Now that our founder, John Odum, is moving on to bigger and better things (more on that later), I think it’s safe to open the locked doors on what really happens at the palatial offices of Green Mountain Daily.

These scenes are pretty accurate, although Mr. Odum isn’t always smoking a cigar as he hands out assignments, chews out recalcitrant reporters, or barks out “Don’t call me Chief!” or some of his other trademarked phrases.

To shift to a more serious note for just a moment,  I really had little idea what to expect when John called me back in 2005 asking me to join what he was conceiving of as a Vermont version of Daily Kos, but I suspect that none of us could have predicted the range and influence that his new idea would attain. Speaking for myself, John Odum’s leadership and news and political judgment will be sorely missed, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to have worked with him these last six years.

Thanks, John, and congratulations.

The votes are in and counted in the capital city, and incoherence is the order of the day.

First, a big tip of the hat to our founder and new City Clerk, John Odum. We knew things were going to be weird for a city clerk race when John’s opponent started putting up yard signs, which upped the ante for both campaigns from the beginning. At the end John came out on top with a very close 1204-1086 victory, and you know what that means: time to get up and go to a real job tomorrow, John!

In other races, though, it’s very hard to make sense of what the people are saying. The race that got the most attention wasn’t an election for any office, but ballot issues 10 and 11, to establish local options sales and rooms & meals taxes for the city of Montpelier. The Council put them on the ballot and almost every downtown merchant fought against them. You can’t go through downtown without seeing the anti-tax posters in the store windows. (And I want to express a big thank-you to Miller Sports, Onion River Sports, Rite-Aid, and any other community-supporting businesses who did not oppose the local options taxes.)

The sales tax went down by a margin of about 2-1, the rooms and meals tax failed by a smaller margin, just under a couple of hundred votes.

The anti-tax forces were led by Thierry Guerlain, who started a group called Vibrant and Affordable Montpelier, and who was also on the ballot for City Council for District 2. Guerlain’s anti-tax, anti-city-government message was apparently popular, as he also defeated twelve-year council veteran Nancy Sherman by over 200 votes, 574-371.

So this would make you think that the anti-tax message carried the day, huh? Well, maybe not so much. Although the proposals to tax commuters failed, every single spending proposal passed, most of them by wide margins, more than 2-1. Whatever anyone else is saying about whether Montpelier city government is spending too much money, Montpelier voters clearly do not agree.

So to sum up: the anti-tax guy who claims he wants  to take some of the burden off property tax payers  gets elected; the only proposal on the ballot that would actually reduce burdens on property tax payers is defeated; and all the spending proposals, which will only add to our property tax burdens, pass.

By replacing outgoing mayor Mary Hooper with John Hollar, who ran unopposed, and Nancy Sherman with Thierry Guerlain, Montpelier’s city council has taken a sudden turn to the right. We’ll see if what the voters get is what they actually want.  

Dear friends,

This is a personal note to share my thoughts about the issues that will come before us this week. Montpelier voters have the opportunity to choose two dedicated public servants on Town Meeting Day.

For City Clerk, John Odum is running to replace our veteran Clerk, Charlotte Hoyt. John is uniquely qualified for this job, and deserves your vote on March 6.

As a longtime database and IT professional, John has been responsible for managing voter registration databases, and is familiar with election laws from his work with state and national election campaigns. John will use his database management skills to reduce paperwork in the City Clerk’s office and make the office operations more efficient and greener than they have ever been. Since John has served the city as a member of the Board of Civil Authority, working on elections and other city activities, John has the knowledge to keep our elections running smoothly and to support our City Council and Manager. Finally, John will ensure that city government will be open, welcoming, and responsive to city residents. I have nothing negative to say about his opponent, but I just think that John has already mastered many of the exact functions needed to succeed as our city clerk.

For City Council, Nancy Sherman is running for reelection as our councilor in District 2. Nancy has served on the Council for twelve years, and she has been at the center of every progressive move the city has taken during those years. By her support for the Housing Trust Fund Nancy has helped to address the shortage of affordable and mixed-income housing in the Capital City. By her support for the multi-modal transportation center and the district heating plan, Nancy has supported downtown economic development and efficient city budgeting.

John Odum and Nancy Sherman offer real solutions to the problems that face Montpelier city government. Their work will help move our city forward. When you vote for John Odum and Nancy Sherman on Town Meeting Day you vote for Montpelier’s future.

On the two local options taxes, I will be voting yes and I urge you to do the same. Montpelier’s budget problems are due in large measure to the cost of providing infrastructure and municipal services to people who come into Montpelier to work, impose burdens on our city government, but pay nothing to support the services our city provides. If you believe that costs should be borne in part by the people who cause us to incur those costs, you should support the local options taxes to realize this goal.

I recognize that many local business owners oppose these proposals, but I think their opposition is misguided. There is no basis to think that someone working in Montpelier will drive out of town to save a dime on a ten dollar lunch order, fifteen cents on a paperback book, or a dollar on a hundred dollar wristwatch or antique. What is more, the anti-tax advocates overlook the fact that our taxes are buying the services that we all use. There is no accounting magic, no bookkeeping tricks that will balance our budget. It is important to make sure that our tax dollars are wisely spent, but it is vital to maintain public works and public safety services that everyone in Montpelier relies on.

Finally, Article 14 of the proposed budget is an appropriation of $41,000 for the Housing Trust Fund. This fund in past years has provided money to make homeownership and rentals more affordable for Montpelier residents, and a recent study showed that based on the additions to the tax rolls that this fund has created, we are receiving a rate of return of almost 20% on that investment. In the context of a very long ballot I urge you to find and support this item.

This is the text of an op-ed piece Montpelier Mayor Mary Hooper published in support of the proposed local options taxes for Montpelier. It is reposted with her permission.

The Chamber of Commerce and Business Association have done an excellent job of presenting a case against local options taxes.  They worry about how this will affect our business community.  The chamber suggests that because we can collect money more efficiently from property taxes, that is how we should pay for services.

Montpelier’s residential community deeply values our downtown and commercial partners.  We have worried about our locally owned retailers and small entrepreneurial businesses.  We support them by shopping locally and by investing property tax dollars in the downtown.

We make these investments because they make us a stronger, more vital community.  We need to keep investing in our community, but we have stretched our property tax payers too far.

We have not heard about the burden our residents are facing.  

Many in our community live on small fixed incomes; many are state employees who have seen 3% and 5% reductions in their pay over the past three years.  All face the same rising costs of health insurance and energy.

We have not heard of the slow shift of paying for services to the residential sector.  Twenty-five years ago, residents paid for about half of the cost of services.  Today they pay for two thirds of these services.

We have not heard about who consumes Montpelier services.  Montpelier has more employees per capita than any community except Williston.  This distinction is part of what makes our community so vital-20,000 people coming into town each day.  And it is what makes our taxes so high-as we pay for the services they use.

Nor have we heard a clear explanation of who pays local options taxes.  Rooms, meals and alcohol taxes are easy to understand-the people who rent a room, buy a meal or a drink will pay the additional 1%.

Sales taxes are more complex.  There are lots of exemptions.  Most food and clothing, farm equipment, residential heating fuel, vehicles, items bought for re-sale and many other items are exempt from the sales tax.  

Specific data on sources of sales tax is not collected by the state.  But one of our large businesses pays $175,000 annually in sales tax.  Extrapolating from this it is safe to assume that the major employers pay at least half of the sales tax.  This is the same commercial sector which draws people into the town and which has seen it’s share of property taxes rise at a slower rate than residential property tax payers.

We do know that less than half of the sales taxes paid in Montpelier will come from the people who shop locally.  We do know that as the charter changes are proposed the local options taxes will reduce property taxes on the average residential property in Montpelier by about $150, in addition to investing an additional $100,000 in the business sector.  And that if Montpelier passes local options taxes the average residential property tax payer would have to spend more than $15,000 to offset this tax savings.

We should not allow this conversation about local options taxes to devolve into a business versus resident debate.    I hope we will carefully consider how we support the needs all of this community.  How do we fairly share the responsibility of providing services to all in our community?  

We may not know a giant among us. I certainly didn’t know it when I moved to Vermont just twenty years after Phil Hoff took office as the first Democratic governor in over a century, and I still didn’t realize it in the mid-1980’s when I was lobbying and he was in the Senate Judiciary Committee, but now, at a remove of half a century, there can be no mistaking the fact that Hoff was a giant of Vermont politics, the most important figure in the second half of the twentieth century.

When Phil Hoff took office Vermont’s governorship was a sleepy, caretaker institution, Vermont was the most reliable of Republican states, and the town of Averill, 2000 population 8, had the same one representative in the House of Representatives as Burlington, 2000 population 39,000. By the time he left we had had legislative reapportionment (in response to a mandate from the Supreme Court), Vermont had a modern executive and administration, and the state had irreversibly learned that government can facilitate and advance progressive change.

As the authors note, “No individual deserves more credit (or in the view of political rivals more blame) for the transformation of Vermont than Philip Hoff.” Those of us who did not grow up in Vermont can scarcely imagine the changes since his time. I think back to life in northern New Jersey fifty years ago and, while things have changed dramatically, the people, places, and institutions of that time are all recognizable today.

The opposite is true of Vermont.  

In Philip Hoff, the authors, a history professor and two veteran journalists, vividly portray the Vermont of the 1950’s and 60’s, illustrating the political life a young, energetic, politically ambitious lawyer found when he arrived, his early life among the “Young Turks” (mostly Republicans) in the Legislature, and the campaign and interpersonal strategies that brought him to the governor’s mansion in 1962. (Okay, the truth is we don’t have a governor’s mansion, but you get the idea.)

Once in office, learning that his tax department couldn’t give him a ten-, five-, or even a one-year projection of tax revenues, Hoff took the bold step of asking the legislature to essentially do nothing for the first year of his administration to give him a chance to understand the structure and the problems facing him and come up with a plan to make things work. A less gifted politician could never have pulled it off, but that first year of temporizing and planning was what set him on course to his later successes, accomplished without ever having a Democratic legislative majority to work with.

Phil Hoff really was to Vermont what people think JFK was for the country. The authors of this short biography put his life in perspective and, with their journalistic approach, bring the events to life. Although they clearly admire him they never descend to hagiography, and provide a balanced treatment of his failings as well as his successes.

Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountain State is essential reading for anyone interested in how Vermont politics evolved from the conservatism of the 1950’s to the dynamism of the present.

It’s less than a week after the giant Komen fiasco and people are still asking what seems like an obvious question: How could such a principled, benevolent organization get so badly led astray?

If you look at the people at the top, the people making the decisions and pulling the strings, not only is the answer obvious, but the question is seen as badly misguided.

We’ll touch lightly on the big boss, who went on MSNBC in the midst of the controversy to lie about their decision, and has so far paid no price for her actions.

Let’s just take one step down the corporate ladder, though, and see who’s running the organization.

First in this rogues’ gallery must be Karen Handel, a right wing former Georgia Secretary of State who was endorsed by Sarah Palin to “fight what the federal government will want to do to our states” when she ran for governor. Even before she was hired by Komen, Handel was saying  “since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.”

Another key player, an outside consultant rooted in the extreme right, is the odious Ari Fleischer, whose prior job was telling lies for George W. Bush. When Komen was looking for a new Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations they called on Fleischer to run the search. According to a source with first-hand knowledge, Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood. You might consider that a pretty normal question, except that Fleischer was already on record as an enemy of Planned Parenthood. In his book, Taking Heat, Fleischer criticized Planned Parenthood as a partisan, ideological organization that receives undeserved positive coverage in the press. In 2001, Fleischer said that the Clinton administration verged too far to the left on family planning efforts because “if Planned Parenthood wanted it, the previous administration favored it.”

Finally, from the outside the anti-woman, anti-choice forces were supported by Charmaine Yoest, who runs Americans United for Life, who has been attacking Planned Parenthood for years. Americans United for Life has, for the past year, aggressively pushed Congress to end Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. It has also drafted model legislation that states can use to bar abortion providers from receiving federal funds. Nine states have passed such laws, although the Obama administration has blocked their implementation. If you think this is the end of her war against Planned Parenthood, think again. Ezra Klein reports that she darkly warns that she will be “be looking at their other supporters.” It was her work that got the bogus Congressional witch hunt against Planned Parenthood started.

So there you have it. The Komen organization is closely tied to a variety of anti-woman hate groups, and there isn’t any sign that’s going to change anytime soon.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, I never had until today, but there’s a new hate group to pay attention to on the American scene.

It’s called One Million Moms (you can pretty much always tell the hate groups by their wholesome names, eh?) and they seem to be a subsidiary of the American Family Association.

But it’s a group of mothers, right, so they must be agitating for beneficial, motherly values, right? Like nutrition programs in the schools, or free health care for low-income women, or early education programs?

Afraid not. Apparently what One Million Moms want is for J.C. Penney to fire Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson.

OMM began contacting JC Penney after the store announced that comedian Ellen Degeneres would become the company’s new spokesperson. Funny that JC Penney thinks hiring an open homosexual spokesperson will help their business when most of its customers are traditional families. As consumers, what we find tragic is a corporate office and customer service department that not only transfers customers to voicemail, but even hangs up on them rather than verses hearing their concerns.

Since JC Penney won’t listen to us nationally, it is time we let them hear from us locally!

J.C. Penney says no, they’re sticking with Ellen.

A spokeswoman for the retailer declined further comment on the issue but did say in an e-mail to Reuters, “jcpenney stands behind its partnership with Ellen DeGeneres” and added that its announcement of the agreement last week sums up the company’s view of the popular TV personality

What’s most striking to me about this call to action is the way they phrase it. In their eyes, lining up with the intolerant bigots is “decid[ing] to be neutral in the culture war”!

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to take their advice. I will contact J.C. Penney, and I’ll tell them that as a longtime customer I’m glad that they’re not caving in to pressure and discriminating against Ellen DeGeneres for her sexual orientation.

Maybe you want to do the same.

Freedom of religion is an important value in American society, right?

This week, if you’re the Catholic Diocese of Burlington, apparently freedom of religion means the freedom to rape little boys with impunity.

It’s hard to believe, but that’s exactly what they’re arguing. According to the Burlington Free Press, in a brief filed in the United States District Court this week, here’s what they say: “The State cannot infringe on a protected freedom by imposing damages and penalties that the church cannot pay,”  . . .

“If the protections of the First Amendment are to mean anything, the government should not be allowed to shut the doors of a church and put it up for sale,” church lawyers Kaveh Shahi and Tom McCormick wrote.

Yes, you read that right: if they are required to pay damages to the victims of their criminal conspiracy to cover up rapes by their employees, and to move their employees around to where they could rape more victims, that would be a violation of their freedom of religion.

In the view of their lawyers, making the church pay damages is taking away the right of Catholics to practice their religion.

Is it just me, or does this seem to put the Catholic seal of approval on child rape to an unprecedented degree?

Color me unsympathetic.

Bet you never thought you’d hear me say that, huh?

I started hearing last night that Donald Trump was about to make a major announcement, and speculation raged about whether he was going to finally set that mangy weasel on his head free or something to do with getting all the Republican candidates to go on Celebrity Apprentice to decide who’s going to be the nominee, but the actual news is almost as good.

According to Politico, Trump is endorsing Newt Gingrich!

Yes, just when you thought Gingrich’s candidacy was dead another billionaire comes through to revive it. Or at least to keep it on life support until the convention.

Obviously a Gingrich presidency would be an unprecedented disaster, so like Robert Reich I wouldn’t even want to risk him being the Republican nominee. On the other hand, an evil alliance of the two biggest fatheads in American politics (pace, Chris Christie; your time will come) to beat up on the inevitable nominee is too much fun to pass up.

Breaking from all over: The Susan G. Komen Foundation has announced that it will cut off all funding for breast cancer screenings to Planned Parenthood.

Or, to be more specific, they conveniently just adopted a new policy barring grants to organizations that are under investigation by local, state or federal authorities. According to Komen, this applies to Planned Parenthood because it’s the focus of an inquiry launched by Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., seeking to determine whether public money was improperly spent on abortions.

You know what Planned Parenthood is. It’s the group with chapters all across the country that provides health care to women and men in such vital areas as family planning and cancer screening. In so doing, Planned Parenthood has probably done more to reduce abortions than any other single organization.

And SGK? The behemoth plastering every product and event it can get its hands on with pink, and spending over a million dollars a year bullying any other organization that even comes close to its “For the Cure” trademark.

Planned Parenthood received $680,000 in 2011 and $580,000 in 2010 from Komen for breast-cancer screening and related services. Nearly 170,000 clinical breast exams were supported by Komen grants.

This is a new low. While they claim they are trying to protect the purity of their funding, it seems more likely that they’re trying to protect themselves against association with the anti-choice, anti-sex attacks leveled against Planned Parenthood.

The Susan G. Komen message boards are being flooded with comments from women protesting this betrayal of women’s health concerns. I encourage you to add your voice.

There are also “Boycott Susan G. Komen” groups popping up on Facebook, and here’s where I suggest caution. If you read the group descriptions, at least one of these groups is an anti-choice cause basing its attacks on the fact that SGK was giving money to Planned Parenthood. The group to join is the one I just linked to, not the Boycott Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, which is the anti-choice group.

So today would be a good day to join the Facebook group, let them know how seriously you take this attack on choice and women’s health, and contribute to Planned Parenthood’s Breast Health Emergency Fund.