Life under the Regency category archive

Via the Richmonder, who promises to be right there with Bob as long as he’s considered a contender for the vice-presidential nomination.

Jim Henley Thoreau explains why, even though he works in Virginia, he lives in Maryland (emphasis added):

Now, if you read other blogs or, I don’t know, newspapers, you may have heard about these developments already. What I’m wondering is, are there any left-wing laws or regulations that take the “you can do this, after we rub your nose in it” form of Virginia’s trans-vaginal ultrasound requirement?

He could have just as easily pointed to the worship of warm guns or a number of other examples of “Now we’re in power and we’re going to do this just because we can.”

Congressional Republicans seem to have taken up a campaign to repeal birth control. Folks who theorize about such things are trying to figure out what grand strategy this manifests.

There is no grand strategy. There is only rampant meanness and hatefulness.

What we are seeing in Virginia and other states which elected wingnut governors and legislatures in the last election is the politics of “I’ve got mine.” These folks are determined to do every crackpot thing they can while they can because they can. Searching for sense is futile.

Republicanism has devolved into a political movement consisting of one part selfish to two parts spite.

Addendum:

I miss-attributed the post at Unqualified Offerings. See the comment below.

Republican late-night fantasy fodder, from ABL.

As Atrios reminds us, these are truly horrible people.

Headline from today’s local rag, referring to one of the anti-abortion bills in the state legislature:

‘Personhood’ bill is medically unsound, some doctors say

Of course the bill is medically unsound.

It has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the skeevy Republican obsession with the sex lives of persons to whom they haven’t even been introduced.

Afterthought:

Then there’s the mandatory ultrasound thing.

A hand up every skirt. What a platform!

One cloud of magickal developer thinking officially disperses.

The City Council on Tuesday officially killed the controversial deal to build a four-star Hyatt hotel near the Virginia Beach Convention Center, an action that opens the door to other proposals.

While the public-private partnership was all but dead after losing political support earlier this year, the City Council’s action was needed to end exclusive negotiations with Armada Hoffler, the development company that would have built the hotel.

You can be certain that, even as I type, small circles of developers gather in their mystical circles conference rooms, weaving their mysterious Points of Power, preparing new incantations to entice an unwitting public to burn yet more money on the altar of empty conference centers, vacant hotels, and broken projections.

Well-timed in view of the Regent’s desire to sell (what remains of) Virginia’s dignity for a few pieces of silver comes Daniel Ruth’s evaluation of a similar proposal in Florida:

Wouldn’t it make it easier to sort out who owns who if Florida’s elected officials could sell their own naming rights? Members of the House and Senate could show up in NASCAR jumpsuits covered with decals for Associated Industries, the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the state’s trial lawyers, insurance companies, oil and gas concerns and gambling cartels.

Now that would be truth in advertising.

Follow the link, then write your delegate.

Frankly, I think this is a vile idea. I cannot look forward to driving the Pampers Highway.

If you’re interested, the governor may have a bridge you can make your own – or at least name.

As part of his 2012 transportation plan, Gov. Bob McDonnell has proposed selling naming rights to the state’s roads and bridges.

Are Republicans determined to sacrifice all dignity to Mammon?

The shovel-money-to-developers effort in Virginia Beach appears stalled. I guess the developer magic went out of the public-private partnership:

Mayor Will Sessoms and Vice Mayor Louis Jones said Wednesday they oppose the plan to build a $109 million four-star Hyatt hotel next to the Virginia Beach Convention Center, dealing the controversial project a severe and likely fatal hit.

Sessoms and Jones joined five council members who have already opposed the hotel deal, meaning a majority of the body now opposes the public-private partnership with developer Armada Hoffler.

There is one certainty.

Little time will lapse before another manifestation of the touching faith in developer magic, the simple confidence that the sweet scent of money burning upon the public-private partnership altar will please the gods, moving them to bestow blessings upon believers.

Anyone who thinks permitting uranium mining in Virgina should read the recent article in the Denver Post about what uranium mines leave behind.

A nugget:

It is a dead place — boned with black, sentinel tree trunks, veined with unspeakably polluted water, laid bare under a paste-white sky. There is no sense of space or time; only pure, absolute quiet.

It is one of my favorite images — “Uranium Tailings No. 12,” taken at Ontario’s Elliot Lake in 1995, part of photographer Edward Burtynski’s troubling series documenting the ravages of mining. The most disturbing part of the work is the beauty apparent in all that ugliness. The molten orange of water tainted by nickel tailings, the taupe and gray shades of soil — smooth and tender looking as skin — swept clean of living mess.

Anyone who has flown over West Virginia knows the devastation of mountain-top removal (the one bright side to the comparison might be that coal at least doesn’t have a half-life).

Only the mining company will benefit. Everyone else, including likely the miners and their families, will pay for centuries the penalty for allowing the depredation.

. . . because the two and a half-dozen hotels on Atlantic and Pacific Avenues are not enough.

Virginia Beach, after raiding school board funds for previous budgets, now wants to change the funding formula for public schools.

The funding formula has been a source of friction between the two bodies as revenues have tightened in the slumping economy. The schools get 51.3 percent and the city gets 48.7 percent of seven city tax revenue streams.

The city has gradually reduced the division’s share of revenues in recent years. The schools originally received 53.1 percent of revenues when the formula was implemented in 1997 in an effort to ease annual budget disputes.

Mayor Will Sessoms said rigid funding formulas don’t work in tight economic times because of competition over money. Will it be killed in Virginia Beach?

Why? So they can give more money to developers, who need it far more than do the schools.

The city’s upfront cost for a proposed hotel to be built next to the Virginia Beach Convention Center on 19th Street would be more than half the project’s total price, but city officials said the hotel would more than pay for itself over time.

City taxpayers would initially pay $61.8 million of the $109.2 million project to build the 15-story, 361-room Hyatt Regency under an agreement between the city and its developer, according to sources briefed on the proposal. The city would own parts of the project including hotel meeting space and the pedestrian bridge that would link the hotel to the convention center.

The forces for building the hotel claim that, if it is built, conventions will automatically materialize through mystickal magickal alchemy.

The hotel currently across the street from the Center is not posh enough or doesn’t put enough mints on the pillow or doesn’t have big enough minibars or something.

I am skeptical of developer magic. I’ve seen it too often leave the rabbit in the hat while disappearing the money.

In this resort town, whose main attraction is a beach, the Convention Center is six long not-very-walkable blocks from the boardwalk and affords a marvelous view of a parking lot and of the beginning of an interstate highway.

I wasn’t here when the Convention Center was built, but I suspect it was located where it is because putting it nearer the beach would have forced some developer to sacrifice something and, in Virginia Beach, sacrifice is not what developers do.

Sacrifice is done for developers by school children and less-well-off neighborhoods, such as the one where the Convention Center is located, when City Council wishes.

Writing at Philly dot com, Leonard Boasberg considers the speech that Eric Cantor was too timid to give because the audience might include persons who (gasp!) disagreed with him.

A nugget:

The speech Cantor didn’t deliver – which was carried in Penn’s student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian – is a goulash of clichés, cant, hypocrisy, nonsense, and Republican talking points. Referring to the preamble to the Constitution, it asserts, “Pursuing both happiness and independence derive from the ingenuity and grit of the American people, not the American government.” That’s that old “government is the problem” argument, and it’s only half-true.

The other half is that the government established land-grant colleges and the transcontinental railroad. The government played a key role in the creation of the Internet. The government funds scientific and medical research. And the government keeps our air and water clean and the food we eat safe.

Read the whole thing. It’s a delicious take-down of Republican hypocrisy, pretension, and duplicity.

I am supporting John Moss for city council.

I met him during the last campaign; he is a man of integrity. There is much in his views on economic issues that I disagree with; they are substantially more conservative than mine.

Nevertheless, as I have said here before, I think there is a divide in any resort town, including this one, that is more important than left and right.

That’s the divide between in the pocket of the developers and not in the pocket of the developers.

John is decidedly not in the pocket of developers.

He will ask the questions they don’t want to answer. Given that council is dominated by the “in the pocket” party (some more in the pocket than others), I find this a valuable quality deserving of support.