I've been out of town since Thursday, so the recent courtship of John Edwards by both Obama and Clinton as described in this evening's NY Times is pretty intriguing.

Open thread, anyone? 

Odum's great diary on race is no longer visible on the front page, so perhaps it's time to talk it up again. 

In today's NY Times, Frank Rich discusses how the Clinton camp is going down the road of overt racism pitting Hispanics against blacks, whites against blacks, and whatever tactic it might take to win the primary — even if it destroys the Democratic party in the process.

Rich begins  

…the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists.

…and I'm sure all of you see where I'm going (esp. since I had to make breakfast for the girls before finishing this diary!). 

As the Legislative session begins, a proposal to fix our structurally deficient bridges has come to the table. In a surprising twist of history, it is our Legislators taking the lead on this issue instead of the Agency of Transportation.

How Neal Lunderville never gave up his first job to the Governor below the fold.

For years folks at AOT and DOT have pointed out that their annual budget has been raided by the Governor's office in order to fund projects somewhere else in the administration. Not this year. Governor Douglas' former political advisor and recent political appointee as Secretary of AOT is more concerned with Vermont's bond rating and overall state budget than the safety of our roads and bridges. His plan, the “Road to Affordability”, eliminates a number of highway projects and defers a considerable amount of upgrades until the distant future when this work will be even more expensive.

Heckuva job, Lunderville.

On the other side of the coin, our State Legislature is moving Vermont forward with an inventive solution. Their plan is to let the State Treasurer decide how to arrange a comprehensive bond which will allow for the necessary upgrades to our bridges – many having not been replaced since the Flood of 1927.

There is more than irony in Lunderville's “Road to Affordability” nonsense. Lunderville has been quoted since January 21st discussing issues outside of the responsibility of his office on issues such as the overall state budget, the Governor's political views, and inferences to Vermonts AAA bond rating. This suggests that he is still wearing the hat of Douglas' political advisor instead of the Secretary of Transportation.

If a Vermont bridge collapses, Mr. Lunderville, what will have to say then?

Nate Freeman

I’m sure many of you just rec’d an email from Matt Dunne, explaining that he will not be running in 2008.  It was a very nice, thoughtful, articulate letter.  Matt is really good at communicating.

And it was the teaser that was most interesting.  

…for reasons that will become clear in the near future, I have decided not to run for office in 2008.

Hmmmm… What does that mean, Matt?

Speculations below the fold.

In his concluding remarks, Matt speaks very highly of Peter Galbraith, our assumed Democratic candidate for Governor.  Maybe it’s the sequence of the narrative that intrigues me the most about these mysterious “reasons that will become clear in the near future.”

I can be a jaded, cynical, snarky political slueth at times — often times dead wrong.  But I can’t help but hear a story beneath the story in Dunne’s letter.

For example, has he made an agreement to run in a coordinated race in 2010?

Is he being promoted to a service politics position in DC?

Are he and his wife having another child?

My first cynical reaction was the first — that a behind the door deal has been made between Dunne and a strong, centrist gubernatorial candidate in a strategic holdout to 2010, leaving Galbraith with some nice words and a thin branch to hang out on.  But maybe that’s not being fair.

I’m curious to hear what you all think.  

( – promoted by JulieWaters)

Dan Froomkin offers the latest storyline regarding 500 days of missing emails in the White House between 2003 and 2005  Spokesman Tony Fratto does an amzaing job of news bending in response to the question of the missing emails: 

Q: “So where are they?”

Fratto: “Where are what? . . . We have no reason to believe that there's any data missing at all — and we've certainly found no evidence of any data missing.”

Q: “So that would mean that if you were asked, you would be in a position to comply with a request to produce those documents?”

Fratto: “Yes, which documents?”

Full text on this subject below the fold. 

From WhiteHouse.gov: 

Q Tony, on the subject, could you address the missing White House emails and the law suit? It is a subject of reports this morning. Are there in fact the emails missing? What's the likelihood of their recovery versus the —

MR. FRATTO: I think our review of this, and you saw the court filing on this, and our declaration in response to the judge's questions — I think to the best of what all the analysis we've been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there's no evidence of that. There's no — we tried to reconstruct some of the work that went into a chart that was entered into court records and could not replicate that or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart. And from everything that we can tell, our analysis of our backup systems, we have no reason to believe that any email at all are missing.

Q So where are they?

MR. FRATTO: Where are what?

Q Where are part of —

MR. FRATTO: Which email? Look, no one will tell you categorically about any system — any system, whether it's your system at Bloomberg or our system here at the White House, past and present, categorically that data cannot be missing. All of our review of it and all of the our understanding of the way that the backup system works, it's a backup system that captures existing data, it captures things that are stored and archived. We have no reason to believe that there's any data missing at all — and we've certainly found no evidence of any data missing.

Q So that would mean that if you were asked, you would be in a position to comply with a request to produce those documents?

MR. FRATTO: Yes, which documents? I mean, if someone has a specific request for documents and they would like us to search for particular emails, of course we could search for emails — and we have. And we have been responsive to requests in the past.

Q And they have been produced? They do exist?

MR. FRATTO: We have produced emails upon request, either for our own internal review or sometimes in response to investigations that have taken place on the Hill. I mean, we have been able to go back and find email. The question is, have we been able to find a large mass of missing email? No, we have not located somewhere in the system the absence of something. We have not been able to note the absence of anything in our databases.*

Q You're saying they're there, you just haven't located them yet?

MR. FRATTO: No, I'm saying we have no evidence that shows that anything at all is missing. And you're saying, well, have you found the missing emails — and we say we have no evidence that anything is missing.

Q So you're saying that would include emails that were erased from the Republican National Committee system that was used by some White House officials?

MR. FRATTO: I can't speak to the RNC's system of archiving and storing email. All I can tell you is that the email on the White House computers, we have no reason to believe that any email or other data are missing.

Olivier.

Q Yes, I want to follow up on that, I've taken a real sky view of this particular story, but — so it was wrong to say a few months ago that there were possibly millions of emails missing?

MR. FRATTO: I think those charges came from outside the White House. I think that's the charge of one of the —

Q One of your colleagues addressed those from the podium and suggested that that was accurate — again, I'm taking —

MR. FRATTO: I'm not sure what was said on that. I can tell you today, though, that we have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any email at all are missing.

In 2007 a new campaign finance reform bill was passed by the House and Senate under the leadership of Peter Shumlin and Gaye Symington.  It was vetoed by the Governor but will return essentially unchanged again this year.  

The bill, S.164, appears to be yet another time consuming and questionable effort on the part of the Legislature in either defiance of the 2005 US Supreme Court decision in Randall v. Sorrell or ignorance of more than 35 years of legal precedence in Buckley v. Valeo.

 

For those who are not familiar with the story behind campaign finance reform over the last 10 years, here is a brief history.

In 1997 the Legislature passed Act 64, significantly lowering campaign contribution limits.  The sentiment behind the law was that so-called “large” contributions of $1000 influenced policy making here in Vermont.   However, the law cited neither examples nor evidence of this kind of corruption, but instead offered broad allegations and a controversial argument that contributions are equivalent to political corruption from outside influences.  

Candidate contribution limits were therefore summarily reduced.  For the position of State Representative, the decrease was 5-fold, plummeting from $1000 to $200 from any single source including political parties.  The law remained in effect until 2005 when the United States Supreme Court concluded that Act 64 was unconstitutional.  

Among several reasons listed, the Justices concluded the following:    

1.The State failed to demonstrate a corruption problem in Vermont; and

2.The contribution limits are too low to survive constitutional scrutiny in respect to either the First Amendment or more than three decades of legal precedent settled in Buckley v. Valeo.  (In Buckley a $1000 limit is upheld.)  

In response to the Supreme Court ruling in 2005 a new bill was introduced to the Senate in 2007.   This bill was brought forward despite both Attorney General Bill Sorrell and the Secretary of State's position that campaign finance law simply reverted back to Vermont's pre-1997 law.  

To make matters more interesting, the new bill offers little change to Act 64 regarding contribution limits, which have already been deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  The new bill, if enacted into law, will be just as susceptible to legal scrutiny as campaign finance reform efforts in 1997.  

For example, while the Supreme Court ruled that the contribution limits were unconstitutionally low, this new bill raised the bar so slightly that it once again can be challenged in court.  Section 2805 of Bill S.164 regarding contributions sets “single source” donations at $250 for candidates to the House, $500 for those seeking Senate, and $750 for statewide offices.  Since Act 64 was cited as unconstitutional due to exceptionally low limits, it appears that bill S.164 is nothing more than an attempt to challenge a Supreme Court decision by restating the same argument made in 1997 as well as last year.  

The first finding in S.164 suggests that so-called “large” campaign contributions of $1000 increases the risk and appearance that elected officials will not act in the best interests of all Vermont citizens.  However, defending Act 64 before Supreme Court justices in 2005, Attorney General Bill Sorrell acknowledged that this type of corruption has not been identified in Vermont.  The first finding in Bill S.164 therefore flies in the face of reality here in Vermont, contradicts the conclusions of six Supreme Court Justices and ignores three decades of precedence in the Buckley case.  

Justice Breyer concluded, among other things, that the rationale for preventing the appearance of corruption does not mean “the lower the limit the better.”  This is because,  

contribution limits that are too low also can harm the electoral process by preventing challengers from mounting effective campaigns against incumbent officeholders, thereby reducing democratic accountability.  

Justice Breyer continues,  

Were we to ignore that fact a statute that seeks to regulate campaign contributions could itself prove an obstacle to the very electoral fairness it seeks to promote.

In “Another Crack at Closing Loopholes” in the January 6th edition of the Times Argus/Rutland Herald, James Bopp, a leading expert in campaign finance law, considers the thinly revised bill as “an attempt by Vermont's General Assembly to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling.”  

"The Supreme Court struck down contribution limits in Vermont because they were too low," he said. "They are making the same arguments to justify those low limits that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected. Can't they read?"  "The limits proposed last year and vetoed by the governor were still too low," said Bopp, who called the bill "an effort to defy rather than comply with that 6-3 ruling."

Such a minimal change in the bill under the leadership of Peter Shumlin and Gaye Symington suggests that they are simply knee-jerking in response to Republican strategies to focus money on key races.  Of course, it has long been an American political tradition for the Majority party to strategically affect laws, rules and other electoral tools to their own benefit against the Minority.  But this is not the stated purpose of S.164, a bill clearly in violation of the US Constitution.  

No matter what the intent of this bill is, it remains as unconstitutional as Act 64 enacted in 1997 and overturned in 2005.  With so many other important issues at stake this session, it's unfortunate that the Vermont Legislature will once again attempt to push through a bill that will clearly create as much legal liability and expense as the ill-fated and unconstitutional Act 64.  

Nate Freeman Northfield, Vermont

( – promoted by odum)

As regular readers of GMD are aware, I am a solid, money-contributing supporter for the Bill Richardson campaign.  

Richardson’s star has yet to rise.  More below the fold.

My reasons why I like him, and a thought about Super Tuesday below the fold.

I consider his experience in foreign policy to be paramount to America’s success in recovering our lost international relations.

I consider his goal for a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 to be realistic.  I also look to his work in creating a green energy economy in New Mexico during his tenure as governor.

I consider his ability to revitalize our economy for middle class workers to be the most progressive and forward thinking of any candidate.

Richardson is 4-time Nobel Prize nominee.  He is a natural leader and offers a humanitarian views on social issues — including gay and lesbian rights, despite his misuse of the word “choice” in August.

The only negative responses offered on this blog are in respect to his gaffes, which have frankly been reported in a disproportional manner compared to the gaffes of the top tier candidates.

On the street in the Northeast people still don’t know a lot about Richardson.  

But in Southern and Western states, he is known quite well.

On Super Tuesday the diverse states of the South and West will vote.  Bill Richardson appeals to moderate independents as well as Democrats.  In the  West and South, we should wait and watch before we rule out the creative, economically inclined, and internationally savvy candidate in Bill Richardson.

Nate Freeman

Northfield, VT

In today's leading WaPo op-ed, 85 year-old George McGovern makes a belated but still compelling case for an impeachment process to begin saying:

“As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.” 

How do you like the apples? 

I myself didn't enter the impeachment debate until after 140 or so Vermonters rec'd a “don't bother us” backhand from S&S in Montpelier, so like McGovern, I can only claim to be belated interested in the subject myself.  But even at this late stagein the Bush Administration, with an outcome to the “Wait for 2008” strategy to complete it's course, there is a firm, compelling argument to be made that impeachment is a necessary process, not necessarily for a timely outcome, but to send a strong message both domestically and internationally that the American people and the American Congress uphold the rule of law here in the United States and in our international policies.  

And no matter what anyone thinkd about impeachment, it's still not too late to confirm the potential of legal integritiy as a mandatory process as versus a preconcieved judgement.

Nothing below the fold.

I may be late to the game on this one, but today noticed for the first time a Christmas themed “Pray for Our Troops” car ribbon.

What’s next, “Happy New Year” ribbons sporting both “2008” and “5 Years and Counting”?