Open source, procurement, and gov tech.
Sen. Robert Hurt is courting the fringe right, Olympia Meola writes in today’s Times-Dispatch: Some conservatives object to Hurt’s voting record—principally his support of a $1.4 billion tax increase pushed by former Gov. Mark R. Warner in 2004. After he cast that vote, Hurt was among 19 Republican delegates and 15 Republican state senators featured …
Continue reading “Robert Hurt has signed on with the free-lunch crowd.”
Bob Lewis has a story today about the state’s slide into a fiscal morass of transportation funding that provides a peek at the stories to come in the years ahead. This is the sort of article that we’ll all look back at in five to ten years and wonder how we didn’t see it coming. …
Continue reading “What will McDonnell do to fund transportation (if anything)?”
The Fifth District Republican Committee has chosen a primary as the method of selecting their nominee against Rep. Tom Perriello, Janelle Rucker writes in the Roanoke Times. It was a 19-13 vote. That’s a significant blow for the backers of basically all of the candidates but Sen. Robert Hurt and Ken Boyd (my representative on …
The field of Republican candidates vying to run against Rep. Tom Perrillo is so strong that…a seventh candidate has kicked off his campaign. Jim McKelvey, a Smith Mountain Lake developer, completes our septumvirate of dwarves. McKelvey says both that he’s not satisfied with any of the other candidates and that “a couple of other good, …
Continue reading “Yet another 5th District Republican (YA5DR) running against Perriello.”
The Roanoke Times editorialized today in favor of the Know Campaign’s guilt-based GOTV campaign, and I couldn’t agree more. That was the conservative group who was looking to send out mailers telling people which of their neighbors have voted in recent elections. The SBE was upset, as were many citizens, who complained that whether or …
Two gripes that I can never make during election season, because they’ll look partisan: 1. The fact that a candidate hasn’t disavowed someone or something doesn’t mean that he supports it. Yes, some issues are so big or important, or so clearly intertwined with a candidate, that a refusal to disavow them can be noteworthy. …
Continue reading “Two political actions that I insist that you stop taking.”
Del. Phil Hamilton lost his reelection bid earlier this month, I was relieved to see–voters saw fit to hand him his hat for lining his own pockets with taxpayer dollars (or so it appears). Democrat Robin Abbott won the Peninsula district with 54% of the vote. Like every other outgoing delegate, Hamilton remains a delegate …
Teabagger Nigel Coleman on why he’s cancelled his plans to burn Rep. Tom Perriello in effigy: I feel like I obviously handled this poorly, as far as the press goes. We really should have thought this through more … and seen how this was going to affect not only us, but other TEA parties and …
Continue reading “The burning of Rep. Perriello has been cancelled.”
Steve Shannon ran this ad in the last month of his campaign: If those IP addresses are an indicator of Steve Shannon’s technical prowess, I don’t think he was going to catch those child pornographers after all. Here’s a screenshot, if you missed it: This is a bit like tracking Virginia criminals by their phone …
As I watch the first of the results of the election come in, I’m struck by the wide variety of options of websites offering data. Until this election, we’ve been left obsessively reloading the SBE’s website, hopping around from precinct to precinct, district to district, trying to remember what the numbers were when last we …