Update: Within hours of the national Freedom to Marry’s press release, Jake Perkinson was out in the media with denials that he had signed on to the call for a national Democratic Party plank supporting marriage equality, as noted in NanuqFC’s comment. So, no plank if it relies on the VDP Chair to actually take a public stand for a position he has said before he personally supports. Much gnashing of teeth behind the scenes at the VDP with regard to Freedom to Marry and an unnamed reporter, according to inside sources. Meanwhile, Perkinson looks like a square breakfast food served with butter and syrup. ~ GMD

Jake Perkinson, chair of the Vermont Democratic Party, is among eleven state Democratic Party chairs pushing the Democratic National Committee to adopt a same-sex marriage plank to the national platform.

According to Talking Points Memo, in addition to Jake the other party chairs who have signed on are John Burton (California), Jay Jacobs (New York), John Walsh (Massachusetts), Ken Martin (Minnesota), Meredith Wood Smith (Oregon), Boyd Richie (Texas), Mike Tate (Wisconsin), Dwight Pelz (Washington), John Wisniewski (New Jersey) and Joan Wagnon (Kansas).

While some of these states, like Vermont, New York, and California, are obvious choices, some of the others are a big deal. Who would have expected such a position from either Texas or Kansas, for instance?

The letter urging adoption of this plank is signed by party leaders, such as our own Howard Dean, and elected officials from all across the country. Could this be the year that marriage equality makes it into the national platform?

A couple of months ago we reported here that the new biography of Governor Phil Hoff that there is no Vermont building dedicated in his honor, even though he is more responsible than anyone else for making Vermont the modern state it is now.

My friend Rich Cassidy over at On Lawyering is now reporting that that oversight has been remedied, and that Castleton State College has announced that their newest building, slated to open in June, will be called Hoff Hall. The building will be a combination dorm and conference center, and, fittingly, will be solar powered. Thus, a building recognizing the man most responsible for modern Vermont will be a major step into Vermont's future.

Congratulations to Castleton and to Governor Hoff for this recognition, and thanks to Rich Cassidy for letting us know about it.

Last night T.J. Donovan announced a list of over one hundred Vermont lawyers who have already endorsed his candidacy. The list contains leading members of the bar from Democratic firms, seasoned prosecutors and defense attorneys, and leading public sector lawyers. The group is chaired by Ellen Mercer Fallon, a partner with Langrock, Sperry, and Wool, the firm where Supreme Court Justice Beth Robinson was a partner before her ascension to the Supremes; and L. Randolph Amis, an attorney in private practice in Burlington.

If you read the press release, reprinted at VtDigger.org, you'll see that the list is dominated by Chittenden County lawyers, although  the list contains lawyers from around the state.

Some of the more interesting names:

Former Republican Attorney General and recent Democratic State Senate candidate Kim Cheney.

Former Sanderista John Franco.

Former State Senator Steve Reynes and former Representative Sandy Baird.

Ritchie Berger of Dinse, Knapp, and McAndrew, who blew up the sexual harassment case against the former UVM hockey coach and who represented David Blittersdorf in a libel suit against Brian Dubie and his campaign.

Big name defense attorney David Sleigh.

This is another move that shows how serious TJ is about his campaign. Nobody's going to win this election with 100 votes, but the fact that TJ has been able to enlist such a wide-ranging list of lawyers in just a few weeks is the first step in an effective organization.

This is starting to look interesting.

Addendum by jvwalt: 

Co-chair Ellen Mercer Fallon was also former Counsel to Governor Madeleine Kunin and former head of the state bar; co-chair L. Randolph Amis is a former Burlington City Councilor who's held a number of party posts at the local and state levels.

A cursory glance at the list also reveals two lawyers named Obuchowski — Joe and Raymond. Relatives of a certain former House Speaker and current member of Governor Shumlin's cabinet. I presume? 

Additional detail about attorney Ritchie Berger, mentioned above by Jack: One of his partners in Dinse Knapp is none other than Shapleigh Smith, our current Speaker of the House who, as you may recall, gave a lot of thought to running for AG himself.

A little kerfuffle in the State Senate this week. Specifically, Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Sears is the latest victim of BKS (Bunched Knicker Syndrome) over a comment our friend, fellow blogger, and Senator Philip Baruth posted here.

In case anyone missed it, here's what Philip posted here about marijuana decriminalization and the prescription drug bill (aka “Let the police see your prescription records without a warrant”):

Just so everyone's clear: Joe Benning and I were promised that our MJ decriminalization language would go on another bill — Senator Sears has now made the decision to put a very similar amendment on this one. But Joe and I are very, very much against this bill, and we won't let our decrim language be used as bait — not successfully, anyway. So we plan to vote against this one, convince others to vote against it, and try our best to attach decrim to another bill entirely. Will that work? Who knows. But at least we won't burn in the everlasting fires for encouraging this particular privacy-invading mess. 

Sears responded by attacking Senator Baruth on the floor of the Senate. As reported by Thatcher Moats, Sears read the blog comment (helpful for any senators or readers of the Times Argus or Rutland Herald who might have missed it) and attacked Philip for being part of the loss of decorum in the Vermont Senate.

Are we seeing a loss of decorum, or is it just a few members of the Old Guard who are grumpy that some of the younger members of the body aren't sitting back to let them run things the way they want?

  Oh, and is it just a coincidence that this attack, based on the marijuana issue, came on 4/20? 

 Whatever it is, from where I sit I'm glad to see our goal of electing more and better Democrats embodied by a senator like Philip Baruth.

 Don't back down, Philip! 

 *Correction: I initially misspelled Senator Baruth's first name. Sorry, Philip.

John Edwards’s trial started this week, and the news just provides more revelations about what a scummy character he is.

When John Edwards started running for president I was in his camp. Among other things, he was the only candidate who really made eradicating poverty the central theme of his campaign. Luckily, given what we have learned since his campaign ended, he didn’t become our candidate.

I don’t care who politicians sleep with. For that matter, I don’t much care who regular people sleep with. When John Edwards was running for president, though, asking people to vote for him, work for him, and give him money, while at the same time he knew he was carrying on an extramarital affair that  was bound to demolish his campaign when it came out (hint: it always comes out), that’s when I do care. He wasn’t just putting his marriage and his family at risk, he was putting the faith and efforts of millions of Democrats across the country, and the fate of the 2008 election, at risk.

So that makes him pretty low in my book, but now it turns out that he’s even worse.

His trial started this week, and the news is carrying reports on the potential witnesses both for and against him. According to the Charlotte News and Observer: Cate Edwards, the grown daughter of the former presidential candidate and one-term Democratic senator, could be called to testify on her father’s behalf.

He doesn’t have to do this. He could plead guilty. He could decide not to involve his daughter. Instead, he’s having his daughter testify to defend him against charges that he gave campaign money to the woman he was having an affair with while his wife, his daughter’s mother, was dying of cancer.

How do you do that to your kid?

The Rent Is Too Damn High by Matthew Yglesias

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Matt Yglesias is a young journalist, formerly with The Center for American Progress, who is now writing on the economy for Slate magazine. Anyone who has followed his recent reporting or Twitter feed is aware that one recent focus of his work has been the supply-limiting effects of needless regulation, and particularly building and zoning codes. Now, taking his lead from Jimmy McMillan, the recent joke candidate for New York Governor on “The Rent Is Too Damn High” ticket, Yglesias lays out his argument for increasing the supply of creating affordable housing in desirable locations by reducing or eliminating zoning and building requirements that distort the market. 

Yglesias's targets include building height limitations, minimum lot size requirements, and parking requirements that subsidized car ownership. Yglesias argues that not only do these regulations force up housing prices, they also prevent cities from creating the dense, walkable neighborhoods that Boomers and Gen Xers want.

Think liberals are always trying to impose restrictive regulations on private enterprise? “The Rent Is Too Damn High” is a rebuttal of those claims. Concerned about the cost of housing and how the market can address the housing needs of your community? Then you should read this and start talking to your city's planning and zoning departments about what they're doing to fix things.

View all my reviews

Norwich University, here in Northfield, has long been known as a leading military school. I believe there is some competition between Norwich and West Point over which is the oldest military college in the country. If I recall correctly, West Point is older but Norwich became a degree-granting institution first.

Anyway, if you live in or around Northfield you know about the military tradition of the Corps of Cadets, and if you live in Vermont you may know of some of Norwich’s other, less traditional, programs. For instance, for many years Norwich has offered a program in Peace Studies, now known as Studies in War and Peace, which is not what you picture for the red-meat military crowd. Norwich also hosts the annual Colby Symposium, which attracts military writers from across the country.

This year, however, is a major departure: next week Norwich will be observing its first Pride Week.  

NORTHFIELD, Vt. – The Norwich University Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Question, and Allies Club (LGBTQA) will be hosting its first ever Pride Week at Norwich University March 26-31.

Highlights of the week include a keynote address by Army Chief Warrant Officer Charlie Morgan and remarks by Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin at Norwich’s first ever Queer Prom on Saturday, March 31.

In conjunction with community partners such as Outright Vermont and RU12 numerous discussions and awareness-raising activities are planned.

There will be six days of events, a day for each color of the LGBT flag with each color representing a LGBT issue or theme, such as red for AIDS awareness and green for allies.

“The purpose of this event is to express and demonstrate equality throughout the Norwich community, along with the public, in order to promote membership in the NULGBTQA and to educate the public on challenges and issues faced by members of the LGBT community,” said Joshua Fontanez, NULGBTQA president and a senior member of the Norwich University Corps of Cadets.

The NULGBTQA made national headlines with its first meeting occurring on Sept. 20, 2011, the day of the repeal of the military’s ban on open homosexuality, commonly known as “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”

“The NULGBTQA is the first ever LGBT Club on a military campus, and we have had local, statewide, and national attention from members of West Point; the Governor of Maryland; the Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Outright Vermont,” Fontanez said. “Departments across campus and myriad members of the Norwich Community are coming together in order to help create Pride Week, free for all.”

The week’s events are sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Students; the Student Government Association; the Student Activities Office; the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention and Education; the Center for Civic Engagement and Campus Climate Committee; the Office of the Vice President of Student Affairs; Human Resources and Title IX; Sodexo; the Office of Student Success and Retention; Norwich Christian Fellowship; Residential Life and the Infirmary.

Throughout the years that opposition to the Vietnam War got ROTC removed from many university campuses there were many who argued that this was a mistake, and that integrating ROTC into mainstream academic life was essential to keeping military values in line with the liberal values of society as a whole. Norwich deserves a lot of credit for doing this.

 If you drive down State St. in Montpelier, in the vicinity of the State House, you will drive by Governor Davis Avenue and then, very shortly, Governor Aiken Avenue. Together they take you toward the entrances at the two ends of the State House.

 What you will not see, either on the maps of our state or on any public building, is a recognition of Governor Phil Hoff.

 The authors of a recent biography of Phil Hoff teach us that “No individual deserves more credit (or in the view of political rivals more blame) for the transformation of Vermont than Philip Hoff.” Nevertheless, they also tell us that Governor Hoff's memory has been neglected, and where other prominent politicians are honored by parks, state buildings, and roads, there is no building or other monument to Hoff's accomplishments.

 Half a century has passed since Phil Hoff was first elected governor, yet we have no physical monument to remind us of his years of service. While on the national stage we have too often been subject to premature idolization, as in the nationwide urge to name things after John Kennedy after his assassination or Ronald Reagan after his death, but Phil Hoff's achievements as governor have stood the test of time.

 It is long overdue to recognize Phil Hoff in the buildings or roads of Vermont.

Sadly, the odious Andrew Breitbart continues to defile the national dialogue, even from beyond the grave.

Fortunately, what he’s done seems to be remarkably ineffective.

You may remember the back story. Shortly before his death, in one of his overheated public appearances, Breitbart claimed that he had video of Barack Obama when he was in college that was going to be some kind of major game changer. “I have videos, this election we’re going to vet him,” Breitbart disclosed to raucous applause. “We are going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.”

Well, even after death Breitbart’s organization continues, and apparently today they got scooped. We know that because when the tape was finally released they called it “selectively edited”. “Spliced and diced.” Well, duh. We knew that would be the case: after the Shirley Sherrod libel, if not before, the whole world knew that everything that came out of the Breitbart organization was sliced and diced. The weird thing is that they admitted it.

Because they got scooped they spent the afternoon talking about how they were going to release the whole tape on Hannitty tonight, and that it would (naturally) blow the whole story up and demolish President Obama’s story, or appeal, or something. They kept the Breitbart web page plastered with hints about what we’re going to find out when the whole thing is released.

I don’t know if the whole video has been released, but it seems as though it has, and there’s nothing there, folks. For one thing, it was all on Frontline back when Obama was running for President, so nothing has been “hidden”. It’s video of a demonstration at Harvard Law School when Obama was there (not from his college days) and it shows Obama speaking in support of Derrick Bell, a prominent law professor there who was a bit of a lightning rod at the time. Obama sounds remarkably the way he sounds today, with the same measured tone, the same tendency to use a falling intonation at the end of sentences, and the same use of language that we hear from him now. What’s more, he doesn’t say anything that remarkable.

To hear the Breitbart people tell it the tape is totally damning, supposedly because they’re now going to release all this video that proves that Bell is a racist or something, but there is literally nothing in this video that makes Obama look much different from what we already know about him.

Another thing that we keep seeing on the Breitbart site is their claims that Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard, told them on an “exclusive tape”, that “We hid this throughout the 2008 campaign. I don’t care if they find it now.” And they say that several times, with hot links to pages where they promise you’re going to find the story of this exclusive tape with Charles Ogletree saying what they claim he said. Don’t bother. No matter how many of those links you follow you never get to the tape they promise.

So what’s their final line? There’s far more coming on Derrick Bell. This is just the beginning. And this video is a smoking gun showing that Barack Obama not only associated with radicals, he was their advocate.

Now it’s been a long time since anyone with a brain took anything from Breitbart seriously, but that didn’t stop him or his people from continuing to peddle anything he could. At this point, though, can’t we just agree that he is both gone and forgotten?

Now that our founder, John Odum, is moving on to bigger and better things (more on that later), I think it’s safe to open the locked doors on what really happens at the palatial offices of Green Mountain Daily.

These scenes are pretty accurate, although Mr. Odum isn’t always smoking a cigar as he hands out assignments, chews out recalcitrant reporters, or barks out “Don’t call me Chief!” or some of his other trademarked phrases.

To shift to a more serious note for just a moment,  I really had little idea what to expect when John called me back in 2005 asking me to join what he was conceiving of as a Vermont version of Daily Kos, but I suspect that none of us could have predicted the range and influence that his new idea would attain. Speaking for myself, John Odum’s leadership and news and political judgment will be sorely missed, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to have worked with him these last six years.

Thanks, John, and congratulations.