Pity the poor Caledonian Broken Record. They’ve obviously got a lot of pent-up anger issues. This self-admitted “Republican” newspaper (hey, at least they admit it) is hard to get too worked up about because they’re just so over-the-top that it’s doubtful anyone other than the most die-hard Ann Coulter sorts are paying any attention whatsoever (remember that legendary op-ed entitled Al Gore: The Jane Fonda of the War on Terror?).

Still, they do occasionally provide insight into the wingnuts, and in that way provide tailor-made ways to make basic, if obvious points. Here’s an example from Friday regarding the British foiling of another terrorist airline bombing plot:

And, you know what? They got it right by using the very techniques that the ACLU, the New York Times, and the Democratic Party power structure have vilified President Bush for using here in the United States. Follow the money transactions and money flow? They sure did. The British have been watching the money paths that financed this intended blood bath for over a year. Telephone surveillance? You bet. British intelligence agencies have been routinely monitoring the calls of large numbers of people where they have discovered the codes and patterns that filled the trap when they snapped it. Travel patterns? One more time. They noted who went where on what flights as these terrorists plotted the date and time that they were going to do it.

And what of Messrs Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy and of Mesdames Pelosi and Boxer? They and their far left friends are so consumed by hatred of George Bush that they have done everything in their power to denounce and spoil the very methods that saved thousands of us this time. There will be other, probably worse plots in the future. We hope to God that Reid, Kennedy, Pelosi, Boxer, and their ideological soul mates aren’t running the show then. Their brand of political insanity would stymie our intelligence agencies’ ability to find and unravel the plots, causing thousands of people to die, needlessly.

Poor, poor addled CBR. As they willfully decided to ignore the fact that any Republicans whatsoever were involved in the Abramoff scandal, so have they willfully ignored the actual point. Lefties take wiretaps, “following the money” and the tools of investigation for granted as everyone does (more so than the Bush administration, apparently), assuming they are used in a Constitutional manner, of course. What we are opposed to – shockingly – is a President in a democratic society who feels he can ignore the law whenever he decides it doesn’t suit him, as well as those sycophants who would enable him. I know, I know…a crazy, radical notion, that whole civilized society thing.

But I understand – all this “anti” stuff gets old, so let me rephrase. What we on the left are in favor of is the rule of law and the US Constitution.

I guess the Broken Record feels differently. Wish I could say I was shocked.

Just back from my first actual vacation in about 3 years (including my 2 year old’s first trip to a zoo… big fun!) I’ll start more substantive posts soon, but considering that the site has become wild west land in my absence, I just want to thank the other front pagers for stepping up and dealing with Admin issues and content while I was away. For the first time, this week had several days worth of GMD front pages without a single byline of mine! It was… unnerving…

A quick reminder, though. This blog, like any blog, exists for a purpose; that is, for like minded people to discuss issues openly and freely without fear of harassment or intimidation. This is not a public area, it’s more like the extended front lawn of myself, Jack, Ed, mataliandy and Brattlerouser (and now, Nat Kinney, formerly of the departed Vermonters First). A front lawn that is open to all to mingle, discuss, argue as well as hopefully organize (although we’re not quite there yet). The only expectation we have is that you are here because you want to be a part of that process, not because you want to attempt to wreck it for others. In addition, many of us have kids of our own, and one of mine occasionally looks at what I’ve been doing on this blog. As such, calling people obscene names or making homophobic comments will get you removed from the lawn without hesitation (however, even the most abusive will be given several chances to demonstrate any inclination to engage rather than troll.)

If you are kicked outta the lawn, be very careful if you attempt to sneak back in. If you get caught under your new identity (web parlance = “sock puppet”), you’ll just get booted again, unless you establish really quickly that you’ve snuck back in to genuinely discuss/debate/etc. If you really dont want to, I’d respectfully suggest that you’re wasting your time here, and would probably be a lot more interested in a site like this one. Or better still, start your own blog.

Thanks to all, and FYI – my own posts will still be spotty this week as I’ll be spending my precious internet time preparing for next Monday’s debate.

It’s Haik Bedrosian vs. National Review Online’s James Robbins over global warming. The email exchange is a must read (assuming it stays posted this time….Haik’s posts at BurlingtonPol are kind of like the Flying Dutchman…you might catch a glimpse from time to time, but then they disappear into the mist…)

Baruth wants to make some cartoons. Somebody go help him out.

Surprise! You probably didn’t know it, but if you find agreement with opinions at this blog, you’re a member of the Taliban, support al Qaeda, are anti-American, a terrorist appeaser who has lost your soul…you know the drill, I’m sure, but it’s been quite a couple days even by frothing rabid rightwing freako standards.

Peter Freyne responded to the email I sent out announcing the launch of GMD so many months ago with an email reply saying simply “guess everybody’s doing it!” Well, now they are, as Freyne himself finally jumps in this coming week. Anybody who doesn’t think that Peter-as-blogger won’t dramatically change the face of the fledgling Vermont political blogosphere is fooling themselves. This will definitely kick it up a notch, and Freyne’s will immediately become the top-dog political blog in the state, hands down (assuming he posts regularly). The only question is whether he will really blog as a blogger by reading and responding to other blogs, linking, etc (its a “Web” after all), or whether he will go the route more frequently travelled by Traditional-Media-pros-turned-“bloggers” (the exception being Cathy Resmer) and blow off the blogosphere on the web, as they routinely do in print and on television. We’ll see.

Stewart Ledbetter at Channel 5 wants to cover the online Lite Guv debate here at GMD! Cool! He’s not blowing off the blogs, obviously. Big hat tip, SL.

Usual suspect PoliticsVT poster “demguy” (outed here as a Republican hack) has this to say in the comments o’er yonder:

I don’t know why you would go to VDB or GMD for your political news. You think PoliticsVT is biased? Go over to those two blogs and read their commentary.

Suffice to say my wife and I had a good, long laugh at the idea of me, Jack, Ed etc as a full-blown news source. God, I hope nobody thinks they can get all their political news from any blog… I mean, don’t forget the Daily Show…

…and finally, I’m on vacation for the next week, dammit. My first vacation in, like, 3 years, or something god-awful like that. Now, I’ll be setting up a few posts to “time release” over the next week, but tracking the current events is gonna be up to folks like Jack, Ed, Vermonter, Brattlerouser and mataliandy. I’m sure they’ll do their part to proudly keep GMD good and biased… that’s why we’re here, after all.

Wow.

The presentation at the Bennington Free Library seemed, at first blush, to be about things like Vermont’s tax burden, education costs, business environment and the cost of health care.

But what it was really about was a chart.

The chart brought by [Sen. Wendy] Wilton [R-Rutland] and [Sen. Kevin] Mullin [R-Rutland] – in so many words – said Republicans are good because they vote to keep Vermont affordable, and that Democrats are bad because they want Vermonters to lose their shirts.

This concocted event was the biggest bunch of election year bootsquash to roll through Bennington since the last horse trailer pulled through town on its way to the Vermont Summer Festival in East Dorset.

The real issue is this: Instead of spinning a misleading list of legislative votes, the state GOP should be working with Democrats to make Vermont a truly affordable place to live.

Sadly, as the “Affordable Vermont Tour” clearly demonstrates, the only thing the GOP is interested in is an agenda of re-election in November.

‘Nuff Said. Check out the whole thing. It only gets better – especially in the account of the Bennington County Democratic Legislators showing up at this farce and calling it for what it is – a crass, cynical attempt by the GOP and the VT Chamber of Commerce to smear Democrats and weasel in their agenda through misrepresentation of legislators’ records.

The national GOP playbook is obviously in broad circulation in Vermont these days.

It’s 2003, and the Democratic Party has 10 candidates in the running for the Presidential nomination. The earliest polls heavily favored Connecticut Senator and former Vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, considered a darling of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and the Senator who would prove to be a bigger, more uncritical supporter of the Iraq War than many Republicans – going so far as to repeatedly cast war critics in his own party as unpatriotic whiners. But the polls were turning fast, and to the amazement of all, the unknown (and also centrist) candidate, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean vaulted into the lead, as well as onto the cover of every major newsmagazine in the country. Dean was propelled by a combination of disaffected liberals, moderates who had become angry about the war and the Democratic Party’s wholesale impotence and indifference on the matter, and new voters who felt for the first time that the election mattered to them. This outsider wave to large extent took control of the campaign itself.

So threatened were the insiders by the developing political tsunami, that Dean’s opponents had to work together and engage in beltway dirty tricks in order to blunt his momentum, and Dean’s media naivete and rapidly imploding professional campaign only made their job easier. Through it all, none spoke for the old guard more clearly and more forcefully than Senator Lieberman himself:

Presidential contender Joe Lieberman warned Tuesday that rival Howard Dean, the hottest candidate in the field, could be “a ticket to nowhere” for Democrats in 2004 by advocating discredited Democratic policies on taxes and national security.

“A candidate who was opposed to the war against Saddam, who has called for the repeal of all of the Bush tax cuts, which would result in an increase in taxes on the middle class … could lead the Democrat party into the political wilderness for a long time to come,”

The Traditional Media initially tried to pass off the Dean phenom as a fluke – a bunch of crazies temporarily riled up. A simple glitch in their collective narrative of American politics. After Dean did not bolt the Party as many predicted, and his supporters dutifully fell in line behind John Kerry’s miserable run, some pundits even started referring to the Dean movement in a positive light, given that it was now safely consigned (as they thought) into history and therefore rendered harmless and irrelevant to their own, beltway-tethered world.

But fast forward to 2006. Howard Dean is the DNC Chair and – to the chagrin of many – is pushing his 50-state strategy forward relentlessly. And it’s Joe Lieberman who has been rejected by a record turnout of his own state Party and is bolting from the Democratic Party altogether. The right-wing Talking Heads are apoplectic, and the centrist types who pass as the “liberal media” (such as Cokie Roberts) are in a complete tailspin, mired in predictions of Democratic apocalypse, all because their own party has rejected the notion that insiders like them have a special right to dictate to the rank-and-file how they should vote and what’s in their best interests.

At day’s end, the traditional Media’s attempts to marginalize the Lamont phenomenon worked decidedly against them. The relentless narrative was that the Lamont campaign was simply fueled by crazy bloggers – which was obviously untrue (try to imagine, for a moment, rank and file Dems sitting around a Connecticut bar talking about DailyKos). As others have observed, focusing on the blogosphere at all shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the new media. Sure, the lefty political blogs are abig part of it, but there is also Burlington’s Democracy for America and True Majority, the mighty MoveOn.org, the media watchdog groups such as Crooks and Liars and Media Matters, journalism sites such as Raw Story – all leaderless, decentralized, and finally, after a couple years – truly grassroots (and I do not use that term lightly).

Still, the blogger narrative was everywhere (except in places like the New York Times, which had – and still today has, in their post-mortem editorial – the wherewithal to see reality), and since perception does have a tendency to become reality in politcs, the liberal blogosphere may have just had their clout bumped up quite a few notches as an unintended result.

In any event, the wave that began with a little, two-room office in Montpelier with Governor Dean, Kate O’Connor (who has now gone to “the dark side”), three interns (Abby Trebilcock and..er…I’ve forgotten yer names guys! – post in and remind me if you’re reading!), Carolyn Dwyer doing some fundraising, and myself running in and out to buy and set-up their first 4 computers (I still have the Governor’s Visa card number in my wallet as a memento) has officially hit the beach. How far it goes remains to be seen.

UPDATE: In case you’re curious, at 9:40 PM, many of the tracking sites are crashing due to traffic, but two things are true: ONE- the stories you may have heard about the Lieberman site being hacked are VERIFIABLY FALSE, and seem to be a weak attempt to get in a dig at Lamont. TWO- It looks like Joe is going down. With 50.27% of precincts reporting, the spread is 52-48 in favor of Lamont. Conventional wisdom has the lead narrowing, as some of the urban precincts are expected to come in late, and Lieberman has a base of support there, but that 4% at this point will probably prove to be too high wide a chasm to fill. A tentative “Woo-hoo!”

Look, I’d be a dolt if I didn’t acknowledge that the main thing on most GMD readers’ minds today is probably the Democratic Senatorial Primary Election in Connecticut. Frankly, enough has been said by smarter folks than me on the subject, but I do want to make the pitch for those who are really into it to keep an eye on Philip Baruth at Vermont Daily Briefing over the next 12-24 hours. He’s really into this, and is promising periodic posts throughout the day. And you’ve got to remember, these are posts from a novelist, which means they lead in with things like:

Currently midway between Syracuse and Burlington, blogging from the undeniably gorgeous public library in Saratoga Springs. In fact the entire town is like Upstate New York’s version of old-money Louisville: leafy, bricky, languorous in its basic approach to life, and dead-serious in its approach to the Arts.

I mean, come on. Find me another blog that sets the scene for ya like that. Dude just needs some background music and he’s set.

I will leave folks with the following prophetic and all-too-true statement from Chris at MyDD:

no matter what happens later today, Wednesday will be the worst day of press for the progressive netroots in years. If Lamont loses, we will be branded as ineffectual, irrelevant, extremist, and destructive. If Ned Lamont wins, we will be branded as powerful, relevant, extremist, and destructive.

Me? I say Lamont by 2-and-a-half, but I really have no idea…

On Monday, August 28th at 12:00 noon, Green Mountain Daily will host Vermont’s first online political candidate debate between the Democratic primary candidates for Lieutenant Governor, Representative John Patrick Tracy of Burlington and Senator Matt Dunne of Hartland. The debate will be held in a live chat room linked from the GMD front page, with comments from viewers in a parallel live-blogging thread.

Yours truly will be moderating, and GMD front pagers Jack McCullough and Vermonter will be on site with the candidates for the duration of the debate.

Details on the format and updates will be forthcoming between now and the 28th. As you can imagine, we’re pretty excited. Mark your calendars and bring a bag lunch to work!

Just got a piece of Tarrant lit handed to my kid. It continues Tarrant’s habit of trying to talk about state issues that a US Senator has little impact on (such as state education policy) in an effort to reach out and colonize any hot-button issue he can find, regardless of whether its germane. It’s fairly run of the mill, except for two things:

• It mentions the word Republican nowhere (although it prominently features his “true independent” campaign slogan).
• It says:
  

  Rich Tarrant has bold, new ideas to create jobs and economic growth. His “Rural Technification Plan” will give young people the opportunity to stay and work in Vermont

Okay, bold? New? Okay, first of all what “Rural Technification Plan?” I see no reference to such a thing on his website or in a google search. If his “bold, new” plan is to, as he briefly mentions in the lit, bring broadband to rural communities and boost tech ed, (what, is he running for Governor?) just throwing those things out there as nice goals is hardly a “plan.” Nor are they “bold” or “new” as many, many actually engaged people have suggested and are working on such things (and by the way, if Tarrant is concerned about the internet as a tool for economic growth and innovation, where is he on net neutrality, for that matter?)

But let’s rewind for a minute…

“Technification?” What – is that a derivation of technify? Technificate?

I suppose if you, uh, want to be talking about innovation, you might…er… say that innovating new words could sorta, I dunno… fit a theme or something. But if you’re talking about education in campaign literature, that’s just a little bit ridiculous, no?

I did check definitions at thesaurus.com and found nothing for technification, technify, or technificate:

No entry found for technificate.
Did you mean disinfect?

Suggestions:
disinfect
Disinfector
To no effect

No entry found for technify.
Did you mean technic?

Suggestions:
technic
techno
technique
technofear

In fact, the only other occasion I could find of the use of that word was, well, Tarrant again, addressing a group in Bethel.

On that theme, we’d like to suggest some other education-oriented plans for the Tarrant campaign to work on:

• Grammarifize Vermont 2006!
• Rural Spellication Bee
• Mathetate our Schools for the 21st Century!

Just think. With Tarrant in the Senate, rarely will the question need to be asked again; is our children learning?

Technify!

Since political junkies of all stripes are collectively holding their breath in anticipation of the Connecticut Democratic Senatorial Primary this Tuesday, I thought it might be nice to provides some helpful links to some good news and discussion on what has become a fight for the ascendence of an anti-war majority, as well as for the soul of the Democratic Party nationally. Here are some links to GMD’s soapblox-sibling-site, My Left Nutmeg:

• Dems Want Joe To Bow Out Gracefully on a poll reflecting Dem opinions on a potential Liberman loss
• Has it really come to this, Senator?, on the recent thuggish tactics of Liberman supporters
• Don’t Believe The Last Minute Lies – Volunteer!
• Gallup: It’s not just Connecticut, the whole nation doesn’t like you Joe
• By the numbers for Ned Lamont
  

And if you want help understanding what this is really all about, check out this great Rolling Stone article:

Even the most casual Democratic voters understand by now that there is a schism within the party, one that pits “party insiders” steeped in the inside-baseball muck of Washington money culture against . . . well, against us, the actual voters.

The insiders have for many years running now succeeded in convincing their voters that their actual beliefs are hopeless losers in the general electoral arena, and that certain compromises must be made if the party is ever to regain power.

Looking forward to Tuesday…

This is a big deal.

The Vermont Supreme Court said Friday that Vermont courts, and not those in Virginia, have exclusive jurisdiction over an emotional case between two women arguing about custody over a child they had while they were in a lesbian relationship.

The unanimous ruling in Vermont conflicts with a series of decisions in Virginia courts, which held that that state’s anti-gay marriage laws controlled the case.

In recognition of the legal union, the Vermont Courts have ruled for joint custody of the former couple’s child. The Virginia courts, of course, refused to recognize the validity of the union – and therefore the family – at all.

(Quick background – the case involves a spouse in a civil union who became a quote-unquote “ex-gay” and renounced her sexual preference. “Reparative therapy” has been condemned by mental health professionals as destructive, but is very popular among the evangelical set. They often parade the “successful” ex-gays around as success stories. They have to while they can, as this “treatment” never takes… surprise, surprise! Here’s a link)

This will likely have to be settled at the US Supreme Court, where the 4 conservative activist justices – Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia will without question vote against the Vermont courts. As such, all eyes will be on Justice Kennedy, who is the default “moderate, swing vote” on the Court these days, even though he is clearly conservative. Still, there is hope, if for no other reason than he is not a gleeful reactionary, as evidenced by his authorship of the majority opinion in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that overruled the Court’s previous 1986 decision upholding sodomy laws (Bowers v. Hardwick). In throwing out Bowers, Kennedy wrote:

“The state cannot demean their [homosexuals’] existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”

At least he’ll have an open mind. No reaction yet on the website of the Center for American Cultural Renewal, the Vermont wannabe-players in the National Religious Right scene who were peripherally involved in the case initially. Click on theres more for an update:

UPDATE: Vermont’s local theocrats at the CFACR just weighed in:

The Vermont Supreme Court ruled on August 4, 2006 that Vermont courts have exclusive jurisdiction over the Lisa Miller-Jenkins custody case. Virginia had ruled other wise, finding that Lisa was entitled to custody over her daughter born while she was in a lesbian relationship with Janet Miller-Jenkins. This ruling is a blow to pro-family advocates and everyone wanting laws to mean something.

Let’s all take a moment to chuckle at the idea of supporters of this administration expressing concerns about “wanting laws to mean something.”