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Much uncertainty swirls around the race for the U.S. Senate seat in Virginia up for re-election in 2012 – first and foremost whether incumbent Democrat Jim Webb will even be in the running for re-election. That uncertainty, and the changing political climate in the Commonwealth since Webb’s upset of George Allen in 2006 and Barack…
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Gov. Bob McDonnell’s plan to use money from the privatization of state-run ABC stores to fund transportation-infrastructure improvements is likely to die a quiet death in the 2011 Virginia General Assembly, according to State Sen. Emmett Hanger. “I think some of us have decided that we would sit on it a little bit, let him…
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The head of the state Democratic Party is offering criticism of Gov. Bob McDonnell in the wake of his election as vice chair of the Republican Governors Association. “Bob McDonnell’s aggressive campaign schedule does raise valid questions about whether campaigning in other states is the best way for our governor to spend his time, especially…
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Editor Chris Graham joins WREL’s “Online with Jim Bresnahan” to talk Virginia news and politics. The segment begins with discussion of a recent poll that shows former governor and senator George Allen leading a pack of potential candidates for support for the 2012 GOP Senate nomination. The same poll, surprisingly, also shows both Jim Webb…
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At first glance, Virginia has flipped, big time. The Old Dominion was blue in 2008, and has been bright red since, with Republicans sweeping the 2009 state races and taking three of the six seats held by incumbent Democrats in the 2010 congressional midterms. Not so fast, says Quentin Kidd, a political-science professor at Christopher…
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The driving force behind this blog is my effort to get my head around what happened in Virginia between 2008 and 2009 that turned the tide from where we saw the Old Dominion give its electoral votes to Democrat Barack Obama in ‘08 and then elected Republicans Bob McDonnell, Bill Bolling and Ken Cuccinelli to…
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Interesting week for me in my often overlapping roles as a business writer and politics writer. On Wednesday, I met with U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, after a roundtable in Staunton with local business owners and business leaders who gave Warner quite the earful about the state of business and the state of the…
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Mark Warner spent his first year in the United States Senate alternatively getting his feet wet and biting his lip. “It was a little bit of earning your bona fides. I tried to do that particularly on the financial-reform bill, really dig in an on issue. And there were probably some times where I bit…
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Former Gov. Tim Kaine signed a much-trumpeted reform of payday lending in 2008, but loopholes in the industry-written law were quickly exploited by lenders, who have since moved on to other high-interest loan products that have proven to be highly marketable in the midst of the ongoing economic slowdown. Staunton City Councilman Bruce Elder led…
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