I spent most of the day in Montpelier at the polls, and there were Sorrell supporters there all day, right to when we closed the polls. There was definitely a lot of enthusiasm there (even conceding that they are lawyers who work for Sorrell).

What is interesting, though, is that Ed Stanak finished pretty weakly. I know a number of people who supported TJ who were not willing to vote for Sorrell. If this had been a significant fraction we would have seen a stronger result for Stanak.

The result, with the strong showing for Sorrell and the weak showing for Stanak, shows that the party unity effort that TJ Donovan and the State Democratic Party mounted was effective to come out of a hotly, some would say bitterly, contested primary.

This is a very good prognostic indicator for TJ’s future.

UPDATE: Marriage equality wins in four states.

Confirmed win in Maine and Maryland, confirmed loss of proposition to ban it in Minnesota, and Washington looks like a clear win once all the votes are counted.

Post your ballot proposition observations here.

Right now it appears that marriage equality is winning in Maine and Maryland and the effort to ban same-sex marriage is losing in Minnesota. This will make it a very big year.

Also a good year for legalization of pot.

Cross posted from Rational Resistance. http://rationalresistance.blog…

It wasn’t possible in 2008, but it appears that the Republicans are trying to steal Florida again.

 It’s mainly being reported at the Huffington Post: hundreds of people waiting on line for early voting, spending hours before they can get in, and in one case even having their cars towed away.

 The chaos is the direct result of new laws enacted by the Republican legislature to curtail early voting, and when the crowds that appeared were too large to be accommodated, did Medicare defrauder Rick Scott extend the hours? Just the opposite:

Miami-Dade attempted to deal with the problem on Sunday by allowing voters to cast absentee ballots in person between 1:00 and 5:00 p.m. However, after just two hours, the Miami-Dade elections department shut down the location after too many people showed up. People outside the locked doors were reportedly screaming, “We want to vote!”

 There is no mistake here. What is happening is, once again, a deliberate effort to suppress the Democratic vote and give Florida’s electoral votes to Romney.

 Which makes Frank Bruni’s column in Sunday’s Times particularly ironic. Bruni calls for amity following the election, a hope that bipartisanship will reign.

There’s an opportunity here, as we hit the reset button, for Obama to begin a second term by lavishing his attention on areas of general bipartisan agreement or for Romney to begin a first term with a focus on that same territory.

Then, predictably, Bruni descends into the MSM’s favorite rhetorical construct: the false equivalence.

The Obama and Romney campaigns have already signaled that they’ll be sending lawyers, thousands of them, to polling places on Tuesday to gather information for possible legal challenges to the results, should the campaigns feel that there’s some justification for challenges and – perhaps just as important – some way to sway the outcome. They’re poised, in other words, to reject the integrity of the tally.

 What’s happening in Florida is proof that we need to send lawyers to challenged states, and to bring in international monitors, not to file challenges after the election is over, but to bring lawsuits while the election is going on, and before the Republicans have the chance to steal it.

 I surely hope for a legitimate Presidency, but the Republicans are doing everything they can to prevent it.

You may have caught my diary last week about John MacGovern, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate who is so anti-choice that he even favors forcing a woman to carry her rapist's baby to term.

Obviously he has no chance against Bernie Sanders, which is a good thing, but I just learned something very troubling.

It turns out that MacGovern's campaign manager, Paul Dame, is running against Democrats Tim Jerman and Linda Waite-Simpson for the House seat for the Chittenden 8-2 (Essex Junction).

Does Dame share the extreme anti-choice position that his Senate candidate is pushing? 

There's a candidates' forum this afternoon at 3:30 at the Brownell Public Library. If you're going it might be a good idea to ask Mr. Dame if he supports the extreme views of Mr. MacGovern, and if he doesn't, why he's trying to get him elected to the U.S. Senate. 

I’ve spent my entire legal career as a Legal Aid lawyer. After I graduated from law school in 1979 I worked at Legal Aid of Western Michigan for four years, and I’ve been working at Vermont Legal Aid since 1983. I’ve loved not necessarily every day of it, but definitely every year, and it’s mainly because the work and the Legal Aid movement makes it possible to bring about positive change both for individual clients and for large segments of the population touched by poverty, neglect, and injustice.

Working in Legal Services for so long I know that we don’t make our achievements alone, and I’m proud not only of what I can accomplish but when my colleagues are able to accomplish great things.

This is one of those stories. At Vermont Legal Aid we have a project that provides legal representation to Medicare beneficiaries, and recently we had an individual case in which a client had been denied reimbursement for rehab services because they weren’t helping her get better. No surprise because lots of people have chronic conditions that will never get better, but rehab services will help them live independent lives in their own homes, giving them the maximum level of self-direction possible, and saving society a lot of money that would otherwise be spent on nursing home care into the bargain. By good lawyering my colleagues were able to keep the independent living services coming and one Medicare beneficiary was able to preserve her independent living situation.

But it didn’t stop there. You may have read about this in The Times. Vermont Legal Aid cooperated with the Center for Medicare Advocacy and filed a class action seeking to change the policy not just for our individual client, but for Medicare beneficiaries across the country who were in danger of losing the home-based that were enabling them to live outside of nursing homes. Last week it was announced that the government had agreed to settle the case, and to continue providing these vital services.

As The Times reports:

Federal officials agreed to rewrite the Medicare manual to make clear that Medicare coverage of nursing and therapy services “does not turn on the presence or absence of an individual’s potential for improvement,” but is based on the beneficiary’s need for skilled care.

The case also attracted an editorial from The Times, which said of the settlement, “It is clearly the humane thing to do for desperately sick people with little hope of recovery.” and “The solution to Medicare’s cost problem is not to deny needed services but to make the delivery of care more efficient and less expensive, and to ensure better management of care for the chronically ill.”

I didn’t work on the case, but I’m proud to be part of an organization that was able to see the need for this change and was willing to support the excellent work needed to carry it through to success.

As I said, the work is hard, the days can be challenging, but the rewards are great.

If you look at the down ticket races this year attention has varied. For most of the summer it was the AG's race that grabbed everybody's attention, and for the last few weeks it's been the Beth Pearce/Wendy Wilton race for Treasurer. 

 Another important contest, though, is the race for Auditor of Accounts. Vermont voters have a choice between a lifelong politician and a policy professional. Doug Hoffer may not know every skeleton in every closet in the State House, or the names of every Republican and Democratic Town Chair, but he knows how to do the work of the Auditor's office, and to do it professionally and without any political bias.

Doug has a new campaign video out, and it's worth a look: 

Hoffer for Auditor “Whiteboard” from Hoffer for Aditor on Vimeo.

There hasn't been a lot of press attention to the federal races in Vermont, and with good reason. After all, it is a given that Peter Welch will be reelected to the House of Representatives and Bernie Sanders will be reelected to the Senate. They will probably each get over 60% of the vote.

What's happening in the Senate race, though, is worth a brief comment. The Republican candidate is John MacGovern, a former Massachusetts legislator who moved to Vermont in the 1990's. In what is one of the most liberal of liberal states, MacGovern has staked out the most extreme anti-choice position, aligning himself with Richard Mourdock (“If you're raped your baby is a gift from god”) and other extremists.

As Will Saletan has  reported in Slate:

 In Vermont, the state right-to-life committee certified Republican nominee John MacGovern as “fully pro-life.” When MacGovern was asked whether “a woman should be forced by the government to give birth to a rapist’s baby,” he answered: “I’ve always in my career and to this day been loyal to the principle of life. I’m pro-life. I’m profoundly pro-life. I’m pro-life to my core.”

MacGovern's statement above about being “profoundly pro-life” comes from a debate with Bernie Sanders, available on YouTube. 

As I say, this guy has no chance of winning, but the fact that in a contested primary where only one of the candidates espoused this extreme anti-choice message, he is the one chosen by Vermont Republicans is very troubling.

This is a reminder that even in Vermont constant vigilance is essential. 

In case you haven't noticed, we've spent a lot of time lately talking about the malign influence of superPACs, and especially Vermonters First, the new outlet for all of Lenore Broughton's sofa cushion cash (to the tune of about three quarters of a million dollars so far). In addition to the State Treasurer's office, she's now trying to buy legislative seats all over the state.

 As it happens, Miss Daisy and her chum Tayt Brooks have decided to try to take down Sarah Buxton, an energetic first-term Democratic Representative who ousted her predecessor, David Ainsworth, by one vote two years ago, so they took out two quarter page ads in the Randolph Herald, which serves Buxton's district.

I'm here to praise M. Dickey Drysdale for two things. First, for agreeing to run the ad. In my view it would be very dangerous for newspapers to start censoring their advertisers, especially political advertisers, based on whether they agree with them.

Second, and more importantly, for refusing to profit from the corrupting effect of superPAC money. In an editorial, which will be available in full next week, Drysdale explains why he's donating the $504.00 Vermonters First paid for the ads to the Randolph Area Food Shelf. (I've included a link in case you're inclined to support them, too.)

In his editorial, here's how Drysdale explains his position:

As for The Herald, we’re glad anytime when we see politicians realize the value of weekly newspaper advertising. However, we deplore the entire super-PAC mechanism, which directs unrestricted gobs of money, from people who can afford it, into our precious political process.

For that reason, we’re donating the $504 to the Randolph Area Food Shelf.

 We agree with Dickey Drysdale both about the value of weekly newspapers and about the effect of unrestricted bogs of money spread around by the rich.

So a big thmbs up to Dicky Drysdale and the Randolph Herald, and another big thmbs down to Vermonters First. 

 Thanks to friend and regular reader Arthur Hamlin for the tip!

You'v heard this, right? Thursday morning Colin Powell went on television and endorsed President Obama's reelection.

 Big deal, right? After all, he endorsed him in 2008 so why wouldn't we expect him to endorse him again this year?

Here's why it is a big deal.

First, we know that if Powell had endorsed Romney in 2012 after endorsing Obama in 2008 it would have been a HUGE deal. He would have been on every talk show and every commercial Romney ran from now to the election. It would have given tremendous support to their message that Obama had his chance but he was a real failure, now it's time to let the grownups back in to take over, and so forth. It especially would have helped Romney on foreign policy, because he could legitimately claim that one of our biggest foreign policy heroes had dumped Obama for the manifestly less qualified Romney.

Of course, since that didn't happen the Romney people can't do that. They always like to have one black guy that they can point to as their own, and when they lost Powell in 2008 they were stuck with crazy guys like the Godfather Pizza Guy. 

Which brings us to the second reason (or maybe second piece of evidence) that this is a big deal: the Republicans are freaking out about it.

Take John Sununu from right across the river. He's now saying that the only reason Powell endorsed Romney Obama is that they're both black. Nothing racist about that, is there? Why should the Republicans give a black guy credit for being able to make decisions based on their carefully considered merits? Even if they were begging him to run on their ticket just a few years ago?

Or as another example, take John “You Kids Get Off My Lawn!” McCain.  Granted, after 2008 McCain probably wasn't Powell's biggest fan, but this goes beyond that. As Benjy Sarlin reports in Talking Points Memo:

 “General Powell, you disappoint us and you have harmed your legacy even further by defending what is clearly the most feckless foreign policy in my lifetime,” McCain told Brian Kilmeade on his radio program.

So yes, this is a big deal. Someone who has had the chance to study President Obama's record, especially on foreign policy, for the last four years, and has tried to understand Romney's foreign policy (hint: he said  “I'm not quite sure which Governor Romney we'd be getting with respect to foreign policy,”), and still came down supporting President Obama, and giving him credit both for his domestic and his foreign policies.

Thank you, Mr. Powell.