The forced remote learning fiasco imposed on Vermont public school students this past year highlighted the lack of common benefits available from the state’s education system.

            A few days ago I received a copy of an email to a constituent from Rep. George Till, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. The Committee is apparently discussing which if any of the recommendations of the Vermont Tax Structure Commission to enact.

Here’s the latest on the climate change battlefront. Guy Page of the Vermont Daily reported last week that “The Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club is standing with the national Sierra Club petition to the Biden administration to regulate dairy farms of 500 or more cows under the Clean Air Act, due to air pollution and climate concerns. If approved, the regulations would affect about 30 Vermont farms, at least to start with.”

Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s Democrat secretary of state has been in his office since 1976, so he has seen and overseen quite a few elections. He testified before congress in vehement opposition to H.R. 1, the proposed legislation that would, among other things, expand vote-by-mail in throughout the nation. Proponents nationally, and here in Vermont as we debate our own proposal to absentee ballots to all voters regardless of request, say this will increase turnout. 

Everybody in Montpelier is already well aware of the decades long and now abandoned Capital Plaza hotel and parking garage project, but for the benefit of others let me quote Charles Martin, of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.

On April 16, Bill Maher gave a scathing, pointed monologue that somehow managed to get his left-leaning audience to laugh at themselves.

For years, legislators on the left have been eager to tax so called “cloud” services, or, as the legal language refers to them, “specified digital products transferred electronically to an end user regardless of whether for permanent use or less than permanent use and regardless of whether or not conditioned upon continued payment from the purchaser; or - … vendor-hosted prewritten computer software and the right to access and use vendor-hosted prewritten computer software to perform data processing services.”

In English, think Spotify, Pandora, TurboTax, Adobe products, Microsoft Office, Netfilx, Hulu, etc. and so on ad infinitum.

By Matthew Strong

Following Secretary of State Jim Condos’ appearance on the WVMT radio show, Morning Drive, where he was confronted by a caller claiming to be a Middlebury landlord who witnessed students “scooping up” and fraudulently submitting unclaimed or unwanted mailed ballots in the last election, we have been asking the Secretary’s office for specific details regarding security measures, or lack thereof, in Vermont’s proposed vote-by-mail bill, S.15. So far, Eric Covey, spokesperson for the office, has been adamant that there is no fraud in Vermont, but evasive regarding specific questions about specific vulnerabilities in the system.