Tag: lieutenant governor

On April 16th, 2018, almost fifteen hundred Albemarle County citizens packed the halls at Monticello High School in Charlottesville, Virginia. They were participating in...

by Kellen Squire Tuesday has come and gone, the second post-Trump test of how our Republic would respond to the authoritarian threat that's been looming...

by Kellen Squire When I graduated from nursing school, I went into my first job ready to take on the world- as many newly-minted RNs...

by Kellen Squire Senator Creigh Deeds is one of the best-known politicians in the Commonwealth. A person who has sacrificed and given more to his...

By Kellen Squire Just after my daughter graduated from fourth grade, we took her to the dentist for her bi-annual checkup. After a series of...

by Kellen Squire From the time I first announced my run for the Virginia House of Delegates last year, I knew I had an uphill...

by Kellen Squire Anyone who works in emergency services knows that there are a lot of days where you spend almost as much time being...

by Kellen Squire I’ve sat here at my keyboard staring at the blinking cursor for awhile. There’s words inside me that need to come out...

As I listened to Democratic Lieutenant Governor candidate Ralph Northam at a fundraiser last night, it occurred to me that the two candidates for that position couldn't possibly be more different.  It is, in short, a race between an accomplished professional who takes everything he does seriously -- and a rabble-rousing demagogue who's never succeeded in anything other than spreading extremism.  

Dr. Northam's day job is as a pediatric neurologist.  Think about it: he treats kids with brain injuries and disorders -- not a position you can BS your way through or in which you can do a half-assed job and call it a day.  It's a highly skilled profession on which children's lives and futures depend.  And he's been in practice for over 20 years, after serving as a physician in the Army and completing residencies at two Army Medical Centers, including Walter Reed.  

He's been in the State Senate since 2007, where his signature accomplishment was the law banning smoking in restaurants, protecting the health of their workers and patrons.  Now think about that -- he got a solid smoking ban in a state where tobacco has been king since the colonial era.  

Northam, is in short, a serious professional, someone who focuses on resolving important challenges -- which, it's worth reminding everyone in this age of Tea Party craziness, is exactly and only what we want our government officials doing.

And then we have the Reverend E.W. Jackson, the extent of whose seriousness on matters of governance may be summed up by the video from his failed Senate campaign where he smashes watermelons labeled "Federal Budget", "Unemployment" and "Obamacare" with an axe.  

Luckily for Ralph Northam, the senator's environmental positions appear 'radically liberal' in comparison to his drive-the-planet-into-the-ground opponent for lieutenant governor, E.W. Jackson. Not only are Jackson's political positions on the environment inimical to its preservation, Jackson represents the wing-nut group of conservatives in Virginia whose primary forte is cooking up conspiracy theories regarding every level of government.

Jackson has argued, for instance, that the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality is a puppet of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 'killing' Virginia's coal-mining sector as a result. While Jackson may believe it's just good politics, a part of me also thinks that Jackson actually believes some of the far-fetched conspiracy theories that he spins out for the mainstream media to print across its front pages.