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Google CEO Endorses Warner in Lyric

October 24th, 2008 cultural, economic, local, political, technical

At noon on Thursday, I stood in line an hour early outside the Lyric to see Blacksburg native and current CEO of Google Eric Schmidt answer questions with and give glowing endorsements to VA Senate candidate and former governor Mark Warner. I attempted a bootleg audio recording via laptop mic which you can try to listen to here (mp3, 1hr, 26Mb). The signal to noise ratio is very poor.

I was impressed by Mark’s precision and passion. He rose above party platitudes to give solid answers about government’s role in education, technology, infrastructure, and energy. I was particularly in agreement with his belief that the government’s role is not to pick winners and losers as they have done with ethanol. He opposes giving subsidies to alternatives and favors the more rational option of simply ending the lucrative 75 year tax breaks the oil industry has enjoyed. Let them compete on a level playing field.

There was also naysaying about the bailout from both Schmidt and Warner, though the latter didn’t explicitly say he would have opposed it. Warner ended with a reminder that his most important achievement as governor was getting Tech into the ACC.