Here's the list of upcoming public hearings on same-sex marriage. Please try and make as many as you can, and bring as many people as you can. Bring your whole family (and please come back and write a user diary on how it went – I'll make sure to promote it to the front page).  For details, check out the Freedom To Marry website. 

THIRD PUBLIC HEARING Monday November 19th Lyndon  State College Alexander Twilight Theater Lyndonville, VT 5pm-6ish –  Informational Session 7pm-9pm – Public Hearing  FOURTH PUBLIC HEARING Wednesday December  5th Brattleboro Time & location:  TBA  FIFTH PUBLIC HEARING Monday December  10th St. Albans Bellows Free Academy  Auditorium 71 South Main 5pm-6pm: Informational  Session 6:30pm-8:30pm: Public Hearing

SIXTH PUBLIC HEARING Tuesday December 18th  Montpelier Statehouse Time:  TBA  SEVENTH PUBLIC HEARING Saturday January 12th  Bennington Time & location:  TBA  EIGHTH PUBLIC HEARING Saturday February  2nd Rutland Time & location:  TBA  NINTH PUBLIC HEARING Monday February  11th Williston Time & location:  TBA

Chris Dodd's presidential website is decked out in activist mode over the upcoming review in the Senate Judiciary Committee of the intelligence bill that would famously give telephone companies that went along with Bush's blatantly illegal wiretapping of US citizens retroactive immunity from legal action (while those that stood their ground get punished with jail time). If you click on the linked image-widget to the right, you'll see that Senator Leahy is still down as a “maybe” on this. I'm not sure why, though, since Leahy has been rather clear on the subject: (Leahy) “They won't tell us what it was they did to break the law but they want us to pass a law saying it's OK. Whatever they did to break the law is all right but we can't tell you what it was they did to break the law. That's Alice in Wonderland and I have no intention of voting for  something like that.”

Sanders has also come out against it, as did Rep. Welch some time back.

Now it may be that the time will come to pressure Leahy and Sanders to support a filibuster, which will likely be the only meaningful vote on whether or not a Senator is truly opposed, given an issue like this (and given that this will probably go through the Judiciary Committee, given that it already has the support of the west-coast Lieberman, California Senator Dianne Feinstein). But we're not there yet. (ht Kagro X)

UPDATE: Well, well – according to MoonWomyn in the comments, Leahy is indeed being non-committal, and his statement to VPR should be parsed with a fine toothed comb (see below). I should say he probably should be getting the calls to his office after all, given this news. Click on the image for a link. 

(This gave me a lot to think about. – promoted by JulieWaters)

I just read JDRyan's thoughtful reflections to all this Welch meeting hoopla over at his site, Five Before Chaos.  Very well put, productive, and worth the read in my opinion.

Well, apparently Obama's very bold technology plan (full details at link) unveiled at Google today has made quite an impression on Matt Stoller. And if the past has been any guide, that's not an easy thing to do.

Stoller writes…

Today, Obama is throwing down the gauntlet on a internet freedom, telecom lobbyists, and on opening up government in general to the public. It's some genuinely radical stuff, and it includes the use of blogs, wikis, and openness in government hearings.  Significantly, Larry Lessig has endorsed Obama's platform.

He continues…

High speed broadband is a core tool for citizens to engage politically; it's not an accident that Color of Change emerged in 2006-2007, after massive growth in broadband to African-Americans.  Building this network out, as Obama is putting forward, and opening up government could create organizing opportunities the likes of which we haven't dreamed.  Imagine the innovative spirit of Silicon Valley combined with the power of government and the movement building organizing capacity of the netroots, and that's a start.  Of course, what's possible is not necessarily what will happen, and it's all in the execution, but this is reaching for something bold.

And finally (my emphasis)…

…Obama has thrown down a big gauntlet, policy-wise.  He is pushing to break up the wireless gatekeepers, net neutrality will be a strong priority in his administration, and open government will allow citizens to generate new sources of political power.  I don't trust Obama's politics and I find his post-partisan rhetoric problematic, but I believe in organizing, and I believe that if he is willing to put the government on an open level playing field for all citizens while protecting our ability to access it, good things will happen.  That's more than I can say about Clinton.  It is tough to figure out where these candidates really do disagree, but on open networks, it seems like this is a clear line of demarcation. 

I am now leaning towards Obama in my choice for President…

[More below the fold…]

Oh yeah, and on a related note, Bowers backs off his claim that Obama's campaign is dead…

At this point, with the time to make a final decision looming, and faced with a primary election that, no matter the inaccuracy of the media narrative, is still primarily a choice between Clinton and Obama, the progressive creative class has decided that it still prefers Obama to Clinton no matter what Obama may or may not have done wrong so far. This is the vote that Obama absolutely needs in order to win either Iowa or New Hampshire, and it seems as though he is keeping enough of that vote in order to stay competitive in both states.

And this…

I can't ignore that one of he two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination is potentially the best identity vessel for my ideal progressive coalition to come around in the history of American politics, bar none. I mean, even though I am a white guy who grew up in the suburbs of Syracuse, New York, I can say without a hint of irony or doubt that Barack Obama is easily the candidate with whom I can most clearly identify.

The Netroots opinion leaders have been notably fickle during this primary season, but as Iowa draws near, it's interesting to track where support is trending.

Apparently — as is the case with many other indicators in the past couple of weeks — it's trending Obama.

Back in June, the Yes Men performed a fairly dramatic stunt.  Pretending to be Natural Petroleum Council members, they presented a proposal to turn human beings into fuel:

After noting that current energy policies will likely lead to “huge global calamities…” Wolff told the audience “…in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could ‘keep fuel flowing’ by transforming the billions of people who die into oil… With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of disaster, but that means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will continue to flow for those of us left.”

Dark humor aside, we might argue over when, but at some point, the oil is going to run out.

Today, I’ll explore how we use energy, how we can change our sense of what energy means and why that change will be so much easier if started earlier than later.

The picture, by the way, is not a Photoshop effect.  It’s long-exposure work, using an infra red filter to reduce the amount of light entering the shutter.  When you do very long exposures (this was 29 seconds), images that pass across the screen don’t always appear, and when they do appear, they often appear ghosted.  In this case, you get the ghost effect of the car as it paused for a moment at the intersection and then continued on.

Okay, so enough of the photo geek babble.  Now onto science geek babble.

In 2004, the BBC was asking Is the world’s oil running out fast?:

How will you pay to run your car? How will you get the children to school? How will you heat your house? How much will transported food go up in price?

How will we pay for plastics, metals, rubber, cheap flights, Simpson’s DVDs, 3G phones and everlasting economic growth?

The basic answer is, we won’t.

This is the message from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO).

People may disagree on when it’s going to happen, but there’s no real question that it will happen in many of our lifetimes.  Per the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

What would happen if the world were to start running out of oil? Conventional wisdom says we’ve got 30 years, but there’s a growing fear amongst petroleum experts it’s happening much sooner than we thought – that we are hitting the beginning of the end of oil now. So how soon will the oil run out, and can we stop our economy collapsing when it does? How prepared are we for the real oil crisis?

What are we going to do in order to make this transition from an oil-based economy to making better use of other fuel sources?  How are we going to make this transition as easy as possible, and how will we do it as painlessly as possible?

Here in Vermont, Post Oil Solutions is organizing around local economy.  They run workshops, educate the public, and support people trying to take control of their own energy solutions.

They have lots of great projects, such as community gardens, the Windham Energy Project and a Winter Farmer’s Market.

These are all projects that were started by people on a small scale and are growing into something big.

And this effort at getting people to think about energy, energy usage and our impact has a direct effect on personal behavior.  I’ll just take a moment to outline some personal changes we’ve made as a household in the past few years.  Many of these are more recent and directly a result of the localvore challenge:

• Composting: I attended a Master Composter course last Fall.  In doing so, I learned how to save resources by not just throwing out uneaten/spoiled food.  We now collect all our scraps, store them and reuse them in gardens once they’re converted to healthy, nutrient-rich, compost.


• Local Harvesting: We’ve started paying a lot more attention to where our food comes from.  This is big.  When you purchase food from across the county, you’re not just paying for the food.  You’re paying for the cost of transporting that food.  When we buy local food, we’re not only supporting our local economy, we’re paying attention to where our food comes from and what the conditions are.  When I visit Hope Roots Farm to buy eggs, I know they’re free range because I see the chickens wandering around.  Usually, I just take it on faith.


• Food Dehydrating: This ties in directly with the local foods.  There are only certain times of year when you can get certain foods locally: blueberries; apples; root vegetables.  Many of these can be dried when they’re in season, stored in various fashions, and used down the line for all sorts of purposes and it’s a lot cheaper to dry food and store it than to refrigerate it.


• Attention to How I Drive: I don’t always have as much choice about this as I’d like: I have places to be and places to be on time.  But, if I have time, I don’t drive as fast as I might otherwise do.  My car (a Prius Hybrid) is much more efficient at 55mpg than it is at 65. So don’t go faster than 55mpg unless I need to and I don’t ever go faster than 65.  But for different cars, there are different efficiency levels.  Whatever car you own, you can probably drive it more efficiently than you do today and you can learn a lot about that through some simple research.


• Paying More Up Front for Better Appliances
  I’m fortunate in that I have the resources to do this.  I understand that a lot of people don’t.  But for those that can, there’s a significant difference between sticker price and cost.  Buying energy-efficient appliances makes good sense from both an earth and an economic sense down the line.  So why not offer low-interest loans or tax rebates so more people can buy things that, in the long run, will be cheaper for them?

None of these are rocket science; they’re simple steps that can be done in small increments.  You don’t have to compost everything you can.  You can make it a small project, composting the easy stuff, which at least reduces waste.  You don’t have to buy everything local.  But you can commit to having one day a week where all your food comes from local resources.  You don’t have to drive slow all the time.  But you can drive at the speed which is best for your vehicle when you have the opportunity to do so.

But in the meantime, though these are good personal steps, they’re small steps and, as individuals, we can only go so far with this.  With so much of our energy being through large-scale industrial facilities, how can we compete with this?

The simple answer is that we can’t compete with it, but we can influence change and we have to do it by demanding more from our government, our corporations and our people.  We can’t stay silent about this, nor can we expect that merely changing ourselves is sufficient.

We’ve got to make changes, and a lot of those changes have to be mandated through law if they’re going to stick.  Changes like Manure Power:

Four Vermont farms will soon be producing electricity from cow manure with the help of Central Vermont Public Service Corp… Farms in Sheldon, Fairlee, West Pawlet and St. Albans will receive the grants from the CVPS Renewable Development Fund, established in 2004 to encourage farmers to develop new renewable generation and provide new manure management options through Cow Power.

It gets better.  According to CVPS President Robert Young, “these grants will help develop 8,400 megawatt-hours of clean renewable energy right here in Vermont… enough energy to supply 1,395 average homes using 500 kwh per month.”

This isn’t science fiction.  This is real.  It’s happening right now, but we need to take it a step further: don’t just award grants for this.  Make it a requirement that farms above a certain production level give back to their communities by using manure power for their operations.  If it’s true that cows contribute to global warming then it’s perfectly reasonable to expect large-scale farms to support anti-global warming efforts.

What if you don’t live in an agricultural state?  Where might you find better energy resources there?  I’ve written before about people power.  I’m not talking about people powered political movements.  I’m talking literally about energy derived from the day to day activities of individuals:

The band takes center stage, the fans surge forward and the sheer power of the crowd’s excitement amplifies the sound of their favorite songs – providing enough energy, in fact, to move a train… The Crowd Farm, a conceptual design by two graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology… seeks to milk the mechanical movement of hundreds or thousands of assembled people to produce electrical power… the students have shown how the simple act of sitting on a stool can generate enough power to turn on four LED lights.

Think about what this could mean: roads designed to harness the power of the vehicles that move across them; sidewalks designed to power the town’s lighting system.  Even without this technology we have playgrounds designed to power water systems.  Can you imagine if we combined this technology with such playgrounds?  What if basketball stadiums were designed to work with the power of the people and the players?  What if assembly lines used the movement of their workers to help power the belt?  What if the movement of people through lobbies powered the elevators?  What if those great big buildings with the huge glass atriums combined solar power and human power to provide resources for their energy?  What if we combined those with small, rooftop-based windmills, to add supplemental energy into the system?

What if all these systems generated more power than they needed?  What if they could sell the excess energy at floor-based charging systems to anyone who wanted to power their phone, their iPod, their electric car or anything else that needed a quick charge? Think about what that could do for our economy?

And what if we provided federal grants for the research and development of these systems?  Wouldn’t that fall under the sort of option that would dramatically improve national security?

What if we started to produce portable solar generators that we could use to power our own electronic devices?  Oh wait, we already do.

In the last week, filmgeek83 posted a Daily Kos Diary about a Yahoo News story —  New technique creates cheap, abundant hydrogen:

US researchers have developed… a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water… their reactor generated hydrogen gas at nearly 99 percent of the theoretical maximum yield using aetic acid, a common dead-end product of glucose fermentation.

I’m not a scientist.  I don’t have the technical background to know all the details behind the exact process behind this.  But I can do math and I understand the basics.  I can look at our choices and see that there is no future in an oil based economy.  I can read and learn and understand that there are things that I can do better, but we need this tackled on a grand scale to make a significant difference.

I don’t know that it’s not too late to change the things we need to change, but I have to live as though we still have meaningful choices, both as individuals and as a nation.

Sure.  We can talk about when the oil runs out.  We can talk about what’s going to happen in the future.  And we can say it’s a long way off, and worry about what’s going to happen when it finally arrives.

But what if we took the lead?  What if we decided here and now that we’re not going to wait for the oil to run out?  What if we decided today that it was time that we stopped treating oil like a necessity and started treating it like the last resort?  What if we decided today that it’s better to invest in safe, renewable energy as though the oil were going to run out next month rather than next century?

We can do this.  We have the resources to do it.  We have the genius to do it.

We only need the will.

This morning, I found the following piece in the  Brattleboro Reformer:

The Douglas administration has long resisted public calls for an ISA of Vermont Yankee, most recently made by the state’s Congressional delegation. But O’Brien indicated Tuesday night that the NRC’s standard oversight process is insufficient, noting that several recent events at the plant had diminished the public’s confidence in its safety and the adequacy of its oversight.

“The governor basically has asked me to work very closely with the congressional delegation to come up with an independent safety assessment that we can all be confident in — that will answer the sort of questions that are being asked about Vermont Yankee,” he said. “I think we make decisions based on the circumstances we’re in and the facts we’re looking at. From the governor’s perspective, he’s not comfortable right now, especially after the past six months — with the cooling tower failure and the valve failure.”

For years, we’ve been fighting for this independent review, and the Governor’s been resisting it.  This is how, even when a Republican’s at the helm, a small group of people can make a serious difference.

I don’t have a lot of time today, so I’ll make this short, but change doesn’t just happen at random.  It happens through concentrated effort and serious intent.

If it hadn’t been for continued pressure to keep the issues about VT Yankee in the light, this might never have happened, but activism and change are about multi-strategy approach: you keep pressure up and spread the word while waiting for the right opportunity to make use of your message.

That opportunity has come repeatedly.  Per a post on Green Mountain Daily from August 2007:

in 2003, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee had to shutdown as a result of a blown recirculation pump seal.
In 2003, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee was fined $51,000 for withholding information from NEC and attempting to impeach an NEC witness
In 2004, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee was fined %82,000 for trying to build a new “temporary” building at VY without permits
In 2005, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee lost nuclear fuel
In 2006, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee had a transformer fire as a result of the uprate
In 2006, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee had an electrical fire in an overheated wire to a condensate pump that now was drawing extra amperage as a result of the uprate
In 2006, Entergy sent a truck containing highly contaminated nuclear equipment to Pennsylvania without noticing the contamination.
In 2007, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee had more than twenty new cracks in its steam dryer as a result of the uprate
In 2007, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee collapsed three cooling tower cells as a result of the uprate
Throughout the entire time period, there have been numerous failures involving emergency planning, but they are too numerous to count.

Thorough all this time, Gov. Douglas has stuck to his nuclear-power guns very strongly.  Just a month ago, he was speaking an entirely different tune:

The bill would also strengthen the role of neighboring states on nuclear safety issues. It would allow, for example, the governor of New Hampshire to ask federal regulators for the independent study when the nearby Vermont Yankee seeks to extend its license for another 20 years.

But Governor Jim Douglas says he’s worried about allowing other states to get involved.
[…]
Douglas says the plant has delivered inexpensive power for decades, and is a major reason Vermont electricity rates are low. He says there’s a good chance that Yankee will be re-licensed for another 20 years, after its current license expires in 2012.

Think about that for a second.  Our Governor — scratch that — our Conservative Republican Governor who’s done nothing to support safety at VT Yankee during his tenure in office, has completely turned around on them.

It’s amazing what a few dramatic events in close proximity can do to activate people on an event.

If it hadn’t been for the dedicated work of activists for years, this existing pressure on Douglas might not have come and he might have been able to casually ignore the most recent incidents.  But a series of dramatic photos, combined with Yankee’s own workers being concerned about safety along with fairly constant pressure from groups opposed to the extension of VT Yankee’s license make for great press, especially with an election a year away.

This is good news.

This is really good news.

Now that I'm entering a strep-throat induced, feverish haze, I can see everything more clearly.

I'd never seen a picture of former Ambassador, former Vermont Democratic Chair, current foreign policy expert/author, and potential candidate for Governor Peter Galbraith before the one Freyne posted at his site:

And I've finally figured out where I've seen him before (click on the link) 

 

Okay, maybe not an exact match, but you see what I'm sayin.

I can just see the debates.