uvAggravator2.0

I just got word from a producer of Deer & Deer Hunting TV that my interview is going to air on the Versus channel this Saturday, July 31st at 9 am ET.

Unfortunately I will not be able to watch, since I don't have cable or satellite at home.

This is an interesting moment to observe because as far as I know this will be the first time that the locavore hunting movement has been formally introduced to the traditional American deer hunting culture. These are two groups that seem very different, yet can be beneficial to each other. I am surprised that this is happening through a TV show rather than a piece in Field & Stream or a similar mainstream hunting publication.

There's no telling what the mainstream hunting culture is going to make of us. Some of them might be suspicious of us, others contemptuous of our odd methods. My hope is that we will be seen as complimentary to mainstream hunting. With our focus on meat-hunting, we tend to shoot does rather than bucks and we may take of some of the pressure off of trophy hunters to cull does while happily leaving the trophy bucks to them.

[The photo is me, speaking to a group of aspiring locavore hunters in NYC]

Will be at the State Capitol with Delegate Mark Keam for the Governor's signing of SB 712, our bill to establish an overseas campus for George Mason in the Republic of Korea.   Representatives of GMU and the Korean Embassy should also be there.

The campus will be built on man-made island in Incheon Harbor that was created when the new airport was opened in 2002.   This island has been designated (and will be created) as a "free trade" international city within Korea, a fitting distinction considering that a third of the world's population is within a two-hour plane flight of Incheon. 

Grants from the Korean government will estblish English-speaking campuses on the island.   George Mason is one of the select American universities invited to participate, because of its role in the prestigious Virginia higher education system and its proximity to Washington DC..  SB 712 gives them the legal framework to do that.

Loved the headline, above, which was on my latest op-ed in Wednesday’s paper.  Readers of this blog may recognize some of the content as having been from this earlier blog post. It was this Wall Street Journal article that prompted me to dust it off and update it for the op-ed. The stats I used came from Norfolk’s most recent budget.

It’s about time.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has finally decided to divest himself of the campaign donations he received from Bobby Thompson, the director of the U.S. Navy Veterans Association. The organization and its director have come under scrutiny in numerous states. According to the article, six states plus Virginia have launched investigations and Thompson has disappeared.

While the other recipients of campaign contributions from Thompson, including Gov. McDonnell, donated those funds to charity a couple of months ago, the AG hung on to his, claiming that Thompson had not been found guilty of anything. The AG is a smart fellow, but even he could no longer deny that Thompson and his group were probably not legit.

In a press release Wednesday afternoon, Cuccinelli said that no decision has been made as to which charity or charities will receive the money. “Our goal here is identify veterans’ charities that have an impact around the Commonwealth – and then direct those funds where they can be of most help to our nation’s heroes.”  Once this has been decided, the campaign intends to announce the recipients.

Social Security does not need to be saved. We need to FINALLY take a good hard look at how a few folks are emptying our treasury and stealing our taxes all in the name of homeland security.

It's madness. Working people have paid into a retirement system that is solvent and works. Social Security is not a tax...it is an investment for retirement. However, the "elected" officials keep raiding the retirement funds in order to make a few folks rich off of corporate warfare. The US is spending money like there's no tomorrow when it comes to warfare. The US is launching wars for corporations all over the world. Millions of people are murdered so a few elitist corporate folks can live like robber barons. They sell this travesty via "patriotism." I hope the American people will wake up and demand an end to these corporate murders in the name of patriotism.

Enough is enough. Serious about the deficit. Then stop playing politics. Take social security off of the table and try to lift up that heavy defense spending up onto the table and please start chopping off huge chunks....and while you're at it...put that foolhardy drug war up there on the chopping block too.

Buzz....Buzz....

I know that a whole lot of people are waiting for me to announce new dates for the 'Deer Hunting for Locavores' classes. Right now the weather is just too hot for us to be confident of getting a fresh, intact deer to the field dressing site before the meat spoils. This is such an important part of the class that I'm not willing to teach without it.

When the weather cools down, I will schedule the next weekend class. Look towards October for that. Meanwhile, I'll probably have the details up in the next 24 hours on small game hunting instruction and outings for September.

• gizmag: Toshiba fast tracks SCiB battery technology The Super Charge ion Battery looks like the first real break-through in battery technology in a long time. It can charge to 90% of capacity in five minutes, and hardly loses any capacity after 6,000 cycles. It's a lithium-ion battery, so the fundamental technology is the same—Toshiba has just made a big leap forward in their use of that technology. (tags: electricity)
• Daring Fireball: An Improved Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs I have lost hours of my life, over the years, to trying to write code that finds URLs in arbitrary chunks of text. I have failed every time. It looks like John Gruber has pulled it off here. (tags: regex)
• Physorg: Biologists find that red-blooded vertebrates evolved twice, independently Just what it says on the tin. Amazing. (tags: evolution science life)

If only the Obama administration had restrained itself last week. If only Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack had first done a little checking, before he acted upon a heads-up about a potentially damaging story about to air on Glenn Beck’s show.

Instead, Vilsack let himself get snookered by a trick as old as storytelling, itself -- editing.

Just imagine how sweet it would have been for the White House if Fox News had run the story with Vilsack’s spokesperson saying, “The Shirley Sherrod tape raises serious questions that call for an investigation. However, until we know more about the tape and have spoken with Mrs. Sherrod, there will be no further statement.”

A day later the entire unedited tape would have surfaced, as it did, anyway. Then Beck, plus whoever else had weighed in by then to condemn Sherrod‘s supposed racism, would have been called upon to eat crow.

After that the history of how the tape had been prepared and made its way into the mainstream press would have been the story. But caught in a panic, Vilsack passed on that beautiful opportunity to one-up his rivals.

Instead, Sherrod was fired on the telephone, pronto!

Then we all witnessed the spectacle unfold. Fox News looked bad. The NAACP looked bad. The White House looked worse than any of them. Vilsack’s blunder revealed a scaredy-cat side of the Obama team that was just the opposite of the coolness under fire it had exhibited during the campaign in 2008.

Perhaps that is what living hardwired to the electronic media will do any group of people, eventually. But when quick response time is valued over accuracy and fair play, isn't trouble bound to follow?

According to reports President Barrack Obama said, “Vilsack jumped the gun.”

Speaking of jumping the gun, remember how long Democrats laughed at the premature jubilation of President George Bush in his jet pilot getup? “Mission accomplished!”

Well, there will be Republicans laughing at the cell phone sacking of Sherrod for at least that long.

So, the character behind the crafted-to-deceive tape, Andrew Breitbart, hit a home run in the dirty tricks game. Plenty of Republicans will decide that his highlights-reel version of Sherrod's remarks revealed a greater truth than the unedited version. No doubt, Breitbart's celebrity status has been buffed by this episode, so we've hardly heard the last of him.

At this writing, the most curious part of this story remains -- Vilsack still has his job.

As I listen for some sign that the Republican Party has a plan, any plan, to fix America's problems, I'm struck by their notion that giving wealthy people a tax cut isn't going to do anymore for unemployed, or underemployed people now than it did when George Bush was President and pushed through his great unfunded tax cuts. And when Republicans voted against extending unemployment benefits when times are so tough, it was WRONG. Who are these guys working for? We need jobs, and a living wage.

So here you go, the "Republican Plan" - you buying?


Out-of-touch, angry and still wrong isn't a plan boys!

From the Associated Press:

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, on Monday reversed a ruling requiring the Tennessee Valley Authority to upgrade emission controls at three coal-fired power plants in Tennessee and one in Alabama. The ruling reverses a decision by Judge Lacy H. Thornburg of Federal District Court, who said emissions affecting air quality in North Carolina’s western mountains were a “public nuisance.” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the appeals court wrote that allowing the ruling to stand would undermine the nation’s regulatory scheme.

Come on, you can't give Tennessee, Alabama & North Carolina cleaner air while letting coal pollution cause respiratory problems, foul our air & water and kill our forests in the rest of the country! Give our lungs an inch, they'll take a mile!
Photo via Flickr's Roger Smith

Tony Hayward is stepping down as BP's CEO to move to another role within the company, getting an $18 million golden parachute as he goes. BP is hoping Gulf coast residents will view his replacement, Bob Dudley, more favorably because he's an American who lived in Mississippi for a time.
Yet the very next day, BP is continuing to use Hayward's rhetoric. A researcher on BP's payroll predicts the BP oil disaster's impact will be "quite small." Hayward himself once infamously predicted the impact would be "relatively tiny."
Last night I was at happy hour at Gordon Biersch in DC talking with friends about the disaster. "This is what BP doesn't get: We don't hate Tony Hayward because he's British," one of my friends said. "We hate him because he fucked the Gulf Coast."

BP dumping its CEO but continuing its lies changes nothing.

A not-so-quick update on what’s going on in Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, and Norfolk. I’ll have to wait until I have more time to catch up on the other local races in Hampton Roads this November.

Portsmouth

The interim mayor of Portsmouth, selected by the council, turned out to be a former Vice Mayor Bernard Griffin. The vote was 5-1, which is interesting to say the least. That means the two council members who offered themselves for the position ended up voting for someone else! I’m guessing that was an interesting closed session, with the two of them trying to sway three others to their respective sides. The official vote, as is generally the case, never reflects the real intentions of council, just their compromise. And the one dissenter, Paige Cherry, obviously couldn’t be convinced in the closed session to go along. His guy, Bishop Curtis Edmonds, was not available for the council interviews held Monday, but was supposed to have been considered.

Griffin has pledged not to run in November. No such pledges yet from Elizabeth Psimas or Charles Whitehurst, the two council members who applied for the appointment. I suspect we’ll see one or both of them announce soon. The only other name I’ve heard mentioned as a candidate for the fall is Kenny Wright.

Virginia Beach

The story of the day yesterday was that Mayor Will Sessoms has amassed a sizeable warchest – according to VPAP, he has $192,986 on hand – and intends to use some of it to help other council candidates. Brian Kirwin raises some good questions about the supposed transparency of Virginia’s campaign financing disclosures. Who among the candidates will Sessoms, who out-raised all of them combined, favor?

Virginia Beach continues to out-pace the other localities with the number of candidates. Two years ago, there were 15 candidates for the council and school board. This year, the number has risen to 23.  Only one council seat – Beach borough, represented by John Uhrin – is unopposed., while three school board seats are unchallenged. Still, it is impressive that so many have offered themselves, particularly in a November race. At some point, I’m hoping that the newspaper starts covering these races.

Norfolk

The special election to fill the remainder of Daun Hester’s term on council will be on the ballot in November. So far, two candidates have announced: real estate appraiser Earl Fraley  on July 8 and Realtor Angelia Williams on July 27. Fraley has the support of councilman Paul Riddick, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view.  Williams has not announced any official supporters yet, but her connection to Norfolk Commissioner of the Revenue Sharon McDonald is raising some eyebrows.

With the filing deadline of August 13 still a couple of weeks away, I am hearing that others may enter the fray. I don’t live in Ward 7, which is a super ward encompassing half of the city, but I’ll be paying close attention to this race. I’d like to see a strong, independent voice join the council.

It seems an English professor at the College of William & Mary thinks he has located the building which housed an 18th-century school for black children, both free blacks and those who were slaves.

The find would be remarkable not only for its historical significance, but for its location in the political and ideological epicenter of slavery. The college itself was funded by taxes on tobacco harvested by slaves. The college, its faculty and even some students owned slaves, and slave labor built core campus buildings, maintained the grounds and fed the residents.

I hope the excavation at the original site and testing of the existing building get done. This would be one heck of a find.

• Wall Street Journal: Does Language Influence Culture? The long nature-or-nurture-styled debate over whether thought influences language or vice versa appears to be tipping in favor of language's impact on how we think. Beginning with Noam Chomsky, it's been assumed that our brains operate at a level above language, and that language is simply the conduit through we express what we're thinking. Now there's good evidence that language is part of the medium in which thoughts flit through and are stored within our brains. Depending on how your language is constructed, you may have very different understandings of the world around you and even of your own experiences. (tags: linguistics language culture psychology brain)
• CrunchGear: The Chevy Volt is now officially on sale for $41K I have to give Chevrolet credit for shipping the Volt. I didn't think it would happen, and I said as much a few years ago. I figured it was just a lot of talk to keep their stock up. (tags: automobiles chevrolet)
• The Bay Citizen: Vaccination Rate Lags As Whooping Cough Spreads Babies are dying of whooping cough in California, while parents treat them with herbs and homeopathic elf poop. All because the parents won't get their kids immunized. One parent says that she thought that her toddler was going to die, that him having whooping cough was the worst experience that she's ever had…but still won't vaccinate her kids. And this is in Marin County, one of the most affluent counties in California. We're moving towards a future where terrible preventable illnesses are diseases of affluence—and ignorance. (tags: vaccines health california)

Fergus Clare, primitive skills expert, skinned this fallow deer a few weekends ago with a piece of obsidian. It hadn't even been turned into a proper tool. Just a broken shard of rock. You could also do this with a knife but it wouldn't be nearly as awesome.

I have skinned more deer than I can even remember using the more common modern technique of cutting the hide off with a skinning knife. Yet after watching Fergus use this method a few times I am fully sold on it. The old-fashioned hunter-gatherer method that Fergus favors is quicker, easier, carries less risk of injury and results in a hide that is easier to scrape and tan.

Please be aware that this is an extremely graphic and honest portrayal of cutting and pulling the hide off of an animal that had been alive only about 15 minutes earlier. If this is going to disturb or offend you then please do not watch the video.

I'm the guy holding the camera and assisting. We were in a serious hurry on account of the hot summer weather that risked spoilage of the meat. There was no time to set up the perfect shot but I think that this video will still give you a good idea of how to use this technique on your next deer. The video is in 3 parts. I wish I could edit it down into 6 or 7 minutes to tell the story more succinctly, but I have no software, talent or time for video editing.

The Governor has a number of commissions meeting this summer.  One of them is focused on Economic Development.

According to today's Richmond Times-Dispatch, that Commission is reviewing 115 different ideas to promote economic growth in the Commonwealth.  

Two of those receiving the most favorable attention according to the RTD:

1.  Eliminating the corporate income tax in Virginia
2.  Increasing our state's economic development budget

Tax less, spend more.  There's an idea.

The last thing we need right now is a Commission which continues to avoid hard choices and just provides happy talk.  Advertising our state is great but the metrics on the return investment are very uncertain (yes, I've heard all the "estimates").  The only sure winner in a marketing campaign is the contractor you hire. 

And eliminating a whole category of taxation, would mean that our small locally-owned businesses (LLC's and PC's) would be stuck with the corporate tax burden while the large companies pay nothing.  That would benefit the large company shareholders.  Do they even live in Virginia?

Personally, I would be much more impressed if the Commission was to tell us what economic tools are not working and suggest elimination.  Or suggest eliminating certain corporate tax breaks which don't create jobs.

That would show something. 

In a ruling yesterday, a three-member panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a website to publish the Social Security numbers of people on a website, The Virginia Watchdog. The site is dedicated to warning the public that various documents are being posted online by government officials that contain this information. In 2008, the Virginia General Assembly passed a law to prohibit individuals from publishing such private information online, even though their own officials do so. The website owner, B.J. Ostergren, filed suit, claiming it was a violation of her First Amendment rights.

So, the question: was the court correct? If so, why? If not, why not?

Inquiring minds want to know

We are less than 100 days to November 2 and the race in the 2nd Congressional District is well underway.

After winning the Republican nomination last month, Scott Rigell found himself a little short on cash. As of June 30, Rigell had a mere $227,000 on hand while incumbent Democrat Glenn Nye had $1.26 million. Through June 30, Rigell had pumped $923,000 into his campaign. Just a couple of days after the Pilot story, he dumped another $500,000 in.  Independent candidate Kenny Golden had about $1,300 on hand as of June 30. I’m guessing TV ads can’t be too far off.

Unlike last cycle, one thing we’re likely not to see are debates. Nye would like to include Golden in the debates but Rigell’s camp is balking, saying that they want Golden to demonstrate “that he has the support of 15 percent of voters as determined by three independent polls.” That ain’t gonna happen. So either we’ll see some debates with just Golden and Nye, or we won’t see any debates at all. I’m betting on the latter.

In the meantime, Nye continues to serve in Congress and make moves to separate himself from the Democratic label. A member of the Blue Dog Coalition, he voted against the budget and against cap-and-trade in 2009, against health care earlier this year, and just last week, against the extension of unemployment benefits.  It is no wonder, then, that his website and emails make no reference to his party affiliation; in fact, the latest emails carry the tagline “An independent voice for us.”

Rigell has trouble with moderate Republicans, Nye has trouble with liberal Democrats, and Golden is hoping there are enough disaffected members of both parties for him to squeeze out a win. The fall should be interesting.

UPDATE: I’ve been informed that the Rigell camp now wants Golden to show 15% support in five polls, not three. Wow. Will there even be five independent polls on this race between now and November?

Today's Oblivious Environmental Journalism Challenge: Can you write an article on this year's worldwide, record-shattering heat ... without using the words climate, global warming, carbon pollution, or man-made?
The New York Times' Erik Eckholm is up to the obfuscating task. His article on the summer heat wave here in the U.S. brilliantly walks a tightrope over the big picture without falling into the trap of connecting it to man-made emissions.
Watch has he even dares to stick his head in the mouth of the lion, mentioning the global records while still carefully avoiding giving his readers proper context:

The stifling heat blanketing the mid-Atlantic this summer seems to be part of a global trend. So far, 2010 is on track to overtake 2005 as the warmest year ever recorded for the planet, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It's hardcore oblivious environmental journalism like this that keeps people thinking global warming is only about melting glaciers at some point in the distant future, not about Americans dying in heat waves right now.
Special Bonus Ostrich: Bloomberg News is always right, therefore anyone who thinks it might have screwed up reporting on oil drilling poll data is automatically wrong.

In spite of his own conservative leanings, Bart Hinkle didn't have much good to say about Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's fraud investigation of former UVa. climatologist Michael Mann (Mann is now at Penn State):

If Mann had taken state grant money and then blown it on cocaine and prostitutes, that would be one thing. But Cuccinelli doesn't say Mann failed to do the work for which he was paid: producing research on matters such as Resolving the Scale-wide Sensitivities in the Dynamical Coupling Between Climate and the Biosphere and Decadal Variability in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Integrating Paleo & Coupled Model Results.

Rather, Cuccinelli says Mann's conclusions from the work he did are wrong. The AG hangs his hat on the fact that other scientists dispute the hockey stick graph and so forth. Yet as UVa argues in a May 27 court filing, "FATA does not authorize the Attorney General to engage in scientific debate."

To read Hinkle's excellent analysis of this matter, published in Thursday's RT-D click here.

One gets the feeling that hardcore skeptics of Mann's research are assuming that everyone on the other side is as likely to stretch or ignore the truth as they are. So, they assume legitimate scientists, whose findings they reject, are mostly trying to find evidence to justify their elitist, liberal beliefs.

My most recent OpEd piece at Richmond.com compares the oil spill in the Gulf to a pollution story closer to home.

Virginians hope nothing, dredging or a storm, will stir the old poison up. More fingers crossed. We’re told by government regulators the amount of Kepone still being found in the seafood harvested from those waters is not too dangerous for consumption.

In the late ’70s some millions of dollars changed hands, but nobody at Allied ever did a day in jail for what Kepone did to harm innocent Virginians in a myriad of ways, some we’re still finding out about.

Recent news from France offers evidence that Allied’s recklessness dramatically increased the chance its employees, who stood ankle deep in Kepone as they shoveled it into bags, would get prostate cancer.

Click here to read "When Oops Isn't Enough."
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Nothing says 'Mauser' to me like those classic silver discs of metal on the stocks of early K-98s. That design element is so distinctive that Hayao Miyazaki used them in the first ten minutes of his animated film, 'Howl's Moving Castle.'

Several people have asked how we installed the original Mauser stock discs in the synthetic stock used for a .35 Whelen that I built in one of our classes a few weeks ago. The best answer is a video of the process.

This is another .35 Whelen that Michael, one of our students this past weekend, was building. I did the stock discs but he did the vast majority of the other work himself. The reason for heating up the discs with a blow torch is that the bottoms of the discs are flat while the side of the rifle stock is curved. We are recessing the discs into the plastic in order avoid a raised edge. Letting the disc melt its own recess guarantees a perfect fit, unlike trying to carve out a recess by other means.

I apologize for the terrible camera work in the first 30 seconds. That is what I get for trying to hold the camera myself while working. After that, Paul Fritz and Michael take turns holding the camera for me.

The parts that are not shown and are not self-explanatory are the flaring of the brass pipe and the clean-up of the area surrounding the discs. After the discs have been melted into the plastic it is still necessary to press something into either end of the pipe to seal it tight into the rings. We used a lathe in this case but any pair of conical pieces of metal pushed hard into either side should work, given enough pressure. The bubbles of melted plastic around the edges were cleaned up easily with a a couple of sharp blades.

The stock discs are fully functional with the strength of the brass tube. I still need to put a video up here that shows how to use those discs to fully disassemble a Mauser bolt.

Friday Night I was at Lanier Middle School in Fairfax to see the City of Fairfax Theater Company (I had the name wrong earlier) put on their performance of "Annie Get Your Gun."

The sets were colorful and the acting was very professional, if not actually professional.  There was also an ad hoc music group, which played the musical numbers from the orchestra pit.

The story, which was written by Irvin Berlin in the 1930's, tells the story of Annie Oakley (a.k.a. "Little Sure Shot") who toured with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in the 1880's.  The show was a smash in the eastern U.S. and in Europe.  Oakley was a famed sharp shooter who married Frank Murphy, another performer.

Hollywood made it a movie in the early 1950's, the era of super-size cinematic productions.  The dialogue and music are definitely period pieces -- don't think you'd see that writing now.  

Anyway, the show plays three more dates (Friday, July 30, Saturday, July 31 and Sunday matinee Aug 1). 

The Washington Post covers the ongoing inability of police to understand or acknowledge that people can almost always take pictures whenever they want:

A few weeks ago, on his way to work, Matt Urick stopped to snap a few pictures of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s headquarters. He thought the building was ugly but might make for an interesting photo. The uniformed officer who ran up to him didn’t agree. He told Urick he was not allowed to photograph federal buildings.

I’ve gotten this before, and my general reaction is to aggressively assert my rights.  The photography involved has never been particularly important or informative, but that’s up to me to decide, not an police officer who doesn’t understand the law.  Lots of people don’t react they way I do, of course, and for understandable reasons:

Urick wanted to tell the guard that there are pictures of the building on HUD’s Web site, that every angle of the building is visible in street views on Google Maps and that he was merely an amateur photographer, not a threat. But Urick kept all this to himself.

“A lot of these guys have guns and are enforcing laws they obviously don’t understand, and they are not to be reasoned with,” he said. After detaining Urick for a few minutes and conferring with a colleague on a radio, the officer let him go.

This continuing harassment by law enforcement officials is getting a lot of coverage. I hope it will sink in at some point.  Until then, I suggest a quick review of your rights in the US.  In the UK, check this out.

How about an outdoor live music festival to be staged on the grassy hill that is Libby Hill Park? How about a Saturday afternoon in early October? With plenty of barbecue and beer on hand, does it sound familiar? Weather permitting, do you think the concept might draw a crowd a crowd?

A source with knowledge of the plans, tells me STYLE Weekly and the Church Hill Association are in the process of cooking up just such a promotion for this fall. Details aren't available at this writing.

However, readers should know this new endeavor does not involve the small group of backers that planned and oversaw the annual High on the Hog parties that were staged in the same space between 1977 and 2006. So, regardless of how derivative this concept may be, on the surface, it is not another installment of High on the Hog.

Still, I'm looking forward to seeing what name the current promoters will put on the event.

In a Sunday OpEd piece for the New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning writer Paul Krugman connects the dots on why we can't pass legislation to deal effectively with climate change.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior. You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers — allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.

Click here to read the entire piece.

From the Washington Redskins web site:

Mike Shanahan, 57, was hired Jan. 6 as the Redskins’ executive vice president and head coach. As head coach of the Denver Broncos from 1995-2008, he guided the club to back-to-back Super Bowl victories following the 1997-98 seasons and compiled a record of 154-103. He spoke with Redskins.com’s Larry Weisman in an exclusive Q&A interview at Redskins Park.

With the Redskins training camp to open on Thursday click here to read the interview.

Virginia Senator Jim Webb started a firestorm when his op-ed, “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege,” appeared in the Wall Street Journal. What Webb said is nothing new. His is a nuanced argument: that affirmative action, under the umbrella of diversity, has benefitted groups of people that it never was intended to benefit, and it is has done so at the expense of whites, particularly poor whites.

I have to admit that I was put off initially by the title of the piece, which, more than likely, Webb did not write. White privilege is not a myth: go read the Peggy McIntosh’s seminal article (pdf) on the topic and tell me that there is not an inherent benefit in our society for being white. Webb’s love for our shared Scots-Irish heritage tends to sometimes obscure the harsh reality: you can take the poorest, least educated white person, teach them how to dress and speak, and that person will be almost universally accepted. The same is cannot be said for a black person. Perhaps I need to send the Senator a copy of Noel Ignatiev’s book, “How the Irish Became White.”

Webb seems to be blinded by his desire to improve the lot of his Appalachian kin, who he thinks have been wronged by the expansion of diversity. He inches very close to the “reverse discrimination” mark as being the reason so many whites are poor and remain poor. Webb fails to acknowledge that many of the anti-poverty programs put in place in the 1960s were geared towards poor whites just as much as poor blacks. There are reasons, Senator Webb, why the white and black underclass remain. The two groups have much in common, even if politics mostly keeps them separate.

The timing of this article is curious as well. Given all that transpired last week with Shirley Sherrod, it’s just a weird read. To whom, exactly, is Webb speaking? His rich, all-white colleagues in the Senate? Or, in gearing up for a re-election campaign, possibly against George Allen, is he trying to send a signal to “real Virginia” that he’s one of them?

But I agree with him that in pursuing diversity, we have lost sight of the original purpose of affirmative action. The goal was redress for black Americans, who, along with Native Americans, had suffered discrimination at the hands of our government. Interestingly enough, Webb made no mention of Native Americans.  Nor did he mention that the largest beneficiaries of affirmative action have been white women.

Diversity has the same Latin root as diversion – diversus­ – and while not synonymous, the two terms are linked, at least in my mind. As America has embraced diversity in our culture, we have been diverted from the real issues that are unique to black Americans. No other group was brought here in chains, enslaved for 250 years, and subjected to second-class citizenship for another 100 years after that. When Webb says “generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight,” he is absolutely correct. One must actually have boots in order to pull oneself up by bootstraps.

There should be – and are – programs to assist the poor. That doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be programs geared towards black Americans – because there should be. When only five of the Fortune 500 CEOs are black, it’s hard to claim that the playing field is level.

Let me get this straight. Two of Portsmouth’s council members want to be appointed mayor. So the four other council members will be interviewing the candidates, including those two. But when the deliberations start on who will be appointed, all six members of council will weigh in.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Am I the only one that sees something wrong with the two council members/mayor candidates participating in the selection of the appointment? It seems to me that if the two of them are not participating in the interviewing process, they should also not participate in the selection process. That is, unless the Portsmouth council intends to allow the two non-members of council to sit in. Why should two be able to advocate privately for themselves and two not?

Seriously – the two council members, Elizabeth Psimas and Charles Whitehurst, should not be in the room when the decision is being made. Such is the price you pay for offering to serve. After all, one of the candidates – Curtis Edmonds – can’t even make the interviews, although he supposedly is still going to be “considered.” What kind of transparency includes having half the candidates vote on the position themselves? Besides, who do you expect them to vote for, if not themselves?

One more thing: just in case Portsmouth hasn’t thought about it, they should consider interviewing each candidate separately, without the others present. I’m assuming the four members have decided on some questions to ask. That being the case, it seems only fair that each candidate have the opportunity to answer without the others hearing their answers and copying their responses.

Read.  And then act.  Call your Congressman, talk to your neighbors, and continue to tell your niece not to sign up to die for lies.

Paul Dateh:

Click here to view the embedded video.

An example of what Cuccinelli might see as fake art: Pollacks' Autumn Rhythm Number 30 (1950)

With the temperature in triple digits outside the courtroom, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was back in court on Friday afternoon, this time to turn the heat up on more alleged fraud within academia. On the heels of his Civil Investigative Demand directed against the University of Virginia, to do with climate-change research, now Cuccinelli has the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in his sights.

So far, no one at the VMFA will go on the record to say what its position is/will be regarding Cuccinelli’s demand to see all records to do with Abstract Expressionism, and abstract art in general, for the last four decades. That includes all emails and doodles in margins.

“Flabbergasted,” was the word that summed up the feelings of an anonymous source within the VMFA, who spoke off-the-record in a dark restaurant a few blocks from the Museum. Cuccinelli’s sweeping demand for information will apparently require thousands of hours of work by VMFA employees.

“I’m no art critic," said Cuccinelli. "This probe isn't about good or bad art, it's about un-art. It’s about fraud. The people who‘ve been handing out grants to their friends and spending the taxpayers' money to exhibit so-called abstract works of art -- stuff that nobody knows for sure what it even means! -- they are now going to have to answer for their dishonesty.”

Cuccinelli, a vocal skeptic of the value of ambiguous art, said he believes it’s mostly a matter of people with no talent for drawing trying to dupe the public into supporting fake art. He suggested the entire concept of abstract art has always "been a hoax." He wondered aloud how much money has been paid to art professors who perpetuated the hoax.

“If they want to sell meaningless paintings and sculpture in prissy private art galleries that’s one thing,” said Cuccinelli, “but when the taxpayers' dollars are used as a social program to redistribute money to slackers who can‘t even draw, well, that‘s where this attorney general draws the line.”

When asked if he planned to go after the art departments at state supported universities that have been teaching students about Abstract Expressionism, etc., Cuccinelli winked, “That’s a question for another day. Hopefully a cooler day.”

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Note: Isn't it about time for a little satirical relief from the heat? Here are the two other posts -- here and here -- that actually inspired me to concoct this one for SLANTblog. Who else wants to play?