Burlington’s CCTV channel 17 and Candleblog’s Bill Simmon are looking for volunteers to (hopefully) put together a live blog project for citizen comments on Election Day through laptops available for comments at key polling places in Burlington. Sounds like fun, but they’ll need help to pull it off. I will probably be live-blogging from the Democratic HQ that day, but if any GMD-reading, so-called “blogging experts” want to help support it on site, put it in the comments and I’ll point you to Bill. Maybe if enough folks are interested, itcan expand from just Burlington.

The Vermont Business Coalition PAC is turning into a major embarassment for the Chamber of Commerce and the Vermont GOP for being such a shamelessly transparent and poorly-coordinated front for Republican partisan interests. Nobody’s coming through on their pledges, and major players like UVM and VSAC are pulling out of the Chamber entirely as a result. Meanwhile, a veritable who’s-who of business interests is scrambling to put as much distance between them and this fiasco as possible. This has definitely become a net loss in electoral and political clout for all the Keystone Konservatives who were responsible for putting this comedy of errors together.

Morriseau to Rainville during the last US Congressional debate: “You do have a duty to disobey illegal orders. You don’t send troops to an illegal war, I don’t give a damn if it was George Bush who told you to do so, General Rainville!” Heh.

The renewed Blier Watch blog continues to draw direct lines between the Vermont GOP and the religious right (as personified by the Vermont Renewal group). Rainville and Douglas have knelt before the altar of the theocrats, and BW now draws a direct line between the same group and VT GOP Chair Jim Barnett.

And in the “in case you missed it while we’ve been obsessing on national issues” department:

Rich Tarrant has triggered the “millionaire’s amendment” to the McCain-Feingold/Shays-Meehan campaign finance law by spending such a colossal amount of money on himself. Bernie can now return to major donors and ask for more above and beyond the standard limits. Gotta wonder if there’s going to be a “Tarrant recession” in Vermont after he gets his butt kicked in November and his steady, massive infusion of capital into Vermont’s economy moves back to Florida.

Baruth is starting a weekly column in the Vermont Guardian. He joins Freyne and Resmer in print… even Charity has a TV show. Where’s our traditional media outlet? How can GMD close the media gap? Maybe we’ll get into video games…

Uberblogger Steve Benen of Carpetbagger finally gets some local props via Cathy Resmer. You go Steve. You and Eve should stop by and post on Vermont stuff sometime. We’ll bake ya a cake.

All Wildernerss, all the time. Whodathunk Douglas would’ve gotten enough of a black eye from his attempt to kill the Wilderness Act (and go to war with Vermont’s Washington delegation) that he would’ve felt the need to backpedal? What clearly started as an in-your-face show of power hasn’t quite worked out that way. Check this great op-ed by Bill McKibben, who is getting a lot more deeply involved in local politics these days, which is great news. Kudos to Bernie to kicking butt and saving the day on the bill. Much as the Tarrant crowd will try to make lemonade out of the demonstration of Sanders’ effectiveness, you know Rich can’t be too happy with the Governor this week.

And Jim Jeffords made his final address to the US Senate this week in Washington. What is there to say but “thanks, Jim.” I remember having my little public access camera and scamming my way past the security guards checking press credentials during Jeffords’ Burlington announcement that he was leaving the GOP. I got to set up right next to Candy Crowley of CNN. Ah, heady times…

My thread on Peter Welch and the state of liberalism has prompted some good discussion on here, especially abot the possibility of a good ‘think tank’, and what it would entail. So, I’m gonna take a stab at it.

In the comments of that post, when talking about Brookings, CAP and such, the term ‘center-left’ has come up. Well, the first thing our theoretical think tank would require is an abandonment of the term ‘center’, for several reasons.

First, what is commonly called the ‘center’ of American politics has moved so far to the right that it offers us on the left very little to chew on. ‘Centrism’ still embraces the tired and oft-disproven mantra, for example that our healthcare crisis can be fixed by ‘market-based’ solutions. How long have we been hearing that one now? HMO’s were the solution? Centrism seems to still blindly hold to the notion that the free market offers the best solutions to ‘insert problem here’. Bullshit. The free market cares not if you live or die, if you’re sick, whatever. Now, I’m not an anti-capitalist as many of my buddies are, but I’m not stupid enough to believe that market-based solutions can fix all of our problems. The point I’m getting at here is that ‘centrism’ in its current form works against many of the things we’re striving for , whether it be healthcare, labor issues, enviro issues and so on.

The next problem with today’s ‘centrism’ is the fact that it implies a compromise with the other side. Well, here’s something to remember. The ohter side (meaning the Republican party and their followers circa 2006) has no interest in compromising with us. On anything. That should be quite obvious to us by now, considering that Democrats have to hold hearings and such in small congressional offices and are often threatened for doing so by the Republican leadership. Plus there are too many things that we should not be willing to compromise on. Torture. Invasions of foreign countries that didn’t attack us. Congressional oversight and accountabilty. Reproductive freedom. Do I really need to go on? Further, we need to remember that there are many of those on the extremities of the right that would completely destroy us if they had a way to get away with it. If you can stomach it, listen to right-wing radio or go to Free Republic or Little Green Footballs. They talk of interment camps, torture, murder, all that great stuff. I’m not kidding and you know it. Now, I know they don’t represent all of the right-wing. Regardless, they are an influential part of it. I don’t want to compromise with them on anything, so we need to stop acting like we’re dealing with rational people here. And often, the rare chances we do get to ‘compromise’ are hardly good at all. Heck, look what the Torture Bill ‘compromise’ looks like; it’s not all that different from the pre-compromise torture bill.

My last little problem with ‘centrism’ is that great change rarely come from the center. The Repubs aren’t getting all of the things they want because they’re coming from the center. The ‘Contract with America’ didn’t come from the center. Neither did the New Deal, the Great Society or the Voting Rights Act. So we need to stop thinking that coming from the ‘mushy middle’ is somehow going to inspire the masses to rise up from their American Idol-induced stupor to support us. If we’re not going to stand proudly in the face of criticism for what we stand for, we might as well just sit down. Heck, lay down.

So that’s the first part of what an effective lefty think tank needs. More to come.

You can read more of JD Ryan’s stuff at http://www.fivebefor…

How many times since 2001 have we heard people ask, “Why do they hate us?” or “Why do they hate America?”

I submit that this is the wrong question. Look at all we’ve done in the world since that day. It strikes me that the relevant question is why do they not hate us more than they do? And I don’t just mean Islamic countries, I mean the whole world. When the NIE came out that proved that the war in Iraq made Islamic terrorism more dangerous, that’s not something that just happened to America. It’s made terrorism more dangerous for the whole world. Luckily we haven’t been hit again on our soil since 2001, but what about England and Spain, and other places we haven’t even heard of? Oh yeah, and Iraq?

But they still want to talk to us, because, no matter what Bush and his accomplices do, there are still people around the world who truly believe in American ideals.

Mary Hooper, Montpelier’s mayor, is traveling to Montpellier, France, to participate in a ceremony where the mayor of Montpellier will sign a mayors’ declaration against nuclear weapons, a statement Hooper has already signed.

“Obviously we can’t wait for the federal government to be talking about this,” Hooper says of the mayors’ anti-nuke campaign. “People need to be talking about it locally. If people in leadership positions — perhaps at every level, but certainly on the local level — say this is important, and we need to be paying attention to this issue, then maybe we can make a change.”

Mary’s paying for her own trip, so come out Saturday night to support the effort:

“Montpelier to Montpellier: A Musical Sendoff,” Christ Church Episcopal, Montpelier, September 30, 7 p.m. Info, 229-2340.