So, the kids over at RaisingKaine.com are very very upset that Gov. Tim Kaine has endorsed Gerry Connolly over their preferred candidate, Leslie Byrne for the race to replace retiring Rep. Tom Davis (11th CD). They’re so upset that they’ve snatched down the site masthead – that read “Raising Kaine”, for years – and have replaced it with a black bar. While I’ve always thought it wasn’t terribly wise to hitch the identity of a community site to an individual politician (tho’ perhaps representative of the site’s approach to politics), this is just really – and amusingly – childish. Great job, guys.
Category: Politics Page 54 of 73
Prompted by many things – Vivian’s question about the size of the Democratic Party tent, and commenter James’ objection to my post about the failure of conservatism included – I’ve been thinking about the intersection of party, ideology, and actual results lately. In the midst of that, I checked out this nifty tool. Put out by The Public Whip, a UK non-profit dedicated to improving the civic process, it tries to help citizens understand whether the party that they’re voting for agrees with them on the issues. While I wasn’t really surprised by the result – I didn’t line up with the part that I’ve historically identified with (and still do) – I was certainly surprised by the distance separating me and that party these days.
Of the many truths that need to be highlighted and examined this election, perhaps the most important is that John McCain is bereft of integrity, and appears to be pretty comfortable with lying about most any subject. That may seem an obvious one to you and I, but there are still an enormous number of people out there who are under a different impression, mostly left over from 2000.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c&e[/youtube]
That appears to be the core claim of this ridiculous piece, which is a rehash of something I’ve seen peddled on Virginia political sites before.
So it looks like John Hagee has decided that the Catholic Church isn’t a “Great Whore” after all. Apparently all those years of preaching were just a bit of a misunderstanding on his part. Gosh, I wonder if this has anything to do with the time he’s been spending with his new BFF John McCain? One has to admit that McCain has demonstrated a pretty remarkable talent for compromising his own supposedly core principles (see, e.g., his embrace of previously rejected “agents of intolerance“, mockery of his own campaign finance reform laws, and support of torturing other human beings).
It seems like it was just yesterday I was saying that I intended to do a better job of paying attention to the (Democratic) Virginia Governor Tim Kaine’s proposed transportation bill this time around. 
Wait, it was. And yet already the usual flat earth Republicans (who control the Virginia House) have declared that they intend to – once again – just stick their fingers in their ears and yell “nyah nyah nyah, can’t hear you!”, making any serious examination of the issue near pointless.
Short of Charleton Heston bringing a burning bush into the VA GOP caucus that instructs them to actually *do* something (and even then . . . ), it looks like Virginia’s Republicans are planning to simply sit and watch NoVA’s traffic strangle itself. There’s a lesson about a goose and a golden egg here, but these Republicans aren’t exactly the forward looking sort. (For real insight into the Virginia Republican mind on this, see Waldo’s helpful translation of Attorney General Bob McDonnell’s take on the bill.)
This is one of the reasons I’m not entirely kidding when I say that Northern Virginia would be better off on its own. As a result of Virginia’s Constitution, the localities in Northern Virginia can’t do anything without the permission of the rest of the state. Despite the fact that the most economically robust region in Virginia can afford to fix its own problems, it instead exists in virtual gridlock. The Republican politicians in the House reject any transportation solution involving taxes, thus burnishing their No New Taxes Ever credentials for the voters back home (places where “traffic” involves two cars approaching a one-lane bridge, it seems). These Republicans trade addressing a fundamental public need of the citizens of Northern Virginia for their own personal political advantage. And there’s nothing Northern Virginia can do about it.
There’s no Republican plan to do anything about transportation, and there won’t be, as long as they’ve got the power to block progress. So maybe it’s not the best idea to spend too much time picking through the details of a bill that, as necessary as it is, looks to be going nowhere.
Photo: Elephants holding up traffic (admittedly not in Virginia)
Greg Anrig, Jr. is dead-on when he says that Democrats ought to aggressively attack conservatism as a failed ideology. They got everything they ever wanted during this administration, and look where that’s gotten us.  A broken government, house-of-cards financial sector, and a war that never should have been started. All courtesy of near-complete control of the Federal government by conservatives.
Stupid or evil? It’s really hard to tell.
I know I owe my readers the rest of the Mark Ellmore interview, as well some thoughts on the debate between him and Amit Singh that took place last Saturday. Soon.