Chronicle Conversations podcasts now available

By Guy Page

Is political predictor Mark Halperin right – will Bernie Sanders be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028?

Right now the ‘smart money’ – AKA the investors in the bookie website Polymarket.com – give him just a one percent chance, even with Oprah Winfrey and way below seven percenter Kamala Harris. Even comedian Jon Stewart gets 2%.

The conventional wisdom is that Sanders has just a few too many rings about the trunk. If elected he would be 91 in his final year of office, far and away the most elderly president in U.S. history. 

And yet, and yet….. Halperin – the guy who saw Donald Trump coming in 2016 before almost anyone else did, the guy who accurately reported the day Biden would resign three days ahead of the event – this same guy says the political winds are blowing strong for the former Burlington mayor. Here’s the …. On the July 9 episode of his podcast, Next Up:

“Bernie Sanders. A lot of you think he’s too old. And I get it,” Halperin told the audience on his Next Up podcast on July 11. But the more he looks at Bernie, the more he thinks that “I believe with increasing fervor that Bernie Sanders is not just possibly one of the front runners, but may well win the Democratic nomination for president.”

We’ll talk with Mark Halperin on Chronicle Conversations Wednesday at 12:30 PM on WVMT AM 620, FM 101.3, and wvmtradio.com. 

Speaking of Chronicle Conversations – our podcast is now available – so if you missed yesterday’s interview with Elizabeth Brown, State Director of the taxpayer watchdog group Fiscal Alliance, You can catch yesterday’s episode and every other episode on our podcast page on WVMTradio.com.

I also interviewed Alexandra Fasulo, dogged reporter of New York State’s top down imposition of solar and wind siting on upstate farmland. The similarities between New York and Vermont energy policies are disconcertingly similar – closing down a carbon-free nuclear power plant then crying for more carbon-free power to be built on mountaintops and prime agricultural land. And then when the populace doesn’t respond quickly enough, wielding the cudgel of government coercion. 

On today’s Chronicle Conversation, I’ll talk with Hank “Planet Hank” Poitras about his federal lawsuit against Attorney General Charity Clark, who is investigating him for not following Vermont’s new synthetic media law by publishing a disclaimer on his political satire AI-generated political satire in which candidate for Congress Mark Coester uses a backhoe to drop incumbent Rep. Becca Balint into a dumpster on the State House lawn. 

Here’s the problem with Clark’s accusation – the law says the creator must be aware their synthetic media is ‘deceptive and fraudulent.’ And the Planet Hank video was nothing of the kind – it was so clearly satire in the long, honorable tradition of a political cartoon. Does anyone think that Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor actually wore a diaper, as depicted in Newcomb’s skewering cartoons that helped coalesce the opposition to relicensing the plant. Of course not. And no-one but a moron would think Planet Hank was trying to deceive anyone into thinking, oh that’s really Becca Balint in that AI video. 

C’mon Charity – where’s your defense of the First Amendment? Or are our commenters on Vermont Daily Chronicle right – does it only cut one way?