After a busy Saturday we made the mistake of turning on the tube Sunday morning for a quick sample of the news and political talk shows.

Big mistake.

There was a panel of talking heads holding forth about how weak the U.S. economy is. Another commentator weighed in with the opinion that the U.S. presidential system was inferior to the European parliamentary system, where the head of the party that wins the general election becomes the chief executive.

Yet another analyst tried to link unrest in London, India and the various Arab states into a world-wide phenomena predicting (at least subliminally) that we might look forward to similar disorder in the United States. Yikes, better stock up on staples and head for the bomb shelter!

At least the question on parliament versus a presidential system was thought provoking, since if the U.S. had had a European system the current U.S. Prime Minister would be John Boehner after last fall’s election!

Where are the Democrats?

National and international news and opinion aside, we had a communication last week that the Gazette is biased because we write about Republicans in Goochland County and ignore Democrats.

To the first part of that charge we plead guilty. Yes we do write about Republicans in Goochland.

And that’s because Republicans are running for office. We haven’t written about Goochland Democrats because we have as yet been unable to unearth a single local politician running for county office who calls themselves a Democrat.

Not one.

We did lead off our coverage of the 22nd state senate seat contest with a profile on Democrat Bert Dodson. Of course he’s from Lynchburg. Since then we have concentrated on the GOP candidates vying for the party nomination to run against him in November, the winner to have been selected in last Tuesday’s primary.

Then long-time Republican Del. Bill Janis decided to drop his bid for reelection to the House of Delegates in order to run for Commonwealth’s Attorney in Henrico and a herd of area Republicans appeared to contest for the GOP nomination for the 56th District. That was also to be decided last Tuesday.

Try as we might and after contacting the local Democratic Party Committee chair Monday evening, we couldn’t scare up the name of a single Democrat willing to jump into the 56th District race. There evidently was no one willing to commit to such an effort.

So we plead guilty once again to not writing about Democrats.

We’d like to if we could find some. It would sure make our job more interesting to cover a vigorous local two-party system.

But you can’t do it in Goochland, if there are no Democratic candidates to write about.