(#1 is, of course, TJ Donovan’s candidacy for Attorney General. See kestrel9000’s diary below.)

State Senator Randy Brock, presumptive Republican nominee for Governor, has announced some key members of his campaign team. They include some well-connected Vermont Republicans, as well as a couple of national political strategists who’ve worked on election victories for some notoriously conservative candidates.

The locals: to no one’s surprise, Darcie Johnston is on the team, leading Brock’s fundraising effort. Johnston is a longtime consultant to Brock; until recently, she headed the anti-health care reform group Vermonters for Health Care Freedom. Oh, and one other nugget: She was the one who goaded the Douglas Administration to try to shut down Karl Hammer’s Vermont Compost operation in 2008:

Vermont Compost’s latest troubles started on March 12, when one of Hammer’s neighbors – Darcie Johnston – complained to Douglas about health hazards she believed were associated with the farm…

An expert from the DEC was dispatched to the scene; her report found no health hazards. But even so, the Administration pursued the case with great vigor. More vigor than it had shown for just about any other environmental issue in the state.  

Other locals on the Brockwagon: Mark Snelling, campaign treasurer. President of Greenleaf Metals, onetime candidate for Lieutenant Governor (didn’t clear the primary), holder of various volunteer posts and a famous name. And Paul Gillies, Montpelier-based attorney, will be the campaign’s legal counsel.

And now I’ll spend some time on the two outsiders. After the jump…  

Brock’s general consultant, lead strategist and pollster is Bob Wickers, California resident and principal in the political consulting firm Dresner Wickers Barber Sanders. The Brock press release touts Wickers’ Vermont ties:

Since 1988, Bob Wickers guided all three of Jim Jeffords’ campaigns for U.S. Senate, Randy Brock’s 2004 race for State Auditor and Mark Snelling’s 2010 campaign for Lt. Governor.

Funny, those names aren’t spotlighted on Wickers’ website. He prefers to trumpet a bunch of hard-right worthies such as Mike Huckabee’s 2008 run for President, Nebraska Governor Mike Johanns, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, and Arizona’s Trent Franks, one of the most conservative members of Congress.

Wickers also helped get Scott Pruitt elected Attorney General of Oklahoma. Pruitt was the only AG who refused to sign onto the government’s settlement with the nation’s five biggest banks over their mortgage lending activities, thus forgoing millions of dollars for Oklahoma mortgage holders simply to make an empty political point. Pruitt is one of the most enthusiastic red-state AGs in the legal battle to overturn President Obama’s health care reform. Thanks, Bob.

The last entry in our rogues’ gallery is media consultant Nick Everhart, Ohio resident and partner in “Strategy Group for Media,” a conservative campaign firm specializing in, yep, media strategy. Its client list include Ohio Governor John Kasich, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Congressmen Todd Akin and Joe Barton, plus Americans for Prosperity, the Family Research Council, and Michele Bachmann’s PAC.

What this says to me is that Brock will eschew whatever is left of the party’s tradition of centrist moderation in favor of a Fox News/Tea Party-style of hard-right conservatism and attack politics. We’ll see how that plays in Vermont.

Unanswered question: Last week, Brock said that his campaign would “rely more on specialists… from outside firms while trying to be lighter on paid staff.” So how much time will these high-powered national consultants actually give to the Brock campaign? Will they be present on the ground in Vermont, or will they be Skype-ing it in?  

Brock promises further additions to his campaign team in the near future, including a campaign coordinator. Which would seem to be the most important position in an effort comprised of pay-for-play consultants. And would seem to be a difficult (if not thankless) job, refereeing arguments between the local and national geniuses and trying to leverage as much time as possible from people who have other commitments.

On the other hand, this crew couldn’t do much worse than, say, Corry Bliss. Or could they?

In Vermont we’re having an early spring and maybe the GOP is working on their own early fall. Even as Romney racks up the delegates he can’t quite dispatch his closest rivals. Chances are slim even less than slim according to pundits but there is talk, lots of talk of a brokered Republican Convention. When asked about this  Fox News' Sarah Palin said

“I wouldn’t be afraid of that” [perhaps seeing it more in terms of her own celebrity career she added] it was “continuation of a process… that would perhaps be very good,”

Onetime RNC chairman Governor Haley Barbour admits that the long undecided primary could “leave scars” but good ol’ Haley knows how to make a little lemonade:

“If it is a convention where we get there with nobody having the vote, [that is] not necessarily all bad.”

Beyond the jump:An energizing train wreck

The Hill.com found some insiders that think it would not be as Mike Huckabee fears “nothing less than a train wreck” but actually energize the party. Some of the speculation is coming from those unaligned with a specific candidate but opposed to Romney. The drama and intrigue of a brokered convention and accompanying battles would energize and mesmerize the broader public they claim. It certainly wouldn’t hurt TV news ratings either.

“Conventions are just hideously boring these days and have become more so, gradually, over the course of my lifetime,” Republican strategist Curt Anderson told The Hill.  A brokered convention, he added, “could make for an actual event that would interest people.”

Keith Appell also held out the possibility that a new candidate could come forward at the convention, presenting themselves as a ‘unity’ choice, capable of bringing together supporters of both Romney and Santorum. Names like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and even Palin herself have been mentioned.

Romney has a good stock of delegates and will gather more this Tuesday but what Democrat isn’t energized at the thought of a brokered Republican convention? It has been a long time since the Republican’s last brokered convention in 1976. Back when Ronald the Reagan battled and lost the nomination to President Gerald “Whip Inflation Now” Ford. Some Republicans may remember President Ford went on to lead his energized party to defeat.  

The good news: Hollywood’s making a movie about our homegrown hero, Captain Richard Phillips (of Somali pirate fame). And what could be a better testament to Phillips, than to have Tom Hanks play him in the movie?

(Okay, maybe George Clooney.)

The bad news: the movie’s “hometown” scenes will be filmed in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

“They thought this area of Sudbury looked a lot like the area in Vermont they’re trying to show,” said town manager Maureen Valente.

And now… for the sordid truth behind this Hollywood perfidy.

While the town may not be an exact replica, locales in the Bay State tend to be cheaper than places like Vermont, said Mary McCormack in the Board of Selectmen’s office.

“It’s much better tax-wise for these companies,” she said.

Quick, to the Ethan Allen Signal! Alert El Jefe General!! Vermont’s Tax Burden Chases Tom Hanks to Taxachusetts!!!!! Dang, if it wasn’t for Governor Shumlin and those tax-happy Democrats, we’d be rubbin’ shoulders with Tom Hanks.  

I can see the bumpersticker now: “Vote Brock! He’ll Bring Matt Damon to Vermont!”

So we have a dilemma: Republicans have clearly decided to go all in with two things:

(1) hostility towards and the demeaning of women

(2) the rights of corporations as people.

I have a modest proposal.

What if women were, in fact, to incorporate?

I can’t believe it took me so long to think of this, but the solution is obvious: women, everywhere, make a point of incorporating yourselves.  Once you’re an actual corporation, Republicans have to treat you like a human being.  It’s part of the pact they make with their corporate masters (it’s actually a very touching ceremony– you should see it sometime.  The ritual tatooing of the corporate logos is just lovely).

Now, of course, another part of the pact involves the public shaming of women.  The ceremony for that one is kind of boring.  They can’t come up with anything more inventive than paying a bunch of women to walk up and down a stage while they yell “slut” at them, but it is how Victoria Jackson got her start in show business, which is great because otherwise we wouldn’t have ever gotten to see this:

But I digress… where was I again?

Oh.  Right.  Incorporation.  See, the best part of this whole idea is that it places Republicans in the situation of not knowing whether to treat humans as objects, or to treat objects as humans.  And by placing them in this dilemma, we may create a logical paradox for them.  

Now, you may point out that, to Republicans, logical paradoxes are kind of home turf.  “Can we defeat them on their own home turf?” you might ask?

This is a good question.  After all, we know that Republicans will gladly attack anything which attempts to make children healthier while at the same time claiming that Democrats are out to kill babies.  If that’s not an extreme amount of comfort in a logical paradox, little else is.

But I think this is different, because it’s pretty clear that corporations are not just another cause to them, but actually their entire bread and butter.  I don’t think they can attack corporations without causing themselves physical damage.

So… to women, everywhere: want to stop Republicans from attacking you?  Incorporate yourselves.  Even better: incorporate your reproductive organs.

Just don’t call your corporation “Solyndra.”

Yup.

Any debate over nuclear power will have one side insisting that it’s a “cheap and environmentally responsible” source of energy, with the other side countering that it isn’t cheap unless heavily subsidized in the construction phase, and that its “responsible” credential has recently come very much into doubt.

But proponents have, so far,  successfully kept the mainstream media from linking to the elephant in the room: the issue of what to do with the waste.

That question was never even raised in a recent high-profile PBS Frontline story that has been questioned for its apparent industry bias.  

The program looked at the prospects of nuclear energy, post-Fukushima, and seemed to be arguing that any country that chooses, as Germany has, to withdraw from the nuclear school is behaving irrationally and will live to regret the decision, since they can not possibly function off the nuclear grid.  Of course, even as the program was aired, Japan was demonstrating rather well how to do just that in the face of an economic crisis that was generated by a natural disaster but compounded by the mismanagement of its nuclear industry.

The good people of Japan have another dilemma on their hands, though. As an industrialized island nation that, for forty years, was heavily invested in nuclear energy to supply its power needs, the waste issue now rears its ugly head.

Spent fuel from Japanese power generation is currently finding temporary storage in on-site pools at reactor sites, but TEPCO has plans to move these materials to the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Mutsu City, Aomori Prefecture. The facility was still in the construction phase when the disaster occurred at Fukushima, causing the work to be suspended.  As planned, reprocessing at the plant could not, in any case, have handled all the waste being produced, and there is currently no alternative in sight.

TEPCO wants to resume construction of the plant, but locals are concerned that, if reprocessing and reuse never actually occurs, (which grows more and more likely as nuclear power falls from favor in Japan), the Rokkasho facility could become the final dumping ground for massive amounts of nuclear waste; a use for which it was never designed.

Long before the Fukushima accidents shone a bright light on TEPCO’s practices, their spent fuel management was out of control:

Last November, TEPCO released a report detailing how they have managed to store more than 10,000 fuel assemblies at the cooling ponds at Fukushima Daiichi as part of a program to consolidate spent fuel elements before putting them in a prospective interim storage facility in Mutsu, Japan. The Mutsu facility is designed to store spent nuclear fuel in above-ground storage for up to 50 years before it is reprocessed.

The Japanese program for waste management is unsustainable, as it is dependent on a fully functioning energy use of plutonium from reprocessed nuclear waste.  The isolation of plutonium has inherent issues itself, including the fact that, since it is nuclear weapon capable, stockpiling is strictly prohibited.

Then there is this little downside:

Reprocessing increases the volume of nuclear waste which must be stored. The increase occurs because the chemicals process for separating the plutonium, uranium, and HLW from spent nuclear fuel generates much greater volumes of waste than the original volume of the spent nuclear fuel. Although most of the radioactivity is concentrated in the high level waste, reprocessing is responsible for a substantial increase in the total volume of low and intermediate level waste which must then be dealt with.

So, are we in the U.S. doing any better than Japan in addressing the long-time storage of nuclear waste?  The short answer is no.

A long-term storage facility was planned and partially constructed at Yucca Mountain  in the State of Nevada, but questions about the site’s suitability and strong resistance from Nevada residents have led to suspension of the project.  The prospects for finding another site are looking dim.  

In the U.S. spent fuel is dealt with more or less as it is in Japan: onsite storage at individual facilities in “dry casks”  following time in spent fuel pools where discarded fuel assemblies must be kept cool until transfer to dry cask storage is possible.

Spent fuel pools are reaching capacity in many locations and alternatives are not presenting themselves.  Dry casks await pick-up that, lacking a destination, never comes to pass.

The spent fuel pools themselves represent risk in a prolonged power-outage, do not have the same level of protection as the active reactors; and those like the ones at Fukushima and Vermont Yankee are potentially more vulnerable to attack simply because they are located above grade rather than below.

It’s not just our children and our grandchildren who will have to deal with the consequences of our appetite for nuclear energy, but our grand-children’s descendants… into the vanishing point of distant time.  

This afternoon I heard a VPR announcer give the weather forecast, and said that tomorrow would bring more “nice weather,” with highs in the 70s for much of the state.

I beg to differ. Much as I enjoy not having to wear heavy coats or shovel snow, the weather doesn’t seem nice to me — it seems creepy.

It shouldn’t be this warm in mid-March. The Winooski River should not be flowing freely. There should still be lots of snow on the ground. Maple sugaring season should be in full swing, not on its last legs.

“Most of the research will show that once you go three days with 60 degree weather, you’re pretty well done. The tree can’t really recover from that, it’s going on to its next process of making the bud and making the leaf,” said Dummerston sugarmaker Steve Glabach, who tapped his first tree in 1968. “What I’m hearing is most people are only at three-quarters of a crop and not feeling good at all about the warm weather. The long-range forecast looks warm.”

…”I talked to a large producer in northern Vermont and he says most producers in the northern tier are close to only one-third of a crop and also feels the season may be ending,” Glabach said.

There’s also this, from state forester Sam Schneski:

“The thing that I hear over and over from longtime sugarmakers is that every year we get further and further away from knowing what an ‘average’ year is. The changes seem to be extreme.”

These on-the-ground observations coincide nicely with a recent statistical study out of UVM, showing that maple sugaring season is getting earlier and earlier.

Gee, you’d think maybe staunch defenders of Vermont tradition like Geoffrey Norman or El Jefe General John McLaughry would be up in arms over this obvious threat to maple sugaring, a great source of Vermontish picturesqueness and jobs, jobs, jobs. You’d maybe hope that the state Republican Party, which built itself on the bedrock of Vermont’s rural culture, would come out in favor of energy efficiency and fast-tracked development of renewables in an effort to save maple sugaring.

Nah, just kidding. They’ll keep quiet about global warming until our next cold snap. Which might be next week, or it might be next January the way things are going.

And weather forecasters: when the temperatures goes 30 degrees above normal (or more!) on Sunday afternoon, please don’t tell me how nice it is.  

It was a busy and productive week at the State House, with major agreements on rebuilding state offices damaged by Tropical Storm Irene. And I’d like to record my appreciation for hard work and reasonable outcomes. Whether or not you agree 100% with the decisions made, it’s remarkable how much was accomplished in the seven days since the release of the French Freeman French report on replacing the Waterbury complex.  

Governor Shumlin and the Legislature worked through the options in the FFF report in a matter of days. The result, with about 900 state workers to be relocated to Waterbury, some to be permanently stationed in Burlington or Montpelier, and about 200 shifted from Montpelier to Barre, looks like a solid plan that will accomplish a number of good things.

Waterbury will get back most of its workers. Not as many as it would have liked, but I thought Shumlin did a decent job of balancing the needs of Waterbury and other communities with bringing the costs to a reasonable level.

I was also pleased — and frankly, surprised, given how stubborn the Governor can be — that he gave ground on sizing a replacement State Hospital. You can argue with the result; some advocates will say it’s too big, many in the medical community think it’ll be too small. But the process was impressive.  

The danger of one-party government is that it can become lazy and complacent. With the Vermont GOP in a prolonged and perhaps permanent eclipse, and the Progs in rebuilding mode, it’s incumbent on Democratic officeholders to use their power wisely and prudently. On the events of the past week, I give Shumlin and the Legislative leadership high marks.  

Posted on VTDigger:

At Senate hearing, Sanders questions NRC about continued operation of Vermont Yankee.

Senators Assess U.S. Nuclear Safety

One Year After Fukushima

WASHINGTON, March 15 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today questioned why federal regulators extended the operating license for the aging Vermont Yankee nuclear plant within days of a disastrous meltdown at a similar plant in Fukushima, Japan.

Marking the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Senate committee that oversees the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a hearing on the slow pace of efforts to strengthen safety at U.S. nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

More:

http://vtdigger.org/2012/03/16…

Late note: I’ve added some new stuff to the end of this diary. See below (after the jump).

The Republican Party has rightly been getting tarred and feathered for the national and state-by-state attacks on reproductive rights. Some Republicans have gotten their share of heat (Rush Limbaugh, Bob McDonnell, Rick Santorum), others haven’t (Rick Perry, Mary Fallin*, Mitt Romney).

*Governor of Oklahoma, another state with punitive anti-abortion legislation.

It’s all over the news. If you Google “Republican War on Women,” you get approximately 74,300,000 hits. (Presumably Google is estimating the number because it keeps increasing so rapidly.)

That’s great. Wonderful. The more attention is paid to this, the more likely it is that their agenda will be derailed and they will lose more elections. But there’s one thing that should bother us all.

It’s not a war on women. It’s a war on anyone who cares about women or is involved in procreating or possibly procreating with a woman.

So really, it’s a Republican War on People. With the partial exception of gay men.  

To call it a “war on women” is to…

(a) minimize its impact on, as I said, anyone who cares about women or whose life involves women.

(b) ignore mens’ role in family planning and reproductive health. Hey, that’s a woman’s job! Just like in the Fifties!

(c) place the onus for political action on the shoulders of women.

Yes, it’s heartening to see empowered women taking action: crowds of women demonstrating outside of state capitols and organizing online campaigns to take political action and (among many other brilliant things) post embarrassing questions on the Facebook pages of certain Governors.

But this isn’t just a war on women; it’s a war against humanity and our personal freedoms. It’s a war against health. And really, at its base, it’s a war against sex.  And men should be fully as engaged in this struggle as women.

To call it a “war on women” diminishes its impact and lets us men off the hook too easily. Let’s find it a more accurate and inclusive name. “Republican War on Reproductive Freedom” isn’t catchy enough. Maybe we should just call it the Republican War on Sex.  

Addendum: Some Commenters have taken this diary in an unfortunate way. They’ve interpreted it as an attempt to shift the spotlight off women’s issues by claiming that men are equal sufferers. This was not my intent, not at all. The point I was trying to make, and maybe I didn’t make it clearly enough, is that men need to fight alongside women on this issue. Because (a) it’s only fair and just, and (b) it’s our war, too.

For the sake of chronological clarity: This was added on Saturday 3/17 at 9:00 pm. There were 25 comments below this diary at the time.