Category Archives: Uncategorized

One Neat Trick for Concealing the Reach of Your Political Donations (CORRECTION)

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Correction. I got a crucial detail wrong in this post. Donors do not file information. The donor info is gleaned from candidate filings. Misspellings and carelessness with donor names and addresses is their fault, not the donors’. The broader point remains, that the blizzard of typos makes it extremely difficult to track donor activity, but that’s not the result of their malfeasance, deliberate or otherwise. Also, my apologies for the delay in correcting; I’ve still got Covid and have precious little energy at all.

In what’s generally been an underwhelming primary season to date, one of the biggest developments has been the outpouring of support going from a bunch of Burlington-area business leaders to a relative handful of candidates. Look at the donor lists of the top earners and you see a bunch of the same guys (well, almost entirely guys) giving four-figure checks to the same people: Stewart Ledbetter, Scott Beck, Elizabeth Brown, John Rodgers, Pat Brennan, etc.

It would be highly instructive to track how much each of these minor tycoons is investing in political centrism and where they’re putting down their markers. And it’s almost impossible to do so, thanks to how the Secretary of State’s campaign finance portal processes donor reports and how the donors seem to be taking full advantage of a loophole on offer.

What’s happening is that donors submit reports with slightly different iterations of their names and addresses. When you search for donors, each report shows up as if it’s a separate person. For instance, if you search for “Lisman, B,” you get not one, but 30 separate matches. If you search for “Broughton, L,” you get 40.

Forty.

And most of them have few if any donations listed. If you want to find out how much Lenore Broughton has given to whom, you’ll have to open each and every one of those 40 in turn. It’s maddening.

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Some Impertinent Advice for Bernie Sanders

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So, Bernie’s running for re-election. At age 82. Well, we have way too many old politicians who believe they’re indispensable, but Bernie is not anywhere near the top of my list for thinning out the herd. He remains the most prominent voice in America for small-p progressive politics. He is a uniquely impactful figure.

So I’m fine with him running for another term. Although, perhaps ironically, I still think he should have left the Senate in 2018. But we’ll get to that in a minute, after discussing one age-related item he should consider.

Which is, he should stop with the “independent” pose and run as a capital-P Progressive. He can still caucus with the Democrats, but he needs to adopt a party label for the first time since his benighted days under the Liberty Union banner.

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The Governor Has No Clothes

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For the second time in two years, Gov. Phil Scott suffered a historic-level smackdown on Monday. It only took the Legislature one single day to override six of his vetoes. He was upheld only on H.121, the data privacy bill. Otherwise it was a complete wipeout for The Most Popular Governor in AmericaTM.

Who is also, far and away, the most overridden governor in Vermont history. I knew he was the rootin’est, tootin’est, vetoin’est governor we’ve ever had, but I hadn’t realized that he’s even more of an outlier on the override front.

I’ve cited the Vermont State Archives’ list of veto messages as my source for veto counts (inclluding my count of 52 vetoes for Governor Nice Guy), but I failed to notice that the list also indicates which vetoes were overridden — with an asterisk.

Are you ready for some truly stunning figures? I know you are.

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The Carroll-Morrissey Emotional Intelligence Test (Updated)

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It’s been interesting… rather inadvertently revelatory… to witness the fallout from one of the oddest political scandals in Vermont history — Rep. Mary Morrissey getting caught wet-handed*, repeatedly dumping water into a tote bag belonging to fellow Bennington Rep. Jim Carroll.

*Rimshot

On the official front, all parties are continuing their lengthy effort to sweep as much of this mess under the nearest rug as thoroughly as possible. On the media front, the coverage has been a mixed bag. On the personal front, both Carroll and Morrissey are flailing in the aftermath. And pretty much everyone is clearly uncomfortable with the situation.

It makes sense, really. This thing is, as Rep. Angela Arsenault told Seven Days’ Kevin McCallum “both juvenile and unconscionable.” To Carroll, already suffering through a difficult session thanks to his February DUI citation in a Statehouse parking lot, it must have caused significant emotional trauma. Arsenault:

“This is the type of thing that is designed to make someone feel like they are going nuts, to make someone question themselves, which to me is straight up cruel.”

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The Uncle I Never Knew

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Meet Morris Henry Wilson, a Michigan boy who enlisted in the Navy at the age of 15 — he told them he was older — and went missing on a submarine that never finished its maiden voyage in the fall of 1943.

Morris was one of my mother’s older brothers. It was a big, troubled, poor family in rural Michigan, a good situation to get away from if you got the chance. He took the chance. My mom never spoke much about Morris, nor did I ever ask her siblings about him. So I can’t tell you anything about his life before enlisting. In honor of Memorial Day, I’ll share what I know about the very brief remainder of his life. Which is pretty much entirely from official records.

By World War II standards, his death was random and inconsequential. He didn’t die in an act of heroism, unless you think the idea of a 15-year-old going to war is pretty damn heroic. I wouldn’t disagree. He died far from any active theater. The cause of his sub’s sinking has never been fully established; the most likely cause was friendly fire. Or it may have hit a German mine near Panama. Either way, the sub was never found and all 77 aboard were presumed dead.

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Final Reading Needs an Attitude Adjustment

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Now that the legislative session (minus override day) is in the rearview, it’s time to address Final Reading, VTDigger’s self-described “inside guide to the Statehouse.” That might be technically accurate, but it was the glossy, gossipy kind of “inside guide,” not the kind that provides insight. More often than not, it failed to dig beneath the surface. Instead, it picked up shiny trinkets and held them aloft as if proffering precious gems.

I could enumerate, and I will. But I need to emphasize, up front, that there’s nothing inherently wrong with snark or cynicism or the occasional eyeroll or even barf emoji. The real problem is Final Reading’s posture of contempt for its subject. The legislative process is boring, don’t you know. It’s a real drag. It’ll bore you to tears or put you to sleep or at least make you all hangry.

Earlier this year, one of Digger’s staff reporters tweeted out a recommendation for Final Reading as — paraphrasing here — a newsletter for people who don’t like politics.

I’m sorry, but no. That’s precisely backwards. Final Reading is for people who are interested in state politics and policymaking and want to know more. The people who don’t like politics are not reading VTDigger at all, much less a daily precís of all things Statehouse. Know your audience, people.

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Congratulations to the VTGOP for Finding a Candidate to Run Against Becca Bal — Oh.

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The Vermont Republican Party’s effort to build a strong statewide ticket are proceeding apace. Mark Coester, who has once before been disavowed by the VTGOP, has announced he’s running for Congress. He is, so far, the only Republican challenger to Democratic U.S. Rep. Becca Balint.

Coester is seen here in the only video that comes up when you search YouTube for “Mark Coester Vermont.” It’s a 21-second clip of Coester meandering along the U.S.-Mexico border wall, pausing in front of a small section that’s either unfinished or damaged, gesturing at it, and saying “Ran out of concrete?” He’s carrying a big ol’ sidearm, just in case he has to Halt A Incursion or something.

This is kind of normal behavior for Coester, whose campaign website promotes him as a man who would bring “common sense and traditional values to Washington, D.C.” He speaks of government accountability and term limits and 100% Fair and Honest Elections and — my favorite bit — decries “the constant bickering, finger pointing and blame games that go on in politics.”

If you’ve read my coverage of far-right stealth candidates, you’ll recognize the warning signs. This guy is a Trump-lovin’ conspiratorialist.

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Man Who Claims to Be Above Politics Does Overtly Political Thing

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It may have adhered, by the tiniest hair on its chinny chin chin, to the letter of tradition, but it absolutely blasted the spirit of tradition right to the moon.

I speak of Gov. Phil Scott’s decision to appoint a Democrat to the seat formerly held by the chair of the House Progressive Caucus. The Progs are furious, and they have every right to be.

Scott’s flimsy rationale is that Emma Mulvaney-Stanak ran for House in 2022 as both a Prog and a Dem. Okay, sure, but c’mon now. Mulvaney-Stanak’s political identification is clearly Progressive. She served on Burlington City Council as a Prog. (For a time, she was the only Prog on City Council.) She ran for mayor of Burlington as a Prog. She served for four years as chair of the Vermont Progressive Party, for Pete’s sake.

I don’t care if she ran for House that one time in the Democratic primary. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak is a Progressive through and through, and her replacement in the House should have been a Prog.

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Welcome to the Gubernatorial Spin Zone

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No, I didn’t expect Gov. Phil Scott to accept the Senate’s vote on Zoie Saunders with grace and equanimity. But he shouldn’t be allowed to rewrite the history of that lopsided rejection of his choice for education secretary.

In his press conference one day after Saunders was rejected, he called it “a partisan political hit job” in which Saunders was collateral damage in an attack aimed at himself:

I  think this was a partisan political hit job, so I would say once they get through that and they get their pound of flesh, which they did, it was all against me, that maybe they will come to their senses and see what I see and confirm her, if that’s the path they choose. 

Yeah, well, none of that is true.

A total of 19 senators voted against Saunders because of her scanty resumé. She’d barely served any time at all working in public schools — as a teacher, principal, district staffer, or janitor or lunch lady or bus driver for that matter. And she had little to no experience managing a sizable bureaucracy, which ought to be a prerequisite for being a cabinet secretary of any sort.

And if this was a case of “it was all against me,” then perhaps the governor could enlighten us about all the other times the Senate rejected a gubernatorial appointee. I can cut to the chase there: It’s never happened before.

As if that load of codswallop wasn’t insulting enough, the governor also accused the Senate of failing to perform due diligence:

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The Goal Isn’t to Prevent Suffering. It’s to Make the Suffering Politically Palatable.

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“I can’t believe this is where we are again.”

Those words came from Brenda Siegel, former gubernatorial candidate and head of End Homelessness Vermont, upon finding herself back in the Statehouse begging legislative budget writers to provide shelter for vulnerable Vermonters.

She spoke at a press conference called today by housing advocacy groups, in the middle of budget deliberations by a legislative conference committee. That panel is hammering out (Only in Journalism) a compromise budget for FY2025, and one of the items at issue is the General Assistance emergency housing program. The House budget includes a fairly robust program; the House also passed a bill to transition from the current bowl-of-spaghetti program to something that makes sense.

The Senate, as it so often has, pinched pennies on the issue. Its budget imposes a cap of 80 nights’ stay in state-paid motel rooms for each household, and caps the total motel rooms available at 1,000 in most of the year and 1,300 in winter. As the advocates pointed out, this would result in hundreds of households losing access to housing. (The Senate also killed the separate transition bill, which means the program would continue to be an ungovernable mess.)

The beauty of it, from a political point of view, is that the pain would be spread out over months and months. Instead of a mass unsheltering that might attract unpleasant media attention, people will be “exited” (such a nice bureaucratic term) slowly over time, a few here, a few there, as they run out of eligibility or the need is greater than the arbitrary room caps. Hey, if the problem is invisible, does it really exist?

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