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1.) Virginia is for haters — The Virginia gubernatorial race is already in the gutter. Oh, it’s nasty. It’s really, really nasty. TheDC’s Alex Pappas reports:
“The first debate between Republican Ken Cuccinelli and Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia gubernatorial race immediately got off to a particularly divisive start Saturday, with both candidates attacking each other’s past in politics and business as evidence of being unfit for office. McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, found himself repeatedly on defense about why he is portraying himself as a job creator when the electric car company he recently founded failed to create jobs. ‘You picked Mississippi,’ Cuccinelli said to McAuliffe about the location of GreenTech’s plant. ‘So run for governor in Mississippi.'”
KABOOM! Anyway, transportation issues seem to be a big area of debate in race. Your DC Morning facilitator isn’t from Virginia, but he did travel to Norfolk from Washington last month to attend the wedding of a colleague. The drive took six hours when it should have taken three. Whoever is elected governor, that’s probably a problem that should be fixed, unless Virginia likes having worse congestion than most third world banana republics.
2.) Jack is hitting the road — Goodbye Southern Avenger. Hello Self Avenger. TheDCNF’s Jim Antle reports:
“The man who for years called himself the ‘Southern Avenger’ says he now seeks to avenge his own honor. Jack Hunter, the aide to Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul who has been under fire for comments critical of Abraham Lincoln and sympathetic to the Confederacy, has left the senator’s office to resume his career as a political pundit. Hunter told The Daily Caller News Foundation that he wanted to avoid being a distraction for Paul and to clear his own name, which he argues is now unfairly associated with racism. … Hunter isn’t denying writing the columns in question, but he does say the coverage doesn’t represent the full body of his writing. ‘The stories made me angry, as well as many who’ve followed my work, because the cherry-picked distortions weren’t even remotely the real me,’ he said. ‘It was enraging to watch neoconservatives, liberals and even some actual racists speculate about what I believe, based on what they were eager to portray me as believing. Not surprisingly, their speculations almost always suited their own political purposes.'”
TheDC Morning hears that Bill Kristol, Bob Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz used to literally force Hunter to wear a confederate flag mask and toast John Wilkes Booth on his birthday.
3.) Not-so-impartial mediators? — TheDC’s Patrick Howley reports:
“The Department of Justice civil rights unit sent to Sanford, Florida in 2012 to mediate the anti-George Zimmerman protests has a history of putting racial advocacy ahead of its mandated duties, according to a former head of the unit. ‘At CRS headquarters, we (meaning I) regularly had to warn or take corrective action against career employees for acting as advocates instead of mediators,’ Ondray Harris, the former director of the DOJ’s Community Relations Service (CRS), told The Daily Caller. CRS was the unit deployed to Sanford in 2012 to oversee anti-Zimmerman protests. ‘Some CRS employees come to the Agency with anti-law enforcement or anti- what they would call the ‘white establishment’ [attitudes]’ added Harris, an African American who joined CRS during the administration of George W. Bush in 2007 and left in 2010.”
4.)High-priced prostitute playdate — Reason number 9,324 for the decline of the West. TheDCNF’s Robbie Soave reports:
“Being a kid is serious business, these days. Wealthy New York mothers are hiring expensive recreation consultants to design highly-structured playdates for their career-oriented four-year-olds. Such sessions, which are designed with long-term academic and professional success in mind, cost $400 an hour, reports The New York Post. ‘Given that admission rates [to elite kindergartens] are so low, parents don’t want to leave anything to chance,’ said Suzanne Rheault, CEO of Aristotle Circle, a tutoring company that organizes the playdates for groups consisting of three to five children.”
Well, it’s good to start the kids early. When they go to college and join a fraternity, they’ll already have experience paying for friends.
5.) Tweet of Yesterday —KimJongNumberUn:This is a really hard first job to have.
6.) Today in North Korean News — BREAKING: “Kim Jong Il’s Statue Erected at Kim Jong Il University of People’s Security”