Tag Archives: Vermont Daily Chronicle

In Re: Coyote V. Boulder

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You probably know what happens when a bunch of Trumpers walk into a courtroom seeking their twisted idea of justice. Unless a like-minded judge happens to occupy the bench, they get laughed out of court.

Well, it happened again today in a Windsor County courtroom. (Technically it happened in digital space; the hearing was conducted remotely via the Webex meeting app.) The Trumpers entered looking for redress, and wound up flattened under the Big Boulder O’ Justice.

The case involved an ongoing dispute between the leadership of the Windsor County Republican Committee and a band of die-hard Trump backers. This has mostly been reported in the pages of the Vermont Daily Chronicle because political journalism in the mainstream press is pretty much dead in Vermont. (I do wish the VDC would learn how to spell John MacGovern’s name, though.)

Close observers could have foreseen the outcome simply by looking at the forces arrayed on each side. The plaintiffs were represented by Deb Bucknam, a former Republican nominee for attorney general (she got her ass kicked by TJ Donovan in 2016) and a former officer of the state party, who now found herself suing that very institution. She really Perry Masoned the case, assembling at least 13 exhibits of evidence and stretching out the hearing to the point where the judge asked her if she could, you know, get to the point.

The defendants, Windsor County Republican Committee chair John MacGovern and VTGOP chair Paul Dame (and the state party itself), didn’t bother hiring lawyers. They didn’t assemble any evidence. MacGovern even admitted that he hadn’t read some of Bucknam’s exhibits, partly because she hadn’t provided some of them until mere hours before the hearing. In short, neither Dame nor MacGovern took the proceeding very seriously. And by God, they were right. The judge dismissed Bucknam’s case after deliberating for about 10 minutes.

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Blows Against the Umpire

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It’s been a bad month for “print” media between the abrupt shutdown of Sports Illustrated, the purchase of the Baltimore Sun by a right-wing rich guy, mass layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, and the assimilation of music review site Pitchfork by GQ. There are signs that the already parlous state of journalism in America is about to get a whole lot worse.

Here in Vermont, we are relatively blessed on that front. We have robust nonprofits like VTDigger and Vermont Public and a reduced but still energetic Seven Days, plus a number of daily and weekly newspapers that are battling to produce meaningful reportage on a shoestring. A lot of energetic, smart people are doing their best to keep us informed.

But over the past couple of weeks, our media have repeatedly failed us. I feel compelled to point this out because the worse they do, the less informed we are. In the words of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

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Veepies Resurrexit a Mortuis

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It’s been a loooong time since I last awarded the Veepies — @thevpo’s honors for exceptional stupidity in our politics. But the end of the year seems to have brought out the stupid in folks, so here we go!

First off, the Any Old Excuse In a Storm Award goes to the fearless folk who wear the uniform of the Vermont State Police. This has to do with their continuing failure to bring Daniel Banyai into custody. They allowed the original arrest warrant to expire. Now, they seem to be in no hurry to act, in spite of the fact that Banyai is defying a court order to turn himself in.

That’s bad enough, but there’s one singular item in VTDigger’s account that spurred the Veepies Board of Trustees to action. VSP spokesperson Adam Silverman helpfully told Digger that Banyai is one of roughly 5,200 people in Vermont with some kind of active warrant. I guess that’s supposed to impress me? But c’mon now, most of those warrants are not at all time-sensitive. Banyai has been defying justice and terrorizing the town of West Pawlet for years, as chronicled in a recent New Yorker piece. He ought to be on top of the VSP’s priority list, and they shouldn’t have the temerity to even suggest that he’s merely one among thousands.

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A Meh Candidate for a Meh Campaign

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Well, okay then. VTDigger has confirmed what was originally reported eleven days ago by Guy Page of the Vermont Daily Chronicle: Miro Weinberger, the outgoing mayor of Burlington, is thinking about a run for an unspecified (but almost certainly gubernatorial) statewide office.

Digger might have had the decency to credit Page for being first, but the standards for crediting rival news outlets around here are, shall we say, highly elastic. The first and last rule seems to be, “Avoid giving credit at all times if at all possible.”

Anyway, so what about a Miro run for governor? You won’t be surprised, given my view of his tenure as mayor, that I’m not doing any cartwheels, metaphorical or otherwise.

But sure, what the hell, why not? Assuming Gov. Phil Scott seeks a fifth term, and why wouldn’t he, then the Democratic nomination will be about as valuable as an expired pet food coupon. Might as well be Miro as anybody else. Any Democrat with serious statewide aspirations is going to sit this one out, just as they did in 2018, 2020, and 2022. But in Miro’s political condition, taking that coupon to the checkout could be a gamble worth taking. He’s got nothing else going on.

I will offer a word of warning, though.

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It Wasn’t Quite This Bad, But It Must Have Been Plenty Bad

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Here’s the saddest sentence I’ve read in a while.

The event took place at the Elks Club, where a modest but impassioned crowd of 25 attended with several left-wing protestors outside. 

“Modest but impassioned” is a well-meaning attempt at making lemonade out of some dried-up rinds.

Those words were typed by one Mike Bielawski, the QAnon-adjacent “reporter” who formerly plied his trade at True North Reports, and has now apparently sold at least one article to Guy Page at Vermont Daily Chronicle. He’d been dispatched to cover an all-day meeting, and I do mean “all-day,” designed to spread conspiracy theories among the True Believers of Vermont’s tiny contingent of ultraconservatives.

Yep, “tiny” sure does check out. “Impassioned crowd of 25” indeed.

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If a Seldom-Read Conservative “News” Site Falls in the Forest…

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It seems the megadonor with more dollars than sense, Lenore Broughton, has experienced a rare flash of insight. Late this afternoon, Broughton suddenly announced the end of True North Reports, the right-wing “news” website.

Broughton, who must be described as a “reclusive heiress” per the sacred rules of journalism, had been single-handedly bankrolling TNR for years. Did she get tired of handing our her money and getting bupkis in return? Is she moving into a new realm of estate planning? Could she — horrors! — be taking my advice and investing her fortune in projects that might promote the conservative movement in Vermont?

Who knows. She certainly won’t tell us. She never talks to the press, and reacts with anger when a photographer tries to take her picture. She ran TNR as a closed book; no contact information was listed on the site. TNR’s (expired) entry in the Secretary of State’s corporate registry cited Broughton as Registered Agent, included no other names, and listed her Burlington home as TNR’s address of record.

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If a Political Committee Does Something Stupid in the Forest, Does It Make a Sound?

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You know, if the Burlington Republican Committee wasn’t a bunch of hateful fuckers, I might feel a little bit sorry for them. They went to all the trouble of writing a painfully detailed resolution denying the very existence of transgender folk and complaining of bathroom incursions by people posing as trans, “authoritarian censorship” of their views on gender, “an alarming increase in violent attacks” on people such as themselves… and oh, so many other things. There’s a grand total of 17 “Whereases” and seven “Be It Resolveds.” It has the distractingly busy look of a Dr. Bronner’s Soap label.

The resolution was first reported on June 23 by Guy “Scoop” Page at the Vermont Daily Chronicle.

The Committee burped out this thing on… April 25. And then sent it to Mayor Miro Weinberger and the Burlington City Council.

Yikes. All that hard work, all that hatred spewed onto a single crowded page, and nobody noticed for almost two months.

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If You’ve Stuck Your Head Up Your Fundament, Keep On Pushing Until You See Daylight

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This past weekend, former Vermont Republican Party Executive Director and Ashley’s husband Jeff Bartley posted a lengthy thread on Twitter about what’s wrong with the party and how to try to fix it. The thread was thoughtful and substantive. And there’s not a chance in hell that the VTGOP will pay him any heed. Instead, the party is doubling down on the strategery that landed it in the political wilderness.

I can tell because at its most recent meeting, the party’s state committee doubled down on election denialism. It appointed a special subcommittee to investigate Vermont’s “election operations, procedures and integrity.”

(This from the Vermont Daily Chronicle because no mainstream media outlet bothers to cover state party meetings anymore.)

That’s right, having failed to get anywhere with its much-touted (and still extant) Excess Ballot Reporting Form, the VTGOP is broadening its search to include every potential source of funny business in the desperate hope of finding any. Because the alternative is to actually admit that it’s losing elections because its policies are deeply unpopular.

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Return of Dregs of the Ballot: The Flamethrowing Farmer

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Attention voters in the South Hero school district! If you’re looking for a school board candidate who believes there are two and ONLY two legitimate genders, the 2020 election was fatally tainted by fraud, Vermont is a totalitarian state and its media “actively censor” conservative viewpoints, and higher education has been taken over by “Marxist (i.e., Centralized Control) professors,” then cast your vote for Robert Fireovid!

On the other hand, if you think he’s a dangerous extremist, please vote for someone else. Anyone else.

Fireovid considers himself a victim of our socialist culture, and believes the schools are leading our children down the primrose path of gender fluidity. He has written that he would seek to bar teachers from teaching about “alternatives to heterosexual practices” or asking students to declare their preferred pronouns. He would examine school libraries for any materials that “contain sexual content or discuss gender fluidity.” He would also prevent the district from punishing school staff who insist on using “pronouns consistent with a student’s actual physical sex,’ which I assume means whatever they’ve got in their pants.

You want that on your school board?

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Let’s Check In On Downtown Burling — Oh, Dear

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There’s a lot of politically-motivated bemoaning of the Queen City’s fallen state these days. Crime, vandalism, fear, lawlessness, tsunamis, earthquakes, alien invasions… but now somebody’s brazen enough to label it an “apocalypse.”

Granted, it’s only Guy Page of the Vermont Daily Chronicle, but still. He really outdid himself with this one:

Fact check, please!

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