Blogging Vermont Style is designed to entertain, inform and engage readers with a variety of topics ranging from world politics and green tech to the truly absurd crap that begs to be shared...
The Douglas Administration will permanently close three interstate rest areas that were temporarily closed earlier this month.
The facilities in Highgate and Hartford and the southbound rest area in Sharon will either be torn down or sold. We should emphasize it's the southbound Sharon rest area-- not the northbound which is a memorial to Vietnam Vets.
The Randolph rest area will close later this month but will re-open next year. And in July the state plans to reduce the hours of operation at the state's 17 other rest areas.
This plan is expected to save the state $1.5 million a year."
Here we go with another round of Rest Area roulette. Whenever the budget gets tight the first thing the politicians go to cut are the rest areas. When times get better they are then the first ones to lament the disadvantage we are put at when we don't have rest areas to direct travellers to local attractions. There seems to be no consistentcy on this issue and it appears to transcend party lines. When you think it couldn't get any more bizarre, we spend enough on the Veterans Rest Area to renovate the rest of the existing rest areas.
I would like to put forth the notion that the state has had enough chances to screw this simple task up. We live in a state with a tourism driven economy and we can't seem to all get on the same page to point travellers in the right direction. When you visit other states, it's easy to see how we've missed the boat. I think that we could partner with the private sector or simply put it out to bid and get far better results at a better cost to the businesses and taxpayers of the state. Closing more rest areas simply isn't a good return on our already stretched dollar.
I started reading this Op Ed piece from the NYT and I'm thinking, "Wow this is someone who seems to have put a lot of thought into this subject and they've really developed a neutral position". What a well written piece it is...imagine my surprise when I got to the end of the article and I realized that it was penned by Muammar Qaddafi the President of Libya!
The last time we really heard from him, we were bombing him into the stone age for supporting terrorism around the world. I wouldn't have pictured him as a person who would take a rational and neutral stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'm sure he has an angle here or a dog in this fight, but what he is saying appears to be one of the more sensible solutions I've heard...ever!
No longer how long you live, something will always happen that will leave you scratching your head, asking WTF?
China's auto makers have set their sights on becoming the next exporting powerhouse on the world's roads and they have made emerging markets, from Latin America to Russia, their proving ground. They have reason to be satisfied so far: China sold 612,700 cars abroad last year, up nearly 80 percent, mostly in the developing world, according to the commerce ministry.
Safety concerns have dogged Chinese cars in their attempts to break into the United States and Europe. The latest in a string of crash test failures came last year with the Brilliance BS6, billed as a premium sedan at a budget price. "An ice cube stands a better chance of survival in the Sahara than the driver of a BS6 does in a severe front or side impact", Car and Driver magazine said on reviewing the test results.
I'm no big anti-everybody protectionist or anything, but don't we still have a huge trade deficit with these jokers? I'm pretty sure we don't need them trying to cut in on our already sagging auto market and flodding us with crappy, cheap and unsafe vehicles. Even if they built the nicest cars on the road, I don't think they should be allowed to sell cars in this country until China seriously addresses the trade imbalance they have benefitted from for years now. They could also use this issue to highlight China's poor human rights record. I hope some politician has the balls to step up and finaly tell the Chinese, No!
The Russians have shot down a Georgian unmanned recon drone that was flying in Georgian airspace. The Georgians, who are understandably mad, have offered this video as proof. This isn't the first time a MIG has shot down a drone aircraft. In 2002, an Iraqi MIG shot down one of our Predators.
MSNBC's First Read looks at Hillary Clinton's records and news coverage of the release of these records. Clinton's records do not provide many specifics, including one "private meeting" after another without mention of who the meetings were with.
I was a Bill Clinton supporter for most of the 90's. Now in hindsight (yes, I know it's 20/20), I realize that most of that support was due to the fact that I despised the Republicans and their sleazy Congressional tactics. The Clintons are probably equally painted with that same brush. If you look back at Whitewater, Monicagate etc.....you suddenly recall all the vague answers and semantic replies that would leave you to read between the lines. The problem is that under closer scrutiny, one began to realize that they were lying through their teeth. The only upside was that the Republicans were so hypocritical you felt like you should sympathize with the Clintons. The constant barrage of attacks against them left a lot of the country feeling sorry for Hillary.We are now in a much different place as a Nation and we simply cannot tolerate the lack of transparency and the outright exaggeration of accomplishments. Having weathered constant battering by her political opponents, simply doesn't translate into any kind of tangible experience. You can be sure that those same opponents are salivating at the chance to do it again. The Republicans smell blood in the water and are working themselves into a frenzy in anticipation that she will win the general election. It's no wonder they are encouraging Republicans to vote for her in the primaries.All these "private meetings" and other vague descriptions in her schedules, don't give us any hope that any thing has changed. I'm an independent, and I'm a little unsold on the experience of Obama as well. On the plus side, he hasn't been entrenched in Washington as long as Hillary or McCain. It would appear that once again we are going to end up having to vote for the lesser of two evils. I'm beginning to think that a McCain/Lieberman ticket might not be too bad, and I don't think we should be too quick to dismiss Obama's ability to be an agent of change. The one thing I can be sure of is that we don't need 4 more years of the Clinton BS machine.
If you want to understand it, listen in to ExxonMobil's presentation to analysts in New York City in early March. Halfway through the three-hour meeting, Exxon management flashed a chart that showed the company's worldwide oil production staying flat through 2012.
Ponder that for a minute. Exxon is the largest publicly traded company in the energy business. In fact, it's the most profitable company in the history of capitalism, earning a record $40.6 billion last year on sales of $404 billion. Yet even with crude oil prices near all-time highs, Exxon isn't planning on producing any more oil four years from now than it did last year.
What if Steve Jobs said Apple wasn't going to sell any more iPhones than it did in 2007? What if Howard Schultz said latte production at Starbucks would stagnate, at least until the next U.S. president embarked on his or her re-election campaign? Shares of both companies would plummet.
This kind of crap has been going on for a long time now. Corporate America has been playing this game for years. It's all about the bottom line, with no real concern for the effect it has on the rest of the economy. Big oil did the same thing in the 1970's oil crisis. Everyone cried that they would never let this kind of outrage ever happen again. Then we elected Bush and all his oil cronies to lead our country. Everyone knew who they were voting for the first term, and then they went and did it again. Perhaps, but not likely, we will learn our lesson from all this.
It would be easy to think that this kind of corporate plundering is only happening in the realm of big oil companies, but the fact is this kind of profiteering is happening in other sectors as well. This type of activity is all too apparent in the financial sector as well. Banks, mortgage companies and Wall Street all knew the risks of shady lending practices should have outweighed the lure of huge profits, but when they saw the dollar signs, they ignored the fact that this behavior would decimate our economy and took the easy money. Now they want the government to bail them out. It makes one yearn for the much simpler days of Enron and Worldcom.
It's not easy to not see the writing on the wall here. As the economy tanks, and energy demands decline, soon big oil will be lobbying Congress to give them tax breaks. They'll cry about Opec and countries like Venezuela flooding the market with cheap oil, coupled with the high costs of producing alternative fuels, as the reason for their shrinking bottom line. When in reality, the bottom line was artificialy inflated (by them) in the first place. If this sounds familiar, it's because it is a very similar equation to the one that has led us to the current housing/mortgage crisis.
The Change Congress project's first mission is to diminish the influence of money in the legislative body by influencing the outcome of the 2008 election campaigns of 67 members of congress which are up for grabs. As the Change Congress project founder Larry Lessig noted in the project's launch Thursday afternoon, there haven't been so many seats open up for challenge in more than a decade.
"The problem we face is ... the problem of crony capitalism using money to capture government," he said on Monday during the launch of his project in Washington, DC. "The challenge is whether in fact we can change this. The political experts tell you that it can't be done, that process always win over substance."
The professor wants legislators to promise to do four things which he says will reduce the influence of money on policymaking: To promise not to accept money from lobbyists and political action committees; support public financing of elections; commit to passing legislation to permanently ban the funneling of money to their districts' projects of questionable worth; and to commit to "compel transparency in the functioning of congress." The project will rely on engaged voters to record and map responses by candidates who are running for open seats. The idea is to make what seems like an abstract idea visually tangible through a Google mash-up.
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This is the type of "outside the box" thinking we need in this country to loosen the grip of powerful lobbying groups in Washington D.C. It's true that the internet has made it possible to accomodate many voices on multiple issues. The next question will be how to harness that power in a meaningful way. In the past two election cycles we have seen candidates on both sides of the aisle tap into that collective power base with suprisingly good results. This new found grassroots movement has been gaining steam in recent years and looks to continue that trend in the future. Candidates like Ross Perot, Howard Dean, Ron Paul and Barak Obama have proven that this is a viable option for voters who feel their voices simply put, are never heard above the din of the big money lobbying machines.
With any luck, the Change Congress will take hold and affect a change on both sides of the aisle. If nothing else, if successful, it will give us an effective yardstick to determine which candidates are truly commited to real change in Washington.
This video makes it very easy to understand the debate about net neutrality. It explains why everyone who uses the internet should be outraged at the government for not standing up to corporate greed. It also gives us great insight into the reason why the ISP's have been so slow to provide reasonable levels of service to rural customers. I would strongly recommend that everyone who has a voice should use it to contact their Congressional Representatives and demand that they stand up to corporate greed and keep the internet a beacon of free speech that is easily accessible to everyone. I would also encourage everyone to share this video with all of the people in their contact lists. If people sceam loud enough, with one voice, perhaps we can drown out the powerful Washington lobbyists who would like to gain control of the internet and impede on our freedom to communicate. It wouldn't be the first time they've tried....
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Comcast has confessed to slowing down certain peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic, but is it being clear enough about what it's doing? That's perhaps the key question that emerged by the end of a lengthy public forum convened by the Federal Communications Commission on Monday here at Harvard Law School. While none of the FCC commissioners was willing to solidify an answer to that just yet, two MIT computer scientists on an afternoon panel accused the cable company of behaving badly on multiple levels.
As most readers of this blog know by now, I am in full support of net neutrality. While one has to understand the concept of the need to "manage" network traffic, it is incredibly naive to think even for a second that how to do this should be left to the sole discretion of the ISP's. The internet has flourished thus far as a communication medium that is unfettered by government interference. The ISP's were exstatic that they now had a whole new revenue stream to tap into and they gladly made the investment necessary to profit greatly from it.
With the advent of VOIP, video, bit torrent etc..., the internet has outgrown it's infancy stage and has reached the point of being a young adolesent. The ISP's should have seen this coming when the net was in its toddler stage, but they chose to favor immediate profits over long term viability. They've now come to a point where the existing infrastructure can't keep up with the demand needed for today's services. The ISP's seem to want to punish the consumer for their bad business choices. This stone age mentality seems to mirror the strategy of one of my other "favorite" subjects, the RIAA. Businesses that are unwilling to change, because they refuse to make necessary investments, should not be coddled by the government or further supported by the public.
It would seem that some highly suspect documents have surfaced from the Dallas DA's office that suggest JFK's assasination was ordered by the Mafia. The current DA has decided to reveal these documents to the public to maintain the appearance of transparency in his office....or he just wants some headlines and publicity.
Once again, RIAA President Cary Sherman shows us how scary his organization really can be. He now lends his support to filters installed on our PC's and cable/dsl modems to detect copyright infringement. Look how quickly they are trying to backpedal from this ridiculous position already.
These folks are bound and determined to alienate every potential consumer of their crappy products that they can. I hope that when the time comes to look back on this whole debate, after he has single-handedly burnt the recording industry to the ground, people will realize what a fucking idiot this guy is. Tell me who the hell would want any company or government monitoring what you do in the privacy of your own home? What's next, the porno industry making your monitor a two way screen so they could see who's whacking off to illegally downloaded porn? Would anyone accept a device installed in your car that would alert the police when you've broken the speed limit? The big brother implications here are really scary. As Mr. Bean would say, people should "be afraid, very afraid".
If the world doesn't wake up to the corporations and governments infringing on our rights to privacy and presumed innocence we will all be living in a place far worse than George Orwell could ever have imagined. If you really want a glimpse of where we are headed and what a slippery slope we are on, I suggest reading the book Farenheight 451.
Below you will see an edited version of a video taken at a recent conference where Cary Sherman is on the panel. The video was edited from the full hour and a half taken at the conference down to 6 minutes to point out some of the highlights of the draconian ideas the RIAA ass monkeys support. If you are interested in seeing it in it's entirety, I would certainly recommend you do so.
If we all educate ourselves as to what we are up against, perhaps enough people will scream as loudly as possible so that the morons in Washington, and politicians around the world, will stop listening to the intense lobbying efforts these jokers are making. They are completely within their rights to distribute and protect their copyrights as they see fit. Just as we are well within our rights to not buy their junk. But, if they are able to pursuede lawmakers into passing legislation that allows them to monitor us 24/7, it sets a very dangerous precedent. Once something is written into law, it is difficult or impossible to change. What the RIAA is now proposing is a right to monitor activities in our home. The police or FBI aren't even granted such a right. Why should a corporation be granted such access? I particularly don't buy Sherman's assertion that this all could be done "anonomously". How long would it be before the RIAA folks persuade lawmakers to give them the right to have access to this "anonomous" information in order to bring more lawsuits? I also found it amusing how quickly the woman at the end of the forum was cut off when she tried to point out that Sherman never said they wouldn't sue people for ripping legally purchased CD's to their mp3 player...
Again, I can't urge you enough to contact your representatives and demand that they not cave in to pressure from these groups. Keep in mind that most of our folks in Washington are too old to be "net savy", so they listen with great interest to lobbyists who represent these media dinosaurs. The problem is that they don't really understand the technology or the dangers of its misuse. If you doubt this, all you need to do is revisit the Ted Stevens "the internet is a series of tubes" speech. Lawmakers may not understand the "internets", but the two things they do understand is the power of money (from these lobbying organizations) and the power of votes (from the likes of you and me). This is where the battle will ultimately lie. Remember, the politicians don't bother to read my blog, or the millions of others like it, but they do read polls and they do count votes!
In a story reminiscent of Watergate, a new report shows that emails are missing from the Vice-President's office. The emails in question relate to the Valerie Plame CIA outing case. In total there are 16 days where email correspondence from Cheney's office are "missing" despite an order from Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to preserve all materials that may relate to the Plame case. The first day of email missing is in fact the day after Cheney learned of the DOJ investigation.
The White House said in a court filing last week that backup tapes, which contained archived copies of the e-mails, were recycled as part of a policy the White House had in place until October 2003. Ironically, Cheney's office is missing emails from the very day President Bush told reporters he'd "take care of" whatever staff member had actually leaked the CIA agent's name.
"If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush said Sept. 30, 2003. "And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of." As you may recall, Scooter Libby was convicted of obstruction charges and lying to investigators.
All in all, some 473 days of emails are missing from various Administration departments, according to a House Democrat who saw a White House presentation on the files.
Originally, I was eager to dismiss the folks in Brattleboro, VT who wanted to have Bush and Cheney arrested if they stood foot in their town as "wacko fringies". But, as this story takes on more Watergate-esque proportions, one has to take pause and consider whether or not this cover-up involves the entire senior White House staff including Cheney and Bush. I mean come on, the "oops I erased the tapes by accident" didn't work for Nixon. What makes the White House think were going to believe the same bullshit story some 35 years later? The severity of the Plame case's ramifications are questionable, but the extent of the cover-up seems to be growing more legs everyday.
If Clinton gets brought up on impeachment charges for getting a hummer in the White House, surely this cover-up warrants a much closer look and yes...perhaps impeachment.
I've been looking to gain insight into the candidates on both sides of the aisle. I started with Barak Obama because he seemed to the most compelling candidate for real change. He also seems to be gaining Howard Dean-like momentum with the younger age groups and grass roots internet types. Unlike Dean, Obama seems to be more well accepted by Democrats as a whole. Even many hard-line party old timers will concede that Obama is a "real" and viable candidate. Many of them will hold off a whole scale endorsement until they see what he can do in the primaries.
Obama has not only succeeded in reaching the well-entrenched folks in his own party, but he also has proven his ability to reach out "accross the aisle" in a way that siphons some moderate Republicans over to his side. This fact was yet again demonstrated in Iowa where he beat Hillary by getting the young vote and the crossover voted. It's these two categories that put him over the top.
The real question now is, "Can Barak Obama Sustain the Momentum?". Obviously time will tell. As we wind through the political season and approach the Vermont Primaries, this blogger (and many others) will be watching them all to see who can close the gap that has been widening between us, fueled by stupid crap like Monicagate and The Contract with America.
I hope that this election cycle brings us a closing of the chasm that has divided us for so long....
RIAA lawyer states in legal brief that copying songs from CDs to computer for personal use is just as illegal as posting them online.You, too, could be sued for thousands of dollars by the major record companies — even if you've never once illegally downloaded music.That's because at least one lawyer for the Recording Industry Association of America, the Big Four record companies' lobbying arm and primary legal weapon, considers the copying of songs from your own CDs to your own computer, for your own personal use, to be just as illegal as posting them online for all to share, according to a federal lawsuit filed in Arizona.
Here's my beef with this whole RIAA crap......If I buy a CD from the Sony/BMG Record Club and pop it into the Sony manufactured CD drive of my Sony Vaio laptop, I might even make a duplicate copy onto some Sony made CD-Rs for good measure, I can't see how the RIAA (representing Sony)could then sue me.....according to them and the courts, merely "enabling" copyright violation is in itself a violation. Why hasn't anyone caught on to this concept? I would like to see an artist sue Sony and the RIAA for "enabling" copyright violations and for not protecting them from said violations.I would go one step further and say that Sony was in fact tantamount in the consortium of companies that developed digital file standards and mp3's themselves. Thus Sony is one example of a copyright violation enabler...Stop and think of how many violations Sony alone has enabled through software and hardware as well as blank media. You could apply this theory backwards into the Eighties when mix tapes were the rage. Who made the best blank tapes and tape recorders....Sony! Can you say Walkman? If you apply the same amounts that Jammie Thomas was slapped with...you get the picture. Bye Bye Sony.....
A small university legal clinic in Maine is about to cause a revolution in the P2P filesharing war launched by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG.
“In what’s probably a world’s first, not lawyers, but student attorneys at the University of Maine School of Law’s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic have themselves taken up the fight on behalf of fellow students.
This a great idea that may well thwart the draconian tactics of the RIAA folks. It would be great to see similar programs take root in other states as well. Like Vermont, many states have a multitude of programs with young, eager, net-savy law students looking to get their feet wet in real world cases. A program like this would tap into the youthful energy of a generation of kids who have grown up on the web. I would venture a bet that more kids have participated in file sharing than have smoked marijuana. This generation views the web as theirs, and they will be loathe to let outsiders ruin the free wheeling nature of the net as we now know it.
Of course in the end, the reality is that this rush to claim this fight as theirs, will end in a resolution somewhat short of what they might envision. But hey...that's all part of growing up.....
"Vermont town seeks Bush, Cheney arrests" By Dave Gram / Associated Press
MONTPELIER, Vt. - President Bush may soon have a new reason to avoid left-leaning Vermont: In one town, activists want him subject to arrest for war crimes. A group in Brattleboro is petitioning to put an item on a town meeting agenda in March that would make Bush and Vice President Cheney subject to arrest and indictment if they visit the southeastern Vermont community."
While I'm generally suspect of anything I read on Michael Moore's website, I had also heard this on the local news as well. Once I was able to contain my gleeful giggling, I found myself amused, yet a bit disturbed. Then I realized that I was more pissed off that Bush has never been here in 8 years than I was about the concept of this ballot initiative.
Ok, I get why he isn't chomping at the bit to visit us, but if I were Republican Governor Jim Douglas, I would be fairly well insulted by this. Is Bush afraid that Howard Dean will jump out of the bushes and give him a "shout"? Granted most people in Vermont don't care for Bush, but there are folks that support his administration. I'm just not sure where they are...
If they want to issue a warrant for their arrest in Brattleboro, I say go for it....I don't think they'll get too far!
A Warren, VT woman is fighting to have her landlord accomodate her service animal which just happens to be a horse. Patty Cooper's service animal is a horse of a different color: a black and white miniature horse, to be exact. She thinks she should be allowed to have this animal under the laws regarding persons with disabilities....an interesting premise, but hardly practical.
Vice President Dick Cheney has presided over an unprecedented power grab during his six years in the White House, former Vice President Walter Mondale wrote in a rare, scathing critique Sunday.
"The real question is why the president allows this to happen," Mondale writes.
I think its about time somebody calls it like it is...I just never thought it would be Walter Mondale! He must have been inspired by Gerald Ford's parting shots...
A whistleblower who lost her job and was gagged by the Bush administration after revealing careerism, corruption and widespread incompetence at the FBI detailed her difficult search for justice to an audience on Monday at the American Library Association's annual conference. Sibel Edmonds, who the FBI hired as a translator shortly after 9/11, was fired in 2002 after reporting a range of problems at the bureau...
What transpires is without a doubt a huge misuse of the public's trust in some mythical right to a fair trial.
General Motors looks like it is serious about this whole hydrogen fuel cell business. The company announced today that it had moved over 500 engineers from development duties over to groups focused on the production of fuel-cell-powered vehicles.
This post from Crave has some links to great information about this exciting technology.
The Douglas Administration will permanently close three interstate rest areas that were temporarily closed earlier this month.
