Gov. Peter Shumlin learned a valuable lesson Tuesday morning during a quick trip to the nation's capital: Don't mess with Texas.

Speaking to beltway reporters at a forum organized by the Third Way, a centrist think tank, the Democratic Governors Association chairman summed up his party's prospects of regaining gubernatorial seats this November.

Reported Real Clear Politics:

Shumlin listed Maine, Pennsylvania, and Florida as states where the DGA has “very high hopes” of defeating Republicans. He added that Democrats have “good shots” in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Shumlin also offered Georgia, South Carolina, Kansas, and Arizona as red states that the DGA is “optimistic” about Democrats’ chances in. 

Whom did Shumlin fail to mention?

You guessed it: Texas Democrat Wendy Davis, who rose to prominence last June after an 11-hour filibuster against new abortion regulations. She's now running for governor.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) may be the one flirting with a run for president, but Vermont's senior senator is the one raking in the campaign cash. 

During the first three months of 2014, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) raised more than $223,000 between his two campaign accounts, according to documents filed this week with the Federal Election Commission. In that same period, Sanders' campaign accounts brought in $114,00, while Congressman Peter Welch's (D-Vt.) took in nearly $105,000.

Of the three, Sanders is still sitting on the biggest pile of cash. The second-term senator has more than $4 million in his reelection campaign account and another $196,000 in his leadership political action committee, called Progressive Voters of America. If he sits out the 2016 presidential race, Sanders won't face another election until 2018.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was in New Hampshire on Saturday, denouncing U.S. economic inequality in a speech at St. Anselm College in Manchester. He had to feel pleased with the first comment from the audience. “If you could give this address in every home in America,” a middle-aged man declared, “I think you'd be elected president.”

Indeed, that's why Sanders was there — New Hampshire hosts the nation's first presidential primary, and Vermont's junior senator acknowledges that he's considering a race for the White House in 2016.

The 200-plus, mostly older listeners who filled the auditorium at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm were predisposed to Sanders' message, despite its unrelievedly bleak tone. They voiced their enthusiasm by giving him a standing ovation before he spoke.

Sanders, 72, did not rely on notes as he segued smoothly from topic to topic, at times jabbing his index finger, waving his arms and shouting in cadenced tempos. He let loose lines such as: “a $7.25 minimum wage is obscene” and “it's morally grotesque to talk about cutting Social Security” and “health care in America is to a very significant degree about making money for private health-care companies.”

The audience was on its feet again at the conclusion of the socialist politician's 70-minute talk. His themes would have been familiar to many Vermonters, but clearly struck some Granite State residents as novel in their radicalism.

Caroline French, a Dover, N.H., resident, expressed delight with Sanders' remarks. “What he's saying isn't being addressed by any other candidate,” French observed following the speech. “He has a solid platform to run on. Inequality is getting worse and worse and could be the demise of this country.”

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders could be edging closer to a 2016 presidential run. In an interview with the Nation published today, Vermont's junior senator said "I am prepared to run for president of the United States."

"What I do wake up every morning feeling is that this country faces more serious problems than at any time since the Great Depression, and there is a horrendous lack of serious political discourse or ideas out there that can address these crises, and that somebody has got to represent the working-class and the middle-class of this country in standing up to the big-money interests who have so much power over the economic and political life of this country," Sanders told the Nation. "So I am prepared to run for president of the United States. I don’t believe that I am the only person out there who can fight this fight, but I am certainly prepared to look seriously at that race."

While stopping short of declaring that he will run, Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, openly discussed for the first time what a campaign might look like, acknowledging it would be "unconventional" and rooted (no surprise) in the fight against inequality.

He spoke of the disparate groups he would have to bring together and said he would continue to travel around the country meeting with people in the near future. Most surprisingly, he said he is unsure whether he would run as a Democrat or independent, but discussed that dilemma in some detail.

"I think we’ve got a message that can resonate, that people want to hear, that people need to hear. Time is very important. But I don’t think it makes sense — or that it is necessary — to start a campaign this early," Sanders said.

The author of the piece, John Nichols, is a long-time Sanders chronicler.

As Seven Days noted in a piece last October speculating about Sanders' presidential ambitions  the senator has developed a national, small-dollar fundraising network that brought in 146,460 contributions from roughly half as many people during his last six-year election cycle.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to headline a Democratic Governors Association fundraiser in the nation's capital Thursday night. And introducing him will be none other than Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, according to DGA spokesman Danny Kanner.

Shumlin and many of the nation's governors will be in Washington, D.C., for the long weekend to attend the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association, a bipartisan group. While they're in town, both the DGA and its counterpart, the Republican Governors Association, will hold their own meetings and fundraisers.

Obama has committed to appear at more than 18 fundraisers to support Democratic groups in the run-up to this fall's elections, according to the Associated Press. In addition to Thursday's reception and dinner at Washington's St. Regis Hotel, he plans to appear at fundraisers for the Democratic National Committee and various entities working to elect Democrats to the House and Senate.

An audience of about 200 college students listened raptly at United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday as Jody Williams recounted her life journey from small-town Vermont to international activism and acclaim.

Williams, 63, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her leadership of a grassroots campaign that led to a global treaty banning production and use of landmines.

It was schoolyard bullying in Putney that first provoked her to confront the harmful exercise of power, Williams recalled. She said she stood up to “the stud of fourth grade who was being mean to a little, nonathletic kid.” And that boldness arose, Williams explained, from having earlier seen her parents defend her older brother, Steve, whom “kids nearby loved to torture” because he was deaf.

Find these news and politics stories in this week's Seven Days...

• In Burlington, one resident has kept up her fight against a neighbor's backyard guitar-building shop for a year and a half. The case could reach the Vermont Supreme Court.
• The Department of Homeland Security has dropped plans to run an "internal checkpoint" 100 miles from the Vermont/Quebec border — though it's too late for one man who faces deportation. 
• University of Vermont researchers are working on technology to allow maple farmers to harvest sap from young saplings rather than the less-plentiful mature trees.
• As part of the love and marriage issue, here's a look back at the path to marriage equality for same-sex couples.
• In Fair Game: How one soldier's allegations of sexual assault changed the Vermont National Guard. Plus, find out who's giving big bucks to Gov. Peter Shumlin's Democratic Governors Association, and why the Committee on Committees isn't a committee — at least when it comes to letting the public and press inside. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) ramped up his political fundraising last year as he hinted at a possible 2016 run for president, according to new documents filed late last week.

In the second half of 2013, Sanders raised nearly $327,000 for Progressive Voters of America, a "leadership political action committee" he recently revived. The second-term senator, who does not face reelection until 2018, raised an additional $15,000 for his traditional campaign account in the final three months of the year.

Year-end fundraising and spending reports filed Friday with the Federal Election Committee show that all three members of Vermont's congressional delegation — Sanders, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vt.) — have come to rely upon so-called leadership PACs to conduct political business. In addition to their traditional campaign accounts, members of Congress can establish such entities to raise money and spend it for political purposes, though not explicitly on their own reelection campaigns.

Before last year, Leahy led the way in steering support to a leadership PAC; his is called Green Mountain PAC. But in March, Welch filed paperwork to establish his own, called Maple PAC. And in July, Sanders announced to his email list that he would focus on building up Progressive Voters of America, a leadership PAC he founded in 2004, but which never previously raised more than $51,000 per quarter. Sanders said at the time he hoped to use the group to "create a strong grass-roots movement in all 50 states, and work hard to elect progressive candidates at the local, state and national level."

State of the union? Booooooring. 

If you're lookin' for a good (political) time tonight, we recommend you skip that snooze-fest of a speech and watch this clip of our own Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) appearing alongside — gasp! — Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) Monday night on CNN's  "Situation Room."

Here it is (with apologies for being slow on the uptake):

After you're done watching, repeat after me: "DO YOU SUPPORT A CHAINED CPI?"

Calm down.

DO YOU SUPPORT A CHAINED CPI?!"

Calm down.

Whelp, it was only a matter of time.

Though New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie banned the press from covering his appearance Wednesday night at the Vermont Republican Party's "Welcome Winter" gala, audio of his speech, inevitably, has emerged.

Come on, dude, it's 2013.

The Vermont Press Bureau managed to sneak a tape recorder in, as reporter Peter Hirschfeld writes about here. And Seven Days has also gotten its dirty little mitts on a tape of Christie's remarks — as well as those of Lt. Gov. Phil Scott. 

Surely you're tired of us writing about this by now, so we'll just leave you to the tapes. Here's Scott warming the crowd up:

And here's Christie delivering his keynote address: