1st District GOP Chair files ethics complaint against Krystal Ball

Tom Foley, the Chairman of the First District Republican Committee, has filed a complain against Krystal Ball with the House Ethics Committee.  Foley’s particular concern is the lack of disclosure from Ball on her stock options – before they were used to make the candidate a millionaire (see here, emphasis added).

Candidate Ball states that she will improve Congressional ethics by increasing disclosure, Foley noted. Yet when it became time to disclose what amounts between one and five million dollars worth of stock options . . . contrary to the committee’s published opinion to err on the side of disclosure, the options were not disclosed.

This is not the first time Ball’s finances have been at issue.

Cross-posted to VV and The Real Krystal Ball

West Virginia: the new canary in the coalmine?

Someday, I’ll pay for that pun.

In the meantime, though, Rasmussen has a poll on the West Virginia Senate race, and it’s a shocker:

In the first Rasmussen Reports post-primary survey of West Virginia’s U.S. Senate race, Democratic Governor Joe Manchin attracts 48% of the vote while Republican businessman John Raese earns 42%.

Keep in mind, Raese was the last sacrificial lamb for the late Robert Byrd.  That he could hold one of the most popular Democrats in the state below 50% is a complete stunner.

Keep in mind, outside of recent presidential elections and any vote involving the Moore family, the GOP does not exist in West Virginia.  If this race is even close in November, the Democrats could very well lose both houses of Congress.

Cross-posted to BD

Deeds to McDonnell: adopt my plan for roads even though the voters rejected it

Creigh “What’s in Your Wallet?” Deeds is at it again.

In a full-spread Op-Ed in the Virginia Pilot, Deeds calls for Governor McDonnell to increase taxes on Virginians to pay for transportation.

Never mind that McDonnell has been in office less than a year (while one of Deeds’ heroes, Mark Warner, couldn’t get his signature achievement imposed until deep into year three).

Never mind that McDonnell promised the voters he would not raise their taxes.

Never mind that Deeds himself, while campaigning on a tax increase, suffered one of the worst defeats a candidate for Governor ever suffered in Virginia.

No, none of that matters, nothing but the hunger for “new revenue.”

Deeds even tries to tempt McDonnell with the ol’ bipartisan talk: “you will find allies in unexpected places.”

I’m sure.  That’s what happens when election winners adopt the platform of the losers.  The losers suddenly become “allies in unexpected places.”  However, Deeds forgot to mention the angry reaction from expected places.  McDonnell is already smarting over the manufacturer’s tax and the accelerated sales tax (to name a few) from within his own party – to say nothing of the 1.1 million Virginians who voted for McDonell last year (more than any other candidate for Governor in Virginia).

McDonnell would be wise not to take advice from the fellow he trounced last year.

Cross-posted to VV

Lest we forget, Krystal Ball backed the “stimulus”, too

My post from this morning on Glenn Nye and his vote for the stimulus got me thinking about Krystal Ball, the Democrat who is running against my Congressman (Rob Wittman).  This should come as no surprise, but Ball also backed the stimulus (Inside Nova).

In other words, Ms. Ball is fully behind the fake Congressional Districts, the checks to the deceased, the attempt to shackle Virginia with long-term spending obligations, and $100 billion in “technological breakthroughs” that the Associated Press (of all people) called, “a collection of rosy projections that ignore many of the challenges, pitfalls and economic realities in all those areas” (NRO - The Corner).

Is she sure she wants us to focus on “the issues”?

Cross-posted to VV and The Real Krystal Ball

Glenn Nye (and oddly enough, the NRCC) miss the point

In his desperate attempt to avoid geting bounced by the voters of the 2nd District, Glenn Nye has even gone so far as to attempt time travel.

Nye would have us believe that he voted against the TARP fiasco. Trouble is, TARP was approved in October 2008, before Nye was elected. The NRCC also noticed that Nye himself repeatedly refused to take any position on it during the 2008 campaign.

Now, one will notice that I did not link to either Nye or the NRCC. That’s not just laziness here. Nye is clearly attempting to portray himself as a different kind of Democrat, while the NRCC are calling him a same-old, same-old. That’s all well and good, but surprisingly NRCC missed the big one: Nye’s vote for the Obama “stimulus.”

With all due respect to Nye (stop laughing, Mr. Kirwin!), all of his talk about being a different Democrat melts away on this one vote. Economists from John Taylor on down were exposing the arguments behind the stimulus as laughable nonsense even as the near-trillion-dollar fiasco was careening through Congress.  Yet Nye voted for it, and thus is on the hook for every embarrassment it has spawned: the fake Congressional Districts, the checks to the deceased, the attempt to shackle Virginia with long-term spending obligations, and just about anything Joe Biden has said over the last two years.

All of this can be laid at the feet of stimulus backers; all 246 of them in the House were Democrats; one of them was Glenn Nye.

I can understand why Nye would want to avoid this issue.  Why the NRCC is helping him out is a larger mystery.  It should be mentioned in every single statement the Committee sends out between now and November, period.

Cross-posted to BD

Perriello slams Hurt for HB3202

Back when the 5th District nominee was not known, I expressed my concern about the tax-hiking history of Rob Hurt.  Wouldn’t you know it, Tom Perriello blasted Hurt on the Transportation Tax Hike of 2007 (otherwise known as HB3202).

From a local perspective, I can only say this – if Perriello beats Hurt, it will be yet another painful lesson about the fate of the Virginia GOP when it does not purge the tax-hikers in its midst.  Remember, the special session of 2008 cleansed every Virginia Republican of the tax hikes from the past . . . except the State Senate caucus.  That could mean some surprising headaches in 2011.

From a national perspective, this is more telling than anything that happened in last night’s primaries.  Alaska merely confirmed that the name Murkowski has become political poison (Sarah Palin knocked off Lisa’s father, Frank, in the 2006 gubernatorial primary).  In Arizona, voters made the best choice in a bad field.  Florida’s GOP finally paid the price for Charlie Crist as its anointed choice – Bill McCollum, whom I personally like – went down in defeat to outsider Rick Scott.  Reading national implications from deeply local primaries is unwise, at best.

Instead, look to what the arguably most vulnerable Democrat in America does – he hits his Republican opponent from the right.  That’s all you need to know about which party’s ideas and prospects are ascendant.

Cross-posted to BD

Oh by the way

As I get back into the swing of things (i.e., recovering from vacation), I’ve added another blog to my repertoire: On the Spot – the blog of my local GOP committee.

Take a look here.

Cross-posted to VV

The surplus . . . what to do, what to do

Governor McDonnell announced today that the FY10 surplus was actually $400 million-plus.  He then announced that all but $71 million was already spoken for (Washington Post).

That aside, there is still the question of the $71 million.  The Governor is waiting until late fall to determine its fate.

I have four suggestions:

1) Kill the manufacturer’s tax: Initially, the General Assembly was planning to wipe out a tax deduction for manufacturing.  In the end it was shaved by a third, but that’s still a tax increase.  Eliminating the entire deduction was supposed to bring in $30 million, so we’re looking at a ten million loss to Richmond’s coffers.

2) Decelerate sales tax collection now instead of later: As was noted during the first surplus celebration, the revenue effect of the accelerated sales tax was nominal.  Deceleration is supposed to come in 2013. Why wait?

3) Restore the vacant judgeships: The last FY11 figures I saw on the savings from leaving the vacancies as such was $6.5 million.

4) Put the rest into closing the VRS gap: McDonnell himself noted that he would take every opportunty to accelerate the payback of the skipped $620 million to the retirement system.  No time like the present, I say.

Cross-posted to VV

Where’s Peter Burke when we need him?

My fellow VV blogger Riley has some rather, um, interesting financial details on Rob Wittman’s opponent, Krystal Ball.  Yikes!  Reminded me somewhat of the “Hard Sell” episode from White Collar.

OK, so the plot wasn’t nearly as complex, but any opportunity I can find to mention a good USA Network show, I’m taking.

In all seriousness, this looks really, really bad for Ms. Ball.  If she was hoping this race could be a springboard to a political career, she should think again.

Hide the Decline: Nepal Edition

There have been so many instances of errors data manipulation, and other shenanigans, from global warming alarmists that the rest of us can barely keep up with them; today’s example ups the number of my posts on this to thirty-two.  Still, every one needs proper exposure, lest the breadth and depth of this be hidden.

So, today, Willis Eschenbach (WUWT) discovers the IPCC’s claims of warming in Nepal, goes deep into the NASA-GISS data wickets, and finds (emphasis added) . . .

GISS has made a straight-line adjustment of 1.1°C in twenty years, or 5.5°C per century. They have changed a cooling trend to a strong warming trend.

In other words, NASA-GISS literally hid the decline in Nepal’s temperatures.

Eschenbach naturally wonders what else is wrong with the NASA-GISS data.

Once again we see huge adjustments made to individual temperature records without reason or justification. This means simply that until GISS are able to demonstrate a sound scientific foundation for their capricious and arbitrary adjustments, we cannot trust the final GISS dataset. Their algorithm obviously has significant problems that lead to the type of wildly unreasonable results seen above and in other temperature datasets, and they are not catching them. Pending a complete examination, we cannot know what other errors the GISS dataset might contain.

Lest anyone forget, this is the same GISS that got caught “smoothing” data in the North Pole.

Cross-posted to VV