Support for marriage equality has been growing faster than any other civil rights issue that I can think of.
Now, fresh off President Obama's announcement of his support for marriage equality, we learn that his Defense Department has decided it will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act.
I want to be careful here, and I want to be fair to Art Woolf, Vermont's Loudest Economist (TM). But his latest screed on Vermont Tiger is irresponsible hackery at best, and race-baiting at worst.
In it, Woolf takes on the results of the US Education Department's 8th Grade National Assessment of Educational Progress Science (NAEP) test. The results are pretty good; 43% of Vermont eighth-graders were proficient in science, compared to 31 percent nationally.
This is, of course, inconvenient news for Woolf and the other Tiggers who are constantly flaying Vermont's public schools for high cost and low performance. So he goes hunting for explanations that don't involve praising Vermont schools. And he finds a goddamn doozy.
To wit: Vermont scores well, not because of our schools or teachers, but because we have a monochromatic population.
In Vermont 93% of students are white. Only 55% of students in the U.S. are white while 21% are Hispanic and 15% are black. In Vermont, 2% are Hispanic and 1% are black.
He then notes that 45% of white students were proficient nationally and 46% in Vermont. And then he compares Vermont to Texas, which had a proficiency rate of only 32%.
But Texas is filled with low income minority students, with 63% Hispanic or black students and only 31% white students. In the Lone Star State, 53% of white students achieved a proficient or advanced score, a higher percent than Vermont's 46%. So which state does a better job of educating students in science?
Oh, Art. I'm sure you didn't mean to assert that the real measure of a school is how well it educates white students. And I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that minority students are naturally less proficient in science than white kids. But it certainly comes across that way.
MONTPELIER, VT. Today, Vermont Democratic Party Chairman Jake Perkinson, heralded the historic news that the President Barack Obama supports full civil rights for all Americans and affirmed his belief that marriage equality should be available to all people. The President said today "I've just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married."
Chairman Perkinson stated "President Obama's statements this afternoon in support of marriage equality mark a watershed moment in this deeply important civil rights issue." Vermont is one of the few states in the union that permits same-sex marriage and has been at the forefront of this issue for over a decade.
Chairman Perkinson continued, "I am personally gratified that the President has made clear that his personal view is that it's wrong to prevent couples who are in loving, committed relationships, and want to marry, from doing so. This is a great step forward for civil rights in the United States and I am proud that the President is leading on this issue just as many courageous people in Vermont, including our own Governor Shumlin, and others elsewhere, have done before him."
The Obama Administration's consistent record in support of the LGBT community also includes:Repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell; Ending the Legal Defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA); Signing Historic Hate Crimes Legislation: Ensuring Hospital Visitation Rights for LGBT Patients and Their Loved Ones; Preventing Bullying Against LGBT Students; Developing and Implementing a National HIV/AIDS Strategy; Expanding Access to Health Coverage; Addressing Health Care Disparities; andTaking Steps to Ensure LGBT Equality in Housing and Crime Prevention.
UPDATE: Today's May 16 and I just got another one of those campaign e-mails at my work e-mail address today.
Hmmm.
Jack McCullough
Well,whoops, Randy Brock’s campaign sent out fundraising solicitations to lobbyists during the legislative session. Three different lobbyists received multi page fundraising letters according to Seven Days.
Three different registered lobbyists provided Seven Days with copies of a two-page fundraising solicitation dated April 18 that was addressed and mailed to their offices in Montpelier. One lobbyist also shared two emails the Brock campaign sent to his work email address during the session containing news on the campaign and links to the "donate" page on the Brock for Governor website.
This solicitation is an apparent violation of part of Vermont campaign finance law that has been trampled on before. Both Peter Shumlin and former Governor Jim Douglas to various degrees have been there and done that. Brock campaign manager Darcie Johnson (formerly of Vermonters for Healthcare Freedom) noted it was a “mistake” and beside that, a disclaimer for lobbyists that might receive the solicitation was included.
And there is this interesting comment by VDP Chairman Jake Perkinson about the lack of enforcement. When asked why he didn’t pursue a complaint with Attorney General Sorrell as he had in the past Perkinson said:
"Frankly, I'm getting frustrated at being the campaign finance police," Perkinson responded. "The last time we filed a complaint, the attorney general didn't do anything about it. At a certain point, you've got to pick your battles."
Just when you thought the arguing was over, two of Vermont's top elected officials have contracted cases of Post-Traumatic Bunched Knicker Syndrome -- an exaggerated sense of wounded entitlement whose onset comes well after the triggering event.
That triggering event was the failure of a bill that would have allowed law-enforcement officials to get their foot in the door of the state Health Department's prescription drug database. Never mind that when the database was established only a few years ago, we were assured that it was to be used purely and solely for health-care purposes. Never mind that those assurance are still prominently displayed on the Health Department's website. Never mind that the Health Department's own figures indicate that since the database was established, the rate of prescription-drug abuse in Vermont has declined or stayed the same.
The details of the bill's demise, for those just joining us: the State Senate approved a bill that would grant law enforcement limited warrantless access to the database. The State House refused to go along with that provision, but did approve several other measures aimed at fighting prescription drug abuse. The entire bill then died in conference for lack of a compromise.
After the jump: Case File No. 1 (Peter Shumlin) and Case File No. 2 (John Campbell).
ABC News and CNN are reporting that Michele Bachmann, shown here ripping pages out of our version of universal health care, has received citizenship in Switzerland.
Don't worry about losing her from Congress, though. When asked if she was going to run for office she said yesterday that that would have to wait until she is fluent in Swiss.*
Big trouble at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, the Vermont company that's been growing by leaps and bounds due to its popular single-cup coffeemakers (and the non-biodegradable K-cups they consume). Last week, GMCR stock took a tumble after it badly missed expectations for second-quarter profits. That, in turn, led to the latest bad news: Founder and Board Chairman Bob Stiller and lead director William Davis were removed from the Board of Directors after they were forced to sell big chunks of company stock during a time when such sales are prohibited by company rules designed to prevent illegal insider trading.
Well, ain't that a sentence and a half. This is a complicated story, but it seems to indicate a real lack of judgment on Stiller's part. And it's one more black mark for a company that's got more than enough on its plate already.
Stiller and Davis (especially Stiller) sold huge chunks of stock last week -- five and a half million shares. They were forced to sell because they'd taken out big loans with their GMCR stock as collateral. The terms of the loans require stock sales if the stock price falls far enough fast enough. Which it did last week. More info on the practice from Bloomberg Business Week:
In general, executives take out loans backed by their stock as a way of obtaining funds without actually selling their shares. Loans are preferable to selling shares, which generate taxable capital gains and can look bad to investors.
If the shares decline in value, lenders will issue a margin call in which the executives must either pay down the loans or provide more collateral. If they fail to do so, the banks seek to recover their loans by selling some of the stock pledged as collateral in the open market.
Seems a bit iffy to me -- taking out loans on company stock to avoid taxes -- but apparently standard operating practice for top execs at successful companies. I'm going to focus on Stiller from here on, because he was by far the biggest borrower and the biggest seller. Before last week's forced sale, he had put 12.5 million of his GMCR shares into margin accounts. Today, he still owns 8.3 million shares -- and all but 1.9 million are in margin accounts.
In short, he borrowed huge amounts of money by pledging the lion's share of his company stock. This worked fine as long as GMCR's share price continued to soar, but spelled instant trouble if GMCR suffered reverses. And the forced stock sales would come at the worst possible time -- when GMCR had just suffered a major reversal.
Is it just me, or was this a really, really stupid thing to do?
"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission violated Clean Water Act (Section) 401 when it granted (an Entergy Corp. subsidiary) a new federal license to operate Vermont Yankee without first obtaining the requisite Vermont-issued '401 Certification' from (the company)," say legal papers filed by the state at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington.
The primary counter argument by the NRC and Entergy is pretty incredible:
New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. and the NRC argue that the state and the NEC did not push hard enough during NRC hearings leading up the new license for the agency to force Vermont Yankee to get a new water quality permit. Entergy maintains that it got a water quality certificate in 1970 and that it remains in effect.
So I guess my driver's license from 1972 ought to still be valid too?
...Especially so, sinceI haven't been leaking tritium or elevating the temperature of the Connecticut River in the inervening years?
God is the author of marriage, and we will not let an activist politician like Barack Obama who is beholden to gay marriage activists for campaign financing to turn marriage into something political that can be redefined according to presidential whim.
"Every American who can't find work, whose home is under water or who can't afford to fill up his gas tank should be wondering why the president is spending even one second of his time thinking about how to radically transform the institution of marriage. It's a political move meant to energize his left-wing base and distract Americans from his disastrous economic policies."
"This is a sad day for America when our president embraces something as blasphemous and just flat out wrong and evil as [so-called] homosexual 'marriage.' Marriage is a sacred institution and to attach it to something that God calls an abomination is just wicked."
Nota bene: It doesn't matter how many of you there are. It doesn't matter what legislation you manage to get passed. Being in the majority may make you a majority, but it doesn't make you right.
When voters in Arizona elected Jan Brewer, that didn't make her a moral paragon. It simply meant that a bunch of dirtbags elected one of their own.
When voters in Virginia, during my time there, passed the Marshall-Newman amendment to that state's Constitution forever denying same sex couples equal rights to marriage, neither their majority, nor their religion, conferred any sort of moral rectitude.
It simply meant that there were enough dirtbags there to enshrine hatred and bigotry into the constitution of the Commonwealth.
Stopped-clock-right-twice-a-day moment:
"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)." -Ayn Rand
This was the deal the LAST time North Carolina amended their Constitution with respect to marriage:
What they did last night is no less shameful. The gulf of years, and the target, changes nothing.
NOTHING.
Hey, North Carolina: If your marriage is so weak it's threatened by what gays do, you don't need a Constitutional amendment, you need marriage counseling.
Well,whoops, Randy Brock’s campaign sent out fundraising solicitations to lobbyists during the legislative session. Three different lobbyists received multi page fundraising letters 
