Just in time for Halloween it's Tim Kaine back from the dead...

Creeeeeeeeeeek...

That, my friends, is the sound of Tim Kaine opening that coffin.

A few posts ago I said that Jerry Kilgore was pounding the nails into Tim Kaine's coffin with his assault on Kaine's death penalty position. My butter-knife sharp political analysis concluded that the death penalty does indeed matter a great deal to Virginia voters.

Two polls released yesterday and today would seem to prove me wrong. Yesterday's Times-Dispatch poll showed that Kaine and Kilgore are tighter than ever in their race for governor. Kilgore's over-the-top commercials using grieving family members of murder victims to attack Kaine's faith-based opposition to the death penalty seems not to have made a difference to Virginia voters. Today's T-D poll explains why. Only 7 percent of voters identify crime and the death penalty as the most important issue to them in the election. It is ranked as the fifth most important issue behind education, state taxes and spending, roads and transportation and economy, jobs and growth.

On the environment, Kaine got some more help recently from a weird source: Rolling Stone magazine. In the Oct. 20 issue with Paul McCartney on the cover (come on, can't we get Annie Liebowitz to shoot these covers anymore? Was that the best shot they could come up with?) Sorry, anyway, on page 44 there is a scathing little sidebar on Marvin Bush, the president's brother, who the magazine says, "profited handsomely from illegal dumping" when an investment firm he co-founded bought a waste-disposal company and proceeded to illegally dump as much as 6,500 tons of waste per day in Page County.

The piece singles out Tim Kaine, the lieutenant governor, as having blown the whistle on the dumping in 2003. Here's where it gets even better for Kaine. The piece asserts that it was Jerry Kilgore as attorney general who "repeatedly delayed hearings on the violations, turning a blind eye as Marvin's company continued to dump more than 1,000 tons per day. While the hearings remained stalled, Kilgore was tapped to head President Bush's re-election campaign in Virginia."

Kilgore, the piece adds, never brought any criminal charges or levied any fines and "kept the Bush name out of the mess."
Oddly, the magazine doesn't mention that Kaine and Kilgore are going head-to-head in a nail-biter gubernatorial race.

It will be interesting to see if Kaine will pick up on this little gift — or perhaps aligning himself with Rolling Stone will just give Kilgore more ammunition to throw the L-word around. Couldn't hurt. That death penalty thing sure didn't work...