Sen. Robert Hurt is courting the fringe right, Olympia Meola writes in today’s Times-Dispatch:
Some conservatives object to Hurt’s voting record—principally his support of a $1.4 billion tax increase pushed by former Gov. Mark R. Warner in 2004.
After he cast that vote, Hurt was among 19 Republican delegates and 15 [...]
22″ inches of snow so far, and it’s still falling, with another couple of inches due. We still have electricity, which is great, but all precautions have been taken for that eventuality.
[...]Bob Lewis has a story today about the state’s slide into a fiscal morass of transportation funding that provides a peek at the stories to come in the years ahead. This is the sort of article that we’ll all look back at in five to ten years and wonder [...]
Apropos of nothing, here’s a money-saving tip: Get rid of your voicemail.
A few years ago I cancelled our call waiting and voicemail, and disabled call waiting on my mobile. Call waiting is really rude. When you answer call waiting, what you’re saying is this: I have no idea who is [...]
The Fifth District Republican Committee has chosen a primary as the method of selecting their nominee against Rep. Tom Perriello, Janelle Rucker writes in the Roanoke Times. It was a 19-13 vote. That’s a significant blow for the backers of basically all of the candidates but Sen. Robert Hurt [...]
Last week I called out Bloomberg’s Alice Schroeder for a bullshit story about Goldman Sachs executives being “armed to the teeth.” Today the Wall Street Journal joins in. They asked the NYPD who confirmed that it’s just not true. A grand total of four Goldman Sachs employees have [...]
The field of Republican candidates vying to run against Rep. Tom Perrillo is so strong that…a seventh candidate has kicked off his campaign. Jim McKelvey, a Smith Mountain Lake developer, completes our septumvirate of dwarves. McKelvey says both that he’s not satisfied with any of the other candidates and [...]
The Roanoke Times editorialized today in favor of the Know Campaign’s guilt-based GOTV campaign, and I couldn’t agree more. That was the conservative group who was looking to send out mailers telling people which of their neighbors have voted in recent elections. The SBE was upset, as were many [...]
I love this story about collectors of frequent flier miles gaming the system. The US Mint was selling dollar coins (at face value, of course) with free shipping. So these mile collectors realized that they could charge these on their cards, get them shipped, and use the money to [...]
Bloomberg claims that Goldman Sachs executives are buying firearms to prepare for a peasant uprising. Major news outlets across the globe are repeating the story uncritically. I call bullshit.
[...]Two gripes that I can never make during election season, because they’ll look partisan:
1. The fact that a candidate hasn’t disavowed someone or something doesn’t mean that he supports it. Yes, some issues are so big or important, or so clearly intertwined with a candidate, that a refusal to disavow [...]
I’ve been enjoying the music of Charlie Poole for the past six months or so, and I was surprised to discover Loudon Wainwright III’s new album, High, Wide and Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project, just before I saw him perform some of the songs at The Paramount last month. If [...]
Del. Phil Hamilton lost his reelection bid earlier this month, I was relieved to see–voters saw fit to hand him his hat for lining his own pockets with taxpayer dollars (or so it appears). Democrat Robin Abbott won the Peninsula district with 54% of the vote. Like every other [...]
Teabagger Nigel Coleman on why he’s cancelled his plans to burn Rep. Tom Perriello in effigy:
I feel like I obviously handled this poorly, as far as the press goes. We really should have thought this through more … and seen how this was going to affect not only us, [...]
Last night I watched With These Hands, a documentary about the closure of the Hooker furniture plant in Martinsville. Hooker sounds like it was a heck of a company. I say “was”—it’s still in business, but they moved all of their manufacturing to China, and it’s really the same [...]
Steve Shannon ran this ad in the last month of his campaign:
If those IP addresses are an indicator of Steve Shannon’s technical prowess, I don’t think he was going to catch those child pornographers after all. Here’s a screenshot, if you missed it:
This is a bit [...]
As I watch the first of the results of the election come in, I’m struck by the wide variety of options of websites offering data. Until this election, we’ve been left obsessively reloading the SBE’s website, hopping around from precinct to precinct, district to district, trying to remember what the [...]
For all of y’all blogging about the election on Tuesday on the sorts of blogs read by people who don’t read blogs like this one (that is, people who aren’t huge politics geeks), provide them with this where-to-vote widget, or just link to the version on Google’s site. [...]
In the name of Bradley Rees, we pray.
Dear God, we thank you for your bounty of stupid. In what promises to be a lousy month for Virginia Democrats, you have been fit to deliver to us Bradley Rees. In your wisdom, you have arranged for Rep. Tom Perriello to [...]
Can we all agree that the notion of either gubernatorial candidate being a “jobs governor” (as McDonnell has branded himself) is fundamentally bullshit? A governor has a very limited capacity to create jobs. I will buy that it’s possible that a governor, over the course of four years, can woo [...]
There’s a little nugget in The Daily Progress’ unsurprising endorsement of Ken Cuccinelli for attorney general that I just want to post here, so that we can all look back on it in the years ahead, assuming that Cuccinelli wins next week:
Mr. Cuccinelli seems to have a better grasp [...]
I’ve had considerably less time to write in the past couple of months, because we’ve finally started building our house. At right is a photo of the groundbreaking, yesterday morning. Leading up to that, though, was months of design work, driveway construction, loan negotiation, builder selection, [...]
Del. Rob Bell, quoted in today’s Daily Progress:
[W]e can all remember how negative mailings filled with innuendo and personal attacks helped defeat Virgil Goode in 2008.
Does anybody have the faintest idea of what he’s talking about? I’m not aware of a single such mailing going out. Rep. Tom Perriello ran [...]
The second part of Don Teschek’s two-part series on my great uncle Eddie Cassidy, for the The Andover (NH) Beacon. The prior installment was about his service in WWII, while this is about how he and his best friend built one another’s vacation homes when they got out [...]
Fun fact: medical marijuana is now legal in Virginia. With President Obama directing the feds to adhere to state laws in enforcement of anti-marijuana laws, that presumably leaves doctors free to prescribe it under §18.2-251.1, which the General Assembly passed in 1979.
[...]My great-uncle Eddie Cassidy—my maternal grandmother’s brother—died Sunday night at the age of 93. The Andover (NH) Beacon recently featured a profile of his service in WWII, the first of a two-part series. (The second is still to come.) The author is the grandson of Uncle Eddie’s lifelong buddy, [...]
Bob McDonnell just doesn’t think that people have anything to do with global climate change, and the AP’s Bob Lewis asked him some hard questions about it. Climate scientists are unanimous: the temperature is going up, and human are doing it. But McDonnell says he merely “thinks” that global [...]
Another week, another random Republican running against Perriello. The 5CD Republican Party is a mess. The candidate, Ron Ferrin, says he looked at the comically crowded field and thought “I felt I could do better.” He has a wonderfully awful website (check out that domain name) that was [...]
Shorter Bob McDonnell: I believe nothing that I said I believed. Except for that business about being able to fire queers. That I’m totally down with. But it has nothing to do with when I said that in my thesis, for reasons I can’t explain. Some of my best [...]
Please take a minute to complete this survey about VPAP. They use this annual survey to help figure out what they’re doing right, what they could be doing better, and what we’d all like them to be doing that they’re not.
[...]I simply don’t have the time to do this justice right now, but I don’t want to fail to acknowledge the cease-and-desist order that Norfolk sent to Vivian Page. Signed by Deputy City Attorney Martha P. McGann, it’s a bit stunning in its legal overreach. A kind interpretation would [...]
Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s new ad claims that Democrat Creigh Deeds’ policies would bring $7,800 in higher taxes over four years for Virginia households. The ad would be devastating, if it were true.
Ouch. It’s all downhill from there.
[...]
We’ve got some giant puffball mushrooms growing here.
Here’s a photo of a cluster of them with a penny set on top for scale.
This ad popped up on Gmail the other day.
It’s an opposition ad, placed by McDonnell. But with ad text like that, maybe it should be reported as an in-kind contribution to the Deeds campaign.
[...]Back in June I was impressed that Bob McDonnell had refused to pledge not to raise taxes. A grownup Republican running for governor! What a relief. But…no. He caved when I wasn’t looking:
Deeds’s Republican opponent, former attorney general Robert F. McDonnell, repeated his pledge not to raise taxes [...]
Sen. Robert Hurt is joining the fray for the Republican nomination in the 5th CD. He’s the sixth candidate to enter the race to challenge Rep. Tom Perriello, and enters as the clear leader. Hurt only advanced to the senate last election, and before that served in the house [...]
[...]
