In case folks hadn't noticed, the contributor list on the sidebar has altered a tad. NanuqFC had told me some time ago that she needed to pull back from the expectation of being a Front Pager, but I talked her into holding off a bit. As of now, though, I've instituted a new category. Front Pager Emeriti. Front pagers past who are backing off, but who maintain front page posting rights, and as such may pop in from time to time. I added former FPer mataliandy to the list as well.

Also stepping back is Brattlerouser, who has a bit too much on his plate these days (including the imminent arrival of a new kid… congrats B, keep us apprised).

To fill in the gaps left by the semi-retirement of Nanuq and B'rouser is new front pager Caoimhin Laochdha, a GMD usual suspect, as well as an occasional commenter on the mothership. (CL, you just gotta make sure the “put diary on front page” box is checked when you post a diary). CL continues our (unintended) tradition of running a Vermont political blog with nobody from Chittenden County on the front page. Funny, that.

Those America-hating Vermonters are at it again. This time it's the most fiendish plot of all. It came to light via Glenn Greenwald in connection to  a piece he'd written for Salon “regarding the politicization of the Army in Iraq, as evidenced by its constant coordination with, and leaking to, the likes of Matt Drudge, The Weekly Standard, and the most extremist right-wing blogs.” Well, the official spokesman for Gen. David Petraeus, one Col. Steven A. Boylan, took umbridge. Thus began a weird series of emails back and forth, which the Colonel tried to deny after the fact (at least some of them), even though, from an IT perspective, it seems that – yes indeed – they came from his email account.

The initial email was replete with gems like this:

You are either too lazy to do the research on the topics to gain the facts, or you are providing purposeful misinformation — much like a propagandist. . . .

But after, among other things, castigating Greenwald for a lack of courage, he seemed to have his own sense of personal responsibility dry up when questioned about the appropriateness of the email. It wasn't his fault. It must have been someone else. Who else exactly?

Heh…

(Boylan to Greenwald): If you do a search on the web, you will also see that I have been a victim of identity theft of late in Vermont

Didn't you just know it was gonna be some latte-sipping, Volvo-driving, sushi-eating, New York Times reading liberal from Vermont? Probably Dean himself. Maybe Sanders. Hell, it was probably some crazy “blame America first” blogger.

You can't trust 'em.

That Benen guy may look 16, but I hear he's really like, 67 or something.

Baruth's a fiction writer (that makes him a professional liar, right?).

No doubt the massive beard sported by Jack McCullough is just there to smuggle things past airport security for his terrorist buddies.

Megadittoes, baby!

The quoted sections below are all from the Burlington Free Press or the Rutland Herald, reporting on the same-sex marriage commission’s hearing last night

Let’s start with the Free Press:

“A marriage license would deliver no more rights than a civil union license,” Greg Johnson told the Vermont Commission on Family Recognition and Protection. That marriage license wouldn’t unlock the 1,096 benefits that the federal government offers only to married men and women, he said. It’s also unlikely it would open doors in states other than the eight where Vermont civil unions currently receive some recognition.

I’ve heard this argument before. This argument is the same as the argument which pretends that global warming doesn’t exist. Don’t bother trying to reduce carbon emissions! It won’t help enough anyway. Why even bother? But really, this is about more than just what’s happening today. It’s about what’s right, what’s relevant and what’s worth doing.

Here’s Johnson again, as reported in the Herald:

Meanwhile, some states have taken upon themselves to either recognize or reject civil unions or same-sex marriage, Johnson said. Right now, eight states recognize Vermont’s civil unions as a marriage equivalent, he said, but more than 40 states have passed laws defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

This is a little misleading. While 40 states have laws defining marriage as between one man and one woman, Vermont is one of those states and not all those states have received constitutional challenges. It’s not clear from this extreme simplification of a complicated issue where the truth of the matter lies.

What’s more relevant, however, is even simpler. Having a two-tiered system in Vermont is wrong. Even if it produces no specific tangible benefits anywhere else in the country (it does, but I’ll get to that in a bit), it’s still right to lead on this. Vermont was the first to move towards Civil Unions. Vermont should be the first to take the step of being the first state in the union to move towards full marriage recognition without a court requirement.

Why should we do this?

Because we’re ready for it and it’s clear and obvious that there’s a need for it.

Let’s put it in simple terms. The Hearld reports on a comment by Peter Teachout from last night’s hearing:

But there are intangible differences between civil unions and traditional marriage, such as that marriage is more widely recognized as a union in the common culture, according to Teachout. The Vermont court did not address that in its 1999 ruling that led to civil unions, but same-sex couples do speak of feeling separate or unequal from heterosexual couples due to the distinction, he explained.

In Vermont, some legislators who supported civil unions lost their seats after that historic move. Two years later, Republicans lost their short-lived majority. Today, Republicans hold a fairly small minority in the legislature, with Democrats and Progressives holding a fairly impressive dominance. The political damage of civil unions was small and short-lived. Howard Dean, who signed the bill into law, was re-elected with a clear (though close) victory, exceeding the 50% necessary to avoid the election being moved to the legislator, against some blistering attacks from both the right (anti-civil-union Republican Ruth Dwyer) and the left (Progressive Party stalwart Anthony Pollina).

In Massachussetts, when the state legislature refused to take active steps to block court-mandated same-sex marriage, none of them, no one who came out directly in favor of same-sex marriage lost their seat.

I mention these two facts for very relevant reasons. The Free Press references Vermont Law School professor Michael Mello’s statement at the hearing:

“If the Vermont Legislature adopted gay marriage, the rest of the country and world would pay attention,” Mello said. Unlike in 2000, when the Legislature was under pressure from a court decision, a change now would signal something significant.

Civil unions changed the nature of our political dialogue. While they were once vehemently opposed by the right, when same-sex marriage was debated in Massachusetts they become the more conservative alternative to marriage. They became the fall-back right-wing position.

Vermont led, in a baby steps, the pathway to full equality. Now it’s time for Vermont to grow up and take responsibility for its earlier vote and replace it with full marriage equality.

Will it work in other states? Only a few, for the moment. This will change, over time. But, in the meantime, take this scenario: a same-sex couple is traveling with their kid in Wisconsin and there’s a car accident. The one member not incapacitated by the accident is the one who’s not biologically related to the child. So when the nurse asks if you’re a family member, what answer do you think will make the most sense? That nurse may not be legally obligated to let the conscious family member make decisions, but it’s a lot more likely that the nurse will recognize the relationship if the response is “we’re married” than if it’s “we have a civil union.”

This is real. It is tangible and it goes way beyond symbolic gestures.

Cross-posted from Rational Resistance. 

We've been discussing whether it's a good idea for Congress to pursue the resolution declaring the Turkish genocide of Armenians to be what it was: genocide. Is it meaningful at this late date, is it the right time to be doing it, does it hurt our foreign policy to do it?

 Chris Hitchens is interested in the same questions, only he's approaching it from a slightly different perspective. He's got a piece in Slate arguing, as the title puts it, that the United States should be squeezing Turkey, not the other way around.

 On this occasion I think Hitch is right. On the other hand, the reasons he's right illustrate once again what a mess Bush has made of American foreign policy. We wouldn't be nearly so concerned about pissing off Turkey if we didn't need them so badly in our war on Iraq. Because we need their help, we're dependent on them, so we can't afford to tell the truth about the Armenian genocide.

So why are we talking about this as though it's Nancy Pelosi's fault, and not Bush's? 

Pretty grim few days, not just for the Obama campaign, but by extension for Americans and Democracy. Obama's new kind of politics looks just like the old this week in the worst possible way; that is, fanning the flames of homophobia to bring in votes. If you missed the details, the basics were diaried here. Suffice to say that the freshman from Illinois has had several opportunities to make this right, but has continued to dig in, in the process demonstrating either a callous indifference to the people hurt by McClurkin's anti-gay rhetoric, or a disturbing level of arrogance by deciding that if people have a problem with his giving this kind of garbage a national microphone and stamping his own endorsement on it, it's just their problem. (If you're curious how this played out – it went basically according to a worse-case scenario).

Obama – of course – was a no-show, just as he's often a no-show on controversial issues in the Senate of late. For my part, I'm going with the arrogance theory over callousness, as it would be consistent with what was on display iin the last couple paragraphs of this weekend's NYT piece, as well as the dug-in “if you build it, they will come” style of campaign he has run.

So this guy, who for most of the year has been my second choice, has now dropped into the Hillary “no way” column for me. The great uniter has thoroughly alienated me (and for an example of what a good job he's doing uniting us all, take a look at the comments at dKos on the topic. It's a pretty piss-poor display, and was utterly avoidable).

But what's really depressing is where this likely leaves me – and many other liberals – looking ahead to the General election. It's likely that either Clinton or Obama will be the nominee. I think for all of us, this was supposed to be the year that – for maybe the first time in memory – we were going to get to vote for a candidate we actually liked – somebody we might actually want to see as President – rather than, yet again, being faced with a “lesser of two evils” choice. In the post-Dean era, after ALL the work we've all done across the country on this party – and with the incredible opportunity afforded by a thoroughly discredited and rejected Republican Party – we were supposed to move beyond that tiresome scenario (even if just barely).

But apparently, not yet. For me, at least, not if it's one of these two. Clearly a lot has happened in the last few years.

But clearly a lot still needs to.