Senate ethics discussion devolves into farce

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Well, now we know why the Senate Rules Committee likes to meet behind closed doors. Because yesterday, with reporters in the room, things got so badly out of control that they had to abruptly pack up and leave. Fortunately, VTDigger’s Mark Johnson was on hand to chronicle the chaos. His report is a classic case of “this would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.”

Senate Rules, a committee designed to defend the status quo, has been forced by events to take up the issue of ethics regulation — the very idea of which seems to offend at least three of the panel’s five members.

The saddest thing? The shambolic performance didn’t even concern a really tough issue. To anyone hoping for genuine ethics reform — like, for example, a state Ethics Commission — yesterday’s meeting was a knife in the back. The five Senators couldn’t even handle the much less impactful idea of an in-house Ethics Panel using the House’s toothless joke of a watchdog as a model.

Instead, they got stuck in the weeds of disclosure requirements.

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The unintended consequences of law

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Conceptual rendering of the Act 46 debate. Dave Sharpe's in there somewhere.

Conceptual rendering of the Act 46 debate. Dave Sharpe’s in there somewhere.

This Act 46 thing is turning into a giant-sized tangle of no-win, isn’t it?

The House and Senate are at odds, with the Senate voting to repeal limits on school budgets and the House considering a range of tweaks. The Senate is also throwing the House under the bus, disavowing any responsibility for the spending limits. The Governor is hounding the Legislature to repeal without thinking about it too much. On top of all that, we discover that the Agency of Education misinterpreted a key passage of Act 46 in a way that changes the actual limits for many a district.

Meanwhile, the Republicans can just sit in the balcony, laughing and throwing Jujubes. As VTDigger’s Anne Galloway notes, unless the House gets buffaloed into changing course, the Republicans will get exactly what they want: the limits will remain in place and the Democrats will look like disorganized idiots who don’t care about rising property taxes. And if the limits are repealed, the Republicans will get something just about as juicy: the Democrats repealing a measure designed to provide some tax relief, and looking like idiots in the process.

Meanwhile, school districts are closing in on Town Meeting time with no idea how to plan their budgets.

Yeah, nice. This lame-duck session is off to a rip-roaring start.

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The Apex of Entertainment Conservatism

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In a perfectly awful way, today was the perfect day.

Donald Trump.

At the John Wayne Homestead Museum.

Being endorsed by John Wayne’s descendants.

And then collecting the support of Sarah Palin.

It was the ideal display of something that MSNBC contributor Joy Reid calls “Entertainment Conservatism.” When I heard her say that, a bell rang in my head and a light bulb lit up above me.

John Wayne, the man brilliantly described by T Bone Burnett as the impostor, the “cowboy with no cattle, warrior with no war.”

Sarah Palin, supposedly a real Tea Partier, until today a staunch backer of Ted Cruz, aligning herself with Donald Trump.

Of course. Because she is, at heart, not an archconservative — she is an Entertainment Conservative.

In a fundamental way, this is the real heart of the conservative movement.

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Energize Vermont’s cockamamie political analysis

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Here’s something I bet you didn’t know.

Widespread unrest over the state’s renewable energy policy was responsible for Governor Shumlin’s near-defeat in 2014.

Actual piece of anti-wind propaganda from Ireland. I'm more afraid of Giant Baby than the turbines. But maybe the vibrations turned him into Babyzilla.

Actual piece of anti-wind propaganda from Ireland. Personally, I’m more afraid of Babyzilla than the turbines. But maybe the vibrations turned him into Babyzilla. Hmm.

Well, that’s the story being peddled by our buddies at Energize Vermont, an anti-renewable nonprofit whose funding sources are entirely opaque. They’re branding it as “The Vermont Energy Rebellion,” which allegedly poses an existential threat to the Democrats in 2016.

But let’s go back to 2014, the year that Scott Milne allegedly surfed the wave of anti-renewables anger to within an eyelash of the governorship. The fevered imagination of Energize Vermont focuses on the key constituency of Craftsbury, population 1,206.

Hey, you in the back: stop laughing!

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Brian Dubie, serial propagandist

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Our former Lieutenant Governor is continuing his all-out campaign against wind farms with his usual mix of overheated rhetoric and outright lies. As is customary with anti-wind activists, it’s a game of Whack-A-Mole: answer one argument, they quickly switch to another, and another, and another. No single argument survives scrutiny; they have to move the target and hope nobody notices. Dubie’s only been playing this game for a few months, but he’s already mastered the basics.

UFOTurbineHis latest foray was especially duplicitous: a claim that a proposed wind farm would be a hazard to aviation. Originally, he brandished a document from the Federal Aviation Administration that seemed to backstop his argument.  Turns out he was misrepresenting a routine FAA notice of interest in the project. The FAA has since ruled that the wind farm poses no risk to aviation.

That hasn’t stopped Dubie from pushing this discredited talking point, brandishing his “expertise” as a longtime airline pilot — which, I guess, makes him more of an expert than the Federal Aviation Administration.  Heh.

In a recent opinion piece, Dubie places the origin of his professional concern about wind turbines to an unspecified time during his tenure as Lieutenant Governor. Which looks like an attempt to rewrite history, since Dubie was a prominent advocate of wind energy — a position that put him at odds with Governor Jim Douglas, a wind-power skeptic. Dubie highlighted the need for more wind power as recently as January 2009, when he was being sworn in to his fourth term as Lite-Gov.

So when was his wind-power conversion? Apparently not during his government service. Indeed, he never raised a peep of concern about wind energy until last year, when he realized there was a plan to build a wind farm near his home.

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How a movie reinforced my doubts about Bruce Lisman

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I saw “The Big Short” last night. Great movie. Manages to be funny and dramatic while also explaining some very tricky financial concepts.

And there was one scene near the end that reminded me very much of The Man Who Would Be Governor, Bruce Lisman. He’s the native Vermonter who spent most of his adult life in the shadowy canyons of Wall Street, working his way up the ladder to the very top ranks of Bear Stearns.

Yes, the financial firm that went kerblooey in the great crash of 2008.

The story of “The Big Short” is that a few marginal investor-class weirdos were the only ones who saw how the mainstream investment community was vastly overextended in the housing market — to such an extent that a crash was inevitable. It also features various Wall Street “geniuses” who were clueless about the coming debacle.

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Shumlin Impresses In Straw-Man Battle

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Note: This is a repost of a piece originally posted a couple days ago. The original had some technical glitches; the easiest way to get rid of them was to start from scratch. 

Looks like the Shumlin administration is seriously worried about the future of the Enterprise Fund. After getting quite a bit of blowback over this month’s $1 million thank-you card to GlobalFoundries, the Governor has come out fighting.

Fighting, need I say, a straw man of his own devising.

On Monday, he batted around his own version of what the Fund’s critics have been saying. And three days later, the administration pushed out a report claiming that the Fund more than pays for itself in additional tax revenues.

We’ll see about that. But let’s go back to Shumlin’s inaccurately-aimed remarks from Monday. From Paul Heintz’ Fair Game column:

… the gov balked at his critics’ concerns, saying that state government “better do everything we can” to keep the Essex Junction plant competitive.

“You know, I got a letter from I don’t know how many legislators saying, ‘Nah, you know, don’t do this. It’s a bad idea. You know, we’ve got budget problems,'” Shumlin told the audience, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’m like, ‘Really?'”

Noting the fiscal impact GlobalFoundries’ departure would have on the state, Shumlin said, “You think a million bucks is a budget challenge? You know, get your head out of the sand!”

There’s a few problems here. I mean, aside from the impolitic move of verbally tossing a letter from 50 lawmakers into the dumpster. Yes, 50 — not “I don’t know how many.”

F-I-F-T-Y.

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At the very least, the Mitchells owe us some answers

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Your Publisher's mugshot.

Your Publisher’s mugshot.

Hey, remember when Catherine Nelson was arrested for re-enacting that A-ha video with her car and various downtown Rutland fixtures? Two days before her promotion to Publisher of the Rutland Herald and Times Argus?

And remember outgoing publisher John Mitchell’s inadequate explanation of the whole thing?

Well, this week it got worse. She pleaded “no contest” to charges stemming from that incident. And in the process, we learned something strange and troubling about her taste in drinking buddies. Paul Heintz:

Nelson finally admitted that she had been drinking with a man named Henry Hance, a habitual offender who, according to the Herald, has been convicted of more than a dozen DUI and drug charges, along with assault, arson and grand larceny. An hour and a half after her own DUI, Nelson blew twice the legal limit.

I’m sure those who follow the news in Rutland are painfully aware of Mr. Hance. RutVegas is full of, shall we say, colorful types; but Hance has got to be in the Top Ten. His record of violent, criminal, drug-dealing behavior covers his entire adult life.

So why the freakin’ hell is the new Publisher of the Rutland newspaper — one of the city’s most prominent citizens — hanging around with one of the city’s worst citizens?

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Senate May Do Absolute Minimum on Ethics

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That wacky Senate Rules Committee, under the steady hand of First Mate Gilligan President Pro Tem John Campbell, is considering a bold move.

Well, “bold” by their frame of reference. The committee met yesterday and discussed setting up an Ethics Panel along the lines of the weaksauce House version. Mind you, they didn’t decide anything; they’re just considering it.

And, well, if they do actually set up an Ethics Panel, I might file the inaugural complaint (just as I did, fruitlessly, with the House Ethics Panel last year). My complaint would be, ahem, against the Senate Rules Committee. The intrepid Paul Heintz:

The Senate Rules Committee, which has a long history of meeting secretly, held Thursday’s discussion behind closed doors in the Senate Cloakroom. Seven Days has repeatedly asked to be informed of such meetings and was told about it in advance by a member. [Senate Secretary John] Bloomer posted public notice of the meeting Thursday morning on the legislature’s website, just hours before it took place. One other reporter, from the Burlington Free Press, attended.

Is it just me, or is there something fundamentally ironic about a “Rules” Committee repeatedly failing to abide by open-meetings requirements? Nothing says “transparency” like having “a history of meeting secretly.” And in a frickin’ closet, no less.

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Metapost: Technical difficulties

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Hi folks, your friendly neighborhood blogger here.

You may have noticed a few formatting bugs in my most recent post. Well, here’s the story.

I came home tonight from a quick trip to Philadelphia (don’t ask) and sat down to write a post about Governor Shumlin’s Enterprise Fund-related tantrums.

And discovered that good old WordPress had gone and updated its posting system. Apparently the old system, which was less streamlined but which I was accustomed to using, is now gone. So I’m playing catch-up with the new system. I hate doing this stuff.

So, my apologies if there are glitches here and there. I’m trying.