WHS alum to travel abroad to teach English
Sarah Coffey admits to being “nervous” about her first trip out of the country in September. She expects she’ll get over the nerves pretty quickly, though.
“I’m not sure what I’ll be doing. I could be teaching 8-year-olds or adults,” said Coffey, a 2006 Waynesboro High School graduate who will be leaving soon for a year in Ecuador, where she will be teaching English.
Coffey is focused for now on raising money to pay her expenses for the trip – $5,000 all told. An admitted math-phobe, she has been crunching numbers like a seasoned CPA, raising more than $2,000 toward the goal, with a July 22 charity golf tournament at the Waynesboro Country Club next on her agenda.
This fall she will be in Ecuador under the auspices of WorldTeach, a nonprofit founded in 1986 that coordinates educational-assistance activities around the world.
Coffey was attracted to the program out of a desire at first to expand her own horizons.
“I keep thinking about how much this country has given me – the opportunity to learn, to expand my knowledge, to get my bachelor’s degree, to get my master’s degree. And I look at other students my age, younger, older, that don’t get that opportunity. I’m taking this as a lifetime experience, a privilege, to expand my knowledge and help others be able to see the opportunities out in the world,” Coffey said.
A key for her students, she hopes, is an ability to communicate in English that can provide them with economic opportunities in addition to cultural enrichment.
“Tourism can be an important part of the economy in Ecuador. The more students can converse easily in English, the better positioned they will be for jobs in that sector, and maybe the better off they will be as a result,” Coffey said.
You can follow Sarah’s preparations for Ecuador and her time there on her blog, El Capitulo Siguiente.
Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing
Howard Dean, Tim Kaine, Vince Lombardi, and a guy named Phil Bengston
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
When the football team starts losing games, the fan base tends to start getting antsy, and when the losses compound into a losing season, you can start hearing calls for the coach’s head.
Politics isn’t unlike football in that respect, which brings us to the curious case of Tim Kaine, the former Virginia governor who was tapped by Barack Obama in January 2009 to head up the Democratic National Committee, a playoff team at the time, to borrow from the football analogy.
The coach that Kaine was replacing was former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who pulled himself up from having been the frontrunner who couldn’t in the 2004 Democratic Party presidential nomination race to basically being the man responsible for rebuilding the DNC from the ashes of two stinging White House defeats on the wings of his controversial 50-state strategy. In the process Dean established himself as a sort of Vince Lombardi of the Democratic Party, the party’s triumphs in the 2006 midterms and the 2008 Obama win in the presidential race being his back-to-back Super Bowls. Continue reading “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” »
Democrats: Where do you go from here?
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
You talk to one Democrat, and the party definitely, no question, needs to restrategize toward the middle. The blowback from voters in Massachusetts is an obvious clear signal. The nation isn’t comfortable with the direction things had been headed on health care and the stimulus. Time to pull things back in for a while.
Talk to another Democrat, and that first Democrat is either an idiot or worse, a sellout. Exit polls in Massachusetts indicate that a strong majority of voters there like their state-level version of universal health care. The blowback was local, aimed at a poorly-run campaign on the part of the Democratic nominee, Martha Coakley.
Changing the course now will bring about a repeat of 1994, when Democrats threw in the towel on health-care reform and suffered at the polls in a historic GOP takeover of the House that November.
“There’s no profit in moving to the center,” said Robert Borosage, the co-director of the Washington, D.C.,-based Campaign for America’s Future, which bills itself as the “strategy center for the progressive movement.” Continue reading “Democrats: Where do you go from here?” »
Focus | The political calculus on health-care reform for Warner, Webb
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Virginia’s two United States senators, within hours of each other earlier this week, were headlining efforts in the Senate aimed at impacting the health-care reform whirlwind winding up on Capitol Hill this December.
Mark Warner was first out of the gate on Tuesday with the coalition of moderate Democrats that he cobbled together to back a series of amendments to the health-reform bill pushing work with the public and private sectors on cost containment. Jim Webb upped the ante with the announcement that he had joined a group of 19 senators – a bipartisan group because it includes four Republicans, most notably Arizona Sen. John McCain – backing another amendment that would allow for the importation of lower-priced, Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs from other approved countries. Continue reading “Focus | The political calculus on health-care reform for Warner, Webb” »
InDepth | First draft of history: How Bob won, how Creigh lost
This just in to the AFP newsroom – Bob McDonnell can now be projected the winner in the 2009 Virginia governor’s race.
OK, most people still have yet to vote, but the writing is on the wall, clearly, with the Republican leading Democrat Creigh Deeds by at least 10 points in the pre-election polls.
The polls tell more about where Virginia is politically right now than that we’re about to elect a Republican to lead state government for the first time in 12 years. Foremost, they tell us that we’re about to make this move even while President Barack Obama and Gov. Tim Kaine, both Democrats, maintain approval ratings among Virginians over 50 percent, with Kaine near 60 percent in some polls. Continue reading “InDepth | First draft of history: How Bob won, how Creigh lost” »
AFP InDepth | What about downticket?
Bob McDonnell clearly appears to be pulling away from Creigh Deeds at the top of the ticket in Virginia’s state races. At first glance, Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and GOP attorney-general candidate Ken Cuccinelli would seem to be on their way to victories on Nov. 3 as well.
A poll conducted by Christopher Newport University puts a different look on the downticket races, and suggests that there’s room for Democratic lieutenant-governor candidate Jody Wagner and ticketmate Steve Shannon in the attorney-general race to pull off upsets on Election Day. Continue reading “AFP InDepth | What about downticket?” »
Breaking down the Democratic primary
Christopher Newport University political scientist Quentin Kidd joins us on “The Chris Graham Show” to break down the June 9 Democratic Party gubernatorial primary race with a focus on how candidates Terry McAuliffe, Creigh Deeds and Brian Moran are running in Hampton Roads and thoughts on the expected voter turnout. Length: 10:39. Continue reading “Breaking down the Democratic primary” »
White House: Obama will turn Virginia blue
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
He started his general-election campaign here in June after sewing up the Democratic Party nomination, and he’s going to end it here late Monday night. Still want to quibble over how seriously Barack Obama is taking Virginia?
“What better way is there to showcase the importance of this state as far as the Democrats and the Obama campaign are concerned?” George Mason University political-science professor Mark Rozell said.
Continue reading “White House: Obama will turn Virginia blue” »
U.S. Senate: The radical centrist will shake things up in D.C.
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
I was working for an ultraconservative newspaper based in Charlottesville – not exactly the best place for somebody who would later become the chair of a Democratic Party committee to be, but it paid the bills. It also gave me a different perspective on Mark Warner, at first a skeptical one, as I covered his 2001 gubernatorial campaign, and his pronouncements about being a fiscal conservative, and then as we launched The Augusta Free Press in 2002, and we heard the drumbeat toward that 2004 budget reform or tax increase or whatever you want to call it depending on your political perspective.
Continue reading “U.S. Senate: The radical centrist will shake things up in D.C.” »
