Year: 2009

99th House of Delegates Mass Meeting: Video: A lot of the delegates wanted to be sure that they could vote against the kook.

Again, the quality isn’t the best and you can hear me talking in the background (I’m the one with the slight country drawl).

Caroline County Chairman Jeff Sili originally started this discussion off by asking a question about the proposed meeting rules but I don’t remember the exact question Sili posed to Webb. Unfortunately, the portion of the video covering Sili’s question is messed up on the MiniDV tape. I guess that’s what I get for using a MiniDV tape that’s two or three years old.

Also, the woman that is seconding all the motions is part of the Caroline County delegation but I didn’t catch her name.

And for a great example of the quality of leadership this committee has, jump to 5:20 in part two and watch the whole room correct Allen Webb on what a Yes or No vote means on a particular motion.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Crabill Watch: The Free Lance–Star blasts her in an editorial.

The Free Lance–Star:

EPISCOPALIANS, “God’s frozen people,” are little given to flam- boyant displays of religiosity. But Albert Pollard, Anglican communicant, surely raised his hands skyward and whooped, “Thank you, Sweet Lord!” when news came last weekend that Republicans had named Catherine Crabill to challenge him in the 99th House District. Not every day does an incumbent get an opponent who calls the U.S. government “domestic terrorists.”

Ms. Crabill, a fan of the militia movement whose members scan the horizon for black helicopters, joins that peculiar pantheon of local GOP politicos given to excessive fervor and insights withheld from the rest of us. One thinks of the county supervisor, given to pious utterance, who left her husband to take up part-time residence in a government office (“He[God]’s not real happy with me right now,” she ruefully acknowledged, a big iron with bullets at her side), not to mention the supervisor candidate who declared public schools unconstitutional.

The weekend GOP convention in Montross might have named no one to take on Mr. Pollard, and should have. He will win hands-down; the nomination of Ms. Crabill, the sole GOP candidate, serves chiefly to bolster the entire party’s kook image. Moderate Republicans, who know the difference between a principle and a fetish, behold the party’s standard in the hands of a Catherine Crabill and lose much complexion (see photo below).

Democrats, of course, are often no summer on the Riviera themselves. But in the 99th, the uncomfortably familiar question once again arises for sensible Republicans: Where do we get these people?

Nice to see that this intrepid hate-blog gives them something to write about…

Just what we need: A government agency to insure municipal bonds.

Because the government has done such a great job insuring every other form of debt. From Reason Magazine:

The National League of Cities has asked for a $5 billion Treasury Department loan in order to set up a municipal bond insurer that would dwarf other players in the private muni insurance market. Say hello to IMBAC, the Issuers Mutual Bond Assurance Co., which would aim to provide insurance against default for cities with poor bond ratings.

The main private players in the muni insurance market (née 1971) have mostly been laid low by the mortgage-backed-securities pox, and don’tcha know the League has discovered that profit was the word of their undoing: “Fifteen shareholder-owned municipal bond insurers have failed because of the intense pressure to produce 15 percent to 25 percent annual returns for their shareholders,” says the League’s preliminary business plan.

A while back, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) proposed a federal muni bond insurer along these lines, envisioning an entity that provides attractive premiums to at-risk municipalities while costing “zero” to the taxpayer. The Wall Street Journal noted that while it’s true they have had historically low rates of default, city governments are entering uncharted waters of debt — with ballast, in many cases, provided by growing and non-negotiable bills stemming from pensions and other obligations. Further increasing the risk of muni defaults is the existence of the insurance itself, which turns bond default from an apocalyptic to a merely regrettable scenario.

H/t: Patterico’s Pontifications

Crabill Watch: Her OKC Trutherism makes The Washington Independent.

The Washington Independent:

The Virginia Republican Party has a lot on its shoulders this year — a failure to take back the governor’s mansion will slow the GOP momentum going in to the 2010 elections. Nevertheless, the party hasn’t been tacking to the center as it builds itself back up again. (It moved far right in 2008, changing candidate nomination rules to clear a path for U.S. Senate candidate Jim Gilmore, who got shellacked by Mark Warner.)

Activist Catherine T. Crabill just won the party’s nomination for a seat in the state House of Delegates, despite having written that “our government was culpable in the [Oklahoma City] bombing” and referring more generally to “the domestic terrorists known as our own government.”

H/t: Fred2Blue

99th House of Delegates Mass Meeting: Video: Rob Wittman (R-1st) takes the money and runs…

NOTE: I just noticed that the audio on the video is out of sync. I’m working on figuring out why. It’s fine on my original that I uploaded but YouTube apparently did something that caused it to be out of sync. It’s fixed now I think.

To paraphrase the Steve Miller Band.

Sorry about the poor quality of the recording but it’s a Sony Handycam with no tripod so you get what you pay for:

Anyone else think he didn’t want to be in that room any longer than he had to be? I don’t blame him of course, I felt like I was going to throw up by the end of the meeting. A relative of mine and I managed to be the first people out the door thankfully.

And here’s the full speech if anyone wants to watch it:

I don’t have video of the comments made by Terry Beatley but I’ll still go over those in a later post.

Catherine Crabill (Republican candidate in the 99th): Bush lied, Iraqis died; McCain a “smirking, angry, bully”; Ron Paul “a seriously credentialed constitutional scholar”.

From a letter to the editor that appeared in the Rappahannock Record in their April 3, 2008 edition:

These last five years the American public and the poor Iraqis have anguished over this horrific war made worse by the fact that the decision to engage this battle was based on lies by the Bush administration.

[…]

Then there’s John McCain, the smirking, angry, bully that has ridden his P.O.W. fame all the way to this year’s Republican Party nomination.

[…]

Meanwhile, the likes of Ron Paul, a seriously credentialed constitutional scholar with the track record, intellect, and character to match, is minimized and ignored to the dust bin of history.

H/t: James Cupp in the comments section of a previous post.

ROFLMAO: Catherine Crabill’s OKC Trutherism makes The Free Lance–Star.

First time I’ve liked something that Frank Delano has written:

Crabill also told the convention that she had been “beaten, humiliated and ridiculed” by bloggers who discovered a 1995 newspaper article in which she blamed the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing on the federal government. At the time, Crabill lived in New Mexico.

The Washington Times quoted her as saying:

“‘If any militia group is truly responsible for the murderous bombing in Oklahoma City, then I say, ‘Hangin’s too good for ’em,'” said Catherine Crabill of Aragon, N.M., who belongs to a group called New Mexico Citizens Action Association.

“But Mrs. Crabill said it’s her belief ‘this heinous act of violence was the work of our government,’ which will ‘use it as an excuse to aggressively attack the growing militia movement across the country.'”

Crabill denied making the 1995 statement, but, in a recent posting on her Web site, catherinecrabill.com, she said: “I did and do believe that our government was culpable in the [Oklahoma City] bombing. I am not ashamed of standing with my friends and neighbors in New Mexico from the domestic terrorists known as our own government.”

How long until all these delegates that voted for her start screaming they knew nothing like typical political cowards?

For the record, I did not “beat” anyone. “[H]umiliated and ridiculed”? Sure, that was me.

Live-twittering the Republican mass meeting for the 99th House of Delegates District.

Follow it on Twitter starting around 10:30 a.m. The meeting is at the A.T. Johnson Human Services Building in Montross for those that are curious.

Hopefully no one there throws a punch (or takes a shot) at me.

UPDATE: For those that weren’t following my updates on Twitter, Catherine Crabill secured the Republican nomination today. I’ll be writing up a post with some thoughts later.