A useful overview of America's "permanent war agenda." Don't miss the very end of the article, entitled "Obama's Permanent War Strategy, which outlines a strategy that should be painfully obvious to all but the most ostrich-like Obama followers.

Gotcha.  That's some of what I've been hearing out there, when talking to people about their concerns... if they're well off, folks are as yet unwilling to even discuss the subject of secession. They haven't been hurt yet by the general decline.  They'll even agree with my first three Senate campaign points, but are afraid of No. 4:

1. NO further Vermont support for War, Torture…or deployment of VT National
   Guard. Order the Guard home now.
2. NOT a dime more for Wall Street…Invest VT funds in VT small banks and
   credit unions for lending here at home.
3. Build a Green Vermont via serious investments in alternative energy,
   human-food-agriculture, and all local community efforts towards self reliance
   and town/village life. Clean, green, decent, peaceful & fun. 
4. Start the discussion with all Vermonters re returning our state to the
   status of a free Independent Republic [as we once were], maintaining free trade
   & good relations with all other nations of the world. 

...and there's the rub.  Nos. 1 through 3, everything that we hope to achieve in Vermont, can happily be blocked or perverted by a federal government pushing its 'standards' and increasingly desperate economic measures and civil repression onto Vermonters.

If you've still got lots of money, the last paragraph may make me sound like a nutjob, a Jeremiah. If you're like most Vermonters, trying like hell to make ends meet as Montpelier cuts essential services; if your kids, parent, spouse (in one case both spouses, leaving the children behind) have been grabbed for Afghanistan, No. 4 begins to make sense!

Dear Governor Kunin,
I am writing to urge you to speak out against further deployments of Vermont troops to Afghanistan and withdrawal of VT troops from Iraq, as Obama promised in his campaign. Obama has betrayed the people who elected him on that basis, and will bring ruin to the US and Vermont if these illegal, immoral wars continue.

An Afghan woman serving in the Parliament, Malali Joya knows of what she speaks in this eye-opening article.

Last Friday, I was driving and listening to National Propaganda Radio (NPR), and I heard Barack Obama discussing his so-called "four options" with regard to Afghanistan (which essentially appears to be a "debate" about how many troops to send and when.)

He said, and I quote:

In October 2007, the Declaration of the Second North American Secessionist Convention began by asserting “The deepest questions of human liberty and government facing our time go beyond right and left, and in fact have made the old left-right split meaningless and dead.”

Charlotte Dennett, an attorney and former investigative journalist who lives in Cambridge, Vermont, was the Vermont Progressive Party’s candidate State Attorney General in 2008. In that race she gained national attention for her campaign pledge to bring murder charges against then-President George Bush if elected. She is an activist in labor, women’s, and environmental causes, and has served on the board of the Vermont AFL-CIO.  Since the election, she has completed a book titled The People v. Bush.