{First, a cheap plug for my blog Senate Guru.}

Before Arlen Specter’s Party switch announcement yesterday, the Senate’s Democratic caucus stood at 58 members.  Senator-elect Al Franken represented Democrats’ 59th vote toward cloture, still short of reliably ending Republican filibusters.  But now, with Specter joining the Democratic caucus, Senator-elect Franken represents the big 6-0, which is why Republicans will redouble their efforts to delay Senator-elect Franken’s seating – and why we in the netroots must redouble our efforts to send obstructionist Republicans a message and also provide them with adequate disincentive from delaying Senator-elect Franken’s seating any further. Since the “One Dollar a Day to Make Norm Coleman Go Away” effort started just a couple weeks ago, about $40,000 has been raised to remind the Republicans funding Norm Coleman’s endless appeals that, for every single day that they delay the implementation of the will of Minnesota voters, progressive voters will raise money to use against these Republicans on Election Day 2010.

(To paraphrase the song: “Ho-o-ope-less, ho-o-ope-less, Ho-opeless.” Though maybe the original refrain (Helpless) works too. – promoted by NanuqFC)

 Lt.Gov. Brian Dubie comments yesterday on his personal role in flu preparations .

“As an airline captain, I was given guidance that said if I detected flu like symptoms on my passengers I was supposed to make sure they didn’t get on the airplane, which is a little problematic from the reality standpoint.  I said yeah, right, I’m going to interview 150 people…”

The advisory group represents local, state and federal officials and it’s designed to coordinate response to terrorism and other threats.  

He has according to news reports  made a specialty of emergency preparedness because of his role in the Air Force Reserve and his experience lending a hand following the attacks of Sept. 11.

http://www.vpr.net/news_detail…

Where were you the last time a GOP Senator dumped the Party?

I was working at the Democratic Party at the time, and let’s just say Senator Leahy’s account that – “we knew [about the Jeffords switch] in Vermont. We knew it long – apparently long before anybody down here. It was well talked about. I see Bill Baroonth (ph) here from Vermont. He knows everybody was talking about it before it happened.” – falls in the “things that make you go ‘hmmm'” category for me. There were two of us in the party office at the time, and my boss (Mark Michaud) had the task (via Leahy’s Washington office) of making it all come together on the ground – very quickly – as well as keep it totally hush-hush… and let me tell you, it caught us flat-footed. We only knew a couple days out, which was problematic since I was talking mornings off that week to teach a class in Randolph. Had to do some crazy last minute rearranging.

Anyway, it all worked out so smoothly. There was some sort of right wing gathering in Montpelier and we didn’t want the event crashed, so Burlington was chosen. The evening before, the Chittenden County Dems were phone banking already (I forget why), so it was a simple matter to ask them to shift their focus to turnout for the big announcement. Big crowds, me BSing my way past the cops pretending to be a reporter with a camera (without credentials…heh)… it all came on very, very quickly, but came together perfectly

I dunno. Maybe in Leahy’s office they were talking about it a long time before it happened, but if so, they sure kept it hidden from the rest of us. But that was some fun week, I tellya.

So here’s an idea that, if taken seriously and agreed to by all four announced and rumored gubernatorial candidates (and any other emerging contenders), could really be a game changer in Vermont, regardless of whether the primary date is moved:

What if all four — Susan Bartlett, Deb Markowitz, Doug Racine, and Peter Shumlin — campaigned for the entire pre-Primary period solely against Jim Douglas, and not against each other?!

That’s what needs to happen to make Jim Douglas go away.

The pluses:

1. Four (or more) cannons aimed at the major target (“eyes on the prize”).

2. Less intra-party acrimony, more party unity post-primary.

3. It would keep Douglas’s PR/campaign people busy.

4. Voters would finally understand what a mess Douglas has made of the state, given evidence from four (plus) different credible people every week of the campaign.

More below the fold …

5. It might increase primary and general election voter participation, countering voter disengagement due to internecine sniping.

6. Primary voters would get to choose which candidate had the best plan to defeat Douglas and the best vision for Vermont, instead of which candidate had the cleverest put-downs of the others or was best at beating up other Democrats.

7. The successful candidate would have plenty of ammunition to use in the final 8 weeks of the campaign.

It would be like a job interview test-task. The task is to campaign effectively against Jim Douglas and his record; the candidate who does the best job of that, gets the job of challenging the Governor with a party that is united in support of the goal: defeating Jim Douglas (and Brian Dubie, don’t forget).

Wouldn’t THAT be amazing?!

Now, just stifle your inner cynic for a few minutes and imagine what that kind of campaign would look like, and how it could transform both the Vermont Democratic Party and future campaigns.

Could we do it? Could someone with pull in the the VDP broker that deal with some teeth? (Making access to the VDP Voter File contingent on signing on is probably a ship that has sailed, but there must be something else on that order of magnitude that would provide a sweet enough carrot to encourage buy-in to the idea.)

Could party activists provide enough pressure to get all the contenders to sign on to a unified targeting agreement? Even as few as four phasers all trained on the same spot can crack an enemy’s armor (or so we learned from Kirk and crew).

C’mon, say it with me: “Imagine …” “Hope …” “I have a dream …”

WASHINGTON, DC- This story is blazing like a wildfire across the Internet. It appears that former Vermont senator Jim Jeffords may have inspired another high ranking Republican Senator to jump ship. But unlike Jeffords, this senator switched parties.

Senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, is about to have a press conference announcing he's leaving the Republican Party to become a Democrat. It's still not clear why he's leaving the party or why he didn't choose to become an independent or why he chose to be a Democrat. Either way, this is big because the Democrats now have a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate… and they're still waiting on the Al Franken-Norm Coleman senate race in Minnesota. The Dems now have 60 seats in the Senate.

NBC's Chuck Todd said “This was a straight up survival decision.” OK then. We'll find out more at his press conference today.

To read more click here.
Kos weighs in. His verdict: “Don't expect much.
GMD's very own Kagro X begs to differ. Sorta.
Kagro X has a second update on what it means.

A good read from today’s Freeps:

Vermont Yankee Oversight Panel (VYOP) report was 50 pages long, which makes it difficult to summarize in an opinion piece limited to 600 words, but as the VYOP’s first chairman, I believe it is important for all Vermonters to understand the panel’s assessment of Yankee’s reliability. Our report was a consensus report created by four individuals with many years of broad nuclear power experience.

The rumor around the state, that the VYOP gave Entergy’s Vermont Yankee nuclear plant a clean bill of health, is simply not true. With significant reservations, we concluded that Entergy’s Vermont Yankee (VY) nuclear plant might operate “reliably” for 20 more years if Entergy made all the required repairs and updates, but thus far there is no methodology in place to assure Vermonters that those costly repairs are made.

The VYOP uncovered serious and system-wide problems. We concluded that VY has both mechanical and cultural problems that Entergy must address before any license extension to 2032.

Check out the whole thing. An important read.

Entergy and their buddy, Gov. Douglas, would love you to think that there are no problems at Vermont Yankee and we can happily go forward without too many worries. We haven't seen it quite the same way here at GMD. In fact, if you search our archives for “Yankee” and “leak” you'll find over 200 entries, and I don't think any of them refer to George Steinbrenner's highest paid employees.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen, who has served on the oversight panel looking into Vermont Yankee's operations, has an op-ed piece in the Free Press today that explores and summarizes the panel's findings and recommendations. Guess what: it's not the clean bill of health that you might have heard.

Here are a couple of highlights, but you'll want to follow the link to read the whole thing.

And as you think of our future with Vermont Yankee continuing to run, and with the 60-year cool-down period vouchsafed to VY by Douglas, you might want to ask yourself, “Do you feel lucky today?”

The VYOP uncovered serious and system-wide problems. We concluded that VY has both mechanical and cultural problems that Entergy must address before any license extension to 2032. Entergy's deferred maintenance of VY's mechanical components is troubling and expensive to fix.

More important than mechanical component failures are the serious systemic cultural problems the VYOP uncovered. Historically, VY has been a very reliable plant, but we found that it is now considered among the 25 percent worst nuclear plants in the United States according to the “Equipment Reliability Index.”

The virus spreading around the world should not be called “swine flu” as it contains avian and human components and no pig has so far been found ill with the disease, the world animal health body said on Monday.

It would be more logical to call the virus “North American influenza”, a name based on its geographic origin like the Spanish influenza, a human flu pandemic with animal origin that killed more than 50 million people in 1918-1919.

(“Swine flu” name is wrong -world animal health body, Reuters, 04/27/09)

I wonder if public relations speak isn’t guiding our names on this? It does sound better blaming it on the swine rather than a geographical location that happens to be our backyard.

But it wouldn’t be the first time … the “Spanish Flu” might have begun here in North America too by some reports.

Although in 1918 influenza was not a nationally reportable disease and diagnostic criteria for influenza and pneumonia were vague, death rates from influenza and pneumonia in the United States had risen sharply in 1915 and 1916 because of a major respiratory disease epidemic beginning in December 1915 (22). Death rates then dipped slightly in 1917. The first pandemic influenza wave appeared in the spring of 1918, followed in rapid succession by much more fatal second and third waves in the fall and winter of 1918-1919, respectively (Figure 1). Is it possible that a poorly-adapted H1N1 virus was already beginning to spread in 1915, causing some serious illnesses but not yet sufficiently fit to initiate a pandemic? Data consistent with this possibility were reported at the time from European military camps (23), but a counter argument is that if a strain with a new hemagglutinin (HA) was causing enough illness to affect the US national death rates from pneumonia and influenza, it should have caused a pandemic sooner, and when it eventually did, in 1918, many people should have been immune or at least partially immunoprotected. “Herald” events in 1915, 1916, and possibly even in early 1918, if they occurred, would be difficult to identify.

(1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics, CDC)

The origins of this influenza variant is not precisely known. It is thought to have originated in China in a rare genetic shift of the influenza virus. The recombination of its surface proteins created a virus novel to almost everyone and a loss of herd immunity. Recently the virus has been reconstructed from the tissue of a dead soldier and is now being genetically characterized. The name of Spanish Flu came from the early affliction and large mortalities in Spain (BMJ,10/19/1918) where it allegedly killed 8 million in May (BMJ, 7/13/1918). However, a first wave of influenza appeared early in the spring of 1918 in Kansas and in military camps throughout the US. Few noticed the epidemic in the midst of the war. Wilson had just given his 14 point address. There was virtually no response or acknowledgment to the epidemics in March and April in the military camps. It was unfortunate that no steps were taken to prepare for the usual recrudescence of the virulent influenza strain in the winter. The lack of action was later criticized when the epidemic could not be ignored in the winter of 1918 (BMJ, 1918). These first epidemics at training camps were a sign of what was coming in greater magnitude in the fall and winter of 1918 to the entire world.

(The Influenza Pandemic of 1918, Stanford University)

Jon Margolis is a smart guy, and his blog is always interesting reading. He does suffer from that most common malady of journalists, and particularly journalist-pundit hybrids; that is, the need to demonstrate his independence and objectivity by making sure he never bops right-wing silliness without smacking the left as well. As though the cosmic balance must be restored against some arbitrary, moderate-fulcrum-point. The truth is simply, of course, that sometimes right wingers just say (and believe) silly things, and silly things are silly all on their own.

But nobody’s perfect, right? Margolis is a wise fellow who knows a lot of stuff, and that’s what makes things like this such fun reading:

Conveniently illustrating the absurdity of (“the ‘businesses will run away’ delusion”), the folks at the Vermont Tiger web site recently warned against raising taxes because ” people will leave a state that is failing economically And they will head for a place where the business environment is friendly. Like North Carolina.”

North Carolina? Give us a break. The “business environment” may be great down there. The economy is a disaster. With a 10.8 percent unemployment rate (Vermont’s is 7.2), North Carolina is the state that’s “failing economically.”

Remember, these are the folks who not long ago wanted Vermont to follow the economic model of Ireland. Who, in fact, may have named their site after the “Celtic Tiger,” nickname for the Irish economic boom of not long ago.

The inanity of this comparison boggles the mind. Ireland is a sovereign nation with control of its currency. It did ease financial regulation and cut taxes in the early 1990s, but it increased spending, largely on education, mooching off the European Union and going into debt.

Oh, and its boom has gone bust, largely because it is under-taxed and under-regulated (and possibly corrupt; see here). No intent here to trash the folks at Vermont Tiger, who seem civilized and who sometimes make sense. But their economic analyses should be viewed through the filter of their Irish delusion.

No response yet at the Tiger. Maybe they’re just hoping if they ignore Margolis, he’ll go away. Or maybe they simply don’t have a good response.

In any event, Margolis has hinted he’ll restore the cosmic balance again by beating up on the left tomorrow. Heh. Maybe it’ll be GMD.

I want to make a few points, here, in response to the diaries below. If, after reading this, anyone is curious as to what I’m more specifically talking about, click here.

1. There’s a reason circumstantial evidence is not welcome in trials. It’s that circumstantial evidence alone can point you all kinds of places that may or may not actually exist. Especially when one mixes in presuppositions about motives, malice, methods and madness of parties in a case.

2. I firmly believe in the maxim “don’t rush to conclusions.” With any developing story, one wants to wait until the facts are not only in, but are clearly distinguishable from opinion, rumor, and presupposition. This is especially true when involving the quantum intricacies of a science as complex and nuanced as biology.

3. There are many kinds of logic, replete with many kinds of fallacies. God is love, love is blind, Stevie Wonder is blind, so Stevie Wonder is god presents several of them at once. But those fallacies are deceptive once you are lost in them – which is all the more reason that numbers 1 and 2 above are so important. If you run to a conclusion, its an easy thing to build the path behind you and create an entirely self-consistent argument.

Ibn al-Haytham said that “truth is sought for its own sake.” If we live under that maxim, our conclusions should be handed out sparingly – even minimalistically. That will, ultimately, make them more valuable in the long run.