Just say no

While most of us are waiting out the doldrums of an off year with not too much happening on the election front, Virginia residents have a bit more on their plates. They’ll be electing a new governor this November, and unlike Senate and House seats – which more affect matters of national policy – the [...]

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Tier 3 strikes again.

The DHS has opened an “ongoing” investigation of human trafficking at a McLean, Virginia location that has a notable owner — the King of Saudi Arabia. Police responded to a call on Tuesday to the diplomatic residence and “rescued” two women, NBC reported yesterday afternoon — and touched off a major diplomatic headache (via Katie [...]

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Priorities.

Buzzfeed‘s Andrew Kaczynski finds the perfect contrast to Terry McAuliffe’s soft-focus introductory campaign ad about family. The Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia is styling himself as a Commonwealth man of the people after years as the quintessential fixture of Beltway culture. According to his own book, it turns out a guy with a semi-permanent [...]

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Kicking things off.

The television-ad portion of the campaign will be officially up and running starting this Monday; there will certainly be many more between now and what’s shaping up to be a close Virginia gubernatorial race this November, but I’m thinking that this is probably a pretty darn good start for Cuccinelli’s campaign. The McAuliffe Democrats are [...]

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Liberties.

I’m borrowing BuzzFeed’s headline but the facts are more complicated than it suggests. Per John McCormack, this isn’t a traditional sodomy case. It involves a 47-year-old man … and a 17-year-old girl. Question for the courts, then: Does the Supreme Court’s famous decision in Lawrence v. Texas ban all laws prohibiting sodomy, or does it [...]

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Undecided.

Ah, dear ol’ Virginia. The now-purplish commonwealth has gone from swinging blue for Obama in 2008, to electing Gov. McDonnell in a landslide just one year later, and then right back to supporting Obama in 2012 — and it’s so far looking like the 2013 gubernatorial is very much up for grabs. This is the [...]

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Principles.

You ready for this? Time magazine was prepared to publish a story noting that Warner’s position on SSM remains unclear because his office responded ambiguously when pressed for comment last week. At which point a panicky Warner (he’s up for reelection next year, remember) rushed out a statement on Facebook insisting that, indeed, he too [...]

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And then there were two.

After, in his view, getting elbowed out of the Virginia Republican nomination last November with the switchover from a primary to a convention nomination process, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling has been flirting with the idea of running as an independent. Last month, he sent out a missive to test the waters, asking for voters’ opinions [...]

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Can one be too prepared?

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell did not do himself any favors with conservatives when he signed his big transportation bill into law last month — it certainly looks like it will be a tax increase in practice (one of his economic advisers just resigned in protest because of it), and the agreement to allow a bicameral commission to [...]

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Out.

Remember how McDonnell’s and Christie’s gubernatorial wins in 2009 gave conservatives a jolt of optimism after the catastrophe of 2008? Good times, good times. No surprise here after he broke his promise not to raise taxes in order to fund Virginia’s new transportation bill, but still newsworthy: Chris Christie isn’t the only Republican governor getting [...]

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Oof.

I find myself torn. On the one hand, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell has generally managed to keep Virginia’s head on straight in most matters fiscal and economic since he was elected in 2010, but on the other, this whole thing seems mighty convoluted for what is absotively, posilutely not supposed to be a tax increase. [...]

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Fierce.

As Virginia’s Attorney General and Republican candidate for governor Ken Cuccinelli attested on Ed’s show on Wednesday, a big theme of his gubernatorial campaign is going to be about the importance of beating back the brazen overreach of the federal government and the virtues of relying more heavily on federalism as an efficient policy problem-solver. [...]

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Oh my.

Via Reason, a big deal potentially for two reasons. One: It’s not unusual for a candidate who identifies predominantly as a libertarian, like Gary Johnson, to endorse legalization. It is unusual for a guy who’s more closely associated with mainstream conservatism, albeit of the tea-party wing, to signal he’s keeping an open mind. As I [...]

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Let's get real.

Like many states, Virginia has implemented certain tax breaks, quotas, and/or incentives on behalf of particular green technologies over the years, not because it was a legitimately excellent idea (read: California), but because it was just the vogue political thing to do at the time. Now that the economy is decidedly on the strugglebus and [...]

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Solutions.

President Obama likes to include ‘infrastructure investment’ as part of the justification for his pushes for new spending, but he often conveniently forgets to mention how we’re supposed to pay for all that infrastructure development when we’re currently racking up trillion-dollar deficits every year — unless you count “asking the wealthy to pay a little [...]

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Show time

Among the various helpful suggestions being stressed by liberals seeking areas where gun rights advocates and gun grabbers might find “common ground” is the question of the Gun Show Loophole in places such as Virginia and Kansas (among others). Just imagine… open forums where criminals, the deranged and the idle rich can wander in off [...]

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Smackdown.

The odd-year gubernatorial election of what now feels like a solidly purple Virginia (…dagger) could potentially serve as a bellwether of which way the national attitude is trending after almost a year into President Obama’s second term, and conservative Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli will be facing former DNC chief Terry McAuliffe in what will likely [...]

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Federalism.

The states are already beginning to play out the battle between the “fewer guns means less crime” and “more guns means less crime” mentalities, and while Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed a bill that would have allowed for concealed carry in schools earlier this week, states like Virginia and Texas are starting to think the [...]

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Conversations.

On Tuesday, Michigan Gov. Rick Synder nixed a bill that would have allowed for adults with extra training to carry concealed weapons in schools, while over in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry voiced his support for the same idea as a viable method of improving school security. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell also spoke up on the [...]

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Accountability and anachronisms.

Big Labor had a lot of high hopes when Barack Obama won in 2008.  They expected a raft of friendly legislation to force workplaces to organize, but instead the Obama administration spent their political capital on ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank rather than card-check and micro-union recognition.  The dreams of union nirvana have turned into nightmares of [...]

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Take your marks.

Things are looking pretty darn good for Gov. Chris Christie’s reelection bid in New Jersey, and things are taking shape in next year’s only other gubernatorial race, too: Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling announced in a statement on Wednesday that he won’t be running for Virginia’s governorship after all. For the past seven years I have [...]

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Odd year.

The current Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell has been and remains a pretty popular leader. His legacy of a decreased unemployment rate that betters the national average, repeatedly balanced budgets, and a relatively evenhanded leadership style will be a tough act to follow, but you can’t run for two consecutive gubernatorial terms in the Old Dominion [...]

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Here we go.

Free advice, take it or leave it: Don’t start obsessing about Ohio until we have a better sense of what’s happening in Virginia. Everyone’s going to go crazy when the OH early voting totals are revealed sometime after 7:30, as that’ll be the first strong sign of whether Romney’s overperforming or not. But there’s a [...]

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