The battle for the heart and soul of the GOP

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham   For a brief moment or two after the 2006 midterm elections, it had seemed that the Republican Party was perhaps going off its ideological moorings. The talk was reaching the level of near-clamor regarding how the GOP was going to have to consider retreating from the right-wing conservative…

Right to left? In what direction will Dems take national politics?

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham   It hasn’t been that long since some in the punditry and the blogosphere were speculating aloud about how Republican victories in the race for the White House and in Congress in 2004 might be signaling the dawn of a GOP century. And it seems that now, instead of…

What the heck just happened?

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham   You listen to Bob Goodlatte, Republican congressman from the Sixth District of Red State Virginia, heading into his eighth term, finishing out his second two-year term as chairman of the powerful House Agriculture Committee, talk about life on Capitol Hill, and you realize pretty quickly that a sea…

Can we all just get along?

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham   The Shenandoah Valley is usually pretty tame as far as its politics goes – but even the solid Republican Mountain Valley has seen its share of contentiousness this political season. To wit … – One of the highlights of the Augusta County Fair this summer was an episode…

Next on the Mark Warner agenda: Is former governor, White House candidate ready to again be a player on Virginia political scene?

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham   Mark Warner made it a point to tell Virginia politics reporters covering the final year of his term as governor of the Old Dominion that he really felt he was hitting his stride in the job – and while the focus of their editors seemed to be on…

Race issues dog Allen

Chris Graham

The Top Story by Chris Graham   A group of former University of Virginia football teammates of U.S. Sen. George Allen alleges that the former quarterback regularly used the n-word to refer to African-Americans. A second group of the Republican’s former teammates has stepped up to say that this is not true. Meanwhile, the state’s…

Fat chance

Chris Graham

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham Isn’t it weird how much we worry about the fact that we’re fat? And don’t think that we don’t all spend way too much time on this. “Hannah says I’m fat,” my 7-year-old niece Rachel said, referring to criticisms from her sister, who is exactly one pound lighter,…

‘E-C-W! E-C-W! E-C-W!’

Chris Graham

Story by Chris Graham ECW at its height was the antithesis of what professional wrestling has become – corporate, antiseptic, formulaic. The question of the summer is – how can the people who pioneered the concept of corporate, antiseptic, formulaic wrestling possibly do justice to the memory of the ECW revolution?