The latest and greatest refrain from today’s Republican Party has become “vote for us because once upon a time we did the right thing”. In particular I’m now hearing how it was primarily the Democratic party that stood in the way of the civil rights movement … hell … it was a Republican president, Abe Lincoln, who actually took up the literal fight to end slavery in the United States.

Of course this was all true up to a point (the reality being that the mainstream Democratic membership by the 1950s was busy going anti-segregation which is why a vast majority of them supported the civil rights movement).

But then Trick Dicky Nixon (not to be confused with Tricky Dickey Cheney) decided he’d win an election by embracing southern style racism ala the Dixiecrats and George Wallace both of whom/which were thoroughly rejected by the mainstream Democratic Party.

The election of a completely corrupt Richard Nixon to the presidency who we know expressed regular disdain (to be polite) for such things as Blacks and Jews quickly set up “the rest of the story”.

Bigotry is not solely the purview of our nation’s south. It darkens the minds and souls of folks from sea to shining sea; but just as we as a nation were getting ready to drive a spike through that evil heart the Republican Party took up the cause by legitimizing the concept of the poor white master now relegated to handing jobs over to blacks simply because of skin color … and then of course came the hippies from the north and then those god damned women libbers and their equal rights amendment and those homosexuals who wanted access to the benefits of society and lately the evil Hispanic hoards intent on invading and annexing the southwest and now the Muslims of the world.

What was it that Nixon picked up on that the Republican Party has used so effectively for the past 50 years?

Simple … do what Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot (ooops, that friend of Ronald Reagan hadn’t come to power yet) did … define some great evil other that requires extraordinary big brother police and military action to stop. When this happens reality doesn’t count because the intended effect is to whip up a frenzy of fear and helplessness that can be assuaged only by allowing the correct people to lead the way.

That has been the message of the Republican Party since Tricky Dicky Nixon became president.

And today we’re hearing such asinine arguments as this NYC mosque being built too close to something called ground zero or the invasion of the Hispanic anchor babies and even terrorist babies being born in US so as to return in 21 years and pull a suicide bombing on us.

Doesn’t really matter as long as there’s an “us” (the good guys) and “them” (the bad guys) and a Republican Party willing to go to extremes of war and torture and stomping on civil liberties to protect us.

Because once upon a time …

And I mean the well know and the little known …

[Republican congressional wannabe Paul] Beaudry is taking a $500-a-week salary from his campaign …

(Two Vermont candidates had money problems, Burlington Free Press, 08/11/10)

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those [liberal naysayers] ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

(White House unloads anger over criticism from ‘professional left’, The Hill, 08/10/10)

So off you guys go, Gibbs/Obama … join Peter “The ACORN attacking weasel Welch in spooning up to your racist, radical, reactionary right wing allies.

Oh, and Sanders … what’s your view on all this? You ready to dump all those folks who supported you too?

Quick question: if you had been found to have been pilfering money from the company that employs you as well as falsifying documents to cover this act up: what would you expect from your bosses?

Apparently if you’re one of the uber-rich negotiating a $100 million dollar contract with HP you get an eye popping “a $12.2 million severance payment and nearly 350,000 shares of HP stock worth about $16 million at Friday’s closing price. The company also extended the deadline for exercising options to buy up to 775,000 HP shares.” (Source: Disgraced HP CEO to get nearly $28 million, Brattleboro Reformer, 08/07/10)

Poor guy, and all us comminists wanna bring his taxes up a bit.

I remember my days working on a small charter fishing boat down in Key West, Florida. More often than not we came in with a full hold of fish and happy customers (not in the hold too of course), and on these occasions we, the crew, could pick up a few extra bucks cleaning the catch of the day.

The process of cleaning, or gutting, is simple enough: slice along the bottom to open the fish up, remove all the innards, cut off the head and fillet the meat off the bones. This would leave you with … well … a bunch of dead fish.

Once again our state government has proven that our (for now) local public schools are nothing more than fish in the sea to be caught and gutted. What’s left is going to be temporarily nourishing at best.

The newest assault on our public education system comes in the way of “targeted reductions”. (Education chief sets budget targets for school districts, Barre/Montpelier Times Argus, 08/05/10) This is nothing more than a tactic designed to impress upon us all the state government’s supremacy, a desire to crush the hard earned wages of dedicated educators and kill off extremely important educational programs that our young folks depend on so much to prepare them for the future … oh, and it’s also designed to remove that local part of our (for now) local school systems by making it impossible for local communities to make rational, local decisions.

(Personally I’m not against reducing the cost of public education, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt this can be done while IMPROVING both educational offerings and outcomes. But the reality is that the command and control freaks in Montpelier don’t want to do the one thing that would really allow this to happen: give up centralized control. ‘Nother discussion, ‘nother day.)

Williamstown recently experienced a community budget process that went through a series of 3 votes with the outcome being a “level funded” budget. I used quotes in the previous sentence because “level funded” really meant a $200,000 cut in educational expenditures for the majority of our (for now) local school district’s youth.

You see we’re budgeting for a little more than $200,000 increase in special education costs over the previous fiscal year. Yet I don’t hear a pip out of the legislature or governor’s office or Vermont’s ed department about the need to find relief for those costs we have literally no control over.

Quite the opposite: There’s a proposal floating around the state house to mandate our (for now) local schools come up with a policy and plan to reach %100 graduation rates. On top of that at least one Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Ms. Markowitz, is actively pushing a plan to turn our (for now) local school systems into prisons for those who have passed their 16th birthday and don’t want to be in school right now.

Nope … no help in spending less to be found there.

This whole process is a well oiled and intentional effort to gut everything out of our (for now) local school districts with the desired end result being a hollowed out, lifeless institution that in the end will do nothing more than churn out well behaved workers for major corporations … just pay attention to the rhetoric and policies coming out of our state government.

So gut the schools, get back at the teacher’s union and screw the kids … ’cause we got targeted cuts to make.

Vermont’s executive and legislative branches are out to gut public education!

It’s a step and a big step. It is really telling that no matter how much government money intended to improve our physical communications infrastructure is being thrown around, publicly owned projects like Burlington’s BT and this ECFiber project are treated like lepers in a downtown department store.

Nope … no tax dollar for the public, but gosh all mighty we got plenty of tax dollars for the big private corporations. And these big private corporations are offering nothing close to the level of service being provided by or envisioned for the publicly owned utilities.

In the release below you’ll see the sentence “The [publicly owned ECFiber] pilot project will be financed with privately-raised funds.” Any other takers for that line?

Anyway … press release from ECFiber.net follows:

For Immediate Release 7/26/2010

For more information, contact Bob Merrill, 802-457-4938,  info@ecfiber.net

ECFiber Project Underway

With financing plans well underway, we have decided to proceed with a pilot project. At its regularly scheduled meeting, the ECFiber Governing Board gave the go ahead to investigate the deployment of a pilot Fiber to the Home project within its territory. The Executive staff immediately set out to identify suitable target areas to begin deployment.

“We have identified several unserved areas that will help to prove our concept,” said Project director Tim Nulty. “Engineering crews started the pre construction process the morning after the vote. We’re very excited to get to work. This has been a long time coming.” Nulty hopes to make the first pole applications within a couple of weeks.

“Delivering cost effective high quality reliable broadband to rural America is a challenge,” said Ron Cassel, coordinator of the build-out. “We decided that we needed an innovative approach to that challenge. We have built a successful model in our labs, but there is no better test than a real life deployment. That’s when the rubber hits the road. We now have a solid roll-out plan in place, and hope to be installing our first customers in a few months!”

The pilot project will provide a solid foundation for the capital lease used to build out the rest of the network, providing 100% coverage in 23 towns in East Central Vermont. While the intent of the project is to prove that the larger project is viable, according to Nulty, “it will be able to stand on its own if we don’t raise another dime of capital.”

The pilot project will be financed with privately-raised funds.

Pomfret resident Loredo Sola, who chairs the Governing Board, was moved by the vote. “This is an historic day for ECFiber, for Vermont, and for rural America. This is the first project of its kind, and will become a model for the rest of the country.”

All of Vermont’s gubernatorial candidates were invited to the meeting; Matt Dunne attended. He applauded ECFiber for its vision, and especially for getting 23 towns to agree to such a complex and important undertaking. He said that the response to the ECFiber effort demonstrates the level of desire for true broadband coverage.

###

ECFiber is a group of 23 towns working to build a community-owned, subscriber-funded Fiber-to-the-Home network to provide phone and ultra-high-speed internet services to 100% of the homes and businesses in the member towns. For more information, see www.ecfiber.net.

————–

Bob Merrill

www.bobmerrill.com

Why does ACORN still matter? Two words – a name: Shirley Sherrod.

The one simple fact about the firing (yes … a coerced resignation is a firing) of Ms. Sherrod is this: It never should have happened! No amount of mea culpas or apologies or even rehiring Shirley can negate this reality.

This whole incident isn’t about Breitbart or the radical right wing lie & smear machine. We already knew they were full of shit. This incident is about a cowardly Obama administration that has shown itself to be lacking in judgment and ready to make kneejerk reactive decisions based upon wholly manufactured evidence. Imagine if we’d been talking about … oh … how about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq Iran some far off nation?

But at least the headline this morning in the Times Argus is “Mea culpa, White House apologizes to fired Ag worker”.

Welch is a totally different story. It’s been the better part of a year since Welch joined his radical right wing lie & smear machine buddies in Congress and attacked the grass roots organization ACORN based entirely on manufactured video evidence and other lies (voting issues, misuse of government funds). Yet the weasel Welch still stands by the lies even though the lies have been publicly exposed! (see this GMD post for audio from a recent Mark Johnson Show providing irrefutable evidence of Welch’s bullshit).

Just as nobody bothered to do even the most cursory fact checking before Shirley Sherrod was sacked from her job; the weasel Welch never bothered to say “You know, as an experienced prosecutor I know the importance of facts when it comes to damning people. I want to see the evidence supporting the claims before I make a judgment on the floor of the House – before I attack a grass roots organization that has done so much to help empower the dis-empowered.”

A simple step for someone with Welch’s experience, yet one he freely and openly refused to take … and refuses to take to this day.

Okay, this whole sordid Shirley Sherrod affair can be written off as a major fuck up with lessons hopefully learned. But the weasel welch continues with his lie based attacks on ACORN. No lessons learned or acknowledgment of poor judgment and worse actions.

Welch is much, much worse. Welch is simply doing a Tricky Dicky Cheney dance (ala Iraqi WMD) and just keeps insisting that despite mountains of evidence proving him wrong that he, Welch, was correct.

Lack of judgment and lack of credibility. That is the phrase that best describes Peter Welch. And he won’t even apologize for it. Those like Welch do not belong in Congress.

Remember when the weasel peter welch joined his radical right wing allies in Congress to attack the grass roots organization ACORN? Remember how each and every reason welch used – AND CONTINUES TO USE – to support his alliance with his radical right wing allies in Congress in attacking ACORN turned out to be irradiate waste product? (Meaning of no value whatsoever … not even to till the earth with.)

Well, now it’s the Obama administration’s turn to be the weasel, and the target of their baseless attacks is a woman named Shirley Sherrod.

Ms. Sherrod WAS a regional director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture down in tea party heaven Georgia. But then she made the mistake of talking about a decades old incident that taught her the evils of looking at life through a lense of skin color … and that was enough for Obama and his courtiers to bounce the poor woman from her job faster than a dumping of Obama’s one time long time pastor Wright.

Of course the wing nuts took Shirley Sherrod’s statements way, way out of context in order to lie about her statements. The lie machines told the world that Sherrod’s statements were about contemporary actions and, rather than discussing a life lesson learned, reflected her attitudes today.

Which obviously was enough to kick the DC Democratic surrender monkey machine into high gear … and promptly push for and receive Ms. Sherrod’s resignation … something I would call firing by coercion.

The NAACP was the first public body to realize just how duped they were by the made up bullshit that Obama and his administration lapped up like tax dollars for bloody and pointless wars.

After watching the full, unedited tape of remarks delivered by Sherrod, however, the NAACP now says that it was “snookered” into casting judgment on Sherrod, and has officially retracted its criticism of her, fulfilling an earlier Surge Desk prediction. In a further bitter irony, Sherrod was actually speaking at an NAACP event.

(NAACP Retracts Criticism of Shirley Sherrod After Viewing Full Video of Speech, AOL News, 07/20/10)

And the supposed victim of Shirley Sherrod’s non-existent rascism?

Earlier in the day, Eloise Spooner, the wife of the farmer mentioned in Sherrod’s story, spoke to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she vigorously defended Sherrod, saying that her actions help the couple hold onto their farm.

(ibid)

Yeah … Obama’s in your corner … until he’s not … which is much more often than the prior.

(PS. Still waiting on that welch apology to ACORN for the damage he did there.)

Full video of Shirley Sherrod’s speech as provided by the NAACP:

The video is about 43 minutes, and I would suggest listening from the beginning and continue at least through her conclusion regarding the incident in question. Her non-controversial controversial statements begin a little after 16 minutes. One note: there is an obvious edit in the filming (looks like a part 1 was appended to a part 2) at 21 minutes but it doesn’t affect her comments one iota.

The embrace of an expensive weapons system with widely disputed merits, [Rep. Suzi Wizowaty, D-Burlington] continued, “will increasingly tie Vermonters to military spending.”

(Burlington F-35 opposition forms, Burlington Free Press, 07/14/10)

Wizowaty was referring specifically to the possibility that Burlington’s airport might become home to a new generation of ultra-expensive war machines (the F-35), but her words of caution here apply to the whole Welch/Leahy/Sanders supported military-industrial welfare complex.

Classical fascism as defined by Benito Mussolini involves the melding of corporate and state governance combined with a militaristic foreign policy. Sound familiar to anyone?

And he’s doing it right out in public.

First the clearing of ACORN and then audio of the weasel welch.

This link is to the preliminary GAO investigation into all the alleged and found without basis accusations leveled against ACORN by Vermont Representative Peter “The Weasel” Welch and his rabid right wing allies.

And then there is this coverage:

Of course others, at least those interested in the truth, easily found the evidence too … California’s Attorney General has cleared ACORN of any criminality.

That’s just a touch of it. Not included above are such as a criminal investigation by a Bronx DA that cleared ACORN and called the videos bullshit; multiple state investigations looking into the voter registration programs run by ACORN that ALL found nothing wrong, and the latest GAO report that cleared ACORN of any financial wrong doings.

My long list can be found here.

And now to the weasel welch in his own words: from the Mark Johnson Show of 07/12/10. The complete podcast can be found here on the Mark Johnson Show website.

So all the evidence says welch is full of shit, but welch just keeps repeating the lies.

The weasel welch does not belong in congress … and if you’re voting for him you are voting for a determined liar.