Usually, when we sit to pen our modest column, we are all giggles and light. But every once in a while we squat, quill in hand, and despair at the bleak landscape that looms before us. This is one of those times. Following the on-camera slaughter of WDBJ journalist Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward […]
In our experience, the current Republican majority in the General Assembly excels at exactly one thing: grandstanding. Not great at legislating, consensus-building or acknowledging basic reality, but boy do they know how to make a ruckus. If the definition of a conservative is, as National Review founder William F. Buckley put it, someone who “stands […]
As you may or may not know, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 recently turned 50, resulting in a flurry of news stories both celebrating the act’s many accomplishments, and lamenting the fact that a central tenant of the law, known as “preclearance,” had been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. Under […]
So here’s the current conventional political wisdom about Virginia: a once-reliable Republican bastion that has, in recent years, drifted toward the Democrats in presidential election years due to a certain charismatic candidate (hint: his name rhymes with Shmarock Mobana), and has therefore become one of the most highly-sought prizes in the 2016 election. In reality, […]
If you’re like us, you spend at least a few minutes every day thinking “What’s good ol’ Jim up to these days?” Jim being, of course, former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, the visionary leader who won the commonwealth’s highest office by promising to eliminate Virginia’s much-hated car tax. While governor, as everyone knows, he not […]
In politics, as in life, there are weeks that simply take your breath away. Weeks where things move so quickly, and with such unexpected force, that it feels like the laws of physics have been suspended, and that time is suddenly moving at twice its normal speed. So it was last week, when the political […]
Well, there you go. The feverish excitement of Virginia’s primary season is over, with literally dozens of voters flooding the polls, and now almost every general election candidate is busy preparing for the big show in November. We say “almost” every candidate, because there are still a number of too-close-to-call contests mired in recounts across […]
There have been, in the history of this column, a grand total of three all-timers. The first was U.S. Representative Virgil Goode—a genial doofus with a white-cloud coiffure and career-long propensity for grandly offensive pronouncements. The second was good ol’ George “Macaca” Allen, former governor, one-term U.S. senator and presidential aspirant, whose awesome display of […]
As we have noted in the past, the Republican party’s traditional focus on the three G’s (God, guns and gays) has long served it well, electorally speaking. By embracing Christian piety and a maximalist interpretation of the Second Amendment while simultaneously courting social conservatives by fulminating against homosexuality and abortion, the GOP has made itself […]
We’d like to kick off this edition of the Odd Dominion with a surprising number: $17,640. That’s the annual base pay for a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates (senators get an equally anemic $18,000 per year). Yes, Virginia’s lawmakers also get a healthy per diem of $180 for every day that the legislature is […]