Some time back I linked to a video wherein the videographer had used a clever “pennies-as-millions” approach to make the Obama proposed budget cuts much clearer for those of us non-economist types. Well, he’s back again, this time with a penny-wise analogy to help you visualize the job losses we’ve incurred since the so-called stimulus bill was passed.
Bear in mind that important last point: we have lost over a million jobs more than if we had not passed that bill at all and that’s by Obama’s own numbers. In short, we’d have still lost the jobs but 1) it might actually have been less and 2) we wouldn’t have run up the astronomical debt we’ve seen. That’s key to remember, folks.
As was widely predicted, Creigh Deeds has won the Democrat primary and is the Dem candidate for Governor in the general election. Jody Wagner has won the Lt. Governor spot.
According to the State Board of Elections (SBE) site Deeds has won over Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran by a margin of 49.73% to 26.41% and 23.84%, respectively. That represents a greater margin of victory than any I had seen guessed at in the last few days, even as it became obvious Deeds was coming on strong. Wagner turned in a crushing victory taking 74.21% of the vote with her opponent, Michael Signer, taking 21.30%. (Interesting statistic: the 3rd Lt. Gov. candidate, Jon Bowerback, took 4.48% of the vote even though he withdrew from the race back on May 18th. He was still on the ballot since there wasn’t time to remove him so there may have been people who honestly didn’t know he wasn’t running.
So, that’s decided. The matchup here in Virginia is:
Governor: Bob McDonnell (R) vs. Creigh Deeds (D)
Lt. Governor: Bill Bolling (R) vs. Jody Wagner (D)
Attorney General: Ken Cuccinelli (R) vs. Steve Shannon (D)
DC’s Rep. Norton has withdrawn a bill she’d proposed to give DC’s residents a voting representation in the House since we was unable to remove an amendment to the bill requiring that DC actually adhere to the Constitution and a Supreme Court ruling in respecting DC citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights:
Legislation that would give District residents a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives was dealt a major setback Tuesday.
D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton pulled the bill after being unable to reach a compromise on a gun amendment attached to the legislation.
…
At issue is an amendment attached by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) that would have removed many of the District’s restrictions on gun ownership.
District leaders were split over the amendment. D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray had been opposed to passing the bill with the gun language. Others, including Mayor Adrian Fenty, were open to the possibility, seeing it as the only way to get the bill passed.
The Ensign Amendment would have revoked DC’s continued restrictions on common classes of handguns and dispensed with the purposely overcomplicated process DC resident must follow to license a firearm for their personal defense. That amendment was passed into the bill with a majority of the House voting to approve it, so you can understand Norton’s difficulty in having it removed. I’m interested in the reference she makes in the story to some sort of compromise they were considering to get the bill moving. Unfortunately, no one says what that compromise might be. Of course, she does take the time to assert that the existing amendment means that the bill “carries a danger to the public safety.”
The only danger to the public safety is in continuing to allow them to be targets for any criminal element that decided to drive on by.
In any case, the bill is now off the table which means it’s unlikely to reappear during this Congress. I guess she’ll try again later.
While I believe the Dems should be allowed to conduct their primary without non-Dems voting there’s certainly nothing wrong with reminding those voters of our take on who should be Governor. Volunteers for GOP candidate Bob McDonnell have made a point of putting up McDonnell signs at polling places around Loudoun County. Here’s an example from just 1 precinct, #105 Hillside in Dulles precinct in Loudoun:
I’m getting similar stories in Purceville and Lowes Island. The GOP’s volunteer army appears to be very motivated, indeed!
Far be it from me to spread rumors but… hey, it ain’t my primary. Via Bearing Drift we have a report over at Virginia Virtucon that Terry McAuliffe is calling his private donors to let them know he’s not going to be winning this race. And this, apparently, before noon on primary day. Hmmm. I wonder what the state of the primary really is at this point. If McAuliffe is really doing this, he must have some pretty solid indicators that he’s having his butt kicked pretty hard. To be waving the white flag before lunch, he’d have to be losing huge. I wonder if Deeds will take it by a larger margin than anyone predicted?
Brian Kirwin at Bearing Drift has a must-read post up today on the topic of the truths our Founders considered to be self-evident and the people who, today, have lost all connection with that. It starts with a quote out of his local paper’s Letters to the Editor section wherein a local resident demonstrates her complete ignorance of our rights, the Constitution, and which came first.
The letter writer takes issue with the assertion of former Governor Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich that the rights of Americans come from God and asserts, herself, that they come from the Constitution. Kirwin needs to look no further than the Declaration of Independence to blow holes in that argument and does so. He continues:
This slow but steady diminishing of the religious base for our system of government has troubled me over the years. I tire of the public schools who teach that Patrick Henry said “give me liberty or give me death” but refuse to acknowledge that he spoke those words in St. John’s Church.
I shake my head when children are taught about Thanksgiving and denied from knowing exactly who was being thanked. (I actually had a public school teacher tell me the first Thanksgiving was when the Pilgrims thanked Native Americans)
And I’m outraged when people understand so little about what made the American experiment great that they think that government gives us our rights.
There was a time when every American – and I do mean every one of them – was expected to know the opening lines of the Declaration and the preamble to the Constitution. If they did, letters like the tripe that made it into Kirwin’s local paper would never appear, or would never appear without immediate correction. (I wonder if the paper hadn’t included the ability for readers to make rebutting comments to letters to the editor if they would have seen fit to make the rebuttal themselves. Or would they have simply let this letter be published, fallacious as it is, and allow the rest of their readership to be influenced by it?)
The Democrat primary is taking place today pitting Terry McAuliffe, Creigh Deeds, and Brian Moran against each other for the Governor’s race. There’s been quite a lot of talk about this primary among my fellow Republicans and we’re rightly interested in the results of the race. But there’s a call being made for we Republicans to vote in the primary today and several reasons are given.
Some are saying we should take the opportunity to try to skew the Democrats’ choice of a contender in the general election toward someone we’re confident we can beat. Others look at things more holistically and want to weigh in on the choice so as to get the best Governor should the Dems win in November. Others still merely want to be agents of chaos and throw a monkey wrench into the works of the Democrat machine.
Me? I say Republicans should observe all they like, predict for all they’re worth, but they should absolutely, positively not vote in a Democratic primary. I believe to participate in the party workings of an organization you do not choose to belong to is unethical.
Back in May 2006 I attended the 10th Congressional District GOP Convention and got both an eyeful of elitist display and a seriously bad taste in my mouth for events like that. I didn’t attend another such event until the RPV Convention in Richmond a couple of weeks ago. What happened at that first one that didn’t at the second was an attempt to unseat delegates who were already accepted by the credentials committee. After the convention, I wrote a post on the matter of freedom of association or, more aptly, freedom of disassocation. In it I spoke of the right of groups to not only form but be exclusive as to their membership:
The US Constitution does not mention in its text the term “freedom of association.” The Supreme Court, however, has ruled that such a thing is Constitutionally protected in that such a freedom is necessary in order to preserve other freedoms specifically safeguarded explicitly, such as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. Inherent in this concept must also be that of a freedom of disassociation. You are free to associate with whomever you please. You are also free to not associate with specific persons. The issue becomes more cloudy when you’re dealing with a group rather than a single person. In our case, is the Republican Party free to not associate with a given person and, if such person is already a member, is it free to enforce a disassociation?
I would argue that private groups such as the GOP must be free to exclude persons from their association. Associations are made to gather like-minded persons together for some purpose. Perhaps it’s a chess club or a scuba-diving club or a network-security professional association that we’re talking about but the reason for the association is always the same. People with a common interest working toward a common goal gather to join in their mutual pursuits. Such groups must be able to deny membership to those they conclude do not share their common interest and to sever their association with persons already a member who demonstrate interests counter to the group’s stated goal.
The Democratic party exists for similar reasons as our Republican committees do: to further the political goals of its membership, primarily through the election of their members to public office. Their goals are decidedly different from ours so I can imagine that having a massive number of local Dems crowding into a GOP primary and swinging the primary race over to a gun-banning, socialist, all-access-abortionist with a plan to turn our military control over the UN would be bothersome to my fellow Republicans. Such a candidate would clearly not represent the goals of our party and would only have a ghost of a chance in a primary so long as people who have made no effort to join our party and do not share the party’s goals involve themselves in the process.
Republicans should be the ones deciding who the Republican candidates are. Democrats should do the same for theirs. Legal or not, it’s just not honorable, it’s just not ethical to get in there and mix up the results of their primary to produce a candidate we like. Bob McDonnell is a better candidate than any of theirs and I’m confident in his ability to get that truth across to the voters in the Commonwealth over the next few months. I’m working to help that happen and that’s where the efforts of my fellow Republicans should be.
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