Earlier today, Sen. Tim Kaine participated in a forum at Virginia Tech with his far-right extremist Republican opponent, the Trump “mini-me” dude (like Voldemort, why even say his name? LOL). See below for video, which I’ve set to start with Sen. Kaine’s half of the forum. If you REALLY want to watch Trump “mini-me,” you can do so, but fair warning that it’s the usual nastiness, lies, xenophobia, ignorance, divisiveness, demagoguery and all-around lunacy we’ve come to expect from him. As for Sen. Kaine, in stark contrast, it’s the usual as well: well-informed, personable, compassionate, sensible, sane, and unifying (Kaine stressed the words “for all,” stating, “I believe in jobs for all, education for all, health care for all, security for all…We are going to send a message that as Virginians and Americans we still support the ‘for all’ at the end of the Pledge of Allegiance”). On November 6, let’s send a resounding message to the nation that Virginia embraces the politics of “for all” and rejects the “vicious,” “ruthless,” “cutthroat” (in his own words) of Trump’s “mini-me.”
P.S. Sen. Kaine’s excellent response to the pipeline question:
“Let me talk about both the Mountain Valley and the Atlantic Coast pipeline, because these are two projects that are proceeding in Virginia and there’s a lot of common issues with both. Three things that I’m doing.
First, there is a process to determine a) when is a pipeline needed to meet energy demand, b) where the pipeline should go. And that’s a process that is run by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Because of many complaints from people in this room and others I became convinced that that FERC process is just outdated and wrong. There hasn’t been sufficient procedures to really understand public input in making these decisions. The way FERC determines whether a pipeline is needed is insufficient and how they listen to public input to determine if it’s needed where should it go is insufficient too. So I’ve introduced a bill about a year ago in Congress, bipartisan, introduced a bill in both houses to try to dramatically change the FERC permitting process to give dramatically more public input to it; that’s the first thing that we need to do.
Second thing we need to do – when FERC granted the the permits for both pipelines they were highly unusual. FERC has five members there were two vacancies. They voted to grant the permits by a two-to-one vote with two vacancies. About a month later both vacancies were filled. Basically they rushed to have the vote before they had a full five-member Commission. And with the filling of the vacancies it was possible that had they waited the vote would have been 3-2 the other direction. In fact the fact that there was a dissent at all was highly unusual, that 98% of FERC orders are unanimous. So the fact of a dissent was significant. And I weighed in and encouraged FERC to do a rehearing on both of the petitions now that they had a full five-member panel.
Finally, the current FERC Chairman who’s a president Trump appointee, after listening to people at least agreed somewhat we need to redo the permitting process. And they’re now doing what’s called a public notice and comment about should the process be redone and if so how. Senator Warner and I have weighed in largely using the bill I introduced to point out a number of ways that the process should be made better. There’s also court actions, there’s also State Water Control Board has jurisdiction over it. But at the federal level the FERC process is bad and it needs to be fixed so that people who live in the route or nearby and their input will be respected”
Sign up for the Blue Virginia weekly newsletter
