(By Gerald Warburg, professor of public policy) Congress is broken. Veteran legislators of all political persuasions are fleeing what one recently termed an "obnoxious" body, polling below 10 percent. The list of unresolved public policy challenges grows daily, from entitlement reform, infrastructure investments and debt reduction to climate change, privacy protections and immigration reform. Sound remedies exist. Compromise and consensus are attainable.
But it's not a prospect that's so far-fetched, says Larry Sabato, professor of politics and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Writing in Politico magazine this month, Sabato suggested Portman may be exactly the kind of candidate the GOP needs, noting his leap into the national headlines with his announcement that his son Will, an undergraduate student at Yale, was gay – and that he also supported same-sex marriage.
The fight is on, but experts say Democrats are in for an uphill battle. “Congressman Hurt has a strong advantage,” Larry J. Sabato, of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said Tuesday. But, he added, “In politics, nothing’s impossible and no one’s invulnerable.”
(By W. Bradford Wilcox, professor of sociology) The portrait painted of Millennial Americans by the Pew Research Center in its new report Millennials in Adulthood is not rosy. Sure, compared with earlier generations, Millennials (now aged 18 to 33) are exceptionally tolerant, optimistic about their economic future, and connected to friends, family, and colleagues on the "new platforms of the digital era" - from Facebook to Twitter. But this report makes clear that Millennial ties to the core human institutions that have sustained the American experiment - work, marriage, and civil so...
(With audio) A Virginia lawyer is on his way to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend the right of a man to grow a beard. Seven states will be watching that case closely. Gregory Holt is serving a life sentence for burglary and domestic battery in Arkansas – one of seven states that bar prisoners from growing a beard. His lawyer says that’s a problem, because Holt is a Muslim. Douglas Laycock, a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Virginia, says Holt got all the way to the Supreme Court without the help of a lawyer. But now he needs a professional, and this ...
"Democrats will probably hold maybe one or two more governorships next year than they do now, but I wouldn't expect there to be a huge turnover, or for the Democrats to hold more governorships than Republicans next year," says Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the University of Virginia's political website Crystal Ball.
And there’s this from Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics: “On the whole, it is a good thing to reach out, entertain the legislators, get to know them,” he says. “Ask Mark Warner; he used the mansion well to get what he wanted from the General Assembly. But positions and party lines have hardened since then. McAuliffe is doing what Obama has been criticized for not doing, yet I doubt it yields very many additional votes on the big-ticket items.”
We’re thrilled to announce the appointment of three new Deputy Editors-in-Chief for PLOS Computational Biology: Sebastian Bonhoeffer, Jason Papin and Olaf Sporns. … Jason Papin is on the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia.
In West Virginia, long-serving U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, a Democrat, was the subject of the most political ad buys during 2013's off-year, according to Kyle Kondik at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. The campaign included two weeks of advertisements by the pro-petroleum nonprofit American Energy Alliance alleging that his support for the federal budget bill was a support for a carbon tax. The 13-termer, one of four Democrats to join Republicans in a 2011 effort to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, is considered unlikely to h...
Perhaps this study out of UCLA, Harvard, and the University of Virginia can help explain it. The authors, Daniel T. Gilbert, Matthew D. Lieberman, Carey K. Morewedge, and Timothy D. Wilson looked at how people processed insults from "partners" versus "non-partners." They would never see the non-partners again, but had to continue working with the partners. The researchers found that people would forgive their partners and have more positive feelings towards them, even after being insulted. In fact, witnesses who observed the insults had stronger negative feelings towards th...
In 2011, two Nobel Prize winners were among hundreds of scientists, faculty colleagues, students, friends, and family who gathered at the University of Virginia School of Medicine to celebrate Joseph Larner’s 90th birthday. One was Alfred Gilman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1994. The other was Ferid Murad, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998. Both had earlier worked under Larner, who was the longtime chairman of U.Va.’s pharmacology department.
“Our understanding of major processes involving this important component of the earth system is evolving rapidly,” agreed atmosphere researcher Bill Keene of the University of Virginia.
The University of Virginia Health System is now part of a national network designed to explore new treatments for neurological diseases. The first clinical trial UVA is taking part in tests whether one medication for progressive multiple sclerosis will work.
National political analysts have noted the change. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, has moved the race from “likely Democratic” to “leans Democratic,” commenting that “Gardner should give Udall a stiffer challenge than the other Republicans in the field.”
The Saffir-Simpson scale, which assigns 1-5 ratings for hurricane intensity, has become a household term each summer and fall when destructive tropical tempests threaten our coastlines. On Saturday, meteorologists from as far away as Florida and Texas convened for a luncheon in Washington Saturday to celebrate the visionary behind the scale, Robert Simpson, a former U.Va. faculty member.
For nearly 15 years, Randy Lichtenberger has been shedding light on the long-buried secrets of the Lynchburg region's history.
It's one thing to get a college education and quite another to get a job with that degree. Now, the University of Virginia is trying to better connect students with the real world that will be waiting for them once they've graduated.
In honor of Women’s History Month, MTS had the opportunity to interview a woman of strong, righteous character. Ms. Monica Wright. Monica is a prominent female basketball player who has excelled on the collegiate level setting records at the University of Virginia, and in the pros with already two WNBA champions (2011 & 2013) in her young, promising career (3 years pro, Minnesota Lynx).