Category Archives: What? Are They Nuts?

Cock of the Walk Getting Layed (Off) In Vermont

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BARRE TOWN, VERMONT — Kathy Rubacalba lives with about 100 chickens and, now, almost no roosters. Her home and her backyard egg operation sits on a quarter-acre homestead in East Barre. Town officials there say her roosters crow. That must violate something, don’t you think?

Last Wednesday afternoon, three police officers, the town’s animal control officer, and a “representative of the town” — a self-proclaimed town “chicken expert” — raided Rubacalba’s roost without a warrant; they confiscated four roosters (three too small to crow) because they, well, crow.

“Dogs bark, roosters crow, mufflers are loud, you live in a village there’s noise,” Ms. Rubacalba said.

Vermont prides itself on being a little behind the times — we were the last state to get a WalMart for heaven’s sake — but Vermont is right at the top of the list on property rights.

Except at Ms. Rubacalba’s house.

One neighbor noticed that the Town “brought a SWAT team” to take a roosters and a couple of chicks.

Max Sennett couldn’t make this property rights and due process stuff up.

The Vermont Right to Farm Act exempts backyard farms from nuisance claims which means flatlanders can’t complain when the farm next door spreads manure in the fields. It also means the East Barre selectboard should have quashed the complaint before the cops got caught up in a clustercluck.

There’s more. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found in Michigan that a local zoning officer violated a landowner’s rights by conducting a warrantless search of the landowner’s property. The zoning enforcement officer made several unannounced visits to the property. The Court noted that the unannounced warrantless searches were not routine inspections. Not only that, the Court said it makes no difference that the zoning enforcement officer was not a law-enforcement officer since “it is clearly established that a government official does not have to carry a badge and a gun to be subject to the restrictions on the Fourth Amendment.”

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court in New Mexico similarly rejected a building inspector’s nonconsensual warrantless search of private property.

East Barre didn’t even send a zoning officer. They sent a “chicken expert” and three police officers who prevented Ms. Rubalcaba from accompanying the expert into at least one of the closed-door chicken coops on her property.

Media attempts to reach Town Manager Carl Rogers or Town Attorney Michael Monte for comment have been unsuccessful.

Ms. [Image] Rubalcaba says she is “a full-time chicken farmer” since her job at Norwich University was “eliminated” in April. Her backyard farm is called Layed In Vermont.

By the way, the chicken expert apparently did get one rooster but took two or three hen chicks. Cartoonist Jeff Danzigger promised to design a logo for Ms. Rubalcaba. Maybe it could look like this.

Vermont Police to Curb Profiling

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For the past three years, a “blue ribbon” committee of Vermonters has studied the possibility of racial profiling by police officers in this state.

Hello? Vermont is, of course, the least diverse state in the Union. The Census Bureau reports that 2008 population of the state is about 621,000, up from 609,000 nine years ago. The population breaks down as 96.4% white and 0.9% black which means that if one non-white person is ticketed, it must be profiling. The community group Uncommon Alliance raised the concerns about racial profiling.

The committee report says Vermont minorities believe they are the victims of pervasive racial profiling by police on traffic stops. The report also shows there is absolutely no data anywhere that support the idea. None.

The Vermont state police say they do investigate about ten racial profiling complaints out of thousands of traffic stops each year.

Reminder: The report shows there is absolutely no data anywhere that support the perceived profiling. None.

Law enforcement leaders have chosen “pro-active responses.”

Vermont Public Safety Commissioner Tom Tremblay said, “We recognize that law enforcement in Vermont needs to address the perception and/or the reality of racial profiling.”

Reminder: The report also shows there is absolutely no data anywhere that support the perceived profiling. None.

Police will create yet another new data collection system and document each person’s race, gender and age at traffic stops. We can expect video cameras in all police cruisers as well as more anti-racial-bias training for cops.

Meanwhile, pigs are a Vermont tradition at county fairs but kids won’t chase any pigs at the Caledonia County Fair in Lyndonville this year. “No swine at the fair,” said Richard Lawrence. It turns out the public could be afraid of pigs because people think the pigs could spread the flu. (The fact is that pigs should fear the people, not the other way around.)

Fair officials say they know that pigs are not spreading the H1N1 virus but they banned them anyway. State and county fairs came to life to promote science and agriculture.

The Fair made its decision “not based on sound science but based on public perception,” Vermont state veterinarian Dr. Kristin Haas told WCAX TV. “In this instance we have an example of a pretty big difference between the two.”

As an aside, a federal program later this month will focus exclusively on drunk driving. By women.

News reports show a host of community forums on profiling will begin Wednesday.

Reminder: The report shows there is absolutely no data anywhere that support the perceived profiling. None.

Don’t confuse me with the facts. It is crucial that we sacrifice truth and dignity on the altar of the politically correct. And left-leaning public perception.

Predictions

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The House passed the Obama energy and climate bill this week.

“There’s a growing awareness that we need to move on energy,” David Axelrod said on NBC’s Meet the Press today. “We’ve been waiting for decades. And this bill will create millions of clean-energy jobs. It will deal with … our dependence on foreign oil, and we have to deal with that. And it deals this deadly pollution and global warming that we have to move on.” He also admitted that “We have not broken the back of the recession” despite the January rush to pass the $787 billion emergency stimulus package.

The bill includes crap and trade as well as extensive taxes on energy use. Investor Warren Buffett called the bill “a huge tax, and there’s no sense calling it anything else … it’s a fairly regressive tax.”

There is every reason to expect the Senate to pass the Obama energy and climate bill this fall.

I predict that gas prices will exceed $6/gallon
immediately after the midterm (2010) elections.

I predict that the prime rate will exceed 12%
immediately after the 2012 elections.

Raising the Roof

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Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas (R-VT) has spent several hours as President Obama’s special guest; this state expects to receive about $900 million as details of the G.R.A.F.T. Act payouts to the states trickle into public view. The President and the U.S. Congress expect some of those funds to shore up “revenue shortfalls” in the states.

Vermont has a TWO hundred million dollar deficit looming over the next two budget years so the Democratically controlled legislature has decided to spend THREE hundred million dollars of our portion of the G.R.A.F.T. Act windfall to “stabilize” the budget.

The Speaker of the Vermont House has proposed a three-man oversight committee to assure the money is spent wisely.

Apparently that is not enough. The Democratically controlled legislature decided today to RAISE taxes by $24 million dollars in order to make up for the revenue shortfall.

Hello?

I think we just fell into Fiddler on the Roof.

“Alms for the poor, alms for the poor,” called Nahum, the beggar.

“Here, Reb Nahum, is one kopek.” Lazar Wolfe gave him the coin.

“One kopek? Last week you gave me two kopeks.”

The butcher shrugged. “I had a bad week.”

“So, if you had a bad week, why should I suffer?”

Vermonters are having a bad day. The unemployment rate here was 6.4% in December, before the latest round of layoffs at IBM and other Vermont companies. My wife, like so many other American workers, has had her “full time” job cut to just three days per week.

Vermonters are having a bad day but the legislature has voted itself two kopeks.

I have some (small) hope that Vermont will do the right thing on the state budget. After all, a few million is a small enough number that people will notice. I have absolutely no hope that Washington will do the right thing. Congressional action to fix the proposed 1.3 trillion dollar Federal budget comes under rule, It is easier to sell a big lie than a little one.

Watch and learn. The largest Federal budget ever proposed will be bigger when it passes.