What a week for State Auditor Tom Salmon, the Vermont GOP’s Golden Boy and crusading voice of fiscal restraint and personal responsibility.

First was the news in last week’s “Fair Game” that Salmon has not always balanced his own books — specifically, he racked up more than $30,000 in debt while living in Los Angeles and was taken to court and ordered to repay it.... Read more

At the end of Maple Street in Derby Line, just before the roadway becomes rue Ball in Québec, stands a set of engraved granite pillars. The 6-foot-tall stanchions loom on either side of the blacktop, spanned by a steel gate with black painted bars spaced wide enough for an adult to squeeze through. The gate looks like something you’d find in a suburban housing development — not exactly high class, but innocuous enough.... Read more

Since leaving the Democratic Party in September, State Auditor Tom Salmon has been on a one-man crusade to convert folks to his Church of Fiscal Responsibility.

He’s been a hit not only at GOP rallies and fundraisers around the state; he’s gone right into the lion’s den — telling union workers they should take pay cuts and the unemployed they should expect less money per week.... Read more

Bright rays of sunlight flooded the sanctuary of Burlington’s Unitarian Universalist Church last Saturday afternoon in fitting tribute to a man who spent much of his life illuminating injustice. John Whitehead Tucker III, a civil rights activist and leader of Burlington’s African American community, was being eulogized.... Read more

In the 1980s, while we were training freelancers to negotiate using the National Writers Union’s model magazine contract, my comrade, the Vermont journalist David Goodman, mentioned that he had a standard reply when editors named a fee: “That sounds a little low to me.” It mattered little what fee the editor suggested; the ploy worked. That’s probably because David was usually telling the truth, and his editors knew it. Some welcomed the chance to wrench a few more bucks out of the boss.... Read more

The media has engaged in plenty of navel gazing and hand wringing in the wake of several small “s” scandals involving officials keeping info secret from the public.

Oh, if we only had more resources, we’d be able to hold officials accountable, has been the mainstream media’s lament. What would the public do without us? How our democracy would suffer.... Read more

Burlington Democrats may be the ones who get burned as a result of smoking out their biggest adversary in the administration of Burlington Mayor Bob Kiss: Chief Administration Officer Jonathan Leopold.

By an 8-6 vote at 1:15 Tuesday morning, the city council passed a resolution urging Mayor Kiss to put Leopold on paid leave pending an audit of Burlington Telecom finances.... Read more

The financial scandals embroiling Montpelier and Burlington have some striking similarities. No, it’s not just that the administrations of both cities are liberal — if not downright progressive.

Rather, key administrators opted to keep their money troubles — and the strategy to get out of those fiscal pickles — a secret from citizens.... Read more

If Omni Measurement Systems of Milton ran an ad for its best-selling product, the Advanced Mission Extender Device, it might look something like this:

One F-16 Falcon fighter jet: $14.6 million

Cost of training a fighter pilot for one year: $2.6 million

Cost, per flight, of using the Advanced Mission Extender Device: $50

Freedom to empty your bladder at 35,000 feet during a Mach 3 dogfight: priceless... Read more

Got work?

To mingle with folks who don’t, I stopped by a peanut-butter-and-jelly “breadline” in New York’s Union Square the other evening. The event was organized by the Retail Action Project, a joint effort of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and the venerable community group Good Old Lower East Side. RAP’s goal is not just to better conditions and organize workers but to build alliances between the employed and the jobless, the laborer and the artist, the clerk and the customer.... Read more