I just heard on VT This Week, and confirmed on her website, that Gaye Symington has a fairly bold new proposal out to address energy issues.

? The “Efficiency Pays” plan enables homeowners, building owners and tenants to purchase and install efficient heating systems and complete weatherization projects with no up-front payment and no debt obligation. Those who benefit from these money-saving investments will pay for them through a monthly charge on their utility bill, but this charge will be lower than the estimated savings that the improvements produce.

“Efficiency Pays will help Vermonters overcome the obstacles of having cash upfront or taking on debt to pay for money-saving efficiency projects. Because they only pay back as they save money, this system should be very attractive to a wide range of Vermonters,” explained Symington.

More analysis below.

For the past few months, as I lay awake at night, I’ve been mulling over the question of how government could most effectively bring about some real change in the energy area, and this is pretty much the plan that I thought would work best. For financing, it looks at the fact that we are already spending money on energy, in many cases, more than we would if we could afford to weatherize our homes. So the most practical (we Vermonters like practical) solution would be to somehow divert that monthly utility money to pay for improvements that will recoup the cash over time.

I’m sure there will be some details to work out that may raise new issues, but I love this proposal by Symington. It’s bold, it’s smart, it will hopefully not be very bureaucratic, and it’s a practical and effective response to a serious issue facing VT.

I think that plays very well into Gaye’s best approach to this race – that she’s a practical, Vermont-style leader who will make government work for us. This plan is a good step in reinforcing that image.

My one further suggestion is to get a catchier name than “Efficiency Pays”.

How about the “Green Vermonster Plan”?

Just got this email from a reader. If true, it is beyond vile and reprehensible:

I live in (town in Central Vermont) and was just push polled.  The questions began with generic questions about the gubernatorial race, but descended into questions intimating that Gay (sic) Symington was weak on child sex offenders, followed by questions intimating that Jim Douglas wants to execute and chemically castrate child sex offenders.

We can have differences of opinion on issues like this, especially after the tragic events in Randolph during the last two weeks.

But to exploit these events and emotions for political gain is unconscionable, and this is not how things are done in Vermont.  I’m appalled and offended by the Douglas campaign, and by extension the governor himself.  I find this disgusting.

Thought you should know that this is going on.

Indeed. Push-polling, in case you don’t know, is the act of faux-polling for the purpose of persuading – often through misleading or even defamatory messaging. The issue rose to particular prominence during the 2000 Election when pro-Bush push polling was used to disseminate rumors about John McCain. Push-polling is considered unethical and roundly criticized (nominally even by those firms that practice it, casting it as “message testing”).

This email follows reports of a noted GOP push-poll firm working in the state last week (Pacific Crest Research out of Utah and California). If anybody has any other details or information, I encourage you to post it here.

UPDATE: Let me be clear; a tragedy like this requires that we talk about solutions in an open, robust way. But refusing to objectively look at the problem and jumping to a well-known, sleazy technique to tar your opponent (especially in light of the failures of Douglas’s Corrections Department in this very instance) belies the real intention, here. If Douglas is a man of any character, he should pull the plug on this immediately, fire whoever is responsible for initiating it, and start a meaningful, cooperative discussion that looks at all the cracks in the system – whether the solutions are legislative, judicial or executive in nature.

UPDATE x2: A poster just alerted me to the fact that Haik has just been hit with the same push poll as well. He identifies the calling firm as ProMark Research Corporation. ProMark is a Houston based company that has done this kind of sleazy crap for Republicans in other states, such as Ohio, Georgia, Colorado and Pennsylvania. So much for “the Vermont Way,” eh? More on these sleazebags as I find out what I can…

I continue to have a lot of lingering fear and anger over the new FISA overhaul and its implications for the future, but amidst it all I have nagging questions over the role in the process and in the debate of our Senior Senator, Patrick Leahy.

Why? Simply that I can’t reconcile why Leahy, for whom concerns over civil liberties has been a signature issue (last year, he was the Vermont ACLU’s Civil Libertarian of the Year), has been disturbingly dualistic on this bill.

And if a glance at the soundbites in play in Barlow’s recent report on the issue has you thinking he hasn’t been, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.

It’s been odd to see the legendarily powerful Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee so disrespected by Majority Leader Reid, first during the Senate’s first stab at a FISA overhaul that would’ve given retroactive immunity to the telcos, at which time Reid broke with protocol and gave primacy to the Intelligence Committee version which included immunity, effectively rolling over Leahy. Sure, there was the formality of giving the Judiciary version a hearing, but its defeat under that schema was clearly a foregone conclusion. Then there was the case of this most recent bill that did pass, fastracked by Reid right onot the floor when a trip through Leahy’s committee would surely have been in order, given its sweeping change to the court system. It’s all begged the question – was Leahy treated so poorly by Reid because he really is not the power broker that we’ve all been assuming he is?

Or, in the final analysis, was he just not moved strongly enough by what he disliked about the bill to do everything he could to scuttle it in light of what he did like about it?

 We’ve taken Leahy to task for speaking in glowing terms of the policy work done on the bill by the likes of Rep. Hoyer and Sen. Rockefeller, who – more than any other two lawmakers – are responsible for the continuing return (and eventual success) of this legislation despite repeated defeats and public marginalization of the underlying issue. The matter was dead, dead, dead – but they brought it backed and pushed it through with very little resistance. While Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold are being praised for their filibuster attempt, many activists seem to have forgotten that Dodd and Feingold had previously intended an Hollywood-style, talk-it-to-death-on-the-floor filibuster – the prospect of which had Majority Leader Reid rightfully concerned about public embarrassment and backlash.

To get a sense of what Leahy really thinks, rather than give him a pass as the traditional media have, lets look at what he actually said. This from Barlow’s article (emphasis added):

Leahy noted that (Sen. Barack Obama) and he had worked together on some provisions when the bill was before the Senate Judiciary Committee and that they both supported the underlining procedural changes.

“We agreed on the FISA changes, but split on the immunity issue,” Leahy said.

And earlier from his press release that opposed the bill, based solely on the immunity provisions:

With respect to the surveillance authorities, I believe the bill represents an improvement over the flawed legislation passed the Senate earlier this year.  I applaud Representative Hoyer and Senator Rockefeller for their diligent work in negotiating this package.

Leahy voted in all the right ways on the floor; for all the amendments that would have delayed retroactive immunity, against cloture and against final passage. But to listen to Leahy, what he was working against was retroactive immunity. But the fact is, immunity was far from the only issue in play in the bill. From the ACLU’s public statement announcing their long-shot attempt to overturn the law:

“Once again, Congress blinked and succumbed to the president’s fear-mongering. With today’s vote, the government has been given a green light to expand its power to spy on Americans and run roughshod over the Constitution,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This legislation will give the government unfettered and unchecked access to innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. This is not only unconstitutional, but absolutely un-American.”

The FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance by allowing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The FISC will not be told any specifics about who will actually be wiretapped, thereby undercutting any meaningful role for the court and violating the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The bill further trivializes court review by authorizing the government to continue a surveillance program even after the government’s general spying procedures are found insufficient or unconstitutional by the FISC. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever information was gathered in the meantime.

And again, it is this part of the new law that Leahy repeatedly has spoken in support of. Still, by loudly trumpeting his resistance to the retroactive immunity portion of the bill, he has left the impression that he is on the side of civil libertarians in this matter. From the sound of it, he isn’t.

Anti-FISA overhaul pointman Glenn Greenwald argues that the retroactive immunity is the more egregious part of the law, as it codifies the Congress’s disinterest in/refusal to respect the laws of the land. This Congress has been worse than ineffective in maintaining the rule of law (worse, in this matter, than the previous GOP led Congress). Not content with its own complacency, it has now added complicity by affirmatively stepping in to interfere with the courts as rulings seemed to be going against the Administration. Here’s George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley on this weekend’s edition of NPR’s On the Media:

We did have one of 3 branches that was functioning – the judicial branch – was in fact looking into the legalities of the programs and exploring the possible injuries that had been done to citizens. what congress effectively did was it shut down that last branch…

…Look what happened: there were 40 lawsuits that were succeeding in court – they just had a ruling by a court that this entire program was unlawful. what was congress’s response? They changed the law and terminated all 40 lawsuits.

But this “lawless society paradigm” argument is still an abstraction. That’s not to minimize it at all, but simply to state that an assessment of its impact will vary from interpretation to interpretation. The rest of the bill, though, is another, more tangible and quantifiable story. As to going forward and the prospect for monitoring any future abuses, Turley has this to say:

The law also allows the president to engage in warrantless surveillance and makes the process very very easy – theres no reason for him to repeat exactly what he did before. Its like solving bank robberies by taking all the doors off the bank. So we really aren’t likely to see telecoms prosecuted because the congress created a law that is almost impossible to violate.

This is the feature of the law that Leahy has no problem with.

It’s very, very hard for me to see how one can support a change to the law that, as the ACLU says “violates the Fourth Amendment and eliminates any meaningful role for judicial oversight of government surveillance” and still consider themselves – or be considered by others – a champion of civil liberties. In light of this, its harder to give Leahy a pass for his sponsorship of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act, or to simply write it off as a case of temporary, post-9/11 insanity. Taken with his support of this wholesale disembowelment of the 4th Amendment, one wonders in there aren’t two Leahys, one a staunch defender of civil liberties, and the other, a force in favor of their congressional trampling. It leaves one to wonder which one may appear during any given debate.

It’s frustrating, and its something we should keep in mind if, as many are suggesting, Leahy may opt not to run for re-election in 2010. He will inevitably be used as the standard in picking a replacement in any Democratic Primary, and we should remind ourselves that – as good as he has been for Vermont and the nation – we can, and should, always be striving to do better.

The Burlington Free Press continues to cover the Vermont Yankee cooling tower story, but here's an interesting point.

 The company reported a leak Friday in a pipe in one of the cooling towers. Spokesman Rob Williams said Saturday that the second cooling tower, which collapsed last year, also showed damage.

Williams didn't mention damage to the second cooling tower to a reporter Friday, though that information was in a preliminary report produced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Now you might find this hard to believe, but there is actually a code of ethics for PR people. It includes the following proposition:

DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION

To build trust with the public by revealing all information needed for responsible decision making.

Guidelines

A member shall:

• Be honest and accurate in all communications.

• Act promptly to correct erroneous communications for which the member is responsible.

One specific example given is lying by omission.

Now, if a PR person knows that there is damage to two cooling towers, and discloses to the public that there is damage to only one of them, has this principle been violated?

UPDATED–For people who don't have an advanced degree in counting funny. 

You may have caught Tax Commissioner Tom Pelham on VPR Friday. He was being interviewed about this wekend’s sales tax holiday, and he was asked about the impact on the state budget, and whether we can really afford it. For one thing, it turns out that the state is actually going to have to make payments to the eight towns that have local options sales taxes. Thus, not only is the state forgoing tax revenues, we are sending checks, out of tax revenues we aren’t getting, to make up the taxes the towns are missing. So the next time you're talking to your friends who live in Burlington, South Burlington, or Williston, tell them to thank you for your contribution to their town budget.

In this discussion, Pelham says that the accepted cost estimate of this tax holiday is $2 million. When you look at how the calculated this figure, however, you have to question it.

Pelham  looked at last years receipts from the sales tax during the third quarter.  He took the total amount and divided it by the number of days in the quarter.  He then considered the cost to be this daily average times two. 

 
Also, buried in the interview was this line: “The State of Vermont is in very good fiscal health.”

 
You heard that right. We’re laying off employees, we’re cutting hundreds of jobs, we’re making people who want Catamount health care wait because we’re not filling those positions, and what’s the state of the Vermont budget?

Let me repeat that: “The State of Vermont is in very good fiscal health.”

Hey, do you think maybe it's time for a governor who will actually do something to help the Vermont economy? 

…and sets Times Argus /Rutland Herald newspapers straight on facts about Entergy’s Vermont Yankee.No not about the safety problems ,but about the unexpected $750 million profit that might be misconstrued as a windfall .Although this is published online today I can only hope that was written before Fridays cooling tower malfunction.

Just the facts, please, on Vermont Yankee

We seek nothing more than having all the facts on the table and ultimately to facilitate a sound, balanced decision for Vermont. At stake is whether nuclear power should continue to be part of our energy supply in the state of Vermont……

..References in the recent Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus article referring to these revenues as “windfalls” and Vermont Yankee as “a cash cow” are slanted terms that serve no purpose other than to cloud the discussion.

Heaven forbid that the public think that Entergy of New Orleans  is actually making money ,alot of money here in Vermont.Rise up Commissioner O’Brien and defend them protect them from potential taxes.Because truly it’s in the goodness of their hearts to provide Vermonters with power almost too cheap to meter . http://www.timesargus.com/apps…

From the ACLU blog:

If you have a problem with school officials strip searching 13-year-olds for Advil – or if you care about the government’s standards for informant use and invasive searches – you can take relief in yesterday’s ruling by a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled 6-5 that students cannot be strip-searched based on the uncorroborated word of another student who is facing disciplinary punishment.

“A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a thirteen-year-old girl to a traumatic search to ‘protect’ her from the danger of Advil,” the federal appellate court wrote in today’s opinion. “We reject Safford’s effort to lump together these run-of-the-mill anti-inflammatory pills with the evocative term ‘prescription drugs,’ in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young girl behind a larger war against drugs.”

Stop for a moment and consider: this was a 5 to 4 6 to 5 decision.

And then consider this: every law passed by our governments in the name of fighting the emotion of terror or whatever under the guise of such as a “PATRIOT Act” was first tested and perfected under Nixon’s war on the American people often euphemistically referred to as the “drug war”.

Whether it’s the degradation and elimination of our civil liberties, increased big government police powers or the “right” of our governments to use deadly force against citizens innocent of any crime or more … it all started with Nixon’s war (supported with alacrity by Democrats and Republicans alike for decades) on us.

What concerns me is the aforementioned 5 to 4 decision may be more more indicative of a final drift away from the type of thinking that showed some common sense and respect for our constitution and us as individuals.

An aside and a previously unanswered question: when has any of our governments given up, voluntarily or otherwise, police powers once these police powers been assumed? And how many 13 year old girls need to be strip searched over Advil before we decide to change this?

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who think it’s perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

(The School Crotch Inspector, Fighting the Advil menace, one strip search at a time, Reason Magazine, 04/02/08)

Count me in with the latter.