Political Vandalism

I noticed this weekend that quite a few of the "Bernie for Senate"
signs in the area have Martha Rainville bumper stickers on top of
them. While I find it plausible that people would support both
Sanders and Rainville, I somehow doubt that's what's going on here.

What's more likely is that someone supporting Rainville is doing
something slimy: vandalizing Bernie signs which can't be easily
replaced in order to create the illusion that a widely popular Senate
candidate is supported by the same people who support a
not-so-popular house candidate.

Martha Rainville, if she wants to support the notions and ideals of a
clean campaign, needs to put a stop to this immediately. She needs
to announce to her supporters that they need to stop it and that
running a clean campaign doesn't just mean for her, but for everyone
who supports her as well.

Why a Republican?

I'm looking forward to Bernie becoming the next Senator from the
great Green Mountain State; it seems a good continuation of Jeffords'
legacy (though clearly quite a different approach).

Here's what I don't get: in this political climate, with this
particular administration in charge, why would anyone run for
Bernie's old seat as a Republican? If Rainville had chosen to run as
an independent instead, she'd actually have had a serious shot at
this.

I've voted for Republicans in the past, but there's no way I'm going
to vote for anyone who willingly chooses to work under that party's
label in this cycle.

Friday Bird Blogging

Work sometimes takes me all over the state of Vermont, which means that on occasion I get to stop by nice birding areas. Thursday night, at Dead Creek (off rte 17, Northwest of Middlebury), I got an amazing look at a pair of black-crowned night herons. Here's one of them:

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Okay, this is ridiculous

Does this sound familiar?

From http://www.martharainville.com/articles/budget/accessFedBudget.htm:

We need maximum transparency for government. There should be no secrets unless it involves critical aspects of National Security. Every earmark, every grant, every contract should be online so the public can get access to it

If it sounds familiar, it's because it's the exact same passage, unchanged, that I found on Sunday night that was stolen from the PBS show NOW. Just in case she takes it down, a screenshot:


This is just getting silly.

NOW it's down

Apparently, someone's paying attention. NOW we get the 404 error:

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Not Found
The requested URL /issues/issuesTxt.htm was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.36 Server at www.martharainville.com Port 80

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Martha, you get a break, because I'm busy tonight. But just in case, double-check your site again. I'll be rechecking tomorrow morning.

"We are reworking the wording of our issues" redux

Okay, so Martha's site is now back up again, and she's fixed all the stolen language problems, right?

Not so much as you might think:

http://www.martharainville.com/issues/issuesTxt.htm::

I also support making health insurance portable. Too often when people switch jobs their health insurance isn't portable, forcing them to change doctors and coverage or lose it entirely.

http://www.rickodonnell.com/healthcare.html:

People switch jobs but their health insurance isn't portable, forcing
them to change doctors and coverage or lose it entirely.

As with before, I kept a copy of the site.

The Greater Internet Culture (agreement)

Odum notes:

At the very least, you have to admit that the greater internet culture enabled your great work. Without search engines, the research would likely have been too much work. Without email, it may not have been as timely.

I fully admit this. There is no way I would have even thought to do this if it were something time consuming or complicated. I think the internet played a very valuable role in all this. And I think blogs did as well. I just don't think this blog did, because (frankly) until this blog got all sorts of media attention, I don't think any of the people now talking about it even knew it existed.

From a strictly personal, standpoint, I think I should have posted it on my website because then it would have been linked to the music I have for sale :).

A few Rainville updates

I've been on the road most of today; when I checked this afternoon, Rainville's whole site was finally taken down.

The reformer has a really nice editorial about the problems the stolen ideas incident created.

But now, something seems ready to blow the whole stolen ideas concept out of the water. Peter Freyne's print column has a broad story about the Vermont political scene which suggests a fairly major problem during Rainville's tenure as head of the VT National Guard. Per Peter:

As for the charge she covered up an internal Guard pornography probe — she denied it. “That’s completely untrue,” said the Vermont congressional hopeful. “I had a relatively short incident that I dealt with immediately,” said Rainville, “and since then some other stuff has developed that Mike is having to deal with. This is not something that either one of us would take lightly.”

I'm thinking that this isn't a week Rainville is going to be looking back on with pleasure.

So why isn't Ranville's website really down?

Martha Rainville does claim that her website's been taken down, but that's not accurate: you can still get to all the stolen material. The MAIN page indicates that the site is down, but all the other pages are still there. Take, for example, this page. Right there and available to anybody.

The Meta-Story

Much of the focus on the whole Rainville story has become more about me and how I uncovered it, and so much of it has been about the power of blogs to influence the mainstream media.

I don't think it should be about any of those things. Here's why:

I'm concerned by the number of people who are impressed by my amazing Google skills. This is not a talent. It's not even a skill. It's just copying some words from text posted on the web, putting them into Google and seeing what happens. Try it yourself. Try it with the phrase "The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray" and you'll see that I took those exact words from a very cool site about an optical illusion.

This isn't about the blogosphere rising up to get the mainstream media to focus on something. I found this information on Sunday night. I posted it on the blog because it was easiest (and because there's a comments field, in case anyone wanted to respond), but I could just as easily have placed it on any one of my websites. If I'd done this, would anyone be framing it in terms of blogs or the blogosphere?

This wasn't picked up by mainstream media because I posted it on my blog. This was picked up by mainstream media because I sent an e-mail out to everyone I could think of who worked for a paper with which I was familiar, and used the blog as an information archive. Mainstream media was all over the story more quickly than most bloggers, and the one blogger who was on it quickly (Peter Freyne) got the story because he was affiliated with Seven Days, one of the newspapers to which I sent the original story.

Blogs are very important, and I think they've provided some valuable resources, but this particular story is not about blogs, nor is it about me. It's about a candidate with manufactured talking points who only seems to have a surface understanding of the ideas she's using to pretend her independence.

"We are reworking the wording of our issues"

The phrase "we are reworking the wording of our issues" suggests to me that somewhere, the point got lost.

This isn't just about stealing words from other people. No question: that's bad. But what does it mean when a candidate has to steal policy statements from other politicians?

I'm not naive. I've been watching politics for long enough that I know not to expect anything new or original from politicians. I know that people write speeches for them and that not everything they say is likely to be their own words.

But I still think this is different. This is not merely echoing talking points. This is letting other people write your policy agenda and signing off on ideas which you may not even understand or comprehend.

The Fallout

Busy day yesterday: all the following are in today's news on Rainville's campaign:

• Brattleboro Reformer
• Rutland Herald
• Burlington Free Press
• Associated Press

They're mostly accurate, too. The one error was from the Rutland Herald which said, about me, "she produces Rep. Bernard Sanders’ Internet broadcasts." I don't produce anything. I just manage the podcast feed. Every once in awhile, someone from the Sanders' campaign sends me a URL for a Sanders speech, and I add it to the podcast. Minor detail but, as someone who produces her own music, I see a big difference between producing broadcasts and just adding URLs to an internet feed. One takes talent. A trained monkey could do the other.

And one more update...

From Peter Freyne again:

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Rainville Website Shut Down & Staffer Fired

GOP Congressional hopeful Martha Rainville told yours truly Monday afternoon she has fired campaign staffer/researcher Christopher Stewart following an internal investigation of the plagiarism scandal involving Rainville’s website.

“I am incredibly disappointed in him and we have shut down the website,” Rainville told us. “We are reworking the wording of our issues and we are continuing an internal investigation to see if there were any other cases of this or if anybody else was aware of it.”

Candidate Rainville said she was not aware of the plagiarism until the matter was brought to her attention on Monday morning. She called it “very disappointing news.” Said Rainville, “It’s not acceptable and we are not going to condone it in any way.”

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Would it be wrong for me to ask if she said those words herself, or if someone wrote them for her?

An update from Peter Freyne

Peter Freyne's blog (Freyne Land) has a wonderful bit on this:

Just before the conference call, we did reach Rainville for Congress spokesman Brendan McKenna. He said he was online checking it out as we spoke.

"Martha Rainville," he told us, "has always taken good ideas because they're good ideas, without regard to the source."

Press Secretary McKenna (nice guy, formerly with the Rutland Herald), corrected himself and asked if he could replace the word "taken" with "considered."

That was Quick

Last night, I made copies of the stolen parts of Martha Rainville's website. Apparently this was a good choice, because now when I go to her website, it reads.

Currently Under Construction

We will be back up as soon as possible!

Rainville's Stolen Ideas

While trying to find polling information about the Welch / Rainville race (Vermont race for the house seat left open by Bernie Sanders) I discovered something interesting:

From Martha Rainville's web site, there is the following statement on energy:

"Briefly, I strongly believe that our present system of energy is weakening our national security, hurting our pocketbooks and threatening our children's future."

source: http://www.martharainville.com/issues/issuesTxt.htm

In May, Hillary Clinton delivered the a speech which includes the following comment:

"Our present system of energy is weakening our national security, hurting our pocketbooks, violating our common values and threatening our children's future. "

Source: http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=255982

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Martha Rainville on easy access to the federal budget:

“We need maximum transparency for government. There should be no secrets unless it involves critical aspects of National Security. Every earmark, every grant, every contract should be online so the public can get access to it,” Rainville said. “Letting the American people see exactly how their money is being spent is one of the best ways to control spending and ensure accountability.”

Source: http://www.martharainville.com/articles/budget/accessFedBudget.htm

This was dated September 8th. On August 25th, there was an interview on the PBS show NOW, which included a segment with Representative Jim Cooper (D-TN), which includes this statement by Cooper:

"Absolutely. I think we need maximum transparency for government. There should be no secrets unless it involves certain parts of national security. Every earmark, every grant, every contract should be online so that the public can get access to it. But the key principle is this: sunshine is the best disinfectant. And we need a lot of disinfectant in Washington today."

Source: http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/234.html

Here's the best part about this: notice the grammatical error in Cooper's original comment: "There should be no secrets unless it involves certain parts of national security." (the noun is singular but the verb is plural). Rainville's statement makes that exact same grammatical error-- it's not just a rendering of the same idea. It's cut and pasted from the statment by Cooper.

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Earlier I found these other items on Rainville's health insurance policy:

Press release from Martha Rainville, dated September 17th:

“Our health insurance system is in a crisis,” Rainville said. “Employers face spiraling cost increases for employee health insurance, forcing them to reduce coverage or drop it completely. People switch jobs but their insurance isn’t portable, forcing them to change doctors and coverage or lose it entirely The uninsured show up in our nation’s emergency rooms and leave unpaid bills, so hospitals cost-shift the added burden onto those with insurance. We see a similar problem with Medicare reimbursements that are far below the cost of care.”

Source: http://www.martharainville.com/articles/MedicareReform/healthCareReform.htm

Here's an excerpt from Rick O'Donnell, who's running for congress in Colorado, dated July, 2006:

America's health insurance system is in crisis. More than 10% of 7thCongressional District residents - nearly 150,000 people - lack healthinsurance. Employers face spiraling cost increases for employee health insurance, forcing them to reduce coverage or drop it all together. People switch jobs but their health insurance isn't portable, forcing them to change doctors and coverage or lose it entirely. The uninsured show up in emergency rooms and leave unpaid bills, so hospitals cost-shift by charging more to those with insurance.

Source http://www.rickodonnell.com/healthcare.html

Hawk Watching

I spent four days out of the last week up on Putney Mountain, squinting at hawks, examining their details and features, taking pictures as best as I could, and enjoying the cool fresh air.

The passion I have for birdwatching is a newfound one and I'm not sure where it came from, but it's a serious thrill for me. I love the work I do, and I'm good at it, but more and more it's becoming one of those things that's not as interesting to me as the play I do outside of work.

And in the meantime, I'm not keeping up with politics, ignoring a lot of what's going on outside of this particularly narrow focus of interest, finding it increasingly difficult to read about the apparently fraudulent ABC 9/11 film, about the elections, etc.

Now, I know all of this is extremely important. I'm actually excited about the prospects in November, for the first time in a long time. But at the same time, I'm also reluctant to care too much because I've been burned so many times.

But really, this is important. It's not just about the Bush administration and it's absurdly wrongheaded policies. It's also about the relatively narrow window we're in as a planet to correct the crash course we're on with our own atmosphere if we don't do something soon to find cleaner fuel sources and resources.

Now, I'm not convinced the Democrats will get it right. I think they may screw it up as well, but I can't imagine them screwing it up in as monumentally horrific fashion as the Republicans. Obviously, getting these ideological neanderthals out of the White House is necessary as well, but at least with Democrats in control of one house of Congress, we can slow down the bleeding a little.

It's been awhile

As may be obvious, I took a break for a time. I'm not sure if I have the time or interest in continuing this blog; things have taken a major turn for me, personally, in the last few months. The last time I posted here was just days before we lost one of our beloved cats to an aggressive lung cancer, and more recently we've been dealing with major health issues on the part of Melissa, our one remaining household pet.

I still care about everything I've posted about here, quite deeply, and I'm still politically active and involved. Our union agitating is going quite well, and Vermont politics are, as usual, surreal. I just don't know if I have the interest in maintaining this specific venue any longer.

Feel free to weigh in.

Never let it be said...

that conservative Christians are merely opposed to the encroachment of homosexuality on their lives. The personal activities of an actor, apparently, is enough to condemn anything connected with them. Check out this article (excerpt below):

"End of the Spear," a movie that depicts the slaying of Protestant missionaries in South America, is provoking a side debate among some religious conservatives because lead actor Chad Allen has advocated for gay causes.

Complete and Total Crap

Check out this exerpt from AP's review of the State of the Union Address:

Figures on the sidelines gave a look at the nation's sharp divide over Iraq. Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier whose summertime vigil near Bush's Texas ranch reinvigorated the anti-war movement, was arrested and escorted from the visitors section of the House gallery after causing a disruption just before the president spoke.

Now read the exerpt from this AP report:

Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that such displays were not allowed, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.

Flip-floppers.

--julie