Daily Archives: April 6, 2007

Call Shumlin this Weekend

(Having heard the Senate Prez Pro Tem speak at the State Democratic Committee meeting last month, calling him to account on this issue is major. How he reacts will determine whether he gets the support of the Constitutional Defense wing of the Vermont Democratic Party in a potential primary next year. – promoted by NanuqFC)

Peter Shumlin is waiting to hear from you.

Last week, with great flair and impressive gravitas, Senate President pro-temp Shumlin said that if he recieved an impeachment resolution, he would see that it moved through the Senate. But it turns out that he was only talking about the impeachment resolution that he knows will never get out of Gaye Symington’s House.

Senator Jeanette White has gotten an impeachment resolution drafted by the legislative counsel and would like to introduce it into the Senate. But Shumlin says that he won’t let it happen.

Did he talk the good talk about the Constitution and the rule of law because he believes in them, or because he saw an opportunity to curry favor without having to actually do anything?

Let’s let him know that we’re sure that he’s a man of principle who can be taken at his word. Let’s all give him a call this weekend and remind him of his promise.

Mr. Shumlin, we are drowning in cynicism, make us proud.

Canada has its own Katrina and Walter Reed

No, no one’s died.  But this illustrates how the so-called conservatives are incapable of doing the simplest acts of governing. 

Canada is about to mark the 90th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge.  This is a very big deal – think Bunker Hill, the Alamo, Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima combined and you get only some idea.  Like Gallipoli for Aussies and New Zealanders, Vimy turned Canada from colony into nation.  How big a deal is the rededication of the memorial at Vimy?  The Queen is leading the delegation not as head of state of the UK or head of the Commonwealth but as Queen of Canada.  The only time I can think of her ever appearing as Queen of Canada outside of Canada was when she and Eisenhower opened the St. Lawrence Seaway. 

So what did Stephen Harper’s Conservatives do or not do.  They didn’t remember to invite members of the opposition to attend until reminded to do so at the last minute.  3600 school children from all over Canada are to attend, but the government has decided they have to buy their own lunch.  But here’s the real biggie.  The bi-lingual plaques in the memorial are in lousy French.  Unnamed persons translated the English texts into wretched French.  Misspellings, using English words, bad grammar.  You get it.

I bet Brownie was hired as the event planner.

Throw Away Your Dixie Cups*

Given all the hoopla over SVR and its unrepudiated League of the South ties, this story from the Washington Post (via the St. Albans Messenger, if you please) by Neely Tucker caught my eye. It suggests that Richmond, Virginia, may lose its 117-year-old Museum of the Confederacy, either to relocation or to a name change that omits the word ‘confederacy.’

Attendance has dropped by nearly half over the past decade. The museum has been losing about $400,000 each year for a decade. Employees have been laid off, hours curtailed. A recent report by a panel of outside experts in museum management concluded that the 117-year-old institution was at a “tipping point” that was going to affect “its very existence.”

More after the jump.

Really, there are just so many reasons! The problem is bad location there in Richmond, the capital of the Old South, next door to the “White House of the Confederacy, home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis” and a National Historic Landmark, to boot. It’s at the end of a dead-end street, lacks parking, is nearly “swallowed by a surrounding medical complex” (emphasis added). It faces competition from roller coasters at a nearby amusement park.

Eventually, a perhaps more plausible reason is brought forward:

a historic shift in the mind-set of the white South, whose psychological underpinnings were held together for more than a century by the romantic ideal of “the lost cause” of the Confederacy. This held the antebellum world as a largely mythological place, a land of moonlight and magnolias, of “Gone With the Wind,” of mint juleps and Henry Timrod’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery”:

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies . . .

(The Messenger edited out the poetry).

Lee’s uniform, J.E.B. Stuart’s plumed hat, letters, battle flags, locks of hair from those who died in the holy cause** became “sacred relics” housed in a shrine to the Confederacy.

And finally, there is, of course, the reason no one wants to talk about: race.

Meanwhile, an even more probable reason for the old museum’s decline is a nearby $13-million American Civil War Center providing artifacts and testimony from three points of view: the South, the North, and from blacks. The new center is packing in paying customers.

One Richmond writer quoted in the article suggests that a lot of the local citizenry are “just sort of embarrassed” by the museum of the holy relics of the War Between the States, especially when contrasted with the new Civil War Center.

Context, they say, is everything. And in the Richmond of the  “New South,” nearly half the residents are not descended from white southerners; they’re snowbirds or immigrants. To them, writes Tucker, paraphrasing one source, “the Confederacy is irrelevant.”

We can applaud the New South in moving past its attachment to a heavily edited and romanticized view of an ugly history, just as we applaud and respect politically moderate and progressive Germans for coming to terms with past fascism and the “Final Solution,” and Amercans — especially Democrats — who come to terms with FDR’s order to forcibly relocate and detain Japanese Americans in prison camps after Pearl Harbor solely because of their race.

At the same time we regard as dangerous and pathological and even pathetic the attachment of fascists everywhere to the symbols of German Nazism. Attachment to the symbols of the Confederacy are clearly of the same ilk.

Too bad the secessionists in our neck of the woods haven’t gotten that message.

———

* In my southern Maine childhood, we mocked confederate nationalism with this saying: “Save your Dixie cups — the South will rise again!” I don’t know where it came from, but I thought it was widely known until I read this to my midwestern-raised spouse and had to explain the title.

** A concise version of the “holy cause” (or causes of the War Between the States): some combination of state’s rights; preservation of slavery as the economic underpinning of the region; cultural and economic independence of the fast-growing industrialized North; and continued control of the federal government by a virtual oligarchy of slave-owning plantation holders based on a skewed census that counted 5 slaves as 3 people.

Transportation Hearing Report

[cross-posted from Rover: Riders of Vermont (*Unofficial*) blog, here]

Drew Hudson, one of the bloggers of Vermont’s Voice blog (Updates from the Vermont Public Interest Research Group Staff), blogged up a good report concerning Tuesday evening’s (April 3, 2007) House Transportation Committee public hearing, here (posted on Wednesday, April 4, 2007).

Douglas blames the wrong folks

Barre Democrat Tommy Walz has a great letter to the editor in today’s Times Argus about the phony affordability sessions Douglas has been staging around the state. Here’s how it starts off:

April 5, 2007

I attended Gov. Douglas’ presentation on “affordability” at the Aldrich Library on March 21 and came away puzzled.

The reason for my puzzlement came to me only after leaving the meeting. There is an enormous flaw in the premise behind the governor’s “affordability” campaign.

He’s blaming us.

Anderson votes with governor on veto issue

( – promoted by gnome)

3:33 p.m.
April 5, 2007

By Louis Porter
Vermont Press Bureau

MONTPELIER – House Democrats came close, but ultimately failed, to overturn Gov. James Douglas’ veto of the bill making mid-year adjustments to the state’s budget Thursday. The vote was 96-52, but 99 members would have had to vote for passing the bill into law without Douglas’ signature, and one Independent and two Democrats voted with Republicans to sustain the veto.

. . .

The vote on the budget bill was one of the first roll call votes for the House’s newest member, Democrat Jon Anderson of Montpelier. Anderson voted to sustain the veto of the governor, who appointed him to the House, despite the fact that Anderson’s was not one of the three names Montpelier Democrats forwarded to Douglas as possible replacements for Francis Brooks. Brooks left the seat to become the Statehouse’s Sergeant at Arms.


Remember, the only reason he vetoed the bill is not that the Legislature won’t appropriate the money he wants for his pet scholarship program, it’s that they want to put it in the FY ’08 appropriation, the Big Bill, rather than in the FY ’07 Budget Adjustment Act. He doesn’t just want the money, he wants to make sure he gets his way, completely. And he got two D’s and an I to vote with him.

Jon, you’re welcome to comment at this site.