Tag Archives: Dave Gram

The Shappening

Well over a hundred people gathered in the midday sun today, to hear House Speaker Shap Smith officially launch his candidacy for Governor. The crowd was enthusiastic, and nobody keeled over from heatstroke, so there’s that. Several state lawmakers were on hand. So too, interestingly, was Governor Shumlin’s recently departed chief of staff Liz Miller. She wasn’t wearing a “Shap” sticker that I could see*, so maybe her presence was mere coincidence. Mo Vegas is, after all, the place to be.

*Tattoo, perhaps.

And if Peter Freyne were still alive, Mr. Speaker might have acquired a new nickname: the Prag Prog.

I say my record is one of pragmatic progressivism.

He also unveiled a campaign logo, “Shap” in large white letters next to a green outline of Vermont, all set against a deep blue background. I would have been tempted to go with “Shapleigh,” but that’s probably why I’m not a candidate.

Holding the event in Morrisville was, I thought, a good move. It emphasized his status as a Vermonter rather than a Statehouse insider, and underlined his speech’s emphasis on ensuring opportunity in every part of Vermont, not just Chittenden County.

My big takeaway: the event highlighted his strengths as a candidate and the big challenges he will face. Most of which revolve around the same thing: his position as Speaker and his central role in Democratic policy initiatives of the past several years.

Continue reading →

BREAKING… URGENT… PREDICTABLE THING HAPPENS

3 Replies

Spoiler alert: Shap Smith will run for governor.

I know, shocking. But so reports the AP’s Dave Gram.

Mr. Speaker appeared on the soon-to-disappear Mark Johnson Show this morning and said that “he would make an announcement next Wednesday,” but wouldn’t say what. So Dave worked the phones and got a couple of unnamed “high-ranking Democrats” to spill the beans.

Being honorable people (cough), the sources refused to be named “because they did not want to be seen pre-empting Smith’s announcement.”

Which, of course, is exactly what they did. It’s just that they “didn’t want to be seen” doing so. Thanks, guys.

We’ve known for months now that Smith would run, just as it’s obvious Matt Dunne will enter the race, and it’ll be a shocker if Sue Minter opts out.

Continue reading →

Don’t expect the Governor to do anything about Bill Sorrell

3 Replies

Went to Governor Shumlin’s news conference today, planning to ask about the Bill Sorrell situation. Which, as you might recall, featured Our Eternal General facing questions about possible campaign finance violations (and VTGOP Vice Chair Brady Toensing formally requesting an independent counsel), and Our Eternal General assuring us all that Our Eternal General is above reproach and an independent probe would be a waste of money, Trust Me On This.

And a couple days ago, I rhetorically asked the state’s top elected Democrats what they planned to do about it.

The answer from Governor Shumlin? Nothing anytime soon. Maybe nothing ever. Because he’s just too busy doing the people’s business.

(If the press corps had been playing the Governor Shumlin Drinking Game, in which everyone has to take a swig every time he repeats certain catchphrases, we all would have been falling-down drunk within a few minutes. The rhetorical bag of tricks was emptied in an effort to evade responsibility.)

I threw out the first Sorrell question: Does the Governor think there should be an independent counsel to look into the allegations?

You know, as you can imagine, I am really focused on trying to get my agenda through the legislature. It’s the most ambitious agenda that I’e set out. And these things have to succeed. Balancing $112M budget shortfall. Getting out of hear with a clean water bill that actually cleans up our polluted waters. Making sure that we finally address both the cost and quality issues in our education system. Getting out of here with my energy bill. That’s what I’m focused on.

I have not had a chance to read the complaint. When the Legislature is all done, I suppose I’ll have time to do that, but I’m focused on my job.

Even by Shumlin standards, that was a rapid-fire pivot away from the question at hand. Continue reading →

Ethics, shmethics

4 Replies

Riddle me this, Batman: How is a political blogpost like a roadkill skunk?

The apparent answer: At first their stench makes them unfit for polite company, but after three weeks or so the smell goes away.

See, way; back on January 19, I wrote a piece about a bill before the legislature to establish a Latin motto for Vermont. Over time, the story went viral; it appeared on the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos, Reddit, Fark, and Gawker. It was shared on Facebook more than 10,000 times, and I literally got over 100,000 pageviews out of it.

But nobody else in Vermont media picked up on the story.

That is, until now. The Associated Press’ Dave Gram wrote a piece about it. The Burlington Free Press posted it on their paywalled website; here’s a link to the story on a non-paywalled site.

Nice of Dave to finally notice the story. Don’t know why it took three weeks.

Not so nice: he didn’t credit the Vermont Political Observer as the original source. Maybe the story’s blogorrific stench has dissipated, but the smell still permeates the dread name “theVPO.”

Gawker, that irresponsible gossipmonger, credited me; the local media, I guess, chooses not to.

Now I realize that (a) this is a trivial story, a sidebar to our coverage of politics and policy, and (b) nobody outside of the room I’m sitting in cares whether I get fair credit. But I do. And the giving and receiving of credit is always a lively topic whenever journalists gather; my salaried colleagues are quick to complain when they are slighted by another media outlet.

So here’s my complaint. For the vast majority of you who don’t care, my apologies and I promise something more relevant next time. Just needed to get that off my chest.

Dick Sears moves the target

1 Reply

Interesting piece by the Associated Press’ Dave Gram (now serving as the Burlington Free Press’ de facto Statehouse Bureau) about legislative consideration of the state’s troubled sex offender registry.

As you may recall, state law requires that the registry pass a “clean audit” before offenders’ addresses can be posted online. And the registry has failed two audits. The most recent, issued last summer, found “critical errors” in 11 percent of cases.

Not good.

But maybe, just maybe good enough for Dick Sears, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a man determined to get those addresses online. He has said there should be a zero percent error rate on the fundamentals, such as whether an individual should be on the registry in the first place. He said so again last Friday, according to Gram.

But he told a different story at a Judiciary Committee meeting on January 8:

“You can’t keep waiting for a positive audit, without defining what a positive audit is. If we were to define (the error rate), it would probably be 10 percent,” Sears said, according to a recording of the session.

Defender General Matthew Valerio interjected, “Or 5, or 2.”

Sears added, “Or 5 or 2 or 1 (percent).”

That first statement, quickly amended, is pretty damn alarming. He redefined “a positive audit” as reporting a 10 percent error rate?

Yikes.

While he immediately parroted Valerio’s words, his original statement is still hanging out there: “a positive audit… would probably be 10 percent.”

Sears then acknowledged that perfection might be impossible to attain: “Human beings enter the information.”

He’s right, of course. The problem is, posting the addresses of people labeled as sex offenders is a huge deal with potentially massive consequences. What if a person is wrongly labeled? What if an offender moves frequently, as is often the case, and an old address stays on the list? How about the new resident at that address?

Sears is dead set on getting those addresses online. And it sounds like he’s lowering his standards in order to achieve his goal. Let’s hope we don’t see a bill emerging from his committee that redefines a “clean audit” as an error rate of 10 percent or less.

Postscript. This story is one small sign of the diminishment of our Statehouse press corps. The key event occurred almost three weeks ago, and was not reported at the time. Gram retrieved the Sears comments from the official recording of the January 8 hearing.

As far as can be told, no reporters actually attended the hearing. Now, hearings go on every day, and Gov. Shumlin was inaugurated on January 8. Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that no reporters attended the committee hearing. But it’s an indication of how thin our Statehouse coverage is, and how many stories go unreported that are well worth our time and attention.

BREAKING — Bernie Sanders Announces A Timetable For An Announzzzzzzzz…..

Unwarranted outrage from your Freeploid

4 Replies

(See also addendum below: the Free Press didn’t have a reporter at one of the biggest news events in recent history!)

Regular readers of the Burlington Free Press (all six of us) know that transparency is one of its signature causes.

(Except when it comes to the Burlington Free Press itself; there, secrecy rules the day.)

Well, this preoccupation caused Vermont’s Saddest Newspaper to leap to an unwarranted conclusion yesterday.

In the morning, the media got notice of a gubernatorial press conference to be held at 2:15 p.m. There was no mention of the subject matter.

And this caused the Freeploid to throw a nutty. It posted a short piece entitled “Secrecy surrounds Shumlin’s news conference.”

Shumlin has led the fight for government transparency, but his new press secretary, Scott Coriell, has failed to respond to questions about the topic of the governor’s meeting with the media.

Well, son of a bitch. Of course he didn’t respond.

Most gubernatorial pressers include a bit of political business — a bill signing, a new initiative, a ribbon-cutting. In those cases, the media alert will tell us what’s coming up.

But when there’s an actual policy announcement of significant magnitude? Hell no. Shumlin’s people aren’t going to upstage the announcement by providing advance information. The Freeploid is basically demanding that the administration leak its own stuff.

Particularly in this case, when the announcement was made simultaneously to the media and to those who’d been involved in the single payer work. If Coriell had disclosed the subject matter, do you think the Free Press wouldn’t have found a way to publish the “scoop”?

The Freeploid went on to complain about changes in the time and venue for the presser. Which, c’mon, grow up. It’s not that big a deal.

I suspect the Freeploid’s real problem is that it no longer has a Statehouse bureau, and the editors had to decide whether to send a staffer down from Burlington. That’s a big deal for a paper as understaffed as the Freeploid. But that’s not the governor’s problem. And Scott Coriell shouldn’t be raked over the coals for simply doing his f’n job.

The article was slightly updated after the presser, and can be viewed by anyone who hasn’t canceled their subscription yet. The updated version mostly changes the verb tenses; the misperceptions, self-entitlement, and aspersions on Coriell remain intact. One more signpost on the Burlington Free Press’ descent into irrelevance.

Addendum. A loyal reader pointed out that the Free Press’ main article on Shumlin’s presser was not written by a Freeploid staffer, but by the Associated Press’ Dave Gram. That’s pretty awful for a “media company” that insists it hasn’t retreated from Statehouse coverage, and whose leader has publicly slammed “rumors and speculation that we are abandoning coverage in Montpelier.” Well, sir, your absence at yesterday’s announcement is not rumor or speculation, but fact.

Presumably what happened was: the Free Press tried to find out the subject of the presser and failed. The editors then made a calculated gamble not to send a reporter — although they did send their photographer Glenn Russell. Their gamble exploded in their faces. Dave Gram’s a fine reporter, but Vermont’s largest newspaper should not be depending on the AP for coverage of a huge news story.

Messaging 101: Don’t make mistakes in press releases about education

1 Reply

So this happened. Governor Shumlin’s office issued a press release on Monday about education funding — specifically its projection of a two-cent increase in the state property tax for the coming year.

And there was an oopsie. First to spot it was Dave Gram of the Associated Press (and now, apparently, chief Statehouse correspondent for the Burlington Free Press):

Shumlin statement: Ed costs rise “faster than Vermonter’s ability to pay.” Too costly to teach the plural apostrophe?

— Dave Gram (@davegramAP) December 2, 2014

And here is the error in context:

“The bottom line is that education spending in Vermont is supported by a wide variety of state revenue sources, not just the property tax,” Gov. Shumlin said. “That’s why I do not think simply shifting more education spending to other sources will address the burden Vermonters feel. We need to tackle this first as a spending challenge because education costs have continued to rise faster than Vermonter’s ability to pay for it, even though our student count has declined.”

It’s bad enough when a gubernatorial missive goes out with a big fat juicy typo. It’s even worse when the subject of said missive is education. Does newly-minted communications chief Scott Coriell need a little proofreading help?

Freeploid headline writer places thumb discreetly, yet firmly, on the scale

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

The Vermont Political Observer.

a.k.a. theVPO: Analysis and observation of Vermont politics from a liberal viewpoint