The Scoreboard: This Week's Winners and Losers
Who won and lost the week in Vermont news and politics?
Cats, Midd kids, political donors, your civil liberties and most definitely Vermont's congressional delegation.
Here's the Scoreboard for the week of Friday, Sept. 13:
Winners:
Vermont's congressional delegation — Last week they were sweating bullets over their pending vote on Syrian air strikes. This week, they dodged a bullet. Now repeat after me: "Thank you, Vladimir!"
Friendship — It sure is great to be chummy with Shummy. If you're tight with him, Gov. Peter Shumlin might buy your solar trackers, roll with you to China and meet with you privately in Manchester.
Rural Vermonters — Front Porch Forum, the online epicenter of municipal musings, has gone statewide, thanks to $300,000 from the Vermont Council on Rural Development. Now if everyone else's FPF is anything like my Old North End forum, you can look forward to plenty of bat-shit crazy.
Losers:
Vermont's congressional delegation — A Chittenden County military installation is a finalist for the Pentagon's latest job-creating defense project. And Vermont's congressional delegation — along with Shumlin — have lined up... against it?! Wait, what happened?! Runner-up winners: F-35 opponents, who will surely note a touch of inconsistency.
Vermont's poor, hungry, elderly and disabled — The state's racked up hundreds of thousands in fines for its "chronic" failure to properly distribute food stamp payments, the Vermont Press Bureau's Peter Hirschfeld reported Wednesday. Low-income energy assistance cuts are looming, VTDigger's Viola Gad reported Thursday. And the Department of Aging and Independent Living won't dole out the funding it's got to those who need it, VTDigger's Alicia Freese reported Thursday.
Vermont Gas Systems — Remember Entergy? That Green Mountain Power/Central Vermont Public Service merger? Those spinning things atop Lowell Mountain? Well, as 600 Vermonters definitively demonstrated Tuesday at a Middlebury hearing of the Public Service Board, Vermont Gas' pipeline proposal is the state's energy kerfuffle du jour.
Your civil liberties — At least, according to this neat web video commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union-Vermont. Runner-up winner: Abby Manock, who created the video (she was also behind Auditor Doug Hoffer's awesome whiteboard web ad) and brought her Noodle Family Traveling Circus to Burlington's South End Art Hop last weekend.
Midd kids — We're down with protests and stuff, but come on, Middlebury. It's worth noting to the "settler on stolen land" who chucked the flags that "visibilize" is not a word. Also, as WPTZ's David Charns reported, it's unclear what Abenaki burial ground the apologetic settler was protecting.
Catamounts — Vermont's favorite feline is really endangered now, the Burlington Free Press's Nancy Remsen reported Tuesday, as the Department of Fish and Wildlife considers scraping the cat off the back of your car. Runner-up winners: brook trout and hermit thrushes.
