Here comes Jack Lindley, head of the impoverished and hopeless VTGOP, trying to stir up some controversy at Gov. Shumlin’s expense. And failing miserably.

Chairman Jack has issued a news release about Shumlin’s widely-rumored interest in becoming the next Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, a post that will become open in December.

Lindley says the DGA chair is nothing more than a disreputable  “bundler of undisclosed corporate donations.” Always makes me laugh out loud when a Republican gets dudgeony about corporate contributions. If he’s so concerned about “bundlers of undisclosed corporate donations,” maybe he should have a stern talk with Jeff Wennberg of the non-disclosing Vermonters for Health Care Freedom. Not to mention Karl Rove et al.

Lindley then goes on to say…

If the governor plans to become the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and be a part-time governor during his next term, Vermonters are entitled to know that before November.

More unintentional comedy.

Now, Jack, you may not be aware of this, but the head of the DGA — just like the Republican Governors Association — is always a sitting Governor. I do hope you’ll be calling out Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell for his “part-time” service to his home state while he’s been chairing the RGA and, as you so vividly put it, “hangin’ with DC big shots and running around the country handing out undisclosed campaign contributions.”

Of course, you were referring not to McDonnell, but to Shumlin’s as-yet hypothetical candidacy for the DGA. I’m sure the RGA is a completely different kind of organization that requires its chairman to do absolutely nothing and raise no money whatsoever.

Poor Jack Lindley. If this is the best his outrage machine can concoct, then the VTGOP is truly up the brown-tinged watercourse without a means of propulsion.  

Oh, goodie. Vermont’s own Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is looking for new ways to sell its plastic non biodegradable K-Cups.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. is in talks with pharmaceutical companies about developing drinks for its Keurig brewers that it hopes could aid the health of consumers and company margins, a senior executive said.

I’ve always been highly ambivalent about GMCR, an authentic Vermont success story that’s created a lot of jobs — but has basically done so by manufacturing gazillions of K-cups. The company is facing an existential crisis on two fronts: the shitcanning of founder Bob Stiller after his binge-borrowing forced a stock sale at an inopportune time; and the pending expiration of some very valuable patents on the Keurig system, which will open the door to cheap competition for GMCR’s core product.

Its response: look for new high-margin stuff to fill those little plastic cups with. Nutritional concoctions, energy drinks, even medications, brewed into a delicious hot single-serving beverage. Or, as CEO Larry Blanford puts it: “a tremendous opportunity to carry functional additives to the consumer.” Just imagine the medicine chest of the future stuffed to the brim with K-cups, and a Keurig machine next to the sink.  Maybe you could even get custom-made K-cups including all your prescription meds.

My ambivalence is heightened. GMCR insists it’s trying to develop a biodegradable K-cup. (Hey, if they manage to do it, there’s a new market they can exploit: the consumer who wants convenience but aspires to be earth-friendly might be willing to pay extra for a “green” K-cup.) But in the meantime, it’s littering our landfills with little plastic cups. And is actively looking for ways to sell lots and lots more of them  — dreaming of a future where there’s a Keurig in every room, and we get all our fluids, supplements, stimulants and medicines one freshly-brewed cup at a time.  

A recent opinion piece by Bill Schubart bugged me when I first heard it, but I wasn’t going to write about it until it kept reappearing in the Vermont media. First as a commentary on VPR, then on Vermont Digger, and finally in the Times Argus and Rutland Herald. The omnipresence of this thing — and why do we have to keep hearing and reading the same handful of commentators over and over and over again? — finally induced me to address its shortcomings.

There’s a certain stock type of opinion piece which we could call The Bemoan. It’s kind of like The Get Off My Lawn, a harkening back to an earlier, idealized day, except with less anger and more sadness.

The latest Bemoan to appear in Vermont media — repeatedly, ad nauseam — is a piece by Bill Schubart called “News and Opinion,” deploring the sorry state of American journalism.  

(Or, as it is entitled on the Rutland Herald’s website: “Media Literach: News or Opinion?”

Yes, “literach.” Sounds like they could use a bit of remedial literacy in the Herald newsroom.)

There are significant problems with American journalism and serious questions about its future, but Schubart manages to miss the target quite badly.

Before I get to the fact that there was never, ever a Golden Age of Journalism, I must mention the single worst sentence in the piece.  

But now, the likes of Walter Cronkite and A.J. Liebling have been replaced by Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher, all bringing us opinion and entertainment that we hear as news.

Okay, hold it right there. “Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher”? A professional opinionator, a left-leaning news anchor, and a topical comedian? All three are equally to blame for the debasement of our national discourse? It’s like taking three very comparable figures from the mythical past — Father Coughlin, I.F. Stone, and Lenny Bruce — and finding them guilty of the exact same sins. Ridiculous. And insulting to the professional ethics of Ms. Maddow.

After the jump: A.J. Liebling, the Maddow of his day.

Second, he’s completely off-base to hold up A.J. Liebling as an exemplar of unbiased journalism. I love Liebling’s writing, and I strongly recommend a book called “The Press,” which gathers his commentary on newspapers in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Liebling was a brilliant observer of the press (and many other things) — but he was not at all objective. He was an advocacy journalist with a strong left-wing viewpoint. Exactly like Rachel Maddow, as a matter of fact.

Third, to cite Liebling as a shining beacon of a lost great era is to absolutely ignore what the man himself wrote about the press of his day. He saw the press as deeply, profoundly dysfunctional in a way that imperiled the functioning of democracy.

Gee, exactly what Bill Schubart is deploring today. Here’s a quote from “The Press”:

As an observer from outside I take a grave view of the plight of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy. It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum, while armament, a secondary instrument of liberty, is a Government concern. A man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there.

And there’s the truth about the sad state of American journalism: it has always, from the very beginning, been a deeply flawed and often dysfunctional thing. It has frequently been as much a hindrance as a help to the health of our democracy. And its shining moments have often resulted from principled journalists battling against the system, finding ways to break through the commercially-driven noise of our media.

We have always had our Edward R. Murrows, seizing opportunities — temporarily, before commercialism drove him into exile — to speak truth to power. We have had our Walter Cronkites, doing their best within the constraints of a system or using their own popularity to present uncomfortable truths. We have had I.F. Stones, blazing their own trail and managing to make a difference outside the system.

We have also, sadly, always had our Rush Limbaughs, our Father Coughlins, our red-baiting Westbrook Peglers, our Walter Winchells serving up celebrity gossip marinated in rabid anti-Communist fervor. We had WIlliam Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer — yes, the one the Prize is named for — whipping up war fever and bullying the United States into the Spanish-American War by publishing blatantly fabricated propaganda. (Funny, there’s no Pulitzer for effective propaganda. There really ought to be, don’t you think?)

Fundamentally, we have always had a system of journalism that, as Liebling pointed out, is beholden first and foremost to commercial interests. It is not a matter of opportunistic individuals exploiting the system; it is a matter of the system seeking out and promoting such individuals for the sake of profit.  

Most of Schubart’s commentary is about a high-school encounter with the fury of William Loeb, longtime publisher of the Union Leader in Manchester, NH. Loeb was a rabid right-winger, always hunting down Commies and railing against taxation. When Schubart was a high school senior, Loeb conducted a vicious smear campaign against Schubart’s school and one of its teachers.

That was in 1962, during the presumed Golden Age of Cronkite and Liebling, and before the dastardly Rachel Maddow and her fellow-travelers Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher began their systematic debasement of American journalism.

Yes, there were heroes and scoundrels alike back then, just as there are now and have always been.Journalism today faces serious existential issues — but it always has. True journalism will always be an endangered species in a society driven by the profit motive, because real journalism has nothing to do with profit.

One more Schubart shibboleth.

Information needs to be vetted by skilled editors and fact-checkers to ensure that it is accurate, unbiased and verifiable.

…responsible reporting on any topic must be derivative of fact, not opinion. Conservatives claim the NY Times is liberal and liberals claim that the Wall Street Journal is conservative, yet both still invest to some degree in ensuring that news is more or less news.

“Skilled editors” do much to ensure a kind of quality control. They also tend to homogenize the news. They rarely question basic assumptions. The herd mentality usually prevails. (Just look at the sad, predictable performance of the Beltway punditry for a good example. Or, if you like, the repeated reliance of the Vermont media on the same old handful of commentators and analysts.) And pardon me, but I am not at all encouraged by the dreary phrase “still invest to some degree in ensuring that news is more or less news.”

To some degree? More or less? There’s a clarion call to inspire the soul and warm the blood.

You know, I think I’d rather watch Rachel Maddow.  

So, the two most popular personalities in public radio have announced their retirement.

Garrison Keillor and Scott Simon? Nina Totenberg and Sylvia Poggioli? Robert Siegel and Ira Glass?

Nope. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of “Car Talk,” will stop recording original shows this fall after celebrating their 25th anniversary on NPR.

“Car Talk” is the adorable little goofball of a show that draws huge ratings and has turned Saturday mornings (“Weekend Edition Saturday,” “Car Talk,” “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”) into the highest-rated and most lucrative daypart of the entire week for public radio. Many stations double-up on “Car Talk” during fund drives, broadcasting at least two hours every Saturday and sometimes another hour or two somewhere else in the weekend schedule. They would often schedule big raffles and challenge grants for Saturday morning because they knew they were reaching their maximum audience. The Car Guys produced special material for fundraisers, offered special premiums, and recorded promotional spots to pay elsewhere in stations’ fund drives.

The car guys will live on — in rerun material from their extensive archives, recut into “new” shows by the “Car Talk” staff. We’ll see how long they can keep that up; sooner or later, it’ll become noticeable that they never talk about recent-model cars. Eventually, the show will decline and disappear, although it may take years for that to happen. I’m sure the vast majority of stations will be happy to continue carrying the reruns as long as they can squeeze any value out of them.  

It’s ironic that “Car Talk” has been such a cornerstone of public radio’s financial world for so long, because it’s helped build a public radio system that’s too big and risk-averse to ever produce another show like it. These days, everything in public radio is tightly formatted and designed not to give any listener a reason to change stations. The days are gone when a couple of untrained ex-auto mechanics could become network stars.

As the shows have been homogenized, so have the individual voices. Unless you’re a hard-core public radio junkie, can you tell Steve Inskeep from David Green from Guy Raz from John Ydstie? When you tune into “All Things Considered,” do you know whether Michelle Norris or Melissa Block is co-hosting? No, and that’s the way management likes it. That’s why Bob Edwards was exiled to satellite radio; they didn’t want any single person to be bigger than the system.

Problem is, it’s hard for a “system” to engage the kind of passion that turns listeners into donors. That’s what “Car Talk” does, and “A Prairie Home Companion” does. And with “Car Talk” edging into the shadows, public radio will have to find new ways to induce the kind of generosity it’s now dependent on.  

A federal appeals court has ruled against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the indefinite storage of spent nuclear fuel at sites around the country.

Seems the NRC thought it didn’t need to conduct an environmental impact review on the question because it assumed that (1) sooner or later we’d get our act together and crate a long-term storage site, even though we’ve repeatedly failed to do that, and (2) on-site storage would create no risk, even if it took 50-60 years to create a long-term solution. And even though there have been numerous instances of leaks from on-site storage facilities.

And the court didn’t like that.

“The commission’s evaluation of the risks of spent nuclear fuel is deficient,” the three-judge panel said in the latest decision. Spent fuel “poses a dangerous long-term health and environmental risk.”

The decision isn’t too surprising, since the NRC got grilled by the court in a March hearing:

As Chief Judge David Sentelle told the NRC attorney during today’s argument in New York, et al., v. NRC: “We don’t owe any deference to your political predictions.”

“Political predictions,” in this case, referring to NRC’s belief that the US will, somehow, someday, identify a long-term storage site. Even though, to date, any place that’s suggested as a site rises up in arms at the prospect. (Including big empty Nevada and the perennially impoverished Upper Peninsula of Michigan.)

After the jump: An update on what the court actually ordered.

Per the Brattleboro Reformer:

The court ordered the NRC to conduct a more thorough and objective review of the storage of nuclear waste and to do a proper review as mandated by the National Environmental Protection Act.

And this nice little snarky comment:

The appeals court wrote that the NRC “apparently has no long-term plan other than hoping for a geologic repository.”

Ya gotta have hope, that’s what I always say. Coming soon to a stage near you: A revival of “Annie,” with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the title role.

“There’ll be a long-term nuclear waste disposal facility

Tomorrow,

Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow,

There’ll be a long-term nuclear waste disposal facility!

Tomorrow, tomorrow,

I love ya, tomorrow,

You’re always a day away!”

Oh, look, what’s this in my Times Argus today? (paywalled on the TA site but available for free here) It’s a story about how the pending cuts in defense spending will savage Vermont’s economy.

A conservative military think-tank based in Washington, D.C., says Vermont stands to lose out on more than $100 million in federal revenue next year if Congress doesn’t avert looming cuts in defense spending.

Hmm, sounds serious. Because the White House and Congress failed to reach agreement on spending and taxes last fall, automatic cuts will take effect later this year. Which means, among many other things, $600 billion in defense cuts over the next ten years.

(Which is a small drop in a very large bucket, but never mind.)

The alarm was sounded by the DC-based Center for Security Policy. We’ll get to their “credentials” in a moment, but first… how did CSP arrive at this “more than $100 million” figure?

Travis Korson, manager of public information for the Center for Security Policy, says if defense cuts of that magnitude are spread evenly, percentage-wise, across the country, Vermont contractors will see awards fall by $122 million annually.

Gosh, how scientific. They took the $600 billion and divided it among the states on a per-capita basis. See, nobody actually knows what cuts will be made because they haven’t been made yet. This CSP “study” took about five minutes with a calculator, and is based on a completely faulty assumption.

But it’s got the business community in a tizzy.

“We absolutely are concerned about what might happen,” says Chris Carrigan, vice president of business development for the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.

After the jump: why nobody should be the least bit concerned.

I could spend some time revisiting the irony of conservatives suddenly being freaked-out about cutting government spending, the abundant evidence that defense spending is a particularly inefficient means of economic stimulus, and the lack of attention to how other spending cuts will affect Vermont’s economy. But let’s take that as read and cut to the punchline.

The Times Argus piece correctly identifies CSP as a “conservative” group. But it fails to identify the “genius” who runs this “think” tank.

Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Ah yes, Frank Gaffney, neoconservative assclown. The guy who’s accused President Obama of being secretly Muslim and having a secret plan to impose Sharia law in America. The guy who sounded the alarm about the new logo of the Missile Defense Agency being a combination “of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo” when, in fact, the logo was designed during the Bush administration.

And yes, the guy who’s questioned whether Barack Obama is a natural born citizen.

And yes, the guy who claimed (in 2009, people — in 2009!) that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing.

And yes, the guy who asserted in 2011 that the Conservative Political Action Committee had “come under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.” The Conservative Political Action Committee!

And yes, the guy who, in 2003, called on the US military to “take out” the Al Jazeera news network.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. He’s a nut.

Y’know, I’m old enough to remember when the term “think tank” actually meant something. The Rand Corporation, the Brookings Institution. Now, any idiot with a website and letterhead can open an institute or a center and put out press releases and get taken seriously by the media. This article is stupid and pointless and a waste of the Times Argus’ extremely limited resources.  

Hm. In Montpelier, a city with a lively night scene and its share of poverty and drugs, the police department’s desire to purchase and deploy Tasers sparked (sorry) a lengthy public debate and a six-month study.

Next door in Berlin, a smaller and more spread-out community with no real town center, the select board has unanimously approved the purchase of four Tasers.

For a police department with seven officers.

Or, as the Times Argus (story presumably paywalled) put it:

Select Board members haven’t yet seen a policy outlining when they should and shouldn’t be used and don’t know precisely where the money to pay for them will come from, but they did agree this week to buy four Tasers for their seven-member police department.

Great. No policy. No budgeted funds. On top of that, former Select Board member Paul Irons noted that, before its vote, the Board had only heard a presentation by a Taser salesman. He suggested that “a true public hearing” would be valuable. But the Board felt otherwise.  And Selectman Pete Kelley offered this pearl of wisdom:

“If you let me shoot you once with my .45 (caliber pistol), I’ll let you Taser me all day,” he [said]. “It’s much safer than a gun.”

Good point, Mr. Kelley. Maybe you’d like to be pepper-sprayed for a few hours while you’re at it. Do I have to say this again? Tasers are touted as a safer alternative to guns, but too often in real life, they are used as less-safe alternatives to nonviolent intervention. Give a man a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, the Berlin police will soon have four shiny new hammers. So if you happen to be visiting their fair town, whatever you do, don’t act like a nail.

(Addendum: When I wrote this, I neglected to check the “Recommended Posts” column before I hit “Save.” If I had, I would have noticed Norsehorse’s diary on the same subject. I didn’t mean to pre-empt his diary.)

In an interview with the Valley News, John Campbell made it official: he’ll run for re-election to the State Senate and seek another term as its President Pro Tem. And in the process, he delivered a nice little condescending pat on the head to certain freshman Senators (viz.  Galbraith, Benning, and Baruth) who, apparently, were responsible for the Senate’s dysfunction this year:

“I know there was some frustration on the part of some of the freshmen in thinking the power was isolated with the committee chairs, but what I was trying to explain to them is there is a thing called seniority and experience, and just as in anything, you have to put in your time and learn the ins and outs of the institution before you want to run the thing.”

(Linknote: The Valley News’ website is a quirky thing. As of right now you can find the story here, but that may change later on.

Now, now, boys! You just sit quietly in the corner and play with your toys, and maybe if you’re still around in eight or ten years we’ll let you join the adults.

Christ on a cracker, what condescension. This, coming from the guy who got into an argument with a colleague and called him a “horse’s ass” within hearing range of a reporter. Yes, he’s the one to turn to for questions of legislative etiquette.

Truth is, the Senate’s old lions are accustomed to doing things their way, and when someone new comes along they don’t like it. From what I read of this session, the Senate could use more new faces and new ideas, and less of the same old same old.  

In the ongoing struggle to recover from Tropical Storm Irene, Governor Shumlin has done a lot of things very well. Top marks virtually across the board — handling a catastrophe so smoothly that I don’t think he gets enough credit for it. The Republicans are ignoring Irene because they can’t find anything to take issue with.

But there’s one big exception: treatment for the mentally ill. The entire system is severely overtaxed. Mental health staff are working as hard as they possibly can just to keep the system functioning — barely. Patients aren’t getting the treatment they need, and are often in unsafe situations. There have been attacks on staffers. A major incident could happen at any moment — one that would catapult this issue onto the front pages and into the center of this year’s political debate, and call into question Governor Shumlin’s carefully manicured reputation for good management.

I’m not talking about the plans for long-term reform or the debate over the size and configuration of a state hospital replacement. I’m talking about the jury-rigged, bailing-wire-and-duct-tape mess we’ve got today. And will continue to be stuck with for quite a while.

The Governor and the Legislature deserve credit for moving quickly to craft a long-term plan. But the short-term plan seems to consist of “keep costs down and hope it doesn’t blow up.”

Well, even without a real blow-up, the mental health care system is starting to become a major issue in the media.

Exhibit A: In a Bloomberg News article about mental health care nationwide, Vermont is the poster child for inadequacy and neglect. The story, entitled “Sleeping in Vermont Dumpster Shows Psychiatric Cuts’ Cost,” begins with the sad case of a Burlington woman who clearly needs some kind of inpatient care, but in the wake of Irene, there simply isn’t any space.

…private-hospital emergency rooms have been backed up with mentally ill patients — some handcuffed to ER beds for as long as two days. Dozens of people are turned away each month without being admitted, and calls to Burlington police about mental-health issues increased 32 percent over the prior year.

The article includes this cheery observation from Dr. Robert Pierattini, chair of psychiatry at UVM: “I think we may see a rise in suicide.”

There has been talk of an 8-bed temporary inpatient facility in Morrisville, or possibly a similar arrangement in Waterbury. That would not come anywhere near solving the problems, although it would ease the pressure a bit. But when will something happen? In a couple of months, we’ll be commemorating the first anniversary of the Irene disaster. It’s taking an awfully damn long time to create a “short-term” fix.  

“I worry every day,” Patrick Flood, the state’s mental health commissioner, said in a telephone interview last month. “I have on my screen right now the case of somebody we have to find a bed for tonight and there’s no apparent bed.”

Your anxiety is duly noted, Mr. Flood. It would be more compelling if you were one of the front-line people in health care or law enforcement, or the friends and family of people who need treatment; they’re the ones who actually deal with the consequences, the danger and the fear on an everyday basis. You’re the one in your office, looking at your screen.

Exhibit B: Another thing Patrick Flood is probably worrying about. A big story posted yesterday on VTDigger by Anne Galloway entitled “Brattleboro Retreat faced regulatory violations over drug overdose as lawmakers approved plan for mental health system.” (A plan that put the Retreat in a very central role and gave it a bunch of state money.)

In January, a patient named Jared Fitzpatrick grabbed some methadone off a nurse’s cart, overdosed, and died. His death triggered intensive reviews by state and federal regulators. The Retreat must implement a corrective action plan or face the loss of federal funding for some patients.

The problems at the Retreat occurred just weeks before the Legislature approved plans to rely on the psychiatric facility as part of its complex plan to replace the Vermont State Hospital with a new decentralized community mental health system.

And yet, officials from the Retreat and the Administration did not inform lawmakers of the nature of the incident or the investigations. In fact, if you read the exchange between Retreat CEO Rob Simpson and a Senate committee about Fitzpatrick’s death, it’s obvious that Simpson carefully framed his responses in a deceptive manner. Example:

“…we have not heard back from the medical examiner with any clarity on this death,” Simpson told lawmakers. “It’s unclear …”

Sen. Kevin Mullin interrupted: “But it was from natural causes, right?”

Simpson said,”Well, we don’t know, the medical examiner’s preliminary report is that, indeterminate cause of death.”

…Yet, the medical examiner’s office had preliminarily determined the cause two weeks prior. On Jan. 23, Steven Shapiro, M.D., noted the pending cause of Fitzpatrick’s death as an overdose of prescribed and non-prescribed medications.

It’s only one incident, but (a) it might have made a difference in how the Legislature viewed plans to give the Retreat a larger role in the mental health care system and give them $5.3 million to upgrade its facilities… and (b) as Jim Croce put it, “you don’t tug on Superman’s cape” by omitting key information from your testimony at such a crucial stage. Or, as Digger put it:

Though Fitzpatrick was not a ward of the state – he was a private patient – lawmakers and advocates say his death raises questions about the reliability of care offered at the Retreat and the ability of the Legislature to adequately monitor private hospital facilities receiving taxpayer dollars.

…Ironically, given the concerns about proper levels of oversight, the Legislature approved the reforms without knowing that the Retreat was in trouble with state and federal regulators.

And that’s a huge issue with Governor Shumlin’s future plans. They depend on private facilities to largely replace a state hospital. Are we going to be able to trust the Retreat to hold up its end of the bargain? And can we trust the Retreat — and the Administration — to be transparent when things don’t go according to plan?  

Thanks to a little detective work by fellow front-pager BP, we now know the source of Randy Brock’s mediocre website. No, it’s not Burlington, or Williston, or Montpelier, or Rutland, or St. Johnsbury; it’s Indianapolis, Indiana. Specifically, the offices of The Prosper Group, an e-campaign consultancy that serves right-wing candidates. They do websites, e-mail marketing and fundraising, robocalls, etc.

The IP address for Brock’s website is 174.129.24.4. It traces back to the Prosper Group. The same IP address is behind the campaign websites of Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra*, Indiana Republican Mike Pence, Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock**, and Minnesota Republican Pete Hegseth***, all of whom are PG clients. (Other past/current PG clients include Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Scott Walker’s Wisconsin GOP, and nutball Congressman Allen West!)

* Whose moment of infamy came on Super Bowl Sunday, when he ran a blatantly racist TV ad (in Michigan markets) with a Chinese-American actress speaking pidgin English and thanking Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow for weakening America with her careless spending. The ad never aired again, and the actress had to issue an abject apology for portraying a racial stereotype.

***Oops, he lost already.

One more thing: that same IP address is shared by the website of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, the absolutely 100% (cough) local (cough, cough) grass-roots (cough cough hack hack hack) organization devoted to killing Gov. Shumlin’s health care reform plan. The VHCF website was registered by a Prosper Group staffer in March 2011. According to the Vermont Press Bureau, VHCF was founded in April 2011 — the month after PG registered its website — by Darcie Johnston. The same Darcie Johnston who’s now a top aide in the Brock campaign.

Small world, hmm? Maybe she got a two-for-one deal on the VHCF and Brock websites.

Anyway, the fact that Brock’s website is being run out of an office in Indianapolis explains why (a) the site looks so slick, and (b) it’s so dreadfully short of content and hardly ever updated. Considering that Randy Brock probably has a smaller budget than most of PG’s other clients, I suspect they’ve given him a cut-and-paste template website and are doing little or nothing for maintenance and updating.

It’s sad, really. Brock could have done better for a lot cheaper by hiring some computer-major Young Republican from UVM. and getting himself a WordPress site.

After the jump: is Brock’s campaign a Trojan horse?

This is one more sign of how Brock’s campaign is hard-wired into the hard-right national Republican network, and how little it’s being tailored to the undecided and Shumlin-leaning voters that Brock will need if he’s to win the race. The most recent poll gave Shumlin 60%, Brock 27% and only 11% undecided — so Brock not only has to sweep the undecideds, he has to convince at least 11% of Shumlin’s voters to switch sides.

Hard to imagine him doing that with the campaign he’s running.

So is Randy Brock stupid, or is his campaign about something other than beating Shumlin?

There are those at GMD who think Brock is basically a kamikaze pilot: not meant to personally win, but to inflict maximum damage on Shumlin and his health care plan. That would certainly explain a lot. The way Republicans are talking these days, it sounds like they’ve half given up on 2012 already. It would also make sense with Bruce Lisman’s costly Campaign for Vermont pounding on the liberals and trying to sway the course of public opinion for the long haul.

I lean a bit more toward “stupid” — or, to be more precise, lacking imagination. I think most Republicans are trapped in a Fox News/Rush/Wall Street Journal bubble, in which all their opinions are reinforced and magnified. They can’t see anything outside that bubble, and they don’t realize that their ideas lack broad appeal. Jack Lindley seems to honestly believe that it’s only a matter of time before Vermont voters wake up and smell the free-market coffee. Or smell what the Brock is cookin’.

(Yes, I’ve been waiting a long time to use that line.)

I don’t think the current VTGOP has enough imagination or creativity to do anything else. Now, if Jim Barnett and Neale Lunderville (a.k.a. The Nasty Boys) were still running things, I’d lean more toward the conspiracy theory. To me, the way the VTGOP is generally floundering, I don’t think they’re playing a long game. I think they’re just trying to stay afloat.  

We might learn a lot more on July 15, the first campaign finance report deadline for 2012. If Brock has a bigger-than-expected war chest, especially if it’s stuffed with out-of-state money, then we’ll know that the VTGOP is being bought out by the conservative Billionaires’ Club, and Vermont Republicans have bought into the idea that money can buy them love. If not in 2012, then somewhere down the yellow brick road.