Life in Virginia's Sickest and GOP Supporting Counties

Grundy Virginia

Over the weekend in Richmond for the inaugural events for the Democrat slate led by Ralph Northam, there were an abundance of people from Virginia's so-called urban crescent that extends from Fairfax County, Arlington and Alexandria southward through Richmond southeast to the cities of Hampton Roads.   These are the areas of Virginia that vote Democrat and oppose the reverse Robin Hood agenda of the Republican Party which, if House Speaker Paul Ryan were to have his way, would include drastic cuts to public support, including disability payments and Medicaid (actually, every city in Virginia other than Lynchburg and Waynesboro and a handful of tiny "cities" in southwest Virginia voted for the Democrat ticket in November, 2017).   Not present in any significant numbers were those from the rural areas of Virginia that supported both Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie who in reality espouse policies that, if enacted would cause major harm to the very same rural areas.  Coincidentally, the same day that Ralph Northam and his ticket mates were sworn into office, I came across an piece in The Atlantic  from 2015, that focused piece on life in America's sickest counties, ten (10) of which are located in Southwest Virginia.   

The county most spotlighted in the piece was Buchanan County, Virginia.   Ironically, despite its severe dependence on federal disability payments, Medicaid payments and remote area medical clinics, Buchanan County voted over 80% for Donald Trump in 2016, and 75.94% for Ed Gillespie this past November.   Trump's tax bill slashed taxes for the wealthy and large corporations, few if any of which are found in Buchanan County, and will fuel Republican desires to slash the social safety net spending.  Gillespie, had he been elected championed a similar tax cut in Virginia that would have left Virginia with a $1.5 billion deficit which would have likewise brought spending cuts in programs that aid an already desperate area of Virginia.  Both votes are yet further displays of the irony that rural regions vote against their own economic interest typically because GOP candidates play upon the residents' racism, homophobia and general rejection of knowledge and modernity itself.  How residents expect to turn their regions around economically when their bigotry and backwardness make them anathema to modern and progressive businesses.  A further irony is that newly inaugurated Governor Northam - a pediatric neurologist by profession - whom Buchanan County rejected last November has pledged spend time working in the RAM clinics mentioned in the cited article.  Here are excerpts from the piece in The Atlantic:

Remote Area Medical ("RAM) was founded in 1985 by Stan Brock, a 79-year-old Brit who wears a tan Air-Force-style uniform and formerly hosted a nature TV show called Wild Kingdom. Even after he spent time in the wilds of Guyana, Brock came to the conclusion that poor Americans needed access to medical care about as badly as the Guyanese did. Now Remote Area Medical holds 20 or so packed clinics all over the country each year, providing free checkups and services to low-income families who pour in from around the region.

Inside, the clinic’s patrons looked more or less able-bodied. Most of the women were overweight, and the majority of the people I talked to were missing some of their teeth. But they were walking and talking, or shuffling patiently along the beige halls as they waited for their names to be called. There weren’t a lot of crutches and wheelchairs.

Yet many of the people in the surrounding county, Buchanan, derive their income from Social Security Disability Insurance, the government program for people who are deemed unfit for work because of permanent physical or mental wounds. Along with neighboring counties, Buchanan has one of the highest percentages of adult disability recipients in the nation, according to a 2014 analysis by the Urban Institute’s Stephan Lindner. Nearly 20 percent of the area's adult residents received government SSDI benefits in 2011, the most recent year Lindner was able to analyze.

[F]ive of the 10 counties that have the most people on disability are in Virginia—and so are four of the lowest, making the state an emblem of how wealth and work determine health and well-being. Six hours to the north, in Arlington, Fairfax, and Loudoun Counties, just one out of every hundred adults draws SSDI benefits. But Buchanan county is home to a shadow economy of maimed workers, eking out a living the only way they can—by joining the nation’s increasingly sizable disability rolls.

Just about everyone I spoke with at the Grundy clinic was a former manual worker, or married to one, and most had a story of a bone-crushing accident that had left them (or their spouse) out of work forever.

In October, the sun-dappled mountains blazed with red and orange as the leaves turned. If you wanted to send someone a postcard to convince them of the merits of Virginia, this would be it.

But if this place has the scenery of the Belgian Ardennes, it has the health statistics of Bangladesh. People here die about five years earlier than they should. About a third of people smoke, and a third are obese. A quarter of the people live in poverty, compared with about 11 percent in the rest of the state.

These Appalachians, many of them former coal miners, are among the nearly nine million American workers receiving disability payments today, compared with 1.4 million in 1970. Spending on the program has risen nine-fold over the past four decades. Clusters of recipients can be found from California to Maine, though as Lindner points out, the states with the highest numbers tend to be in the South and Southeast.

Critics say the program’s expansion is partly driven by Americans who are perfectly capable of working but are unwilling to do so. Since the mid-1980s, government spending on the elderly and disabled has ballooned, even as tightened eligibility rules have slashed welfare aid for needy mothers and children.

But visiting a place like Grundy reveals a more complicated picture. There are undoubtedly some who exaggerate their ailments in order to collect their checks. But many of the coal workers here have experienced horrific on-the-job accidents and can’t go back to the mines. Other residents have been battered by diabetes, obesity, and tobacco. Others still suffer from severe depression and intellectual disabilities that would preclude most kinds of work. And most importantly, there are no other options here: no orthodontist’s office where someone can work the front desk; no big firms brimming with entry-level secretarial jobs. It’s not even clear how a person would go about calling around for a job here: My iPhone stopped working a few miles outside the county line.

Locals blame the town’s economic slump on the decline of coal, which they in turn blame on the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations. Several yards were dotted with campaign signs urging passers-by to “Stop Obama/Vote Gillespie.” (Sixty percent of Buchanan county voted for Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for Senate, though he lost in the state overall.)

The population of the county has shrunk by about 15,000 people since that year [1978]. In May alone, 188 workers were laid off in a mine near Grundy. The industry has been slammed by the newfound natural gas reserves and is expected to contract further by 2020. Still, coal remains the largest private employer in Buchanan, and its heavy impact continues to be felt even by those who no longer work in the mines.

Compare all of this with Arlington County, 400 miles away in the northern part of the state, which has one of the nation’s lowest rates of disability. Only 1 percent of people in Arlington are on disability, and it’s regularly ranked one of the overall healthiest (and richest) counties in the nation. Here, there are well-paved bike routes and a Metro-accessible Whole Foods. People complain when they can’t take their tiny dogs into Starbucks.

Virginia, in other words, is a state divided not only by politics, professions, and mountains, but also by how run-down its citizens are. While Buchanan county’s fortunes have been inextricably tied to coal, those of Northern Virginia are hitched to the government.

An outmigration of the young and talented has left behind an aging population that is ill-equipped to deal with a changing economy. Thirty-two percent of Buchanan's residents never graduated from high school, compared with 15 percent nationwide.

Because getting to a doctor is hard and expensive, people self-medicate with prescription painkillers, alcohol, and tobacco. Eventually, said Smiddy, the pulmonologist, “they become dysfunctional. They're weaving behind the car. They're setting the stove on fire. It's not that they're bad people. They’re probably faith-based people, family people. Most are just trying to function.”

The problem is, even if society were to decide that there should be fewer people on disability, that the system has become too bloated with sneaky pretenders, it isn’t clear what a fifth of the population of Grundy would do to survive. It’s entirely possible that some of the town’s residents are faking their disability claims, but it’s hard to imagine that most of them are. People who are rolling in undeserved government dough generally don’t line up at the crack of dawn to get their teeth fixed in an elementary school cafeteria.

The problem, as Smiddy sees it, isn’t just that the economy is limited, or that the region’s education and medical systems could use an overhaul. The county’s health has been so poor for so long, he says, that locals have set their expectations too low. And once everyone—the people, their employers, their doctors, the government—accepts that bleak vision, it hardens into reality. It makes it so there’s no life after coal.

Yes, Southwest Virginia allowed itself to become wholly dependant on the coal industry which is now dying no matter what promises Der Trumpenführer maymake.  But two other things are at play: 32% of the population never finished high school and much of the population is described as "faith based."  The result is ignorance and bigotry that make the area unattractive to many who might otherwise travel to the region and enjoy its natural beauty (the husband and I would certainly never go there).  As far as new businesses, and uneducated population makes it almost impossible to sell the area.  Sadly, much of the populace refuses to look in the mirror and acknowledge that they are a large part of the problem and that until behavior and attitudes change, things will only continue to get worse.  Understand, I am not unsympathetic to the plight of the people of the region.  I simply cannot grasp how the vote for politicians who espouse policies which will only end up hurting them more while rejecting modern values that are allowing other parts of Virginia to flourish.

Gillespie Lamely Blames Trump for His Gubernatorial Loss

At the moment that I write this post, the results from the Alabama U.S. Senate special election are still coming in and Doug Jones is in potential striking distance.   Time will tell, especially as the largest counties in the state - Mobile, Montgomery, Jefferson, Madison, Shelby and Tuscaloosa - come in.  Meanwhile, here in Virginia failed GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is seemingly blaming Donald Trump for his loss last month.  Yes, Donald Trump is toxic in Virginia outside of the evangelical Christian and neo-Confederates who predominate in the rural regions (especially in Southwest Virginia), but Gillespie conveniently forgets his ridiculous tax proposal that would have bankrupted the state or his racist Trump style campaign ads that many voters found to be repulsive and/or frightening.  The Hill looks at Gillespie's effort to throw blame solely at Trump.  Here are excerpts:

Republican Ed Gillespie said that President Trump may have been a "big factor" in his defeat in the Virginia gubernatorial race last month.

In an interview with CNN's David Axelrod on his podcast "The Axe Files," Gillespie said that during his race against Democrat Ralph Northam, the eventual winner of the election, he tried to separate his campaign from the president and instead make it about Virginia.  But the race was widely seen as an early referendum on Trump's presidency.

"If you're not standing up for President Trump, for his supporters, they see you as not for him," Gillespie said. "And it's not that I was not for him, it's just that I'm not against him. I wanted to be for Virginia and I wanted to keep the focus on Virginia."

"It's a tough tightrope to walk, and it may not be walkable, to be honest with you."

On the campaign trail, Gillespie appeared at times to distance himself from Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in Virginia. He said that he never asked Trump to campaign with him in the state, and that the president never offered to.

Gillespie fell to Northam by about 9 points in the state's Nov. 7 gubernatorial election, and Democrats swept statewide, picking up 16 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates.

After the results of the election, Trump tweeted that Gillespie lost because he did not fully embrace the president and his brand of politics.

Should Roy Moore lose in Alabama, it will be interesting to see if he likewise throws blame at Trump.  Ditto for Congressional Republicans. 

Young Voter Turnout - A Growing Problem for Republicans

In the wake of the previous post's rant, there is encouraging news in Virginia which, if the nation is lucky, can be replicated in other states.  What is it?  Young voter turn out which helped put the Democrat statewide ticket over the top in the elections earlier this month.  Between pandering to religious extremists, racists and misogynists in general, and in pushing policies that are anathema to younger voters, the Republican Party has pretty much burned all bridges with the significant majority of younger voters.  Meanwhile, with attacks on Medicare, the same may happen with senior voters.  I truly cannot comprehend how a major political party seemingly has no long term plan to remain viable beyond the next decade at most.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the GOP's apparent suicide pact.  Here are highlights:

As bad as the overall outcome of Virginia’s recent election was for Republicans, there was one facet of the vote that raises special alarm for the party’s future.

That’s the performance of young voters, who came out in historic numbers and overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate for governor, Ralph Northam.

While Republicans have been wrestling with an aging demographic for some time, analysts say the unpopular actions of President Trump are pushing away a new generation.

“One of the biggest challenges facing the Republican Party in Virginia and nationwide is that the Republican Party has become toxic to a lot of young voters,” said Bob Holsworth, a longtime Virginia political scientist. “I think Trump has exacerbated a trend that was emerging, and it has become very problematic.”

Northam defeated Republican Ed Gillespie by an overall margin of 54 percent to 45 percent, as certified this week by the state Board of Elections. Young voters — who are often among the least-engaged, especially in a nonpresidential election — had a turnout rate of 34 percent, according to an analysis of exit polling by a group at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. That’s up from 26 percent in the 2013 governor’s race and double the youth turnout in 2009. And that surge of millennials was a windfall for Democrats: Sixty-nine percent of those voters supported Northam, vs. 30 percent for Gillespie.

The same trend held when measured in different ways. In precincts adjacent to college campuses, turnout was up 8 points over 2013 and Northam won 72 percent of the vote, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.

In precincts not adjacent to colleges but where voters age 40 and younger make up more than 60 percent of the population, turnout was up 7 points and Northam won more than 81 percent of the vote, the VPAP analysis found.

Virginia’s results suggest that the rise of young voters is a serious problem for Republicans nationwide.  Recent studies by the Pew Research Center found that millennials — generally defined as those age 18 to 35 in 2016 — are fast becoming the largest single bloc in the electorate. By 2020, there will be more millennial and Gen X voters than baby boomers.  And millennials have routinely polled as more left-leaning than other segments of the population.

The only other statewide election this year was in New Jersey, where Democrat Phil Murphy was a prohibitive favorite for governor. Young voters didn’t surge in New Jersey . . . . but 73 percent of them voted for the Democrat, according to the Tufts analysis.
 “Young people have increasingly moved away from the Republican Party, given its perceived status as being the anti-immigrant party and not being tolerant of alternative lifestyles,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. . . . “As long as the Republican Party is seen as not embracing or accepting people as they are, be they gay, transgender, immigrants and the like, that’s a big turnoff to young voters these days.”
 The Virginia results, he said, are “a wake-up call to the Republican Party about the way things are going to go for them next year” in congressional races across the country.  Some Republicans get the message. . . . I’ll summarize that with one word for the GOP: trouble.” . . . Ramadan has long warned that his party has a problem wooing minority voters. “But this election shows that it’s not just a minority problem, it’s a youth problem” — and even broader than that, he added.  Those problems were accelerated this year by “the Trump effect,” he said.

“Unless Republicans get back to mainstream issues instead of sanctuary cities and Confederate statues, we’re going to lose elections,” he said.

Republican pollster Gene Ulm said he was most concerned about “young suburbanites” in the Virginia results. “We basically had 300,000 people show up who don’t normally vote in a gubernatorial election,” he said. “We won 85,000 of them and lost the other 215,000.”

But the overall trend of young, white and suburban voters is a bad sign for the party going into next year’s congressional races, he said. “That affects certainly Barbara Comstock,” he said, referring to the Northern Virginia congresswoman, a Republican whose district went for Northam. “But there’s a lot of other districts in America where that’s going to play a role,” Ulm said.

There are a host of progressive and grass-roots groups aiming specifically to get a large turnout of young voters for Democratic candidates, . . . .  If anger at Donald Trump and the GOP continues to drive turnout up through the 2018 election cycle, when young people will be the largest bloc of eligible voters, we could be looking at a progressive wave powered by millennial voters.”

"Half these new delegates [in the Virginia House of Delegates] are probably millennials,” he said. “The impact of the millennial generation on the electorate is going to be pretty profound, and Democratic candidates tend to be the beneficiary of this far more than Republicans are.”

A piece in Gay Star News reveals that Virginia Republicans for the most part learned nothing from the election results as the Republican House of Delegates leadership is going out of its way to find a method to avoid referring to Delegate elect Danica Roem as female.  

  

Continued GOP Insanity: 82% of Trump Voters Still Support Him

Tuesday's fiasco at the polls for Republicans across the country, not just in Virginia, has caused some in the Republican Party to start having a debate that, in my view, should have begun 20 years ago, and which is all the more need with the toxic regime of Der Trumpenführer damaging the national fabric daily.  Yet a new poll indicated that 82% of Trump voters would vote for the man again despite the fact that he has passed none of the legislation he had promised and is sharply diminishing America's stature in the world.  As a post the other day indicated, the main motivation for these Trump supporters is their animus towards others - blacks, Hispanics, gays, non-Christians, etc., etc. Perhaps the only positive news is that, if one does the math, only 58% of registered voters voted in 2016 and Trump got roughly 47% of that vote which equates to 27.26% of voters.  Thus, more than 70% of Americans did NOT vote for the hate, bigotry and misogyny embodied by Trump.  A piece in Politico looks at these Trump supporters versus sane voters while another piece in Bearing Drift looks at  the mindset of "NeverTrump" Republicans who realize the GOP must change or begin what hopefully will be a precipitous road towards death.  First, highlights from Politico:

One year after the 2016 presidential election, the vast majority of Donald Trump voters have no regrets.

According to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted on the eve of the first anniversary of Trump's historic election, 82 percent of those who say they supported Trump last year would vote for him again if they had to do it over.

Trump’s supporters have largely rallied around the president, despite his poor overall approval ratings, the chaos of his first year in office and the ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

But there are worrying signs for Trump that voters are less inclined to give him a second term three years from now if he decides to run for reelection.

Those red flags go beyond the natural, downward trajectory of most new presidents. Like Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush saw their parties lose governorships in both New Jersey and Virginia the year after their first elections as president. But both Obama and Bush had job-approval ratings over 50 percent at this point.

Roughly twice as many Trump voters (16 percent) are undecided about whom they would support in 2020 as Clinton voters (7 percent), suggesting Trump's support is softer than it appears on the surface.

Similarly, 84 percent of Democratic voters would choose the Democratic candidate, but just 74 percent of GOP voters would back Trump, the poll shows. Nine percent of Democrats are undecided, compared with 17 percent of Republicans.

[A] CNN poll conducted by the firm SSRS, a remarkable 62 percent of registered voters said Trump does not deserve to be reelected in 2020. Only 35 percent of voters said he deserves reelection.
 In another ominous finding from the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, voters have questions about whether Trump will even complete his term in office. The Constitution sets the president's term into January 2021, but only a narrow majority of voters, 52 percent, think it’s likely that Trump completes his four-year term as president — 37 percent believe it’s more likely he will leave office early.
 The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll finds voters are split on whether they are better off financially now than they were a year ago when Trump was first elected. Just over a quarter, 26 percent, say they are better off now, but 28 percent say they are worse off. A 41 percent plurality say their financial situation is about the same as it was a year ago. . . . . The problem, again, for Trump: Just 23 percent of voters strongly approve of his job performance.

In the end, it is worth remembering that only because of the flawed Electoral College system that failed to protect America from an unfit president as contemplated by the Founding Fathers do we have  Der Trumpenführer in the White House.   The piece noted above in Bearing Drift suggests that more and more Republicans realize that Trump could be the death of the GOP brand.  Here are excerpts (the bold face is the author's):

We’re a few days removed from the recent unpleasantness, and we’re starting to see some narratives come together about what happened and why.

 Here is why this narrative from the President and Corey Stewart is weak bullshit:The idea that Gillespie didn’t embrace Trump enough and the result was Trump supporters stayed home is wrong.  What happened was Ed Gillespie broke the record for GOP turnout in a Governor’s race – his nearly 1.2 million votes in the election was more than any GOP governor candidate in history.  In fact, it was more than any successful gubernatorial candidate in Virginia history…other than Ralph Northam. 

Northam’s 1.4 million votes was unprecedented.  No statewide candidate in the history of Virginia has ever gotten that many votes in a non-presidential election.
 The Democrats deserve the credit they’ve earned – they finally cracked the code on how to beat the normal off-year election ennui that tends to infect their party.  All it takes is the most hated sitting president since Richard Nixon, coupled with a white supremacist murdering an innocent woman on hallowed Virginia ground in Charlottesville.
 When it comes down to it, many Republicans hate the Republican Party right now – either because they don’t like Trump or they don’t like the establishment, or they don’t like that we control everything in Washington and nothing is getting done.  That translates into people either leaving the party, or independents who tend to vote Republican not doing so to “send a message”.  You also have the fact that the entire Democratic party, from the middle to the far left, hates Trump so much they will crawl over broken glass to give him the finger, and if they can’t do that, they’ll give it to you and tell you to send him the message.
 Trump cost Republicans the large majority they’ve enjoyed in the House of Delegates for nearly a generation.  Candidates from across the entire political spectrum on the GOP side, from moderates to super conservatives, lost.
 [Y]ou can expect that any Republican held districts where Hillary outperformed Trump in 2016 are going to flip, if they haven’t already done so.  Statewide, it’s going to be extremely difficult for Republicans to win so long as Trump is as unpopular as he is.
 As for next year’s Senate race, if Corey Stewart wants it, I say let him have it.  Watching him get destroyed by the Democrats’ Pretty Hate Machine – which he helped build, thanks to his Confederate statues idiocy – will be almost as much fun to watch as Bob Marshall losing to a transgender woman.

What is most delicious is that the author is a former Northern Virginia GOP chairman.  Oh, and on those coming to Roy Moore's defense, the author tweeted this:

For those GOPers making those arguments, please look in a mirror and ask yourself if you'd be okay with a 32 year old man trying to "date" your daughter. And recognize that no, you wouldn't. At least, not if you've got a soul.

 I left the GOP years ago because I could not sell my soul to the forces of hate and extremism.  More and more Republicans will find themselves having to make the same choice I did.

The GOP Should Be Scared by Virginia

Why did the Republican Party lose so badly in Virginia yesterday?  That is a question that pundits will be bickering about for days and weeks.   But to me, the GOP loss comes down to several factors, not the least of which is the reality in the age of Der Trumpenführer is that it is becoming increasingly impossible for decent, moral people to remain Republicans.  Both in the Virginia campaign and nationally, all the Republican Party has to offer is increasingly overt racism/white nationalism, the coddling of Christian extremists, and taking from the poor and middle class to give to the wealthy.  The entire GOP platform has become the antithesis of the Gospel's social message and outside of rural and ostensibly more religious areas, people are finding the GOP's message repulsive.  Ed Gillespie tried the tax cut promise which would have bankrupted Virginia in the style of what Sam Brownback did in Kansas.  Urban Virginia voters - who shoulder the bulk of the tax burden and basically support rural areas - said "No" resoundingly.   With Danica Roem defeating Bob Marshall, the GOP's use of god, guns and gays to mobilize voters is in its death throes in Virginia.   The other notable thing about the election is the degree of dishonesty in the GOP candidates. Gillespie, John Adams, and Jill Vogel (and many of the GOP House of Delegates candidates as well) lied with abandon and at times shockingly so. Rather than garner them votes (outside of white supremacists and evangelical Christians) the open and blatant lies disgusted far larger numbers of voters.  A column in the New York Times picks up on some of this and lays out why the GOP should be very worried after their playbook went down in flames.  Here are excerpts:

Although at times over the last week it seemed that Democrats were doing their damnedest to lose the Virginia gubernatorial race, they failed miserably in that endeavor, which is to say that they succeeded emphatically at the polls. Ralph Northam will be the state’s next governor.

That’s a gigantic relief, because a Northam defeat would have prompted a Democratic meltdown — and rightly so. In statewide races, Virginia is increasingly blue: Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump there by five points a year ago. And Trump’s ceaseless assault on propriety, decency and ethical, responsible government is supposedly firing up liberals as never before. Virginia on Tuesday was the place to demonstrate that.

The demonstration was impressive. Not only did Northam beat his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, by about nine points . . . but Democrats also performed strongly in other Virginia races. So strongly, in fact, that one Democrat, Danica Roem, easily unseated a longtime Republican incumbent in the House of Delegates and will become the nation’s only openly transgender state representative. The history that she made flies squarely in the face of the bigotry and divisiveness that Trump sows.

Just when we needed a sign that his America is not all of America, Virginia came to the rescue and gave us a vivid one. And I guarantee you that the Republicans up for re-election in 2018 saw it, shuddered and will spend the next weeks and months trying to figure out just how much trouble their party is in and precisely how to repair it. . . . . the returns in Virginia suggested that Trump antipathy is indeed real and that it is definitely animating.

Does it mean that Democrats can wrest one chamber of Congress from Republican control in 2018? Impossible to say. . . . But there are reasons for Republicans to be very afraid.  One is that Northam outperformed Clinton without being a particularly energetic, forceful candidate. . . . . He prevailed, handily.

Republicans should also worry that they’ve oversold themselves on the moderate-progressive divide in the Democratic Party and how severely Democrats would be hobbled by it.

Late Tuesday night, as the final votes were still being counted, Democrats were poised to pick up at least 13 seats, and taking control of the House was not out of the question.

In rooting for a Gillespie victory, the G.O.P. was looking for something larger: an assurance that a Republican in a swing state or swing district could find the right recipe for energizing Trump supporters without alienating Trump skeptics.  Gillespie’s answer was . . . . he parroted the president’s tough talk about criminals and immigrants and denounced professional football players who didn’t stand for the national anthem.

Beyond the returns, this was a governor’s race that made the skin crawl, which is to say that it was a sufficiently accurate mirror and microcosm of American political culture in the Age of Trump. . . . . Northam didn’t sell out his principles nearly as thoroughly as Gillespie did, and Democrats didn’t sink to Republicans’ level. In fact one of the most audacious tricks that Republicans sought to pull off was ginning up as much outrage over a loathsome Latino Victory Fund ad that ran on television just a handful of times — it showed a truck with a Confederate flag hunting down children of color — as there was over viciously negative commercials of Gillespie’s that blanketed the airwaves. These attacks essentially branded Northam, a mild-mannered pediatrician who served in the Army, as some unhinged leftie eager to give guns to pedophiles.

Gillespie’s campaign “has not been just a dog whistle to the intolerant, racially resentful parts of the Republican base; it’s been a mating call,” wrote The Washington Post in a blistering — and wholly warranted — editorial . . . 

Before this race, Gillespie was as establishment as an establishment Republican could be . . . Until the last few months, when he utterly transformed. The impression he left on voters was an ugly one, and he and the G.O.P. have nothing to show for it. That should scare Republicans most of all.

Oppose the Demonization of Gays and Minorities in Virginia's 2017 Elections

Vote for Ralph Northam on November 7, 2017 (as well as the rest of the Democrat ticket)

I left the Republican Party shortly after I came out.  It was obvious to me at the time that the Christofascists were ascendant in the Party and that there was no place in the GOP for anyone who believed in the separation of church and state - something I stated in my letter of resignation - much less for anyone who is LGBT.  Things have only worsened in the years since that time.  Today's Republican Party is only welcoming to white, heterosexual, ultra-conservative Christians who use the Bible daily to condemn members of the LGBT community and, in my view, justify the separation of the races with whites being the only ones entitled to full civil rights much less treatment as fully human.  In the current statewide races, gays and minorities are being demonized by the Republican ticket with Ed Gillespie running deliberately untrue ads that pander to racists.  Meanwhile, AG candidate is an anti-gay extremist who is just as hysterically anti-gay as Ken Cuccinelli and Rick Santorum (both of whom I believe are closeted gays since they are a tad too hysterical about gay sex to be straight men secure in their own sexuality).   A column in Huffington Post looks at the disturbing tactics of Gillespie and Adams who are both running campaigns fueled by hate and bigotry.  Here are excerpts:

No 14-year-old kid should live with these crippling fears, yet that is the reality facing thousands of high schoolers across the country. For undocumented students, every deportation they see on the news is a daily reminder of their precarious legal situation. Every act of violence against an LGBTQ friend or neighbor reminds them that their safety is constantly at risk just for expressing who they are and how they love. And since last November, the stakes for people of color, immigrants and LGBTQ Americans have never been higher.

Virginia’s gubernatorial race makes it clear that these threats aren’t just coming from the White House, but are right here in the Commonwealth. Following in the footsteps of Donald Trump, Ed Gillespie is running a xenophobic and homophobic campaign that makes it clear how much we have to fear from a Gillespie administration.

Throughout his campaign, he has aired hateful, fear-mongering ads that criminalize people of color and make erroneous links between immigrants and MS-13 gang violence. He has also consistently opposed LGBTQ rights, from opposing marriage equality to supporting anti-trans legislation. John Adams, who is running for attorney general, is just as dangerous. During his campaign, he has spread lies that all undocumented students are getting in-state tuition benefits in Virginia or that the Supreme Court decision granting marriage equality is “totally made up.”

No matter what Gillespie says, hate is not a Virginia value. His opponent, Dr. Ralph Northam, is the only candidate for governor who has Virginia’s true values at heart ― values like opportunity and justice for all. Instead of working to divide us by our differences, Northam has fought his entire life to make Virginia a more supportive, welcoming place for all people, no matter their color, race, sexual orientation or immigration status. Now more than ever, we need a leader for our state who will be steadfast defense against the discriminatory policies emanating from the Oval Office, as well as a fearless advocate for LGBTQ and immigrants’ rights. Ralph Northam is that leader.

October 11 marked National Coming Out Day, an annual reminder of the journeys many of us have taken to come out . . . . I reminded people why it was important to vote for Ralph Northam, along with Justin Fairfax (candidate for lieutenant governor) and Mark Herring (candidate for attorney general).

What did I tell them? No matter your politics, we can all agree on one thing: no one should ever have to live in fear.

No one should have to live in fear.  I hope that "friends" as well as my clients and the husband's clients who voted for Trump - who is aggressively attacking the LGBT community - will take the opportunity this November to make amends and vote to protect our civil rights and lives by voting for Ralph Northam, along with Justin Fairfax (candidate for lieutenant governor) and Mark Herring (candidate for attorney general).  Again, no one should live in fear and see their civil rights and basic humanity under attack.

Virginia Democratic Mailer Correctly Links Gillespie to White Nationalists

The campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is having conniption fits because a Virginia Democratic Party mailer correctly links Gillespie to white supremacists. Having viewed many of Gillespie's ads that have definite racist undercurrent to them, combined with his refusal to condemn Donald Trump's apparent embrace of white supremacists in Charlottesville back in August, 2017, and his effort to court Corey Stewart supporters who rallied to Stewart's openly racist and pro-Confederate campaign, I believe that the mailer is accurate.  No doubt some of my Republican "friends" who continue to stick their heads in the sand - or elsewhere where the sun doesn't shine, if you want my candid opinion - will whine and feign false outrage just like Gillespie, but the sad reality is that today's Republican Party IS a racist party and Gillespie - as are AG candidate John Adams and Lt. Governor candidate Jill Vogel - is pandering to white supremacists and religious extremist.  He has no chance of winning without their strong support.  Sometimes, the truth hurts and, if my Republican "friends" do not like being tied to white supremacists, they have two options on November 7th: stay home and do not vote, or vote for the Democratic ticket.  It's really very simple.  If you vote for candidates of a party with a racist, anti-minority agenda, then look in the mirror and face the reality that perhaps you are in fact a racist even if you are not donning KKK robes regularly. The Washington Post looks at the mailer and the GOP's feigned outrage.  Here are excerpts:

Virginia’s heated election cycle is becoming increasingly nasty, with the statewide Democratic ticket sending out a new mailer linking Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie and President Trump to the torch-bearing white nationalists who descended on Charlottesville over the summer.

In August, violent clashes between white supremacists in Charlottesville rallying to defend a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and counterprotestors left one woman dead and two state troopers died when their helicopter crashed.

The mailer features images of both Republican men above a photo of the white supremacists with the text, “On Tuesday November 7th, Virginia Gets To Stand Up...To Hate.”

The back of the literature features a prominent image of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam, along with Democratic lieutenant governor nominee Justin Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring, with the message “This is our chance to stand up to Trump, Gillespie, and hate.” All three Democrats approved the ad, and the Democratic Party of Virginia paid for the mailer. Gillespie’s campaign condemned the mailer, which was first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Northam campaign spokesman David Turner countered that the mailer was fair because Gillespie did not explicitly condemn the president’s response to the Charlottesville unrest. Democrats pummeled Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, for not joining members of his own party, including Virginia U.S. Reps. Barbara Comstock and Scott W. Taylor, in directly criticizing Trump’s reaction. . . . Ed Gillespie should be willing to call out Donald Trump when he’s wrong and because he won’t, he gives voters a clear choice on Nov. 7.”
 [I]n September, Gillespie began airing ads that aimed to link MS-13 gang violence to Northam, while using images of Latinos in a way Latino groups call racist and inflammatory. And another ad suggests Northam wanted to restore gun rights to violent felons. Both parties are also trading barbs over mailers targeting against Latina candidates.

Oh, and lit's not forget that the entire GOP ticket supports voter ID laws and other GOP efforts to disenfranchise minority voters under the lie of preventing nonexistent voter fraud.   Gillespie, et all deserve the label given to the, plain and simple.

The GOP Is No Party for Honest, Honorable Men

A column in the New York Times hits a home run in my view when it comes to looking at the rank dishonesty and moral bankruptcy of today's Republican Party. There was a time when the Republican Party prided itself on honesty, education, respect for science and honorable behavior.  That was the Republican Party of my grandparents and parents and even my days as a GOP committee member.  Now, neither I nor my ancestors simply would recognize today's Republican Party compared to what it once was.   What happened? As I have noted many times before, the defining change in the GOP took place when the evangelical Christians - the Christofascists, if you will - hijacked the party base.  Numerous studies have found that the Christofascists lie with abandon and take the view that anything that furthers their theocratic agenda is justified, including lying constantly and deliberately.  

Now, that mentality permeates the Republican Party.  Donald Trump and Mike Pence personify this deliberate dishonesty. Sadly, many other Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have also embraced outright lying and dishonesty.  But the dishonesty is not limited to the Republican Party at the national level.  In the current Virginia election campaigns, all three of the Republican statewide candidates are lying  and know full well that they are lying.  Ed Gillespie whines about the cost of Confederate monument that will cut funds for public education, but totally ignores his proposed tax cuts that would leave Virginia with a 1.4 billion budget deficit which would be catastrophic to public education funding.  As long as the wealthy get a huge tax cut, trashing public education is perfectly fine with Gillespie.  GOP Attorney General candidate John Adams is no better than Gillespie.  It recent ads, Adams whines that Democrat Mark Herring is lying about him even though Herrings ads about Adams' shady clients is 100% accurate.  The same dishonesty plagues GOP Lt. Governor candidate Jill Vogel.  Like the leaders of Christofascist "family values" organizations, nowadays, if a Republican's lips are moving, the safest assumption is that they are lying.   Here are column highlights:

According to a new CBS News poll, almost 60 percent of the American public believes that the current Republican tax plan favors the wealthy. Some people see this number as a sign that the plan is in trouble; I see it as a sign that Republican lies are working far better than they deserve to.

For the plan does indeed favor the wealthy — overwhelmingly, undeniably. It’s shocking that as many as 40 percent of Americans don’t realize this.

It’s not difficult to see how the plan is tilted toward the very top. The main elements of the plan are a cut in top individual tax rates; a cut in corporate taxes; an end to the estate tax; and the creation of a big new loophole that will allow wealthy individuals to pretend that they are small businesses, and get a preferential tax rate. All of these overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, mainly the top 1 percent.

There are also some measures affecting middle-class families, but they’re relatively small change — and some of them would actually raise taxes. Over all, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that by 2027 almost 80 percent of the gains from the plan would go to the top 1 percent, just 12 percent of the gains to the middle 60 percent of Americans — and that more than a quarter of middle-class families would actually see their taxes go up.

The questions we should be asking instead are why Republicans are pushing this so hard, and how they can hope to get away with it.

Bear in mind that there is essentially no popular constituency demanding tax cuts for the rich. By a large margin, the general public wants to see taxes on corporations and the wealthy go up, not down; even Republicans are divided, with only a modest margin in favor of cuts.

Yet tax cuts for the rich are the overriding objective of the modern G.O.P. They were the principal motivation for the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, since that would also mean repealing the high-income taxes that pay for it; from Republicans’ point of view, depriving millions of health care was just a minor side benefit. And now tax cuts for the wealthy are pretty much the only thing left on the G.O.P.’s legislative agenda.

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the hope for tax cuts is the main thing keeping congressional Republicans in line behind Donald Trump. They know he’s unfit for office, and many worry about his mental stability. But they’ll back him as long as they think he might get those tax cuts through.

So what’s behind this priority? Follow the money. Big donors are furious at missing out on the $700 billion in tax cuts that were supposed to come out of Obamacare repeal. If they don’t get big bucks out of tax “reform,” they might close their pocketbooks for the 2018 midterm elections.

[H]ow can an administration that pretends to be populist, to stand up for ordinary (white) working people, sell such elitist policies?

The answer is a strategy based entirely on lies. And I mean entirely: The Trump administration and its allies are lying about every aspect of their tax plan.

I’m not talking about dubious interpretations of evidence or misleading presentation of the facts — the kind of thing the Bush administration used to specialize in. I’m talking about flat-out, easily refuted lies, like the claim that America has the world’s highest taxes (among rich countries, we have close to the lowest), or the claim that estate taxes are a huge burden on small business (almost no small businesses pay any estate tax).

[C]an they really get away with this? A lot depends on how the news media handles it. If an administration spokesperson declares that up is down, will news reports simply say “so-and-so says up is down, but Democrats disagree,” or will they also report that up is not, in fact, down? I wish I were confident about the answer to that question.

One thing we know for sure, however, is that a great majority of Republican politicians know perfectly well that their party is lying about its tax plan — and every even halfway competent economist aligned with the party definitely understands what’s going on.

What this means is that everyone who goes along with this plan, or even remains silent in the face of the campaign of mass dissimulation, is complicit — is in effect an accomplice to the most dishonest political selling job in American history.

Do not fall for Republican lies at either the national level.  Instead, send a loud message to the GOP. Get out and vote a straigh Democrat ticket on November 7, 2017 - Ralph Northam for Governor, Mark Herring for Attorney General, and Justin Fairfax for Lt. Governor.  Then follow through and vote Democrat in the 2018 mid-term federal elections. 

The Trump/Gillespie Agenda Haunts the Virginia 2017 Elections

Ed Gillespie lies just like Trump

In much of Virginia's so-called urban crescent which, if voters turnout on election day, can thankful out vote the ignorance embracing, reactionary rural areas of the state, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer,  is viewed as nothing less than toxic.  For Ed "Enron Ed" Gillespie, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, this is a problem since the policies he is pushing make him largely a "mini me" version of Trump.  All that is lacking is boasting about sexual harassment of women.  Otherwise, the tax cuts, subtle but deliberate calls to racism and religious extremism are more or less a carbon copy of the ugliness that are Trump trade marks, with Gillespie revealing that he's just as big of liar as Trump.  If Trump "lies like a rug" as alleged by the Democrat candidate, Ralph Northam, so does Gillespie.  Of course, with his sleazy lobbying history, Gillespie has made it very clear that his interests do not lie with average Virginians and that he will lie for the highest bidder.  The contrast with Northam, a former military doctor and pediatric neurologist is stark.  A piece in the New York Times looks at how the revulsion toward Trump is impacting the 2017 Virginia elections.  Here are highlights:

Ed Gillespie, the Republican nominee for Virginia governor, deployed just about every tactical evasion he had learned from a lifetime in politics as he dodged questions about President Trump.

Mr. Trump has so overwhelmed a campaign waged by a pair of bland candidates lacking signature proposals that, much the same way he does across the Potomac, he has made himself and his incendiary style of politics the central issue.

With the president rampaging through news cycles seemingly every day, the biggest question looming before Mr. Gillespie is whether it is worth the risk of trying to harness Mr. Trump’s total-eclipse-of-the-sun attention-getting skills to rouse conservative voters.

His campaign and the Republican Governor’s Association signaled to the White House at a meeting this spring that they preferred the reliable hand of Vice President Mike Pence, who campaigned with Mr. Gillespie on Saturday, over Mr. Trump in a state where the president is loathed in the vote-rich population centers but well-liked in many rural areas.

But trailing in every public poll, Mr. Gillespie is now engaged in a robust debate with his advisers about whether he should ask the president to stump with him, according to multiple Republican officials familiar with the conversations.

But the camp urging Mr. Gillespie to keep his distance from Mr. Trump counters that it would be malpractice to embrace a polarizing president who failed to win even 30 percent of the vote in Fairfax County, the most populous jurisdiction in the state and once a suburban battleground.

As they consider their options, Gillespie supporters have an object lesson: Mr. Trump’s ill-fated rally for Senator Luther Strange in Alabama, where he could not resist veering off-message. At that rally, Mr. Trump started his feud with the N.F.L. while offering a backhanded endorsement of Mr. Strange’s rival, Roy Moore.

Then there is the president’s calculation: Would he even want to risk attaching himself to a potential loser so soon after the Alabama race, in which he felt burned, according to White House officials. West Wing advisers say Mr. Trump is willing to record automated calls for Mr. Gillespie but is not clamoring to fire up Air Force One for the trip to Roanoke.

Yet whether Mr. Trump sets foot here or not, his success at motivating voters with culturally and racially tinged appeals has worn off on Mr. Gillespie. Once one of the loudest voices in his party for an inclusive message, Mr. Gillespie is now assailing Mr. Northam over the Democrat’s opposition to a state measure that would have banned “sanctuary cities” and targeting him for supporting the removal of the state’s many Confederate statues.

The Republican chafes at questions over whether he is adopting a Trumpian message and forgoing his own advice in 2006 that Republicans should resist the “siren song” of anti-immigration rhetoric, insisting he is running as “who I am and what I believe in.”

But his advertising reflects what he thinks will actually move the electorate: He is spending the bulk of his money on commercials focused on the statues, which make no mention of his view that the South was “on the wrong side of history,” and illegal immigrants. One of his immigration ads features amply tattooed Salvadoran prisoners meant to be members of the menacing gang MS-13, a target of the president’s.

After winning his primary partly on the strength of a heavily aired commercial in which he called the president “a narcissistic maniac,” Mr. Northam, who is running to succeed Virginia’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, used the first debate of the general election to call Mr. Trump a dangerous man who also “lies like a rug.”

But at the final debate last week, held in a pro-Trump enclave of Southwest Virginia, Mr. Northam, who will campaign here this week with former President Barack Obama, made no mention of Mr. Trump.

“It’s definitely a change in tone from the primary,” said Lowell Feld, a well-read liberal Virginia blogger, while conceding that “firing up your base while not turning off others is tricky.”

But, Mr. Feld added, “Trump doesn’t make anything easy.”

If you live in Virginia, make sure you register to vote - today is the last day to do so - and be sure to vote "No" to Trump and all that he stands for by voting for Ralph Northam for Governor, Mark Herring for Attorney General, and Justin Fairfax for Lt. Governor. 

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Trump and Gillespie Are Both Lying About "Bringing Back Coal"

One of the lies that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, during his Russian assisted campaign and since is that he would end "the war on cal" and promised those in coal producing regions of the country that he bring back the glory days of the coal industry.  Like so much else that was promised by Trump and his sinister minion, Mike Pence, it was all a lie because there is no war on coal.  The decline of coal is driven not by government regulation but by economic conditions that nothing Trump does can reverse.  Thus, Trump's reversal of Obama administration regulations and moratoriums on leasing on federal lands will change nothing.  With cheaper and cleaner natural gas alternatives, coal fired power plants are on the decline both in America and around the world. Trump, of course, is not the only Republican lying about the ending the war on coal and bringing the coal industry.  Ed Gillespie has crisscrossed Southwest Virginia making the same disingenuous promises that Trump has trumpeted.  Now, Mike Pence is campaigning with Gillespie and telling the same lies.  Sadly, many in rural Virginia are believing the Trump/Gillespie lie that government regulation and the EPA are the problem and will likely be duped into voting against their own long term best interests.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the economic conditions that are really behind the death of the coal industry.   

It was depicted by energy executives and conservatives as a “witch hunt,” “a politically motivated sham” and a move that would “destroy mining in the West .” In January 2016, President Barack Obama imposed a three-year moratorium on federal coal leasing, which halted new projects and delayed pending applications for companies to extract coal from federal land. During that time, the Interior Department was to carry out an overdue review of the program’s social and environmental costs.

A year later, all this was an easy target for President Trump, who had promised to save the coal industry from oppressive regulations and slumping sales . On March 29, his administration lifted the moratorium and deep-sixed the study.
 [T]he president said he was “putting an end to the war on coal.” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke argued that the leasing program was critical to “energy security” and “job creation.” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt followed that by moving this past week to repeal Obama’s Clean Power Plan, designed to limit carbon emissions.

But the moves to save this industry have actually exposed its weaknesses — and revealed a trend that coal companies and the Trump administration have not acknowledged publicly: The companies are scaling back, in some cases shedding workers and declining the opportunities the federal government now wants to give them. Despite Trump’s best efforts, the American coal industry remains on life support.

Outwardly, coal companies and their advocates have embraced Trump’s aggressive rollbacks as aids toward boosting production and creating jobs. These are central elements of Trump’s promise to “make America great again.” And the administration frequently boasts that coal is making a comeback. . . . But a recent White House talking point — that some 50,000 new coal-mining jobs had been created since the election — has been debunked. The figure is closer to 1,300. 

In private, coal company executives are deeply skeptical about the administration’s ability to alter market conditions. In numerous letters to Bureau of Land Management state offices that I obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, the coal industry acknowledged the continuing decline in demand, and in several cases, companies withdrew pending lease applications.

In the six months since that announcement at the EPA, companies have withdrawn five of 44 pending lease applications, and at least eight are indefinitely on hold. In a number of cases, companies have explained that their decisions are based on persistently weak market conditions. 

In the letters to state BLM offices obtained through FOIA requests, coal companies admitted that the future is not as rosy as they might have hoped or would like to project. Arch Coal, the second-largest supplier in the United States, referred to the “continued downward pressure on the Powder River Basin and subsequent reduced output over the past seven years” in explaining why it was withdrawing a lease application for a major new mine in Wyoming. Rhino Energy, which has operations in Appalachia and the West , said that “current coal market conditions remain depressed” and that it wouldn’t move forward with a lease for a proposed 14,000-acre mine in Colorado until that outlook changed. 

This is hardly the picture of an industry on the rebound, and it is squarely at odds with one of the central promises of Trump’s presidential campaign: that policy changes would revive the ailing sector and create thousands of new jobs in coal communities. Not that the administration hasn’t tried. . . . But it’s not enough to compensate for weak domestic demand, driven largely by the rise of natural gas as an alternative to coal.

In the end, lifting the much-vilified moratorium will have little, if any, impact on the price of natural gas (made cheap by the discovery of huge new deposits in the past decade and advances in drilling technology), declining domestic demand for coal (thanks to the shuttering of dozens of coal-fired power plants) or a relatively flat export market (because of price volatility and the cost of shipping). Those fundamentals won’t change anytime soon. And some companies seem to think their best bet is an outright bailout.

If there was suddenly a surge in demand for coal, the industry would be poised to ramp up production from existing mines. That is unlikely to happen. “We don’t think [the industry] is going to need new reserves from the federal government for a decade,” said Daniel Rusz, a research director at Wood Mackenzie, a global consultancy with clients in the financial and energy sector.

For coal’s champions, inside the administration and out, that’s the rub: The domestic coal market shows no signs of fundamentally changing, and without renewed demand, there’s no reason to pursue new leases. According to a March study by Headwaters Economics, 142 coal-fired power plants have retired generators or closed entirely since 2009. That trend is expected to continue. Just this month, one of the largest coal-fired power plants in Texas announced that it would be shutting its doors early next year; a spokesman for the company that owns it called the plant a “money loser.” 

“There are no new coal plants being built,” said Rusz. If companies open new mines, who is going buy the coal in 30 or 40 years?

Not a single ton of coal has been leased from the Powder River Basin since June 2012. “We still have a market moratorium,” Anderson points out. “We had it for four years prior to the official moratorium. And it’s still going.”