( – promoted by odum)

No matter who you’re supporting in the upcoming governor’s race, I think we can all agree it’s going to be a spirited exercise in democracy.

This Saturday is the first chance you’ll get to pin them down on the issues facing our state. Five of the six announced (or nearly announced) candidates* will be at this Saturday’s Environmental Action Conference in Randolph.

Full disclosure: my day job is organizing for VPIRG, one of the groups putting the conference on. That being said, it’s not every day you get five Vermont gubernatorial candidates in a room a year out from an election.

To register go to vtenvironmentalaction.org.

Over 250 environmental activists attend this annual event – the largest grassroots training of its kind in Vermont. In addition to skills and issue workshops on everything from Vermont Yankee to public speaking to zero waste, this year you will have the opportunity to hear from and ask questions of many of the Vermont gubernatorial candidates. Senator Susan Bartlett, Matt Dunne, Secretary Deb Markowitz, Senator Doug Racine*, and Senator Peter Shumlin will each be in attendance to discuss their views on a wide range of environmental, energy, and conservation issues.

You will also have the chance to ask the candidates questions about issues that you think are critically important. What environmental issues do you want our next Governor to prioritize? Vermont Yankee? Renewable energy? Climate change? Land conservation? Water quality? Zero waste?

The Conference is being put on by the New England Grassroots Environment Fund, Toxics Action Center, VLCV, VNRC, Vermont Tech and VPIRG, and it’s a great opportunity to get plugged into the most pressing environmental campaigns happening around the state.

Hope I see you there!

*Senator Racine is unable to attend and will represented by Pat Parenteau  

I'm sure most of the people here also frequent Daily Kos and MyDD and are aware of the whole Bill O'Riely / JetBlue fiasco.  If you're not, here's the general gist:  Billo equated DKos with the KKK and Nazis, taking some troll rated comments and portraying them as the standard for Kos (I won't degrade GMD by posting yet another Billo video here, but if you want you can see his BS in the original on YouTube) and singled JetBlue out for sponsoring Yearly Kos.  Subsequently JetBlue at first resisted and then caved and withdrew their name from the website, though they're still donating the vouchers.  The real kicker was their letter explaining the withdrawal (signed by Dave Barger, their CEO), which essentially goes along with O'Lielly's conclusion that Kos is a hate site (emphasis complements of Scott Shields of MyDD):

I was personally completely unaware of the existence of DailyKos prior to news connecting the YearlyKos convention and thus our airline ticket donation to DailyKos. I personally have never condoned and abhor anything hateful towards anyone and am fully confident that JetBlue's crewmembers share this view.

So here's the letter I sent to JetBlue:

To Whom it May Concern,

I want to say first of all, JetBlue is far and away my favorite airline.  I have flown with you on several occasions and had, until very recently, been looking forward to my next opportunity to do so.  I also want to say that I appreciate your donation of travel vouchers to Yearly Kos.  However, due to your company's decision to withdraw your name from association with the convention due to the disgusting, politically motivated and staggeringly inaccurate attack on the part of Bill O'Riely I feel I can no longer use your airline.

Please, look into what Daily Kos is really about, and do the same for Bill O'Riely.  Decide for yourselves who the real “haters” are, and act accordingly.  I would like to refer you to two recent diaries on Daily Kos, here and here.  Daily Kos is not a hate site.  The comments picked by O'Riely were “troll rated,” meaning the Daily Kos community recognized them for what they were and made their displeasure at the rancor of the comments known.  O'Riely knew this when he picked them but did so nonetheless.  He has no interest in stamping out hate, and I hope you come to realize that.  Until then, I am sorry to say you have lost my business.

Sincerely,
Me*

*not my real name. Also, not in the original letter.

So why did I feel this was important enough to both write a letter to JetBlue and to write a diary (my first, come to think of it) on?  As progressives we need to push back when we're pushed, and especially when we're pushed this hard.  By equating the people that frequent and contribute to Kos (and by implication the rest of the liberal blogosphere) to Nazis and the KKK is to not only slander us, it is to trivialize the horrific crimes those groups perpetrated and trivialize the suffering of their victims.  It's also a point of pride for me to not let blowhards like Billo win the day.  More importantly though, by letting a company implicitly agree that liberals/progressives are hate-filled, bigoted extremists we would be playing right into the narrative that conservatives have spent so much time and energy building.  Only by pushing back and saying “No, this is what we really stand for,” can we win back the meme that's playing out in our society, and this is one small piece of that battle.

Obviously, as maxomai pointed out on Kos there are far, far more important things happening in the world than this, but being successful in the political arena means doing a whole lot of little things right and IMHO at least, this is one of those things.

PS – You can reach JetBlue at corporatecommunications@jetblue.com.