Everything’s going to get a bit crazy in a couple hours, so I figured I’d do one more quick “news roundup” before everything goes haywire.

Two hearings set on wind project and a potential Milton wind farm is being discussed as well.

Speaking of Milton, a Milton sex offender is running for state Senate.

Remember all that talk about liberal professors allegedly converting students to their ideology?  Not so much so.

Hey, our unemployment rate is over 5%.  Go us!

John McCain, slightly lost:

per Maggie Gundersen: Bachman McCarthy Overdrive:

After the fold, I rant about one of the nearby elections.

The Reformer has a story about a former rep, Steve Darrow.  Before I say anything more about this, I will note that I am biased.  A friend of mine, Mike Mrowicki, defeated Darrow last time around and Mike is a great voice of the legislature for early childhood issues as well as pretty much anything else I believe in.  He’s also a very talented musician and an all around great guy.  

So here’s the short version: Steve at some point decided he wanted to run again, but it was too late for him to get on to the primary ballot so he decided to run as a write-in candidate.  

At the primary, he was outside my polling place, which covers more than one district, trying to talk people in to writing him in.  He stopped me on my way in and tried to talk me into voting for him.  I smiled and told him “sorry, but Mike’s a good friend of mine.”  I figured that would be the end of it.  Apparently not.  As I was trying to get in to vote, Darrow proceeded to shout that there were two slots and I could vote for him and Mike.  I was like, let it go, man.  He clearly wasn’t interested in letting it go, but I just ignored him after a short time of this.  Yelling at people you want to support you is unhelpful, and voting is something I like to do so I don’t really enjoy being harassed by local politicians in the process of doing so.  But, whatever.  

I used to like Steve, but now I think of him as basically a jerk, not just for this, but also because his write-in campaign landed him on the Republican ballot.  So he’s still running, but this time as a Republican.

In Windham County.

Yeah.  Good luck with that.

First up.  Sarah Palin gets pranked:

This has to be heard to be believed.  I am sometimes surprised that she, as of yet, hasn’t managed to accidentally sell Alaska to Argentina.

Item #2:

While Bush is dropping out of sight to avoid hurting McCain, Cheney is, apparently, not:

Obama has a great response.

More odd and possibly interesting news after the flip.  

What’s on everyone’s mind tonight as the end of this election cycle is near?

Item #3:  

Apparently, Obama is to the left of Bernie Sanders.  At least that’s what John McCain says.  I think Bernie should challenge him to a duel.

Item #4:

Per the Reformer: Economy: Gov. candidates unveil their plans.  No rush there, I guess.

Item #5:

Just in time for Halloween, there’s a warning about tainted chocolate:

The Vermont Department of Health is advising anyone who may have purchased Sherwood Brands Pirate’s Gold Milk Chocolate Coins, recalled this month by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, not to eat or distribute the coins.

Oh, how I long for the days when pirate gold was a trusted commodity.

Item #6:

Company settles claim it mislabeled pasta sauce as Vt.-made:

The Vermont attorney general’s office announced Wednesday that it settled the first case of its kind under the state’s Vermont-made label regulation, charging that Bove’s of Vermont Inc. mislabeled its pasta sauces and other food products.

The attorney general’s office accused the Burlington-based pasta sauce company of violating the 2006 Vermont-labeling rule for failing to disclose to consumers that its sauces that were once made here are now made in New York.

What I like most about this is the outcome:

The settlement, known as an assurance of discontinuance, requires Bove’s to donate $50,000 worth of food to the Vermont Foodbank and pay a fine of $5,000.

Per today’s Brattleboro Reformer, a good piece by Bob Audette:

Is Entergy stonewalling requests for documents from various state agencies around the nation?

In New York state, the Public Service Commission’s administrative law judges had to file a legal decision to get Entergy to turn over documents related to decommissioning cost studies of the Indian Point nuclear power station in the Hudson Valley.

In Mississippi, Entergy is fighting the attorney general’s office there, which has demanded it supply documents that might prove Entergy has been charging its customers too much money for electricity.

And in Vermont, it recently took several requests from the Department of Public Service’s public advocate to get a report on the effect of the recent economic turmoil on Wall Street on the decommissioning fund for Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon.

[…]

“Entergy’s disregard for the process is notorious,” said New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, D-Westchester, a long-time critic of Indian Point, which is in his district. “They say one thing and do another all the time. They have no regard for the public interest here. Their concentrated greed and cupidity is beyond belief.”

There’s also lots of great Entergy spin in the piece, but the resistance to providing documentation is what I think of as the most relevant.  Any chance they’ll be hiring Dick Cheney in a few months?

I posted some of this back in May about the last days of the Clinton campaign.  This new edition is about the McCain Campaign.

If you study behavioral psychology, you’ll learn about a concept called “the extinction burst.”  

The specific example I use when I teach is this:

You’ve got a child who is throwing tantrums.  In the past, the tantrums have gotten the child attention, which is exactly what the child wants.  Therefore, you have been providing positive reinforcement to that child’s behavior.  It’s “positive” because you’re adding something (attention), not because it’s good.  It’s “reinforcement” because it increases the behavior.

The much more effective approach to reducing tantrums is negative punishment.  “Negative” because you’re removing something and “punishment” because it reduces the behavior.  When we talk about “punishment” in behavioral psychology we don’t necessarily mean anything specific; it’s just any act in a behavioral context which reduces the frequency of a given behavior.

But here’s why many parents don’t use negative punishment: the extinction burst.

You have a child who’s throwing tantrums and you decide to reduce the tantrums through not paying attention.  You try to ignore them completely.  This will generally work.  But before it works, it gets worse.  The child, knowing that the tantrums have worked in the past, thinks that the tantrums are just not loud enough.  

So they get worse, before they fade out entirely.

This last ditch effort to make the tantrums work is the aforementioned “extinction burst.”  It’s perfectly human: something that has worked in the past is losing its power so you don’t try something different.  You do what you’ve been doing all along, but push harder.

Here are some examples of the extinction burst in action:

Per CNN:

Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin “going rogue.”

A Palin associate, however, said the candidate is simply trying to “bust free” of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged roll-out.

McCain sources say Palin has gone off-message several times, and they privately wonder whether the incidents were deliberate. They cited an instance in which she labeled robocalls — recorded messages often used to attack a candidate’s opponent — “irritating” even as the campaign defended their use. Also, they pointed to her telling reporters she disagreed with the campaign’s decision to pull out of Michigan.

A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser. “She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.

John McCain just making crap up:

Per Yahoo News:

Pennsylvania Republicans are disavowing an e-mail sent to Jewish voters that likens a vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to events that led up to the Holocaust.

“Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008,” the e-mail reads. “Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let’s not make a similar one this year!”

Per Huffington Post:

Sarah Palin had a few memorable moments during her campaign stop in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday. But the most eye-opening of them all came, it would appear, when the Alaska Governor somehow drew a connection between Barack Obama’s tax policy and an encroaching, nightmarish, communist government. The Illinois Democrat, she hysterically suggested, would, through his proposals, create a country “where the people are not free.”

Per Raw Story:

After several political signs were stolen or vandalized from his front yard, a Missouri man installed video cameras in an attempt to catch the vandals in the act.

And that’s exactly what he did.

A video below shows a woman stepping out of a truck and kicking Mike Brown’s Obama/Biden political signs before running away.

“I’m just a guy who has a sign in his yard, and this is the first election that I have ever felt was important enough for me to voice my opinion in the form of a yard sign,” said Brown.

Hey, let’s pretend terrorism isn’t terrorism:

Hey, what about Ayers?:

ust 28% of voters believe that John McCain’s campaign has been helped by talking about the relationship between Barack Obama and William Ayers. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 50% believe talk of that issue has hurt McCain’s effort while 15% say it has had no impact.

How about we play the POW card and lie about Obama’s record?

Finally, per Talking Points Memo:

John McCain’s Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established — and even told reporters outright that the “B” carved into the victim’s cheek stood for “Barack,” according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain’s Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, “You’re with the McCain campaign? I’m going to teach you a lesson.”

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the “B” stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

Stay classy, McCain campaign!

Note: I didn’t live in Vermont when we were getting into the whole civil unions things, though I’ve heard it got fairly nasty at times.  This, I think, is demonstrably worse.  I posted this to Daily Kos and thought it might be good to include here as well, even though it’s not local.  So…

I’m going to give a little bit of personal history here.  I am openly queer, and have been for most of my adult life.  I am 5’1.5″ and though I am physically stronger than I look, there are a whole lot of people who could fairly easily beat the crap out of me if they choose to do so.  Everything I’m talking about here on a personal level is old.  I haven’t had cause to feel for my safety due to another person’s malice in more than a decade.

That said, I’ve been threatened and chased on several occasions.  I once had a knife pressed against my throat.  I’ve had death threats left on my answering machine.  While engaged in an anti-war protest once, I had an ROTC student grab me by the throat and press his arm against my neck until his friends pulled him off.  

All of this was scary.  Some of it was very scary.  I don’t know how much of what happened was real danger as opposed to people just trying to intimidate me.  

But this crap (with a hat tip to Pam’s House Blend) scares me in ways that I can’t entirely articulate.  I will warn everyone now that this video disturbed me deeply, and I would not recommend you allow any kids to see it.  It’s that bad:

The Face of Proposition 8 from Theremina on Vimeo.

The text posted with this video (linked here) includes the following:

This footage was recorded 10/23/08 in Oakland, CA, on a public street corner near Lake Merritt. I was on my way home from the Lakeshore district when I encountered this group of supporters of Prop 8 (proposition to ban gay marriage). After turning my vidphone on, I was screamed at, physically intimidated and eventually attacked by one of the sign-wavers.

About two dozen men and women were standing under the I-580, chanting “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” and “Mom and Dad, not Dad and Dad”, etc. There were at least three counter-protesters present as well.

[…]

Something to keep in mind: when I hit the record button, I hadn’t said a single word to anyone, or interfered with the rally any way. I stood a fair distance away from the sign-wavers (remaining at least four feet away from all of them…until they approached me). But as soon as they noticed me filming them, I was greeted with curses and threats of violence. “Get that shit out of here. I’ll knock it out of your hand.” None of these folks knew me, yet they instantly knew they hated me.

Eventually, as you can see, some of the protesters surrounded me and began poking at me with their signs. Others, some of the most visibly angry and hysterical among them (apparently minors), hid their faces behind their banners while continuing to scream at passing traffic.

[…]

The woman continued to poke at my face with her sign and call me “nasty.” Genuinely disturbed by the complete lack of rational behavior I’d seen up to this point, wanting to look into her face and possibly connect on some level with her as a fellow human being, I pulled a corner of the sign down away from my eyes and asked “why are you calling me nasty?”

That’s when she attacked, clawing, grabbing and then shoving. I didn’t fight back; she was much bigger than me. After calling me a “nasty fucker” and threatening to kick my ass, she pried my phone out of my hand and tried to break it in half while her friends egged her on.

[…]

After she took away my phone, I stood there stunned, not really sure what to do. One of the counter-protesters (the woman who you see saying “No on Prop 8” towards the beginning of this clip) intervened and calmed the attacking woman down enough that I felt safe enough to dart forward to try to take my phone back. After a second or two of grappling, she let me have it back and went back to screaming at cars from a lawn chair near the side of the road.

[…]

I stood there for another minute or two, checking the phone’s applications for damage. One of the other sign-wavers, a teenage boy standing nearby, leaned over and whispered “fuck you, dyke.”

Even though I wasn’t hurt besides a small scratch on my hand, and my phone was okay, being attacked definitely shook me up. I was a bit tearful. Call me naive, but I never thought I’d actually be in physical danger just for shooting footage and pulling the edge of a person’s sign out of my eyes. Verbal insults, sure. But attacked? Yikes.

The man holding the “Vote No” sign noticed that I was in tears and approached me. We hugged to a chorus of jeers, exchanged some reassuring words, and I turned to leave. Someone screamed after me: “keep crying, and keep walking.”

So that’s exactly what I did.

I’m voting no on Prop 8. I’ll take love over hate any day.

I don’t know if I have this kind of courage.  I hope that if I were in these circumstances, I would show the strength not to run, but I just don’t know.  I see stuff like this and my hands just start shaking and I get pulled back to that sense of vulnerability that happens, like when a group of homophobes started shouting at me from their car when I was on my bicycle one day and then proceeded to chase me in their car, yelling and threatening me the whole time (fortunately for me, bicycles can go all sorts of places cars can’t get to and it was a heavily trafficked area, so there was no opportunity for them to catch up, but still).

So I see this.  I read it.  I watch it.  And I just think… wow.

I get violence.  I understand it.  I think it’s ineffective and futile, but on a raw psychological level, I get why people become violent and I get how mob mentalities can go a bit crazy from time to time.   I’ve studied the psychology.  Hell, I teach the psychology.  But there’s a big difference between abstract understanding of violence and really knowing it for what it is.  I know violence for what it is in the direct, personal level.  I’ve seen enough of that.  

But this… this… involving children in it?

This isn’t just violence.  This isn’t just mob mentality.  This is sick.  This is pure, unadulterated hate.  

We’ve got to show these people for who they are, everywhere we can.  We have to publicize this and make sure that everyone knows what the Proposition 8 movement is, at its core: violent, dangerous and anti-person.

Loud and clear: we have to expose this everywhere we can.

By now, most of you have heard one version or another of this story:

According to State Police Detective Sgt. Richard Holden of the Brattleboro barracks, on the afternoon of Oct. 2, Department of Child and Family Services license auditors visited Diane’s Family Day Care, a day care facility operated by Diane Wood, 40, of Guilford.

At that time, Holden said the DCFS auditors discovered that Wood, in an alleged effort to conceal that the number of children for which she was providing care was in excess of her actual license, locked four children in a garden shed.

First, a thank you to the other front pagers: when this news broke, I asked that we not just post the news itself in a vacuum but wait until one of us had time to provide some real perspective on it.  I often feel the urge to just post about a sensational story without much comment, and I usually go with that, but this time, it felt as though there was a lot more that needed to be said.  So, thanks to everyone for waiting a couple days until I could get my thoughts together to post something that I think does the story justice without just making it about blame and outrage.

That said, I will be clear: this is bad.  Very bad.  I’m not going to defend this Child Care Provider and I’m not going to pretend that what this woman did was even remotely acceptable.  Instead, I want to talk about what Quality Child Care is, what we’re doing to support it and where, as a state, we’re failing.

A few months back, fellow GMD front pager posted Another Douglas failure on child protection: watching the watchers.

I urge you to go back and read that diary before continuing this one.  It provides a lot of the background for what I’m going to discuss here.

I’m going to start with a couple definitions.  The Child Development Division, which regulates child care providers in Vermont, breaks providers down into two primary categories (there are more than this, but I’m only going to focus on these two): Licensed Child Care and Registered Home Providers.  

Licensed Child Care centers are organizations which have their own child care facilities.  Depending on the size of their facility and the number of staff, they can legally care for very large numbers of children.   These are the professional child care centers that you often see in commercially zoned areas.  The quality of care can vary widely from center to center, but these are the primary focus of Child Care Licensors.  It makes sense to focus on the larger centers: with limited resources being allocated for child care licensors (note the numbers that JD points out in his previous diary), focusing on centers which serve 30-60 children is a better use of licensor time than focusing on Registered Home Providers.

Registered Home Providers are the small, home-based providers.  They are people who work out of their home and are strictly limited in terms of how many children they can have in their care at any one time, even if their home is relatively large.  

These providers are usually women who don’t make much money.  

Many home-based providers provide outstanding care, especially given the poor pay that comes with the job.

Not all do.  Some, like the provider in the article I referenced above, even commit fraud in order to make more money off the care they do provide.  In this case, she took in more children than their license legally allows to make a little extra income.  

They can get support from their local Resource and Referral agencies (there is one in every Agency of Human Services District, located throughout the state of Vermont), but not everyone seeks that support.

In theory, these providers should be visited from time to time by the Child Development Division.  These visits should, ideally, be a surprise.  This has the benefit of having providers expect to be accountable for any regulations they violate.  It also has the benefit of giving the licensors the opportunity to provide the providers with answers to questions, suggestions for possible trainings that may benefit them and give them general support.  No matter how good a provider is, it’s helpful for them to feel that they have support at multiple levels, and those licensing visits are a crucial component to that suport.

But they aren’t happening right now.  Under the Douglas administration, the budget to the Child Development Division has been seriously damaged.  There aren’t nearly enough licensors to provider the necessary services and those who are providing those services are stretched thin.

J.D.’s piece referenced what happened in Tennessee: oversight was lax until an actual death took place.

Is this what we want in Vermont?  Keeping the licensor team so small that they just don’t have the resources to make routine visit inspections to Registered home providers until there’s an active complaint about the provider?

Until we’re ready, as a state, to provide serious investment in child care and early education, we’re putting our children at risk, not because of the vast majority of providers who do their thankless, poor-paying, jobs without complaint, but because of the few in the field who treat children as commodities.

What happened in Guilford is an outrage, but it’s also a tragedy of monumental proportions.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d much rather have the event where children were placed in danger be our rallying cry to put more resources into child care and inspections than wait until that danger turns to injury or, even worse, death.

…because, really, what can you say in response to this?

Per today’s Brattleboro Reformer:

Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors are determining why a shipment of lead shielding from Pilgrim nuclear station in Plymouth, Mass., to Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon exceeded radiation levels established by the federal Department of Transportation.

[…]

When the package arrived in Vermont… the package had radiation readings of between 1.3 and 1.8 millirems an hour. The DOT limit is 0.5 millirems.

“For refueling outages, we routinely ship tools, shielding, equipment and even people from one plant to another to perform work,” said Dave Tarantino, spokesman for Pilgrim.

[…]

“We are pretty darn careful about the shipping of this stuff,” he said.

Crooks and Liars has the details, which they got from govgap.com:

If this is true, then we’re dealing with some incredibly blatant misogyny here, but they might know their target audience.  As Think Progress Reports, the national review’s Rich Lowry, has been busily praising the sex appeal of Palin:

I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

And in that same Think Progress piece, is this youTube clip:

I guess if lots of men voted with their penis, this could be a problem.  I just don’t think that men who might be otherwise inclined to vote with their penis respect women enough to vote for them at all.  

This a flier that’s been distributed around St. Albans recently:

So here’s what interests me:

1. It looks as though they’re enticing people to show up by offering them free crap.  I’m sure that will give us a good perspective on whether or not they’re there to support Wal-mart.
2. It looks like quite a bit of money went into arranging this event.  I wonder where it all came from.
3. The last two sentences win the “unintentional irony of the week” award.  A promotion to support local merchants in support of an organization which is pretty much guaranteed to run them out of business?  This is like having a “pro-life.  pro-family” statement at the end of an announcement for a “lesbians for choice” rally.

I don’t know who dreams this stuff up, but if you could place that sort of surrealism in pill form, you’d probably make millions.

I don’t have time to do a full write-up on this, but I thought y’all should be aware of the e-mail I just got from the Douglas campaign:

Dear Friends,

Governor Douglas has announced a multi-part strategy that builds upon his earlier initiatives to boost Vermont’s economy, while also helping to prepare Vermonters and Vermont companies to succeed in the global economy.

The problems on Wall Street – coupled with the partisan impasse in Washington – are having real consequences for the families of our state.  Vermont cannot just sit by and wait for Washington to intervene or the market to correct itself.  There are things we can and must do here to lessen the effects of this national recession, keep costs down, inspire innovation and grow good jobs that Vermonters are proud to have.

The rest of the “plan” is after the jump.

Governor Douglas is determined to keep our state on a path to prosperity by encouraging innovative businesses and entrepreneurs, making commonsense reforms to our permitting process, using existing infrastructure to help businesses expand or relocate in Vermont and encourage more affordable housing options, promote greater energy efficiency, and create more jobs in emerging green industries – all while not adding to the already high tax burden Vermonters face.

Please help us spread Governor Douglas’ pro-growth, pro-jobs vision by making a contribution today!

The elements of the Governor’s strategy are:

• The Vermont Innovation Challenge: The first company, small business or entrepreneur to cross the line and achieve a goal that both solves an engineering challenge and benefits the public good secures the right to operate new or expanded manufacturing operations free from state taxes, specifically state corporate taxes and education property taxes.




• Research & Development Tax Credits: As the knowledge based sector of the global economy expands, Vermont must continue to adapt by welcoming software development and other high tech industries.  Research and development tax credits will mirror the federal R&D tax credits at the state level for entrepreneurs on the cutting edge of their industries so that Vermont companies to better compete with companies in other states that offer similar credits.




• Permit Reform: Although we have made commonsense changes in recent years, we can do more to streamline the process and welcome families and business to our state.  Governor Douglas will direct the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, the Natural Resources Board, the Agency of Natural Resources, as well as the business and environmental community to come together to once again reform our permitting system so that we can better protect our natural environment and help employers compete.




• Urban Homesteads: By encouraging first-time homeowners to invest in underutilized space on upper floors of thriving commercial buildings, we can significantly increase economic activity in our downtowns and village centers and creating more affordable housing option for Vermonters.




• Opportunity Zones: By encouraging first-time homeowners to invest in these spaces we can significantly increase economic activity in our downtowns and village centers and creating more affordable housing option for Vermonters. Industrial facilities that have been vacant for five years or more would be afforded certain benefits to create incentives for renovation and renewal of use.  




• Green Growth Zones: Ensuring the economic and environmental well-being of current and future generations requires a wide ranging commitment to responsible pro-growth policies. In Green Growth Zones, a renewable energy source (wind towers, solar arrays, a biomass facility, a hydroelectric facility) will serve as the hub around which businesses can locate and create jobs with special incentives such as financing, expedited permitting and lower electric rates.




• Smart Grid for Vermont: A Smart Grid will empower Vermonters by giving them the tools they need to lower electricity consumption and costs; improve system reliability; and give all Vermonters an opportunity to help shape our shared energy future. A Smart Grid is an enhanced electric transmission and distribution network that uses an internet-like communications network technology, distributed computing and associated sensors and software to provide consumers with the decision-making information they need to better manage their family or business’ consumption and energy costs.

We need your help to make sure that Governor Douglas can put these commonsense proposals in action and keep Vermont on a path to prosperity.

Let’s get going in these last 35 days to make sure Governor Douglas can get back to work fighting to make Vermont an even better place to raise a family and start a business.  We need your continued help to get the Governor’s pro-Vermont, pro-jobs message out to Vermonters.  Please contribute what you can today!

Sincerely,

Team Douglas

Discuss.