Two bills sponsored by Rep. Robert Hurt, R. Chatham, won approval in the House Financial Services Committee today.

One eases regulation of private equity firms, with the aim of making it easier for small business to gain access to capital.

The other bill prohibits the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board from requiring public companies to use specific auditors or require the use of different auditors on a rotating basis. The aim is to help businesses hold down the cost of auditing.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke County, is asking the National Park Service to look into adding Natural Bridge, the geological wonder in Rockbridge County, to the nation’s roster of national parks. The story is here.

Councilman Sherman Lea says he’s now inclined to vote for a smaller pay increase for himself and other members of council than the 28.5 percent increase he voted for earlier this month. The story is here.

It’s tough to resist a headline like “No Command and Control for the Cows” (especially for one failed buckaroo here at Blue Ridge Caucus). But Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke County, called for just that, under just that headline, in an intriguing recent Washington Times essay.

Goodlatte wrote about the pending farm bill, and in particular some obscure changes pending in dairy policy. Didn’t know the U.S. had one? It does, and the idea is to make sure dairy farmers have a steady, predictable enough income to keep milk flowing.

The farm bill includes a proposed Dairy Market Stabilization Program that would manage supply – that is, set limits on production — when farmers start to produce more milk than people can drink and processors can use.

That, Goodlatte says, is a “1930s-style command-and-control supply-management system” that will keep prices higher than they should be.

He thinks the farm bill’s basic approach, a kind of insurance policy that dairy farmers could buy to make sure their operating margins are high enough to continue in business, would be enough without any supply management effort.

You shouldn’t, in other words, try telling a cow what to do. Goodness knows, they don’t always listen, as bitter experience trying to herd cows on an Amelia County farm showed me long ago.

Roanoke’s city council postpones vote on a 28.5 percent  salary increase to give members time to consider a smaller raise. The story is  here.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was briefed on lawsuits over gas royalties in southwest Virginia in which a federal judge has said one of his staff intervened inappropriately. The story is here.

There will be a good hard look at the Radford Arsenal’s needs for improvements and modernization, if Sen. Tim Kaine gets his way.

Kaine won his bid for language in the National Defense Authorization Act requiring the Secretary of Defense review critical military manufacturing facilities, like Radford, that are essential to the nation’s defense industrial base.

The aim is to develop a plan for future improvements to the facilities.

Kaine also pushed successfully for the spending bill to include provisions of his separate effort to help men and women in the military get civilian credentials for their skills, as well as to fund construction projects at bases and facilities in Virginia Beach, Quantico, Yorktown and Quantico.

The bill won bipartisan support in the Armed Services Committee and heads now to the full Senate.

A look round the state by the Virginia Public Access Project gives an interesting snapshot of the state of democracy: believe it or not, it will be only a minority of members of the 100 member House of Delegates who get a pass on actually having to win voters’ endorsement in November.

Yes: Only 49 incumbents are in uncontested races.

And an entire one-third of House incumbents face a major party challenger. Another seven face an independent or minor party challenger.

Hoping for new faces? For the 11 open seats, one is uncontested by a new Republican, and in another the Republican candidate faces an independent. Nine are contested by both parties.

An irascible English journalist of the 1760s offers a lesson for our times, as we think about the federal government’s mass surveillance of phones and online communications, Rep. Morgan Griffith, R- Salem, told fellow members of Congress.

Griffith hearkened back to his days as a history student at Emory and Henry College to tell the tale of the journalist John Wilkes.

Wilkes was a bit of a upstart, a bit of rake and a hellion, and somewhat of a radical. He had temerity to print in his paper, The North Briton, that King George III was wrong in urging the peace treaty that ended the Seven Years War (aka the French and Indian War) in 1763.

The king ordered the issue of general warrants — writs that gave officials sweeping powers to seek out Wilkes and his paper. Officers of the King went door to door, arresting roughly 50 people before they nailed Wilkes. Wilkes challenged the warrants in court, and though he was released because he was a member of parliament and therefore immune from arrest, the same judge would two years later hold that such general warrants were illegal. It was one of the most important protections of individual rights to come before our own Bill of Rights.

“He was a hero of liberty,” Griffith said.

And, he added, there are unsettling parallels between the general warrants and the sweeping power the government has exercised to listen in on millions of us.

(Here at Blue Ridge Caucus, we’re fans of Wilkes, for all his faults, too. He fought for freedom of the press — and for the independence of the United States.)

Rep. Morgan Griffith, a congressman with no hubcaps.

The Hill reports today that Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, is driving a car that has no hubcaps:

Many lawmakers on Capitol Hill drive around in luxury cars, but not Rep. Morgan Griffith.

His car has logged more than 300,000 miles and was seen with this week without any hubcaps.

You can find the entire story here.