From today's Times Argus:

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — A Bradford couple who pulled in to McDonald's to buy their 5-year-old son a Happy Meal ended up being ordered out of their minivan at gunpoint Monday afternoon by state troopers who mistakenly thought that an armed fugitive they were seeking was behind the wheel.

Sad news in today's papers: Sally Johnson, a longtime Vermont journalist who edited the Rutland Herald, has died at the age of 60.

I didn't know her that well, but I worked with her a couple of times when cases that I was handling were significant enough to attract media attention. I always appreciated her work, and the intelligence with which she approached her stories.

“She represents to me the golden age of Vermont journalism,” said Steve Kimbell, a retired Vermont lobbyist. “She started writing before the pace of journalism really picked up and that space allowed her to write some investigative and thoughtful pieces that were incredibly valuable.”

Our sympathy and best wishes go out to her husband, Steve Terry, and the rest of her family.

There's a big court decision today. Of course, it's only a District Court decision, but it's one more blow against official discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The subject this time is Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the case is a facial challenge to the federal law. The fact that it's a facial challenge is important: the plaintiffs' position is not that the policy is unfair or invalid as applied to them, but that there is no conceivable way that the policy could be interpreted or applied to survive a constitutional challenge. The District Court agrees.

It's a longish decision, and I haven't read it fully yet, but here are the highlights of the court's reasoning:

1. DADT does not significantly advance the government interest in military preparedness and unit cohesion. (pp. 48-74) While these are legitimate concerns, the court concludes that any claims that gays in the military impede preparedness and unit cohesion are based on assumptions, and that every attempt to actually study the question has concluded that there is no factual basis to the claim.

Foremost among the Rand Report's conclusions is that no empirical evidence exists demonstrating the impact of an openly homosexual
servicemember on the cohesion of any military unit.

Dr. Korb testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on
March 31, 1993 concerning the likely impact on unit cohesion if homosexuals
were permitted to serve openly. According to Dr. Korb, there was no
empirical research to support the view that homosexual servicemembers
would disrupt unit cohesion, and that such evidence could not be obtained
without integrating homosexuals into the military.

In fact, the court finds that not only does DADT not contribute to preparedness and unit cohesion, it actually harms military preparedness by causing the loss of qualified service members, many in critical specialties, by creating additional burdens and costs of recruitment, and by forcing the military to recruit less well-qualified personnel to make up for gays and lesbians who are prevented from serving.

2. DADT infringes on service members' First Amendment rights. (pp. 74-85.) Again, the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, holding that they have First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and the right to petition the government, that DADT infringes on these rights, that the infringement on these rights is based on the content of the speech (which subjects the infringement to the highest level of scrutiny, as, for instance, if a town government adopted an ordinance allowing Republicans but not Democrats to post campaign signs in town), and that these restrictions are broader than necessary to serve any legitimate government interest.

The conclusion is that the plaintiff, which in this case is the Log Cabin Republicans, is entitled to a declaratory judgment that Don't Ask Don't Tell violates the First and Fifth Amendments, and to a permanent injunction prohibiting the government from enforcing the policy.

There are many steps to go from here, starting with whether the government is going to appeal this decision. It can be a long way from a district Court to the Supreme Court. Still, as with recent marriage decisions, this is another showing that equality is on the march.

Tired tonight?  Me, too. Still, it's worth starting thinking about what this election means. People have already started in with the recriminations, and in a multi-candidate race that means the spoiler question.  Was there a spoiler? Who was it? Why did they screw things up for the rest of us?

First off, let's drop the word "spoiler". It tends to piss people off whenever it comes up, whether it's accurate or not. It might be better to ask about the candidates, and whether their presence led to the near-deadlock we're in now.

An example of the discussion is a set of comments from one of my Facebook friends, who was highly critical of Susan Bartlett. Here's an example of some of the things she's said:

Thanks  for nothing, Bartlett, for staying in a race where you had less than a  snowball's chance in Hades. Will we have you to thank for the  unthinkable this November?

And:

I don’t really think these are correct. There’s an implication that Susan was in the race for some reason other than to win: that she was feeding her own ego, or positioning herself for some future career outside of the Legislature.

I don’t think there’s any reason to say that. For one thing, as long as I’ve known Susan, which is a long time, she has never struck me as an ego-trip kind of person. What I think was going on here is that Susan had what she saw was a real political difference with the other candidates, and she thought she could offer people a real choice. I never thought there was any kind of path to victory for her, but that’s a separate question. She obviously did, and that’s why she ran.

You could also argue that she really didn’t have much impact on the outcome: she didn’t divert that many votes, or grassroots workers, or dollars from the other campaigns. She didn’t even win her own county, did she?

A bigger question, though, is that it isn’t obvious that she drew disproportionately from a single candidate. Possibly more Deb than the others because she might have attracted some voters who were motivated by the chance to elect a woman, but the conventional wisdom is that a weak candidate hurts the other candidate who is most ideologically similar, and that person isn’t obvious. It’s entirely possible that even if this had been a three-way or four-way race it would have ended up just about this close.

The candidate who has baffled me from the beginning in this race was Matt Dunne. I like Matt, I think he’s a very attractive and energetic candidate, but his role in the race never made any sense to me. From Matt’s perspective, getting into the race late, I don’t really see how he looked at the candidates who were already in and thought that there was something missing there, so that he could significantly add to the array of choices.

Does that make him a spoiler? No, in part because, even more than Susan, his votes could have been split evenly among the three candidates who finished above him. That’s what people mean when they say he was everybody’s second choice.

As close as the election is, we can be pretty sure that  the margin will be within the range in which a losing candidate can request a recount.

 Here's what Vermont law says:

§ 2601. Recounts

If the difference between the number of votes cast for a winning candidate and the number of votes cast for a losing candidate is less than five percent of the total votes cast for all the candidates for an office, divided by the number of persons to be elected, that losing candidate shall have the right to have the votes for that office recounted.

 The procedure involves a filing in the Washington Superior Court, where all the ballots are transported and counted by hand.

The conventional wisdom is that a recount would be a disaster for us because “we learned from the Salmon recount in 2006 that a recount takes two weeks”.

I think the conventional wisdom is half right and half wrong.

I agree that it would be bad to have a recount. The people who do the recount are people who work in the party and who could, in the absence of a recount, be doing other campaign work. In addition, it does seriously deflate the lift that the winner should come out of the primary with.

I do not think it should take two weeks, though. In 2006 the recount was for a general election for Auditor of Accounts. There were just over 250,000 ballots recounted. This year it's a primary, and we're probably in the neighborhood of 65-70,000 votes, which should take approximately a third as much time as the Salmon recount consumed.

I don't have any inside information that you don't at this point, but keep in mind that the people you're hearing on the radio and TV also probably don't.

The bigotry and intolerance demonstrated by the mainstream of the Republican Party–Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rudolph Giuliani, Rick Lazio, et al., has come to Vermont.  The Times Argus reports today that the assured Republican candidate challenging Pat Leahy for Senate has jumped on the bandwagon.  

Len Britton, a Windsor County businessman looking to unseat Sen. Patrick Leahy in November, issued a campaign missive Tuesday denouncing the proposed mosque as a “slap in the face” to victims of 9/11. He called upon Leahy to do the same.  “Construction of the mosque in such close proximity to Ground Zero is incredibly insensitive to the victims’ families,” Britton said in the release.

 Don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming that Len Britton is a bigot. I don't know him personally, and the odds are I never will. Given the way his campaign is going–out of money and running a deficit–it's just as plausible that he's merely an opportunist.  

And what about that new kind of Democrat (i.e. the kind of Democrat who signs petitions and votes for Republicans), Dan Freilich?

According to the Times Argus, here's where he comes down:  

Daniel Freilich, Leahy’s opponent in the Democratic primary next Tuesday, said people have a right to build a mosque on private property, but that he understands why some would find it so objectionable.  “Victims at least might not be ready for it and … it could be potentially painful,” Freilich said.

Everything the opposition does makes Leahy look better and better.

The Times Argus has a profile of the Washington County Senate primary today. It gives a good basic overview of each of the candidates.  

With longtime incumbent Sen. Phil Scott, R-Montpelier, running for lieutenant governor this year, Washington County voters will elect at least one new senator in November. Although the other two incumbents – Cummings and Sen. Bill Doyle, R-Montpelier – are both running for re-election, only Doyle is assured that his name will be on the ballot when the general election rolls around.  

Doyle, like fellow Republicans David Harrington of Barre Town and Ed Larson of Montpelier, is essentially running unopposed next Tuesday. All three candidates will advance, as will three Democrats who survive Tuesday's primary.  

In addition to Cummings, the list for Senate includes Montpelier resident Kimberly Cheney, Laura Moore of Barre Town, Donny Osman of Plainfield and Anthony Pollina of Middlesex.

What about where you are? Any interesting local primaries of interest? For instance, I’ve seen a smattering of letters to the editor on one of the side judge races–anything of interest there?

I've been undecided about even posting this, but I think it's indicative of the quality of the candidate.

 If you're on Facebook you may have noticed Dan Freilich has been eagerly flogging his web ads, including the one with him on the cow, trying to get as much play as possible. Naturally, he linked to it on his FB page, with this introduction:

Our  video just got covered by Time Magazine (corny or regrettable) either  way people are realizing we know how to tackle serious issues and have  some fun too.

 I posted a snarky little comment to the effect that he should let us know when he gets around to tackling serious issues, but then, the next day I noticed that my comment is gone, so I just posted another comment that I noticed he's now deleting negative comments.

Here's his response on my FB wall:

CaptainDan Freilich                      

when someone is being a petty-prick, we tend to not have any affiliation with them.

Nice, huh?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the same guy who is crying about being “silenced”?

UPDATE:Credit where credit is due.

After this diary was posted I noticed that frequent GMD poster Rama Schneider had also noticed this same phenomenon. And a couple of weeks ago, Shay Totten covered it in Seven Days. So no scoop for either GMD or the Burlington Free Press on this one.

The Burlington Free Press had a story this morning about the financial difficulties of the three Republican candidates for Congress. It's worth reading, particularly because Republicans like to hold themselves out as the party of financial responsibility.

The thing that really jumped out at me when I read the article was this sentence:

If you're interested in educating yourself about the conflict in the Middle East, you might want to check out the documentary film series on the Israeli occupation of Palestine that Black Sheep Books is sponsoring this month.

In 1977, the award-winning journalist and filmmaker, John Pilger, made a documentary film called Palestine Is Still the Issue.  It told the story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.  25 years later, he returned to the Occupied Territories to ask why Palestinians are still living under a brutal, settler-colonial occupation. In this second film with the same title, Pilger interviews Israelis and Palestinians, documents the humiliation and dangers of life under military occupation, and explores why “the fate and struggle of the Palestinians are not just critical to the overdue recognition of their basic human rights, but also central to whether the region, and the wider world, are plunged into war.”

The movie is showing on August 17, 2010 – 7:00pm – 9:00pm at Black Sheep Books, 5 State Street in Montpelier. Follow the link for their information and the rest of the film series.