Rutland County Senate Candidate Dennis Morrisseau Finally Speaks to Rutlanders About Tropical Storm Irene and the Aftermath

"Ruh-roh!"

The would-be senator for Rutland county in the 2012 election cycle has broken his nearly monthlong silence on tropical storm Irene and its devastating impact on his Rutland county neighbors.

This from the website of fake "Senator" Robert Wagner - Denny, put on your crazy hat and take it away:

"Who’s for telling FEMA to get the hell off our roads and out of our skies and pockets and councils?"

Oh, snap! And then what, Denny?

Now go back to sleep, Denny.

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A Review: Rob's Cry-Baby Letter to Seven Days and His Contribution to a Secessionist Collection of Essays About Their Alternate Historical Universe

Recently Rob Williams, a journalist poseur, wrote a scathing letter to the editor to Seven Days (fourth letter down) claiming that,

"For years... [he claims that he has been the victim of] ad hominem slander... [being] accus[ed]... of “racism” (for talking with other independence-minded groups of different political stripes), “anti-Semitism,” (for criticizing the Israeli government’s harsh treatment of Palestinians and D.C.’s powerful pro-Israel lobby) and “neo-Confederate-ism” (for pointing out that Abraham Lincoln used the Civil War to radically reinvent the U.S. Constitution by centralizing federal power at the expense of individual states — Vermont included)."

Actually, Williams is a dyed-in-the-wool neo-Confederate because of his ongoing neo-Confederate four-way with the likes of neo-Confederates Donald Livingston, Thomas DiLorenzo, Kirkpatrick Sale and the baas of the Second Vermont Republic, its Dixie singin' "scholar," the Magnolia Vermonter, Thomas Naylor. Additionally, he's just contributed to a soon-to-be neo-Confederate bible, "Rethinking the American Union for the 21st Century," (already steeply discounted despite being more than a month from its October 31 release date) along with fellow neo-Confederates like the book's editor, Donald Livingston, contributors DiLorenzo, Kirkpatrick Sale and other cranks that are normally found palling around at Livingston's neo-Confederate "think tank," the Abbeville Institute. (NOTE: Secesher "scholars" all seem to need to call some spare room in their home a "think tank"; "think" Thomas Naylor's Second Vermont Republic "think tank"; Kirkpatrick Sale's Middlebury Institute "think tank.")

In 2009 The Chronicle for Higher Education had an excellent profile of Livingston and his Abbeville Institute (read it, it's well worth the time) here.

"(Livingston) started the Abbeville Institute, named after the South Carolina birthplace of John C. Calhoun, seventh vice president of the United States and a forceful advocate of slavery and states' rights. The institute now has 64 associated scholars from various colleges and disciplines. They gather to discuss topics about the South that they feel are misrepresented in today's classrooms. Feeling a chilly reception to its ideas—officials of the Southern Poverty Law Center say its work borders on white supremacy—the group has kept a low profile. Mr. Livingston's own (Emory philosophy) department chair, as well as a number of Emory history professors, say they have never heard of it."

The Chronicle's piece also says of the Abbeville Institute's "scholarly" work,

"(O)utsiders who have heard of Abbeville (Institute) tend not to like what they hear. One historian, whose research includes the cultural history of racism and white supremacy in the United States, and who asked for anonymity to avoid becoming a target of "Southern identity groups," says the lectures he has listened to on the Abbeville Web site (http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org) are dominated by racialism and are "ideological, through and through." There is the condemnation from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group. In 2005, Time magazine pegged Abbeville as a group of "Lincoln loathers."

SPLC had this here in 2004 on Donaldson's basement, er, "think tank":

"(T)he Abbeville Institute but located in Georgia, is led by former LOS board member Donald Livingston, an Emory philosophy professor. Its Web site describes it as devoted to the "Southern tradition," including the allegedly ignored "achievements of white people in the South."

"About 30 people are listed as institute scholars, a staff that overlaps heavily with the LOS institute's staff."

"What these institutes teach is commonly portrayed as the fruit of an intellectual tradition that goes back to the 19th century and even, at the earliest, the colonial era — the line of thought known as "the Southern conservative tradition."

"The Southern conservative tradition stretches all the way back to Thomas Jefferson's belief in the superiority of an agriculture-based society to one built on commerce. Its giants include men like John Calhoun, the preeminent antebellum theorizer in favor of states' rights."

"To many, the tradition includes palpably racist thinkers such as Robert Lewis Dabney, who was chaplain to Civil War Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and Thomas Dixon, whose 1905 novel The Clansman helped spark the 20th century rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan."

"The tradition also boasts of the Nashville Agrarians, a dozen Vanderbilt University-connected essayists who wrote I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition in the 1930s."

"Essentially, this intellectual tradition celebrates Southern agricultural life as Edenic, and contrasts its religious and tradition-bound ways with what is seen as the vulgar materialism of the industrializing North. It is, in the view of many, hopelessly romantic, tied more to an imagined golden age of Southern culture than to an honest appraisal of rural 19th century life as it really was."

"Be that as it may, strains of racism have been intertwined with this tradition almost from the start. In the South, a defense of "tradition" has a habit of ending up as an apologia for slavery."

Despite Williams' Lincoln-hating historical revisionism the fact remains that the slave states seceded to defend slavery and said so in many of the Articles of Secession.

Here's just one of the many, many articles by non-deluded Southerners that amply put the lie to the story that the Civil War was a war of Northern aggression and not about slavery. Transplanted northerners to South Carolina like Kirkpatrick Sale today peddle the lie that the war was not really about slavery.

In his book Livingston makes the anti-Federalist argument that "the virtues of republican life (self-government and the rule of law) were possible only in small polities.” The anti-Federalists, like Livingston and Williams, opposed the US Constitution and its eventual results. That argument was lost nearly 225 years ago. And try as he might, Williams (along with longtime SVR advisory board member and Lincoln historical revisionist, Thomas DiLorenzo) can't successfully argue that Lincoln started what was really started in 1787 and was then continued in the 1830's by Andrew Jackson - the long march of federalism.

Certainly, Williams' complaint about being linked to anti-Semitism and racism can't be taken seriously since he's published material from DiLorenzo (who's had his work published in a Holocaust denial journal and who cites racist sources in his critique of the SPLC ), Paul Michael Craig, Carol Moore (a raving anti-Semite), just to name only a few of these creeps. If he isn't anti-Semitic himself, he's definitely an anti-Semite enabler. When he was advising Connecticut native Dennis Steele's utterly failed gubernatorial campaign last year on the topic of "the Israeli Mafia" he wrote:

"I realize that the Israel plank is near and dear to Thomas (Naylor) - and he'll no doubt mail me another pointed letter scrawled in green pen with more information about the US/Israel connection and tell me that, because I am raising questions here, he will decide to push the "Israeli Mafia" phrase even MORE."

"However, Thomas is not running for office. You are."

"And, the thing is - I agree with Thomas re: Israel."

"I just don't think it makes much sense to use "Israeli Mafia" as a "talking point" for a Vermont independence campaign."

"Why? Three reasons immediately come to mind:"

"#1 - Since most Americans have been conditioned by years of corporate media training to associate anti-Israeli sentiment with Anti Semitism, talking about the Israeli Mafia smacks of antiSemitism blah blah. Holocaust, SVR are racists, etc ad nauseum. I have spent 4 years defusing the SVR/LOS nonsense and it is finally done, even in the blogosphere. Why go there again?" (So how's that working out for you, Rob?)
"#2 - MORE IMPORTANTLY, why not keep our eye on the ball - the United States?"
"#3 - Finally, the "Israeli Mafia" phrase sounds CANNED when it comes out of your mouth. EVERYTHING ELSE YOU SAY sounds like Dennis Steele talking, and kicking ass."

"So - if you decide to continue to use the phrase "Israeli Mafia," then I am asking you to help me think of something to say to Cairn, and others, when they ask."

Years ago, when he was confronted about Livingston's neo-Confederatism and strong links to white supremacists, Williams responded:

"Is ("Don") a racist? I don't know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business"

Williams is an enabler of racialism and bigotry for having invited the white supremacist League of the South and the virulently homophobic hate group, Christian Exodus, to the "talk(s)" that he's sponsored "with other independence-minded groups" over the years in Vermont.

Is Rob Williams a racist? While I have my own opinion on that, that's really more the "damn business" of every Vermonter who Williams proposes to lead into his brave new world of deliberately non-specific proposals for an unlikely "independent" Vermont that Williams would ally with racists, homophobes, anti-Semites and the like.

Williams has also said,

"Secession (began) as a (serious) conversation in New England, (not) in the south. This, also, is a historical fact." (Rob's ALLCAPS deleted)

What our self-professed historian Williams omitted from that statement is that Vermont and its delegate, like the rest of the nation, didn't support the short-lived notions of the Hartford Convention of 1814. Moreover, the three week meeting in Hartford ultimately spelled the end to the - guess who - Federalist Party! That's the group that Williams, Livingston, Naylor, DiLorenzo, Kirkpatrick Sale, et al, ad nauseum so vehemently oppose. That's also an example of the devious nature of Williams and his "small community" (according to a SVR founder and a "Vermont Commons" publisher emeritus or some such nonsense, Ian Baldwin) of Vermont seceshers who routinely twist and pervert the historical record to suit their needs.

In his letter to Seven Days, Williams, whose print publication has failed for five years to convince Vermonters that he and his secesher buddies were nothing more than fringy, ineffectual, batshit crazy, whackjobs, never disclosed that the day before he crafted his recommendations to a real journalist, he'd folded his journal propaganda rag that is more the type of thing that was commonly found on an old fashioned shithouse nail before Charmin came along.

As for his umpteenth sorta invitation to converse,

"Accept invitations to discuss differing political points of view in public dialogue."

I don't meet or chat in bars, as you've so often suggested we do, with Aryan Nation types, neo-Nazis, Liberty Counsel douchebags and other fundie creeps, Southern/Northern/Eastern/Western white supremacists or their enablers. Get it?

(Extra credit reading for secesher scholars like Rob here. It's a piece by a real scholar, James W. Loewen.)

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Eye on "The 30" - Monthly Update #2

Just a brief update on "Senator" Wagner's progress in making truthful his July 20 boast that he had 6 candidates of the 30 needed to takeover the Vermont Senate.

As you may recall, I pointed out in this post that he'd only named 2 of the 30 as of August 1. On August 2 he added a graphic that showed 4 names (he forgot his own). Then on August 5 he added his own name which brought the total announced by him to be running to 5. (See graphics here)

It's now two months since he first made that boast that he already had 6 candidates running and yet still that sixth candidate remains a mystery.

And still 5 ≠ 6.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

BREAKING! Vermont Commons Print Journal To Fold - This Fall's Will Be The Last Issue

In a whistling past the graveyard style editorial that tries to put a cheerful face onto what to any real journalist (which Rob Williams is not and can never be since he doesn't seem to get the ethics involved) would find a horrible task, publisher, editor, statewide distributor and bottle washer, Rob Williams, of the longtime failing propaganda rag for the Vermont secessionist movement, "Vermont Commons", announced the end to print publication of his baby here. It even includes a Schwartzeneger-esque "I'll be back."

The long slide to oblivion began with the revelations on this blog in February 2007 that contributors to the journal were directly affiliated with the white supremacist group called the League of the South. Within two months of that disclosure Seven Days, the Burlington based alternative weekly, cancelled its distribution deal with "Vermont Commons" because of "confusion." Read all about it here.

Apparently a lot of free advertising that was given to fill pages and create the impression of a successful publication wasn't converting into revenue, although Rob never admits that in his editorial swan song. But then editorial honesty has never been Rob's strong suit.

In the meantime, Rob, let me be the first to say, "Buh-bye." Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Update: 9.18.11, 8:30 AM - Williams' announcement of his soon to fold print edition which was previously found only by examining the Vermont Commons Journal's issues archive has been moved to the front page of the web site edition of the journal. Kinda sad that Rob didn't even get to break one of the few real news stories, even if it was a publicity piece, ever published in his journal.

So Rob, what's next for the secesher journal, a paywall?

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

"Senator" Wagner Makes It Official!

At this point, he's going to make his likely to lose, fringer campaign for the Vermont Senate possibly the dirtiness, most negative, dishonest campaign in Addison county history and perhaps, although we've yet to see, in Vermont campaigns for a seat in the General Assembly.

You see, in Robert Wagner's world, a world unfamiliar to his neighbors in Ripton and the people he purports to represent (although he's never won an election anywhere that I can find, except in his head) in the Addison County-Brandon Vermont Senate district, all members of the Vermont legislature are dishonest; in fact, he calls them all thieves here and enablers of corporate theft:

"(International corporations... in Vermont) suck our natural resources dry, we build roads so their trucks can take our groundwater and minerals out-of-state for processing… and they pay no taxes… they’re stealing from us, and our Legislature helps them steal."

Wagner then drives home the point that he's talking about Sen. Claire Ayer (D-Addison):

"My opponent in the 2010 & 2012 elections, incumbent Claire Ayer, stated in a public meeting last Summer[sic] that going after Entergy for fines would be “too hard”. (Much less vote to shut down that leaker that they’re running into the ground.)"

"A double standard. My learned colleagues in the State House get to APPEAR to be antinuclear. Entergy’s in business to make a buck… and Entergy wouldn’t be making any bucks if the Legislature weren’t helping them left and right with environmental subsidies, exemptions, and special tax-free status."

"Too hard indeed. Radioactive tritium has been leaking into soil and water around the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, Entergy officials misled state regulators and lawmakers by saying the plant didn’t have the kind of underground piping that carried tritium, and no fine. Ayer’s really saying that Vermonters will pay part of Entergy’s cost of doing business, keeping electricity costs low through public subsidy… so her party looks good."

"That’s all the incumbents have to offer folks: politics as usual."

Wagner doesn't accurately represent Ayer's position vis à vis why it would be "too hard," he just rails on about Entergy as though that's all that's needed to justify a legal fine.

But one need only look at his statement, "My learned colleagues in the State House," to get a true sense of how deluded Wagner is about his role in the legislature - he has none. He's never once been elected to the legislature, so such posturing is a lie.

You can see the rest of his angry, cut-and-paste ramble here.

I'll have more soon on Wagner's apparent vendettas, self-esteem issues and ongoing delusions.

In the meantime, I submit that candidate Wagner should at least do as his declared opponent has done, someone who he claims is dishonest, which is to disclose who his contributors are and what his campaign expenses have been (something neither he nor any of his past secesher legislative "colleagues" did in 2010), as his declared opponent Claire Ayer has already done months ago here, despite her not having reached the statutorily require threshold.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

I'm Back to "Having a Good Time..."

... and "there's no stopping me."

Irene in Vermont is now headed well into the recovery phase at this moment and absent another flood watch in the area, the clean-up here has progressed to the point where I'm getting my vibe back.

Google has been such an integral source of what I've found, for getting onto five years now, about Vermont's secession movement and, also, this week would have been Freddie Mercury's 65th birthday, so... (turn it up and go to full screen)


(For Freddie Mercury and Queen purists who'd prefer the full-length original [as I do], that's here.)

It's been apparent for a very long time that the Vermont secesher movement, which now likes to euphemistically call itself an independence movement, is essentially a hot-air machine posing as political substance that'll get into bed with any low-life, racist, anti-Semite or homophobe so long as it'll get them to their goal post, no matter who may possibly end up getting hung from it.

They've chosen to keep it vague and label themselves as "independents" and then cheesily presumed to draft in their pronouncements very real independent candidates as their supposed running mates simply because they all use that term "independent." At least one of their actual 7 candidates (not the 40 that some of them have claimed) during their 2010 across the board failure actually disavowed secession for Vermont.

This week is also the 10th anniversary of the lunatic conspiracy theory that they've also chosen to anchor their "movement" to, the 9/11 Truther nonsense. That's not such a surprise since at least one of their past Senate candidates, Gaelan Brown, believes that there's been collusion with aliens and the US government regarding resource extraction from the darkside of the moon.

"Personally I believe that it's likely that NASA has been collaborating with beings from other planets to mine the dark side of the moon in exchange for them giving us some of their technology."

"(I've seen unexplainable UFOs several times and I know a man who works for Carlisle who says there is heavy investment going on re infrastructure to mine the moon for titanium, H3 (nuclear fuel), and other minerals that are rare on earth.)(SIC) I have also studied the chem.-trail and HARPP systems/history and there's a lot of sketchy activity in this category as well."

"But I'm not going to focus on these issues in my campaign. Vt independence is enough of a reach without pushing people on issues that they'll never grasp."
Gaelan Brown, September 1, 2010, on the super top-secret Free Vermont Framework messageboard

Right, Gaelan. Your fellow Vermonters are too stupid to get the whole UFOs on the darkside of the moon thing; keep it simple: secede from something that Vermont sought 3 times to become a part of 220 years ago.

And at least one VTCommons blogger, Simha Bode, worries that Burlington's bike paths are really part of a UN directed, one world government conspiracy trap here, that is when he's not exploring fringe legal theories espoused by sovereign citizen movement types here. Yeah, really.

My focus tonight is on the seceshers response over the last week and a half to the Irene disaster and its wake.

Rob Williams
This week is also the one year of anniversary of "Vermont Commons" news poseur and half-assed media wiz, Rob Williams, declaring on his super top-secret, hidey-hole messageboard:

"Since most Americans have been conditioned by years of corporate media training to associate anti-Israeli sentiment with Anti Semitism, talking about the Israeli Mafia smacks of antiSemitism blah blah. Holocaust, SVR are racists, etc ad nauseum. I have spent 4 years defusing the SVR/LOS nonsense and it is finally done, even in the blogosphere. Why go there again?"

It's also Rob Wiliams' 4½ year anniversary of his infamous "Don't Ask, Don't Care" policy regarding the former director of the white supremacist's League of the South "scholarly" Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History:

"Is ("Don") a racist? I don't know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business"

It seems that my post a few days ago here may have prompted Williams to finally do something on his blog. We learn that his vast, massive organization has limited its Irene response to his backyard and setting up a Facebook page. Oh yeah, he tweets too. Fabulous! And hyper-irrelevant.

Oh! And there's this:

"I've sent many of you who have been asking to Anne Galloway's VermontDigger - she and her crew are doing a fine job of aggregating press releases, official government response documents, and original reporting there."
Source

That's interesting since here's what he was saying on that same top-secret messageboard mentioned above specifically about Galloway in May-June of last year:

"CIA spook that she is..."
[snip]
"Most reporters regurgitate press release as "fact," and call it objective journalism, friends."
"When they dare to have an opinion, they put it on the OP/ED pages."
"It ain't right, and we need to challenge it (as everything else...)"
Source

Ahhh, what a difference a year can make for a not so smooth talking secesher when he's back to trying to woo a member of Vermont's press corps.

Williams' blog post on the Irene disaster surprisingly evoked a militaristic spirit ("boots on the ground") from our anti-miltary Williams, who then slithered off into a Larry-the-Cable-Guy catch phrase ("Git'er done"). Faux militarism with a dollop of insipid inspiration - that's our Robbie.

At times it seems as though Williams can't see his own blatant hypocrisy as others easily can, so it eludes him as to why he and his movement are getting no traction. Nothing on his website but ads and self-promotion. His denial of reality is on a scale that rivals Harold Camping's delusion, except that when Williams stands on a Waitsfield corner wearing his sandwich board, his reads, "Secession Is Near!"

Matthew Cropp
Like Williams, another elite, academic, former campaign manager for one of the most ineptly run gubernatorial bids by a Connecticut native, Dennis Steele (for whom Williams was a primary adviser). Steele was also the former self-commissioned commander of the Green Mountain Brigade (of One?) who then flip-flopped into a "Peace Candidate" of convenience. Cropp set up this spring what he calls the Vermont Independence Alliance. Again, we're presented with the usual gauzy generalities that seceshers have become known for; non-specifics designed to include whatever they think the reader would like to hear, but this one piece jumped out at me:

"We are therefore dedicated to supporting service projects which strengthen our communities and strive to meet local needs with local resources."

So I've watched and waited but nothing's happened. And then I thought that maybe with Irene that the posturing Cropp would drop the crap and finally step up with some real substance rather than the empty words he's become so well known for but, you guessed it, he's not "supporting" shit.

The scary part of Cropp's plan is this nugget:

"In a free Vermont, on the other hand, our own political vision(s) might or might not be adopted, depending on the will of the people, but they’d certainly have the opportunity to be honestly considered and rationally debated."

Did this smart-ass just fall off the intellectual, democratic despot truck? According to his scenario, "the will of the people" can certainly include segregation, reëactment of discriminatory laws based on sexual orientation, age discrimination, resurrection of "restricted public accommodation" laws from the late 40's in Vermont regarding Jews, all in the name of "the will of the people." He never allows for otherwise in his elaborate plan for his New Vermont Order. Just make it attractive to all the baser instincts and it'll get traction, eh Matt?

How can Cropp have so such contempt for Vermonter's instincts that he'd make such thinly veiled appeals to the bigots and knuckledraggers that has been the unravelling of his mentor, Thomas Naylor? And, of course, he's not announced any "service projects which strengthen our communities and strive to meet local needs with local resources" regarding the Irene tragedy at his empty website.

As J.D. Ryan over at fivebeforechaos.com once so aptly described Cropp:

"...(Cropp has an) overinflated and underfunctioning mind..."

"I had the dubious honor of meeting Matt Cropp at some get-together a while back; I can’t remember the specifics. He’s not hard to point out, as he oozes that “I’m the smartest guy in the room” vibe (which is readily apparent if you can stand reading his blog… he is soooo much smarter than you – just accept that). In actuality, he’s more like a politics version of the comic book guy on the Simpsons, with better hygiene- socially inept, arrogant as hell, and well, even though you can tell he’s read a lot of books, you just know that… he’s read a lot of books. Not much else. And, also like the comic book guy on the Simpsons, if you even bothered to notice that he left the room, you’re more likely to be wondering if he’s ever gotten laid than being amazed and humbled at how much smarter he is than you."

"So, I’ve come to find out how Matt’s mind works, and it says a lot about what we can expect in terms of how Dennis Steele’s campaign will be managed."

There's much more by Ryan on the mind of Matthew Cropp here. Fact is that Cropp was so-o-o smart that his campaign management garnered barely ¾ of one percent of gubernatorial vote which I believe may have been the smallest vote percentage of any secesher candidate. Amazingly, Cropp has characterized his candidate's miniscule showing as "momentum." Sure.

Thomas Naylor
The baas of the Second Vermont Republic, vintage über elitist, as well as an economic/academic bullshitter and longtime friend of the white supremacist League of the South hasn't even bothered to note this devastating event that's shattered the lives of so many of his Vermont neighbors. Perhaps it's because that from his redoubt in Charlotte the matter is out of sight and, so, out of mind.

Interestingly, what he did choose to post at his website the very next day after Irene struck so many was another of his banal essays entitled, "Ciphers: People of the Lie." SVR's baas tells us:

"a cipher is a secret message deliberately encoded to mislead unintended recipients."

That pretty well sums up everything that Naylor's published over the last 20 years.

He also says:

'A person, such as a (would be) political leader, who transmits misleading messages is also a cipher.'

That's Naylor to a T.

The point is that Naylor's SVR is silent and doing nothing at all for Vermonters in the wake of Irene. His dreaming of secession now doesn't count for anything except to his own "small community."

Jim Hogue
Possibly the most clueless, acting out, conspiracy addled (although probably tied in that arena with the "Very Foreign Minister" Denny Morrisseau [below]), clown reënactor in the entire "small community" of seceshers.

In his 2009 video Hogue moves up the claim of secession supporters in Vermont from 13% to 18%, which would by his calculation be 110,000 or so people. All this in front of an audience of Naylor, dullard Dennis Steele, a "producer & videographer," and three other losers.

Here's his 9/11 Truther as well as additional secesher, delusional nonsense - don't bother. It's really all a conspiracy against Vermonters, don't ya know, the Feds taking down the Twin Towers to get us in Vermont or something like that (see more below in Denny Morrisseau's segment).

Dennis Morrisseau
At the self-declared "Very Foreign Minister" of a dead in its tracks Second Vermont Republic campaign website for yet another to be miserably failed run for the 2012 Senate seat in Rutland County, so hard hit by Irene - crickets.

As we all know, Denny has a fondness for sappy 60's glurges and sexist ravings, and here's Morrisseau chicken-wire engineering explanation conjecture about what really happened on 9/11. The only thing missing is evidence:



What so many in hard hit Rutland county don't know, where people have been rendered homeless by Irene, is that Denny is a longtime advocate of shipping the homeless out-of-state so that he and his wife don't have to endure their presence. In fact, he feels that his endeavours in that area have been deserving of non-profit status, so much so that he's sued to obtain that benefit for his odious scheme.

"Senator" Robert Wagner
Like Williams, Wagner is keeping his Irene response hyper-local, which means basically his street, the Ripton-Lincoln Road.

This is a guy who wants a senate seat so bad that he's taken to calling himself "Senator" a year before the election for the Addison County-Brandon seat, yet he appears to have had no real, effective presence in the surrounding county since the disaster. His website has some pictures from outside of the Addison County-Brandon area that someone else took; he advises to read the local paper (Addison Independent) where his newsworthiness has apparently escaped the writers and editors; he has no report on the state of his self-declared provisional capitol, Hancock, VT; and his website has only a reprint of a more than week old CVPS press release on the storm. His top post is for some New Age drumming crap. I'm not even going to link to such a waste of bandwidth.

Michael Patno
The other declared secesher candidate from Bristol for the second Addison County-Brandon seat hasn't a damn thing at his website about what his county's residents can do or where they might obtain assistance. Perhaps more than any of the other politically ambitious seceshers, Patno truly is what Papa Naylor has called "a cipher" - one having no influence or value; a nonentity.

Peter Garritano
At the failed 2010 Lite Guv secesher candidate who's now got his sights set one of the Chittenden County senate seats website - ungotz.

Dennis Steele
Who can forget Vermont secesher gubernatorial candidate Dennis Steele? Well, apparently Wikipedia has since they ditched the article he, contrary to Wikipedia conflict of interest rules, put up about himself. Here's what Steele said on November 3, 2010, when he crashed and seriously burned in his 2010 bid for guv:

"When I agreed to take on the difficult and exhausting task of running for Governor as an independent this year, I did so with the hopes that my actions would serve to help lay the foundations for a robust, grass-roots movement that will carry the message of a Free Vermont forward. Towards that end, I’ve been collaborating with several supporters to found a democratic, state-wide organization. Dedicated to spreading the ideas of Vermont Independence, providing support for Independence-minded candidates for public office, and organizing volunteer activities that both serve our neighbors and help lessen our communities’ dependence on the Federal Government, it will serve as our movement’s new center and engine of growth. It will be organized by county, and I encourage anyone who supported my campaign to get involved in their county committee."

Odd, that sounds suspiciously like the crap that his former campaign manager, Matt Cropp, spouts up above.

Anywho, there's zip at his website here tonight about Irene or what can be done to help those in need.

It'd be easy to say that all these "independence" guys are completely full of shit, but let's just say that for all their puffery and grandstanding, when it came right down to it, well, okay, they're completely full of shit.

If there's any good to come from Irene's passage, it'll be the complete exposure of the Vermont secession and independence movement's utter irrelevance at any level to the lives and well-being of Vermonters.

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Flood Stage

This blog will be on a short hiatus while dealing with flood related matters.

Meanwhile, having just restored The Internets connectedness I am not very stunned by the irrelevance of the Second Vermont Republic, "Vermont Commons" and its blog, "Senator" Wagner and the rest of the usual posturing pimps of Vermont secession and independence movement to the flood situation gripping Vermont.

More at a later appropriate time.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.