But Anderson defended his vote, saying that he chose policy over politics. He said he listened carefully to both sides and made a reasoned choice, and denied accusations that he had struck any deals with the Douglas administration to secure the appointment to the House.

I encourage you to go to the Times Argus and read the whole article. Jon is adamant that he made the choice purely on policy, and that he determined that he was choosing a principled policy stand over politics. Taking this statement purely at face value you still have to ask a key question: When in doubt, who should you believe, your own party leadership or the other side?

Barre Democrat Tommy Walz has a great letter to the editor in today’s Times Argus about the phony affordability sessions Douglas has been staging around the state. Here’s how it starts off:

April 5, 2007

He’s blaming us.

( – promoted by gnome)

3:33 p.m.
April 5, 2007

The vote on the budget bill was one of the first roll call votes for the House’s newest member, Democrat Jon Anderson of Montpelier. Anderson voted to sustain the veto of the governor, who appointed him to the House, despite the fact that Anderson’s was not one of the three names Montpelier Democrats forwarded to Douglas as possible replacements for Francis Brooks. Brooks left the seat to become the Statehouse’s Sergeant at Arms.

Remember, the only reason he vetoed the bill is not that the Legislature won’t appropriate the money he wants for his pet scholarship program, it’s that they want to put it in the FY ’08 appropriation, the Big Bill, rather than in the FY ’07 Budget Adjustment Act. He doesn’t just want the money, he wants to make sure he gets his way, completely. And he got two D’s and an I to vote with him.

Jon, you’re welcome to comment at this site.

Cross posted from Rational Resistance

You are probably aware of McCain’s bullshit line the other day about how things are just hunky-dory in Baghdad. The surge is working, everything’s fine, you could just go for a stroll there in perfect safety.

First off, we know it’s a lie. Here’s the picture of McCain taking a little stroll in a market in Baghdad. 
Pretty much the way you go for a stroll, say to the farmer’s market in Montpelier, right? I spend a lot of time at our farmers’ market, and for months at a stretch I’ll spend my Saturday mornings there, registering voters and talking about politics. Needless to say, I’ve never seen anyone wearing body armor.

“What are they talking about?” Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal!”

The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees – the equivalent of an entire company – and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.

“They paralyzed the market when they came,” Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. “This was only for the media.”

“like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” offered Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who was a member of the delegation.

And now get a load of this:

A newborn baby was one of at least 14 children and adults killed when a  suicide bomber detonated a lorry laden with explosives close to a primary  school in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk yesterday.

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were  ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital. The victims came from  the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US  presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the  capital was starting to show signs of progress.

Sometimes I think these guys are just contemptible. Sometimes they’re unspeakably vile.

In the Bush Administration, probably the biggest one is to be willing and able to lie about the role of the United States in the world. In that case, who better to represent the United States than a guy who spent $50,000 to help the Swifties lie about Kerry?

Cross-posted from Rational Resistance

So far the most we’ve gotten out of Alberto Gonzales has been a string of bland assurances that yeah, he’s responsible because he’s the Attorney General, but he didn’t have anything to do with the purge, and he certainly never discussed the firings or had any meetings about it.

Now we know that this was a demonstrable lie.

The first two paragraphs in the story in today’s Times make that perfectly clear:

WASHINGTON, March 23 – Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior advisers discussed the plan to remove seven United States attorneys at a meeting last Nov. 27, 10 days before the dismissals were carried out, according to a Justice Department calendar entry disclosed Friday.

Is this the beginning of the end for Gonzo? Has he now committed the unforgivable crime? Not obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, or subverting the Constitution, but getting caught?

Stay tuned for more.

I heard this on VPR tonight and now it’s available on YouTube. Great clip showing Pat Leahy fighting for getting to the truth of the purge.

Advocates know that one time-tested way to get attention at the State House is to hand out food.

I was over at the State House today and I ran into local activist Andrea Stander, who was handing out birthday cake, but the message was a little odd. Like the headline says, mandatory retirement at age 35.

I’m way past thirty-five and I have no interest in being put out to pasture, but I have to say that in this case VPIRG had a good point.

I think I’ve mentioned that Josh Marshall is the one who’s really made the U.S. Attorney purge a story and kept it going. His blog, Talking Points Memo, posts consistently great journalism, and he’s really my model for the work I do, especially at Rational Resistance.

If you like Josh’s work you might be interested in this profile in the L.A. Times.

Then, on my way home from work today I heard this story on All Things Considered.

I know there is no Pulitzer category for internet reporting, but maybe there should be. Josh made a great story of Bush’s plan to kill Social Security by enlisting his readers across the country to find out their Congressman’s position on the plan. He was all over the Duke Cunningham story, and now he almost singlehandedly made the U.S. Attorney purge a big, national story.

I read TPM multiple times a day. I often comment that he must keep the same hours I keep, because no matter how late I’m up and surfing the Net I find new stories on TPM. It is absolutely indispensable to understand what’s going on.

Of all the candidates for president, the one I am most strongly attracted to has been John Edwards. He is clear, articulate, and committed on the centrality of the need to attack and eliminate poverty, both in the United States and around the world. He has an articulated plan for universal health care. Although he was wrong on Iraq, he has admitted that he was wrong, something that Clinton has not done.

There is a big issue, though, and I’m not at all sure I can get past it, at least not in the primaries. One of my biggest public policy concerns has been the tendencies of the United States to move towards theocracy. It’s most prominent in the Republican Party, and you see it in tons of Bush’s policies, not only his giveaway programs to church groups, but also his reflexive description of the need to launch a “crusade” against our enemies.

The Democrats are afraid of this trend nationally. Unfortunately, it’s not that they’re afraid that the trends will continue, it’s more that they don’t want to get on the wrong side of the religious voters, and they fall all over themselves to avoid it. This is why Pete Stark’s announcement last week was such a big deal.

That’s the problem I have with Edwards. Here’s what he says on belief.net:

Would it be your hope that a John Edwards Supreme Court would allow public schools to encourage more prayer in schools?

What I’m not in favor of is for a teacher to go to the front of the classroom and lead the class in prayer. Because I think that by definition means that that teacher’s faith is being imposed on children who will almost certainly come from different faith beliefs. Allowing time for children to pray for themselves, to themselves, I think is not only okay, I think it’s a good thing.

And there’s more:

So the answer is I think is that in an Edwards presidency faith-based groups, I believe, could be used. But I think it is also tricky business. I think you have to be careful about how you implement it for all of the separation of church and state issues, because you don’t want discrimination. You don’t want federal money going to any organization, including a faith-based group, that’s discriminating. So, you have to be very careful about that.

But, the bottom line is, if you can work through these problems, I think there is a great potential delivery system there.

It has always been true that people’s religious beliefs have influenced their political positions and actions, and that’s not going to change. You can’t even say that it’s necessarily a good or a bad thing, since religious beliefs have supported everything from Martin Luther King’s activism for social justice to the bigotry and repression excmplified by Jerry Falwell or the racism of Bob Jones University.

The problem is that people want power, and they will use religion to get it, and to insulate themselves from the normal political checks on their activities. In this interview Edwards is not only demonstrating a lack of appreciation for fundamental constitutional principles, but also a level of naivete that would make me very concerned about him for president.