Monday, July 2, 2007
That's Jay Morin, a City of Burlington recycle man [for the last two years], doing his duty, bright and early on this chilly summer morning here on the South End of the Queen City.
The fundamentals.
Remember, when it comes to plastic - only plastic bottles and containers are acceptable.
Said Whatshisname in a New York Times op-ed Sunday:
Our home — Earth — is in danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.
Without realizing the consequences of our actions, we have begun to put so much carbon dioxide into the thin shell of air surrounding our world that we have literally changed the heat balance between Earth and the Sun. If we don’t stop doing this pretty quickly, the average temperature will increase to levels humans have never known and put an end to the favorable climate balance on which our civilization depends.
In the last 150 years, in an accelerating frenzy, we have been removing increasing quantities of carbon from the ground — mainly in the form of coal and oil — and burning it in ways that dump 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours into the Earth’s atmosphere.
The concentrations of CO2 — having never risen above 300 parts per million for at least a million years — have been driven from 280 parts per million at the beginning of the coal boom to 383 parts per million this year.
As a direct result, many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several “tipping points” that could — within 10 years — make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization.
Oh, c'mon. We've got more important things to focus on - terror bombing threats and "terror alerts" in countries dominated by white people such as the United Kingdom. Cops and soldiers with automatic weapons at crowded airports is what U.S. TV "news" operations are dishing out. I've seen that burning SUV at the Glasgow airport more times than I can count. But haven't seen a single shot - not one - of the patriotic impeachment protestors at Kennebunkport.
Plus, the CNN Special Investigations Unit feature "Battlefield Breakdown" got bumped from its originally scheduled prime-time showings on both Saturday and Sunday nights. Hey, the incompetence of the Bush Administration in launching its dishonest Iraq War and sending unprepared, ill-trained and ill-equipped American troops into battle is absolutely criminal. I caught an airing at 2 p.m. Sunday afternoon. Not exactly a time for a big audience, eh?
Have an inquiry in to CNN to learn if "Battlefield Breakdown" will yet make it into prime-time as it damn well should!
Meanwhile:
J ust in the last few months, new studies have shown that the north polar ice cap — which helps the planet cool itself — is melting nearly three times faster than the most pessimistic computer models predicted. Unless we take action, summer ice could be completely gone in as little as 35 years. Similarly, at the other end of the planet, near the South Pole, scientists have found new evidence of snow melting in West Antarctica across an area as large as California.
This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue, one that affects the survival of human civilization. It is not a question of left versus right; it is a question of right versus wrong. Put simply, it is wrong to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours.
We — all of us — now face a universal threat. Though it is not from outside this world, it is nevertheless cosmic in scale.
Consider this tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground — having been deposited there by various forms of life over the last 600 million years — and most of the carbon on Venus is in the atmosphere.
As a result, while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. True, Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, but the fault is not in our star; Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun.
It’s the carbon dioxide.
Bummer.
Oh, yeah...Whatshisname is a Democrat named Al Gore. Got the most votes in the 2000 presidential race, but lost the electoral vote count. That means right-wing radio jocks can automatically discount everything Gore writes about global warming and Vermont's Republican Gov. Jim Douglas, who vetoed Vermont's global warming/climate change bill H. 520, won't even be "wasting" his precious ribbon-cutting time reading it.
It's a free country, right?
Hey, there's that burning SUV again, 12th time in the last hour!
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Four hard-working bachelor types were the only customers at Greer's on Dorset Street in South Burlington on Sunday morning - bright and early around 7 a.m.. Asked one of them to snap a picture of yours truly doing his duty, folding.
Mike, it turned out, is a regular early riser. He's been driving a garbage truck for nine years. The 50-year-old native-Californian came to Burlington 20 years ago. Yep, a Vermont woman he met out there, one he's no longer with.
Did kitchen work in a few area restaurants before the trash-hauling. Hard-working guy with a strict work ethic, as they say, and doesn't have a whole lot of respect for those who do not have jobs. In Mike's view, there's work out there and anyone who really wants a job can find one even if it means working in a fast-food restaurant.
Of course, he told me that he's paying $90-a-week out of his paycheck for his share of his health insurance premiums. Rather than complain about the cost, he's just glad to have coverage.
The notion that health care was a "right of citizenship" drew a confused look.
Yes, I recommended he see Sicko.
Meet the Press Host Tim Russert asked the former Chittenden County State’s Attorney why he wouldn’t accept Bush White House Counsel Fred Fielding's latest offer regarding the subpoenas issued for White House officials to testify before Chairman Patrick J. Leahy's Senate Judiciary Committee.
LEAHY: Mr. Fielding is a very competent and very clever lawyer. He spent time in the Nixon White House. He knows how to say these things. But the fact is this is what the offer was:
[Fielding] said we could have some members of the president’s staff meet with a limited number of members of Congress behind closed doors on their agenda with a guarantee that there would be no oath. There’d be no transcripts and nobody would know definitively what was said and we would have to agree never to issue a subpoena for a follow-up.
Well., I said, Mr. Fielding, I would be guilty of legislative malpractice if I accepted it. And nobody has accepted it. No Republican has said that’s a good idea, no Democrat has said it.
RUSSERT: How about if they went in the meeting, agreed to a transcript and agreed to go under oath. Would that be acceptable?
LEAHY: That would be a very good start. But what I want is to be able to do the follow-up if necessary. I’m not doing this as chairman just for myself. I want to make sure the Republicans on my committee and the Democrats on my committee have a chance to hear what is said. But more importantly, that the American people know what happened.
I’ve talked with Mr. Fielding several times, but they still say we have a 'take-it-or-leave-it' offer. And it’s not an offer if you have no way of telling anybody exactly what was said.
Let me tell you, this sort of thing has gone on at the White House. We told them that we understand some of their key members there were using the Republican National Committee email account and that they had a lot of emails about how we’re going to manipulate these prosecutors around the country .
They came back and said they’ve erased those. Sorry.
I said, no, no, you can’t erase emails. They’re in the server somewhere. One of the assistant White House press secretaries said, “What’s he talking about. Is he pretending to be an IT specialist?”
The fact, is now they’ve found them. Of course, they were there. And they have these [emails].
I said, OK, where are they?
"Well, we’re looking at them."
The White House hasn’t given us anything.
I’m not trying to play gotcha. In fact, I’ll give you an example of what I’m willing to do. The attorney general [Alberto Gonzalez] is coming to testify this month before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Now, the last time he came in, he said 60 or 70 times “I don’t remember or "I don’t know"or "I can’t answer.”
So what I’m proposing to do is that we send him a number of key questions from both the Democrats and the Republicans at least a week in advance . We’re giving him the questions! We’re not trying to play gotcha. Here are the questions so there can be no excuse.
RUSSERT: An open-book exam?
LEAHY: An open-book exam! [He} won’t be on "Comedy Central" the next night, saying “I don’t remember,” “I don’t remember," I don’t remember” with the little clock that went click, click, click.
RUSSERT: What if the White House does not respond to these subpoenas, invokes executive privilege?
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Sunday morning at 11 a.m. on WCAX-TV, Ch. 3, Windsor County's veteran State's Attorney Bobby Sand [right] occupies the guest chair on You Can Quote Me.
Even law enforcement types who don't agree with Sand the Prosecutor about taking a "harm-reduction," rather than "lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key" approach, to "illegal" drugs, privately admire his courage.
Hey, did you know that, "The United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners, incarcerating more than 2.3 million citizens in its prisons and jails, at a rate of one in every 136 U.S. residents—the highest rate of incarceration in the world?"
Did you realize that "55% of all federal and over 20% of all state prisoners are convicted of drug law violations, many serving mandatory minimum sentences for simple possession offenses."
Or how about the fact that "federal, state, and local costs of the war on drugs exceed $40 billion annually , yet drugs are still widely available in every community, drug use and demand have not decreased, and most drug prices have fallen while purity levels have increased dramatically?"
Yep. Get past the government propaganda and one is faced with the fact that the Ol' "War on Drugs" is about as effective as the Ol' "War on Terror."
The truth hurts.
And maybe you knew, but I honestly had no idea that "cities across the country have experienced a rise in violent crime and must prioritize scarce law enforcement resources, yet the nation’s police arrested a record 786,545 individuals on marijuana related charges in 2005—almost 90% for simple possession alone—far exceeding the total number of arrests for all violent crimes combined!"
Let's see, the current official estimated population of the State of Vermont - every man, woman and child - is 623,908.
That's 162,637 more pot arrests in America than there are human beings in the Green Mountain State! Sad but true. Great use of our police resources and tax dollars, eh?
My source?
The U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the above is from the resolution adopted at last week's 75th Annual Meeting of the USCM in Los Angeles. Check column-right under "Adopted Resolutions" for a complete copy. [Go to pages 47-50.] America's mayors have had it. They officially want to see "A New Bottom Line In Reducing the Harms of Substance Abuse."
Change is in the air, eh?
Tags: cannabis related , Web Only
Friday, June 29, 2007
Went to Montpelier for the Vermont premier of Michael Moore's Sickoat 9:30 this morning at the Savoy.
Yours truly and WPTZ-TV were theonly media to show up for the presser at the front door of the Savoy Theaterthat Dr. Deb Richter organized.
Powerful stuff. Mind-opening. Heart-breaking. It's about a whole lotmore than the visit to Cuba part that's received all the pre-openingU.S. mainstream-media hype. The visits to Canada, yes, Canada and Paris, France and London, Englandwill blow your all-American mind. They certainly did mine.
Closer to home, he refuses to see Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, still, so I'd be shocked if Vermont's Republican Gov. Jim Douglas,a governor who publicly supports opening up our state to everycherry-picking health insurance outfit in existence, went anywhere nearthis flick.
More later....
Much moore.
Just got home from Montpeculiar and checked the ol' email and learned that this weekend's premier of "Battlefield Breakdown" the CNN Special Investigations Unit Special Report yours truly highlighted in this week's "Inside Track" column in the print edition of Seven Days had been canceled.
The powerful one-hour investigative report was produced by Rice High School and UVM grad Laura Bernardini, with veteran CNN news guy John King and Jung Park and Doug Schantz who work the camera/sound angle.
The first email indicated the powers that be at CNN had pulled the program early this morning "due to breaking news regarding the foiled London terror plot."
You know, the green Mercedes packed with 60 litres of petrol, gas cylinders and nails, and discovered parked outside the Tiger Tiger night club in Haymarket last night? London police say hundreds of innocent people could have been killed.
Ah, yes, what a wonderful world it is.
Great leaders.
The news, I confess, bummed me out. Finally a major mainstream U.S. news network was going to tell it like it is on how this administration has treated its fighting men and women and they pull the plug at the last minute to fan the ol' 9/11-type War on Terror flames.
Hello?
Then about 2:45, "Freyne Land" got word that CNN had changed its mind - a little bit. The "Battlefield Breakdown" documentary will air this weekend after all!
Only it won't be in prime time as originally scheduled. Here are the new times:
Saturday 6:00AM – 7:00AM, 3:00PM and Sunday 6:00AM and 2:00PM.
Don't know about you, but I am an early riser these days.
***LEAHY UPDATE FRIDAY 6 P.M.***
"This is a further shift by the Bush administration into Nixonian stonewalling and more evidence of their disdain for our system of checks and balances," Leahy said.
"Nixonian stonewalling," eh?
Shall we say, the perfect word selection by Vermont's senior Sen. Patrick J. Leahy?
The Senate Judiciary Committee Leahy is chairman of has issued subpoenas to the White House for documents and testimony that will help to uncover the truth about the Bush firing of all those federal prosecutors. We still live in a democracy, right?
*UPDATE: Chairman Leahy will appear live Sunday morning on NBC's "Meet the Press" for a 15-minute solo segment regarding the subpoenas.
C'mon St. Patrick, comb your hair nice.
Closer to home, these folks were out exercising their democratic right of freedom of speech on North Avenue in Burlington last night. Their issue is global warming. And their target is Republican State Rep. Kurt Wright, whose district they were in. Ol' Kwik-Stop Kurt, along with all the other House Republicans, voted "no" on H. 520, the top priority of Democratic Senate leader Peter Shumlin, the big global-warming bill that passed and received a firm gubernatorial veto.
Lawmakers return on July 11 for a veto-override attempt. And it appears obvious to all now, including Shumlin, they simply do not have the two-thirds vote required to win.
That's prompted Shummy & Co. to offer a deal - the withdrawal from the legislation of its controversial funding source, the tax on power generation on Entergy's Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Vernon, Vermont.
"This is dead meat," suggested yours truly to the tiny band of environmental activists. "There’s no impeachment override. The Democrat leaders concede they don’t have the votes. It’s not about getting Kurt’s vote; they can’t even get enough Democrats!"
"That’s only half the point," replied Vermont Public Interest Research Group Field Associate Sean Sarah. "The other half of the point is action and letting people know, and letting legislators know, it’s not just about this one vote, it’s about the issue. And even if we lose this vote, the issue’s still around. The amount of play it’s gotten in the media tells us it’s still going to be around whether we win or lose and that’s equally important."
By the way, "Freyne Land" was the only media that dropped by Thursday's protest.
"I’m sure there’s a chance we’re going to lose." said the VPIRG organizer. "We’re still going to fight and even if we lose, we still have the issue. That’s the most important thing, continuing the dialog afterward."
Becca McHale, a sign-holding Burlington graphic designer, said she liked Gov. Douglas "a lot more before this."
"You didn't vote for him, did you?" I asked.
"No, I didn't, actually, but I didn't think he was this bad!"
McHale said she thought that, "It was the Yankee tax that really did 'em in."
Carrie Shamel, a Burlington social worker, said she was protesting the governor of Vermont's veto of H. 520 during Thursday's dinner hour because she was "saving the planet for my great-great grandchildren."
And the youngest of the tiny band, 17-year-old Sarah Pennucci of South Burlington had biked into the Queen City [no helmet!] for the protest.
"It’s my future that this is concerning," she told me with determination. "Most of the people making the laws will be dead before any of this has any effect, but I have to deal with it and I think I should be part of trying to solve it."
Sarah got wind of the event from a friend at the recently started Vermont Youth Activism Network.
"I think our governor really needs to get a backbone already and stop cow-towing kowtowing [thanks Kitchen Talker], to businesses," added Sean Zigmund, a "computer geek" by trade. "This is not about money anymore. This is really about our future. It's up to the younger generation to step up and say this is bullshit."
Why the rather small turnout Thursday evening on North Avenue? There were more protest signs than hands to hold them.
"Honestly," said Zigmund, "I think it’s because we live in a society and a countrywhere we’re complacent because of the fact that we’re spoon fedeveything through the media and we just buy whatever we’re told.
"And we’re content with what we have and we’re very comfortable. Ifpeople weren’t comfortable you’d know they’d be out in the streetsscreaming about it."
He's got a point, eh?
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Hey, remember winter?
Cool down. It'll return. Like history, winter has a way of repeating itself.
You know, the longer I live, the more I realize the glaring flaw in this little type of primate that I am - the inability to overcome the inability to live under primate leadership that tells the truth and is committed to making peace, not war, its top priority.
And history provides endless lessons, doesn't it?
I had a bunch of Vermont political balls in the air inside the "Freyne Brain" this morning, but then Ol' Garrison Keillor's magnificent Minnesota mind absolutely blew me away with his Writer's Almanac on VPR.
World War I - we all learned about it in school, right?
Today is both the anniversary of the event that started World War I and the day that the treaty was signed that officially brought the war to a close.
The event that started the war was the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Bosnian revolutionary on this day in 1914 in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo.
One month after the assassination, Austria used the event as an excuse to declare war on Serbia, even though the nation of Serbia had nothing to do with the assassination. Germany chose to back Austria in its attack. Russia chose to defend Serbia. France entered the war against Germany. And when Germany invaded Belgium, Great Britain got involved as well, having pledged to defend Belgium from any invaders. That series of alliances led to the largest war ever conducted in history at that point. About ten million people died in the next four years of fighting.
The enormous bloodbath we call "World War I" [first of dozens?] officially ended on this June day in 1919 with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
It redrew the maps of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Four fallen empires [the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Tsarist Russia], were dissolved and their global territory redrawn.
It was done in private by three men: Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Georges Clemenceau of France, and David Lloyd George of Great Britain. Among the countries created by the Treaty of Versailles was Yugoslavia, which collapsed into civil war in the 1990s, and a country every American has now heard of - Iraq.
Just about every major European or Middle Eastern conflict in the last few decades can be traced back to the decisions made in 1919. One of the people paying close attention to the conference was a young Southeast Asian kitchen assistant at the local Ritz Hotel named Ho Chi Minh. During the conference, he submitted a petition appealing for the independence of his home country, Vietnam. But the petition was ignored. So even the Vietnam War can be traced back to the Treaty of Versailles.
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau would later say, "It is much easier to make war than peace."
Thanks, Garrison.
Now fast-forward to the present day and listen to Major General Rick Lynch explain what his U.S. fighting men and women have been doing over the last 12 days, claiming "control" of all of 6 kilometers of ground along the Tigris River on the south side of Baghdad, Iraq.
The straight-talking professional soldier compared his troops task to "playing three-dimensional chess in the dark."
Hear General Lynch for yourself here.
Bottom line: Lynch and his fighting men and women deserve better leaders in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Just like the soldiers of my generation did when they told us if we didn't stop the Communists in Vietnam they'd be in California next!
Instead, we've got Russian hockey players from the Land of Lenin in the NHL and the governor of Vermont, a Republican, just returned from a trade mission to Red China.
You tell me.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
The thermometer hit 96 degrees again in Beautiful Burlington, Vermont, but the humidity was significantly higher than yesterday and that kept a lot of the outdoor tables empty this noon, downtown on The Church Street Marketplace.
Air-conditioning was quite the "hot" commodity today, eh?
There were exceptions.
Recognize these two dudes at Ken's Pizza?
You'd recognize their voices...if you had been listening to Burlington radio through the 1980s and 90s.
That's Louie Manno of "Manno & Condon" fame on WQCR-FM and WKDR-AM on the left [Jim Condon has ended up representing Colchester in the Vermont Legislature.]
On the right, the one and only Arty Lavigne who year-after-year made 'The Wizard" aka WIZN-FM, rock!
Yours truly was en route to a lunch date at Sweetwaters with an old Vermont reporter-type - Diane Derby. "Derbs" is quite familiar to Vermont news junkies and was U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords' last press secretary. Ate in the air-conditioned interior on the College Street side and got to watch all my "pals" from the Freeps go out for their lunch breaks.
The conversation was so good I completely forgot I was packing the little camera.
Realized that when I was sitting on the top block an hour later and this "tourist-type" walked by.
Recognize him?
Let's just say you would if he had the black robe on over the shorts and Hawaiian shirt and you were in the courtroom on the Fifth Floor of the Federal Building during one of the many sessions he presides over.
Looks in pretty good shape, doesn't he?
Nice shirt.
Said he was coming back from his lunch break.
Given the decisions of the Roberts Court this term, I say, when it comes to the First Amendment: Use it, or lose it!
Vermont was the first state to ban slavery, the first state to ban roadside billboards and the first state to recognize the loving relationships of same-sex couples.
And after tomorrow, Thursday, June 28, 2007, it will be the ONE and ONLY state in the United States of America that the most incompetent and dishonest president in our history - George "WMD" Bush - has not visited.
Until this week, there have been two states on the Bush no-go list. The Green Mountain State and Rhode Island have jointly shared the honor and distinction of not having had to "show the flag" for Bush II.
His daddy, President George Herbert Walker Bush visited all 50 states, including Vermont, during his one term in the White House. And his successor, Democrat William Jefferson Clinton did make it to all 50, too, hitting Nebraska in his final month in office.
Word's out this week that the current President Bush plans to speakThursday at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. His topic will be the global fightagainst terrorism [something he's a real authority on, eh?]
The Republican president is making the trip to theheavily Democratic Ocean State before heading north for a vacation atthe seaside estate of his father, former President George H.W. Bush, inKennebunkport, Maine, said a Bush spokesman.
You know what that means, don't you?
After Thursday, we're No. 1.
Hip, hip, hooray!!!
You'd think Republican Gov. Jim Douglas' angry veto of H. 520, the Democrats/tree-huggers global-warming bill that ticks off Corporate Vermont so much from Entergy to the oil dealers, would soften Bush II up a little, wouldn't you?
C'mon Jimbo, use your Republican Party clout!