Education is in line for nearly $966 million. Another $230 million is available for public school construction. There’s $745 million for highways. Child care could receive about $39 million. Toss in $124 million to insulate cold, drafty houses and $21 million for clean drinking water. And this extra-special goodie for our governor: $617 million of your money to spend as he pleases.

Chuck Duvall is a lobbyist of the old school. Quiet, droll, with a purposeful stride, he carries his office in his pocket. What was said of a House speaker from Duvall’s ‘hood might apply to Duvall: He can walk through the woods without rustling the leaves. But Duvall’s mix of clients and this year’s blend of legislation have state Capitol habitues stirring over a perceived conflict of interest.

Chuck Duvall is a lobbyist of the old school. Quiet, droll, with a purposeful stride, he carries his office in his pocket. What was said of a House speaker from Duvall’s ‘hood might apply to Duvall: He can walk through the woods without rustling the leaves. But Duvall’s mix of clients and this year’s blend of legislation have state Capitol habitues stirring over a perceived conflict of interest.

Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw, D-Fairfax, says it wasn’t a message. It looked like one. New restrictions on payday lending cleared the Virginia Senate on a vote of 39-0 yesterday. They would prevent lenders from skirting a 2008 clampdown on high-cost, instant loans. Once a forceful ally of the lenders, Saslaw proposed additional rules for money stores because he is angry over their perceived end-run on last year’s legislation, which took effect only 30 days ago.

Out of view, there was a reunion of sorts in the General Assembly Building the other day. Lobbyists for payday lenders sat down to ponder a problem of the industry’s own making: a furor that is turning the lenders’ best friends in the legislature into their worst enemies. High-cost, instant-loan companies enraged the wrong people by seemingly worming around a clampdown fashioned last year that could have been tougher were it not for Tom, Dick and Kenny. That would be Senators Norment, Saslaw and Stolle.

A lawmaker who doubles as Virginia GOP leader is harvesting money for fellow Republicans but says he’s still in compliance with a prohibition on fundraising during the General Assembly session. Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick, R-Prince William, appealed for funds for the Republican Party of Virginia in a Jan. 9 letter that arrived at some households in the Richmond area this week.

Lawyer Tony Troy has an expansive practice. He lobbies. He litigates. He may be best known for getting politicians out of trouble—in campaign recounts and criminal court. The Democratic former attorney general—along with partners Bill Hurd and Ashley Taylor Jr., Republican alums of the Virginia AG’s office—recently had an intriguing bit of business: getting Roland Burris into the U.S. Senate.

Columnist Jeff Schapiro says payday lenders have already found a loophole in the state law passed last year to limit exhorbitant fees.

Republican legislators are throwing everything but their shoes at Tim Kaine’s budget-balancing plan. It includes a proposal that, depending on your perspective, brings out the best or worst in GOP delegates and senators: new taxes on a favored industry, Big Tobacco. Kaine, who since he was sworn in as governor in 2006 has proposed higher taxes with the frequency of a chain smoker who insists he’s swearing off the habit, gave Republicans—so they believe—an early Christmas present: something to run against in next November’s House and gubernatorial elections.

Today would have been Ernest H. “Judge” Williams Jr.‘s 94th birthday. The famed lobbyist, who died in 2003, had a keen appreciation for a bottom-line tenet of his craft: There’s a difference between being friends and being friendly. It’s something to keep in mind as Richmond’s incoming mayor, Dwight Jones, assembles his administration. The heavily perfumed pastor-politician, now a state delegate, is looking to lobbyists on how to do just that.

On Nov. 13, what remains of the House of Delegates Republican majority met—safe from the prying eyes of the press and always-open pocketbooks of lobbyists—at the Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen for a post-election, pre-General Assembly skull session.

The only real fight for a spot on the 2009 Republican ticket—the contest for the attorney general’s nomination—is now a three-way affair.

Del. Brian J. Moran is poised to collect endorsements for governor from the highest echelons of the state Democratic Party, while presumed rival Terry McAuliffe is being backed by one of Virginia’s biggest political check-writers.

Del. Brian J. Moran is poised to collect endorsements for governor from the highest echelons of the state Democratic Party, while presumed rival Terry McAuliffe is being backed by one of Virginia’s biggest political check-writers.

Their first responsibility is the care of those who give the last full measure of devotion. About 60 soldiers—members of an Army unit that recovers and prepares the bodies of fighting men and women killed in combat—yesterday departed this sprawling base between Petersburg and Hopewell for the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. For some in the 111th Quartermaster Company (Mortuary Affairs), 49th Quartermaster Group, this deployment is back to the future.