University of Vermont Professor Frank Bryan Quits the Vermont Secession Movement

It probably had to happen. Breakups are never a pretty thing and this one has been going on in slow motion for years.

The basis for the relationship was never really all that strong. Sure, they
shared a liking for some of the same things and they had even shared professional interests. Maybe relationship is too strong a term; mutualistic might better describe what was going on.

Alright, this is all getting a little confusing so perhaps asking the question, "How did Frank M. Bryan, a quirky, respected professor at University of Vermont get hooked up with an anti-American poseur and would be founding father of an independent Vermont Republic, Thomas Naylor?" might clear things up. Or not.

For sure, only Frank will ever be the one to answer that question for himself, but what is clear is that he has "left the (Vermont secession) movement." This, according to Ohio secessionist Harold Thomas, from an email sent by Bryan three months ago to Thomas:

"I left the (Vermont secession) movement for the following reason:"

"I love America. I tear up when I hear America the beautiful sung correctly. I say the Pledge of Allegiance and mean it when I do."

"I could not stand by and watch the American flag burned. I honor our soldiers past and present and so on."

"I viewed secession as a divorce breaking up a marriage when both partners may still love one another. (It happens.) Plus I felt (and still do) that Vermont could survive and prosper as an independent Republic. With all that said I simply could not stand my own hypocrisy any longer."

"Actually I stayed on the advisory committee of the SVR (Second Vermont Republic) longer than I should have because (I) was told that 'some people' were calling us racist. I was so put off by that kind of McCarthyist tactic that I didn't want to seem to verify it by resigning at that point."

'Course, here Bryan has again made the same empty charge about being called a racist that Naylor, Rob Williams, and the rest of the Vermont secesher wingnuts have, that early on they were all called racists. The charge was then that the Second Vermont Republic advisory board had been packed with racists from the League of the South. Thomas Naylor has made no secret of his longtime alliance with openly racist groups like the LoS. Williams, when faced with the fact that some of his LoS type pals could be racist responded:

"Is he a racist? I don’t know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business, at a personal level."

You'd think that Bryan, a professor of political science, could at least get the basic facts right.

The split up between Bryan and Naylor's SVR is more than two years old. Naylor drummed Bryan out of his fantasy, secessionist republic in this statement found in a March 2009 edition of UVM's campus publication, The Vermont Cynic:

"Bryan agrees that Vermont is not ready to secede at this point in time and Naylor has said that 'Frank Bryan is not a secessionist' because of this belief."

"'If you said Vermont could secede tomorrow, I would say to you, we're not ready to secede tomorrow. I'm glad I'm not going to see Vermont secede from the union because I'd be desperately lonely. I don't think I even want my kids to [see it happen],' Bryan said.

"(Rob) Williams is on Naylor's side."

Source

On that point we can all agree that Bryan is correct. The deceptive and dishonorable campaign conducted by Naylor, Williams and their lackeys has been so offensive - particularly the undisguised hatred for the vast majority of Vermonters and their institutions - that the very idea of SVR and VTCommons ever succeeding in seceding has become a statewide joke that no one, aside from the "small community" of secesher "Internet cowboys" wants to "see it happen." Between Naylor's increasingly shrill, tweedy tirades against Israel & Vermonters, while at the same time lauding Holocaust denying Ahmadinejad, and Williams' increasingly embarrassing attempts to gain relevance by inviting the uninterested into meeting with him to explain themselves to him, prior to which he launched an Islamophobic, racist attack on President Obama, it becomes progressively clear how unhinged the leadership of the secesher movement (a figure of speech only) has become.

Here's what Naylor has said about the Iranian leader whose country, under his leadership, "remain(s) the most active state sponsor of terrorism": [1] [2]

"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one of the few leaders in the world who possesses the courage to confront the United States and Israel."

Source

The Bryan/Naylor squabble spilled into the public eye in this Seven Days story from late last summer, as well as in a report about it here:

Frank Bryan, a UVM political science professor who spent years arguing for Vermont’s secession, says running candidates was always a goal of the movement. But he argues its current approach is wrong.

“One of the problems with all the secessionists is they’re impatient,” says Bryan, who has turned his back on secession. “They want to go to the top immediately with candidates who really don’t have a lot of experience in governing.”

What candidates like Dennis Steele should do, Bryan argues, is run for school board and city council before seeking statewide office, to establish a record, gain experience and earn the trust of voters.

Naylor calls that argument “totally absurd."

(Connecticut native) “Dennis Steele has done more for the Vermont independence movement in the last six months than anyone has done in the last seven years,” Naylor says. “The only way you could have that platform is by running for governor.”

Naylor knows his candidates face an uphill battle. Even though one UVM poll suggested 13 percent of Vermonters favor secession (VS Editor's Note: a push poll bought and paid for by Naylor - see polling section in right column of this blog), he doesn’t expect that to translate directly into votes. Naylor would be happy if Steele got 10 percent, he says, itself a lofty goal.

Naylor knows the word “secession” carries some very negative connotations. “Secession is anathema. Secession is failure. Secession is civil war. Secession is racism,” he admits with obvious frustration. “Those are hard things to overcome.”

It's now known that Steele failed to get anywhere near the 10% that Naylor said he'd be "happy" to get. Rather, Steele got a fringer's usual less than one percent (0.79%).

Carol Moore, an anti-Semitic blogger and one of Rob Williams' contributors at Vermont Commons, is a coatracking specialist at Wikipedia who has been trying to hide the fact that Frank Bryan has left the SVR advisory board for years, as well as conceal the fact that there's a dearth of true believers in the Vermont secesher movement. No less a true believer than Vermont Commons' publisher emeritus and Naylor pal, Ian Baldwin, has labeled the movement "our small community of secessionists." [1] [2]

The Vermont secession movement has been based on historic misrepresentations, deliberate deceptions and has relied on the half-baked ideals of a coterie of bigots, anti-Semites, homophobes, racists and/or regional supremacists.

With that sort of a foundation for the relationship, a breakup just had to happen.

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

The "Magnolia" Vermonter, Thomas Naylor, Has Got To Be...

... as General Tommy Franks once so famously said about another "great," government thinker, Douglas Feith, "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet." Or maybe it's just that he thinks that the rest of us the world are so stupid and in awe of his intellectual prowess that we'll eat any highbrow shit sandwich that he hands out.

He's written yet another of his tedious essays, although toned down a bit for the greater web world but not by much. You can find it here at CounterPunch, the web refuge for "radical" poseurs.

Naylor, baas of Second Vermont Republic, makes, among other absurd statements, this gem:

"In over two hundred years, the North American continent has never been attacked – nor even seriously threatened with invasion by Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union, or anyone else."

Please, someone interrupt the salon in the Naylor drawing room and
remind those big thinkers about the War of 1812. These clowns have mentioned the War of 1812 as the predicate for the Hartford Convention countless times as a part of their argument of the rightness of secession as the solution for all that ails, so it isn't likely that Naylor just forgot it.

You also might have thought that Naylor would have had the intellectual honesty, while mentioning Andrew Jackson, to have acknowledged that first failed experiment in decentralization and defiance of Federal authority that was the compromise engineered by Jackson called the Indian Removal Act, said by some to be the nation's first civil war. Honesty just isn't the small Vermont secesher community's forte. Besides, since it's Naylor's intent to lay every Native American's death at the doorstep of the "Empire," 4,000 dead American Indians is an inconvenient truth about the even larger impending death toll to come in what was to be a continuing experimentation in secesher thinking that led to the greater second Civil War of the 1860s.

No doubt "Vermont Commons" publisher and Naylor lackey Rob Williams will be eating his baas' new piece of intellectual shit garbage up.

Photo Credit: Southern Poverty Law Center (l-r, Thomas Naylor, Ian Baldwin & Kirkpatrick Sale)

Update January 28, 2011 6:30 PM: VTCommons notes my post here. As usual, intellectual dishonesty prevents Rob Williams from accurately reflecting what I said or what he knows. Rob's never one to let a good chance to pass for a meme to stand in for the truth. There's of course no link for one of his dullards to accidently click on. Way to continue being an asshole, Rob.

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

Today In Vermont History - January 15, 1777

Today being the day that those who would eventually come to call themselves Vermonters declared themselves to be an "independent state," I thought these two brief essays might be in order.

You see, there never really was a First Vermont Republic.

The claim that Vermont operated as a republic is at best flimsy and questionable. Every step taken by those early Vermonters was to the end of membership in the United States. They faced initial obstacles to Vermont's eventual statehood arising from conflicting claims by two adjacent states.

During the Revolutionary War the Vermont militia, known as the Green Mountain Boys, was paid by the Continental Congress via the State of New York.

Many of the settlers, like Thomas Rowley, had come to Vermont from Connecticut and as a symbolic representation of that origin and their independence from both New Hampshire and New York, they first chose the name New Connecticut. The first essay below covers those early days, while the second covers the myths that Thomas Naylor's Second Vermont Republic and Rob Williams' "Vermont Commons" have sought to turn into truths.

American Revolution
Jan 15, 1777:
Vermont New Connecticut Declares Independence

Having recognized the need for their territory to assert its independence from both Britain and New York and remove themselves from the war they were waging against each other, a convention of future Vermonters assembles in Westminster and declares independence from the crown of Great Britain and the colony of New York on this day in 1777. The convention's delegates included Vermont's future governor, Thomas Chittenden, and Ira Allen, who would become known as the "father" of the University of Vermont.

Delegates first named the independent state New Connecticut and, in June 1777, finally settled on the name Vermont, an imperfect translation of the French for green mountain. One month later, on July 2, 1777, a convention of 72 delegates met in Windsor, Vermont, to adopt the state's new—and revolutionary—constitution; it was formally adopted on July 8, 1777. Vermont's constitution was not only the first written national constitution drafted in North America, but also the first to prohibit slavery and to give all adult males, not just property owners, the right to vote. Thomas Chittenden became Vermont's first governor in 1778.

Throughout the 1780s, Congress refused to acknowledge that Vermont was a separate state independent of New York. In response, frustrated Vermonters went so far as to inquire if the British would readmit their territory to the empire as part of Canada. Vermont remained an independent nation even two years after George Washington became president of the United States of America under the new U.S. Constitution. However, as the politics of slavery threatened to divide the U.S., Vermont was finally admitted as the new nation's 14th state in 1791, serving as a free counterbalance to slaveholding Kentucky, which joined the Union in 1792.

And from Vermont's longtime state archivist:

Voice from the Vault
By Gregory Sanford, State Archivist
Myths and Documents.

One of the enduring lines from George Orwell's 1984 is: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." I often think of this line when I encounter folks attempting to achieve a future outcome by manipulating Vermont’s past. When done often enough we come to accept such manipulations as historic realities and incorporate them into our own rhetoric.

At the Archives, for example, we regularly receive requests for copies of the "escape clause" in the Vermont Constitution. This purported clause allows Vermont to withdraw from the United States. A variation, which we call the Brigadoon theory, is that this escape clause opens up every hundred years, presumably starting in 1791. After all, would Vermonters, after 14 years of independence (1777-1791), simply embrace statehood without leaving a way out? The requests come from across the political spectrum: those who do not like a national administration; oppose national foreign or economic policies; loath the federal income tax; or fear gun control or other potential restraints on individual freedom.

The truth, drawn from documents, is less satisfying; there is no, nor has there ever been, such an escape clause.

These thoughts emerged while reading news stories on current efforts to withdraw Vermont from the union. I have before me a news release by two Vermont supporters of secession. Part of their argument is based on historical facts of dubious reputation. Let me illustrate by juxtaposing italicized quotes from the press release with quotes from historical documents.

"Vermont did not join the Union to become part of an empire."
At the January 1791 convention on whether Vermont should ratify the U.S. Constitution and join the union Nathaniel Chipman argued, "But received into the bosom of the union, we at once become brethren and fellow-citizens with more than three millions of people; instead of being confined to the narrow limits of Vermont, we become members of an extensive empire…" Chipman goes on to enumerate the advantages of joining this empire, the United States. His arguments carried the day and the convention voted for ratification 105 to 4.

"Vermont more or less sat out the War of 1812, and its governor ordered troops fighting the British to come home."
Yes, Governor Martin Chittenden did order Vermont troops home from Plattsburgh, but they refused to return, explaining "that when we are ordered into the service of the United States, it becomes our duty, when required, to march to the defence of any section of the Union. We are not of that class who believe that our duties as citizens or soldiers are circumscribed within the narrow limits of the Town or State in which we reside, but that we are under a paramount obligation to our common country, to the great confederation of States."

"Vermont fought the Civil War primarily to end slavery."
And yet in 1861 when Governor Erastus Fairbanks convened the special war session of the Vermont legislature he warned not about slavery but that, "The Federal capital is menaced by an imposing and well armed military force, and the Government itself, and the national archives, are in imminent peril." Jeffrey Marshall, the head of Special Collections at UVM, has read thousands of Civil War letters from hundreds of Vermonters. He reports that only a "handful" of the Vermont soldiers cited slavery as the reason they were fighting; they instead directed their ire at the secessionists, who they characterized as treasonous.

"After the Great Flood of 1927, the worst natural disaster in the state’s history, President Calvin Coolidge (a Vermonter) offered help. Vermont’s governor replied, ‘Vermont will take care of its own’."
Whatever Governor Weeks might have actually said, the reality is that Vermont’s congressional delegation successfully lobbied for $2.6 million in federal flood relief. In addition Governor Weeks accepted a check for $600,000 from the Red Cross to help with flood recovery.

And so on. My point is neither to argue with our current secessionists nor denigrate the beliefs of the authors of the press release. Heck, most of us have, at one time or other, probably cited some of the historical "facts" the authors used. I am simply arguing the importance of having accessible public records to evaluate the rhetoric of public figures.

Locating, understanding and interpreting public records will never be as much fun as mouthing our cherished myths. Public records are, however, evidence of the actions we actually took as a State. They too can be pulled out of context or selectively (mis)used to prove a belief. And yet, I would argue, the stories they hold are as dramatic, and instructive, as those found in Vermont mythology.

That is why I think it so important that we pay more attention to teaching Vermont history and civics in our schools. It is why using Vermont’s historical records is so important to learning to become engaged citizens. To learn how to identify and interpret those records creates an intellectual skill that is essential to navigating through our "information age." If we do not learn how to effectively evaluate information in all its myriad forms we will never be able to perform our responsibilities as citizens. To paraphrase Mr. Orwell, "Whoever understands the past, understands the present; whoever understands the present can plan for the future."

Gregory Sanford, Vermont State Archivist for the Office of the Vermont Secretary of State

The disingenuous opinion piece that Sanford so eloquently refuted was authored by former SVR board member, Frank Bryan and SVR dead-ender, Ian Baldwin.

You can see the text of Vermont's first constitution here at the Secretary of State's website. (Spoiler Alert: The word "republic" appears nowhere in it.)

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

The Second Vermont Republic's "Dennis Steele for Governor" Campaign Responds to Charge of Accepting Contributions from Known Homophobe

Here's the Steele campaign strawman response in it entirety, followed by my comments:

Steele Campaign Response
by: carbonpenguin (Campaign Mgr. Matt Cropp)
Thu Oct 21, 2010 at 16:37:54 PM EDT

I find it quite disappointing that this time of increased awareness of LGBTQ issues has been exploited to take a cheap-shot at my campaign by raising questions about my possibly being a homophobe. Anyone who's talked to me about the issues know I am an ally to Queer people in Vermont, and have actively tried to engage with the LGBTQ community in this campaign. Unlike Brian Dubie, I requested inclusion (but was refused, due to my independent status) in the gubernatorial forum put on in part by Outright Vermont and RU12, and I broadcast the "Winter's a Drag Ball" fundraiser for the VT People with AIDS Coalition on Radio Free Vermont (my online radio station).

Like the other candidates for Governor this election cycle, I don't have an "ideological purity test" that people must take in order to donate to me - rather, they click the link on my website and the dona-
tion goes into the cam-
paign's PayPal account. As such, I find the calls for me to return the donation both odd and counterproductive; why would people who disagree so strongly with this donor want to put resources in his pocket? If he was unaware of my stance on LGBTQ rights before this and doesn't like what I've said, he doesn't have to donate. In the meantime, I will continue working hard on my campaign to bring focus to the issues our state faces that both Dubie and Shumlin refuse to acknowledge. Our communities are being smothered under the weight of an Empire that costs us a trillion dollars a year and has caused the death and displacement of millions of people. It's time for us to stand up together to take political power back from the great corporate banks and the military-industrial complex that has bought and paid for the Federal Government, so we can begin the task of building a Vermont that works for ALL Vermonters.

Imagine... Free Vermont,

Dennis Steele

First, the only person who's raised the question of Steele "possibly being a homophobe" is, queerly, Steele himself.

This is an overused tactic commonly employed by those in service to Thomas Naylor and his Second Vermont Republic. For instance, no one that I know has called Naylor, propaganda minister Rob Williams or any of the other costumed, propeller heads at SVR racists, yet they've whined (Caution: Use of the word "whine" should not by inference confirm one of the myriad conspiracy theories of SVR/VTCommons, that I am, in fact, JD Ryan.) incessantly that they have been so charged, which is nonsense. Do they pal around with and re-print or refer to the works of racists in their publications? Unquestionably.

As for Steele's assertion of solidarity with the "LGBTQ community," nothing could be more misleading about the reality of the Steele campaign. There is no example of such solidarity or public statement by Steele available in the public records that I'm able to find and, believe me, I've looked. Perhaps Matt, Dennis, Rob, Ian, Thomas or some other secesher can point to the overflowing record that I've missed. I'll take his word for it that he broadcast online the fundraiser for the VT PWA Coalition on his content and traffic starved web station, now ranked 1,178,169th on the web (btw Dennis, based on the analytics, if we pull out of Kuwait you'll lose more than 40% of your audience because they'll be home with better options).

What was of more interest to me was that while Steele furiously patted himself on the back for his "hav(ing) actively tried to engage with the LGBTQ community in this campaign," he never quite managed to bring himself to condemn James Duncan's bigoted statements at the listserv even now, if not back when Duncan made his misogynistic, homophobic and racist statements in February and March, and just as Duncan was making his first $100 campaign contribution on March 8. Actually, based on what I've found in addition to the listserv and Secretary of State campaign finance reports, Duncan would seem to be much more of a Strom Thurmond type than his bigoted comments on the listserv would suggest.

I don't buy Steele's rationalization this time, anymore than I did his I-was-just-doing-some-consciousness-raising-bullshit-when-I-started-using-the-Che-Guevara-imagery-on-my-website-and-on-my-handouts. Suggesting that he's merely keeping the "resource" out of the hands of someone that others disagree with (notice that he didn't say that he does, yet again) doesn't pass the smell test:

As such, I find the calls for me to return the donation both odd and counterproductive; why would people who disagree so strongly with this donor want to put resources in his pocket?
- Dennis Steele

Not terribly clever, Matt, er, Dennis.

The fact of the matter is that when the small, by-invitation-only Free Vermont crowd at the listserv first began posting in October of 2009, they reposted a September 9, 2009 advisory on campaign strategy from Gary Flomenhoft:

From: free_vermont_framework at mailmanlist.net
Date: Wed Oct 14 23:29:03 2009
Subject: [free_vermont_framework] Past message from Gary Flo
On 9/9/09 11:35 AM, "Gary Flomenhoft" wrote:

Those who wish to create a political platform for secessionist candidates and/or party are certainly free to do so. I do not think it is advisable beyond advocating independence, and will not put my efforts there.

Here's why: When people asked Thomas (Naylor) in the past what our platform was other than secession and independence his answer was always, "Let the people of sovereign Vermont decide that." I think that is wise.

We need to create as broad a basis for agreement as possible. A political platform is bound to create divisiveness and disagreement from any small piece of it that people don't agree with. I believe it will further marginalize us, just as it did/does to the Greens.

If we just stick with independence and secession then people of all political stripes could be convinced to go along. If we publish a detailed platform, then anyone who disagrees will not support it.

Better to keep the base as broad as possible.
Gary Flo

To which Ian Baldwin of "Vermont Commons" replied:

From: free_vermont_framework at mailmanlist.net
Date: Wed Oct 14 23:31:11 2009
Subject: [free_vermont_framework] Past Message from Ian Baldwin, reply to Gary:

This is extremely provoking, challenging. I myself will not run for office even with a gun to my temple, but I have been unable to imagine a better way to get the idea ? just the thought, the notion ? of secession or independence across to a broader cross section of Vermonters than our 10,000-circulation bi-monthly. If grounded, articulate people can run on a Vermont independence platform that points to all the ways the Federal system tyrannizes us and leaves us impotent to decide our own fate in our own land ? towns, countryside, businesses and farms ? why isn't this one of
the paths we need to take to educate people?

Maybe the prominent Russian political scientist (name escapes me) who recently held fast in public to his earlier prediction that just as the Soviet empire imploded in 1989-91, so too will the USA in 2010 ? maybe we don't need to do a damn thing. Just wait for the fire to start.

We are already "marginalized," and firmly so. Establishing a platform with cajones, in which independence (self-reliance) is the pre-eminent and salient value and goal, and injecting that core idea with many supporting secondary ideas into the various debates held round the state when elections approach can hardly "marginalize" us any more than we now are.

The issue of secession itself comes MUCH later and will indeed be decided by the people as a whole.

Thomas (Naylor) advised, correctly, that we not get involved in the kinds of divisive cultural pot-boiler issues beloved by Karl Rove, gay marriage (Note to seceshers: Gay marriage was settled law as you wrote this), legalized marijuana, women's right to choose, etc., etc. I did not understand him to advise we shirk political life, the political process, altogether.

Ian

Later posts at the listserv made clear that this small group had no intention of letting Vermonters decide much of anything. Private property was to be seized and legislators deemed to be liars executed, to name just a few of their more nutty ideas for Vermont.

Although they've been asked repeatedly, no Free Vermont spokesperson or Steele campaign shill has committed to upholding the Vermont Constitution, the document that they allege created a first republic in Vermont. That's something that all Vermonters should be very, very concerned about.


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Of Petitions and Polls

By now most readers have heard me comment at length about Second Vermont Republic's Thomas Naylor's methodologically flawed polls. If you haven't, check out the polling box in the right column.

Rob Williams, the propaganda minister for the would-be rulers of the future Second Vermont Republic and High Poobah for the secessionist rag, "Vermont Commons" set up a petition back in March devoted to getting signers for a petition to free Vermont, or some such nonsense. As of Sunday, September 26, 2010, there're an overwhelming 39 signators for his petition (40 if you count the guy who signed twice as from CA and VT), 25% of whom don't live here and, it seems, more than half of the rest are the usual suspects comprised of VTCommons bloggers, well-known local secession dead-enders and some, but by no means all, of the 10 candidates supposedly running on the secession ticket. Hell, Vermont secessionist gubernatorial candidate and Connecticut native, Dennis Steele, as well as his campaign manager, Matthew Cropp, haven't bothered to sign it! [1]


"The 39." I kid you not. 39 signers in six months (not counting the guy who signed twice). Here they are:

#40 16:14, Sep 22, Darick Duquette, VT

#39 04:44, Sep 21, Greg Fox, VT

#38 12:18, Sep 18, Eric Rosenbloom, VT.

#37 09:52, Sep 18, Tina Tarani, OR

#36 10:08, Sep 07, Denny Lane, VT

#35 17:07, Sep 02, Preston Wright, NY

#34 08:22, Aug 17, Adam Mitchell, VT

#33 17:58, Aug 12, Jeff Ramsey, VT

#32 18:20, Aug 11, Steve Miller, VT

#31 00:41, Aug 10, Diana Licht, VT

#30 19:03, Aug 08, John Gelineau, VT

#29 03:15, Aug 08, Christopher Mattogno, VT

#28 12:53, Jul 29, Antonio Paoletti, Italy

#27 00:36, Jul 23, George Loehwing, VT

#26 13:58, Jul 16, Charles Sebrell, NC

#25 08:04, Jul 13, Wes Dunn, VT

#24 13:25, Jul 07, Shaun Sintic, NJ

#23 07:13, Jul 04, William Fielding, VT

#22 06:46, Jul 04, Sam Shulman, VT

#21 08:32, Jul 01, Cheryl Diersch, VT

#20 05:47, Jun 30, William Ritke-Jones, VT

#19 08:44, Jun 28, Alec Chalmers, VT.

#18 14:53, Jun 23, Peter McDonald, VT

#17 14:05, Jun 11, Chellis Glendinning, Bolivia.

#16 21:56, May 19, Hector Labbé, Canada

#15 04:59, May 13, Christopher Sol Cruz, MA

#14 18:32, May 09, Charles Sebrell, FL

#13 10:40, May 08, Name not displayed, NC

#12 16:54, Apr 28, Rusty Shackleford, VT

#11 16:52, Apr 28, Rusty Shackleford, CA

#10 12:24, Apr 23, Timothy Lebron, VT

#9 05:34, Apr 23, Maria Korogodsky, VT

#8 19:37, Apr 22, Robert Wagner, VT

#7 11:37, Apr 22, bailey osborne, VT

#6 18:23, Mar 26, Ian Baldwin, VT

#5 15:26, Mar 26, Dennis Morrisseau, VT

#4 14:14, Mar 26, Susie Snow, VT

#3 13:58, Mar 26, Rob Williams, VT

#2 12:55, Mar 26, Cameron Chapman, VT

#1 12:04, Mar 26, Timothy Guiles, VT

Is it any wonder then that I've learned via The Source that former VTCommons publisher, Ian Baldwin, refers to the Free Vermont crowd as "our small community of secessionists."

No doubt, Dennis Steele's backwoods, low-end George Stephanopoulos, Matthew Cropp, who seems also to be afflicted with the Vermont secessionist recessive gene, will plant his foot firmly on his... (well, you know... best to leave the overt, potty mouth stuff to my rumored alter ego) and spin this as a harbinger of the great, great things yet to come since "the only way is up!" Yazz!!!