I noticed that the Vermont Department of Tourism will once again be providing their weekly fall foliage reports this year. Shortly after, I read about lawn painting in California and got to thinking about how much Vermont’s tourist economy and those of many other states are climate dependant.  

But painting your lawn emerald green? In California, lawn spraying businesses are having a field day. Due to the severe drought and imposition of water-use restrictions, lawn painters are in big demand. Spraying green paint on a dull and drying front yard is being touted as a solution to the water shortage for homeowners. You can have it all: a green lawn and less water use.

“Letting it go dead and brown might be an option for some people, but let’s face it, nobody really thinks brown is the new green,” said Mr. Sahbari [lawn paint entrepreneur]. “This lets you cut down on watering and still have a lawn that looks great.”  

 

Low-water-use options, although encouraged, aren’t being widely employed. Naturalized arid landscaping, known as xeriscaping and popular in drought-prone Arizona, isn’t catching on in suburban California.  

Lawn painting, mostly on golf courses and sports surfaces, has been common for years. Spraying green paint on golf fairways in the southern US is done during their mild winters, when the grass would otherwise be dormant, to keep the grass greener than green year round.  

The lawn paint is reported to be a safe, non-toxic water based latex formula of some kind. But exactly what it contains may vary from vendor to vendor. Each lawn paint manufacturer has its own proprietary formulation, a trade secret.

These paints are specially formulated latex-type paints. They are water-based, but they do not contain some of the elements potentially toxic to organisms that normal house paints might have in them.

 

Or so says George Sajner, technical director for Pioneer Athletics, the maker of Match Play Turf Colorants.    

In Vermont, as climate change becomes more evident, what changes will challenge our economy? Would anyone consider painting leaves yellow and orange if they failed to turn colors on their own?  Well, sure, this is all just farfetched climate change paranoia. But we do make our own snow. And 75 percent of the ski terrain in Vermont is “painted” with manufactured snow to keep the resorts running profitably.  

Well then, maybe a little red touch-up paint here and there on those apples wouldn't do any harm. Would it?

‘Just a little opportunity for a surreal chuckle in the fact that Progressive Doug Hoffer won not only the Progressive and Democratic primaries, but also the Republican primary!

It is worthy of special note, even in Vermont, when a Progressive candidate can be said to have “won” all three primaries.

Yes, I know he holds the seat as a Democrat/Progressive, but his roots are well known, and it really is more fun this way.

What must the red states think of Vermont’s failure to muster?

With the announcement that Dean Corren is the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor, as well as the Progressive candidate, lonely Republican Phil Scott is on notice that he won’t be able to coast to reelection.

This will be strange for Scott, whose biggest challenges in recent years have come from within his own party, which refused to retool its pervasively losing strategies.

Scott will finally have to draw some distinguishing lines in the sand rather than simply rely, GW-style, on being the guy with whom voters would most like to have a beer.

That is going to be awkward for the happy fence sitter.

Some of those lines of distinction have already been drawn by the manner in which the two candidates are funding their campaigns:

The Progressive and Democratic unity candidate challenging the incumbent is publicly financed thanks to raising over 800 small donations from only Vermont voters. He is limited to spending $200,000. Meanwhile, the Republican incumbent is following a path of collecting big donations from PACs, corporations and wealthy supporters. Over 82% of the $162,041 he’s raised comes from these sources.

The Shumlin/Milne matchup looks to be a weary rerun of  Shumlin/Brock.

By contrast, the Governor Lite debates should prove fascinating.

Most interesting will be engagements over environmental issues.  An area of strength for Corren, questions on the environment will force Scott to commit to public positions favored by the Republican minority or risk losing his base.

This is not something he has been eager to do in the past, but is of proven significance to Vermont voters, and therefore cannot be avoided.

Scott would probably much rather talk about the economy and all the Chamber events he has graced as Lt. Governor.

Heads up, Mr. Scott; this year’s election ain’t no Chamber mixer.

(Adapted and condensed from posts on The Vermont Political Observer.)



Is it really happening? Is he really serious about running for Governor? Is this some bizarre work of performance art?

Who knows. Who cares, really. But just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, or stranger, for Scott Milne, it gets worserer. And strangerer.

Take his latest campaign finance statement, filed today.

Total donations, since the last filing deadline on August 18: $10,305. For his campaign so far: $53,000.

Total expenditures: $33,000 since August 18, and $62,000 for the campaign. In other words, it’s two months until election day and the Milne campaign is in the red.

Well, it would be, except that Milne loaned his own campaign $25,000. (Something that, earlier in his campaign, he vowed never to do.)

But wait, there’s more bad news within those numbers. Of the $10,305 total, $7,350 came from people named Milne or Milne-related businesses. The breakdown:

— $2,000 from Milne Travel

— $2,000 from B&M Realty, the firm co-owned by Scott Milne and David Boies III

— $2,000 from Donald Milne

— $1,000 from George Milne

—    $350 from Jonathan and Nancy Milne

Aside from that, Milne managed to raise less than $3,000.

As for expenditures, he threw almost $19,000 into pre-primary TV ads. He also paid another $4,600 to campaign manager Brent Burns’ firm “Pure Campaigns LLC.” And he spent $2,500 on his infamous Tele-Town Meeting.

So here we are, at the launch point of Milne 2.0 – the time when he pivots from attacking Governor Shumlin’s record to finally, belatedly, rolling out his own policy ideas – and he’s in negative territory.

And on top of that, he doesn’t seem to be trying very hard. Last Saturday, the Milne campaign released his schedule for the coming week. It included the equivalent of approximately two days of campaign activity. In an entire week.

The details:

Sat 8/30: Four hours at the Champlain Valley Fair

Sun 8/31: No events.

Mon 9/1: Walking the Labor Day Parade in Northfield

Tue: 9/2: A full day of activities in Bennington County, from 9 am to 6 pm.

Wed 9/3: An apparent joint event with former Gov. Jim Douglas at 2 pm in Burlington, and a live interview on WCAX-TV in the late afternoon.

Thu 9/4: Nothing listed

Fri 9/5: “No Public Appearances – Meeting Policy Advisors”

It’s things like this that make me wonder if Scott Milne is actually running for Governor. Seriously. This is the last week before Governor Shumlin formally enters the race. It’s Milne’s last chance to have the stage to himself. And he’s doing nothing to draw media attention outside of the tiny Bennington market and one short interview on Channel 3.

When Milne formally announced his candidacy, he promised “a spirited, but unconventional” campaign. Well, it’s certainly unconventional. But spirited? Only if you mean it in the sense of “ghostly,” “apparitional,” or “insubstantial.”

Here is a press release for an academic study titled “An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?”

The authors [Markus Giesler, Ela Veresiu] identified a process that shifts responsibility from the state and corporations to the individual consumer.

 That’s bound to spark interest.

When businesses convince politicians to encourage responsible consumption instead of implementing policy changes to solve environmental and social problems, business earns the license to create new markets while all of the pressure to solve the problem at hand falls on the individual consumer.

Like a shell game, responsibility is gently shifted to the individual rather than remaining with government and corporations. This shift leads to the belief that government can’t (or won’t, or perhaps even shouldn’t) manage the competing interests of economic and environmental players. The authors defined three steps in the process:

First, economic elites redefine the nature of the problem from political to one of individual consumption (for example, global warming stems from consumers failing to cultivate a sustainable lifestyle). Next, economic elites promote the idea that the only viable solution is for consumers to change their behavior. Third, new markets are created in order to turn this solution into a material reality (eco-friendly light bulbs, hybrid automobiles, energy efficient appliances). Finally, consumers must adopt this new ethical self-understanding.

And, of course, the corporations can greenwash their images while making money from the new “responsible” consumers' purchases.

Seems like close kin to socializing risk and privatizing profit. 

Co-author Ela Veresiu writes that responsible consumption (and this sure doesn’t sound like Vermont) is widely understood as being detached from governmental process. The opposite is true, she maintains. Responsible consumption requires its converse: the active management of consumers as moral entrepreneurs. Just from the press information available, the driving force they see for this “active management” process, whether market forces, government or 'groups' of individuals isn’t clear.

At an inconvenient price of $14.00 a download I am not going to see the study any time soon. This price at least shows that the study’s authors are skilled at monetizing their paper and creating a market to manage consumers.

Even in this upside down-economy, where 95% of all gains went to those Americans ranked in the top 1% of wealth, and the value of America labor is so low that most families must maintain multiple income streams just to keep a roof over their heads, we still persist in celebrating the first Monday in September as “Labor Day.”

At this point, the somewhat arcane holiday has been appropriated by off-shoring retailers like Lowes, Best Buy and  Home Depot in order to flog merchandise with catch phrases like this one from Walmart:

Celebrate hard work with big savings.  Shop now.

Why not?  Labor unions are practically a thing of the past; Americans are being told that they must learn to work for third-world wages in order to compete for employment; and the social safety net that took a century to build is being systematically picked to shreds by a newly callous Republican party in order to satisfy the meanest perimeter of their fringy base.

We were sold a bill of goods in the ’80’s by so-called “free market capitalists,” and now the factories that built America’s middle class are empty and American labor is pretty much defined by low-wage, low-skill services.

Most of us don’t even have enough money to buy the cheap junk from overseas for which we bartered away our children’s future.

Not much to celebrate here.

We have Memorial Day to remember America’s fallen soldiers and sailors.  

Shouldn’t we just declare the first Monday in September “Labor Memorial Day,”  and remember that the U.S. labor force fights a daily battle of diminishing returns in order to simply survive?

(Inspired by the death of two chess players at the Chess Olympics in Norway (Dangerous Game).  Also inspired by the fact that nobody seems to give a shit about Michael Brown.  The cop probably won’t be indicted.  Shelly Frey is still dead from Dec., 2012, and nobody cared about her.  Cops and Security Thugs seem to be able to kill Blacks lately as though they had a license to do so.  Are they pissed about Obama?  Or is it a secret police pogrom?  Also, this will get a few of you PC folks (you know who you are) on GMD wired enough to pay attention because of my ‘racist’ spin.  Enjoy.)

BREAKING…FERGUSON, MO….Just now…

It has been confirmed just now that two black teenagers were killed and five other black teenagers wounded when Ferguson police opened fire on about two dozen black youths engaged in an all day ‘Chess Marathon’ in the Ferguson Municipal Park.

Ferguson town spokesperson Hamash Isis explained:  “These black kids were up to no good all day playing chess in a loud and suggestive manner, as if they were planning crimes.  It was very suspicious.  It’s up to law enforcement all over the country to take proactive preventive action before crimes can be committed.  We have seen other cases of police proactive preventive action across the country in recent years, and we here in Ferguson applaud those peace officers in their campaign to prevent crime.”

When asked what chess had to do with crime, Isis replied:  “These black kids were just being smart asses, flaunting the fact that they were not working at jobs all day.  When you see black teenagers gathered together in a group like that, you just know that they’re going to go out later and hold up a store or a gas station.  To get more goddamn money for chess.  This chess stuff has been creeping up all over the nation among black kids with too much time on their hands.  It’s what I would call a chess epidemic.  Law abiding citizens look to the police to protect them from this new crime wave, and we here in Ferguson are proud that our officers acted before these kids went on a chessed-up crazed rampage.”

Isis also stated that an unnamed nation-wide police network has put out bulletins alerting law enforcement to also watch out for black youths loitering in the streets and on public benches reading books.  “They’re probably reading about how to commit crimes.  We have just set up a hot line here to the Ferguson PD so folks can call if they see black kids behaving suspiciously.  The number is: 1-BLACKBOOKS.  I know some of the lib-er-als will think we here in Ferguson are racially profiling, but we welcome President Obama to come here and take a walk with us down the streets of Ferguson.  He has a job.  Why can’t these kids get jobs?  I mean, get real.  The police of America have the license to act in the public interest.  It’s not racism, it’s crime prevention.  And, mark my words, if police are not allowed to prevent crime before it happens, the next thing you’ll see is gangs of black youths walking around passing out poems they’ve written when they should have been working.  And what, I ask you, do you think those poems will be about?  Thank you.  No more questions.  I think I’ve made it clear how things stand here in Ferguson.  Why don’t you go out and bust some dirty rich Jew’s chops about Gaza?  That’s where your real story is.”

Peter Buknatski

Montpelier, Vt.

Most of our readers aren't lawyers, so in most cases you would think I'd be crazy to suggest that you should all sit down and listen to a couple of hours of oral argument in federal court, but in this case I'm absolutely serious.

You may have read or heard about this already, because it's the latest, or very nearly latest, development in the struggle to provide fairness and equality to same-sex couples, but also because the of the liveliness with which the chief protagonist in these cases, who also happens to be Richard Posner, a conservative federal appeals judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, participates. As you listen to the argument you get the real sense that the national argument is over and that this conservative jurist, who is actively trying to think through the elements of the argument, has come to the conclusion that there is no valid governmental justification for the prohibition of same-sex marriage. 

You can get the links to the liveliest segments, which David Lat at Above the Law refers to as benchslaps, here and here, but I really think you should listen to the whole thing for what it shows us about the litigation process. It's an excellent illustration of why the federal courts are so wrong to prohibit broadcasting of their proceedings.

There are two cases, one from Wisconsin and one from Indiana, and in each case the state's constitutional prohibition on same-sex marriage is being challenged; in each case the state has appealed to the Seventh Circuit because the district courts ruled against them.

When I talk to lawyers to help them prepare for oral argument, or to law students about what it's like, I make sure they understand that a judge is a lawyer just like you, and is really trying to figure out the right answer, so you want to be sure to answer the questions and to talk about what the judge wants to talk about. In these cases Posner is clearly at a loss to understand the state's argument, and he shows it by demonstrating how flimsy and unconvincing the bases for the same-sex marriage prohibitions really are. 

For instance, when the Indiana Solicitor General, Thomas Fisher, argues that preserving tradition is a valid justification, Posner says “So you can say that we've been doing this stupid thing for thousands of years and that's a good reason to keep doing it?” (Paraphrasing here.) This also leads him to conclude– and remember, he's a conservative–that the only real reason for banning same-sex mariage is hate.

He's equally hard on Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Timothy Samuelson, who is equally unprepared to present a single valid reason for prohibiting same sex-marriages.

Some other fun points are when an attorney claims to have read a particular amicus curiae brief but admits that he doesn't remember what's in it, Posner says, “You don't remember. How odd.” And when an attorney is trying to weasel out of answering a fundamental question, Posner says flat out, “Look: just answer the question.” 

If you want to listen to the whole arguments here they are:

 http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/sound/external/rt.1.14-2386_08_26_2014.mp3

And: 

 http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/sound/external/rt.2.14-2526_08_26_2014.mp3

I want to point out a couple of interesting areas to listen to: First, in the Wisconsin case, starting at about 23 minutes in, Posner tries to get the state's attorney to speculate, to just try to think about some possible harms that someone might be worried about if marriage equality were legalized, and the attorney is completely at a loss even to try to speculate about a reason.

Another great point, also in the Wisconsin argument starting at 27:11, is where Judge Hamilton says about the state's proffered justification, “What it is is it's a reverse engineered theory to explain marriage in such a way that you avoid the logic of Lawrence and ignore a good deal of history about the institution of marriage and provide a very narrow artificial rationale for it.” What's significant about this statement is that the courts rarely reject out of hand any state's asserted reason for its policy decision.

Finally, I listened to these arguments in order, and when I listen to oral arguments I picture how I would handle them if I were in this position. In this case, as I was listening to the first argument (Indiana) I was picturing myself being the next guy up, watching his counterpart getting so badly beaten up, and thinking, “Oh shit, that's what's going to happen to me as soon as I stand up.”

It's a long weekend coming up, so spend some of your time listening. 

Boy, am I thankful I pay Union-busting Fairpoint $50 a month for a landline phone; Rasmussen polls just called about Milne versus Shummy.

And as always with polls I listen very carefully to the questions to determine bias or push-polling.  The Rasmussen poll was fairly unbiased.  The only real bias was that for poll answers, “Republican” and “Scott Milne” were always, “1”, and “Democrat” and “Shumlin” were always “2”.

Back to my opening statement, though. I don’t know if everyone is aware of this but Fairpoint is actively busting the lineman’s union right now, as we speak.  Their contract ended on August 31 and Fairpoint has pretty much ignored the union’s attempts to negotiate a new one.  Fairpoint wants to end retirement/pensions, cut pay to below Middle Class levels, and hire “Independent Contractors” (who work for crap-wages, have no pensions, and can’t bargain for a middle-class wage).

Today Fairpoint announced that they are simply going to do what they want and to hell with the union.  They are going to stop all payments to the union’s pension funds and hire “Independent Contractors” to replace their seasoned and efficient linemen.

And who’s going to stop them?

WGOP’s comment section on this news was filled with typical Conservative/Republicans that HATE people that work for a living, saying no one deserves to be paid for their work and no one should ever be allowed to retire – except the CEOs, of course!

Conservatives / Republicans HATE the middle class with a white-hot passion, and Scott Milne does, too. A vote for Milne is a vote to impoverish the few remaining Middle Class jobs and crush them into welfare-dependent poverty.

If you assumed that, with the triple meltdown at Fukushima still unresolved, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency would climb out of the pocket of industry and soberly embrace its role as a safety regulator, you were sadly mistaken.

On August 26, the NRC endorsed the safety of long-term onsite storage of nuclear waste, either in dry casks, or in spent fuel pools, which were originally designed to store very limited amounts of  fuel over just a few years, until they could safely be committed to dry cask storage or a permanent repository.  This decision says that it is safe to leave spent fuel in these pools for sixty, a hundred, even 120 years! In so doing, it opens the door to licensing of even more waste generating reactors.

Opponents of the endorsement have raised an outcry because one of the commissioners, William D. Magwood,  who was in on the vote is leaving the Agency on August 31, and has already accepted a highly paid position working for an agency which promotes the industry he has been regulating.

Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s Nuclear Energy Agency. Under its charter, the NEA actively promotes the use of nuclear energy and the economic interests of its member governments, including governments that own or sponsor U.S. nuclear licensees and applicants.

The vote was originally scheduled to take place in October, after he had made the move and a new Commissioner had taken his place; but it appears as if the date was moved up in order to take advantage of at least one very captive vote.

To understand how outrageous this vote is, it is only necessary to look at events which compromised the spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi.

The real thermal threat of pool storage might last less than a decade, but that is by no means the only manner in which an extremely over-crowded spent fuel pool represents heightened menace to surrounding communities.  

The sheer volume and weight of tons of highly radioactive material stored in this way presents a growing possibility of structural failure and collapse as the years pass by.  

Weather and seismic events; accident or fire, mischief or terrorism; simple human error: there are so many ways in which the limited shielding provided by a spent fuel pool might be breached over the decades that  fuel assemblies would be allowed to languish in the pools of long abandoned facilities.

The truly disgusting reality is that this decision by the NRC was a purely pragmatic one.  If the NRC would not have come down in favor of indefinite onsite storage, including spent fuel storage, it would have been the end of the nuclear industry because there simply is no alternative.

After over forty years of fevered discussion and false starts,  we are no nearer to finding an acceptable place to safely sequester the tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel that already sits at reactor sites across America, let alone any that will be generated in the future.

So, putting on their actuarial caps and weighing the small possibility that something truly catastrophic will happen to one or more of the spent fuel pools (potentially killing thousands) against the loss of their total raison d’etre, the NRC has simply declared the problem non-existent.

End of story.

According to the NRC, there were key assumptions used to justify the GEIS (Generic Environmental Impact Study.)

They included, but are not limited to: Institutional controls, including the continued regulation of spent fuel, will continue; spent fuel canisters and casks would be replaced approximately once every 100 years; a dry transfer system will be built at each location for fuel repacking; and all spent fuel will be transferred from spent fuel pools to dry storage no more than 60 years after operations cease.

Except that there are no protocols in place to how the fuel will be “repacked;” and there is no guarantee that nothing will happen to disrupt the “institutional controls” and “continued regulation of spent fuel” over the long term.  Those are pretty big assumptions.

Even in the short term, we can’t really do much to ensure that Limited Liability companies like Vermont Yankee discharge even their basic obligations, should nuclear fortunes founder significantly and they choose to simply bail and go bankrupt.

His work to make America safe for the nuclear industry done,  Mr. Magwood will move on to his new job at the NEA.  His friends back at the NRC will make sure that nothing stands in the way of nuclear industry “progress.” Not even the cold, hard and unforgiving truth.

_____________________________________________________________

As most of my readers already know, I am pleased to have recently joined the Fairewinds Energy Education Team.  This blogpost, however, represents my own personal opinion and is not intended to reflect the views of Fairewinds, nor that of any of the team at Fairewinds.  I work for Fairewinds strictly as a wordsmith, and make no claims to nuclear expertise.