Month: September 2012
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Questions Surround Bizarre Telephone Call on Uranium Mining Resolution
By Peter Galuszka Many questions surround the bizarre situation in which a Pittsylvania County supervisor taped and caught in an apparent lie prominent Republican State Sen. Bill Stanley who made a late night call to urge that a resolution involving uranium mining be shelved. It raises questions about the integrity of Stanley, who is one…
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Taped Senator’s Call Links McDonnell to Uranium Mining Controversy
By Peter Galuszka Jerry A. Hagerman, a supervisor in Pittsylvania County which is at the center of a battle over proposed uranium mining, says that State Sen. Bill Stanley (pictured) told him that Gov. Robert F. McDonnell asked Stanley to lobby the county Board of Supervisors to shelve a resolution regarding uranium at its Sept.…
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Decline of White Patriarchal Privilege at UVa?
by James A. Bacon The privilege enjoyed by middle-aged white males in American society is a source of great consternation to liberals and progressives everywhere. Ironically, the places where middle-aged white male privilege runs the deepest is in the very set of institutions that decries middle-aged white privilege the loudest, those centers of liberal and…
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How Team Obama-Bernanke Oppresses the Poor
If you’re truly a defender of the “1%” and indifferent to the plight of the poor in American society, don’t waste your vote on Mitt Romney. Barack Obama is your man. While the president proposes addressing society’s unequal distribution of income by raising tax rates on the wealthy, his administration stealthily enriches the rich and…
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Laboring in the Garden of the Lord
A church in Richmond’s inner city does more than minister to the homeless and hungry. Volunteers tend an urban garden to feed them fresh, healthy food.
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Did McDonnell Help Quash Pittsylvania Uranium Mining Resolution?
By Peter Galuszka For months, Pittsylvania County has been a hotbed of controversy as Virginia Uranium tries to get a decades-old moratorium on uranium mining lifted so it can mine and refine a rich, 119-million pound deposit of the radioactive material near Chatham. The latest intrigue involves a Board of Supervisors meeting in early September…
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Immigration Fuels Virginia’s Population Growth
Immigration from other states and from abroad continues to boost Virginia’s population growth, and the Demographics & Workforce Group of the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has the details in a new analysis. Between 2005 and 2009, an estimated 283,000 people moved into the state from other parts of the U.S. while 253,000 left,…
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More Proof that K-12 Education Is Broken
Read the title of a new study by State Budget Solutions, “Throwing Money at Education Isn’t Working,” and you’ve read the main conclusion: Higher spending does not guarantee better student performance. In 2010, the United States spent $809 billion on K-12 education, which represented twice as much per pupil as the nation spent in 1970.…
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The Most Dysfunctional Board in the Country?
by James A. Bacon Talk about a crazy situation… After months of delay, the Washington, D.C., City Council is scheduled October 2 to approve amendments to a bi-state compact with Virginia that would expand the board of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), giving the Old Dominion greater representation. The amendments were based upon legislation…
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Online Learning on a Roll: Picture a Steamroller that Accelerates like a Ferrari
Sophia Naide, a high school student in Northern Virginia, is studying Computer Science 101 with her mother. Is she taking a high school course? No. Is she enrolled in a community college? George Mason University? The Virginia Tech satellite campus? No, no, no. She signed up for a free, online course with Coursera, the online…
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A Suburban Boy Can Survive!
The definition of what constitutes a “sustainable” community continues to evolve as entrepreneurs introduce innovations into the marketplace. A fascinating, if potentially flawed, example is Foxmont in western Fairfax County, which is being developed by environmentalist and attorney Jay Zawatsky. In 300 acres west of Centreville, Zawatsky has plotted 14 five-acre lots for his first…
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Hi-ho, Heyo, It’s Off to Blacksburg We Go!
Yesterday I argued that the economic odds were stacked against Virginia’s smaller metropolitan areas when it came to stimulating the start-up and growth of technology businesses. Economies of scale in the knowledge economy, I suggested, favor large regions with larger, more diverse labor pools. Could I have been wrong? (What, me wrong? Never!) This morning,…
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Innovation and Business-Establishment Density
by James A. Bacon In previous posts, I have postulated that some human settlement patterns do more than others to promote creativity and innovation. Following the lead of such thinkers as urbanist Jane Adams, architect Leon Krier and economic geographer Richard Florida, I have suggested that certain urban forms — cul de sac subdivisions, massive…
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Chart of the Day: Virginia’s Clean Jobs
I’m ambivalent about economic studies on the “clean” economy for at least two reasons. First, authors of such studies equate “clean” largely with “low-carbon.” Thus, a nuclear power plant is “clean” because it has no carbon dioxide emissions, even if it stockpiles radioactive nuclear waste, while a natural gas pipeline, which delivers non-polluting natural gas…
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The Blessing and Curse of Charlottesville for High Tech
Four Charlottesville companies were named this year to the Inc. 5,000 list of fastest growing companies: SNL Financial, WillowTree Apps, Search Mojo and Silverchair Holdings. All four firms are located in downtown Charlottesville, which is emerging as a high-tech district of sorts. Proximity to a leading university and its supply of engineering and IT graduates…