Not Larry Sabato

Comstock's Pre-School Robbery Slapped Down!!!!

I've been doing a lot of (well deserved) Senate bashing recently, but it looks like the budget that came out of conference tonight had a number of key wins for the Senate, including wins on education, mental health and other key progressive priorities.  Good work to the budget conferees!

Most importantly, Barbara Comstock's budget amendment to rob at risk, poor four year olds to fund all day kindergarten for five year olds was rejected and not passed into law. Yay!

Now hopefully voters will do the same with her political career this November!

Weenie of the Week

The one person who is ultimately responsible for Senate Democrats is Dick Saslaw.  When he failed to pay attention to the bill Ryan McDougle introduced that could be amended for abortion clinic regulations he lost the issue forever.

Milk has an expiration date, why don't the political careers of Democratic members of the General Assembly?

DEMOCRATS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ABORTION REGULATIONS PASSING

You are probably wondering- how did regulations designed to close most abortion clinics in Virginia (by regulating them like hospitals) pass the Democratic controlled Senate today after failing in the Republican controlled Senate every single year from 2000 until 2007.

The answer is simple:  Dick Saslaw, Mary Margaret Whipple, Janet Howell and the rest of the Democratic Senate Leadership Team totally screwed up and allowed this to happen.

Here's what went down.  Usually these regulations are killed in the Education and Health committee, which is controlled by pro-choice Senators. 

However, Senate Democrats were napping as Ryan McDougle, a pro-life Republican introduced SB924 this year which changed the same Code of Virginia section that anti-abortion activists have been trying to add these regulations into.  The Senate passed McDougle's bill 40-0 instead of killing it and demanding the House send this bill over first.

Because of this screw up- the House of Delegates was able to amend the bill to add in the abortion restrictions and send it back to the Senate.  When a bill has already passed a body and is amended it goes to the floor- not to committee- and Senate Democratic leaders knew they had 2 Senators on the floor who would vote with the 18 Republicans to pass this regulation into law.

In short, thousands of women will have their lives put at risk because Senate Democrats were not paying attention and allowed this to happen.  In a desperate attempt to save their seats from angry voters, Senate Democrats issued a press release today strongly attacking these regulations.  But they are the ones who are responsible for this bill becoming law.

Primary.  Them.  All.

Del. Morrissey vs. Sen. Marsh?

Delegate Joe Morrissey is in the news this week for applying to have his law license reinstated, but he might be getting ready to make much bigger news.

Sources in the Capitol and in Richmond City Democrats are telling me that Morrissey is telling people he is leaning towards a primary challenge to Senator Henry Marsh.

Morrissey represents the 74th House District, which was the seat formerly held by Senator Don McEachin, so most of his house district does not overlap with Marsh.  However, prior to being disbarred, Morrissey was Commonwealth's Attorney in the City of Richmond where a large part of the the population of Marsh's district lives.

Regardless of this challenge, Democrats would certainly hold both Marsh and Morrissey's seats in November, but Senate Democrats would certainly get involved to help Marsh in this primary- using resources that would otherwise go into marginal districts to keep control of the Senate.

I've got nothing against primary challenges and there are some members of the Senate like Janet Howell (D-Verizon), Mark Herring (D-Verizon) and Dick Saslaw (D-Auto title lenders, D-Verizon, D-Right to work, D-Any polluter, D-Kings Dominion) who have earned them.  But Morrissey is not worthy of support over Marsh.  He's an unreliable disbarred sleezeball who needs to be chased out of office completely.  This primary challenge would certainly give us a chance to do exactly that- but the consequences to it might be Democrats losing the Senate in November.

Cuccinelli Supports Obama on DOMA

Ken Cuccinelli campaigned on the principle that the Attorney General shouldn't defend laws that they determined were unconstitutional. 

Exactly what Eric Holder did today with DOMA.

WaPo is For Rumors, Blogs For Transparency

So says Miles.

I think he has a point.  In fact, I'm working today to help get NVTC out of the shadows.  More to come on that soon...

Redistricting The Virginia Senate

And you can play along at home!

First, go to this website.  It's a great resource for the public to be able to do their own Congressional redistricting.

Once you have gone there and made sure your Silverlight is up to date, Download this file and save it to your desktop.  That is a shape file of every precinct in the state, which I filled in yesterday with the precinct breakdowns for every current Virginia Senate District.  This is somewhat complicated- VPAP has great maps on their site, but they include split precincts on multiple maps, so I had to use the SBE and the 2000 lines to allocate split precincts into one district or the other for this exercise.

Now, let me explain how this works.  Once you download my file, go to the website above and click on "open" in the upper left hand corner, and then open my file from your desktop onto the system.  Once it uploads (may take a couple minutes) you will see each of the current Virginia Senate Districts on the map.  You can zoom in and out as with any google map based system.  On the left side, you can see population and whether the district is too large or too small.  If you click on an individual district the demographics of that district will pop up on the right hand side.  Just click on the big green "color districts" button on the right side to start changing lines.

As you scroll over each precinct you will see a pop up on the right with the demographics for that precinct as well as the Presidential voting percentages along with a party vote average from major elections.  (When you look at an entire district those political numbers are a little off- I think they are averaging the averages of the precincts instead of calculating real votes, so don't follow that too closely.  The demographic numbers are fine). 

Here's a few tips as you start looking at this data:

1) Try to keep districts within a 2% margin of error rate (no smaller than 196,000, no larger than 204,000). 

2) Try to keep clear communities of interest together and respect county lines when possible. 

3) Try not to draw districts on opposite sides of water without a bridge to connect them. 

4) To comply with the Voting Rights act make sure the 2nd, 5th, 9th, 16th, 18th stay above 50% African American with the over 18 population. 

5) Finally, please draw Mark Herring into Maryland and reunite Dave Marsden with his wife in Signal Hill precinct.

Final rule:  Have fun! 

Lurch Draws An Opponent

Former Tim Hugo aide Jason Flanary hasn't announced yet, but looks like he just set up a Facebook fan page.

Major Defection From Allen Camp

In 2006, the George Allen campaign didn't think it needed an online strategy and was already looking ahead to 2008.  Then of course, on August 11, 2006 this happened:

After a few days of flailing around, Virginia's top conservative political blogger (now Judge Chad Dotson) put out a desperate call from the Allen campaign looking for a online/new media coordinator.  The Allen campaign then decided to hire Jon Henke, a libertarian blogger at Q&O to handle the fallout from using a racial slur.

Needless to say in the couple of months that followed Henke learned of every piece of George Allen opposition research, studied every anti-Allen website on the internet and also got a careful look into the inside world of Allen and his advisers.  There's no one out there that knows Allen and his standing in the online universe more than Jon Henke.

That's why I was shocked to learn when sources told me (which I was able to confirm yesterday) that Jamie Radtke has hired Jon and his company CRAFT Media to take on her primary challenge to George Allen.

This is a big move for Radtke who will now have every possible piece of dirt against Allen at her disposal.  If anything didn't come out in 2006, it will now.  I know Jon well, and he will stop at nothing once he is paid by a campaign- you only need to look back to his youtube channel in 2006 to see what how low he was willing to go against Jim Webb.

Buckle in, this is going to be fun.

Ryan Nobles Interviews The President

Absolutely outstanding job. National TV executives- are you watching this?