No one seems quite sure why the first of April is called “April Fool’s Day.” The first reference to the day is in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” In the story, a fox and rooster trick each other in turn.

So it is April Fool’s Day is an occasion for practical jokes. Some scholars believe the tradition began when the societies shifted the beginning of the calendar year from early spring (around the first of April) to January, leaving only “fools” to honor the older tradition.

However it began, it’s with us still and you may be fooled more than once today. There are several times this week when I had wished I was being fooled, but no, it seems I’m merely dealing with fools.

Yesterday is a good example. Barack Obama announced he is opening 167 million acres of the continental shelf to oil and natural gas drilling. This is something George Bush and Dick Cheney wanted to do, but didn’t have the nerve. I thought 2008 was supposed to be a “change” election. Didn’t know it was going to be change for the worse.

I know, I know, we’re going to hear from the usual pundits that this is the White House outmaneuvering the Republicans on energy issues. But it’s not. It’s caving in to the fossil fuel lobby. The reality is that the US and the rest of the world have to slash our greenhouse gas emissions and you don’t do that by expanding drilling any more than you go on a diet by launching a Twinkie binge. You’re a fool to think otherwise and any pundit that tries to convince you otherwise wants to play you for a fool.

Federal Judge Vaughn Walker is neither a fool nor played for one. He ruled yesterday that neither the Bush nor the Obama administration (what’s that about change again?) are allowed to tap the phones of Americans without warrants.

The Obamanians picked up some sort of virus from the Bushies. The Nixon Virus (“When the president does it, it’s not illegal.”), I think it’s called. I didn’t vote to live in a police state in 2000 and I sure as hell didn’t vote to live in one in 2008. A Justice Department spokesperson said no decision has been made about filing an appeal. A word of advice: Don’t.

Fools closer to home (or not) include the Vermont Energy Partnership, which is taking out full-page newspaper ads this week, chastising the Vermont public for allowing the state Senate to vote to shut the state’s only nuclear plant, Vermont Yankee.

There are multiple forms of foolishness afoot here. First, the partnership tries to fool people into thinking it has something to do with Vermont. True, there are Vermont businesses foolish enough to join this bogus trade association, but most of the money for the partnership – and thus the ads it buys – comes from Entergy Louisiana, the out-of-staters who have yet to realize they’ve been invited to leave.

That invitation is the second form of foolishness. It’s over people! It’s been over for more than a month. The Senate voted 26 to 4 in February to shut the plant on schedule in March 2012 (although the smart money says it will shut in November 2011). Entergy Louisiana and its shill, Governor Jim Douglas (R-Lame Duck) persist in calling the vote meaningless, but if you buy that pap, you’re foolish enough to be interested in some irradiated riverfront property for a vacation home.

Third, of course, is you don’t run those kind of ads the week of April 1. It’s just sticking your head in the sand, leaving 120 pounds of butt hanging out for opportunists like me to kick. It is, however, consistent with Entergy Louisiana’s incompetent bungling of the mechanics of running a nuke plant and its tone-deaf public relations policy. Getting a 20-year license extension for that plant should have been a walk in the park. Instead, the executives at Entergy Louisiana orchestrated their own death march.

And for that, I thank them. No foolin’.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Our legislators all have other jobs – they’re farmers and business people, professors and attorneys. There’s a law on the books that says a person cannot be fired from his or her day job because she or he is attending to legislative duties. Wealthy professionals are over-represented in the Vermont legislature, but show me a legislature where they’re not. All in all, I think we do pretty well.

Still, I sense an unvoiced inferiority complex when it comes to our legislature. We have New York just to the west and Massachusetts to the south and while we all thank good fortune every day that we are not those states, there’s a certain junior varsity air to the whole undertaking.

So what? The point of a legislature is not offices and staffers or worse, to provide a space for lobbyists to hang out all the year through. The point is to make good government and then go home. That’s what the Vermont legislature does in 16 weeks (more or less) each year.

Yesterday, the Vermont Senate, on a vote of 26-4, became to first legislative body in America to close a nuclear power plant, Vermont Yankee, which is owned by the Entergy Corporation of New Orleans, Louisiana.

The plant, first opened in 1972, is scheduled to close in 2012. Entergy Louisiana, which bought Vermont Yankee in 2002, wanted the legislature to extend its permission to operate another 20 years.

The Louisiana folks have – to be honest – run the place into the ground. A cooling tower collapse, a transformer fire, a crane dropping high-level radioactive waste, missing fuel rods – it would be funny if it wasn’t tragic.

The latest fiasco has been leaks of tritium and cobalt-60 that Entergy cannot neither find nor plug for the last seven weeks. We do know the leak is from an underground pipe – a pipe Entergy Louisiana officials swore under oath did not exist.

Yesterday Curtis Hebert, new guy in Vermont (the old guy got sent on vacation after the leak) held a (sorta) press conference before the Senate met. He read a statement and refused to take questions. The statement said lawyers hired by Entergy to conduct an “independent internal investigation” found Entergy officials didn’t lie to regulators about the supposedly nonexistent leaky pipe. (Translation: “We’re not dishonest, we’re incompetent. Can we please keep running a nuke in your state?”)

The snow flew all through the day, heavy flakes that accumulated like wet cement. Town meeting, our annual exercise in direct democracy, is next Tuesday and we always seem to get a blizzard within a week of town meeting.

Inside the statehouse, a holiday atmosphere reigned. Some two hundred supporters of closing Vermont Yankee crowded the halls. Entergy Louisiana had trucked in 50 plant workers the day before, but none we present for the actual debate. Off looking for the leaks, I suppose. A public gallery runs the perimeter of the Senate chamber. Citizens sit so close, they can reach out and tap legislators on the shoulder.

Extra police officers were in the halls to help with crowd control, but environmental organizers kept everyone headed where they needed go. I saw one police officer cooing to a year-old baby who had a “Retire Vermont Yankee as Planned” sticker on her snugli. A delegation of Russian citizens on a cultural exchange passed through the crowd with their interpreter. Their eyes were wide in amazement. Doesn’t look like this back home, does it folks?

The final vote – 26 to 4 – is in keeping with conversations I’ve had with fellow Vermonters in the last few years. Most people know the time for nuclear power is past and look forward to a renewable energy future. A few people disagree, are dug in and put out that they constitute such a small minority. It’s OK, they’ll get over it. We’ll welcome them back. It’s Vermont, after all. We’ll be living together for the rest of our lives.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

This is bad timing for Yankee’s owner, Entergy of Louisiana, because the Vermont legislature is currently considering Entergy’s request to extend the 38-year-old plant’s license to operate for another 20 years. (Vermont is the only state in which the legislature has the power to intervene in a nuclear plant’s license.)

Even Governor Jim Douglas, who has been an unabashed Entergy supporter until now, demanded the firing of Entergy Vice President Jay Thayer. Mr. Thayer swore under oath that Vermont Yankee has no underground pipes. Then it was discovered that the tritium was leaking from – underground pipes. (Still a friend to Entergy, the governor has also called for a “timeout” to allow the corporation to rebuild the people’s shattered trust. After all, you wouldn’t want to decide whether or not to go ahead and get married after you catch your intended in bed with your best friend, you’d want to give it time to rebuild trust.)

It’s unclear at this point who is the dog and who is the pony in this dog-and-pony show, but Entergy did get rid of Mr. Thayer. (Which is not to say he was fired. He was placed on “administrative leave” pending investigation, which means he goes on vacation until this whole thing blows over; when he returns with a tan, he’ll be sent off to tell whoppers about some other Entergy facility.)

The new face of Entergy in Vermont is Curt Hebert, Jr., Entergy’s vice president of external affairs and former head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Mr. Hebert is known as a lifelong opponent of government intervention in energy markets. (Then why was he the federal government’s chief energy regulator, you ask? He was appointed by George W. Bush.)

So up here in Vermont, the public, press and politicians are seriously cheesed off at the out-of-state corporation that has mismanaged the state’s only nuke since it bought it in 2002 and has been caught passing misinformation again and again. What’s Entergy’s response? To send a bitter foe of government intervention to the one state where the government has more power to intervene than any other. It makes one wonder if Entergy’s CEO Wayne Leonard might be spending too much time in the radiation room.

Mr. Hebert’s greatest claim to fame is that he presided over the federal government’s deer-in-the-headlights inaction when the 2000-2001 energy crisis caused rolling blackouts in California. (Heckuva job, Curty!)

According to published accounts, Mr. Hebert – acting on Dick Cheney’s orders – covered up the market manipulation by Enron and others that led to the California and instead encouraged California to cancel its environmental regulations. Now his kind ministrations will be visited on Vermont. Oh boy.

To paraphrase Lord Acton, power corrupts and nuclear power corrupts absolutely.

© Mark Floegel, 2010