If you're a regular listener of “Democracy Now” you'll want to be in downtown Barre Saturday. 

WGDR event to feature 'Democracy Now!' host

April 30, 2008

By Mel Huff Times Argus Staff

<!– PHOTOS AND EXTRAS –><!– END EXTRAS –> PLAINFIELD – WGDR-91.1 FM was the first radio station in Vermont to run “Democracy Now!” the hour-long daily news program that the station's general manager, Greg Hooker, calls the station's “flagship.”

On Saturday, Amy Goodman, the host of “Democracy Now!” and her brother David Goodman, the co-author of three of her books, are coming to Barre to celebrate the station's 35th anniversary and promote their latest book. “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times” was released on April 8.

 It's ten bucks to get into the speech at the Labor Hall at 6:30, and worth every penny. I've listened to Amy Goodman on the radio, read their books, and posted about David Goodman when he spoke at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. If you're reading this that proves you care about getting more of the story than you'll hear from the MSM, so you should be there Saturday night.

You may not have heard much about it, but there is an industrial hemp bill pending in the Legislature. The bill is H. 267, and it passed the House by a large (veto-proof) margin. It's getting a lot of support from Rural Vermont. . Stll, it seems like a bill that should pass on the merits.

 It's now stuck in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and it's hard to picture it can get out in the few days they have left. Stil, I've spent enough time in the building to know that if there is the will to do something, it can happen very fast, especially at the end of the session.

HERE'S WHAT YOU CAN DO TO GET THIS BILL MOVING:
Please make TWO PHONE CALLS today. Please call the chair and vice-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee – Senators Dick Sears and John Campbell. Call them at 802-828-2228. Leave a message for each of them with your name and phone number and also a message that says 'please pass H.267.' Please call on Tuesday if you can, and Wednesday morning at the latest. Please DO NOT email these senators. Phone calls are most effective.

I think that most of us around here think that this bill should pass, so maybe we should do something about it. 

Among people that I talk to, one of the main reasons they give for supporting Clinton over Obama is his lack of experience. They reason that she's been around the block a time or two and he barely has. Another part of it is that she's had a lot more experience with hardball political campaigns, which should also make her more electable than he is. One example of why people are continuing to support (shall we say “clinging to”?) Clinton is this clip from a diavlog in which Glenn Loury explains his positions, including his view that she is just more competent.

Many of us Obama supporters, however, tend to question the relevance of her experience, or argue that his cross-partisan appeal, combined with the deep wells of Clinton hatred across the country, make him more electable than she is. Not only that, part of his appeal is that he has the ability to be a transformational leader in a way that Clinton does not. 

Now we have some more data points from recent weeks, and I'm afraid they don't seem to look very good for Obama. We do have the Jeremiah Wright thing, and we also have the clinging to guns and religion thing (which probably doesn't look as bad if you know what was going on when he said it), but these things still seem to demonstrate a political tin ear, which probably makes him look like a weaker candidate than he originally did.

In addition, some of his complaints about the Clinton campaign seem to be in the “Mom, she's being mean to me!” vein, which aren't much fun to listen to coming from your three-year-old, and are much worse coming from a professional politician.

Then, yesterday, he probably did worse than we were expecting. Clinton started out 20 points ahead, he chipped away at her lead, last week people were saying he was going to come within five points or so, and yesterday she won by almost ten. 

I will concede that the long hiatus since the last primaries, and the fact that Pennsylvania was the only game yesterday combined to make yesterday look bigger than it otherwise might have. Still, though, if anyone has momentum now, it's not him. (Remember back in 2004, when the Red Sox came back from a 3-0 lead in the playoffs to beat the Yankees? It was a big deal even when the Red Sox won their first game, even though they had to win three more in a row.)

So where are we? Obama is still the leader, but there are certain defects appearing that we hadn't seen before. We also know that the R's are going to be ten times as mean and dishonest as any Clinton can be, and they're going to make up as many lies about Obama as they did about Kerry four years ago.

I still hear people say that it doesn't matter, McCain just can't win. I think those views are clearly wrong. I think he can potentially win, and I am thinking more and more that the D's can boot this one.

So what do we do? Is anyone thinking that it's time to jump off the Obama band wagon? 

And, in an inside-baseball kind of way, does the deflation of Obama provide the justification of the superdelegate system that people have been criticizing all primary season? 

An op-ed piece from today's Times Argus: 

Article published Apr 20, 2008
Renters' rights deserve protection
Assertions made by landlord lobby are not backed by facts

The point of this bill is to facilitate evictions by landlords, mainly by undermining or rolling back victories tenants have been able to obtain in the courts in recent years. The bill would allow landlords to serve misleading,  confusing eviction notices with inconsistent and contradictory grounds and termination dates, would delay tenants' refunds of their security deposits, and would shorten the time a tenant has to vacate the premises if the court rules in favor of the landlord. Bob Kiss, the mayor of Burlington, is on record opposing the bill.

To call on your representatives to oppose S. 372 you can leave a message at the office of the Sergeant at Arms, 828-2228, or find your represesentative at the online legislative directory. 

The war on science is on the way to Vermont.

That's right, if you're all worried about people who aren't qualified to teach or do science getting fired from their jobs as scientists, this is the movie for you. Right-wing gasbag Ben Stein, who got his start on the national scene as a speech writer for Richard Nixon, is speaking at UVM next week in conjunction with the opening run of Expelled, a silly little movie that makes the unfounded claim that Big Science is engaged in a war against religious believers.

If you haven't heard of Expelled, you definitely should follow up on this. PZ has had a lot of coverage, partly arising from the fact that, although he's in the movie, when they showed it in Minnesota they wouldn't let him in and threatened him with arrest. Expelled Exposed is a whole web page devoted to it, and the Skeptics Society just posted an extended explanation of why the whole movie is a pack of lies.

I haven't seen it myself, and I'm not sure I'm going to bother. Still, it might be worth a trip to the Ira Allen Chapel, armed with one or two of the exposes, and try to get Ben Stein to defend the indefensible.

Vermont, of course, leads the nation in per capita fatalities in the Iraq war. What may be less well-known is that Richard Cody, the Army Vice-Chief of Staff, is a native of Montpelier.

Cody was recentl the subject of a “Talk of the Town” piece in the New Yorker, and his observations of military preparedness after five years of Bush's illegal war in Iraq, coming, as they do, from someone in a position to know, should be read by everyone concerned about our national security.

The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply, and limits our ability to provide ready forces for other contingencies. . . . Soldiers, families, support systems and equipment are stretched and stressed. . . . Overall, our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it. If unaddressed, this lack of balance poses a significant risk to the all-volunteer force and degrades the Army’s ability to make a timely response to other contingencies.

 It's worth reading the rest of the piece.

Maybe there shouldn't even be a question mark there, but today's Free Press has a story that seems to demonstrate that the Douglas administration is following Bush's lead when it comes to science: If the facts don't fit, stick to the party line.

It's a story about turtles up in Lake Champlain, and whether they will be harmed if the Missisquoi Bay causeway is removed.  After the study was done, complete with scientific analysis, Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Wayne Laroche scrubbed the plan to remove discussion that removing the causeway would hurt the turtles, and a scientist who worked on the panel objected:

“My read is that the commissioner would like this plan to minimize any obstacles it might put in the way of removal of the Missisquoi Bay causeway and his priorities for fisheries management,” [Middlebury College professor Jim] Andrews said.

“We don't like this process of one person hijacking the plan; one person saying he wants to edit the plan for four years until it meets his particular goals,” he added.

This isn't just an institutional fight. Here's what a biologist at UVM says:

 “As a scientist, those rub me the wrong way,” C. William Kilpatrick, a University of Vermont biologist and member of the state Scientific Advisory Group on reptiles and amphibians, said of the two points.

He said Laroche had no scientific evidence to back up either idea and that they contradict one another — if the turtles can swim upriver, then they are also strong enough to swim through the causeway opening.

“Things got added to the plan that have poor scientific validity,” he said, adding later, “There seems to be a political filter there.”

Hmm, here we have a politically charged inquiry, an apparent dispute as to the scientific validity of the claims, and the administration dumping the science to arrive at a predetermined political position.

You should read the whole story at the Freeps, and then think about whether  you sense a common thread between Bush and Douglas. 

UPDATED APRIL 8

Slate has also picked up this story. They definitely got the “Dairy Council got what they paid for” angle:

 Nowhere does the release compare the garbage intake from a glass of plain milk to the garbage intake from a glass of chocolate milk. That's because the release was issued by the National Dairy Council. Next I'll be getting alleged research reports about the benefits of drinking ethanol.

The universities are probably the most important centers for scientific research in the United States, and people are naturally inclined to trust what comes from them. They come with a built-in credibility as institutions.

Still, it's important to look a little bit behind the institution and see who's paying.  We're certainly familiar with this phenomenon in drug-company financed researched, but a story on VPR today exemplifies a similar situation using our home-grown version of the drug companies: BIG DAIRY.

Study says flavored milk doesn’t increase risk of obesity

Monday April 7, 2008
Ross Sneyd

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(Host) A University of Vermont researcher has some advice for parents and school administrators: Encourage kids to drink milk, even if it requires a spoonful of sugar to make it go down.

As VPR's Ross Sneyd reports, a new study has concluded that the small amount of sugar in flavored milk doesn't contribute to childhood obesity.

And guess who paid for the study: the National Dairy Council.

The research may not be compromised by the payer, but it may be worth noting that the VPR story, at least, makes no mention of the significant questions about whether cow's milk is actually good for people.

Props to VPR for including the funding source in the story!

There has finally started to be some real coverage of how the MSM are constantly sucking up to McCain.

We have this story from the New Yorker about how he strokes reporters on his bus.

The Times just ran an op-ed piece exploring why they are so enamored of McCain, and what it means for press coverage.

There was also a diavlog between Glenn Greenwald and Ana Marie Cox (I had no idea how insufferable she was until I watched this) in which Glenn attempts to debate the issue and Ana Marie spends the entire time trying to either evade the question or dismiss it without arguing it; while she attacks the Neil Gabler piece for assuming it's true, she finds it inconceivable without attempting to rebut any of the claims made either in the op-ed piece or by Glenn Greenwald.

Finally, we have another clue to what's going on: a video posted on YouTube by McCain's daughter that shows the whole gang of reporters laughing it up with McCain at his house in Sedona, barbecuing some kind of meat with him, and otherwise acting like courtiers instead of journalists.

Of course they're in the tank for him: he's friendly, jovial, and he makes them feel like the close friends of this admitted war hero. I'm guessing they don't spend much time around war heroes, and after they do they get to think about themselves as his friends, and they get to congratulate themselves, or to tell their families and friends the things he confides in them on the bus that he doesn't say to the voters.

It's time to start calling the press on it when they do this.

Here's part of a longer post by my son Adam over at Welcome Campground:

“Good thing I've got this shovel!

And what a shovel it is!

It shines as bright as acorn shells and glistens in the sun,

I got it cause I wanted holes,

it hasn't dug me one!”

“Good thing we've got democracy!

And what a system, oh boy!

We got it for to garner peace and bring self determination,

ol' democracy just sits there, though, I thought it ran the nation?”

Asking a Shovel to dig a hole for you is like asking Democracy to represent you. The government only asks you what you think a couple of times a year. I believe that voting is necessary, but it is possibly the weakest form of democracy there is.

Anybody here guilty of sitting around waiting for democracy to do something for you?