When Congressman Welch was in our chilly county a couple of weeks ago, I went to see him hanging out at Food City (by report, Hannaford and Price Chopper refused to allow the Congressman table space in their entryways: wouldn’t be good for business). He was meetin’ and greetin’ the folks, mostly working class regulars (except for the tie-and-jacket types accompanying Rep. Welch and a few political junkies there to see him specifically). One or two asked him about the war. He asked a few others their opnion while I was there. Most could barely be bothered to shake his hand, they  just wanted to get the damned shopping done, leave ’em alone. A few seemed impressed that their congressman had come to see them on their turf.

So, in a quiet moment I asked him: Peter, why won’t you support impeaching the president?

And here’s what he said: “For me, it’s all about ending the war.”

But Peter, I came back at him, what’s going wrong in this country is way bigger than the war — it’s the Constitution! It’s surveillance and corruption! It’s reclaiming our entire country’s integrity!

“I hear you,” he said, “and I understand your passion. But for me, really, it’s all about ending the war.”

The fact is that Democrats need Republicans if they are going to have any hope to do that. And once impeachment comes out of the closet where the Democratic leadership has stashed it, Republicans retreat to hunker down behind their castle walls, pull up the drawbridge, lower the iron portcullis and man the battlements armed with hot pitch, boiling oil, and poisoned arrows.

I hate it, but that’s reality.

Unless and until the impeachment tidal wave rolls over Washington, of course, and  more and more folks of all political stripes (except the extreme right wingnuts who don’t really believe in democracy of any kind) begin to see that if they want to keep their seats, they’d better get with the program of the people.

I’m not holding my breath — not when the Democratic county chair, acting as the moderator of his town meeting, acts to prevent the impeachment bill from even being presented and discussed.

NanuqFC

My recent (as of last summer) ally in the Progressive camp here in Franklin County, Anaiis Salles, has posted her terrific idea over on The ProgBlog: Call in sick of war on Town Meeting Day, March 7.

She calls it “Sick with the Iraq Flu” (“Iraq: Free, Liberated, and United in deciding on its own destiny”). You’ll find the sickout idea about three-quarters of the way down after the jump on her entry.

The idea has beauty in simplicity: many of us take the day off to go to Town Meeting anyway. Why not use a half hour or so of that day to email or phone our Congressional delegation to support the actions they’ve taken (Leahy and Welch), or to give them a shove toward what they were elected for (Bernie, whose name we haven’t seen on significant anti-Iraq-escalation legislation, although he’s verbally rattled his budgetary sword).

Why not use another half hour or less to contact your state legislators in both Vermont House and Vermont Senate and their leadership: Gaye Symington and Peter Shumlin.

Anaiis gets another part just right:

Town Meeting Day is the perfect day to call or e-mail Nancy Pelosi and tell her impeachment isn’t off the table. Ms. Pelosi doesn’t decide that, the electorate does.

And she provides for consequences for inaction:

Having a “voice” and having power so you are heard and responded to are not the same. We’ve vented, we’ve whined, we’ve discussed the Iraq war issue and have reached a political impasse that’s heading toward an Iranian cliff. It’s time to use the power we, the electorate, have to move this country in a new direction while 60% of our nation’s profit still comes from our going to our jobs every day.

No real change in direction backed up by action rather than words? No work. No peace? No work. No sane federal energy policy? NO WORK.

Anaiis ran Bernie’s campaign in Franklin County and worked hard to be an ally of the Democratic Party there, after a shaky start where Bernie’s campaign began early sucking all the air out of the volunteer pool. She turned that potential for antagonism around. Word on the grapevine is that we were the only county where the Democrats and the Progressives played so nicely together in the sandbox.

She’s got a great idea. Let’s spread it around.

NanuqFC
 

What’s the most interesting (maybe) development in Campaign08? It might be the development of an Internet-based political party founded by three former inside-the-beltway activists taking a last run at running a campaign they can be proud of. They call themselves “Unity08,” and they identify as a third, “centrist” party, aiming to recapture the middle and give the increasingly extreme-base-oriented major parties a one-time kick in the pants toward governing the country for the greater good of all, rather than just major payoffs and other perks for their allies.

They’ve been in the blogosphere since their launch last month and in newspapers and magazines, most notably
The Atlantic Monthly‘s January-February issue , in an article by Joshua Green, a senior editor of The Atlantic. They plan to have their primary online: no smoke-filled back rooms, no picking off candidates after Iowa and NH because of money – or lack thereof.

“They” are Doug Bailey, a former operative for the late Gerald Ford; Jerry Rafshoon, who worked on electing Jimmy Carter, the Peanut President (and nuclear Navy veteran) and best ex-president we’ve probably ever had; and Hamilton Jordan, the other half of Carter’s 1976 election brain trust.

More after the jump.

Here’s the scenario:

To guarantee that it would [represent the center] , they decided that the ticket itself would be bipartisan: one Democrat and one Republican. And if independents with bipartisan tendencies were interested, they’d be welcome, too.

It would take advantage of the “new” transformative or disruptive (depending on your perspective) campaign medium of the Internet by operating primarily online.

That way everyone could join the party online and participate as a delegate, helping to build the party’s platform collectively rather than ceding that task to interest groups, as both major parties tend to do. [emphasis added]

Does this sound familiar to anyone (way to go, Odum! Vermont leads again!)?

In addition, they plan to hold an online convention just after the major party conventions, banking on two facts: the majority of voters will be dissatisfied with the party’s brokered choices; and disappointed candidates might consider a third-party run. But here’s the catch:

Once the balloting has winnowed the field to four, each of the remaining candidates will have to choose a running mate from the opposite party: Democrats must choose Republicans they can work with, and vice versa. Independents can choose someone from either party, but in the spirit of unity, they must also name a senior Cabinet officer from the remaining major party-for instance, a Democratic running mate and a Republican secretary of state.

Unity08 hopes to be qualified on ballots in 25 states by June this year. Another couple of points of interest:

Any registered voter can be a delegate, and can join without having to give up a prior political affiliation. At the same time, the new party’s leaders will begin the process of qualifying Unity08 on all fifty ballots for the 2008 presidential election.

And:

… an important intention of the new party will be to wrest control of the agenda from the candidates and turn it over to the delegates, who will collectively hash out an “American Agenda”-a party platform that Bailey says will be a list not of answers but of questions. … the media will seize on these same questions and put them to all candidates-thereby injecting the American Agenda into the national debate.

Will it work? Who knows? But it’s an interesting proposition.

There’s one choker about the Atlantic’s article, though, and it comes midway through the next-to-last paragraph:

Centrists in both parties, from Joe Lieberman to Chuck Hagel, are known to harbor presidential ambitions that have little chance of being fulfilled along current paths.

Lieberman a “centrist?!” As Jumpin Joe himself might say, “Oy vey!”

NanuqFC

Gaye Symington will be available to answer questions on Vermont Public Radio’s call-in program “Switchboard” on Tuesday, January 9. For sure, the R&R’s  (some of whom now have time for that having been defeated at the polls) — that’s Revolt and Repeal if you haven’t been paying attention to that particular flash in the pan — will be calling in to make sure she and the Democrats who now hold substantial majorities in both houses of the legislature look bad.

And, of course, they’ll continue to take credit for Do-nothing Douglas’s sound-bite appropriation of issues that were proposed by Democrats long before he ever belatedly latched onto the tailgate (like broadband access, global warming, alternative energy technology as a major area of potential job growth, just to name the latest ones).

7 p.m. via radio broadcast or online from their website: vpr.net.

NanuqFC, with a boost from L.W.

Every four years the legislature has the opportunity to begin the long process of amending the Vermont state constitution. This year, the big push is to get four-year terms for the governor and lieutenant governor. It’s being pushed by Sen. Bill Doyle (R- Washington County) and the Snelling Center for Government, which identifies itself as a “nonpartisan” 501c3 group.

All the living former governors are in favor, according to quotes from the Snelling Center. They say it would allow the governor to actually govern and work on more nuanced solutions to complex problems rather than looking for quick answers to tout during the too-soon-upcoming next election. Other proponents cite “strategic planning.”

All I can say is thank the powers that be for Frank Bryan. More after the jump.

The much honored curmudgeon of Vermont politics, supporter of town meeting, and UVM professor of political science is agin it, as am I, and his basic argument is this: in one swell foop, you cut democracy in half, giving Vermonters half as many opportunities to provide concrete feedback by their votes to their executive (and perhaps legislative) branches. Besides, he counters the “strategic planning” pleaders and the “government is too complex  now” complainers, Vermonters have a long history of giving governors a second term in office anyway.

The Snelling Center’s “nonpartisan approach” is to suggest that each office be considered as a separate amendment, let the chips fall where they may (Governor for four years would be one amendment; Lt. Gov would be another; Senate would be another amendment; House still another; constitutional officers would be another separate amendment). Sen. Jim Condos (D-chittenden) won’t go for four years for executive branch only; he wants the legislature included. Sen. Doyle suggests that including the legislature in the proposal would result in its defeat, should an amendment reach the voters (in 2010).

If you want the history, try the Secretary of State’s archives page.

If you want a personality reason to oppose an extension of executive branch terms (only) to four years, here’s one: John McClaughry (anyone notice there’s a “laugh” in the middle of that name?) loves the idea, along with the notion that the Attorney General, at least (and at best, all of the other statewide officers) should be appointed by the Governor, and that the Governor and Lt. Gov should be one slate (I guess he never got over the accession of Howard Dean when Richard Snelling died; perhaps he thought it was really too bad that Barbara Snelling didn’t get the same chance).

McClaughry, should anyone need reminding, is the president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a “think tank” headquartered in Concord, Vermont, and the recipient of at least $103,000 in grants since 1998, according to Media Transparency.org. $40k came from the Roe Foundation (North Carolina) and $48K from the Jaqueline Hume Foundation (San Francisco), with another $15K from the JM Foundation (Madison Ave., NYC). The Ethan Allen Institute bills itself as “nonpartisan,” but I’ve never heard its president support any idea that came from the Democrats. (He’s a dyed in the wool Republican: ran for governor as an R, worked for Ronnie Reagan’s administration, just for two examples.) And I’ve never heard anybody but its president and perhaps his wife Ann, the secretary-treasurer, ever say or write anything identified with the Ethan Allen Institute.

In typically dismissive and snide terms, he argues that legislators do not deserve the same deal as the executive branch because

they just want to be spared the expense, inconvenience and political danger of being held accountable by their voters every two years.

How is this not applicable to the executive branch?

I could manage a grudging acceptance of four-year terms only if the legislature got the same deal; otherwise it stacks the deck way over in the Gov’s column and leads to the inevitable influencing of local campaigns (like that doesn’t happen now) on the non-gubernatorial election years.

Can’t help but wonder what, if anything, the state Democratic Committee might do with this question. Notably both Madeline Kunin and Phil Hoff support four-year terms for the governor.

On the other hand, during the recount for State Auditor, I chatted with a Republican Party activist who agreed with me. (Uh-oh)

Bottom line: I’m with Frank Bryan, although I don’t often agree with him, and he wrote a book with John McClaughry. Don’t gut Vermont grass roots democracy!

NanuqFC

Did anyone else notice the list of staff members soon-to-be sworn-in Congressman Peter Welch (appointed to the powerful Ways and Means Committee) has hired to handle his Washington and Vermont offices?

One name of note is Jon Copans, the immediate past Executive Director of the Vermont Democratic Party, who is now one of the  Congressman’s “outreach specialists.”

More names to know if you want to get through to the Congressman after the jump.

Other names to conjure with: Bob Rogan (chief of staff), Andrew Savage (press secretary), Rachel Seelig (staff assistant & case worker), Molly McFaun (outreach specialist). McFaun’s dad is state Rep. Topper McFaun of Barre Town. Looks like all these folks are moving from the Green Mountains  to the Marble Mausoleums to become Washington office staff, augmented by some DC veterans, including a steal of Claire Benjamin from Sen. Leahy’s office, and Constance Dougherty, formerly of Sen. Bob Kerrey’s staff.

Two other names to know: Molly Gray (keeper of the appointment book), and Calvin Garner (press assistant).

Vermont office folks include Tricia Coates (director), a Vermonter by birth, residing in New York state when hired; Susan Elliot (outreach specialist); Mary Sprayregan of Charlotte (business liaison).

To someone who participated in the Franklin County Women 4 Welch organizing, it’s initially encouraging that there are plenty of women on his staff.

But the name that caught my notice was former Democratic E.D. Jon Copans. The job is likely up his alley: lots of detail work and follow through. Although I’m surprised he’s signed on for another such job, given the level of burnout he seemed to be experiencing through the election. Maybe the move to Washington is enough to restart his engine.

BTW, the Times Argus reports that Welch’s famous four-footed furry friend Pepper is staying with a friend in Vermont where he can run the fields.

NanuqFC

Listen, I don’t know whether it’s kosher to comment on another blog here, but, really, the PoliticsVT entry (Part II) on why Tarrant and Rainville failed is nothing more than barely literate blame shifting from their own bad strategy (or lack of any strategy). And these folks are somehow related to the Capital Press Bureau? Oh please, say it ain’t so!

Whoever posted this stuff is just a Republican Party apologist who can’t spell and doesn’t know how to use a spellchecker.

And the awful thing is that I heard something not as blatant, but bad enough on Vermont Public Radio on one of their end-of-year news roundups. Essentially they said that Rainville lost because it was a bad year for Republicans. Nothing about Welch’s name recognition from a previous statewide race. Nothing about superior strategy run by Carolyn Dwyer …

Sheesh.

NanuqFC

( – promoted by odum)

On Christmas Eve, I suppose “normal” people are wrapping presents or drinking eggnog with friends and family or something, but no, not me.

Since I just finished putting together some language for a legislator on death with dignity (now THERE’s a Christmas-y topic for ya), I’m now doing a diary on Iran for GMD.

So how did I get to Iran for Christmas (not that I celebrate much any more)? Two words: Reza Aslan.

I’d never heard of him, although he’s all over the media in the last two years: Daily Show, Colbert Report, Slate, the Nation, NPR, Craigblog, and more than 16 pages of Google listings. Where I found him was in an intense and sometimes self-indulgent magazine my partner gets, called The Sun.

My point, and I do have one, is that Aslan is the one person I’ve read who makes any sense IMNSH0 on what’s going on in Iraq and Iran and the U.S. More after the jump.

It likely helps that Aslan is an Iranian-born American, and that he’s got degrees in religion (Santa Clara University) and theological studies (Harvard) and attended the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is in perhaps a unique position because he gets both Christianity and Islam.

From that perspective, he says that what’s going on right now is not Islam against the West (“… a clash between Islam and the West would be a clash between a religion and and a geographical location, and that’s ridiculous”). It’s Islam against itself in a struggle he compares with the Protestant Reformation. It’s a struggle over who will control Islam: the institutions (the Ayatollahs and Imams) or the individual.

“[J]ihadist propagandists” are winning the “war on terror” “because they have the better marketing campaign.”

Their campaign works because bigoted idiots (my words, not his) in the U.S. have no understanding of Islam and insist on using language that implies or baldly states that Islam is a backward, violent religion inferior to Christianity.

For example, Reza Aslan says in The Sun interview,

the president [of the U.S,] lumped Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaeda together. These four entities have almost nothing in common. Hezbollah has issued death warrants against bin Laden. Hamas has issued fatwas condemning  him and the attacks of September 11. Both these groups want absolutely nothing to do with the global jihadist movement. The only thing they have in common, besides their use of terror as a tactic, is their Islamic identity, which the president has used to lump them together so that the American people can perceive them as a common enemy.

And, Aslan says in the part of the article you can’t get online,

The president of Iran [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] makes not a single foreign policy decision: not one. Televangelist Pat Robertson has more control over the U.S. Government than the president of Iran has over the Iranian government.

The clerics are in control, so the rhetoric that is apparently driving us toward war is primarily for domestic (Iranian) consumption, because the blacksmith’s son (Ahmadinejad) can’t keep the campaign promises he made to do away with corruption.

In The Nation article, which starts out as a paean to Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian woman lawyer who has fought for the rights of women under an oppressive regime, the spark that lit up a light bulb in my head was about the Iranian Revolution of 1979, about how it was a revolution for democracy, and the U.S. Hostages were taken because the U.S. had interfered and betrayed prior democratic experiments and revolutions. And then that revolution was hijacked by the clerics when Saddam invaded.

And, btw, Aslan is the author of the very well-reviewed No god But God, a history of Islam’s evolution with critiques and suggestions as to where it should go now.

I have waited so long for someone to look at this Iran/Iraq situation and say something that made sense and was not America-centered. Aslan has done it. I recommend checking him out.

NanuqFC

(Amazingly, it sounds like this race has FLIPPED to the D column – at least for the moment! Sounds an awful lot like we’re looking at Auditor Tom Salmon. – promoted by odum)

Observing the recount for the State Auditor’s race in Franklin County has been pretty interesting. And I’ve got 4 counties’ worth of very unofficial numbers.

[Caveat reminder as of Friday morning as noted in an email by one politically astute observer: “More than half the population of the state has yet to be recounted and to weigh in with their figures.  With one stroke of the pen this number could turn topsy turvey.  Additionally, after the counting, Judge Teachout will be reviewing challenged votes and other irregularities and concerns and making decisions about awarding votes.”]

Up here, someone counting ballots in Richford gave 36 Salmon votes to Jerry Levy. Thanks to the recount, Tom Salmon got them back. Richford tallied 886 ballots. Brock gained one vote there. Other than that, the gains and losses were by ones and twos, except for two towns that missed 4 Brock votes each and one other town that missed 8 Salmon votes.

The unofficial county-wide results show Brock gaining 15 votes and Salmon gaining 48 votes, for a net gain for Salmon of 33 votes.

Four other counties’ results were obtained via the grapevine. They show:

a strong trend toward Salmon. Lamoille provided Salmon with 57 more votes; Windsor is reported to have come up with 50 more Salmon votes; Windham (via third-hand report) added “30-something” to the total. That’s already more than the margin of Brock’s so-called victory.

People make mistakes, especially under pressure on a very long election day.

While the biggest mistake in our county came in a small town that marks and tallies its votes by hand, the machine-tabulated towns had changes, too. The five largest towns (Fairfax, Georgia, Swanton, St. Albans City, and St. Albans Town), which use tabulating machines, missed 8 Brock votes and 14 Salmon votes.

Overall in the county, Abbott lost 6 votes; Levy lost the aforementioned 36 in one town, but there were no changes for him anywhere else.

Worst idea: someone used white-out to change one entire ballot. We observers surmised that someone might have voted by early or absentee ballot and changed their mind — or some relative changed it for them. The ballot was considered “spoiled.”

Saw a few ballots where the voter followed the pre-election advice to foil corrupt machines by writing in all chosen candidates. Someone had a problem with the execution: that voter checked the box for the candidate and ALSO checked the write-in box and wrote in the same name. There was discussion as to whether that ballot should be considered spoiled (a double vote) or whether the voter’s intent was clear since the write-in and the candidate check box matched.

I was glad to see the process in action.

NanuqFC

( – promoted by odum)

If you check Seven Days (sevendaysvt.com) or the Advocate online (which cribs from Seven Days) this week, you know that Vermont’s venerable lesbigaytran newspaper, which just attained drinking age this year, is dead.

Or at least comatose and not expected to recover.

Disclosure: Yours truly was the paper’s longest-serving editor (four years, Feb. 2002-Feb. 2006).

It’s not like there are no gay issues left to cover: there will be a push for “equal marriage” in the legislature during this biennium; the gender identity bill (vetoed by the Gov. based on bogus “concerns”) needs revisiting. It’s not like faggots and dykes aren’t still threatened, especially away from what passes in Vermont for urban centers of “tolerance” if not embrace. It’s not like the dailies and weeklies are doing such a bang-up job covering our issues.

So why? Assimilation might be a small part of the answer after the jump. 

Unless you’re gay or used to like to hang out at gay bars, you may not know that there are no gay bars left in Vermont. There were three at one point: in Bellows Falls (under several names, including the Rainbow Cattle Company, most recently the Rainbow Lounge), Burlington (Pearls, more recently 135 Pearl), and for a couple of years in Rutland (Shooka Dooka’s).

And there’s part of the problem. Gay papers elsewhere depend heavily on advertising revenue from bars and liquor distributors for income. Vermont never had enough gay bars — or enough truly urban polities to support them — to make that happen.

And now there are none.

Is the demise of the bars attributable to the same factors as the demise of the newspaper commonly known as OITM?

Did they die from the erasure of a distinct identity because it was based on oppression and discrimination that have now faded away? Is assimilation the secret weapon of homophobes?

Okay, that last is over the top. But what happens when the gay folks who just want to be treated like everyone else get their wish? What happens when the necktie gays and lipstick lesbians successfully fade into the background mass of the middle class? When the gender of their significant others is as significant as the college from which they got their undergraduate degrees?

Assimilation.

And the marginalization of queers who don’t pass: The pierced and punk, the faery and fey, the flamboyant and fiery, the leather-clad and lascivious.

That, after all, was the primary argument for nondiscrimination laws and state recognition of partnerships, a kind of logical double-think: We’re the same as you, except for this one thing we can’t help. [There have been long and heated debates about the origin of same-gender sexual and affectional affiliation, whether nature, nurture, or choice, but I’m not going into that here.]

Assimilation is viewed as “healthy,” a consummation devoutly to be wished. It’s the melting-pot American dream. According to the American ethos, it’s what all immigrants should aspire to:  lose the accent, wear ‘American’ clothes, maybe even change the name to something that sounds less ‘foreign.’

Once upon a time there were ethnic newspapers and clubs; the last one I knew about was the German Club in Burlington. They were places of refuge where folks could gather and relax, speak the language, be reasonably assured that their body language and idioms would be understood without explanation, reconnect with where they came from and feel effortlessly at home.

As those folks aged and died, their children felt no need of such a gathering  place.  The clubs reinvented themselves or died out; the newspapers just died out (with the exception of Spanish-language papers).

Gay bars and OITM were like that too. Maybe they’ve gone away because a utopia of acceptance has arrived in Vermont six years after civil unions, and no gay man who misreads another man’s gestures will be beaten outside the bar. But I doubt it.

Assimilation didn’t save Germany’s Jews from annihilation. It won’t save queers, however well-disguised, from second-class citizenship enforced as a matter of law and policy. Log Cabin Republicans, gay Republican Reps, and high ranking gay staffers of Republican members of Congress have made zero difference in the Republican Party’s support for laws that make us permanently unequal.

I wish I could end this on a high note, with hope and optimism like that I wrote about during the campaign, but I’m a Democrat  in a county where at least half the Democratic legislative delegation would vote against equal marriage. I do have hope that my being here, being known, and attending occasional events with my partner will help them make the connection between their votes and my life. But without OITM, it doesn’t feel like being equal, it doesn’t feel like assimilation; it feels like having no voice to speak, no ears to hear.

This is by no means a complete discussion of reasons for OITM’s departure. It was a nonprofit, depending on declining grants and donations. It had a poorly paid staff for only the last 6 years of its existence — before that, it was all-volunteer. It suffered from the same economic effects as other print newspapers have. Its economic base is — was — Chittenden County, which is the biggest polity in Vermont and the most tolerant; when the money folks there stopped seeing a need, they dumped the rest of us overboard, too.

Perhaps the loss of OITM in print will catapult someone into the blogoshpere with a distinctly Vermont gay voice. That’s something to hope for, but it benefits only those who have broadband access, who probably have already been connecting online to other gay news sources. The rest of our brothers and sisters out in the boonies have lost their lifeline.

NanuqFC