Tag: University of Virginia
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Virginia’s Perpetual Bigotry
By Peter Galuszka All the talk of a “new” Virginia that is somehow the apple of Richard Florida’s “New Urbanist” eye got a drubbing this week when the General Assembly voted against a gay man for a judgeship, showing just how badly the social right-wing is running amok and how more thoughtful people can’t control…
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Something Stinks About This Tax Proposal
By Peter Galuszka Pick a number. Any number. Could 49,000 jobs be created? How about 44.000 jobs? It could be 77,000 jobs, or maybe as few as 900 jobs. These are the all-over-the-board possibilities suggested by the grandly-named Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy in Springfield, which touts itself as a non-partisan think tank, when,…
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The Drones in our Future
By Peter Galuszka The backyard of my house in the piney woods of southern Chesterfield County is shaped like a half moon surrounded by very tall and skinny loblollies and gum trees. It faces north and can be a good place for aircraft watching. I live maybe 20 miles as the crow flies from Ft.…
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Who’s Paying for McDonnell’s Happy Talk TV Ads
By Peter Galuszka It’s hard to have your ego dunned. Yet it’s happened to Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, who, according to the Quinnipiac University, lost five points in a popular poll thanks to his disastrous 2012 General Assembly session that brought the arrests of pro-abortion rights protestors on Capitol ground and a spate of…
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Moscow Memories
By Peter Galuszka It is a cruelly damp and cold day in the autumn of 1986. I am sitting in the lobby of Vnhestorgbank in the Mezhdyunarodnaya Complex, one of the few modern-looking buildings in Moscow at the time. The “Mezh”, also known as the “International Center” or the “Armand Hammer Center” after the U.S.…
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ALEC, the Tea Party and the Feral GOP
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in Business and Economy, Children and Families, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Energy, Environment, Government Finance, Gun rights, Immigration, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, LGBQT, Media, Money in politics, Politics, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka Virginia’s conservatives have gone through a spasm of controversy as they struggle to find their message. They desperately need to balance their ideas of fiscal discipline and limited government with a wide spectrum of unrelated hard-right social issues. The clearest evidence yet of the quandary for their soul involves the American Legislative…
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“Young Gun” Cantor Gets Tiresome
By Peter Galuszka What a difference nine months makes. Last summer, Boy Wonder Eric Cantor, the U.S. house majority leader from Henrico County, was riding high politically. If he wasn’t snubbing President Barack Obama in meetings over the need to raise the debt ceiling, he was racing to get ahead of the Tea Party parade…
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Dulles Rail: “Good Night, John Boy”
By Peter Galuszka The convoluted schemes of Virginia state politicians to avoid paying for rail service to Dulles International Airport are as frustrating as they are self-defeating and unfair. Just a few days ago, it seemed that the General Assembly would consider adding $300 million to extend Metrorail to Dulles on the Silver Line when…
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Closely Watched Trains
By Peter Galuszka A few weeks ago, I was making another trip to the area near Matewan, W.Va., a small, historic town of red brick buildings a stone’s throw across the Tug Fork River from Kentucky. Matewan is noted for its coalfield labor strife caught dramatically in John Sayles superb 1987 movie of the same…
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Bye, Bye, Vice President McDonnell
It appears that ultrasounds, handgun purchases and helping groups ban gays from becoming adoptive parents are costing Gov. Robert F. McDonnell his dreams of being a Republican vice presidential candidate. Now that Mitt Romney has 655 electoral votes tied up and looks like a sure thing as far as the GOP nominee, McDonnell has fallen…
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Another “F” for Transparency
By Peter Galuszka Imagine learning that a court date or a city council meeting is to be held in two days. You show up at the door, only to be told by a guard that admittance is by invitation only. You will have to leave. That, in essence, is how the administration of Virginia Gov.…
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Expanding U.S. 460 and the Chinese Connection
By Peter Galuszka In the past day or so, there’s been a bit of buzz about a decades-old plan to expand the northwest to southeast route U.S. 460 takes through Virginia’s peanut country on its way to Tidewater. This latest bit of boosterism posits that giant ships inbound to Virginia via the widened Panama Canal…
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Five Ways Virginia Sucks
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in Blogs and Blog Administration, Children and Families, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Government Finance, Gun rights, LGBQT, Money in politics, Science & Technology, Social Services and EntitlementsBy Peter Galuszka An alternative blogger is listing five ways Virginia may be the worst state in the union, a.k.a. “Bob Land.” Tara Lohan of AlterNet notes that generally, watching the news these days is like going through a time warp when it comes to debates about birth control or teaching science in the classroom.…
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What Baconauts Won’t Discuss
By Peter Galuszka Reading the Bacon’s Rebellion Blog always displays breathtaking contradictions. Chief among them is the huge contradiction between pushing “smart growth” and shunning any form of increasing gasoline taxation. The crux is that we have lots of horrendous sprawl in the state such as all of Northern Virginia, Route 3 in Fredericksburg and…
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Hate ObamaCare? Try Social Media
By Peter Galuszka For all the chatter before the U.S. Supreme Court and pundits, ObamaCare has raised critical questions striking at the heart of individual rights and the Constitution. Yet there’s another, far more powerful and potentially more sinister force out there that is far more ominous along similar grounds: social media. True, “social media”…