( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

It was so exciting to attend the organizing meeting of the Young Democrats of Vermont the Sunday after Thanksgiving. About 35 Democrats under age 40 met at the State House in Montpelier, voting on by-laws and electing officers. How cool is it that Kate Lapp is our YDV President at 17? Having young Reps in the legislature like Sarah Buxton and Kesha Ram has been an inspiration!

At this first meeting it was clear that the YDV will be promoting legislation that helps young Vermonters with issues like debt, helping young candidates with campaigns, and acting as a voice for young Vermonters.

So what’s next for this organization? I have made it one of my missions as chair of the Franklin County Democrats to make sure our county has a YDV chapter up and running by Spring 2012. By working with Republicans and Progressives in the county I’m hoping to get in front of students to talk about service and civic involvement in an exciting way and hopefully help a core of new young leaders develop. I’d like to provide campaign training to young volunteers for the 2012 season and encourage young candidates to get their names out.

If you’re under 40 and a Democrat in Vermont, talk to your county chair about starting a YDV chapter. Check out this vt.buzz article about the convention

http://blogs.burlingtonfreepre…

Facebook group:

https://www.facebook.com/group…

(For Junior)

Outrage at this bill/law? (Obama has threatened to veto) should be our reaction, especially as Americans take to the streets in the Occupy Movement.

The National Defense Authorization Act would expand Presidential powers to imprison, without due process, Americans all over the world, including us ‘terrorists’ here at home.  It calls for extending the ‘battlefield’ against terrorism to American soil; our own backyards.  (Watch out for loudmouths at your summer barbecues.)  Even worse, it authorizes the President to use the American military to help round up American citizens of suspect political views across this new American ‘battlefield’–our own (we thought) country.  No doubt the same way the U.S. military does it when they break down doors in Afghanistan.

So, we are now not only going to be at war with the World, Congress has declared war on the American people.  

And guess what?  Our beloved Senator Pat Leahy was one of the legion of Dems (along with good old Al Franken) voting FOR this atrocity.  Bernie voted AGAINST.  (Only 3 Dems and 3 Republicans voted with him, against it)  To his credit, Peter Welch voted AGAINST this bill in the House vote.

Look back to 1933 and ’34 when the German Reichstag started giving Hitler and his band of perverts sweeping powers to put people in CONCENTRATION CAMPS, using the military as part of the police force.  Well…Here we are.  How did we get here?  And what are we going to do about it?

Right now, it seems like the Liberal/Progressive/Left is responding the same old way–light a candle and write long essays about it.  I’m really impressed.  Candles and long essays worked really good in 1932.

The MSM will not air out the smell of this bill.  Most Americans probably don’t even know what’s at stake here.  We’re talking, basically, our own little Third Reich here at home.  How Retro.



(And don’t equivocate.  Don’t say bringing up Nazi Germany is a cliche, or that…what?…The Alternative is so much worse?  Gee, lucky for us they didn’t write the use of Zyklon B Gas into the bill.  Think of how you’d react if this bill came under Bush/Cheney.)

The Occupy Wall Street Movement needs our aggressive support because it is apparent that Wall St. has its own Movement–right in our own Congress.  Under NDAA, I would imagine some of these folks supporting unions, workers, and the 99% will become POWs (Prisoners of War on America).  Think of you or me or our loved ones and friends being grabbed off the street and hustled off to an ‘unknown’ detention facility.  For what?  Writing a Letter To The Editor?  (Boy, A Building Boom, they’ll call these Concentration Camps–good for the economy.)

Occupy Wall Street should include outrage at this bill, outrage at War For Capitalism itself, outrage at turning America into the kind of nation that was responsible for the most horrendous acts of War and Injustice in modern times.  And outrage that our children will have, as their future, the ‘privilege’ of ‘serving’ the Fatherland of Capitalism as it goosesteps the World into oblivion.  (Perhaps, since America is now the Battlefield, they’ll give our kiddies knock-off Hitler Youth uniforms–Give?  Shit.  Make them buy them at WalMart.)

Outrageous!  Science Fiction?  New Order.  The Dirty Bastards!

Sieg Heil.  And all this because we’ve grown so attached to our little gadgets and products.  Lifestyle verses Freedom.  Verses Justice, Peace, Human Decency, and, yes, knowledge and curiosity about what The Almighty Spirit has given us out there in the expanding universe.  Just one big ugly Cabaret, old chum.

A Big Harry Dean Stanton “SHIT” on this bill, and those who conceived it, and those who voted for it.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE???!

Peter Buknatski

Montpelier, Vt.

(So pissed-off  

Hold the presses!  There’s been another incident report from Vermont Yankee.  Only this one took two months for the NRC report to appear, and it clearly illustrates that there were significant safety and reliability concerns at the time:

LOSS OF VITAL AC POWER WHILE SHUTDOWN

“This 60-day telephone notification is being made pursuant to 10CFR50.73(a)(2)(iv)(A) and 10CFR50.73(a)(1) to describe an invalid actuation of a containment heat removal system.

“On October 11, 2011, with the reactor shutdown for refueling, a partial loss of vital AC power was experienced which resulted in a loss of shutdown cooling as well as PCIS group 2, 3, 4, and 5 half isolations. The actuation was determined to be invalid as it occurred because a breaker supplying power to the ‘A’ vital AC was manually opened, resulting in actuation of the associated PCIS logic circuitry. The Group 4 actuation resulted in a complete isolation of the single train Residual Heat Removal shutdown cooling suction path. The shutdown cooling path was isolated for approximately 12 minutes resulting in a coolant temperature increase of approximately 2 degrees F. At the time of the event, the reactor cavity was flooded with the spent fuel pool gates removed and the normal fuel pool cooling system in operation to provide reactor cavity cooling. Based on this, there was no impact on public health and safety.”

The licensee notified the NRC Resident Inspector.

That’s one hell of a temperature climb in just twelve minutes!

What took them so long to log the incident?

Former State Auditor and current Franklin County Senator is expected to announce his campaign to challenge Democratic Peter Shumlin for the state’s top job today. A press release only indicated a big announcement of some kind, but Terri Hallenbeck at vtbuzz and WCAX both note that his website (now offline) last night indicated:

“I am a candidate for Governor of the State of Vermont.  I take that candidacy very seriously.  It is the culmination of my two terms as a Vermont State Senator and service as Vermont’s 28th State Auditor.”

The website also suggested he would run as a centrist and will likely therefore (predictably and boring-ly) attempt to paint Shumlin as an out-of-touch liberal (although it sounds as though he’s not interested in getting personal). There will be no (serious) GOP primary, as their coordination of statewide candidates has been tight and methodical.

According to an email notice from the Vermont ACLU, the issue of whether police arrest records are public documents available to reporters will be argued in Vermont Supreme Court Thursday [corrected] at 2 pm. The case involves not just police secrecy, but potential racial profiling.

The arrest included striking the [African-American] man with a baton, pepper-spraying him, handcuffing him, and dragging him nude, wrapped in a blanket, down the stairs and out of his home.

 

The ACLU caught the case when VTDigger.org’s Anne Galloway sought release of the arrest records to investigate the potential involvement of racial profiling and was refused.

 

The Hartford police entry into Wayne Burwell’s home on Memorial Day weekend in 2010 led to harsh criticism of police actions and suggestions that police engaged in racial profiling.

 

Police had received a call from a cleaning service of a suspected burglary at the residence. When officers arrived, they found the African-American man sitting on a bathroom toilet, naked and dazed. The officers claimed that Burwell resisted arrest because he was unresponsive to their commands. They struck him with a baton, then pepper-sprayed and handcuffed him. He was wrapped in a blanket and dragged down the stairs out of the townhouse.

 

Neighbors and EMTs responding to the scene identified Burwell as the home’s owner. He suffers from a chronic blood sugar imbalance and had apparently slipped into a semi-conscious state. He was taken to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, treated, and released. He was never charged with any crime.

 

The state police investigated and absolved the arresting officers, as did Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell.

 

Galloway, who has written stories about possible racial profiling in Vermont, wanted to know more about the Burwell incident. She asked the police department for relevant records but was told she couldn’t have them. She appealed that decision to town officials, and was again denied access. She then sued in Vermont Superior Court, represented by the ACLU-VT.

 

In a decision released in May 2011, the Vermont Superior Court ruled that police investigative records created prior to a decision whether to charge someone with a criminal offense are exempt under the state’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA).

The ACLU has now taken the case to SCOV, where it will be heard at 2 p.m. Thursday [corrected] in the Supreme Court building on Main St. in Montpelier, second floor.

One of the hotly contested areas in state legislation in recent years has been Republican attempts to create new, onerous identification requirements for voting and registering to vote. Republicans claim that all they are interested in is the integrity of our sacred ballot, while liberals and Democrats have pointed out that these efforts are no more than a thinly veiled attempt to prevent one of the most reliable Democratic voting blocks from voting.

For example, Attorney General Eric Holder has argued that voter suppression efforts are inconsistent with the values embedded in American democracy.

“I am not talking about any one particular state effort, but more generally I think for those who would consider trying to use methods, techniques to discourage people from coming to the polls — that’s inconsistent with what we say we are as a nation,” Holder said.

Evidence in a new case in Maryland proves that the Republican claims are the transparent lies we have argued they are, and that they have, in fact, been engaged in a systematic effort to keep black voters away from the polls.

The case is a prosecution for election law violations by the campaign of former Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich. The Washington Post reports that in the lead-up to the 2010 gubernatorial election, Ehrlich's campaign placed over 100.000 anonymous robocalls to the predominantly black Baltimore and Prince George's Counties, telling voters there that the election was in the bag for the Democratic candidate and that they could “relax.”

Without anything more this seems like a pretty clear-cut case of suppression, right? The jury agreed, and convicted Ehrlich’s campaign manager Paul Ehrlich of four counts of election law violations.

Documents obtained in the case prove beyond any question that the whole point of this campaign was to suppress the black vote. For instance in a campaign briefing document called the Schurick Doctrine the consultants say “The Schurick Doctrine is designed to promote confusion, emotionalism, and frustration among African American democrats, focused in precincts where high concentrations of AA vote. As a result of the doctrine, the three favorable outcomes will benefit Republicans on Election Day. The three outcomes are: Don’t Vote (Stay Home), Don’t Vote at the Top of the Ticket ( Skip Box/Bracket for Governor), and Vote Republican (largely due to our persuasion messaging).

Another page of handwritten notes from Rhonda Russell, who worked for the campaign, included the note “suppress turnout in Black communities”.

How do you defend the indefensible? Well, the Republican defendants claimed that the robocalls had nothing to do with suppressing black vote, it was just part of a “reverse psychology” strategy, whereby their calls to black voters would somehow motivate their white conservative base to get out to vote.

Of course, anyone who has worked on campaigns and knows about how they work knows that the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) effort is designed to make sure that identified supporters vote by calling them and reminding them to vote, not by calling people who you expect to support your opponent.

In other words, what we have argued for many years, racism in Republican efforts at vote suppression, has just been proved beyond a doubt.

Police in Vermont have arrested a journalist for doing his job. More than that, he was covering the arrest of several Vermonters.

From VPR (emphasis added):

Opponents of a controversial wind project under construction on Lowell Mountain were arrested yesterday for blocking a road.

…Six of the arrested were protestors but one was a journalist, Chris Braithwaite, publisher of the Barton Chronicle, who was there covering the story.

Regardless of the merits of the issue, the arrest of a journalist covering the arrest of people engaging in civil disobedience is abhorrent, and should be anathema to everyone concerned with maintaining a free society.

Here’s what Braithwaite said during a VPR interview (link).

“I know the Chief Deputy, Phil Brooks pretty well… I told him that I would cover the protesting and cover the arrest and then go down the mountain…Phil came over and said I had to get off the property, I said again that I was really just trying to do my job and would cover the arrest and would leave. He didn’t accept that and I was arrested.

I felt that as the only reporter on the scene that if there was going to be this confrontation between protesting citizens and their government, somebody ought to be there to see ewxcatly how that took place.

and to to obey police orders and just go back down the mountain at that critical moment wouldn’t be good journalism. That’s why I stayed.”

Braithwaite says he was arrested “nicely,” but was charged with Unlawful Trespass and plans to plead Not Guilty.

Damn straight. It’s enough of a crisis that we’re seeing journalist arrests at “occupy” rallies. If the police in this instance have any sense, they’ll drop this quickly, or it’s likely to go national (we’ll be sure of that) and give them a big black eye – as it should.

(H/T to user VCE for bringing this to our attention)

First, let me make clear that I have absolutely no inside information on Shumlin Administration plans to rebuild or replace the state office complex in Waterbury. I only know what I read in the papers (or websites, ahem). But from what I’ve seen, there seems to be significant consideration of a partial move away from Waterbury. The leading candidate to receive some of the displaced appears to be Barre.

Well, it is if you believe Thom Lauzon, Barre’s Battlin’ Mayor. He’s all up in the pages of Seven Days, touting his plan for a new downtown office building and bragging of his “direct line to the governor and his deputies.”

That made me shiver a little bit, although it may simply be Lauzonian hyperbole. Just like his line about Barre being on a “bit of an upward trend.” I’ve been hearing lines like that for a decade or more, going back at least to the ill-fated opening of the Farmers Diner. And I’ve rooted for every tiny signal of a turnaround; I’d love to see a stronger, more vibrant Barre.

Plus, the move of a state agency to Barre would be a bit of payback for the routine (if unplanned) dumping of large numbers of parolees and former inmates on Barre. Lauzon’s been right to complain about that. But I have two big objections to Lauzon’s current dream: one is logistical, and one political. Please stay with me after the jump…  

Logistical: Barre is simply not that easy to get to. It’s “only a 15-minute drive” from Montpelier, but that’s a 15-minute drive along the slow and crowded Barre-Montpelier Road. And then a stately crawl into downtown Barre on its jampacked Main Street. (Which would be exacerbated by a few hundred more state commuters.) But sure, 15 minutes isn’t that bad — if you’re starting from Montpelier. But how many of Waterbury’s state workers live in the Burlington area? For them, a relatively painless commute to Waterbury would become an onerous 75-to-90-minute one-way trip.

(By the way, did Barre not get screwed in a tremendous way when I-89 was built? It glides practically to the front door of the Statehouse in Montpelier, but it bypasses Barre by several miles. Exits 6 and 7 are only somewhat helpful. Considering all the granite traffic there used to be when they were laying out the freeway, and the fact that Barre was a much larger and livelier town than Montpelier at the time, why didn’t I-89 go closer to Barre? It’s been a significant drag on the city’s economy ever since.)

And in terms of the daily business of governing, Barre is awfully distant. In politics, proximity equals power, and if I headed a state agency, I’d fight tooth-and-nails against a move to Barre. The Seven Days article posits the Agency of Natural Resources as a candidate for relocation; if so, what would that mean for its ability to influence the course of environmental policy?

Political: While I’d love to help Barre, the fact is that it has a Republican Mayor who’s openly salivating at the prospect of running for statewide office. Peter Shumlin has already given a big leg up to Phil Scott and Neale Lunderville by giving them significant responsibility and touting their leadership skills. He really doesn’t need to do the Vermont GOP any more favors by elevating another potential Republican candidate.

To the good people of Barre, that’s harsh. I would like to see Barre get a fairer shake. But this is a case where politics trumps policy. And I don’t want to lend any more credibility (or any more “bipartisan” cred) to another potential Republican candidate for higher office. Shumlin’s already done enough of that.  

 Gov.Peter Shumlin traveled to Los Angeles on Monday to attend the Democratic Governors Association meeting. Twenty two Democratic governors are attending and discussions are naturally expected to include how to tackle their state’s budget crisis. While in Los Angeles Shumlin might get wind of New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California Governor Jerry Brown plans to have upper income earners help with their state’s budget problems by pay higher taxes.

Brown said he’d ask voters to raise income taxes on individuals making more than $250,000 a year and boost the sales levy. Cuomo said he wants an income-tax overhaul that would place a higher burden [burden!] on top earners.

Scary political third rail stuff to be sure. However growing middle-class awareness of how  unfairly the pie is divided has been headlined by Occupy movements and may lessen the burden of political fear and allow politicians to torque-up their courage levels. Governor Shumlin might recall last year some 50 wealthy Vermonters actually requested a temporary tax increase surcharge to help shoulder their fair share. Also a recent study in Vermont showed that:

“The effects of taxes on migration are, at most, small—so small that states that raise income taxes on the wealthiest households will see a substantial net gain in revenue.”

So spare Vermonters the perennial warning that wealthy Vermonters will flee for the borders if the state raises their income taxes. No Democrat should ever bother hauling that out and spreading it on the fields again.

Nationally Warren Buffet, other all around rich people and even a group called Patriotic Millionaires are publically support tax increases for their own income brackets. And significantly Republican Bruce Bartlett a former member of the Reagan and GHW Bush administration closes a piece in the New York Times today with the following:  

But the idea that the rich cannot or should not pay more should be dismissed out of hand. They can and must pay more; the only question is how best to do it.

So Governor, do enjoy LA and by all means have a talk with Andrew and Jerry.  

In case you hadn’t noticed, jvwalt has joined the illustrious ranks of GMD front pager. Since a few of us (myself included) are doing less posting these days, it seemed time for some fresh blood, and jvwalt is high-quality blood indeed.

Not only has he been posting good stuff here for some time, he also comes with a mighty media pedigree, including experience in the newspaper world, quite a bit on radio (including at New Hampshire Public Radio), and even has himself a book out there on the shelves – which just goes to show that the new media is not just for those with short attention spans like yours truly.

So: Welcome to GMD’s front page, jvwalt – hope you survive the experience. (geek reference, see pic).