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Saturday, July 31, 2010

Don't ever bet against the American people

President Obama said in his Saturday talk to the nation today not to bet against the American people, because we CAN do it.  I entirely agree.  I am tired of hearing that we can't do anything different than we ever did.  How do they think we ever got to where we were when this country was the best place to live and the most admired in the world?  We tried new things, we changed the old ways, and we can find new ways and do new things again.  So stop saying "No, you can't"  and join us in saying "Yes, we can."
"So to all the naysayers out there, I say this:  Don’t ever bet against the American people.  Because we don’t take the easy way out.  That’s not how we deal with challenge.  That’s not how we build this country into the greatest economic power the world has ever known.  We did it by summoning the courage to persevere, and adapt, and push this country forward, inch by inch. " 

One of the reasons I am a Democrat

One of the reasons I am a Democrat is because we care about the common welfare.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Why I won't pledge to raise your property taxes

I had the pleasure recently of attending the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition training for candidates:  Talking About Taxes.  While I have had a lot of experience with town budgets, as a selectwoman and a member of the budget committee, the state budget is of course bigger and more complicated, although a lot of the basic issues, such as revenue, are the same.  Thanks to an excellent presentation on what we spend money on, where it comes from, and what parts of the budget are growing fastest, I have a clearer picture.  We also had a presentation on education funding, which for the first time gave me a sense of the narrative of the issue over the past few decades.  I came away with a sobering view of what I and my fellow candidates will be facing over the next two years if we are elected.

I would like to address some of the issues and perceptions related to NH taxes over the next couple of weeks on this blog.  I will also give you a link to an article I wrote for The Forum on the Pledge and how I see it affecting the small towns in NH.

And that’s a good place to start.  We often hear that if only we could get all our elected officials to take the pledge and live by it, our tax problems would be solved.  But the pledge to enact no new taxes really means a pledge to have the taxes we already have go up.  We all know where most of the money for town and state budgets comes from in NH, the property tax, approximately 60%. So the pledge is a promise to raise our property taxes as the state grows.  We aren’t making any more land.  Property taxes made sense when your property was the source of your income.  While I hope that agriculture makes a big comeback here for a lot of reasons, I hope we aren’t all going to be farmers.

The other solution we are hearing a lot about in political ads this year is cutting spending.  Since NH has the 4th lowest per capita STATE spending in the country, I really, really wish the people who call for this would explain exactly what they would cut.  I have watched towns do this sort of budgeting, and I hear some of our solutions, like un-paving the town roads, are spreading across the country.    Either they are just plain uncaring about their fellow humans, or they simply have never had to be responsible for a budget bigger than their household or small business.  They certainly are not people who think about the future of their communities when they propose putting off maintenance and capital investments to lower this year’s tax rate, and next year’s, and the year after, until the chickens come home to roost.

Next time we’ll talk about local control.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Why reporting precipitation is so important

As many of you know, I am a local precipitation reporter for CoCoRaHS.  I just got an e-mail from the coordinator, who lives in Colorado, explaining why what we are doing is so important.  Anyone willing to spend a small amount of money on a rain gauge can join and I encourage you to do so.  As our weather gets less and less predictable due to climate change, we need eyes everywhere.

Here's what Nolan had to say:


Dear CoCoRaHS volunteers, friends, foes and family,


Yes, indeed, it‚s July 21-- the dog days of summer. For many parts of
the country this is the hottest, humidest (is that a word?), stillest
(least windy) time of year. As a child, it was my favorite time even
though my upstairs bedroom was painfully hot. It was the time to hang
out with all the neighborhood boys in tiny Royal, IL -- playing
baseball, listening to the Cubs on the radio, and trying to sell
lemonade on main street where only a few cars came even on busy days. At
a nickel a glass and sharing the profits 5 ways, we didn't get rich.
Then, of course, was the daily ritual of cloud gazing and listening for
the first rumbles of thunder. I loved doing that already by the time I
was 7. Then we would watch for distant lightning after sunset with the
hopes of the cool refreshment of a summer storm. I find myself longing
now for those simple pleasures. Fall seemed so far away then, and summer
seemed wonderfully endless. It is odd how perspectives change with age
and responsibility. Now it seems like summer will soon be over and the
new school year will begin way too soon -- and then come the high winter
utility bills.

A reminder about why CoCoRaHS is important

Here in our part of the country (Colorado) the next 3 weeks hold more
potential (based on historic rainfall data) for local intense rains than
any other time of year. This is thanks to subtropical moisture carried
northward by the North American monsoon, a very warm atmosphere capable
of "holding" copious amounts of moisture, and a weak jet stream -- which
means the storms that develop will move slowly. Even today, the air is
ripe with moisture, and the potential for local heavy rains is clearly
stated in the National Weather Service forecast.

This resembles the weather that first motivated CoCoRaHS several years
ago. On July 28, 1997, one of those localized moisture-laden
thunderheads parked itself over west Fort Collins (where I live and
work) and dropped over a foot of rain while other areas just a few miles
away were dry or enjoying a pleasant summer shower. In those few hours,
as the rain poured down 2-3" per hour for over 4 hours straight in what
is normally a semi-arid region, our world briefly but chaotically turned
upside down. Houses flooded, cars floated away, our university was
partially wrecked, there were hundreds of emergency rescues, a train
wreck, gas explosions -- and unfortunately 5 fatalities. It all happened
so fast. 12 years earlier, on August 1, 1985 (the day after our first
child was born), Cheyenne, Wyoming was in the bulls eye of a similar
local storm -- and again, many fatalities and millions of dollars in
damage. And then, of course, the nightmarish Big Thompson Canyon flash
flood of July 31, 1976 -- over 140 souls lost in what was supposed to be
the grand celebration of Colorado's statehood centennial the next day.

That is some of the motivation behind CoCoRaHS and why we care so much.
With a small effort from many weather enthusiasts, we can gather
critical rainfall data, avoid panic storm surprises, and let people know
just how bad a storm is so that warnings can be posted and evacuations
can take place sooner. We can even help engineers and planners do a
better job planning and designing drainage, gutters, culverts and storm
sewers. We can encourage more people to avoid driving into flood waters.
And gradually, working together, we all gain a better understanding of
storms and their behavior. This is the ideal and its worth the effort.

As more and more people join CoCoRaHS across the country, we are making
a difference. Check out the recent "Significant Weather Reports", the
"Drought Impact Reports" and the hail reports under „View Data‰
http://www.cocorahs.org/ViewData/

Yesterday, several stations in southern Iowa and northeast Missouri were
dumped on by over 6" of rain. The peak was of 9.13" near Kirksville, MO.
Today, another area will see heavy rains and tomorrow yet another area.
Each time our rain gauge reports will be helpful and perhaps essential.
Meanwhile, abnormally dry conditions continue to expand in other parts
of the country missed by the July storms. Our rainfall reports, wet or
dry, really do make a difference. Thanks so much for participating and
helping out.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Some Thoughts on the Role of Government

One of the biggest differences between political philosophies these days is the perception of the role of government in our society.  I come to this from the perspective of a student of anthropology, sociology, political history and economics.  Some of my knowledge and belief system comes from schooling, much from reading extensively, and some from discussions with others involved in the political process.  Much of it comes from actually getting involved.

I am not a person who does sound bites well, so I will ask you to stick with me for a bit, rather than turning me off when I can’t give you instant and simple reasons for my beliefs.  I do not believe these things because I am a Democrat, I am a Democrat because this is what I understand about the world I live in.

29 years ago Ronald Reagan made his famous pronouncement, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”  This has been interpreted by many as a license to attack government whenever possible, even while asking to be elected to run such a government.  For some the goal is to “shrink government enough to drown it in a bathtub,” another famous quote from Grover Norquist, lobbyist extraordinaire.

I have a very different vision of my government that comes from getting involved at the local level with town committees and boards, including the selectboard.  Learning about town budgets, employees, taxes, etc. as the person responsible for making it work gave me a different perspective. Standing outside and criticizing is easy.  Actually making it work is very difficult.  However, it is also very, very rewarding.  And I don’t mean monetarily!

The rewards come from the people I have met, truly wonderful, smart, caring, thoughtful people who volunteer their time to make a town run.  The pay stinks, but the rewards come when I have managed to involve some others in the process, because although we all moan about how hard it is, I know have introduced them to something that will enrich their lives and empower them to see what I see, that government is ultimately ours, and we make it or break it.

But when people hear over and over again that government is a problem, that “they” are  taking away from, not adding to our lives, and that the best thing to do is elect people who promise to dismantle what, unfortunately, turns out to be the only thing between the voters and the rapacity of the greedy in all too much of our recent history, what are they to believe?  It is easy to blame someone in “the government,” but we really are responsible, in our system, for electing those in the government and using care in doing so.

The people who founded this country and wrote our constitution did have a vision of how they wanted this to work.  Their vision was of an educated public, who knew something of history and current affairs.  This knowledge came from the written word, books, self-published pamphlets and newspapers.  Today we have many, many ways to get information.  So how do we get ourselves to the point where we actually consider electing people who think government is a problem, to run that government?

Part of it is schooling, and part of it is that explosion of ways to find out about how things work.  Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of the written word involved for too many of us.  Most people now get their news from television, and there are a number of problems with that.  Some of them have to do with the corporate ownership of the media, and some have to do with the way the brain reacts to TV.  Part of our biological heredity is how movement in our field of vision affects us.  We are instinctively compelled to focus on moving images, because back in the day when we were creatures in the wild, anything moving in the area was either food, or something that wanted to make food of us, or potential mates, all things we needed to pay attention to immediately.

Television is an endless series of movements to the visual field.  Reading a book, or a magazine or newspaper or even articles on my laptop, I find it easy to pull myself away from the written word. But if there is a TV in the room it is constantly catching my attention and drawing my eyes, and I find myself sitting there almost hypnotized.  Yes, hypnotized.  Passive, waiting for direction.  So what does that mean in an article about government?

If people are getting most of their information about how to choose their government from a medium that makes them passive, rather than interacting with the information, choosing what to read, stopping and thinking about it, maybe even writing about it, are they not vulnerable to being manipulated?  If you watch TV for hours a day, you certainly are not likely to get involved.  And if you are not involved, at least to some extent, is it not easy to see the government as not being of much importance to you and your life.

And yet everyday, governments at all levels of our society are making decisions that affect our lives.  If our only interaction is once a year, or every two years, or even every 4 years, at the voting booth - and many of us choose not to even do that - how much effort are we going to put into finding out what is really going on?  It is so much easier to sit in front of the TV and watch whatever we happen to find, including 30 second political ads, getting our emotions stimulated, and perhaps even being manipulated into voting against our own self-interest and the interests of the communities we live in.  I don’t think we are lazy, I know we are tired and overworked, which is a subject for another post.  I do suspect we are being used by clever people to find government a distant body that either has little to do with our lives or that actually is hurting us.

But that is not what our founders intended!  And it is not what inevitably has to be.  So when that neighbor of yours runs for office, or asks you to get involved, don’t say, “Oh, I don’t want to get involved in politics, it’s a dirty nasty business.”  It is the business our founders intended us to be involved in deeply and thoughtfully.  It’s our government.

My thanks to Al Gore who called my attention to the TV phenomenon in his book, The Assault on Reason.

The Forum: Serving the Towns in the Shadow of Pawtuckaway

One of the most exciting things to happen in our region was the founding, five years ago, by a group of local residents of The Forum, our local on-line and print newspaper.  Staffed by volunteers, it covers Candia, Deerfield, Northwood and Nottingham, which happen to be the towns in our state rep district, Rockingham One.  While Northwood had some coverage by the Suncook Valley Sun, a weekly out of Pittsfield, most of the towns had spotty, if any, news coverage, being in the middle between Foster's Daily Democrat, The Concord Monitor, and the Union Leader.  As the budgets of regular newspapers have decreased, there are fewer and fewer reporters to cover the small towns on the fringes of their areas.

The Forum publishes a print edition which goes to every household in the four towns, free, three times a year.  They make the sure the print editions correspond to every election, municipal, state or national, where there are local candidates running.  They depend on grants and donations, plus advertising, to keep the site and the print editions available to us all.

It has been my pleasure and privilege to report from Northwood for The Forum, as my time allows, and to voice my opinions, submit many pictures and the occasional poem, and I am a faithful reader.