( – promoted by jvwalt)

So, research now backs up what we all kinda knew was true anyway: increasing taxes on the rich isn’t going to send them packing. On the contrary, they are more likely to suck it up and appreciate the added value of public services.

Not holding my breath, but perhaps Mr. Shumlin will now stop his obsequious behavior and start coming up with some more realistic long term financial scenarios where any necessary tax increases are imposed on those who can, in fact, afford them?

Don’t worry, Peter, those sacred cow millionaire friends of yours will still be your friends (and will still be around for dinner on Friday) — and perhaps, just perhaps, you’re more likely to have a viable state with fewer desperate low income earners when the elections come around…

Sadly misguided op ed in the Burlington Free Press today. Mr. Al Blakley from Brattleboro writes in to berate and belittle those of us who want to see Vermont Yankee closed as planned.

Comparing our fear of leaking, mismanaged VY with the apparent hesitation expressed by some when electric power first became available at the turn of the century, he triumphantly declares, “in the entire 50-year history of commercial U.S. nuclear power plants, no-one has ever died from radiation. How much safer can you get?”

Claiming that, “The problem is that fearing something we do not understand is not a legitimate reason for removing that thing. The responsible action is to educate ourselves and argue facts (including thorough, prudent safeguards and protections), not imagined disasters”, Mr. Blakley goes on to decry our apparent unwillingness to “look at the facts [and] come to see there is not a lot to be afraid of with nuclear power”.

And that, of course, is his mistake right there. We’re horrified at the thought of VY continuing to operate precisely because we’ve looked at the facts and come to realize that there’s quite a lot to be afraid of with nuclear power as it’s irresponsibly produced by an outfit like Entergy.

Indeed, it is not fear of the unknown that drives us, it’s fear of the known — coupled with the potential consequences of the apparent state of denial suffered by the NRC and a subset of (perhaps tritium-laced?) Kool-Aid drinkers like Mr. Blakley.  

New York’s Attorney General, Schneiderman, is apparently the last hold-out preventing Wall Street from gracefully completing the heist that left them with untold billions in profits, while thoroughly trashing the mortgage market and setting off the on-going recession. The White House (eager, no doubt to clear the way for fundraising for the ’12 re-election campaign) is pushing hard to get all the state Attorney Generals to sign on to a $20bn settlement deal that would immunize Bank of America and the rest of the money mafia from further criminal or civil prosecution, effectively letting them get away with a fine and a stern warning. They must be laughing all the way to the bank at the thought of this…

But Schneiderman is having none of it. He’s in the middle of his own thorough investigation of the mortgage scam shenannigans, and he has made it clear that he has no interest in selling out his potential cases by signing on to a get-out-of-jail-free card for the banks. Predictably, he is now being vilified by the Administration’s henchmen and the bank’s paid-for friends on various oversight boards. More on the whole sordid affair from Matt Taibbi in the latest issue of Rolling Stone Magazine.

So, what I’m wondering is this: when did Bill Sorrell in Montpelier decide that he was on board with this grand giveaway to the banks? It’s one thing that he’s reluctant to do much digging himself (I don’t know if the settlement amount is reasonable or not, but he seems to have readily compromised with Countrywide/BofA locally, rather than explore more drastic measures), but it would be nice if he would refrain from sabotaging the honest work by his colleague in New York and not simply sign on to a White House-brokered deal that epitomizes the corrupt relationship between our politicians and the crooks in the financial world.  

( – promoted by Sue Prent)

Billed as “The Largest Vermont Tea Party Rally in History,” Friday night’s “freedom bonfire” in Bradford at one point drew slightly over 30 people, including the organizers, the invited speakers, and yours truly. The audience was from the 50-and-above crowd, and several declared that they had, in fact, come from New Hampshire to attend the event.

Peg Coutermarsh of Bradford was the MC.

Speakers were Henry Lampman of the VT John Birch Society, who went on about the pervasive threat of socialism within the US since forever; John McLaughry of the Ethan Allen Institute, who talked at length about the recent debt ceiling debacle and argued that the coming election was the right time for the tea party to take over the State House in Montpelier; Rutland City Treasurer Wendy Wilton, who had brought along her (in)famous spreadsheet (alas, no Powerpoint) of the endless horrors (in the shape of taxes) that would befall us all when Peter Shumlin got his way with Green Mountain Care. Finally Steven Howard of the Vermont Campaign for Liberty tried to make the argument that our inherent sense of liberty is what makes us so uniquely American, and warned that the flame of liberty was smoldering.

Howard then had the honor of lighting the bonfire, while participants were given the opportunity to write their messages to President Obama on sticks to throw in the flames (apparently the Tea Party hasn’t gotten the memo that the president prefers Twitter).

Unlike with last year’s event, there appeared to be zero media interest in this year’s Vermont Tea Party bonfire.

More pictures from the epic event here.

( – promoted by odum)

On April 12, Tom Salmon will be holding a “Town Hall” in Bradford, VT, ostensibly answering questions like “Where does your tax money go”, “What about Vermont’s finances and reform initiatives?” and “Where is Vermont’s fiscal future going?”

Ownership of the event is a bit unclear, but it was recently announced by an anonymous poster on an Upper Valley list serv. The poster was soon discovered to be the contact person listed by the Ethan Allen Institute as the regional Tea Party contact, and when pressed declared herself to be someone called “Peg.”  

As of today, the event is publicized by the Mountain Rangers Tea Party as well as the Patriot Action Network‘s local branch (but, oddly, it is not listed as an official Vermont Tea Party even, nor is it on the calendar for the Upper Valley Tea Party or the Green Mountain Patriots — it would appear that the ‘baggers roll a bit like the People’s Front of Judea, with lots of splitters obscuring the true nature and organizational prowess of their supposedly silent but deadly majority).

I plan to attend Auditor and Republican candidate Salmon’s event to listen to his “answers” and I would be grateful to hear from GMD posters with any questions that I might ask of Mr. Salmon to get a better sense of where this ex-Democrat, soon-to-be ex auditor, current sweetheart of the Tea Party stands on things.

Bernie Sanders announced today that he’d managed to pull down a $500K grant for Vermont police.

Of that, $100K is to go to a continuation of funding for the School Resource Officer Program, a federal notion from the Clinton era that places a police officer in a public school setting. Sanders claims that:

“This program […] is an important outreach tool that helps deter crime. These officers bridge the gap between law enforcement and students, promote positive attitudes towards law enforcement; prevent juvenile crime by helping students formulate an awareness of rules, authority, and justice; and instruct students how to avoid becoming a victim through self-awareness and crime prevention. “This is a very successful program that has already placed officers in school systems around the state of Vermont,” Sanders said. “This funding will help to place additional school resource officers in Vermont schools.”

I’d love to see some data to support his claim that “this is a very successful program” — I’m not finding any public reports or evaluations of the project. I’d also be curious what metrics Sanders would use to measure the success of something like this.The few media reports of SRO activity offers no real clue — the only significant story relates the 2007 panic attack in when a School Resource Officer “discovered”  that teenagers in Middlebury were using the legally available herb salvie to get a mild high  (laugh if you must, it’s here).

The ACLU examined the SRO program in CT in 2008 — findings and recommendations here. It was a mixed review, at best.

Just as we’re increasingly moving our cops into a more confrontational role (e.g. by giving them tasers so they can feel more at ease using almost-lethal force with their customers), the SRO program seems to be a sign of what the ACLU describes as “a tendency to criminalize  and legalize  infractions that might otherwise have been dealt with  administratively.”

I’m sure a compassionate and considerate police officer can do wonderful things with troubled kids on the verge of getting marginalized because of petty crime and social dysfunction, but so could a councelor or extra teacher’s aide. And just as with the widely criticized and largely ineffective D.A.R.E. youth drug prevention program, the notion that cops are suited at all to educate kids is questionable at best.

I appreciate that Sanders has to look for money where it’s available, and at a time where the only federal budgets with any heft seem to involve surveillance and/or brute force, it’s understandable that he’d end up landing a grant for the Vermont police. but I’d like to think that Sanders would really prefer teachers and parents teaching kids how to conduct themselves and stay out of trouble.

Of his key selling points, “promote positive attitudes towards law enforcement” and “formulate an awareness of rules, authority, and justice” sound a lot more like wish list bullet points from the the Orwellian dream world of the federal government.

With everyone and the janitor’s cat suddenly having a heartfelt and profound opinion on the Cordoba House Community Center (aka the Al Queda Rec Center & Ground Zero Mosque) it’s just all over the map.

Howard Dean, once upon a time smart, progressive and considerate guy, has decided to sign up for an empty slot on Team Clueless Bigots with his claim that:

This isn’t about the right of Muslims to have a worship center — or Jews or Christians or anybody else — to have a place to worship, or any place around Ground Zero. This is something we ought to be able to work out with people of good faith. And we have to understand that it is a real affront to people who’ve lost their lives, including Muslims. That site doesn’t belong to any particular religion, it belongs to all Americans and all faiths.

That was in a conversation with Dan Goodman on WABC earlier today (Politico covers it here). Okay, Howard. let’s start with some definitions.

“This is something we ought to be able to work out with people of good faith” — who is “we” Howard, why are “we” working this out? There’s a process for this sort of thing, and not surprisingly, perhaps, it involves the zoning board for lower Manhattan, not the former governor of Vermont and his fellow travellers in speculation and random fabulation about affronts and good faith.

“That site” — what exactly are you talking about? How many blocks is your particular “muslim-free safe zone” from ground zero?

And “affront to people who’ve lost their lives, including muslims”? Well, if they’re dead, they probably don’t give a shit, Howard, and as for their next of kin, how can you claim to know what affronts them? Are you channeling or is this just wild conjecture to get some air time? You may be affronted, along with random wingnuts across the entire nation, most of whom didn’t lose anybody on 9/11, but all of whom seem awfully affronted. That doesn’t mean we need to care what some random teabagger from San Diego thinks is or isn’t an affront.

And, no offense, but it doesn’t necessarily matter if the widow of a 9/11 victim is affronted. This is really not something that can or should be put to an emotional vote — either there’s a rational, sane, logically compelling, legally sound reason for denying the Cordoba House their project site, or there’s not, in which case you and thousands of others may well be affronted, but that really shouldn’t impact the project.

All of which brings me to part two of today’s interesting times: Bush lawyer and all-around conservative hard-ass, Ted Olson, who lost his wife in 9/11, comes out in support of the Cordoba House project’s right to build:

I do believe that people of all religions have a right to build edifices or structures, places of religious worship or study where the community allows them to do it under zoning laws and that sort of thing. And that we don’t want to turn an act of hate against us by extremists into an act of intolerance for people of religious faith. And I don’t think it should be a political issue.

Yes, that’s right: Ted Olson, lawyer to the rich, obnoxious and very powerful, turns out to be more level-headed, compassionate and rational than Howard “screaming progressive” Dean from the great Socialist state of Vermont. Because while they both say essentially the same vague stuff about freedom of religion, Olson rightly leaves it as a straightforward zoning issue, while Dean has to go all finger wagging on us and add the bit about “the evil mooslims should just go away if they know what’s good for them”. That’s his fail.

Go figure.

(Uncomfortable but fair questions for Rep. Welch. – promoted by GMD)

Peter Welch claims he’s doing all he can to hold BP responsible for the damage caused in the Gulf of Mexico (see http://welch.house.gov/index.p… That’s certainly commendable. A while back, he asked some memorably tough questions of BP CEO Tony Hayward, and he has subsequently poked at some specific shortcomings of BP in the cleanup effort, albeit with dubious results (I doubt BP cares what Peter recommends/suggests/implores they do).

Most audaciously, he’s insisted that BP refrain from paying bonuses and dividends until the cleanup has been completed and the bill paid. All well and good, but so far, it’s been largely rhetoric.

In fact, it’s not clear how much of this is Peter grandstanding on a story that’s front-and-center in the news, and how much of it is a genuine attempt at actually, you know, holding BP responsible. Recall, if you will, that shortly after ACORN had been accused of fraudulent behavior following a theatrical right-wing smear attempt, Peter was awfully quick to jump on the bandwagon and insist that ACORN be barred from receiving federal funds. Specifically, he voted for the house bill to de-fund ACORN, about which author Mike Johanns (R-NE) said: “Until a full investigation is launched into ACORN, no taxpayer money should be used to fund their activities. A vote in favor of my amendment is a vote in favor of the taxpayer and against the status quo.”

Mind you, ACORN hadn’t been found guilty at the time, and the organziation was subsequently aquitted of all charges, but Peter nevertheless found that the accusation alone was enough to vote for Johanns’s draconian bill and withhold all federal funds from ACORN. This turns out to have been illegal in its own right (only after being found guilty could Congress defund an entity like ACORN), but regardless: with Peter’s help, the right-wing smear accomplished its goal, and ACORN was shut down. The poor and disenfranchised lost yet another important advocate, while I assume Peter proudly notched the whole thing down as “holding ACORN responsible…”

Back to BP, then: Attorney General Holder confirms that BP is already under criminal investigation for what has transpired with the Deepwater Horizon disaster. (Obviously, BP is bound to be aquitted — they have too many friends in Congress, and Barack Obama will no doubt offer BP amnesty for past wrongdoings like he did the Bush administration perpetrators of torture and crimes against humanity. Remember, the law is different for big corporations than for you and me). But the investigation alone should be plenty for Peter Welch to come forward with an amendment — he should be the first to state that “Until a full investigation is launched into BP, no taxpayer money should be used to fund their activities. A vote in favor of my amendment is a vote in favor of the taxpayer and against the status quo.”

But as of now, I’m looking in vain to find any mention anywhere of Peter’s initiative to immediately stop, for instance, the annual purchase of almost $1bn worth of aviation fuel from BP by the DoD (see http://www.commondreams.org/he… But if he felt justified in stopping the paychecks of community workers employed by ACORN based on nothing but an alleged crime, then surely this is no different? Actually, this is different, because Peter now claims to himself be on the frontline, “holding BP Responsible.”

Too much for Congressman Welch to pull off? Well, he’s already authored a pending piece of legislation “To require the proposal for debarment from contracting with the Federal Government of persons violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977”,/i> (see http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/… so he’s clearly familiar with precisely this sort of thing. Is the courage to genuinely take on BP perhaps lacking, Congressman?

Which is it Peter: are you going to measure out the same tough justice & love here in an instance where it really matters, or will you simply stomp your feet, raise your voice a bit when the cameras are rolling, but then let BP continue to pull down billions of tax payer dollars as an unjust reward for their criminally inadequate efforts to clean up their act of gross negligence & wanton destruction in the Gulf of Mexico?

My local chief of police here in Norwich just sent out a no doubt well-intentioned missive on the town list serv warning of underage drinking in connection with the pending graduation parties. Fine, probably not a bad idea. But then this jumped out at me:

Some consider underage drinking a “Rite Of Passage”.  In Vermont, we consider it against the law.  With the continued emphasis on our budget to conserve every dollar, it is more important then ever to reduce the financial burden that underage drinking places on our stretched-thin budget.

I'm not sure I can follow his logic. Is he saying that parents should do the right thing because he doesn't have the money to deal with arresting their drunk kids? Does he really think that's the incentive that'll make parents act any differently?

Regardless, given his reasoning, I'm curious to know if Chief Robinson has a similar problem with the financial burden placed on his budget thru his required involvement in the pointless yet exhorbitantly expensive war on drugs? Imagine if he could stop spending time and effort (as he must, since in Vermont “it's against the law”) chasing responsible adults who grow, trade, or use marijuana? I wonder if that wouldn't have an even greater impact on his budget than parents telling their kids to put down the beer 'cause the police chief is running low on cash?

Of course, relieving him of the need to allocate resources to fighting the war on drugs would require a change in policy — either federally (yeah, good luck with that, given Obama's dismissive & derisive laughter at the notion of changing anything about his War on Drugs — it's going almost as well as his War on Afghanistan and his War on the Environment, so why should it stop?), or on a state level. The latter might be possible — particularly if citizens and law enforcement reperesentatives went to their state reps and asked them to take the futile and counterproductive task of enforcing pointless laws off their hands and out of the law enforcement budgets.

A crazy, far-fetched idea? Hardly. From the Marijuana Policy Project:

If this year’s town meeting day ballot in Vermont’s capital of Montpelier is any indication, voters in the Green Mountain State are ready for a change in marijuana policy. In partnership with the Vermont Alliance for Intelligent Drug Laws, MPP sponsored a town meeting day ballot resolution aimed at building support for decriminalizing marijuana possession. By a margin of nearly 3-1 voters implored state legislators to pass legislation that would decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Nonetheless, Vermont’s elected officials were apparently too busy looking for ways to close the state’s gaping budget holes to be bothered with such a sensible and fiscally responsible proposal.

Indeed. While such legalization could help save significantly on local law enforcement budgets (not to mention the judicial and prison system budgets), and while “the people” are clearly in favor of legalization, a majority of politicians, even in Vermont, don't seem to want to take off their blinders and make the obvious choice.

The argument that legalization will give us more trouble with kids getting into drugs is bunk, and has been debunked repeatedly. “The notion that we have to keep something completely banned for adults to keep it away from kids doesn’t hold up,” said Bruce Mirken, communications director of the MPP, quoted in an article in the Seattle Times, which specifically discussed the notion of suffering state budgets and the untenable perpetuation of the war on drugs.

Chief Robinson (and others like him) might find the courage from retired Vermont cop Tim Datig, former chief of police from Weathersfield, Bristol, and St. Albans, who now works with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and has visited Vermont repeatedly to lobby in Montpelier and educate acoss the state on the issue. According to this set of statistics, Vermont is second only to Alaska in marijuana usage, so decriminalizing it would like have a significant impact on law enforcement budgets.

A Google Ad network recently made an appearance; it’s an ad with the headline “Vermont Must Change” and the subhead “taxes are costing jobs.” The ad is anonymous — the only tagline on the ad itself is “surveymonkey.com” and it’s not immediately clear from the survey itself who is behind it and has made the buy with Google Ads.

The survey itself, dubbed “Vermont Chooses” is pre-ambled as follows:

“Vermont is at a crossroads. State revenue is sharply down and likely to remain that way for years; demand for social programs is up. Raising taxes means shrinking the tax base.

Vermont can succeed; can lower the cost of government, lower taxes, create jobs, and allow the tax base to grow. But succeeding means making choices.”



It features an odd mix of tea-baggerish libertarian positions and candidate awareness queries, but there’s a noticable emphasis on Brian Dubie towards the end, making me wonder if this might be his attempt at testing his waters.

The odd survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s….