Scott Milne reportedly is growing less likely to demand a recount in his narrow loss to incumbent Governor Shumlin. It must have become clear to him, after almost a week, that a recount would not give him the more than two thousand votes needed to overcome his shortfall. The final decision in a race this close is required to be decided by the state legislature when they convene next year.  

Commenting to VtDigger.com about his eventful week and the race in general:

Milne said the past week, as he has declined to concede but not decided on a recount, has been fun, and a good learning experience. His status was a hot topic of conversation at his aunt’s 90th birthday party over the weekend. [added emphasis]

Experiential learning may have shortcomings. It is obvious one thing he didn’t learn was, that in the long run it might be wise to graciously accept defeat (however narrow) and conserve hard-won good will accumulated with voters and legislators.  

Milne’s failure to concede after the election and hints that he would lobby legislators’ votes for governor in January earned him a stiff rebuke from a major supporter. Former Governor Jim Douglas found it necessary to publically caution the first-time statewide candidate:

“It would seem to me unlikely that that would be a useful strategy.

[…]  “It would seem to me that the good will that he’s accrued during the last several days ought to be preserved,” said Douglas. “Scott has been well received by the people of Vermont, he has offered an important message and alternative, and I want to be sure that he’s available to offer that again.”

Milne says he was listening to folks and would come up with a plan and wouldn’t be pressing forward if he didn’t see an opportunity to win. He clearly doesn’t seem to be listening to former Governor Douglas.    

As he says, it may have been fun (it sure didn’t look like it), but considering his “strategy” over the last week, I really wonder what it was he learned.  

 Scott Milne seems to have latched onto a crazy idea. VPR reports:

[Milne] said it’s even possible the votes were counted wrong, and his 2,000-vote deficit could turn into a win in a recount.

"It's plausible, clearly. What we're saying is we're leaving all the options on the table, we're listening to folks, and we'll come up with a plan." – GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott Milne, on the possibility of a recount.

Does he think, “That's so crazy, it just might work!"?  That’s the stock TV/movie trope that occurs in ‘B’ sci-fi and adventure stories. In this trope a character or group that finds themselves in a fast moving, difficult situation with no solution easily at hand will desperately seize on a nonsensical plan and declare “That's so crazy, it just might work!"  And only in the movies and TV shows does it ever work.  

So Scott Milne thinks it is plausible that he can make up a two-thousand vote shortfall in a recount, or barring that, he and a few Republican legislative supporters can persuade the Democratic-majority legislature to install him as Governor. I suppose in a move  akin to Mitch McConnell’s pledge to see to it that Obama fails, he could be planning an aggressive VTGOP strategy, one designed to cast a shadow over Shumlin’s next term and set the stage to win the governorship in 2016.

But there are no Karl Rove style strategists in evidence at his campaign. Milne for Vermont’s staff was made up of the candidate’s immediate family and perhaps five paid staffers. So that strategy seems unlikely given Milne’s past performance.  

Milne is a political novice after all. He awkwardly began his campaign by telling a story about rabbit breeding to an uneasy crowd and continued on a stumbling learning curve. In September his newly hired campaign manager the VTGOP’s man Brent Burns left under a cloud with no explanation about why, saying only, "All the rest is between Scott and I.”. Following that there were reports that the former newspaper editor he hired to write press releases and do research had been fired from a previous job for making up stories.  

Following the claim it is plausible to win a recount, Milne says, “we’ll come up with a plan.” Maybe, after doing better than expected or just angry at losing, he has convinced himself that there is a plan out there just crazy enough to work.

But I’d bet that only on TV or in a ‘B’ movie would it make him Governor.  

So, think you could count how many times you’ve heard the following or something similar during this election campaign season? “We have to create a more business-friendly climate in Vermont – taxing industries creates a negative image.” Perhaps we’ll hear that even more often after the election as the state tries to charm promises from Global Foundries, the soon-to-be new owners of IBM’s Essex manufacturing plant.    

Recently when speaking about giving a particular business a tax break Lt. Gov. Phil Scott said  “It doesn’t cost us much.” But how do we know that? Government giveaways – tax abatements, cash grants, loan or loan guarantees – are difficult to document and often not thoroughly tracked. Well that may be about to change.    

New accounting rules, changes that are called “huge” are being proposed by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). The changes would require that states and local governments report corporate tax incentives as lost income.  

"If you care about school finance or smart growth or regionalism or land use in general, this data will enable you to figure things out that were unthinkable before.” Says Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First.    

The proposed tax abatement disclosure requirements would include:    

The tax being abated  

Criteria that must be met for the taxpayer to be eligible for the abatement  

Provisions for recapturing abated taxes  

The types of commitments made by tax abatement recipients  

Number of tax abatement agreements  

Dollar amount of taxes abated  

Other commitments made by a government, such as to build infrastructure assets.  

Also of note is the provision requiring governments to report the criteria that businesses must meet for the abatement and how governments will get that money back if the goals aren't achieved, commonly referred to as clawback provisions.

A  New York Times study in 2012 showed combined federal and state government incentives to corporations give up $170 billion per year. By state, Vermont’s giveaways weren’t at the top but the study showed the state has (as the saying goes) skin in the corporate incentive game.  

The Vermont giveaways to businesses come from somewhere (check your wallet), and collectively they can take a bite out of stressed state and local budgets. Tax incentives for corporations versus money for schools or services – the GASB accounting changes could make the choice that clear.

And since the VTGOP is campaigning on affordability let’s just see how affordable all those corporate tax breaks are for the rest of us. So, when you start adding it up as lost revenue, it may become increasing hard to believe as Lt. Gov. Scott claims that “It doesn’t cost us much,”

I didn’t!  

Ipsos MORI, a market research company, measured the distance peoples’ perceptions stray from reality. Americans scored worst – that is, the scores of Americans showed the largest gap between reality and perception – in a survey of fourteen industrialized countries. Italians are at the bottom with the US. Swedes and Germans ranked highest, although the report says even these two countries’ participating citizens are consistently wrong on some things.

Immigration and teenage pregnancies are two areas where Americans’ perception doesn’t match reality.  

Levels of immigration – a hot-button topic in many developed countries – are overestimated everywhere, but the United States veers further from reality than most, with an average guess that 32 percent of the population are immigrants when the reality is 13 percent.  

[…]Americans think 24 percent of girls aged 15 to 19 give birth each year, when the real figure is just 3 percent, and even the sensible Swedes are badly out, believing the annual teenage pregnancy rate is 8 percent compared to the actual 0.7 percent.

As with all surveys and measures of this sort there are plenty of questions over interpreting the meaning of what is shown by the results. And Bobby Duffy, global director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute wonders if people may be sending a message about what is worrying them as much as trying to reply to the questions correctly. But he warns

"Cause and effect can run both ways, with our concern leading to our misperceptions as much as our misperceptions creating our concern,"

The Ipsos MORI Perils of Perception Quiz can be taken here.  Test your own perception depth.

Here’s a chart from Bloomberg News via TPM showing US media coverage of Ebola. It is quite a spike when seen in perspective to other regions. coverage.                                              More here

 Over-classification of government information may be becoming a major problem. How big a problem? Well it seems that information is classified. A congressionally mandated intelligence agency report about it, completed earlier this year, has been classified and will not be released to the public.  

Now continuing in true Alice in Wonderland fashion the National Security Agency is preventing release of a report on authorized disclosures of classified intelligence to the media.  

A report to Congress on authorized disclosures of classified intelligence to the media — not unauthorized disclosures — is classified and is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Agency said.

The notion of an authorized disclosure of classified information is close to being a contradiction in terms. If something is classified, how can its disclosure be authorized (without declassification)? And if something is disclosed by an official who is authorized to do so, how can it still be classified? And yet, it seems that there is such a thing.

You read that right. Information about authorized disclosures of classified intelligence has been classified. So a disclosure of classified intelligence can be authorized, then any information about the authorized disclosure is classified. A kind of retro secret, forget where you heard this. The NSA is trying to put their toothpaste back in the tube. And if this ploy is successful the public will know even less about how the intelligence community manages authorized ‘leaks’ of intelligence information to the media.

And this stuff is costing money-according to a 2013 report from the National Archives and Records Administration the government classifies 80 million documents each year at a cost of $11 billion. This in turn boosts the number of expensive security clearances needed by federal employees and contractors to access and handle the information. A bill attempting to rein in this expensive overdose of secrecy was presented to congress this July. One goal is to limit classified information by ten percent in five years.

Maybe in the years to come this bill will pass and it will become law. The goal to limit the classification of government documents by ten percent in five years may even be met. But how will anybody know? Chances are it will be classified.  

But it could have been an oil industry oil incident too.

Off the coast of Scotland, a fire aboard a ship carrying radioactive waste resulted in the evacuation of 52 workers from an oil platform near Cromarty Firth (harbor). The ship, MV Parida, designed to carry dangerous shipments, caught fire and began drifting. The fire was extinguished and the ship was taken in tow. But not before workers were evacuated from one of the oil platforms-as a precaution. The MV Parida is now anchored for repairs. The Cromarty Firth is designated by the EU as Special Protection Area for wildlife conservation purposes.

Originally built in the 1950’s the Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR) and the Prototype Fast Reactor(PFR), experimental reactors are being decommissioned. Huge storage vaults are now under construction to store radioactive material on the site which will remain restricted for 300 years.

The radioactive cargo was originally sent to Scotland in the 1990’s for reprocessing is now being shipped out due to the plant’s closing. The reprocessed liquid waste is mixed with cement and poured into drums for transporting. This was the 19th of 21 scheduled shipments.

Dounreay Site Restoration Limited has confirmed the waste was from Dounreay, an experimental nuclear power plant near Thurso which is being decommissioned.The material, which was sent to Dounreay from Belgium for reprocessing in the 1990s, was being shipped back to Belgium.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said the Parida was carrying two containers called flasks, each holding three 500-litre drums of intermediate level waste.The NDA said the ship and its cargo had been categorised at the lowest level of safety concern.

It described Tuesday night's event as a "marine incident and not a nuclear incident".

Okay,call it a marine incident if you want- but a radioactive waste shipment adrift at sea, near oil platforms and a wildlife conservation area – it doesn’t take much imagination to see a potential for so much more than that.  

For anyone with time to waste and who enjoys quizzes here, from a few days ago, is a twelve-question PEW Research test on current events.  

And afterward if you still have time to kill

…see how you did in comparison with 1,002 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions in a national survey conducted September 25-28 by the Pew Research Center.

Past results have shown that one in ten online quiz-takers gets a perfect score.  And as always "your mileage may vary." Mine did.

The Campaign for Vermont just sent me their monthly email newsletter the other day. So in order to see what they ran up Bruce Lisman’s flag pole this month, I visited the Campaign’s Facebook page.    

Among all the usual Campaign for Vermont centrist 'products' that were ‘on sale’ I did notice they have chosen to use an image of the Vermont state flag coat of arms for their Facebook profile picture. The Campaign for Vermont’s profile image design is a Vermont flag in the shape of  the state map with the word “Vermont” clearly visible.

For those not familiar with Facebook stuff, the cover/profile photo is the image that appears on every post and all updates they send out to their 15,000 plus followers. It acts a logo of sorts for all the C for VT’s Facebook posts.

Bruce Lisman, who founded the group, hired a new executive director this summer and reportedly stepped back from running the day-to-day operations. Rumors  that he wants to run for Vermont governor, denied by Lisman, hover over the C for VT. The new director claims the Campaign is not anything more than what they say they are – an issues-based centrist organization without secondary goals. One thing they definitely are is beholden for operating funds to Lisman – who has bankrolled all the organization’s activities from the start, to the tune of more than one million dollars. So Bruce may still have some bit of influence at C for VT.

The Campaign for Vermont’s official webpage also uses part of the flag coat of arms symbol. Both sites’ use of the flag is possibly illegal and a form of misuse of the official state symbol. “The state seal and coat of arms may be used for commemorative medals or for public displays not connected with any advertising…” The entire statute can be found here .    

In 2012 the PAC Vermonters First and a Republican candidate for the state House of Representatives were asked by the Secretary of State to end their use of part the Vermont Flag in their advertisements. Secratary Condos explained at the time:

There are criminal penalties associated with misuses of the symbol, including imprisonment up to one year or a fine of up to $1,000; the attorney general’s office generally advises that Condos notify offenders and request the ad’s modification first.    

The intention behind the law, explained Condos, is “to make sure that people don’t think that the state is providing an endorsement of a candidate or a product. Originally, the law wasn’t there for candidates, but more for products, for people not to use it to try to sell a product.”    

Here, he said,[speaking in 2012] “the product happens to be a candidate.”

In this case the product happens to be Bruce Lisman and his Campaign for Vermont. Flag protection laws are certainly questionable with regard to free speech provisions of the U.S. Constitution, and there are plenty of gray areas. But right or wrong, there seems to be a recognized state law that prohibits this type of use for state flag.

Gonna strike the state colors Bruce?

When he first entered the race, Scott Milne reportedly arrived with pre-approved, but untested, political credentials. A complicated candidate declared Terri Hallenbeck in the Free Press. Milne was, she said, established and simultaneously politically attuned and politically untested. Well he’s being tested this week and he seems uniquely un-attuned politically.

Just days ago Scott Milne’s campaign manager left under mysterious circumstances (he apparently actually did leave to take a hike). Now it turns out one of his campaign staff workers, a man he hired to write press releases, has an interesting past relationship with facts. Scott Fletcher, a former editor for the Times-Argus, was fired from the paper in disgrace twelve years ago.  

Milne has hired five people to run his campaign. Among them is Scott Fletcher, the former managing editor of the Times Argus who was fired for fabricating three articles in 2002. Fletcher now writes press releases for Milne.  

Fletcher made up stories about a 16-year-old prostitute and heroin addict; another about a woman who left New York City after 9/11 to live in a cabin in Ferdinand; and a third based on the diary of a Charlotte woman who supposedly died in the Triangle Shirt factory fire. Fletcher was not able to provide Times Argus management with evidence that any of three women existed.  

Then as now Fletcher denies he fabricated any facts.

Surprisingly Milne was aware and untroubled by Fletcher’s past, yet remains confident in the man’s role in the campaign.

That role, Milne said, is “research and background stuff that he’s doing directly for me.” The candidate said he has no concerns that Fletcher is bringing forth anything but the truth.  

Fletcher elaborated on that, saying that he writes most of the press releases for Milne’s campaign and spends the bulk of his time in policy research and policy development

To campaign also means to struggle, and Scott Milne seems to be doing plenty of that this week, although ‘floundering’ might be a more accurate description. What better gift to the opposition could you give than hiring a man who was fired for making up stories to write your press releases?

Any pitch to voters Milne may have wished to make as a competent manager becomes more difficult after a week like this.