Kos has up this great post about where they are at:
GOP retreat to feature helpful tips on how not to piss off women, minorities
By Hunter
Included in today's GOP retreat schedule: a helpful panel discussion for Republican legislators on "Successful Communication with Minorities and Women." This seems long past due. (And I dare say if they would have allowed videotape, they could have even made a fair bit of money selling the outtakes.)
Alas, some scoundrel somewhere (in this case, half the internet) always needs to crack wise about these things. (Republicans have trouble communicating with minorities and women? That's unpossible!) Things are complicated by the fact that their discussion on talking with minorities is being held in the Burwell Plantation room, named after the famous Virginia slave plantation. The entire GOP retreat is being held on the remnants of the Kingsmill Plantation, which advertises itself thusly:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/17/1179819/-GOP-retreat-to-feature-helpful-tips-on-how-not-to-piss-off-women-minorities
You want a chuckle about just how stupid they are, read the Kos post!
You can also read some more about the history of the retreat they chose here on the Colonial Williamsburg website:
The Burwells Move Their Slaves to the Southside
by Julie Richter
When I read the description of the Ann Powell Burwell Commonplace Book in The Guide to African-American Manuscripts at the Virginia Historical Society, I knew I wanted to see the document. The entry in the guide reads, “Contains lists, 1746-1839, of slaves owned by Armistead Burwell and John Burwell, including ages or dates of birth. One list includes names of mothers.” I hoped to find information in these lists about slaves who lived in eighteenth-century Williamsburg for my ongoing study of this community. What I found was a puzzle: More than one person wrote the lists in the small notebook, the authors did not always date their entries, and the lists were not in an order that made sense. I turned to a variety of documents (including court records, land and personal property tax lists, and the Virginia Gazette) and the jumbled contents of the commonplace book to analyze the information in these lists. The entries in the small notebook provide details that I used to identify several black families owned by three generations of the Burwell family. The appearance of slave families on more than one list helped me to sort the various records into chronological order and to follow the forced movement of Burwell slaves from the Tidewater to the Southside. In addition, the names on the lists enabled me to analyze the reasons the several authors decided to record details about the enslaved men, women, and children whom they owned.
The seven lists of slaves recorded by four members of the Burwell family between 1746 and 1839 fill ten pages in the Ann Powell Burwell Commonplace Book. (See table below.) A Williamsburg merchant named Armistead Burwell authored two of the lists in 1746. The first was a record of “Negro’s sent to Roanoke [torn]5 march 1746 & seated there.” This inventory included the names of four men and an equal number of women. Perhaps “Roanoke” was the name of Burwell’s 3,404-acre plantation on the south side of Finney Wood Creek in Mecklenburg County, land for which he received a patent on January 12, 1746/7.
http://research.history.org/Historical_Research/Research_Themes/ThemeEnslave/Burwells.cfm
Wow, quite the history Kingsmill Resort has going for it!
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