Bill Sorrell gets religion

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There was some welcome news from Vermont’s Eternal General about a month back. Bill Sorrell had begun a series of public hearings on the subject of incarceration — specifically, whether Vermont is putting too many people behind bars. Sorrell and others are gauging public sentiment on the question, and considering whether the Legislature should “adopt a resolution to steer Vermont’s criminal justice system away from incarceration,” according to VTDigger’s account.

Sorrell being Sorrell, he cautioned that nothing much would happen anytime soon.

“It would be like moving a battleship through thousands of individual decisions by prosecutors and judges, and in no small part on the decisions by corrections personnel on when the individual is released,” Sorrell told VTDigger.

Still, if this is how Sorrell plans to spend a chunk of his final year in office, then bully for him. We’ve been imprisoning more and more people for the past three decades, with no appreciable effect on public safety. Our prison population is aging and getting more expensive. It also features an appalling over-representation of Vermont’s teeny-tiny black population.

African-Americans make up just 1 percent of the population of a state that is 95.3 percent white, yet they make up 10.3 percent of Vermont inmates. Put another way, a Vermont inmate is more than 10 times as likely as a resident at large to be African-American.

So if Vermont’s top law enforcement official is on board with reducing incarceration rates, that’s a really great thing. More power to him.

One question, though.

Where the hell was Bill Sorrell all this time?

ICYMI, for the past two decades of our mass incarceration binge, he’s been Vermont’s top law enforcement official. So, welcome to the party, Bill. Sorry it took you so long to get here.

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We’re all stars now in the dope show

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The January 7 episode of “Trump: The Campaign” in Burlington “has stirred turmoil among Vermonters,” or so the Burlington Free Press informs me.

Well, lemme do a quick check… no… nope… sorry, no turmoil here. Annoyance is all I got.

Annoyance at the idea of Trump as a successful candidate, and annoyance that some of us are auditioning for bit parts in Trump’s ongoing performance piece.

Look, why do you suppose he’s coming here? It’s not for votes. I’m sure he’ll frame it as evidence of his bravery — bringing his truthiness to Ground Zero of Bernie Sanders socialism. And if he gets some nice juicy conflict with some stereotypical dirty hippies, then so much the better.

You think he won’t enjoy the spectacle of anti-Trump demonstrations in City Hall Park? You think he won’t be happier than a pig in shit if protesters get into the hall and try to disrupt the proceedings? You think Fox News won’t lovingly repeat the footage for hours in end?

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The victims shall be the perps, and the perps shall be the victims

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(From “The Redacted Beatitudes,” The Book Of Mitch, Chapter 12, verse 17.)

Someone’s getting a wee bit tetchy down Windham way. VTDigger:

Vermont State Police are investigating a “chilling” anti-Semitic voicemail left for an official whose company is seeking to build a large-scale wind farm in southern Vermont.

… Company officials requested the name and position of the employee, who is Jewish, not be released, and he declined to be interviewed.

Good to see that the anonymous perp did her due diligence. It’d be embarrassing if she left this little turd in, say, Clive MacGregor’s inbox:

“You ______ are a Jew and you cannot wait to drive 28 stakes through a town full of free, white Christian men with guns, and unfortunately the way to attract free, white Christian men with guns to you is to try and take their homes.”

“So, why don’t you go to Palestine ______ where you can shoot the feet of Palestinian soccer players, you can burn babies alive, you can rape Russian sex slaves and really overtly enjoy yourself rather than this covert activity in Vermont where you think no one knows you’re a Jew because you’re going to find out that they do. Bye-bye.”

Nice.

You’d think this would be a clearcut case of crossing the line, right? Nobody could possibly defend this, could they?

Hahaha, we’re talking about the anti-wind brigade here.

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Prepare to kneel before our benevolent overlord

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Soja hear the news?

Donald Trump is comin’ to town. Next Thursday, Flynn Center, free tix already gone. (According to one commenter on the Freeploid website, many a liberal signed up for tickets with no intention whatsoever of actually showing up — hoping for an embarrassingly low turnout. Which would be great, but I’m sure there will be plenty of the Great Unwashed on hand to welcome their reality-show wet dream of a candidate.)

Can’t say I’m outraged or particularly concerned. I found it amusing that the Vermont Republican Party immediately sought to distance itself from the proceedings. Executive Director Jeff Bartley doing his best Sergeant Schultz:

We learned late today through media reports that Donald Trump will be making a brief campaign stop in Vermont The Vermont Republican Party did not invite Mr. Trump and has no role in his event.

Although Bartley did everything short of dunking himself in Purell, he did end his brief statement with a note of praise for the GOP’s “very diverse group of candidates.”

And there’s the rub. Trump is the loudest and most effective carnival barker of the bunch, but the Republican field really doesn’t offer much to the serious voter. Certainly no real diversity in thought or policy.

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Try again, Mr. Mitchell

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One of the great ironies of the Fourth Estate is how they are constantly trumpeting The Public’s Right To Know regarding other precincts, but they just can’t stand it when the spotlight is turned on themselves. For example, the studied reticence of the Burlington Free Press whenever it takes a chainsaw to its already-diminished staff.

Another example: In my four-plus years of blogging, I’ve said plenty of harsh things about almost everyone in political circles. When I meet these folks, they tend to be perfectly genial, or at the very least polite.

Not journalists or editors. When I criticize the failings or shortcomings of Vermont’s media, they often react with a pained squeal. There’s only one person who’s blocked me from their Twitter feed, and it’s a staffer at a certain Vermont newspaper. Once, the chief of a major media outlet took time out of his (or her, I ain’t telling) busy day to hector me for being critical of a certain reporter’s work. I was honored by the attention in a perverse way; at least I know they care.

This is a roundabout way to get at the latest Big Story in Vermont media: the DUI arrest of Catherine Nelson two days before her installation as publisher of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.

She bounced her vehicle off multiple inanimate objects in downtown Rutland, and blew a BAC twice the legal limit after being pulled over by the cops.

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The Governor prepares a soft landing

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Is Peter Shumlin starting to act like a lame duck? It would seem so. To judge by this week’s paltry trinkle of news, he looks to have one eye fixed on the past and the other on his post-gubernatorial future. And he’s already given up on fixing one major debit in his administrative ledger.

As VPR’s Bob Kinzel reports, Shumlin opposes any tax increases to pay for Vermont’s burgeoning Medicaid bill, but he doesn’t want to cut eligibility or benefits either. In fact, he’s washing his hands of the whole mess.

“I don’t know which governor is going to get to solve this problem,” he added. “But I hope a governor gets to solve it soon.”

“…once I’m safely ensconced in the private sector with my lissome new bride,” he might have added under his breath.

Yeah, screw the 2016 session. The Governor, you see, proposed a Medicaid fix last year and the Legislature ungratefully rejected it. So he’s done his duty, and hereby washes his hands of the matter.

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Dubie discredited

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There’s quite the journalistic one-two punch on VTDigger today. It’s a story that exposes former Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie’s anti-wind activism for the empty rhetorical shell that it is; it also raises serious ethical questions about a top state official. Or it would, if the state had any serious ethical standards to enforce.

For those just joining us, Dubie emerged from his long political hibernation earlier this year to take up the fight against a proposed seven-turbine wind farm near his home in Swanton. Dubie insisted this wasn’t a case of NIMBYism which, don’t they all. But his political profile lent a bit of suit-and-tie gravitas to the cause.

In addition to the usual discredited arguments about environmental impact, Dubie attacked the Swanton plan as a menace to aviation. And since the guy is a pilot with American Airlines, his words carried some weight. Except it was all bullshit.

This fall, Dubie has been trumpeting a statement from the Federal Aviation Administration to support his stance. But it turns out that the FAA was merely claiming an interest in reviewing the plan. And now it has completed its review, and determined that there is no impact on aviation. None.

In other words, he wasn’t an expert with unique insight. He was just another zealot pushing whatever scraps of “information” he could find.

But what’s worse is that he had a willing accomplice at the highest level of state government: Guy Rouelle, aviation program administrator for the Agency of Transportation.

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A small fortune, on a relative scale

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Retired Wall Street kingpin Bruce Lisman, the Millionaire Who Would Be Governor, released his financials on Monday. Interesting, because (a) candidates usually release financials after Tax Day, so their most recent tax returns are included, and (b) it’s Christmas Week, when relatively few are paying attention. Kind of a newsdump, in other words.

The topline? Lisman’s net worth is $50.9 million.

Sounds like a lot. But my first thought was: I expected more.

After all, this is a guy who was in the top ranks of Bear Stearns, a very lucrative Wall Street firm. Well, it was “very lucrative” until it melted down into a small puddle of goo in the 2008 financial crisis.

And after all, this is a guy who in 2009 sold his Manhattan residence — a four-bedroom pad overlooking Central Park, not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art — for almost $13 million. And his current manse in Shelburne is worth just under $6 million. With real estate exposure like that, I’d have expected a higher net worth.

There are possible explanations.

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Outsiders trolling for dirt on KGM sale

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A very strange half-page advertisement graced page 3 of Your Monday Times Argus. It was a solicitation for inside information on the operations of Keurig Green Mountain and/or its would-be purchaser, JAB Holding Company. And, oddly, it was littered with typos and lousy grammar.

The ad was placed by something called ACTION Group, whose name is too generic to yield anything useful via Google search. At the top of the ad, ACTION Group claims to consist of “Americans Concerned To Improve Our Nation.”

Two people are named in the ad: William T. Juliano and Deborah Dickinson. You might expect them to be ambulance-chasing lawyers, but no — Juliano is a real estate developer and financier based in New Jersey and Boca Raton, Florida, and Dickinson is a longtime employee in his various enterprises.

The ad claims that ACTION Group is “very concerned” with the announced sale of KGM to JAB, described as “a huge German conglomerate whose intentions are to dominate the global coffee industry.”

You know, like the Third Reich only caffeinated. Hm, that doesn’t sound good.

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