It seems the fine folks at the Campaign for Vermont (Prosperity) have executed something of a tactical retreat. Since GMD made note of the increasingly partisan tone of CFV founder/eminence grise Bruce Lisman’s radio ads, and since the Vermont Democratic Party filed a complaint over the anti-Shumlin rhetoric coming from this supposedly nonpartisan group, CFV has produced some new ads. And apparently scrubbed the offending ones from its website.

The new ads cut back on the overt partisanship. Instead of directly slamming Shumlin and the Democratic Legislature, the language is carefully oblique. For example, the new health care spot says that “some legislators are working hard to ensure choice … but many others seem not to completely understand what’s included in the legislation.”

The ads also include multiple voices, perhaps in response to GMD’s observation that CFV seemed to be a vehicle to promote Bruce Lisman rather than a broad-based policy shop. The latest ads include Lisman and an unnamed female voice, and some also include Tom Pelham (CFV co-founder and former tax commissioner under Gov. Jim Douglas) and State Rep. Oliver Olsen (R-Jamaica).

Gee, Bruce, couldn’t find a Democrat for your nonpartisan spots? Kestrel and I got skillz, and we could use the cash.

And, as we’ve noted previously, the CFV website has gotten a slight makeover to de-emphasize the Cult of Bruce. The photos of Lisman are fewer and less prominently placed, with more room for the stock photos of non-Vermonters as documented on GMD. (I do like the new photo of Bruce with a microphone. I imagine him singing karaoke. “Mack the Knife,” perhaps.)

All in all, the changes seem designed to carefully skirt the campaign rules that CFV is accused of violating. CFV is once again sporting its nonpartisan sheep’s clothing… but those Republican eyes are still glowing from within.

We also note with some sadness that the CFV’s list of Vermont media links still doesn’t include GMD. Its three links to websites include the truly nonpartisan Vermont Digger and the two leading conservative sites, Vermont Tiger and True North Reports. Hey Bruce, for the sake of nonpartisanship, how ’bout adding a link to GMD? No hard feelings?

Well, the Republican candidates and the Fox News crowd have found something new to wail about: rising gas prices at a time of year when they’re usually holding steady or falling, in spite of the fact that gas consumption is at its lowest level in 15 years. They’re right that gas prices are unusually high for midwinter, and there’s reason to worry that they may go even higher and threaten our fragile economic recovery; but they’re dead wrong about the causes, which may not exactly be news to some of you.

They’ve taken this — as they take every bit of bad news — as a pretext to bash Obama. His earth-worshipping Administration has turned off the taps! The oil industry is weighed down by the burden of regulation and limits on drilling. And the Keystone pipeline! Ah, if we only had Keystone, then gas would be free to anyone who needs it.

Baloney on all counts.

As for the castigation of the Tree Hugger-in-Chief, as Rachel Maddow showed last night, domestic oil production has increased substantially during the Obama years. It’s been consistently higher than at any point in the Bush presidency.

As for Keystone, anyone with half a brain could tell you that it won’t affect oil prices at all until it’s finished. And even then, the effect will be minuscule because the oil will go into the global marketplace. Keystone oil would make the global pool a little bit bigger, that’s all.  

So why are gas prices so high?

Commodity speculators.  

Let’s look at that renowned Socialist mouthpiece, Bloomberg Business Week, and an article entitled “Rising Gas Prices: Not Demand Driven.” It quotes Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service:

Kloza believes much of the increase is due to speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers. “We’ve seen about $11 billion of speculative money come in on the long side of gas futures,” he says.

Crude prices are so high that some refineries have cut production or even shut down rather than operate at a loss — which means lower gas production and higher prices.

This ain’t the first time we’ve ridden this speculator-driven merry-go-round. Remember June of 2008, before the mortgage meltdown? When gas and oil prices suddenly, and for no discernible reason, went through the roof? It was a severe shock to the economy, and set the stage for recession in the fall of that year.

That was a huge issue around these parts, because it came at exactly the time when heating-oil dealers were selling prebuy contracts for the winter of 2008-09. Customers bought the contracts because oil prices were widely predicted to be on an upward trajectory. There were fears of $5-a-gallon gas prices, and heating-oil prices to match.

Then, after a lot of customers signed those very expensive prebuy contracts, oil prices deflated. For the first time in memory, heating oil was much less expensive in winter than it had been the previous summer. Customers were stuck with the contracts because their dealers were just as stuck; they had prebought at summer prices.

At the time I was working for a local newspaper, and to find out why this had happened I interviewed Matt Cota, Executive Director of the Vermont Fuel Dealers Association. Not exactly an Occupy type. But he placed the blame squarely on commodity speculation.

The problem is that the trading of oil has been deregulated. And large financial players are dominating the market. A recent Washington Post article showed that 81 percent of future oil contracts are controlled by non-physical players — people who don’t own trucks, people who just trade paper.

…It’s provided volatility to a market that, frankly, is so vulnerable to volatility. We’re talking about a product that people need to get to work and to heat their homes. And for this to be used as a financial tool, so Wall Street traders can make billions, is shameful.

There has been some tightening of regulation since 2008. But to judge from the Business Week article, not nearly enough.

p.s. Some lefty commenters have posited a Wall Street conspiracy, driving up oil prices to derail the economy and torpedo Obama’s re-election effort. I might be inclined to agree, except I don’t think Wall Street is smart enough to pull it off. The Masters of Finance did the exact opposite in 2008: flushing the economy down the toilet in the middle of election season, all but assuring a broad Democratic victory. I don’t think they’ve gotten any smarter in the last four years.

Our intrepid State Auditor of Accounts, Tom Salmon, has made another big splashy announcement. He’s released a list of embezzlements from Vermont public schools totaling $415,000 since the year 2000. And he is shocked. Shocked!

“For a small state, the frequency of incidents involving fraud, embezzlement or theft in our schools is alarming,” Salmon said in a news release.

…Salmon expressed concern that the state Department of Education “has no policy for schools to report such incidents.”

(From the Burlington Free Press website)

Wow. Sounds like we have an epidemic of light-fingered school employees (probably unionized, n’est-ce pas?) stealing money out of the taxpayers’ pockets. Good going, Tom! Whatever would we do without our Auditor?

Unfortunately for Mr. Salmon, he made the mistake of issuing a full report with all the data and posting it online. And the full report makes him look like an alarmist out to score cheap political points at the expense of our public schools and citizens’ trust in them.

After the jump: Eight kinds of nonsense.  

First of all, let’s look at the relative scope of the problem. Even if you assume that it’s $415,000 in school system cash — which it is NOT, see below — that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the total amount of money in public education. Salmon’s own press release says “Each year, approximately $1.5 billion flows through the state education system.” Okay, $1.5 billion times twelve years equals $18 billion.

Now, my math skills are pretty rusty, but that looks like a theft rate of about four-one-thousandths of a percent. That’s 0.004%. That’s pretty damn impressive in my book. Our schools must have very good financial controls in place. We don’t have an epidemic of fraud; we have a dearth.

Second, these aren’t newly-discovered incidents. The vast majority were made public at the time. The only thing Salmon did was send a questionnaire to all the districts and Supervisory Unions in the state, and tot up the responses.

Third, in virtually every case, authorities were contacted, the guilty party was found, was fired, and either pled guilty or was convicted.

Fourth, in most cases, restitution was made or is in progress. So the actual losses are substantially less than the reported $415,000. So my 0.004% rate is actually too high. In terms of funds actually lost, it’s probably less than 0.002%.  

Fifth, Salmon’s list is greatly padded in a number of ways: cases where the theft was discovered before any funds were paid*; cases involving petty amounts of money**; cases where student or parent money was taken, not school funds***; and a couple of cases of electronic fraud committed by hackers outside the school system. Several equipment thefts were on the list, and one case where a principal’s keys were stolen, resulting in a $1,000 charge to change the locks. If a district lost a camera or a laptop, it made the list.

Sixth, the total is dramatically inflated by a handful of major cases. Three incidents account for almost three-quarters of the $415,000 total.

Seventh, in every case where it made sense to do so, policies and procedures were tightened up to prevent further thefts.

Eighth, Salmon makes a big stink over the lack of reporting to the Education Department or the Auditor. He implies some sort of negligence or looseness in the system. However, the districts are not required to report such cases, so there is no negligence involved. Virtually all incidents were reported to relevant authorities, and the others were too small to bother with.

My conclusion, after carefully reviewing Salmon’s report, is that our school districts have an excellent handle on their money, that there’s no real need for changes in policy or law, and that Tom Salmon is engaging in shameless political grandstanding.

*Example: An employee changed the salary figure in her contract, inflating her pay by $3,000. It was detected before she ever drew a check, and she lost her job.

***Example: A PTO officer wrote checks totaling $13,000 from the PTO account. There was an arrest, a guilty plea, and full restitution was made.

This diary was prompted by reader bmike’s posting entitled “Salmon, dodging political crossfire?” Credit where credit’s due.

Man, I wish I was State Auditor of Accounts. Good pay, state bennies, and apparently not much to do. Because Tom Salmon CPA* must be really bored. He keeps coming up with stuff that has nothing to do with his job description. Which, according to state law, involves auditing state agencies and departments and funds held by the state or its officers. Regarding local government, the Auditor can audit entities that receive state funds. The office has no general authority to look into a city or town’s finances.

*That’s how he referred to himself in a recent press release. Has he legally changed his last name to “CPA”?

Still, he decided to send a 109-item checklist/questionnaire on local financial practices to the city of Burlington. And then he made a big stink when the city didn’t return it in by his self-imposed deadline. He’s also upset that Burlington hasn’t welcomed his offer to provide professional support.

That purported reluctance is rather understandable on Burlington’s part, given that Salmon has made himself a highly partisan Republican figure, frequently injecting himself into political issues, and having criticized Burlington’s financial management in the past. Welcome, fox, to my henhouse.

The brouhaha is written up in Vermont Digger. (The story is worth reading, and below it is a perceptive comment by Doug Hoffer.) By VTDigger’s account, Salmon sent the checklist to Burlington on January 3, requesting a reply by January 31. The city’s response was dated January 27, but “Salmon told VTDigger that he didn’t see it until about a week later.” By which time he had complained to a state House committee (on February 2, a mere three days “late” by Salmon’s standard) about Burlington’s failure to respond. And had issued a press release about his testimony, presumably seeking maximum exposure for his plaint.

January 27 to February 2. The Burlington-Montpelier mail run is usually faster than that, but never mind.  

After the jump: a possibly irrelevant checklist, a rationalization considered and rejected, and a revelation of piscine impotence.  

In a letter accompanying the city’s completed checklist, acting Chief Administrative Officer Scott Schrader defended the city’s financial practices and noted that the checklist “was intended to assist small Vermont municipalities” that might be lacking in basic accounting knowhow, and that no other Vermont community “undergoes a more rigorous and detailed review of its finances.”

According to Vermont Digger, the checklist was headlined as the “City Version” of the document, but that the only apparent difference between City and Town versions was a single question, “Has there been a theft or embezzlement in the last 10 years?” (The answer was “no,” by the way.)

If Salmon was serious about probing Burlington’s financial and auditing practices, you’d think he could have spent a little more time crafting a City Version.

Looking at this situation objectively, without regard to the personality or track record of our current State Auditor, one can see situations where the Auditor’s intervention into a local government’s affairs might be desirable, even if it’s tangential to the job description. If you’ve got a rotten town council who won’t take its citizens’ complaints seriously or is clearly squandering public resources, then somebody has to step in. And maybe the Auditor can be that somebody in certain situations.

But Tom Salmon has a track record of sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, of making strong partisan attacks on Democratic officials and their policies, and of letting his attention drift from his core responsibilities like a dog distracted by a passing squirrel. In that context, his persistent prodding of Burlington looks less like the selfless act of a Good Samaritan CPA, and more like another move by an occasionally reckless attack dog. Er, attack fish.

Oh, two more things. First, there was a brief item about this on February 2 in vtBuzz, the Burlington Free Press’ politics blog. It included the line: “Salmon has asked legislators the authority to require municipalities to respond to his office’s requests.” (sic)

Wait. You mean that municipalities aren’t required to respond to your requests? Well, then, you really don’t have a complaint, do you?

And second, the best line in the Vermont Digger story:

“We passed on auditing Burlington Telecom because we didn’t want to be in a political crossfire,” Salmon told VTDigger. “We have a long history of patiently standing by.”

The sound you hear is the faint echo of laughter down the Winooski Valley and up the heights of the Green Mountains.

This diary arose from my reading another GMD diary posted by “bmike” and entitled “Lions and Tigers and Bearcats, Oh My.” If you haven’t read it, I’ll wait here while you do so.

Okay, we’re back. The posting is about a controversy in the small city of Keene, New Hampshire (about 22,000 people), which is considering the purchase of an eight-ton, $300,000 armored vehicle, the Lenco Bearcat, with grant funding from the Department of Homeland Security. During a City Council meeting, the Mayor was heard whispering to a City Councilor “We’re going to have our own tank.”

That’s all covered in bmike’s diary, which links to a Huffington Post article on the issue.

In the HuffPo piece, there are several quotes from Jim Massery, the government sales manager for Lenco, based in Pittsfield MA. He says some pretty incredible stuff, at the outer boundary of “ethical” even by a salesman’s standards.

After the jump, my commentary on his pitch, and a closer look at Mr. Jim Massery.  

The deal has sparked significant opposition in the community, who rightly ask why a town with very little violent crime would need a military-style vehicle. Even if it’s “free” (your tax dollars at work!), the city will still be on the hook for maintenance and staffing. And they’ll be looking for reasons to use it, warranted or not.

The opposition irks Mr. Massery. All blockquotes below are his.

I don’t think there’s any place in the country where you can say, “That isn’t a likely terrorist target.” How would you know?

Oh, I think I know. A peaceful town in southwest New Hampshire, best known as the home of Keene State College. No high-profile targets whatsoever. Sure there’s a statistical possibility of a terrorist attack on Keene, but it’s vanishingly small. (And if there is a terrorist attack, what the hell do you think you’re going to accomplish with a single vehicle?)

Next, he tried to portray the eight-ton mini-tank as a messenger of peace.

When a Lenco Bearcat shows up at a crime scene where a suicidal killer is holding hostages, it doesn’t show up with a cannon. It shows up with a negotiator.

How about, “When a Lenco Bearcat shows up at a crime scene, the suicidal killer will fly into a panic and start shooting”? And besides, what suicidal killers? Keene has had a total of two murders — TWO — in the last thirteen years.

Opponents of the deal point to a marketing video produced by Lenco, which shows a camouflaged police team carrying assault weapons and conducting simulated combat maneuvers. At one point, they attach a battering ram to the front of the tank, use it to break down the door of a house, and shoot teargas inside. Mr. Massery?

The video is totally irrelevant. We used some Hollywood effects and slick marketing to promote our product. So what?

So why didn’t your marketing video portray a hostage negotiator talking down a suicidal madman? Because it’s an assault vehicle! It’s designed for heavy-duty military-style action! And because you’re trying to sell this thing to local officials with penis envy. “We’re going to have our own tank,” indeed.

All we do is make trucks. How the trucks are used after the police department gets them isn’t something we can control.

“Sure, I sell cocaine, but I don’t make my customers use the stuff.” No, you’re not responsible for what the cops do with your Doomsday Machine; you’re just responsible for upselling them a piece of dangerous equipment that’s completely unnecessary.

We have Bearcats in 90 percent of the 100 or so largest cities in America.

Yeah, so? Keene is the 1,556th biggest city in America. Go peddle your tanks to the top 1,000 before you come back to Keene.  

And finally…

This is going to happen. It has already happened. To resist now would bed like saying police officers should scrap the Glock and go back to the revolver.

Unfortunate thing to say in Ruger country. But aside from that, no, no, it’s not like that at all. Your comparison is absolute nonsense. There’s no comparing a gun with a mini-tank.

Having explored Jim Massery’s trail of marketing slime, I thought I’d look him up in The Google. And what do I find? He is a conservative Christian, a Rush Limbaugh fan, who believes that Barack Obama is trying to steal away our freedoms. He’s all riled up over big government, wasteful spending, and the size of the deficit.

Except, apparently, when it comes to giving huge bags of cash to small communities so they can buy armored vehicles they don’t need. Talk about waste, fraud and abuse. This is what the Tea Party should be protesting.

This guy is the government sales manager for Lenco. It is his job — his entire job — to convince communities to spend taxpayer dollars for unnecessary (and dangerous) equipment. In other words, if it wasn’t for big government, he wouldn’t have a job.

And forgive me, it’s been a while since I closely read the Gospels, but I don’t recall Jesus traveling in a tank.  

As many GMD readers know, there’s another Vermont political website that leans in the rightward direction. It’s called Vermont Tiger, and it features the postings of local conservative luminaries such as Art Woolf, Geoffrey Norman, and El Jefe General John McClaughry.

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with one of Vermont Tiger’s penmen, so it was with some amazement that I began reading an essay by Tim Hayward entitled “A Retreat From Reason?”  In it, Mr. Hayward (former Chief of Staff for Gov. Jim Douglas) bemoans the increasing tide of anti-intellectualism. More and more people, he complains, are rejecting science in favor of their own preconceived notions:

Science and informed thought are under constant siege. There is now a seeming 21st century “know nothing” movement which, with blinders well in place, ignores science and evidence. And with a mixture of fear and rhetoric, and a media which skims the surface and feeds on controversy, the new know nothings are indeed affecting our lives and our state’s and nation’s policy decisions.

To which I can only say, Bravo, Mr. Hayward! The anti-scientific strain in modern political discourse is a severe handicap to the progress of our society and of humanity in general. It takes on many destructive forms: climate change denial, creationism and its lipstick-on-a-pig cousin “intelligent design,” pseudo-science on the health effects of abortion and birth control, the advocacy of the almost worthless abstinence education, the opposition to embryonic stem cell research, the constant attacks on education. The list goes on and —

Wait, what’s that?

…Ohhhhhhh.

It seems that Mr. Hayward isn’t concerned about all those excrescences of conservatism. He’s all het up over opposition to genetically-modified organisms and vaccines and wireless smart meters. Funny how his outrage is so narrowly focused.

Funny, and absolutely hypocritical. Listen, Tim, the modern Republican Party is the epicenter of anti-intellectualism. Your party has been making political hay, and obstructing positive change, by actively denying scientific truth on a wide range of issues.

His essay calls for a renewed Age of Reason. I sincerely join him in that call. Somehow, I doubt he realizes that a new Age of Reason would turn today’s Republican Party into a relic of a darker and more ignorant time.  

A minor kerfuffle in a North Carolina school lunchroom has turned into a massive, artificially-constructed “controversy” on the right wing. I first came across it on Vermont Tiger, GMD’s Internet Brother From Another Mother. Seems that a four-year-old girl had her home-packed lunch taken away by a lunchroom staffer, allegedly because it didn’t meet nutritional guidelines. So instead of her mom’s turkey sandwich, banana, potato chips and apple juice, the girl was given a cafeteria lunch that included chicken nuggets.

Immediately the cries went up: School Lunch Nazis! Government strikes down motherhood! Nanny state! The New York Post ran a photo of Michelle Obama next to its story entitled “Lunch nazis on the attack.” Vermont Tiger’s Geoffrey Norman seized on the story as an example of America’s journey “down that long, doleful road to serfdom.”

His commentary didn’t contain a link to the original story, so I had to find it on the Google. And what I found was a classic example of a tempest in a teapot. Well, actually, more like a teacup. Or a thimble. Or a wet spot on a napkin.

First of all, the story was originally reported on Carolina Journal, an online enterprise of the John Locke Foundation, a right-wing nonprofit organization. (Think “Ethan Allen Institute” with a drawl. And more money.)  So, consider the source.

It concerns an incident that happened on January 30. According to CJ, the girl had her lunch taken away by a “person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the… classroom that day.”  The girl’s mother says her daughter was instead given a prepared lunch that included chicken nuggets among other items, and that she was charged $1.25 for the lunch.

After the jump: the complicated truth behind a simple story

A spokesperson for the state’s Division of Child Development said the homemade lunch, as described, should not have been a problem, that the staffer shouldn’t have taken away the lunch, and that the parents shouldn’t have been charged.

It’s still unclear exactly who took away the lunch. WRAL-TV reports that the school system said it never took the lunch away or forced the girl to eat cafeteria food.  Assistant Superintendent Bob Barnes said that if a preschooler’s lunch is lacking in balanced nutrition as outlined by the USDA, the school is supposed to offer supplemental items for free. Somehow, the girl wound up in the regular lunch line:

“I don’t know whether the child was confused. I don’t know whether the teacher gave poor direction. I don’t know, but again, that child thought she had to go through the line,” he said. “If there’s a mistake, that’s our mistake.”

Some details remain unclear. But it certainly looks like an isolated incident, a simple screw-up in a crowded lunchroom. The school district wasn’t involved, the state wasn’t involved, the federal government wasn’t involved, and Michelle Obama sure as hell wasn’t involved.

It’s important to remember that this whole thing is like an inverted house of cards. It’s based on what the four-year-old told the mother who told a reporter who reported the story which then blew up on the Internet. It all goes back to the child, and it all depends on her recollection of a single event from two weeks ago.

Thanks to the right-wing echo chamber, though, this little story has been turned into a prime example of Government Gone Wild. And given conservatives’ love of a good meme that supports their opinions and prejudices, the North Carolina School Lunch Nazi is sure to enter the pantheon of right-wing boogeymen, along with the Cadillac-driving welfare queen and the fraudulent ACORN voter-registration drive.

There’s a cautionary lesson for all of us. When you read something that affirms your beliefs or preconceived notions, please take a closer look. You might find a very different reality behind the convenient myth.  

Lots of cheery news from a joint Legislative hearing on Wednesday 2/15 concerning efforts to clean up our increasingly turgid Not-Quite-Great-Lake. The takeaway, as reported by Dave Gram of the AP:

It may take decades for Vermont to clean up Lake Champlain, where phosphorus flowing in from farms, sewage treatment plants and suburban lawns has fed toxic algae blooms in recent summers, lawmakers were told Wednesday.

…Despite working to reduce phosphorus-laden runoff for more than a decade, Vermont cannot show it has made much progress, Environmental Conservation Commissioner David Mears said in an interview. Asked how long it might take, he said, “Decades is the right scale to think about it.”

Lawmakers were getting an update on efforts by state and federal officials to set new clean-water standards for Lake Champlain, in the wake of the Conservation Law Foundation’s successful lawsuit over the old standards, which were too lax. For those keeping score at home, CLF settled the suit in 2010, EPA started working on new rules about a year ago, and it remains a work in progress. Or possibly a case of bureaucratic Four Corners Offense, trying to run down the clock as much as possible before setting new and unpalatable standards.

Several factors are contributing to the the bleak outlook. One is a lack of resources at the state or federal level to tackle such a massive cleanup. Another is the non-point-source nature of lake pollution: so many farms, so many lawns, so many rivers and streams, so much development along waterways.

And then there’s an issue that may be about to get worse.

Another problem facing the lake is silt from erosion in the rivers feeding it, Buzz Hoerr, chairman of a Vermont citizens’ panel that oversees the lake, later told a House committee during a separate hearing.

…He said Vermont needs to “get away from the culture of drainage” that had governed too much river management during the last 200 years and “just slow things down.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, are we really going to see political support for “slowing things down”? There’s already been significant pressure for enhanced drainage to help prevent future floods. Irene is likely to remain a powerful political totem for some time to come, and if the choice is between protecting Champlain or preventing a future Irene, I’d guess that most politicians are going to choose the latter.

In any case, bad news all around for the health of Lake Champlain. And this story deserves more publicity than I think it’s going to get.  

Anti-health care reform activist Darcie Johnston has taken a short break from updating her Facebook page and then deleting it, to produce a couple of new radio ads for her lobbying group “Vermonters for Health Care Freedom.” It must have been a short break indeed, because they are about the worst, most poorly produced radio spots I’ve ever heard. And I’ve worked at some rinky-dink stations in my day.

The ads target (respectively) Representatives Paul Poirier (I-Barre) and Mark Woodward (D-Johnson), pressuring them to support legislation that would force the Shumlin Administration to shorten its timeline for preparing a final health care reform package, so the details would be available before the November election. The ads complain that “Governor Shumlin and the Democrat legislators are trying to pull a fast one” by delaying the details until after November, and urge listeners to contact Poirier or Woodward.  

But the ads are almost unlistenable. There’s no background music; it’s just a woman reading copy for a minute. Poorly-written copy at that. The woman (I suspect it’s Johnson herself) is obviously untrained in speaking on radio; the emphasis is all over the place, the delivery is forced and too fast, there are odd pauses and breaths, and the tone is abrasive. There’s an audible hum in the background, which means it wasn’t recorded in a professional environment.

Johnston also issued a news release trumpeting the new ads, under the title “Vermonters for Health Care Freedom goes to the air waves to encourage Representatives Poirier and Woodward to support releasing health care financing before November election.” Which tells me two things: (1) she doesn’t know how to spell “airwaves,” and (2) she doesn’t know how to write a good headline.

I hate to give Johnston any more pageviews, but I recommend listening to one of the spots as a prime example of how not to do political advertising.

I hope her undisclosed donors didn’t pay too much for these ads. Whatever they paid, they didn’t get their money’s worth.

Addendum 2/16: The Vermont Democratic Party has issued a press release about Darcie Johnston’s unfortunate Facebook post, readable at Vermont Digger which notes that she has close and longstanding ties to State Senator (and presumptive Republican Gubernatorial candidate) Randy Brock. It characterizes her as a paid Brock advisor since 2004. If true, then Senator Brock might want to rethink the relationship. The Facebook post and these awful ads certainly call into question her qualifications as a political operator.

By the way, Johnston posted a comment under the press release, in which she basically falls back on the “I was only kidding” defense. She actually says “I meant no offense to ANYONE.” (Caps hers.) So I guess it’s our fault if we’re offended. Again, is this someone you’d want working for you if you had serious political aspirations?

While writing my previous diary about the accusations against Brian Dubie and the Republican Governors Association, I thought the name of Dubie’s attorney, Brady Toensing, seemed a bit familiar. So I Googled around. And I found some fascinating stuff.

Which, it turns out, was discovered some six years ago by one John Odum, and reported on this very website. At the time, Brady Toensing was representing then-Lieutenant Governor Brian Dubie in a dispute with his then-Democratic challenger Matt Dunne. I’ll provide a brief summary, but for the full story I suggest you go to the original source.  

Brady Toensing is a partner in diGenova & Toensing, a heavy-hitting Washington law firm with a long track record of Republican partisanship. The firm’s founding partners are Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing, a D.C. power couple going back to the Reagan Administration. (Brady is Victoria’s son from a previous marriage.)

But their salad says were in the 1990s, when both were heavily involved in the Republican Congress’ legal battles with the Clinton Administration. Including the impeachment. They were also media whores, appearing hundreds of times on cable and network news shows, advocating in favor of impeachment. Both have continued to be involved in the Republican side of DC politics and lawyering. As has Brady Toensing.

Full details in Odum’s 2006 post. Which ends with the question, “Why is Dubie getting his hands dirty with this guy?”

Dunno, but apparently he likes it, since he’s hired “this guy” again. And “this guy” has launched his defense in the Dubie/RGA case with a direct political assault on Bill Sorrell’s credibility and ethics.