That’s a pretty danged full headline, but I don’t care. There’s something magical about the possibility of a campaign manager doing a perp walk:
The Arlington County Police Department has opened a criminal investigation into a video of Patrick Moran, son of Rep. Jim Moran and former field director of his reelection campaign.
The video, released yesterday by conservative activist James O’Keefe, allegedly shows Moran offering advice on how to cast fraudulent ballots.
You want to play games, Democrats? You want to be able to tar as many Republicans with your brushes as you can? …OK, fine, if that’s how it’s going to be. We can play a game. Hey, here’s a fun one: it’s called “Let’s talk about the Democrats who fought to protect people who rape kids.”
In March, the Virginia state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law that imposed automatic life sentences for any adult convicted of raping a child under the age of 13. The issue received scant attention and even less debate, according to Delegate Rob Bell (R.,Charlottesville), the bill’s sponsor.
“More than half of all rapes in Virginia are to children under 13,” he said. “In the past two years we had 228 offenders, only 10 got life sentences. They were appallingly short.”
Twenty-one state senators and delegates, all Democrats, voted nay on the bill, including a handful of prominent Obama supporters.
…Bless their hearts. Continue reading #rsrh Virginia Democrats voted to shield pedophiles. #truthteam
I suspect that whatever it was, it was memorable.
At a fundraiser at the Richmond, VA Marriott tonight for the Romney campaign, there was a surprise guest. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell introduced Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who in turn introduced Rep. Paul Ryan. But before McDonnell took the mic, another figure was acknowledging dignitaries in the crowd. Among those dignitaries addressed from the stage, was former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, according to a Tatler source who was there.
Moe Lane
PS: Exactly how somebody goes to the wrong fundraiser by accident – particularly one this high-level – is left as an exercise for the interested student.
I assume that everyone is checked out on the basic story? Vice President Joe Biden Opened His Mouth at a majority-African American audience in Virginia and told that audience that if Romney got elected they were all going to end up in chains (he also told them that they were in North Carolina, but that kind of reality-based ambiguity is more or less baked into the cake that is Joe Biden). The White House has decided to pretend that they didn’t hear about it right away… sure you didn’t, Mister President – and that the whole thing is a ‘distraction,’ which is Beltway-speak for ‘a solid sucker punch right to the solar plexus.’ I’d say that Obama has gotten surprisingly adroit at sounding like a typical Dizzy City political… ah, ‘operative’… except that this would be unfair to the Chicago political machine. Mendacity and baldfaced lying are part of the Illinois Combine – and they’re good at it, thank you very much.
Well, former Governor Wilder isn’t too happy about the entire situation:
Continue reading Former VA Governor Doug Wilder (D) smacks around Joe Biden over ‘Chains’ comment.
This was originally going to be a post on snickering at the sight of Virginia Democrats futilely trying to convince President Obama to stop getting in the way of offshore oil drilling for their state – the President simply DOES NOT LIKE increased domestic hydrocarbon energy production, and the sooner that the Democrats understand that they’re being overruled by a Luddite, the happier everyone’s going to be – but I got distracted by something in passing*. The current split in Virginia’s Congressional delegation? 8/3 Republican/Democratic. What was it, after 2008? 5/6 Republican/Democratic. What’s it going to be, after November? …At this rate, 8/3 Republican/Democratic; or maybe 7/4.
Look, obviously you can’t do anything like a one-to-one correspondence between Congressional elections and Presidential ones. But if Barack Obama wants to win Virginia again then he should start figuring out why it is that he apparently has no coat-tails at all there this election cycle. And no, flipping VA-02 again will not be enough.
This is the precise quote (Politico has the video):
It’s not really up to the Supreme Court to second-guess the legitimate decision made by the elected representatives of the people, and if people want to change that law, they can do so by changing the legislators.
Three – no, four – observations on that, with the most pragmatic observations first: Continue reading Gerry Connolly (D, VA-11) hates judicial review.
…weeeee haveeeee coooookieeesssss…
While I’ve gone to great lengths to keep this website a forum for ideas, and not a personal forum, I should say something about the various stories regarding my political future in Virginia, the state that has been my primary home since late December 2010. The short of it is this: I don’t know and am nowhere near deciding. If I were to run, it would be as a Republican. And I am in the process of changing my voter registration from Alabama to Virginia, a development which likely does represent a closing of one chapter and perhaps the opening of another.
As to the horse-race question that animated parts of the blogosphere, it is true that people whose judgment I value have asked me to weigh the prospect of running in one of the Northern Virginia congressional districts in 2014 or 2016, or alternatively, for a seat in the Virginia legislature in 2015. If that sounds imprecise, it’s a function of how uncertain political opportunities can be—and if that sounds expedient, never lose sight of the fact that politics is not wishfulness, it’s the execution of a long, draining process to win votes and help and relationships while your adversaries are working just as hard to tear down the ground you build.
Continue reading #rsrh Artur Davis hearing the siren call of the Dark Side…
Will this be the 2012 election map?
If the Obama administration keeps up their War on Coal (literally: they consider coal more dangerous than terrorism), quite possibly. And it may be at least partially because of coal. Continue reading Electoral implications of the Obama Administration’s War on Coal.
Because statewide elections matter.
Executive summary: the new legislation now requires people filling out provisional ballots from lack of acceptable ID at the polling station “to subsequently submit identification to the electoral board if they want their vote to be counted.” The list of acceptable forms of ID was also expanded to include things like current utility bills and valid student IDs, which will no doubt raise eyebrows among people familiar with voter fraud; but making voters responsible for verifying their own provisional ballots is a pretty important step.
Naturally, agents of the Left (like Anna Scholl of ProgressVA) are livid about this legislation passing. As usual, they’re taking the (heavily racist) position that black people are too stupid to remember to bring their voter registration card, Social Security card, driver’s license, state college ID, employee photo ID, utility bill, bank statement, government check, and/or paycheck to the polling station*. Or perhaps Scholl simply doesn’t believe that black people have any of those things: it’s been my experience that hardcore progressive activists are often suffering from raging cases of epistemic closure… Continue reading Gov. Bob McDonnell (R, VA) signs Voter ID bill.
I just had to throw out four hours of work on a post on Virginia’s Romney/Obama Head-to-Head situation because I don’t really have the data to answer the question What percentage of the white vote can Obama reasonably expect in Virginia in 2012? This is important because (what follows is very much back-of-the-envelope calculating, based off of the NYT exit polls) if Obama gets 40% of the white vote (the percentage he won in 2008) and nothing else changes, he wins Virginia; if Romney gets 68% (the percentage Bush won in 2004) and nothing else changes, then he wins Virginia, by about the same percentage that Obama did*. Unfortunately, it’s still too early to make any kind of confident statement about which percentage of the white vote each candidate will get.
But it’s looks like it’s going to be that demographic that’s going to be the key to VA…
Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh …Dagnabbit, I need better crosstabs on these polls.
