Good Morning, RVA: The best part of waking up

There’s a continual, yet slight chance of rain today. Don’t let it spoil your plans, though!

April 3, 2014; 7:05 AM • by Ross Catrow

Good morning, RVA! At 55 °F, it might be the warmest morning of 2014. Extended cloud cover and a persistent, but small, chance of rain will probably harsh today’s patio buzz. It’s better than biting cold and cutting wind though, right?

Be not bummed, merely check the forecast for tomorrow at 5:00 PM: partly cloudy with a high of 81 °F!

Water cooler

As promised, here’s our list and schedule of RVA’s many food truck and food truck-related gatherings. Today you can find them congregated at Hardywood in the city or Huguenot Road Baptist Church on the Southside.

The Flying Squirrels open their 2014 season tonight in New Britain–which I learned is in Connecticut. They’ll return home next Thursday for the first home game of the year to take on Altoona. Get your tickets now.

A little far afield, but this sentence is just too good: “A 61-year-old driver has been charged after a his tractor-trailer carrying pork broth overturned on the off-ramp from I-295 south to I-64.” WTVR has the details.

A soldier shot and killed three people and wounded 16 at Fort Hood in Texas.

Yesterday, Amazon announced their Amazon Fire TV, a $99 streaming media box designed to compete with Apple TV and Roku. It’ll do the standard set of things you’d expect from a streaming media player, but also includes games and voice search via a microphone in the remote.

This morning’s longread

Divided Court strikes down campaign contribution caps: In Plain English

The always readable SCOTUS Blog has a great plain-English breakdown of the Court’s campaign finance decision. Depending on how you feel about these things, we’ve either really fudged the bucket or totally set Democracy free…

Here, the Chief Justice continued, there is only one kind of corruption that Congress can try to combat by limiting campaign contributions: “quid pro quo” corruption, which involves “a direct exchange of an official act for money.” Quoting the Court’s controversial 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Chief Justice made clear that making campaign contributions in the hope of gaining influence and access does not constitute corruption. To the contrary, in the Court’s view, influence and access exemplify “a central feature of democracy–that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.”

This morning’s Instagram

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Photo by: Mundoo

April 3, 2014 7:05 AM 0