Paul Heintz is on a well-deserved vacation at an undisclosed location (OK, it's Dominica), so I'll be your Scoreboard host today. Without further ado, we present The Scoredboard for the week of Friday, February 22:

Winners:

The Air Guard — Brig. Gen. Steven Cray's election as adjutant general puts a fighter pilot in the Vermont National Guard's proverbial cockpit. Just watch out for those F-35 helmets!

Lawmakers who want to support gun control but worry it'll cost them — Castleton's new poll should give some cover to legislators on the fence about high-capacity ammo, background checks and other gun-control measures. Runner-up winner: Jon Margolis and Vermont Public Television for scooping (with permission) Castleton's own poll results.

Six-figure salaries — Jane Knodell is earning a hefty paycheck while on leave from UVM. But it's proving a liability in her run for city council.  

Mike Kilian — The Freeps' associate editor was promoted up the Gannett corporate ladder this week when he was appointed executive editor of the Daily Times (and eight weeklies) in Salisbury, Md. Warning to Maryland record keepers: Prepare to disclose!

Gnar shredders — Jay Peak and the NEK got a two-foot dump. So why am I still sitting here at my desk?

Paul Heintz — For taking a sweet vacation in an undisclosed (but presumably sunny) location. Runner-up loser: Andy Bromage, for getting left behind to blog in his stead.

More losers after the break...

The Vermont Guard has a new leader — Brig. Gen. Steven Cray, who was overwhelmingly elected adjutant general by a vote of the Legislature on Thursday.

Congrats, dude! Now about that whole F-35 thing...

After winning with 140 votes, Cray faced a scrum of reporters outside the House chamber eager to learn more about the guy succeeding Michael Dubie as head of the 2600-4000-member Vermont National Guard.

Cray is a fighter pilot and 30-year Guard veteran who reportedly commanded a squadron of F-18s over Ground Zero on 9/11. He's also an American Airlines pilot and served in Iraq.

Cray easily beat three other contenders, including anti-F-35 candidate, Jimmy Leas, a South Burlington lawyer who is not a Guard member. Another candidate dropped out last month after an anonymous letter accused him of failing to adequately address allegations of sexual harassment in the Guard.

During Cray's first impromptu press conference, it didn't take long for the subject to turn to the potential basing of F-35 fighter jets on the Air Guard base at Burlington International Airport. Asked if he thinks the Air Guard will have a future if the F-35 doesn't come, Cray said, "I do. It will be different."

Cray said the Guard could find nonflying missions to sustain it, should the Air Force base the F-35s elsewhere, but he's not sure what they would be. That's a slightly more optimistic picture than former adjutant general Michael Dubie painted last June, when he told reporters "there is no plan B" for the Vermont Air Guard base if the F-35s aren't based at BTV.

In this week's issue of Seven Days, starring local musician Jim Rooney on the cover...

• A loophole in Vermont law means downloading child porn is illegal, but merely viewing it is not. Lawmakers are looking to change that.
• Two contests for the South Burlington City Council could determine the future of a number of big issues there, from the F-35 to a development freeze.
• Some local students are attending high school in Québec, with tuition assistance from Vermont.
• Trouble sleeping? Maybe you need to have someone watching you sleep at the Sheraton Burlington.
• In Fair Game: Doug Racine made his career on fighting poverty, but now he's the unlikely lead pitchman selling Gov. Peter Shumlin's welfare cuts. Plus, how can you fight the influence of super PACs? Give more money to the parties themselves, of course. 

Find your copy on newsstands, at sevendaysvt.com or in the App Store.

UPDATE POSTED BELOW:

The Democratic machine that helped elect Miro Weinberger mayor of Burlington and pushed Gov. Peter Shumlin to a landslide victory last fall is humming again.

And by humming, we mean dishing out the nasty to its political enemies.

The Vermont Democratic Party has fired off two missives in the past week aimed at Ward 2 city council candidate Jane Knodell, an old-guard Progressive hoping to reclaim the seat she held for 14 years. She's facing Democrat Emily Lee, a neighborhood activist and vice president at Merrill Lynch.

Last Friday, the Dems issued a press release attacking Knodell (pictured) for voting against a symbolic resolution supporting the decriminalization of marijuana in 2009, and for saying during a recent candidate forum that she couldn't remember a single vote on which she differed from Republican former councilor Kurt Wright.

Then, on Wednesday, the party went after Knodell for what it called a "golden parachute" she's receiving during a leave of absence from the University of Vermont, where she served as provost and will return as a professor in 2014. As Seven Days reported last week, and the Burlington Free Press expanded upon on Wednesday, Knodell will be paid her salary of $270,000 through June — when her contract as provost was set to expire — followed by 12 months' pay at the professor's salary of $150,000 during a year's leave of absence.

"Knodell's golden parachute sounds like an elite, big-city retirement plan, not one that comes from an organization like UVM that exists to serve Vermonters — and that receives taxpayer money to do so," Burlington Democratic Chair David Scherr said in a statement. "At a time when tuition is going up and budgets are being cut, it is hard to understand why Knodell would choose to profit from a golden parachute at the expense of workers and students."

Progressive City Councilor Max Tracy, who is managing Knodell's campaign, hadn't seen the press releases until Seven Days asked him for a reaction to them on Wednesday, but he responded forcefully.

"We had every intention of bringing a positive, issue-based campaign that emphasized Jane's unbelievable record of public service and her ability to execute for Ward 2," he said. "Unfortunately, party hacks have decided to take it in a decidedly negative direction because they realized there was no way that Emily was going to be able to match Jane's tremendous amount of service to the Old North End."

The second-in-command at the Burlington Free Press newsroom has landed a new gig.

The Freeps reports that Associate Editor Mike Kilian has been named executive editor of the Gannett-owned Daily Times of Salisbury, Md. Kilian will also oversee eight weekly newspapers and the website Delmarvanow.com.

He starts the new gig on March 4, the Freeps reports.

From the story:

Kilian joined the Burlington Free Press in fall 2010. In Vermont, he planned and edited coverage recognized in Best of Gannett, Associated Press Media Editors and Sigma Delta Chi contests, including First Amendment work on Vermont’s embezzlement scourge and on poor oversight of search warrants, breaking news and features coverage of Tropical Storm Irene, and online coverage of the nation’s first fatal shooting at an Occupy encampment.

Executive editor Mike Townsend lavished praise on his number two — in a gruff, terse newsman sort of way.

“I am proud of Mike. He will be missed at the Free Press,” said Burlington’s executive editor, Michael Townsend. “He was the best assignment editor I’ve ever hired.”

Incidentally, if you're wondering where the heck Salisbury, Md., is, it's here.

Kilian tells the Freeps that he wants to increase enterprise reporting in Maryland  and will "aim high" when it comes to investigative and "First Amendment" reporting. He also says he'll expand the use of social media at the papers.

Kilian did not immediately return a phone call Tuesday evening, and an email came back with an auto- reply message that said he was out of the office until Wednesday, February 20.

Armisen donned his finest Bernie hair in a sketch parodying the Chuck Hagel confirmation hearings that didn't make it to the airwaves for the February 9 episode of "Saturday Night Live." But NBC posted a "dress rehearsal" clip of the sketch to its website. It's easy to see why it didn't make the final cut — it's one of those one-note "SNL" sketches that goes on about two minutes too long. And it later also raised the ire of the Anti-Defamation League, who accused NBC of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism.

Here's what's happening in Vermont news and politics this week. Got a newsworthy event for next week's calendar? Email by Friday to submit.

Monday, February 18

• At 11 a.m., Channel 17 airs its legislative issues show, "Conversations With Your Legislators." Today's guests: Reps. Kesha Ram (D-Burlington) and Patrick Brennan (R-Colchester). Stream it live.
• At noon, Vermont Public Radio's "Vermont Edition" hosts Burlington-based immigration attorney Leslie Holman discussing the prospects for achieving real immigration reform this year. Listen live.
• Gov. Peter Shumlin is in Montréal today. At 2:30 p.m., he's in a private meeting with Québec Premier Pauline Marois, and at 3:20 p.m. both will sign a "cooperation agreement" between Vermont and Québec. Of note: the advisory says the leaders will pose for photos but take no questions. Mon dieu!

It was famed Vermont activist and author Bill McKibben who led the 35,000-strong "Forward on Climate" march in Washington on Sunday. But it was the scores of uncelebrated Vermonters who helped infuse the largest-ever outpouring of its kind with a vocal mixture of hope and fear.

Three buses filled with students from the University of Vermont and from Middlebury and St. Michael's colleges made the 23-hour round trip along with three more buses carrying Vermonters of all ages. They came to urge President Obama to stop the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would pump oil extracted from Canadian tar sands 1700 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Tar sands oil is an especially carbon-rich fossil fuel that, opponents warn, could push the climate crisis to a tipping point.

But the rally alongside the Washington Monument and a subsequent march around the White House were motivated by more than the Keystone project. There were loud and urgent calls for investment in clean forms of energy, making the event feel at times like a wonky exercise in lobbying. But plenty of raw emotion was expressed on a bitterly cold afternoon.

"I don't want to bring children into a world they can't live in," said Corinne Almquist, a Middlebury vegetable farmer and Nordic ski instructor who plans to become a midwife. "Climate change is the biggest issue of all. It affects everything."

Gary Beckwith of Richmond also expressed worry about how a hotter, more tempestuous planet will affect the lives of his own three children and "all the children of the world." But climate change "isn't just about the future," said the inventor of a bus that runs on solar energy. "It's about today. It's happening now."

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Six weeks before he won reelection to a second term last November, Gov. Peter Shumlin rode a state-owned airplane to a campaign event and failed to reimburse taxpayers for the cost of the trip.

On September 27, Shumlin flew from Berlin's Knapp State Airport to Newport State Airport and then on to Lyndonville's Caledonia County Airport to take part in a series of economic development announcements, according to Shumlin chief of staff Elizabeth Miller. 

After completing his official duties, the governor was flown to Middlebury State Airport and then driven to a house party in Lincoln to raise money for his reelection campaign, Miller says. The Agency of Transportation, which operates the Cessna 182, billed the governor's office $332.76 for Shumlin's air travel that day.

After Seven Days inquired about whether Shumlin used the plane to travel to campaign events, the governor's office said it had decided to ask the campaign to reimburse taxpayers for the final leg of that day's trip, which the AOT says cost just $65.80.

"That seems to me to be the right thing to do," Miller says. "We've also asked AOT that in the future, should the plane be used by our office, to bill us by leg, so that if such expenses need to be reviewed, we can do that."

The September 27 trip was one of five plane rides taken by Shumlin since he was elected governor — all of which took place between August 30 and October 25 of last year, according to records provided by the governor's office. The total cost of the flights amounted to $1671.32.

Why the sudden uptick in plane travel last fall?

"The governor didn't know that there was a state plane for use until last summer," Shumlin spokeswoman Sue Allen said in a written statement.

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Nobody walked away happy, but everyone lived to fight another day.

That was the sentiment on all sides Thursday at the conclusion of the Vermont Senate's epic, three-day struggle over the state's role in end-of-life choices. 

A final 22-8 vote in favor of a stripped-down version of the original so-called "death with dignity" bill Thursday afternoon masked deeper divisions in a body that was essentially evenly divided on the matter. 

For the second time in as many days, Lt. Gov. Phil Scott found himself breaking a tied 15-15 vote on a crucial amendment. Again, he sided with a coalition of Republicans and Democrats who favored divorcing the state from the process of prescribing life-ending drugs to people with fewer than six months to live. Instead, the narrow majority opted simply to indemnify doctors and family members who take part in the process.

That approach was clearly unsatisfactory to those who have spent a decade fighting for a more comprehensive approach modeled on a landmark 1994 Oregon law legalizing physician-assisted suicide. But after losing another amendment fight Thursday, several such advocates voted for the underlying bill anyway, with an eye to improving it in negotiations with the Vermont House.

"I voted for the bill yesterday to make sure that it would keep going. Today I voted for it because if the bill were defeated, that would be it. It wouldn't go to the House," said Sen. Claire Ayer (D-Addison), the Health and Welfare Committee chairwoman who was among the original bill's biggest advocates. "I want the discussion to continue."

Sen. Dick Sears (D-Bennington), the Judiciary Committee chairman who has fought the legislation for years, expressed mixed emotions about Thursday's outcome.

"I'd have rather seen the bill die," he said. "I don't think it's a victory for anybody. But I think the system worked as it was designed. All sides were heard and, in the end, the bill passed. I would've preferred it hadn't passed, but it did."