The Sunday combined Times Argus/Rutland Herald, while typically skimpy, makes up for it in content this week. If you’re in a part of the state that doesn’t get this (these?) papers, check out the following online:

• A firm, resolute endorsement of a single-payer health care system. I kid you not. It makes you want to stand up and cheer, and could well mark a real turning point in the public debate. Here’s the link.
• A terrific piece on free speech from Darren Allen, focusing on the Zack Guiles case and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s recent widely-trashed comments to the American Legion in Salt Lake City (and on Rumsfeld, if you haven’t yet heard Keith Olbermann channeling Edward R. Murrow in his now-legendary smackdown of that speech, stop what you’re doing right now and check it out here).
• And the use of Internet “social networking” sites in electioneering is examined on the front page by Louis Porter. Focusing on former state Representative and current Washington County Democratic Senate candidate Donny Osman, the piece spends most of its focus on sites such as MySpace, but also discusses the impact of blogs (yeah, I’m in there but I don’t say much).

Kudos to the RH-TA. Great stuff.

MoveOn.org has released its “Cost of Iraq Report,” based on data from the National Priorities Project. It collects in one location much of what we’ve been hearing about cost over-runs, Halliburton no-bid contracts, and the general fraud, abuse and profiteering generated by the wartime cottage economy. A copy of the report can be viewed at the Raw Story website.

The document also includes a graph breaking out each US Congressional districts “share” thusfar of the cost of this atrocity, along with a comparitive list of what other goals could have been met with the money. Here are the numbers for Vermont:

And of course, that’s hardly the end of it. Those numbers are already obsolete, as the ticker below demonstrates:

Four months until we can bring the impeachment resolution before the Vermont legislature again seems way too long…

Cross posted from Rational Resistance

It’s not just Iraq. Sure, Bush has been a massive failure in foreign policy, with his adventure in Iraq making things more dangerous for the people we were supposedly trying to help in Iraq, and the people he was supposedly trying to protect in the United States. Still, take a look at the economy and what Bush has done there. Here’s what he says: “The foundation of our economy is solid, and it’s strong. Because of the tax cuts we passed, American workers and families and small businesses are keeping more of the money they earn. And they’re using that money to drive this economy of ours forward.” And here’s what his sycophant Larry Kudlow says about it: Bush has the story right. Low tax rates, strong economic growth and shrinking budget deficits — it’s still the greatest story never told.

On the other hand, here’s a quote from E.J. Dionne’s op-ed piece in toda’s Post: Worse is that the proportion of the poor who are very poor has risen. People are considered in deep poverty if they have half or less of the yearly income of those at the poverty line. In 2005 half the poverty line for a family of three was $7,788; for a family of four it was $9,985. (Try living on that.) According to the new report, 43.1 percent of poor people lived in that sort of deep poverty — a record since 1975, when the government started assembling such statistics.

What’s the difference? The difference is that what Dionne says is based on the facts.

And what this means is that in the next two months we need to do everything we can to elect Democrats to Congress, so we can stop Bush’s war on the poor.

I know it’s been mentioned already a few times here, but here’s this weekend’s Road Less Traveled: Vermonters Walking Toward a Clean Energy Future schedule…

Friday, September 1 at Middlebury’s town green (Main and Pleasant Sts.)

The Back Roads Walk

13 miles to Vergennes via Seymour St., Morgan Horse Farm Rd., Pearson Rd., Green St.

Schedule
9am registration and preparation at Middlebury town green (Main and Pleasant Sts.). Coffee and light breakfast provided.
10am depart for Vergennes. Water and snack station en route.
5:30pm arrive at Vergennes town green for Conversation on the Green with music, town meeting, and action on global warming.

Saturday, September 2 in Vergennes at Burroughs Farm Rd

One Step Closer

11.5 miles to Charlotte via Route 7.

Schedule
9am registration and preparation at 276 Burroughs Farm Rd. Coffee and light breakfast provided.
10am depart for Charlotte. Water and snack station en route.
5pm  arrive at Charlotte senior center, 212 Ferry Rd. for Conversation on  the Green with music, town meeting, and action on global warming.

Sunday, September 3 in Charlotte at Congregational Church, 403 Church Hill Rd

Spiritual Movement

5.8 miles to Shelburne via Route 7

Schedule
10am Paster Will Burhans opens his pulpit to Bill McKibben for spiritual address on global warming.
11am registration and preparation at Congregational Church, 403 Church Hill Rd.
12pm depart for Shelburne
4pm  arrive at Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Rd., for Conversation on the  Green with family activities, interfaith service, music, and theater.  Skinny Pancakes will be serving sweet and savory crepes.
Attendees  are invited to spend the night at Shelburne Farms. Must provide own  camping equipment and dinner. Shuttles will be available from  Burlington back to Shelburne after Monday’s Battery Park events.

Monday, September 4 at Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Rd.

Meeting on the Greens

8 miles to Burlington via Route 7.

Schedule
8am registration and preparation at Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Rd. Coffee and light breakfast provided.
10:30am depart for Burlington
3pm music and Meetings on the Green at Battery Park (Note: the original location for this event, City Hall Park, has been changed to Battery Park).  Maple Wind Farms will be serving grass-fed and finished hamburgers and cheeseburgers and organic sausages.
3pm  Political candidates address Vermonters’ call for action on global  warming. Senator Jim Jeffords and candidates for Governor, Senate, and  House races propose their plans to address global warming (invited).
Shuttles available back to Shelburne Farms.

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit released its decision yesterday on a case involving a challenge to the enforcement of the Williamstown Middle School dress code. The case was brought by the Vermont chapter of the ACLU on behalf of Zachary Guiles.

Zachary was a seventh grader who started wearing an anti-war, anti-Bush, and anti-drug T-shirt to school in early 2004. Although he wore the shirt to school once a week for about two months, when he tried to wear it on a field trip chaperoned by a parent who disagreed with the message, school officials gave him the choice of covering up images of cocaine and martinis, that were intended to suggest George Bush’s hypocrisy and prior history of drug abuse, or going home. He served two days of suspension and finally was allowed to return to school when he agreed to cover the images with tape.

He sued in federal court, and the court agreed in part, but supported the school’s decision to make him cover up the cocaine and alcohol images.

Now, the Second Circuit has released a decision that support’s the student’s rights on every point. They make it clear that students continue to have speech rights, and that the disciplinary action that the school took was directed to the anti-war message that Zach was promoting.

Big ups to Zach Guiles and the ACLU for doing this.

Free speech didn’t fare so well in the friendly skies, this week, though

On August 12 an Iraqi-American architect was trying to board a Jet Blue flight wearing a t-shirt that bore the message “We will not be silent” written in both Arabic and English.

Well, this was obviously too much for the sensibilities of the fragile souls who fly Jet Blue. apparently a number of the passengers complained so security came and told him if he didn’t take the shirt off he couldn’t fly. After an extended confrontation he finally was allowed to fly when he consented to wear another shirt the security people provided for him.

Now I know that some people get worried when they fly, especially nowadays, but come on. From what we know of terrorists in general, and hijackers in particular, don’t they pretty much try to blend in? Since people here in the United States seem to  think that any message written on a t-shirt in Arabic might as well say “I’m a terrorist”, wouldn’t it be smart not to wear that shirt if you actually are one? Maybe it’s just me, but that seems obvious.

I remember a story from when I was a kid. Probably in Boys’ Life. Anyway, a group of kids are out camping and one of them comes staggering into the camp site, clothes torn, bleeding, all craped up and covered with dirt. The other campers ask him what happened and he says, “garter snake.” “Arger snake? They can’t do anything to you.” “If they can make you run off a fifteen foot cliff, they don’t have to!”

Despite what Rumsfeld or any of those guys say, these are the times when we really need to protect our liberties. If we don’t (you guessed it) the terrorists have won. Only this time it’s really true.

Two big events today:

First, the Net Neutrality action at Senator Jeffords’ office. I didn’t write it up previously the way I’ve written up action alerts on congressional action on the matter simply because Jeffords was already on the record being very much in favor of it. Still, it was unquestionably a great thing and we will make sure and forward action alerts from national organizers when the time comes for calls and letters. Cathy has a piece with links as well as several comments from blogger Morgan Brown who was in attendence. Great job, folks!

Second is the press conference held by Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. In a bit of a case of cart-before-horse, candidates are being asked to sign on to support the “Vermont Freedom of Choice Act” (Democratic Lt. Gov candidates John Tracy and Matt Dunne, as well as Progressive candidate Marvin Malek did). Sounds great, except that there is no Vermont Freedom of Choice Act at this point. When it does materialize, it will (according to PPNNE) closely resemble the Federal Freedom of Choice Act (S. 2593 and H.R.5151), introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Rep. Gerald Nadler (D-NY) respectively (and introduced in one form or another into every sitting congress for more than a decade).

Getting pro-active on the matter will not only serve to protect Vermont women from federal action and give pro-choice activists a boost, it will also help draw some bright lines within the Democratic caucus between those who respect women’s basic freedoms and those who are in favor of forced childbirth. That’s a line I, for one, look forward to see being drawn.

For a preview, click on the link to see the text of the Boxer bill:

109th CONGRESS

2d Session

S. 2593

To protect, consistent with Roe v. Wade, a woman’s freedom to choose to bear a child or terminate a pregnancy, and for other purposes.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

April 6, 2006
Mrs. BOXER (for herself, Mrs. FEINSTEIN, Mrs. MURRAY, Ms. MIKULSKI, Mr. LAUTENBERG, Ms. STABENOW, and Ms. CANTWELL) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

——————————————————————————–

A BILL

To protect, consistent with Roe v. Wade, a woman’s freedom to choose to bear a child or terminate a pregnancy, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `Freedom of Choice Act’.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

Congress finds the following:

(1) The United States was founded on core principles, such as liberty, personal privacy, and equality, which ensure that individuals are free to make their most intimate decisions without governmental interference and discrimination.

(2) One of the most private and difficult decisions an individual makes is whether to begin, prevent, continue, or terminate a pregnancy. Those reproductive health decisions are best made by women, in consultation with their loved ones and health care providers.

(3) In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479), and in 1973, in Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113) and Doe v. Bolton (410 U.S. 179), the Supreme Court recognized that the right to privacy protected by the Constitution encompasses the right of every woman to weigh the personal, moral, and religious considerations involved in deciding whether to begin, prevent, continue, or terminate a pregnancy.

(4) The Roe v. Wade decision carefully balances the rights of women to make important reproductive decisions with the State’s interest in potential life. Under Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the right to privacy protects a woman’s decision to choose to terminate her pregnancy prior to fetal viability, with the State permitted to ban abortion after fetal viability except when necessary to protect a woman’s life or health.

(5) These decisions have protected the health and lives of women in the United States. Prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, an estimated 1,200,000 women each year were forced to resort to illegal abortions, despite the risk of unsanitary conditions, incompetent treatment, infection, hemorrhage, disfiguration, and death. Before Roe, it is estimated that thousands of women died annually in the United States as a result of illegal abortions.

(6) In countries in which abortion remains illegal, the risk of maternal mortality is high. According to the World Health Organization, of the approximately 600,000 pregnancy-related deaths occurring annually around the world, 80,000 are associated with unsafe abortions.

(7) The Roe v. Wade decision also expanded the opportunities for women to participate equally in society. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (505 U.S. 833), the Supreme Court observed that, `[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.’.

(8) Even though the Roe v. Wade decision has stood for more than 30 years, there are increasing threats to reproductive health and freedom emerging from all branches and levels of government. In 2006, South Dakota became the first State in more than 15 years to enact a ban on abortion in nearly all circumstances. Supporters of this ban have admitted it is an attempt to directly challenge Roe in the courts. Other States are considering similar bans.

(9) Legal and practical barriers to the full range of reproductive services endanger women’s health and lives. Incremental restrictions on the right to choose imposed by Congress and State legislatures have made access to abortion care extremely difficult, if not impossible, for many women across the country. Currently, 87 percent of the counties in the United States have no abortion provider.

(10) While abortion should remain safe and legal, women should also have more meaningful access to family planning services that prevent unintended pregnancies, thereby reducing the need for abortion.

(11) To guarantee the protections of Roe v. Wade, Federal legislation is necessary.

(12) Although Congress may not create constitutional rights without amending the Constitution, Congress may, where authorized by its enumerated powers and not prohibited by the Constitution, enact legislation to create and secure statutory rights in areas of legitimate national concern.

(13) Congress has the affirmative power under section 8 of article I of the Constitution and section 5 of the 14th amendment to the Constitution to enact legislation to facilitate interstate commerce and to prevent State interference with interstate commerce, liberty, or equal protection of the laws.

(14) Federal protection of a woman’s right to choose to prevent or terminate a pregnancy falls within this affirmative power of Congress, in part, because–

(A) many women cross State lines to obtain abortions and many more would be forced to do so absent a constitutional right or Federal protection;

(B) reproductive health clinics are commercial actors that regularly purchase medicine, medical equipment, and other necessary supplies from out-of-State suppliers; and

(C) reproductive health clinics employ doctors, nurses, and other personnel who travel across State lines in order to provide reproductive health services to patients.

SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.

In this Act:

(1) GOVERNMENT- The term `government’ includes a branch, department, agency, instrumentality, or official (or other individual acting under color of law) of the United States, a State, or a subdivision of a State.

(2) STATE- The term `State’ means each of the States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and each territory or possession of the United States.

(3) VIABILITY- The term `viability’ means that stage of pregnancy when, in the best medical judgment of the attending physician based on the particular medical facts of the case before the physician, there is a reasonable likelihood of the sustained survival of the fetus outside of the woman.

SEC. 4. INTERFERENCE WITH REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH PROHIBITED.

(a) Statement of Policy- It is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child, to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability, or to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.

(b) Prohibition of Interference- A government may not–

(1) deny or interfere with a woman’s right to choose–

(A) to bear a child;

(B) to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability; or

(C) to terminate a pregnancy after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman; or

(2) discriminate against the exercise of the rights set forth in paragraph (1) in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.

(c) Civil Action- An individual aggrieved by a violation of this section may obtain appropriate relief (including relief against a government) in a civil action.

SEC. 5. SEVERABILITY.

If any provision of this Act, or the application of such provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be unconstitutional, the remainder of this Act, or the application of such provision to persons or circumstances other than those as to which the provision is held to be unconstitutional, shall not be affected thereby.

SEC. 6. RETROACTIVE EFFECT.

This Act applies to every Federal, State, and local statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, decision, policy, practice, or other action enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act.
END

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

Once again we’re on the impeachment trail.

Craig Hill, who’s running for the Democratic nomination for Senate, and who lives in Montpelier, was before the Montpelier City Council tonight to talk about the impeachment petition he is planning to circulate for the November ballot.

As he described it, it’s in line with the Jefferson’s Rules impeachment proposal that people have been working on since early his year.

Here’s the language:

Shall the voters of the City of Montpelier request the Legislature of the State of Vermont to formally adopt a joint resolution to require members of the United States House of Representatives, who will take office in January 2007 as the 110th Congress, to uphold their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, by investigating impeachable actions taken by the incumbent President and Vice President of the United States?

Shall the sense of the voters of the City of Montpelier be that the incumbent President and Vice President of the United States, George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, have committed impeachable offenses, and should be removed from office under Article 2, Section 4, of the United States Constitution?

I am of two minds on this. On the one hand, I’m obviously in favor of impeachment, and I’ve written about it before. On the other hand, is the November election, with all that’s at stake, the time to be doing it, or will it mobilize the R’s? Would it be better to hold off until Town Meeting Day, or will that just mean that we lose a lot of time in the 2007 session?

I don’t know the answer, but I understand that this is part of a statewide coordinated effort, so it’s going to happen and I think it will pass in many cities. The war is obviously the most important issue this year, so I hope people will get it.

From the AP:

Vermont could offer health coverage to all its residents and spend $51 million less a year on health care under a single-payer system, according to a legislative consultant’s report released Tuesday…

…[Chittenden County Senator Jim] Leddy called the report “one more step in our ongoing process that will continue.”

So around we go on this…again. There are two things missing to move on single payer: one, the political will. Two: a real roadmap. Now before people go all nuts on the first one, the fact is that without a practicable road map, there won’t be enough political will in the universe to make something this radical happen.

The problem with the activist left on such issues is our frequent inability or lack of interest in thinking about the road map. There’s a “just do it,” leap-of-faith mentality – as most of us are more interested (and practiced) in organizing than policy making. But we need to come to the realization that if there is a road map to progressive change on the table for all to see and consider, there isn’t necessarily a “leap of faith” required, and the problem of political will among our elected leaders diminishes rapidly.

I know I covered all this in a previous post from some time back, but with the above news, it seems more timely now. In the previous post, I just threw out my own, naive roadmap on the table (based on my extremely brief, but instructive experience with medical billing in an IT capacity) in an attempt to jumpstart discussion. With this latest news hopefully rekindling debate, I’m going to reprint it below and invite boos, catcalls, eyerolls, cheers, shrugs, or alternatives…

It’s likely there are many ways to get to single payer. Piloting a system with state employees and incentivizing others into it gradually, for example. However, there are a few cold political realities that must be faced to make something like this work. First, there can be little or no perception of tax increases, or any up-front increase on the burden of working and middle class citizens. Second (and most daunting), the bulk of the changeover must be complete within the two-year election cycle, so incumbents can feel confident they will have results to run on and not face a backlash in the midst of a painful transitional period (and yes, this is the opposite view expressed by many current legislators, I know).
The devil’s in the details, of course but in the interest of keeping all options alive, the following are five broad steps that, as part of a comprehensive reform bill, could facilitate the transition under these preconditions.

The basic premise is this: legislatively lock all current health plans and malpractice insurance plans into place during the transition period, gradually move all insurance reporting to a centralized state-based reporting/tracking/reimbursement system rather than having patient accounts systems and departments at every medical facility, then slide all current commercial planholders into comparable state-administered plans with the same premiums being paid directly to the state rather than the commercial payers. Then use the profit (and there IS profit under the current payment rates – plenty of it) from the premiums (along with taxes levied on larger employers that weren’t adequately covering employees already, as the Catamount plan does) to assume basic coverage for uncovered Vermonters. This gives you a dramatically larger revenue base from which to build a coverage pool for the uninsured, and sufficient resources to have the state implement it directly, rather than farm it out to a commercial payer. By the time the transition is over, we zero out remaining profits (the state shouldn’t be in the for-profit business) by passing on savings to the ratepayers, businesses, and physicians by actually bringing DOWN premiums.

That’s the abstract. Somebody gimme some money to fund a study and I’ll hash out the details. In the meantime, to flesh that out a little bit, I see it playing out in the following order of steps:

1. First, freeze all current private insurance plans with the understanding they will be discontinued within one year. Within that time, require all providers (doctors and hospitals) to convert to electronic medical records. The state should then enter into a partnership with an established commercial “practice management” software provider (no, it doesn’t have to be IDX!) to refit their system to centrally receive, convert and process insurance claims under all the current plans and communicate with the current payers. Collect all existing coverage information into a central database.

2. Once coverage and patient data is centralized, cancel all private insurance and assume the responsibility for all existing, catalogued plans at the state level. All providers will be submitting patient claims to this centralized system, but the insured and their employers will be paying the same rates and receiving the same plan. From the current health care consumer’s standpoint (both individuals and employers), transitioning them into the system should be seamless. There is, of course, profit taking in the system currently, so just transferring the system of premiums and provider recoupment to the state will also transfer those profits, helping to fund the system. The state should put some initial money into a pool to keep the system solvent long enough for the revenue to start flowing.

3. After a comprehensive analysis, settle on a system of a limited amount of coverage plans (much like a for-profit insurance company) that mirror Medicare and Medicaid plans for uniformity, since those forms are dictated to some extent by the federal government. Simplifying and streamlining plans to mirror the federal programs’ systems will also make it simpler for the newly created (and only modestly-sized) State Patient Accounts Division to be the go-between between Medicare and Medicaid eligible patients and the federal government for payment. Fold current users into the new plan that most resembles the commercial plan they are leaving behind and offer uninsured residents their choice of plans with a sliding-scale premium based on their ability to pay.

4. Conduct a parallel process with physician malpractice coverage, with an eye towards a rapid phase in of premiums that truly reflect an overall revenue-neutral, cost/benefit survey on the real costs of supporting malpractice insurance based on historical projections of payouts (I guarantee you such an analysis focusing on Vermont and without a profit incentive or excessive overhead would generate a FAR lower premium for physicians – bringing down what is often cited as the number one spiraling cost on physicians end of the equation). Malpractice costs are an often overstated, but nevertheless very real source of spiraling costs. In fact it seems to be every bit the racket that much of the health insurance industry is. Taking over malpractice insurance at the state level and implementing it with a zero-profit, realistic cost-benefit analysis is therefore critical to the overall goal of controlling helath costs in the state so that any Vermont single payer plan can be predictable and sustainable. In the interest of bringing down costs, drug re-importation also becomes a priority, which is yet another way that implementing such a plan could put the state on a collision course with the feds. Sometimes it’s worth playing chicken though.

Once the data is centralized, a market “going rate” analysis can also be made of what current employers can reasonably be expected to pay into a system, based on a snapshot study of what businesses were paying into commercial plans at the time the transition started. A fair rate for a business premium can be based on this analysis, and should also be based on business’s ability to pay.

Finally, a generic “bare bones” coverage plan can exist for all those that aren’t reached to choose their own plan option (emergency cases), and charges to such patients can be submitted under a “dummy account” to the state, pending proof of residence (as defined by the legislature under the plan).

5. Savings from lower emergency room services, lower paperwork and administrative overhead (providers’ patient accounts personnel resources can likely be reduced by 50-100%) can be used to boost the coverage pool for catastrophic conditions and the sliding premium scale.

Under this approach, there are no new expense increases for the consumer – simply a redirection — and the draconian increases in coverage hitting individuals, employers, and local property taxpayers annually will all but vanish.

There would be bumps in the road of course, not the least of which being confidentiality and privacy concerns. But if nothing else, weary legislators and policy advocates could take heart from this example and not give into cynicism. Obviously working out the details and passing such a plan would be a Herculean task.

But not an impossible one.

Your turn.

[Crossposted at What’s the Point?]

Any of you regular readers of the Vermont political blogosphere probably haven’t missed the ubiquitous, mercurial and entertaining Haik Bedrosian‘s full-on attack against PoliticsVT, claiming that it’s a tool of the Tarrant Senate campaign.

Now, I’ve long admired Haik since the time he ran for Mayor of Burlington while still in high school. And since Haik’s been wondering why nobody seems to want to pay attention to his campaign, I thought I’d show him some respect by taking the time to offer my views on this. So here they are…

Because of the long ago launch of PoliticsVT in January of 2005, and the overall blandly non-partisan tone of PoliticsVT, I think most people regard Haik’s claim as self-evidently absurd. And knowing Haik’s penchant for Andy Kaufman-like absurdity, it seemed to most – or at least to me – to be an elaborate bit of political theater with the possible intent to coax the Dead Guvz into outing themselves, just on principle.

So, I’ve been waiting for the punchline, though I’m no longer so sure it’s going to come.

And even though I seriously doubt Haik’s claims, who knows, he may be right. Regardless, he should certainly be commended for trying to shine some light on the activities of the Hayes Group.

I also think the timing of this effort has been a bit unfortunate for Haik, too.

See, it comes oddly at a time when a certain self-promoting bottom feeder (no link is deserved and this person will hereby be referred to as "Bottom Feeder"), who’s trying to make a name for himself by aggressively deriding others (and, in the process, walking right up to the edge of Frisching himself) has arrived on the scene. Further, through back channels, I’ve come to find out that both Haik and Bottom Feeder have allegedly used similar threats of "war" in private emails to their targets.

This had led at least one person I know to suggest, half-seriously, that Bottom Feeder might really be Haik’s own version of Andy Kaufman’s, obnoxious alter-ego, Tony Clifton. But, since there’s really nothing very similar in their writing styles, I doubt strongly that this is the case.

But a better question may be this:

Instead of PoliticsVT, is it Haik Bedrosian and Bottom Feeder who are on Rich Tarrant’s pay roll?

Let’s try this thought experiment…

Haik’s correct when he says that the Dean campaign, the recent Mayoral race in Burlington, and the Lamont/Lieberman primary are proof of how "powerful" the blogging community can be. And he’s correct that the  Tarrant campaign would be keeping an eye on this power.

But, here’s the thing, blogging seems to largely be a power base on the left…

Instead of putting money into something so non-threatening as PoliticsVT, would it not make more sense to insert a few instigators into Vemont’s blog world, who launch vulgar attacks and make seemingly crazy claims, to try to undercut the legitimacy of the netroots’ efforts and help to negate its influence? A sort of virtual version of the FBI’s infiltration of peace groups in order to stir up trouble?

And how can we square Haik’s staunch support for Bernie with his pro-Douglas inclinations? Suspicious disconnect, eh?

OK, I don’t really think Haik’s a Republican mole (or Bottom Feeder, either, for that matter). But, I think, it makes more sense to me than the PoliticsVT angle.

I do wonder, though, that at a time when we political bloggers have made some headway in being taken seriously – what with the Bloggers BBQ and the online Lt. Governor’s debate drawing coverage in print and on TV and radio – there could likely be some interest in trying to cut our legs out from under us before we have a chance to do something more politically significant.

But, who really knows what’s real and not real the wild west of the net?

Maybe, just maybe, Haik knows more than us all.

By Meteor Blades
[crossposted with permission from DailyKos]

I sure wish I were in Vermont this week. I could join writer/environmentalist/deep thinker Bill McKibben and whoever else shows up for a four-day walk seeking to kindle federal action against global warming.

Billed as “The Road Less Traveled, Vermonters Walking Toward a Clean Energy Future,” the march will begin Thursday noon at Robert Frost’s old writing cabin near Ripton, stop in cities along the way for Conversations on the Green, and end 43 miles up the road in Burlington. Knowing McKibben’s work and the kind of people he attracts, I imagine those are going to be eye-opening conversations for participants and bystanders alike, a traveling teach-in, if you will. You can get a taste of this in my five-question interview with McKibben below.

Many here, I know, downplay the value of a public demonstration, even public action of any kind outside the realm of lawsuits and legislation. Sooooo ’60s, they say. Doesn’t work anymore. If it ever really did. I couldn’t disagree more. Perhaps the reason people say this comes from their being so comprehensively saturated with a megamedia caricature of the era. They don’t believe most or any of what the megamedia tells them about the times they themselves live in, but they accept as gospel what’s been told them regarding one of the periods of greatest social change since the Civil War.

The public intellectuals and other activists who spurred that change worked inside and outside the governing system, using whatever megaphone seemed proper at the moment to capture public attention and increase the pressure on public policy. What you mostly hear about that era today is the media-mediated version, a distorted fraction of the story. That’s not my way of trying to sanctify the “protest” movements or say that we made no mistakes, no strategic blunders, or engaged in no counterproductive activism. Surely, we did more than enough of that and were paid for it with half-victories and outright defeats, some of them long-lasting. But, please, most of the focus, even most of the public events, had nothing to do grubby street demonstrations.

Rather, in every case, the change process began with bits of information transmitted among family, neighbors, classmates and work peers. These conversations led to little groups which made phone calls, worked for candidates, vigiled, lobbied, wrote, did research, and organized public events dedicated to spreading the message of change to others who would themselves spread the message. The organizing got bigger, the conversation wider, the building of political clout more coherent and powerful. Then came the changes … or not.

That is what the Vermont march is about. Talking forcefully in public with an eye toward changing public policy. An  essential catalyst. As McKibben notes in my interview with him, he’s thinking the noise from the “The Road Less Traveled” – along with Al Gore’s film and other actions – will spread nationwide, virally, and “assemble a crowd under the noses of the media.” In the old days, this depended on word-of-mouth. It still does. But now it’s word-of-mouth amplified with broadband and other accouterments of wwwLand that neither the government nor the megamedia have (so far) reined in.

It was 16 years ago that I read McKibben’s The End of Nature. Together that year with the resurrection of Earth Day on its 20th anniversary, his book spurred me to – as Mister Bush would say – spend some political capital and pressure my bosses at the Los Angeles Times to underwrite a syndicated weekly package of environmental articles called Earth Matters. It lasted at the Times as long as I did, 12 years.

Enhanced with McKibben’s signature eloquence, The End of Nature  was the first popular book to demonstrate that one species, allegedly the smartest species ever to appear on Earth, had reached a critical threshold, a point of irrevocably changing the planet’s environment, including its atmosphere. A decade and a half later, more people are paying attention, but, as McKibben points out in his invitation to join the walk:

…leadership has been sorely lacking: even as the science around global warming has grown steadily darker, the political appointees at the head of the Environmental Protection Agency have declared that in their eyes carbon dioxide is “not a pollutant.” The Congress has decided that all legislation addressing this issue must pass through a committee chaired by a man, James Imhofe, who calls global warming “a hoax.” And so–in this warmest year on record across the United States–we walk to ask that this logjam be broken. Our hope is that just as in the past Vermont has spurred action on other issues, so too this example will lead others across the country to increase the pressure.

Here are McKibben’s answers to my five questions:

Meteor Blades: Why Vermont? Wouldn’t a walk and talk along the route from Baltimore to DC have more impact?

  McKibben: Well, the short answer is that Vermont is where I live, and so, where I can organize. But the great hope is precisely that if we can make some noise up here the idea will spread quickly to other spots.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s yet to be a real large-scale protest movement that gets spread virally in the Internet age (although the Seattle WTO protests owed part of their potency to the fact that this then-little-understood medium helped organizers assemble a crowd under the noses of the media). In fact, even in the last few weeks I’ve had emails from around the country asking for advice.

  Anyway, though I suspect our [Vermont] legislators would mostly vote the right way anyway on global warming, we want them to understand that their constituents need them to be champions on this issue.

  Meteor Blades: I know you were an early adopter of hybrid car technology. And I suspect your house is heavily insulated and the refrigerator filled with locally grown food. But one attitude I’ve encountered time and again is that solving global warming is such a huge issue that nothing individuals can do will make a difference, so why bother?  Any advice on how to break through the stubbornness?

  McKibben: It’s hard to break through that idea because, frankly, there’s a deep mathematical logic to it. Individual action is a kind of calisthenics before the big event, which must be political. Only the kind of massive change that can be brought about through national (and, even harder, international) policy will really suffice to reduce the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. So the key is summoning political will – and the very act of coming together in a march, say, to demand that kind of action will help us to start feeling politically powerful again.

  I wrote the very first general book about global warming, way back in 1989, and I’ve been working on it ever since. The science has grown grimmer in the past few years as we understand just how fast we’re unhinging the Earth’s system. There remains time to do something about global warming (not avert it, but keep it from getting any worse than it has to be), but we need very quickly to seize that moment. And I think that right now – because of Katrina, because of Gore’s movie, because of our hot summer – is the best opening we’ve had in two decades.

  Meteor Blades: If you rubbed a compact fluorescent bulb and the Eco-Genie popped out to offer you one wish – passage of a single piece of narrowly focused global warming legislation – what would you ask for?

  McKibben: I think the rapid phase-in of a 40 mpg average for new cars. Because the technology is there to do it easily, because it would demonstrate to us that the change in our sacred lifestyles will be very small at first – and because it will give everyone the added benefit of saving some money on gas. Unless you drive a hybrid, you can’t believe the number of people who sidle up to you at a gas station and ask some longing questions about exactly how far it goes on a tank of gas.

  And after that I’d work my way down Energize America 2020‘s list of policies. I just wrote an overview article for Sierra magazine on our energy situation, and described that joint effort as the single most impressive package of energy policy anyone has yet concocted.

  Meteor Blades: Some people, including long-time environmental critics, are saying that nuclear power can, at the very least, provide a transition that will buy us time to come up with other technologies to reduce or eliminate human-made greenhouse gases. Do you agree? 

  McKibben: Here’s what I think: nuclear power is a potential safety threat, if something goes wrong. Coal-fired power is guaranteed destruction, filling the atmosphere with planet-heating carbon when it operates the way it’s supposed to. I don’t mean to minimize the danger of a reactor; I do mean to use that danger to highlight the awesome peril posed by our conventional means of generating electricity. (And there are 150 new coal plants on the books in some stage or another).

  That said, nuclear power is not where I’d turn first, or second, or even third. The reason is economics – without massive government subsidy it doesn’t work because it’s an inherently expensive technology, rather like burning twenty-dollar bills to generate electricity. All the econometric modeling not paid for by the nuclear industry itself makes clear that if you spent a billion dollars on a nuclear plant and a billion dollars on some conservation program, you’d get three or four or five times the carbon bang for your buck. So – before nuclear power, efficient appliances, heavy-duty insulation, real attention to mass transit, and also an all-out commitment to renewables, especially wind, which are much closer to cost-competitive. And no one ever spent the night worrying that a terrorist was about to smash their wind tower, spreading dangerous wind particles in every direction.

  Meteor Blades: What kind of useful advice does a small-town/rural family like yours have for us urban dwellers?

  McKibben: City dwellers, depending on how they live, are already the greenest Americans. New York City, because it’s the least car-dependent city in the country, is our environmental champion in many ways. I think the biggest changes are needed where the majority of Americans live – i.e., the suburbs, a landscape that only sprung up because of cheap energy, and which will take real work to transform. The kind of semi-intact small towns and local economies that Vermont and some other rural places still possess are useful models – at least, that’s one of the theses of my next book.

  But the real lesson, and the one I hope this march will highlight, is that the technology we need above all is the technology of community. Vermont still has town meeting government – we’re reasonably good at talking with each other. It’s one reason lots of experiments have come out of this state: the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, for instance, or for that matter, the Dean campaign. It’s not that we’re so liberal (we have a conservative governor; we’ve lost more people per capita in Iraq than any other state). But I think we’re still pretty good at community, which is the underlying necessity for a more efficient and happier country. At root, dealing with global warming will mean sanding the edges off of some of America’s hyperindividualism – and perhaps that will be just a little easier out in the country.

Most of us can’t be in Vermont over the Labor Day Weekend. Right now, many are desperately ensconced in getting more Democrats into Congress and getting rid of the likes of California Representative Richard Pombo and Montana Senator Conrad Burns. But, as McKibben points out in his August 24 Op-Ed, Finally, fired up over global warming:

We’ve lobbied hard in state houses and city halls to get local action for change. But it’s not adding up to anywhere near enough – and the reason is clear. Washington, unlike every other capital in the developed world, simply won’t do anything.

  {snip}

  It’s not as if changing the party in power will automatically change the outcome, either. The Clinton administration did little to tackle climate change; most Democrats would probably be all too willing to sign onto some limp compromise like the bill introduced in 2003 by Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, even though the march of science in the years since it was introduced makes clear the inadequacy of its minuscule cuts in carbon. If we lock into some weak regimen now, it may be years before Congress will take up the issue again.

In other words, once we get those new Democrats elected, we need to make them pay attention and do something – soon – about what could be the most transformative issue of our age. That will take a lot more leg work.

If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and walk with the Vermonters for a while. If you can’t, < a href="http://vtwalc.org/">click on the donation tab at their Web site and send them some sugar. Whether you can or can’t do either of those, send an e-mail to your family and friends with a link to McKibben’s Op-Ed or to this Diary.