Republicans are having all the fun these days of having a wide-open presidential nomination contest—OK, guys named Tom and Duncan are likely to drop soon but they still have a Mitt, a Fred, a Rudy, a Ron, a Mike and a John—and now folks are lining up to take on Jim Gilmore.

Jim, the first to drop from the presidential lineup, is by far the front-runner for the right be become the serious underdog to Democrat Mark Warner, another former governor looking for a 2008 Senate seat.

Now a Chris and a Bob are looking seriously at getting in with Jim for a convention battle to see who gets to take on MarkNotJohn.

Chris Saxman, a delegate from Staunton, is little-known outside of GOP circles but has few of the negatives people might attach to Jim Gilmore if they recall the split he helped engineer between Senate and House Republicans during his governorship.

Bob Marshall, a veteran delegate from Prince William County, is better known as perhaps a truer conservative than mighty conservative Gilmore. Marshall is also mulling a Senate bid and notes that Gilmore is not held in high esteem by conservatives for saying he would allow abortions during a woman’s first trimester.

“I’m just looking around,” Marshall said the other day. “I like Jim. I’ve worked with him, but his hands-off first trimester abortions, that’s not going to enthuse anyone.”

“Is it possible for me to do this? I think so,” Marshall said.

Is Gilmore a pure enough conservative for party activists? That question will be knocked around Friday night and Saturday at the GOP’s Advance in Arlington. There’s nothing like a little competition to keep a party kickin. 

The republic has also been good about putting our money where its mouth is. Concerned about the environment? Replace your fleet vehicles with hybrids, grow turf on your roofs and increase the number of trees in the city.

Concerned about social justice and economic inequality? Create housing initiatives to put more people in affordable homes and spend bucks on social programs to level the playing field.

As a social moderate, none of that bothers me. As a fiscal conservative, I’ve gotten my panties twisted on a couple of occasions, but I’ve had little problem with the goals of the republic. For instance, the $8.000 Italian junket for councilors and school boarders doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the cool million the council wants to spend on creating a pay-to-ride ambulance service rather than funding the existing free-ride CARS program.

Right now, though, I’m tending to agree with the former fire chief Julian Taliaferro. Things are tough in the city and everywhere and likely to get tougher in the short run, not just for those in the lower socio-economic brackets for the great washed taxpayers as well. CARS should be dumped and any program not needed for safety and welfare scrutinized. I’m not saying cut them all, I’m saying be very careful with any increase and hold the line. Remember, any tax increase raises our mortgages and mine has increased every year for six years.

“We have to look carefully at the budget and see [what to fund], because I know this will be a tough year,” Councilor J.T. said.

It’s hard to be fiscally conservative and socially responsible. Please, my fellow republicans, do your best. My mortgage payment depends upon it.

She wasn’t thinking about who was behind her. She was zooming with tunes in her iPoded ears with a laptop backpacked and books under arms and couldn’t hear the click of my boot heels three yards away.

That’s not necessarily good. It seems some of us locals, probably the kind of folks who don’t read dailyprogress.com or the hard-copy version very often, are making money off UVa students at the points of guns, knives and fists. There’ve been between a half and a dozen assaults and stick-ups in the past 90 days according to police, all victims students and all perps apparently locals.

There are ways to avoid it, cops said. Watch your back. Watch your front. Get other people to help watch your back while you watch theirs or get a ride home. Students had some good ideas, too. Put a pedestrian crossing over the railroad tracks that most students cross to get to their off-grounds apartments from an evening of fellowship on the Corner. That’s not likely to happen, given the fastidious nature of railroads, governments and funding, so the students will just have to go around and stay off the tracks.

NOTE: Police are ticketing track crossers crossing tracks at non-crossing points for trespassing at the railroad’s request.

So be careful out there. Don’t drink too much, ‘cause crooks like you intoxicated. Don’t take shortcuts through dark places and keep an eye out for trouble, even as you unlock your apartment door.

It’s not a jungle out there, but there are a lot of animals and they will bite.