A couple of awards to give out. Wish I could say that either one came as a big surprise…

Quickest to politicize tragedy: Gov. Jim Douglas.

Sure didn’t take long, but honestly it took a couple more days than I expected. Everybody from the Governor to the Legislative Leaders rightfully put out strong words about the tragedy when the news broke, but Douglas has the distinction of using it to ham-handedly push his electoral agenda before anyone by linking it to a renewed push for his warmed-over, already rejected idea for “civil commitment” that would further extend offenders’ sentences indefinitely. Why does this, and his push for xxx qualify as crass politicization? Because neither would have made one whit of difference in this case. Add that to the fact that Douglas’s tried-and-true propoganda modus operandum is always to return to his oft-rejected (and meaningless) gimmicks at every opportunity, and its clear that the Bennett tragedy is just the latest opportunity for playing the same, tired (but still effective) game.

What makes it even more abhorrent is that xxx has been roundly rejected by everyone except the knee-jerk, emote-now-think-later wing of the GOP, as its blatantly unconstitutional. Of course the guy who put his arm around Dick Cheney, waxing enthused about how “lucky” we are to “have George W. Bush in the White House” is probably not too concerned about constitutionality. It’s pretty gross that he’s using this tragedy as a tool to tear into it further, though. Yuck. Double yuck.

Cheap drama-ing-up of coverage award: Vermont AP’s Wilson Ring.

I was surprised to find myself on a first-name basis with the victim of this too-horrific-for-words crime over the weekend, as the AP writer broke with their standard protocol to consistently refer to Brooke Bennett not as “Bennett” or even “the victim,” but by the first name “Brooke.” Even her photo in the Times Argus was captioned “Brooke.”

Come on. For one thing, this issue is emotional enough without naked attempts by reporters to further personalize it. More to the point, though, it’s not your job to drama it up by making the victim some sort of character in a media storyline. If it were my child that had been killed, and I caught a whiff of that sort of manipulative tackiness (especially in clear contrast with standard reporting practices), I’d be furious.

Please, folks. Do your jobs, and only your jobs. I can think of nothing more serious than this tragedy, and nothing that, therefore, should be treated with more seriousness, respect and professionalism.

Former legislator Tom Costello has jumped into the Democratic Lieutenant Governor primary with scant weeks to go before the deadline. Northfield businessman and famed videographer Nate Freeman jumped in a couple weeks ago.

Costello clearly has the backing of what most would consider the Democratic “establishment,” but is more accurately called the Democratic political class, as there isn’t really a Democratic establishment in Vermont in the sense that expression would be used in a larger state or at the federal level.

Costello and his backers are clearly beginning the process of attempting to shock and awe Freeman out of the race, touting Costello’s significant resume , impressive personal narrative, and electoral experience. Over the next couple weeks, various high profile Dems (including Costello) will almost certainly try to “explain” to Freeman why its in “the best interests of the Party” for him to back off from his challenge. Freeman, on the other hand, has a lot of learning to do about statewide elections, partisan dynamics and campaign finance if he’s going to be a viable candidate.

If he does, he’ll be walking into an interesting narrative that, sadly, will do a disservice to both candidates; the insider versus the insurgent. Establishment vs. Grassroots. While entertaining, such dualities will tell us little to nothing about what each has to offer (or, for that matter, answer some basic questions… is the experienced candidate Costello really so old school as to think that its no big deal to jump into this so late, or is he entering as a sacrificial lamb?).

So I’m proposing what we did 2 years ago, when there was a primary between Matt Dunne and John Tracy; an online debate in a chat room (I’d love to talk video, but too mant Vermonters dont have broadband). Same rules as before – candidates will sit at a computer and answer questions for an hour or so, with a GMD front pager on hand to verify they are answering the questions themselves, and not cutting and pasting. The date can be worked out based on everyone’s convenience.

Mr. Costello, Mr. Freeman – what say you?

We’re about to go into another news cycle of debate about the death penalty, in light of recent news. It won’t be fun.

Let me be clear; there are certain crimes that generate a reflexive, almost instinctive reaction. At least that’s how they feel to me, and looking at others, I expect that’s a fair description. Crimes that seem to demand the death of the perpetrator. Sometimes they may seem to demand the torture of the perpetrator. Or maybe (and I’m not trying to be funny – I’m dead serious), a death by slow torture. And by slow, I may mean over as long a period as possible. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that sometimes, and frankly, I don’t quite trust anybody who would suggest they didn’t.

But we are not children. There are a lot of things we want, and many of those wants are just as primal and visceral as the above desire for painful retribution. Somebody pushes us, we want to punch them. Somebody torments our kid, we want to beat the crap out of them.

But we don’t. It’s not easy, but we don’t. It’s because we decided a long time ago, when our heads were clearer, that its wrong. Immoral. And morality, when done right – by which I mean when it’s not the nakedly self-serving, situationally-convenient morality of most right-wingers and so-called conservative Christians (the kind that tells you not to sweat it, all your impulses and biases actually just happen to line up with those of your lord & savior…. what a happy conicidence!) – is not easy. Morality is not supposed to be easy, or casual. Sometimes, sure, but when it comes to matters of intense, unreasoning passion, morality is a gauntlet.

But it’s a gauntlet that keeps us from being part of the problems in the world instead of part of the solutions.

I suspect most people in this online community understand the innate immorality of capital punishment. We may all have that moral understanding put into a vise in the coming weeks and months as the debate gets rolling (and gets angrier). But character isn’t defined by whether or not you take the moral stance when things are easy. Anybody can do that.

Moral character is a test of strength. You don’t really know the strength of that character until its put under pressure. Until then, it may just be a lot of fluffy sounding talk. And there’s plenty of that in the world already.

I won’t belabor the point with a rambling post, but there is a point worth making. Yes, Obama’s comments suggesting he is laying the groundwork for re-considering his Iraq withdrawal policy have been overstated and overblown. That’s a given.

But the explosion is not simply a media fabrication. Not this time. It’s psychological cause and effect in action.

Obama has been vaulting to the right since sealing the nomination, and on high profile issues. Trade, civil liberties, the church/state divide. On guns and the death penalty, he was already there, but those two issues look less and less like anomalies. It’s left many of us feeling defensive, a bit burned, and pinned into a corner. Any statement he makes on Iraq, health care or tax policy is going to be littered with potential mines given the mood.

And that’s the problem. Obama’s campaign has pushed the mushy idea of “hope,” dealing in policy specifics only when it has to. And its worked pretty well. Certainly he’s got the youth vote motivated like never before, and its due to that message and the well-crafted image of the messenger himself.

But by flip-flopping on issues like FISA and running to the right on issues he was, perhaps, a bit deceptively fuzzy on during the campaign, he risks opening the floodgates on the thing his style of messaging cannot afford: cynicism.

Cynicism is, arguably, the single most powerful force in American Democracy, in that it squelches turnout at the polls right from the get-go. When cynicism is in play, it is a counter-force to change, as it enforces the status quo by generating non-participation and leaving those who do participate with wretchedly puny expectations of those who they have to choose from.

The youth vote may have come over to Obama’s camp, but based on the history of past campaigns, they are likely teetering on the brink. A couple more nudges, and they’re likely to go back to where they traditionally go on Election Day – anywhere but the polls.

And again, this isn’t about people being stupid. You can’t berate them into sucking it up and voting in a way that so cuts against their grain. People are individuals, but they also work as members of groups, and social psychology is every bit as powerful as the psychology of the individual. When we spend all our time ranting about how we think people should behave at the polls, instead of worrying about how they will behave (an upper-middle class liberal specialty), we’ve lost already.

If the tenuous hope Obama has built starts collapsing, giving way to renewed cynicism, it could build on itself and spread across his base like a tidal wave. The McCain campaign knows it, and they’re trying to feed it. The intensity of the conversation in recent days is not a sign of collusion between the GOP and the media, its a sign that cynicism is still viable among the electorate – even (especially?) in regards to Obama – and risks spreading uncontrollably.

If Obama’s political wind-testing and shifting are all about political pragmatism, it is likely that he’s working from a narrowcast, simplistic, insider-driven view of what is “pragmatic,” as its suicide for a campaign built on “hope” to so cavalierly court a resurgence of the very essence of political anti-hope.

It’s official: the first Gubernatorial Debate of the 2008 Election season will be in Waitsfield on Sunday, July 20th at 5:30. The event will be held at the Inn at Lareau Farm, and is co-sponsored by Vermont Localvores, the Vermont Natural Resources Council and American Flatbread. Questions will focus on environmental and food policy, and the event is open to the public.

Governor Jim Douglas, Speaker Gaye Symington and Anthony Pollina have all confirmed. Wish I could go, but I’ll be out of town at a family reunion, however there is talk behind the GMD scenes of somebody being there to liveblog it. Stay tuned!

Corporate franchised psuedo-blog PolitickerVT has had a new infusion of energy and staff, by all appearances. It looked like they, perhaps, had aspirations toward being a legitimate news-ish site, as opposed to simply being the Vermont version of the Drudge Report.

I learned back in the 2000 and 2002 campaigns that Sam Hemingway had a bad habit of getting a piece of a story and then running to the computer to fill in the other 80% with his own preconceptions – which at times were not that tethered to the reality on the ground. But time works wonders, and with his gradual return to journalistic prominence, I found myself giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Well, that makes me 0 for 2.  

Here’s Totten:

On Wednesday, Progressive Pollina claimed the success of the “buy local” marketing campaign “was the work of farmers and citizens, not politicians.” The claim came after an Agency of Agriculture publication touted the gov’s “Buy Local movement.”…

On Thursday, the website PolitickerVT.com… ran its own story, headlined “Farming organization chief on Pollina: ‘NOFA was almost used to make a point.'” The piece, by Zach Silber, was an interview with NOFA-VT’s longtime director Enid Wonnacott, who praised Douglas and his administration for his buy-local efforts and promotional largesse.

Douglas’ campaign quickly blasted an email citing the PolitickerVT.com “story” as proof that Pollina’s claims were half-baked. This meme was later picked up by Burlington Free Press reporter Sam Hemingway in a blog post titled “Anthony’s Ag-ony.”…

Hemingway’s take on the matter was amplified at Green Mountain Daily, which repeated the charge that NOFA was on the attack, noting Pollina was “bloodied” by the blowback.

Here’s the problem: The PolitickerVT story appears to be more fiction than fact. Curious about Wonnacott’s statements, “Fair Game” did what journalists are supposed to do: pick up the phone and call the source instead of repeating shit spewed on a blog.

“I can’t believe how misquoted I was!” Wonnacott said of the PolitckerVT story. “He put things in quotations that I absolutely never said.”

Now Shay gets stuff wrong sometimes too, but by occasionally going up with something too soon, rather than by making shit up or mischaracterizing what people say. In this case, its no contest. I trust Totten.

What sucks here is that some blood has indeed been drawn, as I previously stated. Days have passed, and the hit that Pollina has taken – in the context of overall impressions – hurt. And yeah, that’s totally unfair, but it highlights the need for rapid response. The Governor moved fast to vault this hit job against Pollina into a counterattack. In the future, Pollina should be prepared to call BS right back within the same news cycle. Again – as wrong as it seems – these are bells can’t be cleanly unrung once they’re out there in the press.

(Side note: As to repeating “shit” that was “spewed” on a blog, the problem is that PolitickerVT is a blog (in the loosest sense) that has passed itself off as a professional journalism site. And in the strictest sense, that is what it is, albeit a problematic one. But the lines do blur. Totten is a columnist/journalist, although one could be forgiven for thinking he was a blogger given that bit of self-congratulation on display… heh…)

• Somebody’s polling… but is it above board? Got an email today from a reader who got a polling call. The caller “…asked if I was registered to vote at this address, and then he got sort of flustered (not at me, at his computer screen) and said that was all the questions he had, and that he thought the quota was filled.” The call came from Pacific Crest Research, a company that’s based out of California, but also has an office in Ogden, Utah. PCS mainly does market surveys, but also does work for political candidates – as near as I can tell, exclusively Republican ones. And yes, that includes push polls.

  If anyone got a complete call, I’m sure GMDers would love to hear what questions were asked…

• Note/Clarification/Blogger Sloppiness: A couple weeks back or so, in discussing the Washington-5 Democratic primary, I referenced Rep Warren Kitzmiller’s “support” of Montpelier Mayor Mary Hooper, who is running in the primary with Kitzmiller and Jim-Dog Rep. Jon Anderson. I was referring to that “support” in an informal, good-friends-working-together-everybody-knows-he’s-encouraged-her sense, not a formal endorsement sense. Whoops.
• Speaking of Rep. Jon Anderson, I’ve now heard from several different people that he’s not bothering to mask the fact that he’s encouraging self-identifying Montpelier republicans to pick up Democratic ballots in the primary and bullet vote for him. Sleazy? Yeah, sure – but he’s still gonna come in third.
• Randy Brock running for Franklin County Senate? That’s what Politickervt.com is reporting. This could be a tough race to handicap, as Democratic Senators Kittell and Collins always have tough races. Despite always being targeted, they do consistently manage to get re-elected, though – and its hard to imagine Franklin County voters ignoring the fact that Brock has become something of an electoral carpetbagger, given that he’s reportedly been living in Florida since his statewide election loss.

  On the other hand, in 2006 Brock received 9812 votes in Franklin County in his losing bid for a return to the Auditor’s office. Kittell and Collins got 8598 and 8299 respectively in their State Senate re-elections, so its easy to see the appeal to the GOP of Brock as a candidate. If true, it clearly becomes their best opportunity for a pickup.

Pardon the short diary, but I wanted to raise an idea u on the flagpole and see if anybody saluted it (with the caveat that I’m not sure if I ascribe to it myself).

First we have Wes Clark, offering a fairly harmless comment that the McCain people are smart enough to realize can be blown out of proportion among the media. One wonders if Obama’s quick denunciation of Clark (which, incidentally, has got to decrease the incentive for high-profile Obama supporters to put themselves out there into the media for scrutiny, given that Obama was so quick on the trigger to condemn him, but I digress…), didn’t fire off some kind of light bulb over the head of the McCain team.

Because now we have the same yarn being spun about Jim Webb. Given that both have been suggested to be potential running mates, is it possible that there’s a real intention from the McCain campaign to use what strikes me as a genuine weakness from Obama (the hyper-quickness to distance himself from anyone who comes anywhere near the question of McCain’s service and its relevance to the debate) to drive the decision over Obama’s running mate? Do they agree with the many pundits and observers who have suggested that the dustup has removed Clark from the veep list, and are now going after the next high-profile name on the list with military cred, hoping to push Obama into distancing himself from Webb as well (and in the process, knocking him out of contention)?

I’m not saying I’m convinced this is a conscious strategy….yet… I’m jus’ sayin’, is all…

Remember this shocker from the Rutland Herald/Times Argus a couple weeks ago?

Is the state Agency of Natural Resources too cozy with Omya Inc., the marble processing company with a plant in Florence? That is the view of whistleblower John Brabant, an agency official who believes his superiors at ANR have not been following agency rules in giving Omya a break on the waste it has been dumping in abandoned quarries…

…Brabant says the agency was subject to political pressure from the Douglas administration. When the agency issued its initial finding letting Omya off the hook, Jeff Wennberg, former mayor of Rutland, was commissioner of environmental conservation, and it was possible to believe that Gov. James Douglas and Wennberg together decided it was best to bend the rules to help a company with 300 employees in Rutland County.

This is not the first such story, this year or previous years – or for that matter, previous administrations. Whereas a comparable story at the federal level would result in immediate hubbub, and likely congressional hearings under oath, that’s not generally how it works in Vermont. It’s not that the legislature doesn’t have oversight power in this state – it does. They also have the power to issue legislative subpoenas, if you look deep enough into their governing documentation. There’s also no reason not to take testimony under oath.

But that’s not how it works in Vermont. At least not now.

Sometimes legislative committees that would seem to be the logical places for executive oversight do ask questions, but the questions are never sustained. Nor are there opportunities to do the asking when the session is over. It just doesn’t happen, and when oversight doesn’t happen, a cavalier executive culture develops and thrives.

It’s not that there isn’t interest. It’s not even that there isn’t will. It’s that there isn’t time. The same problem that brings us strange, cobbled together Frankenbills, or laws so painfully bereft of details, too many of those details are punted to that same executive branch to be worked out and implemented as they see fit. It’s yet another manifestation of a theme that is becoming a common one on this site; the need to professionalize our legislature.

We’re not about to take that plunge anytime soon. So, what’s the solution? I’ve suggested that a more feasable proposal might be to professionalize the relatively small State Senate only, allowing committee action to continue outside the session. Short of that, legislative leaders could consider tweaking the committee structure to consolidate executive oversight, taking it out of already overburdened traditional bill writing committees and dumping matters into omnibus oversight committees (wouldn’t you love to chair one of those, eh?).

In any case, the culture needs to change, and the sooner the better.

You know the rest, right? Well, phooey on you if you don’t. It’s the maxim coined by my favorite of the 20th Century philosophers: “With great power comes great responsibility.” There are days when I think we should replace the entire Democratic Party platform with that single line.

The disappearance of Brooke Bennett and the public spectacle of the states first “Amber Alert” has sucked all the air out of rooms across the Vermont. The conversations are slowly emerging from the (apparent) misperception of the first 24 hour news cycle – that this was an old fashioned child abduction. As details have quickly emerged, it seems clear that – once again – this is likely a case involving the social networking phenom site, MySpace.com. Some sort of rendezvous between the discontented 12 year old and an unknown, nameless (to us, anyway) “other” on the internet that went from the virtual to the literal.

The water-cooler conversations will now even further bisect along lines of parents versus non-parents, with non-parents blithely glossing over the complexities that leave the parents a bit terrified. Computers are a medium (and a skillset) that are a pillar of modern life, can you really cut off your child from them? How do you restrict social network sites, and do you want to? Kids may lack judgment and experience, but they’re every bit as smart as adults. If you monitor their MySpace page, there’s nothing stopping them from making one, two or a dozen others.

Here’s the reality that precedes the computer era: information and communication have always been the currency of power in human society, every bit as much (if not moreso) as gold. We are in a new communication and information age, communication and information with & about other institutions as well as other individuals. As a result we all have more access to power, and a world more supercharged with potential power, than ever before, and at every level.

And with that power, comes commensurate responsibility. The complex question is; where does that responsibility land, and how should we deal with it?

It’s a continually evolving question set against a continually evolving environment, requiring vigilance and clear-headedness from everybody – especially parents. All I know for sure is that the power to create answers and keep children as safe as they can be kept (without irrational or punitive restrictions that could, themselves, create needless challenges for them as they develop into adults) lies in two things; sharing information and keeping open lines of communication between parents, law enforcement, professionals and institutions.

And in this era, we have the means to facilitate information and communication like never before. Let’s engage with the medium and its potential for good, rather than leave that kind of power entirely to the predators.