Sometimes we will see political endeavors which either attempt to (1) solve a non-existent problem, (2) attempt to solve a problem through purely rhetorical and non-functional means, or (3) just blame other people for the existence of the problem with no attempt to solve it whatsoever.  Examples of these would include (1) attempting to “fix” social security, (2) the pushing of offshore drilling or (3) claiming that Democrats want us to lose in Iraq.

There are multiple purposes for these approaches: if you frame them properly, you can easily appeal to low information voters in doing so.

The Rockham Selectboard this week actually had the wisdom to avoid all three of these pitfalls, despite pressure to do otherwise.  Per the Rutland Herald:

Rockingham Select Board tabled indefinitely a proposed sex offender ordinance Tuesday night, after the town’s attorney urged them not to adopt it.

Attorney Michael Harty said the proposed ordinance would land the town in court, since a legal challenge is all but guaranteed, and the town had a “one-in-three” chance of being the test case.

[…]

The ordinance would have barred anyone with a sex crime on his or her record from living within 1,000 feet of any school, day-care center or public playground.

Now the thing is, it’s easy to pass this sort of ordinance because, honestly, no one wants sex offenders to live in their neighborhood.  No one likes the idea of it and as soon as we start talking about them living near schools it’s easy to appeal to the fears of people everywhere.

I’ll make this clear: I will admit readily that I personally don’t care too much for the idea of child molesters living near a school.  It’s one of those concepts that creeps me out.

The thing is, that’s not the point.  People who commit sex crimes are not all child molesters.  They’re not all repeat offenders.  They’re not all predators.  

And they do have a right to live in the place of their choosing and they do have the right, once they’ve served their time, to be citizens just like the rest of us.

And the fact of the matter is, this sort of ordinance serves one specific purpose: to allow us to think we’re doing something about child molestation without actually doing anything about it at all.   It gives us a feeling of accomplishment, but does absolutely nothing to protect any child anywhere.

So, good for the Rockingham Select board.  You allowed common sense to override fear and rhetoric.  Too bad Rutland isn’t as sane as you guys.

Some points meriting a mention that have been lost in the news shuffle:

• The Great Email Scramble: I tried to tell folks that the big story from the VSEA email dump following their FOIA request to the Douglas administration, was the fact of the dump itself rather than its content. And sure enough, once that magic line was crossed, the floodgates seem to be opening; Shay Totten of 7 Days has gone for more, Terri Hallenbeck and… Curtis Hier of Vermont Tiger. Hier is targeting legislative emails, natch, making it officially a big free-for-all which must be really scary for everyone in state Government.

  …or not. According to Totten, Hier is getting pushback from the legislature in the form of: 1. a claim of immunity from the FOIA requirement, and 2. the ol’ “sorry, we delete all emails more than 90 days old anyway.” Hier is livid, and is basically responding with: 1. bullshit, and 2. thats government document shredding.

  And you know what? Hier is absolutely right (and yes, I know some places flush their email caches routinely, but 90 days is ridiculous). Sauce for the goose, folks. The email apocalypse has arrived for the executive and legislative branches. Suck it up and play fair.

• Has the rewrite of history already begun on Campaign 2008? Lots of rumors around the idea that there were negotiations between the Dems and Progs to have Pollina run for Lt. Governor after all, and as a ticket with Symington. The rumors run the gamut – VDP Chair Ian Carlton nixed it, Carlton was all for it but Democratic Blue Dogs nixed it, it was Pollina who would have no part of it, it was never going to happen, it was all but a done deal…

  The latest seems to be that it was all but a done deal, but that it was Nate Freeman who queered the deal by deciding to announce he would run as a Dem when the ink was almost dry on an agreement – even though he knew he would wreck the nearly-completed peace & harmony negotiations in the process.

  Hunh. Yeah, right. What I think is that the urban legend machine is kicking in early, fueled by a desire to inoculate Pollina from criticism or blame if Douglas again wins, and it looks as though it was due to the 3 way split. This way – once again – it can still all go down on the true believers’ books as all the big bad Dems fault. Folks – I was talking to Nate at the time of his announcement, and have talked to him since. This rumor is pure fiction.

• Get well soon! Former Republican State Senator and one-term Mayor of Burlington Peter Brownell is having some serious medical challenges. He goes into 7 hours of surgery today to remove a tumor in his spinal cord. The good news is that it appears to be benign, but its still going to be a tough process, with the likelihood of more surgeries to come.

  Peter is a great guy. Wishing him and his family the best. (UPDATE: Peter came through the surgery fine and is in the recovery phase.)

We were talking yesterday about AIG, its collapse, and why the mortgage crisis would hurt insurance companies, and I had no idea. Since then I've heard an excellent interview on Fresh Air and done some reading on the topic, and I think I have a bit of an answer. I may be missing some of the details, but it looks pretty damning for McCain and his economic plans.

To understand this we need to go back to a pretty ugly time, a time back in December, 2000, right after that thug Scalia and his henchmen on the Supreme Court assigned us Bush as our Resident. The federal budget was going through Congress, and Phil Gramm, McCain's biggest economic advisor, called up a bill that had been considered dead, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, and muscled it into the budget bill, which then passed, right around midnight before the Congress went home for Christmas.

It didn't actually deregulate anything, it just prohibited the federal government from regulating a new, and little-known financial instrument called a swap. You may never have heard of a swap, but the swaps are what made the saps at AIG go down.

Now just keep that little bit of history in your mind for a while. Time goes on, the real estate market goes crazy, and people with money burning a hole in their pockets figure that a way to make tons more money is to bet on the following two propositions: real estate prices will always go up, and people who don't have the ability to pay their mortgages will somehow pay them. This bet leads banks and fly-by-night mortgage outfits to start lending out tons of money, even more than the house is worth, and even to people who have bad credit, their income doesn't meet standard underwriting standards, and so on. They then bundle up a whole bunch of these mortgages and sell them on the secondary market in the form of various kinds of securities. I guess the idea is that even if some of the mortgages don't perform, they will be bundled together with a bunch of other very profitable mortgages, so it's a safe bet. (Would you lend the price of a house to someone who doesn't have the money to pay it back? Me neither, but maybe that's why we're not smart enough to run Countrywide or these big banks.)

But, it's not really a safe bet, because it's not safe enough to get reasonably prudent investors to buy them. The risk is too much. However, we've known for a long time how to get people to invest their money in something when they think the risk of losing it all would be too great. It's called insurance. You wouldn't spend $10,000 or 20,000 on a car, or $100,000 or $200,000 on a house, if you thought that you would just be wiped out if the car or the house were destroyed and you were just out the money. Some people won't even spend $1,000 or $2,000 on a vacation without buying insurance on it.

So they figured out that they can just insure this risk too. That's what a swap is. They created an instrument called a credit default swap, in which Investor A pays a premium to Company B, and Company B promises Investor A that if one of the borrowers fails to pay their mortgage, Company B will step in and pay Investor A their investment. Company B gets their money, Investor A gets to make the investment and to receive the income that the investment is going to generate, and it's all possible because of the swap. That's what AIG was selling.

So what, you say? We have insurance for all kinds of things, and all kinds of bad things happen without insurance companies going out of business. People get into car crashes, trees fall on houses, vacations get rained out, and the insurance companies just pay off the policy holder and move on. How do they do it? There's a one-word answer: regulation. Your state government won't let me to call myself a car insurance company, and start collecting car insurance premiums, unless I can prove that I have enough money on hand to pay off the claims. Homeowners' insurance, the same thing.

But now we go back to Phil Gramm, and his midnight Christmas present to the money men. The law he wrote (oh yes, and if I think back to 2000, I'm pretty sure John McCain was in the Senate that year; there's the experience thing) said that these credit default swaps cannot be regulated. The government can't stop me from selling credit default swaps, even if I'm just a guy sitting in my basement in Montpelier, and it can't make me prove that I have enough money to pay off the claims.

And that's where we are today. Property values stop going up. A bunch of those mortgagors (they're the borrower–remember, “Mortgagee rhymes with Simon Legree”) reach into their pocket and come up empty, so they default on their mortgages. The banks have to foreclose, and the people who own the mortgage-backed securities start looking around for someone to cover their losses, and who's standing their with their face hanging out? AIG, which sold them these credit default swaps, these promises that if the mortgages didn't perform, they'd be good for the money.

Only because of Phil Gramm, John McCain, and the other guys who voted for Gramm's bill, nobody ever made AIG set the money aside in case the loss they were insuring should happen.

And now, whose economic ideas are in the head of John McCain, the candidate who admits he doesn't know anything about the economy?

Right, Phil Gramm's.

So tell me, how much sense does it make to turn the economy over to McCain and Gramm?

More leaks in ENVY’s cooling towers, more broken beams.

More truthiness from Entergy Nuclear and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as reported by Dave Gram, Associated Press:

Sheehan and Williams said it wasn’t unusual to have the pipe joints – which are packed with oakum – leak. Sheehan said oakum is loose hemp or similar fiber, treated with a tar-like substance, which is used to caulk seams in wooden ships and pack pipe joints.

(Sounds like that 4th of July party last year when the pot brownies snuck up on a reactor operator…)

While some leaking is considered OK, 60 gallons a minute was deemed serious enough to warrant the power reduction and repair, they said.

Oh man, who kicked over the bong?

Late Wednesday, Vermont Yankee said the investigation of the leak discovered that three vertical support columns for the cooling tower had degraded and needed to be replaced while the packing in the pipe joint was being replaced.

These would be the beams they checked last summer after the gigantic collapse, and this summer after July’s minor mishap, right?

This is called “deferred maintenance” in the nuclear industry.

Sometimes these things just write themselves.

The Republican rap on Obama is that he's an elitist, right? A guy who was raised by a single mother on Food Stamps, got to college on scholarship, went to law school on student loans–elitist all over, right?

Now we have confirmation of that characterization by one of Hillary Clinton's supporters and fundraisers, who announced today that she's supporting McCain.

And her name is . . .

Wait for it . . .

No, she's not the Comtesse de Beige. It's Everywoman, known to her friends as Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, international financier who splits her time between homes in New York and London.

“This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don't like him,” she said of Obama in an interview with CNN’s Joe Johns. “I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.”

Forester is the CEO of EL Rothschild, a holding company with businesses around the world. She is married to international banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.

As my wife said, I guess she would know.

A nice friendly feminine voice in a taped message just asked me if I am voting in the upcoming November election.  I pressed 1 for yes.

The nice recorded lady then asked me if I was voting for 1. Jim Douglas, 2-Gaye Symington, 3-Anthony Pollina — I pushed 2 and was immediately transferred to a new question.  

The new question asked by the friendly recorded feminine voice was who would I vote for for representative.  She did not say state rep or congressional rep, just representative.  I listened and heard two names I did not know.  I waited.  I asked the recorded woman a question.  No response, so I voted for the Democrat, once again #2.

Finally the recorded woman’s voice asked me if I would support a tax on gas to improve Vermont’s roads and bridges vote 1 or against it vote 2.  

That’s a no-brainer for me.  I lived in Connecticut when the Mianus Bridge collapsed and people died.  Luckily it was at 1:30 a.m., so only a few people died rather than the hundreds that would have died during rush-hour.  All because of inadequate maintenance and lack of inspection.  Yeah, I’ll pay a little more in gas money any time to make our bridges safe for everyone.

I pushed 1, and the nice lady on electronic push poll hung up on me without even saying goodbye and thank you.

Got some of the basic data, and its worth a second look. It was indeed Research 2000 (which has recently hit the big time by being tapped to provide the Daily Kos daily tracking poll…. congrats guys!). Again, a 400 person sample, meaning an unfortunately high 5% margin of error (and no, Pollina fans, that doesn't mean the poll is no good, it just means it has a big whopping 5% margin of error).

The poll was taken between September 11th and September 14th, meaning Pollina's AFL and NEA endorsements will not have factored into it, but the VSEA  endorsement did to some extent. Again, in the last decade, I haven't seen a noticable, verifiable labor endorsement bump, but anything's possible. Of course, its also possible that any poll bump might be offset by a dropcaused by such a poor showing in this poll. It'spossible that liberal supporters will start defecting if they no longer see him as viable, given the 7% showing.

So the poll is still better for Symington than Pollina (duh), and she has some other good news as well – despite the pronouncement of the living embodiment of Vermont conventional wisdom – the oft quoted Eric Davis of Middlebury College – that a 15% spread between the candidates would not be enough to trigger national Democratic support, the Democratic Governor's Association has reacted favorably and is forming a PAC to assist in Symington's effort. Whether that just means a contribution under the generally-agreed to limits ($1000 for the general election) or a full blown independent expenditure is not clear.

But back to the numbers:
 

Not a lot of trends that jump out at you in the Governor's race. Symington has stronger support among women than men, and vice versa for Douglas – although Douglas still leads overall among women – and across every demo, in fact. There's a breadth to Douglas's support across gender and location that probably offsets some of the lack of depth we're seeing. As we work down to that core mass of Republican/Douglas support, its easy to see that is a spread-out base.

Pollina runs twice as strong in the south as the north, which is largely a function of Windham County, no doubt. Symington's popularity among the left is clearly lowest there, but apparently not nearly as low as many were expecting, as she too performs better in the south (although not by a statistically significant margin). More undecided women is probably good news for Symington, as they look to be more likely to break her way, while more undecideds in the north may favor Douglas – although, again, in both instances, the distintion is within the margin of error.

And nearly 1 in 10 likely voters has “no opinion” of Jim Douglas. A high-profile, multi-term incumbent. Fascinating. Add that to the 43% unfavorable, and I think this baby may be headed for the legislature….