The big story for some seems to be the endorsements of newspapers. I really have never paid much attention to them before now. So let me get this in perspective. The opinion of an editor or panel says I should vote for this candidate. Yep, that is about it. I feel confident in that for sure. Trust what the old MSM thinks I should do. I have never been at the polls thinking “I wonder who the Times endorsed.†I did enjoy today’s letters to the editor page in the BHC. By my count Kilgore supporters outnumbered the others by far. The BHC may have endorsed Kaine, but the response of the readership applauded Kilgore. To think a newspaper endorsement can change minds is absurd.
I believe I am not alone when I say--I could care less who the papers endorse. Why would anyone care? Amazing!
We are heading northeast today for the swearing in ceremony in Richmond. I will be here for the ceremony which will take place tomorrow.
For some reason, I always thought the ceremony would be in the Supreme Court building. Oh well, after three years of law school and countless hours of studying for the bar exam, if they wanted to swear me in on the sidewalk of Broad Street, I would not complain.
However, it is a little strange that I will finally be an attorney on Halloween, of all days.
Another large paper in Southwest Virginia has endorsed Tim Kaine and Creigh Deeds.
The ads [Kilgore] ran attacking Kaine’s principled opposition to the death penalty have been shameless and, according to some polls, counterproductive.
. . .
[T]he fiscal recklessness of Kilgore’s campaign is most distressing. He has simultaneously attacked the 2004 budget compromise while making promises that would consume every bit of the revenue it generated, and then some.
Kaine’s campaign has been more serious, and more positive — despite a couple of questionable potshots aimed at Kilgore.
Throughout his campaign, Kaine has made it clear that he understands the wisdom, and the necessity, of investing in Virginia’s future.
A smaller, Southwest Virginia paper, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, has also endorsed Tim Kaine.
These endorsements, along with this one from the Bristol Herald Courier, are proving that Kilgore does not get a free pass in Southwest Virginia just because he was originally from here.
...a Fragments retrospective from a year ago tomorrow, and an image I called Burning Bush.
"Oh, these vast, calm measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light every thing seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God." --John Muir
John Muir's nature-religious ecstacies are impossible for some to understand. And those of us who do are reluctant, perhaps, to confess it. But I have been to the mountaintop.
And from the mountain crest yesterday, came the strongest sense of metaphor--the copper sun as God's eye peering from behind me, over the edge of earth. He was watching. And I was known by the Light.
I will show you images this week of both the dawn and the dusk, from misty creek's edge to the rim of the Blue Ridge--from yesterday: a day of immersion in the Range of Light.
"These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be ... the whole body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure-glow not explainable. One's body then seems homogeneous throughout, sound as a crystal." --John Muir
Tim Kaine for governorLet me give you a lesson in "Reading Endorsement Editorials." When the main point focuses on what the favored candidate isn't, you know the endorsement is half-hearted and the enthusiasm is tepid. It appears, upon careful reading, that the only reason The Times supports Kaine is because he's not a Republican. And the author would prefer that Mark Warner run again.
Virginia needs a leader who knows the vital importance of investing in the future of the state. ( link )
Virginia cannot afford a return to the era of fiscal mismanagement characterized by the two Republican governors who preceded Mark Warner in the Executive Mansion.Disastrous? Gosh. How did we survive those years?
After eight years of short-sheeting the state budget by George Allen and Jim Gilmore, Warner led a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers that made the hard choices needed to keep Virginia solvent and able to make necessary investments in the future for such vital public services as education and transportation -- even though the needs still far outweigh the resources to meet them.
Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine is the one candidate for governor who can continue leading Virginia in the right direction, and avoid a disastrous detour to the failed policies of the past.