If you've been paying attention to the debate on Douglas's proposed ATV rules, which Douglas has now promulgated even over the unanimous objection of the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules, you know that one of the big arguments is how bad it will really be if ATV trails are allowed on public lands. Will the new rules open the doors to hooliganism and generally destructive behavior, as environmentalists argue, or will the ATV riders effectively police themselves, as the trails' supporters claim?

The experience on snowmobile trails is instructive. 

The Burlington Free Press reports that so far this winter there have been three fatal snowmobile crashes in Vermont, with alcohol involved in one of the crashes.

The advocacy group for snowmobilers is the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers.  VAST pays $170,000 to Vermont law enforcement for patrols on and near snowmobile trails. The money is divided among state police, county sheriffs’ departments, and Vermont Fish and Wildlife officers. Police conduct patrols on snowmobile trails, much like police look out for drunken drivers on Vermont highways, said Sgt. J.R. Underhill, the recreational enforcement coordinator for the Vermont State Police.

So what can we take from this? Even spending $170,000 a year, the Vermont authorities can't keep snowmobilers from driving like maniacs and killing themselves in the woods.

We also know that ATV riders are already violating accepted standards of behavior. In a report in the Burlington Free Prss, the reporter and her local guide came upon unauthorized trail use:

 A number of signs warned that the trail is off-limits to all but paying members of an umbrella group, the Vermont All-Terrain Vehicle Sportsman’s Association, or VASA. On the other hand, a dozen yards from the legal trail, ATVs had begun to carve a second, unauthorized trail away from the trailhead. Tracks showed in the flattened grass, and a deep mud hole was forming at a low spot.

“That isn’t supposed to be there,” Carlin said, blaming it on “a group of guys who want to go up that way.” He said the club had made a barrier of brush across the informal trail, but it had been removed.
“We have a trail patrol that logs hundreds and hundreds of hours,” he said. The patrols watch for improper use, keep the trails clear and safe, and educate nonmembers about the benefits of joining, he said.

What are the odds they will do any better when the trails are on public lands?

I don't doubt that many of our readers have enjoyed Stephen Huneck's work: his sculptures and other dog art, and the mug he designed for Vermont Public Radio. I've never visited the dog chapel, but I have been to the gallery he used to operate on Martha's Vineyard. At our last visit to the Vineyard last summer the gallery was closed, possibly an indicator of the financial troubles he was facing.

The news today is that on Thursday Stephen Huneck, despondent about the financial setbacks his business had suffered, took his own life.

A letter from his wife, Gwen Huneck, recalls that  “On the last page of the 'Dog Chapel' book Stephen wrote 'you too can build a chapel, in a place that’s always open in your heart'.”

Here's a letter to the editor in today's Times Argus that is revealing of the attitude of the Boy Scouts of America:

My partner and I [have lived] in East Montpelier for over ten years. We have two children and full-time jobs. We attend school and community events, we vote on Election Day and we pay lots of taxes. We even attend church. 

When this couple met with their local Cub Scout leader to introduce themselves and to volunteer to help with the countless tasks running a Cub Scout “pack” entails, you would think they'd be greeted with open arms, right?

No, there's a catch. Because the parents were a lesbian couple the local leader told them they could not help with leadership because “we wouldn't want you pushing your lifestyle on the boys” and he crossed our names off the volunteer list.

The bigotry by the Boy Scouts is no surprise: that's what they do; they exclude atheists, they exclude gays and lesbians, and the list of people they exclude probably goes way beyond what i'm even imagining.

What's as disturbing here, though, is the comments from Times Argus readers. We have the temptation to feel smug, what with marriage equality and the BFP naming Beth Robinson Vermonter of the Year, but this is a real reminder of the bigotry in our midst. 

It’s a holiday, and we know what that means: You’re not at the office reading Green Mountain Daily.

Still, this is an opportunity to look back at 2009 and talk about what was important in the political world, both in Vermont and the rest of the country; what we covered on GMD and what we might have missed.

I’ll throw out a few ideas to get things started.

Vermont adopts marriage equality. After taking the lead with the creation of civil unions, Vermont had fallen behind other states in the recognition of same-sex marriage, and this is the year Vermont took the step to full marriage equality.

Douglas vetoes overridden–twice. After being virtually unstoppable despite an overwhelming legislative deficit, this is the year that Democrats, Progressives, and Independents, particularly in the House, were able to get together to override two important Douglas vetoes, on marriage equality (with the help of some Republicans) and the Big Bill.

Five candidates emerge to run for governor. After a lackluster 2008 campaign, in which the Democrats were barely able to field a candidate, five credible Democratic candidates are in the hunt to succeed Douglas. Susan Bartlett, Matt Dunne, Deb Markowitz, Doug Racine, and Peter Shumlin have either officially announced, or are actively campaigning. All are political veterans; almost all have run statewide campaigns before; who will make it to November to challenge Lite Gov Brian Dubie for the top job?

Your thoughts?

Cross posted from Rational Resistance:

Yes, it's that time again. The Pew Forum released its annual survey of rational thinking and Vermont and New Hampshire, combined in the totals because of our small population, came out in first place.

Well, okay, if you want to get technical about it, that wasn't the way the Pew people viewed the survey. The way Pew asks the questions: Which of the 50 states has the most religious population? Since there are many ways to define “religious,” there is no single answer to this question. But to give a sense of how the states stack up, the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life used polling data to rank them on four measures: the importance of religion in people's lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God. Mississippi stands out on all four, and several other Southern states also rank very high on the measures.

Although the Vermont/New Hampshire combo ranked at the bottom of the scale in the importance of religion in people's lives and certainty of belief in god, we were one from the bottom in church attendance (above Alaska, which may be assisted by the difficulty of transportation) and fourth from the bottom in frequency of prayer.

Still, those of us who favor rationality and evidence-based thought can take pleasure in Vermont's stellar performance. Keep up the good work, Vermonters!

Another legislative death, just a day after Ira Trombley.

WCAXis reporting that Rick Hube, a Republican from Londonderry, reportedly died from an aortic aneurism while visiting his family for Christmas in Florida.

Hube had served in the Legislature since 1999.

The Manchester Journal has more details about his life and political career.

Hube took stances that surprised other lawmakers. He was one of only five Republicans to vote this year for same-sex marriage.

As a lobbyist I'm often in the position of trying to figure out an answer to this question: should we fight, and hold out for what we want, or should we take what we think is the best we can get now, even though it's a lot worse than what we want, and try to get more later?

This is the question that activists are addressing on the health care bill. On the one hand we have people like born-again Democrat Howard Dean and many posters at GMD, arguing that the bill is so bad that it would be better to kill it. On the other hand, we have Democrats and pundits who have been reliably progressive voices but are now being targeted as sellouts for supporting passage.

In evaluating this question, a number of other questions come to my mind:

1. The public option? Really? That's what we wanted?
It's not the only argument against passing the bill now, but the fight over the public option was what fueled much of the controversy through the summer and fall, and particularly the treachery of Joe Lieberman. We need to keep in mind, though, that the public option was always a weak compromise, a recognition that progressives can't get what we really want, single-payer, at least this time around. At GMD we've mocked Catamount Health, Vermont's version of the public option, but we recognize that even an inadequate program is better than nothing.
The public option was definitely an idea worth having, and so was Medicare buy-in. Still, it's a matter of displacement of our true desires that leads us to think the public option is something we need to fight to the death over.

2. We were never going to get anything close to what we wanted.

In these times we know that we need sixty votes in the Senate to get anything passed. In a controversy like this, where getting anything at all passed depended on getting the majority of a handful of moderate Republicans–Snow, Collins, Landrieu, Lieberman, and Nelson, none of whom really care about passing anything, means that the bill that passes will be a compromise of a compromise. That's the way life is and there's not much point in calling Reid and Obama useless, ineffectual losers because they can't get 100% of the votes in their putative caucus.

3. What's the alternative?
One concept in negotiation theory is BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. For our purposes, before telling our representatives to kill the bill we should think about what will happen if they do.
I don't see any likelihood that we will see anything approaching health care reform if this bill is killed in the foreseeable future. None of the conditions that are present now, or that are likely to come about in the future, are going to get any better than what we have now.
First, the politics aren't getting better. We have seen several Democratic representatives announce they are retiring, and there are a number of Democratic senators, including Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, and Arlen Specter*,  who are in trouble and may not get reelected.  This is consonant with the fact that the President's party typically loses votes in the off-year election; I don't see any signs that this won't happen in 2010.
Second, the economics aren't getting better. Whatever the costs of health care are now, and whatever we need to spend to cover those costs, they will only go up. This means that every year into the future will be harder to create a health care financing program than it is now.
Third is the fiscal situation. The Bush deficit, the costs of the bailout, and the costs of the war, are all combining to make federal budgeting problems worse in the next five years than they are now. We can wait for a recovery, but a strong recovery isn't likely to happen in the next five years.

4. Things in Congress are different now.
Changes in party alignment have made it harder to accomplish important things now than it was in the past. For many years people talked about the parties as “big tents”. For most of the 20th Century both major parties tried to follow a big tent strategy, forming their parties out of ideological and regional coalitions. The Democratic Party included northeast liberals and southern racists; the Republican Party included western free-landers and northeast financial types who were not particularly committed to social issues.
This started to change with Nixon's Southern Strategy, a frank, and successful, appeal to southern racists; it continued through the 1980's under Ronald Reagan and Lee Atwater with continued appeals to racism and religious intolerance, and is essentially complete today. The defections of Jim Jeffords and Arlen Specter signaled the completion of the Republican purge of any but the most extreme conservatives.
This has not happened in the Democratic Party. Our party has always been more pluralistic, and has exercised less doctrinal discipline, than the Republicans, and the same is true today. The ideological range in the Democratic Party in 2010 is much broader than that of the Republicans, which means that it is easy for the Republican leadership to dictate the position of every member of the caucus, but it is not possible for the Democratic leadership to do the same thing.
An example from the past is instructive. The 1964 Civil Rights Act passed the Senate 73-27, and passed cloture 71-29 (at a time when 67 votes were needed to support cloture).
What is more interesting is the party breakdown. Democrats in the Senate supported the bill 46-21 and Republicans supported it 27-6. (This is what gives Republicans the support for their claim that it was the Republicans who actually passed the Civil Rights bill.) On both sides we see a tremendous amount of cross-party voting.

We don't see this today: the strongest wish for bipartisan support for this bill is that one or two Republicans, presumably one of the two senators from Maine, would support some form of health care reform. We now know that will never happen. It is unimaginable that we will ever see 27, or even 6, Republicans with the decency or political sense that they need to support something like reformed health care financing.

What does this mean? I suggest it means that we can't pass anything important without close to unanimous Democratic support. That also means that, as much as ever, if not more so, anything that comes out of Congress will have to be a huge compromise, and the negotiating or compromising parties are not the Democrats and the Republicans, because the Republicans are determined to block anything the Democrats, and particularly the Democratic President, want to accomplish. No, the compromise must be reached between the real Democrats and the right wing of the party.

That's what we have today.

I am not willing to say the bill should be killed because I don't see any chance of getting anything better than is before us now at any time in the next five, ten, or fifteen years. As my colleagues have pointed out, this is an extremely weak bill. Nevertheless, It's the best we're likely to see. It's our best chance to get something rather than nothing. It's only after we have something that we can start the equally important work of fixing it.

Oh yes–one other thing. I don't hold Reid responsible for not being able to get 100% of his nominal caucus to line up on health care. I do hold him responsible if he lets Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship and other positions of responsibility within the caucus.

We've covered this story before: the Douglas Administration wants to open public lands to ATV's, while 1005 of the environmentalists in the state oppose it. For months (since just after the Legislature adjourned, actually) they've been going back and forth on the Douglas ATV rule, and for at least a couple of months it has looked very tough for the administration.

Yesterday they voted, and it was a unanimous vote against the rule.

First, here's another view of what's at stake. Here's what the hiking trails you now enjoy might wind up looking like if the rule goes into effect:

The vote was unanimous. Nobody on the committee agreed with the Douglas interpretation that says that the executive has essentially unlimited power to pass rules without a grant of authority from the Legislature.

Back in November in these pages Caoimhin Laochdha eviscerated the administration's argument, and now that analysis has the support of a joint legislative committee. Next stop: consideration by the full Legislature next month.

The action by the committee doesn't stop the rule from going into effect, but it does strip the rule of the presumption of validity it would otherwise have in the event of the (inevitable) chalenge in court.

Does this portend more trouble for the administration when the Legislature reconvenes in January? We can only hope.

Cross posted from Rational Resistance:

I never have, but I am frequently told by people who do, even liberals or leftists, that there is a clear distinction between the Journal's right-wing editorial pages and it's balanced, objective news coverage.

No more.

According to a story in yesterday's Times,

I can't say I'm surprised. Truly, I was always skeptical of the idea that the Journal was a good, objective paper over the years. Now, with the takeover of the paper by Rupert Murdoch, there is no room for doubt.

Romenesko reprints the response from the editor of the Journal, but the perspicacious reader will spot a non-denial denial, no?

If there were some inaccuracy in the Times story you'd think he'd point out where it is, wouldn't you?

That's what I thought.

Everybody I know likes to give at least some money to charity during the Christmas season. Or, to be a little clearer, everybody I know believes that they should give to charity and finds it rewarding to do so. If you're coming here I suspect that one of your life motivations is to make the world a better place.

In my family we decided years ago to concentrate our giving on the Heifer Project, a charity that helps provide food relief, economic development, and self-sufficiency to people in impoverished regions around the world. They have a catalogue that describes what they do and what your contribution buys, so you can give geese, pigs, honeybees, or even big animals like heifers, llamas, or water buffalo. They even have a project specifically targeted to help women, who make up the vast majority of impoverished people around the world.

There's too much need for any of us to think we're doing more than scratching the surface, but I have no doubt that Heifer is one organization that really makes a difference in people's lives.