The politics of convenience...Dem candidates form circular firing squads:

from the NYT...

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/politics/campaigns/12CAMP.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=

the article starts about the unofficial cooperation between Kerry and Gephardt campaigns to attack Dean:

"Aides to both men say there is no overt conspiracy, but they acknowledge that at least at a staff level, the Gephardt and Kerry campaigns are more than friendly: they are sharing information about Dr. Dean that helps fuel each another's attacks.

On Sept. 30, for instance, both campaigns fired off press releases within 18 minutes of each other touting a column in The Boston Globe critical of Dr. Dean.

Shortly before, according to Steve Elmendorf, Mr. Gephardt's chief of staff, he and Jim Jordan, Mr. Kerry's campaign manager, told each other of the column by e-mail. "Either I sent it to Jim, or Jim sent it to me, I can't remember," Mr. Elmendorf said."

--snip--

the article goes on further to explain that all campaigns engage in this type of behavior:

"But Steve Murphy, the Gephardt campaign manager, said Mr. Trippi was being "totally hypocritical," adding: "Two weeks ago he ran into me and some of my staffers at Dulles airport and suggested that instead of attacking Howard Dean on Medicare, we should help him and Howard Dean attack Wesley Clark. This was a lengthy conversation."

--end--

It futhers the belief that both campaigns may encourage some of their supporters to vote for Gephardt in Iowa and Kerry in NH to kill the Dean campiagn's potential wins in both states. The only problem is this is dangerous as too much loss of support could make Kerry seem unviable for NH and Gephardt may have nothing to offer in NH...

Having watched the debates, there does seem to be some organized ganging up by candidates who have a mutual advatage for the gangie to be hit....the only thing is, is it turning off voters who we will need in the general election, those who are not the rank and file base but the independents who will be important for us?

Especially, if they are spending so much time trying to tear Dean down instead of giving folks reasons to vote for *them* over Bush.

It is making Democrats angry at other Dems and it's poor strategy to keep harping, over and over, that your opponent is both Newt Gingrich and George McGovern.

which is Dean's trademark.

Btw, when was the last time Dean used the term Bush-lite, who was and why was that candidate called Bush-lite?

The last time I remember the term being used was in response to an attack by Kerry, where Kerry used the same arguments that Bush used in promoting Bush's tax plan during the 2000 election.

That was, I think, a month or more ago.

Kerry has never let up on his piddly attacks on other Dems.

when his record, as a liberal, doesn't compare to a Democrat like Kerry.

So, Kerry voted for the Iraqi Resolution.

Dean didn't have to and gets no credit for claiming he wouldn't have. That is just hypothetical bs.

And by the way, as far as I've found... Dean no heavy lifting for the Civil Unions Bill and signed it in a closet.

And he's said over and over and over that he is a centrist. At most, if not all, rallies he says he's a centrist and he tells folks, essentially, that they'll agree on many things and disagree on many others.

He used Wellstone's phrase because he saw the anti-Iraq-war Democrats being totally ignored (and sometimes ridiculed) by Democratic "insiders". It was a way of saying that he *is* listening and the others aren't.

Also, Dean's priorities are straight. He is fighting on the correct side of the biggest issues, and Kerry and Gephardt are trying to smear Dean on piddly issues by saying, essentially, "Dean's not liberal enough".

Well, I don't exepect any candidate to be "liberal enough" for myself or to agree with everying I agree with.

for Democrats.

DEREGULATING ELECTRICITY like Dean pushed in Vermont, is a priority for Libertarians and the BFEE.

didn't affect Vermont at all.

I think if Dean wanted to deregulate power, he'd have done it in the 11 years he was governor or during the time he was Lt. governor or a state senator.

Dean finally gave up trying to push it through.

Bob Young is plugging into a career's worth of energy industry experience to lead Central Vermont Public Service
Corp. through deregulation by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

Originally published in Business People, May 2000. Photos: Jeff Clarke)

As deregulation sweeps through America's electric utility industry, utilities are losing their traditional status as power-providing monopolies and are facing a new era of free enterprise and competition. That's the case with Central
Vermont Public Service Corp. (CVPS), Vermont's largest electric utility. Under the leadership of Bob Young, president
and CEO since 1995, CVPS is meeting the challenges of deregulation head-on.

President/CEO Bob Young has been preparing Vermont's largest electric utility for deregulation since 1993. The plan reduced CVPS's employee roster and brought in officers with a variety of backgrounds to compete in an international market.

"He's smart; he's tough," says Gov. Howard Dean. "He's extremely dedicated to his community. He's an enormous asset to CVPS, and to the state."
.............................................................................................................................................................

HIGH VOLTAGE ZAPS STATEHOUSE POWER BROKERS;LEADERSHIP STUNNED

Well, folks, it's a billion dollar rip-off brought to you courtesy of your friendly neighborhood public utility company, Governor Howard Dean, and key satraps of both Democratic and Republican parties. Will Vermonters roll over and submissively shell out? ..

The Senate passed the bill, S-62, placidly called "an act relating to electric industry restructuring," and now it will sit before the House for a year or so. Well and good. House Speaker, Michael Obuchowski has done us all a favor by slowing the power companies' juggernaut and letting the dust settle. The Senate made a valiant but hasty effort to understand the torturously complex piece of legislation but as Finance Committee Chair, Senator Cheryl Rivers said in the floor debate, "We really don't know what this bill will do."

We are, however, beginning to get an idea.
It's starting to look like Vermonters are about to get mugged for truly big bucks.

Senator Vince Illuzzi, in a failed insurrection on the floor, put it best. He said, "This bill should be called: The Hydro Quebec Protection Act." Illuzzi, a strange blend of bad-assed populist and stiff-necked conservative, went on, "This bill is the biggest bailout of an industry in Vermont history. It's analogous to the deregulation of the savings & loan industry and subsequent multi-billion dollar bailout."

Remember Hydro Quebec?

About six years ago, our benevolent power companies and a few high level politicians and bureaucrats rammed through a
disastrously overpriced deal with Hydro Quebec. A lot of people complained about it at the time but the financial implications flew far over the heads of most Vermonters. Now, the chickens come home to roost. And now S-62 proposes to give nearly the same cast of bad actors, bumbling and/or conniving utility executives, their political cat's paws, and their captive techno-bureaucrats, the responsibility of cleaning up this very smelly hen house.

Contrary to the usual media slush, S-62 does NOT deregulate the electric utility industry in Vermont any more than NAFTA
brought about "free trade."

Wrapped into our traditional electric bill are three main cost components: generation, transmission, and distribution. Generation means the machinery and fuels that actually produce the electricity. Transmission means the high voltage network required to wheel large blocks of power long distances. And distribution means the system of poles and wires connecting all of our homes and businesses to the grid.

The distribution component, wires and poles, accounts for forty or fifty percent of our power bills. Transmission costs add another ten or fifteen percent. The remainder, the costs of the actual electrical generators themselves, amounts to less than fifty percent of our total electric bill.

It is this generation component that would be opened, under the new rules, to a kind of market place competitive environment. In theory, each of us consumers would be able to choose our power sources. That's the theory anyway, but in any event, the majority of the price we pay for electricity would continue to go to our same old power companies. For most of us, that means Central Vermont Public Service and Green Mountain Power. These companies and all the smaller Vermont electrical suppliers will still be regulated by the Public Service Board and guaranteed a profit in the same old way.

Getting some kind of choice in where and how and at what price our electricity is produced is a nice idea. We could choose a windmill company in Maine or a solar company in Arizona. You can bet if we had had a chance to choose twenty years ago Vermont Yankee nuclear and Hydro Quebec would have gone out of business in Vermont long ago.

But, unfortunately, our choices promise to be considerably less than free and our electric bills considerably higher than our New England neighbors. If the power companies and Governor Dean and Senator Shumlin and Senator Snelling and Senator Spaulding get their way we will also be forced to pay those same old power companies the costs of their very expensive mistakes.

The big shots say we are all on the hook for this very long contract with Hydro Quebec. Our prudent and public spirited utility executives agreed to pay for a lot more power than we need at a price billions of dollars higher than its market value. It's enough to make a good free market capitalist throw up.

So now it's fake free market time. Why now? Actually, there are no special technical reasons to restructure the electric power business now. It's all really just a matter of corporate bookkeeping. Technically, generation could have been separated from distribution twenty or thirty years ago. Or it doesn't need to happen at all. But everybody's doing it, all over the country. It's the latest thing, so little Vermont has to jump on this bandwagon too.

You might ask, how could us dumb citizens of Vermont have made such a crummy deal with Hydro Quebec in the first place? Well, basically, we didn't. Utility executives, against the advice of their own planners, made that deal, sailed it past the Public Service Board, and signed the contract themselves. We have to pay for it, they say, because they complied with a regulatory process that sticks the public with the bill every time.

The Vermont public wasn't paying close enough attention when the power company executives shopped that turkey around like sweet honey and the promised land. But it's doubtful public pressure would have made any difference anyway. Actually there was quite a hue and cry over the environmental impacts of the gigantic James Bay project. It didn't matter. These power companies have had the political machinery wired for generations. And the same bunch, more or less, maintains its political clout today in the governor's office and the state senate, thus the billion dollar bailout.

Utility lobbyists swarmed the statehouse in record numbers on this one. But those several dozen gray eminences couldn't simply techno-talk and bully their way to victory this time. There is resistance and they are terrified that this new fashion in corporate structure will stick them with some of the costs, or, perish the thought, all of the costs for their own bad decisions. When it started looking like stockholders would be forced to pick up even part of the bill corporate execs started rumbling ominously, "If you don't give us what we want we'll go bankrupt on you."

Bankrupt!

This sand box bully boy tactic actually scared a lot of legislators. "Heavens to Betsy," they were muttering, "the lights will go out all over Vermont." But of course that's nonsense. No matter what the internal financial difficulties of the power companies they can't turn the lights out. It's against the law.

Even so, the senate stuck a whole lot of language in S-62 that guarantees the financial health of the utilities no matter what damned fool things they have done or might do. They also gave the Public Service Board almost unlimited authority to decide how much rate payers (you and me) will be forced to pay and how much corporate stockholders will pay for that ridiculously overpriced Hydro Quebec juice.

What S-62 lacks as a result is any incentive for either the power companies or Hydro Quebec to renegotiate that horrible contract on more realistic terms. Thankfully, it is not a done deal yet. The bill barely skated through the senate with no more than one in three senators actually understanding its details and consequences, which is not bad considering the dense language and loud lobbying. But now the House will have a more reflective opportunity to make it a little more ratepayer friendly. We'll see.

together.net/~wudchuck/987_watchman_34.html

The utilities, the state Senate, and Governor Dean and his task force all tried to put a deregulation (restructuring) package together three years ago. Dean's group and the Senate came up with a plan that was rejected by the House and derided by the utilities. The utilities submitted their own plans to solve the problem of "stranded costs,"but the other groups believed it was too expensive for ratepayers.

The Senate plan, for instance, attempted to soften the blow for both the utilities, which it didn't want to go bankrupt, and the ratepayers by offering a 50-50 split on the stranded costs, or those obligations that are too high-cost to recover simply through modest rate increases (Hydro-Quebec contract, Yankee decommissioning, and
the very high-cost independent power producers, who are shielded by federal law).

The utilities said they'd sue the state if stuck with 50 percent of the stranded costs. But their arguments were rendered moot by House Speaker Michael Obuchowski, a frequent foe of the utilities, who said 50 percent was way to much for ratepayers anyway.

Thus the whole process entered limbo.

The utilities have some issues in play, like Green Mountain Power's appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court over its punishment by the Public Service Board for signing the H-Q contract in the first place. There is also the issue of the ice storm in January 1998 that stopped the flow of power from H-Q, in violation of the contract. Arbitrators
will figure out H-Q's penalty, if any, for that. But it's very unlikely that binding arbitration will lead to the death penalty the Vermont utilities want -- termination of the contract.

All this is background noise, albeit loud at times, for deregulation of the electric industry.

Proponents of deregulation were pounding the drums hard a few of years ago. The utilities support deregulation, so they can get out of the retail business. Those who philosophically favor a free marketplace also support deregulation, of course.

But the solution, for those who ultimately will decide (PSB, Legislature, governor), will feature an open market with certain conditions. A safety net will ensure that low-income ratepayers won't get zapped by high rates. There will be guarantees for a suitable level of system reliability. They also will have to figure how to pay off the stranded costs.

Perhaps Obuchowski just got lucky by road-blocking deregulation in 1998. Perhaps it was fortuitous patience. Maybe it was clairvoyance. In any case, deregulating then probably would have been a disaster, as witnessed in California.

http://www.vtbusinessmagazine.com/oct2000.htm

"The utilities submitted their own plans to solve the problem of "stranded costs," but the other groups believed it was too expensive for ratepayers."

"The utilities support deregulation …"

That says it all for me. Thanks, cryingshame. It looks to me like Dean sided with the people.

btw, Kerry and Enron:
http://www.nonprofitwatch.org/heinz/kerryhypocrisy.html

in the last paragraph. Don't play that baloney that Dean sides with the people all the time.


http://timesargus.nybor.com/Legislature/Story/43125.html


Dean raises money from energy sources

February 27, 2002

By David Gram

ASSOCIATED PRESS

MONTPELIER — When Gov. Howard Dean wanted to raise money for a possible presidential bid, he followed the example of a former governor of Texas and called on his friends in the energy industry.

>>>>>>>
“Administration actions going back some years betray an inappropriate coziness with the utilities,” said Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Service Research Group. “I am not prepared to say it’s a result of contributions given. But these contributions present the appearance of impropriety or appearance of influence that it probably would have been better to avoid.”

Dean’s close relationship with utility representatives dates back to the day he became governor in 1991. A lobbyist for Green Mountain Power and a GMP employee were among the first people Dean called in to help his transition.

A list of the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers includes Green Mountain Power Corp.’s chairman, two company board members and a vice president, all of whom made donations to the Fund For A Healthy America. It also includes two longtime utility lobbyists.

Over the years, the governor has sided with the utilities on many of the most pressing issues, including the push for deregulation of the electric industry, and later backing away from that as a goal. Among other major decisions:

— After years of pushing for the companies to absorb the excess costs of their expensive contract with Hydro-Quebec, Dean’s Department of Public Service agreed to let ratepayers be billed for more than 90 percent of what those excess costs are expected to be in the coming years. The extra costs will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
>>>>>>>

Says he's FOR deregulation and claims he's no big government liberal even though he raise taxes on gasoline, sales tax and income tax.

can get.

As for your interpretation of the speech, I'll just disagree with it, except on the part where he says he's no big government liberal. I'm a big government liberal, but no upper tier candidate running for President is a big goverment liberal.

:cry: what has my party come to?

Yet raises taxes on incomes, sales, gasoline... and that may be all well and good if necessary to fund Health Cre...

But wouldn't it be better to lower Health Care costs by eliminating the middle man (insurance companies) and regulate pharmaceutical profits.

The taxes Dean used in Vermont were highly regressive.

At this point, I'm saying this while looking ahead to Presidential Platforms & what I personally most prefer for National Health Care.

I just hope the someone who is president represents our party as it should be all around liberal.

if not for Dean.
B) Clark has no Democratic record.
C) The rest of the candidates might have had a shot months ago, but no longer do.
D) You provide no quotes or sources for your characterizations.

I am NOT CHARACTERIZING anything.

"You folks at Cato," he told us, "should really like my views because I'm economically conservative and socially laissez-faire." Then he continued: "Believe me, I'm no big-government liberal. I believe in balanced budgets, markets, and deregulation. Look at my record in Vermont." He was scathing in his indictment of the "hyper-enthusiasm for taxes" among Democrats in Washington.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/073ylkiz.asp

"The liberals hated me," he said in an interview from the campaign trail in New
Hampshire. "I would not spend the money. I was a fiscal conservative. So I got
crosswise with liberals immediately. Moderate Republicans and independents
liked me and trusted me with their money."

www.burlingtonfreepress.com/specialnews/dean/25.htm

"I believe in balanced budgets, markets, and deregulation"

That is NOT an interpretation on my part.

Dean also calls himself a "fiscal conservative" when in REALITY he is not.

I'm just pointing out the "irregularity" (I'm being charitable there).

— After years of pushing for the companies to absorb the excess costs of their expensive contract with Hydro-Quebec, Dean’s Department of Public Service agreed to let ratepayers be billed for more than 90 percent of what those excess costs are expected to be in the coming years. The extra costs will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
>>>>>>>

On Dean, who apparently is "tight" with the Cato Institute:

He often reminds people that he balanced the budgets in Vermont, an impressive feat
compared to Bush's half-trillion dollar deficit. From 1994 to 1996, he received an
economic rating of B, the highest rating of any Democratic Governor, from the
Libertarian Cato Institute. "Believe me," he once said at a Cato Institute lunch, "I'm no
big-government liberal. I believe in balanced budgets, markets, and deregulation. Look
at my record in Vermont."

It's been awhile since I've read those.

http://together.net/~wudchuck/back_issues.html

My favorite's #37:

'Spies report that Governor Howard Dean, at a recent high end political fundraiser in Los Angeles, was offered a deal he could not decline by Disney corporation president Michael Eisner. Reportedly, Eisner wants to buy the venerable and beautiful Vermont statehouse for something in excess of fifty million dollars. Allegedly, plans are already in place to dismantle the 150 year old architectural masterpiece and transport it to an already prepared site at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Routine legislative approval is expected.'

:)

Just a subversive one.





Way to go, guys! Just like when they teamed up with the Chimp on Iraq against the best interests of America! (How'd that one work out for ya?)

...and your numbers are correct (about the $200M) but it won't happen because the candidate quality isn't there this time. Wesley Clark is about the best of the bunch but he's too late and too poor and the Republicans have too much money this time.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently about the increasing number of Americans going ex-pat, primarily to the British Isles and to Canada. It's no wonder. For a variety of reasons, we're on the precipice of a civil war in this country. We really need some kind of health care system but the powers won't let it happen. Our national infrastructure is shot but there's no popular will to permit the level of taxation required to repair it. Social Security and Medicare are completely hosed and there's no money to fix them either now or in the future.

Maybe it's just over. Jesus, I can't believe we're even talking about it.

Sleep tight.