( – promoted by odum)

Shockwaves crashed through the internet today as two major sources of rumors merged in a supercollision of media frenzy.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama ended weeks of intense speculation by announcing his choice for Vice-president. The announcement stunned the mainstream media and sports reporters alike as the identity of the choice emerged, but by initial accounts, pundits were praising the choice for it’s strong appeal to Hispanics, legal immigrants and ironically, both oppressed workers and insanely overpaid wealthy elites.

Obama’s VP pick below the fold:

Obama had strong words of praise for Ramirez in his announcement, made on MSNBC and ESPNDeportes, saying “Manny will be Manny, which is much more than a bucket of warm spit, and that’s plenty of credentials to fill this position.”

The announcement, however, did spark an outcry from disgruntled supporters of Alex Rodriquez, who felt that their candidate should have been chosen. “I’s completely unfair and I’m seriously considering becoming a soccer fan and a Libertarian.” said one teary-eyed protester outside of the Obama announcement.

The Democratic Party has also announce that the Boston Red Sox have now retained the draft rights to Bill Richardson to complete the deal for Manny Ramirez.

At the Montpelier parade earlier this month I was talking to a local, very liberal, Democrat, and he started giving me a hard time about the posts on GMD. He said if you take off a few days and then read a bunch of GMD posts at one time, you'll get the impression that the reason we're here is to attack and weaken Democrats, which will have the inevitable effect of strengthening Republicans. I disagreed, but I can see his point. Some of the debate we are having here reflects, although in a cruder and more destructive form, the debate that has been going on in the rest of the country.

Yesterday's Salon is a good illustration of this debate. Glenn Greenwald has a piece arguing that we should start disciplining conservative, Blue Dog, Democrats. They don't support the party's values, they cave in to Bush, they actually help Bush's illegal activities.

Here's part of his analysis of the reason why we can't get any progressive action out of the Congress:

That is precisely what has happened over the past two years. It is why a functional right-wing majority has dominated the House notwithstanding the change of party control — and the change in direction — that American voters thought they were mandating in 2006. As progressive activist Matt Stoller put it, “Blue Dogs are the swing voting block in the House, they are self-described conservatives, and they are perfectly willing to use their status on every action considered by the House.” The more the Democratic leadership accommodates the Blue Dog caucus — the more their power relies upon expanding their numbers through the increase of Blue Dog seats — the less relevant will be the question of which party controls Congress.

According to Greenwald, this will happen as long as these conservative D's are allowed to stay in office and pretend to be Democrats

The counterpoint of this argument is illustrated by the companion Salon piece by Ed Kilgore who argues that we shouldn't decide what to do about them until Bush has been replaced by Obama, when conditions on the ground in Congress will be very different from what they are now. He makes a couple of points. First, in a very short time, Bush won't be president anymore, so whether they stand up to Bush is going to be less of an issue. Second, if you want to punish a deviant party member you'd better have the intellectual, political, and financial wherewithal to make it stick, otherwise you're just wasting everybody's time, especially your own.

This is the same kind of debate we've had in Vermont for years.

Remember when Howard Dean was a conservative DINO, the days of “I've  soured on Howard”? There were a lot of real liberals and progressive who wanted to challenge Dean, but the outcome wasn't a primary challenge to his candidacy for governor, but the formation of a new party. Similarly, just during this past biennium we had two Democrats vote with Douglas on a major veto override, Jon Anderson and Ron Allard, and they're both facing primary challenges.

I think this is healthy. The reason we have primaries is to make decisions within the political partie, and to hold the members of our own political party accountable when they turn against us. We don't know yet how those primaries will come out, but they do give Democrats who disagree with the choices of their elected representatives to challenge them, and potentially get rid of them.

It's also consistent with what I think we're trying to do at Green Mountain Daily–promoting more and better Democrats. To a certain extent my friend at the parade was right, and I'm fine with that. If Democrats are being too conservative, or aren't standing up enough to Bush and Douglas, I want us to be out there calling them on it. If there are some Democrats we want to encourage, and others we want to discourage, you'll know about it here.

What I don't think we're about here is taking positions that the Democratic Party is irredeemably corrupt and warlike, and that there is no difference between the two parties. That's what makes the debate, as I said at the top, cruder and more destructive in Vermont.

You can run on a platform of “Democrats suck”, but maybe you should be a bit less surprised when Democrats don't flock to support you. And you should definitely be less surprised when you split the vote and help elect more Republicans, like our esteemed Lite Gov.

Let's have the debate about where we should be going, but try to remember that we're living in the real world, and in most cases voters have two choices. If they're not voting for a Democrat they're electing a Republican, everywhere but in a handful of legislative districts in the state. We have a strong majority in the House, and an even stronger majority in the Senate, so if you want to take on a particularly objectionable Democrat, first by doing a primary challenge, I'd like to see that. But I don't think it's productive to spend our time here, especially when we know it's just not true, that there is no difference between the two parties.

• Tomorrow’s the big day for politics junkies…. that’s right, baby – its campaign finance filing day. Is Douglas getting any money from the national GOP? Are Freeman and Costello raising any cash? Is Pollina’s money holding out?

  Oh there’s so much to be learned from these silly things – especially when you haven’t seen one in ages and ages. And they’ll get more interesting over the next several weeks. One particularly interesting bit to watch will be how Pollina fares now that he is not the Progressive Party’s candidate – meaning that the Progs will potentially get into trouble if they start spending on his behalf. With his/their track record on such matters, you better believe lots of folks will be watching very closely…

• On the Lt. Governor Primary: Nate “mydog” Freeman’s been busy sending out press releases, while Tom Costello has got a couple familiar faces in his corner: former State Representatives Jerry Kreitzer and Patricia Doyle. Had a delightful chat with Patricia the other day, which unfortunately did not include acceptance of our invitation to an online debate, like the one GMD held between Matt Dunne and John Tracy last time that garnered quite a bit of press. I suppose at this point, I am forced to conclude that the answer is “no.” Bummer. Might help folks make up their minds.

  Some folks who seem like they’ve already made up their minds are the Rutland County Democrats. Rutland, along with Windham County, makes up Costello’s geographic base. The calendar entry on his campaign kickoff announcement reads (emphasis added):

  Thomas Costello a Brattleboro lawyer and Rutland native will be announcing he is running for Lieutenant Governor. Tom served 10 years in the Vermont Legislature from both Rutland and Brattleboro.  He chaired the Judiciary Committee as well as General Housing and Military Affairs. He is a Vietnam Vet. who was awarded a purple heart and a bronze star. He is a proven leader who needs our support. Please come and join him at his announcement.

  Ouch. If there are any Freeman supporters in Rutland County, they must be pretty pissed off by that all-but-explicit endorsement. Very impolitic, shall we say.

• Shay Totten reports that layoffs have begun at the Vermont Milk Company. He quotes heavily from a conversation with Dennis Myrick who was brought on to help shore things up at the former Pollina-co-helmed project:
  

  “As of this week, we’re not able to pay on the back debt and we need to have more on the bottom line and have to pay more of our debt service,” said Myrick. If that can’t happen, then they made need to make more cuts or figure out ways to improve distribution.

  Ouch again.

• Speaking of Totten, he’s onto Vermont Yankee’s creative radiation monitoring scheme first noticed here by Julie (no hat tip to her of course, but that’s just par for the course for “shit spewed on a blog”, I suppose…) (okay, I’ll back off, there..). Totten has brought his experience and interest in the Vermont Yankee issue from his Guardian days into his new gig, and its doing a lot for raising the ENVY profile in the northern half of the state, which is great.

  Less great is how he falls victim to above-it-all-columnist-itis earlier in his piece. Under the heading The Politics of Tragedy, Totten waxes PO’d about the political grandstanding surrounding the Brooke Bennett tragedy. A worthy topic (and point of anger) to be sure.

  Totten recounts Douglas’s gross attempts to deflect criticism of his own Department of Corrections by pushing Democrats into an all-or-nothing demand to corner them on his hot-button (but utterly ineffective) “solutions” such as chemical castration. He chides Dubie and radio-wingnut Paul Beaudry for chiming in as well.

  Then he follows the initial account with the statement…

  Douglas then lamented the “great deal of talk, finger-pointing and grandstanding” that followed the discovery of Bennett’s body in a shallow grave in Randolph County (sic). He should know. Douglas, Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, Symington and Shumlin are in a league of their own when it comes to grandstanding.

  ….before going on to further chide Douglas. Why are Symington and Shumlin thrown into this equivalence mix out of the blue (especially when you consider that Symington is one of the all time worst grandstanders)? Well, Totten never tells us, does he?

  So I will: he spends the next few paragraphs on an extraordinary soapbox, haphazardly courting the same kind of grandstanding charges he just cast about so freely. The reason, then, he had to arbitrarily drop Symington and Shumlin into a story about Jim Douglas is so he can more easily and cleanly cast himself as above all those terrible, terrible politicians, so as to better speak for the people and tell those phonies what’s what. It’s not an unfamiliar dynamic to those of us who follow the beltway columnists, who routinely try and cast Democrats and Republicans as just as bad on issues that Republicans are clearly worse on. Yawn.

  And if you’re inclined to cheer this kind of thing on simply because the Democrats bug you, don’t be. Why not? Because this kind of faux equivalence in the popular media does nothing but help derail real discussion, real progress, and real political solutions. There are plenty of reasons to beat up on Democratic politicians without having to arbitrarily make up more, just for the purpose of giving yourself a bigger platform from which to pontificate.