Cross posted from Beyond Vermont State Hospital.

Remember April Jin, the mayor who blacklisted mental patients in Vergennes last year? Well, she was up for reelection yesterday and was soundly defeated, and will score few points for grace in bowing out of Vergennes politics.

We don’t have any information on what led to this vote, but we do know that it’s very rare for Vermont voters to turn out any kind of incumbent, anywhere.

“I feel like getting the hell out of this town and out of this state. I’m disgusted,” Jin said. “I’ve served on a lot of organizations. Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter.”

Not quite “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” but she doesn’t seem to be adhering to the old advice to keep your words soft and tender, in case you have to eat them later.

From the Capital Press Bureau:   Gov. James Douglas, acting as Middlebury’s moderator, tried to stop a vote on a resolution calling for President Bush’s impeachment and withdrawal of troops from Iraq at the town’s annual meeting Monday night, according to several residents who attended.

WCAX is reporting that voters in 32 cities and towns passed resolutions calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, and 9 towns voted to withdraw from Iraq. While we didn’t get enough signatures to get on the ballot in Montpelier, maybe this will get Leahy, Sanders, and Welch to listen to what their constituents are saying.

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

The big blogger summit happened Saturday night at the Euro Cafe on Main Street in Burlington. It was great to meet many of the writers, some of them colleagues here at GMD, whom I had only encountered electronically. Conversation ranged pretty widely, from the expected: Clinton, Obama, and the 2008 Democratic ticket; to the mundane: TV shows, vasectomies, and how to resolve husband-wife disagreements; to the mind-numbingly technical: peer-to-peer bit torrent technology, for instance.

Some of Vermont’s alt-media stars were there: Philip Baruth, Peter Freyne, Cathy Resmer, along with a gaggle of lesser-known but committed bloggers.

Philip writes a better story about what happened than I could, but I’ll share some of the pictures I took.

This just in: Scooter Libby has been convicted of four of the five counts against him. Two counts of perjury, one count of lying to a federal officer, and one count of obstruction of justice for lying to the grand jury.

UPDATE:  A jury speaking to the press says that frequently during their deliberations the jury members were asking each other, “What are we doing to this guy? Where’s Rove?” He specifically says that they thought Libby was the fall guy.

I’ve been following this story with increasing interest since Josh started running it a few weeks ago. Today is one of the chances for this story to come to a head, with the purged U.S. Attorneys testifying at the Senate Judiciary Committee. You can watch it streaming here: http://www.cspan.org…

One thing that I was struck by, based on what I’ve seen so far, is that Spector seems to be trying to limit the import of the testimony, constantly trying to pin the witnesses down to say that they don’t know for a fact that they were fired for political reasons. Since he was supposedly miffed at the insertion of language that allows the president to appoint U.S. Attorneys without Senate confirmation, you might think he would be a little better on this issue.

One of the interesting discussions I had at the blogger shindig last night (I’ll get a report up on it later) had to do with, what else, who’s the best candidate for president? There was certainly a strong Obama contingent, ably represented by Philip Baruth and Neil Jensen–did I get that right?–but that may not be the end of it.

Bill Simmon has been arguing for Bill Richardson as a dark horse. Well, he’s obviously a dark horse, but does that mean he’s nowhere? Bill was pointing out a lot of good points for Richardson: many years in Congress, experience at the Cabinet level, he’s a governor, he’s Hispanic. All of those things are correct, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a winner. Funnily enough, though, David Brooks makes all the same points in his column ($$) today.

I’m not much to take advice from conservatives, and I find Brooks particularly annoying, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. From what I know of Richardson I think he’s an attractive candidate. The biggest question is how he gets from where he is now, which is pretty much nowhere, to the top of the charts. The way Dean did it four years ago was to be first out of the gate as an antiwar candidate. I didn’t exactly buy his conversion from conservative DINO governor to antiwar diehard Dem, but he sure attracted a lot of people and attention.

Unfortunately Richardson doesn’t have that going for him. I still think the Democratic field is going to shape up as Hillary vs. someone else, or maybe Hillary/Obama vs. someone else. If that’s the way it is I lean toward John Edwards, but I think that Richardson has a shot there. Maybe a long shot, but he’s not Kucinich or Vilsack.

In case you’ve missed it, here’s that vile harpy Ann Coulter on John Edwards.

If you’ve been following the papers in recent years you know that Gov. Douglas’s biggest policy proposal has been civil commitment for sex offenders: basically, lock them up and throw away the key.

Pretty powerful idea. So much so that two years ago there was a legislative study, looking at the experience of other states to see if there is any reason to think it might work. Turns out, it doesn’t.

Here’s what the report says:

However, the committee does not believe that there is adequate evidence that civil commitment is the best use of state resources in trying to protect the community against potentially dangerous sex offenders.

Three of the members of the committee were even stronger in their rejection of the civil commitment idea:

Second, there is no evidence that civil commitment is effective even for those offenders who voluntarily participate in treatment. The evidence shows that recidivism rates in states that have adopted civil commitment are no better for offenders who have successfully completed civil commitment and been released than for offenders who were eligible for civil commitment but were released without being civilly committed.

That’s not enough to stop some people. Once again this year, Kurt Wright is the lead sponsor of a bill in the House to adopt civil commitments in Vermont.

Meanwhile, life goes on. And in this case, when I say “life” I mean more evidence on how these programs really work. Guess what? They don’t.

From tomorrow’s Times:
The decision by New York to confine sex offenders beyond their prison terms places the state at the forefront of a growing national movement that is popular with politicians and voters. But such programs have almost never met a stated purpose of treating the worst criminals until they no longer pose a threat.

But in state after state, such expectations have fallen short. The United States Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the laws in part because their aim is to furnish treatment if possible, not punish someone twice for the same crime. Yet only a small fraction of committed offenders have ever completed treatment to the point where they could be released free and clear.

I know that in the face of truly horrific crimes there is an overwhelming impetus to do something, anything. And I certainly don’t discount the fact that getting tough on the most hated criminals at all is a proven vote-getter (in other words, support your local demagogue).

Still, this is an occasion where Vermont may have been a little bit behind the curve nationally, so maybe we can pay attention to what’s happened in other states and realize that we can protect civil liberties and save ourselves a bundle by not going down the civil commitment road.

Just a suggestion.

Cross posted from Rational Resistance

Here’s the news. I saw it on TV tonight, but I just found it in the Times.

You’ve probably heard part of this story already. Cheney was over in Pakistan earlier this week, apparently to kick Musharraf’s ass about cooperating with us on tracking down terrorists. He then gave an interview–correction, “a senior administration official”–gave a group  interview talking about Cheney’s meeting with Musharraf. The senior administration official seemed pretty well informed about the private meeting between Cheney and Musharraf, and seemed very interested in pointing out inaccuracies in press reports of this meeting.

For instance, did Cheney have this meeting to beat up on Musharraf?

A: That’s not the way I work. I don’t know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn’t know what I’m doing, or isn’t involved in it. But the idea that I’d go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.

So whoever the senior administration official is, he is apparently in a position to use the first person singular when referring to Vice President Richard Cheney.

Okay, so far it’s just ridiculous, a story of a little charade Cheney and the press agreed to.

Now, here’s the good part. Cheney goes over to demand that Musharraf do a better job at rounding up terrorists, and the same day, what happens? Pakistani forces pick up a terrorist, a really big one.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 1 – The former Taliban defense minister was arrested in Pakistan on Monday, the day of Vice President Dick Cheney‘s visit, two government officials said Thursday. He is the most important Taliban member to be captured since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The man, Mullah Obaidullah, was a senior leader of the Afghan insurgency, which has battled American and NATO forces with increasing intensity over the last year.

He is one of the inner core around Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. The leadership is believed to operate from the relative safety of Quetta, Pakistan, where Mullah Obaidullah was arrested.

This is good news, right? After all, this is almost the top guy over there, bigger than anyone else we’ve picked up.

So what’s the problem? Well, to hear Bush tell it, the Pakistanis are our stalwart allies, standing side by side with us, fighting terrorists and building democracy (okay, that part may not be that important). But what happened on Monday? Cheney went over, demanded that they start handing over some terrorists, and that just happens to be the day they pick up one of the biggest targets of all.

I don’t think so. If they could pick him up Monday, they could pick him up Sunday. Isn’t it obvious that they have known where this guy was all along, but they weren’t sufficiently motivated until Vice President Senior went over and threw his weight around?

And if I’m right about that, doesn’t that also mean they’ve been protecting him?

And if they’re protecting this guy, what are the odds they aren’t protecting bin Laden?

Good thing we let al Qaeda out of Tora Bora so we could invade Iraq, isn’t it?