Jim Douglas’s usual MO at the outset of a session is to put out a few lame, marginally-significant-at-best proposals under a cliched title that he’s lifted from some politician somewhere else as his way of having a message base from which to scuttle or sabotage Democratic policy proposals (which, of course, doesn’t stop him from taking full credit for whatever Dem initiatives slip through).

This time is different. Douglas has gone right for the two third rails of Vermont politics – education and Act 250 (in Republicanese – the same language that brought us the heretofore unseen term “partial birth abortion” – the latter is dubbed “permit reform”). Douglas has said he wants to undo the Act 60/68 regime, raid the education fund, do away with income sensitivity, and in the process dump that much more of the state shortfall onto local property taxes. He’s also said that Act 250 should be eviscerated by bringing in criteria that would completely alter its purpose and function in favor of development interests.

The question on many people’s minds is – is Douglas dramatically overreaching, or is he just going whole-hog right-winger because he’s not planning on running again in 2010?

Personally, I think its overreaching, but perhaps not as much as it might appear, as I have this crazy, wildly-speculative notion that there may be method to his madness.

(I wont touch the policies, here, as it gets into the work my employer does, and I would neither want to appear to be speaking from that position, or let drop any points of disagreement I may have with them, but I do want to make a comment on some of the political machinations that may be underway…)

Although both are big issues, the education attack has – and will continue to – get more ink. It’s more straightforward and everyone understands it better. Douglas’s proposals are also DOA. Anybody can see that. They run counter to the economic zeitgeist and pander to his hardcore base, while at the same time will have the effect of healing the rift between the Vermont NEA and the Democratic caucus, blown open last year over the “two-vote” law and the subsequent endorsement of Anthony Pollina over Gaye Symington, by thrusting them onto the same side of a full on policy assault.

So what the hell is he doing?

A theory: perhaps his education proposals aren’t supposed to go anywhere. Education is the easiest, most pavlovian base-roiling issue for the left and the right, but Douglas has never given that much of a damn about the issue beyond soundbite base-fodder. What he does care about is giving free rein to developers. If you look at many of the croneys he taps for campaign assisstance and situates close to him, they aren’t the Libby Sternbergs and the Curt Hiers of the GOP-education wing, they are folks like Tayt Brooks from the development crowd. When he had a chance to fill a legislative vacancy in Montpelier, he went for development lawyer Jon Anderson. This is his crowd.

Going after Act 250 as he’s doing was bound to make a big noise. He also has enough allies he might get somewhere with it under the guise of economic development in an economic downturn. It may have occurred to him that making a bigger noise might give him room to maneuver among legislators, the press and the public. And unlike his education attack, his Act 250 attack may have some chance of getting somewhere.

One of my favorite moments in Vermont-native Frank Miller’s miniseries The Dark Knight Returns is when Batman is asked why, if he’s trying to be all sneaky, does he have a bat image on his chest in a bright yellow circle for all to see. Batman responds that, since his head is not armored and his chest is, he wants to give the bad guys something to shoot at.

I find myself wondering if Douglas isn’t simply giving us all something to shoot at while he pursues his primary goal.

Per today’s Rutland Herald:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given Entergy Nuclear permission to reduce the number of times it conducts tests on control rods, a key safety system at Vermont Yankee plant.

In a decision released earlier this week, the NRC granted a license amendment to Entergy that will allow it to test the control rods on a monthly basis. The control rods are now tested weekly. Entergy filed the request in February 2008.

The control rods are inserted in the reactor core in the event of an emergency or a power reduction to reduce the amount of nuclear reaction in the plant.

(Pardon me for back-to-back promotions of VY diaries but BP has another good one. Dems take note what’s going on down here and Wall Street! – promoted by Christian Avard)

 The business world this week is declaring longer term growth for Entergy “muted” due to market conditions and questions about nuclear power’s future. As Ed’s two Entergy Yankee diaries show, new large nuke construction is on hold, with the old ones future’s in trouble. These events show current size nuclear power plants becoming  dinosaurs financially as well as in the engineering sense. But strangely a new nuke may be emerging, a greatly downsized unit. Generating 25 megawatts (VY is 620 megawatts ) on, or close to where the need is these micro plants are being marketed as a clean replacement for high greenhouse gas emission generating sources. The engineering of these plants is different from the giant versions but the sales pitch sounds ominously similar. It isn’t quite power-too-cheap-to-meter but it could drift into that sales pitch territory.

They are styled on a small reactor built and used by students of nuclear power ,23 are in operation today.Known as Training, Research, Isotopes,General, Atomics or TRIGA they use a different kind of fuel. It is said they are deigned to make a meltdown virtually impossible. In other words no containment buildings are needed. By the way aren’t the large nuclear generating plants also designed to make meltdowns virtually impossible? The entire apparatus is tamper proof and factory sealed before shipping. We hardly have the capacity to monitor the smattering of large nuclear plants in operation now, it is doubtful the same regulatory agencies could cope with thousand of little nukes shipped, scattered and operating through out the land. “All of our units will have remote sensors on them and they’re all monitored around the clock. And there’s on-site monitoring as well. We will know what’s going on with every one of those units at all times,” a spokesman maintains. ……………Thousands of TRIGAs out and about .

More below the fold.

Hyperion Power Generation Inc. has developed a garden shed-sized nuclear reactor that can produce enough heat to generate 25 megawatts of electricity for up to 10 years.That’s enough energy to power 20,000 homes, but still tiny by current nuclear standards. Hyperion, which calls its reactor as a “nuclear battery,” licensed the technology from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It plans to sell the reactor for about $30 million (U.S.) and says there’s potential to sell 4,000 of them around the world by 2025. The company already claims more than $2 billion worth of orders in the pipeline and more than 100 “firm” orders.

TRIGA reactors use low-enriched uranium hydride as a fuel, which can’t be used to make a bomb, and they’re designed to make a meltdown virtually impossible. In other words, no containment building is required.”The secret of the fuel is that it cools itself off,” says a spokesman When uranium hydride gets too hot, above 550 degrees Celsius, it will shed hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen flows out of the core and is stored in special storage trays within the reactor. As the fuel loses hydrogen atoms it begins to naturally cool. As it cools, it will retrieve the hydrogen atoms from the trays.The whole process is self-limiting. A runaway chain reaction isn’t possible – at least that’s what the company claims. The company compares the reactor to lungs that inhale and exhale hydrogen in a natural balance that keeps the reactor at a fairly constant temperature.

http://www.thestar.com/Busines…

http://www.hyperionpowergenera…

or circles make me dizzy and nauseous.

All quotes come from this story: Rubin Leaving Citigroup; Smith Barney for Sale, NY Times, 01/09/09.

The new chapter of wrenching change came as former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who came under fire for his strong support of that model [you know … the model that resulted in Madoff and tranched mortgage backed financial intruments that deliberately hid a lot of bad loans … that sort of thing] in an advisory role that helped fuel the bank’s troubles, said he would resign.

Yupper dupper …

For Mr. Rubin, his resignation is a sobering turn in a sterling career in Washington and on Wall Street. Since joining Citigroup in 1999 as an adviser to the bank’s senior executives, Mr. Rubin, 70, who is an economic adviser on the transition team of President-elect Barack Obama, has sat atop a bank that has made one misstep after another.

Mr. Rubin began backing away from his senior advisory role last summer when he started counseling Mr. Obama, according to several Citigroup executives who have spoken to him recently. Still, he held discussions with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. as Citigroup negotiators orchestrated the bank’s bailout in late November. The government injected more than $45 billion into Citigroup and agreed to guarantee about $269 billion of illiquid mortgage-related assets.

What isn’t mentioned in the NY Times article is: prior to being financial advisor and then Secretary of the Treasury for Clinton, advisor/temp chair for Citigroup, and new found financial guru for Obama; Rubin spent some 25 years rising through the corporate ranks at Goldman Sachs.

Regrets? Guess he’s had a few …

“My great regret,” he added, “is that I and so many of us who have been involved in this industry for so long did not recognize the serious possibility of the extreme circumstances that the financial system faces today.”

… but then again, too few to change him (apologies to Frank Sinatra).

Obama, why didn’t you just bring Greenscamspan into your administration-to-be instead of just channeling him via one of his acolytes?

Ahh yes … “change” we can believe in.

(What a week this has been for Vermont Yankee! – promoted by Christian Avard)

Entergy last year filed for permission to begin construction on two new reactors, one each in Louisiana and Mississippi. Today Entergy announced  it’s giving up on these plans. No new nukes for Entergy, at least for now.

*** And Entergy stocks go from “hold” to “sell.” Check it out. http://greenmountaindaily.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3848 – Christian

“… we have not been able to come to mutually agreeable terms and conditions with GEH for the potential deployment of an ESBWR,” Hinnenkamp said.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/…

Entergy Nuclear says they’d still like to build some kind of new nuke (after all, you can’t run the old ones forever). But these two reactor sites are in states with Public Utility Commissions, who regulate the prices Entergy can charge. Entergy’s in trouble with the MS AG already for Enron-like illegal price manipulation. AG Hood released documents showing

Entergy’s parent company sold Entergy Mississippi electricity at $26 per 1,000 kilowatt hours that it bought on the open market for $12 per 1,000 kilowatt hours.

Entergy denies the charges.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap…

Can’t get funding from the banks, can’t get it from electric rates–only thing left is Obama’s stimulus plan.

http://www.usnews.com/articles…

It looks like GE Hitachi’s Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) design is in trouble, too. And so the unit cost on these early ones is skyrocketing while electricity usage and prices drop.

Some of you may have been following the Soapblox saga since yesterday here and nationally (I understand its even being picked up by a couple national media sources). Basically, the long and the short is that Soapblox is the system that suports nearly all the local netroots sites, GMD included. It's been built and run by basically one guy in his spare time, and for very little in return.

Of late, he hasn't been able to keep up with the hackers, who have gotten in and used the servers for further mischief, getting his ISPs to turn on him. He decided he couldn't take it anymore after a weekend hack and was gonna hang it up, putting, like, 95% of the progressive netroots in peril (along with local sites, Soapblox supports national sites like Open Left, My Left Wing, Pam's House Blend and others).

SO… the national lefty blogging community is banding together to help Paul out and give him some support, and in the short term, that means a drive to get the sites onto uncompromised servers, do security audits, beef up the code, etc. Chris Bowers at Open left has taken the initiative to set up an Act Blue-based fundraising push through BlogPAC (which pays our hosting fees and has been the major financial supporter of Soapblox) to save the day, and to begin the process of stabalizing what has proven to be an unstable situation.

I encourage you to click on the link and pitch in what you can, and in doing so support not just GMD but the entire new media progressive infrastructure nationally. A more detailed account/explanation can be found at Chris's diary here. Thanks!

I recently got word from some mumblings in the statehouse that the pave-the-state forces will be going full on this session, and lo and behold, what's in today's Argus/Herald? Act 250 reform also a target:

Governor James Douglas ensured yet another session-long debate over permit reform Thursday when he blamed Act 250 for impeding economic growth in the state.

Job creation and economic development were keystones last summer and fall in Douglas' re-election campaign. Delivering on promises to reduce unemployment, increase stagnant wages and bolster corporate revenues, Douglas said Thursday, will require wholesale changes to the state's sweeping land-use and development law.

“The current system remains a labyrinth, fraught with unpredictability, which threatens job creation for years ahead – unless we are prepared to make substantive changes that will modernize the system,” Douglas said of Act 250 in his inaugural address.

Douglas' proposal seeks not only to expedite Act 250 proceedings but to fundamentally alter the criteria on which applications are judged. Rather than considering development proposals on their environmental impacts alone, Douglas wants the system to take into account their potential economic and social benefits as well.

Republicans… you can always count on 'em to exploit a crisis to do everything they can to manufacture a reason to undo good things, especially environmental protection. Like so much else they believe, it's a bunch of faith-based fiction. More below the jump.

There is so much wrong with all of this, where do we begin? There's arbitrary magical numbers, former development lobbyists getting cushy jobs in the administration, and outright lies.

Let's start with the numbers. It's often said that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes accepted as a truthful conventional wisdom (it certainly worked for Bush for a long time). And for those of us paying attention, we always hear from the VT GOP that Act 250 keeps away business, just like our tax rates make rich people leave the state (Jon Margolis has a lot on that “rich people leaving” nonsense here).

They repeat the lie often enough, and the lapdog press for the most part repeats it, ad nauseum, unquestioned. Just look at this nonsense:

Kevin Dorn, secretary of the agency of commerce and Community Development, said it's impossible to quantify the downward pressure Act 250 imposes on new development. He said though that a “mountain of anecdotal evidence” suggests would-be entrepreneurs are forgoing business plans for fear of getting entangled in Act 250 red tape.

“The labyrinth is there, and it's daunting to get through,” Dorn said. “… We have story after story of businesses or individuals saying it's just not worth it.”

So, in one sentence we have “it's impossible to quantify” and right afterwards, there's “plenty of anecdotal evidence”, which says to me he's pulling these imaginary numbers out of the darkness of his hindquarters. “Some people say” is not the same as “actual numbers”. 

Now, putting aside for a minute the fact that the few people who have been denied permits are expectedly going to bitch and whine about it, let's look at some numbers. Real numbers, not mythical, made-up ones from the Republican stratosphere. As the article briefly mentions, Jake Brown from the VNRC pointed out that the actual amount of permits denied is exceptionally low. I've got those numbers sitting in front of me, from the state's own Vermont Natural Resources Board Report from 2007 (which, apparently, Douglas couldn't bother to read, as it was probably in his wastebasket), and they pretty much knock dead this idea that Act 250 is a long, drawn-out process that denies a lot of development.

For 2007:

Number of applications: 428.

Number denied: four (0.9 percent)

Percent of Act 250 applications processed as minors or administrative amendments (no public hearing unless required): 83 percent

Median processing time at District Commission level: 35 days.

Percentage of permits issued w/in 60 days: 65 percent

Percentage issued within 120 days: 81 percent.

Estimated percent of Act 250 decisions appealed to the Environmental Court: 1-2 percent

Estimated 60 percent of all development in the state does not fall under Act 250.

So, of the 428 permits applied for, a whopping four (0.9 percent) were denied. Can you smell it? It's pretty thick. As to the “lengthy, drawn out process”, a full 81 percent were issued within 120 days, 65 percent within 60 days. The way Douglas and his toadies put it, you'd think people were waiting 4 years to get a permit. Pfft. And what's even more illustrative of the amount of bullshit Douglas is spewing, his very own words at his presser this morning likened the permitting process as a “culture of no”!  A 99.1 percent approval rate in 2007 sounds much more like a “culture of yes”. But godless forbid if a reporter actually calls him on that fact.

What's more, often the rejected permittees alter their plans, and end up geting approved in many cases. I believe Okemo had wanted to put some new ski trails in an environmentally sensitive area a few years back… the permit was denied, they made some alterations, got their ski trails and we got the environmental protection. Sounds like win-win. What's more, it sounds like Jim Douglas is outright lying, and hoping you won't notice. Or perhaps that you're just too lazy to connect the dots.

As Douglas would have it, “economic and social consideratons” would get more weight, which sounds like if he's told it would create jobs, that should be good enough- the hell with endangered wildlife habitat and the like, those bears can just apply for all of those new jobs it will create. And those ursine slackers better not even think of applying for social services, as those are on the chopping block, as well.

To get all meta for a second here, a major problem with our culture is that when economics and environment clash, the economics win out more than not. What's so great about Act 250 is it levels increases the odds in favor of the environment, a rarity in our modern, make-money-at-all costs society. It needs to stay the way it is. To add insult to injury, Douglas throws in the whole “more self-regulating” nonsense that the GOP loves so much and almost always never works. C'mon, Jim, if you're going to wage war on the environment, could you at least be a bit more original about it? People that hate government should not be running things.

There are two other things that need mentioning here. Douglas often seems to be critical of the Agency of Natural Resources. Perhaps, like when he ignored the global warming advice of his own comission last year, he doesn't realize that it's an entity under his watch? Howzabout streamlining the management process over at ANR? Or is that not sensationalist enough?

Lastly, the cronyism in the Douglas administration is really getting out of hand, it's so Bushlike, and relevant to the issue at hand. Just look at the recent appointment of Tayt Brooks to the head of the housing section of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. Before June, Brooks was the lobbyist for the Homebuilders & Remodelers Association – their PAC arm, HomePAC, is a regular Douglas/GOP contributor. If you've got the patience to go through campaign finance reports here, here, here and here, you'll see that Douglas and the GOP gets a huge amount of money from them and other similar interests. And now the former head lobbyist has a cushy spot in the Douglas administration. Ve-eee-ry interesting. Methinks it's money well spent, as not only does one of their own have a nice, new job in DouglasCo, but they're getting Jim to renew his assault on their favorite target.

This session, I suspect, is going to be a heated, tumuluous one. The economy is in the tank, and Douglas, confident from his electoral victory (perhaps, with a sense that next time might not be so easy) sees this whole mess as something to exploit to the advantage of his business buddies. It's time to put the brakes on this, starting now. I'll be following up on this as it develops.

Entergy stock downgraded to ‘Sell’ from ‘Hold’.

Associated Press, 01.09.09, 09:46 AM EST

Deutsche Bank on Friday downgraded power provider Entergy Corp. to “Sell” from “Hold,” …

…analyst John Kiani added that other mounting concerns for the company include challenges in executing and financing its previously announced spin off of 3 nuclear plants and weakened earnings for the company’s regulated utilities in Arkansas and Texas.

Shares of Entergy slid $3, or 3.6 percent, to $79.94 in morning trading. The stock has ranged from $61.93 to $126.31 over the past year.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap…

The article says Entergy wants to spin off 3 reactors, but the plan was for 6, including Vermont Yankee.

Have corporate plans changed?

New York and Vermont have not agreed to the spin-off.

As most regular GMDers know I have been (and remain) an ardent supporter of Obama.  However, I am very annoyed with the following:

Yesterday, we received an invitation to the inauguration in the mail.  It was addressed from the Presidential Inaugural Committee and was printed on high quality paper.  It looked very real.  

Only it isn’t a real invitation.  There is a second piece of paper that mentions this is only a commemorative invitation in small print in the second paragraph.  It took us a very careful read and a quick call to Peter Welch’s office to determine that the invitation was not a real invitation.  It is a fundraising letter.

We were crestfallen, but more importantly disappointed. I think this is about the most cynical ploy imaginable.  I expect such deceptive practices from credit card companies, but not from the Presidential Inaugural Committee of Barack Obama.  It preys on the hopes of the very people who contributed time and money to make change a reality.

If the Inaugural Committee wants to ask for donations, fine.  Just ask!  There is no need to engage in deceptive marketing tactics.

two-vote requirement

“freeze” of school budgets

merger of underfunded higher eductation