George Allen to run for the U.S. Senate

MoonHowler

It’s official.  Former Virginia Governor George Allen will run for the U.S. Senate for the seat currently held by Senator Jim Webb.  As a matter of fact, George Allen ran for the same seat in 2006 and lost to Senator Webb.  Part of Allen’s problem was a screwed the pooch remark made about a Democratic operative who had been shadowing him.  He called the young man, Macaca, attempting to be funny.  It wasn’t and Allen still bears the scars from his unfortunate mistake.  The Democrats were all over that mistake. 

George Allen speaks of it today.  According to the Huffington Post:

“I made mistakes and I take responsibility for them,” Allen said in an interview with Bearing Drift, before seemingly attempting to play off the slur as a fabricated word that other people had mistakenly interpreted as offensive, a move that he similarly attempted in 2006.

“I needlessly drew a college student who was following me around all over Virginia into the race, and I should not have. He was just doing his job and I should not have made him part of the issue,” Allen said of S.R. Sidarth, the Democratic tracker of Indian descent he was addressing. “It was not done with malice, and if I had known that that made-up word would be connoted as a racial insult I would not have said it.”

After Allen used the phrase in summer 2006, it quickly became a racially-charged ball and chain that is largely thought to have sunk him in his battle against his opponent, Democrat Jim Webb.

As George Allen, who was the one time darling of Virginia Republicans, attempted to address the perceived macaca problem, our very own Corey Stewart was quick to seize the opportunity to throw Allen under the bus:

Stewart, who is heading to Richmond, Va. on Tuesday to talk to party activists and court donors ahead of his own likely Senate bid, said he, along with other Republicans in the state, is “concerned that [Allen’s] not going to be able to shake off the ‘macaca’ moment.”

 

Corey might want to think about his own transgressions in the loose lips department. The moonhowlings folder has all sorts of gaffes that I feel certain the Allen campaign would find useful. A few Allen aides could use our search engine to pull out highlights, or should I say  low lights of many a slip of the tongue made by Stewart.

Keep Shoveling, Corey

MoonHowler

Corey is just the gift that keeps on giving.  The Washington Post in its Virginia Political blog section quotes Corey:

The always-outspoken Stewart repeated his remarks today, and said he doesn’t worry that McDonnell may back Allen because voters already showed they don’t support Allen by voting him out of office in 2006.

“They’re old friends,” Stewart said. “George Allen has a lot of old friends. It’s not Bob McDonnell who chooses the next senator from Virginia. It’s the electorate. … And they have already decided Allen had a mediocre term as senator. He needs to move on.”

Does Corey not know the math of winning an election?  The winner has to get the most votes.  No one decided that George Allen was a mediocre senator.  Jim Webb got more votes.  Corey’s over-simplification is laughable. 
Now Governor McDonnell has come out and defended George Allen. 

“I think a lot of George Allen,” McDonnell said on his monthly radio show Tuesday on WTOP. “I served with him in the legislature when he was governor. He was the most dynamic governor of the modern age. I think he was an exceptional governor. He was a very good senator.”

 

McDonnell also has said he probably won’t endorse anyone.  Perhaps discretion is the better part of valor.  Maybe Corey needs to emulate the governor.  He just keeps digging himself in deeper and deeper.  If he keeps it up, about 10% of the population will support him, if he is lucky.  That’s won’t send Mr. Stewart to Washington. 

5-4 Citizens United Decision Clearly Judicial Activism

MoonHowler

Today the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission which overturned a hundred years of campaign finance laws, including part of the McCain FeingoldAct.  Corporations and Unions can now spend money directly on the support of candidates.  According to Michael Waldman of the Washington Post:

This far-reaching ruling augurs a significant power struggle. For the first time since 1937, an increasingly conservative federal judiciary faces a progressive and activist Congress and president. Until now, it was unclear how the justices would accommodate the new political alignment. The Citizens United decision suggests an assertive court, eager to overturn precedent, looming as a challenge to President Obama’s agenda.

The Atlantic explains the decision:

Justice Kennedy, in the majority opinion, reasoned that the government can’t discriminate against speakers based on their corporate identities, and that “all speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech, and the First Amendment protects the resulting speech.”

This basically eliminates a middleman: before today, corporations and unions had to set up PACs (political action committees), filed separately with the IRS, that would receive donations. And they did. Corporations and unions spend millions of dollars on elections. Now, however, the accounting firewall is gone, and Wal-Mart or the Service Employees International Union, for instance, can spend their corporate/union money directly on candidates.

 

 
Read More

No Official State Song

MoonHowler

Virginia has no official state song.  It has a Virginia Official Song Emeritus.  Ok.  So what’s the problem?  No one would be caught singing the  Virginia Official Song Emeritus, Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, written by an African American man named James Allen Bland who was born in 1854 in New York. 
 

Some history:

James “Jimmy” Allen Bland was born on October 22, 1854 in Flushing, Long Island, New York. When he was 12 and living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he saw an old black man playing a banjo and singing spirituals. He fell in love with the banjo and tried to make one using bailing wire for strings. This didn’t work very well and, besides, a big kid took it and broke it into pieces. Jimmy’s father bought him a real banjo for $8.00 and Jimmy taught himself to play… very well.

Later, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Jimmy finished high school and enrolled in Howard University. He was so talented and had become so proficient with the banjo that he was entertaining professionally at private parties and in hotels and restaurants from the time he was 14.

At Howard University, he met a young lady named Mannie Friend. On a trip with Mannie to her birthplace in Tidewater, Virginia, Alan Bland composed “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”. Sitting on the banks of the James River, Mannie wrote the words down on paper while Jimmy played and sang to her.

 

Read More