“This is a Judiciary Committee matter, and I believe we will some attention being paid to it by the Judiciary Committee,” Pelosi told reporters. “Not necessarily taking up the articles of impeachment because that would have to be approved on the floor, but to have some hearings on the subject.“
Uh-huh.
Sorry, we’re still pissed off about FISA.
Nice try, though. Points for pulling out a real A-list netroots topic-changer…
(This is fascinating… – promoted by odum)
A locally based consortium of 23 towns working to create a high-speed Internet network announced yesterday that it has reached an agreement with a New York investment bank to raise the estimated $85 million needed to build the project.
East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network, known as ECFiber, will contract with New York-based Oppenheimer & Co. to find private investors to back the construction of the network. Investors will recoup their money, plus interest, through fees from eventual subscribers, said state Rep. Jim Masland, D-Thetford, who serves on the organization’s board.
Masland said Oppenheimer has estimated the fundraising will be completed by October, but ECFiber officials say they are taking a more cautious tack and hope that the money will be in the bank by the end of the year.
ECFiber officials expect to begin hooking households up to the fiber-optic network within a year of completing their financing.
(ECFiber Says N.Y. Bank Will Raise Money for Valley Broadband, Valley News, 07/11/08)
Vermont’s Obama campaign staff will be holding organizing meetings around the state over the next few weeks, some in conjunction with County Dem meetings.
In keeping with the 50 State Strategy, focus is not solely on helping Barack Obama, but on building a strong volunteer base to help elect all Democratic candidates.
Join Obama for America Vermont staff and local Obama supporters as we
discuss how to help elect Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic
ticket. Learn how to get involved, pick up Obama gear, and become a part of
our historic movement and campaign for change! If you have any questions,
feel free to contact Morganne at 802-651-7151 or mpollie@barackobama.comMonday, July 14th
Windsor County Democrats Meeting
Damon Hall
1 Queechee Rd, Hartland
7PM
Online signup: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4gr4kWednesday, July 16th
Rutland County for Obama Organizational Meeting
Fox Room of the Rutland Free Library
10 Court St, Rutland
7PM
Online signup: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4gr27Thursday, July 17th
Chittenden County for Obama Organizational Meeting
Fletcher Free Library
235 College St, Burlington
7PM
Online signup: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4grh7Monday, July 21st
Addison County for Obama Organizational Meeting
Carol’s Hungry Mind Café
24 Merchants Row, Middlebury
7PM
Online Signup: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4gr3lMonday, July 21st
Lamoille County Democrats Meeting
Hyde Park Clerk’s Office
344 VT Rte 15 W, Hyde Park
7PM
Online Signup: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4gr54Wednesday, July 23rd
Washington County for Obama Organizational Meeting
Kellogg-Hubbard Free Library
135 Main St, Montpelier
7PM
Online Signup: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4gvvzMonday, July 28th
Bennington County for Obama Organizational Meeting
Bennington Free Library
101 Silver St, Bennington
7PM
Online Signup: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4gr5r
(I think this is is a well-written diary that could generate some really interesting responses. Well done UY! – promoted by Christian Avard)
It will be a loooong one.
One score and fourteen years ago, I was a college student, home for the summer. When I wasn’t working, I was on the floor of my parent’s living room, sprawled out watching TV, glued to the news and the Watergate hearings. The Nixon administration, despite their November 1972 mandate, was twisting in the wind; for us political junkies, it was great theater. And come that August, I was glad to see him go, a happy ending.
And I howled inside when Ford let him off. Outside too. To put it mildly, I was quite indignant. I, along with many others, wanted to see “justice done”, which is a catch-all phrase which usually – for me, I won’t speak for you – includes fantasies of revenge, public humiliation, and often enough, taking the sumbitches down to the beach and shooting them, like they did in Liberia in 1980, and leaving them for the high tide. Suffice to say, there is a part of me that wants my ‘pound of flesh’, likes the idea of ‘an eye for an eye’, (or at the very least, a pie in the eye). Hey, I’m a primate. Would I do it? No. Probably not.
George Walker Bush’s administration has left their skidmarks all over our Constitution. Bypassing the FISA courts is just one of many of those skidmarks. They are without a doubt guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors as outlined in Article II Section 4 of the Constitution they keep wiping their butts on. By and through them, monumental injustices have been perpetrated against Americans and innocents all over the world.
But, let’s face it – the injustices and lawbreaking started with the man’s very (s)election in 2000, and they have continued pretty much unabated and certainly unchecked ever since. (Since 2000, two Vermonters have been in a position to follow their oaths and defend the Constitution – Bernie Sanders (until 2006) and Peter Welch – by indicting/impeaching Bush and/or his many slimy cronies as members of the House that have that authority. Both would rather read the polls than follow their sworn oaths.)
Please note that Obama didn’t make it to Washington until 2005. By that time, the horses were long out of the barn. Bush had had a full term of trashing and shitting on the Constitution, and the American people had just asked for more. We were four-plus years into Constitutional freefall. Note that the American people were – and are – complicit in the trashing of the Constitution. These are all our duly elected (and/or selected) “leaders”, such as they are.
(This is not the first time in our history that we’ve had leadership that threw the Constitution out the window, exploiting fears and panics of the people – Red Scares in the 1950s and the 19 teens and 20s, and New England’s own John Adams come to mind. But this is where we are, in the middle of one of those periods.)
Lots more below the fold.
Obama sees his job as – first – talking us back from the ledge, the abyss. That’s his higher form of defending the Constitution and what he sees as the American Way, since the problem is not the trampling of the Constitution, but the failure of the people to do anything about it.
I take him at his word that he will revisit the FISA mess if elected. He, so far, has shown himself to be a brilliant strategist, he constantly reframes issues in a larger context of hope and opportunity.
Tellingly, he’s even tried to engage the fundamentalists in dialog – including some of our sickest most scared people, people with a fear based worldview and an an active belief in an “end of the world” eschatology. But fundamentalists are people too, and for better or worse (usually worse), our fellow Americans. He’s talking them (and us, since they can take us there) back from the edge, trying to engage not their fear and insanity, but our hopes, our common humanity.
It’s hard hard work. There remains a huge portion – perhaps the voting majority, come November we’ll see – of Americans mired in their fear, their prejudices, their thirst for blood and vengeance, their vicarious love of war. Some of them will hold on to that no matter what. But we can’t give up, because the alternative for the planet – a crazy sick people with a crazy sick leadership with crazy sick weapons capability – is not good.
Back to 1974. To Nixon. To Ford’s pardon.
I didn’t get my “pound of flesh”. Vengeance was not mine, or anyone else’s. It pissed me off, for a long time.
We must brace ourselves for the likelihood, the probability, that we will never get our “pound of flesh” from the Bush administration perpetrators.
As progressives, we are wired to be outraged by injustice, but “vengeance” is not supposed to be our thing. (In New England and the northeast, they build ‘reformatories’, and ‘penitentiaries’ and ‘corrections facilities’. Other places, they build ‘prisons’.)
Somewhere in Vermont, Michael Jacques sits alone in a cell. Some Vermonters have been exercising their revenge fantasies, some more than others. I’m sure there have been plenty of talk radio calls that have gone something like this “just give me 20 minutes with him” or “stick him in the general population, let them take care of him”.
But Michael Jacques is a sick sick man, not well wired for decency or compassion, and probably not well wired for guilt and shame. He is where he needs to be, keep him there and he is not a threat to anyone. Anything else we do to him is vengeance.
George Bush is a sick sick man, too. On many levels, his crimes are every bit as foul as Jacques’. Like Jacques, he is poorly wired for guilt and shame and dealing with reality in general. But the underlying – and much more immediate – problem is not his criminality, his sociopathy, it is the fear and vengeance in the heart of the American electorate.
There’s a gun to the head of our republic. Obama is asking us for the gun, asking us to live in a different future, one unstuck from old paradigms of right-left blue-red, etc. etc, etc, ad anauseum.
I am realizing that “yes we can” is a lifeline – a lifeline of hope. Hope.
He’s throwing it our way. But we have to swim for it, and it will probably mean dropping our desire for revenge – and finding other ways to slake our thirst for justice, at least for the short run – if we want to reach the rope of hope and the peaceful shore…
From today's Argus:
Gov. James Douglas said Thursday that the state should consider all the options in reforming its sex offender laws, including chemical castration and reinstating the death penalty.
Douglas, a Republican up for reelection this year, said he would immediately call for a special legislative session if he believed lawmakers would seriously consider a package of possible reforms in how Vermont prosecutes and retains sex offenders…Douglas suggested several options that he thought should be considered, including Jessica's Law, civil commitment, strengthening the state's sex offender registry, the return of the death penalty to Vermont and chemically castrating sex offenders.
“I think all of those ideas should be on the table,” Douglas said. “We need to look at all the options.”
Undoubtedly, this is a reaction to the Brooke Bennett tragedy.As the discussions on odum's recent post on the death penalty illustrated, most GMD'ers are vehemently against the death penalty in all circumstances. As one of the few dissenters on that matter, I still think this is a bad idea, because regardless of the moral issues at stake here, this gesture from Douglas is reactionary, as well as has a bit of the whiff of election year politics. Allan Gilbert of the VT ACLU says as much:
“I'm not surprised that people are stuck on feelings of vengeance toward a person accused of a horrible crime,” Gilbert said. “But these seem to be political responses to vexing problems.”
As usual, Douglas is blaming the legislature, when the problem apparently lies within the Dept of Corrections, at least in regards to the Bennett matter. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that the sex offender laws in this state need to be toughened, but if Douglas is going to try to accomplish that by putting unreasonable demands and package deals, and then blaming it all on the legislature, we will get nowhere, and ultimately, it is the children of Vermont who will pay the price.
There’ve been a lot of rambling philosophical threads on this site of late. That’s not to say there isn’t news going on… lots actually, but we seem to be in a philosophical mood this week, so here’s one more…
A lot of the previous thread skirts around the idea of what voting is for, at least as far as an individual is concerned. It’s a question I don’t spend much time with, even though its at the crux of whether or not many people will engage with and/or support a third party candidate such as Anthony Pollina or Ralph Nader (for my part, the reason I don’t do third party is more about what I see as the structure of the system than the purpose of voting).
For many, you are obliged to vote for the candidate that most reflects your own views, and that anything short of that is a betrayal of the system. Many would say that voting against one candidate, as opposed to for one, is also a perversion of the system.
I tend to step back as far as I can with these things to get as close to bland neutrality as I can, which is why the view my wife shared with me yesterday really resonated: the purpose of voting is to have an influence in who is selected. Period. I like that because it minimizes the sort of subjective romanticism that is so often the direction the argument goes between Democrats and non-Democrats on the left. We simply vote to have some say in who our leaders are. If you choose not to vote, you’re choosing not to have a say in the process. If you choose to vote against someone, rather than for someone, you’re choosing to exercise influence in the matter of who shouldn’t get the job.
Others…?
In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”
The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen.
(A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue, NY Times, 07/11/08)
Now, however, the Senate has moved to put that minor controversy to rest. Yesterday, the Senate passed a resolution declaring that McCain is a natural-born citizen. The resolution was passed by unanimous consent. More surprising than the result, however, was the fact that the bill was written and submitted by Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and co sponsored by both Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). Politics makes strange bedfellows.
(Clinton, Obama Sponsor McCain Citizenship Bill, AOL News, 05/01/08)
How far are you willing to let Obama go just because he isn’t John McCain?