Articles by William Boardman

Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell // Photo: Valley News - Theophil Syslo When the Attorney General of Vermont decided not to prosecute a Vermont State trooper who used a taser to kill an unarmed, 39-year-old epileptic artist, few Vermonters were surprised, most of the Vermont media managed to get the story partly wrong, and none of the media took note of clear falsification in the AG’s press release describing his decision. Attorney General William Sorrell, 65, issued a carefully writte...

Photo: U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs On October 4, a small group of American veterans went to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in Washington, D.C., to talk to officials there about veteran suicides, veteran homelessness, veteran joblessness, and other veteran struggles. No one from the department would talk to them then. Even the contingent of Homeland Security guards blocking the door on October 4 wouldn’t explain to the veterans why they couldn’t come in. So, they stayed on ...

Mitch McConnel addresses tax cuts as a "non-starter." Photo: Jay Westcott Late on a Friday in September, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a respected agency within the Library of Congress, released a report concluding, in effect, that there is no objective support for core Republican economic policies.  Reducing the top tax rates, the report concludes, has no correlation with the nation’s economic growth, but does contribute to the growing gap between the wealthy and the rest of Americ...

Elections Have Consequences. Election 2012 probably doesn’t prove anything. But it provides some evidence for the hopeful proposition that: even when the game is rigged, the cheaters lose: * MONEY.  Even though the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowed gross amounts of money (almost $6 billion) from known and unknown donors to distort the process, few elections near the top of the ballot appear to have been bought.  But the down-ballot races may be most of the iceberg. Big money ma...

Photo: Official White House Photo // Pete Souza Two of the prime terrorist suspects in the Benghazi attack have been captured (one is dead), dozens more have been arrested in Libya, and the suspect group is dispersed and hunted, with its Benghazi headquarters dismantled. “This issue of Benghazi is really bubbling up,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, said on Fox News October 28, echoing a talking point repeated on other networks and elsewhere by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz...

Critics have called the Romney-Obama debates as narrow as they were shallow, but few have done more to try to broaden and deepen the national discussion than Amy Goodman and the Democracy NOW! team, who have produced their “Expanding the Debate” series with third party candidates added to the pair anointed by the two parties’ debate commission. The third party debate on Democracy Now! took a hard and detailed look at the issues discussed during the mainstream presidential debates. For the final...

The big takeaway from Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech on October 8 is that there’s no big takeaway.  The Republican presidential candidate’s speech did not lay out a coherent foreign policy. Amidst the platitudes and vague generalities, the implied bellicosity and patriotic sentimentalities, there’s no sense of proportion, no sense of scale, little indication of priorities, and no bright, quotable line that crystallizes the candidate’s Romney Doctrine beyond a, “vision for a freer, more pro...

The big takeaway from Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech on October 8 is that there’s no big takeaway.  The Republican presidential candidate’s speech did not lay out a coherent foreign policy. Amidst the platitudes and vague generalities, the implied bellicosity and patriotic sentimentalities, there’s no sense of proportion, no sense of scale, little indication of priorities, and no bright, quotable line that crystallizes the candidate’s Romney Doctrine beyond a, “vision for a freer, more pro...

Credit: commons.wikimedia.org None of the officials involved in Vermont’s first taser death can explain why it’s almost three months since a Vermont State trooper tasered Macadam Mason, a 39-year-old epileptic artist who died almost immediately, and there’s still no completed autopsy report. The same officials in two states, Vermont and New Hampshire, also failed to reveal last June that Taser International, the taser manufacturer, almost immediately intervened in the investigation, submitting...