When: 9:00 AM, Saturday, September 25th

Where:

Bubba’s Deli & BBQ

3600 Dam Neck Road

Virginia Beach, VA

Click for Map & Directions

The VBDC has determined that Democrats could benefit from a good laugh together. In response to this finding, the VBDC is hosting its first ever Saturday Morning Live VBDC Breakfast.

Come prepared with your funniest campaign story or favorite political joke. We’ll have clips from the Daily Show and Stephen Colbert. Come eat and laugh. Coffee only. No tea bags allowed.

The all you can eat breakfast buffet is $10 per person.

On a more serious note, the Foodbank is in dire need of food donations. The names of all those who bring a donation for the foodbank will be put in a hat for a drawing of a door prize befitting the Saturday Morning Live breakfast. Most needed items are peanut butter, canned soups, canned meats, canned tuna, canned vegetables, juice, cereal, macaroni and cheese, pasta and pasta sauces.

I’m trying to follow the city council election in Virginia Beach.  

It’s quite a challenge:  There are 14 candidates.  Seven candidates are vying for two at-large seats.  Four of the seven geographical districts are in play, with three of them contested. City council is by law non-partisan, so party affiliation is not mentioned, which doesn’t help those who think that a candidate’s party affiliation communicates something, however imperfectly, about a candidate.

I have found out that I’m not the only person having trouble co-ordinating names with faces and with positions.  I been a Virginia Beach resident for a little under a year, but even long-time residents can’t keep the field straight in their heads.

So I made myself a program listing the candidates for both the city council and the school board.  It turned out to be pretty useful for making notes at last night’s candidate forum.  

If you’re interested in Virginia Beach, you can download a copy (PDF).

Date: Saturday, September 25th

Time: 9-10:30 a. m.

Location: Bubba’s Deli & BBQ, 3600 Dam Neck Rd, Virginia Beach (west side of Dam Neck Rd. between Princess Anne Blvd. and Rosemont Rd.; access via service road at Lansdowne Ct. next to the Farmers Market).

Cost: Adults $10.00, Under 12 &6.00 for all-you-can-eat buffet (it’s a pretty good buffet, too-plenty of variety).

More information and a map here.

This morning, Republican Party leaders rolled out their “Pledge to America” in Sterling, VA. I was planning to congratulate 30-year incumbent Frank Wolf and his colleagues on finally coming up with an agenda that doesn’t start and end with “no.” Regretfully, I cannot do that. There is little by way of an agenda in the 21-page Pledge that the Republican Party is putting forth.

The Pledge manages to hit many of the hot button GOP issues; make the Bush tax cuts permanent for the top 2%, repeal health care, assail federal employees through hiring freezes, cut spending but pledge to fully fund missile defense programs. It also fails to include one single plan to move the country forward towards progress and prosperity.  

The Pledge to America is chock-full of rhetoric…and not much else.

Where is the Republican Party’s comprehensive energy plan? Every day we send $2 billion abroad to feed our oil addiction and put 16,000 tons of CO2 into the air. Shouldn’t we pledge to America that we will fight global warming and make meaningful strides in the development of renewable energy?

Where is the Republican Party’s plan to improve public education? Our test scores drop compared to our global competitors. The cost of higher education keeps going up. Shouldn’t we pledge to America that a quality public education and access to post-secondary education will be top priorities, because our children must be given the tools to compete in this globalized economy?

Where is the Republican Party’s plan to prevent jobs from going overseas? We help companies with R&D in America then watch as they ship jobs that harness new technologies abroad. Shouldn’t we pledge to keep jobs in America so repatriating jobs isn’t necessary? Shouldn’t we pledge to identify and build the industries that will keep Americans in good, high-paying jobs for years to come?

The Pledge to America answers none of these questions. I am proud that I belong to a party that has.  

The Pledge to America reaffirms why I am a Democrat and why I am running for Congress. We’ve seen this Republican game before. For six years in the 2000s they devastated the middle class, ran up the biggest deficit this country has ever seen, and drove us to the brink of depression. Now they want to recycle many of these same policies to get us out of the muck. That makes no sense.

The people who got us into the mess are not the ones to get us out of it. Especially when they offer nothing but the very proposals that set us on the path towards economic devastation in the first place.  

( – promoted by lowkell)

By Paul Goldman

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli apparently thinks the old adage applies to him, from the Cuccinelli lips to God’s Ears, that whatever the AG he thinks is right just because he thinks it. The latest of his uninformed opinions, legal and otherwise, was issued yesterday. He said Doug Wilder would have lost the 1989 Democratic Gubernatorial nomination if his opponents had not stood aside out of political correctness. .

Where does Mr. Cuccinelli come up with this legal and historical drivel time and time again, in between guest appearances on national talk shows? The most deadly combination in a public official is a mix of arrogance and ignorance. The Attorney General offered his latest uninformed opinion yesterday in response to inquiries about his future intentions, specifically whether he might challenge Lt. Governor Bill Bolling for the 2013 GOP gubernatorial nomination.

From the reaction of the Bolling camp, it is clear they know they can’t beat him in a fair contest, that’s why they didn’t invite him into the race or suggest what Republicans allegedly believe, in the free market system where merit and merit alone is suppose to count. Instead, the showed a white-knuckle fear of such a contest, saying they should get the nomination because Mr. Cuccinelli said during the campaign last year that he intended to finish his term, not interested in national office. Candidate Bob McDonnell also said he wasn’t interested in national office. So if the 2012 GOP presidential candidate offers Governor McDonnell the VP slot, is Lt. Governor Bolling going to cry foul?  .

Is Bolling not ready for prime-time or what? One Lt. Governor Wilder would not have been if he were in Bolling’s chair is afraid of a challenge from the Attorney General. “It’s a free country” is what Wilder would have said. “Bring it on” is how Bush put it. Except he was all hat and no cowboy. Wilder would have paid Cuccinelli’s filing fee.

Fact: Contrary to what Mr. Cuccinelli said about Doug Wilder being handed the 1989 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, no one handed the future Governor anything that year or four years earlier. In 1989, then Democratic Attorney General Mary Sue Terry wanted to run for the party nomination, and she had, or her people implied she had, the wink and a nod from the top party people in the state, no need to rehash old news or name names, it is yesterday’s news.

They didn’t want Wilder to become Governor, it was the worst kept secret in party circles, if folks want to deny it a generation later, fine go ahead, like I say it doesn’t change the facts.

1989 was just a reply of 1985 in that regard: Wilder’s opponents tried to figure out a way to block his nomination, but he wouldn’t blink despite the pressure which was rather intense. So contrary to another of Mr. Cuccinelli’s fantasies, Doug Wilder won two technically uncontested nomination battles because his opponents decided the couldn’t beat him, not because he was handed something out of political correctness.

They chose not to run for a simple reason: they didn’t want to lose.

So it may be that in Mr. Cuccinelli’s mind, a decision by him not to challenge Mr. Bolling in 2013 amounts to the AG with the big ego handing the nomination to his GOP ticket mate who should be eternally grateful. In his case, this may indeed be true, since the statement by Bolling’s top staffer shows a total fear of a nomination fight with the AG.

But when Mr. Cuccinelli opines about how Doug Wilder should thank his lucky stars about being handed the gubernatorial nomination, the AG should learn, finally, to stop issuing opinions based on his own view of the facts and reality. Democratic Attorney General Mary Sue Terry was a good person, who would have made a good Governor. But after testing the political waters, she correctly decided 1989 wasn’t going to be the year she could get the party’s gubernatorial nomination.

Doug Wilder deserves to be seen as getting the nomination by merit, not because of some political correctness in the mind of Ken Cuccinelli. The Attorney General may not have the stuff to challenge Mr. Bolling, and if so, that is his problem, he shouldn’t be projecting his lack of fight to justify another fantasy view of how easy it was for Doug Wilder to make history.