I don’t expect any problems like we’ll be seeing in many other states, where tea party followers are being deployed to challenge the rights of blacks, hispanics, or others they decide look inherently shifty to vote. Nevertheless it is true that Vermont’s tea crowd is planning to deploy poll watchers in defiance of the Secretary of State’s reading of the law on this issue.

All of which is to say there’s the potential for friction, and friction at the polls can lead to nastiness (by which I mean more nastiness than the teabaggers come preloaded with by merit of the 50 pound chips attached to their shoulders).

SO on the off chance there is a problem, readers should be aware of www.866ourvote.org. This is the online home of “Election Protection,” which is standing ready to help voters who are feeling intimidated at the polls. Keep ’em in mind, just in case.

The help number is 1-866-our-vote (1-866-687-8683). Here’s a link to information on using twitter to report anything untoward.

It’s not just the money, its how you spend it.

Democrats are used to being outraised and outspent in statewide elections. When the dust clears on this one, Brian Dubie will have raised and spent more than Peter Shumlin overall. But it aint just about the receipts, and the Dems have learned how to get more bang for their buck (and I don’t just mean that they spend tens of thousands less on internal polls to tell them what they already know).

Dems know how to target their resources. Sure, the data’s always a bit fuzzy, but at least they have data and they use it intelligently, rather than just carpet-bomb their message indiscriminately (and expensively). Consider what’s been reported at this site in the last 24 hours or so:

• GMD front pager and well-known Franklin County gadfly Sue Prent got a robocall from Jim Douglas encouraging her to vote for the local GOP House candidate.
• GMD Front Pager Julie Waters got a robocall encouraging her to vote for Brian Dubie.
• Another GMD commenter received one of the Penny Dubie robocalls (okay, not a public figure, but still – any voter ID information in Dubie HQ at all?
• And a couple weeks ago I received a mailing from Brian Dubie encouraging me to vote early for him. But then, I suppose I’m not that widely known as a Shumlin supporter, really.

I don’t know how Sue and Julie feel, but for my part, I say to Brian Dubie and pals, spend all the money you want trying to convince me to vote for you. Gold plate those mailers, even. Send a mariachi band to my door.

Because its clear that I haven’t made up my mind. Better throw some more persuasion money my way. C’mon. There’s still time. You know you wanna.

The so-dubbed “youth vote” is always a big goal of elections. A lot of effort is pumped into turning out college age voters, and yet year after year they are among the lowest demographic to get to the polls. Two years ago it was a different story, as the Obama candidacy energized the young in a way we haven’t seen. This year, however, a lot of observers  are already concluding that 2008 was an anomaly, and that we should all expect that turnout rate to slide back to its historic levels.

If that worries you, take a look at these pictures (after the flip) from the Green Vote Bomb at UVM a few days ago, in which over 200 students registered and gathered over 100 vote pledges and early ballots in a single day!

A lot of people are working very hard to keep those numbers up.

(If you haven’t yet, be sure you go to the online GOTV tool at votegreengov.org! Use the tool to find your green voting friends and neighbors and send them a personalized email urging them to vote!!)

Wanna help get out the vote but don’t want to make calls?

Through the votegreengov.org project of the Vermont League of Conservation Voters, there’s a nifty tool available that I want to encourage readers to check out. Yeah, I’m gonna toot my own horn, here, and take credit for the concept, but it’s the PowerThru folks that made it work.

VLCV has a list of IDed green voters. When you go to this site and put in your email address, you can enter your zip code and see if there’s anybody you know on that list. You can then click on them and send them a personalized get-out-the-vote email message that comes from you, not some distant, generic, out of state automated-gotv-spam machine. It’s simple, form-driven (so nobody’s email address is hanging out there to be scooped up  by a third party) and includes no contact information, so as not to get into the issue of hanging personal info out there.

I’m excited because it brings true GOTV to the web, as opposed to just making a lot of generalized noise and content to drive as much traffic as possible to persuasion and GOTV sites. CHeck it out, spread the word (and let me know if there’s anything that doesn’t work right).

Here again is the link.

The Bennington Banner:

Mr. Dubie’s negative campaign, which smacks of the tactics of national Republican consultants like Karl Rove and has no place in Vermont. His ads have been too slick and cynical and tended to discourage honest debate

Margolis:

(Dubie) continues to make statements that are simply false, and that he must know are false unless he is willfully refusing to acknowledge what is obviously true.

Congratulations, Brian. Mission accomplished (quote can be heard here, at 6:37 into the audio).

(I wrote this yesterday, put a little time into it, and its languishing in Huffington Posts’s overburdened, pre-election queue. Rather than wait for it to show up and crosspost here, I’ll just go ahead and throw it up on GMD…

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It’s the year of the angry conservative. Of the tea party republican, no less. Voters think Obama is too liberal and are swinging to the far right. The GOP stands to overwhelm the House of Representatives and may take the Senate. Enthusiasm gap! Voter outrage! Dems running against “Obamacare!” Dogs and cats living together…!

And then there’s Vermont. Or perhaps you haven’t heard of us…

Vermont is different in a lot of currently emblematic ways. Yes there’s a tea party candidate for US House, but he is no threat to the staunchly liberal incumbent.

A true blue state you say? Then why has the Governor for most of the decade been a Republican? Why is the Lieutenant Governor a pro-life, anti-gay marriage, conservative Christian who is solidly supportive of GOP mass-market positions such as opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque?”

And why in a state that is the nation’s most rural (which, the media narrative goes, should therefore be the most conservative), does the national narrative stand to be flipped on its head? In Vermont, it’s been a long time Republican administration in executive power, and the voters stand ready to possibly promote a progressive Democrat to the position, despite the fact that he trailed in the polls around 20 points earlier in the summer.

So what gives? The media has neither the wherewithal nor the interest to actively examine this phenomenon. These mainstream narrative mills tend to be uninterested in things that might prove their analyses inadequate, and instead simply cast Vermont as so innately quirky and silly as to merit complete dismissal (and that’s if they acknowledge the state at all). Vermonters are just some kind of seperate species, apparently. They don’t count.

Vermonters tend to embrace this “unique species” branding too (because it’s kind of fun), but they’re obviously humans (and if that seems like too obvious a point to make, well… maybe).

What is the case is that Vermont political dynamics are not beholden to the same overarching guide on what’s-what that our media institutions are promoting as hard truth. And whatever those counter-convention-wisdom dynamics are, they tend to resonate when given a hearing on the national stage. This was evident when the little known former Governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, ran for President in 2004 and was roundly laughed at by the political and media establishment. None of them were laughing only a few months later, when his offering of some of that same Vermont to the nation at large resonated with enough in the Democratic Party that he very nearly walked away with the nomination (in fact, he likely would have if not for the panicked coordination of his opponents in the Washington Democratic Party establishment, notably current Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, to craft one of the more strikingly negative advertising images in recent political memory).

Vermont’s politics can fairly be called dialectic, in the sense that they are the synthesis of many seeming contradictions, therfore defying simple explanations. Almost any issue can serve as an example, but take the politics of the environment. Vermont is considered a haven of liberal environmentalism to many outsiders (and even to many on the inside). Largely that’s due to appearences; it’s rural quality, natural vistas, recreation opportunities, even the lack of billboards along roadsides, banned as the were decades ago. Some of those vistas (along with the relatively low impact of the housing market bust in the state) reflect the success of the landmark land use regulatory regime that has been in place in one form or another for decades. Hidden behind those vistas are the repeated failures to implement natural resource protection laws and strong progressive energy policies.

The fact is that there is nothing in the air, the water or the genes that makes Vermont such a different place – the kind of place that elects both an open socialist to the Senate and a conservative Christian pro-lifer as Lieutenant Governor. In fact there is no one reason to account for the dynamics; it is neither some simple small-town-versus-big-town, nor do the political divisions and discrepencies break down along the lines of “native born” versus “outsiders,” as much as many find it politically advantageous to try and cast it as such.

But here’s the point; instead of looking for the reason why Vermont political society breaks the plotlines of the rest of the country, it makes more sense to explain why the rest of the country isn’t more like Vermont. The easy, pre-digested media narratives, institutional lines of seperation (whether those be institutions defined by distinctions of religion, region, gender, race, income, whatever…) simply haven’t come to define voters in Vermont the way they have in other states. It’s not say they aren’t important – just that they shake out differently. The answer to “why” is probably a complex soup of reasons, rather than one or two easy ones – but we should all be taking a good look at what those reasons may be, and how they can translate to the rest of the country.

It is the paradox of population that the more of us there are and the more we then communicate via mass media, the more we tend to coagulate into monolithic mentalities, depite our increased diversity as a collection of individuals.

What Vermont shows us, though, is that trends, generalities and simplistic media narratives are not necessarily destiny, even as those narratives and the simple stereotyping they feed exert powerful pressures towards their own self-fulfillment.

(Vermonters: Visit votegreengov.org and take the pledge to vote green in 2010!)

The Vermont Department of Public Safety) made public a November 2009 cruiser video showing state Auditor Tom Salmon being stopped and eventually arrested in Montpelier for drunken driving.

Assistant Attorney General Kate Whelley McCabe had argued in court on the department’s behalf that the video was part of a criminal investigation and therefore was exempt from disclosure under the state’s public-records law.

[…] “Does this mean all trooper videos … are a public record?” Sorrell said.

Yes.

Yesterday, Jim Condos called out his GOP opponent for Secretary of State, Jason Gibbs, on his embracing of the “Vermont Tea Party Patriots.” The Vermont group is part of a movement that is initiating voter intimidation tactics across the country. At the time, I snagged this screen grab to demonstrate he was one of 155 members of their Facebook group:

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to read that, after a quick glance back at the site, Mr. Gibbs no longer appears as a member. Wonder how his friends at the site, such as Rob Roper, feel about his high-tailing it away from ’em.

I’m not gonna wax all goopy for my friend Philip, here – just the facts. Speaking generally, first…

• He’s right on the issues. Duh.
• He’s a scholar, rather than another person from the professional pol/lobbyist/Montpelier set. Not that I have anything against the professional pol/lobbyist/Montpelier set at all (where most of my friends live), but there is a clubby atmosphere that forms in that crowd that could stand to be broken up from time to time, and I’d feel especially good about doing that with a scholar.
• He’s a professional artist for heaven’s sake. Not in the sense that he draws pictures (I dunno, maybe he does), but he’s from the arts. He’s a writer, and I think more of our men and women from the arts community – again out of principle – should get into politics. Get a little more of that vision thing going (Vaclav Havel, anyone?)

On to the more specific…

• He’s totally approachable. You can talk to the guy and he’ll listen. Always.
• He won’t pander. He’ll listen, but be straightforward when he disagrees, just as he’ll respect your opinion.
• He’s not dogmatic, and he’s going to be willing to think outside the box for that reason. But at the same time, his stands on principle are unbreakable, and he can be counted on to take those stands when the time comes, without exception.
• He’s a good person, which is the highest praise I know how to give. You just can’t have too many good people in government, and Philip’s one of the best.

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UPDATE: Wowie zowie, the Burlington Free Press agrees, giving Philip their endorsement along with fellow Dems, incumbents Ashe, Miller and Lyons, and Republicans Snelling and Smith.

Damn! First, Anthony Pollina running for State Senate as a Dem, now the Free Press itself endorses a blogmaniac for office!? Should I be keeping my eyes open for scary-looking horsemen on the horizon?

… in fact, as the global maps below indicate, they may already be under way.

Whether were talking a true mass extinction or simply a precipitous drop in ecological diversity over the next 100 years, the fact is that according to a new study more than half of all species of vertabrates on planet Earth move one category closer to extinction each year. Declines are, of course, reversible, but in the scope of the study, 16% of those have already led to extinction.

The maps below, while showing that the greatest concentrations of loss of diversity are in the tropics, particularly in areas of heavy resource extraction, Vermont too is losing the ecological diversity that in many ways defines it:

   

(Brown and blue indicate increased die-offs. This next map uses this die-off data to make projections of the overall deterioration of biodiversity:)



A global problem, sure – but one that will only be solved by a full-court press of solutions from the global right down to the neighborhood level. Many Vermonters are stepping up and doing their part through initiatives such as VECAN’s community-by-community efforts to limit carbon emissions, but action at the statewide level could have so much more impact. We have little to no protection of our rivers (and amphibians in particular are facing a crisis), and have an a Governor in Jim Douglas who has left his own Climate Change Commission’s recommendations rotting on the shelf. Many of the environmental protections and energy initiatives we do have are either window dressing, or too-little-by-half solutions that have had to be clawed and scratched for.

The global crisis won’t fix itself, and the UN can’t just step in and fix it for everybody. That means our governmental institutions need to start taking it seriously. As the maps show, it’s no longer a faraway abstraction, if indeed it ever was. (See here and here for links to the study and a related piece, and ht to Annalee at io9… not a site I usually get my political links from!)

Visit votegreengov.org and take the pledge to vote green in 2010! (a reminder that the posts explicitly promoting votegreengov – and those posts only – are being done as part of my working with LCV for the tail end of the election season)