When I decided to run for the School Board last year I sought the advice of my state delegate Frank Hall. After talking for a while, Frank gave me this one great piece of advice—elections do not turn on issues, they turn on personalities. If people like you they will vote for you even if they do not fully agree with your positions on the issues. If people don’t like you, they will not vote for you even if they love your positions on the issues.

Well, it’s nearly a year later. Frank’s advice didn’t help me win my election, but it sure explains how I’m going to vote in the Democratic Party primary elections next week. Let me start with the contest to replace Frank Hall in the House of Delegates (Frank has moved on to an appointed office in the Commonwealth). The candidates are Carlos Brown, School Board member Betsy Carr and former president of the Richmond Crusade for Voters, Antione Green.

Frank Hall’s principle leads me to a great case of heartburn in this election. I consider both Betsy Carr and Antione Green to be personal friends. I have known Betsy for four years. We work together in the Micah Initiative. During my campaign last summer she helped spur me on to do the grunt work of politics—knocking on doors and shaking hands. I think that Betsy is highly qualified to serve us in the House of Delegates. I would not only like to vote for her, but I would have liked to work on her campaign. But… I met Antione last year at the Crusade school board candidate forum. We quickly became friends. Although the Crusade did not endorse my candidacy, Antione and I met many times over the summer and fall discussing school issues and the campaign. I think that Antione is highly qualified to serve us in the House of Delegates. I would not only like to vote for him, but I would have loved to work on this campaign.

As you might guess, I have worked on neither Betsy’s nor Antione’s campaigns. I just couldn’t get myself to campaign against either of them. How will I vote next week? I can’t tell you now. It will be either Betsy or Antione and I probably won’t decide until I am at the voting machine.

But, you may ask, what about the third candidate, Carlos Brown? I don’t know Carlos Brown. It is possible that last year I shook his hand during the campaign, but I don’t remember. I have received several pieces of his campaign literature. I read what he stands for. I notice that he is endorsed by Mayor Jones and State senators McEachin and Marsh. Those endorsements do not sway me one way or the other.

I will not vote for Mr. Brown. Why? He’s not my friend. I don’t have any personal feelings for him. And as Frank Hall taught me—voters choose based on the person, not the issues.

My advice to you, trusted reader—vote for Betsy Carr or vote for Antione Green. They are both good people.

And to Betsy and Antione I say—Good luck next Tuesday. Whichever one of you wins the primary, be assured that I will work to get you elected next November.

I'm disappointed that we'll probably not hear about all the good stuff that is the backstory to this case: Called-up reservist who lost job sues Chesapeake. There's the possibility of dirty laundry on both sides of this one; the suit might be a disguise for Pandora's Box.

A former police lieutenant sued the city of Chesapeake on Friday, alleging he was denied the right to re-employment after returning from service in the Coast Guard.

Don't dig too deep, 'cause it'll get smelly, quick.

I will be gone for most of the three-day-weekend, so I will post this before I pack for the trip. Drive, fly, and sail safely this weekend!

Thomas E. Ricks, erstwhile journalist and author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, has become the embodiment of the warmongery’s moral and intellectual duplicity.

Ricks’s most recent 15 minutes of fame involved an appearance at a Firedoglake book forum. In reply to a commenter who asked if “more deaths in Iraq are worth it,” Ricks said, “I think staying in Iraq is immoral. But I think that leaving Iraq is even more immoral.” In a nutshell, Ricks framed the core fallacy in the long war philosophy: that two wrongs can make a right. This theme dominates Rick’s work these days. The Gamble and the media blitz that accompanied its debut were dazzling examples of what Voltaire was talking about when he said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Ricks continues to exalt General David Petraeus, who he has known since Petraeus was a colonel or a light colonel (Ricks says he can’t remember which). Ricks became King David’s chief legend maker when the Iraq surge began in January 2007. In a radio interview that month on WNYC in New York, Ricks described Petraeus as a “fascinating character” and “just about the best general in the Army.” He specifically cited Petraeus’s “very successful first tour” as commander in Mosul after the fall of Baghdad, but made little mention that the general tamed the city by handing out guns and bribes, and that months after Petraeus left Mosul the chief of police defected and the place went up for grabs again. (Mosul remains a major trouble spot to this day, and Petraeus is still arming and bribing militants.)

By August 2007 Ricks was waxing giddy over Petraeus’s persona. On NPR he called the general “a force of nature,” and gushed as he described the sight of Petraeus engaging in pushup contests with privates less than half his age. A veteran Pentagon reporter like Ricks should have seen the pushup prank for the used chicken feed it was, but by then Ricks was already sleeping in the general’s field cot.

Freud would have a field day with some of Ricks’s latest disclosures. In The Gamble, Ricks flat out admits that Petraeus deceived Congress (and betrayed the country) by telling the House Foreign Affairs committee he aimed to create “conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage." Petraeus’s plan all along, Ricks confesses, was “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” How does Ricks view this Promethean abuse of power and trust? “"The surge was the right step to take,” He says. It was “the least wrong move in a misconceived war.”

The “least wrong move” mantra might carry Petraeus’s water if Ricks backed it up with a sound argument, but his justifications are a logic lizard that consumes itself from the tail forward. Ricks warns that if we leave Iraq, things will almost certainly go back to the way they were under Saddam Hussein. But he also asserts that things are worse in Iraq then than they were before we invaded because “Saddam was kind of an aging, toothless tiger” and “wasn‘t a threat to anybody.” So we have to stay to keep things from getting better.

Ricks also echoes the ghost story that if we leave Iraq, a regional war is a “live possibility.” None of the countries in that region are capable of projecting conventional force much beyond their own borders, and the only nation in that part of the world capable of nuking anyone else is Israel. Terrorists organizations are already in place and we’ve seen what they can do, which is nothing compared to the havoc we have wrought with our preemptive delusions.

Ricks judges that it was “quite noble” of surge proponents like Ambassador Ray Crocker who “allegedly opposed the initial invasion of Iraq” to “step into something they thought was a mistake.” As if deliberately perpetuating a mistake could ever be a noble thing.

Ricks has evolved into such an incorrigible bull feather merchant he’s taken to lashing out at anyone who presents a viewpoint different from the one he and his masters are shilling. He decries refutations of his rhetoric as “personal” attacks, and harangues his critics with angry emails. At the Firedoglake forum, a guest asked Ricks to comment about criticisms of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new commander in the Bananastans, made recently by my colleague Gareth Porter. Ricks replied, “If Gareth Porter is reporting it, then it’s probably wrong. ‘Nuff said?” (“’Nuff said” is one of those macho expressions guys like Ricks use when they want to sound like Ralph Peters.)

I am familiar enough with Porter’s methods to know he practices sound journalism. Ricks, on the other hand, has succumbed to the access poisoning that has plagues most of the mainstream Washington media. He spent decades courting inside sources. They have now become the movers and shakers of the American hegemony, and he is their court stenographer. The most blatant example of this was his “transformation” of General Ray Odierno from the raging ox whose incompetence was the main cause of the insurgency to the genius who “conceived and executed” the surge strategy “by himself in Baghdad.” The sources of this revelation were Odierno’s subordinates and mentors and Odierno himself.

In response to an Antiwar.com piece criticizing Ricks and his colleagues at the Center for a New American Security, Ricks growled: “This is what happens when someone writes about an area about which they know absolutely freaking nothing.” What Thomas E. Ricks knows about national defense he learned from a flock of and tank thinkers and Pentagon desk rangers who don’t know their centers of gravity from their elbows. If Ricks limits himself to writing what he knows about, we’ll never hear from him again.

Let’s hope that happens real soon.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

SurveyUSA: McAuliffe 37%, Deeds 26%, Moran 22%

Lowell points out that this poll reduced the representation of African-Americans and women in its sample, both groups among which Terry is enjoying very strong support.

With only 20 days to go, now is the time when voters will start waking up and when the campaigns need the most support.

Now is when Terry needs you most. Go Terry!

OK, so it's not my party's primary. And it would be fun to attack McCauliffe in the general election with his record.

But what lesson have we learned from the 2008 elections? Once the Democrats pick their candidate, it won't matter even if we catch him with a dead girl AND a live boy in his bed, the Democrats will vote Democrat, and some independents will totter along if the candidate has enough money to sway them.

And McCauliffe has tons of money, which according to the Washington Post, he earned in the way that Obama says is evil.

The Post in fact deflates the bubble that is McCauliffe's ego, showing that his claims of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and launching dozens of companies, ALL SUCCESSFUL, is just one more of Terri McCauliffe's lies:

Yet McAuliffe's business pedigree is not so simple. He is a dealmaker who made millions from investments. And many of his biggest deals came in partnership with prominent donors and politicians, creating a portrait over the years of a Washington insider who got rich as he rose to power within the Democratic Party.
...
But they belie the complexity of a business career built mostly on intricate land deals and dot-com investments, often with wealthy political donors -- and sometimes with no jobs to show for it.

The Post details deal after deal which were little more than Terri paying off political allies in exchange to access. And it mentions a case where Terri seems to have taken advantage of the unions:

The pension fund put up virtually all the money -- about $40 million compared with McAuliffe's $100 -- even though McAuliffe would own a 50 percent share in the partnership. This detail would become a point of contention in a lawsuit filed against the fund trustees by the Department of Labor, which regulates the management of pension funds and which determined that it had not been a good investment for the electrical workers. In 2001, after two years of litigation, the trustees, including Moore, settled in U.S. District Court.

Terri had 5 companies in Virginia which he touts, but none had any employees:

And at a candidates' forum in December, in response to Moran's claim to be the only candidate who had run a business and raised a family in Virginia, McAuliffe boasted of launching five businesses in Virginia. It turned out that all five are investment partnerships, with no employees, registered to his home address in McLean.

At least he didn't try to claim a grass-cutting business. But he sure likes to "exaggerate", which is the Democrat's euphamism for "lie":

McAuliffe's tendency to exaggerate his successes adds to that perception. Describing the apartments he purchased with the union fund, McAuliffe said he "went through every apartment myself, like 1,600 of them, to make sure the toilets worked" -- but then added: "Well, I didn't go through 1,600. But I went through every property exhaustively. Sure I did! I owned them!" McAuliffe then claimed that his home-building company built 1,300 homes at its peak, but an adviser later clarified that the figure was closer to 800.

The post story is a must-read, which is something I very rarely say.

Here's some fun in the vein of Jeff Foxworthy

You know you're a wingnut when...

Anne Coulter calls you a right-wing radical.

When...

Rush Limbaugh denounces your free-market zealotry.

When

The Richmond Times Dispatch calls you "Right of Center".

Well, the first two may be made up, but the #3 is as real as today's RTD Op-Ed page.

Here are a few choice tidbits as Richmond's favority right-leaning rag chafes under Bob McDonnells's "conservative-sating", record driven by "internal Republican politics":

McDonnell's stances appear driven by internal Republican politics; specifically, sating conservatives who control the nominating process. The opinions were written before Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, now seeking re-election, conceded the gubernatorial nomination to McDonnell.

In another perceived sop to conservatives, McDonnell intervened on behalf of Episcopal parishes in Northern Virginia that broke with the diocese to protest the ordination of a gay bishop in New Hampshire.

McDonnell has to answer for more: his opposition to controls on smoking in public, the non-solution for roads, industry friendly re-regulation of utilities, and federal court rulings spotlighting his hostility to abortion.

Has McDonnell taken positions that allow him to reach the middle, where elections are decided?

To paraphrase his answer to a stickier question -- one best avoided in a family-oriented publication: not that he can recall.

That last dig is a wave towards the drama which earned McDonnell the monniker "Taliban Bob". Read the ugly details here.

One reason for light blogging is that I am lazy.

Another is that I am working on an exhibit for the 15th annual Manassas Railway Festival, to be held June 6, 2009 at the Manassas Rail Station.

I did this back in 2006, when I had my back problems. This year has been a lot easier, since I am not in constant pain. Also, the tables were already built, and I still have most of my models.

So of course, I took the opportunity to make it bigger and badder. I've added a full 2nd level, with an extra wing, so instead of an "L" I now have a "U". I'm also working on intermediate levels, giving a more "3-dimensional" look.

So here's hoping for a sunny, cool day on June 6th. It should be a lot of fun. There will also be live music and games for the kids.

You know you want to have fun, and you know you can't afford to travel this year, so come on out and spend a day with your neighbors looking at trains. You can also see the big empty lot where they don't have an annoying sign.

Sad fact: when I did the last train show, I was right next to that property, and I have pictures of the house that used to be there before they burned it down and made it into a neighborhood eyesore.

I'm still around. Just don't have anything to say that isn't being said somewhere already. Anyway, in the era of Obama, it seems clear the best course of action is to hide under a rock.

You certainly don't want to say anything against what he's doing, because he seems quite willing to use the power of government against people who displease him. I figure if the guy can take over two car companies, what chance do I have?

It is interesting to note that a couple of months ago, we were all told how bad the economy would get by the end of the year if we didn't pass Obama's idea of a "stimulus package". But now that we DID pass Obama's bill, we've already reached all the milestones that were expected by the end of the year. Which would suggest that rather than "stimulating" the economy, Obama actually made it worse.

We have lost more jobs since Obama took office than he promised to "save or create". I once joked that when Obama promised to save 4 million jobs, that the other 100+ million jobholders better watch out. But we won't lose 100 million jobs, because Obama isn't going to cut any government positions. He'll probably hire people to help him run the car companies.

Gas prices dropped like a stone when we got rid of the stupid ban on offshore drilling. But now that Obama seems to be re-imposing the ban by dictatorial fiat, prices are shooting up again.

The problem with the Stimulus bill is that most of the money went to state and local governments. I was in Fair Oaks mall last saturday, and I looked all around, but I didn't see government shopping. If you give money to real people, they go spend it, which means businesses stay open and hire people who spend their earnings which means more business.

If you give money to the government, government doesn't go to the shopping mall, they generate new programs to waste the money where it will do no good. Oh, and they take forever to do no good, apparently after all the rush to enact the stimulus package, only about 15% of the money has been spent.

And when you are trying to figure out who to thank for the federal stimulus money we are getting, thank me. I'm a taxpayer, and it's my money they are giving out. And yours, if you are a taxpayer. Some people are thanking Connally, or Obama, or Webb/Warner. Sorry, they aren't giving you their money, they are giving you MY money. Might as well thank the robber who gives you money he just stole from the guy in the alley.

It is reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch that Russell County businessman and supervisor John Bowerbank has dropped out of the Democratic race for Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor.  This is after he sank record sums of his own money (around $400,000) into the campaign.  Bowerbank is reportedly throwing his support to Jody Wagner.

My guess is that the Democrats have pressured Bowerbank to drop out in exchange for an appointment in the Deeds, McAuliffe, or Moran administrations should the Dems win the Governorship.

Virginia House of Delegates members Rob Bell and David Toscano provided their perspectives on the issues that came before the 2009 legislature at the May 13, 2009 meeting of the Senior Statesmen of Virginia held at the Charlottesville Senior Center. An honors graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Virginia Law School, Rob Bell served as a state prosecutor for five years. He prosecuted over 2,400 cases, working with the police and crime victims to bring criminals to justice. Representing the 58th House District (County of Greene and parts of Albemarle, Fluvanna, and Orange Counties), Rob has written laws that crack down on drunk driving. He was named the 2005 Outstanding Legislator by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)-Virginia. He is also interested in school safety. In recent years, he has written laws to ban criminal sex offenders from school property during school hours and to require additional background checks on school personnel. In 2008, Rob helped overhaul Virginias mental health laws in light of the tragedy at Virginia Tech. An Eagle Scout, Rob was an active volunteer with the Boy Scouts and with the public schools prior to his election in 2001. Robs wife, Jessica, is a schoolteacher. She is currently staying home to raise their children, Robbie and Evelyn. The Bells live in Albemarle County and are members of Aldersgate United Methodist Church David Toscano was elected to his first term in the Virginia House of Delegates in November 2005 representing the 57th House District (City of Charlottesville and part of Albemarle County). David was born in Syracuse, New York in 1950, the first of five children. He was educated in the public schools, received a bachelors degree from Colgate University in 1972, a Ph.D. from Boston College in 1979, and a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1986. He has taught at various colleges and universities, including Boston College, the University of Maryland (European Division), Piedmont Virginia Community College, the University of Virginia, and James Madison University. He is an attorney with Buck, Toscano & Tereskerz, Ltd., specializing in family law and real estate. David served on the Charlottesville City Council from 1990 to 2002 and as Mayor from 1994 to 1996. David is a resident of the City of Charlottesville, where he lives with his wife of 30 years, Nancy A. Tramontin, and their son, Matthew. David serves on the Courts of Justice, Transportation, and Science and Technology Committees in the House of Delegates. He is also a member of the Disability Commission, the Joint Commission to Study Math, Science and Technology Education in the Commonwealth, and the Joint Subcommittee to Study Land Use Tools in the Commonwealth. He is also a member of the United Way Board and the Chamber of Commerce. The program was moderated by SSV board member Jim Perkins. Following the presentation questions were taken from the audience.

Seems students at William and Mary have set a new world record...



Denise Watson Batts of The Virginian-Pilot tells us William & Mary crew breaks record dancing to 'Thriller'.

Thrilling news from the College of William & Mary: The school learned today that an often-off-beat but courageous collection of students, faculty and staff broke the Guinness World Record for the most people performing the Michael Jackson “Thriller” dance simultaneously in one location.

The feat took place on April 19 in the Sunken Garden when 242 “zombies” – dressed mainly, at least from the looks of a You Tube video, in college standard sweats and shorts – gathered to shuffle, stomp and slide as the classic song rolled across the lawn.

What fun...

Cost savings in higher education, from the Times Dispatch.

Bob McDonnell, the presumptive Republican nominee for governor, says Virginia's tax-supported colleges and universities can hold down tuition by cutting expenses.

The recent announcement of General David McKiernan’s permanent transfer to Fort Palooka is the latest punch line in our Bananastan farce. Defense secretary Robert Gates claims that McKiernan’s relief as commander in Afghanistan merely reflected a need for “fresh thinking,” but even the war mongrels on the rabid right can see it was a stratagem to make McKiernan the fall guy for all the collateral damage caused by the air strikes that President Obama authorized.

Ironically, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, McKiernan’s replacement, has a proven record of executing just the kinds of strikes McKiernan got fired for. On top of that, Obama still intends to send the 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that McKiernan requested for no apparent reason. (When Obama asked him how he’d use the extra troops, McKiernan made the sound of sandbags forming a levee.)

So we’re on track to escalate a war for which the administration admits there is no military solution and continuing to employ attrition tactics that make more new bad guys than they attrite. It's enough to make Clausewitz claw at his coffin lid.

Here’s how you’re supposed to plan and execute a military strategy. You look at a situation and you decide what kind of political end state you want to achieve. Then you decide if you can formulate a feasible military objective that can accomplish the policy aim. Next you determine the adversary’s center of gravity, which is the thing (or collection of things) he can use to thwart your military plan, and the thing you have to defeat. Only when you’ve done those things do you begin to calculate how many troops you need to accomplish the mission, and after that you start working details like logistics.

But with our Bananastan strategy, we started with logistics and worked our way backwards. In January 2009, the Washington Post reported that the Army was already building $1.1 billion worth of Fort Palookas in Afghanistan to accommodate additional troops, and planned to begin spending an additional $1.3 billion on construction in 2010. That money started queuing up at the hopper well before McKiernan’s request for 30,000 additional troops became public. It’s a cherished military stratagem: throw bad seed money at whatever hooliganism you want; then Congress has to throw good money after it or be labeled as “weak on national security.”

Gates’s bull feather merchants had been making a show of working on a Bananastan strategy when they decided to let the stink roll uphill for a change. As the Post reported, they began “looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates.” That’s a traditional military leadership technique known in the trenches as “the buck stops there.”

The White House national security team—laughably described by Robert Dreyfus in a recent Rolling Stone article as “Obama’s chess masters”—unveiled a white paper describing its new Bananastan strategy in late March. National Security Adviser James Jones and the rest of the chess club based their plan on “realistic and achievable” objectives that are fantastic and unattainable. We cannot, as they suggest, make stable governments in Afghanistan or Pakistan. “Increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” is a pipe dream that, even if it comes true, would simply give us one more armed outfit in the region that we can’t control. Their initiative for “involving the international community” makes one wonder if they’ve been paying attention at all. To hear Gates tell it, everything that’s gone wrong in the Bananastans is NATO’s fault, so why would we want more international involvement?

The most delusional aspect of the new strategy is its “core goal,” which is to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens.” Modern terrorists need safe havens like dolphins need power tools. The only sanctuary they need to plan and coordinate their operations is a pocket large enough to conceal an iPhone.

The white paper makes no mention of centers of gravity, critical strengths and vulnerabilities, measures of effectiveness, decisive points, courses of action, lines of operations, or any other term that belongs in a proper strategy involving military action. It contains a host of trendy platitudes about a “new way of thinking” and “building a clear consensus.” The paper even has talk of bringing non-military forms of power to bear, as if that’s something new. Information, diplomacy and economy were key elements of warfare long before Thucydides and Sun Tsu wrote on the subject around 400 BCE. And make no mistake; when a foreign policy action involves shooting people and blowing things up, it’s not “economic assistance” or “education and training.” It’s “war.”

When a strategy’s aphorisms morph into non-sequiturs, you know none of the think tankers involved with the project was doing any thinking, new or otherwise. “A strategic communications program must be created, made more effective, and resourced,” the chess set tells us in its white paper. I wonder which they’ll do first: create the program or make it more effective.

I’ve said before that in order to put an end to the American security state, Obama needs to order every military officer from the full bird level up to retire. It is now clear that he also needs to purge the defense apparatus of its thundering flock of foreign policy wonks. It may be that the generals and tank thinkers driving our ship of state will drop dead from brain hemorrhage before they make America the latest superpower to embalm itself in Afghanistan, but don't count on it.

I doubt if Obama will do what needs to be done. Look on the bright side, though. Athens produced most of the art and philosophy that defined western civilization only after it lost its wars with Persia and Sparta, so maybe America can still become Ronald Reagan's "shining city upon a hill.”

If we do, we’ll need a new generation of strategists who know that it’s better to charge down a hill than up one.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

By Bob Gibson

      What happens when news coverage of campaigns and state and local governments starts to dry up?

      Do people rely more on the paid media bought by the candidates? Do voters scour the Internet for thoughts and newsy items on blogs?

      When campaign spending increases and hard news coverage decreases, will the anything-goes atmosphere of the Wild, Wild West replace the solid scoops of news that contain attribution and two or more sides of a story?

      An inveterate political junkie, I read blogs almost daily yet often find anonymous or poorly sourced attacks, heavy on emotional opinion.

      The Virginia General Assembly, which has all 100 of its House of Delegates seats on ballots this fall, is less and less observed and reported on by major media this year as newspapers and stations from Tidewater to Northern Virginia trim back coverage.

      Where many TV stations once considered government and politics important beats to cover, fewer commit to political coverage today. Radio coverage of the state’s politics and government has fallen off as well in recent years. Luckily, Charlottesville residents receive far more coverage of their state and local governments than many other Virginians, yet the trend toward less has hit here as well.

      Newspaper coverage of the General Assembly is lighter everywhere, a sad fact also true in other states, as more papers are doing less in state capitals. Stories are shorter and many items once covered get brief mention or are ignored. Individual major daily newspapers are dying.

      Especially at a time when there is more and more money pouring into politics, fewer reporters are following the money. This trend bodes ill.

      Virginia has been a relatively clean state politically for at least the past 60 years, but when newspapers and major media cut back routine coverage of who is influencing our government to do what, then there is no guarantee the state will stay clean. What positive image there is of government can be replaced all too swiftly by the taint of Illinois on the James.
      Another sad trend is the tendency for media consumers to live in an age of designer information. We all can design our own information sources to reflect our likes and prejudices so much that opposing views are either missing or more demonized than understood. We can pick whole networks and other sources of views and news to tell us pretty much what we want to hear.

      Sarah Palin fans watched her on the like-minded Fox News. Barack Obama supporters preferred his coverage on MSNBC.

      By contrast, one example of how people can come together to share different views took place at an issue forum last September that drew about 350 people in Danville to hear from congressional candidates Virgil Goode and Tom Perriello. Most of the audience who attended came supporting one of the two candidates and enjoyed cheering their guy. Afterward, many people commented that they appreciated the chance to really listen for a couple of hours to the other side.

    Our state and nation are split down the middle into partisan camps that don’t often meet each other. They don’t read and watch the same news. It’s little wonder that both major party brands have lost some luster. The independent, or generic, political brand may be growing as Democrats or Republicans each are demonized in the eyes of those increasingly getting news from more partisan sources.

      Virginia is in play today for both political parties in statewide races and, as such, is about to attract more money than ever to influence who runs our state. Just in the past two weeks, more than $2 million was pumped into gubernatorial campaigns and partisan groups to tout one side or attack another.

      No matter who wins the June 9 Democratic primary for governor among three candidates, this will be a historically expensive and hard-hitting general election campaign with more money behind negative ads than in any previous Virginia governor’s contest. It’s likely that Republican Bob McDonnell will join the attack after Democrats Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran finish their nomination fight. Any dirt deemed too radioactive for a campaign to throw will be tossed by other groups that might, or might not, operate independently and yet are well funded by the parties and their big donors.

      Polls show McAuliffe, a big-money magnet with a loud and magnetic personality, is a front-runner in the primary despite never having held or sought Virginia political office before. That said, polls are not predictive and are notoriously off in the spring because no one really knows who is very likely to vote in a rare June gubernatorial Democratic primary with perhaps only 5 to 7 percent of the state’s registered voters participating. Most voters have given Nov. 3 little thought.

      McDonnell leads all three Democrats in recent polling for hypothetical Nov. 3 matchups, but Mary Sue Terry and Jerry Kilgore, who also ran for governor of Virginia after winning attorney general elections, can testify to the reversible nature of leads in early polls. 

      McDonnell, who is unopposed for the GOP nomination, has been sidling over toward the middle of the Virginia electorate from his former position on the right. McDonnell, like McAuliffe, Deeds and Moran, will be casting himself as a nice guy with a lot of leadership skills. Each will seek to cast himself as a jobs-creating governor.

      As the money piles up in the governor’s race and in legislative contests viewed as competitive, let’s hope that many people follow the money. Neither party is being given lots of money to shrink government, so let the bloggers, the reporters and the interested public see who is trying to help or influence whom.

This recipe is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S

In lean times and good times too, it's always good to use up all the edible food in the fridge, but what is a household to do after they've eaten hot dogs or sausage on the grill one night and then don't feel like that type of meal for another several weeks? You've got leftover buns, hon. Thanks for Jake for naming this new recipe.

Banana Nut Dog
1 half or whole hot dog bun
1 tablespoon of peanut putter
1/2 banana (optional)


Make into a sandwich for a quick on-the-go snack.