In continuing fallout from the Harrisonburg voter registration incident, Brad Blog has turned up something that should surprise no one:  Karl Rove, Nathan Sproul, and Ed Gillispie are joined at the hip — along with Virginia State Senator Jill Holtzman Vogel.

As sharp-eyed BRAD BLOG commenter “Citizen92” noticed in those newly released documents, the “Key takeaway from this is that Strategic Allied Consulting has a business address of 45 North Hill Drive, Suite 100, Warrenton, VA.”

“Who else has a business address at 45 North Hill Drive?,” Citizen92 asked rhetorically, “American Crossroads, Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie’s 527 group.”

Indeed our good Citizen92 is correct, according to the IRS 527 filing for American Crossroads [PDF], the mailing address for Rove’s outfit is also 45 North Hill Drive, Suite 100, in Warrenton, VA.

The address belongs to HoltzmanVogelJosefiak PLLC, a top RNC law firm headed up by Jill Holtzman Vogel who also now serves as a Virginia State Senator from the 27th District.

Read the whole article here:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9632

And check out this one also:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9643

Good for Rep. Connolly, calling out the wildly irresponsible demagogue Darrell Issa for endangering American lives, exposing sensitive information on our operations in Libya, etc. Isn’t that what used to be known as “treason?”

Connolly Condemns Chairman Darrell Issa’s Dangerous Disclosure of Sensitive Information about U.S. Operations in Libya

Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA), a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, issued the following statement in response to Chairman Darrell Issa’s decision to publish sensitive documents about U.S. operations in Libya that could endanger the lives of U.S. personnel and Libyans working with them.

Chairman Issa’s decision to publish sensitive information that details ongoing U.S. operations in Libya and identifies, by name, Libyans working with us to achieve strategic national security goals in the region is extremely troubling.

Those of us entrusted with sensitive national security information must exercise extreme caution with the use of that information. Clearly Chairman Issa, in his zeal to damage the Administration, failed to exercise that caution.

The irony is that while Chairman Issa purports to be sincere in his desire to investigate the recent attack so that we can learn how best to protect our diplomats in the future, his own actions have now compromised the safety of U.S. personnel and Libyans working together to forge a better Libya.

Once again, Chairman Issa’s actions are a stain on the once-impeccable reputation of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee. While the damage has probably already been done, I call on Chairman Issa to remove all sensitive and personal information from the Committee’s website. It is time for Chairman Issa to stop playing politics with our national security.

If you didn’t live in Virginia when George Allen was Governor you may not understand just how anti-environmental he is.  In the US Senate he had an abysmal record but those were only votes.

It was as Governor where George Allen demonstrated his utter contempt for environmental laws.   Right after he was sworn in as Governor, he gutted the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.  Allen, bringing in what we then caused “wise users” at the time to run this key environmental agency is today’s equivalent of putting the Tea Party in charge.  There were mass firings and mass resignations of agency staffers who refused to follow orders to ignore pollution violations.

Allen also interfered with an on going EPA lawsuit against Smithfield Foods for water pollution.  The CEO of Smithfield at the time, Joe Luter, gave Allen a $100,000 campaign contribution and after Allen was elected he had the state intervene in that EPA lawsuit, effectively neutralizing federal action against Smithfield.  As unethical as this may sound, it apparently is not illegal in Virginia where there is no limit on campaign contributions.

The Allen Administration even lied to the US EPA about the status of data collected on toxic emissions. When the EPA sought the toxic pollution data from the state, the response was that they did not have it, all the while it was actually locked in safe at the DEQ.

If elected to the US Senate, George Allen will continue his war against the environment, attacking EPA funding and regulations and voting as he has before to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.  We must not let this happen.  

Each day women across this country continue to battle issues of inequality. The sad fact is that women still make seventy-four cents on the dollar in comparison to us men. By remaining stagnant on this issue, by simply brushing it aside, keeping it in the back of our minds, we remain committed to an all too familiar phrase, “separate, but equal.”

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), passed by Congress in 1972, would have become the 27th Amendment to the Constitution if three-fourths of the states had ratified it by June 30, 1982. However, that date passed with only 35 of the necessary 38 state ratifications. Instead, the 27th Amendment is the “Madison Amendment,” concerning Congressional pay raises, which went to the states for ratification in 1789 and reached the three-fourths goal in 1992.

The fact that a 203-year ratification period was accepted as valid has led ERA supporters to propose that Congress has the power to maintain the legal viability of the ERA and the existing 35 state ratifications. If so, only three more state ratifications would be needed to make the ERA part of the Constitution. Legal analysis supporting this strategy was developed in 1995 by Allison Held, Sheryl Herndon and Danielle Stager, then third-year law students at the T. C. Williams School of Law in Richmond, VA. Their article, “Why the ERA Remains Legally Viable and Properly Before the States,” was published in the Spring 1997 issue of William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law.

The Commonwealth of Virginia remains one of the fifteen states to yet ratify the ERA. This should be an embarrassing fact for all of us Virginians. I ask you to join with me, in asking our elected leaders to place the ERA back on the state’s agenda, which if ratified by Virginia would place it back onto the national agenda as well. We would be just two states away from finishing the job of amending the constitution.

The Equal Rights Amendment isn’t about politicians scoring some political points. It’s about the girl who wants equal opportunity in school. It’s about the single mother who can’t get a mortgage or a small business loan. It’s about the woman who faces harassment in her place of work and violence in her home. The ERA is not going to solve all of these problems, but it will help.

Alice Paul wrote the original amendment way back in 1923, just after women had won the right to vote. Many detractors had told her that the battle for equality was over, but Alice Paul fought onward. She’d like to quote an adage she had learned from her mother, a farmer. “When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row.”

And so, like Alice Paul and some many others who have come after her, we fight on. We take one step forward, then another and another. We shall keep our hands to the plow.

In the Declaration of Independence, “The first truth to be held as self-evident is that all men are created equal,” since women didn’t win the right to vote until about a century and a half later, I’m afraid we have to assume that they did mean “men.”

Now, we can’t amend the Declaration of Independence, but we can and must amend the constitution to make absolutely sure that women have all of the equal rights and privileges, as do men.

Sign the petition below to push Virginia to finally ratify the ERA!

https://www.change.org/petitio…