More here

There’s been a lot of activity here lately, but I think this deserves some attention.  Recently, Jack McCullough penned the piece Burlington Free Press calls out O’Brien’s partisanship.

In it, Jack notes that:

Dave O’Brien didn’t have much credibility to begin with, but the key is that the whole world is now seeing that Dave O’Brien’s loyalties are to the Douglas/Dubie administration and their wealthy friends, and not with the people of Vermont.

O’Brien chose to respond, without actually responding:

So I do not have any close wealthy friends, nor do I do the bidding of any.  I have no affection or loyalty to Entergy, they just happen to own this facility that is so integral to the state.  I defend the idea that the facility should continue to operate, and in my role as a consumer advocate I have seen Senator Shumlin and many others distort the record and many people are taking what they say to be the whole story and that is unfortunate.

Note that O’Brien doesn’t actually respond to what Jack said.  He pretends that Jack made reference to O’Brien’s wealthy friends, without seeming to understand or care that the “wealthy” reference was to Douglas’ friends.  O’Brien claims to have no loyalty to Entergy, but the issue was not about Entergy as much as it was the Douglas administration and a partisan agenda.

I’m going to quote another snippet of O’Brien’s comments:

The science of the tritium release is entirely the opposite.  The Health Dept has not once found any indication of a threat to the public health and safety.  Are their motives also somehow corrupted by greed and therefore not informed by sound science and the ethics of the medical field?

Now here’s the thing: I’ve written about the word “threat” before.  The claim of there being no “threat” is inaccurate and misleading.  The term he should be using here is “imminent threat.”  But the very existence of a plant that has pipes and tubing in places that the owners failed to acknowledge even existed, that has leaks that take months to discover?  That is a real and genuine threat.  Failure for that threat to manifest itself?  That’s just dumb luck.  

I will quote one more item from O’Brien:

Firstly I am looking at a far more extensive set of information on VY than the general public.  What is reported in the media is a mere fraction of the record, it is a drive by treatment.  I would say that if people were to base their ultimate opinion on VY based on what is reported in the media well apprehension would be natural.  So keep in mind I have much more info and technical input from a team of experienced energy professionals (all democrats and quite liberal), but why is it so hard to accept that someone can a different opinion?

So this is something I find interesting: what O’Brien is claiming here is that he is sitting on secret information about Vermont Yankee that is kept hidden from the public.  This may or may not be true, but it is extremely convenient to be able to tell everyone “if you only knew what I knew we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”  We know that Entergy LA is pushing hard to keep VY open (this may be so that they can more easily find a buyer) so I find it very hard to believe that they would refuse to release information which would increase public perception that the plant is safe and reliable.

People can agree or disagree that the plant should be open.  That’s our choice, but the simple truth is that we’ve had nearly a decade of a Republican administration who refused to lift a finger to prepare for the eventual closing of this plant and to set in motion a plan to keep Vermonters employed should it close on schedule. They could have put resources into preparing for both possibilities.  Instead, they set up a scenario designed to promote the idea that closing VY would be anti-Vermont and anti-jobs.  It’s a form of political blackmail that I truly hope will be shown to be a complete failure come November 2nd.

This sort of reckless disregard for the future of Vermont is not only incompetent.  It’s dereliction of duty on the part of the Douglas administration.  

If O’Brien wants to defend that, that’s obviously his right, but when a public official tries to serve as an apologist for this sort of mendacious hostility towards the state of Vermont and its long-term interests, We The People have both the right and a moral obligation to call him out on it.

To understand this piece, you need to hear this part of the debate, starting at around the 33 minute mark, which I embedded in this previous piece.

The whole exchange lasts a little under four minutes.

There are two questions, and they’re yes or no questions, asked by Shumlin of Dubie:

• if a bill arrived at your desk restricting a woman’s right to chose, would you sign it, and;


• do you oppose abortion in the cases of rape and incest;

A lot of candidates are willing to answer these questions Dubie, however (like his running mate, Phil Scott) seems to hover around the issue like a fly trying to figure out which piece of fruit is the moldiest, yet still worried about getting smacked down in flight.

Len Britton, apparently, doesn’t want to answer the question at all.  If he has any opinion on abortion, he’s hidden it well enough that I can’t find it.

Beaudry, on the other hand, is willing to be quite specific:

Furthermore, Beaudry shared his views about the ongoing abortion controversy. He proudly stated that he is a “pro-life” candidate, with the obvious exceptions of rape, incest, and cases where the mother’s life is in danger. He also said that he is being fully endorsed by the Vermont Right to Life Political Committee along with gubernatorial candidate Brian Dubie.

Now– I’m pro-choice and have been for most of my adult life, but I know people who are anti-abortion, and I don’t necessarily think badly of them for that– I get where they’re coming from.  While I think that politicians often use pro-life issues in a fairly cynical fashion as wedge issues, they are able to do so because of the chunk of population that honestly believes abortion to be amoral.  

I’m not posting to argue that point.  More than a decade ago, I just gave up on arguing with people about abortion.  I can’t think of any case in the last fifteen years where I’ve had a discussion in which someone changed their mind about it, so I’m not here to discuss that.

I’m here to discuss integrity.  

There’s a history in this country of a stealth campaign on the part of activists on the religious right since the 1970’s.  They’d float school board candidates who would conceal their agenda until in a position of power.  That’s how you end up with situations such as a school in Connecticut attempting to hold a graduation in a Christian church.

I want to be clear: this is not about Christians or Christianity.  This is about a group of activists who are intentionally using stealth techniques to get into office by obscuring their extremism.  This is why, until this year, candidates like Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle, rarely had any electoral victories at all, even in primaries: they were too openly crazy to win anything.  

In Vermont, this embracing of wingnut right-wing idiocy has yet to manifest itself in a serious fashion, so our candidates who support extreme views need to be careful enough not to allow those views to see the light of day lest it leave them scorched and maimed.  

So let’s be clear about this: when a candidate refuses to answer a question about whether or not he thinks abortion is acceptable in the case of rape and incest?  There’s virtually nothing to lose by saying “I think that’s a perfectly acceptable exception” unless he is (a) strongly beholden to pro-life extremists or (b) is a pro-life extremist himself.  

There is no reason not to answer that question unless you don’t have the simple integrity to stand by what you believe.  

Cowards.  Every damned one of them.

Full debate available after the jump.  

Given that the Free Press most recently endorsed Jim Douglas for governor, this has to be a major blow to Dubie, especially given that the free Press endorsed both Scott and Gibbs, but not the top of the ticket.

I’ll start with Hoffer:

Hoffer understands the importance of public accountability in government, and the key to that accountability is public access to information. He sees secrecy as the breeding ground for government waste and inefficiency. Hoffer can make his mark as auditor by exposing what closed government is costing the people of Vermont.

I don’t say this a lot about Free Press editorials, but I agree fully.

On to Shumlin:

In politics, the safe route is to stick to generalities and avoid leaving a public trail that could come back to haunt a candidate. In the general election campaign, Shumlin’s willingness to speak out on contentious issues and talk about specifics of his platform leaves him open to equally specific criticism. He has been direct. Again, this is part of being open and accessible as a representative of the people.

The piece ends with:

Vermont needs a doer.

Peter Shumlin of Putney will be that governor.

For Dubie, that’s got to really sting.

Quite recently I was talking to a friend of mine about Dubie and we were asking “what’s he actually claim to have accomplished.”

Every politician in the world manages to make up some sort of stuff on their web site about what they’ve done.  Dubie, however, avoids this.  He talks about his 3-point (I’m rounding down) “plan,” which I still think can be best summarized as follows:

But the sum total of what he has actually accomplished as Lt. Governor?  I can’t find much of anything.  He talks about committees he’s on that have accomplished a few things, but when it comes to anything that he’s really done?  

The shallowness of that well is, quite frankly, astonishing.

New Hampshire’s Union Leader has long been known to have a somewhat conservative bias.  They Endorsed John McCain in 2008 and in 2004 they endorsed Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary.

But that pales in comparison to this:

[Union Leader Editor] McQuaid said in a statement to WMUR the Union Leader, the largest newspaper in New Hampshire, is “not anti-gay,” but has a constitutional right to print or not print whatever it wants.

McQuaid continues:

“This newspaper has never published wedding or engagement announcements from homosexual couples. It would be hypocritical of us to do so, given our belief that marriage is and needs to remain a social and civil structure between men and women and our opposition to the recent state law legalizing gay marriage.”

Shorter McQuaid: we’re not anti-gay, but even if we were, it would be our right to be bigots, so screw you.

Paul Hodes, however, gets it right:

“The Union Leader’s disgraceful policy of exclusion harkens to a different time in this country when people were denied opportunity because of their race, religion and ethnic origin,” Hodes said in the letter.

The thing is, while technically the paper has the right to say whatever it likes, there is actual a question as to whether or not this is a constitutional right.  They have the right to print or not print wedding announcements, but I think there’s a valid question here: if they, as a policy, print all wedding announcements without vetting them (I am not clear that this is the case, but it appears to me that it is, and their policy doesn’t seem to place any restrictions on this), it would seem to me that this is a public service, in which case it needs to be provided universally.

I’d like some input from lawyers on this: how do you view this case?  While I fully support freedom of speech, I don’t see wedding announcements as a speech issue as much as I do see them as a public accommodations issue, in which case, refusing to include them sounds like it might fall afoul of anti-discrimination laws.  

Obviously, this would be different if it were a paper that as policy, only included weddings from people from certain organizations.  A Jewish or Catholic paper, for example, could be expected to provide wedding announcements specifically from Jewish o Catholic couples, and that seems like an acceptable policy, but a paper that doesn’t include specific organizations as part of its wedding policy?  It seems to me that that paper has the legal obligation to print any wedding announcement which is legal and fits its announced timelines.

I don’t think we’ve encountered this problem in here in Vermont so far: no major paper that I know of has refused to include same-sex wedding announcements (when we got married we didn’t send any announcements out because we didn’t want people making a fuss, but everyone found out anyway).

Regardless of the constitutional issue, I do think it’s time to call for an active boycott of the Union Leader.  What do our friends across the River think?

I’m just curious: wit this music, is he attempting to win over the people who were on Darth Vader’s side?  ‘Cause that’s the vibe I get.

The number of fans he has on Facebook is a very compelling argument.  Oh, and donors in every county.   That means he’s managed to fully sweep all of Vermont’s 14 Counties.  Way to step up.  Oh, and I love the red background when the words “red tape” appear on the screen.  Subtle.

A couple days ago I wrote about AOT contract recipient flacking for Dubie and getting paid by the state while doing so.

I just got this e-mail from someone who would like to remain anonymous.  I consider this to be a well trusted source whom I’m sure knows extremely well that to feed me false info would be a huge mistake, so I’m taking this as fact until proven otherwise.  Among the information included were the facts that:

1. Dubie has taken at least $9,593 from Debra Ricker, her husband and their businesses;
2. The Rickers’ businesses have been awarded six contracts to do road work for the Agency of Transportation since Jan. 2009, for a total of $2,314,897 in contract money;
3. Governor Douglas appointed Debra Ricker to the Council of Economic Advisers;
4. Governor Douglas appointed William Ricker to the Public Oversight Commission.

I offer the the following:

Dubie… hit Shumlin again when asked about an issue in the news Tuesday morning: that Shumlin had appointed supporter David Blittersdorf to the state’s Clean Energy Development Fund board, which went on to award Blittersdorf more than $4 million in tax credits for solar projects. Dubie said Shumlin should return the $8,000 that Blittersdorf and various companies he’s associated with contributed to Shumlin’s campaign.

Shumlin asked Blittserdorf to resign from that board, and he did.  Did Dubie ask the Rickers to resign from their seats of power?  Did Dubie think that he should return their money?

In one case, we have a Democrat who asked a man to resign from a board in order to avoid conflict of interest.  On the other hand, we have a Republican who is being actively supported by someone who benefits directly from his administration and hasn’t said a word about it.

Is it any surprise that no one is covering this but us?

I never, in my whole life, thought I would say this, but I need to give a hat tip to Art Woolf at Vermont Tiger for this one.  He notes that the poll done by VPR significantly oversamples people over 50.

Here’s the breakdown from VPR:

(Admittedly, it was just 65+, but I couldn’t help myself).

Since this is an off year election without Obama driving the youth vote, I’m not inclined to compare this to 2008.  I’d be much more interested in seeing how this distribution stacks up against 2006.

Unfortunately, the statistics I could find about 2006 didn’t break down the ages in the same fashion as this survey did, so this makes it all extremely complicated to do a proper analysis.  I.e., 18-24 is one Census block, 25-44 another.  You can’t draw an inference from one to the other since they don’t map along the same lines.

But  

Let’s pause for a moment and consider this image.

As previously noted, this is part of an anti-Shumlin stunt that the Dubie campaign denies has anything to do with them.  The Dubie campaign classifies this as jokes and games, but they somehow fail to notice that this is about racism.

Wearing a swastika while protesting a candidate is fairly tasteless.  Wearing a swastika while protesting a Jewish candidate goes far beyond that.  This isn’t something that any campaign should be disavowing as a trick or a prank.  This is something that Dubie’s campaign should be calling out as overtly racist.

The failure of Dubie’s campaign to note this action as something which is (a) at least partially their responsibility and (b) dog whistle racism is a sign of where some of his support lies.  Just like with the “Take Back Vermont” crowd, the tea partiers supporting Dubie are not just about lower taxes but, as with the various racist imagery we’ve seen at tea party rallies during the 2008 campaign, about xenophobia and racism as well.

To be clear: this is not something everyone in the tea party supports and this is not necessarily something even the Dubie campaign itself supports.  But the campaign knows it’s beholden to the interests, some of them powerful interests, of people who proudly support some of this racism.  For the Dubie campaign to push back against it would actually probably cost them some of that support.  

This is an ongoing problem with falling in bed with right wing radical groups: their support and energy is helpful to you, and their fundraising can be strong, but then you are placed in the uncomfortable position of being completely incapable of responding properly to overt racism.

Keep in mind: I am not accusing the Dubie campaign of racism.  Nor am I accusing most of his supporters of being racist.  I am saying that there is enough of a racist faction within his support base that they can’t be easily alienated or fought, especially not in an election this close.

To put it more simply: I don’t think the Dubie campaign is racist, but I think this “stunt” demonstrates quite clearly that they’re racist-adjacent.