Virginia in the News

Virginia has been in the news lately. The Washington Post is once again touting it as a battleground state in the presidential election. A new fact I was not aware of is that McCain is apparently considering Rep. Eric Cantor as his running mate. Cantor is a four term Congressman from Virginia, and (like the author of this blog) a graduate of both The College of William and Mary and George Washington University. Seems like a small fish to me - I doubt he'll get picked - but that's an interesting tidbit. It's notable that McCain isn't going near any of Virginia's bigger name Republicans - like George Allen.

Forbes magazine also reported its annual ranking of states in terms of their competitiveness. For the third year in a row Virginia ranked first, but the runners up closed the gap from last year. In fact, the first two paragraphs are dedicated to the fifth-place state - Georgia - without mentioning Virginia at all until the third paragraph! The Bacon's Rebellion blog, on my blog roll, reports on this as well.

You have to take these rankings with a grain of salt - the underlying point is that we're doing well. Lots of rankings like this exist (maybe I'll do a blog post on it some day), so you have to look at where you fall out in the distribution across several of them.

Finally, yesterday's Post reported on a number of new wind energy projects that are set to go up in the western part of Virginia over the next several years. This is very exciting, but there seems to be some opposition from... not Big Coal... not state Republicans... but ENVIRONMENTALISTS! Yes folks, wind turbines can kill birds and destroy the tranquility of the mountain forests where they will be built. Good grief. I fancy myself an environmentalist for all intents and purposes - but these people are going to have us living in caves pretty soon. An environmentalist opposing wind energy? I was dumbfounded.

Apparently Virginia passed a law in 2007 that made the state very friendly to the development of wind energy, which got a lot of firms interested in new projects. Kudos to Richmond! The article did not talk much about the state's coal options. We have a lot of coal left in Virginia, and we really need to look into how to burn it AND extract it cleanly. A lot of people scoff at the idea of "clean coal", but my understanding is there's something to it. It's certainly worth checking it out since we're sitting on so much of the stuff.

"America's Decline" in Becker and Posner's Blog

Becker and Posner have a new blog post up on "America's Decline". Becker leads, and Posner responds. It doesn't delve too deeply into anything, but these are smart guys, so it's always interesting to hear what they have to say.

I responded to Posner's comment - which I think is a little better - with much the same argument that I use in my "Folk Economics" post from a couple weeks back.

In other news, "The Dark Knight" is an amazing movie - I highly recommend you see it in theaters. Very dark, as everyone is saying. I've also heard people say that it wouldn't be as big of a deal if Heath Ledger hadn't died. This is not true either, by any stretch. This movie would have launched Ledger's career out of the "pretty boy" roles he's used to and into a whole new range of potential characters. They said that "Brokeback Mountain" demonstrated that Ledger could play weightier roles than he had in the past, but trust me - gay cowboys don't hold a candle to this new Joker. He stole the show.

I also saw the preview for "The Watchmen". I've never read the graphic novel, but now I'm intrigued. It's really confusing to understand exactly what's going on from the preview, though. I'll need to educate myself.