The first few months of the 2012 legislative session were largely devoid of disputation and controversy, as the Legislature disposed of some pretty serious issues -- Irene cleanup, the budget, the Vermont State Hospital and state office complex replacements, the next step on health care reform.
But in the last few weeks, things went sideways. And the lion's share of the dysfunction was in the State Senate. Which raises the question: What kind of job did John Campbell do as Senate President Pro Tem? And should he be given another chance in 2013?
Some facts are inarguable: the House maintained a good pace and moved through a lot of legislation more or less on time, while the Senate played a frantic game of catch-up in the closing days of the Legislature. Most of the visible conflict came on the Senate side. And, where there were differences between the two bodies, the House won out on almost every issue.
In a look-back on the past session, VTDigger's Anne Galloway concluded that Speaker Shap Smith had emerged as the dominant force; she quotes one lobbyist who said that Smith is "in charge of the building." On the other hand...
Lobbyists and lawmakers say Campbell, who is well-liked, had difficulty controlling the Senate calendar. Instead of marching through the day's orders, no one knew what legislation he was actually going to take up on a given day. They say he came across as too eager to please, disorganized and willing to change his position on a whim.
That's pretty damning stuff, evidence that Campbell was failing at basic tasks of leadership.
After the jump: amendments, subamendments, and a horse's ass.
Though unbeknownst to the good people of Rochester, New York going about their daily lives all around it, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assures us that they knew all about it.
Matt Pearce of the LaTimes made this wry observation:
A spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told the Los Angeles Times that the company had enriched 1,582 grams of uranium-235 up to 93.4%, a level considered weapons-grade. Good thing Kodak isn't in Iran; that's the kind of thing Israel's been threatening to go to war over.
The company, which is now in bankcruptcy proceedings
ditched the uranium in 2007 with the coordination of the U.S. government, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Great. One has to wonder what exactly has become of the waste, and how provision for decommissioning will be built into the bankruptcy. Is it going to be stockholders first and the people of the State of New York only second?
Neil Sheehan, a commission spokesman, told The Times that he doesn't know how many private companies have weapons-grade uranium but that Kodak's situation was rare. "This was a unique type of device they were using at Kodak," he said.
I'm sure the folks in Rochester New York might now agree that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should not be trusted as the sole decider when it comes to nuclear safety.
Pro golfer Tiger Woods was found unresponsive in his luxury vacation rental house near the Roko Ki golf resort in the Dominican Republic earlier today and later pronounced dead from what appears to be natural causes.
But this isn't, and by now you've probably heard.
The nakedly partisan shout channel for the Vermont GOP that the Caledonian-Record disingenuously refers to as a "non-partisan, non-profit advocacy and media enterprise" is doing a Santorum/Gingrich/Ron Paul etc. etc. etc. and "suspending its campaign":
Impossible, just now, to say when - or even if - we will return to business as usual. This is a blog. Most blogs have fairly short half-lives.
That's what Geoffrey Norman had to say in part about Vermont Tiger going into suspended animation like the Space Family Robinson.
Then, there's this:
Though Vermont Tiger has a right-of-center reputation, Norman eschews labels: "The conventional, knee-jerk, unthinking, pigeon hole definition is that it's right wing, bordering on fascist I suppose, which, you know, gets old."
Hey, if it gets old, you must hear it a lot.......there might be a reason for that, I'd conjecture......
Then, there's another this:
"So what? No one reads it anyway. They don't really have any effect on the political sphere here," he says. "Conservatives historically don't do as well with social media as liberals do - for the same reason they do so well with AM radio and Fox News: because these are one-way shout channels. Conservative messaging comes from the top."
Retired Wall Street kingpin Bruce Lisman has made a big splash in state politics with a blizzard of advertising from his self-funded right-wing advocacy group, Campaign for Vermont. (Well, it's supposedly nonpartisan, but its issues are clearly conservative.) Of necessity, those brief ads are short on specifics and long on buzzwords and right-wing dog whistles.
It's unclear where Lisman wants to go with this; he might be a future self-funded candidate a la Rich Tarrant, or perhaps a conservative sugar daddy a la the Koch Brothers. But the question is, what does Bruce Lisman really stand for? And if he did actually wield political power, what would he do?
The answers can be found in a May 2010 speech entitled "Finding Skin: How Vermont Can Become Its Own Version of an Economic Powerhouse Without Abandoning Its Values." "Skin" is an allusion to "skin in the game," a Warren Buffett coinage referring to organizational insiders who use their own money to buy stock in their enterprise. But the advertisement for the event included a mugshot-style photo of Lisman that made him look like he meant "finding skin" in a Hannibal Lecter sort of way.
The talk can be viewed online thanks to Channel 17/Town Meeting Television. I've watched the whole thing, which is not exactly fun; as a public speaker, Lisman is halting and colorless. But the talk reveals his outlook in detail, and the details are by turns striking, disturbing, and appalling. A full rundown follows, but suffice it to say that Bruce Lisman's worldview is a pure Wall Street product (unsurprising in a person who spent two-thirds of his life there).
Lisman is a capitalist in the literal sense: he believes that capital is the most important thing for a society's health. He believes that economic growth is the solution to all our problems, and that fostering growth is government's primary job. He repeatedly emphasizes "transparency" and "accountability," but he's short on specifics. He seems to believe that government should run like a business -- an article of faith among tycoons-turned-politicians, which has failed to work in real life whenever it's been tried. (viz. Craig Benson's brief, unhappy reign as Governor of New Hampshire.)
Details after the jump, including Sh*t Bruce Says and The Lisman Agenda.
Former President George W. Bush and seven others from his administration were found guilty of war crimes in a symbolic Kuala Lumpur tribunal of conscience. Included in the guilty verdicts are former Vice President Dick Cheney; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; Bush/Cheney administration legal counselors Alberto Gonzales and David Addington; Defense Dept. counsel William Haynes II; and Justice Dept. lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo.
Victims of torture told a panel of five judges in Kuala Lumpur of their suffering at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among the evidence, Briton Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee, said he was beaten, put in a hood and left in solitary confinement. Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi said she was stripped and humiliated in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
"The US is subject to customary international law and to the principles of the Nuremberg Charter, and exceptional circumstances such as war, instability and public emergency cannot excuse torture."
The Kuala Lumpur Tribunal findings will be publicized and submitted to the International Criminal Court, the United Nations and the Security Council. Tribunal members hope nations will be reluctant to invite “war criminals” from the Bush years to their countries. Maybe expecting a vigorous effort to deal with Bush/Cheney administration's possible war crimes here in the US was always a quaint concept. But for now justice has swerved, at least symbolically, to Malaysia.
With Democratic Senator Sara Kittell announcing that she will not run again this year; and Randy Brock already out of the picture, Franklin County's senate race is wide open. Former Democratic Senator Don Collins has already thrown his hat in the ring, and now Caroline Bright of Fletcher has announced as well for the Democratic party.
The 21-year old graduated yesterday from St. Mike's and, fulfilling a long-standing ambition, announced her candidacy on the same day. A sorority alum who favors pearls and polished nails, Bright's style appears a departure from the usual for young Vermont Democrats.
Republicans are fielding two candidates for the Senate as well: Norm McAllister of Highgate, a ten-year veteran of the House, and Joe Sinagra of St. Albans Town, a former housing industry lobbyist who now owns a bounce-house rental business. (How's that for irony?)
Mr. McAllister is a goat farmer who distinguished himself this past session as the only member of the House Agriculture Committee to oppose labelling of genetically engineered food. He himself grows a GMO crop of corn, so it's not surprising that he voted contrary to the majority opinion in Vermont.
Franklin County politics is definitely becoming a youth movement. Dynamic Franklin County Democratic Chair, Mike McCarthy is just 28 years old, and the St. Albans City Council now boasts a 25-year old Alderman from Ward 5, Ryan Doyle.
Of course the long-term commitment that comes with election to office must outlive the glamour of a brief campaign. There are persistent rumors about another of Franklin County's "young turks," Republican Rep. Dustin Degree of St. Albans City, who has just finished his first term and is looking for a second. It is said that he is not very good at showing up for committee meetings on which he is expected to serve. One has to wonder if, at twenty-five, he really was mature enough to make that commitment.
Philip Baruth and the St. Albans Messenger are reporting that Sara Kittell will be stepping down after seventeen years representing Franklin County in the Vermont Senate.
Because of her committee assignments first in the General Affairs and Housing and then in the Health and Human Services committees I had the chance to work with Sara on a number of bills. I was always impressed by her instinctive empathy for and understanding of tenants, people labeled with mental illness, and others who are structurally powerless in our society. This is something that you don't necessarily see among everyone, even Democrats, and even people who come around to support you intellectually. In fact, it's rare.
There's one story, though, that really says all you need to know about Sara. David Moats, Pulitzer Prize winning writer from the Rutland Herald, tells it in his book Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage. In 2000, after the Vermont Supreme Court's Baker decision, when civil unions were the big issue in the Legislature, things were really ugly. Legislators who were known or suspected of supporting civil unions were getting threatening calls and even messages from constituents telling them that they would be going to hell; good legislators lost their offices in the Take Back Vermont backlash because of their support for civil unions. Then as now, Democrats had a strong majority in the Senate, and since Sara comes from a conservative county the Senate leadership went to her and told her that there were plenty of yes votes in the Senate, they didn't need her vote, so it would be okay if she voted no to avoid the almost certain personal attacks and potential loss of her seat. Sara knew what was right, and she was right there voting yes no matter what the cost. She later told a colleague, Mark McDonald, another civil union supporter, that it had never occurred to her to do anything else.
She was reelected anyway, but she certainly didn't know that at the time. This was a true profile in courage.
The State Committee of the Vermont Democratic Party met yesterday in Randolph, and probably the issue that drew the most interest was the endorsement of candidates for statewide office.
On yesterday's agenda were requests to endorse Doug Hoffer in his second run for Auditor of Accounts and TJ Donovan for Attorney General.
The Hoffer endorsement was pretty straightforward, and nearly unanimous (there was one "no" vote). Doug spoke to the committee and expressed his desire to be the guy who actually wants the office he's running for, unlike Tom Salmon, who seems to be interested in just about everything except doing the job he was elected to do.
The bigger question was the endorsement of TJ Donovan, and that's probably what brought the press out (Andy Bromage from Seven Days was in the front row). Part of the question was that there was a motion to endorse TJ, but there was no motion before the body to endorse Bill Sorrell, who was also in attendance. Consequently, some members raised the question of whether we should endorse one candidate, and what that would mean for the candidates and the message it would send to the public.
This all arises from the peculiar endorsement rules for the State Committee. Our bylaws provide that we can endorse more than one candidate for a single office, and we have done that in the past. For instance, in 2010 all the Democratic candidates for governor received the endorsement.
Still, the question was whether endorsing one candidate in May and another candidate at our next meeting, probably in July, would send the signal that the party is favoring Donovan over Sorrell.
To be absolutely clear, that's just wrong. Many speakers specifically said they were voting to endorse Donovan yesterday and they intended to endorse Sorrell at our next meeting.
On the other hand,this is more evidence that TJ has gotten his campaign organized ahead of Sorrell's. They were both present with their teams at yesterday's meeting and at last week's David Curtis Award dinner. Yesterday they both gave good speeches that were well received, and they are both lining up lists of important and prominent Democratic supporters.
Still, The fact that he got his petitions in first seems to be an indication that Donovan recognizes that he has to work hard to unseat an incumbent.
Does that mean it's a sure thing? Absolutely not. For one thing, it's always hard to defeat an incumbent. For another, TJ indicated yesterday his support for the drug database access bill that never became law this year. He argued that the bill was not the civil liberties nightmare its opponents painted it to be, but his support of this legislation may cost him support among the Democratic base.
This should be an interesting race.
Finally, one last observation: I always enjoy going to these meetings at Randolph Elementary School because of the great, large-scale student artwork on display, and yesterday was no exception. Randolph, like so many Vermont schools, clearly understands that schools are more than just test-taking machines.
It appears that my sister in Portland, Oregon can relax a bit; but friends in Japan, not so much.
Fairewinds Associates have an intriguing new video uploaded on their site, in which Arnie and Maggie Gundersen discuss the nature of "hot particles" and radiation with Marco Kaltofen, founder of Boston Chemical Data Corporation.
Boston Chemical Data has been analyzing automobile filters and childrens shoes collected from Japan in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster.
In the new video, Mr. Kaltofen explains the nature of "hot particles" and radiation, and the manner in which they have been distributed to human beings following the accident. He tells us that the size and nature of the radioactive particles affect their potential for damage, and describes a complex topography of radioactivity that was produced at Fukushima.
The power of the human mind, when faced with facts or realities at odds with long-held beliefs, to find ways to deny said facts or realities, is a wonder to behold.
Case in point: Bruce Lisman.
Lisman is the native Vermonter who spent decades in the executive suites of Wall Street before retiring to his home state in 2009. Last fall, he created Campaign for Vermont, the self-described nonpartisan, common-sense organization that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on clearly conservative issue-advocacy ads.
In May of 2010 Lisman gave a talk in Burlington, which bore the verbose and mildly creepy title "Finding Skin: How Vermont Can Become Its Own Version of an Economic Powerhouse Without Abandoning Its Values."
This talk can be seen online thanks to the good folks at Burlington's Channel 17/Town Meeting Television. I've watched the whole thing, and I'll have a full report in the near future. (Suffice it to say, Lisman reveals himself as (1) a lousy public speaker and (2) a hard-core free-marketeer whose policy prescriptions wouldn't be out of line in a speech by Paul Ryan.)
For now, I wanted to pass along one little nugget from the talk. Remember that Lisman spent almost his entire career at Bear Stearns, the financial firm responsible for many of the iffy investment vehicles that almost brought down the global economy in 2008.
In his talk, Lisman gave the following description of the 2008 calamity:
"This thing that happened to us in '08 and '09 was not the ordinary garden-variety recession. It was a Darwinian asteroid that hit us. It was big enough to topple countries."
Oh. My. God. Where do I begin? "This thing that happened," this "Darwinian asteroid" (whatever the f*ck that's supposed to mean). This Act of God. It wasn't anyone's fault; it was an unforeseeable catastrophe that suddenly manifested out of nowhere. "Sure, we ran the Titanic through iceberg-infested waters and ignored 21 separate warnings of hazardous ice in its path -- but who could have possibly foreseen its collision with an iceberg? Yeah, the sinking of the ship, the loss of 1500 people, it was this thing that happened."
There are only two explanations for this piece of utter claptrap:
1. Bruce Lisman is in the grip of a magnificent delusion triggered by the collision of (a) his devout belief in the unsinkability of the free market and (b) the fact that Wall Street ran into an iceberg of its own making and had to be rescued by the government.
