The Vermont Democratic Party should be ashamed of leaving Brenda Siegel in an uncontested primary to be the Democratic candidate for governor.
Siegel has no visible record of accomplishments or experience that might make her a reasonable candidate for the highest office in the state.
Her actions as director of the Southern Vermont Dance Festival landed her in Windham County's small claims court with at least one contractor (Vermont Superior Court, Windham Civil Division, docket number 149-8-16 WMSC). The case rightly went against her and came with a small, but fair judgment.
In the face of the judgment against her, Siegel still refused to pay what she owed. She appealed the court's decision and showed up in court, without her lawyer or any evidence to support her appeal, using valuable court resources.
The Senate Republicans have certainly taught former President Trump a lesson, but will our democracy survive it? The nation knows he is guilty. And now his guilt is their guilt. They are like the white juries in the South who acquitted lynchers, murderers, and Klansmen for a century and...
This accelerating season of racial violence has not triggered, so much as revealed, the deeply held racial biases that can kill innocents on both sides of the blue line when they are not explicitly examined. I believe no one in the United States comes to adulthood without some problems...
I have friends in Paris. They are currently all right. But more darkness has come to the city of light. I suppose it is helpful to know that the world is full of violence and deprivation and that they feed on each other. The people who seem to suffer least are the ones who cause the problem by hoarding the resources that should rightly nourish the community. The imbalances in human communities look to me more and more like imbalances...
Thank you for having ears for this story, and the wherewithal to share it with us all. We are headed into what seems to be a hard winter in a land of hard winters. We have to talk about the homeless in our midst. And do something.
I am prompted to write by the Jan. 2 letter to the editor of the Brattleboro Reformer by Dwight Zeager, written in response to the daily paper's editorials about police and race. Zeager presented opinions there that are trumpeted by every surviving white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan group in the nation. Though it is simple for anyone familiar with the history of the United States to refute Zeager's opinions, it is nonetheless necessary. As the late Duke University Professor...
I find myself in tears for the men and women we send into war (our veterans), for the victims, and the many families harmed by Bashar Hafez al-Assad's callous and venal use of chemical weapons. There is no joy in this for me. I wanted our president, Barack Obama, to actually rise to his own rhetoric. I admit to being a fool. And I would again willingly pay the price for my hopefulness. I will still back him if he...
As a layman who is well-versed in the health effects of radiation, I am offended by the misleading comments of the Tokyo Electric Power Co., Japanese and U.S. government officials, and media commentators regarding the radiation being inflicted on the people of Japan, the region, and the world. Radiation exposure is cumulative. As the work of Dr. John Goffman, a Manhattan Project participant, demonstrated back in the 1980s, there is no safe level of radiation. Every cumulative increase in exposure...