Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

Emily Peyton, a longtime secession and public bank backer has now sought support from and affiliates her campaign with the worst of the worst - child molesters, murderers, violent criminals and other assorted convicted felons.

I'll deal with the secession stuff first.

In August of 2010, during her premier, disastrous gubernatorial campaign where she eventually garnered a whooping whole quarter of one percent of the votes cast, Peyton commented in a Seven Days article,

"We ought to do the groundwork before we secede. That is the basis of my platform, to prepare the foundation for economic survival and integrity, thus that we have legs to stand on when we wish to secede!"

"Of course we want to be an independent republic, what has being a member of the US done for us ? Brought us the pride of being the terror of the world? The dignity of creating the worst pollution per capita ? The joy of having more prisons and prisoners per capita than anywhere else? The hope of being the place where our gross national product is dominated by things that kill other people?"

"With economic stability that my proposals bring, and the economic independence we could actually secede. Right now we would be scrambling for a way to do business as the FED places sanctions on us for doing so. Put the [public] banking proposals I name in place and the VUE, vermont unit of exchange, and we can do quite well all by ourselves. People ! Hear this! Please."
Source

For years now, Emily Peyton has been at the helm of a boatload of batshit crazy proposals like Vermont secession but this report from Vermont Public Radio confirms the worst of it. It seems that Peyton, who on a good day polls in the single digit percentile or less, is so bereft of supporters here in Vermont that she has taken a very dark turn and has encouraged a letter writing campaign from prisoners at Vermont's out-of-state prison facility in Beattyville, KY aimed at Vermont newsrooms. What is she seeking to unleash? Prisoners who have no access to local programming are demanding coverage for Peyton and her whacky views, one of which is that rather than incarceration for non-violent prisoners, Vermont should give them free land to farm! Giving the miscreants 3-4 acres to farm will do far more to rehabilitate them than letting the Court direct the remedy, be it incarceration, a drug court, probation with conditions like not drinking or getting a job, etc, according to Peyton. Welcome to Peytopia for criminals! Maybe I'll repeatedly drive drunk, burglarize a few empty residences, embezzle funds from a corporation or two and bounce some checks, and then ask for my 4 acres in Woodstock or some lakefront in Charlotte! Ka-ching!

The reported leader of her gray bar outreach campaign is an admitted child molester whose conviction Peyton calls "questionable." The undisputed, unquestionable facts of his case are that this monster:

• First admitted to sexually molesting his stepdaughter in 2002 when she was five or six years old.
• Self reported his crime to an agent of the Vermont Department of Children & Families in May of 2006.
• The next day admitted to officers of Burlington PD's Chittenden Unit for Special Investigations that he had sexually molested his stepdaughter four years earlier.
• Pled guilty to two counts of molesting his stepdaughter in November of 2007.
• Six weeks later, in January, 2008, the child molester tried to back out of his guilty plea wherein he had escaped additional charges including possession of child pornography and obstruction of justice.
• In a December 2013 appeal decision related to the child molester's case a three judge panel of the Vermont Supreme Court issued yet another smack down of his repeated collateral attacks regarding his conviction.
• The child molester agent for Peyton's campaign in the gang riddled Beattyville, KY prison has unsuccessfully sought in US District Court (Vermont) in 2009 to thwart the Department of Corrections from properly supervising computer access by prisoners, and has recently filed a new collateral attack in the same court. Also, he made a premature application for relief from the same court awhile ago which got kicked back. He refiled something like it in April of this year (pro se, of course) after the Vermont Supreme Court shot him down, arguing 1) that he was denied the right to a speedy trial, 2) had ineffective assistance of counsel (he acted pro se after repeatedly firing his court appointed lawyers, fer crissakes!), 3) involuntary guilty plea, and 4) insufficient evidence to sustain the prospect for conviction (like the self reporting to a child protection agency and the subsequent confession to police investigators should be ignored at this time). Anyone want to make a bet at this point? If not on the likelihood that he'll get denied, then on the likelihood that he'll appeal the denial to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit? No? Don't blame ya.

I won't be mentioning the scumbag's name since, like school shooters and mass murderers, this guy craves attention. He had a website which later was shutdown, only to reemerge when he began trolling for support in the pen for Peyton - and, no, I'm also never going to link to any of his weasley, justifying, word salad ramblings because this dirtbag has gone so far as to further his abuse of his stepdaughter by repeatedly publishing her full name and where she now lives, and, perhaps most reprehensibly, published the graphic details of her forensic pediatric clinical examination along with his commentary about her genitals on his blog.

You can read Peyton's long-winded and tortuous March 25, 2014 letter to this scumbag here.

The only thing questionable here is why a candidate for governor of the State of Vermont who has done so poorly in her two previous tries would chuck her dignity to scrape the very bottom of the barrel for support from an admitted and convicted child molester, among numerous other felons. Has she no shame?

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Vermont Secession Leader Levies A Unsubstantiated Charge That Seemingly Implicates The Vermont's Air National Guard's Supporters In Vandalism

Vermont secessionists have a long history of flinging absurd, wildly unhinged charges against their neighbors and those who aren't lapping up the secesher Kool-Aid. The method usually entails an allusion to responsibility of some kind for those that they hate for not slavishly sucking up to their life view in their invariably imprecise fashion. Over the weekend the Vermont Commons web and content editor, sham radical, nimby queen and anti-Vermont Army and Air National Guard activist, Juliet Buck, has made just such a slimy, flimsy, unfounded and weaselly charge by way of her most recent demand of the VTANG.

This cheesy tactic is of a type normally associated with weak campaigns that seek to undermine the perceived opposition (VTANG) by making a demand that they accept some kind of, no matter how much unwarranted, responsibility for unsubstantiated, iffy charges. Here's the schmuck's, er, Buck's specious charge:

"I think it would be entirely appropriate for the VTANG to issue a press release expressly condemning the acts of vandalism that have been committed against the personal property of certain persons opposed to the F-35. Not doing so implicitly condones this kind of cowardly intimidation.

"Implicitly?"

How 'bout Buck issue her own apology for her VTCommons website having promote the hateful anti-Semitism, white supremacism, collaboration with, both inside and outside of its membership, of racists, misogynists and homophobes. The toxic nature of the members of her group is a fact. All she's presented against the VTANG that she hates so much is an completely evidenceless smear.

Figures.

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Secession Can't Seem To Get Any Respect

Despite there never having been a successful secession from these United States of America since the American Revolution, Vermont secessionists like the baas of the non-existent Second Vermont Republic, the Dixie singin' Thomas H. Naylor, continues in his effort, along with a "small community" of Vermont secessionists, to make more out of his movement than any reasonably sane person would think could ever be acceptable to the "reality based community."

Tommy Boy has spent years churning out ridiculously redundant essays that get smeared across the Internet on various self publishing sites like CounterPunch.com. One philosopher that he's absurdly sought to hitch his intellectual wagon to is Albert Camus. His most recent essay is typical Naylor navel gazing in which he reveals his own whiny devotion to hopelessness here. Given his string of failures over the years in peddling the myth of the viabilty of secession in America, I'm not so surprised at the depressing tone of his missive to those outside of his immediate salon. He's correctly guessed that his direction will lead to nothing.

As if to underscore the absurdity of his efforts, I came across this ironic bit of Interflotsam:

On November 7, 2005, Hardin County, Ohio became a country. A little more than five months later the country of Hardin was no more. (Wikipedialand source here and here)

And that's probably the best it's ever gonna get to be, Tommy Boy.

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Blog Note: I expect to be on hiatus for the near future but will, of course, make every attempt to bring you the latest on secesher ideologues like the not-ever-likely-to-be Senator Robert "Needed Killin" Wagner or his inspiration, the Magnolia Vermonter, Thomas H. Naylor, as need arises.

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Another Cynical Act by Thomas H. Naylor at the Second Vermont Republic

One thing about secessionists is that you can always count on them to take the most disingenuous course in advancing The Lost Cause.

Today's post at the Dixie singin' Thomas H. Naylor's website provides more evidence of the contempt he has for Vermonter's and their memories of his group of losers.

Today is March 27, 2012. I get a daily Google Alert on anything Naylor churns out. I'd visited his website yesterday so I know that the post, "Vermont Yankee and Vermont Independence: A Call for Action on March 22", wasn't there then or in the days leading up to, during or immediately after the demonstration at Vermont Yankee.

Naylor's post today is an unattributed reprint written by his embed in the Occupy Vermont movement, Matt Cropp. Naylor, Cropp and secesher senate candidates Robert Wagner and Peter Garritano have been lamprey-like in how they temporarily attach themselves to much more credible public policy advocates but Naylor's unattributed, undated post of a stale, nearly week old "call for action" written by one of his minions is a new low, even for him.

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Vermont Secessionist Senate Candidate and Vermont's Biggest Crybaby, Robert Wagner, Isn't Just Going After Vermont's Legislature...

... No, no. He's had the Ripton, VT selectboard in his sights for awhile now.

Last summer he thought he had them in how they'd managed funds from a Federal/State grant. I know, I know, Wagner, who likes to call himself "Senator," has claimed to oppose all federal grants as a burden on his grandchildren but in this case he wanted the selectboard to illegally set aside the funds for Riptonites first and apparently believed that Ripton residents had somehow been shortchanged. It wasn't good enough to him that the grant work had been awarded under criteria required by law to benefit the entire community and had gone to a local river engineer from just a few miles down that same river in East Middlebury. I don't believe that he really cared one way or the other. You see, Wagner's had a wicked hard on for the board since they passed him over for a board seat. It was all about intimating that the board had handled the grant improperly even though Wagner had no evidence whatsoever in support of that assertion.

Here's the likely reason why Wagner went after the selectboard: in August of 2009 Wagner volunteered to takeover a vacant Ripton, VT selectboard seat. According to the selectboard's minutes for August 17, 2009, the board spent the least amount of time of that spent with the four candidates interviewing Wagner. Apparently that didn't go down so well. Figures.

Wagner is a slavish follower the dictum of the baas of the Second Vermont Republic founder, the Dixie singin' Magnolia Vermonter Thomas Naylor who asserts that,

"In a left-wing state like Vermont, politics are basically grounded in anger and fear..."
Source

Wagner's doing his best this electoral go around in 2012 to exceed the secesher excesses of 2010.

Wagner was invited to discuss his concerns with the board, as he had requested, but when the time set aside came the weasel didn't even bother to show up. Needless to say, he's dropped this particular matter. Probably being totally wrong had something to do with that.

As I mentioned earlier in the post below this one, the Vermont secessionist or independence or liberty or whatever the hell he's calling himself today candidate for one of the Vermont Senate seats for Addison County in west central Vermont, Robert Wagner, has yet again announced that he's running. "Senator" (as he likes to call himself despite never having held the office) Wagner, in his usual doomsayer fashion, starts out by telling his Addison County neighbors that "a storm is coming."

Right.

Let's take a look at the storm known as "Senator" Robert Wagner.

In December of 2010, after suffering a crushing defeat for the Addison County senate seat due in part to his hypocritical campaign rhetoric pertaining to community sponsored and funded bridgework in Middlebury, VT versus the special treatment he pleaded for in a bridge replacement project in his hometown of Ripton, VT, Wagner delared Hancock, VT to be his new provisional capitol for his new state, er, republic or whatever it is that he was thinking might boost secesher spirits in the aftermath of their 2010 across the board defeats.

You see, a potential detour would have impacted his personal neighborhood, so Wagner demanded temporary bridges be erected despite the fact that Vermont's Agency of Transportation deems such an alternative to be the least cost effect method of completing such a project. I guess that unlike when Wagner worries about accumulating debt for his grandchicldren, as he said in his announcement, he has no such worries when shifting costs to his statewide neighbors.

Around the same time that Wagner was trying to stir up a stink with the Ripton selectboard, a meeting was held by the Addison County Regional Planning Commission Transportation Advisory Committee where Mike Hedges, head of VTRANS Bridges section advised (as I'd written a year earlier) that:

"(W)herever possible, (VTRANS is) eliminating temporary structures that allow for free flow traffic detours during construction. Though this creates some very short term inconvenience, it can dramatically simplify design, construction, and overall cost. It also can significantly reduce project timeline because it reduces impact and simplifies permitting. VTrans is also trying to scale projects in such a way to avoid Act 250 permitting. Together, these have a significant impact on reducing the amount of time, and resource necessary to complete a project."

Wagner had argued in 2010 that there is some temporary bridge piggy bank maintained by the state would easily rectify his issues. What a fraud.

As for his confusion about the flood mitigation project Wagner might have consulted a local Ripton blog nearly a year earlier here, here, here, here and here or in 2011 here.

In closing, there's been no word yet about whether Wagner will be returning the $288.30 subsidy he received while flying out of the airport in Rutland, VT, which is exactly the kind of subsidy that he "is strongly opposed to" and has argued harms Vermonters, that I revealed he'd hypocritically availed himself of (as in sticking his snout in the federal money trough) here.

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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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"Senator" Wagner Is Digging In on His More Than One Month Old Lie

It's fascinating to watch as Ripton, VT's Robert Wagner, the primary organizer of a campaign to throw out every Vermont state senator for being "corrupt," for "stealing from us," and for being "pathological liars," repeatedly lying on his own website about the number of Vermont secesher, er, independence candidates. Thus far, the list includes only five of the usual secesher losers whose electoral showings are normally single digit or often just a fraction of that - loopy Dennis Morrisseau, nasty Peter Garritano, flaky Peter Moss, newbie but longtime secession promoter and Second Vermont Republic honcho Michael Patno, as well as his own sorry, unaccomplished self, a member of Rob Williams' stable of headcase bloggers at "Vermont Commons", Robert Wagner.

"... we must vote out the incumbents, starting with the Vermont Senate. 30 seats. We can do it, will you run with us? I’m recruiting senators… the pay’s decent, we’ve got six so far."

Although I'd normally link to "Senator" Wagner's post, this one contains photographs that gratuitously conflate the violence in Libya with some of Wagner's usual cheesy arguments. The guy is becoming a true asshole.

5 ≠ 6





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