Vermont lawmakers are currently chewing over “an act relating to providing meals to health care providers at conferences.”

President Trump has moved a portrait of President Andrew Jackson into the Oval Office, prompting a comparison from which some intriguing similarities emerge.

I moved to Vermont in 1973 with the father of my 1 year old son, We were young hippies in search of a place where political activism was coalescing – a place close to the border just in case – and a place with a natural water source where we could grow food and create renewable energy.

President Trump has moved a portrait of President Andrew Jackson into the Oval Office, prompting a comparison from which some intriguing similarities emerge. While campaigning, Mr. Trump referred to Mexicans as possible “murderers” and “rapists”, and proposed a one thousand, nine hundred and thirty three mile wall between the two nations – which he still insists Mexico will pay for. In Jackson’s time, nearly two hundred years ago, most of the Southwest had been ceded to Mexico by Spain.

I recently attended my friend Hemant’s naturalization ceremony in a courthouse in Burlington. He and his wife became American citizens that day.

We chose the name Total Loss Farm on a whim. We’d never heard of a commune. But when we arrived, fresh from riots in Washington, DC, we could see a future in the open fields, woods, rickety house, barn, and outbuildings. At 23, I wanted to dig in and create our sudden Eden.

Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan and Governor Phil Scott both supported immigration bill S.79 now passed by the legislature. Some say it was largely an anti-Trump symbolic gesture, while others say it sets the stage for a sanctuary state without explicitly stating that goal.

In the 60s and 70s, many young women came to Vermont in search of an alternative way of life. They came here partly as a way to rebel against the Vietnam War, nuclear armament and a materialistic, consumer-driven society. They joined communes and formed what became known as the counterculture.

Chuck Berry’s passing reminds me of a summer night in 1987 when the rock n’ roll legend played a concert I produced in Lyndonville.

We banned the Chinese in the 1880s, southern Europeans in 1924 – and, infamously, refused to admit a shipload of German Jews in 1939. But I can’t stop thinking about 1850.