Huh? The Heartland Institute, a conservative libertarian think tank ranked Vermont first in their fifty state Property and Casualty Insurance Report Card 2011(PDF). Rating criteria included Politicization (States were docked points if candidates for office made insurance regulation a campaign issue), Regularity clarity, Rate regulation (docked if the state protected high risk customers from high rates), Residual markets, Market concentration, Credit scoring and territorial rating.

The best state, Vermont, scored 24 of a maximum possible score of 35. It lost one point for the size of its residual auto markets and10 points for having price regulations that are good (“high flexibility”) but not as good as Illinois’ no-file system.  

The top five were: Vermont (A+).Ohio (A+).Illinois (A).Maine (A).and Wisconsin (B+).

The worst states were Massachusetts (D-) Hawaii (F), California (F), Texas (F), and Florida(F).

And yes Vermont’s “A+” is from that Heartland Institute. The rightwing “research organization” that recently sponsored billboards comparing climate change scientists and advocates to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, noted murderer Charles Manson and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

This might be kind of a bothersome honor, ignore it , cheer it or double check the way Vermont regulates the industry? Guess bragging rights must be considered sufficient as no mention was made of prizes or trophy.  

Oh, goodie. Vermont’s own Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is looking for new ways to sell its plastic non biodegradable K-Cups.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. is in talks with pharmaceutical companies about developing drinks for its Keurig brewers that it hopes could aid the health of consumers and company margins, a senior executive said.

I’ve always been highly ambivalent about GMCR, an authentic Vermont success story that’s created a lot of jobs — but has basically done so by manufacturing gazillions of K-cups. The company is facing an existential crisis on two fronts: the shitcanning of founder Bob Stiller after his binge-borrowing forced a stock sale at an inopportune time; and the pending expiration of some very valuable patents on the Keurig system, which will open the door to cheap competition for GMCR’s core product.

Its response: look for new high-margin stuff to fill those little plastic cups with. Nutritional concoctions, energy drinks, even medications, brewed into a delicious hot single-serving beverage. Or, as CEO Larry Blanford puts it: “a tremendous opportunity to carry functional additives to the consumer.” Just imagine the medicine chest of the future stuffed to the brim with K-cups, and a Keurig machine next to the sink.  Maybe you could even get custom-made K-cups including all your prescription meds.

My ambivalence is heightened. GMCR insists it’s trying to develop a biodegradable K-cup. (Hey, if they manage to do it, there’s a new market they can exploit: the consumer who wants convenience but aspires to be earth-friendly might be willing to pay extra for a “green” K-cup.) But in the meantime, it’s littering our landfills with little plastic cups. And is actively looking for ways to sell lots and lots more of them  — dreaming of a future where there’s a Keurig in every room, and we get all our fluids, supplements, stimulants and medicines one freshly-brewed cup at a time.  

A recent opinion piece by Bill Schubart bugged me when I first heard it, but I wasn’t going to write about it until it kept reappearing in the Vermont media. First as a commentary on VPR, then on Vermont Digger, and finally in the Times Argus and Rutland Herald. The omnipresence of this thing — and why do we have to keep hearing and reading the same handful of commentators over and over and over again? — finally induced me to address its shortcomings.

There’s a certain stock type of opinion piece which we could call The Bemoan. It’s kind of like The Get Off My Lawn, a harkening back to an earlier, idealized day, except with less anger and more sadness.

The latest Bemoan to appear in Vermont media — repeatedly, ad nauseam — is a piece by Bill Schubart called “News and Opinion,” deploring the sorry state of American journalism.  

(Or, as it is entitled on the Rutland Herald’s website: “Media Literach: News or Opinion?”

Yes, “literach.” Sounds like they could use a bit of remedial literacy in the Herald newsroom.)

There are significant problems with American journalism and serious questions about its future, but Schubart manages to miss the target quite badly.

Before I get to the fact that there was never, ever a Golden Age of Journalism, I must mention the single worst sentence in the piece.  

But now, the likes of Walter Cronkite and A.J. Liebling have been replaced by Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher, all bringing us opinion and entertainment that we hear as news.

Okay, hold it right there. “Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher”? A professional opinionator, a left-leaning news anchor, and a topical comedian? All three are equally to blame for the debasement of our national discourse? It’s like taking three very comparable figures from the mythical past — Father Coughlin, I.F. Stone, and Lenny Bruce — and finding them guilty of the exact same sins. Ridiculous. And insulting to the professional ethics of Ms. Maddow.

After the jump: A.J. Liebling, the Maddow of his day.

Second, he’s completely off-base to hold up A.J. Liebling as an exemplar of unbiased journalism. I love Liebling’s writing, and I strongly recommend a book called “The Press,” which gathers his commentary on newspapers in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Liebling was a brilliant observer of the press (and many other things) — but he was not at all objective. He was an advocacy journalist with a strong left-wing viewpoint. Exactly like Rachel Maddow, as a matter of fact.

Third, to cite Liebling as a shining beacon of a lost great era is to absolutely ignore what the man himself wrote about the press of his day. He saw the press as deeply, profoundly dysfunctional in a way that imperiled the functioning of democracy.

Gee, exactly what Bill Schubart is deploring today. Here’s a quote from “The Press”:

As an observer from outside I take a grave view of the plight of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy. It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum, while armament, a secondary instrument of liberty, is a Government concern. A man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there.

And there’s the truth about the sad state of American journalism: it has always, from the very beginning, been a deeply flawed and often dysfunctional thing. It has frequently been as much a hindrance as a help to the health of our democracy. And its shining moments have often resulted from principled journalists battling against the system, finding ways to break through the commercially-driven noise of our media.

We have always had our Edward R. Murrows, seizing opportunities — temporarily, before commercialism drove him into exile — to speak truth to power. We have had our Walter Cronkites, doing their best within the constraints of a system or using their own popularity to present uncomfortable truths. We have had I.F. Stones, blazing their own trail and managing to make a difference outside the system.

We have also, sadly, always had our Rush Limbaughs, our Father Coughlins, our red-baiting Westbrook Peglers, our Walter Winchells serving up celebrity gossip marinated in rabid anti-Communist fervor. We had WIlliam Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer — yes, the one the Prize is named for — whipping up war fever and bullying the United States into the Spanish-American War by publishing blatantly fabricated propaganda. (Funny, there’s no Pulitzer for effective propaganda. There really ought to be, don’t you think?)

Fundamentally, we have always had a system of journalism that, as Liebling pointed out, is beholden first and foremost to commercial interests. It is not a matter of opportunistic individuals exploiting the system; it is a matter of the system seeking out and promoting such individuals for the sake of profit.  

Most of Schubart’s commentary is about a high-school encounter with the fury of William Loeb, longtime publisher of the Union Leader in Manchester, NH. Loeb was a rabid right-winger, always hunting down Commies and railing against taxation. When Schubart was a high school senior, Loeb conducted a vicious smear campaign against Schubart’s school and one of its teachers.

That was in 1962, during the presumed Golden Age of Cronkite and Liebling, and before the dastardly Rachel Maddow and her fellow-travelers Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher began their systematic debasement of American journalism.

Yes, there were heroes and scoundrels alike back then, just as there are now and have always been.Journalism today faces serious existential issues — but it always has. True journalism will always be an endangered species in a society driven by the profit motive, because real journalism has nothing to do with profit.

One more Schubart shibboleth.

Information needs to be vetted by skilled editors and fact-checkers to ensure that it is accurate, unbiased and verifiable.

…responsible reporting on any topic must be derivative of fact, not opinion. Conservatives claim the NY Times is liberal and liberals claim that the Wall Street Journal is conservative, yet both still invest to some degree in ensuring that news is more or less news.

“Skilled editors” do much to ensure a kind of quality control. They also tend to homogenize the news. They rarely question basic assumptions. The herd mentality usually prevails. (Just look at the sad, predictable performance of the Beltway punditry for a good example. Or, if you like, the repeated reliance of the Vermont media on the same old handful of commentators and analysts.) And pardon me, but I am not at all encouraged by the dreary phrase “still invest to some degree in ensuring that news is more or less news.”

To some degree? More or less? There’s a clarion call to inspire the soul and warm the blood.

You know, I think I’d rather watch Rachel Maddow.  

This week,  Democratic Sec. of State Jim Condos succeeded in persuading the Vermont Supreme Court to revise the wording it chose when it crafted a recent opinion on access to public records.   In so doing, he protected the principle of government transparency and highlighted how critical precise language is to legal protections.

The case involved the Rutland Herald’s suing the city of Rutland and its local labor union over access to an investigation into city employees viewing pornography while working. The Herald won a partial victory when the justices ruled the newspaper can get access to disciplinary records stemming from the investigation of city employees, but the court told the city it could black out the names of the offending workers.

Condos urged the justices to strike reference to “nonpublic records” in the decision and replace the term with “exempt public records.”

Such a subtlety would probably elude most casual readers, but the two terms have a world of difference in implication.  

As Condos explained in his letter to the Supremes:

“The erroneous perception, at times, is that if a record is ‘nonpublic,’ its retention and disposition need not follow specified objective standards established” under Vermont law.

“Public officials sometimes inadvertently lose sight of the fact that even exempt public records must still be managed as public records.”

“As part of my, and my office’s, efforts to raise awareness and transparency associated with public records, I therefore try to discourage use of the term ‘nonpublic records’ and would welcome it if the Court would join me in trying to keep this point clear,”

Upon consideration, the court agreed with Sec. Condos, choosing to replace the term “nonpublic records” with “witheld” public records.

 

Republicans in congress have proposed and passed cuts to food stamps, pension benefits for federal workers, health care and social services programs like Meals on Wheels for the elderly.

Finally though, on Friday before heading off on a weeklong vacation Congressional Republicans said enough to their own austerity.So after two years of cuts they have drawn a line on some cuts just too deep and maybe too close to home. Republicans in the House sponsored a move to spare congressional office expense accounts from budget cuts.  

Republicans controlling the House have been trying to cut domestic agency budgets by about 5 percent. But when it came to their own staff, travel and office expenses, GOP leaders opted to freeze their $574 million budget after two years of cuts.

The funding bill includes a 1 percent cut that comes chiefly from cutting back on repairs to the iconic Capitol dome, which dates to the Civil War.

The vote was 307-102 with 96 Democrats voting with 211 Republicans to pass the bill.

Vermont Congressman Peter Welch voted nay. On average congressional office budget is $1.4 million and salaries account for 70 percent of the cost.  

So, the two most popular personalities in public radio have announced their retirement.

Garrison Keillor and Scott Simon? Nina Totenberg and Sylvia Poggioli? Robert Siegel and Ira Glass?

Nope. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of “Car Talk,” will stop recording original shows this fall after celebrating their 25th anniversary on NPR.

“Car Talk” is the adorable little goofball of a show that draws huge ratings and has turned Saturday mornings (“Weekend Edition Saturday,” “Car Talk,” “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”) into the highest-rated and most lucrative daypart of the entire week for public radio. Many stations double-up on “Car Talk” during fund drives, broadcasting at least two hours every Saturday and sometimes another hour or two somewhere else in the weekend schedule. They would often schedule big raffles and challenge grants for Saturday morning because they knew they were reaching their maximum audience. The Car Guys produced special material for fundraisers, offered special premiums, and recorded promotional spots to pay elsewhere in stations’ fund drives.

The car guys will live on — in rerun material from their extensive archives, recut into “new” shows by the “Car Talk” staff. We’ll see how long they can keep that up; sooner or later, it’ll become noticeable that they never talk about recent-model cars. Eventually, the show will decline and disappear, although it may take years for that to happen. I’m sure the vast majority of stations will be happy to continue carrying the reruns as long as they can squeeze any value out of them.  

It’s ironic that “Car Talk” has been such a cornerstone of public radio’s financial world for so long, because it’s helped build a public radio system that’s too big and risk-averse to ever produce another show like it. These days, everything in public radio is tightly formatted and designed not to give any listener a reason to change stations. The days are gone when a couple of untrained ex-auto mechanics could become network stars.

As the shows have been homogenized, so have the individual voices. Unless you’re a hard-core public radio junkie, can you tell Steve Inskeep from David Green from Guy Raz from John Ydstie? When you tune into “All Things Considered,” do you know whether Michelle Norris or Melissa Block is co-hosting? No, and that’s the way management likes it. That’s why Bob Edwards was exiled to satellite radio; they didn’t want any single person to be bigger than the system.

Problem is, it’s hard for a “system” to engage the kind of passion that turns listeners into donors. That’s what “Car Talk” does, and “A Prairie Home Companion” does. And with “Car Talk” edging into the shadows, public radio will have to find new ways to induce the kind of generosity it’s now dependent on.  

A federal appeals court has ruled against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the indefinite storage of spent nuclear fuel at sites around the country.

Seems the NRC thought it didn’t need to conduct an environmental impact review on the question because it assumed that (1) sooner or later we’d get our act together and crate a long-term storage site, even though we’ve repeatedly failed to do that, and (2) on-site storage would create no risk, even if it took 50-60 years to create a long-term solution. And even though there have been numerous instances of leaks from on-site storage facilities.

And the court didn’t like that.

“The commission’s evaluation of the risks of spent nuclear fuel is deficient,” the three-judge panel said in the latest decision. Spent fuel “poses a dangerous long-term health and environmental risk.”

The decision isn’t too surprising, since the NRC got grilled by the court in a March hearing:

As Chief Judge David Sentelle told the NRC attorney during today’s argument in New York, et al., v. NRC: “We don’t owe any deference to your political predictions.”

“Political predictions,” in this case, referring to NRC’s belief that the US will, somehow, someday, identify a long-term storage site. Even though, to date, any place that’s suggested as a site rises up in arms at the prospect. (Including big empty Nevada and the perennially impoverished Upper Peninsula of Michigan.)

After the jump: An update on what the court actually ordered.

Per the Brattleboro Reformer:

The court ordered the NRC to conduct a more thorough and objective review of the storage of nuclear waste and to do a proper review as mandated by the National Environmental Protection Act.

And this nice little snarky comment:

The appeals court wrote that the NRC “apparently has no long-term plan other than hoping for a geologic repository.”

Ya gotta have hope, that’s what I always say. Coming soon to a stage near you: A revival of “Annie,” with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the title role.

“There’ll be a long-term nuclear waste disposal facility

Tomorrow,

Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow,

There’ll be a long-term nuclear waste disposal facility!

Tomorrow, tomorrow,

I love ya, tomorrow,

You’re always a day away!”

Oh, look, what’s this in my Times Argus today? (paywalled on the TA site but available for free here) It’s a story about how the pending cuts in defense spending will savage Vermont’s economy.

A conservative military think-tank based in Washington, D.C., says Vermont stands to lose out on more than $100 million in federal revenue next year if Congress doesn’t avert looming cuts in defense spending.

Hmm, sounds serious. Because the White House and Congress failed to reach agreement on spending and taxes last fall, automatic cuts will take effect later this year. Which means, among many other things, $600 billion in defense cuts over the next ten years.

(Which is a small drop in a very large bucket, but never mind.)

The alarm was sounded by the DC-based Center for Security Policy. We’ll get to their “credentials” in a moment, but first… how did CSP arrive at this “more than $100 million” figure?

Travis Korson, manager of public information for the Center for Security Policy, says if defense cuts of that magnitude are spread evenly, percentage-wise, across the country, Vermont contractors will see awards fall by $122 million annually.

Gosh, how scientific. They took the $600 billion and divided it among the states on a per-capita basis. See, nobody actually knows what cuts will be made because they haven’t been made yet. This CSP “study” took about five minutes with a calculator, and is based on a completely faulty assumption.

But it’s got the business community in a tizzy.

“We absolutely are concerned about what might happen,” says Chris Carrigan, vice president of business development for the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.

After the jump: why nobody should be the least bit concerned.

I could spend some time revisiting the irony of conservatives suddenly being freaked-out about cutting government spending, the abundant evidence that defense spending is a particularly inefficient means of economic stimulus, and the lack of attention to how other spending cuts will affect Vermont’s economy. But let’s take that as read and cut to the punchline.

The Times Argus piece correctly identifies CSP as a “conservative” group. But it fails to identify the “genius” who runs this “think” tank.

Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Ah yes, Frank Gaffney, neoconservative assclown. The guy who’s accused President Obama of being secretly Muslim and having a secret plan to impose Sharia law in America. The guy who sounded the alarm about the new logo of the Missile Defense Agency being a combination “of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo” when, in fact, the logo was designed during the Bush administration.

And yes, the guy who’s questioned whether Barack Obama is a natural born citizen.

And yes, the guy who claimed (in 2009, people — in 2009!) that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing.

And yes, the guy who asserted in 2011 that the Conservative Political Action Committee had “come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.” The Conservative Political Action Committee!

And yes, the guy who, in 2003, called on the US military to “take out” the Al Jazeera news network.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. He’s a nut.

Y’know, I’m old enough to remember when the term “think tank” actually meant something. The Rand Corporation, the Brookings Institution. Now, any idiot with a website and letterhead can open an institute or a center and put out press releases and get taken seriously by the media. This article is stupid and pointless and a waste of the Times Argus’ extremely limited resources.  

The jury is still out on the Free Press’ new tabloid format, which officially debuted today; but I eventually found all of the familiar landmarks and rather liked it’s table-friendly uniformity.  We can only hope that the emphasis on “feature” stories will not cause the paper  to economize on original staff writing and resort too frequently to the shallow pool of USA Today.

Case in point was page 10A,  anointed the “Environment” page, which featured two hand-me-downs from USA Today by Wendy Koch.  The first piece is an innocuous one on bike lanes, but the second fails to pass muster.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has produced a report  about the relative carbon footprint of a wide range of human activities, which emphasizes the fact that individual decisions to permanently change behaviors in relatively small arenas can have a huge impact on the global condition:

“Scaling it up – Think small changes can’t make a big impact? Take a look at what a cooler smarter town looks like.  Or a cooler, smarter country.”

What do you think the significant news is that  Ms. Koch has gleaned from this scientific effort?

Food grown locally, rather than far away, supports area farmers and is often fresher, but it makes little difference in the fight against climate change…How about e-readers vs. print books? Or opening a new car’s windows rather than running its air conditioner? The answer’s the same in each case: There’s no big difference in which consumes less energy overall, so don’t sweat it.

Those are the opening observations in Ms. Koch’s brief overview of the study, which she says

“debunks the myths of the green lifestyle”

And who has the final word in Ms. Koch’s story?  Why it’s the climate change deniers, of course!

Responding to the study’s authors, who quite reasonably argue that,

“Our failure to address this problem (climate change) will imperil us all.”

Ms. Koch allows David Kreutzer to dismiss the whole thing as malarky in the final two paragraphs of the piece. Mr. Kreutzer, whom Ms. Koch identifies as

a research fellow in energy economics and climate change at the Heritage Foundation, a self-described “conservative” think tank.

has this to say:

“I don’t think that’s true. There’s not a consensus we’re heading toward catastrophe,”   Americans should cut their carbon footprint “if it makes them feel good,” but not because they fear for the future.

Was this simply a misdirected effort at “fair and balanced” reporting by a tabloid hack; or does it represent a deliberate effort at false equivalency in service to an increasingly conservative media conglomerate?

Only time will tell.

So the Vermont AFL-CIO is backing TJ Donovan over Bill Sorrell for AG…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

June 6, 2012

CONTACT: Jay Els

802.503.0017

tjforag@gmail.com

TJ DONOVAN RECEIVES SUPPORT OF VERMONT STATE LABOR COUNCIL, AFL-CIO

Labor Leaders Say Fighting for Working Families and Economic Justice a Must for Next Attorney General

BURLINGTON, VT – TJ Donovan, candidate for Vermont Attorney General, received key support today from the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO. The coalition of unions, which represents nearly 10,000 members in numerous unions throughout the state, cited TJ’s understanding of the demands on working families, engagement with the labor community, and commitment to protecting Vermont workers for their support of Donovan’s campaign.

“The Vermont AFL-CIO is excited to support TJ Donovan’s candidacy to become Vermont’s next Attorney General,” said Ben Johnson, President Vermont Labor Council, AFL-CIO. “TJ’s background, family history and our discussions with him have demonstrated TJ’s respect and support of the labor movement and his strong commitment to working people. Whether it’s ensuring compliance with Vermont’s labor laws or protecting employees from workplace discrimination, we have full confidence that as Attorney General TJ will do everything within his power to be a champion for middle and working class Vermonters .”

Donovan responded to the announcement saying, “I am honored to have the backing of the Vermont Labor Council, AFL-CIO. I look forward to developing a close relationship with the hard-working men and women of these unions and working families throughout this state. I am committed to supporting the hard-working Vermonters by fighting for economic justice in the workplace as well as social justice in our communities.”

The Vermont Labor Council, AFL-CIO joins a growing list of groups and elected officials from across the state, including the Vermont Troopers Association, Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Sears (D-Bennington) and the Vermont Sheriffs Association publicly supporting TJ’s candidacy for Attorney General and his vision for the office.

The Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO is the state federation of labor representing nearly 10,000 members in more than 80 unions throughout Vermont. The mission of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO is to improve the lives of working families-to bring economic justice to the workplace and social justice to our state and the nation.

TJ was born and raised in Burlington. He currently serves as State’s Attorney for Chittenden County, an office he was elected to in 2006. The Chittenden County State’s Attorney’s Office is the busiest county prosecutor’s office in the State of Vermont, handling over 5,000 criminal cases and 300 Family Court cases each year.