We can move forward in time again, to United States v. Windsor exactly two years before Friday's decision, when, in another Kennedy decision, the Court held that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional. In dissent again: Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, and Alito.

  And now it's back to today, and today's landmark decision. The dissenters again, in ever more extreme, emotional language: Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.

What they demonstrate, both by their abandonment of any pretense of legal reasoning for pure vitriol, and by their consistency, is that what offends them is not any legal or jurisprudential principle, not any concern for the role of the courts or the balance between state and federal laws. No. They just can't tolerate any limitation on what can be done to gay people. Whether it's the threat of criminal prosecution in Lawrence, the unequal application of state antidiscrimination laws in Romer, or the unfair and unequal application of federal estate tax laws in Windsor, these guys are forever on guard to make sure that lesbians and gays can never be full members of society.

 That's what was at issue today, and the culminating (though perhaps not final) achievement of full acceptance of our lesbian and gay friends, coworkers, and family members is as inevitable as it is sweet. 

Oh yes, and one last thing: it's not “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” anymore. “Marriage” works just fine. 

“You rape our women and you're taking over our country.”

 He was known to make racist jokes.

He posted a picture of himself with a Confederate flag license plate and the flags of the racist Rhodesian and South African regimes. 

He drove over a hundred miles, through areas thick with churches, to find one that was predicably occupied by black people.

He sat with the people in the church for an our. 

Yet, somehow, the motivation is a mystery to the Republicans.

Jeb Bush:  “I don't know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes.“

Rick Santorum:  “you know, you talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before.”

Carly Fiorina:  “We ought not to start immediately rushing to policy prescriptions or engaging in the blame game.”

Donald Trump:  “The tragedy in South Carolina is incomprehensible.“

Rick Perry:  “Anytime there is an accident like this, the president is clear: He doesn’t like for Americans to have guns, and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message.”

Seriously, this goes beyond the standard moral obtuseness we see from the Republican Party. A politician who absolutely refuses to admit that the motivation of this attack was racism, and who abolutely refuses to consider the role of guns in this kind of terrorist act, is a monster.

Candidates of both political parties like to have rock music playing at their rallies for obvious reasons. Rock is the music of millions of Americans, it has energy, it evokes a certain forward-looking vision, it connects with young people, it is culturally inclusive, and it implies that the candidate is not part of the Establishment.

In other words, rock is everything that Republicans are not. Still, they keep trying their own version of cultural appropriation by choosing rousing rock anthems to warm up the crowd, and once again, the musician who recorded that rock anthem told the Republican to get lost.

Today it was Neil Young. Today The Donald and that dead weasel on his head announced his candidacy for president to the tune of Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World.

And just as fast, Neil Young told The Donald to get bent. “Donald Trump’s use of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ was not authorized,” Roberts said, adding for good measure, “Mr. Young is a longtime supporter of Bernie Sanders.”

And, as usual, the candidate missed the entire point of the song.

Other examples:

Just a couple of months ago it was the Dropkick Murpheys and Scott Walker. New York (AFP) – The Dropkick Murphys, the Boston rockers known for their left-wing politics, have voiced outrage after union-busting Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin played their music at a conservative forum.

“Please stop using our music in any way. We literally hate you!!! Love, Dropkick Murphys,” the band tweeted over the weekend.

It was also Rage Against the Machine when Paul Ryan tried to appropriate their music. As the band's Tom Morello wrote in Rolling Stone: Don't mistake me, I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta “rage” in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he's not raging against is the privileged elite he's groveling in front of for campaign contributions.

The list goes on and on, but maybe we should confine ourselves to the list of music that Republicans should use for their rallies: Hank Williams, Jr., who said  “We've got a Muslim president who hates farming, hates the military, hates the U.S. and we hate him!”

Ted Nugent, who said of President Obama  “I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist raised communist educated communist nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America.”. 

What about you? If the Republicans must play music at their rallies, what is your ideal Republican playlist?

UPDATE: Diane Rehm has apologized.  

You can judge for yourself if it is adequate. Personally, I feel that she's letting herself off pretty easy, given that her question was the equivalent to asking if it's true that Jews use the blood of gentile babies to make matzohs. 

Cross posted from Rational Resistance. 

Or I should say, incompetent, sloppy journalism repeating a vile lie.

I like the Diane Rehm Show. She has good guests and she is generally a good, well-informed interviewer, but today she went way out of bounds.

I didn't hear the show myself, but Talking Points Memo reports that in the middle of her interview of Bernie Sanders she asked him this:

“Senator, you have dual citizenship with Israel,” Rehm said during the interview on her nationally broadcast show based on station WAMU.

. . .

Rehm cited “a list we have gotten” at NPR that said Sanders was “on that list.”

Sanders dismissed it as “nonsense that goes on in the Internet.”

(Rehm's station WAMU did not immediately return TPM's request for comment on Wednesday.)

“Are there members of Congress who do have dual citizenship or is that part of the fable?” Rehm asked Sanders.

It's true, there is a list on the Internet of members of Congress with dual citizenship. As you might expect, it is a vile, anti-Semitic lie. It repeats the canard that American Jews are not really Americans, and their loyalty cannot be trusted because their true allegiance is to Israel. Kind of funny that even though the media love to trace the genealogy that connects any particular president to the English royal family we never heard claims that George Bush or Ronald Reagan had dual citizenship with England, did we? No, it's always Israel and it's pretty much always Democrats.

When Bernie first announced I got on one of the very first Sanders for President Facebook pages and I soon left after I realized that a high percentage, maybe half, of the posts there were claims that he is a dual citizen.

This is just intolerable. As many awards as Diane Rehm has, she has to know better than to regurgitate this kind of anti-Semitic garbage. I haven't seen a retraction on her page yet, so when I'm done with this I'm going over to lodge a complaint. I hope you will, too.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, if you hear someone complaining about how the Rothschilds are running the world, that person's an anti-Semite, too.

Republicans are funny. In their own antisocial way, that is.

When you get them talking about politics, and about the differences between the parties, you can't shut them up about the value of education, and how being all smart and educated makes them better than Democrats. They love to point out the differences in educational attainment between Democratic and Republican voters. Ol' Rushbo loves to attack what he calls the “low-information voters”, by which I'm pretty sure he means black people who vote for Democrats. In fact, education is so important to the Republicans, and conservatives in general, that the ur-text of the modern conservative movement is William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, where he upholds the sacred values of education against the political perversion of the academy.

But, as I say, they're funny. Somewhere after William F. Buckley was a lone, foaming-at-the-mouth conservative standing athwart history yelling, “Stop,” and the present, where the whole Republican Party is foaming at the mouth, their attitude toward education took a radical turn. To be specific, they used to be for it, now they're against it.

Developments in the last week or two have made this painfully clear, and I'll just mention a couple of them.

Wisconsin. For many years, probably owing to its Progressive history, Wisconsin has been the only state to enshrine the principle of tenure for public university faculties in its statutes. That won't last long, as Governor and likely presidential candidate Scott Walker got a legislative committee to repeal that statutory provision. Because Walker has a right-wing supermajority in the legislature, count on that repeal becoming law very soon.

Wisconsin. Walker again. This time it's not just attacking academic freedom and protections for professors, Walker is also pushing $300 million in cuts from the state's public universities while asking for $500 million to give the Milwaukee Bucks a new stadium.

Wisconsin. Still Walker. This time it's a proposal to gut teacher licensing standards. Anyone with a bachelor's degree could teach core subjects from grades six through twelve, no advance degree or specialized education required. And it gets better: for non-core subjects, no college required!

Is it fair to pick on one state so much? Maybe not, but with Walker's own undistinguished education (dropped out of Marquette with a 2.6–in other words, passing, barely–GPA) maybe we shouldn't be surprised that he places little value on education for others.

Nevada. New rule in Nevada: Who needs public schools? Take your voucher and go wherever you want. Want to send your kids to a fundamentalist school where they'll learn that the universe was created in six days, six thousand years ago? Well, there go your tax dollars right along with it. We'll see how that stands up to a constitutional challenge.

Texas. You know what William Tecumseh Sherman said about Texas, don't you? “If I owned Hell and Texas, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell.” Things haven't gotten any better. Now, when your kids study history in the Texas public schools they will learn that Moses was one of our Founding Fathers. Yes, that Moses. The one with the burning bush. Since it's Texas we're talking about, maybe it was a tumbleweed.

North Carolina. (Motto: Not as bad as South Carolina!) Budget cuts, tuition increases, and attacks on academic centers based explicitly on political ideology. Will there be anything left of higher education in North Carolina once the John William Pope Center, the Tarheel version of the Koch brothers, gets done with it?

Kansas. Last but not least. It's a little older news, but it's breathtaking in the sheer audacity of the program. You know that Sam Brownback has been working for his entire tenure as governor to undermine and abolish any beneficial government activity, hoping to prove that if he cuts enough taxes on enough rich people the economy will perk back up. It hasn't happened yet, but in Brownback's mind that just means that he hasn't cut enough for long enough. The collateral damage? Hardly anything worth mentioning. They just had to shut down public schools in Kansas early because the government doesn't have the money to keep them open! Is that even possible? Forget about the dislocation for the families, who now must make other arrangements for their children while the parents are working, did it even occur to them that what goes on in schools is actually important? Apparently not.

Louisiana. Believe it or not, Bobby Jindal is a Rhodes scholar. Still, in Louisiana public school teachers are being allowed, encouraged, and pressured to teach that creationism is a valid explanation for the millions of species on earth. The parents must be hoping that when their kids graduate from high school they can get accepted to one of those many fine universities that “don't hold with book-larnin'”.

I could go on, but it's really too discouraging. For instance, I'm not even going to get into global warming. We are brought to a point where the parties aren't even seeing the same world. How is it possible to have any kind of debate or discussion when one of the parties is so militantly opposed to reality and facts?

The Republican attacks on education are a direct attack on the future. As long as this goes on they won't need Buckley to stand athwart the future. It's a good thing, because they're going to have a hard time finding someone who knows what “athwart” means.

tDespite what we're hearing in the media, The biggest question that faces outgoing governor Peter Shumlin is probably now whether he can be effective working with the legislature in 2016.

No, the biggest challenges he is facing, and they start right now, are in the executive branch.

This week Paul Dupre, who has been the commissioner of the Department of Mental Health for two years, will be retiring.  

Is there anything to talk about besides Peter Shumlin's bombshell tonight?

For weeks all anybody's said to me about him, in more or less favorable terms, is that he would never be able to stomach going out a loser, so he's got to run again to prove that he can make the comeback and go out on top.

So much for that. If you hang around long enough you should know that nothing's inevitable, no matter how smart you think you are.

One thing we do know, though, is that the 2016 campaign starts now. All the could-bes and should-bes who think they have to take their shot are no longer in a position to say that they'll wait until after the 2016 legislative session ends to make their decision, which is exactly what Shap Smith said just three days ago on You Can Quote Me. Anyone who waits that long will be too late. 

The governor's decision has changed the landscape completely, and has vastly strengthened the position of the Vermont Democrats. Just think about it: the conventional wisdom has been that Phil Scott is ready to run, and after some serious injuries this year, many of them self-inflicted, Shumlin was looking like an extremely vulnerable incumbent. Now, with Shumlin stepping aside and 2016 looking like a strong year for Democrats in Vermont–especially if Bernie is the candidate–the path to victory for any Republican is very much less clear than it was. In 2014 the Republicans almost disproved that time-honored truism that you can't beat somebody with nobody, but 2016 is not looking like a year they can pull it off again. In addition, a Shumlin candidacy was going to guarantee a Progressive candidate for governor next year, which would be a big boost for the R's, but now we may not see that.

So who are the candidates and what are the odds?

Shap Smith. Oh yeah, he's in. I say 80% chance and he announces in 2015. On the other hand, he has young kids and I can't remember the last time someone made the jump directly from the Legislature to governor, but he is the only person under the Dome with the visibility to have a chance to pull it off.

Deb Markowitz. She's smart, she's energetic, and she hasn't been tagged with any administrative fuckups in her time at ANR. She'sthe only one of Shumlin's rivals who has stayed in the job he appointed her to throughout his governorship. Also, she'll be in the job market in a year and a half no matter what happens. 60%

Matt Dunne. Impressed a lot of people last time around. Very smart and still has a loyal fan base. 50%.

Doug Racine. I was very impressed with his commitment to fighting poverty when he ran last time. Still, there were problems at AHS when he was there, and they didn't all come from conservative pressures from the Fifth Floor. 40%, maybe 30%.

 Peter Welch. I see from John Walters that he's being mentioned, but I just don't see it. He's really impressed people with his effectiveness but he's only been in Congress for five terms, which isn't long enough to really accomplish anything. 5%, just because I don't want to say zero,

 The other statewides: Beth Pearce, Doug Hoffer, Jim Condos. Sure, they'll be mentioned, but they're all doing the jobs they want to do with no foreseeable effective challenge, so they can keep doing those jobs as long as they want. They're staying put.

 Long shots? You never know who could possibly emerge. There's talk about Sue Minter, who ran the Irene recovery and then took over at Transportation. Sue's great, although she doesn't have tremendous statewide visibility. It might make more sense for her to wait for Scott's announcement and then annouce for Lite Gov. 

What about you? Anyone you want to nominate? Anyone mentioned in this diary automatically gets front-paged if you're ready to announce. 

From Secretary of State and GMD reader Jim Condos

Posted with permission

Vermonters deserve good government – and that includes an open and transparent government!

We are proud of our State and our collective ability to overcome any difficult issue we may encounter. As Vermonters, when we see a problem, we know we can fix it through hard work and a dose of common sense. We expect the same of our government.

Vermont’s constitution (Chapter 1, Article 6) states that the power is “derived from the people, therefore, all officers of government, whether legislative or executive, are their trustees and servants; and at all times, in a legal way, accountable to them.”

The public’s access to open and transparent government is key to our democracy.

This sacred trust must not be taken lightly.  We must either restore that accountability or risk Vermonters’ faith in our ability to govern.

Over the last 4 years, I have traveled to over 30 locations around Vermont explaining our Open Meeting and Access to Public Records laws on my “Got Transparency?” tour. Several hundred Vermonters have heard my call for more transparency in government and how that leads to increased accountability. I’ll be on the road again this fall because this issue is so very important. But is that enough?  No.

The time has come for Vermont to enact a clear law regarding ethics, conflicts of interest, and financial disclosure for our elected officials.

Just in the last few years, Vermonters have heard allegations of ethical issues about the Governor, Attorney General, legislators, candidates, and municipal officials. These complaints cross all party lines. The Secretary of State’s office receives calls almost every week about municipal officials, alleging conflicts of interest and other ethically suspect actions.  With no authority for the Secretary of State to investigate or enforce these complaints, these citizens come away from the process feeling frustrated, helpless and increasingly cynical.

The time has come to create an independent ethics commission to address complaints from the Legislative, Executive, and Municipal sections of government.  

Vermont is one of only 3 states nationwide without an Ethics Commission.  The 2012 Center for Public Integrity ranking of the states had Vermont with an overall grade of D+, in large part because we do not have an authoritative ethics commission or the required financial disclosures existing in nearly every other state. Vermont can and must do better!

A focus on Ethics should include: a clear definition of conflicts of interest, required financial disclosures by all candidates and elected officers, and establishing an independent Ethics Commission.  This independent body should be empowered to adopt a code of ethics and to fairly and impartially field complaints from the public to determine if a violation has occurred in the areas of conflict of interest, campaign finance, or financial disclosure.  This Ethics Commission must also have the authority to enforce those laws.  This will require a budget and a small staff to be effective, but these investments will be a small price to pay for a more accountable government and a place where affected Vermonters can seek redress.

This is not a new issue – in fact, I have spoken on this topic many times over the last five years. I often hear that we are a small state and are not affected by such things, but frankly, that is not good enough. Recent events are more than enough bear out the need for an ethics commission once again.

By and large, we are served well by our dedicated public servants. The vast majority of our elected state and local officials are trustworthy, dedicated and passionate individuals who want to do the right thing.  However, corruption can exist, and in small doses it can be just as corrosive to our democracy as any prominent scandal, undermining the public trust.  

Will establishing an ethics committee suddenly provide government a moral compass? Certainly not, but it will be a step in the right direction and will shine a brighter light on better transparency and accountability.  

It’s about time we move Vermont forward – let’s fix this!

Here at Green Mountain Daily we adhere to the goal of more and better Democrats.

Margaret Lucenti embodied that principle.

Not simply the grandmotherly figure you would see at the State House or on election days in Montpelier, Margaret was a giant in progressive Democratic politics. As her obituary points out, Margaret was the first chair of the Vermont Human Rights Commission. She worked for three decades as a committee assistant in the Vermont Legislature. (I first met her twenty-five or thirty years ago in my first foray into lobbying, and I got some tips from her as she pointed out that she was also on the board of Central Vermont Community Action.) I worked with her for many years on Montpelier's Board of Civil Authority, and for many years she was the treasurer of the Montpelier Democratic Committee.

As her obituary in the Times Argus tells us, and you should really read the entire thing: 

 She was also chairperson of the Vermont delegation to the 1976 Democratic Convention in her role as a Vermont National Democratic committeewoman, a candidate for the Vermont House of Representatives and the Washington County Senate seat in 1978. She was also the first woman to run in a Democratic primary in Vermont for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974. Her commitment to civic participation by continuous active involvement on town, county and state Democratic committees, often serving as an officer, was most admirable. This included her long tenure as a justice of the peace. Margaret also served as board member of the Washington Electric Coop from 1976-1978. 

 Three years ago she was the subject of a “Super Senior” profile on WCAX, and it relates how her opposition to the Vietnam War spurred her to activism.

What you probably won't read elsewhere, though, is that it was Margaret who, while a member of Vermont's delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1972, convinced Tom Salmon to run for governor. He won, becoming only Vermont's second Democratic governor since 1854. 

Margaret was also inseparable from her husband, Sal, who died just last month. They were married for 72 years.

Margaret's funeral is 10:00 Thursday morning at St. Augustine's Church in Montpelier.

Margaret will be missed by everyone who knew her. 

Governor Shumlin is again calling for budget cuts to forestall proposed tax increases in the latest end-of-session jockeying with the Legislature. Here's what he says on his web page:

I feel that the income tax changes being considered are not geared toward improving our economy or Vermonters’ prosperity. Instead of making these changes and asking working Vermonters to pay more in income taxes, I feel we should do everything we can to reduce spending further and avoid these increases. My message is simple: Let’s find additional spending reductions before we ask Vermonters to pay more income taxes.      

 I think he's dead wrong here. Look at the cuts he's talking about. The big ticket items that advocates are criticizing include: 

$2.87 million in state employee payroll. (On top of the cuts they're already taking.)

$2 million in cuts to weatherization. 

 All to avoid some moderately progressive tax changes.

It's not everything, but by limiting itemized deductions in general, and the mortgage interest deduction in particular, you're holding harmless the generally lower-income segments of the taxpaying public who can't take advantage of these tax benefits.

At this late date, I say save the programs and raise the money from taxes.