Yesterday while browsing Crooks and Liars I read about a recent Al Qaeda video encouraging their followers to go down to the nearest gun show and buy an assault rifle since you’ll be confronted most likely “without a background check and most likely without having to show an identification card.” Since we’ve had several lively gun discussions here in the past I figured this would be a good opportunity to resume the conversation.

This video will likely bee seen as rather inflammatory as some, but it does pose an interesting question. Why, when the patriot act was designed, was access restrictions or waiting periods for assault weapons left out? I’m guessing the answer to that would be the NRA lobby (if only the ACLU had so strong a lobby…) but it does seem like a gaping hole. Is it more important for the government to know who just bought a large amount of ammo and assault weapons or to know who took out the communist manifesto at the local library?

Rep. Peter Welch was on Rachel Maddow’s show Friday, discussing opposition in Congress to the war in Afghanistan. Welch is playing a leading role in that opposition.

This is doubly cool because Welch appears on the program from in front of Dan and Whit’s general store in Norwich

Odd changes in Entergy’s J. Wayne Leonard’s compensation package according to the April 14 issue of Forbes.

I’ve been so busy worrying about the accident at Japan’s Fukushima reactor, that I almost forgot about Vermont Yankee and all the doins here in Vermont.  Although I haven’t forgotten that VY is the same age and make as Fukushima.

An out-of-state friend was reviewing the compensation packages for utility execs in Forbes magazine and sent me this little gem today, and I just had to share it with Vermonters since the state is also being sued by Entergy.

FROM FORBES

Total Compensation

   $18.12 mil

   5-Year Compensation

   $101.96 mil

   Education:

   College: Ball State University BS ’73

   Graduate School: Indiana University MBA ’87

J Wayne Leonard has been CEO of Entergy (ETR) for 12 years. Mr. Leonard has been with the company for 13 years. The 60 year old executive ranks 2 within Utilities

Leonard also ranks 65 in compensation compared with other corporate execs.  Wow.



In 2009, the Vermont Yankee Public Oversight Panel recommended that Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee (ENVY) buy a new condenser for its reactor.  Well, actually ENVY’s own staff recommended that VY needed a new condenser all the way back in 1999.  ENVY has claimed it does not have the $100 Million needed, but they did have the $100 Million to pay out over 5 years in a special compensation package for Entergy CEO J. Wayne Leonard!

Wow – Leonard could buy VY its condenser and still have more than $1 Million in compensation.  Leonard could make a significant donation and ease VY’s reliability issues and still be left with a pretty hunk of change.  Of course, he still couldn’t change VY’s Fukushima Mark 1 BWR design.

I think we must take a moment to speak “Hallelujah!,” or at least “hallelujah” for a small act of humanity, not to mention common sense, on the part of Vermont’s esteemed legislators: medical marijuana is legal at last.

It couldn’t have come in a more appropriate month, as far as I am concerned.  June means Father’s Day, and my father was a glaucoma sufferer, way back in the 1960’s.

My parents had met on a train in the middle of America at the end of the Second World War.  Mother, an Army nurse, and Dad, a lowly private were already a little longer-of-tooth than most young sweethearts of the day.

From what I’ve been told, it was love at first sight.

By the time they were  mustered-out and could finally marry, having us kids became job one, as women approaching 40 and gentlemen older than that were not thought to be prime parent material.  So my sister and I arrived, just twenty-one months apart, and proceeded to keep their lives interesting through the fifties, ratcheting-things up somewhat in the turbulent sixties.  

Both bore it like troopers; but most surprising was the adaptability of my Dad, who had been raised a staunch Roman Catholic on a farm in central Illinois. Whether it was his disappointment at being unable to utilize a scholarship to teacher’s college, witnessing his family lose their farm, or surviving the Great Depression by working odd jobs for food; something set a decidedly progressive engine rumbling beneath his conservative roots.  

When I was seventeen, he began pressure drops for previously undetected glaucoma.  Despite the fact that both my Dad and my mother were working, we didn’t have a lot of money, so we went to the neighborhood dentist, the neighborhood GP, and the neighborhood eye doctor…whom we learned too late was just a trained optician with delusions of grandeur.   Once detected by a legitimate ophthalmologist,  Dad’s glaucoma didn’t respond well to drops, so surgery was required.

While he was still struggling on the drops, however, my bold big sister ventured to tell him about new evidence suggesting that marijuana could provide some relief!  Now keep in mind that this was around 1968, by which time the whole nation had taken to hyperventilating about the evils of “grass.”  Nevertheless, my straight-arrow blue-collar Dad simply thanked her for the suggestion and joked, “I think I have enough bad habits.”  

So here’s to all the glaucoma sufferers and cancer patients in Vermont who will soon be able to step up to a local dispensary in broad daylight, and legally get the simple relief that has so long been denied to them…and here’s to my darling Dad.

   Yup, it’s still going on.  

Water, water everywhere and hardly a drop not contaminated. Tepco workers still struggling with damaged reactor cores must inject water to keep them cool but, this results in radioactive water leaking into basement-levels of the damaged plants. Also over 15 million gallons of water that was pumped and sprayed over the plants during the height of the emergency must be cleaned-up. An engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists says Tepco’s problem  “resembles a board game with 16 squares and one empty spot,”    

The next step coming in two weeks called “…better than nothing”  

A potential turning point comes roughly two weeks from now, when Tepco plans to begin a treatment process in which water is sucked from the basement rooms and fed into a special tank, then treated with chemicals that eliminate its radioactivity. The process creates a byproduct of radioactive sludge, which is generally mixed with bitumen, poured into drums, then sealed and buried. The water itself can either be cycled back into reactors or discarded into the ocean.  

The treatment system is being set up by Areva, a French company that uses the technology at its La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant, off the Normandy coast. Since 1997, Greenpeace — after taking water samples from La Hague’s discharge pipe — has made repeated claims that the supposedly decontaminated water in fact contains radioactivity levels above the regulatory limit.    

The process “is not 100 percent, but it’s better than nothing,” David Lochbaum [Union of Concerned Scientists] said. “The alternative: you let the water simply evaporate and radioactivity carries to all parts far and wide.”  

The future of the site: Making nuclear lemonade?  

One plan recently reported under consideration would be convert Fukushima Dai-Ichi into a nuclear waste storage site. This means permanently storing the nuclear waste at the site of the damaged reactors.  

The Atomic Energy Society of Japan is studying the proposal, which would cost tens of billions of dollars, Muneo Morokuzu, a professor of energy and environmental public policy at the University of Tokyo, said in an interview yesterday. The society makes policy recommendations to the government.  “We are involved in intense talks on the cleanup of the Dai-Ichi plant and construction of nuclear waste storage facilities at the site is one option,” said Morokuzu.

(TOMORROW!!!!! – promoted by odum)

So, do I really need to explain the deal again? Blah blah blah… Vermont Daily Briefing and Green Mountain Daily… blah blah blah… annual grillin’ get-together…blah blah blah… again at it’s ancestral homeland of North Beach in Burlington… blah blah blah … BIGGEST, BADDEST POLITICAL EVENT OF THE YEAR… you know, no biggie.

SEE More Legislators, candidates, officeholders, online media folk, and curious anthropologists than you can shake a router at.

SEE Our cool Lake Champlain beachfront party site.

SEE Philip Baruth, blog-to-Senate crossover superstar, and try to make him say or do something embarrassing that you can blackmail him with when he finally runs for Governor some day.

And come and see most (all?) of the GMD team, pictured above. What more can you ask for?

Food, maybe. There will be that. And drink. That too. Bring the whole family! Bring someone else’s family!

Below is a list of bills passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Governor Shumlin thusfar (there are a few more on the way).

Whatever we'd like to see happen that may not be happening, there's no denying that quite a bit is getting done. Some terrific stuff in here, for sure (I don't have links to all the bills, here – I'll try to fill them in a bit later). See after the flip for the list. I’ll go back and finish the links when I can.

(Inspired by comments on Memorial Day posts.)

   Marketing Meeting Bullets

We have the fashions and we have the photos.

Just look at Ms. Vermont National Guard.

Ain’t she hot holding that compress to her breast?

I mean, this will sell itself–Support The Troops.

War is Sexy–War is Powerful–War is IN!

I’ve done all the work–The Youth Market.

And the kiddies–they’ll want the camos for Daycare.

Look at this–an armored ‘Smart’ SUV.  It seeks out Malls.

These Lean Mean Real Bloodstain Jeans–Wear ’em to hip-hop concerts.

I’ve got Vanity Fair and Vogue.  And a page in the Times.

And all the cool youth mags, including the Goth ones.

We can go with this next week.  In time for the 4th.

I’m tellin’ you, it’ll be bigger than Rock ‘n’ Roll!

Wouldn’t you like to fuck Ms. Vermont National Guard?

In the backseat of an armored Mall-seeking SUV?

The whole country gone nuts on a new kind of Sex.

Rap songs and movies and TV and even goddamn books.

Better than that Vampire/Zombie shit.

I’m getting the hard-on graphics on the victims too.

Rape and sexy refugees.  Salacious slaughter and pillage.

And when this takes off, then we can do the weapons.

The Pentagon will want in on this.  Shoot its load.

Even the Christians–they love fuckin’ War!

So, are we agreed?–I mean War is our new Viagra.

Americans want New Sex.  Never-ending Sex through Never-ending War.

Ok, get one of the girls to bring in some drinks–the one with the Tits.

Remember the Fifties, guys?  All those boobs?

Shit.  Marilyn Monroe jumping out of an Apache?

The whip from the rotors blowing her vest off.

And legs.  We’ll make a fortune with the mini fatigues.

It’s all about Eye Candy, boys.  It’s all about War.

Goddamn!  When the Nukes start, I’ve got a great idea!

Peter Buknatski

Montpelier, Vt.

It’s a smaller version– clicking on the image gets you to a larger one.

Thought you might like to know this.  $=Cdn

Stanley Marshall Fortis Inc. FTS

Salary:1,000,000

Bonus: 1,160,000

Subtotal: 2,160,000

% change from last year-1

Other: 231,859

Stock Awards s:1,407,600

Option Grants: 483,565

Pension Value: 622,444

Total: 4,905,468

% Change:14

Value of Unexercised in-the-money options:6,191,701

Value of unvested share based awards:: 2,281,199

Value of CEO’s equity:14,400,600

Company’s Accrued obligation to CEO Pension:13,649,228

That’s a lot of kilowatts!

Source: Globe and Mail June 1, 2011 Executive compensation rankings for Canada’s 100 biggest companies