Jim Condos is rapidly becoming my all-time favorite elected official.
Last year he toured the state, patiently explaining in town after village, the purpose and process of open meetings. Having attended one of those tutorials in the Town of St. Albans I can tell you that he was nothing if not thorough.
The purview of the Secretary of State may not be very sexy, having to do, primarily, with the minutia of law; but as I have learned through painful experience, corruption of the local process is at the very heart of many of the problems we later spend years (and fortunes) trying to sort out.
The excessively liberal use of Executive Session has long been a debatable issue here in Franklin County. Minutes from meetings are typically punctuated with cryptic moves to Executive Session, citing only the statute under which the presumptive move is being made.
Little attempt is made to identify what is the actual business of the Executive Session beyond what is revealed in a resulting decision.
I recently obtained the minutes of a City Council meeting which immediately commenced with one of those broadly-based statutory motions into Executive Session. Return to open session was soon followed with a second Executive Session; so that the reader was at a complete loss as to the rationale or responsibility for decisions that emerged from the meeting.
Exactly whose interests are those obfuscations protecting? Certainly not those of the citizens.
Finally, it seems that the culture of opacity in our local decision-making process has gone too far .
Condos... wrote (that) the district had failed to give a true indication of what happened at a Jan. 3 meeting and a motion to go into secret session that night was worded improperly.
The Free Press inquiry was based on lacking minutes when the board was considering discipline against a teacher and a student for a deer hunting incident on school time.
I have absolutely no connection to the school or to anyone involved, and wouldn't even speculate on whether the decision the Board reached was appropriate; but I will certainly bear in mind the School Board's lack of transparency the next time I step up to the ballot box.
No doubt Secretary Condos' name will frequently be taken in vain this weekend here and there around St. Albans, where boards and councils rarely face challenges when they do things 'their way.'
This is just to say that there remain many St. Albans residents who congratulate you, Secretary Condos, for a job well-done.
Got a story for you. It was during the Democratic primary wars last Presidential election and I was working in Fall River, MA doing talk. I was running the board for a guest host, and serving as a co-host at the same time.
This guy was a big time PUMA and was, on nearly every appearance on the station (he'd come in more or less once a week) would bash Obama like the most rabid of right wingers, using their attack points and dog whistles. The birther crap was about the ONLY thing we didn't get out of this guy, but Jeremiah Wright Gawd Damn America Bill Ayers Secretly A Muslim yada yada yackity smackity ad nauseum.
So here we are, at the end of hour two of a two hour excursion, and I'm about hitting my tipping point. It was already acrimonious in there, I was flipping his attacks back in his face and the calls were breaking mostly my way.
Mostly.
I think there was about 20 minutes left in the show, and I'd already gotten the "Shut up, this is MY show" treatment from him a few minutes back.
So finally the hostility was dying down, in spite of the fact that his hour topic was "Is America ready for a black President?"
Which didn't set real well with me. I had my knives out, of course.
So we'd just cleared a caller off the phone and he and I are going back and forth and he was playing the "experience/red phone 3am" game, and referred to Obama's Presidential run as "presumptuous."
"Presumptuous?" I asked him.
"Well, sure!" he said defensively.
I smiled and said, "You mean, 'uppity'? Don't you?"
That was too much, I guess. "Are you calling me a racist? How dare you call me a racist!" and stripped off his headphones.
"10:43, and we'll be back with your calls in seconds."
The guy actually stormed out of the control room and I had to finish the show on my own.
Which was fine.
But...did I actually think that Obama's election would usher in a post-racial America? No, of course not......but I never dreamed we'd fall this far.
"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."
This came out a couple of days ago, but my eagle eye only spotted it today. Press release from the state Ag department, as seen on Vermont Digger:
The Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets announced today that the Mobile Poultry Processing Unit has been sold to Lila Bennett and David Robb of Tangletown Farm in Middlesex. The unit was sold via an online auction site, and after a competitive bidding process, the final sale price was $61,000.
Lila and David are regular vendors at the Montpelier farmers' market, and they also do a meat CSA program. Their purpose is to raise and sell local, humanely-raised meat, and they do a really good job.
I'm happy to see the state's processing in their hands, because I'm sure they will use it to further their mission and help other similarly-minded farmers get their products to market. I wish them all the best.
The definition of "liberty" -- a concept much beloved of our Founding Fathers* -- has undergone a severe narrowing in recent years. Free-marketers, Randians, Tea Partiers and Wall Streeters, the Koch Brothers, big-haired Congressmen Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, and their local brethren such as El Jefe General John McClaughry and the oleaginous Rob Roper, have done their level best to take this noble and free-flying concept and shackle it to the pure pursuit of financial advantage.
*Mothers having been persona non grata in the smoky taverns of Revolutionary-era discourse, and considered -- along with any person of dark-hued skin -- fundamentally ineligible for the blessings of liberty).
If these folks had their way, we'd all be "free" to make as much money as we could. Let loose from burdensome regulation and taxation, we would rise ever upward on the Ladder of Success. (And somehow, the LoS won't topple when all of our weight is gathered on the top rung.) The flood tide of capital would right all wrongs, cure all ills, and allow humanity to reach its full potential.
Color me unconvinced. In their definition of "liberty" I see oppression. And lest you think me overwrought, let's look at what a lifetime of such "liberty" would entail.
(After the jump: life on the hamster wheel, the big lie of "the opportunity society," and the true meaning of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)
Did you get a robo-call yesterday from schoolchoiceweek.com?
I did; and as innocuous as the approach was, the underlying dog whistle was ear-splitting.
So I took a little stroll around the web, first visiting the touted website which offered little more than honey-covered affirmations of how concerned we all are that our kids should have the best possible opportunities to learn.
I didn't choose to immediately jump down one of the rabbit holes that capture data from the innocent, but instead returned to my Google search where I learned that the site was directly linked to another site belonging to "Students for Liberty" which was seeking student bloggers to write about School Choice Week.
That site was considerably more revealing, as it included video clips of Dr. Eward Hughes of "The Atlas Society for Objectivism" and Michael Strong of "FLOW," both devoted to themes of libertarianism and capitalism; and it made the following call to college students:
The philosophy of liberty is in jeopardy today. The older generations have let us down, and there seem to be few short-term solutions. Our hope for a free society lies in the future. The best investment one can make to promote liberty today is in the youth, particularly in students...The problem is significant, but the solution is clear: There is a need for an organization to counter the climate of authoritarianism on campus by directly supporting students dedicated to liberty.
A little more digging and I came up with the usual suspects: the Koch Brothers, of course. It seems that promotion of the second annual School Choice Week is being funded by the now familiar Americans for Prosperity.
While speaking on the radio recently (True North, WDEV), Tom Salmon offered his views on tax policy. He said he would like Vermont to be a "no income tax state." Apparently he views this as a necessary remedy because "we're a very sketchy state for businesses [and] New Hampshire continues to eat our lunch."
The idea that Vermont's economy is anti-business and suffers in comparison to other states is a common refrain but is not supported by the evidence. For example, for three major economic measures -- rate of job creation, unemployment, and per capita GDP, Vermont has exceeded the national average over the last ten years and is virtually identical to (or better than) New Hampshire.
Like the rest of the country, Vermont still has problems. But to suggest that Vermont is an economic basket case is just plain wrong. And it is hyperbole (if not demagoguery) to suggest that New Hampshire is "eating our lunch."
Finally, not only is Mr. Salmon's desire for Vermont to be a no-income tax state the wrong remedy, it creates a $600 million dollar hole in the state budget. Mr. Salmon hasn't said how he would fill that hole. Typically, having no income tax means the state must rely more heavily on regressive property taxes and fees (like New Hampshire). The result is a skewed distribution of the tax burden that benefits the wealthy.
Mr. Salmon is certainly entitled to his opinion, but as the State Auditor, one would hope that he forms his opinions after careful analysis of the facts. To my knowledge, the Auditor's Office has not produced any reports that provide the evidence necessary to support Mr. Salmon's conclusions. In this case, it appears that Mr. Salmon is satisfied with unexamined assumptions and sound bites. These are not qualities we look for in a State Auditor.
Well, our good neighbors at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant are at it again. Report from the Associated Press, which came to my computer by way of the Huffington Post:
Energy Corp.'s Vermont Yankee nuclear plant once again is refusing the state's request that it conduct more tests for radioactive tritium ikn a former drinking water well on the plant grounds.
Christopher Wamser, site vice president for plant owner Entergy, says in a Jan. 20 letter to Public Service Commissioner Elizabeth Miller that such testing would be inappropriate because it could contaminate the bedrock aquifer at the bottom of the well and might not produce reliable results.
Well, all righty then. The fine folks at Entergy are simply trying to protect the environment. (Not that they haven't argued all along that tritium poses no danger to public health and safety, so a bit o'tritium in the groundwater shouldn't be a problem, should it?)
Read further in the story, and you discover that the problem isn't necessarily with testing the well water -- it's with the type of testing VY wants to do. Its preferred method involves purging the well, which could force tritium-tainted water into the aquifer.
The state's preferred method is to take a "grab sample" from the well. No purging, no pumping, no danger of spreading contaminated water. Wamser argues that this sampling technique might produce inaccurate results: "vertical flow within the well and insertion of the sampling equipment could cause mixing within the well column..."
But state geologist Lawrence Becker says he checked with the EPA, who assured him that the "grab sample" method is perfectly fine, and should produce a representative result.
Oh, and one more thing.
Wamser's Jan. 20 letter came one day after a federal judge in Brattleboro issued a ruling saying Vermont may not force its lone nuclear plant to shut down when its initial 40-year license expires March 21.
Not a good news day for Gingrich leading into the last debate before the Florida primary.
A week ago Gingrich had to stand up to a debate the day after ABC aired an interview with his ex-wife in which she described his request to convert his marriage with a six-year affair on the side to what he called an open marriage. He handled it pretty well, doing what comes naturally to him: he lied.
You really should watch the video. A week after he lied in the debate, and two days after he lied on camera, they had to come back and admit that what was baloney here, to use Gingrich's term, was not ABC's reporting but Gingrich's own claims.
I didn't watch tonight's debate, but I'm pretty sure they didn't ask the question I would have asked. If I were asking the questions, my first one would be:
Mr. Gingrich at a debate the other night you stated that you had asked ABC to interview several of your friends and that they had refused to do so. Today your campaign admitted that your statement was false, and that the only people you offered to ABC to interview were your two daughters, who have also worked on your campaign.
In light of the fact that your statements during the debate were demonstrably and intentionally false, how can you expect the American people to believe anything else you say to them?
Alternate wording: In light of the fact that your statements during the debate were demonstrably and intentionally false, are you prepared to release to the American people a list of the other knowing misstatements you have made during your long political career?
So tell me, did anyone ask that question, or any version of it?
When I first moved to Vermont in 1987, I was told in no uncertain terms that I should give up any idea of growing rhododendrons or roses at my new home. The winters were simply too cold.
Just shy of thirty years later, rhododendrons and roses grow in abundance here in St. Albans, and a 2008 article in USA Today complained that the growing zone map issued by the USDA was no longer a reliable source:
The map doesn't show, for example, that the Southern magnolia, once limited largely to growing zones ranging from Florida to Virginia, now can thrive as far north as Pennsylvania. Or that kiwis, long hardy only as far north as Oklahoma, now might give fruit in St. Louis.
Magnolias in Pennsylvania and kiwis in St. Louis? Who'd have thought...?
While the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls may be in full climate science denial, a brand new USDA zone map confirms that a general warm-up has indeed been in progress for some years now.
So that we might better appreciate the significance of the changes, the Arbor Day Foundation provides their own handy interactive map on which we are invited to track the northward shift of climate zones clear across America.
And, anticipating release of the new USDA map, forestry writer Cristina Santiestevanwrote in 2010 that
The type of climate we have for plants now is what we had 20 years ago, but roughly 200 miles to the south," explains Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who develops models to predict future climate impacts around the country. In other words, the hardiness zones on the old map are now off, in some cases by as much as 200 miles.
She included her own mapped projections of forest impacts due to climate change over the next 90 years and concluded:
Ultimately, climate change will draw new lines between species and ecosystems. Some changes may be subtle and hard to notice, such as the gradual decline of coastal redwood forests over the coming centuries. Other changes will be hard to miss, such as the absence of blazing sugar maple trees in much of New England's autumn landscape.
And, if her projections prove correct, long before the sugar maples disappear entirely, their economic value to Vermont will shrivel and disappear. What happens then to the "Vermont Brand?"
Every year, as the color fades and the syrup dwindles, we will be painfully reminded not of nature's renewable miracles, but of her ultimate fragility at the hands of a reckless and insatiable species.
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