As Town Meeting Day approaches my mind goes back to three years ago, when our founder, John Odum, was engaged in a hotly contested race for Montpelier City Clerk. He won by a couple of hundred votes, but it was a real campaign, with yard signs, handouts, and everything.

So John took office and he immediately started doing great things in the job. Here's one example from the city clerk's Facebook page:

 As many of you who come by frequently know, since the nearly 3 years since I arrived in the office, we have changed the way we process and provide access to land records. Our new system allows us, not only to make land records and indexes available online, but also to turn around those records and make them available on the same day they arrive, breaking up a backlog that was sometimes as long as 3 months.

Even more exciting is that these changes allowed us to decrease the costs by around 2/3rds. This is a major reason why I was actually able to present my third departmental budget in a row that was actually a decrease from the previous year.

 And what about the election contest he faced three years ago?Well, here's a clip from this year's sample ballot:

Observers have been assuming that Miro Weinberger has an easy path to reelection, and the three-way split for the opposition can only help him, right?

The latest move by Greg Guma to stand out from the crowd has worked, but probably not in the way he had hoped.

Attack ads? The line on them is everybody hates them, but everybody knows they work. I'm not sure this one's coming up trumps for Guma, though. Let's take a look.

Bulls-eye superimposed on the mayor's head–Check

Sound of a gunshot along with the bulls-eye–Check

Swiping a copyrighted photo from the Burlington Free Press--That's your trifecta right there!

 “Greg Guma–Take the target off Burlington's back” and put it on the mayor's head.

I'm not involved in the election, but this leaves me shaking my head. 

Vaccines are not a Democrat-Republican issue, or a left-right issue. Vaccines are a matter of public health. The only division is between the rational and the irrational.

Today Phil Scott came down on the side of the rational. According to VPR,  Lt. Gov. Phil Scott says he thinks lawmakers should do away with the philosophical exemption to the state's mandatory immunization law.

I'm hearing that the anti-vaxxers are all over him for this stance, although I'm waiting for the evidence. Meanwhile, I think it's great to have a leading statewide official standing for public health and safety. 

Over the decades we have often seen that the young, refusing to blindly swallow what they have been told, are at the forefront of the march for freedom.

The intrepid heroes on display today are a group of young people, we can consider them a resistance cell, in Palatine, Illinois. There are only five now, but there is every reason to expect their numbers will grow and their philosophy of freedom will continue to expand.

From the Chicago Tribune:

 Public health officials warned Thursday that more measles cases are likely after five infants who attend a suburban day care center were diagnosed with the highly infectious disease.

The outbreak at a KinderCare Learning Center in Palatine marks the second appearance of the measles in Illinois within the last month. Officials last week said a suburban Cook County adult had contracted the disease and visited a Palatine grocery store and health clinic while possibly contagious.

 http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/chi-measles-palatine-20150205-story.html#page=1

 My hat is off to these brave activists, all under the age of twelve months. If we're lucky, their refusal to accept the orthodoxy of the vaccine industry will spread to Vermont very soon.

If you weren't listening closely you would have missed it.

What it was was just one more piece of evidence that, as conservatives keep claiming, the hatred for President Obama has nothing to do with race.

Today it's a story on NPR's Morning Edition about the latest attack on women's rights by Congressional Republicans, and you need to listen very closely to the chant at the very end of the story.

If you don't want to wait for it, move the cursor ahead to about 4:09 of the 4:11 story, to where you hear a bunch of anti-abortion demonstrators. I had to listen a few times to be sure, but what they're chanting is “Hey, Obama, yo'mama chose life”. 

Yes, you heard right. It's a bunch of young white women chanting “Yo mama” at our black president.

Nothing racial about that, right? 

I thought we heard a great speech tonight, and here's what I heard from President Obama right out of the box:

 Today, we’re the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers. Forty-three million workers have no paid sick leave. Forty-three million. Think about that. And that forces too many parents to make the gut-wrenching choice between a paycheck and a sick kid at home. So I’ll be taking new action to help states adopt paid leave laws of their own. And since paid sick leave won where it was on the ballot last November, let’s put it to a vote right here in Washington. Send me a bill that gives every worker in America the opportunity to earn seven days of paid sick leave. It’s the right thing to do.

 We could have had paid sick leave last year. It was a bill in the Legislature but late in the session it didn't pass. 

The concept did come before the Democratic Party's platform convention last year, though, and we did adopt it as part of our platform: 

 Is committed to ensuring that workplace standards in Vermont promote public health and safety and are responsive to the needs of Vermont's workforce and families.  To this end, we support establishing a minimum standard of earned paid leave for all Vermont workers.

It's another year and another legislative session. Democrats still have strong majorities in both the House and the Senate. It's time to show what we work for when we elect those majorities. It's time for Vermont to follow President Obama's lead and pass earned sick leave. 

Since the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo last week there have been plenty of discussions of what is really terrorism, and whether there is such a thing as explicitly Muslim terrorism.

Let's take a look at the definition. Federal law defines terrorism as follows:

“International terrorism” means activities with the following three characteristics:

Involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;

Appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

Occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S., or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.*

“Domestic terrorism” means activities with the following three characteristics:

Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;

Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination. or kidnapping; and

Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.

There are some differences, but the key concepts include violent or dangerous acts intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population. Let's keep those concepts in mind.

Last Friday, a blogger in Saudi Arabia received the first fifty lashes of the sentence he received of ten years in prison and one thousand lashes for “insulting Islam”. According to the Washington Post, In 2011 prosecutors alleged that his Web site “infringes on religious values.” He was arrested in 2012, when a well-known cleric issued a religious ruling that Mr. Badawi was an apostate who must be tried. 

In the Philippines, local cultural activist Carlos Celdran is appealing a sentence of imprisonment imposed for violating the law against “offending religious feelings.”

In both cases, the state seeks to carry out violent acts to prevent public criticism of the dominant religion.

There are differences. For instance, critics of Celdran might be quick to point out that the crime he was convicted of involved his going into a church service with a protest sign, but look more closely: he wasn't charged with unlawful trespass, or disrupting the church service. The gravamen of his crime was that he offended religious feelings.

The State Department publishes a list of state sponsors of terrorism, countries that have been “determined to have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism”. The listing has always been political. Nevertheless, given the actions of these two United States “allies”, one of them, Saudi Arabia, being one of the most repressive regimes in the world, can we justify not targeting these states for terrorism against their own people?

I'm sure you don't recognize this guy, because, after all, you don't live in Idaho.

If you did you might recognize him as Barry McHugh, the prosecuting attorney for Kootenai County, Idaho.

Old Barry's hit the news, and maybe not for something he'd want to be in the news for. You see, Barry has issued a warrant for the arrest of a nine-year-old boy for stealing gum.

I don't know, maybe the kid's a repeat offender. Maybe he stole a cookie when he was six and got away with it, so now he's headed down the road to a life of crime. A cookie here, gum there, and there's no telling where it will end.

I'm sure Barry has his reasons, because, you see, he has prosecutorial discretion. He gets to decide who he will prosecute and who he won't prosecute, and there's pretty much nothing that anybody else can do about it. So the nine-year-old gets sent off the the Little Big House to learn the error of his ways.

But you know, practicing law can be hard work, especially with all that exercising prosecutorial discretion. You mouth sure can get dry from all that discretioning, especially up in Idaho.

So wouldn't it be a kind gesture, a way to let him know how much we appreciate his efforts to keep Kootenai safe, to send him a piece of gum?

I know that's what I'm going to do, and if you're inclined to do the same, here's the address:

Barry McHugh, Prosecuting Atty

P: (208) 446-1800

Physical Address:

501 Government Way

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83814

Oh, one other thing: I went and got some legal advice and I'm told that if you are inclined to send ol' Barry some gum you should make sure not to send him anything with a liquid center or a powdery residue. There are people who send dangerous stuff through the mail, but a little gum never hurt anybody.

Lord knows there's no shortage of issues to get organized about, but I know what my number one advocacy issue would be for the coming year if I were living in Boston right now.

It's the Olympics.

Sure, it's supposedly a point of national pride when your country is selected to hold the Olympics, and within the country it's supposedly a point of pride, of preeminence, a sign that you've made it if your city is selected, but what's the benefit of being selected for the equivalent of a flood, an earthquake, or a major hurricane? Yet that's exactly what the U.S. Olympic Committee wants the people of Boston to do.

Friday Nate Scott posted a column in USA Today laying out some of the practical problems with trying to shoehorn an extra half million people into a medium-sized, already congested city with already inadequate transportation and housing infrastructure. Boston's already been through one massive, disastrous public works program in recent years, and the congestion, delays, and cost overruns of the Big Dig will be dwarfed by the spending and construction needed to build the Olympics.

In addition to the problems with this plan that Scott enunciates, anyone in Boston or anywhere in Massachusetts who thinks that there are already misguided priorities in the city and state budgets will be shocked by what can only be a massive diversion of funding from human needs to this plaything for the international rich.

But it's not just the money. Just last year Norway decided to pass on a bid for the Winter Olympics because of the arrogant demands of the International Olympic Committee to be treated like royalty throughout their say at the competition. Here are some of their demands:

*A meeting and cocktail party with King Harald before and after the opening ceremony, with the royal family or Norwegian Olympic committee picking up the tab.

*A full bar for IOC pooh-bahs at the stadium during the opening and closing ceremonies.

*IOC members must be greeted with a smile upon arriving at their hotels.

*Hotels for IOC members must be pre-cleaned “particularly well,” and hotel management should be prepared to correct the slightest problem posthaste.

*All meeting rooms must be kept at 68 degrees.

*The usual car and driver at the beck and call of IOC members.

When I was growing up I always enjoyed watching the Olympics, and the exploits of athletes like Michael Johnson and Usain Bolt remind us all that we can count on greatness from the competitors. Nevertheless, as time goes on, the excess of the ceremonies, the celebrity and personality focus of the coverage, and the sheer bloat of the entire event has led me to conclude that I don't really care if they have another Olympics ever.

At a minimum, I would expect the people of Boston to be saying “Not here”.

It was just over five years ago that we were writing about censorship at Yale. On that occasion Yale University decided to excise the Danish cartoons from a scholarly work examining freedom of expression and the cartoon controversy.

As we said at the time: So what does it say when one of our greatest universities lacks the courage of a small newspaper in Denmark?

Again it's a tiny publication in comparison to one of our great institutions of journalism, and again the terrorists and murderers have won.

Yes, the New York Times has decided that it won't publish the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo that apparently led to the murders of twelve free people. The same is true of NBC News. And the Washington Post.

Here's one of them:

Pretty crude and juvenile, right? Muhammad is depicted as saying, “100 lashes if you don't die of laughter.”

The voices of “responsible” journalism have the usual things to say: they're not being intimidated, they're being sensitive; they are never in the business of being offensive just for the sake of being offensive; how can they justify putting their employees at risk?

The thing is, though, that freedom of speech is important to us here in America. We figured out a long time ago that we can't have a democratic, civilized society without it. If some people are offended, so be it.

And the other thing is that there's no limit. There's no way a writer, an editor, or a publication can say, “If I just give in to them on this one point it'll be okay.” There's never just one point. Once you let the terrorists decide what you can publish they'll be making that decision for you and your readers every day, and all of a sudden you're out of the journalism business and into–well, I don't know what you call it at that point.

Coincidentally, down in Maryland we just observed the case of an idiot politician threatening to sue a local newspaper any time they published his name. They didn't back down, and they made him a laughing stock. Rightly so. That was an easy one, though, because the entire world knew that he couldn't make it stick: his was a hollow threat.

The threat to kill journalists who publish pictures someone doesn't like has repeatedly been shown not to be a hollow threat at all. Still, the fundamentalists and terrorists don't get to win, because after they win one, what's to stop them from winning all of them?