The Free Press’s Mike Donoghue has confirmed that the FBI has taken an interest in the Burlington Telecom Scandal. Bad, bad news for Mayor Bob Kiss & company.

Why? After conversing with folks who have some understanding of how the FBI works, I’m informed that the Feds simply would not engage with this matter unless the blood was right there in the water. The FBI doesn’t get involved with bad checks or broken promises – nor do they get involved in any way with state investigations, such as the one underway out of the Attorney General’s office. Given the Kiss administration’s default on the lease with Citibank, however, it’s a whole new, multimillion dollar ballgame.

The Feds take interest if they’re thinking a large corporation (Citibank) was defrauded for a lot of money. The fact that we’re talking about a bank makes it even more their kind of thing. This could mean something in the Racketeering & Corrupt Organizations area, but the Feds have been moving away from prosecutions under that broad statute. I’m told something in the Bank Fraud or Wire Fraud arena is more likely.

All of which is to say that the fantasy bubble Bob Kiss is still living in – where Citibank will simply come put their leased equipment back in the box, roll up the cables, and part with a handshake while Burlington just goes and gets replacement equipment from Radio Shack or something – is about to be burst in a serious way.

It is so past time to take up the bailout offer from the Reboot Burlington Telecom group – an offer which was recently remade. But pride, territoriality and politics still stand in the way. Given the tense Progressive/Democrat dynamics unique to the Queen City, it’s hard not to conclude that the offer hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves because the image of a bunch of Democrats swooping in to save the city from mismanagement by a Progressive administration is just too much to bear.

All of which walks dangerously close to an if we can’t have it, nobody will attitude. One wonders if even potential federal criminal charges could be enough to break through the Prog-Dem battlements in Burlington.

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

UPDATE: VPR confirms that Green Mountain Daily is always right:

Governor-elect Peter Shumlin has picked Secretary of State Deb Markowitz to run the state Agency of Natural Resources.

It's been the rumor for a while that outgoing Secretary of State Deb Markowitz was being looked at to head the beleaguered (and largely Jim-Douglas-decimated) Agency of Natural Resources, and it sounds like a formal announcement of the appointment could come at any time (maybe tomorrow? Just guessing on the timing, there, but…). From a resume perspective, it may seem like an odd fit. SoS is not a job with an environmental component. One would have to reach back into her stint as a staff attorney at the League of Cities and Towns to dig up any kind of eco-record, and that aint exactly like being a park ranger or anything. As far as her views on environmental issues during the campaign, she sounded the right notes, but many in the environmental community were concerned by the lack of specifics and what sometimes sounded like rhetoric on permitting that was overly-accommodating to the right. Really, it is her husband who is known as the big green guy. But there a couple reassuring responses to the above. First, all these agency-head positions are really management positions. If the Governor has a strong vision, the agency head understands and shares that vision, then its a function of how well they'll be able to implement that from the top.

At SoS, Markowitz ran quite hot and cold with folks – folks seem to adore her, or… not (recall, VSEA backed Republican Michael Bertrand against her some elections back… no love lost there). But the fact remains that she inspires strong loyalty (and hard work) from her deputies, and lord knows ANR could use some top-down enthusiasm. As for the issues themselves, remember: Markowitz ran much of her primary campaign as though it were a general election campaign, rhetorically speaking (a mistake, IMO – one that likely ended up costing her the nomination over the long haul). She was deliberately vague in an effort to appeal (prematurely) to self-identifying moderates and even conservatives. Many of her supporters always suggested she was more progressive than she seemed. This could be the position where she shows that. And speaking of the word “progressive,” expect more complaints from Progressive Party members, many of whom loathe her for siding against Anthony Pollina over campaign finance matters. At the time, I thought she made sense, frankly… (ducking)

Buzzing around the internet is the story of a couple of House Republicans who, perhaps emboldened by their new majority, have cast common sense to the wind in a united front against last weeks’ decision by the USDA to compensate farmers who were harmed through discrimination by that agency in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Joined by perennial space-cadet Michele Bachman (R-Minnesota), Steve King (R-Iowa) is equating the payments to compensation for slavery, saying that the U.S. will never pay such “slavery reparations.”  

Never mind the fact that even the worst student of American history would be unlikely to confuse discriminatory practices in the late twentieth century with the slave era, which ended more than a hundred years earlier…or that their remarks,  like this from Rep. King:

“We’ve got to stand up at some point and say, ‘We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress,'” he continued. “That war’s been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood, and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially. And there’s no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one’s filing that claim.”

exhibit a level of ignorance and insensitivity most people would be embarrassed to admit to.  You have to wonder why it is becoming acceptable for political figures to openly parade their worst prejudices while serving in the name of the American people.

Look at what King had to say on March 8, 2008, as he announced his run for a fourth term, which coincided with the presidential race that was then in progress:

I’ll just say this: When you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States — I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam?”

if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror.”

Even after expressing such an unsavory view, the guy got re-elected; and he’s still going strong! So now I guess he feels invincible to broader public opinion.

Michelle Bachman goes so far as to allege fraud on the part of the farmers and ex-farmers whom the USDA proposes to compensate.  As is usual for Bachman, she makes this claim without offering any supporting evidence whatsoever, and despite the fact that the USDA has already conducted reviews of the 15,000 claims involved in the first phase of the Pigford discrimination claims process and found only 3 to be fraudulent! She proposes that Congress begin cutting the federal budget by eliminating the USDA’s discrimination settlements entirely!  Shades of the Acorn witchhunt?

I read these things in disbelief and alarm to think what the coming sessions of Congress may visit upon us.    

  The midmorning meeting came a day after Obama, pre-empting the Republicans, announced he was proposing to freeze the salaries of some 2 million federal workers for the next two years.

Below is a short diversion from this type of Obama stuff.

Because you know he’s not listening to Howard Dean when he says:

“— you're not going to placate the conservatives,” Dean said (Times Argus AP pay-walled). “They're out to get you and they've placed that as their highest interest.”  

The red bees of Red Hook

An urban bee keeper, in Red Hook section of Brooklyn has found her bees have a strange problem. The forager bees were arriving back at the hive with mysterious stripes of red color.

Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.  

A fellow beekeeper sent samples of the red substance that the bees were producing to an apiculturalist who works for New York State, and that expert, acting as a kind of forensic foodie, found the samples riddled with Red Dye No. 40, the same dye used in the maraschino cherry juice. “…an entire season that should have been devoted to honey yielded instead a red concoction that tasted metallic and then overly sweet.”  

One food author explains terroir ,the taste of place used by the French to describe the way that local conditions such as soil and climate manifest themselves in the flavor of wine and food is a fast rising buzzword that Amercia is catching up with .  

What a strange example of Americanized terroir, the red overly sweet metallic tasting honey given by the bees that frequent the vats at the nearby maraschino cherry (red dye 40) processing plant nearby.  

[QUICK HIT: The Orleans-Caledonia 1 recount confirms up-and-comer Democrat Sam Young’s win, with a margin of one single vote. The recount was requested by fellow Democrat John Rodgers, who came in third in the two-seat district after Republican Vicki Strong and young Sam.]

Tuesday’s Franklin-4 (Bakersfield-Enosburg) recount may have established a precedent, although you couldn’t tell by the result. Incumbent Republican Peter Perley was certified the winner over Progressive-Democratic candidate Cindy Weed – the same overall outcome as on election night. The margin was 3 votes closer than on Nov. 2.

What makes this recount special, according to Secretary of State Elections Division Director Kathy DeWolfe, is that there has never before been a recount where one candidate was co-endorsed by two parties, the Progressives and the Democrats. There have been plenty of candidates who’ve run as Democratic/Republican, but those seats are usually “gimmes,” no opposition, and thus no recount. There have been some P/D candidates, but they either won or lost by a wide enough margin that there was no recount.

So why have a recount? And how did it work with a P/D candidate? If you’re not a wonkish sort, you might want to move on to another diary.

With a margin of just 34 votes out of 1569 votes cast, Cindy Weed was well within her rights to file for a recount.

On November 16, County Clerk Jim Pelkey requested Republican and Democratic county chairs to each submit a list of at least 12 recount volunteers. By Monday the 22nd, the Progressive Party had been asked for a list, too.

Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving), Jim sent out a proposal for assignment of duties. Many of you know how this works because of the recent gubernatorial primary recount. In this recount there were various “teams”: a checklist team, a ballot bag team, a set of “clerk observers,” a “clerk assistance team,” and four tables of counters. All the teams had representatives from each party.

That’s when the fun began. The situation and the argument is summarized in the document I eventually filed for a court ruling:

Emergency Request for Ruling

Franklin County Superior Court – Civil Division

IN RE: Cindy Weed, for the recount of votes cast Docket No. S 501-10 Fc

for State Representative from Franklin District 4,

General Election of November 2, 2010 Emergency request for ruling

Now comes Euan Bear, County Chairwoman of the Franklin County Democratic Committee to request an emergency ruling (due to the imminence of the scheduled recount) on the fairness and legality of apportionment of recount participants for the Tuesday, November 30 recount of votes cast in Franklin District 4.

Republican County Chair Linda Kirker requested of County Clerk Jim Pelkey to reduce the number of participants from the Democratic and Progressive Parties, alleging that because the two parties would both represent Candidate Cindy Weed’s interests, their number combined should equal that of the Republican participants in the recount.

I, Euan Bear, on behalf of the Franklin County Democratic Committee, object to this parsing of 17 V.S.A. 2602a – Appointment of recount committee, subsection (b), which reads:

The superior court shall set an early date for the recount, making appointments to the recount committee from among those nominated under this section. In making these appointments, the court shall appoint an equal number of persons from each party and from those persons representing an independent candidate. After making the appointments, the court shall notify all candidates  […] (Added 1985, No. 148 (Adj. Sess.), § 5; amended 2009, No. 40, § 3, eff. May 26, 2009.) [emphasis added]

The statute requires an equal number of participants from each party. The proposal to reduce and combine two parties’ representation on the recount committee violates that provision of statute.

Candidate Cindy Weed ran in the Democratic Party Primary and won our party’s nomination. She also was nominated via write-in vote in the Progressive Party Primary. There were two primaries by two separate major parties. In regard to this recount, each party – Democratic, Progressive, and Republican – has a separate interest in the outcome of the recount and is entitled to an equal representation on the recount committee.

Attempting to combine the interests of two separate major Parties and thus cut in half their representation on the recount committee would set a bad precedent. The fact that the two major Parties endorsed the same candidate is irrelevant. Separate major Parties’ endorsement of the same candidate should not result in the abrogation of their right to equal representation on recount committees.

Kirker’s argument had made a kind of sense on first glance. Jim sent out a request on the day after Thanksgiving to cut the D’s list. I called a few people to let ’em off the hook and then realized the whole idea gave me agita. I phoned GMD frontpager and Washington County Chair Jack McCullough for help with the recount law, and his research formed the centerpiece of my argument to the court.

There was a flurry of emails over the weekend in an attempt to find a workable compromise. Kirker cited the next section of the law to bolster her position:

§ 2602b. Assignment of duties

(b) The county clerk shall assign committee members to teams of at least four persons, consisting of one caller and one observer, representing different candidates, and one tally person and one double-check person, representing different candidates. Any additional team members shall be additional observers and double-check persons […]  [emphasis added]

I called an ‘elder statesman’ and Democratic rabble rouser, just to run the whole thing by him. He made clear the distinction between the party representatives appointed to the recount committee and the assignment of duties to representatives of each candidate.

It was above my ‘pay grade’ to figure out the apparent conflict between the two sections of the statute. I let Jim know I would be filing my request for an emergency ruling from presiding judge Mark Keller first thing Monday morning.

I have worked to bring Progressives and Democrats together in Franklin County. I helped convince both Cindy Weed and the County Democratic Committee that the election math would only make sense if she ran in the Democratic Primary and got an organized write-in vote from the Progressive Party. So, Ds & Ps can and should work together? Yes. Should we have to give up rights as separate parties to do so? Emphatically no!

I wanted to be sure that the principle of equal representation for each party was upheld. It might have far-reaching, though rarely applied, implications if running on two parties’ tickets meant giving up that right.

With help in phrasing from another lawyer friend, I filed the request, Kirker filed her response, and by the end of the day, we had our answer: The principle of party parity was upheld.

Parties are entitled to equal representation at the counting tables as well as on the other teams; but in the “core four,” there would be two Rs and either two Ds or a P and a D. The extra Ps or Ds would be extra checkers at the tables.

From Judge Keller’s order:

In this admittedly unusual case, there will be more people on the recount committee who support Democratic/Progressive candidate Ms. Weed than who support Republican candidate Peter Perley.

However, this is not prohibited […] The recount statutes expressly allow additional committee members – above and beyond the four core members – to be assigned to a team without requiring that they be assigned with regard to party or candidate affiliation. […] Thus, as long as the caller, observer, tally person, and double check person are properly assigned, it is not problemmatic to have additional team members disproportionately favoring one candidate or party.

In practice, the Progressives had fewer people in the room. There were four tables of five, with two Rs at each table, and two D’s and a P. The duties were basically rotated, and each batch of 50 ballots was hand-counted twice. The machine-tabulated totals from Enosburg tallied exactly with the manual recount. In Bakersfield, where all votes are hand-counted, Cindy Weed gained three votes.

And in Franklin County, the principle of party parity in recounts was upheld.

Per today’s Burlington Free Press:

A new federal report on hunger issued Nov. 15 found that Vermont and Alabama have had the highest increase in “food insecurity” during the past 10 years.

The term “food insecurity” is a useful and specific term from a policy perspective– it’s more accurate than “starvation,” though it does lack the emotional punch.

So let me give a little perspective.

My direct experience with this is short lived– I had a short-term experience in the early 1990’s where money was bad enough that I had to scramble for meals.  This lasted about three weeks.  It’s the only time in my life I looked for support from a food pantry.  I also volunteered for Clinton’s campaign on evening shifts, primarily because the volunteers got free pizza.  Before that, on several occasions I had popcorn for dinner because it was cheap and available.  Once I was willing to accept food from a pantry, I started eating real meals again, but it was incredibly difficult for me to accept that this was necessary.

People go through bad experiences in life, for a variety of reasons.  I’m not writing this to reveal personal information and not interested in discussing the specifics of how this came about.  That’s not the point.

The point is this: food is one of those things that we often take for granted.  When the expectation of consistent meals is lost, it changes your mindset.  You start thinking of food as something to hoard, to grab, to hold.  It puts you outside of “normal” society and, to an extent, at least in my experience, has a kind of decivilizing effect.  

In my case, it made me feel isolated– I felt separated from the people around me like there was something I needed to be ashamed of.  Getting donations from other people, despite their best intentions, made me feel kind of… violated, I guess, is the word for it.  This isn’t a criticism of anything or anyone.  It’s just the way it worked in my head.  I needed the food, and knew I needed it, and yet it was humiliating and left me shaken.  The experience left a kind of fracture on my sense of the world around me and my place in it.

I say all this because I want to be clear: this is what happens when it’s short-lived and you know it’s going to improve in the near future.  

What happens when it’s long term and you don’t know the way out?

The thought of that simply horrifies me.  It should horrify you, too.

UPDATE: Doug Racine will be heading the Agency of Human Services, which is an ideal fit for him. Many speculated that he wouldn’t get this position since he and Shumlin do not necessarily see eye-to-eye on health care policy, though both see universal coverage as a goal, with the government’s involvement. Some others wondered whether Racine would get any position, considering that it’s not secret that the two haven’t always had the greatest working relationship.

But this is good news, and a great place for Racine to contribute to the state. It also goes a long way to healing any lingering primary-driven tension within the Democratic base.

This is certainly turning into an interesting – and generally quite talented – administration. Good news.

Former Dean Transportation Secretary Brian Searles (who has since run the Burlington airport) has been tapped to return to the post in the Shumlin administration. Waterbury Representative Sue Minter will leave the legislature to be Searles’ Deputy.

Searles is both the obvious choice and a great choice for the position. Minter is also a good choice, but her move represents a real loss for the Legislature. Minter is smart, talented, and was one of those Dems that looked more than capable of climbing the ladder for higher office. As a political player, she’ll be missed.

On the other hand, Brain Dubie is to be some sort of “ambassador” to Quebec for us. From vpr:

Shumlin says the exact nature of Dubie’s role hasn’t been worked out. But he’s confident that the lieutenant governor will be a key asset in helping the Shumlin administration forge a strong relationship with Quebec.

An interesting Vermont export to be sure. I presume this will come with a big taxpayer-funded paycheck? Maybe not. Remsen suggests this is just a one-shot deal.

But if true, it starts to look as though Shumlin is handing out enough goodies to Republicans to make one wonder whether he is trying to sow goodwill to blunt his 2012 challenge. After all, early signs are that Phil Scott, unlike his predecessor, is gearing up to be a more engaged Lieutenant Governor. One has to assume that he is to be Shumlin’s challenger in two years, whether or not it actually works out that way.

More on that soon.

Diplomatic Cables Based on U.S. Intelligence Reports — Published by Whistleblower Web Site WikiLeaks — Reveal North Koreans Sold 19 Nuclear-Capable IRBM Missiles to Iran Capable of Striking Targets Throughout Europe and in Russia; Documents Show Arab States Called for Attack on Iran’s Nuke Facilities — China Admits It’s Fed Up With North Korea’s Belligerence, Wants Peninsula Reunified Under Seoul’s Control

FOR ONCE, WIKILEAKS PERFORMS A VITAL WORLD PUBLIC SERVICE — Contrary to demands by Representative Peter King (R- New York) that the whistleblower Web site WikliLeaks be “designated a foreign terrorist organization” for making public thousands of previously secret U.S. diplomatic cables, the Web site should be honored for performing a vital public service to the world by revealing that North Korea sold 19 nuclear-capable R-27 missiles — such as these on display in a recent military parade in Pyongyang — to Iran, giving Tehran the potential to fire them at targets throughout Europe and even toward the Russian capital, Moscow. The documents, if accurate, show that Iran and North Korea pose a far greater threat to world peace and stability than previously thought. (Photo: Yonhap News Agency via European Pressphoto Agency)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 30, 2010)

(Updated 11:15 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 30, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Memo to Representative Peter King (R-New York):

Shut the hell up!

The ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee — who will take over as chairman in January — called on Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks, under the Espionage Act and for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to designate the site “a foreign terrorist organization,’ in reaction to its posting on Sunday of more than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

“This is extremely damaging to U.S. troops, U.S. interests and U.S. intelligence,” King told Fox News on Monday. “They [WikiLeaks] are engaged in terrorist activity. What they’re doing is clearly aiding and abetting terrorist groups. Either we’re serious about this or we’re not,” adding that putting the Web site on the State Department’s list of known foreign terrorist organizations would enable the U.S. to shut down WikiLeaks by seizing its assets and to stop other entities — including news media outlets — from cooperating with it.

Excuse us, Congressman King, but since when is it “aiding and abetting terrorist groups” to expose the fact that Iran and North Korea pose a dangerous threat to world peace — a threat much more dangerous than previously thought — to the point that even China is reportedly “fed up” with North Korea’s belligerence?

=========================

CHINA CONFIRMS IT WANTS KOREAN PENINSULA REUNIFIED UNDER SEOUL’S CONTROL, ADMITS ‘FRUSTRATION’ WITH PYONGYANG

The officials admitted to a sense of frustration in Beijing over North Korea’s recent actions, including its nuclear and missile tests – which China opposed – and last week’s lethal artillery bombardment of a South Korean island.

=========================

Instead of prosecuting Assange and attempting to shut down WikiLeaks — which, by the way, would clearly violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees under the First Amendment of a free and unfettered news and information media — WikiLeaks should be honored for performing, for once, a vital public service by alerting the world to the mounting threat to world peace and stability posed by Tehran and Pyongyang — a danger that has been building since 2003 and is now approaching a dangerous flashpoint on the Korean Peninsula.

The whistleblower site made public what the State Department should have told the world months ago: That North Korea sold to Iran 19 intermediate-range R-27 ballistic missiles — missiles that could be armed with nuclear warheads and, when fired from Iran, could strike cities throughout Europe.

Even the Russian capital Moscow could potentially be threatened by nuclear-armed Iranian IRBMs, the U.S. diplomatic cables show, based on intelligence reports. That revelation comes just four months after relations between Russia and Iran began to deteriorate over Iran’s nuclear program.

MISSILE THREAT TO EUROPE, RUSSIA DETAILED IN U.S. MEETINGS WITH RUSSIAN OFFICIALS

According to the cables obtained by WikiLeaks — accounts of which were published Sunday by The New York Times — top Russian officials were alerted to the Iranian missile threat in February during a meeting in Moscow with a U.S. delegation led by Vann Van Diepen, a top official of the State Department’s nuclear nonproliferation division.

Van Diepen, while working in his previous capacity as a national intelligence officer, “played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity,” according to the Times account of the cables.

Iran’s acquisition of the North Korean-built R-27 missiles — which, ironically, were originally designed by the Russians during the Soviet era — gives Tehran the capability of striking cities throughout Europe and that even Moscow lies within the missiles’ striking range, the cables show.

The U.S. delegation warned their Russian counterparts that the missiles, which have an advanced propulsion system that the North Koreans developed, would bring Iran closer to developing its own arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at a time when the two former Cold War adversaries reached a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) — yet to be ratified by the U.S. Senate — aimed at further reducing the U.S. and Russia’s ICBM stockpiles.

CABLES REVEAL GROWING WORLDWIDE ALARM OVER IRANIAN NUKE PROGRAMS

The nuclear development program of Iran been the source of increasing alarm by the United States for the past half-decade. Now, it appears, the alarm has spread worldwide — nowhere more so than in the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah is so worried about Iran’s nuclear program that he repeatedly called on the U.S. to launch a pre-emptive strike and destroy the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities — as the Israelis did to Iraq’s nuclear plant in a 1981 air strike, according to an account of the cables published Sunday by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.

And Saudi Arabia isn’t alone, according to the cables. They reveal that Arab governments are just as suspicious as the U.S., Israel and the European Union are that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. One cable recorded King Abdullah as having “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program.”

According to Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., the king, in an April 2008 meeting in Riyadh with General David Petraeus, then the commander of the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq, told him to “cut off the head of the snake,” referring to Iran’s nuclear program, the Guardian reported in its account of the cables.

ARAB COUNTRIES DEMAND ACTION AGAINST IRAN’S NUKE FACILITIES, CABLES SAY

Other Arab countries, notably Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, referred to Iran as “evil”, an “existential threat” and a power that “is going to take us to war,” according to the cables. Jordan and Bahrain have even gone so far as to openly demand that Iran’s nuclear program “be stopped by any means necessary” — including military action.

The Arab countries’ demand for action against Iran marks a dramatic departure from widely-held perceptions that to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities would have triggered a much wider war in the Middle East, with Tehran likely to retaliate with a massive missile strike against Israel.

For its part, Israel let it be known to American officials in June 2009 that it was prepared, if necessary, to “go it alone” and attack Iran’s nuclear facilities unilaterally, according to the Guardian account of the cables. They quoted Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak as saying that there was a window of “between six and 18 months from now in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable,” beyond which any military action “would result in unacceptable collateral damage.”

According to Barak’s timetable, that window will close at the end of this year.

Iran lashed out at the WikiLeaks disclosures Monday, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissing the leaks as a “worthless” psychological warfare campaign by the U.S. against his country. “We don’t think this information was leaked,” Ahmadinejad said during a televised news conference in Tehran. “We think it was organized to be released on a regular basis and they are pursuing political goals.”

Ahmadinejad insisted to reporters that Arab nations’ demand for action against Iran’s nuclear program would have no impact on his country’s relations with them. “We are friends with the regional countries and mischievous acts will not affect relations,” he said.

CABLES REVEAL CHINA ‘FED UP’ WITH ‘SPOILED CHILD’ NORTH KOREA’S BELLIGERENCE

Disclosure of North Korea’s sale of the R-27 missiles to Iran could not have come at a more sensitive time, as tensions on the Korean Peninsula have reached a crisis stage after North Korea launched an artillery barrage on a South Korean island, killing four South Korean civilians and bringing the peninsula to the brink of war.

Among a second cache of U.S. diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks on Monday include a bombshell revelation that China, North Korea’s longtime ally, is “fed up” with the increasingly belligerent regime in Pyongyang, with senior Chinese officials quoted as derisively branding North Korea “a spoiled child.”

While Beijing publicly has refused to condemn Pyongyang for its November 23 attack on the South Korean island of Yeongyeong and has called for a resumption of the six-party nuclear talks, the cables reveal China’s mounting private frustration with North Korea in the four years since Pyongyang’s provocative underground nuclear tests and test firings of its long-range Taepodong-2 ballistic missiles.

In a February 17 cable, South Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Chun Yung-woo, told Kathleen Stephens, the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, that senior Chinese officials told him that Beijing “is fed up with the North Korean regime’s behavior and would not oppose” the unification of the Korean peninsula under South Korean control.

S. KOREAN OFFICIAL; N. KOREA ‘ALREADY COLLAPSING’

Chun, who heads the South Korean delegation to the six-nation talks aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program, said China “would not be able to stop North Korea’s collapse” following the death of its ailing, 68-year-old dictator, Kim Jong-il, according to the cable. The North, Chun said, “had already collapsed economically and would collapse politically [within] two to three years” after Kim’s death — despite Pyongyang’s apparent grooming of the dictator’s 27-yer-old son, Kim Jong-un, to take over.

Chun dismissed South Korean media reports that Chinese companies had agreed to pump $10 billion into the North’s economy, the cable said. “Beijing had ‘no will’ to use its modest economic leverage to force a change in Pyongyang’s policies,” Chun said.

In a sign of the deteriorating relations between Beijing and Pyongyang, the cable quotes Chun as saying that North Korea has a low regard for Wu Dawei, China’s deputy foreign minister and chief representative at the six-party nuclear talks, with the North Koreans characterizing him as “the most incompetent official in China.”

For his part, Wu is quoted in an April 2009 cable as telling U.S. officials that Pyongyang was behaving like “a spoiled child” to get Washington’s attention by carrying out its missile tests — which severely jangled nerves in Japan, where the government in Tokyo regarded the tests as a direct threat to Japan’s national security.

Another sign of tension between the two countries has been a series of violent incidents along the Chinese-North Korean border — the most highly publicized of which was the deadly shooting in July by North Korean border guards of three Chinese citizens and the wounding of a fourth.

The four Chinese were shot on the North Korean side of the border, after North Korean guards suspected them of “crossing the border for trade activities,” according to Qin Gang, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry. Beijing filed a formal diplomatic protest to Pyongyang over the incident.

WHY WIKILEAKS: LACK OF FEDERAL ‘SHIELD LAW’ TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS’ SOURCES

Congressman King and other politicians, in their condemnation of WikiLeaks, have forgotten the reason why WikiLeaks came into being in the first place: The refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 to review federal court rulings ordering two investigative reporters to reveal their confidential sources.

It has been a longstanding practice of investigative journalists uncovering corruption in and wrongdoing by the government and private entities to keep the identities of confidential sources secret to protect them from retaliation for their disclosures. The Valerie Plame affair undermined that practice, prompting many sources to remain silent, out of fear of discovery and retribution.

Courts ordered then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and then-Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to reveal their sources for information about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in apparent retaliation for the public challenge by her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, to the credibility of the Bush administration’s claim of an alleged Iraqi stockpile of weapons of mass destruction as the rationale for invading Iraq in 2003.

WIKILEAKS ‘CREATED TO PROTECT WHISTLEBLOWERS’

As Peter Scheer, a journalist and practicing attorney who is also executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, writes in a November 16 blog posting on the coalition’s Web site, “WikiLeaks emerged as a technological solution to this hole in the fabric of legal rules implementing the First Amendment’s free press and free speech guarantees.”

WikiLeaks is designed “to foil subpoenas or other assertions of judicial power,” Scheer wrote. “Because the Web site is not tied to any single real-world venue and apparently was built with layers of redundancy, court injunctions issued against WikiLeaks, whether directed to its Internet service providers (ISPs), its lawyers or other entities, are unlikely to disable it.”

More important, Scheer wrote, “WikiLeaks claims to use technology that erases the fingerprints of sources, rendering leaked documents untraceable. By contrast, the same documents leaked to a newspaper, such as The Washington Post, whether by means of e-mail, ‘cloud’-based Internet services or other electronic communications, would be vulnerable to interception and tracing.

“Even if the documents, instead, were hand-delivered to the Post, its reporter could be subpoenaed and forced to testify,” Scheer added.

It is a both a tragedy and a disgrace that it took a Web site such as WikiLeaks to alert the world to the dangers to world peace and security that Iran and North Korea pose — a job that the mainstream media should have done but has been intimidated by the court rulings in the Plame case into not doing.

WikiLeaks should not be prosecuted for that. It should instead be given a great deal of thanks for performing a vitally needed public service.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.  

From VPR today:

([Governor Elect Peter] Shumlin) “I guess my biggest regret that Challenges to Change was never intended to be a way to cut budgets. It was intended to be a way to change the way that government does business.”

This statement is, of course, rather silly. Of course it was about budgets. If you don’t trust your own memory, check the media coverage at the time. The Free Press (paywalled): “a budgeting experiment.” WCAX: “a savings plan”. The AP (paywalled): “…general fund savings through a process dubbed Challenges for Change.”

Fact: Shumlin’s statement that this was “never intended to be a way to cut budgets” is an attempt at a political retcon. Couple this with the other oft-heard mythology of the last year (after C-for-C so badly blew up with nonprofits and constituency groups), also best articulated by the Governor-Elect, that “The mistake we made was by thinking we could do it with an administration who wanted to decimate many of the services of state government”, and you have the new line: we meant well, there’s a good idea in there (that wasn’t even “ours” as it came from out-of-state consultants), but the Governor screwed it up.

None of which fully reflects the reality of the legislative leadership’s role. Challenges was borne from a budget crisis, built on budget cutting targets, and its manifestation was as a creature of the legislature – and it is in that legislature run by Speaker Smith and Shumlin that the inevitably-controversial proposals were fast tracked. The big bad Governor, of course, had no say over the legislative calendar, after all. Challenges was also a fiercely ideological creature, not the blandly clerical project it is now presented as (for example, it contained among its legislative proposals the abject destruction of the environmental permitting system).

But here’s the reality now: after relationships between advocates and legislators were damaged, after a large scale mobilization of constituency groups arose to counter it, “Challenges for Change” became an albatross. It was a mistake, and words like “failed” and “mistake” from Smith and Shumlin make it abundantly clear that they know it.

So here’s the question: given that face-saving postscripts and historical fudges are a standard element of “moving on,” not simply in the public, political arena, but even in more day-to-day interpersonal settings, should activists allow this retcon to take?

My own feeling is yes. It doesn’t hurt us any to get in on the rah-rahs in this way – in fact, in doing so we simply allow the sense that Challenges was a debacle to become even more firmly entrenched as conventional wisdom, and that’s a good thing. We also potentially feed momentum to reinvent the budget slashing process into something more akin to what our Democratic leaders now claim C-for-C was always meant to be – a push for efficiency. Who doesn’t love efficiency?

But as the man said, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. So while we may quietly acquiesce to the Challenges was just misunderstood, and it was all Jim Douglas’s fault anyway reality, there should be no mistake that the advocacy and activist community does remember how it really went down.

And we’ll be watching.

From VPR today:

([Governor Elect Peter] Shumlin) “I guess my biggest regret that Challenges to Change was never intended to be a way to cut budgets. It was intended to be a way to change the way that government does business.”

This statement is, of course, rather silly. Of course it was about budgets. If you don’t trust your own memory, check the media coverage at the time. The Free Press (paywalled): “a budgeting experiment”. WCAX: “a savings plan”. The AP (paywalled): “…general fund savings through a process dubbed Challenges for Change.”.

Fact: Shumlin’s statement that this “never intended to be a way to cut budgets” is an attempt at a political retcon. Couple this with the other oft-heard mythology of the last year (after C-for-C so badly blew up with nonprofits and constituency groups), also best articulated by the Governor-Elect, that “The mistake we made was by thinking we could do it with an administration who wanted to decimate many of the services of state government.”, and you have the new line: we meant well, there’s a good idea in there (that wasn’t even “ours” as it came from out-of-state consultants), but the Governor screwed it up.

None of which fully reflects the reality of the legislative leadership’s role. Challenges was borne from a budget crisis, built on budget cutting targets, and its manifestation was as a creature of the legislature – and it is in that legislature run by Speaker Smith and Shumlin that the inevitably-controversial proposals were fast tracked. The big bad Governor, of course, had no say over the legislative calendar, after all. Challenges was also a fiercely ideological creature, not the blandly clerical project it is no presented as (for example, it contained among its legislative proposals the abject destruction of the environmental permitting system).

But here’s the reality now: after relationships between advocates and legislators were damaged, after a large scale mobilization of constituency groups arose to counter it, “Challenges for Change” became an albatross. It was a mistake, and words like “failed” and “mistake” from Smith and Shumlin make it abundantly clear that they know it.

So here’s the question: given that face-saving postscripts and historical fudges are a standard element of “moving on,” not simply in the public, political arena, but even in more day-to-day interpersonal settings, should activists allow this retcon to take?

My own feeling is yes. It doesn’t hurt us any to get in on the rah-rahs in this way – in fact, in doing so we simply allow the sense that Challenges was a debacle to become even more firmly entrenched as conventional wisdom, and that’s a good thing. We also potentially feed momentum to reinvent the budget slashing process into something more akin to what our Democratic leaders now claim C-for-C was always meant to be – a push for efficiency. Who doesn’t love efficiency?

But as the man said, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. So while we may quietly acquiesce to the Challenges was just misunderstood, and it was all Jim Douglas’s fault anyway reality, there should be no mistake that the advocacy and activist community does remember how it really went down.

And we’ll be watching.