Year: 2012
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Bad Days for Mickey D.
By Peter Galuszka There must be considerable gnashing of teeth in the Governor’s Mansion. Robert F. McDonnell had been working so hard to distance himself from his social conservative past, notably that nettlesome and Neanderthal anti-gay and anti-female graduate thesis. He had worked hard to remake himself as a reasonable moderate, thus setting himself up…
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Panama Canal a Long-Term, not Short-Term, Game Changer
by James A. Bacon The Virginian-Pilot has published a piece on the “cargo bonanza” potentially awaiting the port of Virginia when the Panama Canal opens its bigger locks, enabling monster container ships to cut their travel times between Asia and the East Coast of the United States. Much of the article recounts background information that…
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National Laughingstock, Again
By Peter Galuszka Saturday Night Live’s recent mocking of the Virginia General Assembly’s proposed legislation to force women considering abortion to have trans-vaginal ultrasound exams and establishing conception as the moment of life’s beginning makes the Old Dominion the butt of national jokes once again. It seems that no matter how Virginians try to build…
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Questions about VDOT’s On-Budget/On-Time Performance
The Virginia Department of Transportation is doing its best job of delivering projects on budget and on time since FY 2010. According to VDOT’s most recent quarterly report, the department had 340 maintenance and construction projects due for completion during the October-December quarter. Of those, 77.1% were completed both on time and on budget —…
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Creating a Real Medical Marketplace in Virginia
Graphic credit: American Enterprise Institute by James A. Bacon Excellent story in the Times-Dispatch today. Too bad it’s buried on the business page. It should have been squeezed onto the front page, or at least in the A section, to share space with the wall-to-wall coverage of abortion, gun bills and the rest of the Culture War effluvia that…
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Our Upstanding Founding Fathers
By Peter Galuszka Since it is President’s Day and Virginia is the “Mother of Presidents,” I thought it might be interesting to put some things in perspective. One of the more curious blog postings of late on the site was Jim Bacon’s gushy advocacy of a move to private, religious-oriented schools because of what he…
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Uncertainties and Risks in the Charlottesville Bypass Bid
by James A. Bacon Uh, oh, it looks like the bidding process for the Charlottesville Bypass is running into complications. Prospective bidders for the construction phase of the controversial project, estimated to cost $244 million, have lots of questions… and the Virginia Department of Transportation doesn’t have all the answers. A document obtained by Charlottesville…
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How to Leverage an Indexed Gas Tax
The state Senate has passed a budget bill, which must reconciled with the House of Delegaes budget bill, that seemingly does something right: It rejects Governor Bob McDonnell’s idea of diverting up to one-quarter of a percentage point from the state’s 4.5% sales tax from the General Fund to transportation. Transportation should be funded on…
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Why Tobacco Exports Are Wrong
By Peter Galuszka Virginia’s business lobby is blasting President Barack Obama for balking at pushing U.S. grown tobacco leaf in upcoming trade talks involving Pacific Rim nations. Barry E. DuVal, president and CEO of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, complains that Obama is “targeting tobacco” by trying to leave it out of upcoming talks involving…
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Does HB33 Protect Open Shop Contractors?
by James A. Bacon Mea culpa. I missed a critical point in my previous analysis of the political chess match between the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) and the McDonnell administration. I said naively that Gov. Bob McDonnell may have no choice under new legislation but to yank $150 million in state funds allocated to…
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Teaching Like Socrates
Low tuition, classical education – what’s not to like? By James A. Bacon One day about two years ago Ann McLean, a devout Christian and mother of four, felt that she was “spoken to” by God and given a mission in life – to start a new school. She never looked back. If all goes…
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Port of Virginia’s Growth Opportunity
by James A. Bacon The Port of Virginia was the third largest East Coast port ranked by container traffic in 2010, with 11% market share. It trailed Savannah and New York/New Jersey, and Charleston was nipping on its heals. But the market for U.S. containerized cargo is forecast to double over the next decade, and…
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A Pathetic Half-Time
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By Peter Galuszka It’s so-called halftime at the Virginia General Assembly, and with conservative Republicans holding sway and many serious problems facing the Commonwealth, here’s what we’ve come up with so far: Women exercising their constitutional right to have an abortion now will be forced to undergo and pay for an ultrasound before the procedure.…
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Goodbye Grundy! Hello, Wal-Mart
By Peter Galuszka Hours west of Richmond by car lies the old coal town of Grundy, lying at a confluence of the flood-prone Levisa Fork River below steep cliffs of sedimentary rock of sandstone and shale. Grundy has been a touchstone for my various trips to the Virginia coalfields over the years. I hadn’t been…
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MWAA Plays Chicken with McDonnell over PLAs
by James A. Bacon The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) board pressed ahead yesterday in its bid to preserve the $2.8 billion Phase 2 of the Rail-to-Dulles project as a union job. First, under pressure from Republican legislators, the board retracted a previous decision mandating that Phase 2 be subject to a Project Labor Agreement (PLA). Instead of requiring the…