All posts by Caoimhin Laochdha

About Caoimhin Laochdha

Central Vermont life-long civil liberties activist. I offset my carbon footprint by growing my own energy and riding my bicycle at least 8 months of the year. Every election cycle, since Gerald Ford's social promotion to the Oval Office, I've volunteered for at least one Democratic presidential campaign that ultimately finished in second (or lower) place.

A picture is worth . . .

a thousand Hail Marys words.

Photobucket

The June cover of Vermont Catholic Magazine.

With the lightening speed of millions of mice, this magazine cover has ricocheted across the Globe — or as the Church would tell Galileo — “God’s flat surface around which the sun revolves.”

The picture depicts an ordination ceremony. (I believe “Ordination” is Latin for “breaking in the new guy”). The debate over the picture falls into several camps. Some observers are saying:

1. The PR folks for the Vermont Diocese are either pathetically stupid or they are using a pathetically stupid approach to undercut Photoshop;



while others are arguing that

2. The Catholic hierarchy is truly, pathologically, that far out of touch with both perception and reality;



and still others seem to think that

3. For decades, the political infrastructure of the Catholic Church was dominated by evil bastards who did everything in their power to protect child rapers. The timing of the picture is just one big middle finger pointed at the Vermont victims of the Church’s criminal conduct — coming only a month after settling the last of the abuse cases that the Church has covered up and dragged out for years.

I suspect it is more likely #2 rather than #3.  That said, can the media arm of a large Vermont Corporation truly be this out of touch?  We know the lengths to which this organization went to protect and preserve a culture of predatory criminal sexual violence against children: how can anything truly be a surprise?

BREAKING (Broken?) Entergy Cooling Tower Cover-Up Exposed

Eyewitness accounts and records are finally surfacing that expose Entergy’s reckless corporate negligence in the moments leading up to its infamous 2007 cooling tower collapse.  

In addition to the previous Vermont Yankee tritium leak Entergy hid from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we now have evidence of a more serious incident occurring in 2007. While we the source of the incident is now public, the underlying problem remains, by all accounts, unresolved.

As of this afternoon, a Whistle-Blower revealed the reason for the infamous 2007 cooling tower collapse. In fact, we now know the entire ugly incident was worse AND had nothing to do (surprise!) with the corporate-speak PR line Entergy spoon-fed to overly trusting government officials.

From eyewitness reports, and photographs taken from Entergy’s security surveillance cameras (and smuggled out by a Whistle-Blower), we now know and can now report there was a serious internal and operational level incident involving concentrated releases of gamma radiation at potentially lethal levels. At least one senior staff technician suffered exposure.

Details of how this release specifically led to the cooling tower collapse are unclear, but the photographic evidence (see below) taken immediately following the massive radiation exposure demonstrates the basis for Entergy’s cover-up.

The photos are disturbing and below the fold:


Image Source,Photobucket Uploader Firefox Extension

THE FIRST VERMONT PRESIDENTIAL STRAW POLL (for links to the candidates exploratory committees, refer to the diary on the right-hand column)!!! If the 2008 Vermont Democratic Presidential Primary were

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Bernie Sanders to Insure Public Option Receives Up-or-Down Vote (Defying Democratic Leaders)

NOTE: This is from our friends at FDL who are letting us reprint Jon Walker’s post on Bernie’s continued fight for health care reform.  The following post discusses Senator Sanders’ willingness to push a vote on a public option despite opposition from the Democratic leadership.



Thank you Bernie and keep up the fight.

——————————————-

Bernie Sanders to Make Sure Public Option Gets Up-or-Down Vote, Defying Reid, Durbin

 — By: Jon Walker

We recently learned that Harry Reid (D-NV) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) were actually whipping against the public option and trying to deny the American people a real up-or-down vote on the issue in the Senate. It is good to see that Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is willing to defy them and instead go with the will of the American people. From Greg Sargent:

   “I think somebody should do that, and I’d certainly be prepared to do that,” Sanders told me when I asked him if he’d be willing to commit to introducing a public option amendment. This is, in effect, a commitment to introduce the amendment if no one else does.

As I have explained earlier, if even one senator offers a public option amendment, and it is ruled germane, it would likely receive an up-or-down vote as part of the reconciliation vote-a-rama. Designing a public option/public program buy-in that would be ruled germane and does not violate the Byrd rule should definitely be possible.

Durbin’s argument against the public option amendment, or any other smart, pro-consumer, Democratic amendments, is that they could endanger passage of the reconciliation bill if it is sent back to the House. Given that Republican sources are saying the Senate parliamentarian ruled the House must first pass the comprehensive Senate health care bill before the reconciliation fixes can be taken up, the fear that the public option amendment could derail the reconciliation fixes seem strange.

If it gets to that point, Durbin will already have the health care reform bill he originally voted for signed into law. The reconciliation fixes are minor, and clearly not overly important to Durbin, since he already voted for a bill with all the “problems” in it. Since Durbin does not want the important student loan reform bill as part of reconciliation, there is no reason to actually worry about the fate of the reconciliation sidecar bill from his stand point.

Friday Vomitorium

http://greenmountaindaily.com/…

You got the word now.  Yeah, me too.  I forgot how the U.S. military won all those hearts and minds in the Nam.  And Lebanon.  And……………….

I’m so glad our military is in Haiti to make sure them folks are really gonna get their $3.09 a day.

Remember Pearl Harbor!

And maybe, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, the Philippine Insurrection, United Fruit in the ‘Banana Wars’, and on and on and on….

Where was our benign and ‘effective’ military might when it came to Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia and………….?

Oh, but I forgot, this is only for ‘show’–no live ammo, please; just the American military doing things in a ‘kinder, gentler’ way.  Sort of like…what are the words?…lock and load and lobotomy.  

Ah, Peace In Our Time.  May I please introduce my friend Adolf and his corporate entourage.  Hey, we’re back to the Olympics!  Sue–maybe in 2014, they’ll have War events.  I see GOLD.

http://greenmountaindaily.com/… — GOOD QUOTES

IRV Created Kurt Wright, Burlington Bans Future Wrights

Kurt Wright has a serious blind spot and a gross inability to reflect upon the obvious. IRV is the ONLY reason someone like Kurt Wright was taken seriously enough to run for mayor in 2009.

Prior to IRV, a side-show-fringe-appeal player such as Kurt Wright, would be the obvious “spoiler” candidate. Kurt Wright received an inordinately high 32.86% of the first round votes in the 2009 election. The virtually certain historical fact is, however, that in a non-IRV environment we would have seen at least 85%(or more) of the vote going exclusively to the “serious” candidates – Andy Montroll or a 2006/9 Bob Kiss – and a few scraps would fall off the table to Smith, Write-Ins, Wright & Simpson.

Guess what, the days of just table scraps going to “Smith, Write-Ins, Wright & Simpson” are back.  The pre-IRV days will return and political Special Olympians like Kurt Wright can no longer count on the social promotion of IRV to lift their message for one election; or more importantly, to carry their message forward to the next election or into future elections.  The status quo is safe once more. Instead of campaigning on ideas, prepare for hyper-scrutiny of candidates until there are only two establishment anointed “mainstream” acceptable candidates. The yappy spoilers barking on the fringes can make their “we stood on principle” speech to their 9 family members and 4 supporters at a “neighborhood celebration.”



You bet there’s more . .
.

Normally, a “Wright type candidate” would be the fringe spoiler that so-called establishment types – who are out of power –  would be calling on to get.out.of.the.way so that someone electable could challenge the Progressive incumbent.  

Questionable, handicapped and otherwise non-credible candidacies, such as the Wright 2009 Mayoral bid, do not win broad based support in a city-wide election. While he held a neighborhood niche following together, he was unelectable in a straight-up election with a credible city-wide candidate. That’s not news, that’s history. Talk to Bernie Sanders who ran, and lost, as the non-IRV candidate in state-wide elections in 1972, 1974, 1976, 1986 and 1988 and finally won in 1990 in a “throw’um all out year” when he was finally seen as a non-spoiler. Kurt Wright is no Bernie Sanders.

However, because of IRV, voters bothered to listen to Wright when he campaigned 2009 and because of IRV Wright has garnered a 15-minutes’ of credibility that a scrutinized candidate in a plurality election could never enjoy. Rather than constantly debating whether Wright was hurting Andy Montroll’s chances to defeat Kiss, in the last Mayoral election, political Special Olympian Wright had an IRV ticket to play Varsity. Wright, again, only because of IRV in 2009, was permitted into a line-up of candidates where he was allowed to keep swinging until the pitcher finally hit his bat. IRV was a refreshing change of pace, the dynamics of which were about twenty feet over Wright’s head.

This is what makes Wright’s latter-day complaints about IRV such a huge joke. He is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of IRV Vermont has seen so far.  In 2009, IRV was the lipstick that hid Wright’s pig-lipped joke of a non-IRV campaign. In fact, IRV remains the reason why someone such as Wright, (extreme views albeit with a modicum of credibility) still has a shot in Burlington. I’d like to give Wright the benefit of the doubt and credit him with being duplicitously cynical and merely disingenuous by criticizing IRV.  Unfortunately, as we approached Town Meeting day, it seems he really is dumb enough not to realize that IRV is the only thing that allowed him look serious for a few months in 2009.

Please, don’t take this the wrong way. IRV is not bad because it elevates someone like Kurt Wright who is functionally dumber than a bucket of hammers. IRV is great BECAUSE it can elevate and give an opportunity to someone, not because they are dumber than a box of hammers, but in spite of the fact that they are dumber than a box of hammers. IRV also opens up the process to many other creative and useful ideas that move our democratic process forward.  The status quo craves the homogenized but stagnant uninspired middle, and plurality voting awards both homogenization and the status quo.

Congratulations Burlington on your, um, victory.

Friday Vomitorium

This might become a new feature. We’ll see.

Every week we receive comments that are worth a second look, further discussion or just plain recognition for being smart, entertaining, pathetically retarded (h/t Rush&Sara) lame, entertaining or generally worthy of a second slide through the page.    

Friday is a good day to post, rescue, reprint (regurgitate?) a few of the better, more interesting, funny, insightful or just plain awful comments from our virtual banquet of reader punditry from the preceding week.

So which reader comments hit your radar this week? Drop your links and thoughts in the comments. A few of my picks are below the fold.  

On the overdue but still insufficient primary date correction, you can’t argue with this clear statement of the situation from Reelvermonter:

If Douglas vetos a bill that passed the House with 139 votes it will prove once and foreall who is POLITICAL!  If he does not veto it, it will also prove who talks out of both sides of his mouth.

Long-time GMD denizen Hoopmeister pinned the tail on the donkey (and the elephant and the moose) with this spot-on observation regarding Burlington Telecomm:

it never should have come to this and the intervention of Shaver and that other numnuts from the NNE is further evidence of how far the R contingent will go to stand in the way of progress just to spite Kiss. . .

When will Burlington folks realize that internet and TV and phone are public utilities and the ability of a public entity to provide that service is a good and cost savings thing for citizens??

Are those clowns now advocating that Burlington Electric be sold off to GMP or Velco???  Pretty much the same situation except one is established and the other developing and competing with Fairpoint and Comcast. The service from BurlTel is so much better than Comcast that they cant stand a side by side test.  Even for the same money you get better service…  

Both the R and D contingent are willing to sacrifice something good to shame Kiss, who is not without blame, but they certainly should be able to rise above this game for the public good.  

DoesLess and his PSB clowns are just another story… we no longer have a functioning state government.

Truer words, Buddy, truer words . . .

In response to Hoopmeister’s wise reminder that Burlington Tellcomm is a better deal and far more customer friendly than, for instance, the jokers at Comcast, Doug Hoffer is quick to remind everyone what passes for GOP “policy” when it comes to public utilities or public policy for that matter, by reminding us all that Burlington Electric:

was targeted for sale 15 years ago when Peter Brownell was mayor (for one term); it was even supported by the General Manager of BED at the time; ridiculous but that’s what passes for policy ideas from that crowd

That would have been brilliant!

There are too many angles to the story about legislative reimbursement for food and travel to cover. Putting aside the legal and moral questions as well as the political nuances, Mike Eldred hits a pragmatic realism note with his thoughtful observations:

If you drop per diem, then it will either cost substantially more to be a legislator from, say, Bennington than to be a legislator from Barre. Many legislators simply have to stay in Montpelier during the week, or else they face three to six hours on the road every day. And they’d miss a lot of the other work that goes on between legislators outside of the regular day.

There has to be some way of dealing with the added expense that some legislators face because of the location of the districts they represent – whether it’s to require reimbursement based on receipts for actual expenses incurred or to build a dorm and cafeteria for legislators.  (Visions of all-nighters and food fights.)  

I’ve received both a per diem and a meals allowance from the federal government.  It was just a flat rate, based on the local economic conditions.  If I spent less, the rest was mine, if I spent more, the difference was mine to make up out of my base pay.  

And that’s the way it was supposed to be.  I wasn’t supposed to claim an amount based on actual expenses.  There wasn’t any way to return money that wasn’t used for its specific purpose.  Nothing I was doing was considered unusual or unethical, in fact, I had no choice but to accept the terms.

On the other hand, I’ve also collected mileage from the federal government.  It had to be for actual miles driven in my own personal (or borrowed or rented) car.  I did not, and could not legally, collect mileage reimbursement for carpooling miles in someone else’s car, or for personal side trips.

So what exactly are the rules for legislators?  According to the 7D article, legislators are supposed to estimate their expenses for the coming year in January – that’s not even the “honor system,” that’s asking them to make a prediction. Is it any wonder that legislators predict they’ll need the maximum?

Finally, check out this Olympic PeteySweety / Sue / Bill McKibben discussion.

There are plenty more comments to mine and run through the vomitorium for further review, next week maybe I’ll flesh it out some more.  

What comments have caught your attention recently? Nothing is off-topic in this post.

Campaign Finance Returns to Vermont

With the hoopla over our result-oriented activist Supreme Court’s latest campaign finance ruling, we are finally hearing people take Vermont’s campaign finance problems seriously. At GMD, we’ve been lamenting the fact that Vermont is, apparently, the only state in the union that does NOT have any limits on donations to a candidate by corporations, individuals or political parties.

Entergy could legally contribute $1million dollars, tomorrow, to Brian Dubie or a slate of General Assembly candidates from southern Vermont or any other state candidate for that matter.  Same for Walmart and same for the national political parties.  

We have no entered into another campaign cycle with a no-holds-barred campaign finance environment.  The Supreme Court’s political activism has resulted in renewed visibility of this issue and the time in now to give voters, candidates and the electoral process some much needed certainty going into this year’s primary and general election.

It is still true what we pointed out almost two years ago:

By vetoing the [General Assembly’s campaign finance reforms] Governor Douglas [has] prevented any statutory limit on campaign contributions to gubernatorial (or any) candidates. . .

. . . Prior to 1998, Vermont law mandated “No candidate shall accept contributions totaling more than $1,000 from a single source.” 3 V.S.A. §2805 (pre-1988 language)

In 1997, our General Assembly repealed the $1,000 campaign contribution limit. In its place the legislature adopted a new law mandating a $400 single source contribution limit[, whcih the Supreme Court overruled. . .   So what is the contribution limit to a gubernatorial campaign?  The simple, and legally correct answer, is that there is no limit.

Incredibly, the Attorney General takes the position that the once the General Assembly repealed to prior contribution limits and passed new one, and after the Supreme Court overturned the law as it was currently in effect, a pre-1998 campaign statute “reverted” into place.  

I’ve spoken to many attorneys and many people who received a 70, or higher, in Junior High School Civics class about this.  The universal, and correct, assessment regarding the Attorney General’s view is that it is “creative.”  Legall invalid, but politically “creative.”  The only attorneys who actuall

Too Many Reasons to Oppose Senate Insurance Bill to Count Them All

The insurance companies are popping corks as they prepare to welcome millions of new policy holder, billions in premiums and quickly transfer middle class worker’s salary and tax subsidies . . . wait for it . . . INTO THEIR OWN POCKETS.

The Senate bill transfers money – mandates money – to the insurance industry. It does not provide access to health care.  It provides “health insurance,” which is the name of a product that becomes more and more unrelated to the concept of “access to health care” with each annual rise in premiums, with each annual new set of benefit exclusions, with each new annual removal of medications from coverage, with each new annual dis-allowance of covered treatment options and with every single guaranteed annual rise in co-pays, out-of-pocket requirements and general rationing of providers and treatment options.

The following comments are taken liberally from Jon Walker’s excellent analysis on this subject.

The sole defense of this massive corporate giveaway, formally known as the Senate health care reform bill, is that it would still do some “good,” helping millions of the uninsured.

This is false.

The Senate Health Insurance Bill dramatically worsens the quality of current insurance coverage for tens of millions Americans, thanks to the new excise tax on insurance plans. The remaining “good,” what actually stays, does not outweigh the massive amount of harm. The remaining “good” is ultimately priced out the average patient’s ability to pay for it.

The “help” in the Senate bill is defined as giving insufficient subsides to Americans who are now forced to buy extremely expensive, poorly regulated, junk insurance.  Any purported “regulations” on policy holder payments above the cost of insurance are meaningless without banning annual limits and NO out-of-pocket caps/ (the “cap” language does not actually cap anything – it’s not even a loophole it’s a massive license to the exact opposite of what the alleged stated purpose – banning limits – actually is). The “Ban on Limits” law is a license cut off payments. Sounds like a limiting green light to me.  

As a result, mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a family with a one-year major illness from being bankrupted by accumulated medical debt.

As a result, mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a family from being bankrupted by a single family member with a chronic illness.  

As a result, mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a family from being bankrupted if a single family member has a major injury that requires multiple treatments and surgeries over more than one calendar year.

Insurance that does not protect you from financial ruin if you get sick makes is a mockery of the entire concept health insurance.

Mandated “coverage” does nothing to stop a person or family from being bankrupted by health care costs.  All mandated coverage does is mandate coverage.  It does not mandate ACCESS to health care.

Mandated coverage and access to health care are unrelated subjects under the current private health insurance regime in the United States.

— Below — The harm of the Senate tax on middle class health care access is enormous.

The harm the excise tax on employer-provided insurance benefits will do is enormous. The health care bill is designed with the goal of making millions of middle class Americans’ health insurance coverage much worse. That is not a bug, it is a feature of the Senate version.

The excise tax is meant to force your employer to cut back your insurance benefits, reduce your coverage, and increase your co-pays and deductibles. This is a fact established by insurance company conduct, the structure of their plans and IT IS THE CONCLUSION OF THE NON-PARTISAN Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Congress’ own financial analysis found:

   [A]n estimated 19 percent of workers with employment-based coverage would be affected by the excise tax. . .  Those individuals who kept their high-premium policies would pay a higher premium than under current law, with the difference in premiums roughly equal to the amount of the tax. However, CBO and JCT estimate that most people would avoid the cost of the excise tax by enrolling in plans that had lower premiums; those reductions would result from choosing plans that either pay a smaller share of covered health care costs (which would reduce premiums directly as well as indirectly by leading to less use of covered medical services), manage benefits more tightly, or cover fewer services.

The CMS’s analysis showed that:

In reaction to the tax, many employers would reduce the scope of their health benefits. The resulting reductions in covered services and/or increases in employee cost-sharing requirements would induce workers to use fewer services. Because plan benefit values would generally increase faster than the threshold amounts for defining high-cost plans (which are indexed by the CPI plus 1 percent), over time additional plans would become subject to the excise tax, prompting those employers to scale back coverage.

To translate, the Senate middle class tax on health care coverage will effectively force employers to scale back the health insurance benefits they offer in order to avoid the excise tax. This can be done by reducing what benefits the plan covers and/or increasing cost sharing (i.e. higher co-pays, higher deductibles, higher out-of-pocket limits, and possibly lower annual limits). If you have a good employer provided health insurance plan, it will be dramatically scaled back. Contrary to Obama’s direct promise, you will not be able to keep the coverage you currently have, and that is by design of the Senate tax on middle class health care coverage.

One critical problem with this excise tax, which goes to what are misleadingly dubbed “Cadillac” plans, is that it is not indexed to health care inflation. After a short period, it will force employers to make the vast majority of employer-provided health insurance plans much worse. A decade after the coverage mandate and tax take hold, most Americans will have much worse health insurance coverage as a result.

Instead of paying for reform with a tax on the richest one percent of Americans, like the House bill, the Senate bill pays for reform by worsening the insurance coverage for the vast majority of Americans.

Ruining the coverage of most working class Americans to get the money for a huge corporate boondoggle that will only enrich the insurance companies while not stopping medical bankruptcy in this country does not sound like a good trade.

Fighting Like a Superpower

Superpowers have a great advantage when they impose war on another country:  They never have to surrender.

Superpowers have a great DISADVANTAGE when they impose war on another country:  They never have to surrender.

Whether it wins a war or loses a war, a superpower can keep fighting without ever surrendering, without ever stopping, without ever acknowledging that the purpose for fighting the war (assuming there was one) has long since ended or the objective is no longer obtainable or realistic.  “Winning” or “losing” are ultimately irrelevant to a warring superpower because it can keep fighting as long as it wants.

There is no greater threat to the security of a superpower than for its leaders to continue fighting in a conflict long after that superpower lost the war. To continue fighting long after any chance to achieve a strategic advantage is lost.  To continue fighting long after there is any justification for the destruction of another country and the destruction of our own resources

By all objective analysis, the United States lost its war on Afghanistan shortly after it began.  The political leadership at that time, such as it was, announced that it would fight a “war on terror” in Afghanistan to make the United States safe from another 9-11 type attack. It was a war to protect the United States – to make us safer.  Indeed, why else does a civilized country go to war but to protect itself from the threat of destruction at the hand of another country?  By the end of 2002, despite toppling the Taliban, which was a feeble and the most recent political entity to claim control of Afghanistan, the strategically naive Bush abandoned any objectively reasonable policy that could have led to a safer United States. The haphazard occupation squandered any opportunity to achieve something constructive from our violent presence in that country.

By those “measures” — by the US’s own stated objectives — we lost the war before President Obama took the oath of office.

No matter what we do in Afghanistan now, the enormity of our killing, our lost resources and the hatred we have engendered have made the U.S. less safe. We have nothing to gain by staying and only the waste of resources and pain and suffering to inflict on Afghanistan if we continue the occupation. The only mission that will make the U.S. more secure in 2009, is a rapid withdrawal and a much needed and overdue honest discussion of the failures committed in the name of U.S. security over the past eight years.

The continued failure to acknowledge that the “war” to make the U.S. safer was lost long ago, is ultimately an acceptance of that defeat. It compounds strategic losses caused by failed political leadership. The days of countries fighting until one could fight no longer are essentially over. We cannot expect that parties will meet at some point on the USS Missouri where officials recognize the end of a war.

Today, wars will end when men sitting behind desks, often many time zones away from the fighting, decide that there is no political strategic advantage to continuing the investment in bloodshed. We had no hope and no expectation of this type of (rudimentary) political strength or strategic vision from the last administration. Sadly, we have every reason to demand it from the current one.