Okay, it’s not quite the wet dream the title suggests – or is it?
Because, within limits, the leftern blogosphere CAN contribute to the programming of a radio station in a red state that’s blue-ing. I have decided this, and I have the ability to implement it.
Names are changed to protect the innocent below the fold.

This is how it works.
The group I work for has three radio stations in this market, operated as a cluster.
One of the three is my responsibility. The programming is 100% satellite. Three hours of the morning show are occupied by an extremely popular male/female team in national syndication. The rest of the day is Westwood One’s Adult Hits format, known as “SAM” or “Simply About Music.” In many cities, the format is known as “Jack-FM” or “Bob” or whoever. In Burlington, the format is presented as “MP103.”
The way it’s positioned is iconoclastic: “We play whatever we want. You never know what we’ll do. We are the rebels. We are the pie in the face of corporate radio.Whatever, whenever.”

For the sake of discussion, we’ll refer to this station as “Willy 93.1.”

These are the program elements that I control:

Three ten-second spoken statements per hour which must include the moniker.

Example:

“Like Willy 93.1? Tell President Bush. Oh, never mind, he knows, He listens to your phone calls. We’re Willy 93.1.”

“We do whatever we want. Kinda like President Bush. The only difference is the Constitution’s on our side. We’re Willy 93.1.”

A great deal of unsold inventory in :60 and :30 slots. Now writing political scripts to fill these avails and voicing them myself will get me strung up and shot. But things found on the internets, linky links to mp3s and oreo cookies are good things.

During the syndicated morning show, which I’d like to change to Rachel and Marc, but one thing at a time, there are five minute twenty-second positions that are set there for news. We fill with music instead. Any requests?

Any ideas for promotions, ways to frme the community calendar, any brainstorms at all are good.
Think of yourself as having the very real keys to a very real radio station. Because in fact, that isn’t that far from true.

Please keep in mind that your suggestions in the thread may actually end up implemented on the real air at a real radio station.
This is for real. What do you want to spew out through the transmitter within the framework I’ve described? 
I gotta start doing something with the damn thing anyway. It’s picking up popularity. 
Those ten second lines are particularly valuable.

The snapshot poll of where GMD readers are in the Democratic primary of Lieuteneant Governor is over, and what a poll it was. Both campaigns obviously took it seriously and rallied supporters. The final results are:

Although Senator Dunne has earned bragging rights to victory here, realistically it was an absolute dead heat — especially considering the vagueries of internet polling. Still, there are three things the poll tells us:

1. These campaigns are both taking the webroots seriously.

2. Late start or no and despite what many outside observers have been thinking, John Tracy has a wideawake campaign base, so this primary will be a true contest, and…

3. The game’s afoot! Welcome to election season!

Stay tuned. We’ll be talking a lot about this race over the coming months (and of course, both candidates remain invited to post issue-focused diaries on GMS, as Sen. Dunne has been doing for a few weeks now). And no doubt we will run the poll again sometime…

1. Chittenden County Senator and former State Auditor Ed Flanagan is definitely on the mend (it was good to see you, Ed).

2. “Jefferson’s Manual,” state-based Presidential Impeachment is still very much a hot topic evoking strong expressions of support, as well as some cold immobile stares.

3. If the Democrat-supported candidates win for US House and US Senate, our Washington delegation will have approximately one full head of hair between them.

4. Award recipient and Rutland Resolution Author Jeff Taylor has been a “troublemaker” for the Party before — having successfully challenged the Delegate selection process as discriminatory back in the mid seventies.

5. Rich Tarrant has a firm handshake (no, I don’t know WHAT he was doing there or why I had to be the first person he bumped into coming into the gathering).

6. If possible, you should try to avoid direct sunlight from the hours of 10 AM to 2 PM.

7. At the end of the day, actual Party designation is meaningless — it’s the issues and values that really matter to all the folks who call themselves Dems (according to VDP Chair Ian Carleton in his introduction of Bernie Sanders… undoubtedly there were many in the room who disagreed, but they would’ve looked pretty petty not applauding…)

8. Virtually every Democrat over 60 apparently used to be a “Goldwater Republican” (or was that a “Rockefeller Republican?”)

9. Peter Welch seems to read this blog, as a statement he made in introducing Gaye Symington (“Good policy IS ALWAYS good politics”) would seem to be a pointed smackdown of this post from a few weeks ago that I caught hell for. Coulda been a coincidental turn of phrase, but then again it’s a small state.

10. Regardless of lingering frustration from the left over impeachment, healthcare and other issues, this party is really surprisingly strong and united (which I wasn’t necessarily expecting to see, but it did my heart good). It should be a good election season.

…and that these sorts of big, coat-‘n-tie fundraisers are really not for me anymore (okay, so that was eleven…)

Chuck Kletecka, the last member of the Vermont Human Rights Commission appointed by Howard Dean, quit in protest of the Governor’s veto of the Gender Identity non-discrimination bill. The Governor wouldn’t really offer a coherent reason for his veto, making it obvious that it was simply done in deference to the Center For American Cultural Renewal/Vermont Renewal and Vermont’s religious right. The now all-Douglas-sock puppet Human Rights Commission is apparently the front of respectability for this scary outfit that you can read more about at this linked diary.

There seems to be some dispute as to who first came up with the notion to initiate the impeachment process of a sitting President at a state legislature, via the Jefferson’s Manual. Well, wonder no more, as it looks like the idea was first broached by… the Republicans. That’s right, if they hadn’t had the Congress on their side against Clinton, there was discussion of using Section 603 of the JM all the way back in ’97. Sort of puts Republican complaints on the process into the “methinks thou dost protest too much” column, eh? It’s also another sign to Dems-in-denial that it’s a tool very much in the Republican arsenal that they are ready, willing, and able to use when a Dem returns to power. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

If you haven’t seen it yet, go to Baruth’s piece about the clumsy mole sent by the Rainville campaign to tape record Peter Welch’s press conference. Get a load of the bumper stickers sported by this “stealth operative.” Heh.

Who needs Champ Anymore? iBrattleboro reports sightings of a wandering pack of naked men at 3 AM. It’s not the first report either, as another poster spotted them on bikes last October. A couple more sightings and maybe we can start mentioning it on Vermont tourist brochures.

Despite the rain, and competing events such as Bernie’s campaign kickoff and the Democratic Party fundraiser, 80 members of Vermont peace groups showed up to protest Laura Bush’s gala Republican event. Inside, the shindig may have raised as much as $150,000. Rainville: “I know that together we can send a Republican back to the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives.”

Darren Allen, Vermont’s print media-to-blogosphere crossover darling is back at the Times Argus/Rutland Herald’s Hall Monitor. He’s got some good stuff that I’ll be talking about later today (I think).

Speaking of the Times Argus and Rutland Herald, I’m getting really annoyed that they still haven’t fixed their article links. Grumble.

…and remember, the GMD Lt Gov poll stays up only as long is takes me to get up Sunday morning, square away the kids, and get an uninterrupted 10 minutes on this machine. Cast your vote! It’s become quite the cyber-slugfest.

Apparently the Vermont GOP and the Rainville Campaign are charging $5000 to have a picture taken with Laura Bush when she stops by to raise money for the General.

We at GMD know that $5000 is pretty steep — and we know a dose of market competition always does a body good! Therefore, thanks to the miracle of Photoshop, GMD is proud to announce that we’ll be happy to set you up with a picture of yourself and Laura for a mere $1000! (Wotta deal!) And you won’t even have to leave the comfort of your home! Just imagine…

…and if you act now, for a mere $200 more, we’ll also throw in another patriotic American of your choice! Click for an example —

Yes sir, with a deal like this how can you go wrong? Sure, Martha won’t get your money — but that’s okay! She’s got Tom DeLay’s and Duke Cunningham’s crowd for that!

Tell your friends… first twenty get a free cowboy hat…

Take a deep breath before you click on the link…

There’s no need to frame this (emphasis added):

Some of the most vituperative emails I have ever got came in after I made an offhand remark, in one of my monthly NRO diaries, to the effect that very few of us are physically appealing after our salad days, which in the case of women I pegged at ages 15-20. While the storm was raging, biologist Razib Khan over at Gene Expression (forget philosophers, theologians, and even novelists: the only people with interesting things to say about human nature nowadays are the scientists) decided to look up some actual numbers. Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics.

He found a 1992 report (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation) from the National Victim Center showing the age distribution of female rape victims. Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent). Only six percent were older than 29. When a woman gets past her mid twenties, in fact, her probability of being raped drops off like a continental shelf. If you histogram the figures, you get a peak around ages 12-14… which is precisely the age Lolita was at the time of her affair with Humbert Humbert. As Razib noted, my own “15-20” estimate was slightly off. An upper limit of 24 would be more reasonable. The lower limit really doesn’t bear thinking about. (I have a 13-year-old daughter.)

Behind such sad numbers, and in the works of literary geniuses like Vladimir Nabokov, does the reality of human nature lie. It is all too much for our prim, sissified, feminized, swooning, emoting, mealy mouthed, litigation-whipped, “diversity”-terrorized, race-and-“gender”-panicked society. We shudder and turn away, or write an angry email. The America of 1958, with all its shortcomings, was saltier, wiser, closer to the flesh and the bone and the wet earth, less fearful of itself. (It was also, according to at least one scholarly study, happier.)

Ah, to return to those bygone days of 1958 when America was “happier.”

Just to be clear; Derbyshire cites statistics that show that most women who are raped are actually 12-14 year old girls. His conclusion? It’s because 12-14 year old girls are just so hot. In fact, since rape is all about how hot the target is, it sounds like it’s actually a compliment (does that mean it’d be downright ungentlemanly not to?).

If I were a cop that lived in the same town with this guy, I’d start interviewing every young girl he’s come into contact with — starting with his daughter. This guy’s trouble, and he’s proud of it.

We don’t do so much media critiquing around here, which is probably not a good thing. Of course we’re all familiar with the WCAX news bureau’s well-deserved reputation for being Vermont’s own little Fox News Channel, but if you want to see the most jaw-dropping, ranting, angry-to-the-point-of-delusional right-wing media source you will ever see anywhere in this nation, there’s no place like St. Johnsbury’s newspaper, the Caledonian Record. In fact, I have never seen another such newspaper anywhere (left or right leaning) that doesn’t even bother with the pretense of objectivity, referring to itself in it’s own editorial page as a ”Republican newspaper.”

By all means click on the link for the rest of the post. If you’re not familiar with this paper, you’re gonna love this…

The CBR never fails to live up to that description it wears so proudly, even when it has to twist itself into knots of self-parody to do so. You’ll recall the story from a few days back when Scudder Parker demanded action from the Douglas administration on the ever-growing domestic spying scandal:

I have asked my campaign staff to investigate whether the Bush administration’s warrantless spying activities, and the action of telecommunication companies involved in these disclosures, may have violated any Vermont laws, and if so, what actions have been taken to protect the rights of the citizens of this state”

The Douglas administration quickly (and wisely) attempted to innoculate itself:

Jason Gibbs, a spokesman for Gov. James Douglas, said the governor had ordered O’Brien to determine if Verizon’s actions violated Vermont law

So how does the CBR spin this?

We take this opportunity to applaud Vermont Republican Gov. James Douglas.

  To quote Jason Gibbs, a spokesman for Gov. Douglas: “The governor is certainly disturbed by this, and the Department of Public Service is going to take action if the rights of any Vermonters have been violated.”

And how many times is Scudder Parker mentioned in the editorial? That’s right – zero. That takes some serious kahunas right there, but that is nothing. This paper has a greatest hits that’s worthy of the Colbert Report.

Try the editorial entitled Al Gore: The Jane Fonda of the War on Terror, or maybe Dean’s Delerium (hint: he was talking about Iraq). Health Care? Check out their visciously deceptive op-ed entitled Jim Dandy To The Rescue.  The Abramoff scandal? Bet you didn’t know that there wasn’t a single Republican involved, but virtually every major Dem lawmaker seemed to be. Who knew? Bet you didn’t realize how ”many black leaders are race-baiters”. Don’t worry, the CBR from it’s perch in the Northeast Kingdom will separate the good blacks from the bad (read: liberals). After all, the Democrats are the “party that just loves to raise taxes in order to tuck another taxpayer-funded comforter around the body politic,” right?

Come on, admit it. At some point reading that list you started to chuckle. Just a little.

( – promoted by odum)

(Cross-posted at DailyKos)

  When I started my undergraduate career, I was enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, and boy, nothing works harder than a Democrat in Texas – we had lobbying committees set up for different issue areas, and we were in legislators’ offices every week presenting our case.  We were fired up and we were effecting change.

But then I decided I needed a change, because while the University Democrats were a beacon for reason and hope, a lot of the rest of the student body was not, and the school didn’t seem to be suiting my academic needs.  So I thought, “where can I get the education I want and be in an amazing political environment?”  My answer: The University of Vermont!

So I arrived in the Green Mountain State, thoroughly excited to join a thriving, motivated, spectacular political group – the College Democrats.  Upon attending my first meeting, I found less than ten people in attendance, and it only got worse from there.

Read on below!

Only ten people at a College Democrats meeting with a student body of over 8,000!  What happened to the Vermont I had heard about from so many people?  It seems that at my University, the student body has been sticken with a serious case of political apathy. 

And it’s not even for lack of competitive races – Peter Welch is running for Congress against a highly decorated military official who comes across as more honest and moderate than any Republican I’ve ever heard speak in person; Bernie Sanders is against Rich “Monopoly Man” Tarrant, doling out thousands of dollars and free laptops to summer interns, and spending ridiculous money on his campaign; Scudder Parker is running a grassroots initiative against Jim Douglas in a state that has a disturbing tendency to re-elect incumbents just because.  So what’s the problem?

My second semester at UVM (why not UVT?  It’s from the latin for University of the Green Mountains,) I became the co-President of College Dems, and we managed to put together a stellar executive board, all ready and willing to whip our campus into shape.  We went on an advertising blitz, brought free food, and set up a table three days a week.  We got a grand total of, again, less than ten people at our first meeting, and it only went down from there.

Then Barrack Obama came.  Students streamed into the Ira Allen Chapel where he was to speak, filling its 900-person capacity in mere minutes, with more pressing their faces up against the window to try to hear him speak.  Barrack Obama will surely fire these students up!  Grand total of new members as a result of Obama’s speech: one.  And she only came to one meeting.

So at the end of my second semester at the University of Vermont, I’m the President of the College Democrats, and I have no one to lead.  I have no one excited about the local races, or even taking back Congress in November.  The most popular student groups on this campus are the outing club, and the ski and snowboard club.  Why are so many students politically apathetic?

I must have talked to dozens of people a day running the College Dems table, and almost none of them knew who Roberts or Alito were, people blinked at me when I said Bill Frist, and some didn’t even know that Howard Dean was running the DNC – Howard Dean, Vermont’s native son!

We need a candidate who’s willing to talk to young people in this country, because even back in Texas, UDems was maybe 40 or 50 students from a student body upwards of 50,000.  We need a candidate who speaks to America’s youth, and not just when he or she is addressing a crowd of college students.  I don’t want to hear “I’m going to ignore the advice my political consultants give me and pay attention to young people” every time someone is addressing me and others my age, but at no other time.

I want a candidate who speaks to the future leaders of this country, and communicates why issues like domestic spying and our nuclear stand-off with Iran matter to them.  I want a candidate to court the youth vote like they court the senior vote.  I want to see students reading the newspaper before class instead of listening to whatever their iPod Shuffle tells them to.

I’m not really sure what the punchline of this diary is, but this is a big problem, and I’m genuinely terrified that the well-being of my children will be in the hands of my generation, because as much as I see activism and interest and amazing things happening, I see ten times as much apathy, and it’s scary.

(I’m promoting this to balance out the fact that I took Dean to task on this blog a few days ago — well, that and of course because, as usual, Vermoter writes a great post that folks should read. – promoted by odum)

I saw the War Room this past year. And seeing the contrast between the youthful and sincere Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos during the ’92 election, and the establishment celebrity pundits they’ve become, is more than a little sad.

Zack Exley, writing on Huffington Post yesterday (and cross-posted at Daily Kos), chastises Begala for his less than warm comments about Dean’s DNC’s 50 State Strategy.

He writes, in part…

Your comments came as part of a series of attacks on Dean and the DNC from big-name members of your Clinton Class of ’92. A whole generation of new Democratic activists finds these attacks totally bewildering and appalling.

You should be up there on TV celebrating that we finally have a DNC who understands that winning means building real power and standing for something. Your entire career has been about teaching Democrats to “stand for something.” But, coming from a communications background, maybe you just don’t understand the “building real power” part of the equation. So let me try to reach you on that point.

Starting with George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, the Republican Party slowly built a powerful grassroots machine, county by county, year by year, across the whole country. That “50 State” grassroots machine trounced us, achieving the highest voter turnout of any candidate ever. On our side, the combined efforts of fifteen separate swing state “Coordinated Campaigns,” the national Kerry campaign, and all the 527’s put together couldn’t match the work of one unified, well-organized political party.

I spent the last couple months of the campaign in the field, in almost every one of the targeted swing states. On our side it was utter chaos on the ground. Both the party organizations and the 527 organizations had been slapped together in a few hurried months. Operations varied in quality from state to state, and even county to county, but overall it was a disorganized mess — a disservice to the record hundreds of thousands of passionate volunteers who threw themselves into the campaign. On the Republican side, their organizations had been formed years before the election, and scaled up during the campaign under the tested and stable leadership of organizers rooted in their home states and local communities. (It is worth noting that the AFL-CIO’s voter contact program ran very smoothly and effectively, having been built slowly and consistently over several cycles.)

And Exley can speak with some authority on this.

After the frustrating chaos during the 2004 election he describes above, he took the time to publicly lay out a detailed blueprint for how to merge the top-down/bottom-up divide. And it’s the only comprehensive one I’ve ever seen.

I’ve always been surprised how this particular essential  meta-discussion is so absent throughout lefty blogland.

Though it’s no longer available online, I snagged his very persuasive “Letter to the Next DNC Chair” from January 27, 2005, for a brief netroots primer I put together a bit ago for Scudder Parker‘s campaign.

Really excellent stuff. But, perhaps because of some feud with Kos that I never knew the details of, it has largely vanished down the memory hole.

Exley, Peter Daou and James Boyce are some of the very few people who saw the Kerry operation close-up and who’ve been strongly advocating for the netroots perspective on Huffington Post and elsewhere.

VERMONT-SPECIFIC ADDENDUM: As an aside, it should be noted that Scudder’s campaign has apparently given up – at least for now – on the idea of a blog.

And a further troubling sign for us netroots advocates is that I entered a comment on Bernie’s blog on a thread on May 10th. Nothing showed up for an entire day, but the only one they decided to post was an anti-Bernie rant. It was simply a comment on Tarrant’s “You don’t have a million dollars… You’re a loser!” comment to Peter Freyne. This could easily be an oversight, but I doubt I’ll take the time to contribute to Progressive America any time soon…

I don’t like the direction of this trend, if that’s what I’m seeing, and I hope it’s just a temporary retreat from opening up the dialogue.

Cross-posted at What’s the Point?

This is cold.

In response to the concerns expressed in Senator Matt Dunne’s diary immediately below, which stated:

In January, when federal wire tapping of Vermonters’ phone calls first came to light, I sent a letter co-signed by over 100 Vermont legislators to Lt. Governor Dubie asking to formally denounce government spying on our citizens.  The Lt. Governor never responded to the letter, in writing or to the press. The council has met since the letter was sent, but Chairman Dubie has yet to include it on an agenda.

The Lt. Governor should respond to every single Vermonter who takes time to write him a letter on important public matters.  To ignore a request from a majority of the Vermont legislature is indefensible.

Dubie bravely did his duty, firing off the following email to the two thirds of our Washington delegation he can bring himself to admit exist:

Dear Senator Leahy and Senator Jeffords,  I would to pass along the concerns of a number of Vermonters.  Very Respectfully, Brian Dubie

Man, that’s a big middle finger to Dunne and the other Legislators if I ever saw one. He didn’t even bother to check his grammar.

This guy doesn’t give a damn about the illegal excesses of his monarch-in-chief. He has got to go.