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Today’s Times-Argus features an op/ed by Rep. Thomas Koch, a Republican member of the Vermont House of Representatives,  castigating liberals for being illiberal. Koch highlights a number of recent acts of civil disobedience by Vermont rabble-rousers as evidence that liberals don’t believe in liberalism anymore because we dare to break a few rules (and laws) here and there. Whatever.

It strikes me as hilarious that people like Koch – and many of the liberals he and I both dislike – have apparently forgotten how social and political change has taken place in this country. Name, for example, any major social or political change that wasn’t accompanied by some good old-fashioned civil disobedience. It hasn’t happened.

Beginning with the founding of this nation, substantive change has always been accompanied by acts of civil disobedience. Slavery. Women’s suffrage. Civil rights. Vietnam. Granted, civil disobedience wasn’t the ONLY ingredient to the change, but it was a necessary ingredient – kind of like the flour for bread.

And to ignore this history of social change is to deny the very founding ideals of this nation. We were being pushed around and we fought back – not with mere polite requests to the King of England, but with “illegal” and – gasp! – “illiberal” acts.

Thank goodness the Koch’s of the world were overwhelmed by the reason and the passion necessary to overcome the past ills that have plagued this nation. And, hopefully, they’ll be overwhelmed once again (and again and again) as new ills and injustices are confronted.

Memo to Koch: Read some history for crying out loud.

P.S. My favorite line in the Koch editorial is this one: “Amid the yelling and the consequent arrests, the demonstrators precise message was lost…” Hardly, the “precise message” was splashed across every newspaper in the state and on every television and radio broadcast in the state — and beyond. If Negroponte’s little party hadn’t been crashed, few in this state would have known of his visit or his hideous past.

Cross-posted from Rational Resistance

I’ll summarize this but it’s worth reading the whole story in Slate today.

It’s a bit of a small point from today’s Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. It hinges on a standard tool for determining legislative intent. In interpreting a statute, if the court finds that the language of the statute is clear, the clear language of the statute controls. The question, though, is what to do if the language is ambiguous. One of the standard tools is legislative history, which encompasses a range of information, including statements made during debate on the legislation. It makes sense, right? If we want to know what Congress meant when they passed a law, see what they were saying about it when they passed it.

In this case, a big issue was the correct interpretation of the Detainee Treatment Act, which was passed last December. Late in December, after the bill was passed, when nobody else was around, John Kyl (R-Tex.) and Lindsey Graham (R- S.C.) inserted a phony dialogue in the Congressional Record, making it look as though it was a colloquy they held during floor debate on the bill. Then, they used the language they inserted into the record as the basis for an amicus curiae brief they filed in the Supreme Court to argue for their preferred interpretation.

Too bad for them, though.

Either Justice Stevens or his clerk was too smart for them, discovered this, and actually called them out on it. Here’s what he said in a footnote of his opinion: “While statements attributed to the final bill’s two other sponsors, Senators Graham and Kyl, arguably contradict Senator Levin’s contention that the final version of the Act preserved jurisdiction over pending habeas cases … those statements appear to have been inserted in the Congressional Record after the Senate debate.”

You certainly wouldn’t expect anything better than this from Kyl, but Graham likes to put on a show of being more moderate, presumably grooming himself for an eventual presidential run. What this shows, though, is that he is devoid of integrity and cannot be trusted.

It must be election season in Vermont because everyone is jumping at the chance to throw money at the state’s dairy farmers. Even our “I hate government spending” governor, Jim Douglas, has stepped up to the plate with a program that will provide millions to the struggling dairy farmers. But can you say: too little, too late. I knew you could. Because that’s exactly what all the “look at me, I’m helping dairy farmers” proposals amount to. And, worse, I guarantee that after November’s elections all these crocodile tears for farmers will be long gone.

Anthony Pollina and Vermont’s Progressive Party have what should be the best shot at addressing the issue of the struggling dairy industry in Vermont. He has, after all, proclaimed it as his top priority for over 15 years (how’s that going, by the way?). But, like most of the Prog proposals, their plan for helping diary farmers seems timid, tepid, and just a smidgen better than what the two-party duopoly is proposing. Ugh.

To be specific, Pollina and the Progs have rolled out their traditional rhetoric about the need for a “state-sponsored” milk processing plant and a renewed (and renewed and renewed) call for state institutions to purchase Vermont milk products. On paper, it all sounds hunky-dory. But why can’t these folks ever get anything off of the paper and into reality?

If, as they argue, the milk processors are the ones reaping so much benefit from the toil of the farmers, why is Pollina & Co. having such a hard time raising the capital to start their own processing plant? They’ve put this issue on the table for years, first trying (unsuccessfully) to get the state to pony up the money for it two years ago. Then they declared in a huff that they would fund it privately. Again, how’s that going?

It would be much more satisfying for Vermont’s supposed “other” party to avoid the rhetoric and get to what’s really wrong with Vermont’s dairy industry. And what’s that? Well, for starters, industrial agriculture. The dirty little secret in this whole debate is that Vermont dairy farmers CAN’T compete in the market they’re playing in. It’s impossible. Period. Vermont doesn’t have the flat land or the climate to compete with the mega-dairies of the south and west.

But Pollina’s love affair with the notion that he’ll be elected SOMEDAY for SOMETHING prevents him from casting aspersions at industrial agriculture. Remember, he was the one who condemned attacks on Cabot when they were gleefully using Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone (rBGH) and poured cold water on the spotlight activist groups attempted to put on Ben & Jerry’s use of toxic pesticides (fundraising always seems to trump principles in the Prog camp).

Go ahead, folks, keep pitching your pennies at the poor farmers. But, sooner or later, we’ll all have to get at what’s real with this issue: capitalism and small dairy farming doesn’t mix.

Until then, enjoy the show – and don’t forget your hanky.