Even though this has nothing to do with Vermont, I thought you “might” wanna see this piece I co-wrote with Carol Ann Burger of Huffington Post. The story was brought to my attention from my aunt in Lee County, Florida. I got hooked up Carol Ann in southwest Florida and we put something together. Enjoy! – Christian

Crossposted at Huffington Post’s Off the Bus.

Lee County and Collier County are the largest counties in Southwest Florida and are well-known as Republican havens. So when Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin visited the area on October 6th, it was no surprise she drew a record crowd to the Germain Arena in nearby Estero. The Arena seats 9,800 people and several thousand had to be turned away.

Some of those who made it in were 56 female Christian school students years away from voting age. The teacher who organized the trip said described it as an empowering lesson in U.S. politics.

“I got this crazy scheme to hear Gov. Palin speak. I thought it might have been hare-brained but it seemed a good idea to expose them to a woman running for one of the highest offices in the land,” says Susan Morris, a teacher at Evangelical Christian School in Fort Myers.

Morris says she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Republican but that she “isn’t all that crazy for Sarah Palin.” Still, she adds, “we teach for all possibilities here at ECS. We are an interdenominational school. ECS has 1, 200 students. We have Muslims and Buddhists. One of our students has become a Rhodes scholar and another is now playing in the NFL. All our girls are intelligent and thoughtful so I thought it would be a valuable experience for them to go.” The girls went with the school’s blessing.

The main inspiration for the “field trip,” Morris says, was the fact that Palin is a woman. “I wouldn’t take them to see John McCain or Barack Obama or Joe Biden. But I would take them to see Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama.”

Morris said the girls, who mostly are the children of well-do-do parents, were not pleased to have to stand for hours without food or drink. “That was the most suffering they’ve ever done, but as soon as they saw the Secret Service they knew this was serious stuff. We were very lucky and were only five feet away from Palin. I told them this was a campaign rally and to expect a political stump speech, but that it might very well also be a historic time for America. My point was for the girls to see that being a woman isn’t always as the media portrays it to be. Later, I had the girls write a paper on their impressions,” Morris said.

More below the fold.

So what did the girls think? “Well, it wasn’t her clothes or shoes that impressed them,” says Morris. “They thought she was a fiery chick, but also a lady. They knew not to expect a serious discussion of foreign policy but rather a boost for the McCain/Palin ticket, and that’s what they saw. They did notice the teleprompter, but Palin seemed to be controlling it. When she slacked off, it slowed down. Many of these girls hear their parents talk about politics, so they are not uninformed, and this is a predominantly Republican area so it wasn’t a surprise to hear Palin say that the Obama/Biden campaign is waving the white flag of surrender on Iraq and that Obama is too inexperienced to be president.”

Danielle Galietti, a junior at ECS reported all the female juniors and seniors were told it would be a once-in-a-lifetime educational experience if they could attend the Palin rally, since Palin is an important woman who may become the Vice President of the United States. Galietti said they were given VIP status and were told they would sit in the VIP section right behind Palin.

Galietti was one of three students who turned down the offer to attend because she was studying for a chemistry test.

She reported that students told her they were bused to the arena at 8:30 in the morning, arrived at about 9:30 and stood in line in some cases until l:30 p.m.. Palin did not appear until after 3:30. Many student VIPs had no seats but stood throughout the event.

Morris said there was an Obama heckler in the crowd who was shouting profanities. “That was unfortunate because there were children nearby who had to hear that sort of thing.” But it showed the girls that Americans have very strongly held opinions — on both sides — in this presidential campaign, she noted.

“I’m not a cookie-cutter conservative,” Morris says, “but I do vote Republican because I go with God. I’m anti-abortion so I’m a one-issue voter, it’s true. I’m thrilled with the Republican Party’s stand on abortion, so, so far so good. But if they change their stand I may not vote at all, but that’s just me personally. And I also believe in the Republican view of the economy. Sarah Palin is not an idiot and she brings more accessibility to politics, whether you agree with her or not.”

Morris is no fan of Obama. “Obama hasn’t been middle class since his childhood,” she says, “and we’re not even sure where he was born. That hasn’t really been brought up by the mainstream media.”

Told that news outlets have all but unanimously accepted the validity of Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate, Morris remained skeptical.

Other local Christian schools, including SW Florida Christian Academy and the Cape Coral Christian School did not officially excuse students to attend the rally. A spokesperson for SW Florida Christian said that some thirty students did attend, “but they didn’t represent the school. Their parents signed them out and took them.” A spokesman for Cape Coral simply said, “We didn’t go.”

The Barron Collier High School Band played at the rally. “It’s really cool,” band Co-Captain Stehpanie Karaczun told local WINK News, “’cause it’s like a once in a lifetime kind of experience to go and play for a presidential rally.”

Workers were wearing special work clothes provided by their employer  

I didn’t think they could re-fuel without an “event” and it’s still not completed(several more weeks) .850 contract workers are re-fueling the aging Vermont Yankee while it is off line .Could this nuclear plant even survive at this rate until 2032?

There must be a point between incident and tragedy that some official will say enough to this .Our Gov.Jim doesn’t have the stomach to bait his own fish hook let alone take on a corporate giant like Entergy of New Orleans and it’s Yankee franchise .These articles are almost routine in their bland statements,promises of never ,never again and fill in the blank style reassurances .The frequency and routine of these event says more than any spokesperson is capable of glossing over .

Given this record and the new difficult financial situation Entergy  faces with it’s efforts to spinoff  5 aging plants into an Enexus shell entity a tougher road lies ahead.On top of all this re-negotiating the power contract rates has been kicked down the road until after the election.In a manner of speaking this could continue to be a hot button issue for some time .

Alarms went off on the refueling floor alerting workers to the rising levels of radiation, and workers were evacuated from the refueling floor for four hours, checked for levels of contamination and later returned to work, according to Entergy Nuclear spokesman Robert Williams.

“There was never any issue of public health,” according to William Irwin of the Department of Health.

Irwin said that while the incident “was something we wished hadn’t occurred,” Entergy Nuclear had handled the incident well.

“It was a minor contamination event. You don’t really want them to happen, but Entergy handled it well,” said Irwin.

http://www.timesargus.com/apps…

(Ed has the latest on Vermont Yankee, Dave O’Brien and the DPS. Check it out.   – promoted by Christian Avard)

Continuing saga of David O’Brien, Gov. Douglas’ main man in the Dept of Public Service. That department is supposed to be the protector of Vermont ratepayers, but for years has instead been the protector of Entergy Nuclear.

The latest: after foot-dragging on everything Entergy (e.g., the many studies mandated by Act 160 on energy needs and resources, jobs, evacuation plans, environment, etc; the Comprehensive Vertical Assessment; fence line radiation dose) O’Brien continues to call out nuclear expert, whistleblower, and appointee of Peter Shumlin to the independent inspection oversight team, Arnie Gundersen.

From the Brattleboro Reformer,

DPS and the governor’s office have never really liked Arnie simply because he is an expert in his field and has the courage to step forward and tell people what he knows and what he thinks might happen as a result of things he is seeing,” said Bob Stannard, spokesman for Citizen Awareness Network, which is lobbying for the closure of Yankee in 2012. “The department has never been terribly supportive of Arnie and his comments. That’s too bad, because it appears he’s the only guy who’s been consistently right.”

Gundersen predicted cooling tower failures, increased dose rates at the plant’s fence line, gaps in the plant’s preventative maintenance and inspection program that led to a transformer fire and cracks in the steam dryer, said Stannard.

http://www.reformer.com/localn…

O’Brien claims they “have committed significant staff resources” to the inspection. That’s wrong. First, any costs are supposed to be billed to Entergy Nuclear, but Gov. Douglas has been consistent in running all state nuclear oversight on the cheap. Second, staffing has been so minimal that the inspection ordered by the legislature has been shortchanged.

The heart of O’Brien’s accusations against Arnie Gundersen this time are that Bob Audette from the Reformer received emails from Gundersen recounting the roadblocks thrown up by the DPS. Wrong. Small potatoes, maybe, but still, Wrong. Turns out the emails were released by DPS’s own lawyer, Sarah Hoffman, to the Free Press and Seven Days, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Shumlin fired back at O’Brien today.

What I find most disturbing is that these attacks undermine the long tradition of civility and respect that Vermonters have rightly come to expect from their state officials.

McCain-Palin style campaigning comes to Vermont. With last month’s WCAX poll showing 52% of Vermonters supporting shutdown for the Entergy reactor, we can expect the losing side to start up with “anti-American” slanders soon.

As dramatic as Colin Powell’s endorsement was, the more interesting endorsement that’s come down the pipe in the last couple days is that of neoconservative bigdog Ken Adelman (I know Jack refers to him as a paleocon, but I don’t think he’s a paleocon, especially given his buddy list… will check it out). Adelman goes way back with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc., and he has been consternated over what he calls the mismanagement of the Iraq War. When pushed by George Packer of the New Yorker, Edelman indicated that he has concerned by McCain’s questionable temperament, and by his lack of good judgment – in particular as demonstrated by the choice of Palin to join him on the ticket. Adelman:

“That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office-I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign-Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.”

Interestingly, this was also a major complaint of Powell’s during his endorsement. Powell, of course – for whatever his faults – is not a neoconservative. In fact, he has been famously loathed by the neocons, and its easy to infer from press smatterings that this affection has been returned in kind.

But this common ground is no coincidence, as the neocon wing of the GOP and the pragmatic centrist wing have the same enemy; the theocons, popularly known as the religious right. While the Palin pick was a bone to what the media repeatedly calls “the Republican base”, really it was a bone specifically to the fundamentalist base, leaving the other lobes of the GOP base left out. To many of these jilted basers, Palin was the last straw, in what has become a huge heaping stack of such straws ever since the breakdown of the Reagan-era marriage of convenience among the conservative lobes. To them, Palin is a smack in the face. She is nakedly unqualified for the position, and that appeal to the theocrats would then seem to be the only thing that mattered in her selection. That sent a message to many other hard-right types that they were out – that fundamentalist appeal is truly the only thing that matters in the modern Republican Party – and that they were now simply a captive constituency.

Now to some, it doesn’t matter. The most parochial of neocons only care about whether a candidate is going to take us to war with Iran – and regardless of other concerns, McCain most assuredly will – with Palin eagerly alongside. But to Adelman and others, enough is enough. He, the pragmatist Powell, and an increasing number of Republicans have decided to draw the line for influence, if not control, in the conservative movement, and they’ve decided that the centrist Obama is not so appalling to them that they can’t stomach putting their feet down in the context of the Presidential election when the fundies’ control and credibility is seeming increasingly tenuous with Palin turning out to be such a drag on the ticket.

The peculiar result is that Obama has been drafted in a sense as the warrior proxy of some members of a different, disenchanted Republican base threatened by the theocons. He stands in as the last defense against a complete takeover of their party by religious fundamentalists. Obama is their line in the sand, and as such, the Democratic nominee finds himself at the nexus of a perfect storm that will help blow him into office.

That’s not to say the poll numbers won’t still tighten. They will as McCain falls back on ads and robocalls that will increasingly emphasize Jeremiah Wright. But the storm wont blow over. Those numbers will narrow, but they will harden, and all things being equal, the future is only looking better for Obama.