Per Think Progress:

Last month, Phillip Zelikow disclosed that while serving as a top-aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005, he had written and circulated a memo expressing grave concerns about the Bush administration’s torture regime. Another memo Zelikow co-authored at around the same time even offered a legal alternative to the program. Now, it turns out that strong opposition to President Bush’s interrogation policies came from within his tight-knit inner circle. Karen Hughes, counselor to the president, told the Houston Chronicle this week that she was “very vocal in the internal debate”

You know what?  

That’s it.  I’ve had it with this crap

If you were part of this administration and you knew that torture was going on, and kept silent about it while we were committing crimes of war, you probably had your reasons for not going public.  I’m not going to judge that.  

No.  Scratch that.  I’ll judge that.  

You were wrong.  

You had no business allowing this administration to engage in criminal acts and no business just relying on saying things internally and going through appropriate channels.

But that’s not the point of this piece.

If that’s what you chose to do, you have to live with that, and one of the rules of living with that is that you do not, at this point in time, get to go back and say that you opposed it at the time.  

You do not get to attempt to whitewash your public image.  

You do not get to pretend you were not party to this.

You do not get to be absolved of your complicity through the description of how you registered your protests at the time.  

You do not get to play the good guy by having waited until that administration was out of office to say “oh, by the way, I didn’t like it when it was going on.”

You were part of this.

You stood by this administration when it was committing criminal acts.

There is a word for that.

The word is accomplice.

( – promoted by odum)

Needless to say, we’re not there yet. But by sending the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights to President Obama’s desk for signature today, we’ve made real progress – progress in limiting the arbitrary and capricious tactics credit card companies use against consumers and progress in making clear to the industry that it is on thin ice.

GMD readers know as well as anybody that credit card companies have been taking us to the cleaners for too long. They’ve fought every reform we’ve proposed tooth and nail. And until President Obama took office, they’ve had a regulator who looked the other way. Today we made it very clear that those days are over.

My only regret about today’s vote is that Sen. Sanders and I weren’t able to amend the bill to cap interest rates at a reasonable level. As I wrote in the Free Press last month, the 30 percent rates these companies charge would make the Mafia blush. Though we weren’t able to cap interest rates in this bill, believe me, we’re going to keep pushing for it.

Credit card companies can consider this a shot across the bow.

(I wanted to write a diary on today’s shocker in the NH House, but Mike Abadi covered it well. The folks in New Hampshire aren’t giving up. Let’s do what we can to help them! Plus… Euan’s interviewed!!! – promoted by Christian Avard)

When Euan Bear and I sat down to discuss marriage equality, she was in town to celebrate Vermont’s historic legislative veto override. The day before the interview, the NH Senate had passed marriage equality, and the day we sat down, Maine’s Senate followed suit. Can you say “momentum”? Since then, marriage equality has become the law in Maine.

Here Euan shares GLAD’s efforts to challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), “coming out” on bureaucratic forms, Iowa, Jim Douglas, economic and conservative arguments for marriage equality. This clip ends with her discussing a church’s willingness to perform a marriage as paramount, anticipating some of the political maneuvering that has gone on across the river.  

In NH, Governor John Lynch said he would sign marriage equality if the bill included language that would protect churches that disagree with gay marriage. The NH Senate passed the amended version, and today the House came oh-so-close

The Senate passed the changes 14-10 Wednesday, but the House failed to agree later in the day by a vote of 188-186. Opponents tried to kill the bill, but failed. The House then voted 207-168 to ask the Senate to negotiate a compromise.

So the bill is not dead, and it looks like the House and Senate can iron out any differences, if the House vote on negotiating a compromise is any indication. My superstitious side says “don’t jinx it” but

progress+freedom+justice+equality+momentum=inevitability!

UPDATE: uh-oh here’s a just-posted Reuters piece:

The House vote against the governor’s amendment means the bill will be sent to a committee that will try to resolve the differences between the two chambers. It remains unclear how the governor would respond to any changes to his wording.

Lynch has said he would veto gay marriage if his wording is not adopted.

State Representative Steve Vaillancourt, a gay Republican from Manchester, was a leading voice against the amendment securing religious liberties, saying that the House should not be “bullied” by the governor.

Vaillancourt said an earlier bill that did not provide protections to clerics or religious groups was the one that should have been passed, adding that the amended bill would allow discrimination to be written into state law.

Hang on to your hats!  

I actually think that the Dems and Progs are going to be able to work something out (either officially or unofficially) to avoid splitting the vote against Douglas this coming up election, but I also think that is not something that is going to happen every election, and therefor I still feel like Instant Runoff Voting is something that people need to continue to push for.

I’m pretty sure people here at GMD are well educated on what IRV is, and while I understand that not everyone here thinks it’s the perfect solution, I do think most of us think it’s a lot better then the plurality method we are currently using. What I’d really like to discuss is people’s opinions on the best strategy to achieve it. Should we try to get it instated on the local levels first, as we tried to do here in Rutland last year, and slowly work up to higher elections? Or go straight for a bill to have IRV used in the Gubernatorial election, which will most definately be challenged in court, but I think has good legal standing that it is constitutional (our constitution says nothing about the method used to receive a majority of the votes.) Both? Neither? Did the last Burlington IRV election hurt our efforts? Are they going to try and overturn using IRV in Burlington? What can we do to stop that?

Lots of questions and not many answers (at least from me…hoping some of you have some!). Rep. Mike Fisher has just been confirmed to lead a session on achieving IRV for Vermont at DemocracyFest. I look forward to hearing his plan!

Good grief. Douglas has made the choice for wavering lawmakers on whether or not to override his coming veto on the budget an easy one – whether those waverers are on the right or on the left. At least if they’re capable of paying attention.

For the left, this budget opens up on the full spectrum – medicare, education, the safety net (including welfare-to-work programs), more people thrown out of work – with Secretary of Administration Waylon Smithers Neale Lunderville justifying it with defensive, ideological cries of just how good all those poor, sick and unemployed folks have had it in Vermont for so long.

For the left and the right (and everyone in between) is the incomprehensible raid on the education fund and the massive shift of the burden to local communities. According to a press release from Appropriations Chairs Bartlett and Heath (emphasis added), “Governor Douglas is burdening an average $1,100 property tax increase on 13,000 middle income families. In fact, the actual impact on individual Vermont families could be as high as $8,000” (yes, I am a tapped-out property taxpayer, if that helps explain my ire this morning).

It begs the question as to whether or not Douglas is simply declaring war, not just on public schools, but on local government itself. This huge shift in the burden would simply be more than could be absorbed, even if they cut like fiends. This is not just Grover Norquist’s plan “to get (government) down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”, this is tying an anvil around local government’s ankle and tossing it into the Mariana Trench. There is no way the result won’t be both a massive local tax increase as well as a virtual collapse of local and school services as we’ve known them. No politician – Democrat, Republican, Progressive, or Independent – wants to face their constituents after that depth charge hits.

Oh yes, and even more tax cuts for the wealthy then we’re already stuck with.

Of course, expect the usual suspects – Emerson Lynn, Vermont Tiger, and the one-bad-day-away-from-joining-a-militia editorial squad at the Caledonian Record to fall all over themselves stroking the Governor and using Wealth of Nations Cliff Notes they don’t really understand to sound smart in uncritically backing him up. This GOP Public Relations squad does its job well.

But the fact is, that the striking thing about this so-called budget can be summed up in one word, and its not “ideological,” – it’s incompetent. Jim Douglas dragged his feet on putting forward an alternative (as opposed to throwing out vague, half-baked ideas and trash-talking Dems) for months, and now we know why.

Because he’s in way over his head. This “budget,” coming as it is during a monumental financial downturn, would do to this state what his pal Bush did to the nation and the world; leave it (and us) in an economic shambles.

There is no further compromise to be had with incompetence. There are little PR gimmes included in the proposal, such as an increase in cigarette taxes, designed to make it possible to sell this to friendly news outlets as a “compromise” from the Governor (a “compromise” to a budget that is already far more of a compromise than many of us wanted to see in the first place).

Take the veto and do what it takes to override.

UPDATE: The following letter went to the Governor from the Legislative leadership:

Dear Governor Douglas:

Yesterday we received copies of your revised budget proposal.  In the coming weeks, we intend to give due diligence to your ideas outlined in the proposal.  Therefore, we respectfully request that you direct your staff to submit your new budget in bill form to us no later than Friday, May 29.  The actual language of your proposal is critical for all of our members and our staff to fully understand and evaluate your proposal.

Thank you in advance for the attention of your staff to this matter and please know that our doors remain open to you and your ideas.

Sincerely,

Representative Shap Smith                                          Senator Peter Shumlin

Speaker of the House                                                 Senate President Pro Tem

ROFL!! Douglas clearly has commitment issues.

Filibuster-proof Senate sounds great…but what is Arlen Specter up to now that he’s suddenly found the light?

Even as Arlen Specter (D-PA) announced publicly last month that he intended to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party, I, for one am not ready to throw myself behind him in support…yet. I’m afraid perhaps I have too vivid of a memory of 2005, when Specter attempted to replace asbestos tort litigation with a corporate-friendly bail out for the manufacturers and their insurance companies.

Ah yes, you must remember now? S.852, (Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution Act) ironically and incorrectly bearing the acronym of the “FAIR” Act of 2005, was a piece of legislation designed to end all asbestos injury litigation in the United States by replacing the tort system with a massive trust fund that was supposed to provide for all future claims.

Sounds good on the surface, right? Perhaps, but just below the crust of S.852, which was Specter’s sponsored brainchild, there were several problems.

Perhaps most importantly, the fund was estimated by several neutral think tanks to be drastically underfunded, considering the nature of asbestos related illness and latency between exposure and the onset of health problems, like the rare but devastating cancer mesothelioma.

t would essentially establish a sunset on asbestos injury compensation when the money ran out, so those who didn’t get sick fast enough would be left out of the bill and left out of the courts. Now I’m sure the asbestos companies and insurers are more than eager for the sun to set on their responsibility to compensate those they injured, but those slowly suffocating as their lungs collapse from asbestos damage would likely see things differently.

Veterans of the United States armed forces were particularly affected by this bill, as exposure was common among servicemen and women. Asbestos exposure was common in military installations and aboard naval vessels. Many today are having enough trouble securing their VA claims that they certainly don’t need the additional complication of trying to access compensation that they wouldn’t be entitled to under Specter’s crown jewel of the special interests.

Perhaps more disturbing is that Specter attempted to build into the bill enough tax breaks for asbestos companies and their insurers that the fund would be completely covered by a shuffling-around of tax-payer funds.

I may change my tune in the coming months but you have to think that Specter sitting on the left side of the aisle has to make a few of his new buddies a little nervous. Will he hold up the healthcare bill to get something corporate-friendly like S.852 through? I hope not, but until then he’s the new kid on the block and shouldn’t be trusted until he proves his faith to the people, not the special interests.

Terri Hallenbeck outed him as a candidate, so there’s one less secret I have to sit on (5 zillion to go)…

VDB’s Philip Baroonth Baruth is diving into the 2010 candidate circus, and has filed to run for Chittenden State Senate. Current Senators from the County are Democrats Racine (who is running for Governor, opening up a slot), Lyons, Flanagan, Miller and Ashe (a Dem/Prog), along with Republican Diane Snelling.

An honest-to-goodness netroots candidate! How exciting. Civilization as we know it is almost certainly all downhill from here. We look forward to live blogging from the Senate chambers.

It’s safe to consider this my first endorsement of 2010.

There are people who love Maureen Dowd's column in the Times. I'm not a huge fan, myself, but she does have the occasional good insight.

I am a huge fan of Josh Marshall, so I do get annoyed when people, especially bigfoot journalists, steal his work and don't give him credit, like MoDo did Sunday.

After she got called on it she admitted it. At least, she admitted that the words in her column had apparently come from somewhere else. Really, what choice did she have? You judge for yourself.

Josh wrote:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

Maureen wrote:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

I'll save you the trouble of counting. It's forty-five words, and the only change is from “we were” to “the Bush crowd was”. Dowd's explanation is that she got the line from a friend and reproduced it in her column. Even if you grant that as a professional writer she may have a slightly greater sensitivity to, and recollection of words, than most people, do you believe that she heard this sentence one time, in a conversation, and was able to reproduce it in her column, word for word, down to the punctuation?

Or if you're like me, maybe your first reaction was, “My sweet lord!”

Today's Burlington Free Press covers a new watering hole in Montpelier.

Montpelier's new Three Penny Taproom is bringing local brews of all kinds to the capital city. One of the three owners, Wes Hamilton, shared the inspiration behind the fledgling business.

• WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO START THIS BUSINESS? We love beer! Aside from that, a lot of people only know beer as one style, one flavor. A lot of folks may be familiar with the more popular or mass-marketed microbrews, but there are so many really exciting, creative, unique things happening with beer right now. We wanted to bring that to people.

 In case the name sounds familiar, Wes is a regular here at GMD, as well as running his own blog, Integral Psychosis.

 Follow the Free Press link to read what Wes has to say about his new venture.Then when you're done, stop by the Threepenny Taproom on Main St. in Montpelier. Tell them GMD sent you.