I, like many Vermonters, found Peter Shumlin’s and Pat Leahy’s extremely early endorsement of Hillary Clinton disappointing.
Coming as early as they did, those endorsements rang of quid pro quo for campaign support from the powerful Clinton bloc, or currying political favor with the presumptive nominee.
They also carried the distinct message, “ he’s not with us.”
To some this was an unnecessarily disloyal thing to do, since BernieSanders has, with few exceptions, pulled with the Democratic “team” since being sent to Congress, and more than given back to the others’ campaigns from his own well of regional popularity.
I immediately credited Peter Welch for shrewd independence and character under the circumstances.
His endorsement for Bernie coming now, at some distance from Shumlin’s and Leahy’s rush to declare, not only casts a positive light on Welch’s own greater discretion, but it gives him valuable cache amongst the groundswell of young voters who have been attracted to the race in support of Sanders.
Congratulations, Congressman Welch, and thank you for giving me another good reason to celebrate your service to your constituents.
From VtDigger.com: The Intex “Easy Set” swimming pool retails for anywhere from $35 to $500 depending on its dimensions and it’s billed as one of “the easiest family and friend-sized pools to set up in the world.”
But in Vernon, the Easy Set is serving a much different purpose than the one advertised on the manufacturer’s colorful website: It’s being used to help manage a complex groundwater-intrusion problem at Vermont Yankee.
That news about Vermont Yankee will likely not surprise anyone who remembers how Entergy let the operating boiling water reactor’s wooden cooling tower deteriorate so badly that that by 2007 it collapsed into a pile of timber leaking water.
Well give them credit; rushing out to Home Depot to buy a bunch of cheap plastic swimming pools for this is better than just mops and buckets. However they might want to use the term SOTASAFSTOR (SOrT Aa SAFe STORage) to be more accurate about Vermont Yankee’s condition.
The NRC reports the kiddie pools are located in the lower level of the turbine building and are “[…] placed such that any leakage would drain into the plant’s radioactive waste treatment system,” And no need to worry: the low level radioactive kiddie pools are only temporary — until the technicians come up with a better plan.
No worries. Entergy Vermont Yankee spokesman Marty Cohn echoed that, saying “there is no health or safety impact to the public or employees from this issue.” The swimming pools are a temporary measure, he added.
“The integrity of the pools was found to be adequate and the water found to be acceptable for those types of pools,” Cohn said. “Drains near these pools lead to sump pumps, which in turn lead to a waste-processing system.”
And while they mop up the contaminated water, Entergy and the plant’s surrounding town are “condensing” their emergency plan capacity. Beginning in April the emergency zone shrinks to the nuclear power plant site’s boundary, and one person on site is trained to extinguish basic fires and act as liaison to local agencies
Only a “catastrophic” event — like if all the water is released from the cooling pools and the fuel then reheats — would require a response from outside towns. And even then, according to plant owner Entergy, an emergency would unfold slowly.
“We’d have anywhere from 10 hours to 10 days to react,” said Brattleboro Fire Chief Mike Bucossi, “and reverse the process of those fuel rods.”
Yes VY, fill up the pools! Even in a catastrophe — according to Entergy— there is “anywhere from 10 hours to 10 days to react” — time enough to wade in the shallow end.
Are you coming to grips with the fact that we live in a world where pondering the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency is no longer considered completely delusional?
We can see a troubling future looming for America in two seemingly unrelated events — the water crisis in Flint and the Republican presidential primaries.
Both suggest that America is moving away from the high ideals of President Kennedy’s inaugural address — “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Instead we see politicians who say they love America, but hate the American government.
There is a word to describe the kind of government Michigan has and America is at risk of developing. It’s called kakistocracy.
It means government by the worst men, from the ancient Greek words kákistos, meaning worst, and kratia, meaning to rule.
And in the Republican party, currently full of the worst, front runner Donald Trump might be the biggest kakistocrat ever.
It’s already started, the conservative drumbeat about how devoted Scalia was to the Constitution.
Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course, but that doesn’t stop them from saying it.
Scalia practiced a form of fundamentalism known as textualism or originalism. Like religious fundamentalism, it has never been a consistent intellectual theme in either law or religion, but is a reaction to modernism and the inclusion of new ideas and population groups. The originalism practiced by Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts is merely an intellectual gloss on their visceral disapproval of the Twenty-First (and much of the Twentieth) Century.
A perfect example of Scalia’s legacy, one that has had terrible consequences for the United States and the world, is Bush v. Gore.
We know what Bush v. Gore did: it installed George W. Bush as president. What is significant to understand the thinking of the majority, however, is how they reached that result. The basis of the decision was the Equal Protection Clause, and the claim that differential vote counting methods in different counties in Florida violated equal protection.
The irony, of course, is that the majority was a collection of conservatives who never, ever saw an equal protection claim they agreed with. For them, and for Scalia in particular, the Equal Protection Clause was entirely limited to what Congress intended when it adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, and could legitimately go not an inch beyond. Thus, for example, Scalia consistently refused to apply equal protection to claims of sex discrimination because it never occurred to 19th Century Congressmen that women could make a legitimate claim to political or legal equality.
No, but for some reason, unique in the history of jurisprudence, the one disfavored group entitled in the eyes of these conservatives to make an equal protection claim was the residents of certain counties in Florida. Because that’s what the Civil War was all about, right? Oppressed county residents.
If there is any question in your mind, that meaning is that the conservatives were not deciding a case based on a legal principle, which would, of necessity, be limited not just to “present circumstances”, but would be applicable to all future cases raising the same legal questions. No, their decision was merely that they preferred to choose the Republican and not the Democratic candidate, and if you didn’t like it you could, as Scalia said, “Get over it.”
I watched the Super Bowl with my father, and as a cord-cutting member of the millenial generation I will admit that the most expensive ad buys of the year are a guilty pleasure. My fave was definitey Mt. Dew Kickstart’s “Puppy Monkey Baby”. Great dose of weirdness for a product I will never buy.
The real shocker though was an ad for a new drug, taking care of a problem one would like to think only a small, small minority of Americans face. Surely the market of people suffering from Opioid-Induced Constipation is not so great as to justify a multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad buy…. but apparently it is.
According to CNN there were 259 million prescriptions for opiates in 2012. Percocet, Vicodin, and the big daddy of them all OxyContin. The U.S. Pain Foundation says 1 in 3 Americans are in pain. If the market keeps growing the way AstraZeneca thinks, there will be 10 times more people who are suffering from OIC in 2019 than there are today.
The reaction to the ad was swift. Federal, state and local law enforcement took to Twitter to voice their disgust. Gov. Shumlin weighed in saying,
“The irrational exuberance with which opiates are handed out in America is driving the addiction crisis in this country…Now is the time to change that, not attempt to further normalize long-term opiate use by advertising a drug to help people take even more opiates during the most watched sporting event of the year.”
There is a huge disconnect between the public health crisis of opiate addiction and the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries promotion of these drugs. The fact that these drugs relieve terrible pain in a powerful, some would say “miraculous” way isn’t a justification for their liberal over-prescription.
My high school friend died from a heroin overdose, and got started by using pills like OxyContin. Another friend found his teenage son dead. These deaths are preventable. We could decide to treat these drugs with greater care. Limit their availability to those who are severe pain for whom non-opioid pain relief isn’t enough. That is not what we do. Opiates are the go to for post-operative pain management and chronic pain management.
I once went to the doctor with a friend who had a severe sore throat that wouldn’t go away. She walked out of a short visit with a big bottle of Hydrocodone. It was like prescribing a bazooka when a BB gun would do. She ended up just taking some Tylenol and resting up for a couple of days.Is the elimination of pain really a healthy goal for a society when the side-effect is the death of our children? Why are we doing this?
The answer is so obvious and so banal, it’s become cliche: PROFITS. Last year Forbes did a profile of the Sackler family and their $14 Billion net worth. It’s a sickening read. It describes the way in which the Sackler’s company, Purdue Pharma took generic Oxycodone, added a time-release mechanism to “prevent abuse” and expanded the market far beyond the cancer patients that a powerful opiate like this was originally prescribed to treat.
“Someone looking for a fix could just crush the pills to break the time-release mechanism, then snort the powder for a heroin-like high. Addiction, overdoses and accidental deaths followed, and Purdue Pharma found itself facing charges that it had misbranded OxyContin as far less risky than it was.”
They ended up paying $635 million in fines in 2007. I bet they still crack jokes at parties about the tiny percentage of their billions this amounts to. I wonder how many people they know are hiding their opiate addiction from their families, switching to heroin when they can no longer afford the pills and dying as a result of the Sacklers’ greed.
Yesterday I attended a “Congress in your Community” event with Rep. Peter Welch. Former State Senator Sara Kittell talked about the need for more support for treatment and recovery programs. We discussed the success of some local law enforcement efforts. Everyone looked at me like I had two heads when I brought up the idea of limiting the amount of prescriptions being written for these drugs. Before you work on the symptoms of blood loss from a patient, don’t you staunch the bleeding?
Local politicians pay a lot of lip service to this issue, but they haven’t been willing to demand that we do healthcare differently or put up the resources for access to treatment and recovery programs. We have got to have a shift in policy at the federal level, no doubt. However, we could do some things at the state level that would make prescription opiates less available. This requires challenging the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry and our culture’s obsession with pain.
In a way I wonder if we’re all addicted to opiates. I’m not willing to watch people in my life become addicted to opiates and die from them and then pretend that there’s nothing we can do to prevent more deaths. We know what we have to do, but I fear we don’t have the will to do it. The fact that it has become acceptable to promote the sale of a drug to treat a side-effect from opiate use during the most-watched sporting event of the year should be evidence enough that we have a huge problem.
Second, he’s going to have a fight to do it. Already we’re seeing Republicans saying that he should hold off until the next president takes office. You can understand why they would say that, but bullshit. It’s almost a year until a new president takes office, and many cases to be decided. It would be irresponsible to leave the Court with a 4-4 split for the rest of the current term and the first half or more of the next term, especially when the sole reason would be to give a Republican the chance to do it.
I’m hearing people say that there is a tradition not to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in the last year of a president’s term, but that’s also nonsense. The occasion hasn’t come up that often, since there have been only 112 justices, but a quick look tells me that both Anthony Kennedy and Benjamin Cardozo were appointed in the last year of their appointing president’s terms.
Speaking of Kennedy, this is a huge demotion for him. If Obama does get a nomination confirmed this moves Kennedy from being the most powerful member of the Court, the perennial swing vote, to the guy who gets to decide whether there are three or four votes in dissent.
The way the Supreme Court works is that it takes a majority vote to reverse a lower court decision that comes to the Court. Thus, if the votes are split, 4-4, which is the way things stand now, the lower court’s decision is upheld. If you look at the list of the cases already argued and awaiting decision, or even the cases yet to be argued this term, you will see that in some of the cases it is a conservative challenging a liberal decision, in some it is a liberal challenging a conservative decision. As long as there is a 4-4 split on the court we can predict that there will be some lower court decisions that would certainly have been reversed with Scalia voting but that will likely be upheld without him as the fifth vote to reverse.
Finally, a few last points about a replacement. I don’t doubt that the Republicans will do what they can to block any nominee, and if they vote as a unit they have the votes. There is one absolutely clear point you can make about the Republican caucus in the Senate:
Looking at the list of Republican senators I have a hard time seeing how he gets 14 votes (counting Sanders and King as Democrats).
Nevertheless, let’s say he goes forward with an appointment. I don’t have any inside information on who might get the nod, but I think we’re looking at a youngish–fifty or younger–person who has already been through the judicial or Cabinet-level confirmation process. Wikipedia has a list of people who have been “mentioned” for Obama before that I’ll link to here, along with a list of his judicial appointments. Look to judges who were appointed unanimously or nearly so: there may be some Republicans who would be hard put to justify rejecting someone they’ve already voted to confirm once or twice. Finally, as a long shot, there’s always the possibility of nominating a senator. I’ve heard it said that almost any senator would be confirmed, but that was in earlier, less bitterly partisan times.
And, to imagine one particularly unlikely scenario that might have a certain Machiavelian appeal to it, how about Hillary Clinton? She’s a smart lawyer, but she has two things that might make her appeal to the Republicans: she’s old, so she won’t be in office as long as a different appointee, and she gives the Republicans what they want, the chance to run against Bernie in November. Ya think?
Of course, anyone’s guess is as good as mine. I wouldn’t be much on his chances of getting someone through, but someone who has a less dark view of the Republicans in the Senate might be more optimistic.
Nothing could please me more than sharing this news: Jon Groveman, a dear friend to sustainability, is returning to the Vermont Natural Resource Council after serving as General Counsel for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources (since 2011), and as Chair of the Natural Resources Board (appointed in 2015.)
Jon will be the new Policy and Water Program Director at the VNRC, but the benefit of his experience and passion for the work will no doubt be felt throughout the organization.
Having served above and beyond the call as Water Program Director and General Counsel at the VNRC for a number of years, Jon accepted the appointment at ANR in order to see that agency into a new and more meaningful role under the stewardship of Secretary Deb Markowitz.
In the interim, VNRC has grown in size and influence with the commingling of its skills and resources with those of Vermont Conservation Voters to become the keystone of Vermont environmental policy and education that it is today. (Full disclosure: I am proud to currently serve on the board of the VCV.)
With Jon rejoining the ranks, we can look forward to a dynamic future of advocacy for sustainable living at the VNRC, that matches the demands of twenty-first century policy questions.
If all this ‘endorsement’ sounds unusually florid, even for me, it is because Jon was an influence on me at the dawn of my late-flowering grassroots involvement.
For more than ten years, as we, of the Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth fought to save our local economy and prime agricultural soils from Walmart, Jon was our legal representative and so much more.
We have Jon and his family to thank for the time they sacrificed together so that all of the little legal battles on the way to the big one could be fought in turn. Some of those battles brought important victories for water protection that will benefit Franklin County despite the fact that we were ultimately unable to stop the store from being built.
In the interim won by Jon’s hard labor, market influences within Walmart and the economy as a whole have worked to minimize the store’s ultimate impact on the area. Unlike in Williston, the success of the Walmart application has not resulted in the explosion of secondary growth that was expected to follow.
At this writing, St. Albans’ Walmart (like the cheese) stands alone in the middle of a vast tract of undeveloped property with only a small credit union on the corner of the lot to keep it company.
As it turns out, this may be fortunate for St. Albans, since Walmart has recently announced closure of hundreds of stores and the lay-off of thousands of workers. Walmart is no longer the anchor store it once was, and the big box store is rapidly approaching the same fate as conventional department stores that went the way of the dinosaur.
Jon remains a hero to many friends in Franklin County. As we look with foreboding to the critical significance of water issues in our future, we are comforted to know that Jon Groveman will be our champion in the courts and beyond.
Allowing Bill Clinton to lash himself to your campaign did you no favor in 2008. This year, its an even worse idea.
As everyone within shouting distance knows, I am a HUGEBernie Sanders supporter.
Nevertheless, I recognize Hillary’s competence and experience. If, after a fair primary season, she is the nominee, I will support her.
That being said, I never liked Bill and am liking him less every time he opens his mouth.
What Hillary has to understand is that many Bernie supporters don’t dislike her; but this is despite her husband, who falls just a little to the left of George Bush in the greater scheme of things. He does nothing to burnish her progressive credentials, if that’s as important to her as it seems to be.
Worse than Monica Lewinsky, he gave us NAFTA and “Don’t ask, don’t tell”…which probably was his personal motto.
Under Boyfriend Bill, the rich got still richer and the myth of American exceptionalism was on steroids.
If it’s all about summoning some sort of racial divide based on voting habits from twenty years ago, that seems more than a little demeaning to minority voters who are, after all, individuals whose lives have been shaped, much like everyone else’s have, by events and emerging issues from the intervening years.
Please Hillary, PLEASE: send the big boy home.
He will be toxic for your campaign and, by extension, the whole Democratic party.
It seems the F-35 fighter; aka the most expensive weapons system ever, hasn’t been in the news too often lately. And most of the news out that is out there is awful, according to reports in early February. If or when the jet fighters do fly on a regular basis, at some point in the future some will be used by the Vermont Air National Guard and based at the Burlington airport. This is over objections from residents in nearby towns over possible noise levels during take-off and landings — so, here’s a heads up for Vermonters.
If you care to read more details, that can be done here. But these three descriptive headlines provide a more than adequate, quick summary: The Version That the Marines Are Using Is Very Buggy; ALIS [Autonomic Logistics Information System] Is Still Terrible, Perhaps Even Getting Worse; and my favorite, Lockouts, Confusion, etc.
From Lockouts,Confusion,etc.:
The F-35 fails to detect if it’s been flying too fast or what effect that might have. “The Integrated Exceedance Management System, designed to assess and report whether the aircraft exceeded limitations during flight, failed to function properly.”
The plane “randomly prevented user logins into ALIS.
The plane doesn’t know how broken parts are: “The maintenance action severity code functionality…designed to automatically assign severity codes to work orders as maintenance personnel create them—did not work correctly.”
The plane’s crews need to phone Lockheed Martin tech support because the plane can’t handle the data it needs to process in order to run missions. “Managing data loads associated with mission planning required extensive contractor support.”
I think it was on Ground Hog Day that the Pentagon’s office of testing’s recent evaluations made their way into the news. So if the report sees its shadow and tax money is allowed to flow on and on, there will likely be six more months of testing for the most expensive weapons system ever. One does wonder how many crashes and injured or killed pilots will it take to ground this hog.
This is Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R, plumbago) wife’s birthday cake. Really!
The Governor took some time recently away from dealing with the Flint city water emergency to celebrate in style behind blacked-out windows at an upscale Michigan restaurant.
The owner of the boutique bakery said : […] “We knew that renting out West End Grill is not a cheap thing to do on a Saturday night, but we have a lot of high end clients. We just didn’t know this one was the governor.”
The cost of the cake was not divulged but it took 30 hours to bake (build/design?), and the bakery charges by the serving: there were 60 servings in this cake. The outlandish cake seems almost by design to draw contrast to the thousands of Flint residents unable to drink and in some cases even wash with their tap water.
While under management of Gov. Snyder’s hand-picked overseer, the water system of the city of Flint, Michigan (pop. 100,000) became contaminated with high levels of lead. The contamination apparently happened, at least in part, as a result of cost saving measures. Congressional hearings are being held, but Republican Governor Snyder was not subpoenaed. Several members of his administration were forced to testify but Snyder has ‘declined an invitation’ to testify before a congressional committee on February tenth. Guess he must be busy planning his wife’s party, er, I mean, managing the water crisis.
So what is it with GOP governors and the French revolution? Last month Maine Governor Paul LePage publicly expressed his interest in bringing back the guillotine for criminals. And now Governor Snyder’s cake recalls a similar level of insensitivity to the plight of others as Marie Antoinette’s famous, “Let them eat their cake” remark directed at starving peasants.
But let’s be fair, Governor Snyder isn’t totally insensitive and he does make sacrifices. With a net worth in 2014 of approximately $200 million, the former venture capitalist and Gateway Inc. president selflessly declines his yearly state salary of $159,300 and returns it to the state. Still, it leaves him enough for cake.
