Liberally Speaking

Remembering Steve Mount

2011-07-07T23:39:00.003-04:00

The Williston Observer staff is deeply saddened by Steve Mount’s sudden passing on July 2. Our heartfelt condolences go out to Steve’s family and friends. We encourage our readers to send contributions to the college education fund set up for his three children. Donations can be made to Mount Family Education Trust, 325 South Union St., Burlington, VT 05401.

In his nearly four years as the columnist for “Liberally Speaking,” Steve stayed true to himself and our readers about his beliefs and dedication to the U.S. Constitution. He wrote timely, well-researched columns that helped everyone, whatever their political persuasion, to think more deeply about the issues facing our country.

He was also proactive. In May, when terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs, Steve discarded a column he already wrote so he could provide thought-provoking commentary on the monumental incident.

Thank you for reading and Steve, thank you for writing.

In defense of the closed session

2011-06-16T21:44:00.000-04:00

In defense of the closed session

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 16, 2011.

Recent reporting in the Observer brought to light the policy of our Development Review Board to go into closed session when deliberating about its decisions.

The policy, done in accordance with Vermont open government laws, pre-dates all current DRB members. Quoting our reporting, the closed sessions were "justified by [board] members as necessary to an effective discussion and decision-making process."

Government, in the final analysis, is us. We, the people, select our representatives to various governmental bodies, either directly or indirectly. The members are responsible for the public trust and responsible to the public at large. In a perfect world, all hearings, deliberations, and votes would be public.

Because our institutions are human ones, they are subject to the ill effects of bias, prejudice, and favoritism. The more open government is, the lower effect these human frailties will have on the decisions come to by the bodies. If a board member is actively prejudiced against an applicant, a pattern will emerge that any one can see, because any one can watch. Mitigating the effects of such human failings is one of the best aspects of open government.

However, openness can also affect frankness. As Burlington DRB Chair Austin Hart was quoted in our article, "It's a lot harder to say 'no' when they are sitting right in front of you."

And there's the rub. If the DRB should say no to a project or request, but board members just cannot quite summon the courage to do what they think is right ... well, that is where the benefit of the closed session comes in. The members of the DRB have to make judgement calls based on the evidence and testimony given to them. The members must then talk amongst themselves to decide if the project before them meets the town's plan.

When I think of how this process works, I think immediately of a judge or jury in court. It would be unthinkable for a new deliberation process to emerge, where the judge goes to chambers to make a decision and each step of the way, the lawyers, defendant, plaintiff, and even the public could weigh in.

Similarly, if a jury room was populated not only by the members of the jury, but also the parties in the case, the public, the media - no one would think that this was a good idea. The things a jury hashes out in its deliberations, the statements made by jurors, the arguments... these are not for public consumption.

I'm a big advocate of open government. I want to be able to access journals and minutes of deliberations quickly, easily, and freely. I want to be able to watch congressional hearings live on television or on the Internet. I want to be able to sit in the back of the room during a school board meeting. I want to see the testimony before the DRB live or on public access cable.

But I don't think that every single step in the process has to be open to the public as it happens. There is a practicality to a closed meeting that just makes sense to me.

That having been said, I think that closed meetings should have inviolable rules - and I should note that some of these rules are currently in effect, according to town bylaws. Minutes should be taken - not a word-for-word journal, but minutes that can be referred to by the board and the public in the future. Decisions of the board should be explained in writing - in the bylaws, this is referred to as a "record of decision that conveys the DRB's findings of fact and conclusions of law." Members of the board should be required to back up their closed-session vote in public, just as a jury may be polled following the announcement of its verdict in a case.

Open government is a crucial and important part of our democracy. However, government must, at the same time, be effective. If to be effective it must be closed for certain steps in the process, so be it.

Time to Reevaluate the Patriot Act?

2011-06-02T13:56:00.000-04:00

Time to Reevaluate the Patriot Act?

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 2, 2011.

In 2001, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the Congress worked to put new provisions into place in U.S. law, designed to combat terrorism. The result, the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 (or just "Patriot Act"), was passed in the House with a wide majority and by an overwhelming 98-1 vote in the Senate. President George Bush signed the bill into law on October 26, 2001.

The Act was seen as necessary by many, but was condemned by others for overstepping constitutional bounds. Constitutionality, however, is often in the eye of the beholder.

The Act has ten titles, changing U.S. law in several different areas: domestic security, surveillance, money laundering, border security, terrorism, and intelligence gathering. There was also a title providing relief to victims of terrorism and their families, and a final title for miscellaneous provisions.

Some of the provisions make basic common sense. For example, the Act required various government bureaus and agencies to share information about immigrants and foreign visitors; it required the government to invest in technologies to improve background checks on incoming visitors; and an increase in the number of border patrol agents.

Some provisions, however, were not so widely supported.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." This quote, often attributed to Benjamin Franklin (but with an uncertain provenance), was reproduced often as the Patriot Act was being voted on, and again as its provisions have been renewed.

Title II of the Act, in particular, ruffled the feathers of many civil libertarians. This title involved enhanced surveillance, authorizing and even requiring many new surveillance techniques, such as the loosening of requirements for wiretaps and broad requirements for Internet service providers to supply identifying data and logs to law enforcement officials. One provision, allowing a so-called "sneak and peek wiretap," was struck down as unconstitutional in 2007.

This topic is of interest now because last week, the Congress renewed, and President Barack Obama signed into law, some provisions of the Patriot Act that were scheduled to sunset. The three provisions of the Act were originally set to expire in 2010, but were temporarily renewed in February 2010.

The three provisions allowed: a roving wiretap that covered several phones with one warrant; seizure of records and property for terrorism-related cases; and surveillance provisions for "lone wolf" persons, non-U.S. citizens who might be involved in terrorism.

Without the renewal, the provisions would have expired, but most of Congress and the President agreed that that renewal should happen. The renewal, however, was not a rubber-stamp. One Senator, in particular, was not so keen on the renewal, and it is here that this Senator and I may have our only points of agreement.

Rand Paul, Republican Senator from Kentucky, used procedural tactics to force a delay in the Senate's vote on the renewal, a tactic I generally disagree with, but which in this case, forced the Senate to take a needed step back to think if these provisions were really necessary.

In a deal reached with Senate leaders, Paul did allow the vote to move forward. The deal wrote in some 2nd Amendment protections, and the three provisions listed above were renewed until 2015.

Now that we are nearly ten years out from the attacks, though, I think it is time that we take a close look at all of the provisions of the Patriot Act. The protection of 2nd Amendment rights is important, but more important to me are the protection of 1st and 4th Amendment rights.

Several provisions of the original Patriot Act have been struck down as being in violation of 4th Amendment rights. A full review of the Act should be undertaken, provisions that make sense should be renewed, and any that are on shaky constitutional grounds should be either modified or scrapped completely. It seems like a tall order, given the other priorities the Congress has, but the protection of civil liberties is, or should be, paramount.

One Step Closer to a National Popular Vote

2011-05-19T13:30:00.000-04:00

One Step Closer to a National Popular Vote

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 19, 2011.

The Electoral College is a unique feature of our system of electing a national leader. After two centuries, though, is it time to do away with the College?

The Electoral College is the body that actually elects the President and Vice President. When we, the people, vote for a presidential candidate, we are not actually voting for a single person. We are, instead, voting for a slate of electors. The chosen electors meet on Elector Day, sometime in December following the general election, and cast their votes for the two offices.

Each state has a number of electors equal to its congressional representation. With one seat in the House and two seats in the Senate, Vermont has three electors. Electors are selected by each party fielding a presidential candidate. The electors are typically party loyalists, pledged to cast their vote for the party's choice for President and Vice President.

The Electoral College was designed, in 1787, for an entirely different America. Time, however, revealed some fatal flaws in the Electoral College system, and though the most egregious flaws were fixed long ago, it may be time to take another serious look.

Originally, each elector cast two votes for President. The person with the most votes became President, and the runner-up became Vice President. This system would have worked fine if people did not begin to divide themselves into parties - but they did, almost immediately.

In the election of 1800, the Democratic-Republican party ran Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr against Federalists John Adams and Thomas Pinckney. Each dutiful Democratic-Republican elector cast his votes, toeing the party line: one for Jefferson and one for Burr. In the end, both Jefferson and Burr got 73 votes, even though the plan had been to elect Jefferson. Someone forgot to tell at least one Democratic-Republican elector to vote for someone other than Burr. The resulting fray, where the election was decided in the House by a Federalist majority, lead to the 12th Amendment, that specified separate ballots for the two executive positions.

The 1876 election of Rutherford Hayes was a partisan mess. Hayes's opponent, Samuel Tilden, won a narrow majority of the popular vote, but when it came time to count the electoral votes, the results were not quite so clear. Hayes and Tilden were both close to the needed majority, but many electoral votes were challenged. It took a congressional commission, and the end of military occupation in the post-war South, to assign enough votes to Hayes.

Most of us remember the controversy between George Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Gore had a narrow lead over Bush in the popular vote, beating Bush by just over half a percentage point. After much controversy in several states, and Florida in particular, the electoral vote went to Bush, 271-266.

The National Popular Vote movement, which aims to make the winner of the popular vote the President without concern for these electoral college vagaries, got a boost this year when the Vermont legislature threw its support behind the plan. The NPV movement looks not to amend the Constitution, but to work within its confines.

It seeks to create a compact of sorts, accumulating support one state at a time, until at least enough states to make up the majority of 270 electoral votes sign on. In states where NPV is enacted, the state's law would change to direct its electors to cast their votes for whichever candidate won the national popular vote, without regard to the candidate's vote tally in that state.

Including Vermont's three, NPV now has 77 electoral votes from eight states to its name.

I'm a fan of working within the system, and would like to see the NPV plan come to fruition. I am dubious that electors could be punished for not voting with the national popular vote (the Constitution gives the electors wide latitude in their votes), but it would not be difficult to avoid faithless electors with proper vetting.

I do think that losing the Electoral College would be a sad thing. It is quirky, uniquely American, and an avenue into learning more about where we came from as a nation. But despite the value of these things, having a simple, straight-forward, and predictable system, based on the popular vote, seems like the best way forward for our democracy. Hopefully, Vermont's support for the compact will nudge other states to support NPV, too.

With Somber Reflection

2011-05-05T09:03:00.000-04:00

With Somber Reflection

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 5, 2011.

It was getting late on Sunday night when I heard a rumor that the President was going to make an announcement on TV within a few minutes. I quickly tuned to CNN to see if the report was true. It seemed to be - Wolf Blitzer was telling viewers that the President would be speaking to the nation from the East Room of the White House "any minute now."

CNN was very careful not to speculate what the announcement was about, so my mind started to race. Such an announcement is very unusual, and reserved for big (and usually bad) news. Did something happen to the President's family? Is the Vice President dead? Did terrorists strike somewhere? Was there a tragedy with our troops overseas?

Checking Internet news feeds, reports that Osama bin Laden was dead started to become more and more frequent. And finally CNN had enough strong sources that they could say that this was, indeed, the big news. When the President finally came on the screen, his announcement was almost anti-climactic, though the scant details he provided were interesting:

Bin Laden was expertly killed by U.S. forces operating in Pakistan. His body had been taken into custody by those forces. The identity of bin Laden was definite. No Americans lost their lives in the process.

CNN was also reporting that there were cheering crowds just outside the fence surrounding the White House. Just off-camera, I could hear emotionally raw and off-tune renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner being belted out. There was obvious joy in the news. Watching, I knew that this was good news, for America and the world.

Beyond that raw and emotionally-informed knowledge, though, I wasn't so sure how I felt. It was only after discussing it with some friends and hearing what they had to say that I could begin to sort it out.

It feels odd to celebrate the death of a person. In our culture, we are taught to value life so highly, above almost anything else. I know this is not a universal value (though it should be). Bin Laden himself could easily be described as someone who valued politics over human life. He could even be rightly described as a misanthrope. But even given that, should I feel joy in his death?

I recall feeling the same sort of confusion when Saddam Hussein was executed in Iraq in 2006. Here was this tyrant, this despicable human being, responsible for war and the deaths of thousands of innocents, reduced to a cowering shell, stripped of his power and influence ... and the best we can do is kill him?

I'm convinced there are people who are better off dead. But it is much easier to be sure of this in the abstract. I wonder how evolved we really are if destruction of life is our best answer to these people.

The details of the bin Laden killing place his death in a slightly different category - he died in a firefight, not in front of a firing squad. Part of me wanted to see him captured, tried, and imprisoned. But if he'd been captured, his detention and trial would have been epic in scope and undoubtedly circus-like in ways I can only imagine.

I must conclude, then, that we are better off with him shot dead and buried at sea.

I'm just not sure joyful celebration is the proper response.

Another friend called it a Pyrrhic victory. We have already lost so many lives to bin Laden and al Qaeda, both as a nation and a species. Will we lose even more now that he is gone? Hopefully we have cut off the head of the snake. But the snake could end up being like the mythological hydra, with two or three new heads growing back where one was before.

To ensure that terrorism dies, we must not just be rid of its sponsors. We must change the minds of those who follow. Perhaps a means to that end is not to celebrate bin Laden's death with cheers and song, but to reflect on it somberly.

Connections: GE and the Royal Wedding

2011-04-21T23:30:00.000-04:00

Connections: GE and the Royal Wedding

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 21, 2011.

As I was recently pondering two seemingly disparate and unrelated topics the other day, the television series Connections, and its sequels and imitators, came to mind.

In Connections, historian James Burke started with an historical event and connected that event to something new and current. One made-up example might explain how the threads of history weave and intersect so that without the development of the cotton gin, we would not today have Velcro.

My connection has to do with two items in the national (and even international) news the past few weeks: the tiresome wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton and the irksome news that General Electric paid no corporate income tax in 2010.

First, to the wedding. My weekday morning schedule is such that just as I'm getting ready for work, the CBS morning news is starting its royal wedding coverage. I was tired of hearing about William and Kate after the very first report of their impending nuptials; I got more so when CBS began weekly reports; now I'm positively driven insane by the daily reports from London.

The reports are all about what dress the M.O.B. (mother of the bride) is wearing, how much the Middletons are contributing to the billionaire royal family for the ceremonies, the route the royal wedding carriage will take, the bloody nose the queen developed, and how the wedding will compare to that of Charles and Diana.

Frankly, I don't understand why any American wants to give the wedding any more than an iota of their brain power. We, my fellow Americans, fought several wars, on our own soil, to throw off the reins of royalty. And not any royalty - the English royalty.

And yet when I want to find out about tornadoes in North Carolina, I instead am subjected to the latest from Buckingham Palace; instead of learning about the latest movie Gwyneth Paltrow is making, I have to hear about how long Kate's bridal train will be.

If I were king for a day (irony noted), I would ban all present and future coverage of any royal goings-on.

The other topic concerns a New York Times report that GE paid no corporate income tax in 2010. Worldwide, GE made $14.2 billion, $5.1 billion of that from U.S. operations. And $0 in taxes paid to the United States Treasury. In fact, the Times article reports, GE took a $3.2 billion tax benefit.

Since I work for GE, it might seem odd that I call such news "irksome." But I do - in fact, I'm a bit ashamed of the tax news. I do, however, have to defend GE.

That GE paid no income tax to the U.S. is not GE's fault. In fact, if there were loopholes and exceptions in the tax code that GE knew about and did not take advantage of, its shareholders would be right to raise red flags.

As I drove by the small cadre of protesters standing on the corner of Shelburne Road and IDX Drive on Monday, I felt like stopping to tell them that where they should be camped out is not at my office, but at the offices of our members of Congress.

The tax code is a mess. It is incomprehensible, and it is that way virtually on purpose. The influence of lobbyists on the tax code is despicable. It should be scrapped and we should start over. Simpler is better, and our tax code is not simple.

My connection is this: we threw off the yoke of the monarchy over 200 years ago (even though a sizable portion of our population is still inexplicably fascinated by it); it is time for us to throw off the yoke of our tax code. I'm not a proponent of a flat tax (there is such a thing as "too simple"), but we should be able to explain our tax structure in 20 pages or less, rather than the almost 15,000 pages that it currently consists of.

Maybe if all these people paying so much attention to the future king of England paid half as much attention to Congress and the tax code, more people might actually make this same connection, and we would have the critical mass needed to do something about it.

Discovering the Obama Doctrine

2011-04-07T13:51:00.000-04:00

Discovering the Obama Doctrine

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 7, 2011.

President Barack Obama spoke to the nation last week to explain why the United States committed troops and material to aid the rebels in Libya. Though to many the reasons seem obvious - to avoid a humanitarian disaster of the types we regretted allowing to happen in Africa; because on March 17, the United Nations voted to impose a no-fly zone in the skies over Libya; and because though other nations' air forces are closer, there is no doubt that ours is the most capable and powerful - the President was right to explain himself to the American people.

In his speech on the 28th of March, Obama articulated a reason for the Libyan conflict that could be a policy, a Doctrine, he will apply in future conflicts:

"Mindful of the risks and costs of military action, we are naturally reluctant to use force to solve the world’s many challenges. But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act."

Not only when our interests are at stake, but also, perhaps more importantly, when our values are at stake.

Our values - the principles that we extol as examples for other nations, the principles that make us proud to be Americans, the principles that make us Americans - are what set us apart from modern barbarians like Muammar Gaddafi, North Korea's Kim Jong-il, al-Qaeda, and the Iranian state. We cannot sit back and watch, helplessly and impotently, as dictators slaughter their own people.

More importantly, these values are not uniquely American. They are universal - or should be. There is nothing uniquely American about love of freedom, of desire for a government run on democratic principles, of the desire to protect innocents from the vagaries of the powerful. These are human values.

Whether the forcible imposition of these values becomes a true "doctrine," a policy for use in future, unknown and unknowable situations, remains to be seen. But this is certain: it is honorable and even necessary. Even with our military stretched with a war in Afghanistan, extensive residual deployments in Iraq, and doing humanitarian work in Japan, we are capable of a mission such as that in Libya. As long as we are capable, and there is a need, we should act.

Ultimately, though, we cannot free the people of Libya. They must accomplish this goal themselves. They must convince Gaddafi's own military of the rightness of their struggle, convince Gaddafi's inner circle that they are sitting on the wrong side of the table, convince the people of Libya that the cause, that of freedom, is the right one.

Our own Revolutionary War history shows that winning the hearts and minds of the people is at least as important as military victory. It was an internal struggle that we had to fight and win ourselves. But at the same time, with the help of international friends, especially the French, our rebel forces were able to overcome an enemy that seemed superior in almost every way.

Like the French in 1781, the international community allying with the Libyan rebels against Gaddafi could be a turning point in their struggle. And, as in Libya, our help may be needed in other nations in the future.

The best way to bring change is at the ballot box. And change can be had. The people of Southern Sudan overwhelmingly voted for independence in January, and a peaceful separation of Sudan and Southern Sudan is planned for July.

When that sort of change is not possible, the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia show that the voice of the people can still be heard. Even without a peaceful vote, change can be had with a minimum of bloodshed.

For the intransigent dictator, though, armed conflict may be the only option. The people of Libya thought so. And when the international community saw that the rebels in Libya were serious, the weight of a UN resolution was thrown their way. It is not inconceivable that another such situation could arise in any of a number of other nations.

The Obama Doctrine, if it can truly be called that, is in line with our values and as such should be supported by all Americans. We do not want to get involved in the internal politics of every nation. But when innocent life is at stake, especially when freedom is the ultimate goal, we must be prepared to act.

Nuclear power - a second look

2011-03-24T16:19:00.000-04:00

Nuclear power - a second look

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on March 24, 2011.

Recent events in Japan have forced me to reevaluate a position that I have extolled in this space several times over the past years: my support for nuclear power.

The earthquake and resulting tsunami that hit Japan on March 11 left in their wake, as of this writing, over 10,000 casualties and almost 13,000 missing. The earthquake itself was the seventh largest in recorded history, but even that dubious honor may be too low considering that scientists are still poring over data.

The tsunami swept away cars, trains, entire villages. Its effects were felt as far away as California, where it was predicted that millions of dollars in damage was done.

And right in the middle of both natural disasters are the sites of 14 of Japan's 55 nuclear reactors. The reactors at the Tokai and Onagawa sites did have issues and there were shutdowns, but the damage was relatively minor.

Some of the ten reactors at the Fukushima sites, however, were heavily damaged and are causing concern not only in Japan, but across the world.

There is an international nuclear event scale, which tries to put nuclear accidents into some perspective, according to the effects of the incident both on- an off-site. The Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 is noted as a level 5 accident. An incident in the Soviet Union in 1957 is the only recorded level 6 accident. And the Chernobyl accident, in 1986, is the only one rated at the highest level, level 7.

Where the Fukushima incident will land on this scale is as yet unknown. Certainly it will be a level 5 incident and may already be a level 6. Everyone is hoping, and some are certain, that it will not become a level 7.

With the on-going issues at Vermont Yankee, and the shock of a minor earthquake, centered near Montreal, coming so soon after the Japanese disaster, many are wondering if what happened there could happen here. And even if reasonable people think that it cannot, can we take the risk? Should Vermont Yankee be completely shut down?

Should any nuclear power plant built along a major fault line, like several have been in California, be allowed to operate further? Should nuclear power be allowed to continue at all?

At times like these, with disaster so fresh in the media and the consequences still rubbing raw in our minds, it is reasonable to ask these questions. But because everything is so fresh, we must not jump to hasty conclusions.

Nuclear power, until we have more viable options in terms of safety, sustainability, low-impact, and absolute power output, is the best way for us to produce the energy that we need. The safety record of U.S. nuclear power plants is very good - issues at Vermont Yankee and incidents like Three Mile Island notwithstanding. The footprint of nuclear power plants is small compared to that needed to have a reasonable wind farm. The nuclear power plant generates electricity 24 hour hours a day, regardless of wind, tides, or sunlight, and without any carbon emissions. We cannot sustain our economy as we do now without them.

This is not to say that I accept nuclear without reservation. The issue of waste is a real and pressing one. I think we could solve much of it with reasonable and common sense recycling of nuclear material, but even that will not solve the waste issue completely.

Reactors the age of those at Vermont Yankee can continue to run safely past their design parameters. But even given that, the issues Yankee has had with leaks show that even if the reactor can continue, the infrastructure supporting it may not be able to.

President Obama has announced his administration's intention to continue to fund and support nuclear power, incorporating all the latest advances into new plants that are safer and more efficient than ever. Scientists continue to look for ways to make fission reactors more and more safe, always with an eye to the holy grail, the fusion reactor.

We must take lessons away from the Japanese disaster, build these lessons into new designs and close or retrofit old plants where necessary. What we cannot afford to do is abandon nuclear power completely - not now, and not in the foreseeable future.

Explaining Government Shutdowns

2011-03-10T14:55:00.000-05:00

Explaining Government Shutdowns

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on March 10, 2011.

The federal government operates on a fiscal year of October 1 to September 30. What this means is that spending for 2011 started back in October. Or, rather, it should have.

Prior to 1976, the fiscal year began in July, which means that a new Congress had just over six months to negotiate and pass a new budget. In 1976, the fiscal year start was shifted to October, to give the Congress an extra three months to figure out the budget.

This brief lesson in the government's fiscal year is intended to help explain how the government came to the brink of shutdown last week, and why it is again at the brink next week.

The last Congress was unable to come to an agreement on the 2011 fiscal year (FY11) budget. Instead, from October through December, 2010, it passed continuing resolutions to duplicate the FY10 budget; in December the Congress did the same, pushing the funding out to March 4, 2011.

Since budget negotiations were at an impasse, and already at least three months late, Democrats were happy to have it done. Republicans, fully aware that they would be taking the reins of power in the House in January, 2011, were happy to know that in just a few months, the budget would be in their hands (the House, by way of explanation, is where all spending bills must originate, so the House has the first crack at them).

But March 4 loomed, and even with Republicans in control of the House (or perhaps especially because they were in control of the House), the two houses of Congress were unable to come to an agreement on a budget. Without one in place, a government shutdown was the only alternative.

There have only been a few government shutdowns in our history, all since 1981. Most were short. In 1981, a budget impasse between President Reagan and Congress lasted just a few hours - federal workers were sent home at lunchtime and came back to work the next morning.

The most severe shutdowns happened in 1995 and 1996. The shutdowns were the result of another impasse between branches of government, with the Republican-controlled Congress on one side and Democratic President Bill Clinton on the other. The shutdowns kept non-essential government workers at home; estimates released by the White House said that in real dollars, the 1995 shutdown cost $800 million - half because government employees, though home, were still paid; and the other half in taxes that went uncollected because IRS agents and investigators were unable to force collection.

Perhaps the bigger cost came in the form of inconvenience to Americans - federal parks were closed; hot-lines at the CDCP went unanswered; new Medicare and Social Security applications went unprocessed; toxic waste cleanup was halted; passport and visa applications were delayed; government-backed loans were delayed; and veterans' health care and services were delayed. Many pundits see the 1995 and 1996 shutdowns as one of the reasons that Clinton won reelection in the 1996 election.

Shutting down the government today would have the same sorts of effects on Americans. The most essential services, including the military, the TSA, those who process and issue Social Security checks, law enforcement personnel, health care personnel, and prison staff, would continue to work.

The rest? Furlough. As in 1995 and 1996, employees are not laid off, not fired, and don't go unpaid. They just don't go to work. In fact, there is a federal law that can be used to prosecute any furloughed employee for doing their job anyway, with up to $5000 in fines and two years' imprisonment.

The newest extension of the budget is good for only two weeks, meaning that as March 18 approaches, we again have a shutdown looming. Democrats are ready to deal, but Republicans, and especially the Tea Party wing, are looking to make waves.

If you're suddenly worried about FY12, you're right to worry. Every day that Congress wastes on the current fiscal year is one less to negotiate for the coming fiscal year. Though it may not be ideal, the Congress should extend the FY10 budget through the rest of FY11, and start work as soon as possible on the next fiscal year, which begins in less than seven months.

The Basics of American Libertarianism

2011-02-24T14:43:00.000-05:00

The Basics of American Libertarianism

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on February 24, 2011.

For the second year in a row, Ron Paul, a Republican Representative from Texas, won the straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The straw poll is seen as an indication of the most conservative voters' choice for a presidential candidate in the next big election.

Ron Paul has long been a darling of the extreme right. But I'm not here to write about CPAC, the straw poll, the 2012 presidential election, nor even Ron Paul specifically. Instead, my topic this week is libertarianism.

Paul is widely seen as one of the most striking examples of a libertarian, and his rise to the top in the CPAC straw poll may signal a resurgence of libertarian sentiment in the far right wing of the conservative mindset.

The United States is host to the Libertarian Party, self-described as our third largest party, in terms of registered members. The Libertarian Party describes itself thusly:

"Our vision is for a world in which all individuals can freely exercise the natural right of sole dominion over their own lives, liberty and property by building a political party that elects Libertarians to public office, and moving public policy in a libertarian direction."

Taken at face value, this statement sounds appealing. Boiled down to its basics, the statement expands on libertarianism's two basic principles: freedom of thought and freedom of action.

The first of these is easy - I absolutely agree with the principle of freedom of thought. In fact, I think most Americans are on board with this basic principle.

It is in the second basic principle, freedom of action, that libertarians and I diverge. That being said, I agree with the broad idea that people should be allowed to do what they want, when they want, as long as no one else is harmed by it. The principle, though, taken to its logical extremes, quickly becomes troublesome.

The individual is important. But society matters, too. It has an interest in ensuring that its members are not only happy but healthy, too.

For example, under a libertarian state, the unregulated use of any substance would be perfectly fine, and government attempts to regulate those substances would not be allowed. Over time, science has made it clear that use of tobacco products is detrimental to any person's health. There is not a single seriously-reported positive benefit of tobacco consumption.

Recognizing this, we tax tobacco products to the point where they are unaffordable by many; and the revenue is used, in part, to discourage further tobacco use. Such taxes and programs are completely contrary to libertarian principles. Anyone should be allowed to smoke or chew, period.

Similarly, libertarians do not see a place for government in social services. They would much rather see the poor, sick, and elderly taken care of by private charities, with funds willingly donated by individuals. Again, I agree with this in principle, but when reality raises its ugly head, it is clear that relying on private entities is insufficient.

A government such as ours should offer a minimum safety net. It cannot and should not be the only safety net, but in a society where we value human life and dignity above all other things, leaving this role to private charities is wrong-headed.

We often say that we live in a democracy. But this is not true. In a pure democracy, majority always rules. The rights of the minority are not relevant - in fact, "the rights of the minority" is a concept that a pure democracy does not hold. Instead, we live in a society that adheres to democratic principles, taking the best parts of democracy, like "one person, one vote", and integrating them into our own system.

Likewise, libertarianism has a lot of great ideas. Its basic principles of freedom of thought and freedom of action are important to each of us. We accept these libertarian principles in general, and have integrated them into our system, applying modifications for the betterment of all members of our society.

Those who call themselves libertarians must continue to adhere to their principles - it is their right and their duty. If they have ideas that are good for our country as a whole, it is only through their continued advocacy that those ideas will move from the fringes to the mainstream. With Republican Ron Paul as a de facto head of the movement, these principles will get a fair airing, and exposure to ideas is a benefit to us all.

The Internet: Democracy's Infection Vector?

2011-02-10T11:58:00.000-05:00

The Internet: Democracy's Infection Vector?

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on February 10, 2011.

Abby, a good friend of mine, sent me a photo this past weekend, a photo that sparked a wide-ranging geopolitical discussion between us. It also illustrated something perhaps best described as the inevitability of change in our fast-evolving digital age.

The photo was from Egypt, and at first glance showed nothing particularly unusual: a large group of Muslims in their iconic prostrate kneeling as they attended to one of the basic tenets of their belief system. Salah, or ritual prayer, is to be performed five times a day - even in the midst of political protest.

What was amazing about the photo, however, was what, or rather who, was in the foreground of the photo: Egyptian Christians surrounding their Muslim countrymen, protecting them from pro-Mubarak forces while vulnerable.

The image reminded me of similar scenes and stories from the United States, of neighbors coming to the aid of Muslims who endured attacks from the small-minded in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. This sort of solidarity is a sign of a culture that values our common humanity enough to overcome the all-too-human distrust of those who are different from us.

Abby said that this photo gave her hope for humanity - not just for the future of Egypt in their time of political turmoil, but for us as a species. That in extreme situations, we can and will come together for the common good.

I share her optimism.

The recent and on-going changes in Tunisia, Egypt, and even Jordan, are all part of a wave of feeling in the Near and Middle East. The feeling that autocracy is not the best way. That despite its flaws, a government founded on true democratic principles is the best way.

Frustratingly, waves of change rush to shore and often quickly retreat. Our own history shows that change can come, but in fits and starts. The equal rights movement had many milestones and setbacks - there were as many Birminghams as there were Rosa Parks. But eventually, over the course of a decade, change did come.

Protesters around the world would do well to follow the example set by Martin Luther King and his fellow warriors for equality. The most important tenet of their movement was peaceful, non-violent protest.

By eschewing violence, they were able to show white America that they were not interested in revenge for the past injustices foisted upon them. They simply wanted to be treated like regular human beings. Though it can mean bloodshed, as seen here and in Egypt as the agents of the status quo fight back, in the long run, non-violence is the best tactic.

The Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989 seemed to be a turning point for that country, but they turned out not to be - the Communist Party has as firm a grasp as ever in China, though the grasp does seem to have loosened since 1989. This loosening is in large part because of another driving force that Abby and I discussed and which I've already alluded to: The Internet.

That photo of Christians guarding Muslims in prayer? It was sent from an Egyptian's camera phone to Twitter and retweeted across the Internet. It ended up on Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, and eventually in Abby's mailbox and then mine.

Images are powerful - remember the man who stopped the column of tanks in China. Remember the angry police dogs lurching at marchers in Alabama. And now, praying Muslims in Egypt. Images have always been powerful. But now they have the ability to spread from person to person, country to country, in a matter of seconds.

Imagine a closet Christian in Iran who wants to worship his God in the open, or a Burmese fed up with military patrols on her street, or even a North Korean in line for a rare bag of rice. Imagine what they think when they happen upon such an image. It is not so big a leap to think that these people, who though oppressed have desire for freedom as strong as any of ours, could be the seed that starts a movement in those countries.

The ideal of democracy has been with humanity for millennia. Over time, it has been fragile, sometimes fleeting, susceptible to cults of personality that leverage its draw to entrap people (the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"?). But with the dawning of the digital age, democracy may finally have found its best vector.

The Consequences of Repealing the Health Care Law

2011-01-27T01:10:00.000-05:00

The Consequences of Repealing the Health Care Law

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on January 27, 2011.

Last week, the United States House of Representatives voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known in some circles as "Obamacare." The repeal vote, which passed on a party line vote (except for three Democrats who broke ranks), has largely been reported as symbolic for two important reasons.

First, the Senate, which is still (though just barely) held by the Democrats, will likely never even take up the repeal bill, let alone pass it.

Second, should the impossible happen and the repeal bill pass the Senate, the President would undoubtedly veto it. Given that, it would take an even more impossible two-thirds vote of Congress to override the veto.

So why even bother? Republicans have said it is because they made a promise to do so in their 2010 congressional campaigns, and the people had given them a mandate: repeal the health care law.

While I agree that the Republican sweep of the House was a message from the people, I don't think it had a thing to do with the health care law. The law, in fact, contains many provisions that people are either very happy about or would be if they thought about the bill as more than "Obamacare." The repeal effort is little more than a Republican gift to its real base - and that base is certainly not the people of the United States.

There are several key provisions that have not even gone into effect yet, but with repeal, the following important, existing features would disappear:

- Beginning almost immediately after the law took effect, children of covered persons could remain on their parents' policy until age 26, unless covered by their own policy. Previous insurance company rules dropped children at the age of 19, or when they graduated from college. This requirement is now insuring an estimated 1.2 million people.

- Insurance companies can no longer deny coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions. Being a Type 1 diabetic, this is of particular interest to me, and to three million others like me. And that's just diabetes - there are scores of other conditions and diseases that can exclude a person from individual coverage. I'm fortunate to be covered by a corporate policy, but many others are not so lucky, and they are now protected.

- Lifetime limits are eliminated, meaning that if you have a chronic condition that requires on-going treatment, you need not worry about running your benefit out. Annual limits are still legal, but they are being phased out over the next three years.

- In the law, breastfeeding mothers must be given time to either breastfeed or pump breast milk during the workday. Loss of this provision would force some mothers to make a tough choice between working and staying home; between using breast milk and formula, a choice that can cost money not only immediately (in the form of savings on formula) but also in the long-run (in the form of health benefits to babies whose mothers are able to breastfeed).

- The law aims the soften the financial blow of the so-called Medicare Part D "Donut Hole." Prior to the new health care law, seniors paid a coinsurance for drugs up to $2840. After that, and up to $4550, prescriptions were completely uncovered. The new law provides for a 50% discount for drugs purchased while in the $2840 - $4550 range, which can add up to considerable savings for those on a fixed income.

Different polls show different levels of support for repeal - but numbers that mean a "mandate"? A recent AP-GfK poll puts support for repeal at just 41%, with opposition to repeal at 40%. This one percent edge is hardly a mandate.

The "mandate" disappears when the details are examined. In the same poll, for example, support for a ban on the pre-existing existing condition exclusion stands at 50%, with 34% opposing such a ban (though the 34% who oppose make me muse at the respondents' misanthropy).

Repealing the health care law, even if it could be done, would be a bad idea. What Democrats have done and need to continue to do is highlight how important this law is to so many people. As more and more of its provisions take effect, more and more people will be affected by it. By increasing coverage, we will increase the overall health of Americans, and in doing so, provide a stronger, healthier workforce to help America meet the challenges that face us in the evolving global economy.

Shumlin's plans for success

2011-01-13T12:59:00.000-05:00

Shumlin's plans for success

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on January 13, 2011.

Peter Shumlin is under no illusions about how tough he and even a friendly legislature are going to have it over the next two years. He said as much in his inaugural address almost two weeks ago, when he listed just a few of the fears of Vermonters, as he sees them:

"All across our state," Shumlin noted, "too many Vermonters are living in fear; fear that they might lose their jobs, face another pay cut, fail to keep their homes, send their children to college, afford health insurance or the secure retirement that they've always dreamed of."

The job of Vermont's government is to help relieve some of these fears while also doing its best to improve the lives of Vermonters in the long term. Toward this end, Shumlin wants to focus on improving the educational system and health care system in Vermont, as well as expanding broadband Internet coverage in the state.

These three issues, along with making Vermont's tax system more fair and supporting Vermont's agricultural industry, mark the five major points of focus that Shumlin said will be most important to his administration, and which he asked a joint session of the legislature to support.

Seeing the Vermont brand as a mark of quality that should be more heavily marketed in the major metropolitan areas that surround us - Montreal, Boston, and New York City - Shumlin has ambitions to grow jobs in the agricultural sector.

"The renaissance in Vermont agriculture is rooted in the growing concern by consumers across America about where and how their food is produced. Consumers are increasingly demanding locally grown, chemical free, high quality food," Shumlin said.

I know that I am spoiled, because when I go to my local grocery store, I think almost nothing of the cards that say this corn or that tomato was grown locally. It makes it easy for me to support local farms by buying food that I already know will be fresh, tasty, and of high quality. By leveraging the cachet of the "Made in Vermont" or "Grown in Vermont" label, we can make the list of staple Vermont products expand beyond ice cream, cheese, and maple syrup. The goal is to make even a lowly Vermont zucchini sought-after for a premium price.

I think that the answer to the nation's health care woes is a single-payer plan, or something approaching that sort of approach, and Shumlin wants Vermont to lead the way in showing the country that such a system is not only beneficial to the people, but to the state's treasury as well. By using technology, something I'm intimately familiar with in my work at GE Healthcare, Shumlin says that we can reduce costs and bring better outcomes. Combined with a state-sized pool of insured, rising costs can be reined in:

"That's why we must create a single-payer health care system that provides universal, affordable health insurance for all Vermonters that brings these skyrocketing costs under control. Let Vermont be the first state in the nation to treat health care as a right and not a privilege; removing the burden of coverage from our business community and using technology and outcomes-based medicine to contain costs."

As I noted, Shumlin is sure the issue is complex, but is equally sure that by bringing the right minds together, the challenge can be met: "I call upon single payer supporters to resist the temptation to oversimplify the challenge. I call upon skeptics to challenge us, but to join us at the table."

Shumlin addresses a concern that I have about any negotiation about a controversial subject - the tendency to under-emphasize unfortunate truths and over-emphasize minor features. We all do it, but when we're talking about the laws and policies of a state, or a nation, then these diminutions and exaltations become destructive to the process, and tend to push the sides further apart. I hope that Shumlin and his administration can bring the sides together and depolarize the debate, leading to productive discussion and compromise.

It is far too early to grade anything Shumlin has done, but his inaugural address reaffirms my belief that he is the right man for the job. I look forward to watching what he and the legislature bring to Vermont and Vermonters, and hope that in two years' time, they have helped pull Vermont out of our current economic doldrums and placed us on a path to success and national leadership.

Get a Lawyer!

2010-12-22T18:46:00.000-05:00

Get a Lawyer!

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on December 22, 2010.

I, dear reader, watch an almost embarrassingly large amount of television. It is one of my vices. There are worse things.

One of the types of shows I enjoy the most involve the police in some way. If you've watched almost any television in the past twenty years, you know the type. There are classics like the Law & Order franchise, Homicide: Life on the Street, and Hill Street Blues; there are variations on the theme like the CSI franchise; and newer shows like Medium, The Mentalist, and Blue Bloods.

If you've watched almost any television in the past twenty years, you've also heard the Miranda warning. The warning, which the Supreme Court has ruled must be given to suspects of crimes before they are questioned, goes like this:

"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense."

The verbal warning is kept relatively short, so that police can recite it quickly (which is good, for TV), but there is a much longer version, almost three times longer, that is more comprehensive and is usually given in written form.

The key components of the Miranda warning, spoken or written, are these: the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, and the fact that your own words can be used against you.

The point of all this is the dismay that I feel when watching some of these favorite police shows of mine. You might think, with my build-up above, that my problem is that police in these shows tend to forget the Miranda warning. Actually, to my memory, most television cops are very good about giving the Miranda warning, and many scenes end with a suspect being carted off in handcuffs for questioning as the arresting officer starts reciting, sometimes in a rote monotone, "You have the right to remain silent..."

No, it is not the TV cops' treatment of the Miranda warning that causes me dismay. It is that most suspects seem to forget all of their rights as soon as they step into a police station.

I certainly understand the need to move the story along, and watching a suspect sit and wait for a lawyer is hardly compelling TV. In fact, a lawyer-supervised interrogation is also hardly compelling - much more TV-friendly is the tearful or angry confession, caused by a detective asking just the right question or a suspect being caught in a lie. And I have to admit a certain degree of schadenfreude when a smug suspect, whom the audience is well-aware is guilty, slips up and realizes they've just confessed to the crime.

What I'm afraid of, what my dismay is all about, is that as people watch these shows, and see these suspects spill their guts with a lawyer no where in sight, they will begin to think nothing of it - that should they ever find themselves in that situation, the best or perhaps only option, the Miranda warning be damned, is to confess and take their punishment.

As a civil libertarian, I want everyone to know their rights and exercise them to their fullest extent. But don't get me wrong - in the end, with their rights intact, I want the guilty to be punished to the fullest extent. What I wish is that these shows could figure out a way for suspects to be represented by counsel and still get their just rewards.

Perhaps it is too much to ask - that a suspect exercising his right to counsel can still be compelling drama. But there has to be a way, and I issue a challenge to the writers of Hollywood to not only write such story lines, but to make them the majority rather than the minority. Unfortunately, I don't know any Hollywood writers.

What I have, dear reader, is you. God forbid you should ever find yourself as a suspect in a crime. But if you do, don't go down the route taken by too many TV characters. Exercise your rights and get yourself a lawyer; don't answer any questions without that lawyer present; and for goodness' sake, follow your lawyer's advice.

The Wikileaks Cables: Worth the Ink?

2010-12-09T12:28:00.001-05:00

The Wikileaks Cables: Worth the Ink?

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on December 8, 2010.

In many of the roles I've played in the course of my life, including college student, journalist, history buff, and constitutional scholar, one mantra is common to them all: information wants to be free.

In each of these roles, only by having access to accurate information could I write a valid conclusion for a term paper; write a story that told my readers something important; or allowed me and others to analyze events and personalities to reach conclusions about the people who made and shaped our history.

Much of the information journalists and historians (and ultimately the public) need was secret at one point in its lifetime. One of the most famous examples is the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971 by the New York Times. The Papers were a classified history of United States-Vietnam relations, and revealed previously unknown or unsubstantiated facts about the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos.

The Times was prosecuted for publishing the Papers, in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, a case which eventually found its way to the Supreme Court. The Court dismissed the case, but only by finding technical issues with the prosecution, and not with the Espionage Act itself.

It is under this Espionage Act that some pundits and politicians are contemplating prosecution of the Wikileaks site or its founder Julian Assange. Wikileaks has been in the news before. The site's raison d'etre is to be a safe place for whistle-blowers to release classified or secret information to the public.

The types of information released via Wikileaks includes documentation about government corruption in Kenya, assassination plans in Somalia, Scientology documents, and Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account contents. More recently Wikileaks is also responsible for the release of thousands of pages of secret diplomatic documents, known as cables.

The question that the U.S. government must now grapple with is if the publication of the so-called Wikileaks Cables constitute a violation of the law - and if so, what can be done about it?

To prevent itself from being the target of corporate and governmental retaliation for what it publishes, Wikileaks exists almost wholly as an Internet-only organization. This has its own problems - as of the writing of this column, for example, the main Wikileaks site cannot be accessed because of denial of service attacks and disputes with its hosting companies.

Though there may be no real "Wikileaks company" to go after, there is Assange, the organization's public face. During last Sunday's broadcast of NBC's Meet the Press, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called for Assange to be prosecuted under U.S. law. With the release of the Cables, McConnell said, Assange has "done enormous damage to our country."

Though the Espionage Act can apply just as equally to those who publish classified information as to those who took it in the first place, those like McConnell who would prosecute Wikileaks or Assange could run into real trouble actually doing so.

Assange is neither a U.S. citizen nor a U.S. resident. Originally from Australia, Assange seems to constantly shift his location within Europe; reports have him currently living in England. If Assange cannot be brought to an American court, he cannot be tried - trial in absentia is illegal. He would, instead, have to be deported to the U.S. by a government that not only has him in their jurisdiction, but also has the same concerns about American diplomatic security as the U.S. might have.

It seems to me that prosecution of Assange is unlikely. That still leaves a key question, though. Given what I've already written, that information wants to be free, is the leaking of the Cables something I oppose?

The observations made in the Wikileaks Cables, frank statements of opinion by U.S. diplomatic staff and international leaders, are sometimes of no more value than any random story in the National Enquirer. It's not so much that I have a problem with the Cables being leaked as I have a problem that anyone cares about the contents of the Cables.

On the basis of the newly freed information that I've seen from the Cables, one thing is obvious: The Cables are no Pentagon Papers.

There is no revelation of corrupt ruling families or assassination plots. All we see is that diplomats are human and can speak with some crassness about each other. All we see is that governments don't trust each other.

In other words, we have been reminded of facts that we already knew.

Note: After press time, Assange turned himself in to English authorities because of an outstanding warrant from Sweden.

Campaign Spending 2010

2010-11-25T22:29:00.000-05:00

Campaign Spending 2010

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on November 24, 2010.

In January, the Supreme Court, in its Citizens United ruling, forbade the government from restricting corporate spending on candidate elections. Some pundits mocked the ruling, as it continued the Court's practice of treating corporations as individuals, this time in terms of free political speech rights. Others worried that elections would now be flooded with money as corporate donors attempted to "buy votes."

Now that the election is over, a valid and important question is, did anyone try to buy votes? Or was this just a red herring? Before we can answer that question, we need to know how much money was spent in the 2010 election season. The number, actually, is astounding.

The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that almost $4 billion (with a "B") was spent on the various races in the 2010 election - the most ever.

In races for the House, $972 million was raised and $845 million was spent. Republicans out-raised Democrats $502 million to $465 million. The race that raised the most money was in Minnesota, where Republican incumbent, and eventual winner, Michele Bachmann raised over $11 million, more than doubling the $4.2 million raised by her Democratic challenger Tarryl Clark.

In races for the Senate, $668 million was raised and $609 million was spent. Republicans also out-raised Democrats, $356 million to $294 million. The top race was in Connecticut, where Democrat Richard Blumenthal raised $7.6 million to hold on to Democratic stalwart Chris Dodd's former seat. He was able to overcome Republican challenger Linda McMahon, who raised a whopping $47 million, almost all of it coming from her own personal accounts.

Does it really take over $15 million to run a race for a House seat and $55 million to run a race for a Senate seat? Fortunately not - at least not yet.

In Vermont, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy raised $4.6 million, and spent just over $3 million, to defeat Republican Len Britton. Britton's numbers pale in comparison to Leahy's, with just under $200,000 raised and $144,000 spent.

Democratic Representative Peter Welch raised $974,000 and spent $573,000 to retain his seat; Republican challenger Paul Baudry raised just over $30,000 and spent $23,000 of that.

But what about all that unrestricted corporate spending? The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that this outside spending amounted to $282 million in the 2010 election - $90 million in support of liberal candidates and $184 million in support of conservative candidates.

It is hard to say, however, how much of an effect on elections this money had in 2010. It seems clear that impatience with the pace of economic improvement played a big part in Republican gains in 2010. Even if spending on conservative candidates had not almost doubled that on liberal candidates, it's unlikely that the outcome would have been much different.

So why all the hullabaloo about Citizens United and all the unrestricted and unreported corporate spending if it is likely that the result in 2010 would have been the same anyway? The problem is that the next election may not be so stilted to one side, and any small weight could tip the scales. Plus, with the presidency on the line, the temptation to spend even more money in 2012 will be hard to resist.

The regulation of political spending is a mine field of conflicting principles and interests. Most would agree that it is getting our of hand, if it has not already. The big question is, though, what can be done about it? I don't think the issue is a threat to our democracy just yet, but it can become one.

It should be a priority to work out the issues surrounding campaign financing. It must be possible to come to agreement on what can be accomplished relative to the guidelines provided by the Supreme Court (or to propose amendments to the Constitution if these limits are too restrictive). We must have and enforce reasonable reporting requirements. And we must expect the government and the press to make sure that the public knows all it has a right to, in a timely manner, so we can decide for ourselves if someone is trying to buy our vote.

Analyzing the 2010 Election

2010-11-12T00:47:00.000-05:00

Analyzing the 2010 Election

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on November 11, 2010.

Interpreting election results can be as tricky as predicting them. Given that, I suggest you add my voice to all the others you've heard in the past week as you make up your own mind.

At the state level, I am proud of Vermonters as we did two things: we bucked the general trend toward the right, but at the same time, we were maverick-like in our choices at the state level.

With so many office-holders giving up their seats this year, many of the main offices were fresh for the taking: Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, Secretary of State.

Williston itself showed a conservative streak in its vote for governor, with Republican Brian Dubie winning the vote 53 percent to Democrat Peter Shumlin's 46 percent. Statewide, though Shumlin pulled in just under 50 percent of the vote (to Dubie's 47 percent), Dubie conceeded the race. The selection of governor will, technically, be left to the legislature, but Dubie's concession virtually guarantees Shumlin's eventual win.

In the Lieutenant Governor's race, the Republican Phil Scott beat Democrat Steve Howard 48 percent to 41 percent; in Williston, Scott pulled in 54 percent of the vote to Howard's 39 percent.

And finally in the Secretary of State's race, Democrat Jim Condos beat out Republican Jason Gibbs 54 percent to 44 percent; in Williston, the numbers were similar, 54 percent to 46 percent.

Based on Williston's vote in the top two races on the ticket, I still have a lot of work to do here, trying to convince the majority of my neighbors that the best choice for Vermont is left-leaning. I hope the governor's actions help me out in that regard!

My impression is that Vermonters in general were not particularly impressed with the tone the political advertisements took in Vermont this campaign season, particularly in the governor's race. At the same time, I was impressed with much of Peter Shumlin's advertising, especially his "whiteboard" series, which condensed complex issues down to their bare bones, and may have made a real difference in the campaign.

Shumlin's unerring support for closing Vermont Yankee also resonated with many Vermonters (though not with your humble columnist), and ads touting his business experience also raised confidence in many Vermonters.

The wide margins won by our current members of Congress show yet again the power of incumbency, especially when there is a general air of satisfaction with the incumbent's work. The best advice I would have for any newly elected member of Congress from Vermont is to represent the state vigorously and to keep your nose clean. With those two things under your belt, a long-term job seems easy to keep.

Nationally, of course, this is no time for liberals to celebrate. Though the polls told us it was coming, hope sprung eternal that the losses would not be so bad. Democrats did retain control of the Senate, but likely because only a third of the body was up for election.

In the House, the swing from Democratic to Republican control is one of the biggest on record. However, since Democrats still hold the Presidency and the Senate, the next two years are going to be the Republicans' chance to show not that they can flex their muscle, but that they can compromise.

The 2010 election made one thing clear: the American public is impatient. Given what they got in 2008, President Obama and the 111th Congress accomplished a lot, but in the face of continued unemployment near double digits, it seems that we as a people think that the Republicans can do better. I'm not sure they can, but I'm not going to wish that they fail. I hope that Republicans and Democrats both can set aside their differences and work to finding solutions to our national problems.

We'll also see if the gleam of the Tea Party continues to shine, or if it will tarnish as its new leaders, including Senators-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, try to influence legislation in the 112th Congress. Fortunately for their states, and us all, the worst of the Tea Party, Sharon Angle and Christine O'Donnell, went down to defeat. Even Alaska's Joe Miller seems, at this writing, to have lost to write-in incumbent Lisa Murkowski.

I'm confident that Democrats are willing to work with Republicans to get the tough work of governing the nation done. The next two years will show the American people if the Republicans are just as willing, or if the obstructionism they've been known for in the last two years will continue to be a feature of their governing strategy for the next two years.

On Amending the Constitution

2010-10-28T00:37:00.000-04:00

On Amending the Constitution

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on October 28, 2010.

You'll notice an unusual item on your ballot on November 2 - a vote on an amendment to the Vermont Constitution. Its appearance gives me a chance to discuss the long road that an amendment to the Vermont Constitution has to travel, and how widely the procedure varies from amending the United States Constitution.

The process for amending any constitution should not be an easy one - a constitution is the basic law of a political unit, and provides a stable foundation that can be relied on for years, decades, even centuries.

The process of amending the U.S. Constitution has a few different paths, not all of which have been taken.

The most common path is for the Congress to vote, by two-thirds concurrence in both houses, to recommend an amendment. It has never been an easy thing to get a two-thirds vote in Congress, and this high bar reflects the framers' thoughts that changes should only come with broad consensus.

After those votes, however, there is a final stage that can be just as hard to overcome. The amendment is then sent to the states, where three-quarters of them must ratify the amendment.

The states can ratify in one of two ways - by majority votes of each state's legislature (which is most often another two-part hurdle) or, if directed by the amendment itself, by a special ratifying convention called in each state.

This second option may seem like a bit of an end-run around the legislatures, and to some degree it is. However, depending on state law, it is the executive or legislature that must convene the convention, and a determined governor or legislature could refuse to do so or at least drag its heels.

In the case of Vermont, heel-dragging is not an option. The responsibility to convene a convention is given to the governor, who has only 60 days following an amendment proposal to call the convention. The process then involves the voters, who choose 14 people from a list of 28 compiled by the governor, lieutenant governor, and speaker of the house.

The election must take place between three and 12 months after the governor's call, and the convention itself must take place 20 to 30 days after the election. The convention is free to conduct itself in any way it decides, and a majority vote on the proposed amendment, either way, decides the issue.

The convention route for a constitutional amendment has only been used once - to ratify the 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th Amendment and made liquor again legal in the United States.

The second, unused method for proposing amendments is by a convention of all the states. Many fear what amendments could come out of such a convention, and that fear has, in my opinion, been the main reason that many resist any call for an amendment convention.

Amending the Vermont Constitution is a longer process, by design.

First, amendments may only be proposed every four years, beginning in 1975. The Senate must initiate the process, and must approve the amendment by two-thirds vote. The House must then approve the amendment by a majority vote. The last year an amendment could be proposed was 2007 and the next is 2011.

Once this first hurdle is crossed, the amendment must lay dormant until the next two-year legislative session. The amendment is then taken up again and must be approved by a majority of both houses of the legislature. If those votes are successful, the amendment has one final hurdle - the people.

That is the stage the voting age amendment has reached this year. If a majority of Vermonters approve the amendment, it will become a part of our Constitution; if not, it will have to wait until 2011 for another go.

Both methods have pros and cons. The method used by Vermont would probably be unworkable for an electorate on the scale of the United States, so even though there is value in getting the direct voice of the people, the methods already in place work well enough. The nation needs a way to rapidly change its constitution in a time of crisis, so the built-in speed bumps in the Vermont amendment process could actually be dangerous for the federal constitution.

When you go to the polls next week, be sure not to miss the question on the constitutional amendment presented to you. It is a rare opportunity for you to voice how our constitution should be constructed.

Elect Peter Shumlin

2010-10-14T14:18:00.001-04:00

Elect Peter Shumlin

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on October 14, 2010.

It should come as no surprise to any regular reader that I'm endorsing Democrat Peter Shumlin for governor, and urge everyone else to vote for him, too. Williston did not come out strongly for Shumlin in the Democratic Party primary - he was third behind Doug Racine and Deb Markowitz - but now it is time for Vermonters in general and Democrats in particular to rally behind Shumlin.

What might be a little surprising is that my decision to endorse Shumlin was not as automatic as one might infer from my partisan label.

I believe that the legislative and executive branches should not be in collusion - they should, in fact, be at odds at how things should get done. There might be agreement about final outcomes, but what I want to see is disagreement about how to get there. Because when there is disagreement, there is a place for compromise; and it is in compromise that we find the best laws and policies.

If there is one truism in Vermont politics over the last several decades, it is this: incumbent governors keep their job as long as they want it. The only change in the governor's office we've seen since the election of Madeleine Kunin in 1984 has been when a sitting governor decided not to seek reelection, or a sitting governor died in office.

The governor we elect in November, then, will likely be the governor of Vermont, for better or worse, for the next six or eight years. The decision is not to be made lightly. With this knowledge, I looked thoughtfully and seriously at Republican Brian Dubie.

Dubie is an honorable man who has served his state and country with distinction. Politically, we have some agreements - our positions on Vermont Yankee, for example, are pretty close. He has a good and valid point when he notes that Vermont's regulatory procedures should be reviewed and streamlined.

Most of his other positions, however, sound like more of the same Republican parroting that we hear over and over again at the national level. The solution to our woes is lower taxes and cuts in spending.

Neither of these platitudes is a solution in itself. There are places taxes can and should be cut - I certainly don't advocate that we willy-nilly raise taxes, nor does any Democrat. But the opposite - cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes! - seems to be the default Republican war cry, and Dubie is not deviating from that position.

Similarly, I do not think that every program is necessarily worthy of its current funding level, so funding levels should be examined closely, but Dubie criticizes, first and foremost, the generosity of Vermont's social programs, which protect our most vulnerable citizens - an expense well worth paying.

What Shumlin brings to the table is all the best of Dubie's plans - to grow the green economy, for example - but with the touch of a Democrat who wants to look out for the little guy rather than the big guy.

Shumlin also has the advantage of knowing the Vermont business environment from the business-owner side of the equation. He knows the challenges that an overly onerous regulatory process can impose, and can offer suggestions to the legislature to ease the burden without losing the benefits of good regulation.

He also knows that to have a better society, we have to not only cater to business but we also have to protect and improve the lives of the people.

Shumlin's platform not only focuses on growing the jobs market and the green economy, but also sustaining and improving education, health care, equal rights for all Vermonters, caring for our older population, and maintaining Vermont's farm economy.

In short, Shumlin has a better plan, a more humane plan, a more attractive plan.

Brian Dubie would not be a bad choice for Vermont. Peter Shumlin, however, is a much better choice. I hope that you agree with my assessment and vote for Peter Shumlin for governor on November 2.

----

This year will mark a first for me - since I'll be away on election day, I'll be voting early for the first time. If voting on election day is an issue for you, I encourage you to visit the Town Clerk's office at your earliest convenience and get an absentee ballot. There is no excuse for not having your voice heard.

GOP Pledge is Nothing New

2010-09-30T00:01:00.001-04:00

GOP Pledge is Nothing New

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on September 30, 2010.

As Yogi Berra said, "It's deja vu all over again."

In 1994, with Bill Clinton two years into his first term as president, Republicans presented a Contract with America to the electorate. The Contract was a list of legislative priorities that the Republicans promised to turn into bills within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress. It was a ploy that played to the angers and frustrations of the American people at the time.

The ploy worked. The House of Representatives had a Republican majority for the first time in 40 years. Though many of the bills based on the Contract failed to become law either because of presidential veto or because the Senate failed to pass them, the Republican majority in the House lasted from the 104th Congress through to the 109th. The Democrats were not able to wrest control until the 110th Congress, almost four years ago, in January, 2007.

The legacy of that Republican control includes government shutdowns, tax cuts for the richest Americans, authorization of an unnecessary war, and the worst recession in decades.

More recently, Republicans have released their Pledge to America. The GOP is pledging to right all the wrongs that they see in American government and society, a good and noble sentiment, but forgetting that it was they who were the root cause of many of these woes.

President Obama came to office promising change, change that many of us, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, were eager for. It is change that we have not seen in many cases, change that we still wait for. But even as we await more of the president's promises to come to fruition, we cannot allow ourselves to be blinded to the fact that change has, indeed, already happened.

To me, the Pledge to America is more about undoing the good that has already been done and thwarting any possibility for more good to be done in the next two years.

Just last week, some of the most important provisions of the health care bill came into effect:

Children can no longer be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition
Health care policies must cover children up to age 26
Health care policies may no longer include lifetime limits on coverage

These features and protections are all important and have real impact on people's lives today. And if Republicans had had their way six months ago, none of these provisions would have taken effect. Because of the staggered implementation of the health care bill, even more changes will be taking effect over the next few years.

Another major accomplishment of the President and his congressional allies is the end of combat operations in Iraq. This war, the wrong war to have spent blood and treasure on, was authorized by a Republican Congress. Ending it was one of Obama's top priorities, and though it took two years, he was able to accomplish the goal without putting undue risk on our troops or the Iraqi people.

Though Republicans use it as a selling point for their own agenda, calling it a "government take-over", the government's support for General Motors and Chrysler saved an American industry and all the jobs that go with it.

According to Recovery.gov, the Recovery Act, put in place by the Democratic Congress, has brought over $250 million to Vermont through June 30, and another $500 million has been awarded to Vermont. This money represents real jobs, held by your neighbors.

The Republican leadership would have you forget about all of these accomplishments. Is there more to be done? Of course there is, but the way to get things done is not to take a step backwards, back to Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

As he introduced the latest Republican ploy, the Pledge to America, House Minority Leader John Boehner said that if they are placed in the majority, the American people can expect Republicans to "not be any different than we have been". I don't think that America can afford, nor stomach, "not different" from the Republicans, because they have been combative, obstructive, and contrary ever since the new Congress was sworn in.

What we need is a new Republican party that is willing to work with Democrats to come up with solutions, not create more problems. In lieu of that seeming pipe dream, our best bet is to maintain the Democratic majorities in Congress, and for all Democrats to work diligently toward that goal.

The End of Don't Ask Don't Tell

2010-09-16T10:09:00.000-04:00

The End of Don't Ask Don't Tell

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on September 16, 2010.

Of all the divisions of the U.S. government, the military is likely the most conservative, in this context meaning cautious and resistant to change. But the military must reflect society, and eventually, it does change. First, the military integrated on racial lines. Then it allowed women to serve alongside men in non-combat roles.

Aside from women serving in combat, there is only one major barrier to military service for an entire class of people: homosexuality.

Despite the fact that the same moot canard has been used against other classes of people, such as persons of color and women, the most common reason for forbidding service to openly gay persons is "unit cohesion". The theory is that if a unit was aware that a gay person was serving with them, that unit would not function as a unit. It would, in fact, be at risk of tearing itself apart.

I always found this theory to be a bit insulting. I was asked to serve alongside farm boys and inner city kids, with whom I had very little in common personally. Face it - we all have prejudices, and I am no exception to this truism. But in becoming a platoon, we each had to overcome our prejudices to bond as a unit.

Just as there are dyed-in-the-wool racists who will never change, and have no place in our military, there will be those who will never accept homosexuals as equals. The solution is to weed those people out, not to prevent homosexuals from serving their country.

The anti-homosexual policy in the military went through a shift in 1993. A policy commonly known as Don't Ask Don't Tell was put into place. The practical effect of DADT was that the military would not ask its personnel to say if they were homosexual or not. In exchange, service members would not say or acknowledge if they were gay or not.

At the time, it seemed a reasonable compromise and it probably was. The effect, however, is that the policy required homosexual people to lie to the service, to themselves, to their friends, and to their families about who they were. Upon reflection, these restrictions seem unfair.

In a time of war, the policy also proved problematic. Any soldier who was revealed to be homosexual was subject to discharge - even if that soldier filled a critical role, such as Arabic translator. As of 2007, 58 Arabic linguists had been ousted from service because of DADT.

Beginning in 2001, the DADT policy was modified so that it would not be enforced against service members serving in combat zones. The rationale was the these personnel were too critical to the mission to lose any of them to the policy. This fact played a pivotal role in a recent federal district court ruling in California, which struck down the entire DADT policy as unconstitutional.

As Judge Virgina Phillips ruled, if unit cohesion is important in times of peace, it would seem to be doubly so in times of war, in a combat zone. Yet the military did not increase or tighten enforcement of the policy, it relaxed it. Having a valued member of a team pulled out of that team has more of a negative effect on the unit than the unit discovering a member is gay - something most of the members of the team might have known or suspected anyway.

If my experience in the military taught me nothing, it is that people of disparate backgrounds can, and will, come together as a team. It should be no surprise that members of our military can accept a gay service member as easily as anyone else.

Our military exists to protect our liberty from those who would take it from us. It is an arm of a political system that is based on personal freedom. The DADT policy violates the First Amendment rights of gay service members. It puts our nation and other members of the service at risk. And it is an affront to our national pride in a quality that we say we admire: that a young man or woman would risk his or her life to serve their country.

We should all celebrate and support Judge Phillips's ruling, then drink a toast to the end of DADT. Next up, the last vestiges of discrimination: allowing women to serve in combat and to register for the draft.

Beck's Dream

2010-09-02T15:51:00.000-04:00

Beck's Dream

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on September 2, 2010.

Last week, on August 28, Fox News personality Glenn Beck held a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Beck is simultaneously put upon a pedestal by the extreme right wing and denigrated by the majority of the left wing for his utterances, conspiracy theories, near-lunatic rants, and unsubstantiated claims.

Many liberal personalities and organizations were especially critical of Beck because of his choice not only of date for his rally but for its venue. The famous "I Have a Dream" speech was given by Martin Luther King, Jr., on August 28, 1963 on those very steps. Considering the vitriol that Beck has launched against President Barack Obama, including unsubstantiated claims that Obama has hate for "white people and white culture," many have taken personal offense at the event and its organizer.

I can't say that I take the same offense. I'm a great admirer of King's, and admire his I Have a Dream speech so much that I include it in a short list on my web site, a list of documents that I consider of uncommon importance to the nation. And, to be sure, I have no love for Beck. I shake my head in disbelief at his antics, guffaw at his misstatements, and cringe if I ever mistune to his radio or TV programs.

But in the great tradition of the 1st Amendment, Beck has every right to speak his mind in a public venue, and to gather supporters and detractors alike to witness his speech and those of his invited guests. As for the date, there are, after all, only 365 days in a year, and only about half of those in Washington's warm days. As for venues, there are only a few as iconic as the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. If we start to restrict dates and places because something of import happened there once, we will eventually run out of dates and venues.

I honestly don't know if Beck's choice of the date and place is a deliberate affront to the memory of King, but to me it almost doesn't matter. Even a deliberate affront is an exercise of free speech. If a man is being a fool, his actions will show him to be a fool. If a man speaks like a fool, his words will show him to be a fool. Let the man speak unmolested, that we might all hear.

And hear we did - from continuous coverage on Fox to lengthy articles on national news sites, Beck certainly got his chance to air his views. More than anything else, it turned out to be an old-fashioned revival.

In the weeks before the rally, Beck started to say that his event, which was entitled "Restoring Honor" and which was ostensibly held to honor members of the U.S. military, could actually be witness to the word of God emanating from his very mouth. Beck said all he was going to write down for his speech were bullet points, in case "the Spirit wants to talk."

Then, at the rally itself, Beck said that beginning with his rally, America was "turning back to God - for too long, this country has wandered in darkness." Stay tuned to find out when the Church of Beck is slated to open. Beck has said that his inspiration to organize the event came from God himself, that God dropped a "giant sandbag" on his head.

The crowd was substantial, though estimates varied from between 78,000 to a half million. Fortunately for Beck, and unfortunately for those of us who are amused by the sometimes silly, sometimes badly spelled, sometimes ironic, and sometimes hateful placards carried by the Tea Party faithful, most attendees heeded Beck's request that such placards remain out of the rally. The reason for the request, Beck said, was that the event was not political in nature. This in itself is laughable - it was, of course, all about politics.

Last time I wrote about the importance of upholding our freedom of religion, even if the religion is one we do not understand or agree with. I've written before in defense of speech I disagree with, have done so again today, and will continue to do so.

Only by supporting and defending the free speech rights of our foes can we reasonably claim them and defend them for ourselves.

Denounce right-wing attacks on mosque

2010-08-19T21:31:00.000-04:00

Denounce right-wing attacks on mosque

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on August 19, 2010.

"Thou shalt allow religious freedom" - this is as close to a secular commandment that the United States has. Along with the freedoms of speech, of the press, of assembly, and of petition, freedom of religion is an important First Amendment right.

We have often let ourselves be blinded to our freedoms (adding "under God" to our Pledge of Allegiance, for example, as a counter to communist godlessness, and in doing so violating the spirit of religious freedom). Some of the figureheads of the Republican Party and conservative movement, however, have latched on to a new issue to garner support while not only turning a blind eye to the principle, but actively disrespecting it.

In case you have not heard, there is a brouhaha brewing about a new building being proposed for 51 Park Place in lower Manhattan. The building, aptly named Park51 and financed by Islamic community groups, will contain a gym, an auditorium, a restaurant, a library, childcare facilities, a September 11 memorial, and, controversially, a mosque.

Over the past month, the shrill right has begun to keen about this issue. Such Republican luminaries as Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have publicly denounced the project. One person, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, is advocating not just a halt to the building of the Park51 mosque, but a halt to the construction of all mosques across the United States.

Driven by the talking heads, some less thoughtful right wing sheep have begun to flock to the city to hold up placards and protest signs. I'm almost too embarrassed for them to reprint what they say, but the only way to illustrate the lunacy is to do so:

"Don't glorify murders of 3000 - no 9/11 Victory Mosque"
"Islam builds mosques at the sites of their conquests and victories"
"A mosque at Ground Zero spits on the graves of 9/11 victims"

All of this lunacy over nothing.

The truth is that the proposed mosque is not at Ground Zero. Imagine, for a moment, that Burlington's Town Center Mall is Ground Zero. The location of the mosque in New York City is equivalent to where Burlington's Fletcher Free Library is. No one would say that the library is "in" the Burlington Town Center Mall. It is a mistake at best, and a deception at worst, to say that the proposed site is "at" Ground Zero.

All of this lunacy in contrary to a cherished American principle.

I think it is safe to say that if Park51 was going to hold a chapel, church, or synagogue, then there would be not so much as a single breath wasted on it. The fact that it is a mosque should not be relevant.

An argument is that Islam is a religion of violence, and allowing the mosque at Park51 is akin to allowing a terrorist training ground in the middle of Lower Manhattan. This guilt by association only works because many people buy into the notion that Islam is a religion of violence. What Islam has is an unfortunate number of fanatics who twist the religion to their own agenda, and that's no reason to stop construction at Park51, let alone, of course, a nationwide moratorium.

Based on that sort of logic, the actions of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh would have stopped construction of Catholic churches; Scott Roeder's killing of abortion doctor George Tiller and Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph should have closed down other Christian churches. Religious terrorism is not unique to Islam. We cannot paint an entire religion with the brush given to us by these zealots.

Fortunately, at the end of the day, cooler heads will prevail. Though some called it a political risk, President Obama came out firmly in support of the Park51 project, as has New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Americans, regardless of creed or political leaning, should lend their support to the groups responsible for the Park51 project. If you cannot, perhaps you should rethink your feelings about religious freedom in general.

As a reminder, the primary elections are taking place next Tuesday. There are choices to be made on both the Democratic and Republican ballots. Primaries are much less well attended than the general election, but I hope that if you were not sure about voting on Tuesday, a few words of encouragement will sway you.

Voting is another of our cherished rights, and we should not waste it. Please, vote on Tuesday.

Arizona law is unconstitutional

2010-07-29T17:46:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on July 29, 2010.

Note: this entry was written before certain provisions of the Arizona law were stayed by a federal judge.

Arizona law is unconstitutional

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the history of immigration in America, focusing on discrimination that various ethnic groups have suffered. In particular, I focused on the most recent groups to suffer, Hispanics and Latinos.

What I did not get into was the most recent issue, the state-level immigration policies that are scheduled to go into effect today in Arizona. The state law requires immigrants in Arizona to carry their immigration papers with them at all times. If a state or local law enforcement officer has a suspicion that any particular individual is an illegal immigrant, they are required to question that person about their immigration status.

The law has been excoriated by many other state and local governments, many going so far as to put official boycotts of Arizona in place, forbidding, for example, attendance at conferences held in Arizona. This is not to say that there is no support for the law. Nine states, including those as diverse as Michigan and Alabama, have officially endorsed the law in legal briefs.

According to Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, "Arizona, Michigan and every other state have the authority to enforce immigration laws." Here, Cox is simply incorrect. Cox went on to lament that the Obama Administration was spending tax payer dollars fighting the Arizona law.

There are two major problems with this law, and they both run smack into the supreme law, the U.S. Constitution. The first is found in two parts of the original text of the Constitution, at Article 1, Section 8, Clause 4; and at Article 6.

Article 1, Section 8 is all about the powers of the federal government. The powers listed therein are not shared by the federal government and state governments. They are exclusively federal. These include the power to coin money, to establish post offices, to establish patents and copyrights, and the power to maintain an army and navy. In that list is Clause 4, which grants the power to establish a "uniform rule of Naturalization." In this context, "naturalization" is an umbrella term that includes immigration policy.

States can argue that this clause does not, actually, include immigration, but they would then have to argue against almost 200 years of established legal precedent on the matter. The ability of states to convince the Supreme Court that its precedent on this issue is incorrect seems unlikely.

Article 6 simply buttresses this argument by noting that the Constitution, and laws made under it, are the supreme law of the United States. A law passed by a state that impinges upon federal powers is no law at all.

Finally, the law violates the 14th Amendment, which guarantees all persons due process under the law. Laws cannot be applied arbitrarily and capriciously. We rely on the judgement of our police officers for many things, and I applaud and support them in the application of that judgement. But here, Arizona police officers will have to make decisions about people based on their perception of an individual. What distinguishes a legal Latino immigrant from an illegal Latino immigrant? Is there something you can see in their eyes? A change in their skin tone? A certain scent a police officer can pick up? Anything, at all, that an officer can use as an objective measuring stick?

No, there is not. Either they will have to ignore the law or they will have to consider all persons who do not have their proper papers as illegals. The casting of this wide net will undoubtedly catch illegal immigrants. But it will just as undoubtedly catch legal immigrants and even native-born citizens of the United States.

Even if immigration was not the exclusive bailiwick of the federal government, these terms of the law are enough to render it null and void. It is my sincere hope that the courts that hear the case smack this law down with the full force of Constitution and send a message to all states that such a usurpation of federal authority will not be tolerated.

If the Obama Administration should be spending tax payer dollars anywhere, it is in fighting state violations of the Constitution. We have, after all, already fought a civil war over the issue of states trying to override federal authority over powers granted to it in the Constitution. What would be a waste, morally, legally, and constitutionally, is to not fight Arizona's law.

Solving the immigration problem

2010-07-15T09:15:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on July 15, 2010.

Solving the immigration problem

The cliche is that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Often cliches are simply untrue, but in this case nothing could be closer to the truth. With the exception of 1.5 percent of us who, in the 2000 census, reported aboriginal heritage, the vast majority of Americans are the products of immigrant heritage.

The waves of immigration the United States has had include the English, Norwegians, Germans, Irish, Russian Jews, Mexicans, Asians, and Armenians. Throughout the 19th century, the United States was a beacon to Europeans escaping famine, economic collapse, and war.

At almost any point in history, we can find anti-immigration sentiment, often worked up to a fever pitch. The Italians; the Irish; the Chinese; the latest immigrant demon is Hispanics.

Liberals are often painted with a broad brush, and on immigration there is no exception. We're soft on illegal immigrants, willing to open our borders to anyone who comes knocking, happy to offer up tax-financed social services to anyone.

These are not the positions that we take, however, and anyone who is willing to do more than sixty seconds of research on the Internet or to talk to a liberal friend will confirm it.

What, then, can we say about how liberals think about immigration?

Liberals are, if nothing else, realistic pragmatists. We recognize that the United States is still a great beacon to people of the world. Department of Homeland Security statistics show that we accept legal immigrants from every corner of the globe: 660 thousand in 2007, just over 1 million in 2008, and 744 thousand in 2009. The top countries of birth in 2009 were Mexico, India, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and South Korea. In that small list, we can see a wide variety of languages, religions, and ethnic groups. Just the sort of melting pot that our children still learn about in civics classes.

People want to come here for all the right reasons, and we, as a nation, are willing to let immigrants come. Thankfully, the current debate is less about legal immigration, but what to do about illegal immigrants. These are people we all know are here, whom we all rely on to some degree directly or indirectly, but who we often prefer to pretend don't exist.

Perhaps it is time to create a new immigration status. Many illegal immigrants don't want to become citizens - they just want to work to support their families. We are more than happy to allow skilled workers into the United States. We encourage it even, with special visas. The H1-B visa allows people to come to the United States to work, where the intent of the worker is not to be an immigrant. The visa is only good for specific positions and only as long as the person is in the specific job.

There is no equivalent for unskilled workers, however. Perhaps there should be.

Let's face it — illegal workers are willing to do things that most Americans are not. Whether it is to clean hotel rooms, pick fruit, milk cows, do simple construction, sew garments, or take care of children, the jobs are there because there are illegal immigrants willing to take them. With a special non-immigrant status, allowing certain persons to come to the United States to live and work, we could control the flow better, keep better track of people, even increase tax revenues. Not quite an H1-B visa, with all of its paperwork and sponsorships, but something much more than the illegal status most such workers now have.

Closing off the border is not the answer. Border walls and fences can help stanch the flow of illegal immigrants in some specific places, but we cannot enclose the United States in a protective wall. It is impractical and would give us all a bunker mentality we have been lucky to avoid so far.

Above all, the United States is a place that should be a beacon to the world. To live up to that ideal, we must be compassionate even as we enforce our laws. In creating a new class of visa, we might eventually prevent most illegal immigration — with the added benefit of preventing these poor souls from falling victim to desert heat or, often worse, the villainy of organized crime.

I'm not sure what the answer to the question of illegal immigration is, but I am sure that demonizing illegal immigrants is not it.

The oil spill's biggest victim: BP?

2010-07-01T16:09:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on July 1, 2010.

The oil spill's biggest victim: BP?

The latest liberal-leaning Internet meme is a new take on the Republican Party's venerable elephant logo. You know the one — the red-bodied elephant with the blue upper body emblazoned with three big white stars.

The new meme converts the elephant to BP greens, with a dark green body and a light green upper body. The stars are replaced by the BP rosette, and the elephant's truck has a oil gusher squirting out of it. The meme also renames the "Grand Old Party" to the "Grand Oil Party," inserting the "B" from BP to make the point painfully clear: GObP.

The new icon comes from the creative staff of left-leaning news show host Keith Olbermann, and is intended to poke fun at (and speak truth to) the Republican members of Congress who have taken to defending BP from criticism.

The most blatant example was that of Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), who went on record in a House committee hearing on June 17 and apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward. The day before, the Obama White House and BP had announced that BP would set up a $20 billion trust fund to help fund clean-up efforts and to compensate victims of the economic damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Barton called the agreement a "shake-down," said that the agreement violated due process, and that it was illegal. Barton was "ashamed" of the agreement, and apologized to BP and Hayward for it.

What the rest of us might call "the right thing," or, "the least BP could do," Barton was calling an illegal shakedown for which he was ashamed. The only shame should have been Barton's. What he exposed himself as, as though we couldn't already tell considering his accumulated campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry generally and from BP specifically, was a shill for the industry.

One member of Congress bending over backwards for the industry does not deserve a whole new logo, though. Fortunately for the logo makers, there were plenty of other Republicans who were more than willing to bend for BP.

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) also put his foot in his mouth. After rightfully praising BP for paying out what claims it has already, he also lambasted the President for meeting with BP and coming to an agreement with them. What Barton and Price seem to forget is that it is the President's job, the government's job, to protect our nation and its people from all threats, including the threat of irresponsible companies and the threat of on-going economic damage.

Frequently shrill Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) worried aloud that BP was going to get "fleeced" by claims and that the victims' fund would end up being just a "redistribution of wealth." Yes, from the cash-soaked BP to the broke and possibly bankrupt people of the Gulf region whose jobs and even careers were ruined by BP's spill. If there is to be any redistribution of wealth, this is the place for it.

Finally, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, of "Drill, Baby, Drill!" fame, has been using Twitter and Facebook to come to the defense of BP. Citing an article that equates the trust fund to Nazism, Palin called the agreement "an unconstitutional power grab."

Who are all these people kidding?

Every day, at nearly any hour, we can still turn on the television and watch as barrel after barrel of oil leaks out of the Deepwater Horizon well. I'm certainly troubled that our federal regulations did not require companies to have better plans for this sort of thing, but that is no excuse for this disaster.

In my last column, I wrote that the time to assess blame for the long-term effects of this disaster was not yet here. But there has been more than enough time to assess blame in the short-term. Any reasonable person would place that blame firmly on BP — heck, BP itself is taking the blame in interview after interview and hearing after hearing.

The attempts by these members of the GObP to deflect this short-term blame by raising the flag of unfairness, illegality, or unconstitutionality, are so transparent as to be laughable.

So don't blame yourself for having a small chuckle over the BP-green elephant logo and the new moniker. A little dark humor helps us cope with disasters of this scale. It's just unfortunate that we seem to need so much dark humor these days.

Too early to assess blame

2010-06-17T14:37:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 17, 2010.

Too early to assess blame

The overriding question in the Gulf of Mexico right now is how can the daily spewing of 20,000 to 40,000 barrels of crude oil be stopped and, eventually, cleaned up. Inevitably, however, the question will be who is to blame for the disaster.

Parenthetically, given past history, it is likely that it will be decades before all the cases are heard and decided. The 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, which spilled a total of 200,000 barrels of oil (which the Deepwater Horizon can leak in just 10 days), is still being litigated. In 2008, the Supreme Court sent a punitive damages award case back to the lower courts for further hearings.

On my website, in the month of June, I've been taking a poll asking my visitors exactly who they blame for the on-going disaster. The choices include BP, Halliburton, the majority and minority owners of the oil rig, and the government in any of three forms: the Minerals Management Service (in charge of off-shore oil rig regulation), the Obama Administration generally, or just The Government generally.

My site tends to attract a conservative audience (in 2009, 34 percent of my visitors self-reported as Republicans, only 13 percent as Democrats; 55 percent reported voting for John McCain, only 35 percent for Obama), so the results two weeks into the month are not shocking. Still, given the situation, I do find the numbers a little surprising.

Only 44 percent of respondents blame BP or one of the affiliated companies. 47 percent blame the government for the on-going disaster. 21 percent blame the Obama Administration specifically, even though the administration has, thus far, taken a very conservative approach and been relatively hands-off in terms of forcing the companies involved to do much of anything.

The approach makes some sense. An oil company should know best how to handle a spill at an oil rig — the oil company or at least the companies responsible for the component parts of the oil rig. Halliburton, for example, was contracted to do the final cementing of the oil well, and Cameron International is the supplier of the failed blow-out preventer. That these companies have failed to perform their basic duties is a condemnation of the industry in general.

When it comes to fixing a problem with one of these component parts, it should be the job of the company to fix them. This is not a liberal or conservative position — it is a common sense position. The fact the oil is important to the nation from a defense standpoint or from an economic standpoint is no excuse for not being able to control an oil spill, and not a reason to assume the spill is the government's fault.

I know my poll is hardly scientific. One visitor recently told me that because my poll does not allow for a write-in response, it is essentially "useless." I countered that Internet polls, mine included, are generally useless, because they are not controlled and they are self-selected.

But the sense I get from reading a few other polls is that the feeling is not isolated. In a USA Today/Yahoo poll released May 26, 75 percent thought BP was doing a poor job with the spill, but 53 percent thought the Obama administration was also doing a poor job.

As I've noted before, the President often gets blamed, or gets credit, for things that are not his doing. Regardless, the office of the presidency is a powerful and important one. What a president says matters. Obama is pushing BP and the industry from his bully pulpit, and that must continue.

The administration, in recent weeks, has gone on the offensive. This past weekend, the administration said they planned to order BP to establish a fund of an undetermined amount to help compensate victims of the spill. Earlier this week, the president visited affected states for the fourth time since the oil rig sank. The Energy Department has established a web site to consolidate all the data it can about the spill.

Is the administration doing all it can in the face of this disaster? Perhaps, perhaps not — that's a tough call at this point. It may only be in the calm of the post-disaster analysis that we can tell that for sure. For now, the priorities must be finally capping the leak, containing the already-lost oil, and protecting the fragile ecosystems of the Gulf coast.

There will be plenty of time, decades in fact, for blame.

The Sinking of the Cheonan

2010-06-03T00:01:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 3, 2010. This version is slightly different from the published version.

The Sinking of the Cheonan

Just after 9:00 p.m. local time, on March 26, 2010, the sailors on the South Korean Navy corvette Cmheonan were thown into a mariner's nightmare. An explosion rocked the ship, and split it in two. The stern sank within minutes, according to the ship's captain. Of the 104 members aboard, only 58 were pulled from the sea. 46 are unaccounted for and are assumed drowned.

After weeks of rescue operations, the focus shifted to salvage and investigation. Portions of the hull of the Cheonan were visible above water, as the seas were only 130 feet deep at the site of the incident. By the end of April, both halves of the Cheonan had been recovered from the sea floor and were taken to a South Korean naval base for examination.

Speculation at the time of the tragedy was rampant, but experts said that only two causes were probable. Either an internal explosion, the result of an accident, fire, or some other incident on board; or an external explosion, the result of some kind of attack.

The Cheonan was operating within its territorial waters as declared by the United Nations. North Korea, however, considers the waters to belong to them. If the explosion was external, the North was the obvious suspect in an attack.

Within a day of the raising of both halves of the boat, the South Korean defense minister said that the cause of the splitting of the Cheonan was a "bubble jet," an extraordinary change in pressure that was strong enough to split the boat in half. Such a bubble jet can be caused by a proximate but non-contact explosion, as from a torpedo.

On May 20, an international commission consisting of Koreans, Americans, British, Swedes, and Australians, released a report on the sinking of the Cheonan. The report's conclusion was unequivocal:

"The [commission] assesses that a strong underwater explosion generated by the detonation of a homing torpedo below and to the left of the gas turbine room caused Cheonan to split apart and sink."

The evidence is highly technical in nature, and I don't purport to understand it all, but it convinced the experts. Some parts of the evidence I understand quite well: torpedo parts mixed in with the wreckage of the Cheonan. Though the Cheonan herself carried torpedoes, the parts included marks that were consistent with other North Korean-made torpedoes previously obtained by the allies.

North Korea, however, is not quite so convinced.

According to North Korea's official English-language news site, the commission's report is "foolish and fabricated." It called the Cheonan sailors traitors, and condemned the entire South Korean Navy as a "puppet navy." North Korea warned against any punishment for the sinking of the Cheonan, threatening "all-out war" if such measures are taken.

The bellicose blustering of the North is to be expected. Whether the attack on the South Korean ship was deliberate (the result of an order from on-high or an act of aggression by a lone captain) or an accident, it seems par for the course that North Korea would deny any involvement. The phrase "Thou dost protest too much" comes to mind.

American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the attack by the North as "provocative" and said that the actions will have consequences. Though she failed to elaborate much further, she noted that "business as usual" could not continue.

Liberals are generally regarded as doves, but if this past Memorial Day is a reminder of nothing else, it must be that Americans of all kinds serve and have served — men, women, all races, colors, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, and political leanings. I think it is fair to say that no one of these groupings loves peace or is willing to fight to defend freedom more than any other.

Given that, it should be no surprise that President Obama's administration is willing to meet North Korea's tough talk with tough talk of its own. Our commitment to the freedom of the South Korean people should not be questioned, because through every administration since the armistice treaty was signed, our military has had a strong presence in South Korea.

By remaining firm in our resolve, and by using diplomacy (both public and secret), I hope that the North will own up to its responsibility. If it does not, and it provokes a fight, the South Koreans can rest assured that the United States will stand by them, up to and including war. It isn't what we want, but it is what we will do.

Nuclear: The Life-Saving Alternative?

2010-05-20T09:09:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 20, 2010.

Nuclear: The Life-Saving Alternative?

You may or may not have ever heard of Adam Carolla — he's a radio personality who also hosted The Man Show on cable's Comedy Central and co-hosted Loveline, a sex and relationship advice show, with Dr. Drew Pinsky. Recently, tech website Gizmodo.com asked Carolla his opinions on a topic I've written about here before: nuclear power.

Normally, I would not use someone like Carolla as entree into a column topic, but what he had to say, in just a few minutes, was spot-on (though crude — if you look for Carolla's video at Gizmodo, be sure to watch once the kids are in bed).

The interview was posted days after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a month after the Massey coal mine disaster in West Virginia. Regarding nuclear power, Carolla asks this pointed question: after 11 people died drilling for oil and nearly 30 died digging for coal in just the last month, exactly how many people have died producing nuclear power in the United States in the past month, or year, or decade?

His answer is zero. If we were to choose a way to produce power solely on the safety of the workers behind that power, nuclear is the clear choice.

Now, Carolla was riffing, and didn't stop to think that uranium is also mined (albeit by non-Americans). There are dangers to uranium mining, not the least of which is exposure to radioactive dust and radon gas. But these are risks that can (and should) be mitigated. Coal miners, though, are never quite sure if they will emerge from the mine when the make their way in.

Environmentally, the threat posed by offshore oil drilling is no longer just a threat — it is about as real as it can get. So real, in fact, that President Obama is having second thoughts about his plans to allow more such drilling, as is California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Coal mining is no friend of the environment either, especially when the mountaintop removal method is used. Just think about that — removal of a mountaintop so we can burn the coal that the mountain is made of.

There are dangers, to be sure, in nuclear power. The last two years of news out of Vermont Yankee show that mistakes can and will be made; this is not to mention Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. These lessons cannot be fogotten.

These are, however, extreme examples. Given what we have learned since the last nuclear power plant in the United States came on line in 1996, and what other countries have learned, we know we can build safe, effective plants that can not only produce massive amounts of power in a relatively small space, but which can also reuse their own fuel, recycling it instead of sending if off for permanent storage.

Our power needs are growing and will continue to grow. Just imagine if electricity was clean, bountiful, and cheap. Just imagine quantum-leap discoveries in battery technology that would make the electric car ubiquitous. Just imagine if we no longer need fossil fuels to produce electricity nor run our cars.

If we redouble our efforts to bolster our reliance on renewables, continuing to improve solar cell efficiency and continuing to build wind farms in the right places, that will help. But what will also help is for we, as a nation, to decide that nuclear power must be a part of that future, too.

------------

I want to take this opportunity to bid farewell, on these pages, to Mike Benevento. I have had the pleasure of writing opposite him for a year. Our point and counterpoint columns have reaffirmed to me that it not only possible to have civil discussions about matters we disagree on, it is absolutely essential.

In the end, we share a love for this country and its democracy. We both know that there are a few things that are essential to our freedoms: a free press, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and a system of government that allows for the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. Most likely, you reading this also share these values.

I look forward to debating the finer points of politics and the world with someone new. But be warned - you do have some large shoes to fill.

The F-35 and the Cost of Safety

2010-05-08T23:19:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 6, 2010.

The F-35 and the Cost of Safety

Back in October of 1988, I wrote a story for the Vermont Cynic about the Atlas nuclear missile sites in northern Vermont, including one in Alburgh. This story was close to my heart, because for years I'd driven by the Alburgh site, as it was at the end of a back road between my family's camp in Alburgh Springs and Alburgh Town.

When I went to interview a neighboring property owner in 1988, a time of relative fear of nuclear holocaust, I asked how he felt when the government put the missile in place. Surely they were scared to death about having such a powerful weapon buried just a few feet under the ground.

The owner's response was, "Well, I guess it's scary if you think about it now, but back then, all we knew was that missile was there to keep us safe."

When I was in the National Guard, my home armory was in the middle of a neighborhood in Swanton. We kept our jeeps, trucks, and M60A3 tank in the motor pool, separated from the neighbors by just a chain link fence. The armory, like Williston's today, was used for community purposes as well as for the military - a preschool used our classrooms during the school year.

But come training days, when we had to start up those vehicles, we did so knowing that we were disturbing the peace. The engine of an M60A3 is anything but quiet, and after a few months sitting idle, it could throw off thick, black exhaust that would blanket the neighborhood. Once, so I'm told, someone hit the switch on the tank's smoke generator. Having experienced the thick, white smoke on training battlefields, I could only imagine what the neighborhood looked like.

I'm certain that on training days, our neighbors watched us warily, so they could be prepared for the billowing exhaust, the roar of the engine, and the loud squeak of the tracks as we maneuvered the nearly 50-ton monster around our grounds. Perhaps those neighbors also had the feeling that despite the inconvenience, we were there to help keep them safe.

When my family and I moved to Williston, we lived on North Brownell Road. We quickly found that our home, like the Lamplight Acres neighborhood across the street from us, was on the landing path of some flights flown by the Vermont Air National Guard. The first few fly-overs were a surprise to us, as we had quickly learned that civilian planes rarely ever flew overhead.

By the next summer, the loud whine of the jets' engines were just background noise, and it was actually exciting to see the jets fly so low over our house that you could see the pilots and hear the hydraulics whine as the pilot worked the controls.

When the kids asked what the loud noise was, the sentiment expressed by that Alburgh property owner always came to mind. That plane, that noise, was telling us that someone was up there to keep us safe.

Having experienced living on the landing path of F-16s hardly compares to those who live closer to the airport and will have to deal with increased noise from the proposed F-35. I can only imagine the noise when one of these advanced fighters engages its engines and afterburners to move 15 tons of metal from a standstill to take-off speed.

However, just as we cannot reasonably pull the F-16s out of the airport and maintain the same security in our skies, we cannot fail to innovate. The F-35 is the latest innovation, and the Vermont Air Guard is right to feel honored to be one of only a handful of bases where the F-35 is being considered for deployment over the next half-decade.

That honor is probably little consolation to the airport's neighbors, just as it is little consolation that some tests done so far show the F-35 is only slightly louder than the F-16. Tell that to a child woken by afterburners roaring for night missions.

However, our service men and women need to be using the latest equipment possible, in order to help secure our freedom and safety. This is less a liberal or conservative issue than it is a community one.

My suggestion is that we, as a community, work with the Guard to be sure that when Vermont is chosen as a site, we can make the situation the best possible, rather than work against even bringing the new planes here.

Advice for the Tea Party

2010-04-22T21:17:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 22, 2010.

Advice for the Tea Party

The Tea Party movement has been active for about a year now, and with the movement's rise comes a lot of questions. Despite the fact that I don't agree with most of the Tea Party's message, they are a continuation of the great American spirit of dissent and protest.

The common use of the Gadsden Flag by Partiers, with its yellow field, coiled rattlesnake, and "Don't Tread on Me" message, is the group's own attempt to link back to our revolutionary heritage.

The Doonesbury cartoon series has noticed, too: When perpetual hippie Zonker attended a Tea Party rally, he heard Partiers chanting "Down with the Tyrants!" Zonker noted they had the same "outasight" message his generation had. Zonker also found common cause with a Partier who was out to "stick it to the man."

The Tea Party, though, has image problems it needs to deal with. I'm sure you've heard these stories:

At a January rally in New Mexico, news reports said that "many" of the Partiers showed up with loaded semi-automatic weapons and holstered pistols. All perfectly legal, but the image this sort of thing projects to the average American, who supports gun rights but is wary of guns, is one of aggression and conflict.

Charges of racism in the Tea Party have also come up again and again. Many examples I cannot repeat here, but this is one: Calling the health care act "white slavery" senselessly and callously belittles the actual slavery the ancestors of some of our black citizens had to endure.

Finally, a common scene depicted at some rallies has the face of President Barack Obama placed over the image of Adolph Hitler. Aside from the fact that nothing Obama's administration has done approaches Nazism, there is Godwin's Law, which states that if you start comparing people to Hitler, the discussion has, by default, gone on too long.

Has the discussion gone on too long?

Last month, my colleague on the right-hand page, Mike Benevento, noted that the Tea Party movement was fragile. The movement, he wrote, "risks fizzling out." Mike noted that the movement had to not only grow from the grass-roots, but it also had to unify nationally. Otherwise, it risked being just a local phenomenon, with no national influence.

I agree with Mike, but his advice must be only part of the movement's long-term survival plan. If it continues to appeal to the fringes of the right wing, the ones who insist on screaming "baby killers!" and "socialists!" and even "Nazis!" at every turn, they will lose any hope of wide appeal.

I've seen this sort of thing happen before, up-close, and on the left. When I was a student at UVM, because of my work on the Vermont Cynic, I was asked by a far-left campus group to help produce their own alternative newspaper. It was called ?The Gadfly, and it contained a fair number of good stories about students working with organizations in Burlington to help the city's poor and down-trodden.

These stories had a real shot of getting more students involved in social action. However, the stories were buried between reprints from Granma International (an English-language newspaper from Cuba, which extolled the virtues of Castro and his Revolution) and the People's World (a communist weekly from New York City). The Gadfly was largely ignored.

The lesson is that a good, positive message of change can easily be derailed by being connected too closely to extreme messages that the common man has no interest in hearing.

The Tea Party's raison d'etre now is to be against the health care law. If that's all it has to hang its hat on, then I don't think the Party has much life left in it. They may help Republicans pick up a few seats in November, but I also think that for every negative message about the law the Republicans and the Tea Party have to offer, there are (at least) two positive stories about how the law will make the average American's health better and more secure.

The movement's other major issue, the raging deficit, is a big concern; but the only way to stop that now would be to leave our troops in a lurch or to allow the bottom to drop out of the economy. Obama has plans to bring our troops home and hopes with the rest of us that the economy is rebounding, bringing us back to the surpluses of the Clinton years.

The Tea Party might be a force for change over the next few years; they just need to be sure what they want to change is worth changing, and that they do it with rational arguments and tempered words.

Correcting health care misinformation

2010-04-08T14:54:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 8, 2010.

Correcting health care misinformation

My task this week is to write about the new health care law, and you might think that I would be full of praise for the new law and its provisions. But I have something more important to write about — don't get me wrong, I am excited the bill made it through the congressional gauntlet and the President was able to sign it, but I've heard a lot of misinformation about the law that I think has to be addressed, lest that misinformation become "common knowledge".

First, the response of many Republicans to the new law was to launch a campaign to "repeal and replace" the law. Obviously, the minority party does not have the votes to do either yet, but the plan was to get enough votes in Congress in the next election.

I'm not going to say it is outside the realm of possibility, but I think the voter anger that the Republicans will have to tap into to get sufficient numbers, a whopping two-thirds of both houses of Congress, simply won't be there in November — at least not at the level needed to put this plan in motion. I think as people hear more about the law, they will come to agree with its provisions and look forward to them coming into effect.

Republican leaders, initially so keen on "repeal and replace" that it was reported as a new campaign mantra, seem to have already begun to back away from the notion. That's a bit of good news.

Another common misperception, willingly hoisted upon the public by conservative pundits and politicians, is that the law creates "socialized medicine." Socialism is a big dirty word in Washington, and is bandied about with abandon. What the law provides, however, has no resemblance to socialism.

Socialists believe in government take-over of industry. The health care law is no government take-over. Health insurance, for most, is still provided by insurance companies. Doctors are not government employees. Drugs are not produced by government factories. Under the law, the private sector is still a vital part of the health care system.

Anyone who is decrying the law as a socialist take-over is either not aware of what the word means or is deliberately using inflammatory language to scare the public.

Another tidbit playing on peoples' fear is that the law creates a new IRS army, and that one of 16,500 armed agents will be knocking on your doors to see proof that you are properly insured. There will be penalties, eventually, if individuals remain uninsured, and these will likely be assessed at tax time. The personal mandate is necessary for the system to work, to spread the liability. But the law is also quite specific — the IRS may not confiscate assets or property, nor impose jail time, for failure to have insurance.

Simply put, armed agents will not be knocking on your door for failure to comply with the law.

Also in the news of late is word that over a dozen Attorneys General have filed or plan to file suit against the federal government, alleging that the new law is an unconstitutional power grab. Other Attorneys General, with a bit more common sense and legal precedent on their side, have refused to sign on to the effort.

The Supreme Court, in its prior rulings, has said that insurance regulation is an interstate commerce issue that Congress can regulate. Even conservative stalwarts like Justice Antonin Scalia have agreed, if reluctantly, that such regulation is constitutional.

I won't say that all of these cases are political posturing, but some of them surely are; and they won't come cheap. Attorneys General in Kentucky and Arizona said they would be a waste of taxpayer money. Vermont's Attorney General has not even wasted space on his website to announce that he won't join in any such frivolous lawsuits.

The fact is that we now have a health care law in effect. It is not perfect — far from it — but it is a starting point. As its features are phased in over the next few months and the next few years, we will be able to see what's working and what's not and make changes to ensure that the economy can adapt to it. The public, in the meantime, can set its collective mind at ease by checking on what the politicians and pundits are saying, discarding the misinformation, and learning more about what the law actually does.

More than just a head count

2010-03-25T10:54:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on March 25, 2010. The original column stated there are an estimated 118 million households in the United States. The 2008 census data actually puts that number at 113 million. I regret the error.

More than just a head count

It's been a busy few weeks at my website, USConstitution.net. I was expecting it to be busy, but I expected the questions to be all about the health care bill and congressional rules and procedures. The bulk of the email I've gotten though, was about something completely different.

The subject of interest is perhaps best illustrated by this question: "Is there a place in the Constitution that says that I don't have to answer all the questions asked by the census?"

The question seems to come from a place of paranoia that I just cannot quite get my head around. Before I address that, though, a little history about the census itself might be interesting.

When the framers of the Constitution came to their great compromise between the small and large states, they created a bicameral Congress: one house with equal representation, the Senate, and one with proportional representation, the House of Representatives. This was a great departure from the Congress created by the Articles of Confederation, where each state had an equal voice.

To ensure that the proportional representation, or apportionment, in the House was fair, the Constitution requires the Congress to conduct a census every ten years. Until that first census, the Constitution guessed at proportions, with small Delaware and Rhode Island garnering one representative each and the largest state, Virginia, getting ten.

The very first census was held in 1790. The Constitution allows the Congress to conduct the census in "such manner as they shall by law direct." From the very beginning, the law directed that the census be more than a simple head count.

In that first census, which was conducted by census marshals and deputies who visited each home, the questions asked included the name of the head of household and the gender, race, slave status, and age of each person. The slave status was necessary because slaves were counted as three-fifths of a whole person, a slight remedied by the 14th Amendment.

Fast-forward to 2010, and the release of the 2010 census form. The questions on the form are not so different today as they were back in 1790. It asks for the name, gender, birth date, age, race, ethnicity, and relationship to the head of household of each individual. For the entire household, there are questions about whether the dwelling is rented or owned and for the household phone number.

These questions are not overly intrusive. The courts have said as much - the Supreme Court blessed non-headcount questions in 1870, and lower courts affirmed them as late as 2000. The questions form the basis for a relatively comprehensive look at the American population, and because similar questions have been asked since 1790, we have a wealth of information about our changing demographics over time.

Yet there are still those who question the questions, and feel certain that the Constitution must allow people to refuse to answer them.

The Constitution, of course, does not have a provision to allow you to refuse to answer. In fact, the Constitution explicitly gives the Congress the power to ask them - the census is to be conducted in such manner as the Congress requires by law. This statement seems pretty straightforward.

If nothing else, the census has become less intrusive in recent years. The form in 2010 has about ten questions; the 2000 census form was basically the same. In 1990, however, the 200th anniversary of the census, the census had 33 numbered questions for individuals and 26 for the dwelling. Filling out the form could take hours.

Some three million households, of an estimated 113 million, will get a longer form this year - a copy of the American Community Survey. This survey goes into the sort of detail the 1990 survey asked of all households. The information is required by law, so if you get one, you should take the time to fill it out. The questions asked can seem intrusive - what sort of fuel do you use for cooking, for example - but the answers can help the Congress, and even our own state legislature, make critical policy choices.

The answer to the question posed to me is no, there is no provision in the Constitution giving you the right to refuse to answer census questions. The head count is crucial to proper apportionment of the House, but beyond that, accurate answers can help shape policy for years to come.

Life After Vermont Yankee

2010-03-11T12:50:00.004-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on March 11, 2010, under the headline "Vermont must seek new energy".

Life After Vermont Yankee

Though the plant is not dead yet, Vermont Yankee is getting close. The state Senate voted, by a wide margin, not to recommend the Public Service Board look into renewing Vermont's only nuclear power plant's license for 20 years past its 2012 license term.

Though next year's Senate could change its mind, a reversal seems unlikely. Vermont Yankee currently supplies one third of Vermont's power - what will replace that power once it is gone?

One suggestion is to reuse the Vernon site: as the current reactor is taken down, a new, modern one would be built alongside it. Given the political climate in this state, this solution seems unlikely. No new plants have been built in the US since 1996, and though Washington has plans to push new plants along, no one has seriously pushed Vernon as the site for a new reactor.

Today, with the green revolution in full effect, many are pushing for Vermont to take a bold step into that revolution, creating power using the latest green technologies.

The key to these technologies is the harvesting of energy that is already there, but which is being effectively wasted. Nature provides us with energy in many forms, including the sun, the wind, even gravity itself.

Solar is a technology with a long history, and from the local Hannaford to Hinesburg's NRG Systems, solar arrays are popping up everywhere. But is solar ready to provide power for one third of the state?

Briefly, no. Vermont is notoriously cloudy, and though solar can generate power without direct sunlight, its ability to do so is greatly reduced. Without great advances in the technology, solar will not be our solution.

We have been using gravity, in the form of water flowing downhill, to supply power for over one hundred years. Hydro power has great potential, but it also can do some serious damage. One third of Vermont's power comes from hydro, but the will to build more dams in the state does not seem to be there.

Fortunately, Hydro-Quebec harnesses the power of Quebec's northern rivers. Vermont currently contracts with Hydro-Quebec for one quarter of our power, and it seems likely that these contracts will not only be renewed but expanded. With Hydro-Quebec's recent forays into harnessing wind power, these contracts could fit nicely into our power portfolio.

Wind power recently got a boost from the town of Lowell, which approved a project at its recent town meeting. While government maps of Vermont show no part of the state as being suitable for solar power generation, the vast majority of the state is suitable for wind power generation. The biggest hurdle is getting towns to buy into the plans.

The best wind is atop our mountain ranges, a fact that is hard for some residents to swallow. Wind turbines can reach skyward hundreds of feet, marring the picturesque views. Many, however, would find a skyline interrupted by wind turbines to be even more picturesque. What wind needs is the will of the next generation. Though pretty views are important, power is, too.

There is one other, very intriguing possibility for our power needs. Relatively unique today, the concept of on-site generation is slowly gaining traction. This is what NRG Systems hopes to do - to produce enough of its own power that it need draw none from the grid.

Small-scale, on-site generation could be where the future lies, using the grid only as a backup. The Observer reported just last week about the small wind turbine that will soon be installed at Allen Brook School, part of AllEarth Renewables' push into the important residential market.

Also recently in the news is the BloomBox, a pair pf tiny cubes made of advanced materials that can reportedly power the average American home. The BloomBox uses an emissions-free reaction between natural gas (or any other combustible gas, like waste methane) and oxygen to produce electricity. Enormous data centers for Google and eBay are already using large-scale BloomBox installations to produce energy, quietly, cleanly, and with a very small footprint. Could a BloomBox be in your future?

The most likely answer is theat a combination of these technologies, and others not even invented yet, will be the future of Vermont's power. What seems pretty clear, though, is that we need to be planning for that future right now. While we will be able to live without Yankee, we won't be able to live without the power it provides.

Words Matter

2010-02-25T10:17:00.003-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on February 25, 2010.

Words Matter

If the news in the last few weeks proves nothing else, it is that words matter. How we say things, how we describe them, can make all the difference in the world.

When Joseph Allen Stack flew a plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, a building he knew housed IRS employees, the police and the press had a decision to make: was Stack a criminal, or was he a terrorist?

Police, trying to calm frazzled nerves, insisted Stack was nothing more than a common criminal. Muslim activists, however, began to wonder - was it only Muslims who flew planes into buildings who were considered terrorists? Within days, the debate was filling newspaper columns and blogs, with a Google search returning over 26,000 results in blogs alone.

The opinions varied, but the most compelling argument that I saw was that Stack was a lone wolf, without an organization behind him, and hence a criminal. It is a close call, though, considering the scope of his cowardly and deadly act and the overtly political nature of his manifesto.

In the world of politics, words are the stock in trade, and words can easily be mangled depending on the political point of view.

If you've paid close attention to the news, from time to time, you will hear Republicans refer to their political foes as members of the "Democrat Party." The first time I heard this, I just figured the speaker was ignorant, mispronouncing a relatively simple word. It turns out, though, this is part of a somewhat concerted effort to try to turn "Democratic Party" into an epithet.

Republicans who have taken to using this "epithet" are being silly. Deliberately mangling someone's name to aggravate them is an elementary school tactic. Democrats who take too much offense should remember that age-old mothers' mantra: "They only say it because it bothers you."

Most reasonable people, having heard waterboarding described or witnessed it in action, would call it torture. Many conservatives, notably and recently former Vice President Dick Cheney, prefer to call it "enhanced interrogation." The distinction is self-serving. Torture is illegal. Enhanced interrogation, presumably, is not.

The White House recently released a brightly colored chart, which attempts to put a positive spin on the nation's continued loss of jobs. On one half of the chart, colored Republican-red, the bars in the chart dip further and further below zero, indicating an increasing loss of jobs. On the other half, colored Democratic-blue, the bars are nearly all still below zero, but marching back up towards zero. The presumption is that soon, the numbers will be positive.

The White House line, and that of the Democratic National Committee's Organizing for America project, is that this is all part of the "recovery." There is the "Road to Recovery," the Recovery.gov website, and the Recovery Act (the short name of the act's actual title, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009).

Republicans, though, insist on calling the law "the stimulus bill." The point is to turn the positive word "recovery" into a negative. I'm not exactly sure what it is about "stimulus" that is negative, but both House Republican Majority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor have done this repeatedly in just the last week.

Finally, scheduled for today is a meeting of lawmakers from both sides of the political spectrum. The President touted the meeting in last weekend's radio address:

"I don't want to see this meeting turn into political theater, with each side simply reciting talking points and trying to score political points. Instead, I ask members of both parties to seek common ground in an effort to solve a problem that's been with us for generations."

The response from Republicans? They plan to attend, but with their words, were sure to take pot shots at the summit before it even began. Speaking on Sunday's Meet the Press, Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) said this:

"Republicans are ready to work. But what we can't help but feel like here is the Democrats spell summit S-E-T-U-P."

That the Republicans could fear a summit, a televised chance to talk out differences with the approaches of each party to the issue, tells me that what they really fear is that when they express their plan, the entire country will see how devoid it is of real reform.

Words do matter. Listen to them carefully and you will be able to divine which have worth and which are worthless.

2010 Legislative Review

2010-02-11T22:30:00.003-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on February 11, 2010.

2010 Legislative Review

The Vermont Legislature is moving full speed through this legislative session. The challenges our government is facing are daunting. The two biggest, settling a budget in a time of recession and concerns about Vermont Yankee, are enough to keep them busy until May, but there is more work to be done.

$150 million — that's the projected budget shortfall that the governor and the legislature have to fill this session. Running a deficit is not an option, so there are only two choices: cut costs or raise revenues.

The governor, in his budget address in January, called for a bit of both. He suggested raising the property tax on middle-income taxpayers, while also calling for major cuts in education and health care.

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate were receptive to hearing the governor's ideas, but indicated that they had their own strategies for cutting the budget.

One idea that has been batted around is dipping into the state's various rainy day funds, money squirreled away when the economy was seeing better times. The governor, however, feels these funds should be held back in case revenues fall short. By using a portion of these funds now, however, fewer drastic changes might be necessary.

Just one example: the monthly premium for the state's Catamount Health Plan for a person earning twice the federal poverty level (about $10.41 per hour) is $60 for 2010 and is expected to be higher in 2011. The plan's out-of-pocket limit, now at $800 for an individual, would jump to $2500 under the governor's budget proposal. This is a tough sell for someone living at one or two times the poverty level. Already low-wage earners are choosing to forego Catamount. This increase could make many more decide to drop the plan. Pricing the plan out of the hands of those who need it would be penny wise and pound foolish.

Anyone who has read this column knows that I am an unrepentant booster of nuclear power. My resolve on the issue is unchanged, but I am troubled by all of the news out of Vernon recently. Confidence has been shaken by the flawed testimony of Yankee executives, by the detection of tritium in test wells that surround the plant, and by the plan to sell the plant to a spin-off company that seems like smarmy corporate buck-passing.

According to Williston Representative Jim McCullough, the closing of Yankee need not be the economic disaster some portray it as. With some state incentives, a shut-down could stimulate investment in alternative energy projects, which could bring even more jobs to Vermont. I'm not completely convinced, but I'm willing to listen.

Another of McCullough's priorities is the protection of shorelines and riparian lands. This is an issue near and dear to many in Williston, especially those kids in our schools who have studied the Allen Brook for years, watching for signs of deterioration and environmental damage.

Our other Representative, Terry Macaig, is looking to help reign in budget shortfalls in the corrections department. Part of the plan would reduce the imprisonment of non-violent offenders and increase services in prison to help reduce recidivism.

Macaig is a cosponsor of a bill that seeks to implement universal health care in Vermont. The stated goal of the bill is to reduce the cost of health care by implementing efficiencies which would follow after the elimination of multiple insurance payers.

Macaig also told me of a plan that could directly effect Williston's town budget: a look into the fees towns pay the state to administer the local option tax. It turns out the fees are out of line with expenses, and representatives from local option towns want this changed.

Chittenden County Senator Ginny Lyons, a Williston resident, has several priorities, including action on Yankee; but she sees health care as a top priority. Some of the ideas she relayed to me include public-private partnerships to improve the quality of care for chronic illnesses and for the elderly, with the goal of not only improved care but also reduced cost.

Lyons is also working on reducing costs in education by looking at school district consolidation, a hot topic for some of the smaller towns and districts in the state, but one which effects the Common Level of Appraisal and could result in a lower state-wide property tax.

There are many ideas for how the state should proceed in these lean times. I'll be watching as the governor and our legislature work out the details. This is not a time to score political points. It is a time to work together to find solutions to these tough problems.

My Facebook Status: Revisit Health Care

2010-01-28T00:30:00.002-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on January 28, 2010.

My Facebook Status: Revisit Health Care

Facebook, in case you've been living under a rock the past year or two, is a great Internet service for keeping in touch with friends and family.

According to Facebook, I have 173 friends. Most of the time, our interactions are simple. I post a status to say what's new in my life and my Facebook friends do the same. Every so often, I or they are moved to comment on those status updates in one way or another.

Status updates are generally of the "Wow, that movie was awful!" or "The recipe we cooked tonight was wonderful!" type. The kind of stuff that comedians like to poke fun at.

Last week, though, I was moved to post this (in the ubiquitous Facebook third-person):

"Steve is lamenting the loss in Massachusetts, but is thinking it needn't be the end of health care reform. It could just be the end to all the unseemly deals needed to get this far."

The update was, of course, about the loss in Massachusetts of Democrat Martha Coakley to Republican Scott Brown for a permanent replacement for Ted Kennedy's seat in the U.S. Senate. The win was a surprise not only because Massachusetts only has only 13 percent registered Republicans, but because just three weeks ago, Coakley was still leading in the polls. Brown's win was primarily due to his ability to sway the Massachusetts independent bloc, blowing pundit predictions out of the water.

The win means an end to the supposedly filibuster-proof 60-40 majority the Democrats gained once Minnesota's Al Franken finally took office back in July.

My Facebook status post brought comments from one of my liberal friends and several of my conservative friends, stirring a mini-debate.

Political debates on the Internet are nothing new, but often the debates take place behind the veil of some degree of anonymity. This debate, though, was not with anonymous avatars, with people I'd never met and never would. This debate was with friends, family, and co-workers. That meant that vitriol was at a minimum, and thoughtfulness and reflection were at a maximum.

Most of the posts agreed in particular with my final point — that the Senate bill is a perfect example of what's wrong with the legislative process. My conservative friends said that the abomination was because Republicans had been left out of the process. I replied that they seemed to forget all the committee hearings where the Republicans had more than ample time to give their input.

What was really responsible for the ugliness of the Senate bill, I noted, was how the Democratic leadership allowed the bill to be held hostage by other Democrats. Mindful of the razor-thin majority, a few Democrats were able to demand some pretty sweet deals for their states, deals the rest of us would be paying for. The most egregious example: Nebraska's Ben Nelson was able to guarantee that his state's Medicaid bill would be paid for by the federal government in perpetuity.

Thus far, I've supported passage of either the House or Senate version of the bill, despite these types of deals, so that we can get something out there, something that will stop insurance company abuses and save lives.

But given this change in the Senate, perhaps it is time to take a step back and have a fresh look at the problem. The debates have already been held, the discussion has already been had. We know those parts of the bills that have some Republican support. Let's pass those parts now. These include the complete elimination of pre-existing conditions and of retroactive policy denial, and a cap on insurance company profit-taking.

Then, using the momentum of change from these reforms and the goodwill they will create between the Congress and the people, we can continue to pound away at the health care problem, working toward a public option with teeth, rather than the limp impersonation that the current bills contain.

This sort of strategy should help both parties. The Republicans can tout their support for some reforms and hope the public forgets all the stalling tactics and the spreading of misinformation that started last summer. The Democrats can show some movement on an issue that the majority of the public wants fixed, giving them something to hang their hats on as election season nears.

Win-win for the parties; but more importantly, a win for the people. Something worth posting a Facebook status update about.

Humans versus Nature: The Challenge of Global Warming

2010-01-14T14:19:00.002-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on January 14, 2010.

Humans versus Nature: The Challenge of Global Warming

Let's start with an assumption: global climate change is real and is happening now. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's data for 2009 confirms that the last decade was the warmest on record and that 2009 temperatures in the U.S. and the world were both above the long-term average.

Naturalist and author Richard Ellis's latest book, On Thin Ice, laments the loss of the polar bear because of the loss of its habitat. The polar ice cap, upon which the familiar white bear relies for hunting, is disappearing and the bear along with it. Within 50 years, Ellis writes, the polar bear will be gone -- no matter what we do, it will happen.

The images in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth are striking and disturbing: the melting of the polar ice caps leads to coastal flooding of a massive scale. In some projections, the entire state of Florida is submerged. We cringe when we think of the loss of a species like the polar bear, but what of the loss of an entire state?

Only a few pig-headed stalwarts completely deny global warming. For the rest of us, the question is not so much if it is happening, but why.

The first theory is that global warming is the result of natural processes, cycles that have repeated over and over again through history. For proponents of this Natural Theory, the Earth is too big, too complex, for the activities of our species to affect these cycles.

The second theory is that global warming is the direct result of the activities of we humans, especially since the dawning of the industrial age. This Human Theory recognizes long-term climate change cycles, as they are undeniable in the fossil record; but it alleges that we have either disrupted the natural cycle or we have accelerated it.

As a rule, liberals find themselves on the side of the Human Theory. The basic solution is that we need to cut back on our use of those things that make our society run, namely fossil fuels.

Conservatives mostly find themselves upholding the Natural Theory, and say that disrupting our economy by reducing the use of fossil fuels would be an economic disaster as bad as any natural one.

I can see the Natural Theory's side of the argument. One of the problems that Natural Theorists accuse Human Theorists of is a logical fallacy known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc — that is, that since A occurred after B, A must have caused B. Are Human Theorists guilty of this fallacy?

Al Gore's charts show what appear to be some clear and stark correlations. As global emissions rose, so did global temperatures. But did A, emissions, cause B, climate change? Since we cannot possibly test an alternative case, we cannot know that if our historical emissions had been lower that the global temperatures would also have been lower.

I have to admit, even as a Human Theorist, that it is possible we are guilty of the fallacy.

But rather than throw up my hands and admit defeat, which is more or less what Natural Theorists advocate, I think we have to make the leap of faith that since we cannot test our logic for the fallacy, we must assume the logic is correct. For if it is not, and we change our habits and nothing changes, then at least we tried. But if we could have averted global disaster by changing our habits and we did not, then we can rightly and truly be blamed for the consequences.

When the world met in Copenhagen last month, there were high hopes that some sort of binding and lasting agreement would come out of the meetings. But amid all the noise and clamor of protest and all the whispering in closed-door diplomatic meetings, all the world could muster was a tepid accord that acknowledges that global climate change is a challenge the whole world needs to address.

Richard Ellis says it is too late for the polar bear, and I fear he is correct. The loss of one species is a drop in the bucket compared to annual extinctions worldwide, but it would be a deep symbolic loss. Worse, however, would be the loss of New Orleans or Miami or Charleston or Boston to rising waters.

If we don't all agree to do something, soon, then it might be more than the polar bear that can only be seen in the history books.

Despite its flaws, pass the bill

2009-12-23T12:06:00.003-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on December 23, 2009.

Despite its flaws, pass the bill

Democrats are in a fine mess now. The public is watching closely to see what kind of health care reform the Democrats can actually pass. Even with sizable majorities in both houses of Congress, the sixty vote majority needed to stop debate in the Senate has been hard to find.

Part of the problem is one of the Democratic Party's strengths — the fact that it is a large tent, happy to encompass a wide diversity of opinion and position. This does, however, make the Party vulnerable to dissenters.

A major problem recently has been Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, who threatened to hold up the health care bill unless he managed to have anti-abortion language added. Despite the opposition of many Democrats, Nelson had his way.

Independent Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman is another problem. He was, of course, a long-time Democrat, but defected from the party to run as an independent when primary voters managed to knock him out of the running for his seat as a Democrat in 2006. He has since been something of a curmudgeon, becoming a unknown quantity. Will he stick with his previous statements or will he allow his position to shift with the political winds?

The job of a Senator is to take how he feels about the issue at hand, and to combine that with how his constituents feel and his party platform. These three interests are often competing, and for both Senators Lieberman and Nelson, along with some others who have been on the fence, such as Maine's Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, the pull of one interest can sway their statements, their negotiations, their votes.

The problem, from my perspective, is when things are this close (close, of course, being a relative term, since there are more than enough votes for the full-on health care reform bill, complete with consumer protections and a public option — the closeness is in that insane cloture vote), the vote of one Senator can trump what's right, what's best for the country.

I understand Governor Howard Dean's frustration, and his call for the health care bill, in its current stripped-down form, be defeated by those who support true reform. I listened to his arguments with a wide-open mind. His suggestion is to kill the bill and use the reconciliation process, a special process for budget bills, which many have argued the health care bill can reasonably be considered, to pass something closer to what the House passed in November.

The biggest problem Dean has with the current bill is that it does nothing to combat the monopoly that the insurance industry has over the health care industry. In fact, it plays into the insurance industry's hands by requiring the uninsured to buy insurance, or face fines. The uninsured cannot choose a government-run plan, because there isn't one. The insurance industry loves this bill. The people want real choices, Dean says, and with this bill, there are no choices.

He feels the real reforms in the bill, such as the elimination of pre-existing conditions, funding for wellness and prevention programs, and support for community health care centers, should be pulled out, placed in a separate bill, and passed on their own.

He also must feel, considering his former job as chair of the Democratic National Committee, that the current bill be be a blow to Democrats in the 2010 elections — given the majorities Democrats have, we should be able to accomplish more. Will the voters give the Democrats another chance to get the work of government done?

Despite my deep respect for Governor Dean, and the appeal of his suggestion, I don't think that Democrats should take the advice. The current bill is sorely lacking in many areas, but one thing is agreed by all left-wing commentators: this bill, as it is now, will save lives. Yes, it will add undeserved profit to the insurance industry; but in the end, people who otherwise would have died will live.

We can blame many, perhaps even most, of the problems with the bill on the necessity to accommodate the single, contrarian Senator. But despite that, we do have a bill that does something substantive, something real and good. It gives the Democrats something to hang their hats on in 2010, even if it is not what all of us would have liked to see.

The bill should be supported, it should be passed, it should become law.

Finishing the job in Afghanistan

2009-12-10T23:02:00.000-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on December 10, 2009.

Finishing the job in Afghanistan

After the United States joined World War 2, the Allies had victory over the Axis war machine in less than four years. In doing so, the United States lost over 400,000 soldiers. Few, then or now, doubted that the war was necessary.

Our war in Afghanistan, by contrast, is very different. The first boots hit the ground in 2001, making this war eight years old, with the end only just a nebulous plan.

This war is not a war against a nation or alliance of nations. Our enemy has no capital to capture, no president to arrest. We all want victory, but few can express exactly what victory in the larger war means.

One reason that we are still in Afghanistan now, and will be for years to come, is that we were distracted from this fight by the war in Iraq. While our efforts in Iraq wane, and with the touch of a new commander in chief, we have been reminded of our unfinished business in Afghanistan.

The other reason I've already alluded to — our enemy is not a people, a country, or even a government. It is a loose alliance of organizations, with decentralized command, constantly moving troops, and with often-reluctant support from the people. Worse, they know no borders, and all that does is complicate matters even further.

The president's new plan for Afghanistan is relatively simple: to provide 30,000 additional troops to the war and to be in a position to begin pulling out again in 18 months.

To some, those on the left especially, any extension of the war is a broken promise. By the time the expansion is complete, the United States will have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. This is a far cry from Obama's campaign promise to end the wars and bring all the troops home.

Obama, however, has called the Afghanistan conflict the "right war", contrasting it with the Iraq conflict, the "wrong war." It is not surprising, then, that Obama would want to finish what the United States started in Afghanistan. We have fulfilled only part of what we set out to do. We have removed the Taliban from power, and a new government has been put into place.

These successes are not without issue.

The Taliban is no longer in power, but it is still a threat. Afghanistan security forces must be in a position to oppose and suppress uprisings after we leave, and we must get Pakistan to join the effort in earnest.

The Afghan government is seriously flawed, with corruption and graft the seeming norm, and the results of the last election are a nagging question. In an area with a history like Afghanistan, however, it is a wonder they are as far along as they are.

On the right, the president's plan to begin pull-outs in 18 months is seen as a sign of weakness, a signal to the enemy that all they need to do is wait us out and they can have free reign again. These criticisms ignore too much, though. The president never said we would pull out in 18 months, only that pull-outs could begin then. This past weekend, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was clear that if the situation does not warrant a withdrawal, one will not happen.

As if to make the point even clearer, United States forces began offensives into Taliban-held towns in Afghanistan almost as soon as the president's announcement was made.

I don't want us to be in Afghanistan a moment longer than we have to be, and as 1500 Vermont Guard forces prepare to deploy there, I don't want any more of our soldiers to have to die over there. But at the same time, we made a commitment to bring peace and stability to the region. We took our eyes off that ball for a long time, and it is time we refocus there, do what we said we would do, and then get out.

The Afghan War may never have the equivalent of a VJ Day, with soldiers and civilians celebrating victory in Times Square. I would give up a thousand VJ Day celebrations to know that the people of Afghanistan have peace, stability, jobs, and prosperity, and no need for the Taliban. When that happens, when hope returns to the Afghan people, then we will have won, and we can bring all of our troops home with the knowledge that we kept our promises.

It's Time to Kill the Filibuster

2009-11-25T18:48:00.003-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on November 25, 2009.

It's Time to Kill the Filibuster

A few weeks ago in these pages, I took issue with those who insist we live in a democracy, explaining that a democracy is not an ideal system for a population of any significant size. Our system of representative democracy, where we hire, or elect, people to represent us, is a much better way of running a government.

Along with this indirect form of representation, we have protections in our system to ensure that the majority does not act as a tyrant. Our constitutions, for example, protect the freedoms of all, especially those of the minority.

Given all this, I feel the time is right to rail against one of my least favorite "features" of our legislative process — the filibuster.

The word derives from a Dutch term for a type of pirate. The term was first applied to American adventurers who sought to overthrow Central American governments in the 19th century, and was transferred to Senators who attempt to do the same to legislation.

The filibuster has a long history. At their inception, both houses of Congress allowed for unlimited debate — which is a fancy way of saying that a member of Congress could talk for as long as they wished, on any subject. While the member spoke, no other business could be conducted. If you could get two-like minded members to team up, that house of Congress would grind to a halt.

This is the exact opposite of a democratic principle, a tyranny of one.

The House long ago did away with this practice, as the number of Representatives rose. The Senate, however, retains the practice. For over 100 years, there was no way to stop debate. In 1917, the Senate created the cloture rule. Under the cloture rule, if enough Senators vote to stop debate, it stops. Originally, the number needed to invoke cloture was two-thirds, or 67 Senators in today's Senate. In 1975, the number needed to invoke cloture was reduced to three-fifths, or 60 Senators.

There have been several famous filibusters through history. Some are the stuff of legend — Huey Long, Democrat of Louisiana, filibustered the Senate multiple times in the 1930s, as he railed against legislation he felt gave too much to America's upper class. He entertained the nation by reading the phone book, Shakespeare, and the Bible into the public record.

Some filibusters had nothing short of evil intent. Strom Thurmond, Democrat (and Republican) of South Carolina, filibustered for over 24 hours to stop civil rights legislation in 1957. Other anti-civil rights filibusters were the norm until 1964, when the Senate was finally able to move the issue forward.

We have made some progress from the tyranny of one, to the tyranny of the third, to the tyranny of the two-fifths. I am a proponent for the protection of the minority, but the main protection for the minority is the Constitution, not an arcane Senate rule. It is time, has been time for a long time, to remove this technical procedure altogether.

Lest you think that this is just some sour grapes, the result of the recent close vote on cloture to allow the Senate's version of the health care bill to come to the floor, I admit that's part of it. It isn't like I sit around mulling over the filibuster and cloture every day.

But the recent vote only brought the issue to the foreground. I've disliked the filibuster and cloture for as long as I can remember. I would support doing away with it when the Senate is controlled by Republicans, too.

Not only is the filibuster anti-democratic, it is also ripe for abuse. Recent reports that Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu's vote for cloture was bought with a $100 million gift to Louisiana is just another side of the problem — to get to cloture, the majority party might be willing to buy votes.

Whether that happened here or not is not relevant — what is relevant is that it can happen, that it has happened before, that it will happen again.

I'm thankful that the Senate voted to allow the health care bill to come to the floor for debate. It is a good step in the right direction. Once we have this important piece of legislation properly vetted, debated, amended, and passed, hopefully the Senate will take a close look at its rules, and decide that the time of the filibuster has long since gone.

Note: The orginally published text said "tyrrany of the quarter" — this text corrects that to "tyranny of the third."

Remembering All of Our Honored Veterans

2009-11-12T23:08:00.004-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on November 12, 2009.

Remembering All of Our Honored Veterans

I was having a relaxed lunch with my grandmother the other day, when the subject of Veterans Day came up. The day, set aside to honor all military veterans, is a state and national holiday, but not a day off for most businesses or schools. GE, where I work, does give all of its American employees Veterans Day off, which prompted the turn of conversation.

She spoke of my grandfather's time away during World War 2, but more specifically of what she was doing during those times. While he was off serving in Italy, she was trying to make ends meet back in Massachusetts, with a new-born daughter to take care of.

She told of finding a place to live and work, taking care of the children of a school headmaster; of the friendships my mother, as a toddler, made with his children; of the family dinners they were welcomed at and the dinners where she was expected to help serve the guests.

She told of my grandfather's homecoming, and how he was expected home in the afternoon, but surprised them by arriving in the morning instead. She told of his meeting his daughter for the first time.

As I listened to these stories of "home," a specific feeling began to tug at me — I'll get to that feeling in a moment.

Technically, I am one of the veterans whom we honored yesterday. I served in the National Guard for five years in the early nineties. I feel embarrassed to be included in the category, though. I never saw any combat, never even left the country. I and my comrades watched the invasion of Iraq in Desert Storm from the comfort of our living rooms in Vermont, from the comfort of our armory in Swanton.

I feel like I sacrificed nothing more than a few summers in Kentucky, one weekend a month in exotic locales like Jericho, or a few weeks away at far-off Fort Drum. Compared to those veterans who spent years away from home, with those who endured gunfire and artillery, my service was a walk in the park.

My children ask me, from time to time, about what I did in the Army. I have fond memories of my Southern drill sergeants, of the young men from Vermont and New Hampshire that I trained with, of driving tanks through the backwoods of Camp Johnson, of firing shells at plywood cutouts in the hills of the Ethan Allen Firing Range, of waving to the cheering crowds from a perch atop my tank as we drove down the street during a Fourth of July parade.

I tell them that I served in the Guard because I felt it was the least I could do. That I hoped because of what I did and what countless others before me and since had done, that they might never have to put on a uniform. But if they did, that they would join a proud American tradition of military service.

Which brings me back to that feeling — the feeling that while we honor our veterans, we should also honor those they left behind. The spouses who raised the children while the soldier was away. The parents who wished for some news, but not the wrong kind of news. The civilians who endured the shortages and rationing. These people are also veterans of a different sort, and as we honor those who served, I feel that we should also honor those who supported those who served.

In June of this year, according to the Department of Defense, U.S. military personnel were serving in 150 countries across the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, from the single soldier in Guyana to 171,000 personnel in Iraq. Significant numbers are also serving in Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, Djibouti, Belgium, Turkey, and Bahrain.

These men and women currently serving join an estimated 43 million other veterans who have served the United States since the Revolutionary War. Hopefully you were able to take a few moments yesterday to remember all of these people, and to remember those who supported them back at home.

For it is because of "home" that they serve at all.

Thankfully, we're not a democracy

2009-10-29T15:32:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on October 29, 2009.

Thankfully, we're not a democracy

"We live in a democracy!" is an often-heard cry from those who feel unheard in government. The statement, however, has a basic inaccuracy, an inaccuracy that could be described as simple semantics, but certainly is not.

The United States is not a democracy, and we should be thankful for that. What we are, instead, is a representative democracy. That one word makes all the difference in the world.

A democracy, in its purest form, is rule by the people. Every issue of importance is put to the people for a vote, and the majority rules. The system sounds good - everyone has an equal vote, an equal voice, and the will of the people is the will of the majority.

There are, however, many difficulties with such a system, a couple of which I will detail.

The first is one of practicality. It is impractical to put every issue to the people in any but the smallest of societies. It's often been said that the closest we, as modern Americans, come to pure democracy is that staple of March in Vermont, the town meeting.

While I agree that the town meeting is an important institution, it is notable that even small towns have learned that the town meeting is only effective as a method of governance to a specific point. Most obviously, town meetings are only held once per year. The rest of the year, the town is invariably run by representatives. More to the point, most people simply don't want to be involved in the everyday decision-making of the town.

Western society has a rich history, dating a thousand years, of delegating authority. The authority must be kept in check, however, and in the United States, we have devised institutions to do that. Elections are the most basic check, but we also have term limits, checks and balances, and separation of powers.

So basic is the shift from democracy to representative democracy that we see it at every level of government. Not only in the U.S. Congress, but also in the Vermont Legislature, in the Selectboard, even to the FAP Advisory Council in our schools. Representative democracy is all around us, and unlike pure democracy, it works.

Another major problem with a pure democracy is "majority rule". Most of the time, majority rule works just fine. When we are selecting a representative, the candidate with the most votes should be the winner. If the question of a roundabout on Route 2 is put to a vote, then the majority should carry the question.

But some things should not be subject to majority rule - basic human rights, for example. The ability of a person to speak his mind or to worship as she wishes should not be subject to a vote. If a people voted to institute slavery, the fact that a majority voted for it would make it no less a violation of human rights.

The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution and the similar Declaration of Rights in the Vermont Constitution lay out for all to see those principles that we hold dear and which are not subject to a vote. "The people have a right to freedom of speech," the Vermont Constitution says. There is no exception that reads "unless the people of the state vote to remove that freedom from any person or group."

This entire discussion came to mind because of a conversation I've been having with someone who is unsatisfied with our current national government. He advocates the abolition of the Congress and its replacement with the votes of the people. The idea sounds great in sound-bite format: "Your voice will be heard! Your vote will really count! Take the influence of lobbyists out of the government!"

These slogans are rooted in democratic principles, and might be true in a pure democracy. As noted above, though, it is impractical. We do not all want to be part-time politicians. We want to elect people to do that for us.

Democracy is a great idea in principle but a lousy one in practice. What we have done is taken that principle and tweaked the system to make it work for each of our levels of government. It can be improved, no doubt about that; but our attempts to improve the system should not include throwing it out and replacing it with something we know will not work.

Confronting Judicial Uncertainties

2009-10-15T13:56:00.001-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on October 15, 2009.

Confronting Judicial Uncertainties

Our justice system is one of the best in the world. It exemplifies many of our basic beliefs: that one is innocent until proved guilty; the importance of due process; the concept of equal justice.

As with any human institution, our justice system is not perfect. Over time, a long series of Supreme Court decisions have ensured that our principles are applied.

One of the most famous, 1966's Miranda v Arizona, is the source of the Miranda Warning, which begins "You have the right to remain silent..." The decision in this case ensures that suspects are at least aware of their rights when they talk to police. Whether the suspects take the advice the Miranda Warning gives them is another story entirely.

Another famous case is 1963's Gideon v Wainwright, immortalized in the book Gideon's Trumpet, and the TV movie of the same name. This case ensured that all criminal defendants, even those not accused of a capital crime, must be provided a lawyer. One of my earliest memories of our justice system is watching Henry Fonda, playing Clarence Gideon, writing a motion to the Supreme Court by hand.

These cases, both decided before I was even born, stay with us today. They are applied in interrogation rooms and courtrooms on a daily basis. The police and prosecutors constantly push the boundaries of these and other important decisions, and the courts are constantly refining those boundaries for the next set of cases.

But even with all these defined boundaries, these legal limits, there still come times when we have to take serious looks at our system. The mere fact that the law and the processes to apply the law need refinement shows that what we have is not yet perfect.

As I watch and read news stories about national and local court cases, I grapple with these conflicts constantly. I'll take two examples to show what I mean.

First is the grand and divisive issue of the death penalty. Vermont, among other states, has decided that the death penalty is not a punishment we want to use. As we've seen in many cases, famous and infamous, those on death row can be placed there in error. The problem with the death penalty is its finality. Once the punishment is meted out, there is no going back.

Because we can, and do, err, my sense of justice tells me that the death penalty is unjust. But at the same time, my sense of justice tells me that in cases like those of now-executed Ted Bundy and Timothy McVeigh, justice was served in a way no other penalty could have satisfied. I struggle with this dichotomy in my own principles.

The second example involves another basic tenet of our criminal justice system: that after a convicted criminal does his time, he is then released back into society, and that's the end of it. It would be the height of unfairness, of injustice, to impose a higher penalty after someone has served his time or at any time after sentencing.

This, however, seems exactly what we do when we put convicted sex offenders on a list for the rest of their lives, and track them, publicly, after they are released. My senses are piqued when I hear about this, because it seems unfair, unjust. But at the same time, as a father, as a neighbor, as a member of the community, this is information I feel the need to know and the right to have.

Questions of fairness, of justice, can be hard to answer. The right thing to do can seem obvious in the abstract, but once you hear the details, see the effects on real people, imagine how you would react as you sat in a jury or if you or a friend or family member were a victim of a crime with similar circumstances, the obvious can be less so.

Fortunately, most of the time, these nagging issues do not become a part of an individual criminal case. Be it embezzlement, drunk driving, stalking, sexual assault, burglary, or murder, most of the details of the case are not cast into constitutional waters. When they are, however, we can be assured that those arguing the case, on both sides, are looking out for all of our best interests, both the interests of the public and the interests of the individual.

Note: the originally published column had Peter Fonda playing the role of Clarence Gideon in Gideon's Trumpet. The actor was actually Henry Fonda.

Constitutional FAQ

2009-10-01T12:13:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on October 1, 2009.

Constitutional FAQ

One of the most popular pages on my U.S. Constitution web site is the FAQ. As you may already know, "FAQ" stands for "Frequently Asked Questions." The concept is to place such questions in a central location so that as the same questions arise again and again, the answers can be quickly found.

Despite the FAQ, I still get a lot of the same frequently asked questions, especially, it seems, from students who have come to expect that answers should fall into their laps, rather than come to them through a bit of research. I find these to be "teachable moments," and often refer these students to specific sections of the Constitution, writing "If you read this section, you'll find your answer."

The past year has brought about a whole new set of questions that I had not seen before — whether they will attain "Frequently Asked" status or not, only time will tell.

One perfectly reasonable question often goes like this: "I've searched through the Constitution and cannot find the words 'health care' anywhere. What gives Congress the right to enact health care legislation at all?"

Parenthetically, I usually tell such questioners that the Congress doesn't have "rights" to do anything. It does, however, have the "power" to do things. The discussion of rights versus powers is sometimes an overwhelmingly philosophical one, but the distinction is important.

That detail aside, the answer to many questions of this type have the same answer: Article 1, Section 8 is a list of the powers of Congress. Some of them are quite specific and limited (for example, the power to coin money or establish post offices).

Others, however, are succinct in their phrasing but expansive in their practical effects. Clause 1 is one of the most expansive, granting Congress the power to collect taxes in order to, among other things, provide for the "general Welfare" of the United States.

If health care cannot be called a component of the general welfare of the people, nothing can be.

Clause 18 completes the picture. This clause grants Congress the power to make all laws "necessary and proper" to carrying out the powers listed previously. Whether the Framers of the Constitution understood what they had done when they wrote clauses 1 and 18 is a subject of some debate in historical and political science circles, but for all practical purposes the debate is settled.

When the Bush and Obama administrations were bailing out troubled banks, a common question went like this: "Under what authority does the government gain control of private business by giving or loaning them taxpayer money?"

The answer is another expansive clause of Article 1, Section 8; Clause 3, the interstate commerce clause. Under this clause, paired with Clause 18 again, the Congress has the power to enter into arrangements with business such as it did at the beginning of this year. I hasten to note that the government was not looking for an actual take-over of the affected businesses, but some degree of control was thought necessary (and proper, if you'll forgive the constitutional pun) to bring banks under control. This would give Congress and government agencies time to come up with new regulations to prevent such crises in the future, once the direct government influence of the businesses was removed.

Finally, this question came to me recently: "How does the Constitution say the people can kick out the Congress or the President?"

Questions such as these bemuse me, and it happens quite often. A plain reading of the Constitution reveals that there is nothing like a "recall clause", but the questioner assumes it must be there.

In my response, I told the questioner that there is no such clause in the Constitution, and that it was actually a good thing that it's not there. Recall efforts are disruptive and take attention away from the work that the Congress or the President should be doing. If a member of Congress or the President acts in an egregious manner, there are ways of removing them from office (to wit, impeachment). Short of that extreme and rare measure, the people are free to exercise their rights of free speech, of petition, and, ultimately, the power of the vote.

Sizing up the 2010 governor's race

2009-09-17T23:29:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on September 17, 2009.

Sizing up the 2010 governor's race

Just a little under a year ago, in this space, I noted that Governor Jim Douglas was a virtual shoo-in for governor in the 2010 election, should he decide to run. As you've surely heard or read by now, Douglas has, indeed, announced his intention to not run in 2010.

True to his Vermont spirit, Douglas assured Vermonters that he would serve out his term, unlike some other notable Republican governors. When VPR's Bob Kinzel suggested that Douglas could give his Republican lieutenant governor Brian Dubie a leg up in the 2010 election by stepping down early, Douglas was unequivocal about his intention to go the distance.

With the curtain on the Incumbent Protection Plan drawn back, Douglas's decision opens up possibilities for a new face in the office, the same way Howard Dean's decision gave Douglas his chance, and Madeleine Kunin's decision allowed Richard Snelling to step back into the governor's office.

On the Republican side, there are several familiar names mentioned as contenders, though none have officially announced as yet. These include Lt. Governor Brian Dubie, former Vermont National Guard Commander Gen. Martha Rainville, recent Republican convert Tom Salmon, and Mark Snelling, son of the late aforementioned governor. The general consensus is that everyone else is awaiting Dubie's decision before moving ahead with their own plans.

On the Democratic side, there are several familiar names, many of whom are now serving the state with distinction. Unlike the Republicans, though, some are not waiting to make their intentions known.

Deborah Markowitz has been Vermont's Secretary of State since 1998, having been elected to the office six times. In 2008, she was reelected with 70.8% of the vote. In her role, she has been a champion of towns and cities and of open government. I've been impressed with her efforts promoting free and fair elections, and in her office's efforts to move the state to higher and higher voter turn-outs. Though she is the veteran of many statewide elections, I'm not sure of her experience as an executive.

Doug Racine is a former lieutenant governor and on-again-off-again member of the state Senate. Racine lost a bid for the governor's office in 2002, to Douglas. Racine has the benefit of statewide name recognition and executive experience, both in business and government. In Chittenden County, at least, he enjoys wide popularity, being re-elected to the Senate in 2008 by the highest vote count in history. Fair or not, though, I do feel like Racine had his chance in 2002.

Both Markowitz and Racine have officially announced their intention to run for governor in 2010.

Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin has been mentioned frequently as a possible contender, but has not made a formal announcement as yet. Shumlin has served in the House and the Senate since 1989. Shumlin ran for lieutenant governor in 2002, losing to Dubie. It would be interesting to see the two lock horns again for the big chair in 2010, but I have a feeling the experience may have left Shumlin gun shy. He may be more content to serve the state on the legislative side.

A possible dark-horse candidate could be Treasurer Jeb Spaulding. TV commercials produced for the Treasurer's office, offering Vermonters a chance to recover misplaced bank accounts, have graced the airwaves for years, boosting Spaulding's statewide name recognition. Spaulding also enjoyed a whopping 89.9% support rate in the last election, though he had no serious Republican opponent, a luxury he would not enjoy in 2010.

Finally, there are rumblings that our U.S. Representative Peter Welch might be interested in the governor's job, and also that recently selected Speaker of the Vermont House, Shap Smith, is contemplating a run. I'm dubious, however. Welch, like Racine, has made a trip to the trough, in 1990, losing to Richard Snelling; and Smith, with even less experience than 2008 Democratic loser Gaye Symington had in the same job, might not see statewide office as attainable just yet.

Lastly, this question: Kunin, after leaving office, joined the U.S. diplomatic corps, serving her adopted country as ambassador to her native Switzerland. Dean, as we can well-remember, ran for president in 2000, then became head of the Democratic National Committee. What, then, is in store for Douglas?

When he spoke with Kinzel at the end of August, he had no plans yet, but I'm sure offers will begin to flow soon, if they have not already. Whatever role he plays, I am certain of one thing. He will play it with distinction.

Quality health care is a right

2009-09-03T23:39:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on September 3, 2009.

Quality health care is a right

If you've read more than one or two of these columns, you know that I'm a big fan of President Barack Obama. He represents the best that America has to offer, and I'm happy to see him occupying the big chair in the White House.

But I'm no sycophant. Obama and his crew are not above criticism. To paraphrase James Madison, if Obama was an angel, there would be no need for criticism. But he is not an angel, and as such, he is subject to error.

So it is with his handling of the health care debate of late.

Democrats had a long wait to get to where we are today. We hold the White House, we hold a strong majority in the House, and we even hold a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. In theory, we could do whatever we feel is best for the country.

The President, however, has waffled on too many points, allowing a strong stance to wither to a soft position on the issue. I agree with him that some reform of our current system is necessary. Using haberdashery as a metaphor, he said insurance reform is a belt and the public insurance option is a pair of suspenders — both will keep up your pants. Using his analogy, though, I say that if reform is the belt, the public option is the belt loops. If you don't have the latter, the former won't be effective.

The far-right lie machine is partially to blame for Obama's shift. The President has been working so hard to squashing the lies, there's little time left to talk about the basic issues. But the lies keep coming: death panels, pulling the plug on grandma, taxing the middle class, rationing health care, socialized medicine, and, most recently "The Death Book." If I didn't know better, I'd be scared.

But I'm more scared of what will happen without a strong public insurance option, and part of this fear is for myself. What if a I lose my insurance? I'm a Type 1 diabetic, completely reliant on insulin injected on a minute-by-minute basis to stay healthy and, indeed, alive. I am the definition of "pre-existing condition."

I've been fortunate that I love my job and the people I work with, that I've made good choices with my career path, and that I've had a bit of luck here and there. I hear horror stories about people like me who lose their jobs, or change a job willingly, or move to a new city, or even who graduate from college to the work force (and, thus, transition from their parents' insurance plan to their own), and have to wait for benefits to kick in.

It is a simple concept: No one should have to live with the fear of losing their insurance.

Recently-departed Senator Edward Kennedy was a champion of health care for all, and in the course of several television and radio obituraries last week, it was noted that one of his biggest frustrations over the past four decades was the lack of movement on universal health care coverage. Obama and the Democrats should honor Kennedy's memory by renewing their efforts to push for a better plan.

President Obama needs to use the power of the bully pulpit to bring Democratic leaders together and come up with a comprehensive plan for American's health care future. The public health insurance option must be a part of that plan, as a safety net and as an alternative for business.

We must reform how insurance works in this country so that insurance companies are more concerned with patient outcomes than with profits.

We must spend money to find the most beneficial and cost-effective treatments for common conditions. We must work to prevent disease that is the result of lifestyle choices like smoking, overeating, and inactivity. We must continue to develop new equipment, techniques, and treatments that will help us or our loved ones.

We must leverage technology to contain costs and ensure the best care is cost-effective care.

I've wrestled with the notion of health care being a right versus a privilege, but I've come to the conclusion that without good health, there is no point to having freedom of worship or speech or expression. Good health is a right — a basic human right — and our government should start acting like it is.

Milking the Market

2009-08-20T22:43:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on August 20, 2009.

Milking the Market

Anyone who has ever prepared a family budget knows that there is one basic, overriding principle: don't spend more than you take in. If you earn $100, don't spend $110. If you do, you'll either dip into savings or start to accumulate debt. Vermont dairy farmers are keenly aware of this simple formula. They have one problem, though: It costs more to produce a gallon of milk than anyone is willing to pay for it.

The individual farmer can do nothing to change milk prices. The price is set in an international marketplace, and that price has been going down. The farmer could try to get into a niche market, like organic products, and some supplement their income by selling small amounts of raw milk to neighbors, but the real money is (or should be) in the general bulk market.

If a farmer cannot make money on his farm, there are only a few options. One is to change what he produces. This is a viable option for a grower, but not so much for a dairy farmer, who has a herd to take care of. Another is to get out of the business completely. The loss of a farm or two might not be any more than a local tragedy, but according to the Rutland Times-Argus, since January 1, Vermont has lost over thirty farms.

The federal government has resurrected the Milk Income Loss Compact (MILC) program through which farmers can receive payments from the government when milk prices fall below a certain level. The formula is a bit complicated, because it is adjusted monthly for feed costs, but it is roughly $17.50 per hundred pounds of milk.

The government is also helping by increasing the floor that it pays for milk for its own needs. Vermont's congressional delegation pushed hard for this increase, and spoke favorably of Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's announcement.

Senator Bernie Sanders is attacking the problem from another angle, directing his office to investigate the pricing policies of monopolistic dairy companies, companies large enough to be able to influence prices in ways that individual producers can only dream of.

If this all sounds familiar, it's because dairy prices rise and fall in cycles. The problem is the low end of the cycle is often far too low. The last big dip was in 2006. Back then, Vermont Public Radio commentator John McClaughry touted programs that were trying to make dairy farmers more productive in their business. Watching the nightly news on WCAX, it seems that there are unending reports of dairy farmers who are making milking or feeding more efficient.

Our ultimate goal should be the elimination of all subsidies. Government subsidies and tariffs are generally not a good thing, and can have far-reaching economic implications.

The imposition of tariffs on imports can hurt domestic producers, to the point where the exporting country retaliates with tariffs of its own. This sort of tit-for-tat economics has the real possibility of cutting goods off from a nation in the best case, and becoming a diplomatic crisis even leading to war in the worst case.

Looking to avoid such games, the United States has sought and supported free trade agreements across the world, from our own continental neighborhood to the tiny nation of Singapore. Even so, most free trade agreements have exceptions, as with the prohibition of Mexican trucks on most U.S. roads and U.S. tariffs on Canadian softwoods.

The increase in the number of free trade agreements the U.S. has with other nations is a recognition of the general proposition that tariffs and subsidies are not of long-term benefit. Though dairy may be a special case, given the perishable nature of liquid milk, we should still try to avoid subsidies when we can.

Because dairy is in a precarious position right now, we should continue to pay out subsidies. At the same time, we should be increasing our technological aid to dairy farmers, to ensure that those who are capable can get their product out for the least cost possible. We should take a close look at each dairy operation and make hard but necessary choices about farms that are beyond saving. And we should ensure that no one company has too great an effect on pricing.

Taking coordinated steps such as these can provide us with an industry that is both local and sustainable, and which protects vital national interests.

Coming clean on spreading misinformation

2009-08-06T13:42:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on August 6, 2009.

Coming clean on spreading misinformation

Friends and neighbors, I have decided to come clean. There is some personal risk — I could lose my membership in the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy — but I find I cannot keep our secrets from you any longer.

The truth is that I have been working with VLWC for some time, doing my small part to coordinate and orchestrate some events that would be unbelievable in any novel.

To wit: at our behest, Texas Representative Louie Gohmert recently signed on as co-sponsor to the so-called "birther bill," which would require future presidential candidates to provide irrefutable proof of their eligibility to become president, such as an official state-issued birth certificate. His action brought renewed attention to the bill.

What does Gohmert have to do with the VLWC? While Gohmert purports to be a Republican, in truth, Gohmert has been working for us since his election in 2004. The role of our operatives is to spread misinformation that sounds scary but is easily disproven. The VLWC then sits back to watch the fireworks that ensue.

The VLWC wasn't sure we'd be able to get any traction from the Obama birth certificate controversy. We'd tried to get that ball rolling before the election, but then an Obama staffer, who had not been briefed about the VLWC's tactics, had the candidate's actual Hawaii-issued birth certificate released to the press. It is now easily viewable on the web.

However, after the truth settled in, we decided to resurrect the rumor. Soon, we were delighted to see Republican members of Congress blind-sided by birthers at town hall meetings, demanding that "Obama release his official birth certificate."

The VLWC also assigned Gohmert the task of helping spread the rumor that a current draft of the health care reform bill encourages and actually requires our elderly Medicare population to prepare themselves for euthanasia. As with the birther rumor, we have also assigned other undercover operatives, including Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina.

As is typical with our operations, you can quickly see the results of our tinkering on easily-duped websites like the Drudge Report and World Net Daily. Within a few days, and some times within a few hours, the snowball has begun to roll as we pick up the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and Sean Hannity. From there, the path to Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Post is a short one. With the right critical mass, soon the mainstream press is forced to cover the story, and the debunking process begins.

It is here that the rubber really hits the road. Neutral websites like FactCheck.org and Snopes.com weigh in and suddenly the big story is not the information we planted but the fact that the information is false. As time wears on, and the story continues to propagate, those who keep bringing it up move from the mainstream column to the wing-nut column.

Sometimes there are bonus off-shoots of craziness; the health care debate has a classic example. You may have recently seen a television advertisement produced by the Family Research Council that features a senior couple lamenting the fact that the new proposal will mean that while their health care wanes, government-financed abortions will be on the uptick. We didn't even think to plant the abortion canard — they made that one up all on their own.

The final stage is satire. When David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, the Colbert Report, or the Daily Show spoof the story, the VLWC lets out a collective yelp of pleasure, in celebration of a job well done...

I know, dear reader, that I have not fooled you. There is, of course, no VLWC to help make the wing-nuts of the conservative movement look bad. Unfortunately, they do this all on their own.

My sincere hope is that if you listen to the right wing media, you listen with a critical ear, and verify the "facts" that you hear for yourself. The Internet is a double-edged sword here: while it allows misinformation to spread faster and further than ever before, it also allows facts to be checked faster and by more authoritative experts than ever before.

To be fair, I fully acknowledge that the left wing is not immune from the spreading of misinformation. On balance, however, it seems that when there is misinformation to be spread, it starts much further up the right-wing totem pole, lending it gravitas that makes it particularly dangerous.

The sticky problem with "judicial activism"

2009-07-26T00:09:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on July 23, 2009.

The sticky problem with "judicial activism"

Federal judges and justices of the Supreme Court hold a unique position in our governmental system, with special protections for their positions enumerated in Article 3 of the Constitution. Specifically, the positions are appointed; the positions are held for life; and while a judge holds a seat, their salary may not be reduced.

These three protections are notable for a few reasons. First, they tie directly to one of the complaints against the King the colonists listed in the Declaration of Independence. Second, they are designed to make the federal bench apolitical, allowing judges to focus on the law and ignore political considerations. Lastly, ironically, they make the process of confirmation particularly political.

As we saw last week with the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor, nominees come under intense scrutiny; indeed, the scrutiny is mandated by the Constitution, as part of the separation of powers. A potential justice must not only satisfy the requirements of the President but of the Senate as well.

Senators look for disqualifying comments or rulings; they dig for prejudices and bigotry; they look for indications of bad character or conduct unbecoming of a judge. Since the 1950's, Senators have looked specifically for something called "judicial activism."

Judicial activism has no concrete meaning, but it is generally taken to mean a judge who would look at cases with some specific agenda in mind. They might find more weight in an argument that appeals to their political leanings than one that appeals to the letter of the law.

That's what much of the lengthy questioning of Sotomayor was all about — an attempt to pin the "activist judge" label on her. Conservatives were gleeful when two comments by Sotomayor, in particular, came to light. The first was her now infamous "wise Latina" comment; the other was a comment where Sotomayor acknowledged a truism: that it is in the courts "where policy is made."

To her first comment, Sotomayor's backers pointed out that the comment, in context, is far less onerous than it has been made out to be. Sotomayor herself said that she made a poor choice of words, and that the comment was not meant to say that her life experiences made her a better judge than someone with different experiences.

What does this have to do with judicial activism? The message Republicans were trying to convey is that Sotomayor would go into the job thinking that her background gave her a better perspective on some cases than the experiences of the men on the Court, a perspective that would allow her to see a different side to a case, a side that was not in line with the law. And it is the law, after all, that judges are sworn to uphold.

Sotomayor's response was basically this: she believes the law to be paramount, her comments and various interpretations of those comments notwithstanding. In my opinion, without a smoking gun to contradict her, she must be taken at her word on this point, as much as any person would be.

To her second comment, I noted that the "policy" statement is a truism. That may make some cringe, but it is reality. The legislative branch makes laws; the executive branch puts procedures in place to implement the laws; and the judiciary interprets the laws. Often, in the interpretation, policy is made.

Jeffrey Segal, of Stony Brook University, gave a perfect example: recently, the Supreme Court ruled that a school official could be sued for having a strip search conducted on a 13-year-old girl believed to be carrying contraband ibuprofen. This is now a policy of the United States, a policy that is not found in the US Code and not in the Federal Register, but a policy nonetheless. When the law and procedures are unclear, it is the courts that set policy.

This is not a liberal or conservative issue — it is simply a fact.

Looking for activist judges is a good thing. We do not want judges with an agenda sitting on the bench, especially the federal bench. The problem is in the widening definition of what it means to be activist. So long as only a few partisan Senators carry the banner ad nauseum, the process is safe. Congress must ensure that judges will not overstep their bounds. We, however, must ensure the in that quest, Congress does not overstep its own bounds.

Death throes of the GOP

2009-07-09T11:56:00.004-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on July 9, 2009.

Death throes of the GOP

As Mark Twain is famous for saying, "The report of my death was an exaggeration." So it may be for the reports of the death of the Republican Party. There are plenty of signs of potentially terminal illness, however.

From the outset, let me make it clear that I am well aware of the Democratic Party's rogues gallery. Just to name a few, in chronological order: Gary Hart, Dan Rostenkowski, Bill Clinton, Gary Condit, William Jefferson, Eliot Spitzer, and Rod Blagojevich.

This rogues gallery was populated over the course of two decades, and it is nothing to be proud of. From marital infidelities to outright graft and bribery, some of the violations were of trust and others of the law; prices were paid, political, personal, and legal.

The Republican Party, a party usually noted for its toeing of the "family values" line, is not the first place one would think to look to find infidelities, improprieties, political cowardice, and outright craziness. But in just the past couple of years, indeed the past couple of months, plenty of examples have sunk to the bottom of the swamp.

I mention older cases by name only — you can look each of them up on the Internet to get the sordid details: Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, Representative Mark Foley of Florida, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons, and New York Representative Vito Fossella.

More recently, the fourth-ranked Republican in the Senate, John Ensign of Nevada, announced in June that from December 2007 to August 2008, he had been engaged in an extra-marital affair. Ensign, who is active in the ironically-named Promise Keepers, stepped down from his leadership post on the Republican Policy Committee. Ensign's wife Darlene said that she and Ensign were working on a reconciliation. Perhaps she should forego getting him to promise, and put him on a leash instead.

Just two weeks ago, a name mentioned frequently as a 2012 presidential hopeful, Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, was mixed up in a bizarre adultery scandal. Sanford, who ran some of his last campaign on a family values platform, has been keeping a mistress in Argentina since 2008. The affair cost Sanford his job as head of the Republican Governor's Association and some cash (as he reimbursed the state for some expenses incurred during one of his trysts). Still unsure are his job as governor, his marriage, and any hope of a run in 2012.

Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann has developed a penchant for her idiotic utterances, including her seditious call for Minnesotans to become "armed and dangerous" to fight President Barack Obama's plan to limit greenhouse gases. Her latest craziness involves the decennial census. She vows to only answer the question about how many people live in her home, because the Constitution does not authorize any other questions. What Bachmann fails to recognize is that the Congress has the power to ask any demographic question it needs to help set policy. Even the first census in 1790 collected more data than a straight count, and Congress has authorized a $100 fine for failing to complete the census forms.

Bachmann also has said she fears the census data will be used when the government decides to begin to intern citizens in concentration camps. The foundation of concentration camps is a favorite lark of the extreme right, one that any person of sound mind dismisses out of hand.

Finally, just last week we heard of a fine example of political cowardice. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, formerly John McCain's Vice Presidential candidate, announced that she is not going to finish out her term as governor; she will resign at the end of July. Palin's ambition to be the Republican nominee for President in 2012 is widely reported, and some say that she is quitting to concentrate on that run. Palin herself said that with her decision not to run for governor again in 2010, she did not want to be a lame duck for eighteen months. Imagine the precedent she could be setting — aside from cowardly, this could even be considered Bachmann-crazy.

The Republican Party is not dead yet, but it seems to be ill. As a liberal, I watch it all with a healthy dose of schadenfreude, hoping for the time being that their weakness can add to our strength, helping the Congress and the President actually get some good things done.

Note: the original printing of this column noted a $5000 fine for failing to answer questions on the census. This is incorrect. The fine for failing to answer is $100; the fine for providing false answers is $500.

A Historical Look at the Fourth of July

2009-06-25T11:17:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 25, 2009.

A Historical Look at the Fourth of July

As a young boy, I remember quite well the trips that I, my siblings, and cousins would all take to the fireworks stands that sprouted up all around Los Angeles and Orange counties, California in late June. July 4 was not only a celebration of our nation's birth, but of my grandfather's, too. We would buy some fireworks to celebrate each. On the night of the Fourth, the entire block would close down as families set off all sorts of pyrotechnics to honor the nation and my grandfather.

As an early teen, my family celebrated a private July 4. We lived in Canada, and the big July celebration there, July 1, is for Canada Day. Since we lived in Quebec, the Canada Day celebrations were a bit ironic, since Quebec seemed poised to secede from Canada.

As a full-fledged grown-up, I gained distinct and fond memories of my first Fourth of July in Williston. We came here from Starksboro, a town too small for any extensive July 4 celebrations. Coming to Williston, with its magnificent parade, day-long family activities, cacophonous book sale, and glorious fireworks show, I suddenly had something to look forward to, like those youthful days in California.

It's worth taking a few moments to remember what the fuss is all about, and to realize that if not for the work of some very dedicated men, we might not be celebrating at all. In early 1776, the case for independence had not yet been forcefully made. Compromise with Britain, and seats in Parliament, were seen by many as the better way to go.

A relatively short pamphlet, Common Sense by Thomas Paine, finally made a convincing argument for independence, and the opinion of the populace and the Congress began to change.

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee, delegate from Virginia, formally brought the arguments in Common Sense to the Second Continental Congress. He proposed both a declaration of independence and a union of the colonies. A committee was formed to craft a document. The committee included Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson was assigned by the committee to write the declaration, which he completed in just a few days.

Jefferson's first draft was edited by Franklin, then forwarded on to the Congress, which toned down some of Jefferson's most inflammatory language. In the end, the Declaration of Independence listed almost thirty grievances against the King, called for independence and unification, and told the people of Britain that the quarrel of the United States was with the King, and not with them.

The document was accepted by the Congress on July 4, 1776, though not until August 2, 1776, was the Declaration was actually signed.

Though the new United States was still at war in 1777, history records several small-scale celebrations to celebrate the first anniversary, including several 13-gun salutes. In Philadelphia, official dinners and celebrations were held along with prayers, parades, and fireworks. In 1778, General George Washington ordered a double ration of run for the troops.

By the turn of the 19th century, fireworks were becoming more and more common, as were formal celebrations of the day at the White House. Parades, military revues, bands, songs, plays, poems, anthems, and ballet were all performed to celebrate the date.

In 1870, July 4 was designated a day off, without pay, for federal workers; in 1938, the law was changed to give the day off with pay. In 1998, Congress designated the days between Flag Day and Independence Day as "Honor America Days."

Many notable events have been scheduled to happen on July 4, including temperance and anti-slavery speeches, the laying of cornerstones (of the Washington Monument, for one), and the christening of ships. In recent memory, the July 4's of 1976, the nation's bicentennial year, and 2002, the first following the September 11 attacks, were notable for the proud displays of patriotism from the citizenry.

The Fourth of July is a uniquely American holiday, and we celebrate it in a uniquely American way. At some point before the holiday, to celebrate the two hundred and thirty-third year of the American Republic, take a few minutes and read the Declaration of Independence; refresh your memory about what the fireworks, barbecue, and camaraderie are all about.

The Importance of Self-Editing

2009-06-11T15:42:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on June 11, 2009.

The Importance of Self-Editing

When you're writing for yourself, as in a diary, there's little need to be careful about how you write or even what you write. You can make up facts, twist reality, leave out inconvenient truths.

When you read your diary back to yourself, you do not edit it. In fact, if you edit your diary, correcting for misstatements, you might lose something valuable -- how you were feeling at the moment you put those thoughts down.

Similarly, fiction is, by definition, one big, long lie. I recently wrote a short story that is based on a trip I recently took to Hershey, Pennsylvania. Aside from the fact of the trip itself, however, none of the events in the story actually happened to me.

When you read back a piece of fiction, you will notice inconsistencies that need to be corrected, lest you jar your reader with them. But you generally don't correct misstatements, because the entire thing is a misstatement.

When you're writing "the news," though, you have an entirely different set of rules to live by. The writer is responsible for telling a compelling story, but more than that, the story must be true, it must be accurate.

If you write, you might find, as I do, that you fall in love with your words, that you come to see them as little children. You don't want to cut any of them -- you lose your objectivity.

When I was a reporter back in college, I developed quite a love/hate relationship with my editors. They would take my stories and rearrange, reword, cut. I hated each revision, dreaded seeing the edited copy. But, invariably, my story was better because of the editing.

Later in my college career, I became the editor, and my hope was that when I rearranged, reworded, and cut, I was doing my writers a favor, making the stories tighter, more readable. But even then, when I wrote hard news, I insisted that someone, anyone, edit my stories. The story, the integrity of the words, was more important than the writer.

Had I not been in love with my words, I would have been able to self-edit. But with my objectivity gone, it took a disinterested third party to keep me, and my words, honest. It is this love of ones own words that seems to be dampening the self-editing skills of the famous right-of-center commentators.

Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, touted by both the left and right (and by himself) as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, has repeatedly, unabashedly, and unashamedly spread half-truths, innuendo, and outright falsehoods. Senator-elect Al Franken went so far as to write a book, with Limbaugh as a prime example, called "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them".

Fox News Commentator Bill O'Reilly repeatedly called Dr. George Tiller a "baby killer" and equated him with Hitler, Mao, and Stalin. After Tiller was gunned down in his Kansas church, several right-wing websites repeated O'Reilly's rhetoric as they applauded and justified Tiller's death. O'Reilly half-heartedly decried the killing, but we are not fooled.

Most recently, the right's attack machine has been twisting a comment by Associate Justice-designate Sonia Sotomayor about the ability of a female Hispanic to render neutral judgement. They all came to the intellectually dishonest conclusion that she is a "racist." The futile attack was levelled by Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, and, of course, Rush Limbaugh.

Some of these personalities, after taking a step back, decided the rhetoric was over the top. Gingrich, for example, apologized for using the term. Republican Senator Jeff Sessions called for an end to the name-calling.

I understand how hard it is to self-edit -- it's even harder when your words are spoken than when they are written. I also understand that for these commentators, it is a part of their job to be loud, brash, and controversial. But with their wide following, self-editing is a skill they would do well to hone.

The legislative session: triumph and compromise

2009-05-28T13:48:00.004-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 28, 2009.

The legislative session: triumph and compromise

"It ain't over till it's over," said baseball sage Yogi Berra. So it is with this year's legislative session. Though they have adjourned, they will be back.

At least one act of the legislature will have a lasting and profound effect on Vermont and, perhaps, the nation.

That act, S.115, has a deceptively meek title: "An act relating to civil marriage." Known colloquially as the Same-Sex Marriage Act, it will give same-sex couples marriage equity as of September 1, 2009. Plan on extensive news coverage of wedding ceremonies that day.

The act also protects religious institutions, specifically allowing almost any such institution in the state to refuse to perform any marriage that violates its beliefs.

The act, in just ten printed pages, made Vermont a vanguard in the effort to bring marriage equity to the entire nation. Vermont is the first state to have its legislature open up marriage to same sex couples, rather than have it imposed by the state's judiciary. After Governor Jim Douglas vetoed the act, there was uncertainty whether the legislature could garner the votes to override. On April 7, however, the legislature was able to override the veto, by the absolute narrowest of margins.

S.115 was the most high-profile bill the legislature worked on, but not the only one.

For young hunters, H.64 eliminates Youth Hunting Day for Vermonters sixteen and under, and expands Youth Hunting Weekend to anyone fifteen and under who has taken a hunter safety course.

An important act for wine producers, S.27 allows "manufacturers or rectifiers of vinous beverages" to hold wine-tastings on their property, as long as they provide 14-day notice of the event to the department of liquor control. The act also allows producers to sell products they did not produce, which could increase networking opportunities for this burgeoning industry.

Notably for Williston, H.31 approves our charter changes, including one that allows the town manager to appoint and discharge the zoning administrator. Also important for the Williston community, teacher Al Myers was honored with House Concurrent Resolution 160, the passage of which was witnessed by many Williston students.

Despite all this good work, though, it ain't quite over yet. The Governor is recalling the legislature into a special session to deal with the budget. The budget approved by the legislature, in bill H.441, has come under fire from the Governor as being irresponsible and unsustainable.

This is the governor's job -- to use his judgement to determine if bills passed by the legislature are appropriate for the state and to veto them if they are not. Since the budget passed the Democrat-controlled house by a comfortable margin, but not by enough to override a veto, the threat of a veto is being taken seriously. The governor's proposal is being looked at closely by legislative leaders as they prepare for the special session.

According to news reports, though, those leaders are not happy with what they've seen. The governor's budget has cuts that the legislature does not want to see, but worse, it envisions savings that have no definite source.

Democrats want to tax higher-income Vermonters, placing a $5000 cap on itemized deductions and replacing the 40% exemption on capital gains tax with the $5000 cap. The additional funds raised allowed the legislative budget to cut across-the-board taxes and to avoid additional budget cuts. The governor argues against the adjustment because he opposes new revenue in general and wants to see more cuts to the budget.

The budget is an essential part of the running of the government, which is why this dodge and parry is even taking place at all. The governor's veto pen is his leverage, but the legislature is not without some leverage of its own. Without a budget, the wheels of government will grind to a halt, and as the executive, the governor will shoulder much of the blame if a compromise cannot be reached.

State Auditor of Accounts Tom Salmon has volunteered to help mediate the differences between the two proposed budgets. This would certainly be a positive step. The best scenario for the state would be for the two sides to come to a compromise before the special session, and then have the session simply rubber-stamp that compromise.

Then, it would be over.

A Novel Idea: Idealizing Society

2009-05-15T00:17:00.003-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 14, 2009.

A Novel Idea: Idealizing Society

For the past couple of years, I've been working on a novel for middle school students. Right now, the novel is in the hands of an agent, whom I hope will agree to represent my work to publishers.

The novel, which follows a group of four girls, takes place in Williston. The Williston of my characters, however, is not our Williston, not exactly.

When deciding where to set the novel, the oft-used phrase "write what you know" came to mind. However, our town has many quirks that could take a lot of explanation to get across to a visitor, especially a visitor by literary means. For just one example, in the literary Williston, we have a Williston Elementary School and a Williston Middle School.

To have taken Williston's schools as a model, and have to explain why there are elementary schoolers in the middle school, would take more words than I could afford to spend pages on — so I idealized our school system.

Is there a lesson to be learned in such idealizations?

After working on the Williston Conceptual Frameworks Committee since last summer, I am keenly aware that there are divisions in our town about how our schools are structured. If our schools were structured like my idealized Williston schools, could the controversies have been avoided? As I wrote, as I edited, as I attended Committee meetings, I gave this question a lot of thought.

The reason that I idealized our schools, though, was not to teach us Willistonians a lesson of any kind. The reason is actually quite pedestrian: simple literary license.

As I thought about all this, I realized that there are actually very few novels that I've read in my lifetime that idealize society. More common, by far, are the novels that exaggerate problems with society, magnify them. These novels are typically categorized as "dystopian," a genre I've written about before.

Almost anyone could name a dystopian novel: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, The Giver, A Clockwork Orange. Some of the characters in these novels might consider that they live in utopias; but they are written for us, and we can recognize that the cost of the utopia is something we hold dear — liberty, security, democracy, or even individuality.

I'm a big fan of science fiction, and I've often heard Star Trek described as a look at a utopian future. That may be true for the people of Earth, done with war and poverty, even with greed and money, with our attention focused on the stars. But I dispute this characterization. Any Trekker knows that war, poverty, greed, and money play a big role in the Star Trek universe.

Closer to home, a good example of a true utopian novel (one that describes a society that its author wishes us to aspire to, rather than one the author wishes us to avoid), is called "Looking Backward", by Edward Bellamy.

(You can read "Looking Backward" online by going to Project Gutenberg, where Bellamy's book is available for free. Go to gutenberg.org to find out more.)

In Bellamy's work, a citizen of Boston from 1887 is put into a hypnotic trance from which he does not awake until the year 2000. Some of the advances of Boston in Bellamy's year 2000 might seem laughable to us today, but some were strangely prescient.

Bellamy did not foresee television, but he did foresee a "music room" into which music could be piped in from any one of a number of live performances, via the telephone wires. Bellamy foresaw a store with only one sample of each item on the shelves; shoppers put in their orders for goods, which were made on demand and delivered to their doorstep. All workers started out at the bottom, in the "industrial army", and worked their way up according to desire and ability; but in any case, retirement was at the ripe old age of 45.

In my case, I idealized Williston to avoid having to explain too much, to make my job easier, to make the reader's job easier.

Bellamy idealized all of the United States, and, indeed, the world, to illustrate a place we could land, something to aspire to. As I read "Looking Backward," there was much fault I found in his year 2000, a little I recognized, and also a few things to look forward to.

Do you have a favorite utopian novel? Let me know, I'd love to read it.

Fighting Poverty, Preventing Piracy

2009-04-30T22:59:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 30, 2009.

Fighting Poverty, Preventing Piracy

Any time revenues decline, whether in a business, family, or government, there is an inevitable search for a place to cut costs.

One place that financial advisers will not advise a family to cut, though, is in investing for the future. The "magic" of compound interest means that a dollar not invested now could cost you four dollars in thirty years.

Similarly, there are investments in the future that we, as a nation, must think carefully about when we are looking to cut. If we are to invest in our nation's future, one way to do that is to provide non-military foreign aid. If we do not invest in foreign aid, we risk putting our future in jeopardy.

One need only look to the piracy crisis that has recently grabbed the nation's attention to see the results of poverty and chaos. Though the attention is recent, the problem has been festering for quite some time. In 1991, for example, the World Food Programme was having trouble finding shipping companies willing to take food aid to Somalia because of piracy off the Somali coast.

Because of overwhelming poverty, some of the people of Somalia have chosen piracy as their best choice for survival, even with all the inherent risks.

Is there anything we could do to reverse the piracy problem? It seems we may be doing all we can at this point - the solution is a military one.

According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), another hot spot for piracy is the Strait of Malacca. In all of 2000, over 75 attacks were recorded in the strait. By 2004, that number had decreased to 38, and in the first quarter of 2009, to only one. According to the IMB, the difference is in the patrols, which have dramatically increased over the past ten years, especially by the navies and coast guards of Malaysia, Indonesia, and other littoral nations.

While the key to stopping piracy seems to be military diligence, preventing piracy from even starting is where our money could be well-spent.

The budget for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, which distributes American foreign aid, was almost $19.5 billion in 2007, $17.6 billion in 2008, and budgeted to be $18.8 billion in 2009. These number are nothing to sneeze at, but they are a pittance compared to our military budget.

Our foreign aid budget covers a lot of important things, according the USAID's Citizen's Report. Counter-terrorism, peace support, conflict mitigation, good governance, promotion of human rights, and combating AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. The budget also pays for programs to improve infrastructure, agriculture, water supply safety, economic opportunity, and financial transparency.

This last group of programs, under the category heading "Promoting Economic Growth and Prosperity", is where our money can help end the conditions that lead to problems like piracy. If a nation has a sound government, a reliable food and water supply, and provides opportunity for its people, the lure of easy money from piracy or other crime is suddenly that less strong.

The change in administration has brought change to the philosophy behind foreign aid. The 2009 budget was built by George W. Bush's State Department. The 2010 budget, built by Barack Obama's State Department, increases the department's budget by 40%, and the budget for USAID would go up a similar percentage.

With this increase, our efforts to fight poverty, both with direct aid and developmental aid, could make a big difference in peoples' lives. Could this increase also be a piracy prevention measure? We can only hope - as with any investment, the return is not guaranteed.

---

On a personal note, with many of you, I mourn the death of Williston Central School teacher Al Myers. Over the years, I'd seen Al show off his musical skills at the FAP Variety Show, show off his Civil War knowledge in presentations to the Cub Scouts, and show off his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Williston schools and FAP as he recounted the evolution of our current system.

Al's fellow teachers in Swift House and throughout the school system are coping bravely with the loss as they simultaneously help all the kids cope with the loss.

While I salute his memory and his legacy, I also salute the continued professionalism of our entire teaching staff. Al's death will leave a hole, but I know it will be quickly filled.

Tempering Faction

2009-04-16T10:45:00.000-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 16, 2009.

Tempering Faction

I was recently asked a question about the Constitution that comes through my email box every so often in one of two forms. The first is "Where are political parties mentioned in the Constitution?" The second is "How does the Constitution support the two-party system?"

The first question is the easier one to answer. The Constitution does not mention political parties at all. Political parties evolved in our system after the ratification of the Constitution, so it would have been great foresight for the Constitution to have included them.

However, even in the later amendments, right up to those proposed and ratified in the 20th century, we managed to keep any mention of parties out of the Constitution.

The harder question is the second one, and it is a good question. Since the Civil War, the Republicans and Democrats have traded the presidency and control of the Congress. Rarely has a third party had a lasting effect.

Third parties have had a role to play in our political history, even if it was a fleeting role. Free Soil, Anti-Mason, Prohibition, Socialist, Reform, Green - these parties raised issues that the major parties eventually had to deal with.

The second question usually has a masked underlying question: Is the two-party system something positive, something worth retaining?

While there is something to be said for third parties, I think that we have a good thing with our two-party system, something worth retaining.

However, we also have something that some of our most influential founding fathers found to be a real issue in politics. The faction, better known today as "special interests."

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, writing in the Federalist Papers as Publius, warned against special interests tearing at the fabric of society. Madison saw two ways of controlling factions: "The one, by removing its causes; the other by controlling its effects."

Madison knew it was pointless to remove the cause of faction, dangerous even. Only by removing liberty or by making all persons the same could the cause of faction disappear.

Better, then, to control the effect of faction. The federal system, with representative democracy, was his solution for the nation, the solution offered by the Constitution. In such a system, majority opinion is important, but minority rights are just as important, and protected.

Of course, factions still emerge. We see the divisions starkly, at the national, state, and local levels.

Pro-life versus pro-choice; for and against gay marriage; Option B versus Option C for our schools.

When factions are truly destructive is when the two sides cannot find common ground. On the most polarizing issues, common ground can be hard to find, especially when there are some on the fringes who will not budge. But there is almost always common ground to be found.

This is where discussion, compromise, and agreement come into play. The fringes can sabotage agreement, but only if they're allowed to. The larger part of any faction will be willing to compromise. Take the gay marriage debate as just one example.

When the state Supreme Court forced the issue in 1999, the state legislature heard from both sides - those who were adamantly opposed to gay marriage and those just as adamantly for it. By April of 2000, a compromise was reached, and civil unions became the law of this state.

Today, after nine years under that law, Vermonters decided that the advent of civil unions did not cause the downfall of society, and, in fact, enhanced it by granting similar rights to committed same-sex couples. In September, we will take the final step, and make marriage an institution available to any committed couple.

Through compromise and patience, the factions came together enough so that equal rights could be guaranteed.

It is a model for all factional disagreements that we face. The solution might not be perfect, but if found by compromise, it can at least be a shared victory, and when the opportunity arises again to reexamine the issue, lessons learned from the past can be applied.

This nation, this state, this community, all have had to deal with the passions of faction in the past. We deal with them now. We will deal with them in the future. The one thing I'm certain of is that through compromise, and patience, a suitable solution can always be found.

Securing Social Security

2009-04-02T14:43:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on April 2, 2009.

Securing Social Security

My first brush with Social Security came at a very young age. I don't recall the event specifically, but I carry the effect: my first Social Security card with my signature on it. Judging by the handwriting, I was likely right around ten years old when I signed it.

According to the Social Security Administration, the first year I made any money at all was 1983, and I grossed $359. That year, 5.4% of my income went to the pay the Social Security tax. This year, the tax rate is 6.2% for employees. Employers pay the same amount. The self-employed pay the full 12.4% themselves.

What is it that we get for that money?

Social Security was originally designed to be a savings account of last resort, a forced retirement savings account.

Throughout your working career, you pay into the program, and eventually, upon retirement, you start to get some of that money back. The plan is basically a government insurance plan, complete with actuarial tables, qualifications, and exclusions.

The point was to prevent retired workers from becoming destitute, to prevent widows from being turned out on the street with the death of the main breadwinner, and to prevent those injured on the job from becoming a burden on society.

The plan counted on an ever-increasing population, ever-increasing productivity, an ever-increasing tax base.

Contributions to the program funded the benefits paid by the program. Excess money was put in the Social Security Trust Fund, to be invested in government bonds, which the government promises to repay the Trust Fund with some interest. When outlays outpaced revenues, the Trust Fund would be tapped to pay the difference.

Projections from the Congressional Budget Office in 2008 predicted that in 2019, the Trust Fund would not longer be pulling in more than it was paying out, and those government bonds would have to be called in to pay benefits. This negative trend was not a blip: by 2049, the Trust Fund runs out of money completely, unable to pay all promised benefits.

Social Security has become the backbone of many Americans' retirement planning. There is an obligation to pay back the benefits that the workers have contributed hard-earned money to get. Having the Trust Fund run out of funds is simply not a viable option.

Benefits could be cut, but the problem is that the cost of living never seems to go down, so decreasing benefits does not seem to be a good way to prevent destitution. The cutting of benefits is also a political third-rail, touched by politicians at their own risk.

There are several steps that could be taken, none of them painless.

First is to raise the Social Security tax. The tax started out at 1% in 1937, and has increased over time, but not since 1990. A rise to 6.5% might be in order.

Another is to raise the retirement age. It has been done before - the age at which benefits could be collected was originally 65 and is now 67. A gradual increase to 68, 69, or even 70 could do much to aid the solvency of the fund.

Finally, the ceiling on the taxable income could be increased or eliminated. Did you know that all income over $102,000 is exempt from the tax? The reason for this eludes me - there are some who reach this limit in a month, even in a week, and once the limit is reached, no more tax is paid. If we taxed all income, the extra funds could bring a long and happy life to the trust fund.

One recent idea that history has shown to be an exceedingly bad one is privatization - allowing you to invest your contribution in any number of ways, including in the stock market. Can you imagine the financial tragedy if billions in Social Security funds had been invested in the recent stock market?

Social Security is a vital program that many people rely on today or will rely on in the future. We must continue to do what is necessary to keep the program viable.

Though there is not much in the news now about any partisan battles to keep the Trust Fund in the black, you can be sure they will come. In the meantime, do your homework, so that you can start planning how Social Security will enter into your own personal retirement plan.

Greasing the right squeaky wheels

2009-03-19T09:55:00.002-04:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on March 19, 2009.

Greasing the right squeaky wheels

It was recently reported that Latreasa Goodman got her money back from McDonald's.

Who is Goodman, you might ask? She recently placed an order for Chicken McNuggets at a Florida McDonald's, paid for her order, and was then informed that the restaurant was out of her particular culinary choice. Goodman wanted her money back; the manager offered a substitution. Goodman called 911 to report the manager's "transgression." Three times.

Goodman was arrested for her antics, but despite this, the McDonald's Corporation will be presenting Goodman with an Arch Card loaded with a refund for her purchase.

The point of this is to illustrate a classic idiom (with, in this case, an unintended pun): The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Had Goodman not been a squeaky wheel, to the point of misdemeanor, her story would have been a non-story.

Historically, we have our share of squeaky wheels. Thankfully, they are often not as trivial as Goodman.

Thomas Jefferson is one example. His tirade against the King of England became our Declaration of Independence which, along with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, are considered our Charters of Freedom. But before it was released to the American public, Jefferson's screed had to be toned down, by no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin.

More recently, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post wrote reports almost daily about a minor burglary at the Democratic National Committee's office in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. More and more information was leaked to them, leading to more and more stories. Each new story took a small chip out of the Nixon presidency, leading to Nixon's eventual resignation.

Sometimes the squeaky wheel has a noble goal, but because of the fervor generated by the squeaker, the means to the end can be tragic.

John Brown is a perfect historical example. Brown was an ardent abolitionist in antebellum America, anti-slavery before it was a national priority. Though his ultimate goal was laudable and noble, his methods were not.

He lead one attack on pro-slavery settlers in Kansas that left five settlers dead. His raid on an armory in Harper's Ferry, Virginia left ten of his men and five defenders dead.

After the Harper's Ferry attack, Brown was captured, tried, and convicted of murder, conspiracy, and treason. He was hanged.

Though Brown became a rallying point for anti-slavery forces, and a song written in his honor would evolve into the well-known Battle Hymn of the Republic, his tactics cannot be defended.

Other squeaky wheels deserve no attention, and are easy to write-off. I'm thinking here of Holocaust deniers; the anti-Semitic publishing of industrialist Henry Ford in the Dearborn Independent; those still trying to prove that George W. Bush planned, or purposefully did not stop the 9/11 attacks. In this day of instant communication, it is easier than ever for those nuts to get their message out, but at the same time, thankfully, our skepticism has also increased.

More worrisome are the squeaky wheels who sound reasonable to a bigger audience, those who appeal to the pre-conceived notions of the public, or a bloc of the public.

One who keeps rising up like the proverbial cockroach that just cannot be squashed, is Ann Coulter. Coulter is an attention hound, especially after the publication of one of her books which, though waning in popularity, are released every couple of years.

Her good looks, quick and sharp wit, and inflammatory language maintain her as a media darling. But her rhetoric does not deserve the kind of air time she is able to extract from the mainstream media. The titles of her books alone illustrate her penchant for hyperbole: Slander; Treason; Godless; Guilty; and If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans.

Then there is the best example of all. Rush Limbaugh. He wraps his divisive rhetoric in catch phrases, appealing to the basest prejudices of the human character.

Whether calling women "femi-Nazis" or repeating the President's middle name ad nauseum, his broadcasts are masses of verbal bile -- squeaks that many conservatives are quick to pick up and run with.

The challenge for us, listening to all the rancor, is to discern what's worthy of our attention from what's not. Are the squeaks leading us to needed and desired change, or down an undesirable path that only a few truly wish to follow.

It's a conscious decision — make it wisely.

Stimulating Prospects

2009-03-06T15:09:00.002-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on March 5, 2009.

Stimulating Prospects

$44 million in 120 days. A lot of money, very little time.

That's part of the amount that Vermont will be receiving under the stimulus package passed by Congress two weeks ago, and in order to get projects underway quickly, Vermont must decide where that $44 million will go in just a few months: use it or lose it.

The term "shovel-ready" has become ubiquitous, so much so that it has already entered the popular vernacular. The Vermont Agency of Transportation already has an $85 million list of thirty shovel-ready projects, including the Richmond bridge and the Bennington bypass.

Luckily, Vermont is slated to get a total of about $125 million in transportation money in the long run, so all of the state's transportation priorities should get funding.

All together, our federal lawmakers have said that Vermont will be the beneficiary of about $1 billion in stimulus money. Aside from the $125 million for transportation projects, there will also be funds for Medicaid, for job creation programs, and for education spending.

Williston has its own shovel-ready project, and I don't mean the Williston portion of the Circ Highway. The construction of the Allen Brook school expansion could solve many of the town's problems with education.

The temporary classrooms would become an historical curiosity and not a point of contention with the Development Review Board; the Frameworks Committee would be able to heartily recommend the physical separation of grades 1-4 and 5-8; and the town would have plenty of room for future enrollment, when the economy bounces back and housing construction begins anew.

Of course, Williston will have to compete with the rest of the state for funds, but we do have Chittenden County on our side. With a project as large as a school expansion, and a labor base as large as the county's, a large infusion of cash seems logical. Logical, but far from certain. So, we should not count our infrastructure dollars before they're doled out.

The stimulus package will certainly not be a panacea, much as we would like it to be. It will be a stop-gap measure, hopefully a stepping stone on the way to recovery. And it does not help everyone - there is no money, for example, for dairy farmers hit hard by plummeting milk prices.

Some, of course, question the need for or the logic of having the stimulus package at all. It is a fair question - but those who ask it had no problem stimulating the economy of Halliburton and its ilk for six years, pouring billions in "temporary spending" into a permanent state of war.

I put no stock in the counter arguments - it is our time to bear the fruits of our labor.

Our congressional delegation will be holding meetings throughout Vermont to explain the details further. The first and biggest will be held by Senator Patrick Leahy and Governor Jim Douglas tomorrow at Champlain College. The list of workshops shows the staggering breadth of the stimulus package.

From small business loans, to first-time home buyer tax credits; from community block grants to unemployment assistance; from health care IT grants to infrastructure improvements. There is a workshop for everyone.

These sorts of workshops should be held across the nation as well, so that people can see that jobs are coming; that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully it will be money well-spent, money that will restart our economic engine. A little confidence will spur buying; buying will spur investment; investment will spur lending; lending will spur building; building will spur job growth, which will spur confidence. And so on.

I do dearly hope that Williston is the beneficiary of some of the funds. But even if not, as projects throughout the state are approved and started, we will feel the ripples as the stimulus spreads throughout the area.

--

I note the passing of Paul Harvey this past weekend. I remember listening to his newscast years ago as I drove to meet my wife for occasional lunches. The tone, pace, and timbre of his voice were unmistakable. Though I had not heard him for a long while, his tag lines, like "And that's the rest of the story," "Page 2," and his distinctive "Good day!" not to mention his famous pregnant pauses, are etched in my memory. Harvey will be missed.

The Problem With the Truth

2009-02-19T15:32:00.001-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on February 19, 2009.

The Problem With the Truth

When Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy starts talking about truth-telling, people start to get squirmy. It's odd - truth-telling should be a goal for all of us, but especially for public servants, for our elected representatives.

Leahy has a plan to create a Truth Commission, to place in the sunlight the most controversial acts of the Bush Administration. There are several goals in such exposure. First, exposure gives us a chance to take a sober look at what happened and decide for ourselves if it was all necessary.

Second, exposure shows us places where our system of checks and balances might have failed, and show where the underpinnings of that system might need to be reinforced.

Lastly, exposure shows the rest of the world that we can admit our mistakes and rise above them.

But when President Barack Obama was asked about the establishment of a Truth Commission, his response was, as described by the Associated Press, "lukewarm."

I understand Obama's reticence. He wants to place laser-like focus on the economy right now, putting policies in place to create and maintain jobs, to ensure that struggling homeowners stay in their homes, to get credit flowing. These are all critically important, and he's loathe to support any distraction from those goals.

"My view is also that nobody's above the law," Obama said last week, "and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen... but my general orientation is to say let's get it right moving forward."

I'm in general agreement with the president's conclusion here, that we need to move forward. However, I agree more with his statement that no one is above the law and people should be held accountable for wrongdoing.

Basically, there are three schools of thought on the whole issue. One was voiced by former Bush aide Mark Thiessen, who said that such a commission would expose the facts about American interrogation techniques, exposure that would be "terribly dangerous."

Those kinds of remarks make me incredulous. Are you honestly saying that violations of American law, international law, and basic human rights should not be exposed because al Qaeda would then know what we did? This creates an institutional loophole for abuses of power. Cloak the abuses in "national security" and the abuses become uncheckable.

The second school of thought says that we must prosecute everyone from the people who performed torture and should have refused to, all the way up to the person who explicitly or tacitly authorized the torture itself.

Beyond the feeling that justice needs to be served, constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley points out that we have treaty obligations in place in regards to investigating allegations of torture. Turley supports prosecutions, but is incredulous himself over Obama's lack of support for even a Truth Commission.

"I have great respect for [Obama]," Turley said, "but you cannot say that no one is above the law and block the investigation of the war crimes by your predecessor. It is a position without principle."

Despite my sense of justice, though, I cannot imagine actual trials having the effect that Leahy's Truth Commission would have. Those who would be prosecuted would undoubtedly by the lowest-level worker bees who are actually the least culpable. The prosecution of someone at the level of a department secretary, or even higher, would drag on for years, tangled in so much red tape and black redaction that we might never get the answers we need.

That leaves us with the third school, Leahy's school. Forget about prosecution - let's just get it out there. Tell the truth about wire tapping, about political hiring and firing in the Justice Department, about bad intelligence. Tell the truth about torture.

According to Mary Robinson, President of the International Commission of Jurists, our actions are being used as justification by other nations: "We were getting evidence of practices of torture, et cetera... Somehow the laws had changed, the situation had changed, and when we countered that, they would say, well look what's happening in the United States... Our concern was that countries that were champions of upholding the rule of law had compromised those standards in the name of countering terrorism."

We should never have compromised those standards. It seems pretty clear that we did. The perpetrators should be punished, but that just may not be practical. At the very least, we should learn the truth, so that we can keep it from happening again.

Legislating our way to prosperity?

2009-02-05T14:45:00.002-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on February 5, 2009.

Legislating our way to prosperity?

Just two weeks into the job, President Barack Obama is hitting something of a stride, despite the best efforts of some.

The mouthpiece of the Republican opposition, Rush Limbaugh, has already indicated that "I want him to fail," the "him" being Obama. His "damn the torpedoes" philosophy would rather see the economy in ruin than see Obama succeed.

Not every Republican finds kinship with Limbaugh's divisive opinions. One notable challenger is Republican stalwart Bill Bennett, who said that Limbaugh's "locution" was not what the nation needed.

However, challenging Limbaugh seems to be for brave-of-heart only. Republican Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia made a public apology to Limbaugh after saying that he should "back off" the rhetoric.

As Bennett notes, such obstructionism is not helpful, especially as Obama and his team face the train wreck that is the American and global economies.

I definitely do not want Obama to fail. I want to keep my job and want to see my friends, family, and neighbors keep their jobs. The real question is, will the administration's current plans succeed in doing just that.

Of course, the President does not make law - he can only make coherent and thoughtful suggestions, and then sit back and watch the Congress mangle the plan into a chaotic mess, with bits of pork, poison pills, and totally unrelated measures added here and there.

The first version crafted by House Democrats was put before the full House and with the input of House Republicans, pared down in places and expanded in others. Of course, that input into the process didn't convince a single House Republican to vote for the $819 billion package. But with a sizable Democratic majority, the bill could stand to have no Republican support, and even a handful of Democratic detractors, and still pass.

The House's plan is now in front of the Senate, where it will get a much closer look. In the Senate, the Republicans have a considerable measure of power. This is good for the nation, because as I've written before, it does none of us any good to have bad bills railroaded through, even if there is majority agreement with them.

The sober second look the Senate will take (and, indeed, was designed to take) will end up being something Democrats and Republicans equally like and hate, a sure sign it is a good bill.

The end result must stimulate the economy. It must spend money on things to put people to work, now and in the future; on things that will entice or force banks to begin lending again; on things that will make a real difference.

As of this writing, the bill has a higher price tag than the original House version: $900 billion. The bill is divided into two parts: spending increases and tax cuts.

Welcome to the wonderfully confusing and seemingly paradoxical world of macroeconomics: while spending more, we need to take in less.

The strategy of tax cuts is to give consumers and businesses more money in their pockets, and then hope neither group sits on the new-found funds. If people are out there buying things, orders for new things will increase. If businesses have more orders, they will increase inventory, inventory that will have to produced by people. Hiring more people will lead to more people working, with more money to spend, and so on.

The strategy of increased spending is more direct - the government funds projects that require businesses and employees to complete, and more projects means more productive workers. Of course, more workers means more income tax, hopefully enough to balance out the tax cuts and some of that extra spending.

Case in point: the Census Bureau's plans to open shop in Williston, a possible boon for many of our recently-laid off.

It's the adage "You've got to spend money to make money" writ large.

The outlay of $900 billion scares me in its scope, but the consequences of doing nothing scare me even more. If the president has his way, the bill will be finalized and passed within a couple of weeks. The Congress has time to craft a final bill worthy of passage, worthy of signature. I hope that their sense of what's right, and not a Limbaugh-esque sense of spite, takes over and we get a bill that will help us claw our way out of this crisis.

Vermont's New Year's Resolutions

2009-01-22T11:27:00.000-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on January 22, 2009.

Vermont's New Year's Resolutions

It is time for our state government to make its New Year's resolutions. Our constitution mandates that they meet on the first Wednesday after the first Monday in January, every other year. Of course, they end up meeting every year - the age of the true biennial legislature is long gone.

Though it took some time to catch up to Vermont, the bad economic times the nation is feeling are here. Layoffs are happening as we speak and most of us took marked hits when the stock and housing markets tanked.

With this atmosphere, the governor and the legislature have to be ready to make tough choices, choices that will affect all of us.

The new speaker of the house, Shap Smith of Lamoille, said he was borrowing a page from former Governor Dick Snelling's book when he proposed a new stimulus plan. On opening day, Smith was elected speaker and wasted no time in proposing a $150 million plan to bolster the Vermont economy by investing in infrastructure.

To pay for this, Smith would borrow $30 million and finance the rest in bonds to be funded by higher gas taxes, or something else, a detail to be worked out by legislative committees. The main point, though, to get Vermonters working, and to have that work produce something tangible and long-lasting, seems sound.

Before we start thinking seriously about a stimulus package, however, we need to think about the forecasted budget shortfall. The revenue shortfall is expected to be $27 million this year. Cuts are planned, but even so, projections are for $21 million in unexpected expenses.

Governor Jim Douglas has an interesting idea to help fill the hole - federal funds. Douglas says that Vermont should be getting $58 million in the form of extra Medicare reimbursement that the state could use to cover the $48 million shortfall, and have $10 million left over for next year's predicted shortfall.

The cuts, of course, are going to affect real people. One of the cuts is to the VPharm program, which helps elderly Vermonters with prescription costs. Another is to the Medicaid dental program, limiting covered expenses to $200 instead of $495. Unfortunately, these kinds of cuts are hard to make, since they affect the poorest of us, but it seems like there is little alternative.

Of particular interest to me, and to many across the state, is the governor's plan to ask that school budget votes be delayed past Town Meeting Day, as part of his plan to freeze education spending. Floated as a trial balloon by an aide, the plan seems to me to be a bad idea. School boards need to know their budgets as soon as possible - and if a budget is defeated, more time is needed to craft cuts for a new vote. Plus, if we're looking to save money, an off-schedule vote for just the school budget is an obvious waste of money.

All this talk of budgets, revenue, cuts, and taxes is exhausting. The machinations that are contrived to move funds from here to there, hopefully trimming slim percentages off as it goes, boggle my non-accounting-oriented mind. My biggest hope is that we get quick agreement from experts on the issues and get it done.

Easier for me to process are some of the other legislative proposals that have been advanced. Prompted by the Brooke Bennett case, the Senate has proposed a bill that features the addition of a twenty-five year mandatory minimum sentence for the crime of aggravated sexual assault of a child. I'm not a big fan of mandatory minimums, but I'm willing to set my general objections aside for this particular crime.

One of the Senate's other bills would extend employment protection to volunteer firefighters, similar to that members of the National Guard enjoy. Another would strengthen Vermont's employee protections for testimony given to the legislature or for serving on a jury.

In the House, one bill is specific to Williston, approving charter changes approved by us at the November election. Another changes fuel taxes to fuel fees, and raises the fee by six cents per gallon; the change is help make it easier to implement Speaker Smith's bonding idea. One more permits the state to seize and sell the car of any person convicted of a DUI with death or injury resulting, even on a first offense.

Hopefully, the legislature and the governor will work together and agree on reasoned solutions to our state's problems. I'll be keeping my eye on them.

A Conspiracy of the Truth

2009-01-08T09:53:00.000-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on January 8, 2009.

A Conspiracy of the Truth

Some people still believe that any day now, a terrorist attack orchestrated by the Bush administration will be Bush's entré into a third term of office. Others, even a decade later, still believe that Bill Clinton ordered the death of Deputy White House Council Vince Foster.

There is little that one can do to counter such conspiracy theories, because even if you provide evidence to the contrary, the theorists suspect the evidence.

The Internet is already rife with Barack Obama conspiracy theories. I have had some personal interest in one in particular, not the least of which because I've been accused of helping cover up the conspiracy.

These theorists believe there is something amiss with Obama's status as a natural-born citizen. Being a natural-born citizen, according to Article 2, Section 1, of the Constitution, is a requirement for being president.

The requirement is an original part of the Constitution, not added to nor altered since 1787. The concept is so basic that it appears to have been added to the Constitution in committee, and never questioned nor modified by the Philadelphia convention. So basic, in fact, that the authors of the Federalist Papers felt no need to expand on the topic, as they did, copiously, on so many others.

The Obama natural-born theory actually has two main prongs.

The first says that Obama was not born in the U.S. at all, but instead in Kenya or Indonesia. His Hawaiian birth certificate is a fraud perpetrated on us by his parents, who, like seers, predicted his rise to power. Or a fraud perpetrated by Hawaiian officials desperate to see a native son assume the office.

The Obama campaign sought to put this theory to rest back in August, when it released copies of Obama's state-certified birth certificate to the press and to specific organizations, like FactCheck.org. The state-certified copy, of course, is suspect because state officials are suspect.

Though it is impossible to prove a negative, the theory does not pass the smell test. While any parent might have aspirations that their child might grow up to be president some day, to begin a conspiracy from the day of birth is too far-fetched to bear scrutiny; and I have no reason to doubt the honesty and veracity of Hawaiian state officials.

The second prong of attack goes along these lines: even given that Obama was born in Hawaii, his father was a British subject. As such, international law says that Obama's citizenship follows that of his father, and so Obama was born British, not American.

The sum of the true parts, however, do not add up to a true whole.

First, Obama's father was a British subject - Kenya, in 1961, was a British territory. Second, Emerich de Vattel's "Law of Nations," first published in 1758, does state, at section 212, "The country of the father is ... that of the children." Third, Vattel was well-known and distributed by the time of the drafting of the Constitution, and the Framers knew about it.

All truths, but all irrelevant. The Constitution, for one thing, was a repudiation of many of the "laws" put down by Vattel. His work spends a great deal of ink explaining a prince's responsibilities to his subjects, and those of the subjects to their prince. If these parts of Vattel are ignored by our Constitution, why not section 212 as well?

Further, and more importantly, Vattel was never the law of this land, and certainly not in 1961. In 1961, U.S. law stated what it states now - that a citizen at birth is "a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof."

Finally, the theorists take issue with me and my website, which treat the constitutional phrase "natural born citizen" and the law's phrase "citizen at birth" as synonymous. In doing so, I've been told, I am deliberately lying to the web-using public.

I defend these charges as best I can - in one out of ten cases, my correspondent is willing to listen. Most of the time, however, it is quickly apparent that the conspiracy theory has taken over all sense of reason, and I abruptly end conversation.

Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen of the United States of America. With our vote in November, the Electoral College's vote in December, and the counting of the votes in Congress scheduled for today, Obama's status as our president-elect is in no reasonable doubt.

Call it a conspiracy of the truth.

The tenets of my liberalism

2008-12-18T10:41:00.003-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on December 18, 2008.

The tenets of my liberalism

When I hear my children praise Barack Obama and spout some traditionally liberal values, I smile inwardly, but I often find myself presenting them with the conservative viewpoint on the issue or making sure I debunk the rhetoric. My daughter, now learning the fine points of forensics, often catches me in this, repeating her lessons that one of the best way to bolster your side of a debate is to know the arguments of the other side.

While this is true, my bigger point in illuminating the counterargument is to make sure that when my kids are exposed to ideas, they are exposed to a wide array of ideas; not only so that they can anticipate the "other side", but so that they can explore all sides, and make up their own mind about what side they fall on, in any issue.

I have to think that all the exposure to knowledge that my own parents gave to me and my siblings was to that end. Not to make us personal ideology clones of themselves, but to give us each the ability to form that ideology on our own.

I hope that was their goal, because if they wanted clones, that's not what they got. Given a political spectrum, my siblings and I are spread all over. And as I look beyond my sibling to my cousins, the same pattern holds true -- from politics to religion to food to music, we all have the same roots, but we have all spread out like branches on a tree.

For a tree to flourish, it must be fed, and likewise so must the flourishing of an ideology be nourished with ideas.

---

I think there are two main points of contention between today's American liberal and today's American conservative. These points on which our views pivot are social justice and personal liberty.

To ensure social justice, we must have a strong government that has a role in ensuring that justice is maintained. Generally, conservatives feel that government is best kept to a minimum. Liberals aren't the opposite - we don't think that more government is better. Instead, we feel that in many cases, government is the best equipped entity to solve some problems.

Some of the best and most helpful social safety net programs, be they food stamps, Medicaid, or Medicare and Social Security, were all started to tackle problems too big for individuals to tackle themselves, too necessary to be left to the vagaries of philanthropy.

It was only through a strong federal government that we were able to see the dreams of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King come to fruition in the racist South. No one can today, with a straight face, insist that this exercise of government power, to ensure social justice, was an abuse of that power.

Conservatives tend to oppose most government regulation of business. By contrast, liberals don't support regulation for the sake of regulation, but we know that left to its own devices, business would only look out for itself. Whether it is environmental protection, worker protection, or consumer protection, it may be true that the market would eventually cull the bad apples, but not before true harm is done. Better, we feel, to regulate industry from the start.

Paradoxically, liberals want government to stay out of our personal business even as it is a strong advocate of social justice. To me, the most stable government, the strongest economy, the mightiest military, all mean nothing if we do not have our personal liberties. All of the former are there to protect and promote the latter.

While it is probably a truism that to have perfect liberty we must also have perfect insecurity, today's conservatives, exemplified by President George Bush and his cronies, are willing to trade liberty for security at an unacceptable ratio.

Liberty and security can coexist, but liberty must always take priority. If it does not, the drive for security will overwhelm the drive for liberty, until that which security was meant to protect is gone.

---

Labels can change. The Republican of Lincoln's time bears little resemblance to the Republican of today. Today's Democrat would cringe ashamedly at the racist rantings of Dixiecrats. We can't always count on labels.

What we can count on, this year, into the next year, and beyond, is that by discussing our differences, by exposing our ideas, we will find common ground. It is there, in the common ground, that progress is made.

November - thanks tempered by fear

2008-12-04T09:57:00.000-05:00

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on December 4, 2008.

November - thanks tempered by fear

It was one heck of a November. There was simultaneously much to be thankful for and much to be fearful of.

In the former category, for me and the majority of the the rest of the voting population, the election of Barack Obama has let us all breathe a collective sigh of relief. Demonstrating restraint and respect, Obama continues to abide by the truism that "we have one president at a time," and hence refused to meet with G-20 leaders in Washington in mid-November.

At the same time, however, he is not wasting a single moment in trying to shore up the ailing American economy, choosing economic advisers whom he feels will best be able to guide him and us through the next financial year. Results have been mixed, with Wall Street responding favorably one day, but taking a hit the next.

To the relief of retail managers throughout the area, reports from the local media noted that retailers were pleased with sales over the past week, which bodes well for the season. As Chittenden County goes, so goes the nation?

With positive retail sales, and a $200 billion kick from the Treasury Secretary to get banks lending again, brokers in New York and around the world may have something positive to hang their hats on, and hence a reason to buy, or advise others to do so.

The price of oil, the bane of our existence a scant six months ago, has moved into bearable territory of late. That, of course, means bad news for the OPEC nations, and plans to cut production to raise prices have been discussed. Cheating, however, is rampant, which is good news for oil consumers.

Even with the price of gasoline down significantly - under $2! - we may have locked ourselves into a pattern of decreased usage, a trend which could help our pocketbooks, as well as our environment, in the long run.

The lower prices have also helped some of those who need it most. While the decision to drive can be helped by conservation - by good planning and combining destinations, for example - some uses of fuel have no viable alternative. I'm writing specifically of home heating.

There were those who feared actual fatalities from people freezing to death in their homes from want of fuel. The decline in the price of oil has meant, however, that heating oil is more affordable than it was feared it would be. Lower prices, paired with an increase in the federal subsidy, could allow the Vermont fuel assistance program to help over 7000 households instead of last year's 6100.

Locally, the month of November was a productive one for our schools. Between the book fair, parent conferences, and five Frameworks Committee meetings, good works were done for the children of our town.

Personally, I'm thankful for the advent of December, as that means the near end of holiday shopping. My wife is not one to put things off, and on November 30th, we were able to put the finishing touches on this season's economy-bolstering gift-buying.

The end of November also allowed me to put the finishing touches on a 50,000-word novel, for the third year in a row. I may write more about that some other time, but for now, suffice it to say that writing so much in a month makes a busy month even busier.

As for the latter category, those things to be fearful of, the economy is no where near back from the brink, and it seems the littlest thing could set it atumble.

The Big Three auto companies, in trying to scare Congress into fronting it billions of dollars, only seemed to manage to make people wary of buying from them.

Terrorism continues to plague the world - with India its latest victim, the threat of a regional nuclear war again raises its ugly head.

And in one way, it seems we are back in the 18th century, as the crews of ships in the Gulf of Aden and the rest of littoral Somalia, who want to do no more than deliver their cargoes and see their families again, have to contend with pirates.

In closing, and on the lighter side, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin continued to show up in the news, to the particular detriment of Alaskan turkeys. And worse, the Patriots may not be able to buy their way into the playoffs this year. Woe is New England.