January 2009 edition

Read the January 2009 edition of The New Dominion Magazine here.

The right to vote, taken: If you have a felony record, it’s not a right anymore

Story by Chris Graham

Virginia Painter had stopped watching the news a couple of years earlier. Her brother had done a tour of duty in Iraq, and the nightly-news reports from the front lines had just been too much for her.
But one day flipping through the channels she ended up at CNN, and saw this guy with a funny-sounding name giving speech in the Senate. “And I just knew. Something about him, I just said, He’s going to be the next president of the United States,” said Painter, a Greenville thirtysomething who had not even voted in a presidential election before she decided to drop everything and do what she could to help get this Barack Obama guy elected. Read more

How can we make it work better?

Story by Chris Graham

I had at my disposal two state legislators who have been working for several years to open up the process that ex-felons have to go through to get their voting rights restored, plus the man in the governor’s office whose job is to oversee the workings of the process as it currently is constituted.
I had to ask the question. You have the chance to make this work the way you think it will work best. What does that process look like? Read more

Podcast | Hanger, Henderson talk about restoration of voting rights

State Sen. Emmett Hanger and Deputy Secretary of the Commonwealth Bernie Henderson talk with New Dominion editor Chris Graham about the process for restoring voting rights for former felons. Length: 17:15. Read more

Catching Up With … Doug Walker: Former city manager now in the private sector, but still in familiar role

Story by Chris Graham

Me, I’d be a bushel of bad lemons. But Doug Walker is not even the slightest bit bitter.
“What I said at the time, I meant. It is their privilege, it is the nature of the business. It doesn’t matter whether I liked it or not or understood it or not. That’s why I have a contract, is to make it OK. I said it then, and I believe it now,” said Walker, who was let go as city manager in Waynesboro in June after five years on the job in a controversial move initiated by the new majority on Waynesboro City Council. Read more

Podcast | Virginia Painter tells her story

Augusta County native Virginia Painter shares with New Dominion editor Chris Graham her story of how she worked to get her right to vote restored. Length: 10:05. Read more

Changing of the guard: Rosberg steps down, hands reins of Ntelos Wireless to telecom vet

Story by Chris Graham

Carl Rosberg and Frank Guido have a lot in common. They’re both huge ACC basketball fans, for starters. And they both cut their teeth in the telecom industry at a time when the industry was making the transition from wireline to wireless that only a few could foresee taking hold the way it has. Read more

Podcast | Changing of the guard at Ntelos Wireless

New Dominion editor talks with retired Ntelos Wireless president Carl Rosberg and the new man in charge at the Waynesboro telecom, Frank Guido. Length: 22:23. Read more

18 million and one: Obama victory signals major social change, but what about the one in the offing for women?

Story by Elizabeth Geris

It seemed like everyone wanted to participate in the 2008 Democratic primary. For some voters, however, deciding between candidates Sen. Hillary Clinton, a white female, and Sen. Barack Obama, a black male, meant accepting the rare, burdensome challenge of acknowledging the equal abilities of only one political representative from two socially disadvantaged groups – that is, if platforms and campaigns weren’t the only considerations in opting for a candidate. Read more

Former city manager dishes on departure

Story by Chris Graham

Doug Walker would have liked to have had the chance to have worked with the new conservative majority on Waynesboro City Council. Even after he was told that the majority was going to undo everything he’d done in his five years in the River City. Read more

A clean sweep: Dems form working majority on City Council in Harrisonburg

Story by Chris Graham

The days when Republicans could get a party nomination, put a sign out in their front yard and then schedule their swearing-in are over in Harrisonburg. Of course, some of us had foreseen that before Nov. 4.
“It kind of puzzles me that they couldn’t see that coming. That seemed to be kind of a no-brainer, because Democrats have been winning in Harrisonburg,” said Dave Wiens, a former Harrisonburg Democratic Committee chair who was elected along with fellow Democrats Richard Baugh and Kai Degner in a clean sweep of the ‘08 Harrisonburg City Council elections. Read more

How The ‘Burg was won

Story by Chris Graham

They plotted and planned and maneuvered and the rest for a year, and then reality hit.
“It pretty well turned out that that strategy that we’d been working on just never took hold, that we were never able to execute that strategy very well. Because we just kept continually getting overshadowed by the Obama campaign,” said Dave Wiens, one of the three victorious Democratic Party nominees in the 2008 Harrisonburg City Council elections. Read more

Podcast | Inside the clean sweep

New Dominion editor Chris Graham talks with the three Democrats who swept the Harrisonburg City Council elections in November – Richard Baugh, Kai Degner and Dave Wiens. Length: 33:26. Read more

Fat and (un)happy

Story by Chris Graham

Two Januarys ago, I weighed 285 pounds, and it didn’t bother me a bit. I had rationalized it a million times.
You still play basketball once a week and make it up and down the court just fine. You lift weights three nights a week, ride the exercise bike a half-hour every other day. Right? So you’re OK.
And then I got a gander at some pictures that had been taken at a family holiday gathering. That wasn’t me, I said, looking through the stack of evidence to the contrary.
Well, I decided, it wasn’t going to be me. Read more

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