( – promoted by Sue Prent)

I was at the debate tonight.   There was a packed house.  I filmed the whole thing and I’ll have some pieces of it on my blog.  Wanted to share a couple things for now…

Dubie brought an “entourage” with him.  Folks in Dubie tshirts.  Someone who knows a lot about this stuff told me they are getting paid.  They brought a stacks of lawn signs with them. First they put all the lawn signs out right in front of the entrance to the convention center.  There must have been 40 or 50 of them, and one HUGE one that took several people to hold up.  If you were driving by the Sheraton, you’d think there was a Dubie convention going on there, not a REV conference.  I gave them a piece of my mind.. I told them you can’t win an election with lawn signs.  I told them it was ironic that given the administration’s lack of support for renewables, that they were putting up all these signs in front of a rewnwable energy conference.

Then the debate took place.  More on that later. The one thing I want to mention is at the end, when Dubie was thanking everyone he couldn’t remember the name of Renewable Energy Vermont.  Everyone chuckled.

Then all his fans with the signs went back to the front doors.  They stood there with their stacks of signs, expecting to give them all away to people on their way out.  But guess what, NO ONE took one!  It was hilarious!  Every single person walked right by them.  One person I saw took a sign, but he walked a bit into the parking lot and he just dropped it on the ground, stepped on it, and left it there.   I know… littering is bad… but it was kinda comical.

more soon

I just got a Robo-Call from “Friends of Brain Dubie.”  The subject was how scary, unsafe and irresponsible it would be to release non-violent criminals, and how Shumlin wants to do just that.

The problem is, there is no logic to the argument.  They are trying to make me scared, that releasing these people “onto our streets” will jeopordize our safety.  Evidently these “friends of Brian Dubie” don’t understand what “non-violent” means.  Should we fear for our safety if tax evaders and embezzelors are roaming the streets at night?

The elephant in the closet here is that “non-violent” is a buzz word for “drug users and dealers.”

Now if someone smokes pot in their own home, or if they grow a couple plants in their back yard and get caught, that’s a non-violent offender.  Am I afraid of that person?  No.  Is that person going to make the streets less safe?  No.  Should you and I, the taxpayers, be paying for that person to be sitting behind bars?  I say NO.

If that person went and stabbed somed someone, or robbed a bank at gunpoint when they were high on marijuana, then that would be a violent crime and they should be locked up.

I think we need to read between the lines here and while the buzzword is “non-violent” what Peter is really referring to is the many people behind bars for using or selling a controlled substance that really is a personal choice to use or not.  Putting people in jail for ingesting a substance, especially when it’s a plant, seems archaic to me.  Sure there are some embezzelors and tax evaders behind bars and we can debate that… but I think the majority of the people in question are in there for drug offenses.  Now keep in mind that our country has more people in jail per capita than any other country in the world, and the majority of these people are there for these so called “non-violent” offenses.  And accordingly, we spend more money on keeping people in jail than any other country.  So maybe we should actually think this through instead of trying to scare people.

I think also that Peter must be telling us he wants to change the laws and reduce the sentencing for these “non-violent” people too.  And presumably, if some of these substances were made legal like alcohol, that would take the dealers out of the picture and all we’d have left is the users to worry about.  So I guess Brian Dubie is telling us we should all run home and lock our doors be there could be pot smokers roaming the streets!

Peter is on the correct side of this issue.  The robocalls are just trying to scare people into voting for Dubie, without any basis in reality.  There’s no reason to be scared of pot smokers.  For the most part, they are pacifists and a bit lazy.  Something to be scared of?  Nah.

Of course, no Governor can make a law all by himself.  If this process ever began, there would be a long debate on which offenders are “non-violent” and which ones need to remain behind bars.  And a vote in the Legislature would be a part of the process.  I trust the legislature would do its part to keep the violent people behind bars and give some of these lazy potheads their lives back.

So I call BS on the “Friends of Brian Dubie” for trying to instill fear in the minds of voters.  Remember it’s the VIOLENT criminals we have to fear, not the non-violent ones.

At EcoFest, Peter Shumlin spoke for a few minutes on the solar powered stage.  He tells how he was once asked, what is the most important issue facing Vermonters.  His answer may surprise you.