A screen shot from today’s Rutland Herald online:

How much waste will VY be allowed to “store” in our ground before something is done to stop them?

I’m guessing we won’t see sentencing for VY or Energy officials anytime soon.

The teachers of the ANESU, Bristol, Monkton, New Haven, Starksboro and Lincoln voted tonight not to strike. The teachers have apparently accepted the last offer from the ANESU Boards (see previous post).  

Former President George W. Bush has canceled a trip to a charity event in Switzerland where he was to speak about freedom and offer reflections on his presidency. It was unclear if he was to be paid for his speaking and reflecting.   The AP reported that a spokesman for next week’s event said “The calls to demonstrate were sliding into dangerous terrain.”

On what would have been his first trip to Europe after leaving office Bush might have had quite a greeting. Mimicking the time in Baghdad 2008 when at a secure news event George Bush was assaulted with a shoe thrown by an Iraqi journalist, protest rally organizers wanted demonstrators to bring a shoes to the event.  

It seems a very small price to pay for starting a war and authorizing torture (allegedly, says the Washington Post story).

However the Post mentions another bit of potential trouble for our former “decider” President, perhaps more serious than facing crowds armed with shoes for throwing. Amnesty International and the Center for Constitutional Rights are requesting a criminal investigation by Swiss prosecutors over Bush’s admission in his recent memoirs that he personally authorized water boarding torture.

The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement that they had planned to bring the complaint under the Convention Against Torture* on behalf of two of men, Majid Khan, who remains at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Sami al-Hajj, a former al-Jazeera cameraman who was released in May 2008. The 2,500-page complaint will not be filed in court, but will be released Monday at a media event in Switzerland.

* The U.N. Convention Against Torture was signed by Pres. Reagan in 1988

The Swiss maintain Bush would have immunity, but the Center for Constitutional Rights says no such immunity exists under the Convention Against Torture and plan to persist. Similar charges were thrown out against former Bush Sec.of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he canceled his trip to avoid our case,” the center’s statement said. “The message from civil society is clear: If you’re a torturer, be careful in your travel plans. It’s a slow process for accountability, but we keep going.”

I love New England in the Winter.

The crisp air brings birds out that we don’t normally get in warmer months, and keeping the feeders well stocked helps as well.  

Nothing I’ve photographed here took me far from my car– some are from the driveway and some are from driving around in New Hampshire.  Given that the temperatures around here have dropped into the negatives frequently in the last month, it’s good not to be walking very far.  

A quick note: these are all smaller versions of the image; clicking on them gets you to the full-sized version.  

The picture above is of this bird:

When I got home Friday morning, it was in the tree near the feeders.  I spotted it and kind of stalked it while it came out to eat.  If you’re familiar with it at all, you probably know exactly what it is.  If not, it’s a good bird ID exercise.

I’ve never managed to get a Hoary Redpoll at the feeders, but we occasionally get irruptions (bursts of movement into a region of birds not usually in that region) of common redpolls.  There were two at our feeders a few weeks ago– it was a dark and cloudy day and this is the best I did:

We get white-breasted nuthatches throughout the year, but I love photographing them in Winter:

This Barred owl was hanging out on a low branch in New Hampshire, not far from where I live:

And this Barred Owl is sitting outside my window as I type this:

Right now the snow is so high in our driveway that it’s hard to get pictures of the birds on the ground, but fortunately I was able to get this Northern Cardinal:

And this finch, which comes with a quiz: is this a house finch or a purple finch?  Show your work.

But the real treat from Friday was the local Agway in Walpole, NH.  Someone there noticed a small flock of Horned Larks and Snow Buntings in the field out back and started putting seed down every day.  So if you get there at the right time, you can get really close and they’ll just fly in and eat, anywhere from 15′-30′ away.  

I’ve had pictures this nice of Horned Larks before:

But never one this crisp and clear of a Snow Bunting:

And capturing them in flight (mixture of horned larks and snow buntings) is a real treat:

I look for Butings and Larks all winter and couldn’t find the flocks in their usual spots.  Now I know why.  They’re all hanging out at the Agway.

Agway is also a good place to look for Mockingbirds.  I suspect this one is a year-round resident:

And, of course, black-capped chickadees are ubiquitous:

These are from November.  You probably know the species

And a few more older photos of various winter birds from the past few years:

Last night’s surprising Thundersnow rattled our windows and scared the heck out of our pets.  The initial rumble was a startling sound that seemed to last for at least a minute and sounded like a cross between a huge snowplow crashing with an airplane.

Read Sutkoski’s whole article detailing the rarity of Thundersnow in the eastern US!

According to Matt Sutkoski in today’s Burlington Free Press,

Thundersnow is very rare, especially in Vermont, so it was interesting that it was so widespread. There was thunder and lightning here at my house in St. Albans, and people told me they had thundersnow in Colchester, Underhill, Fairfax and Littleton, N.H., so it was everywhere.

Check out the great video Sutkoski posted from You Tube of weather forecaster Jim Cantore witnessing thundersnow in Chicago.  

Tomorrow Is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, and we just passed the thirtieth anniversary of his inauguration as president, so we have already been subjected to hagiographic portrayals of him, his life, and his supposedly classic American virtues.

That makes this an appropriate time to consider some of the truth of Ronald Reagan as an antidote to the lies, half truths, and mythology that we are about to hear. There are many reasons to despise and scorn the memory of Ronald Reagan, so I’ll just concentrate on a few of them.

Racism. It’s impossible to consider Reagan’s presidency without confronting the centrality of his appeals to racism. He opened his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the city most famous for the murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. His speech made an appeal to “states’ rights”, a code word for segregation and racial oppression since the earliest days of the Civil Rigjhts Movement (not to mention the Civil War). His announcement was an explicit message to any who would hear that he would support the aims of the racist South. In this way, Reagan’s presidency can be understood as the culmination of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

As he ran, so he governed. From his support for the racist policies of Bob Jones University to his references to “big bucks” abusing Food Stamps; from his support for apartheid to the clear understanding of his aide Lee Atwater, who explained how Reagan and Bush used concealed racism to win Southern votes, Reagan’s presidency was suffused with racism, but you won’t hear any of his acolytes discuss it this week.

Support for dictators. If you listen to the Reagan apologists this week you’ll hear endless recitations of claims that he revered and valued democracy and freedom. Of course, the opposite is true. As I mentioned, he supported apartheid and resisted any efforts to attack or dismantle it. His foreign policy is characterized by support for the most vicious dictators, with his support for the incumbent dictator in El Salvador and his creation of the contra mercenaries in Nicaragua to restore the Somoza dictatorship there the most outstanding example.

Bargaining with terrorists. Maybe a smaller point, but remember that part of Reagan’s support for the contras was giving weapons to terrorists to free American hostages.

Corruption. Let’s not forget: Reagan’s administration may have been the most corrupt in our history.

Superstition. It’s a daily event that American presidents engage in superstition and mythology to gain public support. (Hint: when’s the last time you heard a presidential speech that didn’t end with “God bless you and God bless the United States”?) Reagan went beyond this by basing his public decisions on the favorite superstition of the soft-headed, astrology.

Taxes. Even today, every Republican pledges loyalty to Reagan’s anti-tax ideology. We know that after he cut taxes he raised them again, so take it as stipulated that he wasn’t as consistently opposed to taxation as his worshippers claim. Nevertheless, the message stuck. This is what I would say is the worst of the many evils that Ronald Reagan is responsible for: he convinced a wide swath of the American people that they can have all the benefits of our American society and government without paying for it.  When the teabaggers claim him as their political and spiritual godfather, this is really what they’re talking about.

Per Bob Audette / Brattleboro Reformer:

On Friday, the Vermont Department of Health received laboratory data from Yankee that indicated samples collected last week from groundwater monitoring well GZ-23S are contaminated with low levels of tritium.

This, of course, is becoming a familiar refrain.  In case you don’t have your well monitoring score card handy, it should be noted that this is a new detection of tritium in a well that had not been detected before.

So that’s… comforting?

I was gratified this morning to read an op-ed by Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, taking up the neglected mantle of moral high-ground on behalf of the left.  It has long puzzled me why we progressives folded so easily to the conservative grab for moral superiority and the Tea Party’s appropriation of the Constitution.  Conditioned as we are, by our embrace of tolerance, to bending over backwards in the name of equanimity; it is, ironically, this very moral dichotomy that seems to have kept us from claiming the high-ground that should so rightly be ours.

Marcus focuses on a portion of President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast as the inspiration for her own reflections on the progressives’ dilemma.  Observing that the resources of private charities are limited in their ability to help all of the desperate and deserving among us, Mr. Obama concluded:

“…And that’s why  I continue to believe that in a caring and and in a just society, government must have a role to play; that our values, our love and our charity must find expression not just in our families, not just in our places of work and our places of worship, but also in our government and in our politics.”

Says Marcus

“Obama’s remarks resonated because I’ve been bristling recently at conservatives’: dual hijacking: morality and the Constitution as the domain of small government conservatives.  I’d like them back.”

Me too.

Why, particularly during the health-care debates weren’t our leaders all over the moral superiority of providing for the needs of the poor and disadvantaged?  Why did all of the arguments have to center on the economics,  a gnarled and arcane discussion that few understood at the time and that leant themselves so easily to defeat in the public forum by conservative truisms.  Why didn’t our progressive champions in Congress stand shoulder to shoulder and loudly proclaim that we must begin to provide universal proactive healthcare for all Americans because it is the right thing to do; because healthcare is a human right?  Why aren’t they making those arguments right now, to put Republicans on the defensive as they try to take back the little progress we have made toward fulfilling that moral obligation?

And what about reclaiming the Constitution for the left?  It isn’t just about protecting people’s right to be selfish, greedy, bigoted and threatening.  In equal parts, it is about protecting the weak, the unpopular and the vulnerable.  It has in it’s framework the intention to champion an enlightened tolerance and the common good over cynical opportunism.  As Marcus says,

“It’s my constitution as much as it is Michele Bachmann’s.”

It bears repeating here and everywhere else progressive opinion is expressed, as often and as loudly as possible. Social responsibility and tolerance are the moral high-ground.  By upholding them we serve the true values of our Constitution.