Challenges ahead for state lawmakers

Chris Graham

  Column by State Sen. Creigh Deeds www.creighdeeds.com The General Assembly convened on Jan. 13. Twenty new members of the House of Delegates were sworn in, reflecting in large part the Republican sweep of the elections in November. Two new senators were sworn in, both vacancies created by the November election. Sen. Ken Stolle from…

Boyd: Poll gives candidate early lead

Chris Graham

  Staff Report News Tips: [email protected] Albemarle County Board of Supervisors member Ken Boyd is claiming the early lead in the race for the Fifth District Republican congressional nomination. An e-mail sent out by the Boyd campaign on Monday reports that a poll commissioned by the campaign has Boyd ahead of State Sen. Robert Hurt…

Focus | Morton: A ‘principled conservative’

Chris Graham

Fifth District GOP candidate builds support toward run for party nod Story by Chris Graham [email protected] The Fifth District is a living laboratory to Fluvanna County biology teacher Feda Morton, a veteran Republican Party activist seeking the GOP nomination to run for Congress in the Fifth. All Morton has to do over the course of…

Howell, Putney address concerns over health-care reform

Chris Graham

Pair cite state Medicaid-funding issue in letter to Webb, Warner Staff Report News Tips: [email protected] House Speaker Bill Howell, R-Stafford, and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Lacey E. Putney, I-Bedford, today announced that they have written U.S. Sens. Jim Webb and Mark Warner to voice their “significant concern” about the impact that health-care reform bill making…

Focus | Democratic divide

Chris Graham

Battle brewing between progressives, centrists over direction of party Story by Chris Graham [email protected] The 2001 election that ushered in the Democratic Decade in Virginia gave power in Democratic Party circles to the centrists in the mold of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine who led the mini-revolution that fall. The model that they laid out…

Focus | Verga makes case for GOP nomination in Fifth

Chris Graham

   Story by Chris Graham [email protected] What’s wrong with America, if you ask Laurence Verga, isn’t just with the direction that the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress is taking, but what their Republican predecessors did, or rather didn’t do, ahead of them. “One of the reasons our country is in the challenged position it…

Focus | Does Virginia’s state-budget process make sense?

Chris Graham

House Speaker weighs in Story by Chris Graham [email protected] The Kaine administration is hard at work putting together a proposed two-year budget for state lawmakers to review in the upcoming 2010 General Assembly session. Anybody see what might be wrong with this picture? The big thing is that Tim Kaine won’t be governor next year,…