VB Dems

Writes RTD: “Gov. Bob McDonnell and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar discussed the next steps for Virginia offshore exploration and drilling yesterday during a private lunchtime tête-à-tête at the Executive Mansion.

McDonnell, an enthusiastic supporter of offshore oil drilling, asked Salazar to help keep the momentum going now that Virginia has been cleared as the first state on the Atlantic Coast to explore and, depending on what’s found, drill.

“I urged him to do everything possible, since he was managing the process, to keep this on track for late 2011 or sometime in 2012, and he assured me that he would do that,” McDonnell said shortly after the meeting.

Ha! McDonnell now relinquishes to 2012: “2011… or 2012″. How about 2013, 2017, 2024, never…

The more we get to know about Virginia’s coastal environment the less and less likely we are to see any drills. That study will take time and it looks like more and more time will be awarded to the process.

Sorry, Bob. No wonder you look so glum in this RTD photo. (Photo credit: BOB BROWN/TIMES-DISPATCH)

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“It’s just the right cotton-pickin’ thing to do,” said VB Mayor Sessoms. What an idiot! Vivian has details.

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I wonder if GOPper 2nd district candidate Scott Rigell did his homework on this guy Mike Farris before he so gushingly announced his endorsement on Facebook.

Publicly proclaiming that “homosexual behavior is immoral“, this founder of the Home School Legal Defense Fund is a faithful adherent to the “Christian World View of Law“. Not only do these Dominionists believe that homosexuality is immoral, but they want it outlawed as well.

2.6. Sexual Morality

2.6.1. Recognizing in law that monogamous, heterosexual marriage is the only legitimate place for sexual expression and pleasure;

2.6.2. Opposing by law all other forms of sexual relationship and expression—e.g., homosexual and lesbian relationships, bestiality, incest, etc.

So whacked is Farris’ extreme “world view” and the political agenda of HSLDA, that the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers which represents over 85% of the homeschooling community in Virginia that its President is forced to “doing damage control behind HSLDA.” Unlike HSLDA, OVH is an inclusive grassroots advocacy group that provides accurate information and advocacy for ALL homeschoolers.

So this endorsement from this extreme right winger begs a number of questions to candidate Rigell, number 1 of which is his beliefs on homosexuality and number 2 of which is his concerns for the 85% of Virginia’s homeschooling community not under Farris’ control and domination.

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“If there’s going to be money made from drilling for gas, I want the city of Virginia Beach to benefit, period,” said Mayor Will Sessoms.

How exactly is Virginia Beach making money from drilling?

The Feds don’t allow for revenue sharing with coastal states, and if they did, Virginia wouldn’t spend it on roads in Virginia Beach. The limited number of jobs on rigs would be filled by workers from all over the U.S. Most offshore oil rig jobs call for a 14/21 day rotation, meaning working for 14 days and having 21 days off. This equates to having approximately 3/5 of the year off. For this reason, workers would not have to relocate their families and otherwise disrupt their lives to work on Virginia’s offshore rigs, opting to simply fly in from the Gulf Coast for the handful of times they are needed to work off Virginia’s shores.

Yet the visions of “jobs, jobs, jobs” dancing around Sessoms’ head remains as put there by Gov. Bob McDonnell. “This is the City Council showing support for the governor”, said Sessoms like any good lap dog.

Meanwhile, McDonnell has based his “jobs, jobs, jobs” song-and-dance entirely on a 2005 “report” by Dr. James V. Koch, local celebrity economist and former ODU president. Writes Dr. Koch in an email to me: “First, this really doesn’t qualify as a report. Indeed, I don’t even have a copy. I was given about 48 hours to produce a very quick estimate of the economic benefits (jobs, income, taxes) that might be generated by drilling off shore. Since I had no Virginia data, and no time to produce any, I looked at what had happened previously in Louisiana and a Canadian province as a guide. I did not have time to take environmental costs, etc., into account. I do not list this work on my C.V. because I did not invest the considerable time and attention that I give to the many economic impact studies that I do”.

To the right is a zoning map of Virginia Beach. The Louisiana that Dr. Koch looked to for modeling his economic projections is the one pictured above and below as riddled with green boxes, red circles and a myriad of grey lines. (The grey lines are pipelines; the red lines are pipelines damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.) With visions of those thousands of jobs and millions in revenue, Virginia Beach would have to be similarly riddled.

This is what Mayor Sessoms’ envisions off Virginia Beach?!? What a pawn!

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As reported in WaPo, “Virginia’s Air Pollution Control Board voted today to direct its chairman to tell the Environmental Protection Agency that Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli did not act in their behalf when he filed a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases last month”. As a friend writes, “An excellent statement from the Air Board that not only does Cuccinelli not represent Virginians – he doesn’t even represent Virginia’s environmental authorities in state government!”

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Sorry Bob, but with only 6.5 days worth of oil off Virginia’s coast, you just ain’t that attractive! No wonder you ain’t got any suitors.

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Let’s see if I can summarize the drama that’s unfolding at Bearing Drift.

JR put up a post (“2nd District embroiled in controversy and innuendo over reform”) where he compared the “Contract on Congress” produced jointly by 2nd district candidates Scott Taylor and Ben Loyola and released on March 22 to Scott Rigell’s reform plan that he released on March 23. They are basically identical and so the squabble begins as to who copied who.

Apparently Rigell had been working on his for awhile so the comments are very condemning of Taylor and Loyola. But a couple commenters contend that Rigell pretty much got it from the Repug Congressional Committee. There’s also contentions that a Rigell staffer leaked it to Taylor and Loyola. It’s also described as a “set up”.

Damn, if Glenn Nye won’t luck out and win re-election. What a joke these Repugs are!

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Good grief! What is with these Republican candidates for the 2nd district?!? Scott Taylor and bombs, now Kenny Golden and shooting up people, all trying to out *soldier* the others. I’ll venture to guess that Scott Rigell doesn’t have any military experience. What a riot?

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What part of the following statements does McDonnell and his cronies not get?

“… the special interest sale proposed for the Mid-Atlantic Region in late 2011 is not acceptable to the Department because of its incompatibility with the military training and testing conducted in this area” – Dept. of Defense, Nov. 27, 2006

“… the Navy requires unencumbered access to the full expanse of this operations area.”
“… the Department opposes oil and gas development activity in this OCS planning location.” – Dept. of the Navy, April 10, 2006

“Proposed Sale 220 lies within the Virginia Capes (VACAPES) Range Complex where Navy conducts significant training and test and evaluation activity. A portion of proposed Sale 220 overlaps a Navy identified Mission Critical Area (MCA) within Warning Area 386. Development of oil and gas structures in this MCA would be incompatible with Navy readiness and test activities conducted there.” – Dept. of the Navy, Jan. 12, 2009

“For safety reasons, the military is compelled to discourage certain oil and gas activities where such activities would clearly be incompatible with military missile flights, low-flying aircraft, and weapons testing and evaluation.” – DOI and DOD MOA July 20, 1983

And while we’re looking at that MOA, let’s not forget who is and more importantly who is NOT authorized to speak on behalf of the Department of Defense.

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Send a SEAL, not a RINO??? Whaa???

From Scott Taylor’s Facebook page:

You can help send a principled conservative to Congress. www.ScottTaylorMoneyBomb.com

Scott Taylor is a former Navy SEAL, Iraq-War Veteran and small business owner. Take a minute and learn about Scott at www.ScottTaylorforCongress.com

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From Vivian Paige comes a horrible story of Democrats gone haywire.

Pictured above is one Norfolk Councilman Randy Wright – on the left wearing a McCain/Palin sticker and standing with Norfolk GOP Chairwoman Pam Brown, and on the right grinning with Sen. Mark Warner who is hosting a fundraiser for Wright on March 19.

The pic on the left is from a Pilot article entitled “McAuliffe’s Man. “”Yup, I was there,” Wright said when I asked him about the picture in my files. “I voted for McCain-Palin. And I love Sarah Palin… she knew how to talk to regular people.”

Seven months later Wright becomes “McDonnell’s Man” and he’s rumored to be supporting Scott Rigell for Congress. Yet all the constitutional officers in Norfolk call themselves “Democrats” and all have endorsed Randy Wright. Egads!

As Vivian writes “a close reading of the Virginia Democratic Party Plan shows that the section which deals with ousting of party members when they support another candidate (Sec. 10.8) only comes into play if the candidate is the party nominee”. Norfolk’s races are non-partisan thus there isn’t a party nominee on the ballot. “This loophole needs to be closed”, she writes. “The Party Plan should treat endorsees just like nominees”.

What a mess, especially considering a really great Democrat, Tommy Smiegel, is also running for that Ward 5 seat. And WTF is Mark Warner’s problem???

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Wow! Apparently, there are two different varieties of Republican. On the one hand you have the garden-variety sheep who lap up on another spewed by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. They little know how to spell “socialism” let alone know what it means. But hell, throw a bumpersticker on your car saying “Obama = Socialism” despite your ignorance.

But it’s a different story for Republican donors who actually engage and utilize the gray matter between their ears. Now the RNC is sheepishly back away from it big time. From

“It’s one to sit around a conference room or a bar with your colleagues and talk about stuff like this,” said Denver-based political analyst Eric Sondermann. “It’s another thing — a whole new level of both cynicism and immaturity to put it into a Power Point presentation to other donors and strategists. And it’s a level of stupidity to leave it lying around.”

Sondermann said the document surfacing can hurt Republicans in two ways — with Democrats, already suspicious of the conservative movement’s possibly racist underbelly, and with wealthy Republican donors, who are referred to as “ego-driven” and easily milked with offers of access and “tchochkes.”

Way to go, Repugs!

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Ha! The DCCC sent me a funny email today. “Last time someone spoke out of the both sides of their mouth this much, they were trying to sell a Pinto”, writes Southern Regional Press Secretary Jesse Ferguson.

Scott “Blah, blah, blah, bad Obama” Rigell is a car salesman. Yet despite his opposition to all things Obama, he was all too happy to rake in the cash from the Feds for “Cash for Clunkers”… $450,000 worth of happy.

Rigell is also trying to sell himself as a dyed-in-the-wool Repug despite his $1,000 donation to Obama in 2008, albeit pre-primary and supposedly as a “protest donation” against Hillary Clinton. Bwaaa!!!

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