Like Vermont Yankee post-decommissioning, VDB is about to go into SafeStor mode for the holiday. But we wanted to give you a heads-up for this coming Saturday, the 29th, when we’ll be Tim Kavanagh’s guest on Late Night Saturday over at WCAX, Channel 3. The airs at 11:30 pm, and if you’ve never seen Tim work, imagine the brains of David Letterman packed into the brawn of Joe the Plumber. Add a crack production team, and the end result is devastating.

Special musical guest: bassist and all-around cult hero Aram Bedrosian. A recap of this election year, and much political humor, with more than a few of the sharper pokes directed at Douglas and Dubie.

What’s not to like?

Late Update, Sunday, November 30th, 12:06 pm:

Turns out this Late Night thing is all the rage: Pat Leahy will be taping an episode this Thursday, December 4, to coincide with his becoming Vermont’s longest serving US Senator.

If you want to be part of the action, for free tickets. Filmmaker David Giancola will be taping an episode that same night at 7, so if you’d like to be in the audience for both shows, show up at Champlain College’s Alumni Auditorium at about 6:40. If you just want to catch the Leahy spot, be there at 7:40.

The Leahy segment airs Saturday December 13.

A few choice Danziger cartoons that managed to go unposted in the tense run-up to Thanksgiving. A heavy helping of Lieberman, dressed for your holiday table, with a tart side of Doles, Bob and Elizabeth. Eat hearty, everyone.

Newsweek has been running a very readable series of embedded reports called “How He Did It: The Inside Story of Campaign 2008.” Much of it received wisdom, but with the occasional bit of real news. Most disgusting revelation in the whole kit and kaboodle? Hands down: “Piper, the governor’s 7-year-old, thought nothing of crawling across Joe Lieberman’s lap to get to her mother. Lindsey Graham mischievously enjoyed getting the child hopped up on Mountain Dew, a beverage to which he was mildly addicted.” How sweet. Not quite Neverland Ranch and not quite normal, but somewhere just uncomfortably in between.

Much of the political world is abuzz today with good news for the Franken camp out in Minnesota: after picking up a good chunk of votes in a single recounting session yesterday, something like 20% of the lead Coleman now holds, Franken aides seemed to feel that the outlook was brightening substantially. But that was only half the buzz. The other half concerned the lizard people.

You’re looking at one of the challenged ballots in question. You’ll note that it would seem to state two preferences: one for Franken, and one for “lizard people.” Enough to confuse any optical scanner.

So the issues, with this particular ballot, seem clear enough.

One, whom did the voter finally prefer, Franken or the man-lizard(s)? Two, why, after going to the trouble to write in a man-lizard, did the voter in question have second thoughts about blackening the reptilian box next to their handwritten entry? Was the lizard-thing in question suddenly too frightening a choice? If so, why so?

And three, if the man-lizard(s) was/were the intended candidate, how to attribute said vote? That is, which candidate can most credibly claim to be the spawn of human and lizard, and hence the recipient of the much-contested vote?

Beats the hell out of VDB.

Look, VDB voted for Hope and Change. Which we took to mean this: we Hoped that the Democrats would Change Joe Lieberman from a Senator to the guy who cleans the bathrooms on the Interstate. But now, apparently, our hopes are dashed. The world is dark, for Big Joe will continue blithely on as though nothing has changed, for all the world. Oh, except for one thing: no doubt he’ll begin to execute oversight on the Executive Branch starting, say, January 21st. Don’t talk to VDB, please. We need to be alone.

Late Update, Wednesday, 9:08 am:

VDB-reader Jim writes in with some calming words from Japan, where his sensei is helping him learn the intricacies of Eastern engraving:

Hello VDB,

If it’s any consolation, per Joe Lieberman, the Shoguns used to draw their rivals in close in order to limit their power and keep an eye on them. This was a tactic of Nelson Mandela as well.

Off to Osaka today to see my engraving sensei. Foliage just really getting going here in Kyoto. Here’s a shot at Kodaiji Temple. I really had to work at eliminating the throngs of sightseers.

Ja matta,

Jim

Announcer: The end of Election 2008 hit everyone a little bit differently. For various reasons, it took Commentator Philip Baruth back to a moment when he was twelve years old, running his first sled-dog race. Here’s Philip.

Notes from the New Vermont
Commentary #222: A Tale of Two Races

When I was a kid, my family raised Siberian huskies, and we raced them with a local organization, the Mohawk Valley Sled Dog Club. I started my own short racing career as a basket boy, riding in the basket of my mother’s sled on training days — I was there to keep her company, to turn the dogs at the halfway point, and to untangle them if they were suddenly at one another’s throats.

But by the time I turned twelve, I’d managed to convince my mother that it was time I had a team of my own. Just a five-dog team, nothing elaborate. And my gang were the misfits, the dogs too slow or too old to make my parents’ teams.

But they were mine, and I trained with them all through the fall using a big metal rig with wheels to run them up and down our little country road. Come winter, the night before my first race, I was out of my mind with excitement.

And I asked my mother what seemed like only a logical question: how many trophies do they hand out for each race? Three? Or four?

My mother gave me a look, and she sat me down in the living room and gave me a little straight talk.

She said that I had to face the facts: it was my first race, and I’d be up against tough competition; that almost everyone running would be older, and bigger, and more experienced. Just finishing a ten-mile run would be an achievement for a twelve-year-old kid.

It was fine advice, and I took it like any twelve-year-old boy: I went into a snit, and refused to speak more than a syllable at a time all the way to the race venue the next morning. My mother helped me harness my dogs, but as I remember I was still too indignant to say thank you.

But as I took off, everything leading up to the race faded away, and when the dogs finally slowed from the initial burst of the take-off, I got off the runners and began to run behind the sled as fast as I could.

Now, typically, a sled dog racer runs behind the sled when the dogs bog down, and rides the runners when the speed picks up again. In between, drivers pump the sled like a scooter.

But as far as I can remember I didn’t pump at all that day, and I only rode the runners on downhill slopes when I had no choice. Otherwise I ran full-tilt, as hard as I could in my boots, for most of that ten miles.

Eventually I ran past another team, and then another.

And before I knew it, I rounded a corner and came into sight of Heartbreak Hill, the long upward climb to the finish. I can’t say I ran the last hill, but I slogged it behind the sled, with the dogs dragging me up to the finish line.

And then I did the singlemost publicly embarrassing thing I’ve ever done in my entire life: I crossed the finish line, handed my team off to a total stranger, collapsed to my knees and — that’s right — vomited in a snowbank.

My mother finally helped me back to the cab of our truck, before unharnessing my dogs, and then harnessing her own. Because it was time for her own race, but she made sure I was all right first, and then left me there in the cab.

It was about 20 minutes later that someone rapped on the window. It was a race official, come to tell me that I’d won my class by just 28 seconds. “And I just wanted to be the first to shake your paw,” the official said.

And then he left, and I sat there in the cold cab of the truck, feeling this very particular mix of deep exhaustion and elation and vindication.

It was a peculiar feeling I was never to feel again, until Election Night last week, when a campaign longer and tougher than any in recent history finally came to a close.

Because even though I watched the final moments of this race in a hotel ballroom surrounded by hundreds of cheering people, I felt somehow like I was twelve again, back in the cab of our old dog truck, parked out in the middle of a frozen field somewhere, fingers numb, but with the sudden sense that the rest of my life was just beginning.

[This piece aired first on Vermont Public Radio. Audio of the commentary is available here.]

What does it feel like when your longtime favorite superhero cold-cocks your longtime most despised super-villain? Something like this: Pat Leahy calls for Big Joe Lieberman to be stripped of his influential Chairmanship. “I’m one who does not feel that somebody should be rewarded with a major chairmanship after doing what he did.” VDB’s another one, Senator. To put it pretty mildly.

In a freak dog attack earlier this year, Big Joe lost the last remnants of his Democratic face-paint

Hopefully this throws a big pail of ice-cold water on the effort by Senators like Bahy and Dodd to have Lieberman’s sins forgiven without so much as a slap on the wrist. Some lines cannot be crossed, without paying the ferryman.

Kudos also to the news team at Vermont Public Radio. Another in a long line of major national gets.

Late Update, 5:51 pm:

Bernie’s in too. Officially tag-teaming Big Joe at this point.

Okay, apparently nuclear power plants have these things called “steam dryers.” And apparently sometimes these dryers get things called “cracks,” and these “cracks” are apparently not good. They’re not good because cracks are like long skinny holes in the side of your dryer. Turns out Vermont Yankee has sixteen of these cracks that went unreported to the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, and now, gosh darn it, it’s too late to amend the report.

But according to corporate voice box Rob Williams none of this lack of reportage is the fault of Entergy, owners of Vermont Yankee. That Rob Williams denied risk and responsibility would hardly be worth reporting.

But the reasons Williams gave in this particular instance are surprisingly instructive.

Entergy had no responsibility to report these sixteen cracks because “they were not new and had been discovered using enhanced inspection techniques.” Now, you might think that it wouldn’t matter how long-standing the crack — a long skinny hole is a long skinny hole.

But you would be wrong. It seems these cracks were “old,” and therefore analagous to a pre-existing condition for the plant, relieving the corporation involved of all responsibility to report their existence.

But that’s only the half of it. More than anything else, it was the method of discovery that relieved Yankee of its obligation to report: the cracks were found using “enhanced inspection techniques.”

And we all know that any intel secured through enhanced techniques is classified for reasons of national security, and inadmissible in a court of law. And they said Donald Rumsfeld had balls.

Rob Williams, you make Rummy look like a eunuch.

In the confusing transition from the Bush Era to something more closely resembling twenty-first-century Democracy, I forgot to pass on the video from an excellent discussion the League of Women Voters put together in the run-up to Election Night. Topic: the influence of the media, both new and traditional, on the 2008 election cycle.

Sue Allen spoke primarily to print media, Kristen Carlson covered broadcast television, and I yapped about the Internets. UVM political scientist Tony Gierzynski moderated, and the crowd was refreshingly engaged, to the extent that in the final moments we were pretty effectively challenged by the cameraman from Channel 17. Decent lunch time viewing; approved for general audiences. Click here for the video.

Sarah Palin, in a new and exclusive Fox interview concerning her hope that God will show her the way on a 2012 run for the Presidency, should such a thing so bless her:

“I’m like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it’s cracked up a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don’t let me miss an open door.”

That’s right: even if that door’s only cracked up a little bit. Even then, she’s plowing. Even prematurely. Even with insufficient cracking up of that open door, she’s plowing.