Journalistic malpractice, Freeploid-style:

That’s how the ‘Loid headlined an article about Speaker Shap Smith appointing one additional Democrat to the Health Care Committee.

One.

Singular.

Headline: “Seats.” Plural. Nice little thumb on the scale, Mr. (or Ms.) Freeploid Headline Writer. What’s the matter, wasn’t there room to write “one more seat” instead of “more seats”?

As for the story itself, there’s nothing much wrong, aside from it coming out three days after Peter “Scoop” Hirschfeld had the same story in the Mitchell Family Organ. (Not paywalled.) And, well, Hirschfeld had a fuller explanation for Smith’s move.

As for the move itself, Smith offloaded Republican “Not That” John Mitchell* in favor of newly appointed Democrat Kathy Hoyt, leaving the 11-person panel with only two Republicans. (The rest: 7 Dems, Independent Paul Poirier, Prog Chris Pearson.)

*Watergate reference. You young ‘uns can Google it.

Smith has two solid reasons for tilting the committee even further.  

First, Hoyt has impeccable credentials. She was Secretary of Administration in the Kunin and Dean administrations, and she served on a panel that examined Vermont’s tax structure. She knows government finance and tax policy, which will be the keys in implementing single-payer. She will be a valuable addition to the committee.

Second, even though the 2013 committee had a solid Democratic majority, it was occasionally troublesome. Poirier, Pearson, and the Republicans often acted as a Coalition of Mutual Convenience. As Smith put it, “It’s a 6-5 committee right now.” And as Hirschfeld reports:

That narrow margin led to some very public setbacks last session for the committee’s Democratic chairman, who saw his committee go against him on at least one high-profile vote.

The strengthening of the Dems’ partisan edge is a bit of a slap at Republicans, and also at Pearson and Poirier, who willingly made common cause with a party that’s staunchly opposed to health care reform. It’s a power play by Smith to be sure, but it’s well within the purview of a Speaker with a super-majority. Can’t say I blame him, what with health care reform being the signature issue of the Shumlin Administration.

The maneuver prompted the customary partisan bleat from the other side:

House Minority Leader Don Turner, however, said the shake up amounts to partisan maneuvering designed to undermine the influence of the GOP as the Democratic supermajority prepares to face tough questions over the troubled roll out of the new health insurance exchange.

Uh, well, yeah. But I’d say two things to Mr. Turner.

One, “the influence of the GOP” was pretty much nonexistent already.

Two, if you don’t like it, go win some elections.  

Oh, it’s just one piece of bad news after another for our “trouble-plagued” Vermont Health Connect.

Well, you’d think so if you got all your information from certain media outlets. Seven Days’ Paul “The Huntsman” Heintz apparently spent a good chunk of last week foaming at the mouth about the deceptively rosy picture painted by Governor Shumlin in recent months. And he ended the week by grudgingly listing VHC as a “winner” (although he added a big, only partly relevant, caveat) while listing the Governor as his top “loser” for having, in the mind of Heintz, “lost any remaining credibility he might have had with the press corps.”

Over the top much?

We will return to the Huntsman, but now we skip on to the Freeploid’s Nancy Remsen, who penned an article allegedly covering the ups and downs of VHC. The story, of course, spent very little time on the ups while painstakingly lingering over the downs. Roughly one-quarter of the entire story recounted, blow by blow, the bad experience of one single Vermonter. This, after briefly mentioning the news that VHC enrollment numbers are climbing steadily and that, in Shumlin’s words, “We are making great progress.”  

But for those fortunate enough to have access to the Mitchell Family Organ, Peter “Radio Killed the Newsprint Star” Hirschfeld provides a balanced overview of the state of health care reform:

Much has been made of all the tumult surrounding the rollout of the federal Affordable Care Act.

But for a significant swath of the Vermont population, the arrival of the new law has brought with it the solution to many of their health care problems.

Revised income eligibility limits mean that about 40,000 residents of the state have become newly eligible for Medicaid… for many of the clients served by advocates like Peter Sterling, executive director of the Vermont Campaign for Health Care Security, the changes will mean the difference between having insurance or not.

And there’s the real point, and the real victory of reform: a whole lot of people will now have health care security. Many will have access for the first time, and everyone will have access to insurance plans that meet solid standards. Those good things, and more, are happening regardless of the temporary troubles of the VHC website.

Indeed, as I’ve previously reported in this space, Vermont has been the most successful state in the country — and it’s not even close.

But let’s go back to Paul Heintz, the Huntsman who’s gone to sea and morphed into Captain Ahab, pursuing the Great White Whale of VHC “disaster” and Shumlin deceptiveness.  

The Huntsman’s high dudgeon was triggered by a gubernatorial press conference at which Shumlin claimed he’d been open and honest about the state of VHC.

Which is, of course, not true. Shumlin spent most of 2013 as VHC’s #1 salesman, accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative — or at least doing his best to sweep it under the rug.

This is where Shumlin’s worst qualities shine brightest. He always acts like a salesman for his own policies, often transparently so. And he refuses to admit that he’s ever wrong, or that he failed to tell the whole truth. Which bit him in the ass at last week’s presser, as he endlessly parried reporters’ questions and narrowly parsed the meaning of words, phrases, and reports. I’ve seen it happen, and it’s often cringe-worthy.

So yeah, Heintz is right: Shumlin did a sales job on health care reform, downplayed any problems, and refused to admit he’d done anything wrong.

But that’s not an impeachable offense. It’s what politicians do.

Shumlin does it more brazenly than some others. But Heintz’ Captain Ahab act is an extreme overreaction. Governor Shumlin has lost some credibility. But he’ll gain it back and more, if health care reform continues to progress.

Heintz ends his tirade with a reference to VHC as a “train-wreck,” which is farther from the truth about health care reform than anything the Governor has said. And while Heintz has dutifully chronicled the missteps and problems, he has written little or nothing about the positive side of the story.

Which dramatically outweighs the negative. And that ain’t spin; it’s the simple truth.  

As much to move the front page along as to re-focus the conversation on pan-handling,  I thought it would be useful to share a couple of links to recent stories that deal with other cities’ attempts to address the question.

First, is Boise, Idaho, where the ACLU has initiated legal action against the City over the imposition of an anti-panhandling ordinance.

Then, there is the town of Hudson, NH which is grappling with its own attempts at imposing an anti-panhandling ordinance.

That’s as far as I looked on Google; but the fact the stories are gleaned from virtually opposite ends of the country suggests that this is an issue whose day has come.  Certainly, the amount of controversy and traffic engendered by the diary below rivals that of our hottest gun discussions.  That some of the animus was personality-driven nevertheless leaves considerable actual debate on the table with regard to the substantial issues.

India was mentioned in one of the threads, reminding me once again, that when I visited that country in 1983, begging and homelessness was still uncommon in most of the U.S.   So uncommon, in fact, that  I was quite unprepared for the shock of seeing so many people living such marginal lives in close proximity with the homes of bankers, stock-brokers and wealthy business owners.  I think at that time, India had one of the highest levels of income inequity in the developed world.  Today, the U.S. occupies a similar position, with India having improved to be closer to the European norm.

So, unless something can be done to stem the tide of income inequity (which seems unlikely given today’s political realities) we can only hope to have as peaceful a coexistence of parallel but contrasting lives as India had in 1983!

It is however, a faint hope at best.  Despite its diversity of traditional cultures, India’s population was pretty homogenous in its practical belief systems.  If you were poor, centuries of tradition had taught your people that this was never going to change for them; and a convenient religious conceit provided that you must accept that lot in life if you were ever to hope for a better hereafter.

As visitors, we were struck by the fact that despite the horrifying crimes of violence that seemed to be routinely taking place among the rural poor; and despite what we in the U.S. would have seen as conditions strongly favoring revolution in the cities; the wealthiest citizens walked amongst the throngs of wraithlike poor, more or less unmolested…except for what can only be described as the most aggressive pan-handling.

How will the U.S. fair in its own decent into two-tiered living, when our popular mythology has relentlessly insisted that anyone can be rich, anyone can be famous, anyone can be president?  I wonder.

It’s been almost a century since America’s financial elite recognized the smell of revolution in the aftermath of WWI.  Tent cities constructed by homeless Veterans served to put the robber barons on notice that, if somebody didn’t come up with a way to remedy some of the inequities, the wolves that would be at their own doors would be their own fellow citizens, and they would come trained as merciless killers, just as had happened in Russia not long before.

It was not some noble inclination that finally prompted the power elite to create what the Republican’s like to think of as the “Welfare State;” it was this fear that violent revolution might be just around the corner.

But Republicans, particularly “Tea Party” Republicans, have just as short a memory as they have an attention span for the troubles of the 99%.

I realize this was sort of a long story with a short purpose of redirecting the conversation back to what place we will find for the destitute in our unequal society, when they begin to quote the language of the Bill of Rights?

VPT had a very interesting Bill Moyers segment on today, in which he spoke with Richard Slotkin, author of “Violence,” “The Fatal Environment” and “Gunfighter Nation” about the mythology and history of violence in this country.

I end with a link to that program because, although it focusses on school shootings,  it certainly is worth considering in this conversation, too.  

Despite years of promoting Vermont secession and patently bullshit representations of the law to absolutely no affect other than to clog the Internet with various forms of her lies, Missy Rosemarie keeps limping along like some demented, energized bunny.

In her most recent dishonest bit of fact omitting legerdemain, Jackowski, who describes herself as an “advocacy journalist” ( who, by the way, has no journalistic roost other than the websites that offer an unrestricted portal to any nutjob with a keyboard and internet access) has yet again (12/13/13) accused a Bennington Select Board member of “threatening” a member of the  public.

Taking, for a moment, Jackowski’s claim to be an advocacy journalist, let’s consider what, exactly, an advocacy journalist is.  By the definition of most in the reality based world, an advocacy journalist is one who uses facts while presenting a point of view of said facts.  In Jackowski’s perverted use of the term “advocacy journalist” such a journalist plays fast and loose with the known facts and conveniently ignores facts that interfere with the point of view being pushed.

Recently Jackowski has been making the charge that Bennington’s “highest ranking public official” has made “threats against a citizen.”  Oddly, the citizen purportedly threatened has made no complaint.  Jackowski’s left that out of her “reportage.”  Moreover, while that official has made a public apology to the citizen for his intemperate remarks that were not intended as a personal threat (12/6/13), Jackowski has continued to work her meme more than a week after the apology at another website while making no mention of either the apology or the lack of a complaint.  In fact, she has been repeatedly challenged to make the complaint herself if she thinks it’s such a fucking big deal but, like with requests for facts from even her supporters here, she’s done nothing and ignores all queries.

Rosemarie Jackowski has lied about a smear poem that she concocted at one website by stating that (although no one said she did) she didn’t smear them on GMD.  I’d doubt that the Board would agree that she hasn’t smeared them here with unsubstantiated claims of conflicts of interest on GMD – we’re still waiting for those ghost facts of yours, Rosemarie.

It’s time for Rosemarie to man up and do what that Select Board member did and to apologize for her own specific gross misrepresentations, calculated omissions and lies here and elsewhere.  As an example of the two faced quality of her journalistic standards, Jackowski dedicates her diary below to one of the most foul mouthed mud slingers on GMD.  I guess she’s only against mud slinging when it isn’t one of hers doing the slinging.

Time to come clean, Rosemarie.  Or maybe you ought to just personally secede.

Dedicated to PeteySweety and all wise men during this season of Peace and Good Will…

Has Christmas become too commercialized? In some towns the display of decorated trees is now controversial. Is it a ‘holiday’, or is it a ‘holyday’? Is it ‘Christmas’, or is it ‘Xmas’?

Rosemarie Jackowski

Vermont News

Christie to Vt: ‘Candidates matter’

By Peter Hirschfeld

Vermont Press Bureau | December 13,2013

That was the message from the Republican governor of New Jersey this week as he regaled nearly 700 members of the Vermont GOP with the story of his own unlikely rise in a state where politics tend to run the same shade of blue as in Vermont.

[..]Media were barred from the fundraising gala at the Champlain Valley Expo in Essex Junction, but an audio recorder belonging to the Vermont Press Bureau made it past the gates. In addition to Christie, the recording captured speeches by Lt. Gov. Phil Scott and Rep. Heidi Scheuermann, who were among the lead organizers of an event they say marked the dawn of a new era in the Vermont Republican Party.

http://rutlandherald.com/artic…

Wow … I gotta say very impressive. Like the oldschool journalists that used to hide in closets eavesdropping to get stories.

A standing O for VPB & Peter Hirschfeld & most of all the “smuggler”.

So Chris Christie has come and gone. Vermont Republicans feel a sugar-rush of energy and hope unfelt since the salad days of Jim Douglas. They also received a much-needed infusion of cash from their first successful high-profile fundraiser in at least two years. Otherwise?

The evening was an opportunity squandered.

The party could have gotten so much more out of the evening — in money, and in free publicity.

Money first. It was reportedly a capacity crowd, which begs the question, “How many more tickets could have been sold?” The event was held at the Champlain Valley Expo, which has a large and flexible events facility. (Banquet capacity up to 2,000, according to its website.)

I don’t know if anything else was going on last night at the Expo, but ticket sales had been brisk from the moment Christie’s appearance was announced. Could the party have requested a larger space? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps after the dismal performance of the Scott Brown fundraiser in Rutland (50 attendees, a net loss for the event), party leaders may have been understandably gun-shy.

Okay, so the VTGOP failed to maximize its investment. The bigger failure, by far, was the limited publicity due to a complete news blackout. The media were banned from the event — and even banned from getting anywhere near the event. And by all accounts, nothing controversial was said! No “legitimate rape,” no “lazy 47-percenters,” just an evening of uplifting messages about broadening the party’s appeal. Republican Rep. Patti Komline Tweeted, “NO partisan trash talking. Loving it!” And former Democratic Burlington City Councilor Ed Adrian Tweeted, “No ‘red meat’ … Still wondering why media shut out.”

Me. too.

(Even a clueless Tea Partier like John “MacGoo” MacGovern realizes that his party missed an opportunity. He posted this comment today on VTDigger: “Though I agree that the Vermont media does not, generally, give Republicans a fair shake, the idea of keeping the media out of an event like this one strikes me as utterly foolish and counter-productive.”)

This morning could have brought an avalanche of positive press for the VTGOP: energy, enthusiasm, money, a validation of Phil Scott’s alleged new direction. Instead, we get dribbly little write-arounds (Freeploid’s Nancy Remsen resorted to quoting a Christie speech from last month, since she couldn’t get even a transcript of his remarks at the Expo) and complaints about lack of access (Paul Heintz and Anne Galloway). All festooned with dismal photos of a cold, dark parking lot and a forlorn “GOP GALA” sign.  

Not only were the media kept out of the event — they were blocked from getting anywhere near the frickin’ building! An understandably cranky Galloway:

Party officials, security and police officers refused to let us anywhere near the doorway to the Blue Ribbon Pavilion at the Champlain Valley Fairgrounds and relegated us to the chain link fence on the edge of the property. So we stood for about an hour and a half outside the entrance gate, jumping up and down to keep warm and waving at the GOP attendees driving past.

At one point, we took our chances and wandered in, only to be chided by security who were backed up by several young police officers who looked as though they relished the thought of carting us off.

It appears as though Christie’s team requested the ban on coverage of his speech, but this blockade of the entire site seems like absolute overkill. And the blame for that has to go to the VTGOP.

The Christie team was also, as far as I can tell, guilty of overkill, in a way that reveals a lack of respect for the VTGOP. Christie himself jetted in and out of town; his stay was as brief as possible. State party officials were even afraid he’d miss the $10,000 “policy roundtable” because his schedule was so tight. His office couldn’t be bothered to return calls from multiple Vermont reporters.

And if the Christie team ordered the media ban, well, they don’t always do so. Remsen reports that the media were welcome to a Christie fundraiser last week for Idaho’s Republican Governor. Why can Idaho reporters do their jobs, while Vermont’s finest have to freeze in the dark?

No press conference, no access to the speech. Not even a brief photo opportunity!

No, Christie gave the VTGOP the absolute minimum of his time and effort. And the VTGOP, being what it is, was grateful for the crumbs from his table.

(Admittedly, that’s a whole lotta crumbs. …Thank you! I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.)

Christie reportedly promised to return to Vermont when hell freezes over if Vermont gets “great candidates up and down the ballot.” I think he’s fully aware that that’s a check he’ll never have to cash.  

(North or south, east or west, local conflicts of interest effectively disenfranchise folks in many communities throughout Vermont.  Time for a statewide policy! – promoted by Sue Prent)

Those who say any publicity is good, might not be right this time.  The new Anti-panhandler law has brought focus to Bennington from far and wide. Most of the publicity has been very negative.  We need to find a way out of this quagmire.

Locally the law has generated the largest citizen protest since March 20, 2003.  That protest opposed The Shock and Awe war which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

A few citizens are asking questions about a possible conflict of interest. Three members of the Select Board have connections to businesses on Main Street.  Whether or not any law was broken is not the issue. There is a perception of impropriety.  Select Boards represent all citizens, not only the business community.

Some citizens are circulating petitions so that the law will be the subject of a citizen vote.

Many others, have serious concerns about the impact of this law on taxes. Laws restricting free speech have been overturned all over the country. Legal battles are expensive. Will taxpayers be at risk if the law is challenged on Constitutional grounds?  The ‘law-of-unintended-consequences’ might come back to haunt us sometime in the near future.

Beyond all that, there is another question. Was the law based on ‘misinformation’?   Citizens, and also maybe some members of the Select Board, were given the impression that the law was necessary because the presence of pan-handlers was having a negative impact on Main Street businesses.  How can that be?  The front page of the October 15, 2013 issue of the Bennington Banner ran a news report about how great business was. “I’ve been here for 13 years, and this is the best Columbus Day week-end since...”, said the office manager of Evans News.  Other Main Street businesses reported similar good news.

The issue right now, today, is how do we stop the bleeding and allow the healing process to begin.   There is a way.  Think about this: What would happen if a citizen – any citizen- made a request of the Select Board to reconsider the law and have an immediate re-vote?   Could that happen without a citizen request? Suppose the Select Board on their own, made the decision to hold a re-vote. This would be a win-win-win for everyone. There is no downside to this.  Consider the risk-benefit ratio. The Select Board would look good, because they would be functioning at the highest level of democratic standards. The citizens would be comforted to know that the members of the Select Board were courageous enough to either change their votes, or else they were convinced that their original votes were correct.

With the new information that is now available – the depth of citizen opposition, and the information in the October 15 issue of the Banner,  the Members of the Select Board owe it to themselves to reconsider.   A few votes of conscience could turn this around.

Before I moved to Vermont I lived in Michigan for about twelve years, and it was there that I cast my only vote for a Republican.

The year was 1978 and the candidates for governor were William Milliken, a very moderate, Nelson Rockefeller-style incumbent, and William Fitzgerald, a conservative, Catholic, anti-choice Democrat. Because of the choice issue I voted for Milliken, who won easily, and I've never regretted that vote.

But look at Michigan today. They still have a Republican governor, but it's Rick Snyder, a vicious conservative, and today they pushed through a new anti-woman measure, narrowly defeating a provision to give the bill immediate effect.

The new bill provides that abortion can't be covered by health insurance. A woman who wants coverage for abortion will have to buy that coverage separately. And get this: pregnancy is a pre-existing condition, so you can only buy the coverage before you're pregnant (or before your father raped and impregnated you, say).

 Snyder has appointed an emergency manager for Detroit, and he has praised that manager's attack on retired city workers in his bankruptcy filing. These are terrible times for a once-great state.

By the way, Governor Milliken is still alive and 91 yars old. He supported John Kerry in 2004, endorsed McCain in 2008 but changed his mind after McCain's attacks on Obama, and has said   “Increasingly, the party is moving toward rigidity, and I don't like that. I think Gerald Ford would hold generally the same view I'm holding on the direction of the Republican Party.” He supported Snyder in 2010 but I doubt he would approve of what he's done lately.

Today, Seven Days’ Off Message has a story about dueling finance claims by the two sides of the F-35 debate.

On the one hand, you’ve got Nicole Citro of the Green Ribbons (pro) campaign making this claim:

Together, she reckons, business sources accounted for “around half” of the Green Ribbons campaign’s total take of “a little more than $20,000.” Citro says the rest of the money came from “hundreds” of work a day Vermonters who either made small donations or bought marked-up merchandise such as hats and T-shirts emblazoned with pro-F-35 slogans.

Okay.  I’ll  take her word for that, but clearly $20,000. is not the end of the funding story, so more money was coming from somewhere.  If not the Green Ribbon Campaign, then who else paid for a fleet of costly advertising?

Why demure and deflect?

We know that Ernie Pommerleau, got very busy with his checkbook, out of the goodness of his heart.  He paid for that junket for Frank Cioffi, the Governor and the rest of the in-crowd to bop down to Florida for a look-see.

I’m sure that he has nothing personal to gain from siting the F-35 at Burlington Airport.  He’s just a patriot as opposed to anyone who thinks the siting of the planes in Burlington is a terrible idea; and that includes a couple of former Guardsmen/women.

Proponents such as he and Citro were actually motivated by a desire to “stand up for the Guard,” Pomerleau says. F-35 opponents, he charges, were “demonizing” the 1100 Vermonters who serve with the Green Mountain Boys.

Okay.  Perhaps that was just a little over the top.  Don’t oversell it, Mr. Pomerleau.

Of course, in this age of “balanced” reporting (aka, false equivalency) Seven Days is careful to say that the opponents spent money, too; and themselves, have yet to give a full accounting.  

Operating under the “umbrella” of Burlington Peace & Justice, a local non-profit, details of their separate financing are not broken out in BP&J’s tax records, which cover all of the affiliate organizations that operate under that same umbrella.  

Roger Bourassa, treasurer of Stop the F-35, volunteers to sit down with journalists and give a full accounting; which seems like a pretty fair offer.

‘Wonder if bloggers can sit in.

Who has more claim to the “grassroots” designation? You tell me.

Stop the F-35 appears to have just two big backers.

The perennial deep-pockets of Ben Cohen  yielded $12,000. to $15,000.

Nothing mysterious there.  Cohen is an unabashed “do-gooder,” a class of windmill tilters for whom I must confess great personal affection and affinity.  

The other big contributor wishes to remain anonymous, giving $12,000. in cash and paying $8,000. for website services.  It sounds like that pretty much all disappeared into legal fees.  

When you go up against the kind of power block that supported this project, that kind of money doesn’t go very far.  

And speaking of the power block, it is also reported that one sustaining donor to the Democratic Party is redirecting his/her monthly contribution of $100. to Stop the F-35; so the push to site the plane has not been without some collateral damage to the power block’s base.

Stop the F-35 isn’t giving up yet.  The group is appealing the site approval; and appeals are money and energy sponges.  

Believe me, I know.   It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it.

And the Stop the F-35 Coalition isn’t giving up – at least not in terms of getting its message out, which Andreoli says has consistently been, “Love the Guard, hate the plane.” It’s aiming to raise another $75,000 in 2014.

Hear that, Mr. Pomerleau?  

See you in court with Old Glory waving!