Town Meeting Day Musings
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010Being a responsible citizen, the News Guy went to Town Meeting, and initially planned to write no new post for today. But events, minor though they were, intruded, requiring a few observations and clarifications.
Nobody on the other end.
“Hello, hello,” and finally came that delightful metallic tone of a recorded voice explaining that this was a political poll, and asking the respondent whether he had a favorable (press 1) or unfavorable (press 2) opinion about Sen. Patrick Leahy.
At which point, the respondent, being a politically sophisticated type, assumed the poll had been commissioned by a Leahy opponent.
A conclusion confirmed by the next question: Would you vote for Pat Leahy no matter who ran against him? (Or words to that effect. Notes were not being taken. It could have been something like, “regardless of who runs against him”).
Now, aside from Pat Leahy, his wife, his children, and a few devoted, down-the-line Democrats, who on earth is going to answer that question in the affirmative? Suppose Jonathan Papelbon were to quit the Red Sox, or Tom Brady were to retire from the Patriots, move to Vermont, and run for the Senate? What if Oprah moved here and wanted the job? They’d get lots of votes. Rare is the voter who would commit to a candidate without taking even a quick look at the opposition.
“That’s a pretty typical hard re-elect question used in polling,” said Dan Riley, the spokesman for Len Britton, the Republican running against Leahy, who was indeed the power behind the poll.
Well, not really. More typical would be something like, “do you think Pat Leahy has done a good enough job as senator to deserve re-election, or is it time to give somebody else a chance?”
But just because the question was unusual did not make it pointless. Britton can try to trumpet the likely result (look for a press release headlined, “80 percent might vote against Leahy”) to convince contributors that his is not a lost cause.
Which of course it is not. Eight months before the election, nobody’s cause is lost. Improbable, perhaps, but not lost.
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Outside some polling places Tuesday health care activists were handing out little slips of paper with their motto, a phrase commonly heard but rarely examined in Vermont these days: “Health care is a human right.”
It is? Who says? And more broadly, who decides what is and is not a human right?
The questions bring up the recently quoted remarks of John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, that “it’s not intrinsic in the nature of human beings to have a right to health care.”
Mackey is right, of course. But then it’s not intrinsic in the nature of human beings to have the right of free speech, freedom of religion, security against unreasonable search and seizure, or the power to choose the folks who will govern them.
These are all artificial inventions, or what the folks in parts of academia would call social constructs. They come neither from nature nor heaven, but from people in particular cultures, notably ours.
Intrinsic or not, it’s up to human beings to decide what rights they and their society should have. In America we have in effect (because we’ve never spelled it out) decided that health care is a human right for those old enough, poor enough, or, needless to say, rich enough.
For everybody else it isn’t. Yet.
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Some clarifications of recent items are in order here, including a clarification of a clarification. Monday, the News Guy corrected the previous Monday’s post that said the recent statewide poll taken by Research 2000 for WCAX-TV had a four percent margin of error.
Actually five percent, said the correction.
Actually five percentage points, which the numerate among you will understand is not the same thing. This is one of those stupid errors which is stupider than most stupid errors, being an error the News Guy has often corrected when committed by others, making it especially foolish of him to commit it himself.
Almost as embarrassing was the typo in Monday’s other correction. Why the spell check did not catch “secondary sourc” remains a mystery (but not an excuse; we can’t rely on spell check). Perhaps there is such a word is “sourc”? Whichever, this was supposed to be a” secondary source.”
More substantively, Monday’s post reported that the spent nuclear fuel stored at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant site in Vernon could remain dangerous for 24,000 years.
Worse than that, emailed Margaret Gundersen of Fairewinds consulting, which deals with nuclear power issues. That 24,000 years “is the half-life of the nastiest radioactive isotopes,” she said, “but it takes roughly 10-half lives for the radioactivity to decay completely and for the radioactivity to be equal to what is natural background. So, mathematically, 10-half lives of 24,000 years means 240,000…years.
This becomes a question of personal responsibility. The News Guy wants to make sure that his error has lulled no one into thinking he or she can wander around the grounds of the abandoned Vermont Yankee plant as early as the year 26,010. That could still be dangerous. Unless the waste has first been removed to Yucca Mountain, Nevada (but don’t hold your breath for that one) or elsewhere, do NOT, under any circumstances, walk around that area until the year 242,010.
Assuming, of course, that human beings then are still counting years under the same system. Assuming that is, that human beings have not either (a) evolved into a possibly more rational species; or (b) completely destroyed themselves and their surroundings.





