Congressman Rick Boucher with Floyd County Store owner Woody Crenshaw during visit to Floyd

Many Congressional incumbents around the country are in trouble. At the moment, veteran 9th District Congressman Rick Boucher does not appear to be one of them.

A new poll shows Democrat Boucher leading Republican challenger Morgan Griffith by 13 points — 52-39 percent. An incumbent with more than 50 percent re-elect is not usually considered in trouble.

Griffith, of couse, sees it different, calling his attempt to defeat the long-time Congressman “one of the most competitive races in the country.”

Given his record, I’ve always suspected Griffith is on drugs. This comment ices it.

Boucher will be hard to beat. He has a solid political base in Southwestern Virginia and generally votes the wishes of his constituency, even when it means going against the Democratic leadership of Congress. He was one of the few Democrats to vote against Obama’s so-called “health care reform.”

Griffith, on the other hand, is a right-wing flake that even many conservative Republicans consider too far out on the fringe.

Things could change by November but — at this point — the odds favor Boucher for another term.

Tea Party: The revolution is over

Just call the Tea Party the CB Radio of this year’s political circus, a fad that is fading fast, a crackpot idea whose time never was and now is disappearing faster than Sarah Palin’s credibility.

Three Tea Party candidates went down in flames in the Virginia primaries Tuesday, beaten to a pulp by established candidates.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows 50 percent of Americans now view the Tea Party movement unfavorably — an 11 percent jump from just a couple of months ago.  Most Americans now correctly believe the Tea Party movement is controlled by loons.

Turn off the tea pot, the party’s over. Like so many so-called populist movements dominated by extremists, the Tea Party appears destined for a well-deserved place in the toxic waste dump of political sewage.

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Gov. Bob McDonnell: What can he be thinking?

The rabid right wing of the Republican party saw Bob McDonnell’s election as a road to the past, restoring the shameful and restrictive policies of the Old South to the Old Dominion.

Now they’re not so sure.

“He clearly cannot be trusted,” Joe Glover, a Republican activist who lives near Lynchburg and heads the Family Policy Network, a Christian advocacy group, tells The Washington Post. “He’s clearly not the conservative he would like conservatives to think he is. I will not make the mistake of voting for Bob McDonnell again.”

Clearly, the gov has made a few missteps that does not fall into the stone-age policies of the far right. He had the gall to appoint some moderates to his administration, bitch-slapped attorney general Ken Cuccinelli for his ill-conceived memo telling state colleges and universities and memos to ignore equality for gays and actually apologized for failing to mention the shame of slavery in his questionable restoration of Confederate History Month.

What is McDonnell thinking? Doesn’t he know that acting like a decent human being is not something the rabid right wants in an elected official.

Reports The Washington Post:

After eight years of Democratic rule, Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell was seen by conservatives as a political savior, someone who would restore the state’s right-leaning policies and traditions. But less than four months into his term, many conservatives have grown disenchanted, even as he has made direct appeals to causes they care about.

Two recent high-profile efforts to cater to parts of the conservative coalition — declaring April as Confederate History Month and slashing funding for Planned Parenthood — only further agitated many.

McDonnell’s failure to mention slavery in the Confederate proclamation led to a cycle of national ridicule followed by an apology from the governor, dampening whatever boost he might have gotten. And although McDonnell removed most state funding from Planned Parenthood, he stopped short of his campaign promise to cut all funds from the nation’s largest abortion provider, leaving many social conservatives feeling let down.

“Bob McDonnell is a typical politician trying to please both sides of the aisle and hopes that you and I are naive enough to buy it,” read an e-mail sent to supporters of Virginians for Life last month that also called the governor “gutless.”

McDonnell may turn out to have a heart and a conscience — and there just ain’t any place for that in the world of extreme right-wing politics.

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Gov. Bob McDonnell, playing to his mostly-white, Conservative base, restored Confederate History Month to Virginia’s Hall of Shame recently, reversing an eight-year trend of relegating the history of the ill-fated Confederacy to its well-deserved place in the dustbin of historical mistakes.

For some, dedicating a month to remembering the Confederacy is akin to declaring a National Holocaust Month.  It’s a slap in the face to any Virginian who believes we should learn from history and not honor its mistakes.

Confederate History Month was established in 1997 by well-known racist George Allen when he served as governor. Allen’s successor, James Gilmoree III, put some anti-slavery language into the proclamation but McDonnell took it out.  Governors Mark Warner and Tim Kaine scrapped the month altogether.

The circle of shame from last year’s election is complete: A racist governor and his homophobic attorney general. What’s next: A state holiday honoring the Klan?

Those who defend the outmoded concept of a Confederate History Month usually trot out the tired argument that the Civil War was not about slavery but was more about states’ rights. Yeah, it was about a state’s right to enslave people — nothing more, nothing less.

McDonnell’s latest move is just another regressive step by an administration in Richmond determined to drag the Commonwealth back into the stone age.

McDonnell, Attorney Gen. Ken Cucinelli and others in the party in power are troglodytes — throwbacks to a shameful time when whites lynched blacks and a favorite Virginia past time was night sticking the colored folk.

McDonnell claims his actions will be “good for tourism.” Yeah, right: If you want Virginia to become a popular destination for white supremacists, bigots and racists.

Sadly, it comes at a time when another national disgrace is brewing at the federal level with Arlington National Cemetery.

Reports Salon:

Almost 20 years ago Congress ordered Arlington National Cemetery to preserve history, after one of the oldest parts of the burial grounds had fallen into disrepair. That forlorn group of several thousand graves, called Section 27, holds the remains of thousands of Civil War troops, including African-Americans who served with the U.S. Colored Troops, as well as thousands of freed slaves.

But when then-congressman and African-American history buff Louis Stokes began to visit there around 1990, he found headstones there were falling apart and overgrown with weeds. Prodded by Stokes, in 1992 Congress ordered Arlington to replace the crumbling headstones and organize and preserve the historical burial records for Section 27 so vital history about those buried there would not be lost forever.

Superintendent John Metzler told Congress the cemetery was on the case. Arlington replaced the old, crumbling headstones in that section with new, shiny white marble markers. The cemetery also told Congress that burial records for the area got straightened up and preserved. (Metzler is still the superintendent at Arlington).

A Salon investigation shows that 17 years after Metzler’s commitment, the cemetery’s cosmetic fixes did little to preserve the history of the dead there, and instead appear to have made matters worse. Salon obtained thousands of internal cemetery burial records for that section, along with the cemetery’s own internal grave-by-grave map of the section completed in 1990 just before the cemetery’s overhaul began, as well as copies of the old, handwritten burial register of the former slaves interred there back in the mid-1800s. Salon discovered that an unknown number of those new, perfect-looking headstones in the historical section have the wrong names on them or are wrongly marked “Unknown.” And at least 500 graves, listed as occupied in the cemetery’s own records, stand unmarked today.

UPDATE (6:07 P.M.): Gov. Bob McDonnell today apologized for omitting any mention of slavery from his proclamation on Confederate History Month.  In a prepared statement, McDonnell said (in part):

The proclamation issued by this Office designating April as Confederate History Month contained a major omission. The failure to include any reference to slavery was a mistake, and for that I apologize to any fellow Virginian who has been offended or disappointed. The abomination of slavery divided our nation, deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights, and led to the Civil War. Slavery was an evil, vicious and inhumane practice which degraded human beings to property, and it has left a stain on the soul of this state and nation. In 2007, the Virginia General Assembly approved a formal statement of “profound regret” for the Commonwealth’s history of slavery, which was the right thing to do.

McDonnell did not withdraw the proclamation but added the following to it:

WHEREAS, it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders, and the study of this time period should reflect upon and learn from this painful part of our history…..

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Photo courtesy of AFP

Our two Democratic Congressmen split their votes on the health care “reform” package that passed the House of Representatives late Sunday night.

Rep. Rick Boucher voted “no,” saying the bill’s cuts in Medicare hurt his large senior citizen constituency. Rep. Tom Perriello cast a “yes” vote, a move which could cost him in the mid-term elections this fall because most polls show Southwest Virginians aren’t sold on the s0-called “reform” plan that heads for President Barack Obama‘s desk for signature this week.

The 219-212 passage came without a single Republican vote and Obama bought that passage with a last-minute capitulation to Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life moderate who brought enough votes with him to put the bill over the top. Obama agreed to an “executive order” that would prohibit using federal funds to pay for abortions.

But the bill, for all its hoopla, does little to “reform” the health care morass in this country. Premiums will not do down. Most will increase. The bill not only extends health care protection to 32 million uninsured Americans — it mandates it, even if you can’t afford to pay. Failure to pay will bring a fine from the Feds.

For the most part, the bill is crippled by capitulations to the very insurance companies Obama claimed he wanted to control.

Obama sold out on health care reform — and he sold out the country as well.

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Democrats mourn in Massachusetts (AP Photo)

Hell froze over in Massachusetts Tuesday.

Voters sent a Republican to Washington to represent the most liberal state in the union in the United States Senate.

Defeated Democrats immediately launched their typical finger-pointing game — blaming the loss of seat held for so long by Sen. Ted Kennedy on everyone and everything except themselves.

Most of the fingers are pointed at Martha Coakley, the lackluster candidate who ran a lackluster campaign.

As candidates go, Coakley ranks high on any grading curve based on ineptitude. She took the race for granted, went on vacation rather than campaign and considered simple things like shaking hands with voters a boring waste of time.

Like Democrat Creigh Deeds in his disastrous run for governor in Virginia last year, Coakley committed every possible political sin and gave Republicans a big win just a year after Barack Obama carried the Old Dominion in the Presidential election.
But Tuesday’s election was Massachusetts for God’s sake — land of the liberal and home of the Democratic party: A place where a half-wit in a clown suit could be elected to office as long as he or she ran as a Democrat.

That was before Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, et. al took control of the party. That was before Democrats swept into control on Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008 on promises of change and a better way but delivered the same old corruption, the same old lobbyist-dominated way of doing things and the same old “screw the voters, we’re in this for ourselves” form of government.

Coakley’s stunning loss to Republican Scott Brown Tuesday is far more than an upset in a single election. It is a political tsunami that began with Republican victories in other elections months ago, gained momentum with the Democratic loss of governorships in Virginia and New Jersey and crashed ashore in Massachusetts Tuesday — drowning the arrogance of a clueless Democratic establishment that thought it could do whatever it wanted and however it wanted without regard to consequences.

Gone, in a flash, is the magical 60-vote majority in the Senate — the benchmark that assured Democratic domination of the political agenda. Gone is the illusion that Barack Obama may know what he is doing or that his election signaled any real game change in Washington. Gone is the fantasy of reform.

With luck, gone too is the phony health care “reform” bill that does nothing to resolve the problem that faces too many Americans.

Democrats did it to themselves and they deserved the ass-kicking they received. Voters have buyer’s remorse. They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.

Karma rules the game of politics and Tuesday, as Willie Nelson once sang, was “just a little old-fashioned karma coming ’round.” Liberal lanyard Keith Olbermann abandoned any remaining pretense of objective news reporting on MSNBC Tuesay night and unleashed all his vitriol on GOP Senator-elect Scott Brown, calling him sexist, corrupt and inept. As the Glenn Beck of the left, Olbermann sputtered, spit and gagged at the prospect of voters not following his liberal laments. How dare they display independent thought and vote conscience, not party?

Like the lunatic fringe that controlled the GOP during the Bush years, the left lost its way by falsely assuming a superiority of intellect and compounded the crime with an ill-perceived sense of infallibility.What they saw as voter mandates in 2006 and 2008 was nothing more than an angry backlash against abuse of power and disregard for the desires of those who put them into office. Republicans made the same mistake after winning control of Congress in 1996 and the White House in 2000.

Voters want change but change cannot be delivered by politicians who put their party’s agenda ahead of the best interests of a nation. Democrats and Republicans may represent different philosophies but they are the same when it comes to governing. They cater to different special interests but it is still those special interests that control each political party and special interests are controlled by money and greed, not public need or a common good.

On Tuesday, Grubbs confirmed the buzz. He’s stepping down when his current term ends in March, ending a 16-year tenure on the bench.

Like many retired judges, however, Grubbs will remain available to sit in on cases as a substitute judge.

Grubbs said he is “not ready to quit” completely but will step back from the regular grind of sitting on cases in Floyd and Montgomery Counties.

The search begins now for a new judge, starting with recommendations from the local bar associations and ending with approval by the Virginia General Assembly.

Karen Duncan (center) with Gov. Tim Kaine (Photo from Anoymous is a Woman)

The Virginia blog graveyard got another addition Saturday as Democratic political activist Karen Duncan announced she is shutting down her popular Anonymous is a Woman site because of a potential conflict with an unnamed new job.

Duncan is shutting down her blog for what she feels are good reasons. Others recently have quietly walked away from sites and blogs with no explanation and some just disappear without warning.

It’s a jungle out there.

Writes Duncan:

Readers may have noticed that I’ve been posting less and my posts have not been as overtly political as usual.  I won’t be coy about it.  I have been slowly disengaging from blogging because it’s time to close up shop.

I did this once before because I was getting burned out and wanted to move on to try different forms of writing.  But once I had taken a much needed break, I realized how much I truly missed blogging and came back.  This time is different.

First of all, I’m not burnt out.  And I already know that I will miss it.  My reason for leaving is much simpler now than it was the first time I took a break.  I have a new job that would make blogging a conflict of interest.  I won’t go into the details about the job, but please believe me that it would present a real conflict for me and my employer if I were to be running a blog and publicly sounding off about politics and other controversial issues.

Recent weeks and months haven’t been good to area blogs that focus on politics and/or community news. Star City Harbinger, launched with a lot of fanfare by Roanoke legal aid attorney Hank Bostwick, disappeared quietly from the web in the last few weeks. Links to old articles give a “404″ page now found and the primary url redirects to to the moribund BlogRoanoke, which hasn’t posted anything new since October.

Will Griffin takes oath as mayor of Floyd

New Supervisor Casey Clinger

Some new faces joined the ranks of elected officials Monday as Circuit Judge Ray W. Grubbs administered the oath of office in the courtroom of the county courthouse.

Among those taking the oath of office were newly-elected town Mayor Will Griffin, council members Bruce Turner and Karen Agnew Bingham, Courthouse district supervisor Casey Clinger and school board member Linda King

Indian Valley Supervisor Fred Gerald, who ran for re-election unopposed, was also sworn in.

The new officials take office on Jan. 1.  King defeated incumbent Howard Cundiff by 62 percent, an incredible voter rejection of an sitting office holder.

All face daunting challenges when they assume their seats: continuing budget cuts from the Commonwealth, high unemployment and a stagnant county economy that mirrors the problems elsewhere in Virginia and the nation.

Wish them luck. They will need it, along with support from Floyd County’s normally passive electorate.

Republican Casey Clinger easily defeated former Town Manager Mike Maslaney, a Democrat running as an independent, collecting 56.56 percent of the vote to win the open seat on the Floyd County Board of Supervisors, replacing retiring Democrat-turned-Republican Jerry W. Boothe.  Boothe endorsed Clinger and the win gives the GOP a solid 4-1 majority on the county board.

Some saw the race as a referendum on old vs. new: Clinger, the local boy and businessman, against Maslaney, the newcomer heavily involved in the downtown rehab project. Others felt Maslaney would be hurt by his seat on the county Economic Development Authority, currently involved in a questionable deal to sell 51.5 acres in the county’ Commerce Park to a company with a dubious track record.

Whatever the reason, county voters returned to their GOP roots Tuesday, giving the three Republicans running for statewide office 65 percent of the vote and delegate Charles Poindexter 74 percent.

In the school board race, however, voters dumped incumbent Howard Cundiff — replacing him with Linda King, who rang up 62.65 percent of the vote in a comfortable win.

In the town council race, appointed councilman Bruce Turner, Floyd County’s Chief Deputy in the Sheriff’s Department, led voting with 102 votes (39.08 percent), followed by Karen Agnew Bingham (71 votes: 27.20 percent), Ross G. Miller (50 votes: 19.15 percent) and Dennis Wagner (37 votes: 14.17 percent).  Will Griffin, running unopposed for mayor, won with only 1 dissenting write-in vote.

Statewide, Republicans padded their majority in the House of Delegates, picking up at least four seats, and newly-elected governor Bob McDonnell delivered the final blow to Democrats by capturing the Northern Virginia counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William.  Independent voters who helped put Mark Warner and Tim Kaine in the governor’s office in the last two elections, went to McDonnell this time around. Democrats weren’t helped by the the incredibly inept campaign of Bath County Senator Creigh Deeds in his bid for the state’s top job.