Here’s a miscellany of pieces that I came across tonight while not watching the Chimp in Chief:

MIAMI, Florida (AP) — E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon’s presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88.

And from the left-wing media: JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) — Allegations that Sen. Barack Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school known as a “madrassa” are not accurate, according to CNN reporting.

Insight Magazine, which is owned by the same company as The Washington Times, reported on its Web site last week that associates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, had unearthed information the Illinois Democrat and likely presidential candidate attended a Muslim religious school known for teaching the most fundamentalist form of Islam.

MONTPELIER – A new report prepared for the Legislature raises question about whether Vermont’s tax burden is as bad compared to other states as is often suggested.

Sen. Claire Ayer, D-Addison, said the report was welcome. “It destroys the myth that Vermont is such an unfriendly place for business and families,” she said.

MONTPELIER – Vermonters could save nearly a half-billion dollars over the next decade by more efficiently using heating fuels, according to a study by the Department of Public Service.

The state would have to invest about $149 million over that period, but residents could save $486 million and significantly cut the production of gases responsible for global warming.

Rich Little won’t be mentioning Iraq or ratings when he addresses the White House Correspondents’ Dinner April 21.

Little said organizers of the event made it clear they don’t want a repeat of last year’s controversial appearance by Stephen Colbert, whose searing satire of President Bush and the White House press corps fell flat and apparently touched too many nerves.

Cross-posted from Rational Resistance

We knew that when Pat Leahy ascended to the chair of the Judiciary Committee he would regularly be called on to stand up for rights, for civil liberties.. In light of today’s news we canall be glad he’s there.

What are we trying to establish in Iraq? Democracy, right? American-style democracy, with due process of law and all that stuff?

Maybe, depending on what you think due process of law and all those other inconveniences mean.

Here’s what Bush’s people think it means:

“I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Yup, that was Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. He’s the guy in charge of detainees, and presumably in charge of the show trials they’re getting. He’s also a lawyer who graduated from George Mason University. Maybe while he was there he missed the day they talked about John Peter Zenger, and his court-appointed lawyer, Alexander Hamilton. So if there’s any question in his mind, here’s a little tip: you don’t have to prove you’re innocent in order to qualify for a lawyer.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote to President Bush on Friday asking him to disavow Mr. Stimson’s remarks. They’re trying to distance themselves from Stimson, but since they’re the same people who fired a Navy lawyer for taking them to the Supreme Court on the Hamdan case, it’s hard to take what they say very seriously.

Okay, I’m sure you think that this was some kind of test, and somehow my keyboard passed (or failed?) by letting me type the title of this diary. That would be a good hypothesis, but in this case it turns out not to be correct.

Actually, I’m writing to recommend another site. I’ve been a regular viewer of BloggingHeadsTV, a site that Robert Wright has been running for a couple of years now. It’s like the video version of blogging, and the way it works is that Bob Wright and someone else (commonly, but not always, Mickey Kaus) sit at their computers, with their webcams and headsets, and debate issues. They call them diavlogs, and they do two or three a week, sometimes Bob and Mickey, sometimes two other people.

It varies. John and I have talked about it, and I suspect he doesn’t watch BHTV because of how much he can’t stand Mickey. This is entirely understandable, because Mickey is one of these guys (they seem to be legion, like Chris Matthews and Tim Russert) who like to parlay a long-ago staff job for some Democrat into some kind of Democratic bona fides, even though they have slipped irredeemably, or nearly so, into conservatism. Bob does challenge Mickey on his claims to be a Democrat, and I think he routinely has the better of the argument, but I still think some of the diavlogs can be enlightening.

Tonight I just watched one between Bob Wright and Andrew Sullivan, whom you may know as the former editor of the New Republic. I thought it was very good, largely because (here’s the shocking part) Andrew Sullivan admits that he was wrong to support the Republican War in Iraq, and talks at great length about why. His comments are really way beyond the norm for former war supporters, and they seem to demonstrate that not only does he realize that he was wrong, but that he has understood that he has to rethink his whole way of looking at things.

You can certainly judge for yourself if you think that’s true, but I think it’s worth viewing the diavlog for that and other reasons.

One of the main reasons is that they talk about why, knowing what we know now about the runup to the war–excuse me, the Republican War in Iraq–it is more important than ever to talk about impeachment.

Most of us were against the war all along, and we were pretty convinced that Hussein didn’t have the weapons that Bush claimed he had. Bob Wright points out in this diavlog, though, that Bush knew something we didn’t know.

You remember that the UN was inspecting weapons sites, basically unhindered, and they kept coming up empty. It’s pretty clear that they could have kept doing it until the camels came home and they still wouldn’t have found any weapons. What Bush knew, and we didn’t, was that the sites the UN inspectors were inspecting were not chosen at random, but were the top sites that the Americans were sending them to as the sites that we had identified as weapons sites. That’s right, while our elected (okay, selected) representatives were telling us they knew were these weapons were, they were also sending the UN to those very places, and the UN was reporting back that the weapons weren’t there.

Here’s the quote from Terry Gross’s interview of Hans Blix:

Mr. BLIX: No, not really. I mean, I feel more like an analyst, and I don’t feel a grudge. I mean, I regret what happened. I think it’s–it was tragic. I think that if the Security Council would have allowed inspectors to continue inspections for a few months, we would have been able to report that all the sites we’d gone to had no weapons of mass destruction, and since many of these sites were given to us by intelligence organizations, including the CIA, they would have realized that the tips they had, the sources they had, were unsatisfactory.

In other words, if there were any question before, it is now absolutely clear that Bush and his minions were knowingly lying to us and to the Congress about the basis for the war. Although there is no explicit definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” in the Constitution, can we all agree that it doesn’t include lying about blow jobs, and it does include lying to get us into a war that kills thousands of our own troops, and tens of thousands of innocent civilians?

It’s been a big year, with lots of political news. We’ve seen Douglas keep his seat as governor, the D’s increase their majorities in the House and Senate, the national D’s take control of the House and Senate, and Vermont D’s leading the way in the impeachment initiative.

I’m sure there’s a lot more that I’m not mentioning, but this is a start to tee up this subject. We’ve never had a Vermonter of the Year here at GMD before (mainly because we didn’t exist before), but at the close of 2006, if GMD were to name a Vermonter of the Year, who should it be?

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Cross posted from Rational Resistance
This is really sort of like comic relief. I got this story from Josh and you can read about it here.

You may have read about it, but the short version is that the communications director for Montana Representative Denny Rehberg has been fired after he got caught trying to hire someone to break into his college’s computer system and improve his grade point average.

The funny thing, though, is that you can go online and read the emails between this guy and the people he was soliciting to do this illegal act, including repeated demands that he provide photographs of pigeons and squirrels to prove his bona fides.

As I say, since it is the holidays, if you’re interested in a chuckle, take a look.

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

The final count from Chittenden County is in and Tom Salmon has won the Auditor of Accounts race! The final statewide margin is just 104 votes, making this the first time in Vermont history that a recount has reversed the results of a statewide election.

WCAX has more: BURLINGTON, Vt. — A recount in the Nov. 7 election for Vermont state auditor concluded Monday, showing Democrat Thomas M. Salmon won by the closest of margins, apparently overturning the re-election of incumbent Auditor Randy Brock.

Salmon, who lost by 137 votes in Election Day balloting, ended up prevailing by 104 votes in the two-week-long recount, in which more than 250,000 ballots were counted by hand in the state’s 14 counties. The results have yet to be certified.

Can someone explain to me why a single Democrat should be giving Bush cover for his new bogus plan for Iraq? He created the problem, he owns it, and he  and his Republican friends should be stuck with it.

So what was Harry Reid doing backing him up today on  ABC?

“If it’s for a surge, that is, for two or three months and it’s part of a program to get us out of there as indicated by this time next year, then, sure, I’ll go along with it,” Reid, who will become the majority leader when Democrats take control of the Senate next month, told ABC’s “This Week” program.

How bogus is this? It’s so bogus that Colin Powell not only knows it, he’s willing to say so.

“There really are no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there, there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops.”

The “active Army is about broken,” Powell said.

Josh is absolutely right about this. Bush is wrong on the war and the public knows it. Almost three quarters of the public are opposed to the war, so where is the payoff in lining up behind Bush?

Must be part of that big spam crackdown we’ve been waiting for.

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist a straight line like that.)

Cross-posted from Rational Resistance

Biology may be the science that I am least interested in, but I found this story from the Times the other day quite interesting. It turns out that humans developed the ability to digest milk in adulthood incredibly recently, like thre thousand years ago. Also, we can tell that this trait was evolved in response to the cultural practice of keeping domestic cattle and using their milk for food.

Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart is no longer needed. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.

You have to wonder, though, don’t you: why wasn’t this trait intelligently designed by our all-knowing, infinitely benevolent creator?

Here’s the link to Ross Sneyd’s story on the Auditor of Accounts recount. It confirms what our sources have been saying: the consistent trend has been for Salmon to pick up votes, and he’s now up by 265:

AP Ahead: Salmon picks up votes as clerks complete vote recounts

MONTPELIER, Vt. –With a recount still under way, Democrat Thomas M. Salmon has picked up more than enough votes to overturn his razor-thin Nov. 7 loss to incumbent Auditor Randy Brock, according to unofficial ballot totals obtained Monday by The Associated Press.