The other night, I attended a candidate forum in White River Junction.  This was  a local candidate forum focused on:

• Developing a health care system that works for everyone


• Affordable childcare and access to quality early education


• Access to jobs and the impact of cuts to public services

This was part of a series of forums sponsored by the Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign – Vermont Workers’ Center,  Vermont Early Educators United – American Federation of Teachers and the Vermont Center for Independent Living.  All local candidates for state senate and house were invited, but only Democrats showed up.

In attendance were Dick McCormack (not pictured; he was late due to a class he was scheduled to teach), Charles Bohi, Mark Mitchell, Kevin Christie, Alice Nitka and Jim Masland.

What you’re seeing here is a picture of, Dawn Gieseke, Director of Rainbow Preschool in Woodstock and Member of Vermont’s Early Educators United asking them a very specific question.  She wanted to know if the legislators would support their right to unionize.  This is a yes or no question– you either support legislation which allows child care workers to form a union or you don’t.

For most, the answer was a fairly strong “yes,” with a couple simple reservations.  For Alice Mitka, it was more of a “probably,” explaining that she wanted to be certain of what it involved and that it would be fair.  That’s understandable, but the question wasn’t would the support the union but allow for the choice to form one.

And then there’s Charles Bohi’s response.

In Bohi’s case, his response started with him saying that in forums like this there’s often a question that he knows people won’t like the answer to.  He went on to talk about his fairly extensive union background, how he’s supported unions his whole life, detailing quite a long history.  If I can get the video, I will post it.

He then went on to waffle saying he couldn’t really support this because he didn’t know what form it would take and whether or not it would work in ways which were beneficial.

This is what he left out: the question wasn’t “will you support our union.”  The question was will you support our right to form a union.

There are unions I’ve been part of and unions I’ve left.  Not all unions are perfect.  But never for a moment would I say that people don’t have the right to unionize.  

Under current law, Child Care Providers can not unionize in Vermont.  It takes a simple act of the legislature to change that (it’s required to allow for an exception to anti-trust legislation).

I don’t care how much union cred you have in your history.  I don’t care how much good you think unions have done in the past.  If you refuse to support this unions right to organize and to work collectively with the state of Vermont, you are anti union.

In the prior thread, there was discussion about how 7 Days disclosed all its polling and lack of participation, which is technically accurate, but missing a bit: it’s fairly easy to find a 7 Days article that references the poll results without talking about poor participation, such as:

http://www.7dvt.com/2010legislative-survey-results.  On that piece there is no mention of the poor results.  You have to go to the piece which does “analysis” of the findings for that.  It indicates a low response rate but doesn’t acknowledge that that low response rate is relatively poor:

Of the 400 surveys sent out, only 30 came back with legitimate answers – a response rate of 7.5 percent. That’s better than direct mail – for which a 2 percent return rate is considered successful – and not too much worse than the turnout for a Burlington election, which was 23 percent on Town Meeting Day. Honestly, we hoped for better.

Just to clarify here: direct mail has an entirely different goal than surveys.  Direct mail isn’t intended to assess opinion.  It’s intended to sell things.

Surveys which attempt to assess opinion generally use sampling, so having a small sample size is acceptable, but it depends on the size of the sample group and how much stock you want to take in the results.  A sample of about 100 people out of 400 would give you a fairly solid confidence interval.  A sample of less than 1/3rd of that gives you very little confidence at all in the results.

Honestly, the comparison of the results to direct mail response results isn’t just poor judgment: it represents a complete and total lack of understanding of what statistics are and how they work.  

That piece also makes an odd inference.  When referencing the “most ethically challenged” item, it doesn’t just report on the results, but actually tries to connect them to a specific event:

During last month’s Mardi Gras parade in Burlington, Sen. Peter Shumlin climbed aboard an anti-Vermont Yankee float  sponsored by the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. No doubt he saw it as an opportunity in the wake of the Senate vote against the nuke plant. Turns out he may have used VPIRG polling information to his political advantage, too. Smart, affable and possessing sales skills some would describe as “slick,” the senator from Putney never misses an opportunity to advance his ambitious agenda…

This isn’t part of the survey.  It’s not part of anything involving the survey at all.  It’s just 7D waxing about Shumlin.  That’s fine, but it’s not analysis of the results.  It’s just opinion under the guise of information.

Which brings me to the last point about this survey’s “analysis:”  when you send out surveys like this to individuals with political ambition and goals, it’s very easy for a small group of people to game the survey to serve their own agendas.  

And to be fair: I expect this sort of nonsense from political organizations.  The Heritage Foundation routinely uses real data to create an “analysis” of the information designed and targeted to suit their political agenda.  It’s slimy, but I expect it from that sort of organization.

Media, on the other hand, has an ethical obligation to see to it that those doing “analysis” of their information actually have the basic competencies to do the job and to do so in a fashion which doesn’t serve a political agenda.  By performing this sort of “analysis” under the guise of a legitimate news organization, they are basically doing the work of the Dubie campaign by allowing them to take fake facts and present them as real facts.

There’s a lot I like about 7 Days, but the way they handled this?  I don’t know if it’s malice or incompetence at play here, but if it’s neither of those, it’s just reckless disregard for the truth.  

Tonight in White River Junction at Hartford High School there is a candidate forum focused on:

• Developing a health care system that works for everyone


• Affordable childcare and access to quality early education


• Access to jobs and the impact of cuts to public services

The candidate forums are sponsored by the Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign – Vermont Workers’ Center,  Vermont Early Educators United – American Federation of Teachers and the Vermont Center for Independent Living.

All local candidates were invited to participate.  Those who have, as of this moment, verified their participation are:

• Senate Majority Leader John Campbell


• Vermont State Senator Alice Mitka


• Vermont State Senator Dick McCormack


• Representative Donna G. Sweaney


• Representative Charles Bohi


• House Candidate Kevin Christie


• Representative Jim Masland

The forum begins at 6:30  

I’m busy doing phone banking for the Vermont Democratic Party so I figured I’d throw this up while y’all hide from my call.

In today’s Burlington Free Press, there’s a story by Nancy Remsen with the headline “Vermont State Police members improperly ‘fixed’ Shumlin ticket, public safety official says.”  

The piece suggests that the ticket that Shumlin received some time back was improperly voided.  It’s got implications of small-c corruption on, well, someone’s part, even though there is no indication that Shumlin had anything to do with it.

It’s fine to run a story about improper conduct on the part of state troopers and it’s fine to question whether or not a candidate for higher office knew about or was involved in that improper conduct.

What’s not fine, however, is to fail to note that the person making the accusation of misconduct is a Jim Douglas appointee.

This leaves one question: is the Burlington Free Press reporting this as an in-kind contribution to the Dubie campaign?

I want to start with a note– this isn’t intended to be a set of rules or guidelines about how the site ratings are used.  This is more of a technical explanation of what effect comment rating has and how it works.  Don’t assume anything I’m saying here is instructions, rules, etc.  It’s all just information.

That said: comment rating serves several purposes:

• identifying trusted users;


• hiding inappropriate comments;


• complimenting people when they say something you really like.

There are currently five options for rating a comment.  I’ll explain them, but first to go over the above in a little more detail:

Trusted users are people who have received enough positive ratings from longer-term members of the site to qualify.  Only trusted users can rate comments.

Inappropriate comments are not something we’ve defined in a technical sense, but if a comment receives enough zero ratings, it will get automatically hidden.  Trusted users can still view the comments but others can not.

Specifically what those ratings do: I’ve told you almost everything about them.  Functionally speaking (and we can change this from the admin side if we choose to), there is only a little difference between a 2 (“meh”) and a 4 (“right there with you!”) rating, except for one thing: 2s do not make you into a trusted user and 4s do.  But 2s do not hide comments.  The other difference is when rating to counter someone’s troll rating, a 4 brings the average up higher, so if two people are using troll (0) ratings in ways you think are inappropriate, a 4 will push against that 0 rating more than a 2 would.

On more factor: whether or not you are a trusted user really depends on your most recent comment ratings.  If you, for example, get ten 2 or lower ratings in a row, you’re going to lose your TU status and not be able to rate other peoples’ posts any longer.  That’s not something the admins do manually; it’s something that happens automatically.

This next part gets off the technical aspects and into the more, as Sarah Palin might put it, “guidelywiney” aspect:

As far as whether or not to use a “troll” rating: we don’t have a clearly defined policy on that, but generally speaking on most blogs of this nature, a troll rating is used when a comment is extremely offensive to community standards (this doesn’t just include things such as a rape joke or a homophobic or racist comment, but it could include revealing private or personal information about someone, such as identifying someone’s place of work without their consent), or apparently intended just to disrupt.  

Basically, a troll rating is not just saying you seriously dislike the comment, but that you think there’s valid reason to have it removed from view entirely.  A more clear-cut case for this is if someone’s spamming the group.  If I weren’t an admin, I’d TR anything I thought of as spamming the group, but I have the option of just deleting those comments when necessary.  And when I say spam, I don’t mean people pointing to their own web sites or blogs as a side note.  I mean “free money store” posts and the like.

One last thing: for the admins specifically, we can’t have our status changed by ratings.  If someone troll rates an admin, it really doesn’t do anything at all except, possibly hide the comment if enough people do so.  

I hope this explains a little bit about what those ratings are for.  I tend to use them a bit when I don’t feel as though I have anything to add but really like what someone has had to say, but they’re entirely optional.  I think you can even set your own profile to indicate whether or not you want to see the option to rate comments.  I.e., if you think the drop downs are annoying or useless, you don’t have to use them or even see them if you don’t want to.

Crossposted to The Curse of the Northern Hawk Owl

See the shell in this gull’s mouth?

See below for what it does with it.

This isn’t from Vermont, but I thought y’all might still find it interesting.  

What’s going on here is that gulls (and other birds that feed on shellfish) will sometimes lift their intended prey high into the air and drop it onto the rocks to break the shell. They, of course, have to follow it down so no other bird grabs it if it cracks. I’d heard of this before, but never actually seen it, so to be able to photograph the sequence is kind of cool.

We covered this yesterday and today, the Rutland Herald picked up the AP piece as well.  Not only does reporter Dave Gram go into a level of deep detail we rarely see in contemporary newspaper journalism, he does so in ways which are generally precise, factual and clear.  

Items included in this piece are that:

• Out of 62 legislative sessions, Dubie missed 25, whereas Shumlin missed 2;



• Out of those 25 Dubie missed, only five were due to his conflicting duties as temporary governor while Douglas was away.  Those are fair and valid reasons to have missed the sessions;



• Shumlin had to step in to fulfill Dubie’s duties on 22 separate occasions;




• Dubie claimed that his “jobs tour” didn’t interfere with his duties as Lt. Gov, but on Feb 4th, the legislature was in session while Dubie was campaigning touring in Chittenden County;



• Dubie’s campaign referenced his deployment as a col in the Air Force Reserves apparently as an excuse for some of the absences, but later acknowledged that that deployment did not actually coincide with any legislative session;



• Dubie claims that in some cases, he “may” have been in conversation with constituents when he was failing to fulfill his role as described in the constitution.

And just in case we’re unclear as to what the VT constitution has to say about his role:

§ 19. Powers of senate; Lieutenant-Governor’s duties

…The Lieutenant-Governor shall be President of the Senate, except when exercising the office of Governor, or when the office of the Lieutenant-Governor shall be vacant, or in the absence of the Lieutenant-Governor, in which cases the Senate shall appoint one of its own members to be President of the Senate, pro tempore. And the President of the Senate shall have a casting vote, but no other.

With the exception of the Lt. Governor’s role to replace the Governor or serve as acting governor, the above is it.  The Lt. Governor’s job is to be President of the Senate and to, when necessary, serve as acting Governor.

Does Dubie know that being Governor is a full-time job?  If not, someone should really tell him.

…today’s headline is “Dubie presses Shumlin on Corrections.”

Apparently my answer to the question “Will the Free Press coverage of the election be all about vapid surface assessments? is yes.

To be fair, however, the piece itself is a bit more fair than the headline suggests, but it creates this sense that the debate was hostile and bitter, such as with this paragraph:

The continuing dispute over Shumlin’s Corrections plan highlights an increasingly bristly relationship between the candidates that arose several times during the 90-minute debate… Shumlin said Dubie wasn’t telling the truth in a Corrections ad he is airing. Dubie lashed out about an advertisement by an outside group that criticizes his stance on the future of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

While technically accurate as far as what was said goes, the debate was, as with all the debates so far, cordial, polite and reasonable.  They disagree, fairly strongly, but no one is being nasty.  No one is being hostile.  They are sticking to their positions and their points of view.

We’re having good debates that do not debase the candidates.  Why do we have to pretend otherwise?

Is anyone else watching this?  Dubie and Shumlin are debating live on Vermont Public Television as of 6:30pm.

Impressions so far is that Dubie is just not very good at this.  He started off the debate by holding up pieces of paper and pointing to them.  

Feel free to comment about the debate as it goes along.