If Peter Welch hadn't insisted on ignoring the pre-planned agenda for last Sunday's meeting in Barre, then the audience would certainly not have been as aggressive as they were.

I left after it was apparent Welch felt he was too good to put up with leadership by the riffraff.

(This part added after the fact.)

Why do I say this about Welch? Why because it was Welch who felt he had to get up, interrupt the flow of the meeting, and physically grab a microphone out of somebody's hands. All so he could speak out of turn.

(Done with after the fact addition.)

If we had sat in rapt and adoring attention as Welch said the same tired words he has been repeating for a year now everyone would be talking what a great guy Welch … oh and we all love him!

Well, that's not why Welch was asked to attend the meeting, and any claim by Welch or those who rush to his defense to the contrary is false.

I was ready to shut up and listen to everybody … Welch definately included. I was not ready to be shut up, and I was not ready to listen to a holier than me politician.

So I left. I'm glad I did. I had more important things to do than talk to a brick Welch wall yet one more time. He was in Barre to make excuses for the piss poor Democratic performance. He was not there to try and understand.

You've undoubtedly read 1984, although it was probably a long time ago, and you undoubtedly remember Newspeak, the 1984 lexicon in which war was redefined as peace, and so forth.

Guess what, it's still happening. It shouldn't be surprising that a regime that is dedicated to wiping out dissent by making independent thought impossible would use the perversion of the English language (“oldspeak”) to carry out its aims.

 For example, under the Bush administration we have PATRIOT, a law dedicated to wiping out the American values of liberty, privacy, and dissent.

Here's the latest:  Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.

 Yes, I'm not kidding. Privacy means that the government is carefully monitoring everything you do and say, and guarding that information.

If you don't like it, go talk to the Minstry of Truth. 

Congressman Peter Welch met today with a group of some 100-120 Vermonters to discuss the war in the Aldrich Library in Barre today. Hoo boy, where to begin… Let's just say that it was the most heated confrontation that I've ever personally witnessed between constituents and a politician. Much more below the jump, it's a long one…

Continue reading Welch meets with anti-war constituents, gets quite the earful →

Sometimes you get taken by surprise.



I was in Bellows Falls tonight to do a gig and saw a sign that said “special event tonight: expect delays.” Nothing was happening in town, but when I parked and got out of the car, I heard drums. I set up the camera and realized that there was a Veteran’s Day parade coming through, so I grabbed a few photographs. Night photography is tricky work, and not everything comes out as expected, but I particularly like the two shots I’ve included in this post. The first is of the parade itself. You can see the ghost flags as part of the shot.



The second picture is what followed after:
when the march ended, there was a ceremony to dispose of old flags that were no longer of use. I’d never seen one of these ceremonies before and I found it profoundly moving. All the participants were clearly veterans or family members of veterans. I couldn’t tell you the words they spoke during the ceremony; I wasn’t even paying attention to the language as much as just the raw feeling of it.



But what the feeling boiled down to, at least for me, is that there was a point in my life where my country meant a lot more than it does today, that there was something profound and meaningful about the flag.



I remember thinking I lived in the greatest country in the world. I’m not stupid. I know some of that was an illusion. But I always thought that we tried, even though we didn’t always do it the best we could, to do what was right. I always thought that we lived in a country where people could make big changes by the power of their purse and the power of their vote.



Today, I find myself regretfully embarrassed by how our flag and our love of country have been used and abused by some in our government and how easily we allowed them to appropriate a symbol that was meant for everyone; how easily we allowed them to steal our love of country and turn it into something profane and disgusting.



I don’t know about you, but I want my country back. I want to stop being repulsed by what’s being done in our name and I want to find a way to move beyond treating the military as a political football.



I know that, as a country, we’ve done some horrendous things in the past.



But we’re better than this. We’re better than torture. We’re better than illegal wiretapping. We’re better than the occupation of Iraq.



We’re better than the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We’re better than the treatment of the Jena Six.



We’re better than a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. We’re better than drilling for oil in Alaska. We’re better than refusing to let people help clean up toxic waste in California.



We’re better than stolen elections. We’re better than the Supreme Court intervening to appoint our President. We’re better than pardoning Scooter Libby and we’re better than outing Valerie Plame.



We have to be.



Or what the hell’s the point of even pretending to be a Democracy any longer?