(This is truly gross, or as UVM Political Science Professor Garrison Nelson said, it “smacks of bribery.” – promoted by odum)

Looks like Richie Rich is setting himself up to be Vermont’s ‘Education’ Senator .. hey, it worked for Dubya (thousands of children left behind) .. Katie, you didn’t argue against this? …

Multi-millionaire Tarrant can afford to hire junior and senior high school students to go door to door with his literature, but is it 10 week employment, or is it a bribe?  Potentially 15,000 students may be asked to submit a 500 word essay saying ‘Why Richard Tarrant Should Be Elected to the United States Senate in order to be considered for($3,000 each and a free laptop computer). That’s a tough job; it’s a no-brainer to submit one that considers why he shouldn’t be!

I wonder if the school boards should put this on their next agenda if they don’t have a policy already in place.

Bernie’s unpaid volunteers are really shaking their heads over this one.

This is another example of someone funding a campaign with his own money — he is answerable to no one — and a good example of why he should not be elected.  This may work where he lives in his Florida gated communities, but I think it will come back to bite him in Vermont.

We can’t be bought!

Barbara

So just what happened on Saturday? It truly was a very impressive meeting, filled with respectful and impassioned statements by people from all over the state. The public statements were overwhelmingly in support of the Rutland Resolution – with the “Rule 603” wording intact. The committee was divided, with the majority focused on the need to win the upcoming elections, and concerned about the potential impact of the Rutland Resolution being plunked into the laps of the legislature this late in the season.

So, was it a Victory? A Defeat? Were the “Rule 603” afficionadoes “had”?

Let’s start with the last question: being “had” would have required going into the meeting blind to the fact that there were folks actively hoping to reduce the result to a statement of support for the existing Feingold censure – if that much. No, we were too aware of the resistance to be “had.”

That leads us to the victory/defeat balance.  No one walked out of the meeting with what they really wanted.  Impeachment was not quashed, and the Rule 603 lever was not added to the Congressional toolkit.

So, I’d say it was a draw, but a very promising draw. It is a draw that means the grassroots, including both long-term party regulars and newly minted activists, were able to swing the party from “no” to “yes” in 6 short weeks. The “yes” wasn’t quite the “yes” we wanted, but it was a sea change in the party’s official viewpoint. And that is a good thing.

In the mean time, others are meeting, and voting. Some in the Democratic party, some in other parties. Some in VT, and some in other parts of the country.

When a thunderstorm forms, the big mass of cloud is built up from smaller bits that collect over the course of the day. As the heat builds, the cloud heightens, the winds strengthen, and then the refreshing rain washes away the heat of the day, often leaving the world awash in the golden glow of late afternoon sunshine. If you listen closely, you can hear the distant rumbling of democracy. Our little bit of energy has been added to the brewing storm.  The rain will come, and we will have been a part of making it happen.

It’s still early in the day, and the rain is a ways off, yet.

We are called to continue this journey. Called by those who fought for the freedoms granted by the Constitution, by the innocents who have died and are dying in an unprovoked war, by the children whose future has been mortgaged for folly, by the victims of torture being done in our names. And sometimes, the call comes from things that are less obvious and more personal – such as the flyer that used to say that there had been no FBI requests for information at the Bradford Public Library.