By avoiding best practices in a vote-by-mail effort practiced in other states, our Secretary of State Jim Condos is opening Vermont up to questions of electoral fraud.

A Supreme Court ruling in a Montana case finds that the government’s failure to pay tuition for children attending faith based schools is an unacceptable burden on “free exercise of religion”. That opens the door to tuitioning to such schools in Vermont, and vitiating our “no compelled support” constitutional provision.

For years, public demonstrations on issues ranging from abortion to climate change have been commonplace in Vermont, signs of a healthy civil discourse. But some demonstrations have taken a more sinister tone of late, undermining the foundations of our democracy.

Candidates continue to promise “affordable health care”, but on close inspection that translates to “I promise to make the government transfer your health care costs to somebody else.” India’s Narayana Health City actually does make surgery affordable, with modern Western techniques and comparable results. There a CABG operation goes for an all-in bundled price of $12,000 (plus $10,000 airfare for two). In the U.S. the tab is $100,000 or more.  Wake up, America!

Slavery was and is a horrible, dehumanizing institution, but to call it the United States’ “original sin” and to tear down statues and deface memorials to our founders (not to be confused with Confederate generals) is historically ignorant and dangerous. Slavery was hardly an original concept in the late 18^th and 19^th Century. In fact, pretty much every society since the modern version of humans evolved had slavery up until that time.

The Greeks had slaves. The Romans had slaves. The Egyptians had slaves to build the pyramids, and the Chinese had slaves to build the Wall. Vikings enslaved Saxons. Muslims enslaved Vikings. The English enslaved Irish and Scots. The Russians had serfs (potAYto, potAHto). The Incas, Mayans and Aztecs all had slavery, as did the North American native tribes. African nations had slaves themselves and sold them to European slave traders. Slavery was the norm for all 5500 or so years of recorded human history — until those crusty, old, dead, European white guys abolished it.