Category: Politics
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Redistricting: Partisan Fighting Continues
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The diabolical person who came up with the framework for the state constitutional amendment establishing a redistricting commission was not content with designing it so that it would fail due to partisan wrangling. He also injected partisan politics into the phase in which the state Supreme Court must come up with the…
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What Is Going on in Portsmouth?
by Kerry Dougherty Are there cities that are more dysfunctional than Portsmouth, Virginia? Yes, of course there are. There’s always San Francisco where you can get an app for your phone called “SnapCrap” to allow you to report piles of human feces to city sanitation workers. There’s Chicago. The Windy City was recently designated the…
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Infrastructure Vote? Oh No, That’s Their Bill
by Dick Hall-Sizemore There has long been a consensus that America needs to pay more attention to its infrastructure. Last week, the House of Representatives passed President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure package and sent it to the President for his signature. Of the total amount, $550 billion was new money; the remainder was funding normally…
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Indians and McAuliffe’s Last Stand
by James A. Bacon A certain KP Nayar offers an interesting perspective on Virginia’s gubernatorial election from his vantage point as the Washington columnist for Moneycontrol.com, an English-language publication serving the business market in India. “Indian Americans constitute only one percent of the U.S. electorate, but Virginia is a state where they have influenced state…
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Earning the Right to Govern
by Shaun Kenney Now that a solid week has passed between Virginia and the November elections, the sobering up can begin in earnest. With a Republican sweep that gave Youngkin 50.59% of the vote, Sears 50.72%, and Miyares 50.36%, it is clear that rhetoric caged in the spirit of a Roman triumph is a touch…
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The Rise of the Mises Caucus
by Bruce Majors Virginia had elections this week that garnered no media coverage: internal elections for offices in the Libertarian Party of Northern Virginia. Voters and the media pay little attention to Libertarian and other smaller party candidates except when they poll well enough to look like spoilers. That happened in the 2013 gubernatorial election when…
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Election Integrity? Not a Problem Now. We Won.
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Now that the election is over, it is a good time to look at the integrity of the results. Over the last two years, Democratic majorities in the General Assembly eased voter ID requirements, established the longest early election period in the country, and instituted “no excuse” absentee voting. Republicans were alarmed.…
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Spanberger Speaks Truth to Power
by James A. Bacon As Democrats come to terms with their butt-whooping in Virginia and their near-death experience in New Jersey, they’ve been asking themselves what went wrong. Predictably, pundits from the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato to MSNBC’s Joy Reid have interpreted the shellacking as a racist White backlash. This delusional bubble-think is a…
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College Faculty Don’t “Think Like America”
by James A. Bacon It has become a widespread conviction on Virginia’s colleges and universities that faculty and staff should “look like Virginia” in their demographic make-up. There is no comparable obsession with hiring faculty and staff that “think like Virginia.” Employees of James Madison University — faculty, staff, and administrators — donated more than…
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What Did Democrats Learn from Tuesday’s Spanking?
by Kerry Dougherty And the news just keeps getting better. Seems Democrats learned next to nothing from Tuesday’s spanking in Virginia. Turn on any cable news network — except Fox — and pundits on the left are declaring Glenn Youngkin’s victory a win for racism. They can’t stop yapping about white supremacy, culture wars and…
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Personnel is Policy On Future Energy Reform
by Steve Haner Does Tuesday’s election result mean Virginia is going to move back towards a rational energy policy? Watch two key personnel decisions, both entirely matters for the next legislature to decide. State Corporation Commissioner Angela Navarro was elected by the 2021 General Assembly to fill the unexpired term of Mark Christie, who moved…
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If Money Were Votes
The Virginia Public Access Project has published an interactive map, broken down by precinct that shows the dollar volumes and number of contributors to the gubernatorial campaigns of Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin. If the number of contributors were votes, Youngkin would win the race handily 12,098 to 9,346. But McAuliffe remains the big favorite…
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FEC Asked to Investigate McAuliffe’s Foreign Donations
by Hans Bader The Washington Free Beacon reports that the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, was hit with a campaign finance complaint on Friday over a $350,000 donation he received from a foreign-owned company linked to overseas money laundering probe. The National Legal and Policy Center requested that the FEC “promptly investigate”…
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Youngkin Takes the Lead
by James C. Sherlock The Real Clear Politics poll average has Glenn Youngkin in the lead for the first time. Nice job, Glenn. Terry, thank you for being perhaps the worst retail politician Virginia has seen since Ken Cuccinelli.
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Youngkin for Education Dictator?
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Republicans, the advocates for smaller governor and for not having Richmond dictate to localities, seem to be running a would-be dictator for governor. In Halifax County recently, Glenn Youngkin announced, “We will not teach Critical Race Theory in our schools” and, according to the South Boston News and Record, “on day one…