January 2008

Frank Wolf had a huge standing room only crowd of probably 300 people last night for his birthday/campaign kick-off celebration. Of course this only warrants the tiniest of mentions in the WaPo. If this were a Feder extravaganza it certainly would’ve made first page Metro above the fold. Of course Feder just doesn’t draw these kinds of crowds and remains way out of touch with the voters of the 10th District.

Tom Davis spoke, and I have to say his departure from the scene is really depressing. For all the arrows shot at him from the wingnuts this guy really knew how to stay relevant and as conservative as possible in an increasingly Democratic district. Keith Fimian was working the crowd, and since he is the apparent frontrunner I hope he heeds the advice of Davis and doesn’t go too far in placating the hard religious right. That is not a path to victory. He absolutely needs Davis strongly on his side to win this. His greatest gift would be a Hillary coronation with a Leslie Byrne candidacy, it wil simply be too easy to paint them as Hillary Sr. and Hillary Jr.. While this may play well in the more liberal portions of the district, it would be a great driver to the polls for Republicans.

Back to Frank Wolf – what a great guy and one who really truly cares about this country and his constituents. There is no way in the world that Judy Feder will ever beat Wolf. Never gonna happen.

Tom Davis announced his retirement this afternoon at 2:00 p.m. More on it here, here and here.

Meanwhile, Connection Newspapers, the quasi-media outlet that they are, is reporting here that:

Davis believes the best Republican candidate to succeed him is Oakton resident Keith Fimian, a former football player and business owner who has “quietly raised $670,000, more than any of the Democrats who have formed exploratory committees,” he said.

(I won’t repeat the misspelling of Fimian’s name in the article)

I wrote one week ago about the remaining candidates for Congress, and I came to the conclusion that Fimian would be a great candidate to run for the seat. If Tom Davis agrees, and puts some of his political muscle, fundraising, and grassroots support into the race for Fimian, we might see some heads turn. Meanwhile, now that Fimian will have two months to fundraise for a seat that’s officially open, his finance reports due on March 31st will be an important marker of things to come.

EDIT: BTW, Kudos to Bob Gibson for breaking the story in advance five days ago. Davis claims that his mind wasn’t made up until yesterday, but he was clearly making preperations.

Prince William County Chairman(and Mitt Romney supporter) Corey Stewart is set to announce his intention to run for Lt. Governor as soon as the end of the week…

Developing….

McCain or Romney, that is the question. Giuliani has sunk into the depths after betting the deck on winning Florida. Huckabee is vying with Giuliani for third place pretty far behind the two pack leaders. We’ll see what happens. All signs point to a McCain-Romney battle till the end.

On the Dem side, Florida isn’t supposed to matter due to its defiance of the DNC and the subsequent stripping of delegates, but hey, when did rules ever stop the increasingly callow Clintons? As expected Hillary is talking up how the poor people of Michigan and Florida have been stripped of delegates by the meanies at the DNC. Only she and Bill really care about them (cue Bill’s trembling lip and Hillary’s cracking voice). After the candidates agreed to not campaign in these two states, Hillary does so in as low key a fashion as a Clinton can, than whines about how the delegates should count after all. Between this and Bill’s blatant race card politics, it’s no wonder she’s sinking in the polls.

Aftermath Update: McCain will be the Republican nominee – the writing is all over the wall. A solid five point margin for McCain, Giuliani to drop out and endorse McCain.Â

Hillary of course uses her zero delegate “victory” to proclaim how the delegates need to count after she signed the DNC pledge that they wouldn’t. How …. Clintonesque!Â

Rep. Jeff Frederick will challenge current RPV Chairman John Hager for the post.

I am 100% behind Hager whose sensible leadership is slowly but steadily rebuilding our party in Virginia that Jeff Frederick’s faction has been destroying.

Thoughts?

The Loudoun County Sanitation Authority (LCSA) has been cleaned up with the loss of Steve Snow and Eugene Delgaudio from its board (Leesburg Today story here). Dimitri Kesari is going to be a little lonely I think. John Rocca, who was deposed as Chairman by the Sultan of Sh*t himself, Steve Snow, is back on the board along with Patti Psaris, who is an environmental engineer with (surprise!) relevant experience. Both Rocca and Psaris received eight votes (I can only imagine who the no vote was!), while additional new board member Chuck Harris received six votes for his slot.

I guess putting Harris on this board is some sort of consolation prize, although I don’t understand for what. Nearly all of the Democratic supervisor candidates complained about Harris’ lack of campaigning for himself or anyone else, with him relying entirely on the Dem supervisor candidates to promote his less than inspired candidacy for Treasurer.

I guess the drive to force sewer into the Transition Area will fall by the wayside now, as it should. This makes even more sense with the apparent collapse of the Dulles Metro deal. I’ll be perfectly happy with no additional residential growth in this county for the next ten years. We’ve already grown beyond our carrying capacity in so many ways. Of course a slowdown may not be god for LCSA which has a brand spanking new treatment facility coming on line – another reason it is great to see no supervisors capable of approving land use decisions on the LCSA board.Â

LCSA is also planning to spend $89 million to increase connectivity to the Fairfax water system since (surprise!) we seem to have outstripped our own water producing capacity (WaPo story here). Really? Who would have thought that water isn’t infinite? Fairfax already supplys Loudoun with 2/3 of its water supply. This just great, Loudoun becomes even more dependent on Fairfax County, after we already serve Fairfax as a bedroom community (with all the tax burden) for its employment centers. Good deal for Fairfax!

What a strategic mistake this is. A representative for Leslie Byrne’s camp pokes her finger into Lori Alexander’s shoulder and says she better “think long and hard” about running for Congress? Mason Conservative has more thoughts about it here.

Forget that Byrne, a one-term Rep. and statewide loser, is bizzarely acting like some sort of political machine, and just think about the attention that brings upon Alexander, a no-name candidate. What are the chances that WaPo would write about Alexander’s candidacy at all if that confrontation doesn’t take place? In an open seat election, expect up to a dozen or more names to file on both sides. Hell, 28 candidates were on the ballot in both primaries for the open Senate seat in Maryland last year. Why would you go out of your way to elevate a candidate who will have trouble gaining media attention on her own?

Three answers come to mind. One, Leslie Byrne’s camp is so inept they didn’t think through such an action; two, Byrne and her organizers are so full of ego that they believe no one else, especially another woman, has a right to run for “her” seat; or three, they on some level feel threatened by Alexander’s candidacy. As MC said, Byrne likely wins a one-on-one battle with Connelly, while a crowded primary complicates matters for her. Whatever the case, amateur mistakes are the quickest way to lose an election. Let’s hope Byrne keeps it up.

10th District Chairman Jim Rich who was viciously opposed by Heidi Stirrup a couple years ago will be unopposed at the upcoming 10th District Convention.

This is GREAT for party unity.

Some news out of Manassas convention were Way, Smith and Wolfe won the convention.

…it’s that she cares too much [pause to wipe tear].

From the American Prospect’s Ezra Klein, Hillary Clinton is now calling on her fellow potential nominees to re-instate the delegates from Michigan and Florida that were stripped by the DNC when they violated their rules and moved their primary ahead of the 2/5 limit.

I hear all the time from people in Florida and Michigan that they want their voices heard in selecting the Democratic nominee.

I believe our nominee will need the enthusiastic support of Democrats in these states to win the general election, and so I will ask my Democratic convention delegates to support seating the delegations from Florida and Michigan.

Of course, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Obama and Edwards weren’t even on the Michigan ballot, and are prohibited by the DNC from campaigning in Florida, where Hillary has had a lead since last January, preventing them from duplicating the kind of success they had in Iowa and (soon-to-be) in South Carolina.

You have to wonder if, at a certain point, Hillary just gave up at trying not to appear craven, and how gullible the people are who believe that Hillary has anyone’s interests other than her own in mind.

I know, I know, the language has been getting a bit coarse here at TC, but there really is no better term to describe what will be blowing up in a week or so when the latest Loudoun County real estate assessments come out. Real estate values continue to plummet and show no sign of recovery any time soon. Supply has far outstripped demand and houses sit and sit on the market after continual price reductions. If the county assessor relies on comparable sales, the big problem is that nothing is selling even at reduced prices, so the comps are way out of date and out of the ballpark of current “value”.

This poses a huge dilema for county government. After all, they seemed to have no problem of assessing property at “100%” of value during the boom years, even while many people thought they were pushing ahead of the curve with assessed values to pre-adjust for continual increases. Somehow I think the same forecasting philosophy will not be used during the downturn. “I’m sorry Mr. Jones, we can only base your assessment on those sales from a year ago in your neighborhood, and who are we to guess what the current value is? We can only work off of comparable sales.”

Of course this is all just a bit of a shell game as the supervisors will adjust the tax rate to provide what they believe to be neccesary to run the county government (primarily the schools). What is most shocking and disappointing to me is that while the tax rate was reduced during our last “conservative Republican” board, annual expenditures for county government spending increased at unsustainable rates. Yet another echo of the national Republican malaise and misdirection at our county level.

On a related note, if you didn’t follow the spat between a local real estate blogger and County Assessor Todd Kaufman, go to realdiablog.com and scroll back through the posts about this attempt at intimidation by Kaufman. Obviously he’s a bit sensitive about this issue.