Last year, a lesbian couple sued the Wildflower Inn in Lyndonville when it refused to host the couple's wedding reception due to the owners' religious beliefs. That case came to an end this summer, when the inn agreed to pay $30,000 as a part of a settlement with the couple.

Now Jim and Mary O'Reilly, the owners of the Wildflower Inn, are appearing in a TV ad opposing same-sex marriage in Maine, where voters will decide whether to overturn the state's same-sex marriage ban on Election Day. "A lesbian couple sued us for not supporting their gay wedding because of our Christian beliefs," Jim says in the ad, which was paid for by a group called Protect Marriage Maine.

The Portland Press Herald calls the ad "misleading" and "mostly false," since the innkeepers were sued for breaking a 1992 anti-discrimination law, not the 2009 same-sex marriage law. Watch it for yourself below.

Two weeks until Election Day. (Yes, this too shall pass). Here's what's happening in Vermont politics and news this week. Got a newsworthy event for next week's calendar? Email us by Friday to submit.

Monday, October 22

• Today at 11 a.m., Champlain College is making a "major announcement." Folks there wouldn't give any hint, but promised reporters it'd be worth their while to attend. Check back on Off Message to see what the big surprise was.
• Also at 11 a.m., in the Statehouse Cedar Creek Room, the Vermont Ecumenical Council and Bible Society holds a press conference calling for just immigration policies.
• At 7 p.m., Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeffrey Gettleman, the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, speaks at St. Michael's College. Details here. Read Kevin J. Kelley's interview with Gettleman here.
• At 9 p.m., it's the third and final presidential debate. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama tussle over foreign policy, from a seated position.

Rest of the week after the jump...

Does Republican gubernatorial candidate Randy Brock want to eliminate income sensitivity in the statewide property tax?

Gov. Peter Shumlin and the Democratic Party would certainly like you to think so. During Wednesday's gubernatorial debate on WPTZ, Shumlin said that Brock recently told Vermont Public Radio that he wanted to end the program that lets taxpayers who earn less than $87,000 a year pay property taxes based on their income, rather than their property wealth.

He said Brock's plan would "raise property taxes" on families earning $30,000 to $50,000 a year.

Then Shumlin looked dead into the camera and uttered the sharpest line of the night: "All I can say to Vermonters is, watch out. If you're a middle-class Vermonter, what you just heard is that Randy is willing to reduce income sensitivity on property taxes — the one thing that's making property taxes affordable ..."

At which point Brock interjected, "Now, Governor, that's not what I said at all. I said that we should review our entire tax code so that things that look like income taxes ought to be called income taxes."

"Well, now you sound like Mitt Romney," Shumlin shot back. "Specifically, how you gonna do that?"

Link to debate video — exchange starts around minute 37:40

The next morning, Dems doubled down with a press release titled "Brock Denies His Own Statements During Gubernatorial Debate." The release included a link to an October 1 VPR story that Shumlin cited in the debate as the source of his "Brock wants to kill income sensitivity" claim.

In this case, what the story reported and what Brock claims his position is are two different things.

The Burlington Free Press had quite a scoop Friday morning: As business writer Dan D'Ambrosio reports, the Freeps itself is selling off $3.3 million worth of downtown real estate — the bulk of its College Street headquarters.

The paper hopes to sell 55,570 square-feet of space in seven interconnected buildings, which range from two to four stories each, according to a listing on the website of real estate broker V/T Commercial.

The Freeps will hold on to 40,000 square-feet of space in five additional buildings it owns on the block. Those include its mailroom and printing press, which was recently refurbished to the tune of $2.4 million. The paper also hopes to lease back 10,000 square-feet of office space from a prospective buyer in order to keep its newsroom and business operations downtown.

"The Free Press is committed to supporting the vibrant Burlington community and all of the Vermont communities we serve every day," Freeps publisher Jim Fogler said in a press release. "We plan to stay in downtown Burlington and lease some of the office space. This is an exciting opportunity and an attractive one for a developer to create multi-use space in this wonderful downtown location with a built-in tenant."

Fogler declined a request for an interview.

Jeffrey Gettleman, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting, says that as a reporter for a highly influential newspaper he gets "a lot of crap" regardless of what he's writing about. But no critic can justly accuse this 41-year-old New York Times East Africa bureau chief of embodying the stereotype of the journalist as a lazy cynic.

Gettleman, who's speaking at St. Michael's College on Monday evening (7 p.m. in McCarthy recital hall), regularly risks his life reporting from lethal and largely ignored corners of Africa because "I want to try to help people who are experiencing famine or really horrific abuses."

As the Pulitzer panel noted in its award citation, Gettleman writes "vivid reports, often at personal peril." He has covered the Islamist insurgency in Somalia — generally considered the most dangerous place in the world for journalists — atrocities carried out by the maniacal Lord's Resistance Army in central Africa, and albinos murdered in Tanzania because their body parts are believed to confer magical powers. He composes these dispatches in uncommonly graceful prose that can remain lodged in readers' memories long after the day's newspaper has been tossed in the recycling bin.

A sampling of his stories is available on the Pulitzer website: http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2012-International-Reporting.

Seven Days caught up with by phone with Gettleman, who was in Los Angeles on Thursday.

SEVEN DAYS: You've been heading the Times bureau in Nairobi, Kenya, for a while now. Are you going to be rotated out of there soon? Do you want to leave?

JEFFREY GETTLEMAN: I've been in Nairobi since 2006. The Times does have an unspoken practice of having a correspondent spend four or five years at a post and then moving on. But that won't necessarily happen with Nairobi. We really like it there. My wife has a good job [with the State Department] and both our kids were born there. The older one, who's 3, is starting to learn Swahili. There's nowhere else I want to go at this stage of my career.

Better late than never: The news and politics from this week's print edition of Seven Days...

• In this week's cover story, Paul Heintz looks at the state of the Vermont Republican Party — short on cash, organization and viable candidates.
• In a related story, Andy Bromage tries to shed a little light on Lenore Broughton, the woman who's contributed more than $600,000 to conservative super PAC Vermonters First. (You've already read what happens when you try to photograph her...)
• Cass Gekas is young, broke and running for lieutenant governor. Does she have a shot at unseating Phil Scott?
• Burlington voters will cast their ballots on a $9 million bond that Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger says is necessary to secure the city's financial future. 
• In a related story, learn about the other ballot items Burlington will vote on come Nov. 6, including a waterfront revamp and a referendum on pot legalization.
• Remember playing Army as a kid? A group of Vermonters are taking that to its logical extreme in Charlotte using Airsoft guns.
• Yours truly asked two of Seven Days' graphic designers their thoughts on this year's crop of campaign lawn signs. If they're going to be ubiquitous, they may as well look good.
• In Fair Game, Paul Heintz takes a closer look at the latest campaign finance reports. Plus, the future of the attorney general's office, and auditor candidate Vince Illuzzi un-endorses Mitt Romney.

Illustration by Kym Balthazar

UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this post, we learned from the Shumlin campaign that the ad mentioned immediately below won't air until Monday. A separate ad featuring Barre Mayor Thom Lauzon and Rutland Mayor Chris Louras, which was just posted on YouTube, began running today. We've included that video at the bottom of this post.

Gov. Peter Shumlin posted his first campaign ad of the season Thursday on YouTube, and it hits on some familiar themes: job creation, health care reform and the state's recovery from Tropical Storm Irene.

If you're like us and you drink every time you hear him say some variation of how he "gets tough things done," then you'd better keep the TV off 'til Nov. 6 — or find yourself a designated driver.

The ad features the governor speaking directly to the camera, with what could pass for the West Wing soundtrack playing in the background. Looking mighty sincere, he tells us, "When you elected me governor, I said we'd get tough things done. And together, we've made it through some tough times."

After breezing through his accomplishments, Shummy flashes us his trademark smile and says, "So I'm asking for your vote. With your help, we'll keep getting tough things done, together."

Here's the ad:

This week's issue of Seven Days has a story on Lenore Broughton, the mysterious Burlington woman who is bankrolling the conservative super PAC Vermonters First to the tune of $682,500 — singlehandedly boosting the electoral fortunes of two down-ticket Republicans and a selection of legislative candidates.

While we learned quite a bit more about Broughton's background than had previously been reported, we were not able to get a photograph of her. Broughton is notoriously private and would not agree to be interviewed for the story, much less photographed.

As the story notes, there doesn't appear to be a single picture of her anywhere on the web — a rarity in this digital age. (If you know of one, by all means, email us.)

On Tuesday, we tried — and failed — to capture the elusive GOP funder on film. This picture was pretty much all we managed to get (explanation below). Here's how it went down. 

As we reported in this week's Fair Game, Republican gubernatorial candidate Randy Brock has a new television ad out today hitting Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin on his record on taxes and spending.

"It continues to show the contrast between what Gov. Shumlin will do and what I propose doing," Brock told Seven Days late Tuesday. "I propose more focus on honest spending."

Here's what the new ad looks like:

According to records filed with the Secretary of State's office, it looks like Brock's buying just $30,000 in air time, which won't get him too far. The Franklin County senator hinted to reporters last week that he may replenish his campaign account with another personal loan — he's already invested $300,000 of his own money — but Brock said Tuesday that he has yet to make such a decision.

Shumlin's campaign plans to air its first two ads of the cycle starting later this week at a cost of $125,000.

We caught up with the governor Wednesday after a press conference at Winooski's MyWebGrocer and asked him about Brock's ad. Though he hadn't yet seen it, Shumlin was more than happy to discuss his own spending record.

A Burlington bakery was transformed into a post-debate spin room Wednesday afternoon, when Sen. Patrick Leahy dropped by for a round of Romney bashing.

Vermont's senior senator called a press conference at August First Bakery and Cafe on South Champlain Street to offer his own postmortem on Tuesday night's presidential debate. Leahy was joined by bakery owners Jodi Whalen and Phil Merrick, who said their small business has thrived during the Obama presidency.

"We opened our bakery in 2009 with a staff of five and I'm happy to report that today we now employ 23 people, many of them full-time," Whalen said.

Leahy said the Obama that showed up to last night's debate was "the Barack Obama that we know." He was clear, concise direct and honest, the senator said. Romney, Leahy said, only gave "slogans, tested catch phrases and no substance."

He wasn't so enamored of the president's first debate performance. "This was not the Barack Obama I know so well. And it worried me that ... I think he was, he saw some things that were patently untrue being said by former governor Romney."

Leahy made one thing clear: He apparently received the Democratic talking points memo. He hit Romney for his "binders full of women," for opposing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, for saying he'd let Detroit go bankrupt, and for not revealing the deductions and loopholes he'd eliminate to balance his $5 trillion tax plan.