Category: Politics
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An Inconvenient Obamacare Truth
By Peter Galuszka It is highly amusing to watch Obamacare detractors mock news that the Affordable Care Act has more than reached it goal by signing up 7.1 million Americans. This inconvenient truth turns the Fox News echo chambers on its head. You also read a bit of that on this blog – there’s an…
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Why Five Ex-Attorneys General Are So Wrong
By Peter Galuszka The practice of law in Virginia is supposed to be an honorable profession. The state, which produced such orators as Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, loves its lawyers perhaps much more than individuals who actually create or do something of value. It could be why the state has so many of them.…
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An Ex-Coal Baron’s Strange Movie
By Peter Galuszka Almost four years after 29 miners employed by then Richmond-based Massey Energy were killed in a West Virginia mine explosion, its former chief executive under federal investigation for widespread safety violations has come forward with an apparently self-funded “documentary” proclaiming his innocence. Donald Blankenship released the film “Upper Big Branch, Never Again”…
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Ukraine Secret Ops: A Virginia Spy Story
By Peter Galuszka About 32 years ago, I was driving my dark green Audi Fox through Virginia’s lush horse country near Middleburg in search of a 350-acre farm owned by Harry Rositzke, author, educator and linguist. He also was one of the highest ranking spies in the Central Intelligence Agency which ran secret operations against…
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Who Is Being Intransigent Now?
by James A. Bacon Let me get this straight. Virginia Democrats in the General Assembly are saying that they will not pass a state budget until they get Medicaid expansion? “We won’t vote for a budget — and I can’t be emphatic enough — we will not vote for a budget, nor will the governor…
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The Koch’s Bizarre Meddling in Chesterfield
By Peter Galuszka The Koch brothers are back in the bucolic suburban tracts of Chesterfield County. This time, their national group, Americans for Prosperity, has launched a robocall campaign to oppose a proposed real estate tax hike of 4.6 cents to help pay for $304 million renovations to schools or perhaps hire more teachers to…
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Is Virginia Now the “Mother of Dictators?”
By Peter Galuszka One of the serious problems in this state that has been called the “Mother of Presidents” is that its electoral process is in many ways anything but a democracy. In far too many districts, especially rural and suburban ones, gerrymandering and autocratic party diktat mean that the races are utterly non-competitive and…
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Mark Warner: Let’s Out-Gas Putin
By Peter Galuszka One way to clip the wings of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aggressive land grabs, says U.S. Sen. Mark Warner who is running for reelection, is to expedite permitting of the 20 or so proposals to export liquefied natural gas, including one by Richmond-based Dominion Resources. “Most of Europe and Ukraine…
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The Terrible Link Between Income and Longevity
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Health Care, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and EntitlementsBy Peter Galuszka Call it a tale of two Virginias. One is rich with military retirees, ample benefits and gated communities. The other is remote, poor and polluted, where the life expectancy for men is merely 64 years. The former is Fairfax County at the heart of NOVA, Virginia’s economic engine, the land of federal…
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McDonnell’s U.S. 460 Debacle
By Peter Galuszka Towards the end of his term, former Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and his transportation chief, Sean Connaughton, bulldozed through a dubious project that would build a superhighway from Suffolk to Petersburg along the path of old U.S. 460 in southeastern Virginia. Few understood the urgency of such a project, which involved a…
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Modern Day Sharecroppers
By Peter Galuszka One book on my to-read list is Christopher Leonard’s “The Meat Racket” which looks at how food production in this country is being absorbed by large, vertically integrated companies that combine indirect federal government support with anti-free market policies to control much of the chicken, pork and beef we eat. The book,…
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Bacon Bits: Madison… Saslaw… Embrey Mill
About darn time.Writing in City Journal, Myron Magnet writes about the restoration of James Madison’s home, Montpelier. It may be the most unsung historical restoration of the 21st century. A team led by Kat Imhoff has peeled back the 19th-century shell added by DuPont family members to reveal Madison’s original building. Many of Madison’s original pieces,…
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No Negative Coal Poetry, Please
By Peter Galuszka Meanwhile, over in West Virginia, the long arm of King Coal reaches over to a high school poetry reading. Grace Pitt, a Hurricane High School student, wanted to read a poem by Charleston poet Crystal Good about Richmond-based Massey Energy’s April 5, 2010, disaster at its Upper Big Branch mine that killed…
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Coal Giant Alpha Pays Biggest Water Fine Ever
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Government Finance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & TechnologyBy Peter Galuszka Alpha Natural Resources of Bristol, the coal giant that took over troubled Massey Energy of Richmond in 2011, has the dubious honor paying the highest fines ever of $27.5 million for water pollution violations at its coal mining operations in five Appalachian states, including Virginia. Massey Energy, the owner of the Upper…
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The Surreal Tensions With Russia
By Peter Galuszka Back in the 1950s, when I was a little kid living in North Carolina or the Washington area, our family would take a semi-annual trip to visit my father’s relatives in western Massachusetts. My grandparents lived in a nice two-story house with an old-style brick barbecue in the back but that wasn’t…