The YDN is reporting that Peter Salovey, who’s served as Dean of the Graduate School since Susan Hockfield got promoted to Provost to replace Alison Richard, has been named the new Dean of Yale College. Salovey’s replacement as Dean of the Graduate School? Jon Butler, perhaps the foremost foe of graduate students’ right to organize among the Yale faculty.

I could say it, but it means much more coming from Andrew Sullivan, who voted for Bush the last time:

The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens – and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes…

This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations – and rightly so. I knew this was coming, but the way in which it has been delivered and the actual fact of its occurrence is so deeply depressing it is still hard to absorb. But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He’s a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans – and their families and their friends – his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.

Dubya:

After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization. Their action has created confusion on an issue that requires clarity.

Homosexuality is apparently the most confusing, heretical thing to happen to marriage since miscegnation.

Our government should respect every person and protect the institution of marriage. There is no contradiction between these responsibilities. We should also conduct this difficult debate in a matter worthy of our country, without bitterness or anger. In all that lies ahead, let us match strong convictions with kindness and good will and decency.

In other words, just because gay people need separate institutions doesn’t mean we don’t respect them as equals.

Anger? Bitterness? You better count on it.

And the Times falls into the trap FAIR identified last week by reporting that Musgrave’s ammendment would not “enact a federal ban on civil union or domestic partnership laws.” Halvai it should be that way.

I don’t think Rove expects to see this passed in this term – it strikes me more as a desperate move to throw something to the base to make up for faux-moderate proposals like the crypto-bracero program that Bush also doesn’t plan to see passed.

Doesn’t make Bush’s latest offense any less disgusting though.

Standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” somewhat louder and more hypocritically than before:

President Bush on Wednesday will back a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in an attempt to halt same-sex unions like the thousands that have been allowed this month in San Francisco. “He has always strongly believed that marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

He said Bush believes that legislation for such an amendment, submitted by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., “meets his principles” in protecting the “sanctity of marriage” between men and women.

A uniter, not a divider:

Education Secretary Rod Paige said Monday that the National Education Association, one of the nation’s largest labor unions, was like “a terrorist organization” because of the way it was resisting many provisions of a school improvement law pushed through Congress by President Bush in 2001. Mr. Paige made the comment in a private meeting with governors at the White House, just hours before the president stepped up the tempo of his re-election campaign with a speech attacking his Democratic opponents. The secretary later apologized for a poor choice of words, but repeated his criticism of the teachers’ union as a group of obstructionists.

His initial remark was described by four governors and confirmed by the Education Department. “The secretary was responding to a question,” said Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for Mr. Paige. “He said he considered the N.E.A. to be a terrorist organization.

That’s right, kids. Those teachers who come to work every day, and provide the education that policy analysts and politicians love to tout or dismiss – terrorists. Because they believe in standing up for what their vision of their teaching conditions and your learning conditions.

This is, perhaps, a problematic message to be sending children – or perhaps just preparing them for life in Bush’s America.

As Nathan Newman puts it:

This was not a slip of the tongue but a reflection of a mindset in a White House that sees all opposition as treason, all criticism as terrorism. And it’s an administration armed with a Patriot Act which has allowed them to infiltrate opposition political groups to spy and undermine that opposition.

Take your pick.

GET-UP votes to strike:

A minority of members — like John Laury, a second-year Linguistics Ph.D. candidate — showed up to the meeting still undecided on which way to vote. “I’m marginally in favor,” Laury said before the meeting. “I haven’t been involved with GET-UP for too long. I’m here because we all have a stake in this matter. I want to hear what other people have to say because I am still undecided.”

Laury said that he ultimately ended up voting for the strike. “Before, I was very worried about the University’s reaction to a strike,” he said. “I was worried about turning off faculty and students, but hearing what the strike’s intentions were in the meeting made me more assured that it was right.”

Local 35 and Greater New Haven Labor Council President Bob Proto offers a historical perspective on the struggle for graduate student unionization at Yale:

In 1995, GESO went on strike twice. That got Yale’s attention, and it started boosting salaries. Back then, graduate teachers earned $10,000 for a year of teaching. Now, they earn $16,000 during their first five years. But there’s a problem: After the fifth year, a graduate teacher’s salary drops to $14,000 or less. Since most doctoral candidates take seven years to finish, the more experience you have teaching, the less you get paid. In 1997, a majority of graduate students, including those in the sciences, signed a petition calling on Yale to sit down and negotiate over salary and health care. Back then, family health insurance cost almost $3,000 a year. A few months after the petition, the university decided every graduate student deserved and would get free individual health insurance. Great victory. Only one problem: Families only got half coverage, and the charges started to skyrocket. Today, their “half” charge comes to about $3,000 a year.

But after 60 years of representing workers on Yale’s campus, we know that these gains are not maintained by Yale’s goodwill. They are maintained by our strength. They are maintained by having a union. This is as important in Yale’s Graduate School as it is in Yale’s teaching hospital. Yale’s graduate teachers today just want the right to choose whether to unionize…

My YDN op-ed on Nader and the Democrats is on-line here:

…And Nader is poised, as The Nation argued, not only to damage his self-stated goal of “retiring our current President,” but to set back the prospects for a real progressive transformation of American politics. By running without having built a broad-based movement, in a season when many see ousting Bush as prerequisite for any lasting progressive change, and garnering far fewer votes than he did in 2000, he’ll invite critical announcements of the death knell of third party politics. For these reasons, and others, I was one of the majority who voted against a 2004 run on Nader’s exploratory Web site, prompting him to shut down the poll.

When it comes to political hypocrisy, however, Ralph Nader has nothing on the Democratic National Committee, whose chairman, Terry McAuliffe, warned Nader against a legacy of “giving this country eight years of George Bush.” While Nader’s candidacy may indeed represent one nail in the coffin of the Gore campaign, McAuliffe’s threat continues a long and disingenuous campaign by too many Democratic leaders and activists to appropriate Nader as a scapegoat for the tragic failings of their party. It’s telling that the most memorable moments of Gore’s listless, centrist, visionless 2000 campaign were a staged tongue-lock with his wife to defend himself from associations with infidelity, a series of accurate but unmoving attempts to defend himself from media charges of mendacity, and a Saturday Night Live parody of his “lockbox” strategy to defend social security from campaigns to dismantle it…

For anyone who doubted it, Sam Smith is apparently a weapon of mass destruction after all:

This report is coming to you direct from a laptop computer that scant hours ago was in the custody – along with its owner and his wife – of the Transportation Security Administration at MacArthur Airport in Islip, Long Island. The computer and by inference its owner and wife were suspected of being a WMD. This was not the metaphorical judgment that critics sometimes make about this journal but a literal interpretation of the computer’s capabilities given the alleged emission of traces of explosives.

What makes this even more remarkable is that the computer in question is a Compaq Presario 1200 purchased in 1999 and currently lacking an F1 and right hand shift key. The most common disparaging remark previously made about it has been, “You still got one of those?”

Nader has this much right:

He said Democrats were seeking a scapegoat for the 2000 race that Gore “had stolen from him and had Democratic Party blunders fail to rescue it in Florida.”

Greg Palast has all the gorey details on that one. More on this in a piece I wrote for the YDN tomorrow, which hopefully will elicit some angry responses from Democrats and Greens alike…

Alyssa Rosenberg explains why she’s running for Ward 22 co-chair:

She immigrated to the United States the day after her 21st birthday, and she voted in every election, she told me, until she lost her house. When she was evicted, she went looking for the people she had voted for — her alderwoman and then-Mayor John Daniels — and found that her vote didn’t count for anything. After all the campaign promises she’d heard, all the trips to the polls, all the levers she’d pulled in the privacy of the voting booth, no one would help her. No one seemed to care. So quite understandably, she abandoned the system that had abandoned her and stopped voting altogether.

Alyssa and her running mate, Shaneane Ragin, are running against a team headlined by the ward’s former Alderperson, Mae Ola Riddick, who failed to serve the needs or interests of her constituents and this fall lost the Ward Committee Nomination, got on the ballot and lost the primary, and conducted a secret write-in campaign but lost a third time for re-election in the general election, despite the efforts of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs – and a third ticket with a disenchanted former Riddick ally. Alyssa and Shaneane represent the first co-chair ticket for the ward that brings together a woman from Yale and another from Dixwell, and their vision for the community is one that everyone who cares about Ward 22 should get behind.

Check out their website here.

Meyerson on Nader:

He did, of course, assert that there were no very serious differences between the two parties, though host Tim Russert got him to concede that there were distinctions on such ephemera as judicial nominations, tax cuts, and environmental enforcement. The American government, Nader reiterated, was still a two-party duopoly.

Would that it were! I don’t know which branch of government Nader thinks the Democrats still control, but it would hearten us all to discover some niche that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove don’t dominate. Ralph, if you’re sitting on a secret source of Democratic power, now is as good a time as any to let us know.