From the Virginia Shooting Sports Association:
Gun control activist Lori Haas has been appointed to the McAuliffe transition team.
This woman is not a general political leader who just happened to stick her toe into the gun control waters. Her entire mission is gun control, and she now works for CSGV. Obama doesn’t even recognize them as a mainstream enough gun control group to invite them to the weekly White House meetings, according to the press.
And, yet, this is what Virginians voted for in regards to gun laws. Good luck, folks.
I feel sorry for Jay. He moves from Massachusetts just in time for Virginia to turn Blue…
Virginia is quite purple. The governorship has changed party quite regularly in the last 40 years, before it was reliably Democrat for the preceding 150 years. The Senate is split 20-20, the Lt. Governor breaks tie votes, the House of Delegates is heavily Republican (67-33).
I think the interesting topic for political analysis is understanding why Northam (D) won the Lt. Governorship handily (55%-45%), while McAuliffe (D) won by a small margin (2.5%) and Herring (D) is currently leading in the Attorney General election by around 160 votes.
Yep! He went from being MArooned to being VArooned!
I see a lot of new outlaws living in Virginia soon
At least for Jay there’s a chance of things swinging back. Hell just look at all the crappy VA laws repealed recently.
Now look at all the repealed laws in Mass….
I feel bad for him, but at the same time he’s currently sleeping on a pile of 30-round P-Mags and Glock Mags with a comforter pulled over them!
Oh and he can walk into a shop and buy a Hi-Point or a Springfield 1911, or a 4th Gen Glock, despite those guns being too “Dangerous” to be sold in Mass.
“Oh and he can walk into a shop and buy a Hi-Point…”
There’s a downside to everything, I guess. ;)
LOL! Yeah Tam you miss the slave mentality we have.
I bought a Jennings off of Jay a few years ago, and it sucks just as much as you’d assume… But I have it because THEY don’t want me to have one.
I think if I moved to Free America possibly one of the first thing I’d buy besides magazines would be a Sub $100 shit pistol JUST BECAUSE.
So basically IF PA Gov. Corbett loses reelction next year, this is something we might see with Bloomberg jumping into the race for the eventual Democratic challenger/winnner (US Rep Allyson Schwartz?)/ Bloomy giving the Commonwealth of PA residents a “gift” with one of his stooges being “appointed” to the new Gov’s “Cabinet”….?
Yikes!
What can Terry do without a legislature that’s not willing to take up his causes?
That’s a big question. How much executive power does the VA gov have?
Are there certain processes (such as the issue of carry permits or gun sales) that he can influence by being in charge of the State Police?
What kind of vetos can he make? Line item? Amendatory?
No. Permits are controlled through statutory means and are quite absolute in terms of how and when they must be issued. No games he can play there with the State Police to “tighten” standards, slow down issuance, etc. He could try but VCDL and others would be all over it.
I don’t recall the VA governor having line item vetoes. It’s “all or nothing” and the VA legislature has been know to override them.
The only thing I know about the VA gov is that they are limited to one term. They can’t serve consecutive terms.
Did Jay G just move to Virginia?
Ha!!! No one told me. Oh well, I blame Sarvis and the fools who fell for that fraud. A collegue, who is a well placed Democrat was laughing to me today about how easy it is for them to get Republicans to fall for this kind of thing all the time. Their base may be crazy, but they will never make the Ralph Nader mistake again. Republicans though . . . .
The exit polls had Sarvis taking more Dem votes than Republican.
I blame VA Republicans for nominating a mediocre candidate and running a terrible campaign.
^^THIS^^
If the Republicans want my vote, they can run a candidate worth voting for. And they need to learn to STFU on the social issues, already!
“Gun control activist Lori Haas has been appointed to the McAuliffe transition team.”
Yeah, but how is she on abortion or gay marriage?
I imagine that she is horrible on both.
More specifically, I imagine that she is for the legalized murder of the unborn, in addition to being in favor of increased government intrusion into personal/religious matters.
As far as the issue of so-called “gay rights” goes, if they’re truly human rights to begin with, then the government has no business dictating terms and conditions: If it is truly my right to “marry”, by mutual consent, anyone whom I so choose, then any sort of permitting scheme is a violation of that basic right. In other words, the fight shouldn’t be about legislating an expanded definition of marriage (read: sticking it to adherents to Judeo-Christian philosophy), but instead it should be about getting the government the hell out of our lives and our bedrooms (read: eliminating government oversight of the personal/religious issue of marriage).
As far as legalized infanticide goes, it’s another clear-cut libertarian issue: the fetus isn’t a cancerous growth, it’s a human being. It’s a life. The prime purpose for which governments are instituted by men is to erect the framework which will preserve liberty, the right to life being chief among these.
I don’t expect he’s going to make much progress on any of that crap — this isn’t Chicago. Still, it’s deeply disappointing that this assclown won the election. And even more so that the even bigger assclown running for AG also looks to have won the (perhaps Chicago-style) recount.
I think Lori Haas on the “transition team” has about the same practical significance as Ted Nugent being on the NRA Board of Directors.
I would concur with this. We can’t lose our will every time this happens. They also had Tim Kaine who was an anti-gun democrat. I’m glad the VA gov only gets one term. Wish PA were the same.
I am of the mind that that what politicians say and what they actually do are rarely the same. It can just as easily work in your favor.
I agree.
Not all of us voted for McAuliffe.
Since every state candidate I’ve ever voted for has lost, I think I’ll start voting Democrat just to see if the effect holds.
For much the same reason, I’m thinking about registering Democrat in 2014 just so I can screw with their primaries.
If I were going to register with a party, I would consider joining the Republicans. It is their primaries that could use some screwing with, so that they stop picking losers.
Yeah, see, I’ve been doing that for years and with little success. Thought it might be time to change things up a bit.
I guess I’m forced to acknowledge experience and agree. The few times I’ve registered briefly with a party over the years, it has been with the Republicans to support a specific candidate in a primary. It always resulted in disappointment and to some extent, private embarrassment.
I have no love at all for Republicans in general, but I also don’t want to see the self-destruction of either party, so the other party can run open-loop.
The real trick to getting candidates elected is to find ones that are far enough to the right that they actually understand the legitimate role of government (and that our current government vastly exceeds it’s legitimate authority), who are also able to intelligently express our positions on a wide variety of issues.
So far, it seems that the establishment wing of the Republican party has largely taken the view that they are in business to do nothing more than stay in office, and that the best way to do so is to get in the good graces of the drive-by media (read: by moving to the left on every issue.).
HSR47, “moving to the left on every issue” is not how Cuccinelli threw away the Virginia election. Quite the opposite. And the outcome was entirely predictable.
“The real trick to getting candidates elected is to find ones that are far enough to the right that they actually understand the legitimate role of government”
That conflation of the left-right axis with a politian’s view of *coercion* makes this conversation harder. Statists come in all flavors, from far left to far right, and the desire to use the power of the State to compel individuals to live by others’ belief is not confined to one side of the political spectrum.
That’s exactly what I did when I registered to vote for the 2008 cycle.
Historically, the democrat primaries in my area tended to be more interesting/important, while the opposite was generally true of the other major party.
In the last 4 years, the pattern has largely reversed; The Republican primary has become the one with the interesting contests, while the democrat primary has become largely devoid of any real choice.
Add to this that my state primary falls too late in the year to really mean much of anything in the presidential primary.
Really though, I just wish my Commonwealth had open primaries.
It’s not just what Virginians voted for, but in part what apathetic gun owner’s didn’t vote for.
Apathy. It is pervasive and destructive.
It wasn’t all apathy. The Republicans knowingly chose to run someone who a lot of gun owners (and other non-SoCons) couldn’t vote for, and there were plenty of discussions on this blog well prior to the election about what Cuccinelli needed to do to fix that and didn’t.
If I were a Virginia Republican, I’d be pushing discussions in the VA GOP about running on positions that are radioactive even to a lot of people on the right, never mind libertarians. Yes, elections have consequences. Taking inane/inept/offensive positions on divisive issues has consequences too, and if the GOP doesn’t learn this lesson quickly then they are going to continue to have problems.
“positions that are radioactive even to a lot of people on the right, never mind libertarians.”
I’ll open by quoting George Orwell, for the sake of analogy:
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
To paraphrase, I would substitute “right-leaning voter” for “nationalist.”
It astounds me the levels of apologia I encounter for right-wing candidates who have said and done things that cross into lunacy, or, have pandered to and associated with totally distasteful groups with virtually fascist underpinnings, and yet their supporters seem to be totally unaware of any of it. That may be a result of their self-censorship (any bearer of discomforting news becomes “leftist” and thus what they say must be dismissed out of hand) yet they are facts that a large swath of the population knows about, without need for “attack ads”. That “large swath” usually includes a goodly percentage of right-leaning people who legitimately doubt that a neo-fascist loon really intends to deliver on the promises of “freedom” he or she is prattling about.
“Fascists” are actually Leftists. Racism has nothing to do with fascism. Fascism is when the government legislates and controls the ways and means of production through the enforcement by a centralized military or paramilitary unit headed by a dictator and/or single party unicameral parliament that is un-elected and rather a pose for the dictator. Communism and fascism are not different and evolve from Marxist-Socialist political theory.
The Republicans knowingly chose to run someone who a lot of gun owners couldn’t vote for
What they got was better?
Since the Republican-majority House can be (mostly) counted on to reliably vote against McAuliffe, yes, it is better. Sure, Virginia gun owners might not gain much during his term, but it’s also highly unlikely that we’ll lose anything.
Yes. At least you won’t lose anything except for the image that Bloomberg can’t buy gubernatorial elections or anything as silly as that…
You mean the fact that, despite Bloomer letting him out spend Cuccinelli something like 3 to 1, and Cuccinelli making the traditional Republican social issue screwups, McAuliffe still only managed to win by less than 3%? How about the way that McAuliffe’s numbers dropped like a rock as soon as he started talking about guns?
IOW, yeah, he might have bought this election, but the effort was massively disproportionate to the results. Plus, he illustrated quite handily that gun control is a losing issue in Virginia.
See, the social issues aren’t the “screwups,” and you are making much too simplistic of an argument when you and others say that. It’s extremely easy to point to one issue to attempt to make your case by simple association. In doing so, anti-gun people could also easily make the case that it was Bloomberg’s help that tipped the scale in favor of a candidate who supported gun control. So, therefore, Virginia supports more gun control, and the GOP should temper its message on guns to win. See what I did there?
As you mentioned, the take by the Dems was less than 3% for the governor’s race. You can argue that Cuccinelli could have articulated positions better, which I did, or that the GOP should embrace a pro-liberty position, which I do.
The take by the Dems was less than 50%, with the majority of the state wanting either the nominated Republican candidate, or voting for the Democrat supported Libertarian in a fantasy that such a vote would do anything other than elect the Democrat.
Virginia was stolen by Dems running a third party candidate to split the opposition vote. It worked.
Glad I left VA in the nick of time. PA may not be perfect, but at least out here I don’t have to worry about massive federal spending that causes untold numbers of yuppie transplants to swarm into the area and vote for the same crap that caused them to leave their home states in the first place.
Metro DC is a great place to make some money/investments, but I’d advise everyone to get out before they lose their soul for good.