This is big news.

NPR.org, April 30, 2009 · NPR has learned that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is planning to retire at the end of the current court term.

The vacancy will give President Obama his first chance to name a member of the high court and begin to shape its future direction.

Souter has recently been referred to as one of the Court's “liberals”. This is a stretch, but it is clear that Souter showed an amazing degree of independence from the Republicans who appointed and supported him. I've always been impressed by his writing and work on the court.

For instance, in this week's oral argument on the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act:

Justice David Souter disputes that the day is all that different, laying out the recent empirical evidence of voting disparities and government misconduct.

It was expected that Obama would have opportunities to make one or more appointments early in his term. Just this week rumors surfaced that Clarence Thomas has floated the idea of retiring if he can reach an accommodation with Obama on a replacement. Whoever is appointed to replace Souter will not change the balance of power on the Court, but it does give Obama a chance to start making an impression on the Court's makeup and direction.

Entergy and their buddy, Gov. Douglas, would love you to think that there are no problems at Vermont Yankee and we can happily go forward without too many worries. We haven't seen it quite the same way here at GMD. In fact, if you search our archives for “Yankee” and “leak” you'll find over 200 entries, and I don't think any of them refer to George Steinbrenner's highest paid employees.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen, who has served on the oversight panel looking into Vermont Yankee's operations, has an op-ed piece in the Free Press today that explores and summarizes the panel's findings and recommendations. Guess what: it's not the clean bill of health that you might have heard.

Here are a couple of highlights, but you'll want to follow the link to read the whole thing.

And as you think of our future with Vermont Yankee continuing to run, and with the 60-year cool-down period vouchsafed to VY by Douglas, you might want to ask yourself, “Do you feel lucky today?”

The VYOP uncovered serious and system-wide problems. We concluded that VY has both mechanical and cultural problems that Entergy must address before any license extension to 2032. Entergy's deferred maintenance of VY's mechanical components is troubling and expensive to fix.

More important than mechanical component failures are the serious systemic cultural problems the VYOP uncovered. Historically, VY has been a very reliable plant, but we found that it is now considered among the 25 percent worst nuclear plants in the United States according to the “Equipment Reliability Index.”

My friend Audrey has one of the most important jobs I know: she's a public school teacher. She's just started a blog about her experiences and what she's learning about inequality and how we need to raise our children so we'll have the kind of humane society many of us are trying to get to.  

I love this blog. It's smart and personal, and you can really see how much she loves her kids, and why they love her. I'll definitely be going back.

UPDATE AGAIN:

GMD learned from T.J. Donovan this afternoon that he has declined to prosecute the Pillow Bandit. This has since been confirmed on WCAX:

“There is no crime. Nobody was injured. It appears that all the participants were willing participants. No damage was done to any of the property, the businesses downtown. No pedestrian traffic was impeded. It lasted about 90 seconds. It was truly a pillow fight,”

Great decision, T.J.!

UPDATE:

It appears that sanity reigns at the office of the Chittenden County State's Attorney.

 “As of right now I’m not overly concerned,” Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan said Monday afternoon, though he promised to review the disorderly conduct charge police are recommending he file against Cassler. “If it is as it sounds, and it was some sophomoric hijinks, and some kids were having a pillow fight, it sounds like it’s much to do about nothing.”

 We've been critical of T.J. Donovan in the past for his handling of antiwar protesters. Let's hope he stays on track here and declines to prosecute.

From pillow fighters, that is.

The short version: there was a flash mob on Church Street last Friday afternoon, the activity being a big pillow fight.

For the rest of the story, take a look at Blazing Indiscretions.

Or follow this link for video.

There's also a Stuck in Vermont video here.

For me, though, it's pretty hard to see why the organizer had to be arrested.

It's not necessarily the end of the road (not by a long shot, now that the Republicans have discovered the joys of our litigious society and the uses of litigation to overturn legitimate elections), but the news from Minnesota's three-judge panel is clear: Al Franken is the new senator from Minnesota. The judges determined that “Franken is entitled to receive the certificate of election” after defeating Coleman by 312 votes.

“Franken received the highest number of lawfully cast ballots in the Nov. 4, 2008 general election,” the ruling stated. With recently added absentee ballots counted, Franken upped his lead over incumbent Norm Coleman to 312 votes.

The odious Ben Ginsberg, Bush's henchman in overthrowing the 2000 election of President Al Gore, promises an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court

You must look at this article from PZ. The story is very clear: a nursing student in Canada has been kicked out of her nursing program because she is a lesbian who chooses not to discuss her sexual orientation with her patients.

How do we know this? Because the bigot who kicked her out was dumb enough to put it in writing:

Nioska, I've been thinking about the meeting in rita's office and I feel that maybe Nursing is the wrong career for you. As a nurse, I have to advocate for my patients, and i feel that female patients will be uncomfortable having a lesbian nurse caring for them.

If you're interested in communicating with the nursing program about this, here are some contact e-mail addresses:

Cathy Dufour, Academic Department Coordinator, Nursing cdufour@cegep-heritage.qc.ca, and Jo Anne Werner, Academic Dean. jwerner@cegep-heritage.qc.ca.
And the person who kicked her out: TKINGSLEY@cegep-heritage.qc.ca.

Cross posted from Rational Resistance:

It's almost enough to make you wish she had been elected VP, isn't it?

Todd Palin's half-sister arrested for burglary

Palin is the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin. He declined comment.

Earlier today we posted a story about homophobia in a Canadian nursing program. Because questions have arisen concerning the veracity of the story, it has been taken down until we can be more comfortable with the facts as originally reported.

Moves to Print-Only Service for Twenty-First Century

Exclusive from Editor and Publisher:

Bucking current trends in newspaper publishing, Green Mountain Daily announced that today's posts will be the final Internet edition of the decades-old publication.

GMD Editor in Chief John Odum announced the move at a packed press conference in Montpelier. “I've always had printer's ink in my veins,” Odum said. “Now, with such national publications as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain Daily ceasing publication, we sense an opportunity for a change in our business model. With our daily readership approaching eight hundred, we think the best way to expand our coverage is to open things up to people who don't have an Internet machine in their house.”

Under the new arrangement, Green Mountain Daily will continue to be a daily newspaper, but will be delivered to readers' homes and sold at news stands  across Vermont and in other population centers, such as Washington, D.C., Boston, and Bratislava, where GMD readers are found.

GMD Chief Financial Officer Julie Waters explained that the new arrangement will immediately be more profitable than the outmoded online version. “The Internet has posed significant problems for our revenue stream,” Waters explained. “Although our advertising and subscription rates should theoretically be sufficient to support the operation, our revenues have never been able to keep pace with the expense of sending out technicians to disconnect the GMD service of nonpaying subscribers.”

Green Mountain Daily maintains its commitment to staying on top of the latest technology. For instance, through an innovative partnership with Western Union, the new GMD Twitter edition will now be delivered to subscribers by telegram at the standard rate of 140 characters per Tweet.

Do you remember the old joke about the Soviet Union? It had to do with whether a two-party system could ever work, and the answer was no, because if there ever were another party, everybody would join it.

The nomenklatura of the American health insurance industry have figured out that the same principle applies to them. In the current discussions of health care reform (and thankfully, since we kicked the Republicans out of the White House, that doesn't mean they're talking about slamming the courthouse doors on the victims of medical malpractice), one of the questions is what kind of public option should be built into the new system.

What the health insurance companies realize is that they're parasites, and they can't compete with the public system. Or, as they put it, A public plan would most likely employ the payments rates used in Medicare, which are far lower than the rates paid by private payers. In fact, the average family of four with private insurance spends an additional $1,778 on health care each year because of Medicare and Medicaid underpayments to providers. On an aggregate level, commercial payers incur approximately $89 billion more in costs than they would if public and private payers all paid equivalent rates.

Tim Noah has a longer article on this in Slate that is worth a look. His conclusion is that when the insurance companies whine about needing a “level playing field”, what they really mean is that they don't want to face the competition from a public system that will inevitably put them out of business.

And it can't come a moment too soon.