Virginia’s Quadrennial Dilemma: Whosis or Whatsizname?

Posted October 16, 2005, 11:31 a.m.

Interesting piece by Linton Weeks in the Post today about the Virginia gubernatorial race—or, more accurately, why people aren’t very interested in it. It’s good to see that I’m not the only person who was thoroughly uninspired by the candidates this year.

In addition to this race’s specifics, it also talks about some of the Virginia electoral oddities. For example, we’re one of only a few states that hold our elections in ‘off-off’ years (years without any national races) and we’re the only state that does not allow consecutive reelection (so our candidates are usually new, relatively-unfamiliar faces).

That most local offices are uncontested (thanks, gerrymandering!) doesn’t help matters either.

Virginia’s Quadrennial Dilemma: Whosis or Whatsizname? (Washington Post; free registration may be required).

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.

Quotes

The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.

Bernard Shaw

Once I conquer Finland, I’ll head south through the Baltics and on to Belarus. Soon, all the world will find me mildly amusing.

Conan O’Brien

Those who call black black, and white white, are sentenced for intolerance. Only the grays live.

Fulton Sheen

My dear, when people show you who they are, why don’t you believe them?

Maya Angelou

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

Bertrand Russell

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Thomas Jefferson

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.

Albert Einstein

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

Salman Rushdie

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that’s being dead.

Elie Wiesel

All economic transactions involve mutual accommodation and each transactor has to make the deal a net benefit to the other transactor, in order to have a deal at all.

Thomas Sowell

Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.

Dave Barry

Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.

Arthur Brisbane

But in the countries in which the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people ostensibly prevails, the censorship of the press is not only dangerous, but it is absurd.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.

Michael Crichton

We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

[The vote is] the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Ambrose Bierce

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile.

Universal Dec. of Human Rights

Accept whatever is brought upon you, and in changes that humble you be patient. For gold is tested in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of humiliation.

Holy Bible

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Laurence J. Peter

The body hates the soul . . . because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.

Clement of Rome

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