And I quote:

The longer we wait to make reductions, the more difficult these decisions become, and the deeper we have to cut to find the savings.

What does this mean?  He clarifies:

In human service programs alone, we estimate that for every month of delay, we will need either to find an extra $3M in new cuts or take substantially deeper program reductions in order to achieve the same savings.

And I’m sure their estimate is based on sound, economic principles, as opposed to ideological hackery.

But basically, this is political gaming of the system: if you don’t do what we want you to do now, we’ll just insist you do something worse.

Gotta run this morning but – –

Isn’t it time for a really big demonstration in Montpelier to let our legislators know that it is not OK to balance the books on those least fortunate in our society?

Doug Hoffer laid out plenty of options for dealing with the current crisis without resorting to slashing programs for those that need it now more that ever.

If there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans, now is the time to prove it.

PJ

This week, I had the rare privilege of seeing two profoundly magical moments in two days.

The first was Sunday night, after I turned out the lights and climbed into bed. I lay down, with my face toward the window, and saw two brilliant stars through the trees. I leaned forward to get a better look and realized that instead of stars, I was seeing the moon reflected in the ice on the branches of a tree. Then I noticed that every branch of every tree within my view had dozens of tiny moons tracing its curves. It was a starkly beautiful display that made all those human attempts at tree-lighting seem as awkward and graceless as a day-old colt in the mud.

Then at 10 am yesterday, in a small gathering in Room 11 of the State House, Vermont’s Electors officially cast their ballots for President and Vice President of the United States.

Vermont may be a little state, but even with only 3 electors, we provided one of the more diverse electoral college contingents in the country: 33.3% male, 66% female, 33.3% African American, 33.3% lesbian, and 33.3% State Senator all in one tidy little bundle!

The crowd was small (Orange County was seriously over-represented: fielding 7 people out of roughly 20), but the energy was large – you could feel the excitement as the proceedings began with the swearing in of the electors.

(Electors, Standing: Claire Ayer, Euan Bear, Kevin Christie)

More photographic goodness below the fold…

They had to take 2 oaths of office, and elect members for 3 different positions (which was pretty amusing to watch, since there were exactly as many people as positions).

Once the formalities were out of the way, the electors got down to business. There were two slips of blue paper for each elector. One had the name of the Presidential candidate and a check box; the other had the name of the Vice Presidential candidate and a check box. They didn’t seem to need a whole lot of time to figure out which candidate to choose!

Then came the most time-consuming part of the event. Each elector had to sign 6 copies of the State of Vermont Certificate of Vote form. I never needed to know whether or not the word “sextuplicate” existed before this. (It does.)

Now the forms will be sent to separate places to ensure that if one copy is lost, there are others from which the data can be recovered.

The most notable recipient will be the President of the US Senate, VP Dick Cheney, who will officially count the Electoral College vote on January 6. Let’s hope he’s a whole lot better at counting than he is at hunting birds whose wings have been clipped. At the very least, he doesn’t need a firearm for counting, so all faces in the room should be safe, unless he has a trick abacus or something…

So there you have it. Vermont quietly participated in the historic victory of the first African-American President of the United States: a brilliant spot of sunlight on a gray December morning. We were the first state to be declared for Obama, and now we’ve sealed the deal.

Congratulations to the Electors on their role in making history!

update:

Now available in Orange

The opponents of so-called “clean coal” have been amping up their efforts (and if you watch TV, you’ve probably seen the ads and know what I’m talking about). There is a real sense of urgency infusing the environmental community on this, above and beyond the obvious urgency over the whole climate change and destroying the environment thing (cuz obviously, potentially rendering the Earth uninhabitable only gets people so excited, but I digress…). With Barack Obama looking serious about engaging with climate change and energy issues (the likely and unfortunate elevation of Ken Salazar to Interior Secretary notwithstanding), environmentalists are at once excited about the potential for positive movement, while at the same time deeply concerned that “Clean Coal” technology will be part of the energy mix, potentially offsetting much of the good that could be accomplished.

Obama has been touting Clean (cough) Coal since well before the election season. He introduced the “Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007” while the Sierra Club was calling liquefied coal “the dirtiest, most expensive energy gamble we could take.”

During Monday’s announcement of the nomination of Nobel Prize winning scientist Steven Chu to lead the Department of Energy, Obama commented that “My administration will value science… We will make decisions based on facts.”

And now, activists of all stripes are preparing to work to guarantee Obama keeps that promise.

Among those efforts is a planned demonstration and civil disobedience action in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 at a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill. Wendell Berry and Vermont’s Bill McKibben sent out an email today promoting the effort and encouraging the word to be spread.

Now I’m one of those who believes that the value of such demonstrations has diminished dramatically over the years, but this one has the potential to be meaningful, mainly due to its timing, contextualized as it will be against the brand new administration and its stated priorities. It also doesn’t hurt that its being pushed by prominent individuals such as Berry and McKibben.

The email includes an appeal to forward its content far and wide. Copy it in its entirety into an email if you’re so inclined, or just send a link (but make sure you link to the extended diary and not just the front page, as it’ll scroll off into the archives in about a week).

Complete email below the fold…

There are moments in a nation’s-and a planet’s-history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

       We will be there to make several points:

           #Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level-below 350 parts per million co2-lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.

            # Even if climate change were not the urgent crisis that it is, we would still be burning our fossil fuels too fast, wasting too much energy and releasing too much poison into the air and water. We would still need to slow down, and to restore thrift to its old place as an economic virtue.

           #Coal is filthy at its source. Much of the coal used in this country comes from West Virginia and Kentucky, where companies engage in “mountaintop removal” to get at the stuff; they leave behind a leveled wasteland, and impoverished human communities. No technology better exemplifies the out-of-control relationship between humans and the rest of creation.

           #Coal smoke makes children sick. Asthma rates in urban areas near coal-fired power plants are high. Air pollution from burning coal is harmful to the health of grown-ups too, and to the health of everything that breathes, including forests.

       The industry claim that there is something called “clean coal” is, put simply, a lie. But it’s a lie told with tens of millions of dollars, which we do not have. We have our bodies, and we are willing to use them to make our point. We don’t come to such a step lightly. We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, and while in recent months there has been real progress against new coal-fired power plants, the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated. It’s time to make clear that we can’t safely run this planet on coal at all. So we feel the time has come to do more–we hear President Barack Obama’s call for a movement for change that continues past election day, and we hear Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s call for creative non-violence outside coal plants. As part of the international negotiations now underway on global warming, our nation will be asking China, India, and others to limit their use of coal in the future to help save the planet’s atmosphere. This is a hard thing to ask, because it’s their cheapest fuel. Part of our witness in March will be to say that we’re willing to make some sacrifices ourselves, even if it’s only a trip to the jail.

       With any luck, this will be the largest such protest yet, large enough that it may provide a real spark. If you want to participate with us, you need to go through a short course of non-violence training. This will be, to the extent it depends on us, an entirely peaceful demonstration, carried out in a spirit of hope and not rancor. We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you. There will be young people, people from faith communities, people from the coal fields of Appalachia, and from the neighborhoods in Washington that get to breathe the smoke from the plant.

       We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested. After that we have no certainty what will happen, but lawyers and such will be on hand. Our goal is not to shut the plant down for the day-it is but  one of many, and anyway its operation for a day is not the point. The worldwide daily reliance on coal is the danger; this is one small step to raise awareness of that ruinous habit and hence help to break it.

       Needless to say, we’re not handling the logistics of this day. All the credit goes to a variety of groups, especially the Energy Action Coalition (which is bringing thousands of young people to Washington that weekend), Greenpeace, the Ruckus Society, and the Rainforest Action Network. A website at that latter organization is serving as a temporary organizing hub: http://ran.org/get_involved/po… If you go there, you will find a place to leave your name so that we’ll know you want to join us.

   Thank you,

Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben

P.S.-This is important: Please forward this letter to anyone and everyone you think might be interested.