Dumb move, dumping Greenberg
All Seth Greenberg did in Blacksburg was win 58 percent of his games in nine seasons.
Keep in mind that in the eight seasons prior to his arrival, Virginia Tech had won just 49 percent of its games, and that the program had gone a woeful 30-54 in the three seasons before Greenberg showed up in Southwest Virginia to take on the program’s latest rebuilding effort.
What Greenberg failed ultimately to do was live up to the expectations that his success had created among the fan base and administration, both otherwise fat and happy with the gold standard that is Virginia Tech football.
That Greenberg’s most heralded success came five years ago, when Tech went to what turned out to be its only NCAA Tournament under Greenberg, in 2006-2007, was his biggest sin. It felt like there were several near-misses at NCAA bids after, but really there were only two, in 2010, when a 23-win Hokies squad was denied a dance ticket, and a year later, when a 21-win Tech team was similarly left on the outside looking in. Read more
Three-point-five million reasons to vote da bums out
Frank Lucente will tell you ’til he’s blue in the face that he’s for the little guy. And then there’s the truth.
The little guy doesn’t have thousands to give to his re-election campaign, and that’s what Lucente and his cronies on City Council have their focus on, getting re-elected. And why not – because when you hold the power of the people’s pursestrings, you can do a lot to say thanks to the people who put you there.
There are three-point-five million reasons to back Frank Lucente if you have the means to get his attention with a campaign contribution. That’s how much money Lucente’s City Council approved for scrub brush over at the foot of the mountain owned by two of his golfing buddies. Read more
A new look at Tebow Time
He’s such an athlete. So physical. Look at the guy.
OK, he might not make a good NFL quarterback, but you’ve got to figure a way to get him on the field.
How many black college quarterbacks have we heard that said about over the years?
Except that now we’re saying it about good ol’ Tim Tebow, who apparently is going to serve as everything from Wildcat gimmick QB to H-back and fullback to personal punt protector for the New York Jets.
Look, I get it. As much as I’ve editorialized for Timmy in the past, he’s not likely to be a long-term starter in the NFL at quarterback. He’d need to find a team willing to build to spec around him and also build backup quarterbacks in his mold behind him in the event that he’d miss time due to injury, which would be a likely occurrence given his physical style. Read more
Not all that enthusiastic about Obama
And it’s not that hard for me to admit, actually. And no, I won’t be voting for Mitt Romney, or a third-party candidate, or sitting out the election altogether.
But still, I wish I could vote for another candidate for president this November. My first choice would be Mark Warner, a close second Hillary Clinton, but the way these contests work, they won’t be running.
My lack of enthusiasm isn’t because I think Barack Obama has done a bad job. it’s that I expected him to do a much better job, which of course was a pipe dream, in retrospect.
I’ll save the chapter and verse on how tough it was destined to be for whoever was going to be selected our 44th President of the United States. Yeah, the economy was in the tank, and we had two wars from which we were seemingly never going to be able to get out from under. Read more
Somebody needs to be the grownup
The ongoing state budget stalemate is going to continue to be ongoing until Democrats on one side and Republicans on the other come to the realization that somebody needs to be the grownup.
And yes, it’s both sides that need to come to that realization. The nonsense that you hear from Richmond from Democrats blaming Republicans and Republicans blaming Democrats is nothing more than a sign that we’re still in the political-posturing phase of this budget battle.
Memo to the pols: This isn’t about who has more points on the partisan scoreboard at the end of the day. What this is about is local governments being able to finish their own budgets for the coming fiscal year. Read more
No more cheap gas
Drill all you want. The days of $2-a-gallon gas – hell, $3-a-gallon gas – are over.
That’s just reality. Peak oil or no peak oil, we’re finding new sources of oil, which is good news, except that, bad news, it’s a lot harder (and thus more expensive) to tap these new finds like the ones off the coast of Brazil and in the plains of North Dakota. The reason oil companies are willing to develop these harder-to-extract sources is clear – it’s called moolah, and gobs of it.
Not that the U.S. government or even a coalition of any number of governments worldwide could do anything to cool the speculation on where oil prices are going to go, but even if they could, all that would do is make it harder (i.e. less profitable) for those interested in doing so to actually get the oil out of the ground and from beneath the ocean floor and into our gas tanks. Read more
Ba-a-a-d customer service
To make a long story short: We’re changing cable and Internet providers.
How we got there …
Well, for starters, we weren’t unhappy with Comcast/Xfinity until the past couple of weeks, though actually we could’ve been unhappy customers dating back a little while. Ever since the company changed its on-screen menu, about a month ago or so, we’ve had problems with the TV service – screen freezes being one issue, another, bigger issue being the inability for us to access on-demand TV. Read more
Virginia GOP doing its best to re-elect Obama
Think back all the way to the spring of 2010. The world was such a different place. Democrats were still riding high, relatively, anyway. Sure, the Tea Party protests of the summer and fall of 2009 were a jolt, but Dems still had enough political capital at their disposal to pass historic health-care reform.
Ah, the historic health-care reform. What seemed the zenith was actually the nadir of the brief blue turn of the American electorate, which turned on Democrats in the 2010 midterms and gave the House back to the GOP and set the country on its current pace of governmental sluggishness.
Now think ahead to the spring of 2013. I’m betting we look back a year to where we are now and say that what seemed to be the zenith for Virginia Republicans – passing regressive social-issues legislation aimed at putting women in their place, pushing for budget cuts that would cripple public education and other core government services – was actually the state GOP’s nadir. Read more
Stick it to ‘em
I was accosted, for lack of a better word, the other day while walking on the new greenway trail by a gentleman who couldn’t believe that I didn’t agree that City Council shouldn’t “stick it to” the School Board for the School Board’s supposed lack of foresight regarding payments on the renovations to Kate Collins Middle School.
The issue, I countered, isn’t with the School Board or City Council, but rather the Virginia General Assembly, which decided to balance its books by clawing back lottery funds that had been a solid source for school improvement monies for years. Read more
Say yes, then figure it out
“So, Chris, can you produce videos?”
“Um … sure.”
I mean, I had produced videos, kinda, sorta. If you count pointing a Flip camera at myself and ranting and then figuring out how to get the result onto YouTube so that people could comment.
“Yeah, definitely.” Read more
