I wrote this last year for Huffington Post and it’s important now as it was last year. I hope you all find some meaning in this post.

DUMMERSTON, VT– Memorial Day weekend has come and gone. All weekend, I saw veterans honored on television, the newspapers, parades, etc. I saw more than my share of yellow ribbons, American flags, 21-gun salutes and more. But something was missing, something I wish would be covered every Memorial Day: voices of dissent, especially from those who served our country.

Don’t get me wrong. I support the troops. I support them just as much as those who support war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I also support veterans in past conflicts. For many of them, Memorial Day means everything. But there are other veterans that never get heard. They are silenced, ignored and misunderstood because they have something vastly different to share. I’m talking about those veterans who served their country, survived the horrors of war and heal their wounds through advocacy efforts.

It pains me that veterans organizations advocating for peace are always overlooked on Memorial Day. For many of these organizations, getting into a Memorial Day parade can be a controversial ordeal. In Bremerton, Washington, Veterans for Peace were told to stay away from this year’s festivities. Why? Why should we honor one kind of veteran and not another? Why is it controversial to honor veterans who want their service be remembered differently? It seems that every Memorial Day, we miss another opportunity to honor veterans’ in a different and meaningful context. It’s time we open our minds to the complexity of the meaning of past military service. It’s well past time we honor those who fought and who speak out against war.

War is traumatic and many veterans who speak out against their actions (or their government’s policies) want their experiences to be validated, understood, and accepted. Anti-war veterans organizations must be honored to the same degree many of us honor Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion or Disabled American Veterans, ever Memorial Day. All veterans must be honored, even those who speak out against war.

I honor those who want to be remembered for their service. I honor those who lost their lives fighting for what they believed in but I also honor those who experienced the other side of war and want to make our country and our communities less-violent places. This Memorial Day I also honor the Veterans for Peace, Courage to Resist, Gold Star Families for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Veterans Against the Iraq War. I’m sure there are many more. The members of all of these organizations served America and they love their country. It’s well past time we honor them on Memorial Day.  

 The point of Shila Renee Mullins’s brain surgery was to remove a malignant tumor threatening to paralyze her left side. But Methodist University Hospital in Memphis also saw an opportunity to promote the hospital to prospective patients.

Healthcare is just a business after all .Our health care system needs to be fixed but maybe it is nothing a little marketing can’t cure.  Methodist University Hospital in Memphis Tennessee substituted a model for the real patient in the promo ads for the brain surgery broadcast. Maybe this is something that almost had to happen, hospital marketing one step beyond. But,should there be any, would the patient get the royalties? Any discount? What if the video goes viral,a performance bonus?  Will there be awards perhaps in the future for best doctor performing in a surgery webcast? Suppose the patient has the poor taste not to recovery as advertised?  Ethics ?

So, a video webcast of Ms. Mullins’s awake craniotomy, in which the patient remains conscious and talking while surgeons prod and cut inside her brain, was promoted with infomercials and newspaper advertisements featuring a photograph of a beautiful model, not Ms. Mullins.

This time, Methodist did not use billboards as it has with other operations, deeming this procedure too sensitive. But its marketing department monitors how many people have watched the Webcast (2,212), seen a preview on Youtube(21,555) and requested appointments (3).

“The goal is to further our reputation as well as to educate the community, who will ask their physicians about our care,” said Jill Fazakerly, Methodist’s marketing director.

In one unexpected marketing success, after Methodist advertised a coming brain-surgery Webcast, a man called, volunteering to be the patient. Methodist agreed. “He told Dr. Sills that if he was operating live on the Web, he must be pretty darn good,” Ms. Fazakerly said.

Brain Webcasts also “build business for our other departments,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05…

Per the AP, via today’s Rutland Herald:

Retired Marine Gen. James Jones, the White House’s national security adviser, said this month he wasn’t sure the policy would be overturned.

“We have a lot on our plate right now,” he said.

There is concern that reopening the socially and politically divisive question of gays and lesbians in the ranks could place an additional burden on a military stretching to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So here’s my question:

How, exactly, does not pulling units apart, not forcing soldiers to lie and not forcing them conceal aspects of their lives from their colleagues place an additional burden on anyone?

Let’s turn this around:

How much of a burden is it for us to fire soldiers who have served with honor, who are fluent in Arabic, who have cost us millions of dollars in training?

“We have a lot on our plate right now?”

So why are we wasting our time getting rid of people whose only crime are the words “I am gay?”

And how much of a problem do we think this will be when 58% of the population supports repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell??

Unlike some people, I’m not in a serious rush over this.  I’m fine with getting an act of Congress to repeal it, and as long as this happens in this congressional session, that’s great.  But this concern troll idiocy is simply ludicrous.  

There’s no serious political force opposing this repeal and honestly, this is the only argument they’ve got left:

From Louis Porter, in today’s Rutland Herald:

Douglas administration officials said their proposal is a necessary brake on education spending that has not taken the same kind of reductions as state government and human services over the last year.

The governor’s proposal would move additional costs into the Education Fund – including teachers’ retirement costs and early education costs – and place a firm cap on education spending for the fiscal year that follows this one.

“Given the investment in education that taxpayers have made in Vermont and the current woes that taxpayers are having in the economy that level funding education spending for one year is reasonable,” Tax Commissioner Tom Pelham said. “Especially when many programs funded by the General Fund are seeing not level funding but cuts in their budgets.”

This isn’t a budget proposal.  It’s an attempt to damage public education by setting more of the burden on property taxes and create conflict between schools and residents at the local level.

First off, spending freezes are not freezes.  They’re cuts.  School programs get a little more expensive each year, so a budget freeze basically means a budget cut.

This means that programs seen as non-essential, even though they have a great deal of overall educational benefit (such as art and music classes), get cut while programs that have a more dubious educational benefit (such as sports programs) tend to stick around.

Don’t get me wrong: I am in favor of sports programs.  I think they’re great.  I just don’t think they have the educational benefit that art and music do and I sometimes question whether pairing them so closely with public school programs is such a good idea.

That said, there’s a term which conservatives like to throw around: “school choice.”  Here’s an example of Douglas referencing it:

Not every child receives an equal opportunity for the best education VT’s public schools can provide. When a school fails to meet the individual needs of a student, wealthy families can pay tuition and choose another school, but poor and middle-class children are left behind. That is wrong. Choice should not be a privilege reserved for only the wealthy. It should be the right of all Vermonters. I will open the doors of our best public schools to every child.

Here’s what Douglas’ proposal above does: it gives parents with the resources to move their kids to another school the option to do so, forcing those without those resources to keep their kids local, but does nothing to actually benefit the school that’s in trouble.  It therefore, keeps poor kids poorly educated, and leaves wealthier kids with more options.

Let’s get back to the Herald piece.  There’s a telling line towards the end:

And the expansion of income sensitivity and other measures have somewhat masked the cost of schools, Douglas said.

“Vermonters need to know what the true cost of our education system is,” he said.

And he’s right.  We should know the “true cost” of all the choices we make with our budgets.   So here’s my thought for the day: the “true cost” of not fully funding our educational system?  

It’s really expensive.

 Or the good oil years are behind us.Unless big things change energy wise the Arctic may face a new challenge. As the search for new oil and energy turns to the Arctic, the first interested   national or corporate entities on location with a way of supplying power for this remote exploration and extraction may also determine who controls dwindling energy resources. A race (or aggressive rivalry) of sorts may be underway between nations to be the first to build and put into use (deploy?) mini nuclear power plants.  The Russia government, private US and Japanese firms are exploring mini nuke power plants.

The US plant is styled on a small stationary reactor similar to those used by students of nuclear power, known as Training, Research, Isotopes, General, Atomics or TRIGA. They are made to be buried and generate 25 megawatts. Hyperion, the New Mexico based US firm calls its reactor a “nuclear battery”.

The Russians have been more innovative. They designed a floating nuclear power station with two units that will produce 35 megawatts each and travel to where it is needed.

According to Moscow times The Russian power plant, which is being assembled at the St. Petersburg-based Baltic Shipyard by Energoatom, a subsidiary of Rosatom, is the first of seven floating nuclear power plants that the company plans to build, Energoatom head Sergei Obozov told reporters on Monday

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/…

There won’t be much to distinguish an FNPS from a regular ship, to an untrained observer. The first will be 472 feet long and 98 wide, weighing in at 21,500 tons. The two reactors inside can produce 35 megawatts each .Although ostensibly built to serve far northern towns like Vilyuchinsk, which lies off the Bering Sea near Alaska, the real purpose of the new design, which will potentially end up in dozens of plants, is to help Russia extend its reach into the Artic if and when it begins to drill there for oil and gas. The only kink in that plan is that the Artic is far from a settled issue, politically.

Energy prices will likely dictate how long it is until the Russia, as well as other countries including the United States and Canada, delay oil and gas exploration in the region. Serious entry into the Artic will come only after the half-dozen countries with a claim have fought it out amongst themselves – potentially dueling it out with another sort of nuke.

http://industry.bnet.com/energ…

For more on a possible Arctic oil scenario unreassuredly headlined   The coldest war: Russia and U.S. face off over Arctic resources

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new…

One can be forgiven a feeling of schadenfreude, given the history of the Democratic Legislature being, shall we say, less than supportive of its party’s candidates for higher office. This Legislature may end up better, of course, but it did fail its first test (moving the primary date to something more reasonable).

Still, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and past sins notwithstanding, the fact is that caucus leaders need support in this budget showdown with the Governor – not grandstanding – particularly not from other high profile Democrats, lest their grandstanding be used as a rhetorical billy club against us all by Republicans. This budget standoff is both a delicate and incalculably important political affair, and it behooves fellow Democrats in higher office already not to be too opportunistic and upset the apple cart. Case in point, Auditor Tom Salmon:

State Auditor Thomas M. Salmon has offered to lend his services as a mediator during the budget negotiations between the governor’s administration and the Legislature.

“Yes, the auditor has offered,” said Salmon in an e-mail to the Reformer Tuesday morning.

Salmon, first elected in 2006, said this is a sensitive and serious issue in Montpelier, and he could bring an independent and impartial voice to the discussions.

“I think most Vermonters would like to see a solution from the servants of the people,” Salmon said.

Salmon is not a professional mediator, he’s had nothing to do with this process, he’s not in any way qualified to play the role of parent-from-on-high he’s casting himself as – and yet he’s doing so at the worst possible time. We do expect a certain amount of showboating from politicians, but this one fails the right-place-at-the-right-time test rather spectacularly.  

Just one more bit of neanderthal bias on the part of someone who should not be running a school.

From the website for the San Diego chapter of the ACLU (emphasis added):

Wrongly citing a school policy on sex education, a California school illegally censored a sixth grader’s classroom presentation about Harvey Milk earlier this month. According to a demand letter sent by the American Civil Liberties Union to the Ramona Unified School District today, the school violated Natalie Jones’s free speech rights when it refused to allow her to give the presentation in class. Instead, the school improperly required classmates to get parental permission to see the presentation during a lunch recess.

“This whole thing is unbelievable – first my daughter got called into the principal’s office as if she were in some kind of trouble, and then they treated her presentation like it was something icky,” said Bonnie Jones, mother of the Mt. Woodson Elementary School student. “Harvey Milk was an elected official in this state and an important person in history. To say my daughter’s presentation is ‘sex education’ because Harvey Milk happened to be gay is completely wrong.”

Yup. The principal decided that since San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk was gay, any presentation about him and his campaign for basic civil rights for lesbians and gay men must be about sex. Natalie’s written report scored 49 out of 50 points. The second part of the assignment was to prepare a Power Point presentation to show classmates. I guess the principal – and the superintendent – didn’t mind the written word, seen only by the teacher, but visuals about gay people? Um, must be about sex.

The superintendent told her mom that

Natalie couldn’t give her presentation because of a district board policy on “Family Life/Sex Education.” A few days later, the school sent letters to parents of students in the class, explaining that her presentation would be held during a lunch recess on May 8, and that students could only attend if they had parental permission.

Un. Frackin’. Believable.

In case anyone needs it spelled out, the ACLU has parsed it:

“Writing or talking about a gay historical figure who advocated for equal rights for LGBT Californians is in no way the same thing as talking about sex, and school officials should not pretend otherwise. … This school completely overstepped its bounds in trying to silence Natalie Jones by shunting her presentation off to a lunch recess time and misusing a school policy to justify requiring parental permission to see it.”

Gosh, ya think this is what the “Gathering Storm” zombies were talking about?

NanuqFC

Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice. ~ Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)

(NOTE: I submitted this a week ago, and decided not to wait around for the paper any longer)

It is not often I find time to write to the local paper, but Douglas Greg’s My Turn piece (Health care your responsibility, May 11 – http://tinyurl.com/qdkxq3), simply cannot go without retort. His ad hominem attacks and distortions of simple facts do his readers a great disservice.

For those readers who may have missed the article, Mr. Greg argues, in response to a healthcare activist campaign led by the Vermont Workers’ Center, that healthcare should not be treated as a human right.

But before he even gives readers a chance to be taken seriously, he resorts to juvenile – and borderline shameful – meanderings.

Mr Greg writes that after he saw a group of pro-healthcare activists on the road he “figured that maybe they were fans of a local sporting event” since “half of the group were kids.” But, much to his displeasure, he learns they are pro-healthcare activists and immediately dismisses them as crazy lefties with “blood for oil” signs

“Everyone needs a hobby,” he concludes.

It is rather astounding that in one paragraph Greg manages to dismiss all healthcare activists, young people and anti-war activists as unworthy of being taken seriously. More astounding is that the rest of his piece proves to show that the same critique could be applied to him in a far more convincing way.

His insistence that Catamount Health, Dr. Dynosaur and the Vermont Health Access plan – three psuedo-public programs that offer subsidized healthcare to needy Vermonters – “are essentially free to those who need it” is an unambiguous falsehood.

To give just one example, Catamount Health is anything but free. Even those with no income must pay a small premium, and someone making short of $30,000 a year still must come up with $160 a month for insurance, plus deductibles and co-pays. This can be rather cost-prohibitive for people just barely getting by on service-sector jobs. These plans also do nothing to control costs – which are escalating well past the rate of inflation – whereas a public plan would cut costs dramatically.

Further, if Vermont already had “basically free” universal insurance, how does he explain that 11 percent of Vermonters – including, unforgivably, thousands of children – have no insurance at all?

Now, if Greg would prefer that for-profit private insurers with virtually no accountability handle our healthcare system, rather than the citizens of Vermont, that is his prerogative. But he could at least refrain from misleading readers about the economic costs of a public plan, as opposed to the current private system.

Due to corporate profits and administrative waste, private insurance is actually far more expensive than a public system. According to a study commissioned by the Legislature in 2006, Vermont would save $51 million a year if it implemented a single-payer healthcare system. Indeed, contrary to the doctrinaire assumptions of Greg and other free-market absolutists, single-payer is far more fiscally conservative a plan than what we currently have.

I do hope and suspect readers of the Free Press see past the misinformation put forth in that piece and at least consider a more humane healthcare system that leaves no one behind.

He taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago.

He said he would end torture, and then he did it.

He said he would close the prison camp at Guantanamo, only to be shot down by his own party. NOTE: Full credit to Pat Leahy and Peter Welch for supporting this effort!

But now we have this: Not only has he pivoted on military commissions (motto: military justice is to justice as military music is to music) apparently Barack Obama is considering imposing a system of preventive detention on people the government doesn't like.

At a private, off-the-record with human rights advocates, Obama broached the topic of preventive detention.

The two participants, outsiders who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was intended to be off the record, said they left the meeting dismayed.

They said Mr. Obama told them he was thinking about “the long game” — how to establish a legal system that would endure for future presidents. He raised the issue of preventive detention himself, but made clear that he had not made a decision on it. Several senior White House officials did not respond to requests for comment on the outsiders’ accounts.

“He was almost ruminating over the need for statutory change to the laws so that we can deal with individuals who we can’t charge and detain,” one participant said. “We’ve known this is on the horizon for many years, but we were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning.”

Note: “individuals who we can't charge and detain” means people who haven't done anything, or we don't have evidence that they've done anything, or the case otherwise wouldn't stand up to scrutiny in court.

You'll remember that it was less than a year ago that the Supreme Court, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, invalidated the Military Commissions Act because it abolishes the right of habeas corpus for military detainees. The new Obama initiative, if it ever comes to fruition, will have to have the same abolition of habeas corpus in order to enable the government to keep people it suspects of harboring lethal intent towards us. How will our Constitutional Law professor president square his desire to abolish habeas corpus with Boumediene, or, for that matter, with his oath of office?

UPDATE (from odum): Here's a link to a posting of the prepared remarks Obama will make on these issues today. They are well-written (although more than a bit defensive), will no doubt be well-spoken, and pretty much say simply: “state secrets, military commissions, holding back photos… the Bush admin was bad when they did these things because they weren't thematically coordinated and didn't appreciate American values like I do. Since I do have those values (as you can see because I said 'no more torture' and want to close the Gitmo gulag), you can just trust me to do these things – but with a more noble attitude and in a manner that you shouldn't trouble yourselves over. That's why my critics are all wrong.”