Category: Media
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Don’t Mess with Down Home
By Peter Galuszka Steamy and sticky in the late-summer humidity, U.S. 460 between Petersburg and Suffolk has the milieu of the Deep South with its rusting peanut processing plants, red brick small towns and the straight-as-an-arrow mainline of the Norfolk Southern slicing through occasional roads with warning lights at the sides. These days, curious little roadside…
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Where is Sarah When We Need Her?
By Peter Galuszka It seems so underwhelming. There was the hurricane that went elsewhere. A retrograde platform. A vice presidential candidate in search of a fact checker. A lame speech by POTUS-to-be. Even Clint Eastwood couldn’t make our day. Flash back four years. John McCain stunned the nation with Sarah Palin, the tough hockey mom…
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Forgetting Slavery for Baseball in Richmond
By Peter Galuszka In Virginia, it never ceases to amaze how the white elite finds it so easy to extract the painful history of slavery from whatever it is they are trying to do. In his first year in office, for instance, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell went astonishingly brain-dead when he completely forgot to mention…
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Hottest July on Record!
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in Business and Economy, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Taxes, Water-waste water‘Nuff said. — PAG
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Keeping the Silence About Guns
By Peter Galuszka Late morning near Ashland, the shopping crowd of mostly middle-aged white men is busy poring over the wares at Green Top Sporting Goods. Although it is only late July, hunting season looms and buyers are checking guns and rifles of all types and sizes. Also on display are scores of handguns, mostly…
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The Dangerous Online Education Craze
By Peter Galuszka Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell sure seems to love lobbyists. When it came time select someone to be co-chairman of a “summit” on education in August, he chose James W. Dyke Jr., a former state secretary of education who is now a registered lobbyist for the big-time online, for-profit companies as The…
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Virginia’s Slipping “Best To Do Business” Rating
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in Business and Economy, Demographics, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka Old Dominion politicians and economic boosters love to tout the state’s typically high ranking in various surveys of the “best states to do business.” But the latest such ranking, by CNBC, shows Virginia dropping from first place to third. One reason is roads. “Infrastructure – specifically the state’s perpetually clogged highways –…
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Hotter Than. . .
By Peter Galuszka …The Fourth of July. Sorry that I have to spell it out, but there are a number of climate change deniers at this blog, including the Big Blogger himself, so it may be necessary to make things simple. In case, you haven’t noticed, this Independence Day marks a period of some extreme…
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Remake Boards of Visitors Now
By Peter Galuszka An early summer calm has settled on the “The Lawn” at the University of Virginia following 16 days of pointless controversy that damaged the school’s reputation and raised serious questions about how Mr. Jefferson’s school should be run. The most important issues wafting up from the now-quiet battleground are not really whether…
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Reinstate Sullivan Now
By Peter Galuszka The best way the University of Virginia can get out of its surrealistic nightmare is to ask Rector Helen Dragas to resign and reinstate President Teresa Sullivan. It is possible to do so, provided Dragas is gone and the board votes again on Sullivan’s future by June 27. From the start, the…
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A Tale of Two Speeches
By Peter Galuszka Call it a Tale of Two Speeches. One was a clear and resounding defense of one of America’s most prized possessions: its university system. The other was Corporate-Speak – a kind of muddle of platitudes and lofty thoughts with little point that is so common among chief executive officers and company presidents…
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Maybe It’s Not “The Vision Thing” At All
By Peter Galuszka The sad demise of Teresa Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia poses many questions regarding what happened to her and how and why the Board of Visitors did what it did. Given the board’s lack of transparency and non-communicative nature at this prestigious, public university, much opinion and supposition have…
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Pulling the Trigger on Aeschylus
By Peter Galuszka The news from Charlottesville just gets worse. Freshly-fired President Teresa Sullivan, it turns out, had been getting pressure from the Board of Visitors to eliminate parts of the university that were “underperforming,” possibly the Classics Department. Meanwhile, the university administration is asking Dominion (that’s right, the power company) to parachute in two…
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Spinning Virginia Coal
By Peter Galuszka There’s a predictable drumbeat in the Old Dominion that is trying to blame Big Coal’s economic weakness on federal regulators. A weekend ago, a group called the Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security, a “grass roots” group with ties to the coal industry, staged a rally in Abingdon attended by about…