There are two serious problems with this image posted by Darcie Johnston of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom on her facebook page.

Here’s the despicable image:

And here’s what’s wrong with it:

1) It implies that people in different states are fundamentally different. This is untrue – humans are humans. There are people with varied beliefs everywhere you go. There is no such thing as a blue or red state – all states are purple. This is a method of dividing people, instead of uniting them (I guess she mustn’t like being part of the UNITED States).

‘

and

2) It furthers the derogatory dog whistles of bigots who believe the following, and who want you to believe these things, too:

(A) People who join the armed forces are automatically better than others.

(B) People who join the armed forces are more patriotic than other people.

(D) People who join the armed forces are never gay.

(E) People who are gay are automatically lesser than others.

(F) People who live in states that tend to vote republican join the armed services, and people who live in states that don’t vote republican never join the armed services.

(G) People who live in states that vote democratic are unserious, immoral, partiers who don’t care about their country.

It’s nice to see that at least one person called her on this sad display bigotry.

It’s sad she is so ignorant of the proud military heritage of Vermont. This is not to say that militarism is automatically good or bad, but the state’s participation shows that military participation and respect for people in all their diverse beauty are not mutually exclusive.

She also denigrates the memories of all the Vermonters who have died in the ongoing wars in the Middle East. Perhaps she is unaware that Vermont has the highest per-capita casualty rate in the country?

It’s not surprising to see her comment about how she wishes she lived in another state. Clearly, she doesn’t know or care about the state in which she lives.

But I guess we could have guessed that by the fact that she is fighting to prevent Vermonters from getting equal, affordable access to quality medical care.

The Republican War on Women is now official.  

Apparently the desire by an overwhelming majority of American women (and probably the majority of American men) to have affordable birth control universally available is less important to the Republican Party than the views of a handful of Catholic bishops.

Yes, Catholic bishops, who for decades turned a blind-eye to systemic child abuse, and even now express outrage at attempts by the victims to receive compensation….Catholic bishops who continue to reinforce an official disdain for women that approaches that of the Taliban, albeit without the physical repression…these same Catholic bishops will now dictate the Republican agenda.

Not content to deny birth control coverage to female employees of Catholic institutions, Republican’s have decided it’s a good idea to let any employer deny coverage just because he or she feels like it.

Who couldn’t have seen this one coming?

Under the false colors of religious freedom, Republicans will do their level best to undermine every other intimate choice we care to make.

Way to further narrow your base, Guys!

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This week, we learned that the two top executives of Montpelier’s Kellogg-Hubbard Library have resigned, and that management is being restructured. Beyond that, a number of questions are unanswered. Given the cozy insularity of many Vermont institutions, public and private, large and small, I fear these questions will never be answered.

(Pretty much the only media source for this story is the Times Argus, whose website and archive are behind a paywall, so I won’t bother embedding a link. I’ll include some fair-use quotes in this story. To see the rest, subscribe! Or go to your local, ahem, library, and read it in the February 9 edition.)

For the last six-plus years, the Library has had a rather unusual two-headed leadership model. An Executive Director (Daniel Pudvah) responsible for finances, fundraising, and such. And a library Director (Robin Sales) responsible for day-to-day management. There are reasons to have this kind of structure, but I’d always wondered if it was really necessary in a smallish library like Kellogg-Hubbard.

Now, I’m wondering even more — about the original move, and its reversal.  

First of all, in retrospect, was it a mistake to adopt the structure in 2005? Did we get our money’s worth out of the extra burden of two directors? If so, why are we abandoning it? If not, why did it take six-plus years to figure this out?

There were two events that precipitated the move. One was Pudvah’s decision to take a new job with Radio Vermont/WDEV. He’d been in talks with WDEV since sometime in the fall, and in January he notified the library’s Board that he was leaving. The other event, as reported the Times Argus:

According to Sales, while she was out on maternity leave, the board of trustees hired a consultant to examine the leadership structure of the library.

The consultant recommended that the library do away with the dual director model and return to a single chief executive or head librarian.

…Board Secretary Marialisa Calta said the dual director model was “clunky,” and that the restructuring will streamline the organization and possibly save money.

One executive instead of two? I’ll bet it will “possibly” save money. But wait a minute: This all happened while Sales was on maternity leave? Yep.

When Sales returned, she learned of the restructuring and decided to resign. …[she] would have been required to apply for the new position.

“I was a little disenchanted by the process,” Sales said.

Well, yeah. An employer can get in hot water for taking away a woman’s job while she’s on maternity leave. If this wasn’t illegal, it was a skin-of-the-teeth, carefully-crafted procedure designed to meet the letter of the law while violating its spirit. Board President John Page, perhaps in a nod to any employment attorneys tuning in, was careful to note that Sales and Pudvah “resigned on their own free will.”

But while Pudvah resigned to take a new job, Sales is unemployed. She may have resigned on her own free will, but was she really given a choice?

How did all this play out? Which came first: the realization that the dual model was “clunky,” the hiring of the consultant, Pudvah’s pending departure? The Board isn’t saying.

Page declined to comment on when exactly the consultant was hired to look at the leadership structure, who the consultant was or when the restructuring recommendation was made.

“I;m not going to comment about that,” Page said, because it involves an “internal personnel matter.”  

Bullfeathers. The hiring of a consultant, the identity of the consultant, and the timing of the recommendation are only tangentially “personnel matters.”  

Unless, of course, it would make the Library look really bad. Or even make them vulnerable to a lawsuit from Sales. Say, for instance, it went like this: Pudvah let people know he was planning to leave. A consultant was hired, and produced a report that provided cover for the forced departure of Sales by effectively eliminating her job.

That’s a worst-case interpretation. But the lack of transparency by the Library Board lends itself to unfavorable interpretations.

Public institutions that use public funds have a responsibility to answer for their decisions to the public. The Kellogg-Hubbary Library Board is, so far, failing to meet this obligation.

In a story that, as far as I can tell, has gone unreported except by Vermont Digger, the University of Vermont’s Board of Trustees has chosen UVM’s next President. It happened at a Board meeting last weekend.

They’re not naming the name just yet; they have to negotiate a contract first. We won’t know Dan Fogel’s successor until late February, according to a UVM release. Negotiating on behalf of UVM will be the board’s Chair, Robert Cioffi.

(Who, FYI, is a native Vermonter who’s now a partner in a private equity firm* located in one of the tonier precincts of Connecticut. Gee, another one of them running something. There’s a surprise.)

Let’s hope they’ve made the right choice. UVM has, to put it mildly, a mixed track record in presidential selections. And to judge from the Vermont Digger account, it doesn’t look like the Board has learned very much from the Dan Fogel kerfuffle.

After the jump: big bucks, “modest revisions,” and octopus ink.

The Board also received a report (authored by, yep, Robert Cioffi) on the controversy over Fogel’s departure as President and the compensation package he received. The report highlighted concerns over the “corporatization” of UVM, but “without a clear definition of what this means.”

That’s actually a quote from the report. Really. If you don’t know what “corporatization” means, then how can you take effective steps to change it? And if you didn’t bother to define the term, how serious are you about reform?

On the subject of executive pay, which is certainly part of the concern over “corporatization,” the report basically stomped all over UVM’s critics. From VT Digger:

The report asserts a “widespread understanding” that salaries must be nationally competitive, but “tempered by some who believe that Vermont is unique and has different values, and should not be bound by the marketplace or a corporate culture.

There you go. Those who are critical of excessive compensation are depicted as “some who believe” in a warm fuzzy ideal of Vermont. And their concerns are obviously trumped by the “‘widespread understanding’ that salaries must be nationally competitive.”  

A brief aside: There are a lot of salaries at UVM that are not at all “nationally competitive.” This is also true, as it happens, at Dartmouth. Both institutions operate on the unspoken assumption that the area’s natural beauty and lifestyle options are powerful draws. And I’m talking about fairly high academic positions. But not for top executives, no way, nossir, nohow. They need money.

In response to said report, the Board adopted what VT Digger rightfully called “modest revisions” of university policy.

…new wording says that the president will not be eligible to receive outside compensation without prior board authorization. A sentence was also deleted, the requirement that the president inform the board of “all compensation paid or assignable to him/her in consideration of his appointment; regardless of the source of funds.”

Maybe I’m uninformed, but… (a) I don’t remember “outside compensation” being an issue in the Fogel case, and (b) if the president can’t receive outside compensation but doesn’t have to inform the board of “all compensation,” then how is the new policy supposed to be enforced?

So, given the concern by “some” over executive pay, what can we expect UVM to offer its new leader? VT Digger says…

Based on equity criteria for senior UVM administrators, the president’s starting salary is likely to be around $400,000. The dean of UVM’s Medical School made $431,000 in 2010. Fogel’s top pay, not including other forms of compensation, was $322,563.

Well. If my math is correct, the new President can expect a 24% raise over what (the obviously undercompensated) Dan Fogel received. How did he manage to put food on the table?

A little perspective from UVM professor, State Senator, and ace blogger Philip Baruth:

Baruth wrote that he sees no substantial change in the way a future president will be compensated.

The public “has a right to insist that a strong, clear, enforceable policy on compensation help to direct the Board in such matters,” he concludes.

The public may have “a right to insist,” but it sure seems like the insistence isn’t producing results. Instead of clarity, we’re getting another cloud of octopus ink. The report downplayed the concerns of UVM critics and apparently produced no meaningful reforms. The presidential salary is about to take another huge leap. And it’s being negotiated by a venture capitalist — whose industry is a leader in skyrocketing executive pay.

To quote John McCain, that’s not change you can believe in.

*Correction 2/13/12: A reader pointed out that Robert Cioffi is not a venture capitalist, as I originally described him, but a partner in a private equity firm. Venture capitalists invest in startup companies, often in high-tech; private equity firms invest in — or take over — existing companies. In our current political discourse, “venture capitalist” has become the default term. Mitt Romney, for example, is often referred to as a venture capitalist, when in fact he was in private equity. My apologies for the error, and my thanks to the reader for correcting it.

 The Environmental Evangelical Network (EEN) a green evangelical “pro-life” group that supports EPA rules limiting harmful mercury is catching the wrath of fellow “pro-lifers”. The EEN favors specific restrictions on emissions from power plants because they will protect the health of the unborn. The EEN critics maintain that to portray safeguards against environmental hazards as “pro-life” is to obscure the meaning of the term.

While the EEN’ers still deny that human activity is driving global warming the group has urged support for regulatory restrictions by sponsoring TV, radio ads and billboards. A spokesman spells out their view this way:

We believe protecting the unborn from mercury poisoning is a consistent pro-life position,

  Mercury exposure can cause mental retardation, cerebral palsy, deafness and blindness in infants. Low doses may result in developmental delays affecting walking, talking, attention span and learning disabilities.

However the EEN’s broader views and actions spell trouble for them from 30 other religious “pro-lifers” and conservative anti-EPA legislators including, The Family Research Council and Sen. James Inhofe. It appears these critics see a threat to the “pro-life” brand name. Says Inhofe about the EEN’s position:

To claim that EPA’s devastating, job-killing regime is somehow ‘pro-life’ is absurd.

 This is a troublesome junction for control of the issue when a brand boundary gets blurred and is no longer focused as they wish it to be. And worse still for Sen. Inhofe is the intersecting issue with his longtime pet villain, the “job-killing” EPA. So while watching the “pro-lifers” fight over their brand can you imagine the EPA protecting life?

As if there aren’t already enough compelling reasons to immediately retire BWR Mark 1 reactors like the ones at Fukushima and at Vermont Yankee, Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates has just identified a doozy of a containment flaw that had previously escaped detection!

Analyzing data from the first day of the Fukushima accident, after the tsunami but before the explosions; and comparing those numbers to data collected during a test forty years earlier at the Brunswick facility in North Carolina, Arnie noticed a striking similarity which suggests an entirely unanticpated explanation for how those explosions came to pass.

In the scenario proposed by Fairewinds, as cooling failed at Fukushima, there was an accompanying build-up of contaminated hydrogen gas in the containment vessel. After about eight hours, the pressure build-up in the vessel so far exceeded it’s designed capacity that it actually stretched retaining bolts on the vessel “lid,” creating a space through which  volatile gas escaped into the reactor.  A single spark was all it took to set off a blast, ripping through the reactor and rocketing contaminated debris and gases into the atmosphere.

When the possibility of a hydrogen explosion in the Mark 1 was finally recognized in the 1980’s, a design modification involving a vent was made to all containments for that generation of reactors. This modification has come to be widely accepted as a permanent fix for the problem.  

It turns out that, even though the vent appears to have  functioned properly at Fukushima,  it never could have prevented the exact problem that precipitated the explosions that occurred there!

The potential for a similar chain of events linked to that single design flaw still exists in all Mark 1BWR reactors that remain online today.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has long maintained its official position that the original design flaw in this generation of reactors was resolved through the vent modification, and that the containment vessel could not be breached.

This new evidence suggests otherwise.

Have a look at the brief and very straightforward explanation that Arnie Gundersen provides for this phenomenon:

New Containment Flaw Identified in the BWR Mark 1 from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.

So Senate President Pro Tem John Campbell has declared H.97 – the bill passed last session by the House that would provide limited collective bargaining rights to home-based child care workers (and a bill I did some work on) – dead. He does not intent to let it come out of committee. Barring some last minute intervention from the Governor, it’s likely to stay dead (and Shumlin has already picked his controversies for this election year… this bill is not on the list).

It should never have come to this, and has because of self-destructive behavior on both sides.

On the union’s side, it’s no secret in the Statehouse that AFT has continued to wield a strategic sledgehammer, even those times when finesse has been called for. Vermont legislators are more prickly than most on that regard.

On Campbell’s end, it seems to be simply about pique. He’s not able to see beyond some of that strategic clumsiness to judge the issue on its merits, simply because bill proponents have dared to cross him. And when you dare to cross Campbell, apparently, political reality becomes an afterthought.

Putting aside the ethics of the bill and the right to collective bargaining – a right Democrats are supposed to stand for – consider the more politically crass implications. Campbell is assumed to be eyeing higher office – possibly the governorship after Shumlin moves on. He’ll inevitably face a primary, and this move won’t play well in that arena.

But more than that – consider the general election. In its earliest form, this bill could have unionized 8,000 low-income Vermonters, mostly women. That’s 8000 union members who would get mailings endorsing candidates – and most of those would be Democrats.

This is why I have little doubt that Republican insiders are laughing their butts off at Campbell’s decision to let his personal pride overcome his common sense.

Oh looky here, a new hashtag has appeared on Twitter this afternoon — #kurtfacts. It’s the old Chuck Norris meme, except with Kurt Wright as the hero. Samples:

“Kurt Wright can blow bubbles with beef jerky.”

“Kurt Wright was born in a log cabin … that he built with his bare hands.”

“Kurt Wright has a bear skin rug in his living room its not dead it’s just afraid to move”

Hilarity, to be sure. Feel free to Tweet your own, preferably subversive, entries. (I just Tweeted “Kurt Wright has one freakishly large tooth. Named “Nigel.”) Or maybe start #wandafacts or #mirofacts.  

This just in from the Guv:

Gov. Peter Shumlin today appointed Jill Krowinski of Burlington to replace outgoing state Rep. Rachel Weston for the seat representing Ward 3.

“Jill has worked hard to get young people involved in the political process and registered to vote,” Gov. Shumlin said. “She also knows how the House and Senate operate from her time working as assistant to former House Speaker Gaye Symington, so she’ll hit the ground running.”

“I want to thank Governor Shumlin for giving me this incredible opportunity to represent Burlington in the House of Representatives,” Krowinski said. “I’m ready to get to work with a great group of legislators from Burlington and excited to work for a great community.”

Among her priority issues are health care reform, education, and empowering young people to get involved in their communities. Krowinski graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in Urban Studies and Political Science in 2002. In addition to her work for Symington, she has served as Executive Director of the Vermont Democratic Party and founded a non-profit dedicated to registering young people to vote. She is currently the Vermont Director of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England.  Krowinski serves on the Board of Directors of the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, Begin Blue, Vermont Access to Reproductive Freedom, and is a Commissioner for the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington.