Just look at what he did this evening: speak at the monthly meeting of the Jefferson Area Tea Party. Consider that for a moment. Perriello is, for the second year in a row, holding dozens of town hall meetings across the district. Last year he held more such meetings than any other member of congress, and I imagine he’ll set the record this year, too. That’s really quite remarkable. Those of us in the district have come to regard this as normal, but it’s really not.

Can you imagine Virgil Goode having ever done this sort of thing? Speaking at—to use the left-wing equivalent of teabaggers—a meeting of angry socialists? Taking questions, some hostile, from audiences of hundreds of people? Of course not! Save for the minimal number of debates with challengers, I don’t remember Goode ever addressing an audience more challenging than his own donors, and that includes when he was a Democrat, independent, and a Republican.

I wonder if Robert Hurt might be willing to commit to doing the same thing, if elected. Would he agree to hold two dozen public forums throughout the district each year, take unscreened questions from audience members, and respond to all of them? Like all challengers, he’d almost certainly say “yes,” but the important thing is to get him on the record, in case he does win. If he does emerge victorious next November, I’d put $50 up against anybody that he won’t meet or exceed the bar established by Perriello in this regard.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more responsive, more open congressman in the nation than Rep. Perriello. Don’t lose sight of that.

Hey, it’s better than most of the crap other people have proposed.

This was our last state song. It’s amazing that it remained the state song as long as it did.

(Via Craig Fifer)

It’s entirely possible that Perriello is a few points behind Hurt now, given the political climate—these results may well be correct. And I think it’s good news that Hurt’s name recognition is comparatively low, because that gives Perriello a chance to define him. With this poll, I finally feel like this race can be assessed. Let the games begin.

The bumps that Hurt and Perriello are finding on the campaign trail reflect nationwide discontent and suspicion among voters. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 68 percent of voters lack confidence in Democratic lawmakers, and 72 percent lack confidence in Republican lawmakers.

Only 26 percent of registered voters said they were likely to vote for their current House representative. Among those most likely to vote, 56 percent said they would prefer a GOP takeover of the House.

So we’ve got a pair of polls within the MoE that show that 70% of voters don’t trust lawmakers. We’ve got a deeply implausible poll that shows that 74% of registered voters are going to replace the incumbent. (Consider, for a moment, the odds of 322 seats turning over this November.) And we’ve got people expressing a desire about something that they have basically no input into, which is how people will vote in the rest of the nation, rather than what party they’d prefer to represent them.

Translation: Don’t nobody know nothin’. Pollsters, politicians, or voters, apparently.

DP: [Are you] going to be willing to debate Jeff Clark and Tom Perriello?
RH: We need to work out all of the details, but debates are a very, very important part of elections and obviously we want to make ourselves available to all of the citizens who will be judging us and we’re committed to doing that but obviously we have the details to work out. We haven’t talked with the Perriello campaign—I don’t think—about what they’re interested in.
DP: But would you be willing to?
RH: Absolutely.

That couldn’t be much more clear.

Then, shortly after midnight this morning, Hurt’s campaign released a written statement to the paper, in which he said that “we cannot allow the important debate in this election to be sidetracked by a candidate who is not serious about his campaign or his ability to win.” The campaign claims that Hurt wasn’t answering the question of whether he would debate Clark, but instead was…uh…well, they’re not saying. Apparently, if you ask Hurt if he’s willing to do something, he just says “absolutely.”

Hurt’s campaign is right to want Clark excluded from debates. I imagine the guy is polling below the margin of error. Not only would his involvement in debates probably not be useful, but it would be a bad political move for Hurt to give Clark any attention. Congressman Perriello quite naturally wants Clark included, because every vote that Clark gets is taken from Hurt. The problem here is this business of saying one thing one week and another the next, without explaining the change and, worse still, pretending that the Progress is at fault here. It’s OK to change your mind in the face of new information—in fact, it’s often the only reasonable thing to do—but you’ve got to share those facts with others if you want to be perceived as reasonable. Attempting to discredit a newspaper whose endorsement will be important this November is a foolish move.

I’d put money on the Progress endorsing Hurt. Or, rather, I would have. Now I’m not so sure.

Here’s the promotional blurb:

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has demanded that UVA turn over years of private correspondence between climate researchers. The University is fighting back, arguing that Cuccinelli doesn’t have the right to do that, and that the subpoena amounts to a partisan witch hunt. The outcome of this battle between Cuccinelli and UVA will establish what academic freedom really amounts to in Virginia—and how safe any employee of the University is from this sort of partisan investigation.

Virginia ACLU Executive Director, Kent Willis, will explain what’s really going on here—the process that the Attorney General is using, what UVA’s position is in fighting back, and what the outcome is likely to be.

Free appetizers and socializing (with a cash bar) from 7 to 7:30 p.m. precedes the discussion and question and answer session. Please come join us!

RSVP on Facebook, if you’re into that, or just show up at Rapture, have a drink or two, meet some new people, and learn what the deal is with this whole Cuccinelli subpoena business.

Virginia Republicans launched a pair of attack ads Wednesday questioning whether Reps. Tom Perriello, D-5th District, and Rick Boucher, D-9th District, joined with other congressional Democrats who applauded Mexican President Felipe Calderon last week for urging an assault weapons ban.

The problem, the Los Angeles Times pointed out Thursday, was neither Perriello nor Boucher attended Calderon’s speech.

It gets worse:

Garren Shipley, RPV director of communications, said in an e-mail statement that pro-gun Democrats like Perriello should have spoken out against Calderon’s speech. He said the ads would stay online until Perriello gives his opinion on Calderon’s call to ban sporting guns.

It was lame enough that the RPV half-assedly accused the congressmen of doing something without any evidence that they did it. Then, when shown to be wrong, their response is to further entrench themselves in that lie. Just admit it, RPV: you screwed up. Just say “we’re grateful to know that these congressman are on the right side of this issue.”

Accusing somebody of believing something that there’s no evidence that they believe, and then demanding that they repudiate that imaginary position, is a tactic of the most desperate, pathetic politics. It’s practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike, but really more the style of partisan bloggers than an entire state political party. Given how well Virginia Republicans did last November, can’t we expect better from them?

Kagan, famously, joined in an amicus brief in a lawsuit fighting the Solomon Amendment, the law that prohibits federal funding to universities that bar military recruiters from their campus. Kagan did so on behalf of Harvard Law School, where she was dean, because the school prohibits any organization from recruiting on campus that discriminates. The military, of course, prohibits gays from serving, ergo they weren’t allowed on campus. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the military, and that was that.

Here’s the odd thing: the RPV doesn’t mention the nut of this, the fact that it’s about “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They claim that Kagan prohibited recruiters to send the message that “somehow the armed forces are not a valid career, and that military service is something to be shunned.” The dispute wasn’t about the military, it was about discrimination against gays. The same RPV that spearheaded the marriage amendment just four years ago now can’t even bring itself to mention to its own supporters that Kagan was standing up for gay rights. In 2006, that would have been worse than barring recruiters. In 2010—when both Laura Bush and Dick Cheney have come out in favor of gay marriage—the RPV won’t even acknowledge the reason behind the dispute in question, because they know that their membership is increasingly A-OK with homosexuality.

The times, they are a-changin’.

The original text of the letter follows.

Friends-

Yesterday 10 members of the General Assembly, who also proudly served in our nation’s armed forces, sent a letter to Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb asking them if they share Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s belief that military recruiters should be kicked off the campuses of our Colleges and Universities.

You see, President Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court signed onto an amicus brief when she served a [sic] Dean of Harvard Law School that said the brave men and women who serve in our armed forces were not permitted on campus to try and recruit our nation’s best and brightest.

I want to ask you to join these General Assembly veterans and sign the letter to Senators Warner and Webb by clicking here or going to www.LetterToWarnerAndWebb.com

Virginia is home to some of the nation’s best colleges and universities and it also home to hundreds of thousands of active duty and retired military personnel, as well as their families. We should all be deeply concerned about the judicial philosophy of a candidate for the highest court in our land who appears to hold the men and women of our military in such low regard.

Blocking recruiters from campus suggests that somehow the armed forces are not a valid career, and that military service is something to be shunned. The men and women of our armed forces put their lives on the line every day to protect our freedom. Sacrifice for country is not something to be hidden away or blocked. Indeed, it should be celebrated. Additionally, shouldn’t our armed forces always try to recruit our best and brightest to ensure that the freedoms that so many have fought and died to defend, remain intact?

After you sign the letter to our U.S. Senators please forward this email to your friends and family and ask them to sign as well. The people of Virginia deserve to know if Senators Warner and Webb share Elena Kagan’s beliefs about the military or if they disagree with President Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thank you in advance for signing the letter to Senators Warner and Webb at www.LetterToWarnerAndWebb.com

Sincerely,

Pat

P.S. Once you have signed the letter at www.LetterToWarnerAndWebb.com please forward it to all of your friends and ask them to sign as well. The people of Virginia deserve to know if Senators Warner and Webb share President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee’s believe that our military should be kicked off the campuses of our colleges and universities.

The prominent anti-gay guy who turns out to be a closet case has become a cliché at this point. Can we just start assuming that the most stridently anti-gay people are gay? Is that a safe bet now?

And this is how it looked in 1780, in a medal that Governor Thomas Jefferson had struck:

Our state seal was designed by Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Edmund Pendleton, and George Wythe between July 1 and July 5, 1776. Sadly, it is not good enough for Ken Cuccinelli these 234 years later.

As you can see, the most faithful rendering of an older version of the state seal would involve showing both of Virtus’ breasts, not neither of them.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is opting for a more modest depiction of the state’s seal.

The seal depicts the Roman goddess Virtus wearing a blue tunic draped over one shoulder with her left breast exposed. But on the new lapel pins Cuccinelli recently handed out to his staff, her bosom is covered by an armored breastplate.

But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: any informed voter knew that this was just what they were getting when they voted for Cuccinelli last November. Virginia is stuck being a national laughingstock for the next three and a half years, as surely we’ll continue to play host to a series of similarly ridiculous actions and declarations on Cuccinelli’s part every month or so.

As of this morning, the slick is 100 miles long and 45 miles wide. It’s twenty miles off the coast of Louisiana, and due to hit the shore this weekend. If this wasn’t enough of a disaster in the ocean, if this stuff washes up on shore, it’ll be a nightmare. It’s so bad that officials are considering lighting it on fire. That’s right—4,500 square miles of flaming oil slick is preferable to this stuff washing up, so nasty the consequences would be. It gets worse: the slick is growing, because although the offshore drilling platform exploded, burned, and collapsed beneath the waves (killing eleven), the oil is still gushing up from the ocean floor, through the twisted and broken pipe, and out into the surrounding water, at the rate of 42,000 gallons a day. BP said this afternoon that it’ll take months to stem the flow, though now they have a never-before-tested idea that they can float in an enormous dome and drop it down over the leak, and then drill another well to suck the oil out of to stop it from coming out of the busted on. They’ve got no idea if any of this stuff will work, but they’ve got to do it, because the alternative is admitting that the gulf coast is fucked. (Again.)

Fear not: there are ships working to clean up the spill. They’re in that satellite photo. But since each ship is significantly smaller than a pixel in size, relative to the image, you can imagine how much good they’re going to do. The task is Sisyphean.

Isn’t there some kind of a government safety system in place to prevent this from happening? Well, yes, but it’s purely voluntary. There’s a proposal to make it mandatory, but—as the WSJ points out—none of these rules would have prevented this from happening. Obviously, BP didn’t want to have their drilling platform explode—this represents an enormous economic loss to them. If the fourth largest business in the world can’t stop this from happening, then is it even possible to prevent this kind of an accident?

Never mind all that, though: Governor Bob McDonnell is a “drill here, drill now” kind of guy:

Bob McDonnell supports the safe offshore exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas 50 miles off the coast of Virginia. This is not only an issue of energy independence and national security, but the development of Virginia’s offshore energy reserves will mean thousands of new jobs, billions of dollars in new investment, and hundreds of millions in new tax revenue to the Commonwealth.

Like many Republican officeholders, he likes to say that drilling offshore is perfectly safe—technology solves all!—and that it’ll put lots of people to work. The latter, as we can see from the scramble underway in the gulf right now, is absolutely true. BP is about to put thousands of people to work building a giant dome, scrubbing down oil-slicked terns, and scrubbing crude off of a hundred miles of shoreline. Offshore oil is good for the economy in the same sense that me breaking my neck is good for the economy: think of all of the doctors, therapists, etc. who will be put to work! Whether there is such a thing as “safe” drilling for oil, though, remains to be seen.

The reality of offshore oil is that we have to pick: What’s worth more, our seaside economy or oil? Can you imagine the economic apocalypse in Virginia Beach that would result from their shoreline soaked in crude? In the Bay after fisheries are destroyed, and the remaining fish migrate out of the area? Offshore oil wells present a very real risk, and we are not well served by a faith-based attempt to balance these competing interests. We’ve got to do the math, figure out the real risk, and decide if we want to stake our marine economy on the safety of drilling off Virginia’s coast.

What choice do I have? You either live, or you die. If you die, you’re dead. If you live, you’ve got a responsibility to keep moving, keep working, keep fighting. The struggle goes on. That’s the position I’m in.

It’ll be interesting to see what his district looks like after the 2011 session.

LaCivita said that Hurt will not pledge, as Perriello has, to reject contributions from lobbyists or corporate PACs. Hurt will promise, he added, to not take money from “communists”

Must we continue to pretend to be surprised by acts of violence on the part of the angry right?

Federal, state, and local officials are investigating what’s is believed to be an attempt on the life of Congressman Perriello. Coleman is now claiming to be shocked that this “collateral damage” has resulted. This is the same Coleman who planned to burn Perriello in effigy. Having spent a year and a half suggesting that Perriello should be assassinated, we’re now to believe that he’s shocked—shocked!—that anybody might actually give it a whirl.

Teabaggers are completely ineffective in the political realm. So now they’re left attempting to murder their own congressman. This isn’t a political movement. It’s an assassination conspiracy. It’s terrorism.

Danville Tea Party Leader Nigel Coleman posted [Perriello's home] address on his Facebook profile, which is not limited to only his Facebook “friends.”

“This is Rep. Thomas Stuart Price Perriello’s home address,” Coleman wrote Monday. “… I ain’t holding back anymore!!”

When Coleman learned the address was actually Perriello’s brother’s — Politico reported he and his wife have four young children — Coleman commented on another blog that the mistake was “collateral damage.”

“Do you mean I posted his brother’s address on my Facebook?” Coleman wrote. “Oh well, collateral damage.”

“I ain’t holding back,” and “collateral damage.” That says it all, doesn’t it? Teabaggers don’t want to burn Perriello in effigy, they just want to burn him. On the plus side, these guys are doing a brilliant job at building sympathy for Perriello in the district.

From the Associated Press, May 20, 1965. I think this might pass the Virginia House.

After that, the General Assembly will get together again in their annual reconvened session on April 21—just five weeks from now—when they’ll have a chance to muster enough votes to override the governor’s veto on any bills. That’s usually very brief—a few hours—and whether it’ll be interest depends on what the governor vetoes.

But Richmond Sunlight doesn’t shut down during the rest of the year. As always, we’ll be adding new features, analyzing what exactly happened this year, and filling you in on all of the stuff that goes on during the other ten months out of the year. After all, prefiling for the 2011 session starts in just four months.

Video courtesy of the House Republican Caucus.

Anyhow, just to stick a thumb in the eye of Senate Democrats, this evening I put together an HTML version of the same data, making it easier for folks to access and for search engines to index. It took me—no kidding—about twenty minutes. (For example, here’s my senator’s 2009 voting record.) As always, every scrap of legislative data on Richmond Sunlight comes directly from the legislature’s website, so I don’t have access to any special fairy dust that the Senate doesn’t have. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t care who’s in charge of the legislature, transparency is essential. Any Democrats who thinks I’m going to go easy on them had best think again.

According to Edwards the Clerk of the Senate, Susan Schaar said this would take substantial staff time to comply with such a bill. In any case Edwards said the House could do this on their own administratively saying “you don’t need a bill … it sounded like the House was trying to tell the Senate how to run its own affairs.”

The Senate has its own website internally explained Edwards that is not available to the public. Edwards wondered why anyone would “want to look at the whole list” of bills and “aren’t people just interested in looking at one bill at a time.”

Note that, despite Edwards’ remarks, the House and Senate use the same computer system to display vote data, and only one system would need to be changed. Note, too, that the legislature doesn’t even make it possible to look at one bill at a time—the public can only look at one vote at a time. To find out how legislators voted on this very bill, for instance, it’s necessary to look at three different sets of vote results. A significant reason that people want to look at a big list of bills, as Edwards is likely aware, is for opposition research. If a Republican was to challenge Edwards, she would need to read through and hand-tally thousands of votes to assemble a comprehensive voting record for Edwards, in order to inform voters whether Edwards’ record matches his rhetoric. (Journalists, bloggers, and constituents all frequently find themselves faced with performing the same task, too.) Putting all of a legislator’s votes in one place makes that process substantially easier.

HB778 was opposed by Mary Margaret Whipple (D-31), Chuck Colgan (D-29), John Edwards (D-21), Janet Howell (D-32), Mamie Locke (D-2), Louise Lucas (D-18), Henry Marsh (D-16), Yvonne Miller (D-5), Tommy Norment (R-3), Phil Puckett (D-38), Toddy Puller (D-36), Dick Saslaw (D-35), Patsy Ticer (D-30), and William Wampler (R-40). The only two legislators who supported it were Edd Houck (D-17) and Fred Quayle (R-13). Although the committee is controlled overwhelmingly by Democrats, this was not a party-line vote: two Republicans voted against the bill, while one voted for it.

This very flaw in the legislature’s website was a significant impetus behind establishing Richmond Sunlight. Want to get Del. LeMunyon’s 2010 voting record? Download from us it as a spreadsheet. It just takes a few seconds. That spreadsheet is generated on the fly—no human effort required—using the very data that’s already on the General Assembly’s website. You can download any legislator’s voting record from the bottom of the right-hand column of their page.

The Roanoke Times, in an editorial today, calls for legislators to open up their voting records, and includes some very nice words about Richmond Sunlight:

The clerk of the Senate reportedly worries that compiling the records would be costly and difficult. One must look no further than RichmondSunlight.com to see such concerns are unfounded.

RichmondSunlight is a nonpartisan Web site that compiles General Assembly information, including the voting records for each member. If a shoestring, volunteer Web site can do it, surely legislative staff can.

Indeed, RichmondSunlight, for its ease of use and comprehensive presentation of General Assembly records, has become the go-to site for anyone who follows the action in Richmond. Yet because a private group runs it, it could disappear in a moment after a fundraising shortfall or volunteer disinterest. It’s nice to have, but Virginians need an official tally.

We agree entirely, although with one correction.: Richmond Sunlight has an annual budget of $0, there is no fundraising, no staff, just one volunteer. It exists because Blue Ridge InternetWorks, a big supporter of open government, has donated a dedicated server. Which, if anything, further validates the Times’ position that the General Assembly has got to provide voting records themselves. Richmond Sunlight will exist for many years to come, but odds are that the General Assembly will be around longer still. Their website should be the official record, not ours.