Looking at the results from Tuesday’s state elections that way, then, you’d think, Well, going to be tough for a guy named Barack Obama and a guy named Tim Kaine to win in Virginia in 2012. You know, because they’re Democrats, and Democrats are the minority party in Virginia these days.

Funny thing there – this new normal is based on Republicans gaining exactly two seats in the State Senate. And since all 40 seats were up for re-election in the 2011 cycle, that means a gain from 18 seats to 20, with Democrats dropping two to go from 22 to 20.

So we have a 20-20 tie in the State Senate. And looking at vote totals from yesterday’s elections, well, more on that in a minute.

There were 25 contested races involving a Democratic candidate facing off with a Republican candidate among the 40 up for grabs in the 2011 cycle. In those 25 races, Democratic candidates received 471,450 votes, according to numbers I pulled from the State Board of Elections website and then plugged into a spreadsheet. And the Republican candidates in those races received … 470,093 votes.

Republicans have all the power right now. Democrats are obviously still very competitive.

2012 should be very interesting in Virginia.

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This is what the 2011 Board of Supervisor elections will come down to, in my view. Do you like the way things are going in county government? If so, you’ve got excellent candidates to choose from in the four contested races on the ballot on Tuesday, for starters in the race for Pyles’ Pastures District seat, where he is being challenged by Jim Warren, a well-spoken small businessman.

Jeremy Shifflett is the current chair of the board and running for re-election in the Beverley Manor District against David Karaffa, one of three challengers who have aligned with Pyles. The second of that group is Marshall Pattie, a James Madison University business professor running for the North River District seat against Larry Roller and Steve Morris. The other contested race pits Kurt Michael, an educator also aligned with Pyles, against School Board representative Jeff Moore in the Wayne District.

(The incumbent in North River, Larry Howdyshell, and the incumbent in the Wayne, Wendell Coleman, are not running for re-election this year.)

Ads run in the local media paid for and authorized by the local GOP committee will tell you that the proper vote choices in the races would be Warren, Shifflett, Roller and Moore. In going with recent history in local politics, though, the ’11 elections in the county are a lot more complicated than any party ad line could spell out for you.

Pyles has been elected four times in Pastures as a Democrat, and Pattie is a former Augusta County Democratic Committee chair. Their ticketmates, Michael and Karaffa, have histories on the other side of the aisle – Michael as a sometimes-controversial former Augusta County Republican Committee chair, and Karaffa as an activist in local Republican circles who made a bid for the 2009 20th House District GOP nomination.

The County Quartet, as I’m branding them, are staking their political fortunes to the groundswell of public disfavor with the handling of the most recent county reassessments, which pushed property values up significantly (and locked them in for four years) just after the real-estate market had begun to crater. The bad situation there was made worse, in their view, by the way the Board of Supervisors responded, with a move to cut the county property-tax rate nearly 20 percent, eroding county revenues at a time when, the Quartet says, the county stands to lose millions in state funding for education and other public services due to the faulty reassessments.

I’m in a minority of one among the local news-editor set in agreeing with the perspective on county policy advanced by Pyles and his group, which means I’m also in a minority of one wanting to see a change in leadership at the Government Center in Verona. I’m OK with that, because unlike the other news entities here locally, which have had to cut jobs and outsource operations to remain afloat, I’ve actually been able to grow my business and even create a few jobs in the past couple of years, and I see the Quartet pushing a similar agenda.

Let’s get county government running well first, with a stable source of government revenues, from local sources and from the state, and then let’s turn our attention to jobs. Not that long ago, we had the interest of a major auto manufacturer that wanted to locate here in the Valley. It’s hard to believe that we turned that opportunity down, and I don’t see a Pyles-led board doing so a second time. And in the meantime, we can give the county economic-development department more resources to market county locations, including the still-practically-empty industrial park in Verona.

The good news for county voters is that if you see things differently, if you like the way county government is being run, you’ve got some solid choices among candidates who can continue the status quo.

I really think Augusta County will be in good hands whatever happens on Nov. 8. I just happen to think it will be in better hands if Pyles, Karaffa, Pattie and Michael are victorious at the end of the day.

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This other Dickie Bell, the one who comes across as a hard-core social and fiscal conservative, I don’t know him that well, but I understand what’s going on there. Back when Dickie first got the nomination to run as the Republican nominee for the 20th House District seat in 2009, he was about as close to the political center of the long list of candidates as you could be and still be considered a Republican.

He could have viewed his ultimate blessing by the party hierarchy as an endorsement of his approach to politics, but decided instead to run to the right after having secured the nomination. A curious move, indeed, but it’s hard to criticize – he won the November 2009 election with more than 70 percent of the vote in a district that includes Democratic-leaning Staunton.

Now with the borders of the 20th redrawn to include Waynesboro and Nelson County, Bell could very well face a challenge at some point down the road in a district that is tilting back toward the political middle. This is where the old Dickie, the one that I like, would do well to re-emerge.

He doesn’t have anything to worry about in 2011. Laura Kleiner, God bless her for trying, but it’s hard to imagine a lot of people, even diehard Democrats, being able to justify pulling the lever for her given her age (22) and lack of experience (she’s a recent college graduate with no meaningful political or business qualifications). Bell, for his part, has plenty to call upon – four terms on Staunton City Council, for starters, plus a long run as a teacher and coach in the Augusta County school system.

And he has a history of reaching across the aisle to get things done. I know this personally, having worked with Bell for more than a year in the early 2000s on an effort to develop a public skateboard park in Staunton. Through an orchestrated series of public meetings and private one-on-ones, Bell was able to methodically gain support for the effort, and the results are what we’d both said they’d be when he first brought the idea up and I first began to write in support of it – it’s a rare day to drive by the park on Lake Tams and not see it teeming with skateboarders.

I still have issues sometimes reconciling the Dickie Bell that I’ve known and worked with over the years with some of the public pronouncements I see being made in his name on some issues of the day. In the end, I get it, that’s politics, and when the politics are accounted for, the Dickie that can get a skateboard park built in the face of initial opposition from City Council and the local newspaper is the Dickie that can get things done in Richmond.

That’s why I’ll be pulling the lever for Dickie Bell on Nov. 8.

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IVORY TOWER, N.Y. (Nov. 3, 2011) -

Seriously, no playing around. This Herman Cain thing is the last straw. Seriously, as if we wouldn’t want a presidential race with two African-Americans. You think we in the liberal media don’t get all lathered up over that prospect? Give us credit for being the liberal media.

So now that it’s clear that no, it wasn’t us that schemed up the sexual-harassment claims against Cain, and that in fact it was an operative for a rival Republican presidential candidate, well, yeah, we’re upset.

OK, no, actually, we’re not at all upset. Our brand name has been suffering a bit lately, what with the slide back into irrelevance for people like Glenn Beck, who now looks up in the ratings at Keith Olbermann over in the netherworld that is Current TV. The decline in influence of Beck and his former Fox brethren (Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc.) has been tough on us. Without an entire network lobbing consistent reminders about how powerful we are, you know, we found ourselves in desperate need for somebody to rattle the cages.

But really, if it was up to us, we’d have left the Herman Cain thing alone until, oh, about this time next year. Oh, yeah, a good old-fashioned October Surprise. That’d boost the ratings and sell copies of the New York Times and Washington Post. (They are still in print, right? We’ll have somebody fact-check that. Somebody call the copy desk. It’s in India. Yeah, we’ve had to outsource a lot, too.)

So as pleased as we were that we were, for a fleeting moment, relevant, with all the talk about how we’d undermined another GOP frontrunner, no, sorry, wasn’t us.

See, of course we want to see Obama re-elected. We figure the best way to make that happen would be to let one of the cast of thousands of GOP frontrunners-in-waiting swoop in from the lunatic fringe at the last minute completely and totally unvetted so that we can sink our collective incisors into them and tear off as many pounds of flesh as we can before Election Day.

Seems that this Cain fellow would have been a weeks-long feast. We’re sorry that we won’t be able to have more than another nice dinner or two before he fades back into the obscurity that an overnight weekend time slot on Fox News will have to offer.

Now back to the important message that we wanted to leave you in this press release. Fear the liberal media. (Please.)

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Now to the bad news: Bowls are a losing prospect no matter where you play, and yes, I’m talking even if Virginia were to run the table all the way to the Orange Bowl.

According to the book Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series, Virginia Tech suffered a loss of nearly $2.2 million on its trip to the Orange Bowl in 2009, all because of requirements in bowl contracts that schools have to buy gobs of tickets at face value when nobody pays face value for tickets anymore, and because of add-ons to the game experience like the required lengthy stays that programs and their traveling parties need to make at official bowl hotels at top-of-the-line room rates.

So if you lose money going to the BCS game, then surely you lose money going to the Toilet Bowl, which, no offense, is where teams that are just hoping for that sixth win to get into contention for the postseason end up heading, right?

Right. Maybe not on the grand scale that we saw with Virginia Tech and the ’09 Orange Bowl, but it’s still a losing proposition to play in the lower-rung non-BCS bowls.

You’re still required to buy boxes full of tickets at face value that fans can get on StubHub for pennies the day of the game, and you still have to pay for the team and coaches and the band and assorted hangers-on to stay at some downtown hotel for several nights at full freight.

If you’re thinking none of this makes any sense, you’re right, it doesn’t. Bowls are supposed to make money for football programs, which in turn are supposed to make money to fund the rest of their athletics departments.

Well, at Virginia, the athletics department budget is balanced in part on the backs of student fees, $11.9 million of which went to athletics if fiscal-year 2009, according to Transylvania University study.

Only 14 of the 120 Division I-A athletics departments made money in fiscal-year ’09, according to that study. The rest needed serious transfusions of cash from student fees and higher ticket prices to keep the train chugging down the tracks.

So if the prospect of a bowl game makes it even more likely that UVa. will have to hit up its students or season-ticket holders for more money, I say … pass. Until the current BCS system is scrapped for a meaningful playoff, there’s only one postseason game that means anything, and if you’re not playing in that one, then it’s a guarantee that you’re going to end your season on a down note.

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Cain holds leads across the country in polls conducted by Public Policy Polling – in eight states of the nine that PPP has surveyed in the past two weeks.

And even in the one state that Cain trails in, Nevada, it’s only by one point, and he’s gained 21 points in Nevada since July there.

So that would be good news if you’re a Cain fan. The bad news for Cain and his fans – there aren’t a lot of what you’d call committed Cain supporters. The former pizza CEO lags behind Romney in voters who say they will definitely vote for him.

More bad news for those who want to see Mr. 9-9-9 get the Republican nomination – Cain is sorely lacking in terms of campaign organization. The Cain campaign, such as it is, seems as surprised as the rest of us at his recent surge in the polls, to the point that it’s now being forced to scramble to get an infrastructure in place to take advantage.

And then there’s the bad news for Rick Perry fans – the Texas governor’s fall from frontrunner to also-ran seems complete at this point. He’s at 6 percent – 6 percent! – in Nevada, where 59 percent of voters have an unfavorable opinion of him, and his numbers in other states are comparably bad.

Meanwhile, Bachmann (3 percent in Nevada, 5 percent in Wisconsin) is now officially an afterthought.

You ask me, Romney is the one sitting pretty. I didn’t use the setting the pace analogy in my lead here for nothing. The former Massachusetts governor seems content to let others get their moment or two in the glare of the lead of the pack as he continues to raise money and build campaign bases in the key battleground states.

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Allen has been running consistently in the upper 50s to mid to upper 60s in the polls for the Republican nomination and is in a virtual dead heat with Democrat Tim Kaine in polls looking ahead to the 2012 general election. Tea Party stalwart Jamie Radtke has the lead in the race for second, but Radtke hasn’t been able to consistently crack the 10 percent barrier.

But say the rest of the field decides to throw its support to Radtke. It’s not as if she (or another similarly chosen anointed intraparty opposition candidate) would automatically bump up from single digits to somewhere in the 30s overnight. It could very well be that Allen would see his support grow among those GOP primary voters for whom Allen would have been a second choice to their preferred candidate. It could also be that the departure from the race of that preferred candidate could disarm and demobilize that candidate’s supporters, who could just leave the primary altogether.

That having been said, my thinking on this is that the similarities among the challengers to Allen – all of whom are running to the right of the former governor and senator, albeit with nuanced points of individual emphasis issue-wise – could give rise to something of a bona fide challenge to the establishment candidate if those candidates were to decide to coalesce around one from their group. And say it was Radtke, who has demonstrated an ability to raise money in decent amounts for someone running well behind in the polls in a crowded field, well, campaigns are all about organization, message being equal. I could see Radtke eventually getting a bump into the 30s in the polls and seeing her campaign treasury (and thus organizational strength) get a similar bump, but really only if she was to be the lone challenger with the unified support of the hard right and the Tea Party.

To put it in football terms, as Allen, a former UVa. quarterback, so often likes to do, the spread offense being run by the right won’t work nearly as well as a ground attack that runs right into the teeth of the Allen campaign defense.

To the next question: Do I see any of this happening the way I think it would need to happen for Allen to have anything to worry about next spring? No, I don’t.

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Little things can be and usually are big things in a game pitting two evenly-matched teams.

“You’ve got to do better. You’ve got to make those plays. You’ve got to get the coverages. You’ve got to stay onsides. It’s different things like that. We just wanted to reemphasize that preparation for this week’s upcoming opponent has to start in a film room, the practice field and everything that they do to rededicate themselves. These are close games, but you can be on the other side of a close game by just executing,” UVa. coach Mike London said after his team’s 30-24 home loss to Southern Miss Saturday night.

The three interceptions led to a Southern Miss field goal and snuffed out a Virginia scoring drive. The punt-team issues resulted in 14 USM points. The ‘Hoos also failed to convert a first-and-goal into a touchdown on a critical third-quarter drive and then failed to capitalize on a fourth-quarter Golden Eagles fumble around midfield.

Little things. Big things.

“Whenever we lose a game, we look at the little things and figure out what exactly it is that we need to work on. I’m pretty sure that tomorrow when we get in the film room, the coaches are going to break it down and let us know the small things we need to improve on,” said fifth-year senior wideout Kris Burd, who dropped a fourth-down pass in the final minute as the Cavs made a last-ditch effort at a rally.

London is still in the honeymoon phase of his tenure in Charlottesville. Year two of a rebuilding project is not the time to jump the gun. The London staff is obviously recruiting well, if not getting the fan base excited about where things are going. (Saturday’s attendance, 43,220, is barely above the capacity for Scott Stadium before the 2000 renovation that pushed the capacity to 62,500.)

Somebody needs to say this, and I guess it’ll have to be me, since few others who cover the team on a regular basis seem willing to go out on a limb – these little things that cost Virginia another game aren’t Al Groh’s fault. Two weeks running now, Virginia has outplayed quality opponents but failed to post Ws on the ledger because it couldn’t take care of the little things that so often mean the difference in the end.

And that comes down to the head coach and the staff.

Bottom line.

London acknowledged as much himself postgame.

“We just got to coach it up better and do better, still be aggressive, but at the same time be smart about how we do things,” London said.

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Monday night, City Council is set to vote on a proposed $50,000 appropriation ordinance related to the development of a city economic-development website and associated marketing materials.

I know personally that the city could save at least $14,000 on the project. I know because my company, Augusta Free Press LLC, submitted a bid to do the work that was $14,000 below the bid approved by the city.

Atlas Advertising, based in Denver, Colo., was awarded the project after submitting a $30,750 bid to do the work, which encompasses the development of a city economic-development website, a mobile version of that website, an eight-page brochure and four information sheets.

If that sounds like a lot of money for that kind of work, it is. Augusta Free Press LLC bid $16,100 to do the project.

Breaking down the winning bid and the unsuccessful AFP bid:

- Atlas is charging the city $5,000 to develop advertising concepts related to the project. AFP estimated $375 for this work.

- Overall, Atlas is charging the city $17,750 for the ad concepts, three four-color ads based on those concepts, the eight-page brochure, four information sheets. AFP bid $4,275 to do this work.

- Atlas is charging the city $12,500 to develop the website and the mobile version of the website. AFP bid $5,250 to do this part of the project.

- Atlas has suggested a $5,000, two-day “immersion trip” to Waynesboro to acclimate its staff in advance of the work. AFP did not include travel in its bid; we live here!

I exchanged several e-mails with a city administrator in the process of trying to obtain a copy of the Atlas bid, and in the process was told that local governments are by and large bound to go with the low bidder on projects involving the delivery of run-of-the-mill goods and services, but in the area of professional and creative services, there is a “complicated matrix” guiding decisions in which cost is just one factor.

The implication there: Sorry, AFP, you’re just not good enough.

I’m prepared to hear our mayor, the rest of City Council, the folks in the city manager’s and ED offices and others talk me down in that respect as they are asked to defend the move to overspend on this project.

I’m a big boy. I can take it.

I don’t bring this to folks’ attention because I feel bad that I lost out on the chance to make another $16,000. Like everybody else, I like making more money, but AFP has been blessed of late with more than enough business to keep us busy for at least the next few months.

My issue here is that I absolutely know that city taxpayers are getting royally screwed on this deal. For starters, I’m not aware of what other bids were submitted for this work, and that mine was even the lowest bid. It may very well be that taxpayers could have gotten an even better deal from another bidder.

I do know this: AFP didn’t even make the cut for interviews for finalists out of the original set of bids.

Which is to say, a local company that has developed more than 100 websites, with clients including an entertainment company that puts on international live-TV events to the local YMCA and the Valley Program for Aging Services and local businesses and industries small-, medium- and large-sized all, couldn’t even get a sniff on a project in its hometown by submitting a bid that was almost half of what the ultimate winning bid ended up being.

The city administrator with whom I traded e-mails on this topic told me that procurement laws prevent local governments from showing bias toward hometown businesses in awarding goverment contracts. Apparently the City of Waynesboro takes that to also mean that our local government should show bias against hometown businesses in awarding contracts.

I do have a suggestion for how we can change this backwards way of thinking pervading city government – fire everybody that works in City Hall and 301 W. Main St. and start over with people who have the common sense to take the low bid from qualifed local companies.

In the meantime, I wish Atlas the best of luck with that $5,000 immersion trip. It won’t take two minutes to learn how bass-ackwards we do things around here.

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Not 4 degrees Fahrenheit, 4 degrees Celsius.

Just … four.

That’s how I’ll remember my friend Lisa.

She was the sunniest person I think I’ll ever know, and I’ve been thinking that one through a lot of late. We’d fallen out of regular contact in recent years, as often happens with friends from high school, but I knew her well enough from back then to be able to judge if she had a sort of dark side, and I never saw it, not once.

OK, there was once. I’d torn my ACL in our senior year of high school, and trouper that she was, Lisa offered to ferry me back and forth to school to save me having to climb up and down with crutches off the school bus. So we’re on our way back from school one afternoon, and me being me, I made a wisecrack about the hair on her forearms, which I may have said needed a closer shave, or something to that effect.

She had a little sportscar, which could stop on a dime, I found out, when she stopped it on said dime from about 50 mph. “Get out!” she said, with every bit of earnestness that she could muster.

Another thing I’ll remember is how she tried to get me over my fear of roller coasters. Her idea was that I’d ride the scariest roller coaster that Kings Dominion had to offer, which at the time was the Anaconda, and I’d see that it wasn’t so bad, and I’d be cured of my fear of roller coasters.

Turns out she wasn’t right about that, not at all. I wish I still had the snapshot photo they offer you after you get off the coaster. I cursed like a sailor with Tourette’s the whole ride, and that was obvious in the picture.

Last two times I saw her – on my birthday at Applebee’s was the second-to-last time. I was there eating dinner with my wife, and Lisa saw us and came over to wish me a happy birthday, which I of course thought was very nice and all since it meant she’d seen it on Facebook or just remembered. Either way, it was flattering, and we all talked for a few minutes.

The last time she was at Chick-fil-A with her daughter. Sadly, I don’t remember much of what we talked about. Just that she was sunny as ever, and that it was chilly in the restaurant, and I was waiting for her to say that it was four, just for old times’ sake.

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