WRAP UP OF RESPONSES TO COMMENTS ON FOUR INFRASTRUCTURE POSTS Keeping up with serious comments on the INFRASTRUCTURE posts has been difficult given other commitments. Included below are notes on the remaining comments that merit consideration and response from the four prior INFRASTRUCTURE posts. Most of the comments, including those that had to be deleted,…

It’s both amusing and disturbing how the right-wing keeps moving from group to group seeking out bogey-men to blame for what they claim are the country’s ills. Not long ago, it was a foreign-born Barack Obama who mostly likely was a secret Muslim. Then it was Spanish-speaking, dark-skinned Latino immigrants who may or not be…

Dealing as they do with weighty matters, the Virginia House of Delegates on Tuesday conferred the honor of “official saltwater fish” to the striped bass, otherwise known to Southerners as the “rockfish.” In many ways, this is cause for celebration. Rockfish are extremely tasty and tend to be caught in the cold months, when sustenance…

Eric “Young Gun” Cantor, the Republican House Majority Leader from Henrico County, seemed older and out-gunned Wednesday when new Republican members in the GOP-controlled House voted 233-198 to kill an alternative engine for the new F-35 strike fighter that even the Pentagon didn’t want. More than half of the new Congressmen voted against the engine…

Besides the funny papers, one of my favorite Sunday morning treats is skimming the Commentary section of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It is filled with plenty of amusing material, such as the usual local boosterism nonsense from the publisher, why we should ignore anything coming from the Congressional Budget Office and why we should beware Democrat…

My Boomergeddon project is winding down, so it’s on to the next one. This time, I’m entering the no-spin zone…. I’m not peddling my own opinions and nostrums, I’m peddling those of the brightest minds in the public policy arena: think tank scholars. I strip out all the op-eds and blog posts and digest the…

The 150th anniversary of the Civil War is approaching and it shows just how much things have changed and, in many ways, how they remain the same. Virginia was the epicenter of so much of the grief the war caused plus the triumph of African-American slaves who, in a new historical interpretation of the war,…

The New York Times has published an awesome tool for visualizing human settlement patterns. I could play with it all day long! The tool, “Mapping America: Every City, Every Block,” breaks down the nation into Census tracts and displays the population with a dot for every 1,000 people in the map scale seen to the…

So far the comments following INFRASTRUCTURE MEDIA raise few serious questions. EMR addressed one and will try to get to a second one but there is one inquiry that deserves special attention. It is buried so deep in musings, cuteness, irrelevant reminiscences, misconceptions, Idea Spam and Intentional Information Sabotage that few may have gotten to…

!! AARRRGH !! Oh, the frustration! As Peter Galuszka has noted, EMR has not posted much at BRB of late. This is NOT just due to travel, holidays, snow or even the process of aging. At SYNERGY there are a number of new projects and Perspectives well on the way to publication BUT The PLAN…

It’s no surprise that George Allen wants his Senate seat back. The question for him is whether he understands how much the political landscape has changed in Virginia since his disastrous reelection run in 2006. Republican insiders say that Allen is a much-chastened, humbler politician — a far cry from the smug, cowboy-boot-wearing hombre whose…

First Virginia fell to second place in the Forbes “Best States for Business” ranking. I was so depressed that I couldn’t blog about it. Now, we’ve fallen from 6th to 8th place in the Milken Institute’s 2010 State Technology and Science Index. I guess I can’t ignore our declining status any longer. Here is the…

Now that Prince Eric has been elevated to his new position of House Majority Leader, Cantor’s made good on his pledge to lead a repeal vote against Obamacare in the House, now controlled by Republicans. So, it should come as no tremendous surprise that Cantor is being especially well-funded by the managed care industry, which…

Not only is the cost of a college education may be escalating without let-up, it’s pretty clear that students are not getting any more for their money. A new book, co-written by University of Virginia sociology professor Josipa Roksa, paints an alarming picture of what’s going on in higher education today. In research for the…

I hope someone in the McDonnell administration reads the Wall Street Journal. I’m getting queasier and queasier about the idea of Virginia taking on more debt. I reproduce this blog post from the Boomergeddon blog. Financial markets have tightened their grip on sovereign debt — especially U.S. municipal debt — in the past two months.…