Tag Archives: Shaun Robinson

Nothing to See Here, Just Your Garden Variety Ruling Class Mutual Back-Scratching

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So, the Scott administration finally did the long-rumored thing. It signed a five-year, $2.3 million lease for commercial office space in Waterbury. Office space that’s only necessary because of Scott’s back-to-commute order that would overload the state-owned buildings in town.

Now, that $2.3 million is only part of the price tag for this deal. It costs real money to prepare office space for full-time occupancy. Will we ever get a full accounting of the cost? I wouldn’t bet on it.

The immediate beneficiaries of this deal are some good friends and political supporters of, ahem, Gov. Phil Scott. VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson got a lot of this story, but not all of it.

As Robinson reported, the lease involves 22,000 square feet of office space in the Pilgrim Park complex, the former headquarters of Green Mountain Coffee. It’s now owned by Malone Superior, LLC, a real estate firm co-owned by Wayne Lamberton, Patrick Malone, and Randy Lague. As Robinson reported, Malone Superior is located at the same address as Malone Properties, also owned by Patrick Malone. And as Robinson reported, Malone Properties donated “about $12,000” to Phil Scott’s gubernatorial campaigns in 2016, 2018 and 2020.

But there’s more, quite a bit more, that Robinson missed.

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Russ Ingalls Can Do What He Wants With His Radio Stations, But He Doesn’t Have to Be an Asshole About It

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When state Sen. Russ Ingalls, a conservative Republican, bought a bunch of Northeast Kingdom radio stations earlier this year, he indulged in some high-toned blather about emphasizing local information and keeping politics out of the product.

Well, now we know how that turned out.

As VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson reports, Ingalls has raised some ire among liberal listeners by getting rid of newscasts from major network broadcasters and the Associated Press and replacing them with, you guessed it, Fox News.

And that’s the way our capitalist media system works, isn’t it? He who pays the piper calls the tune. Ingalls is well within his rights to air whatever kind of newscasts he wants. (Thanks, it must be said, to Ronald Reagan’s deep-sixing of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to fairly represent all points of view from the birth of electronic media until its repeal in 1987.)

Actually, when I first scanned the headline, I thought he’d replaced the stations’ entire programming with far-right conservative talk. He hasn’t. He’s decided to air Fox News in the brief window devoted to news at the top of each hour. Which usually amounts to no more than a couple minutes of news along with plenty of advertisements.

Point being, if you depend on commercial radio newscasts to keep you informed, it’s kind of like making Lunchables the foundation of your diet.

So I don’t have much of a beef with Ingalls’ decision. I do have trouble, and plenty of it, with his comments about the situation. Which reveal him to be a tunnel-visioned ideologue with no patience for criticism of himself, the country, or its current (you should pardon the expression) leadership. Not to mention his open contempt for constituents who disagree with him.

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Democrats Be Democrattin’

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VTDigger’s post-Mearhoff political “team” has done itself proud in the early days of the new year, publishing not one, but two, articles outlining a fresh outbreak of an old familiar malady of the left — Democrats in Disarray.

Yeah, I’ve seen this movie before, over and over again. The Dems react to an electoral defeat by watering down their agenda and shifting (if not stampeding) to the center. When, in fact, the lesson to be learned from election victories on both sides is that voters reward authenticity — and are unconvinced by carefully titrated policy positions that have been focus-grouped to death. And by “authenticity” I mean everything from Jimmy Carter’s humble populism to Donald Trump’s extravagant disregard for political norms. (Trump may be a phony and a huckster but he’s consistent about it. He is, as he has told us repeatedly, that snake.)

Digger’s Emma Cotton brings us word of a panicky retreat from the Dems’ climate agenda, while the (at least for the moment) sole occupant of the political beat, Shaun Robinson, reports that quite a few House Democrats are prepared to defenestrate Speaker Jill Krowinski in favor of independent Rep. Laura Sibilia. Enough are against Krowinski or undecided that next week’s election for Speaker may be a close affair.

Both are clear and obvious overreactions to the results of the November elections, which saw many a Democrat go down to defeat — but which left the Democrats with a majority in the Senate and nearly a two-thirds majority in the House. To say that they “lost” the election is to avoid the fact that they still rule the Statehouse roost, and would be fully justified in pursuing an ambitious agenda in the new biennium. Even so, many Dems seem to be running scared. Some of their more influential member are, dare I say, sounding a lot like Phil Scott Republicans. And no, that’s not a compliment.

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