Tag Archives: Seven Days

Lifestyles of the affluent and connected

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Both halves of one of Vermont’s top power couples are on the move. Eric Miller is in line to be the next U.S. Attorney for Vermont, while loyal spouse Liz Miller just announced her exit from Governor Shumlin’s office, destination TBA.

Eric M. will presumably take a hefty pay cut in his move from principal at Sheehey, Furling & Behm to Humble Servant of the People. Liz is about to forego her six-figure salary as a H.S.O.P., but could presumably have her pick of lucrative jobs in lawyerin’, lobbyin’, or corporate fixin’.

In announcing her move, Liz M. said something that could be taken one of two ways:

Liz Miller said Thursday that the two moves are coincidental. But she said the timing was good for her to leave a grueling job as he prepares to begin one.

“It would be difficult on the bill-paying and the dog, if nothing else,” she said.

I’m pretty sure she meant “difficult on the bill-paying” as a simple statement of time management: if both of them are burning the midnight oil as H.S.O.P.s, who tends to the duties of home and hearth?

LizMillerOn the other hand, if she meant it’d be hard for a childless couple with Ivy League law degrees and a costly home on Lake Champlain, plus extensive experience and connections in Vermont’s corridors of power, to make ends meet… well, no sympathy here.

At risk of losing my License to Blog, I’m willing to accept the less silver-spoony interpretation. Although I will point out that, whatever job Liz Miller takes next, they could probably afford to hre a part-time secretary/dog walker. Hey, jobs for Vermonters.

Is this the end of Rico?

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Well, if this isn’t the mother of all Friday newsdumps.

After 18 months of headaches caused by Vermont Health Connect, Gov. Peter Shumlin announced Friday that he’s prepared to replace the online health insurance marketplace if it fails to meet two new deadlines.

(Note: According to VTDigger, Shumlin first made his announcement on WDEV’s Mark Johnson Show. Credit where it’s due.)

Yeezus. I make a little day trip to New Hampshire, and this is what happens? I may never leave Vermont again.

“This is not an attractive option,” Shumlin’s chief of health care reform, Lawrence Miller, said at the press conference.

Miller added that “bubonic plague can ruin your day, and zombies are bad news.”

In the past I have occasionally been guilty of hyperbole, so it’s understandable if you take this with a grain of salt, but…

This doesn't end well.

This doesn’t end well.

If Vermont Health Connect fails, it is the end of Peter Shumlin’s political career.

It wouldn’t be the last act; he’d still remain governor for another year and a half. But the abandonment of VHC would be a death blow to whatever’s left of his reputation for managerial competence. And trustworthiness. He will have a simple, stark choice: Serve out his term as best he can, step aside with grace and dignity (and hopefully a big show of unity with a consensus candidate for the Democratic nomination)… or go down in a metaphorical burst of tommygun fire.

Mind, all this is contingent on the failure of VHC, which is far from a sure thing. But given its track record (and the Governor’s), today’s announcement has to send shivers down the spines of everyone who’s invested political capital in the Shumlin Growth Fund.

The song goes like this: assurances of success; bumps in the road; conditional assurances of success; postponements; failures; promises to learn lessons and do better; new plans with later deadlines; fresh assurances; lather, rinse, repeat.

We have just gone from “assurances of success” to “conditional assurances.”

The fallback plan, should VHC again fail to meet functionality targets, is a hybrid marketplace: federally supported but state-regulated. It’s not a terrible Plan B, but it would put the lie to every assurance Governor Shumlin has made about Vermont Health Connect since its launch. It would hand the Republicans a huge quantity of ammunition, and it would permanently sink Shumlin’s managerial reputation.

The Governor’s new timeline:

Shumlin said he would only deploy the contingency plan if Vermont Health Connect is unable to automatically process changes in account information by May or if it’s unable to smoothly reenroll users by October. Even then, the state would not adopt the new system until October 2016, in time for the 2017 open-enrollment period.

Oh great. So if VHC isn’t working by October, then we’ll be activating Plan B right in the middle of the next gubernatorial campaign.

And what if anything — at all — goes wrong? It drags on until after the election. If that happens, it may not matter who the Democrats nominate.

If all that happens, Peter Shumlin will not only go down in history as a failure. He’ll also be the guy who squandered a king’s ransom in political capital for his Democratic Party.

Tweetblocked by a Hero Of Journalism™

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Funny thing happened sometime in the past 18 hours or so. Burlington Free Press deputy editor (and Chief Assistant Gannett Cheerleader) Adam Silverman (a.k.a. @Wej12) blocked me from his Twitter feed.

I guess it was only a matter of time; I smack around the Freeploid pretty regularly, and he’s apparently the touchiest guy in the building. So, what finally broke the camel’s back?

Judging by the chronology, it was a series of replies I made to SilverTweets from the Newspaper Association of America “mediaXchange” conference in Nashville.

(Note the trendy non-traditional capitalization. That’s a sign of a desperate industry seeking new-century relevance. Kind of like when big corporations fill their Tweets with millennial slang like “bae” and “on fleek.”)

Silverman was liveTweeting from conference workshops. I couldn’t help but respond to some of them. First, a harmless jape:

After that, Silverman sent a couple Tweets I found darkly humorous. First:

And second:

A little background there. The Free Press is notoriously stingy with crediting other news organizations for original stories. Especially when it comes to Seven Days, which the Free Press likes to pretend doesn’t exist.

Anyway, I guess I stepped on some tender toes. Since then, I haven’t seen any Tweets from Silverman and I just discovered I’ve been blocked. So disappointing; I was learning so much from him about the joyless, soulless state of 21st Century Journalism.

Single-payer price tag: the dollars matter less than what they bought

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Another fine “Fair Game” column by Seven Days politimeister Paul Heintz, most of which is an attempt to put a price tag on Gov. Shumlin’s failed pursuit of single-payer health care.

The takeaway number: $2 million. But that comes with some major cutouts; if you changed the ground rules, you could come up with a much higher number.

Heintz sought that number for ten weeks before the administration finally came up with it. And after all that time, all they did was add up two numbers: $597,000 to ten consultants, and $1.33 million spent on the governor’s Office of Health Care Reform.

However… the consultants and the OHCR weren’t the only people who put in time on single-payer. Work was also done by staffers in “10 offices, departments and agencies.” There was lobbying and flackery on behalf of single-payer. And many millions were spent on the Green Mountain Care Board and other entities that might not have existed, or been nearly so expensive, if not for their work on single-payer.

So, $2 million. Or a lot more, your choice.

The big question, though: was that too much? And the answer is, it depends.

If it was spent well and wisely, then $2 million or even $20 million would be a perfectly reasonable investment in research on a huge policy initiative. If it was spent poorly, then $2 million or $2,000 would be a waste.

So it depends. If you oppose single-payer, it’s an outrage. If you favor single-payer and believe the governor did his best, it’s reasonable.

And if, like me and many other single-payer supporters, you have your doubts regarding the administration’s performance, then that $2 million figure will make you a bit more queasy about the whole enterprise.

Urp.

The curious incident of the GOP in the night-time

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Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the press release in the night-time.”

Gregory: “Therre was no press release in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

— Not Quite Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Vermont Republican Party can’t be counted on for much, but one thing that’s as regular as clockwork is the issuance of potboiler press releases attacking Democrats for political sins, real or imagined. Lately, the circular files of Vermont media have been filled by a series of missives about the Shumlin-Shap Smith Economy, and what a dreadful thing it is. There’s also been plenty of hash — much of it deserved this time — about the Jonathan Gruber billing caper.

But it’s been more than three days since Seven Days’ Terri Hallenbeck spilled the beans on the increased staffing of the Senate President Pro Tem’s office under current occupant John Campbell. And not a peep from the VTGOP.

I find that curious. Don’t you?

If the situation were reversed, and House Speaker Shap Smith was the one who’d padded his office staff to the tune of $72,000 In Taxpayer Dollars, it wouldn’t have taken the Republicans more than a few minutes to try to capitalize.

Why no castigation for Campbell?

Is it because he’s the next best thing to a Republican Pro Tem — allowing the blockage of many a piece of liberal legislation, reliably backing Phil Scott, packing the Committee on Committees with “centrist” figures? Hey, if a Senate majority is out of the VTGOP’s reach, then Campbell is the next best thing.

Is it because Campbell is such a nice guy? Or that he’s no threat to run for higher office? Or because of his rumored girlfriend?

I’m still waiting for the Republican attack on the wasteful spending of John Campbell. But I’m not holding my breath.

Ethics, shmethics: Legislative edition

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Maybe it’s my inner flatlander, accustomed to the sometimes shady dealings in other states’ politics, but I get even more cynical than usual on the subject of ethics in the legislature.

The subject comes to mind today because of Paul Heintz’ excellent column in this week’s Seven Days, which chronicles the fitful, woefully inadequate first steps of the newly minted House Ethics Panel.

Until now, as Heintz reports, “Vermont was one of just 10 states without any sort of internal legislative ethics committee empowered to investigate potential wrongdoing… [and] remains one of just eight states without an external ethics commission.” (Emphasis his.)

The House panel barely qualifies as an overseer of ethics. Its chair, David Deen, hopes to keep investigations secret “to protect from public embarrassment those who are wrongly accused.”

Oh, that’s nice. We wouldn’t want one of our public servants to suffer embarrassment. What say we apply the same standard to court cases? If a lawmaker needs to be shielded from “public embarrassment” over an ethical matter, how much worse is the potential embarrassment of, say, a charge of murder?

I’d also remind the good Representative of something that often gets lost under the Golden Dome of Silence: these people work for us, and should be answerable to us. If that includes the occasional “public embarrassment,” well, tough.

The purest form of insular Statehouse sentiment comes from the Senate, which remains blissfully unencumbered by any sort of ethics committee. President Pro Tem John Campbell assures us that “Vermont is one of the cleanest states.”

No way to prove that, of course.  Not without an ethics panel. Which we don’t need, because John Campbell says so.

I really don’t know if Vermont is a particularly clean state. We certainly have our share of public corruption, especially in situations where no one is on guard — such as the numerous cases of embezzlement by small-town officials or the odd drug addict overseeing a police evidence storage room.

Most of our public servants do have good intentions and work hard for very little reward, but there’s a whole lot of potential for ethical violations baked into our system. Lawmakers routinely cast votes that have an effect on their non-legislative work. They spend a substantial amount of time with lobbyists, and many friendships result. (Campbell is, I’ve been told, best buds with one of the top Black Hats in town.) They depend heavily on those lobbyists for political contributions and for policy advice, since all but the top leaders have no staff support.

To some extent, Vermont has some measure of protection from serious scandal because it’s such a small place. But in other ways, our smallness makes us more vulnerable. Example: the Colchester Police Department brusquely dismissed initial complaints about Tyler Kinney because, well, he was One Of Us and couldn’t possibly have been a thief and addict who compromised countless criminal investigations.

Except he was.

There may be no big undiscovered scandals at the Statehouse, but there is a faintly rancid smell about the clubbiness of the place. It could use the occasional blast of fresh air. And we could use an ethics panel with independence, transparency, and a good sharp set of teeth.

Will the last one off the seventh floor please turn out the lights?

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The institutional memory at the Burlington Free Press, Vermont’s Shrinkingest Newspaper, has taken another big hit. 28-year veteran reporter Molly Walsh is leaving the Freeploid for the friendlier confines of Seven Days.

It’s a body blow to the Free Press’ diminishing ability to cover the news. And the timing couldn’t be worse, since Walsh has been reporting the Burlington mayoral race. Not quite as bad as Terri Hallenbeck and Nancy Remsen leaving on Election Day, but not helpful. It’s also one more indication of Seven Days’ growing dominance in the Chittenden County news market, and its seriousness about positioning itself as a vital news source.

Better days…

Better days…

Walsh was diplomatic about the lifeboat she’s swimming away from:

There’s been a lot of change. I think some of the changes are for the better and some are questionable.

But her actions speak louder than her words. Can you imagine, at any earlier point in history, an established reporter voluntarily leaving an established daily newspaper for an alt-weekly?

Strange but true: Seven Days is a better place to work than the Freeploid, with its reporters expected to write clickbait-friendly articles, produce endlessly, create and market their “brand,” provide video and photography as well as copy, work with the sales department and key advertisers, and live on the high-wire of editing their own stories.

About the last point. One of the Freeploid’s sister Gannett papers, the Cincinnati Enquirer, was inundated by reader complaints about the quantity of mistakes in the Sunday paper. Most of the errors were minor, but every one undercuts a newspaper’s credibility. The Enquirer, like the Freeploid, is an example of Gannett’s Newsroom of the Future, which includes little or no copyediting.

The Sunday foofaraw was so bad, it prompted chief editor Carolyn Washburn to write a memo to news staff emphasizing the need for them to “take full ownership of your own clean copy.” Meaning, “don’t expect the editors — pardon me, Producers and Coaches — to be your backstop.”

Now, you’d think an average reporter would be capable of producing literate copy, but it’s not nearly as simple as you’d think. This former copyeditor can tell you that mistakes are like cockroaches in a New York City apartment: no matter how hard you try, it’s almost impossible to stamp ’em out. And it gets harder with every re-reading of a story: after two or three scans, your eyes inevitably start to glaze over. That’s why media outlets have traditionally had copyeditors: the more eyes you have on a story, the more likely you are to weed out the errors.

In sum, the Free Press has got to be a really hard place to work these days, and it’s only going to get worse. Walsh’s departure is one more signpost on the Free Press’ road to irrelevance.

RNC leader thinks better of Israel trip

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Hmm. Apparently Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican National Committee, ducked out of that big trip to Israel arranged by the hateful bigoted folks at the American Family Association.

Priebus was one of the many top Republicans, including Vermont’s own Susie Hudson, who were booked on a nine-day trip to Israel paid for, and guided by, officials of the American Family Association and its subsidiary, the American Renewal Project. The voyagers left last weekend, but Priebus was spotted this week in Washington, D.C. after a meeting with Senate Republicans. Talking Points Memo:

His appearance in Washington came as something of a surprise after the founder of the American Renewal Project, David Lane, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week that he would be taking Priebus, Priebus’ wife and about 60 other committee members to the Holy Land.

The trip was scheduled in November, but became a source of controversy last week after the Israeli media outlet Haaretz spilled the inconvenient beans about the AFA’s extreme Christianist positions.

You know, it’s funny how the Republican Party doesn’t mind offending Americans with its close ties to a hate group, but it’s afraid to offend Israelis. Yeah, funny.

I guess Priebus decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and quietly canceled. Hudson and the others made the trip, and are currently getting their heads filled with AFA dogma about Middle Eastern politics. Perhaps when Hudson comes back on Sunday, someone from the Vermont media will ask her what she learned, and about the appropriateness of the Republican National Committee accepting the lavish hospitality of the American Family Association.

Let’s hope so. To date, Seven Days’ Paul Heintz is the only reporter to pursue this story. How about it, VTDigger, Burlington Free Press, Vermont Press Bureau, Associated Press, VPR, WCAX, and WPTZ? The Vermont Republican Party actively distances itself from the more extreme provinces of national conservatism; how do its leaders explain one of their own, who holds a top position with the national party, taking an expensive AFA junket and absorbing its poisonous worldview?

Top Vermont Republican still consorting with hatemongers

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Susie Hudson is still going to Israel on a trip paid for by the American Family Association, the far-right Christianist organization. She sees nothing wrong here.

Predictable, but disappointing.

Hudson, a resident of Montpelier and newly-elected secretary of the Republican National Committee, is one of many RNC members going on a nine-day trip to Israel paid for by the AFA and guided by AFA leaders. The trip made news when the Israeli news outlet Haaretz reported the many bigoted comments by longtime AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer. In response, AFA fired Fischer as its spokesman — but retained him as a talk-radio host.

Yep, they’re still paying the guy for equating Islam with Ebola, asserting that the First Amendment only applies to Christianity, and that gay Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust because homosexuals are inherently savage.

He may not be their spokesman, but as a talk radio host, he remains their public face. And they’re happy to pay him for that. Plus, his comments were barely outside the usual poisonous stream of AFA demagoguery.

After I revealed Hudson’s travel plans in this space, Seven Days‘ Paul Heintz reached Hudson, and she gave him a heapin’ helpin’ of weaksauce.

“I mean, I know there’s been some stuff that’s been out in the press yesterday, but it’s my understanding that there was an individual who made some inappropriate comments, and I certainly don’t agree with them, and it’s my understanding they are no longer with the organization.”

Okay, stop right there. Fischer is still with the organization, still holds a prominent position. His public statements have arisen from his radio show, not from his duties as AFA spokesman. If they wanted to punish him, they’d take away his media platform.

… Asked whether she was familiar with AFA’s beliefs, Hudson said, “I mean, obviously I’m somewhat familiar with them, yes.”

But, she said, “I did not know that whatever group you said has called them a hate group.”

Wow. Just wow. That’s an almost Palinesque cavalcade of ignorance. Now, I’m sure Ms. Hudson is just acting stupid to avoid taking a stand on the AFA, but I’d expect someone in her position to do a better job than that.

“Somewhat familiar” with the American Family Association, a leading power-broker on the Christian Right? “Whatever group you said”? Yeah, just the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of America’s leading crusaders against hate groups for more than 40 years. “Stuff that’s been out in the press”? In the words of Katie Couric, what newspapers do you read?

To top it all off, “Hudson… repeatedly declined to say what she understood AFA’s beliefs to be.”

Come on. That’s not credible at all. The Republican Party’s top officials have to know the lay of their land. That includes groups like the American Family Association, who have a lot of influence in Republican politics.

There, of course, is the rub. Hudson can’t afford to publicly distance herself from the AFA because it is so influential. And because AFA members and sympathizers form a substantial part of the Republican base, even in liberal old Vermont. She’d rather come across as an uninformed dunderhead than utter a word against the AFA and the extremism it stands for.

Which brings us to the Vermont Republican Party itself. VTGOP leaders like to downplay social issues, but they don’t want to actively contradict the views of the Christian Right. No matter how extreme, hateful, and downright unAmerican those views might be.

Theme from “Jaws” heard in southern Vermont newsrooms

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Looks like the Vermont journalism scene is about to take another step into the abyss. Paul Heintz has a story on the Seven Days website, headlined by a bit of consolidation at the Brattleboro Reformer and Bennington Banner: both papers will now share a single managing editor, Michelle Karas. (When asked if she could handle both papers, her less than reassuring response was “I’m hoping so.”)

To me, though, the more important — and more worrying — news was several paragraphs down in Heintz’ piece: DigitalFirst Media, the corporate parent of both papers, wants to get out of the newspaper business. It’s in the process of selling its entire portfolio of more than 100 papers nationwide. It would prefer to unload the whole shebang in a single transaction, although it may wind up selling things piecemeal.

Newspaper Rd. Dead EndDFM’s stash includes such notable properties as the San Jose Mercury News, Salt Lake Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, and Denver Post. Our southern Vermont dailies are afterthoughts by comparison.

And they are about to be thoroughly buffeted by the winds of corporate change.

Possible buyers include a passel of private equity firms, many of which have no experience in newspapers. That’s bad enough, but even worse are the experienced operators said to be in the running. They include Gannett, currently engaged in a slow strangulation of the Burlington Free Press; and GateHouse Media, whose name is poison in Massachusetts.

GateHouse is the creation of another private-equity firm, Fortress Investment Group. Fortress has seen its share of financial trouble in recent years; it nearly went bankrupt in the market crash of 2008. This caused it to default on a huge loan deal to fund construction of the athletes’ village for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. That forced the City of Vancouver to pony up $450 million (Cdn) to get the village built.

Oh well, you know what they say about eggs and omelets.

Even as it has struggled, Fortress has built a newspaper entity that seems to break all the rules of business. According to the Boston Globe, GateHouse “has never made an annual profit as a public company,” and in 2013 filed for bankruptcy “under the weight of nearly $1.2 billion in debt.”

Even so, Fortress finagled the finances in a way that allowed GateHouse to scoop up 33 more New England newspapers. After which, it immediately imposed draconian staff cuts. Poynter Institute media business analyst Rick Edmonds says GateHouse has a reputation as a “bottom-line, lean operator” that isn’t squeamish about making cuts. “In a case like this, they’ve probably looked at the numbers and said, ‘We can squeeze more [savings] out of this,’” he said.

Through its holding companies, Fortress controls “nearly every newspaper south of Boston,” and also “dominates Boston’s western suburbs.”

Brattleboro and Bennington, just a hop and a skip away. Looking at the two behemoths said to be in the running to buy DigitalFirst, I’d say GateHouse makes a lot more sense than Gannett. And if Gannett winds up buying all of DFM, I wouldn’t be surprised if it spun off the two Vermont dailies, which are teeny-tiny by Gannett standards but right in GateHouse’s comfort zone.

Either way, look for more slashing in southern Vermont’s already sad print-media scene. Which is a real shame; the healthier Vermont media properties, VTDigger, Seven Days, and VPR, all have a clear northern Vermont slash statewide focus. Very seldom does southern Vermont show up on their radar.

There is one thin ray of hope in Heintz’ story. As the Brattleboro Reformer has declined, he notes that an independent weekly, The Commons, has expanded its circulation in recent years.

This may be the next mutation of journalism: a Seven Days approach, including a single weekly print edition and a Web presence with more frequent postings. To be sure, there’s no sign that daily papers will do anything other than continue to diminish in size and quality.