On the Western Banks of the Shenandoah

Details have been released for the 61st outing of the Shad Planking, a benefit put together by the Wakefield Ruritan Club. During the Byrd Days the gathering was an exclusively white Democratic affair that was essentially used to anoint the next Governor. However, over the years the event has evolved in to a day of binge drinking and political theater as campaigns on both sides put themselves through a rigorous organizational test, mostly in the form of epic sign wars on the road leading to the Planking grounds. This year the main event will be the speeches by McDonnell, Moran, McAullife, and Deeds, the contenders for Governor. 

I’ve never been, but this might be my year. Tickets are $20. 

The story line that is dominating the passage of a compromise smoking ban bill in the House is that Speaker Howell got the bill passed. However, what hasn’t been told is just what the shakedown was on his support, and it doesn’t look good for the Speaker. 

Thirty two Republicans (out of the fifty three strong caucus, excluding Abbitt and Putney) sided against the Speaker on this one, just over 60% of the Caucus. Additionally, those who should be closest to the speaker, Committee Chairs, only sided with the Speaker by an 8 to 6 margin. Add in the leadership (Leader Griffith, Whip Cox, and Caucus Chair Nixon) and that number goes to 9 to 8.

Perhaps even more telling is the margins according to when the Delegates were elected. Of those Delegates elected before the Speaker was elected in 2003, the margin is 19 against to 17 yes, meaning that a little over half of those elected prior to Howell becoming speaker voted against him. This in of itself shows the waning power of the Speaker. However, when you look at those elected after 2003, the numbers are even more eye opening. 11 voted against the speaker while just 5 voted with him. Nearly 70% of those elected while Howell was Speaker bucked him. Things are slightly better when you look at those candidates that Howell supported financially since 2003. Six voted against him, four with him. However, that’s still 60% of those he supported who bucked him on this vote. 

Howell managed to get his way this time, just as he did in 2004 with Warner’s tax package. Inside sources have indicated that Howell had several members of finance take a walk out of the Committee, allowing for its passage. This allowed the bill to get through but also allowed Howell to vote no, sparing him some criticism. However, this time it wasn’t clear that Kaine had the votes. Howell orchestrated this with many of the NOVA, Hampton Roads and Richmond members who will be counting on his financial support to give them an issue to campaign on (as well as to benefit his own re-election prospects). He did this, however, on the back of the party being the party of liberty, and without realizing that Kaine will also be dumping money on the candidates who will challenge the GOPers regardless while at the same time giving Democrats an issue. It will be the Democrats who can say they are the party that saved Virginia’s non-smokers, not Howell.

I’ll put up a spreadsheet later, but it has become fairly obvious that Howell is losing the support of the conservative and rural wing of his party. The big question is: will the 11 Young Turks who bucked Howell despite his support in their races be able to find 15 or so votes if they think they can knock him off as Speaker? The GOP has to hold the majority first, but it’s clear that even many old hands are tired of the Speaker’s wishy washy leadership and tendency to back down, even when, as we saw this time, the votes are there to stand on the side of property rights and personal liberty. 

As an long time observer of the General Assembly shared with me, one has to wonder if Chichester is still sitting in some dark corner of the Commonwealth, pulling the strings to make his boy Howell dance.

George F. Will writes today about the amazing certitude that has possessed both Obama and Congressional Democrats. After running a campaign of hope and change, they seem determined to elicit enough fear and panic to garner the support of average Americans. From Townhall.com:

The president, convinced that the only thing America has to fear is an insufficiency of fear, has warned that “disaster” and “catastrophe” are the certain alternatives to swift passage of the stimulus legislation. One marvels at his certitude more than one envies his custody of this adventure.

 

 

Certitude of one flavor or another is never entirely out of fashion in Washington. Thirty years ago, some conservatives were certain that their tax cuts would be so stimulative that they would be completely self-financing. Today, some liberals are certain that the spending they favor — on green jobs, infrastructure and everything else — will completely pay for itself. For liberals, “stimulus spending” is a classification that no longer classifies: All spending is, they are certain,necessarily stimulative.

Will recounts the last time that Democrats were this certain about the healing power of massive government spending:

resident Lyndon Johnson was embarked on building the Great Society, assisted by policymakers who, wrote Time, “have used Keynesian principles” to smooth the moderate business cycles and achieve price stability: “Washington’s economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes’ central theme” that a modern economy can operate at “top efficiency” only with government “intervention and influence.” So, “economists have descended in force from their ivory towers and now sit confidently at the elbow of almost every important leader in government and business, where they are increasingly called upon to forecast, plan and decide.” Ten years later, the “misery index” — the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate — was 19.9, heading for 22 percent in 1980.

I’m not one to wish misery upon this country or to predict economic trends. However, past history shows that Keynesian economics may be good for a short term fix but in the long run can hamper the engines of innovation in our economy. 

Will wraps it up with an apt comparison to the first “100 Days”–but not the one you’re thinking about:

John McCain probably was eager to return to the Senate as an avatar of bipartisanship, a role he has enjoyed. It is, therefore, a measure of the recklessness of House Democrats that they caused the stimulus debate to revolve around a bill that McCain dismisses as “generational theft.”

The federal government, with its separation of powers and myriad blocking mechanisms, was not made for speed but for safety. This is particularly pertinent today because if $789 billion is spent ineffectively or destructively, government does not get to say “oops” and take a mulligan. Senate Republicans have slowed and altered the course of the “disaster! catastrophe!” stampede. Still, as Anthony Trollope wrote in one of his parliamentary novels, “The best carriage horses are those which can most steadily hold back against the coach as it trundles down the hill.”

Not yet a third of the way through the president’s “first 100 days,” he and we should remember that it was not FDR’s initial burst of activity in 1933 that put the phrase “100 days” into the Western lexicon. It was Napoleon’s frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo.

Guess the old Pontiac finally gave out:

“Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter. ”

Sen. Tom Daschle, Congressional Record, May 7, 1998, p. S4507.

William Kristol points to past experiences in the minority to give the party some sage advice about how it should spend its time in the wilderness. From the Weekly Standard:

Everyone looks back nostalgically to 1993-94, the last time Republicans were out of power, but that example is a bit misleading. In 1992, Clinton had won only 43 percent of the vote, and the Republicans had gained congressional seats. The successful Reagan years remained fresh in voters’ minds. The task was simply to reclaim and revivify the Reagan agenda. The task today is both harder and less well defined.

The situation is more like 1977. For one thing, given the unlikelihood of Republicans taking back Congress in 2010, it requires a four-year horizon rather than a two-year one. More important, it requires serious rethinking in fundamental areas. Consider how far the party moved from 1977 to 1980. It was a period of vigorous, even hectic, political, policy, and institutional entrepreneurship, among conservatives both old and new. Thanks to the controversial efforts of backbenchers like Jack Kemp and Bill Steiger, the party rejected green eyeshade budget-balancing and embraced pro-growth supply-side economic policies. Thanks to the emergence of the neoconservatives, Kissingerian détente gave way to Reaganite freedom-fighting. Religious conservatives moved en masse to join the ranks of the GOP. All of this in four years.

For those of you who are looking for order, patience. Good ideas are never born out of easy solutions.

RIP Billy Powell. From The RTD:

Billy Powell, longtime keyboardist for the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, died this morning at his northeast Florida home. He was 56.

….

 

The Jacksonville-based band was formed in 1966 by a group of high school students — famously, it took its name from a P.E. teacher they disliked, Leonard Skinner. Powell joined the group around 1972, the year before they released their first album, “Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd.”

The band was decimated on Oct. 20, 1977, when their chartered plane crashed in a swamp near McComb, Miss.

Six people were killed — lead singer Ronnie Van Zant; guitarist Steve Gaines; and his sister, vocalist Cassie Gaines; as well as an assistant road manager, the pilot and co-pilot.

Powell was one of the survivors.

 

From the PilotOnline:

The House Rules Committee on Tuesday killed three resolutions to confer the status on various songs composed by Virginians.

The state has been without a tune since 1997, when “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” was retired because of its lyrics. The song is about a slave fondly recalling the days toiling for “old Massa.”

The Rules Committee for years has been hearing and rejecting potential new state songs.

Actually, its not just the Rules Committee that suffers through greatly enjoys listening to potential offerings. The year I worked in Richmond, there were at least three CDs that came through the office with potential offerings on them. I know that replacing the song has been a pet project of “beloved” State Senator Emmett Hanger, but, come on. Number one, do we really have to out and out replace the state song? Wouldn’t a few changes have fixed the two? Number two, twelve years???? It’s been twelve years, and from my research no less than 23 songs have been considered by the Senate and the House regarding the state song.

However, this doesn’t even include the hard work of the State Song Sub-Committee of the Virginia Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relation. This is the group that worked for 2 YEARS to first whittle the list down to 59 songs then to eight grand finalists. They ran into some flack over Jimmy Dean’s submission being favored and again when another contestant didn’t want to sign over the rights to his song, and then the Committee was abolished in 2004. Apparently, according to the Washington Post, it was only due to the fact that the committee lost the staff person who was keeping track of the votes during that year’s budget crisis. 

Your tax dollars in action. Just pick a damn song already! I don’t even care if its “Meet Virginia” by Train at this point. At least it has the state’s name in it.

This week’s Virginia Notebook spills some wasted ink laying out the mainstream narrative of the 2009 Governor’s race in Virginia as a test of both President Obama and the Democrat’s new coalition and of Tim Kaine’s political mettle. However, two quotes stand out:

“I don’t think Obama could have picked a more boring, less exciting person than Tim Kaine,” Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, an influential liberal blog, said in an interview last week. “But we have the White House. We have the Senate. We have the House. So no one really cares much about Kaine.”

Good to see some on the other side of the aisle see Kaine as just about as useless as Republicans do. It also opens questions about if Kaine will be able to motivate and direct Democrats as well as Obama if the big guy and his team are tied up in Washington around November.

Of more important note is Tim Craig’s assertion that the party elected after an outgoing Governor determines their precessor’s legacy:

More importantly, Kaine’s legacy as governor will probably rest on his ability to have a Democrat succeed him.

Going back to the 1970s, Virginia governors succeeded by a member of the same party have generally been viewed as successful in office. Those whose political opponents succeed them have had more difficulty in crafting a positive narrative about their legacies.

After James S. Gilmore III (R) left office in 2002, his successor, Democrat Mark R. Warner, spent the four years blaming him for the state’s budget woes.

When Warner left office in 2006, he was succeeded by Kaine, who has spent three years praising his predecessor’s decisions. If the GOP takes over the Governor’s Mansion, the public probably will be blanketed with news for four years about what Kaine did wrong in office instead of what he did right.

Uh, no offense Tim…..but if the opposition party ends up getting elected in the first place, wasn’t the outgoing Governor’s legacy already going down the tubes? Also, remember that Jerry Kilgore was in a much tighter race before some major gaffes in the fall campaign, and that Douglas Wilder is praised in many circles for correcting the budget that his Democratic predecessor Gerald Balilies wrecked. Although its always good to have a cheerleader out there, your actual actions determine whether or not there’s going to be a cheerleader, not just the fact that they’re of the same party.

Many of you who know me personally know how much I loathe the hero-worshipper of Che Guevera that you find amongst leftists (and occasionally, generally uninformed hipsters) on today’s college campuses. However, with the recent release of Benicio Del Toro’s epic four-hour biopic of the communist idealist cum bloodthirsty revolutionary, the man is becoming a salient topic and not just something I think about while I toss and turn in the wee hours of the morning. 

From Q and O, we have word that Mr. del Toro walked out of an interview about the film we confronted with some of the facts of Che’s career, which included such highlights as when: 

n January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain…. His belongings were now mine.” Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim “was really guilty enough to deserve death,” he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: “He had to pay the price.” At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.

As well as when:

Che was in charge of the Comisión Depuradora. The process followed the law of the Sierra: there was a military court and Che’s guidelines to us were that we should act with conviction, meaning that they were all murderers and the revolutionary way to proceed was to be implacable. My direct superior was Miguel Duque Estrada. My duty was to legalize the files before they were sent on to the Ministry. Executions took place from Monday to Friday, in the middle of the night, just after the sentence was given and automatically confirmed by the appellate body. On the most gruesome night I remember, seven men were executed.

A must-read for anyone worried about leftist hero worship amongst the college crowd.

There are countless personal recollections and photos circulating around that capture the massive nature of Tuesday’s historic events. However, those responsible with cleaning things up are finding history in the most unlikely of places. From the WaPo:

Washington trash trucks hauled away at least 130 tons of garbage after the inauguration ofPresident Obama, with more to go. National Park Serviceworkers picked up almost 100 tons on the Mall and near the White House.

Because most trash cans had been removed for security reasons and a record-breaking crowd gathered downtown, the mountain of rubbish left behind was of historic proportions.

“More than any Fourth of July, more than any event we’ve seen,” Park Service spokesman William Line said.

The detritus included handwarmer packets, bottles, food, newspapers, blankets, gloves, coolers and a table or two, in addition to items bought from street vendors.

“They left behind Obama hats, Obama bags, Obama socks,” said Mafara Hobson, spokeswoman forMayor Adrian M. Fenty (D). “People left behind a lot of trash. A lot of it was the vendors along the parade route, too.”