Also available at Daily Kos
The chickenshits at Lowlife Gutless Fascists have crossed a line with me.
They have attacked a dear friend of mine.
Guess what: They have angered this kestrel.
My talons are out, and I am on the wing.

Live Game Feeding below the fold.

UPDATE: BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Rosemarie Jackowski is an advocacy journalist living in Vermont. On March 20, 2003, her 66th birthday, she was arrested for participating in a peaceful protest against the war.

Again, I want to thank the Daily Kos community for the AWESOME response to this diary. Rosemarie is getting a lot of press right now.

I’ll be very direct: I would take a bullet for this lady. I love her to death. She is a doll.

I remember once, she and I were having a semi-heated discussion in email about He Who Must Not Be Named.

Suddenly in my email, I found a picture done in MS Paint of a small cottage on the seashore with gulls wheeling in a cloud-laced sky overhead.

The note accompanying it said, “While debating you, I did this to calm you down.”

It worked.

Maybe she oughta send me another painting now, because I am wicked pissed.
A hat tip to Karmafish for alerting me to this situation.

AP is now covering Rosemarie’s story, and among the attention the coverage has attracted are bloggers who claim fealty to the party of family values and civility, of high-handed morality and civil discourse.

Hypocritical bastards.

I wll make no pretenses here. I have no interest whatsoever in being civil to these dirtbags.

Fuck them.

NOTE:The LGF comments reproduced below are VILE. I have been occasionally peeking in on the right-wing blogs for a while now, but some of this stuff is as bad as I’ve seen it get. Some of it is on an outrage level on par with what you’d find on the WN sites. There are also some Iraq war photos in here that some may not wish to view. If this is something you don’t want to deal with, scroll rapidly down to the picture of the sunrise, or use your browser’s text finder and search out the phrase, “very big yawn” and it will carry you past this material.

Let us begin.

#3  MandyManners  12/18/2006 09:44AM PST

Where’s a reindeer? Maybe we can get her run over by one.

Ar ar ar. So funny I forgot to laugh.

#10  rcris5  12/18/2006 09:48AM PST

Vermont, great white bastion…no blacks, browns and certainly no Jooos allowed.

(here I redacted my narration from last night….)

12  republic  12/18/2006 09:48AM PST

Thank goodness she is a “former school teacher”, although there are plenty of moonbats still to go around.

What the leftist kook moonbats are trying to teach my daughters, in their school, with absolutely no luck, I might add, is beyond me.

This comment speaks for itself.

#14  goodbye_natalie  12/18/2006 09:48AM PST

Nothing that a good Peterbilt couldn’t overcome…treat the loony tune like Wily Coyote and watch the moonbats howl.

#25  troonbop  12/18/2006 09:51AM PST

I wish that retired navy guy could figure out a moe dignified way to “get some”. Sure she’s a younger woman, but she’ll probably just get him to spring for bail and then she’ll break his heart.
Yes, I am a lonely man with issues.

I see why.

#18  blutonazi98  12/18/2006 09:49AM PST

i think the 73 year old captain is trying to get into a pair of 69 year old pants

Andrew Schoerke. Military veteran and a married man. His wife’s name is Nancy.
I guess this asshole is doing his best to live up to his screen name – a bully and a fascist.

#24  FrogMarch  12/18/2006 09:50AM PST

Leftists like to hide behind Grandma and small children.

Cindy is just middle-aged. Bye cindy.

I’m not hiding behind anyone.

#35  locutus  12/18/2006 09:56AM PST

 

^{She’s not a loony toon by any means, said Andrew Schoerke, 73, a retired U.S. Navy captain who was arrested with her.}

Of course, they have to stand her up against a retired Navy captain so they can imply “see, even this hard-boiled old guy who still wears a crew-cut and salutes the American flag every morning agrees with the Peace Grandma.” It gives her instant “street-cred” with every veteran, past, present or future.

Rosemarie Jackowski is a retired Air Force officer. I’m so sorry if that fact that indicates she has all the cred she needs on her own shoots down your line of “reasoning”.

If you and your ilk are capable of anything resembling “reasoning.” Which I doubt.

#36  Colorado Mike  12/18/2006 09:58AM PST

Shows the difference between my home town in Colo and Vermont. We had a moon bat protest here at a local park (near a major throughfare on the east side of town) They were told by the cops to not even step into the street (or think about blocking traffic) One of them did and the cops teargassed the whole lot… Heh, heh, heh.

I’m going to stop interjecting comments of my own here. I might say something I’ll regret later.

(Note from morning pre-posting review: And I wasn’t kidding. I read some of my own stuff and I was scared of me.)

“These people are fucking sick…” – Lady Kestrel

#50  Terp Mole  12/18/2006 10:11AM PST

Lex-Nex search

  Associated Press State & Local Wire
  April 13, 1999
  Bennington women complaining about child support system

  Several Bennington County women are complaining the state child support office has turned itself into a “deadbeat dad protection agency” that is ignoring their needs.
  —–
  The agency has “morphed itself into a deadbeat dad protection agency,” said Rosemarie Jackowski who said she was owed nearly $250,000 in back child support for her now 30-year-old daughter.

Shakedown granny.

#54  goodbye_natalie  12/18/2006 10:17AM PST

Where does the left dreg up these fossils? So what, we’ve got crazy Aunt Rosemarie out dancing the waltz in the middle of the street holding a sign? Probably looks like a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Call out the psychiatric clinic and get the old woman off the streets before she hurts herself.

I know I said I wasn’t gonna interject anymore, but:

#58  TotallySirius  12/18/2006 10:20AM PST

Well,one problem is that there isn’t jack shit to do in Vermont….ever hear any stories about the Burlington nightlife?

The boredom causes dain bramage.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! You don’t get out much yourself, do you? hehehehehehehehe

74  shortboard surfer  12/18/2006 11:26AM PST

Will she toss a fully-loaded Depends over the White House fence?

Okay. I have to stop. I cannot read this shit anymore:

99  Terp Mole  12/18/2006 12:25PM PST

 

^{Mandy(lacks)Manners @ #80: WTF? Do you actually think a father should just get to walk away no matter how long after the CS is owed?}

Since when did Vermont taxpayers become liable for $250K (nice round number that) for this peacenik spreading her hippie legs in 1969?

Maybe she should find the trucker or carney who knocked her up and take him to court.

Let me digress for a second and share with you something Mudcat Saunders told me, and he also told me I could quote him on this:

I hate doing the fucking internet. Once in a while I’ll get a good idea from some blog that somebody sends me, but I despise the fact that a (coward) can go on line, say some shit about you, use some bullshit name, and you can’t find him to kick his ass. MUDCAT

That said, some of these people seem to think Rosemarie has a problem.

They are correct. Rosemarie indeed has a problem.
Let me show you what Rosemarie’s problem is.

Rosemarie’s problem is this:

And this:

Come to think of it, I myself have a problem with this:

And this:

Did my government do this?

And what of this?

At this point, the anger is getting the better of me. It is now 9:27 pm Eastern, Monday, 18 December 2006.
I am going to stop writing now. I will finish this diary when I get up in the morning, and will post it after I get my kids on the school bus. But before I close for the night, I want to share with you the third of three emails I sent to the LGF admins today:

Hey, what’s wrong with you cowardly little punks? Why haven’t you responded to me?
(REDACTED)
Cowards (REDACTED) Every one of you.
And you’ll prove that by not responding to this.
Pshaw.
Hey, how’d the election work out for you?
Asswipes.

Good night. (and good luck…)

(very big yawn)

Okay, I’m back.
First thing I’m going to do is some heavy review and redactions on what I wrote, in beer-fueled anger, last night. Then, I’m going to ask for your help.
Rosemarie has not, as of this writing, found an attorney.
Some additional background and commentary on this matter can be found here. (hat tip: vtpeace)
A legal defense fund has been established, and is being jointly administered in Bennington by Nancy Schoerke and kossack vtpeace. Details are here, in the comment thread.
A blog for discussion of this issue and updates relevant to the situation has been created, and can be found here.
Another thing we’d like to do is hand-deliver a big old stack of letters to Governor Douglas’ office in Montpelier, asking him to pardon or grant clemency to Rosemarie.
He will probably refuse, but we can ask. The boots are on the ground to get this done. Please, write a letter, enclose a check if you can, and send it to the address in the comment thread linked above. vtpeace is working on getting paypal going, but she’s having trouple with it and I can’t help her. If anyone’s conversant with that, she could use some assistance.
If you’d like to post your letter in the comment thread, please do so. That would be a great thing.
All forms of assistance – from financial to moral support to prayers – are appreciated, and thank you.

Was just “tipped” that Randy Brock, Vermont’s current (until the recount against Tom Salmon is official) State Auditor, is being looked at to head BISCHA.

I don’t know Brock personally but he has a sterling reputation as a hardworking and able public servant. I think we would all be glad to see him stay in public service if he were to lose to Salmon.

Speaking of Salmon, I like Salmon. I’ve liked him ever since I saw him standing by himself on a Burlington street corner waving a “Salmon for Auditor” sign as the 5pm September traffic rolled by. The guy wanted to win. Bad. Now it looks like he has.

Good for him.

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

The final count from Chittenden County is in and Tom Salmon has won the Auditor of Accounts race! The final statewide margin is just 104 votes, making this the first time in Vermont history that a recount has reversed the results of a statewide election.

WCAX has more: BURLINGTON, Vt. — A recount in the Nov. 7 election for Vermont state auditor concluded Monday, showing Democrat Thomas M. Salmon won by the closest of margins, apparently overturning the re-election of incumbent Auditor Randy Brock.

Salmon, who lost by 137 votes in Election Day balloting, ended up prevailing by 104 votes in the two-week-long recount, in which more than 250,000 ballots were counted by hand in the state’s 14 counties. The results have yet to be certified.

( – promoted by odum)

Darren Allen’s Sunday column was a condemnation of money in politics, but with Allen’s attempt at a populist bent by suggesting that the extreme “per-voter” amount spent electioneering would be more better spent as individual checks to individual voters. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but whatever.

What did catch my eye was his phrasing near the beginning:

The much-reviled-on-the-left Swift Boat Veterans For Truth agreed to pay the Federal Election Commission $300,000 to settle charges that its $22.6 million attacks on Sen. John Kerry in 2004 violated campaign finance laws.

But two other so-called 527 groups also settled with the FEC last week for acting like political action committees rather than the soft-money, unregulated entities they purported to be.

And, lo and behold, those two others – coughing up a total of $330,000 – were ultra-left-wing MoveOn.org and the League of Conservation Voters.

What strikes me about this excerpt is his descriptions of the different organizations. MoveOn.org and the LCV are “ultra-left wing.” The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, on the other hand, are “much-reviled-on-the-left.” Two things to note here, in my view (and on the flip).

The first is obvious. “Ultra-left” is clearly beyond simply “left.” Using “ultra” suggests that they are off the charts – beyond the mainstream; radical, crazy, not to be trusted and have little or nothing to do with everyday political dialogue (in fact, I googled “ultra-left” and most of my first hits had words like “marxism,” “anarchism” and “Lenin” in the headings). And the Swift Boaters? Well, they are simply those who are reviled (read “hated” – and hate is always an ugly thing) by those on the other side of the passage who have just effectively been labeled nuts. Sure, this is an opinion column we’re talking about, but Allen is playing the dual role of columnist and reporter – a problematic combination to be sure.

We see this all the time, and have for years (Allen himself nonsensically referred to the center-left Philip Baruth as “somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders” in his now-famous-in-blogging-circles brush-off of the Vermont political blogosphere). The Traditional Media gleefully accepted the right-wings qualification of centrist New Democrat Bill Clinton as a “liberal,” and in doing so helped set the mainstream political spectrum so far to the right, virtually any and all progressive policymaking ended with the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Consider the spectrum that Allen has just laid out for readers. We have the infamous Swift Boaters, who successfully smeared John Kerry’s reputation through a campaign of outright lies, described in such a way that allows them entry into the arena of public debate – if for no other reason than the fact that they aren’t explicitly cast outside of that arena as MoveOn and LCV are a few sentences later.

So who are the two organizations that are so far to the left, as to be practically mocked as the “ultra-left?”

MoveOn evokes strong feelings because of their effective advertising and communications campaigns. The name, drawn from their genesis during the Clinton impeachment hearings, was shorthand for “censure and move on” as an alternative to the protracted Starr investigation and subsequent impeachment. A glance at their website reveals that this crazy leftist cabal is currently advocating for causes such as election/ballot reform and stabalized funding for public radio and television. They are also promoting screenings of “An Inconvenient Truth.” Is Al Gore now an “ultra-left” radical as well?

And the LCV? Never in my life would I have expected to hear the League of COnservation Voters described as “ultra-left.” In looking at that sentence, it is possible that Allen intended that adjective only for MoveOn, but it’s ambiguous at best – and the association is clear, regardless. And that association must extend to the LCV’s current board members (such as John Podesta), as well as as past members such as former Chair Bruce Babbitt.

I may mock, but we’ve all witnessed the very serious effects over time of this kind of political branding on the public discourse. If we let the likes of Al Gore and Bruce Babbitt be defined as crazy, outside-the-acceptable-range-of-debate left wing loonies, that puts the political center roughly around the likes of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, with Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (who considers homosexuality to be the “greatest threat to freedom”) in the role of the right, and Joe Lieberman in the role of the left.

This is hardly reflective of the real spectrum of American discourse, and allowing it to be cast as such serves the interest of the right – particularly the far right, so dominant in the modern GOP – in no uncertain terms.

But I said there were two things to note. The second may seem middling, but I think it’s significant as well. Both polarities (the LCV and MoveOn onthe one hand, and the Swift Boaters on the other) are characterized by their relation to the left. This intrigues me because it is, again, something you see often in the traditional media.

The fact is, reporters often make such placements relative to the left because that’s where they’re looking. Using that scrutiny on the right leads to a lot of unpleasant places I suspect many simply don’t want to go, for fear of being tarred as the “liberal media.” As I’ve said before, the way to demonstrate one’s intellectual independence in the modern TM is to demonstrate that you can reach out and connect with right wingers on the one hand, but be sure to challenge, confront, and take-no-guff from left wingers on the other. And sure, I suspect it is precisely because so many in the media probably are center-left themselves, and therefore feel constantly vulnerable to charges of “liberal bias.” It creates a dynamic easy for the right to exploit, as they have been doing for decades now with astounding success.

What this means for journalism as a whole is probably complicated. It means instead of journalism classes teaching some sort of denial-based, non-existent concept of personal objectivity, they should probably start teaching students how to confront their own subjectivity and biases in such a way to better create an objective product (to the extent that’s possible), and to not be manipulated by affinity for one side, or by charges of bias from the other.

In the meantime, there’s always conditioning. In other words – you and me and everyone we know calling this sort of subtle political consciousness-shaping out whenever we see it.

Well, well, well. Is it possible the national, traditional media has finally hit bottom? The latest Time Magazine “Person of The Year” may mark a watershed point of sorts. Is there anyone who thinks this is anything other than insipid nonsense? Putting aside it’s worth or quality for a moment, in the past, Time’s “Person” has been an honest, vaguely interesting attempt to identify the individual who had the greatest impact on the world, for good or for ill. Is there anyone who thinks (especially after 2003’s almost equally meaningless winner, “the American Soldier”) this hasn’t destroyed the meaning, credibility (such as it was) and blandly academic value of Time’s Person of the Year feature once and quite possibly even for all? No one outside the Time payroll, I’ll bet. But that’s not the real question, is it? What we should ask is whether or not anyone could possibly be offended by the selection of “you” (WTF?) as Time’s Person of the Year. Again, the answer is no one. And that’s really the point, isn’t it?

Looking at the last decade, you can almost pity the older mainstream media sources like Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and the major network operations in the face of “advocacy journalism,” pundits-as-newscasters, talk radio and the ascendence of Fox News. Not that I share a romanticized version of the “old days” of news – for the most part, it’s tended to be a bastion of mediocrity, but with enough flashes of brilliance from time to time to keep the institution relevant. But in the changing face of reporting and the ascendence of niche journalism, the old-schoolers who still try to do the quote-unquote “objective” thing have moved from trying to stay relevant to trying to stay profitable, and we’ve all seen how that’s played out over the years.

Increasingly measuring their impact, revenue and futures against the conservative media monster, the old-liners piled on Clinton in the nineties before adding ridicule and scorn on the likes of Gore and Dean, while giving Bush a virtual free pass. Post-9/11, the old-liners simply parroted the adminsitration’s propoganda in the face of all evidence (and common sense) to the contrary, and are now dealing with the inevitable aftermath. Many of the old-liners have found themselves, not as a vanguard of truth, but literally the last to come around to reality. The left figured it out years ago, the blogs, certainly the rest of the world. Even the very population that has defined cluelessness – the Washington Democrats – started waking up to the reality of Iraq, Bush, and the modern Republican, one-party rule before most in the old-line media did.

So what to do? It’s tough to do any mea culpas and retain the pretense of credibility. If they try to change their ways now, they’ll find the right-wingers just as ready to deride and reject them as ever. And what credibility they had on the left (or, at this point, the middle) is in tatters. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t – a perfect recipe for paralysis, stagnation and entropy.

And thus we have the bottoming out of Time’s Person of the Year. Meaningless. Pointless. Ridiculous, yes – but safely non-provocative.

All in all, the clearest manifestation of the traditional media identity crisis I could’ve imagined.

Now, anybody want to place a bet on how many of Time’s lingering, long-suffering subscribers bail after this?

Can someone explain to me why a single Democrat should be giving Bush cover for his new bogus plan for Iraq? He created the problem, he owns it, and he  and his Republican friends should be stuck with it.

So what was Harry Reid doing backing him up today on  ABC?

“If it’s for a surge, that is, for two or three months and it’s part of a program to get us out of there as indicated by this time next year, then, sure, I’ll go along with it,” Reid, who will become the majority leader when Democrats take control of the Senate next month, told ABC’s “This Week” program.

How bogus is this? It’s so bogus that Colin Powell not only knows it, he’s willing to say so.

“There really are no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there, there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops.”

The “active Army is about broken,” Powell said.

Josh is absolutely right about this. Bush is wrong on the war and the public knows it. Almost three quarters of the public are opposed to the war, so where is the payoff in lining up behind Bush?

( – promoted by odum)

I’ve never had much respect for the abilities of Condoleeza Rice.  She has the reputation of being acadmically smart, based on her job as provost of Stanford and her PhD in international relations.  However, the Provost job is basically administrative.  According to Wikipedia..
”  The Provost [at Harvard] has special responsibility for fostering intellectual interactions across the University, including the five Interfaculty Initiatives (environment, ethics and the professions, schooling and children, mind/brain/behavior, and health policy). The Provost also acts to help improve the quality and efficiency of central services organized at Harvard under the aegis of the Vice Presidents. “

In other words, conflict resolution to contain academic jealousy and intercollege competition for budgets.  Maybe a reasonable job description for a National Security Advisor, who is supposed to coordinate the activities of the various agencies,  but not for Secretary of State, who has to actually create value rather than referee among those who do.  As Nora Ephron over at Huffington Post points out:
” Condoleezza Rice was once a Provost, and if there’s ever been a job description that doesn’t require humor, it’s Provost. She was an expert on the Soviet Union. I mean, what would that be like? You spend your academic life becoming an expert on something that one day just ceases to exist. Everything you once knew turns out to be outdated, irrelevant and wrong. That alone could cause you to lose your gift for humor, if you ever had one.

But what Condi is really good at is making nice, … I’ve always believed that women of my generation (and hers) were literally trained to make nice. It wasn’t really important for us to have opinions of our own; instead, we were supposed to preside over dinner parties, and when two men at the table disagreed violently with one another, we were supposed to step in and point out the remarkable similarities between their opposing positions. “

As for that PhD, she got it at the University of Denver, an institution that is well down the ranks, in a program which I can assure you is not now nor ever been world class.  It’s OK, mind you, but not the Kennedy School by a long shot.  And relevance?… See Nora about the USSR above…

Piling on,  here comes today’s Financial Times :

  Rice lying low at the Middle East crossroads
  By Guy Dinmore and Edward Luce in Washington and William Wallis in Cairo

  Published: December 14 2006
  While US policy in the Middle East has stalled at multiple crossroads in the search for a “new way forward” in Iraq, Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, has been notable only for her low visibility….

A new low was plumbed in the US’s international standing when, on the 10th day of Lebanon’s summer war, with civilian casualties mounting from Israeli attacks, Ms Rice declared the world was witnessing the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.

Since then, the pro-western Lebanese government has been seriously weakened, the conflict in Iraq has intensified, and the Palestinian territories are close to civil war. Meanwhile, Washington’s adversaries – Iran,Syria and Sudan [not to mention North Korea:  bw]- have been emboldened…..
  “The smart thing to do would be to be working quietly behind the scenes with the Saudis [who have just had their ambassador to the US suddenly and without explanation resign: bw] 
and the Israelis to try to get the peace process on the road again,” says Dov Zakheim, a former Pentagon official….

When Ms Rice has met her Middle Eastern counterparts in recent months, Arab  officials tried to press the urgent need for momentum on the Arab-Israeli conflict to counter more radical agendas sweeping through the region.

“Our problem with people like Condoleezza Rice is they  take too long to understand the reality on the ground, which is a different reality than the one explained to them.” [said an Arab diplomat]

“They [Arab regimes] don’t believe she can change the dynamics because they see her as part of the problem,” says a well-connected Saudi commentator. “She is gung-ho on Iran and she doesn’t believe there are two sides to the Palestinian problem.” …
“The lesson for many Arabs is that the US  will always side with Israel no matter what, and that being America’s ally  does not necessarily bring substantive political benefits when most needed,”

  “America emerged as unreliable in Lebanon and incompetent in Iraq. The consequences of this for America’s image in the region are serious.”
 

As the Iraq Study Group suggested he do, President Bush is getting ready to send twenty thousand or more American troops into Iraq.

The New York Times has the story here: http://www.nytimes.c…

I think that sending more troops into Iraq is our last (and only) real option. My thoughts on this can be found here: http://greenmountain…

This development represents a serious political problem for Vermont’s newly elected Congressman Peter Welch. Welch ran for Congress on the “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” platform, promised voters he would “hold President Bush accountable” and would create a timetable for troop withdrawal.

Of course I could be wrong. Congressman Welch might be flying high without a care in the world. But here is why I don’t think that I am.

An interesting statistic from the 2006 House race between Martha Rainville and Peter Welch that no one has talked much about is that polling shows that when Rainville lost on election day her “favorables” were HIGHER than Welch’s and her “negatives” were LOWER than Welch’s.

On election day more people liked Martha Rainville than liked Peter Welch and more people disliked Peter Welch than disliked Martha Rainville.

However, in 2006 it just didn’t matter. Rainville still lost.

She lost because Peter’s “I’m mad as hell” message deeply resonated with a state that was, well, mad as hell about the President and the war. Nothing else mattered in the race.

Carolyn Dwyer’s talked about the Welch/Rainville race with Phil Baruth in last weekend’s Vermont Guardian. Carolyn is a savvy operator who knows her business and the state of Vermont. I will concede that she is correct in many (but not all) of her critiques of Martha’s campaign.

However, if she is being honest, she will admit (both teams were looking at essentially the same polling data) that on election day 2006 the less popular candidate won. And since she is so savvy and honest, she knows why this polling is significant. And she understands that Congressman Welch is fast approaching a series of decisions that will greatly influence his chances for re-election in 2008.

The great irony of the 2006 mid-terms is that this country – sick of war, sick of the President and sick of Donald Rumsfeld – voted to “throw the bums out” and give control of Congress back to the Democrats so we can “move Iraq in a new direction”. The voters, for all that hard work, are going to get “twenty thousand or more troops into Iraq”.

If it wasn’t so sad I would be laughing my ass off.

Which brings us back to Welch (and the Democratic Congress in general). If I am a betting man, I am betting that when Vermonters held their noses and voted for Welch’s “new direction in Iraq” over a candidate they actually liked the voters DID NOT think that they were voting for sending twenty thousand or more American troops into Baghdad.

Unfortunately, for Peter, that’s just what the headlines are reading.

It’s an open secret. President Bush does not give a Texas hoot about Welch, Nancy Pelosi, Republicans, people who worked for his father or anybody else. Bush is on a mission from God, and by God he is going to finish what he started in Iraq.

President Bush isn’t going to pull troops out of Iraq. The only way American troops are coming out of Iraq is if the Democratic Congress cuts off funding for the war.

Let me repeat that again so that everyone reading this is clear – The only way American troops are coming home from Iraq is if the Democrats cut off funding for the war. The Democrats have this power.

So, what’s the big deal? Democrats were elected to “change the course in Iraq”. Why do just that?

Because rage is easy and leadership is always harder than you think. Always.

Me, I’m easy and opinionated. I’m betting that the Democrats don’t have the guts to cut off funding. I’m betting that they are too worried that they will be labeled “soft on national security” going into the 2008 Presidential race. I’m betting that they’re betting voters will have forgotten their 06′ rage by 08′. I’m betting Pelosi really begins to like the view from the Speaker’s office. I’m betting that all the Democrat talk about “changing the course in Iraq” was just that, talk.

I’m betting.

Who should be more upset about this? A moderate Republican who believed fiercely that Martha Rainville was far superior to Peter Welch? Or an anti-war/anti-Bush voter who fiercely wanted to believe that Welch was the real deal?

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” is a tough sell when Rumsfeld is gone, the Democrats control Congress and you sit on the Rules Committee, which is the most powerful, inside baseball committee in the House.

The letters to the editor have already started. This is going to be interesting.

( – promoted by odum)

Another Saturday with crappy weather. In between trolling eBay for Spaghetti Westerns not available in the U.S. (someone badly needs a life, eh?), I put together a linkdump for y’all. Enjoy.

I’m still kinda baffled by all of the Obama hoopla on the left. I don’t know what to make of it. I’m still cynical in the sense that I believe the race/name thing will make him pretty unelectable in the nether regions of this country. And I think that a lot of people are latching on to him because of his charisma and the fact that he’s not Hillary. I haven’t seen anything in his legislative record that stands out as something that would make me want to vote for him (and see a few things that would make me NOT want to, such as his support of the bankruptcy bill). And he seems to be pretty good at Clintonesque triangulation, a serious black mark in my book. Yet people go nuts over him, as in this latest account by Vermont Daily Briefing of an Obama meetup in Burlington this last week. I’m sure I’ll continue to be baffled many times in the next two years.

Good rundown of the misconceptions floating about since the election from TPM here. Things like, you know, how Bush gives a shit about what anyone else thinks.

More gov’t censorship dep’t – White House puts the kibosh on an op-ed piece by a former National Security Council member criticizing Iran policy, that had already been cleared by the CIA.

Apparently, it’s quite possible to turn your cell phone into a listening bug without you even knowing about it. Not paranoid hoopla, this is for real.

With all the Bible-thumpers going on about ‘how we’re a Christian nation’ bullshit, many often forget or don’t know that many of the Founding Fathers, such as Jefferson, were deists. In a nutshell, deists believe that God came and did his work, and left. Dr. Gerry Lower over at Smirking Chimp has a great piece that gives the whole rundown on deism. Being a staunch atheist of the Richard Dawkins variety,I don’t buy into deism but it’s always been interesting to me because of the historical angle.

You can read more of JD Ryan at five before chaos. But why would you want to?

Had a brief conversation with a friend today (you know who you are…) about how newly elected State Auditor Salmon (yeah, I’m callin’ it) could have pulled off a victory against an incumbent having run such an… ahem… subtle campaign, seemingly made up exclusively of talking to Democrats in a few swing areas. Was it really all name recognition that came from sharing his name with his father, former Governor Tom Salmon?

Maybe, but Vermonters are also famously unwilling to throw out incumbents. Even previous Auditor Elizabeth Ready had to accumulate two scandals before voters finally turned on her (the cell phone charges and the padded resume).

Consider this possibility. Sure Salmon had a name recognition boost, but it was modest, given that his father was a two-term governor 30 years ago. And sure, Brock had an incumbency advantage, but after only one term, that advantage hadn’t fully matured. One could argue that these two respective advantages cancelled each other out. One could also argue that Brock ran an equally ineffective campaign, relying exclusively on radio ads (which don’t do much for you), and running around cutting ribbons with Governor Douglas (in a state that seems to offer NO political coattails whatsover, based on the past several elections).

What you’d be left with, then, is the closest thing on the statewide ballot to a generic party preference poll. If so, that gives us 44 percent each for the Republican and Democrat. Probably a bit more for the Dem, actually, as a full 9 percent went to Progressive Martha Abbott who ran a pretty strong campaign. Had she made an equally lackadaisical effort as her rivals, she likely would have lost a few points – most of which would have gone to Salmon. Given that, perhaps a 49 D 48 D (just noticed the bad math – sorry), 44 R, 5 P and 3 “other” would be more accurate.

Sounds more complicated than a straight-up “blue” state to me – but we already knew that, didn’t we?