Year: 2012
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The Intercity Bus Revolution
Fed train follies fail while freedom actually works by James A. Bacon While President Obama dreams about spending hundreds of billions of public dollars building a high-speed, intercity rail network, an entrepreneurial revolution in the old-timey bus industry is scoring dramatic gains in market share for intercity travel – without government subsidies. After decades of…
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A Rare Instance of Sanity on the Rachel Maddow Show
by James A. Bacon Last night, for the first time in my life, I managed to watch the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC without my blood pressure shooting through the roof. Even more amazing, I maintained my cool while Maddow interviewed Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, the bilious co-author, among other dubious accomplishments, of the Fannie…
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Grrrrrr….
My posting might be light the next couple of days. My PC died yesterday and I had to buy a new one. Now I’m focused on the laborious process of downloading all my old software and files. Fortunately, I backed up my files on Carbonite.com, a cloud service. But the darn thing tells me it…
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Nothing Exciting in the McDonnell Jobs Bill
by James A. Bacon Gov. Bob McDonnell has released his legislative agenda for economic development, calling for a $36.8 million mix of initiatives over two years, including $10 million for life sciences, $4 million for Wallops Island, $4 million for advanced manufacturing and $4 million for non-course credits at community colleges, plus a grab bag…
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Full Funding for Virginia’s HBUs
by James A. Bacon A Maryland school segregation case in U.S. federal court may bear watching here in Virginia. A lawsuit filed by students and alumni of Maryland’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) accuses the state of failing to fulfill state promises to desegregate the schools. The plaintiffs are seeking more than $2 billion…
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More Hypocrisy from Philip Morris USA
By Peter Galuszka Tobacco has always been a powerful industry in Virginia since the days of the Jamestown colony. It is no less influential today as Henrico County-based Philip Morris USA and its parent firm, Altria, constantly play shell games about the hazards of their products. Just before Christmas, and right in time for the 2012 election year,…
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Clash of Principles in Wind Farm Debate
by James A. Bacon The Floyd County board of supervisors is considering a ban on structures taller than 40 feet on mountain ridges, an action that would kill any chance of building a wind farm in the Southwest Virginia county. The proposal is bound to be controversial in the sparsely populated jurisdiction — and it…
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Public Private Partnership Laws Need a New Look
The Virginian-Pilot has published a polished version of a blog post I wrote last month. In case you missed the original, here it is. — JAB While Virginia’s Public Private Partnership Act may be experiencing growing pains as projects from the Midtown and Downtown tunnels to HOT lanes on Interstate 95 see the light of…
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Good Bye and Good Riddance to 2011
by James A. Bacon Good riddance to 2011, 365 days of misery that brought us the Gulf Oil Spill, Quantitative Easing 2 and the bulge in Anthony Weiner’s briefs. Most distressing of all, the year marked another failure by the country’s political leadership to address the nation’s fiscal free fall and avert the hard, hard…
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Virginia: Mother of Bad Ideas
By Peter Galuszka The Mother of Presidents is back at it again. Through some legal quirk — typical for the Old Dominion — only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul will be on the ballot for the March 6 Republican primary. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry did not meet the state’s onerous requirement for 10,000 petition signatures…