader, even a civil rights leader, under the bus if it meant winning elections. If standing for what’s right and what’s principled means losing elections, then the Democratic Party, my party, will compromise their integrity.

I realize that politics is not perfect.  But if I were in Obama’s shoes, I’d draw the line, keep Jones in my administration and tell the bloviators at Fox and co. to #@! off. I would not expect the Obama administration to believe what Beck says on his shows, nor react to what he says. They know Jones well and what he’s all about. The fact that they can’t stand up for a man like him, doesn’t say much about the party and the president I voted for. Thankfully my former governor and current Senator have the courage to stand up for him. Where’s Leahy and Welch? Hopefully they’ll have something to say.  

Maybe Alternet’s Don Hazen was right. Jones is too classy to be involved with the Obama administration. I’m sure he’ll do a lot more outside of government than to work with a bunch of weak-minded politicians.

Not a good weekend for being a Democrat.  

Can't someone stop this dangerous fanatic?

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

It’s Time to ‘Take Off the Gloves’ and Reveal Orly Taitz’s True Motivation For Her Stubborn Effort to Force Obama Out of Office: She’s a Rabid Islamophobe With Backing From a Radical Jewish Extremist Group That Adamantly Insists Obama Is a Muslim and Poses a ‘Dangerous Threat’ to the Survival of Israel

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, September 7, 2009)

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A ‘SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL

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Enough is enough!

The time has come to “take off the gloves” and reveal the true motivations of Orly Taitz, the so-called “Queen of the Birther Movement” that bullheadedly insists President Obama is not a U.S. citizen and is holding the presidency illegally — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Taitz’s stubborn campaign to remove Obama from office resumed anew Friday with her filing of yet another lawsuit in a California federal court, accompanied with yet another certificate allegedly documenting the president’s birth in Kenya.

But, just as in her previous lawsuit, the alleged Kenyan birth certificate of the president that Taitz filed with the court was immediately exposed as a forgery.

Her absolutely hell-bent determination to remove Obama from office despite her “evidence” against him getting shot down as fraudulent again and again and again would be laughable, were it not for her extreme prejudice in pursuing it.

That, unfortunately, has made it necessary to once and for all expose Taitz for what she is: A rabid Islamophobe who tenaciously clings to the false belief that the president is a Muslim and considers him a “dangerous threat” to the security of Israel.

That Taitz is motivated by extreme anti-Muslim hatred can no longer be ignored. In early April, Taitz — an immigrant from the former Soviet republic of Moldova who holds dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship — made an appearance at a gun show in Knob Creek, Kentucky, according to Esquire magazine, and unleashed a fusillade of anti-Muslim invectives against the president:

“I am extremely concerned about Obama specifically because I was born in [the] Soviet Union, so I can tell that he is extremely dangerous,” the magazine quoted Taitz telling the crowd. “I believe he is the most dangerous thing one can imagine, in that he represents radical communism and radical Islam. He was born and raised in radical Islam, all of his associations are with radical Islam, and he was groomed in the environment of the dirty Chicago Mafia! Can there be anything scarier than that?”

TAITZ BACKED BY RADICAL JEWISH EXTREMIST FOLLOWERS OF KAHANE

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report has subsequently learned that Taitz has support from the Jewish Task Force, a radical extremist group whose members, according to its Web site, follow the teachings of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL), who later emigrated to Israel and founded the far-right extremist Kach Party.

The JTF, like Taitz, adamantly insists that President Obama is a Muslim — despite overwhelming evidence that he is, in fact, a Christian — and considers him a traitor to the U.S. and a direct threat to Israel.  “We are opposed to Israel surrendering land for ‘peace,'” the JTF declared on its Web site. “We are also opposed to Islamic terrorism, which we believe is an integral part of Islam.”

The JTF regards critics of Israel in both the U.S. and Israel itself as “domestic fifth columnists who attempt to undermine America’s and Israel’s will to defend themselves and to properly fight their wars [against Islamic terrorism],” and included Obama as a “fifth columnist.”

The group formed another organization, Jews Against Obama, “to expose him as being just that” and it strongly supports Taitz’s efforts to oust the president from office. It has posted a highly inflammatory video online that claims Obama “wants to destroy Israel.”

KAHANE MOVEMENT BANNED IN ISRAEL AS ‘RACISTS,’ ‘TERRORISTS’

In 1988, Kahane’s Kach Party was branded racist by the Israeli government for its rabid anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred and banned from the Israeli Parliament.

In 1994, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Kach Party member Baruch Goldstein, an American-born immigrant, opened fire on a group of Muslim worshippers at the al-Haram al-Ibrahimi Mosque in the Palestinian city of Hebron, killing 29. Following the massacre, the Israeli government outlawed Kach as a terrorist organization.

The Anti-Defamation League, in a report on Jewish extremists, noted that while followers of Kahane — who was assassinated in New York in 1990 — “advocate militant Jewish nationalism as a means to protect the Jewish people, the Kahane Movement, in its 35-year history, “has demonstrated a pattern of xenophobia, anti-Arab bigotry and violence in the U.S. and Israel.”

The ADL report notes that in 2001 — exactly two months after the September 11 attacks — JDL leader Irv Rubin and Earl Krugel, the group’s former West Coast coordinator, were arrested in California just days before they planned to launch apparently retaliatory attacks. They were charged with plotting to blow up the San Clemente offices of Darrell Issa, a Lebanese-American Republican congressman; the Los Angeles offices of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the King Fahd mosque in Culver City, south of Beverly Hills.

Rubin committed suicide while awaiting trial in November 2002. In September 2005, Krugel was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the plot.

DESPITE SETBACKS, TAITZ PRESSES AHEAD WITH NEW CLAIMS AGAINST OBAMA

Taitz cannot practice law anywhere outside California because she never passed the bar exam and received her law degree from an online university that is not accredited. And her previous lawsuit against the president was undermined when an alleged birth certificate showing Obama’s birth in Kenya was almost immediately exposed as a forgery.

Undaunted, however, Taitz went ahead with yet another lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California claiming yet again that the president was not born in the United States, but in Kenya.

Taitz filed as part of her new lawsuit yet another alleged birth certificate showing Obama having been born at “Coast Province General Hospital, Mombasa, British Protectorate of Kenya” on August 4, 1961.

And this time, Taitz claims to have a witness: Lucas Daniel Smith, a 29-year-old Iowan, who, according to Taitz’s lawsuit, “went to Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya in February and paid ‘a cash consideration’ to a Kenyan military officer on duty to look the other way, while I obtained the copy of the birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama.”

A POINT-BY-POINT DISMANTLING OF NEW KENYA ‘BIRTH CERTIFICATE’

But, as was the case in her previous lawsuit, no sooner than the alleged “Kenyan” birth certificate Taitz filed in her new suit was made public, it was immediately exposed as a forgery. Even the Orange County Register, the largest newspaper in California’s most staunchly conservative Republican county, cast doubt on the authenticity of the document.

In the first place, the city of Mombasa was not Kenyan territory in 1961; it was part of Zanzibar. Although the city was administered by the British under its Kenya Protectorate, Mombasa remained Zanzibari territory until it was formally ceded to Kenya in 1963 — after Kenya won its independence from Britain.

Second, as we pointed out in a previous editorial on this matter last month, British law requires a birth certificate to bear the signatures of a newborn infant’s parents in order for the certificate to be legally valid. This new alleged certificate — as well as the previous one filed by Taitz — do not bear the signatures of either the president’s father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. or of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.

Third, this new alleged “Kenyan birth certificate” lists the time of the future president’s birth as 7:24 p.m. local time  — which happens to be the precise time he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, according to a widely-distributed copy of Obama’s birth certificate issued by the State of Hawaii.

Any serious student of geography can tell you that there is a 13-hour time difference between Honolulu and Mombasa. When it was 7:24 p.m. on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, it was 8:24 a.m. the following day in Mombasa.

Hawaii state law forbids the release of birth or marriage certificates to anyone but the persons named in the documents or their immediate relatives. A copy of the president’s birth certificate released by his campaign in June of last year to the nonpartisan Web site FactCheck.org carries a date stamp of June 6, 2007 — which the Web site noted “has bled through from the reverse side.”

“It’s therefore probably a copy obtained by Obama himself at that time,” said FactCheck.org’s Brooks Jackson, a former correspondent for CNN. “This document should put to rest [all this] groundless speculation.”

Fourth, Dunham, who, contrary to what both alleged “Kenyan birth certificates” say, kept her maiden name throughout her three-year marriage to the senior Obama — and, in fact, did not adopt the surname of her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, until after their divorce in 1980, altering the spelling to “Sutoro.”

OBAMA’S MOTHER WAS NEVER IN KENYA . . .

Fifth — and most important — Dunham was never in Africa at the time of her son’s birth. It would have been extremely dangerous for Dunham to be in Kenya in 1961. Tribal warfare between the Kikuyus and the Luos was raging in Kenya at the time of her pregnancy.

The ethnic warfare erupted in the immediate aftermath of the Mau Mau uprising against the British colonialists. There’s no way that Barack Obama Sr., a Luo, would have dared to bring his pregnant, white American wife to Kenya at the time, knowing full well that her safety — and that of their unborn son — would have been in grave jeopardy.

There was another reason the senior Obama, a Muslim who later became an atheist, dared not bring Dunham to Kenya: He was married to three other women there — a fact he kept secret from Dunham.  It is not unusual under Muslim tradition for a man to have as many as four wives, but the senior Obama knew that would have been deeply offensive to his Christian-raised American wife. In addition, the senior Obama’s marriage to Dunham was fiercely opposed by several of his Kenyan relatives at the time.

Ultimately, Dunham did learn of her husband’s other marriages and filed for divorce in 1964.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Dunham ever set foot outside of the United States before 1967, when she moved to Indonesia to live with her second husband, Lolo Seotoro.

. . . AND HIS FATHER LIVED IN THE U.S. FOR SIX YEARS

And then there is the not-so-small matter that the government of Kenya flatly denies that the U.S. president was born on its soil.

In Washington, Jon Chessoni, administration secretary of the Kenyan Embassy, told the online journal The Washington Independent last month that his office has received many questions about the president’s alleged birth in Kenya, which he called “baseless.”

“It’s madness,” said Chessoni, pointing out that the president’s father, had been out of the country when his son, the future U.S. president, was born in 1961. “When this matter first came up, the Kenyan government did its research and confirmed that these are all baseless claims,” he said.

In fact, the senior Obama left Kenya in 1959 after he was awarded a scholarship from an American program offering educational opportunities to Kenyan students and did not return to his homeland until 1965. During those six years in the United States, the senior Obama was a student at University of Hawaii, where he first met Dunham in the fall of 1960.

They married in February 1961, only to separate a little over a year later. After graduating from the University of Hawaii in 1962, Obama Sr. left Hawaii for Boston — leaving behind his wife and son — and took graduate study courses at Harvard University before returning to Kenya three years later.

TAITZ’S ‘WITNESS’ FALSELY CLAIMS KENYAN P.M. IS OBAMA’S COUSIN — AND ADMITS BRIBERY

In a written declaration filed with the court as part of Taitz’s lawsuit, Smith claimed that he “traveled to Kenya and Mombasa in particular with the intent to obtain the original birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama, as I was told previously that it was on file in the hospital and under seal, due to the fact that the prime minister of Kenya Raela [SIC] Odinga is Barack Hussein Obama’s cousin.”

Smith’s claim that Raila Odinga is the president’s cousin is false. In a January 2008 BBC interview, Odinga did assert that he was the Obama’s first cousin.  But Obama’s paternal uncle, Saiid Obama, denied any direct relation to Odinga.

In an interview with the Reuters news agency in January from the president’s ancestral village of Kogelo, Saiid Obama acknowledged that “Odinga’s mother came from this area” and is of the same Luo community as the Obamas, “so it is normal for us to talk about cousins,” he said. But “he is not a blood relative,” Saiid Obama told Reuters. Even if Odinga’s claim were true and he was the president’s first cousin — the son of his uncle Saiid — then why does the prime minister of Kenya not bear the Obama family name?

Smith continued in his declaration that “I had to pay a cash ‘consideration’ to a Kenyan military officer on duty to look the other way, while I obtained the copy of the birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama.”

While it’s well known that corruption is widespread in Kenya, Smith incriminated himself by admitting in court that he paid a government official to “look the other way.” In any country, that’s a criminal offense — bribery of a government official. That Smith admitted it in court renders this new so-called “Kenyan birth certificate” inadmissible as evidence, even if it was authentic, because it was obtained illegally.

No court in its right mind can accept evidence that was obtained by illegal means. Are Smith and Taitz really that stupid?

TAITZ NOW FACES POSSIBLE BAN FROM PRACTICING LAW IN CALIFORNIA

Now Taitz will have to defend herself against an attempt to ban her from practicing law in California — and she’s already lost a lawsuit from an erstwhile ally in the “Birther” movement.

A formal complaint has been filed with the California Bar Association against Taitz, on the grounds that she has “indiscriminately hurled charges of treason and called for an armed revolt against the federal government” — the latter of which is a federal crime under the Smith Act of 1940, under which Taitz can be prosecuted.

Taitz is also accused of “actively recruited clients in a state where she is not licensed to practice law;” of “repeatedly disrespected judges and officers of the court;” of making  “false and misleading claims in court filings” and of “not properly” accounting “for money she has raised to further her crusade.”

Taitz was also sued by Philip Berg, a Pennsylvania lawyer who sought unsuccessfully to declare Obama ineligible to be president on the grounds that he is not a native-born U.S. citizen, as the Constitution requires.

Berg accused Taitz of “harassing” him and fellow plaintiffs in Berg’s unsuccessful lawsuit against then-candidate Obama, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. He won a default judgement against Taitz in June after Taitz failed to respond to his lawsuit by a court-imposed deadline.

Yet despite all this, Taitz stubbornly continues her campaign to oust the president, even as others in the “Birther” movement have begun to give up, frustrated by their inability to come up with any concrete evidence to prove their claims against him. Only an extremist would continue to carry on despite having no chance whatsoever of winning.

And make no mistake, Orly Taitz is an extremist. She deserves absolutely no credibility whatsoever and we have every confidence that the courts will toss her latest lawsuit into the wastebasket, where it clearly belongs.

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor & Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All Rights Reserved.

The rumor mill says Lt. Governor Brian Dubie will not run for Governor. I believe that is correct and I predict he will not run. While I don’t have any inside information, his public actions speak volumes.

What and why – after the flip. . .

In 2002, Peter Shumlin and Doug Racine both announced they were running for Governor.

Many Democrats who wanted to avoid a primary at all costs (as well as folks in Racine’s camp), convinced Peter Shumlin to run for Lt. Governor instead.  So Shumlin took-one-for-the-team, bowed out of the gubernatorial primary and ran for Lt. Governor rather than Governor.

Early in the 2002 campaign, Peter met with a group of potential supporters/donors/volunteers etc. He told us the following disarmingly candid statement, which is also a basic truism of Vermont politics although the majority of Lite Gov. candidates don’t seem to admit it.

Shumlin said:  “I hope you’ll support me. I also hope you’ll consider your support of me as an investment in a future Governor. Let’s be honest here, kids don’t grow up saying ‘I want to be Lt. Governor someday’ and neither did I. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be Lt. Governor, but if I’m elected, I will also be coming back to you because I want to be Governor at some point.  I want to use this campaign and my time as Lt. Governor to demonstrate the type of Governor I can be for you.”

Point well taken.

2009:  So what’s up with Lt. Governor Brian Dubie?

Over the past 30+ years, virtually every person who ran for Lt. Governor did so because they wanted to be Governor.

In fact, if you go back to 1974, when Brian Burns was elected to be Thomas P. Salmon Sr.’s Lt. Governor, every Lt. Governor DID, with varying degrees of success, run for Governor of Vermont (Brian Burns, Peter Smith, Madeleine Kunin, Howard Dean, Doug Racine).**

Where does that leave Brian Dubie?

Countless Vermont politicians have run for, coveted, or served as Lt. Governor for the sole purpose of positioning themselves to be the “Next Governor Of The State Of Vermont.”  

So Dubie is running, right?  No. Here’s why.

First, Brian Dubie has had since the summer of 2002 to think about being Governor and, at some level, the idea of being Governor has appeal to him. It has appeal to anyone who has the least bit of political ambition and has run a state-wide campaign.

But here are just a few of the considerations he’s mulling today. One, he can’t win and he knows it. Two, he can’t win and I suspect there is no shortage of people telling him just that. Three, if he truly wanted the job, he would have been geared up a nano-second after Jim Douglas announced he was being pushed stepping aside. Let’s face it, number one is a show-stopper and number three is as clear a look into his thinking as we can possibly have.

Brian Dubie’s public behavior has telegraphed far more than anything he has said on the subject. He is not running.

There are a lot of Republicans glued to their cell phones this beautiful Labor Day weekend.  Enjoy folks!

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** The two notable exceptions are T.Gary Buckley who was eaten by his own in the ’78 GOP Lt. Gov. primary by Peter Smith and once again by a dozen or so other Republicans in a senate primary in 1980. The other exception is Barbara Snelling who served in the State Senate until health problems forced her to retire.

Being a member of the reality-based community, I admit that sometimes I don’t cotton onto some of the more bizarre currents of what passes for the intellectual life of the country. This time, however, now that I have caught up with it, really just has to leave you shaking your head in wonder.

Take a look at some of these quotes:

“As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology,”

“I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement.”

‘This is Marxist propaganda.’

And what’s the socialist message Obama is selling?

During this special address, the president will speak directly to the nation’s children and youth about persisting and succeeding in school. The president will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning.

But what are the wingers calling it? How about Obama’s ‘Dear Leader’ speech to students

I don’t think this is all about race. Of course, the birther controversy was. There is no chance that the idea would have gotten any traction if his name were O’Hara instead of Obama. Still, it goes beyond Obama’s race, and we know that because we saw it with Clinton, too. We have come to the point where the right wing in America simply denies the legitimacy of any election in which the Democratic candidate wins. When Clinton was elected, Limbaugh started his broadcasts with “America held hostage”, and when Clinton was going to speak at an Army base the wingers speculated about whether he could be protected against the real Americans who did not recognize him as their commander-in-chief. Now, extremists show up at presidential speeches carrying guns and making veiled threats to kill the president.

In short, the American right has decided that constitutional government is not for them, and that they will use any means necessary to ensure that we will have a permanent conservative government.

And they’re the ones who impugn our patriotism?

Another amazing Gallery Walk in Brattle-town! The Brattleboro Brass Band put on a great show on Eliot Street tonight.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend!

This Labor Day, Wake Up Walmart, along with a large coalition of labor, environmental and community groups, are challenging Walmart to live up to their PR promises and join us in supporting the American Values Agenda for Change at Walmart.

To help with the effort, Wake Up Wal-Mart is airing two TV ads in major cities.  Check out the first here and the second below the fold:

The coalition includes: AFL-CIO, Change to Win, Sierra Club, Campaign for America’s Future, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, National Consumers League, AFSCME, American Rights at Work, Communications Workers of America, Interfaith Worker Justice, LIUNA, National Labor Coordinating Committee, Service Employees International Union, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, United Auto Workers, United Farmer Workers and United Steel Workers.

The American Values Agenda for Change at Walmart issues a direct challenge to Walmart in five key areas: worker rights, quality jobs, equal opportunity, corporate responsibility and a healthy environment and lays out the next steps for how the coalition, led by the UFCW, will hold Walmart accountable for those challenges.

UPDATE 3 – Tuesday: WCAX, which is as well-connected to the Vermont Republican party as any corporation, reports that “Republican sources have confirmed for WCAX News” that Tom Salmon is joining the Republican party and that he will run for reelection. Statement by Vermont Democratic State Committee below the fold.

(UPDATE 2 – Monday Tuesday (woops): Since its Salmon jump day, I thought I’d bump Julie’s diary from Friday back up top. Totten is less skeptical today, and even has a copy of Salmon’s letter to supporters on the matter (yeah, apparently he still has a couple. Who knew?). Word is that Mr. Auditor’s Democratic re-election consultant team of Burlington Democratic Chair Jake Perkinson and former Peter Welch Staffer Selene Hofer-Shall will be severing ties. — odum)

(UPDATE – Saturday: In terms of professional media picking this up, Hallenbeck echoes what we’ve been hearing, while Totten is skeptical that Tuesday’s announcement will be substantive. – odum)

We’ve got two fairly reliable sources contributing to the following rumors:

1. Salmon will be switching parties on Tuesday, September 8th;


2. Salmon will still be running for auditor unless Dubie chooses not to run for Governor, in which case Salmon will run for governor instead.

We’ve also heard that someone named Lenny Britton (from South Pomfret), who owns a lumberyard in Windsor County, is talking about running for Senate in 2010.

Remember.  You heard it here first.  Or second.  Or whenever.  But, unlike some websites, we’re not going to sit here and pretend after the fact that we knew it was coming but chose not to post about it.

What does any of this mean?  I suspect that in Salmon’s case, it merely suggests that he’s returning to his natural spawning grounds.  For those of you who weren’t paying attention to the auditor’s race in 2006, he basically didn’t bother running much of a campaign at all, and merely squeaked in over a fairly unimpressive and (as I’ve noted before), smarmy opponent.  If he runs as a Republican, I think we’ve got a good chance at beating him just by showing up and actually trying to get someone elected, as opposed to slouching our way into office.

I’d write more, but I think my metaphors are a bit fishy today.  It’s best I clam up now.

Statement by the Vermont Democratic Party regarding Auditor Tom Salmon’s Announcement

We are disappointed by Auditor Tom Salmon’s decision to switch to the Republican Party. Auditor Salmon and his family have a long and storied history with the Democratic Party in this state and have enjoyed a great deal of electoral success with the help and support of the party and our dedicated activists.

As shown during this past budget battle and again in his statement today, it is clear that the Auditor identifies himself with Republican Governor Jim Douglas and the “Party of No-New Ideas.”

We will field an exciting slate of well qualified Democratic candidates for every statewide office in 2010. We are confident they will be successful and continue to do great work on behalf of the people of Vermont.

At the start, the polls showed good support for health care reform. A Democratic House and the Senate; this time it would work differently than the Clinton attempt years ago. With polls showing public support, it could be fixed, right?  Change.

Late yesterday leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus wrote to Obama saying

“A health reform bill without a robust public option will not achieve the health reform this country so desperately needs,” the letter continues. “We cannot vote for anything less…..We look forward to meeting with you regarding a robust public option in any final health reform bill and request that that meeting take place as soon as possible,”

Obama needed a reminder even during the campaign about where a big chunk of his support was coming from. An online petition and letter from the Nation Magazine forwarded to Obama urged him to follow up his rhetoric with support of progressive issues. Part of the 2008 letter read

We recognize that compromise is necessary in any democracy…………. But retreating from the stands that have been the signature of your campaign will weaken the movement whose vigorous backing you need in order to win and then deliver the change you have promised.  

First Snowe , then squeeze a caucus.

Maybe it was predicable .Here  from an article in late 2008 about Obama and his Chicago guys. The author a reporter with long Chicago experience who wrote in the Washington Independent said of the Obama Chicago team  By and large, this is a bunch of pragmatic deal makers who view ideology – especially extreme left-wing ideology – as a weakness.  

This seems relevant with news that the White House is still negotiating for a compromise bill with Maine Republican Olympia Snow.  Snowe  is perhaps the last remaining Republican member of what had been the bi-partisan  “Gang of Six “.

A “Gang of One ” ?

Searching out a middle where none exists .

CNN reports that the compromise would not include a public option but leave the door open for a public option provision added at a later date.

The Plum Line blog says ..

should Obama jettison the public option, progressives will come under tremendous pressure to back the plan anyway. White House advisers will likely insist that liberals mustn’t deny the president a historic victory and enable a defeat that could cripple the first African-American presidency.

http://washingtonindependent.c…

http://www.thenation.com/doc/2…

http://theplumline.whorunsgov….

To give a sense of how the greater political world is viewing Jim Douglas’s retirement, Cook’s Political Report just upgraded Vermont’s gubernatorial race from “Likely Republican” to “Toss-Up” status yesterday.

The Democratic Governor’s Association confirmed last week that they will place Vermont among their top-tier targets, along with states like Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota and California (and possibly Rhode Island, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona).