A few days ago, the Central Vermont Localvores presented Montpelier with a plethora of culinary delights all cooked with local ingredients and prepared by some of Vermont’s esteemed chefs. The State House has lawn was flooded with hundreds of Vermonters including the Governor. The Governor as it seems was the case was there for his usual photo shoot and not for a genuine support for the next day he was in Berlin,  Vermont cutting the ribbon of the rebuilt Mc Donald’s. I guess you can say the proof was in the pudding.

The Governor either was meeting Ronald Mc Donald or he has decided that his respect for Vermont farmers and the health of the food supply is conditional to those he speaks with.

SuperSized article below the fold:

True to his nickname, Governor Scissorhands:

“It's an affordable place to have a meal. It provides dozens of jobs,” Douglas told a crowd gathered on hot black pavement outside the building. “And the good nutrition and fitness at your amenities here will help us with that as well,” the governor said before cutting a thick red ribbon with a giant pair of scissors.- From the Times Argus.

The governor spoke without mentioning that the majority of the Mc Donald’s menu consists of processed foods and its super-sized image has been attributed to the expansion of obesity rates in America to the level of epidemic proportions. The Mc Donald’s s system has thrived on squeezing out all facets of our food industry. Whether it is in the large scale feed lots, subsided corn fields or the roadside strip-malls diners, Mc Donald’s has a history of squashing small scale farming and family business in favor of non sustainable farming and a profit driven agenda. McDonald’s is not an affordable place to have a meal because we are now facing larger health risks from the Mc Donald’s super size image, greater environmental cleanup costs and taxpayers are continuing to pay billions in subsidies to support industrial corn which is used to feed the cattle it’s unnatural diet.

As for the faulty logic of job creation, this topic is a farce for the governor to hail. The McDonald’s corporation has received millions of dollars in tax breaks or subsidies under the guise of job creation and most employees are paid on or about minimum wage. The simplistic picture coded instruction manuals do not teach future job skills and is merely a dead end job proposition. While most employees of McDonalds are shortly employed politicians continually hail their job creation while forgetting that smaller in state and family owned restaurants fail to receive their market shares.

The American landscape has now become littered by fast food chains and in many locations the mom and pop shop has become a distant memory. As with the big-box store it is not job creation when jobs and businesses are removed from an already viable source, therefore a corporate business that extracts the dollars from the local economy and exploits the landscape should not be a model to praise. The Mc Donald’s corporation spends more money marketing to children than they do to paying wages, and therefore creating a whole new generation of malnourished consumers and under paid workers. While the Governor cuts another ribbon and fails to live past one day of hailing the triumphs of healthy local foods I hope that it becomes another nail in his political coffin. I can see through Governor Douglas’s phony smile and I just wonder when others will see through his deceit.

Peace

Robb Kidd

“Eating at fast food outlets …. is simply a manifestation of the commodification of time coupled with the relatively low value many Americans have placed on the food they eat.” Andrew F. Smith, ‘Encyclopedia of Junk food and Fast Food’ (2006)
 

A really big lie, if repeated consistently and loud enough, becomes a truth for people to act on. We've seen this, for example, in the (demonstrated non-existent) Iraqi WMD and the (demonstrated false) claims that nobody thought the New Orleans levies would fail. Another big lie meme is this continuous reference to the “1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” otherwise known as FISA (Senate passes Bush terrorism spy bill, Times Argus, 08/04/07).

Reality is FISA has been updated some 50 times since it came into existence including eight times since the attacks of Sept 9, 2001. It is not the 1978 version by any stretch of the imagination, yet opportunistic politicians and their pandering, obsequious national media continue to throw that phrase at us.

Click here for a Congressional Research Service list of FISA updates since 1996 as posted on the Federation of American Scientists website. The total number of 50 updates comes from the ACLU.

It would be nice for a change to see the national “news” media spend more time spreading the really big truth.

Over at the Rude Pundit, he has guest bloggers filling in for him this week, while he's on vacation. Have a look at guest blogger African American Political Pundit's latest rumination on Hillary, white bloggers at YKos, and Obama's Pakistan blunder.  Happy Saturday, everyone.

Cross posted from Rational Resistance.

You remember Rep. William Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat who was caught in a bribery sting with $90,000 in cold cash in his freezer?

Of course, that was a long time ago, so you may be wondering why the case is taking so long compared to other prosecutions, like that of Duke Cunningham. You would think they would have this guy locked up already, wouldn't you? Especially since he's a Democrat, which would make the Bushies even more interested in nailing him.

Well, you would think that, except that the people who were going to restore honor and integrity to the Oval Office can't even prosecute corruption right, and that's kept the case tied up since last year.

You see, the Justice Department had the FBI raid Jefferson's Congressional office, something that had never been done before, and Jefferson challenged the search in court. Today, the court ruled that even though the search was legal, the FBI violated the Constitution by searching his Congressional records and papers. The court said the Constitution insists that lawmakers must be free from any intrusion into their congressional duties. Such intrusion, even by a filter team, “may therefore chill the exchange of views with respect to legislative activity,” the court held.

This was an intrusion that was so egregious that it brought together Democrats and Republicans, with former House Speakers Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and Thomas Foley, a Democrat, fil[ing] legal documents opposing the raid, along with former House Minority Leader Bob Michel, a Republican.

Now they still have to litigate whether they can use anything they scooped up in the raid of his office, and there's no telling how long that will take.

Maybe Gonzalez has a new motto: “Sure we're corrupt, but we're incompetent, too!”

(NOTE: The statement I have blockquoted in the diary text demanded that I, as is my responsibility as a site administrator, demote this diary from the front page on the basis that it is in conflict with GMD’s stated identity as a Democratic blog. This action on my part should not be construed as agreement or disagreement with the statement itself, but rather as an enforcement action taken in the interest of GMD’s mission. Pure meta. -kestrel9000)

This past Sunday, July 29, over 50 impeachment activists from seven northeastern states met in Worcester MA to spearhead a united push for impeachment across the region.

Below is our Statement of Purpoose and a regional call for actions in the next two months.

Dan DeWalt

Northeast Impeachment Coalition Statement of Purpose

Our nation is in crisis. The executive branch of the Bush administration has breached constitutional rule in our Republic. They have shown contempt for our nation, the Constitution and the principle of the separation of powers by asserting a self-professed authority to block oversight of the executive branch by Congress and the courts.

If this assault on the separation of powers goes unchecked, it will set a dangerous precedent, encouraging future presidents to act contrary to the interests of the nation with impunity.

Impeachment of the President and Vice President is the only constitutional remedy available to the Congress that addresses executive abuse of power. Yet Congress has refused to act.

Every member of Congress takes an oath of office to preserve and defend the Constitution. They have an ethical obligation to act in its defense without exceptions for political expediency. Every member acknowledged this professional obligation when they swore their personal solemn and sacred oath.

Failure by Congress to impeach puts the Constitution, the rule of law, civil liberties and our democratic form of government at severe risk.

MORE BELOW THE FOLD. 

Whereas George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have:

1. Doctored intelligence, as described in the Downing Street minutes and deliberately misled the nation about the threat from Iraq in order to justify a war of aggression and an occupation of Iraq,

2. Committed crimes against peace by initiating war against Iraq in violation of the UN Charter,

3. Committed crimes against humanity in their conduct of the occupation of Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed and millions have been made refugees while over 3600 American servicemen and women have been killed and many thousands wounded,

4. Detained thousands of prisoners without charges and without providing the ability to confront their accusers at a fair trial,

5. Condoned the torture of prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions and US law,

6. Approved illegal electronic surveillance of American citizens without a warrant in violation of the fourth amendment,

 7. Attacked basic human rights protections in the Constitution including habeas corpus, Fifth Amendment freedom from loss of life, liberty and property without due process of law, eighth amendment freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable search and seizure,

8. Attacked the separation of powers in an effort to consolidate power in the executive,

 9. Failed “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed” by issuing signing statements that claim the authority to disobey laws based on Presidential fiat and then acted in violation of these laws, including the US law making torture a crime, laws requiring the executive branch to provide oversight information to the Congress, laws regarding domestic spying, laws regarding civil liberties, and laws strengthening whistle blower protection, thereby expanding the president's own power at the expense of Congress and the courts, upsetting the balance among the three branches of government, and moving us away from the rule of law toward vastly increased executive power;

10. Condoned criminal conduct and obstructed justice by commuting the sentence of convicted perjurer Scooter Libby, demonstrating that Bush and Cheney will not allow high officials in the administration to be held accountable for their criminal acts; and

11. Obstructed congressional investigations of these and other acts of the administration by disregarding subpoenas from Senate and House committees seeking documents and testimony under oath by administration officials and former administration officials.

The Constitution mandates that “the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”.  Only one such act is needed for impeachment. But each and every one of the above listed acts of Bush and Cheney meet this standard.

Therefore, the Northeast Impeachment Movement calls upon the U.S. House of Representatives to initiate immediately the impeachment of George W. Bush and  Richard Cheney, as provided for in the Constitution of the United States of America. In particular, we call on the House to begin the process by adopting H. Res. 333 calling for the impeachment of the Vice President.

Recognizing that our power is in the number of people who participate, the Northeast Impeachment Movement will organize and coordinate actions throughout the Northeast to build public participation in the campaign to initiate the investigation, impeachment, and removal of Bush and Cheney from office without further delay.

Action Plan for the Northeast

Our nation can no longer bear silent witness as our constitutional Republic disintegrates before our eyes.

It has become clear that the U.S. Congress is not willing to act to defend the Constitution by holding the President and Vice President accountable through impeachment.

The Northeast Impeachment Coalition recognizes that only a peaceful, popular uprising by the general populace can force our “leaders” to lead.

To this end, we are initiating a number of actions gauged to pressure Congress and to spark the public into action.

Dozens of towns and cities across the Northeast will join in the national Honk to Impeach actions being held weekly at high visibility locations, to help those who are entrenched in business and politics as usual to understand just how many Americans want impeachment and the return to constitutional law.

A citizens’ action impeachment tour will travel the region in late September, featuring local, regional and national speakers who will inspire citizens to take action in the streets and in the halls of power.

Troops of cell phone brigades will be spreading out through the country with Congress members’ phone numbers preprogrammed and available for instant calling of the public to their representative.

A delegation representing organizations from throughout the region will be traveling to Washington D.C. to meet with Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and others to make them understand that this is a nationwide movement that will not go gently into the shadows of an impending election.

Coordinated lobbying for defense of the Constitution through impeachment will be targeted at several New England Congress members, culminating in office occupations of recalcitrant members by late September.

We will work in coordination with the National Pledge to Impeach, enlisting thousands of Americans to promise to strike if Congress refuses to act on impeachment.

Congress members who can’t find it within themselves to defend the Constitution will be faced with opponents both in their party primaries

and in the general election. Nancy Pelosi (CA) and Peter Welch (VT) have already been targeted for defeat in the next election.

We will support and strengthen other organizations and planned mobilizations such as the upcoming Peace encampment confronting George W. Bush in Kennebunkport Maine on August 25, and actions which will greet Presidential candidates in Dartmouth N.H. on September 26.

The Northeast Impeachment Coalition recognizes and supports the patriotic actions that are being taken by Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Veterans for Peace and will work with them and other groups to spread their message.

The many grievances of our nation’s founders were ignored until they declared themselves independent by force of arms. The people of this nation are united in their distress and disgust with the willingness of our leaders to ignore the Constitution and the rule of law. We will not drop our constitutional demands. We will continue to escalate our actions until we see results. If those who govern wish to be able to continue doing so, they would do well to adhere to their oaths of office and return our country to constitutional government.

We will not remain silent.

When people hear that we are running a candidate to oppose Vermont Democratic Congressman Peter Welch in next year’s election, they are often quick to mention that next term will be too late to impeach Bush or Cheney. This is an indication that they either miss the point, or that they are dedicated Democrats who can’t bear to see erstwhile allies bearing down on their compatriots.

Allow me to explain our reasons for running. During the last election cycle, the American people made it abundantly clear that we wanted serious change. The Democratic victory, which was larger that anything that even the Democrats had dared to hoped for, was a mandate to bring the occupation of Iraq to an end, and to stop Bush from further damaging the country, if not to hold him accountable.

Instead, we see the Democratic Congressional leadership shying away from meaningful confrontation with the President or Vice-President, and being unable and unwilling to take a single significant step in ending or even slowing the occupation. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, the man who, while serving in the Republican controlled House during the last Congress, wrote the book on the impeachment of Bush, now not only doesn’t believe in it, but is fighting tooth and nail to keep it from being considered in his committee.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has declared impeachment “off the table”. She prefers to watch Bush and Cheney twist in the wind for the next 18 months in the hopes that the Democrats will thus inherit the White House. What she and Conyers fail to include in their political calculations are the numbers of lives to be lost while those 18 months creep by and Bush continues to act out on his policy whims. What she and Conyers, and Peter Welch and the vast majority of Democratic lawmakers who are going along with this masquerade are conveniently forgetting to put into their calculus is that they have taken a professional and moral oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

We will run a candidate who knows that their first loyalty is to the Constitution and their second is to their constituents. We don’t care who the next President is. We do not want to give her or him anything near the amount of power that George Bush has amassed for the current executive branch. The Democrats say “trust us, we’re on your side, it will all come out in the wash with the next election.” We say what have you done to deserve our trust? Where is your defense of the Constitution?

Where is your moral outrage? Where is an investigation that is really focusing on the crimes of the President or the Vice-President and not just concentrating on their underlings? Where are the results of all this important work that you claim to be doing which is precluding you from taking any action on impeachment? Since when is some future judgment of history an adequate substitute for justice served in response to constitutional breaches and criminality?

If you want to know what a determined opposition can do to a President from the other side of the aisle, take a glance at Newt Gingrich’s Congress and how they went after Bill Clinton, yielding no ground and effectively bottling him up and neutralizing him. The best that these current Democrats can do is to waste money rolling out the cots so they can stay up all night with a pajama party talkfest about how bad they think the war is. There is a reason that the only body in this nation with a lower approval rating than the President is the Congress. It is because they have betrayed the American people. If we wanted discredited Republican policies to continue, we would have voted the Republicans back in.

The hubris and condescension that emanates from lawmakers who tell us that in spite of the majority of their constituents demanding impeachment and accountability, they know better and are ignoring our demands for our own good are infuriating and nauseating. They, like the President, are putting themselves above the constrictions of the Constitution and think that they are wise Pooh-Bahs, when they are nothing more than puppets for the corporate oligarchy for whom most of our government functions.

We are running to take back our country from the political parties who have squandered and misdirected our resources, destroyed any veneer of respectability that might have survived the Reagan/Bush/Clinton years and have cast us into the darkness of endless war against an ethereal enemy.

We have reached the end of our rope. 

From an email I got today from the Obama campaign:

The next president must end the war in Iraq, refocus on Afghanistan and the Taliban resurgence, and pressure Pakistan to root out al Qaeda once and for all.

Most importantly, the next president must make sure that Osama bin Ladin and al Qaeda’s core leadership are captured or killed. If Pakistan or any other nation won’t act against bin Ladin and his cohorts, we will.

Sign on to my plan and spread the word:

http://action.barack…

The time has come to turn the page on a failed approach.

The next President of the United States must commit to getting our troops out of Iraq and taking the fight to the terrorists.

We must reinforce our mission in Afghanistan with additional troops. We must press Pakistan and President Musharraf to close down terrorist training camps and stop the Taliban from using Pakistan as a safe-haven.

If Musharraf acts, we will stand with him. But if Pakistan will not act against Osama bin Ladin and the terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans, we will.

These are achievable goals, and when I am president we will wage the war we need to win with a comprehensive strategy.

Read the plan, declare your support, and spread the word that it’s time to change direction.

His link to donate if you are inspired by this militaristic message is cynically entitled:

http :// action. barackobama. com / newleadership

New leadership?

more..

This is the candidate who is running solely on the premise of being different, and for change. This is a total cave-in to the usual and customary powers that be in politics who demand the same old tired saber-rattling to get elected. And if you vote for him, or support him, you are now supporting the status quo.

Yes, I’m talking to YOU!

We already know that no matter who gets elected, except maybe if it were possible for Kucinich to get in somehow, there will not be much in the way of real change. Candidates who are caving already, in the damn primary, fer crissakes, will NOT bring substantial change to this country.

With this email, I am now official putting Obama in the same litter box as Hillary on my personal scorecard. I’m moving him from “neutral” to “against” in the primary, but would support if nominated.

How does your card look?

I'm traveling at the moment, so I don't have much time to blog, but I wanted to make sure and give a shout-out to Philip Baruth, whose Vermont Daily Briefing has, for the second year in a row, won the Seven Days reader poll for most popular (political) blog. Hip! Hip! (Yee-ha!)

Cross posted from Rational Resistance: 

A friend of mine was asking me yesterday if I'm against Obama, and I'm really not. Still, I've come across a couple of things that really show him in a bad light, and since he is the leading candidate among liberals (for instance, he just won the Vermont Democratic Party's straw poll), I think it's important to look closely at him before he's our candidate, not after.

Therefore, I want to link to this diavlog that in it Matt Stoller makes some important points:

1. He was right on Iraq, but he hasn't done anything effective against the war or torture since he's been in the Senate.
2. He doesn't like activists, partly because of his whole “let's just get along” approach to things.
3. He wants to be part of the establishment, and consequently he hasn't really taken on the powerful institutions and politicians, like the press, that got us into the war.
4. There are no spots where you could show that his positions differ from those of Hillary Clinton.

Stoller is also saying that there are things he can do that would get away from these errors, like identifying the people who caused the war (“if he would Sister Souljah a liberal hawk . . .”) and saying that they were wrong and will have no role in his administration.

I know that most of the readers around here probably support him, so I'd be interested to hear what you think after you watch this.

First I want to point out it was the TMPmuckraker blog that pointed to the information I'm using below. And it should be noted a poster on that blog also made the same comment I'm going to.

The question is how long the Cheney/Bush administration can claim that Gonzales was/wasn't talking about the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' (TSP) … or was … or wasn't … errr … separate things … uh … whatever.

Titular president Cheney's recent interview with Larry King contains this fun tidbit:

(Interview of the Vice President by Larry King, CNN, White House press release, 07/31/07)

TPM noted the silliness of this “I don't remember” excuse, but as one of the follow up posters noted: “Wait…I thought the visit WASN'T about the TSP!!!”

(Documents Contradict Gonzales Testimony, CBS News, 07/25/07)

Hmmm, Gonzales doesn't remember except to assure us he wasn't at the hospital about the TSP. Cheney doesn't remember except to assure us it was about the TSP.

And today the Washington Post is reporting:

(NSA Spying Part of Broader Effort, Washington Post, 08/01/07)

So now we can really muddy the waters. Beyond “I don't remember” there is the “Well, we've really been doing a whole lot of secret crap to you that we're not gonna discuss”.

There's a bigger problem than the dishonesty regarding this subject. The Cheney/Bush administration considers their “war against terror” to be without borders … and that includes the United States of America. That means every one of us is a potential threat in the eyes of our current federal administration. We are being treated as the enemy!