Senator Henry Marsh’s big day.

Today was a big day for Senator Henry Marsh. The legislator of twenty years took a rare day off during the Virginia Senate’s 46-day session, to attend President Barack Obama’s second-term inauguration in Washington D.C. For the 79-year-old black civil rights lawyer, attending a black president’s inauguration on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is perhaps …

George Allen says he’s done running for office.

Thank God. What an embarrassment it would have been for Virginia if this casually vicious racist had won. He fashioned himself in the image of the unreformed old southern racists of the 1960s, and never bothered to update his mindset, only how to fake it for brief stretches. In the meantime, Virginia—and the whole US—changed …

A conservative Virginia activist has been sending anti-Obama SMSes.

Jason Flanary, failed 2011 candidate for the Virginia Senate, had Twitter all a-flutter over the past few days after sending bajillions of really nasty anti-Obama SMS messages to mobile phones in total violation of federal election law. “VP Biden mocks a fallen Navy Seal during memorial. Our military deserves better” and “Obama believes killing children …

Links for November 15th

FDIC Bank ClosingsI was curious where banks closed by the FDIC tend to be located, so I put together this visualization. (You have to click on Visualize -> Map.) Turns out they're mostly in Florida and Georgia which are—surely not coincidentally—hot spots for home foreclosures. Almost all of these closings were after mid-2008. Pew Charitable …

It only took Allen a week to prove himself a hypocrite.

Remember last week, when George Allen criticized Tim Kaine for raising money out of state? Well, today George Allen was at a fundraiser in Newport Beach, California. That took exactly one week. It was a dumb-ass criticism from Allen in the first place. He got burned making the same criticism of Webb in 2006, and …

Allen says it’s bad to leave Virginia.

From the Daily Progress, covering George Allen getting a haircut at my barber today (seriously): Allen criticized Kaine for his spending time with Obama in Chicago, rather than campaigning in Virginia. “While I’m here in Charlottesville, at Staples Barber Shop, he’s up in Chicago with President Obama’s big money bundlers, in Chicago, and I’d rather …

Links for July 9th

GAO: Replacing the $1 Note with a $1 Coin Would Provide a Financial Benefit to the GovernmentGetting rid of the $1 bill would save the government $184M/year. Not an enormous amount, on the scale of the budget, but there's no getting around that $184M is a very large amount of money indeed. Ten years ago, …

Links for July 7th

PolitiFact: George Allen changes stance again on ethanol subsidiesAllen was against ethanol subsidies. Then he was for them. Now he's against them. It's got to be dizzying, change positions every time the political wind shifts. PolitiFact: Virginia GOP says Phil Puckett voted against sending EPA a messagePolitiFact finds the RPV's criticism of Sen. Puckett to …

Jeff Frederick running for senate.

My favoritest RPV chair ever, Jeff Frederick, is running for state senate! (Or, apparently, he and some friends will be sharing the seat, because in his e-mail to supporters, he wrote that “we’ve decided to run.“) This is for the 36th district, Toddy Puller’s open seat. I don’t know the dynamics of the district well …

Claudia Tucker, Wilkins’ eavesdropper, is running for senate.

Claudia Tucker is running for state senate. Does that name ring a bell? RPV executive director Ed Matricardi fingered Tucker in the Republican eavesdropping scandal, back in 2003, rolling over on her and four other Republican leaders as having orchestrated and participated in the illegal monitoring of DPVA phone calls. (After serving prison time, Matricardi …