I posted a piece to the Guardian site on the liberal reaction to the Baucus health care bill passing out of the Senate Finance Committee with the help of Olympia Snowe. Public option promoters among the liberal online activist set (folks like Chris Bowers and Jane Hamsher) fully expected this result, so in a sense nothing has changed. The cooperation of Snowe, however, gives ammunition to those in the traditional media and the Obama Administration who wouild like to jettison the public option in favor of something seen as “centrist,” rehardless of its ultimate viability and effectiveness. From the piece:

The dangerous dynamic for the Obama administration is clear. If, as all signs indicate, they truly would prefer to abandon the public option in a final bill, the left will try to cast them as standing with the nasty insurance industry over regular folks. The White House will move quickly to try and get ahead of that rhetoric, while simultaneously touting Snowe’s support for the finance committee bill.

The next round of the battle will be an attempt by Reid, in concert with Baucus, the Obama administration and senator Tom Harkin (whose committee produced a bill to the liking of progressives), to merge the products on the table into a final bill to be presented to the full Senate.

Given the blowback from AHIP’s aggressiveness and the current unanimity of progressives, the left may – for the moment, at least – be able to counter somewhat the narrative of bipartisanship created by Snowe’s vote and influence this next, crucial stage. The one thing that now seems certain is that a healthcare bill will pass both chambers of Congress, and while many pundits will count the left out of the process after Snowe’s engagement, modern progressives have proven to be a far more resilient lot than their immediate historical predecessors.

Here’s a link to the complete piece.

PS… Also, for those who may have read the post about my son Tucker’s parentally-assigned film project and his associated blog, he watched his first film today; Troy, the big Hollywood treatment of the Trojan War story. His review is up here (keep in mind, he’s 10).

I have no official affiliation with WGDR but I have appreciated what it contributes to central VT for decades. Just Sunday I was driving on rt2 and it was hard to keep my eyes on the road because of the stunningly beautiful foliage. The road was literally littered with leaf-peepers parked on shoulderless stretches of curviness. And on the radio, a great set of Afropop from Mali. Had it not been for GDR, I may have had to choose between the station playing the Bad Company song and the one playing Steve Miller. Yeah I know hands down it would have been Steve Miller, but the point is WGDR brings a world of musical genres to a state where a commercial radio station can claim “true music diveristy” if they play both Paul Simon AND Beck.  

I also learned on that drive that it is WGDR’s pledge drive week. Contribute here or call (802) 454-7762.  

WGDR doesnt just enrich central Vermont’s musical life with local music and global sounds. It also delivers the progressive  politics throughout the week. Check out this schedule: Democracy Now!, BBC, TUC radio, WINGS, Alternative Radio, Unwelcome Guests, Free Speech Radio News, and a host of opportunities for local discussion.  When you think about how Vermont has changed politically in the last 35 years, consider the role a cultural and political oasis like WGDR has in nurturing that change.

The parallel between the progressive blogosphere and community radio is clear. Both provide local culture on the cheap with a commitment to increasing the number of voices heard. In conversations with both kestrel9000 and Bill Simmon, blogosphere/radio connections arose. If you aren’t convinced yet, here’s Skeeter Sanders:

[Cross-posted to Broadsides.org]

By now, anyone who cares already knows that Montpelier’s city government came forward last week with the head-spinning admission that – whoops – they made a $400,000 error. And if that’s not bad enough, Mayor Mary Hooper and Town Manager Bill Fraser are also admitting that they have been purposely “not disclosing” this error to the town’s taxpayers for several years. Yes, years.

The Times Argus broke the story last week, right before – wink, wink – Hooper & Fraser, et al said they were about to go public with the information themselves. [Editorial assertion: Yeah, right.]

And the back-story is as dumb as it is simple: The town got goofy with digits and issued a check to a contractor for nearly $400,000 more than the correct $50,000ish owed to him. And the smarmy contractor cashed it, paid off a debt or two and then, when finally confronted more than a year later, said: “The money’s gone.”

Now, if this were happening to mere citizen mortals, this would be the point in the story where law enforcement was contacted and any and all legal measures were put into place to recover the money. No such luck here, because Hooper & Fraser et al decided to make their situation worse by “not disclosing” (read: hiding) it from the public AND entering a multi-year re-payment plan with a man who had already shown all his cards when it came to his ethics.

I know, let’s call it: “Operation: Dumb, squared.” Just because.

But the deed is done.

“Mistakes were made,” declared Mayor Hooper to WDEV’s Mark Johnson this morning, while in the midst of a rather Nixon-like ramble about “feeling bad,” “understanding the urge to feel bad,” and “feeling so bad that she feels like throwing up in the morning.” Um, too much information, Mayor.

But the reality here is that Mayor Mary Hooper must go. And probably Bill Fraser too. Because this mistake, its non-disclosure, and the awkward, unconvincing and – frankly – insulting manner in which Hooper has tried to spin it, is a huge mistake that will have a tremendous economic impact to Montpelierites.

It’s sadly ironic that the “good liberals” in Montpelier have been deafly silent on what is already being called Hooper’s Watergate. That’s what happens when party loyalty usurps better judgment: you start to ignore gross neglect when “among friends.” Ouch.

Imagine, for example, if a similar story was breaking statewide with regards to a Jim Douglas mistake. The response from the liberal Dems would be, “Outrage! Outrage! Outrage!” As it should be.

But when their own house starts to stink, they sound like little more than a field of crickets in response. Carry on, because there’s no one here but us crickets.

Let me repeat: Hooper must go.  

A lot going on today, so rather than report or opine, here’s Rep. Peter Welch from a few days ago on legislation to reform credit card interchange fees (‘swipe’ fees). Credit Card reform is something Welch has pursued for some time. In this video, he is introducing testimony from Kathy Miller of the Elmore Store in before the House Financial Services Committee on October 8, 2009. Miller has testified in hearings at the request of Senator Leahy in the past, so she’s become a bit of a go-to Vermonter on the Hill, I suppose.

( – promoted by odum)

Vermont’s lame duck and thrifty Governor Jim Douglas is headed off to the Far East (is it still called that ?) on a Fall harvest trip seeking EB-5 investors for his business friends but first he had to get one of the earlier taxpayer funded flu shots(seasonal flu) before taking flight .

VtBuzz had the ironically sickening details  

Douglas said he got his flu shot courtesy of the state employee wellness program. That’s the program that was proposed for elimination during the administrations unsuccessful negotiations with the Vermont State Employees Association.

Always ready to reassure Douglas it is noted  ….

he said he doesn’t take offense if someone prefers to nod, rather than shake.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress…

 

The unmistakable direction of social progress has been LEFT, for several thousand years.  But, today's left has forgotten that it's the signposts that everyone sees and follows, allowing the right to reverse the signage, and turn America completely around. 

So, President Bush, having made his fortune using the power of government, felt completely comfortable holding hands with a king whose 14th century behavior brought us 9-11-2001. 

WHAT WE NEED TO REALIZE IS THAT BUSH GAVE US THE PERFECT SYMBOL TO GET EVERYONE TO CHANGE THE SIGNAGE BACK!

We need to hold up the picture of Bush and Abdullah, and shout, “Never Again!“, until all Democrats say, “We made a huge mistake, and it must not happen again,” and until Republicans can only say, “We made a huge mistake, but…”

Once people realize that it was the right who made us insecure, they will begin to realize that it was the right who screwed up the markets, and who created the deficits.  But, as long as the right is perceived as making us secure, we will have an uphill battle on everything else!

Even the President — Caught Completely By Surprise — Admits That He Doesn’t Feel That He Deserves to Receive the Peace Prize After Less Than Ten Months in Office, But Nobel Committee’s Decision Shows How Deeply the World Holds Obama’s Predecessor in Contempt

President Obama passes by a battered United Nations flag on his way to addressing the General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York on September 23. The flag had flown  over the UN’s bombed-out Iraq headquarters in Baghdad. On Friday, the nation, the world — and even the president himself — were stunned by the news that he won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, even though Obama has been in office for barely ten months.  The five-member Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo, Norway cited Obama for “giving the world hope for a better future” with his work for peace and calls to reduce the global stockpile of nuclear weapons. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, October 12, 2009)

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

A ‘SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL

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

“What do we do now?”

That was the question that Bill McKay, the Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in California, asked his campaign manager on election night in the closing scene of the 1972 motion picture “The Candidate.”

The Bobby Kennedy-like McKay (played by Robert Redford) had just been projected the winner of a hard-fought campaign against an entrenched, Barry Goldwater-like Republican incumbent Senator Crocker Jarmon (Played by Don Porter), a campaign that McKay had not expected to win. His victory thus caught him by surprise.

I thought a lot about that final scene from the film, and particularly Redford’s closing line, as the news had sunk in on Friday that President Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Like most of the world — and even the president himself — my immediate reaction was one of disbelief.

AWARDING PEACE PRIZE TO A PRESIDENT WHO MIGHT ESCALATE A WAR IS AWKWARD

How could the Oslo, Norway-based Nobel Peace Prize Committee award the world’s most prestigious honor to a man who had been in office as president of the United States for just under ten months — and facing a rapidly deteriorating military situation in Afghanistan?

It is difficult to imagine Obama not experiencing his own “What do we do now?” moment upon receiving the news. He, after all, is facing the  most difficult foreign-policy decision that any president can face — one that, indeed, could make or break his presidency. On top of that, Obama is also confronted with seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At a time when the Obama administration is conducting a review of U.s. strategy in the eight-year-old conflict against al-Qaida and its Taliban allies — and coming under under pressure from military leaders — as well as from his Republican critics — to send as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan — winning the peace prize now certainly appears awkward.

What impact will it have on Obama’s ability to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan and the Mideast? We don’t know. Only time holds the answer to that question. But why now?

EVEN OBAMA HIMSELF CAUGHT OFF-GUARD

Even the president himself, caught off-guard by the news, was initially in disbelief. As he told reporters at a hastily-called news briefing at the White House Rose Garden on Friday, Obama acknowledged that “this is not how I expected to wake up this morning.”

Admitting that he was “surprised” that he had been chosen to receive the prize, the president said that “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.”

But Obama also acknowledged “this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build — a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.”

To that end, the president said that he would accept the award in Oslo on December 10  “as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.” He said later that he will donate to charity the $1.4 million that accompanies the prize.

NOBEL COMMITTEE STICKS IT TO BUSH — FOR THE FOURTH TIME

Anyone who has read The ‘Skeeter Bites Report over the past 18 months knows that its editor and publisher is a staunch supporter of Obama. I endorsed him for the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton in February of last year. I voted for him in November.

I have relentlessly gone after the more outrageous of his critics, most notably the whacked-out “birthers,” whose relentless, yet futile campaign to remove Obama from office with false, unprovable claims that he is a foreigner constitutionally ineligible to be president was  — and is — clearly motivated by racist and misplaced Islamophobic animus against him.

But for once, I find myself in agreement with the president’s critics on this one. I do believe that the Nobel Prize Committee was premature to award the Peace Prize to Obama now, in the face of what is very likely to be an escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

Not that I oppose the conflict against al-Qaida and the Taliban; quite the contrary, Obana was right all along when he said on the campaign trail that the war in Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein was a massive distraction by the Bush administration away from the real war on terror in Afghanistan. George W. Bush squandered a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to truly unite the nation and the world against the threat of global terrorism waged by al-Qaida.

Indeed, it has to be said that by awarding the Peace Prize to Obama, the Nobel Committee has, for the fourth time since 2002, heaped a pile of cow manure on Bush. Its decision was only the latest expression of the world’s deep-seated contempt for the former president.

BUSH DESERVES TO GET THE SMACKDOWN FOR DISGRACING AMERICA TO THE WORLD

And who can blame them?  Bush turned up his nose at the world by deciding to go to war against Saddam Hussein based on flimsy claims that Iraq was building up a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that he will probably never live down the day he presented to the UN Security Council what turned out to be phony evidence of Iraqi WMDs.

Result: the Nobel Committee awarded the 2002 peace prize to former President Jimmy Carter, a sharp critic of Bush’s propaganda campaign leading to the Iraq War, and the 2005 Peace Prize to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei, that rejected Bush’s claims that Iraq possessed a WMD stockpile.

Two years later, the Nobel Committee stuck it to Bush again when it awarded the 2007 Peace Prize to former Vice President Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  for spreading the word about global warming. Bush defied the world on the growing threat of climate change when he refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — making the U.S. the lone holdout against the agreement.

Now comes the 2009 Peace Prize to Obama. I’m a strong supporter of this president, but I’m not so naive to believe that the Nobel Committee wasn’t motivated by a desire to snap the cat-o’-nine-tails across Bush’s backside one last time; it’s hardly a secret that Obama’s number-one foreign policy priority in the nine months he’s been in office has been to repair much of the damage to America’s relations with the rest of the world that Bush wreaked during his eight years in the White House.

Nevertheless, Afghanistan has a very real potential to destroy Obama’s presidency just as Vietnam destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s. So far, the president has acted very deliberately, determined not to repeat the mistakes of past presidents.

Congratulations, Mr. President, and Good Luck — You’re going to really need it.

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor& Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Some photos are worth waiting for.  

This Great Blue Heron was hanging out at Allen Brothers Marsh, and looked like it was stalking something, so I gave myself a little time to wait and see what would happen.

I was not disappointed.

A bunch more photos after the fold (all of them are smaller versions; clicking on them gets you to the larger ones).

I wanted to focus this primarily on Vermont, but I just have to say, this is one of the best speeches I’ve ever seen him give:

Obama gave this speech last night:

I have to say, I love this speech.  It actually made me cry.  

And the speech is a good start.  But it’s the same good start we made in November, and the same good start we’ve repeatedly had.

I’m one of the people that’s been urging patience, but I also think that since our President is refusing to issue a timeline, I should issue one of my own.

So here’s the deal: he took office in January of 2009.  

I’m counseling patience with pressure: never stop asking about DOMA, about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, about ENDA (and, specifically, one that includes protections on the basis of gender identity as well as sexual orientation).  Withhold donations to campaigns of politicians who refuse to answer questions on these issues.  Tell your representatives that these are important to you.  

But let’s give it a little time to work its way through.  And I do mean, a little.  I’m behind this President and I’m behind my party.  But since Obama won’t tell us when he intends to do these things except in vague and general terms, here’s my timeline (he’s got a lot to do, so I’ll be generous):

He’s got a year from the day he took office to make a serious impact on DOMA, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or ENDA.  This means pressuring congress to do the right thing and get a bill on his desk that he can sign.  If I don’t see this by the end of January 2010, I will no longer be urging patience of any sort.  I will be urging constant and continual pressure without apology, without reservation, without anything.

This isn’t for me.  I live in Vermont, and work in New Hampshire.  My rights are actually pretty solid.  I want them on the federal level, but my day to day life… I’m fine.  This is for every queer kid in Indiana who has to tolerate abuse at school.  This is for the 15-year old in Oklahoma who knows she’s transsexual, but can’t understand what to do about it because the nearest resource center is hundreds of miles away.  This is for every gay couple in Maine who doesn’t know what the hell is going to happen to their marriage rights this year.

This is because I know where I come from, what I had to go through, and who I am and I’m not leaving my people behind just because I’m comfortable.  This is for all of us.

I’m not expecting that all I have to do is to click my heels three times and have everything be okay.

I’m with my president, and I loved this speech.

Now I want to see it made manifest.

Okay, after the fold, open thready stuff.

First, this pair of headlines showed up next to one another in the Herald this week:

Over at Daily Kos, there’s a link to this piece of wingnut art, which is almost funny enough on its own.  If you put the mouse over parts of the artwork, you get commentary about the various people, such as, with the Immigrant, “Why does he have his hand up like that…?  I wanted him to have a look of shock when he realizes where the source of America’s greatness comes from as he sees Christ holding the Constitution.”

There’s also a great spoof of it.  Here’s a screen shot of one of the mouseover bits:

And, finally, a question:

Are the people who made this decision competent at what they do?

…But the number of mudpuppies killed in the Lamoille during the lampricide treatment a week ago raises questions about how well biologists understand the population of the salamander, the effect of the chemical used to control lamprey and the potential that other stresses can put the creatures at risk during such treatments, Andrews said.

“These are complex systems we are tinkering with,” he said.

“It is a large number,” Laroche said of the mudpuppies killed. But, he added, “I am not alarmed.”

The large number of mudpuppies killed might mean that the Lamoille – which has never been treated with lampricide before – has a very high population of the mottled brown salamanders, he said.

“We could have an abundance of mudpuppies and just have a situation where it is difficult to find them and catch them,” Laroche said.

Really?  You kill over 500 members of a species of a rare species of serious concern and you’re “not alarmed?”