Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Virginia General Assembly, 2007

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Introduction

This year, all seats in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly—the Virginia Senate and the Virginia House of Delegates—are up for election. The Virginia Senate is made up of 40 Senators, and the Republican Party currently holds a 23/17 majority over the Democratic Party. The Virginia House of Delegates is made up of 100 Delegates, and the Republican Party currently holds a 57/40 majority over the Democratic Party with 3 seats held by independents. The General Assembly is the oldest legislative body in the western hemisphere and has been operating since 1619.

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Local Offices (Board of Supervisors, etc.), 2007

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Introduction

Many, many, many local offices are up for election this year—the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, the Fairfax County School Board, the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney, the Fairfax County Sheriff, the Clerk of the Fairfax County Circuit Court, and the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Directors. While they lack the glamor of federal (or even state) offices, many of these elections are generally very important and have a large impact on local quality of life.

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Fairfax County Bond Referendums, 2007

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Introduction

Virginia counties are required to put bond issuance to a voter referendum in order to borrow money on behalf of the county. The issuance of bonds is usually used by governments to raise money for large capital expenditures and they are repaid at a later date with interest. Bond referendums historically pass by a large margin, in large part because people vote for the recipients of the bond money (after all, who will vote against schools, parks, or transportation?) without realizing that bond issuance contributes to government debt and should be used sparingly.

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GM Workers Strike: An Opportunity

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Big news this morning in the auto industry: the United Auto Workers (UAW) labor union has called a strike at General Motors (GM) factories after failing to reach a deal with management for new contracts. I have predicted for some time that a real, knock-down, drag-out war between the UAW and the American auto manufacturers was coming (for many of the reasons discussed in my Fixing the American Auto Industry piece). I hope this is it, and that GM doesn’t give-in. Fire the union workers and rehire on a case-by-case basis with individual contracts like most every other modern industry. This is GM’s opportunity to break the unions and free itself to grow and improve in reliability, sales, and profit—which will ultimately help it and its workers (and chart a course for Ford and Chrysler to follow later). Go for it!

RSS & LiveJournal Feed Problem (Fixed)

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Some of you may have noticed problems with my RSS feed, and the LiveJournal feed that runs off of it (I’m not using LJ much lately, so I didn’t find out about this until my sister brought it to my attention). Turns out there was a phantom character—known as a ‘gremlin’—in one of my entries, which caused the feed to be invalid XML. This caused a parsing error when attempting to use the feed with some feed-readers, including whichever one LiveJournal uses to parse and display the feed. I have ‘zapped’ the ‘gremlin’ and everything should work fine now. LiveJournal updates their version of the feed again at 2am tomorrow (Monday, Sept. 24), so everything should be back-to-normal then.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.