The Burlington Free Press online Sunday had a two paragraph article (more details added by Monday) with a headline and image that grabbed my attention; Bondsman subdues suspect in Old North End.  

The image (you can only see it here, Gannett and Free Press don’t share) shows two men, both in street clothes; first man, his face bloodied, appears to have had his hands bound and has been forced headfirst into the pavement by second man, who is atop with his knee jammed into the upper back and neck of bloodied first man. Second man is a “fugitive recovery agent” from Northeast Fugitive Recovery who was himself captured on camera in the act of forcibly “recovering” a fugitive (alleged fugitive?). What if he didn’t have the correct person?

An employee with the Northeast Fugitive Recovery Task Force holds down a bloodied suspect at Walnut and Archibald streets.  They [sic] were in search of a suspect who did not make a court appearance.

They found a man at a pay phone. Burlington police arrived at the scene, and the suspect was placed in a squad car. Police at the scene gave out no iinformation about the individual.

Just visible in the second man’s (the agent’s) right hand is something that might be a weapon, perhaps a taser.  The Northeast Recovery webpage says that the term “fugitive recovery agent” is preferred over what they say is the derogatory term, “bounty hunter” also included is this: 213 Fugitives Apprehended in 2009!  

I assume towns, cities and the state having to cope with ever tighter budget resources no longer readily pursue accused persons for what might be considered minor things such as failure to make a court appearance. However a for-profit recovery agency with a financial incentive and focus on recapturing their bail bond money – not public safety – will step in to accomplish the task. The guy has a price on his head: basically his recovery was monetized. So it’s just a little violent free-enterprise based drama playing out on a Vermont street. Nothing to see here, just keep moving.  

So the Vermont Republicans held their annual convention on Saturday in the Montpelier High School Auditorium. I guess the gathering was largely unencumbered by the presence of the media; as far as I can tell, only the Vermont Press Bureau published a story about the event on Sunday. Maybe the Freeps is saving it for Monday, I don’t know.

For those blocked by the Mitchell Family Paywall, here are some highlights from the day.

Less than 24 hours after his stunning decision not to seek re-election as Auditor, Tom Salmon was actually brave enough to make an appearance in front of the people he’d just screwed over.

(According to Vermont Digger, Salmon insisted on May 11 that he would run for re-election. He then withdrew on May 18, only three and a half weeks before the filing deadline. If it wasn’t for the fact that two Senators* (so far) are chomping at the bit to run, the Republicans would have been up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Or a Salmon. And they would have been fully justified in booing the Fish-Man off the stage.)

*Kevin Mullin and Vince Illuzzi. Actually, Illuzzi says he is looking at both Auditor and Attorney General, as well as running for the Senate again. Gee, dithering about which office to run for; sounds like Vince is following in Salmon’s footsteps.  

And, if the VPB account can be believed, Salmon got off the line of the day:

“I grew up with two Democratic parents. And those Democratic parents taught me to tell the truth and to hold myself accountable,” the Republican auditor said in a speech. “And, as a result, I became a Republican.”

Bahahahaha. THe crowd ate it up, ignoring the disingenuousness of the remark. Do we need to recount the sordid history of Salmon’s pique-inspired party switch, nine months into his second term as Auditor? He didn’t exactly “tell the truth” to the voters in 2008, did he? DId he “hold [him]self accountable” when he dabbled with running for every other office in the state, or when he wasted his time sending out questionnaires to “uncover” embezzlements that had already been fully investigated and reported? Or when he abandoned his party with no advance notice? Just a written press release on a Friday afternoon — Bad News Dump Day.

Well, let’s leave it there, and move on to the rest of the convention.  

Randy Brock trotted out a new stump speech, in which he promised to “pull Vermont back from the edge of the abyss where Peter Shumlin and his cohorts have taken it.”

Gee, Randy, is that the “abyss” with stable taxes, a balanced budget, and a massive head-start on Irene reconstruction? Not to mention Vermont’s shiny new 4.6% unemployment rate? That’s the nicest damn abyss I’ve ever seen. Clearly, Brock is playing from the boilerplate Republican playbook: accuse the Democrats of perfidy, recklessness, and radicalism. Yes, Brock actually called Shumlin “the most liberal governor in our history.” Predictable.

Pursuing the same line of rhetorical excess, Brock dubbed Shumlin’s health care plan “Titanic Care”: “It’s huge, it’s new, it’s untested, it’s got an overconfident captain who ignores predictable

dangers just below the surface, and it’s going to sink.”

How timely, a Titanic reference on the 100th anniversary. I wonder which of his expensive consultants wrote that for him. Is he going to have an intern dress up in a Titanic costume, or maybe wear a captain’s uniform and a Shumlin mask? Is the poor $21 million bear headed for the unemployment line? When the VTGOP announces its full statewide ticket, will they wear Avengers costumes? Randy will be Captain America and I guess Phil Scott would be Thor. If Illuzzi is on the ticket, I’d pick him for The Hulk: the mild-mannered little guy who occasionally morphs into a bad-tempered behemoth. But who gets to tell Wendy Wilton that she has to put on the Black Widow getup?

Beyond the partisan bombast, there were strong indications that all is not well with the VTGOP. With less than four weeks until the filing deadline, there are still some apparent vacancies on the ticket. And its only candidates for Congress and Senate are little-known no-hopers.

Party chair Jack Lindley has made optimistic noises about retaking the State House and Senate. But House Minority Leader Don Turner is far less sanguine:

“I’m focused hard on keeping the numbers we’ve got, so really anything over 48 is a win,” Turner said. “But if we could get to 60, I’d be extremely happy.”

This year, the Republicans have 47 seats out of 150. Turner’s goal is to hold his ground, and his best-case scenario is 60? Sad. And dispiriting for Randy Brock as well:

“If I’m elected governor and the Legislature stays as unbalanced as it is, my options are going to be severely limited,” he said

.

Brilliant.

All in all, a lot of predictable Republican rhetoric from the stage and a lot of low expectations in the crowd. Hardly the display of dynamism and unity that could fuel a Republican resurgence this fall.

One more thing: apparently the Ron Paul folks were on hand in force. Paul, you may recall, took 25% of the vote in the presidential primary, second to Mitt Rommey’s 39 percent. And one of the Paul People, tea partier and all-around libertygibbet Jessica Bernier, was nominated to be Vermont’s national committee chairwoman. I’m sure she’ll do Vermont proud at the national convention.

Since Fukushima, details of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s laissez-faire relationship with the nuclear industry have underwhelmed us with confidence; so it comes as less of a  surprise to learn that safety requirements have slackened rather than tightening in the wake of that catastrophic display of regulatory failure.

Without fanfare, the nation’s nuclear power regulators have overhauled community emergency planning for the first time in more than three decades, requiring fewer exercises for major accidents and recommending that fewer people be evacuated right away.

You well might ask the reason for this counterintuitive move.

For several years before the Fukushima accident, the NRC was in the process of reconfiguring some emergency response protocols to reflect what it believed would be an increased threat from terrorism.  

Apparently, they didn’t want to burden  the industry with more requirements without relieving them of some existing ones.   One of the ways in which this was made possible was by assuming in emergency scenarios that no radiation would be released!  No kidding.

At least four years in the works, the changes appear to clash with more recent lessons of last year’s reactor crisis in Japan. A mandate that local responders always run practice exercises for a radiation release has been eliminated – a move viewed as downright bizarre by some emergency planners.

The new U.S. program has kept the 10- and 50-mile planning zones in place, as well as the requirement for one full exercise for a 10-mile evacuation every two years. However, required 50-mile planning exercises will now be held less often: every eight years, instead of every six years.

Incredibly,  following the Japanese disaster, rather than reassessing the new protocols in light of lessons from Fukushima, the NRC decided to go right ahead with instituting their new protocols as planned.  

The new rules went into effect in December of 2011, but it was so stealthy a release that nuclear watchdog groups only became aware of the changes over the past week.

The U.S. government recommended that Americans stay at least 50 miles from the Japanese plant. Government officials said the same kind of action could be taken domestically in a similar accident, but advance planning for U.S. evacuations is, in fact, restricted to 10 miles.

The logistical reasoning behind this policy is pretty alarming:  it is simply unworkable to evacuate the huge populations that are now located within fifty miles of most U.S. nuclear plants.

the AP reported that populations within 10 miles of U.S. nuclear sites have ballooned by as much as 4 1/2 times since 1980. Nuclear sites were originally picked in less populated areas to minimize the impact of accidents. Now, about 120 million Americans – almost 40 percent – live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, according to the AP’s analysis of 2010 Census data. The Indian Point plant in Buchanan, N.Y., is at the center of the largest such zone, with 17.3 million people, including almost all of New York City.

“They’re saying, `If there’s no way to evacuate, then we won’t,'” Phillip Musegaas, a lawyer with the environmental group Riverkeeper, said of the stronger emphasis on taking shelter at home. The group is challenging relicensing of Indian Point.

So, in order to make it convenient for the industry to continue operating a fleet of reactors that have passed their designed life-expectancy, the NRC has effectively reduced the number of safeguards for affected populations and turned a blind eye to any likelihood of a radiation release similar to what occurred at Fukushima.  

The fall-back position of the NRC on safety now appears to rely on a very different lesson from Japan: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.

As we all know, there is no global warming (cough). And if there is, it’s not caused by human activity (snort). And even if it is, we can’t do anything to stop it that might hurt our economy. (Cough, choke, hack. Sorry, something caught in my throat.)

So here comes a very disturbing article from the Reuters news service about the disastrous maple crop of 2012, that seems to portend a very severe crunch on domestic producers. I haven’t seen any similar reports in the Vermont media; don’t know if they’re asleep at the switch or what.

Whammy no.1: this year’s domestic crop will be much smaller than last year’s. We knew that, but here we have new numbers.  

U.S. production will likely total 18 million pounds this year, down from 30 million pounds in 2011, according to a new crop estimate report from Arnold Coombs of Bascom Maple Farms in Alstead, New Hampshire, one of the four largest maple processors in the United States.

Whammy no.2: much of the crop is poor quality and unsalable in its pure form.

“You take 80 degrees (27 degrees Celsius) in March by golly it don’t help nothing,” said Alfred Carrier, a sugarmaker in Glover, Vermont. “We had quite a lot of off-flavored syrup. I don’t think you’d want to put it on a pancake.”

Finally — and this is the real topper — whammy no.3: the scarce crop isn’t leading to higher prices for syrup.

Despite the shortfall, retail prices have risen just 5 percent this year as the Federation of Quebec Maple Producers has retained a 38-million-pound reserve from a bumper crop in 2011, says Coombs. Quebec produces about 80 percent of the world’s maple syrup.

Take those three together, and it looks like a disastrous year for domestic producers.

Yeah, fighting global warming has associated costs. But failing to fight global warming has some real costs as well.

After the jump: the limits of denialism.

On a related note, one of the leading promulgators of climate-change denial, the Heartland Institute, has made an interesting move. It has spun off its insurance research program into a separate entity.

Why?

Because the insurance industry is aware of the tremendous potential economic impact of climate change, and Heartland’s insurance researchers are abandoning denialism. Therefore, they can no longer be directly affiliated with Heartland, which is continuing to push its hard line.

(Heartland, ICYMI, is the organization that briefly put up some obnoxious billboards in the Chicago area, comparing climate change believers to mass murderers like Ted Kaczynski and Charles Manson. Real fun-loving folks, them Heartlanders.)  

 After being somewhat agnostic about Facebook I found myself getting a really bad attitude this week. The IPO hype alone was deafening and as if things would be different this time, lessons from past internet bubbles seemed hushed by comparison.

The story of co-founder Eduardo Saverin certainly didn’t help the creeping anger. He renounced his US citizenship weeks before the IPO would make him an even richer man and increase his tax liability. Saverin currently thinks of himself as “a citizen of the world” but he became a resident of Singapore; a place, which by happy coincidence for him happens to have no capital gains tax at all.

“This had nothing to do with taxes," he told The New York Times. A statement many other fellow citizens of the world might find doubtful.

As it turned out Facebook stock wobbled and underwriting banks had to prop up the share price. On its first day of trading, ticker symbol FB barely managed the task of walking on its own legs.

Amidst all this blogger Charlie Pierce offered his thoughts on the frenzy and asked: Why is America so happy about Facebook?

Entire news networks dedicating huge blocks of time, the way they once went live for hours covering the Mercury program, to the release of a stock onto the market.

Pierce, who calls himself an Old Guy Who Loves Facebook, takes exception to celebrating the rich for simply getting richer and says that to do so marks us as once and future fools.

This was a triumph of the insiders, of the people who concocted credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, and the people who will do it again, over and over, unless a more critical eye is placed upon them by the institutions of self-government.

This does nothing to ameliorate the effects of our rigged casino economy. It solves nothing connected to wealth inequality or unemployment. It is magic numbers on the screen to which only a very few people have the password, and they're not sharing it with anyone.

So here we are, years after the historic Crash of 2008 and all in the same week JP Morgan (a federally guaranteed bank) reports loses in the billions, caused by risky bets made with a trader (believe it or not) called “the London Whale” and the media goes giddy over barely profitable Facebook’s IPO.

Well rinse, wash and crash. What have we learned from the past?  

 The Vermont Press Bureau has a statement from Vermont Auditor Tom Salmon that reads in part :

I have decided not to run for the office of state auditor this November.  

I have achieved the goal set when I took office in January 2007 to transform the Vermont State Auditor’s Office into a first-rate performance auditing shop.  It is time for me to move on to new challenges.

I have a number of options presented to me, and some still out there, in God’s hands. It is most likely I will land in federal service in the IG or CFO communities as my passion continues to be improving government performance and better federal-state-local intergovernmental collaboration.  I have an offer from a CPA firm as well.

Doug Hoffer who would have been Tom Salmon’s likely opponent wished him well and said in a statement:

I wish Mr. Salmon well.  

I'm running for State Auditor regardless of the opponent. I'm going to tell voters about my qualifications, my experience, and my plans for the job. I have begun meeting with Democrats and Progressives around the state and I look forward to the campaign.

Remarkable piece of video shown last night on “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell,” required viewing for any liberal, Dem or Prog. It’s a six-minute talk by Nick Hanauer, a wealthy venture capitalist who was one of the original investors in Amazon.com.

And in six minutes, he absolutely destroys the “cut taxes on wealthy job creators” dogma of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Bruce Lisman, and all their Galtian buddies. A few quotes to whet your appetite:

Rich people don’t create jobs. Jobs are a consequence of a circle-of-life feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring.

In this sense, an ordinary consumer is more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

Hiring more people is a course of last resort for capitalists. It’s what we do if — and ONLY if — rising consumer demand requires it.

In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are middle-class consumers. Taxing the rich to make investments that make the middle class grow and thrive is the single shrewdest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor, and the rich.

This is a green-eyeshade version of Progressivism — tax the rich and boost the working and middle classes, not as a way to achieve some socialistic model of equity, but as the BEST way to create a prosperous capitalist economy.

I find it compelling and brilliant, and I urge everyone to watch it.  

It looks like the time to comment on F-35 deployment in Burlington has been extended to June 20.  

2) The F-35 fighter program is not without its detractors, quite apart from nuisance noise and ethical considerations.

____________________________________________________________________

Opponents of the proposed F-35 fighter jet deployment in South Burlington have only until June 1 to make their concerns known to the Air Force. Public opportunities have already been held in Vermont, New York and New Hampshire, reflecting the broad spectrum of affected communities.

The results of the Air Command’s “Center for Sustainable Installations”  environmental study on deployment of the jets are available for the public to read, should they be so inclined; but most people will probably just resort to the talking points in order to frame their opinions because the actual study takes eons even to download.

GMD looked at this issue, much earlier in the process,  without drawing a conclusion.

The economic benefits are significant, but so is the risk of environmental degradation.  Then there are the ancillary arguments: “patriotism” vs. a community with a strong peace ethic; development vs. maintenance of sustainable living environments.  It’s never easy to turn down what is seen to be a huge economic windfall, even when your ears may be under daily assault.

The point is that no amount of analysis or conjecture on the part of an interested party such as the Air Command… or opponents of the project… is any substitute for an actual experience of take-off and fly-over sound.  If this is not physically possible until after the area around the airport has been leveled, removing any opportunity for a claw-back, I guess the good folks of South Burlington are truly between a rock and a hard place.

For what it’s worth, I want to urge everyone who has any perspective to contribute, to weigh-in on this community changing decision.  I didn’t find an easy e-mail link in my reading, but here is the mailing address for written comments:

Written comments can be submitted… via U.S. Postal Service to HQ ACC/A7PS, 129 Andrews Street, Suite 337, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia 23665-2769, ATTN: Mr. Nick Germanos.

Vermont has just one shot to get this right.  You don’t want to find yourself on the other side of the decision, holding your ears and wondering why you didn’t speak up.

Governor Shumlin has issued his first and only veto of 2012, and it’s deeply troubling in a couple of ways. The vetoed bill would have required the Agency of Human Services to issue monthly reports to the Legislature on elder abuse in Vermont — a program that’s been understaffed for years, resulting in a hefty backlog of cases.

Shumlin’s veto came with some blistering words, viz. VTDigger:

The governor lanced into lawmakers for proposing a bill that “does nothing to advance the goal of protecting those vulnerable Vermonters, and adds yet another layer of bureaucracy to state government, and wastes taxpayer dollars.”

Small problem. Backers of the bill say they took pains to ensure that the legislation was acceptable to the administration.  

Rep. Sandy Haas, D-Rochester*, said she was flabbergasted by the veto.

“We worked with them and we came to an accord, and they said, ‘Fine, we can do it,'” Haas said. “That’s the place where we’re scratching our heads.”

[Sen. Claire] Ayer took umbrage at the governor’s message to lawmakers. “It was an insulting, condescending veto,” Ayer said. “I think he must have the wrong information because it’s a good bill.”

*Correction: Rep. Haas was identified by VTDigger as a Democrat; she is, in fact, a Progressive.

So when the bill passed, the Administration was fine with it. Now that the Legislature has left town, the bill is excessively bureaucratic and a waste of taxpayer money. Fascinating.

After the jump: a rare Doug Racine sighting, and another small problem.

Lawmakers sought the reporting requirements because the Adult Protective Services division has been fraught with problems. And the Shumlin Administration doesn’t seem to have made much progress on a backlog of “several hundred reports” of elder abuse that stacked up during the salad days of Jim Douglas. The lack of progress led Vermont Legal Aid and Disability Rights Vermont to file a lawsuit against the state in December.

Human Services Secretary Doug Racine briefly emerged from an undisclosed location to slam the lawsuit as a “distraction,” and as for the vetoed bill:  

“We were clear the legislation wasn’t needed and could get in the way of getting the work done,” Racine said. …The monthly reporting mandate, he said, would take away resources from the staff of 10-12 investigators in Adult Protective Services.

(A reminder to Mr. Racine: When you leave the Administration, don’t forget to retrieve your soul from escrow.)  

Well, that sounds reasonable. We don’t want to turn our overworked investigators into paper-pushers, do we?

Small problem: According to Ayer and Haas, the whole bureaucracy/paperwork complaint is completely unfounded.

[Ayer said] the information queries are built into the “off the shelf” software program the department recently purchased, and so lawmakers felt the requirements were wouldn’t be a burden for staff to produce.

“We understood it was just a matter of pushing the button,” Haas said. “It takes longer to print than to do the work to ask for it.”

It appears that Shumlin’s rationale has no connection to reality. So why do this? Why veto a bill that had been worked out to everybody’s satisfaction, therefore incurring a significant dose of anger and mistrust in the legislature?

I can only think of one explanation: that the reports would be so full of bad news, made public on a monthly basis, that it would be an ongoing PR nightmare and could hurt the state’s defense in the lawsuit.  

That’s a pretty damned noxious explanation, but if you can suggest a better one, I’m all ears.  

Note: Brief update added below, 5/17, 12 noon.

On April 5, Governor Shumlin held a big splashy news conference to announce that the state had sold 25,000 “Vermont Strong” license plates — halfway toward its goal of 50,000. It was an authentic feel-good moment for the Administration and for Irene recovery efforts, which are the major beneficiaries of plate sales.

Little problem: 25,000 was the number produced, not the number sold. The Vermont Press Bureau* took the bold step of asking the DMV for sales figures, and the number turned out to be less than 8,000.

I take three things away from this. The most prominent and least important: major, major PR screwup for the Governor. When you’re making such a highly-touted announcement, you’d better have your facts straight. This is the kind of process/detail stuff that Shumlin is usually good at. Not this time.

The second lesson, second most important: the Governor went out on a limb with this program, as VPB reported (article behind the Herald/T-A paywall)…

Lawmakers didn’t learn of the plan until the governor unveiled it in his [State of the State] address, and many felt he’d undercut the legislative process by doing so.

At the time, this was poor form and created a bit of executive/legislative tension for no good reason. Now that the program is falling far short of expectations, Shumlin doesn’t just look impolitic — he also looks wrong on the merits of “Vermont Strong” itself. That erodes his credibility.

After the jump: A big opportunity squandered.

The third lesson, and most important, is that “Vermont Strong” looks like a major bust for Irene recovery. Of the $25 price of each plate, $18 goes to the Vermont Disaster Relief Fund and $2 to the state food bank. Those causes have received a little less than $200,000 so far, which is obviously far short of the $1 million goal. What’s worse is that the state has already spent $136,000 to manufacture 28,000 plates. So the net revenue from the project is a little more than $60,000. (Note: The relief agencies have received their full share of the proceeds so far. The DMV is more than $100,000 in the hole, having paid the full production costs for 28,000 plates.)

Shumlin announced “Vermont Strong” four months ago, so the program has presumably lost momentum. Sales are only about 16% of the projected goal. It’s hard to imagine the kind of dramatic, sustained surge it would take to get anywhere near the goal. And, as Prog/Dem Senator Tim Ashe told the VPB…

“Financially, the plates may have prevented us from really considering more substantial opportunities to help our neighbors,” Ashe said. “For example, if every person this year on their has bill was asked to pay $1 to go into the fund… we would have raised a lot more money than this license plate program.”

And that, rather than last month’s PR screwup, is the real shame of this story.

Update: At least one person realized Shumlin’s mistake immediately, at the April 5 newser: DMC Commissioner Robert Ide, according to the Burlington Free Press:

I’m rather astounded by that. Ide goes on to explain that “we were selling them fast,” so I guess he thought reality would catch up with the announcement. Which, turns out, was a gross miscalculation on his part. I wonder if anyone else noticed the discrepancy and didn’t say anything about it.