A few weeks back, I posted a column on the fervor over “High Speed” Rail in Richmond and attempts to improve rail service between here and Washington. My opinion is that any improvement is a good idea, but I raised questions about what is “high speed” rail, really, and how much it might cost. Daniel…

WaPo IS AGAIN WASTEING OPPORTUNITY AND EFFORT As some of you may have noted the ‘A’ section, page 14 on Thursday, 30 July had an impressive looking graphic on house foreclosures titled “Geography of Distress.” Lets start with the big problem: The graphic is based on Zip Codes. EMR has pointed out the problems with…

Typically, as a gubernatorial or senate race kicks off in the Old Dominion, the launching pad is the Virginia Bar Association which usually holds the initial debate between the campaign candidates at such tony mountain reports as The Homestead or The Greenbrier. Although the debates have been open to the public, they have always had…

Funny what a difference a half a century makes. Here it is, 50 years after Virginia’s racist “Massive Resistance” policy against court-ordered integration came to an end. Commemorating it will be a conference tomorrow at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. A time of reckoning and reconciliation is in the air. What is truly…

You have to love how Richmond works. There’s a certain elite that tries to make all the decisions and it includes whoever is the mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, a few heads of whatever banks and investment houses are left over, sometimes the Armstrongs and Gottwallds and almost certainly Jim Ukrop. The ruling party Pravda,…

Let us talk of Fundamental Transformation of governace structure. (Note: Peter Galuszka’s post on Commonwealth’s information technology “Behind the Northrop Grumman / VITA Scandals” 30 June 2009) spit into two themes as well as a sub-theme dealing with MainStream Media. EMR addressed the sub-theme on MainStream Media in the “Unbelievable Obliviousness” post of 7 July…

EMR is trying to catch up now that TRILO-G is going out for Beta Review and the fourth printing of The Shape of the Future is about to ship to Amazon, et. al. First we will do a post on the other theme raised in Peters ‘Northrop’ post (Governance Transformation) to answer some questions and…

The comments on Peter’s post on Commonwealth’s information technology “Behind the Northrop Grumman / VITA Scandals”) spit into two themes. In addition there is a sub-theme dealing with MainStream Media. Let us examine the sub-theme: TMT called our attention to a 2 July item on POLITICO re WaPo lobbyist ‘sponsored’ dinners. EMR printed it out…

The continuing woes of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency and the state’s $2.4 billion IT contract with Northrop Grumman raise questions about some particularly “Virginian” conceits. One has to do with the state’s self consciousness about being a “tech” state and its propensity for privatizing public operations. Northrop Grumman has been accused of cost overruns,…

Coal-fired electricity generation remains one of the hottest issues in the Old Dominion and the nation. With some form of cap and trade law almost inevitable in Congress and with polls showing that 75 percent of Americans think that carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases need regulation, the issues really does have legs. In Virginia, for…

A PATH TO UNDERSTANDING THE IMPORTANCE OF REGIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE IMPERATIVE OF EVOLVING REGIONAL STRATEGIES On 17 June Gooze Views posted “How Virginia’s Metro Areas Are Weathering the Recession” about the three largest of Virginia’s 11 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). On the same day a WaPo story addressed the Washington, D. C.-VA-MD-WV MSA. As…

The dramatic escape from his Taliban captors by New York Times correspondent David Rohde shows just how dangerous journalism can be. Yet journalists keep getting trashed, mostly from the right wing, for supposedly being biased or dim-witted dupes. Many actually work very hard risking their lives for little fame and, these days, less and less…

How’s Virginia faring in the recession? Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads are doing well among the nation’s metropolitan areas. Richmond is about in the middle. That’s the conclusion of a new Brookings Institution study of the nation’s top 100 metro areas.See: http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/06_metro_monitor.aspx. All in all Virginia isn’t in bad shape, the study implies. Hardest hit…

Many years ago –38 to be precise — I was sweating in the Turkish bath of an Eastern North Carolina tobacco field working on a story about seasonal labor hired to prime and sucker the plant. It was just before dawn and a reddish tinge glowing over the country mist. Young teenagers were getting out…

When the financial world was turned upside down last fall, there was gnashing of teeth aplenty at what seemed to be the Bush Administration’s bailout after bailout of wayward banks. One side of the aisle complained that the government had no business tampering with free markets and the other complained that why should public money…