Chris Hardie's Blog

Tonight's meeting of the City of Richmond Plan Commission was an interesting peek into the world of how urban planning in towns like Richmond takes place. It was apparently one of the only times for citizens to comment on the plan in its final form, though of course the whole process of developing the [...]

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The "Town Hall meeting" with Congressman Mike Pence this morning at the Leland Residence was fairly well attended (compared to similar such events, not as a function of the district's population) and interesting, I thought. Pence talked about his recent decision not to join the congressional leadership so that he could continue to pursue [...]

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Wednesday night I attended a screening of The Ambassador, a documentary about John Dimitri Negroponte, currently the U.S. Director of National Intelligence and formerly U.S. ambassador to Honduras, the United Nations and Iraq. Negroponte has been a controversial figure due to his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair and human rights violations in Honduras, and [...]

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In an editorial today, the Palladium-Item called for Richmond and Wayne County to embrace job growth in the retail and service sectors, as opposed to the manufacturing sector. I generally support their call for an intentional focus on facilitating the kinds of economic growth that Richmond needs, and I was pleasantly surprised to find [...]

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I generally avoid national bestselling political books that are just consolidated accounts of the political soap operas that go on in our nation's capital, designed to make more buzz and more money for the journalists or whistle-blowers or former aides that happened to keep really good notes during the experience. But once in a [...]

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It looks like the War on Terror is over. That is, it's now become a Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, according to the Bush administration's shift in language being used to describe that particular set of economic, military, domestic law enforcement, and foreign policy initiatives. I suppose we've come along way from the [...]

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The eminent and celebrated E. Thomas Kemp points us to a wonderful and clever use of news aggregation and weblog technologies, Plogress. Using Perl and Wordpress, the apparently anonymous administrator has created a site that sucks data out of the Library of Congress and displays a blog of the doings of individual Senators and [...]

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Dave Pollard has a post up about conflict resolution. After a few paragraphs castigating the ability of the U.S. legal system and its agents to resolve conflicts, he talks about how to resolve peer-to-peer conflicts. It's interesting to me that the examples he gives of conflicts involving opposing worldviews pitted family members against [...]

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In January 1935, President Roosevelt submitted a proposal for "Social Security" to the Congress. The draft legislation is introduced as "a bill to alleviate the hazards of old age, unemployment, illness, and dependency..." It is entirely fitting, I think, that the U.S. government would classify old age as something hazardous, dependency as something [...]

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The Drudge Report had a subtle series of links Monday about the apparently "misspoken" remark that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made in Iraq this weekend, where he mentioned that the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 was shot down. Of course, the Pentagon has now quickly corrected that, and I'm sure if [...]

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