quote:

Abrams stated back in August that she was open to being vice president to "any nominee" running for president in the 2020 election.

I don't doubt that. Probably only honest thing she's ever said.

this could be a separate thread, but I do believe Bloomberg had a huge influence on the 2019 Virginia elections

From 2015, just 5 years ago, here is what Bloomberg said

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive,

targeting minorities w gun control ? 95% is way too high on a national level. 50% would be closer to the data

“These kids think they’re going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed,” Bloomberg said. “They just don’t have any long-term focus or anything. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger.”

that may be true, but is he telling that to the Stacey Abrams team ?

When an audience member asked the 72-year-old Bloomberg about Colorado marijuana, he responded that it was a terrible idea, one that is hurting the developing minds of children. Though he admitted to smoking a joint in the 1960s, he said the drug is more accessible and more damaging today.

“What are we going to say in 10 years when we see all these kids whose IQs are 5 and 10 points lower than they would have been?” he asked. “I couldn’t feel more strongly about it, and my girlfriend says it’s no different than alcohol. It is different than alcohol. This is one of the stupider things that’s happening across our country.”

will we hear that on the campaign trail now ?

Cities should create jobs that meet the skills of its residents, he said, not potential residents. In New York City, where 56 million tourists visit annually, Bloomberg said the hospitality and service industries are key. Though some might say those aren’t good jobs, he claimed that a waitress in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel makes $150,000 a year because of strong union negotiations. A waitress in a decent New York restaurant will make $50,000 to $60,000 a year, he said.

because we all know waitresses who make 150k

https://www.aspentimes.com/new...on-legal-pot-stupid/

Through 2019 Bloomberg has given $6,272,540 to Dems in Va just through Everytown for Gun Safety.

Including $1,404,276 for Northam and $709,374 for Herring.

It ain't rocket science.

I you follow the money on Northam alone, you can see his agenda.

$1,976,881 Planned Parenthood Va
$1,404,276 Everytown for Gun Safety
$995,261 NextGen Climate Action

Virginians should start publicly screaming for Bloomberg to stay out of Virginia’s business with his dirty money- then you’ll really see the elected officials getting defensive.

did you all email your delegates and senators today?

My quick email to them.

"Hello,

As a fellow Virginia resident I would like to recommend crafting a bill that would encourage prosecutors to prosecute felons and individuals not allowed to be in possession of a firearm with said crime. Currently, the prosecution rate is 2% nationwide. I truly believe the best way to keep guns out of criminal hands is to keep the criminals behind bars when caught with a gun.


When criminals or individuals who try and buy guns via a legal means IE gun store. They are never prosecuted either. Currently, those people have a prosecutorial rate of 0.055 %. Again, the best way to keep them from searching out other avenues to purchase, steal or acquire firearms is to prosecute them.

here are some ideas to think about

we are all crusaders in getting out the vote

some tips can come from Obama

2012 NYT article

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/1...-obama-campaign.html

Academic ‘Dream Team’ Helped Obama’s Effort
By BENEDICT CAREYNOV. 12, 2012

Late last year Matthew Barzun, an official with the Obama campaign, called Craig Fox, a psychologist in Los Angeles, and invited him to a political planning meeting in Chicago, according to two people who attended the session.

“He said, ‘Bring the whole group; let’s hear what you have to say,’ ” recalled Dr. Fox, a behavioral economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

So began an effort by a team of social scientists to help their favored candidate in the 2012 presidential election. Some members of the team had consulted with the Obama campaign in the 2008 cycle, but the meeting in January signaled a different direction.

“The culture of the campaign had changed,” Dr. Fox said. “Before then I felt like we had to sell ourselves; this time there was a real hunger for our ideas.”

This election season the Obama campaign won a reputation for drawing on the tools of social science. The book “The Victory Lab,” by Sasha Issenberg, and news reports have portrayed an operation that ran its own experiment and, among other efforts, consulted with the Analyst Institute, a Washington voter research group established in 2007 by union officials and their allies to help Democratic candidates.

Less well known is that the Obama campaign also had a panel of unpaid academic advisers. The group — which calls itself the “consortium of behavioral scientists,” or COBS — provided ideas on how to counter false rumors, like one that President Obama is a Muslim. It suggested how to characterize the Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in advertisements. It also delivered research-based advice on how to mobilize voters.

“In the way it used research, this was a campaign like no other,” said Todd Rogers, a psychologist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former director of the Analyst Institute. “It’s a big change for a culture that historically has relied on consultants, experts and gurulike intuition.”

When asked about the outside psychologists, the Obama campaign would neither confirm nor deny a relationship with them. “This campaign was built on the energy, enthusiasm and ingenuity of thousands of grass-roots supporters and our staff in the states and in Chicago,” said Adam Fetcher, a campaign spokesman. “Throughout the campaign we saw an outpouring of individuals across the country who lent a wide variety of ideas and input to our efforts to get the president re-elected.”

For their part, consortium members said they did nothing more than pass on research-based ideas, in e-mails and conference calls. They said they could talk only in general terms about the research, because they had signed nondisclosure agreements with the campaign.

In addition to Dr. Fox, the consortium included Susan T. Fiske of Princeton University; Samuel L. Popkin of the University of California, San Diego; Robert Cialdini, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University; Richard H. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago’s business school; and Michael Morris, a psychologist at Columbia.

“A kind of dream team, in my opinion,” Dr. Fox said.

He said that the ideas the team proposed were “little things that can make a difference” in people’s behavior.

For example, Dr. Fiske’s research has shown that when deciding on a candidate, people generally focus on two elements: competence and warmth. “A candidate wants to make sure to score high on both dimensions,” Dr. Fiske said in an interview. “You can’t just run on the idea that everyone wants to have a beer with you; some people care a whole lot about competence.”

Mr. Romney was recognized as a competent businessman, polling found. But he was often portrayed in opposition ads as distant, unable to relate to the problems of ordinary people.

When it comes to countering rumors, psychologists have found that the best strategy is not to deny the charge (“I am not a flip-flopper”) but to affirm a competing notion. “The denial works in the short term; but in the long term people remember only the association, like ‘Obama and Muslim,’ ” said Dr. Fox, of the persistent false rumor.

The president’s team affirmed that he is a Christian.

At least some of the consortium’s proposals seemed to have found their way into daily operations. Campaign volunteers who knocked on doors last week in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada did not merely remind people to vote and arrange for rides to the polls. Rather, they worked from a script, using subtle motivational techniques that research has shown can prompt people to take action.

“We used the scripts more as a guide,” said Sarah Weinstein, 18, a Columbia freshman who traveled with a group to Cleveland the weekend before the election. “The actual language we used was invested in the individual person.”

Simply identifying a person as a voter, as many volunteers did — “Mr. Jones, we know you have voted in the past” — acts as a subtle prompt to future voting, said Dr. Cialdini, a foundational figure in the science of persuasion. “People want to be congruent with what they have committed to in the past, especially if that commitment is public,” he said.

Many volunteers also asked would-be voters if they would sign an informal commitment to vote, a card with the president’s picture on it. This small, voluntary agreement amplifies the likelihood that the person will follow through, research has found.

In a now classic experiment, a pair of Stanford psychologists asked people if they would display in a home window a small card proclaiming the importance of safe driving. Those who agreed to this small favor were later much more likely to agree to a much larger favor, to post a large “Drive Carefully” sign on their lawn — “something no one would agree to do otherwise,” Dr. Cialdini said.

Obama volunteers also asked people if they had a plan to vote and if not, to make one, specifying a time, according to Stephen Shaw, a retired cancer researcher who knocked on doors in Nevada and Virginia in the days before the election. “One thing we’d say is that we know that when people have a plan, voting goes more smoothly,” he said.

Recent research has shown that making even a simple plan increases the likelihood that a person will follow through, Dr. Rogers, of Harvard, said.

Another technique some volunteers said they used was to inform supporters that others in their neighborhood were planning to vote. Again, recent research shows that this kind of message is much more likely to prompt people to vote than traditional campaign literature that emphasizes the negative — that many neighbors did not vote and thus lost an opportunity to make a difference.

This kind of approach trades on a human instinct to conform to social norms, psychologists say. In another well-known experiment, Dr. Cialdini and two colleagues tested how effective different messages were in getting hotel guests to reuse towels. The message “the majority of guests reuse their towels” prompted a 29 percent increase in reuse, compared with the usual message about helping the environment. The message “the majority of guests in this room reuse their towels” resulted in a 41 percent increase, he said.

Salespeople have known the value of such approaches for a generation, and political campaigns have also used them before this election. Social scientists began offering their services to Democrats back in 2004, when President George W. Bush’s campaign was attacking the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, as a flip-flopper and making the label stick.

Dr. Fox and others got an audience with someone in the Kerry campaign, but the meeting didn’t lead to any active consulting, he said. The group circulated a paper outlining its members’ expertise and proposals and in 2006 got a meeting with some senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and Harry M. Reid.

Consortium members said they knew of no such informal advisory panel on the Republican side. Efforts to contact the Romney campaign were unsuccessful.

The researchers said they weren’t told which of their ideas were put to use, or how. But sometimes they got hints. Dr. Fiske, the Princeton psychologist, said she received a generic, mass-market e-mail from the Obama campaign before the election.

“It said, ‘People do things when they make plans to do them; what’s your plan?’ ” Dr. Fiske said. “How about that?”

VCDL has a link to help with automated emails


This is what I got today:



Folks are busy!

quote:

Originally posted by thunderson:
Folks are busy!

Good!

reminder:

Start your campaign now , don't wait. Keep a list of people you know will vote. Think of others who might not. Talk to them

if you find someone who isn't registered to vote, help them register.

They can do it online

https://www.elections.virginia...ion/how-to-register/

I just emailed my delegate and senator. Rather than use the VCDL form letter. I created my own, personal letter. I thought it may give greater credence or weight to the reader knowing it was not the result of a mass mailing effort.

No, Virginia, There is No Santa Claus
By
DRGO -
January 6, 2020

From our friends at DRGO
(from coloribus.com)

Those who seek to disarm us have an uncanny ability to ignore reality. The Richmond Times Dispatch piece by Josh Horowitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, plumbs new depths of distortion on the road to the opening of the 2020 Virginia General Assembly, accusing law-abiding gun owners of all manner of mayhem. Unsurprisingly, all the supposed sins of the gun owners were committed instead by his liberal cronies.

The piece opens with misdirection:

“On Nov. 5, gun violence prevention won in Virginia. The issue propelled Democrats to complete control in the commonwealth. For more than a decade, efforts to strengthen Virginia’s weak gun laws and prevent the more than 1,000 annual gun deaths in the Commonwealth have been rejected, dismissed and ignored by Republicans and their extremist allies in the gun lobby.”

What is “gun violence prevention”? To a gun owner, the rules of gun safety and safe storage when not in use so exist to ensure that guns can be used safely. This supposed “issue” didn’t propel anything, Bloomberg’$ million$ did. This was a midyear election and sadly our side didn’t show up. “Strong” gun laws endanger civilians by creating more “gun free” zones and more restrictions on concealed carry.

He then rolls out the tired list of virtue-signaling interventions that do nothing but infringe on gun owners:

“Virginia needs universal background checks, extreme risk laws and other policies that will keep our families, schools and communities safe.”

Although the Governor’s public standing has swung from “must resign” to “all good here”, he is at least consistent in that his proposed infringements would have done nothing to stop the tragedies that ostensibly inspired them.

Horowitz then pouts about gun owners copying his side’s playbook:

“Those jurisdictions that support the concept of Second Amendment sanctuaries have publicly stated that they will not enforce or abide by state laws — in this case, gun violence prevention laws — that they, not a court, consider unconstitutional. In essence, they will not follow or respect the rule of law. They will not comply with democratic norms. They are ready to dismiss elections entirely and rely instead on mob rule, intimidation and heavily armed anarchy.”

Let’s add some local context about law enforcement. Several local prosecutors have thumbed their noses at our marijuana laws, either by continuing cases without findings before dropping them, or not pursuing them at all. It is the policy of northern Virginia counties to not cooperate with ICE detainers. Where does he think that Second Amendment supporters got the idea of “sanctuary”? From other liberal politicians who have been obstructing criminal investigations by offering “sanctuary” to illegal immigrants. Now that we are using this to uphold a Constitutionally enumerated right, the gun grabbers yell foul.

Then came outright lies accusing uncompromising gun owners of treason:

“The rhetoric surrounding Second Amendment sanctuaries is morphing in a disturbing way. It is becoming more radical and dangerous for the citizens of Virginia. There are now localities discussing deputizing members of their citizenry to rise up against the state government. Anti-government rhetoric is being spread on gun message boards and blogs about the impending armed uprising against gun violence prevention champion Gov. Ralph Northam, House and Senate leadership, and the new Democratic majorities.”

Culpepper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins stated he would deputize county residents so that they could keep their guns—not to rise up against state government. No uprising is being planned, armed or otherwise. In fact, even though it is entirely lawful to carry long guns to the Assembly, the Virginia Citizens Defense League—the no-compromise statewide advocacy group—has attendees not to bring guns to the Capitol for Lobby Day. From VCDL President Phil Van Cleave:

“Long Guns

“If you are asking how you can help with VCDL’s mission, carrying long guns at Lobby Day is not helpful—it is a distraction. VCDL’s important messages inevitably get lost as the press rushes to get pictures of anyone carrying an AR or AK. The stories then become about the rifle, not VCDL’s agenda. You can set your watch by it. Long guns are not easy to carry in a crowd, either. VCDL needs its voice heard loud and clear in order to able to stop the onslaught of gun-control bills.”

Regarding rhetoric, let’s remember who is doing the escalating. First, the Governor suggested that outright confiscation was in the works:

“When asked directly about whether he is supportive of confiscating ‘assault weapons from gun owners’ Northam replied, ‘That’s something I’m working [on] with our secretary of public safety. I’ll work with the gun violence activists, and we’ll work [on] that. I don’t have a definitely plan today.’ “

Then Congressman McEachen suggested that the National Guard could enforce gun control laws the Assembly passes:

“I’m not the governor, but the governor may have to nationalize the National Guard to enforce the law. That’s his call, because I don’t know how serious these counties are and how severe the violations of law will be. But that’s obviously an option he has.”

If Horowitz attended a Second Amendment Sanctuary Hearing before a county Board of Supervisors, he’d see how orderly consideration is being given. For example, in Prince Edward County, the Board established clear ground rules for the 650 attendees: three minutes per speaker, and an equal number of speakers for and against (15 each). After finding only seven who would speak against, the board cut off further comment, and read two proposals. One was more worded more compellingly than the other. A majority voted for the stronger of the two. There were no threats of violence, merely serious civic engagement.

Virginia’s government needs to be guided by facts, not ideology. Violent crime using guns is endemic to inner city areas where gangs and the drug trade thrive. Disarming law abiding law-abiding citizens will puts them at greater risk. The risk of suicide by gun (or any means) requires mental health interventions, because disarmed persons with suicidal ideation can find other means.

Please come to two Virginia Gun Lobby Days coming shortly: with the NRA on January 13 and with VCDL on January 20.

Stopping authoritarian government from stealing our natural rights does not come as a gift or easily, ever. Do not back down!

https://gatdaily.com/no-virgin...e-is-no-santa-claus/

vote removes the ability to carry at the capitol grounds.

https://wset.com/news/at-the-c...PuAItt5BiqnXDNRiaXcA

quote:

Lawmakers have banned guns at the state Capitol
by ALAN SUDERMAN, The Associated PressFriday, January 10th 2020
AA

The Capitol building is bathed in sunlight in Richmond, Va., Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2014. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)



RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia lawmakers voted Friday to ban firearms at the state Capitol, the first in what’s expected to be many contentious gun votes in coming weeks.

Newly empowered Democrats in the General Assembly voted to ban guns at the Capitol and a legislative office building, saying the move was needed to protect public safety.

Public officials have expressed concerns about planned Jan. 20 rallies that are set to draw huge crowds of pro-gun and gun-control advocates. Gun advocates from around Virginia and even out of state have pledged to turn out in force to highlight their resistance to proposed gun-control measures.

“The overall goal here is to protect and ensure the safety of our members and of the people that are in our building coming and going,” Democratic Del. Marcus Simon said before the vote.

The ban would apply to lawmakers in addition to the general public.

Republicans have voiced opposition to banning guns at the Capitol and some GOP lawmakers routinely carry guns while at the legislature. “I feel this egregious, I think it’s an overreach.” said Del. Terry Austin.

Previously, anyone with a valid concealed handgun permit was allowed to bring a gun into the Capitol. Weapons were banned in certain parts of the building, which was designed by former President Thomas Jefferson, including the Senate gallery and the governor’s office on the third floor.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has outlawed guns from other state buildings, continuing a policy started by his predessor, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, in 2015.

The debate on whether to ban guns in the Capitol is part of a larger fight on guns that’s set to dominate this year’s legislative session.

Democrats have a full majority at the state house for the first time in a generation and have promised significant new gun restrictions, including universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons and a red flag law that would allow authorities to temporarily take guns away from anyone deemed to be dangerous to themselves or others.

Gun owners are demanding that local government officials establish sanctuaries for gun rights. More than 100 counties, cities and towns have declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries and vowed to oppose any new “unconstitutional restrictions” on guns.

quote:

“The overall goal here is to protect and ensure the safety of our members and of the people that are in our building coming and going,” Democratic Del. Marcus Simon said before the vote.

The ban would apply to lawmakers in addition to the general public.

Republicans have voiced opposition to banning guns at the Capitol and some GOP lawmakers routinely carry guns while at the legislature. “I feel this egregious, I think it’s an overreach.” said Del. Terry Austin.

How will they enforce this?
I guess with metal detectors and state police searches at every entrance?
If I were a Delegate, I'd feel safer with my own carry gun.

not sure, I still have not been able to find out if this is a rule change, or a bill that was voted on.

if it is a bill, it would not take effect till july 1, 2020. If it is a rule change, I am unsure if that can be done.

quote:

The ban would apply to lawmakers in addition to the general public.

I'll just BET it does. I smell an "ok for thee but not for me" scenario.

Will they ban pitchforks and torches next? Just sayin'...

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

quote:

“The overall goal here is to protect and ensure the safety of our members and of the people that are in our building coming and going,” Democratic Del. Marcus Simon said before the vote.

The ban would apply to lawmakers in addition to the general public.

Republicans have voiced opposition to banning guns at the Capitol and some GOP lawmakers routinely carry guns while at the legislature. “I feel this egregious, I think it’s an overreach.” said Del. Terry Austin.

How will they enforce this?
I guess with metal detectors and state police searches at every entrance?
If I were a Delegate, I'd feel safer with my own carry gun.

They are afraid.

I hope these communist turds keep it up. Keep pushing more and more restrictions you jerks, you’re just proving our point.