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The
relentlessly partisan Day highlighted his choice for
the most egregious action of the General Assembly:
putting more tax burden on “average” Virginians
by ending the estate tax.
He dubbed it a “swindle.”
Margaret
Edds of the Virginian-Pilot
started looking past adjournment. “The sense of
impending fiscal doom seems to have lessened,” she
wrote, urging Governor Warner to propose an overhaul
of Virginia’s tax code, an item the General
Assembly punted, in advance of the November
elections.
Their
Mothers Would Be So Proud
R.
H. Melton
of the Washington
Post came pretty close to calling members of the
General Assembly liars and cheats, but instead used
phrases like “casual lies,”
“double-dealing,” “distortions,” and
“partisan deceit.”
According to Melton, “Every promise in
Richmond also carries an asterisk, an escape clause
that permits the promiser to renege if voters back
home complain or pressure is applied.”
Them,
Too
A.
Barton Hinkle
of the Richmond
Times-Dispatch reminded us that not all perfidy
is at the state level.
He chronicled the misadventures of the
Richmond City Council even before news broke that
one council member had been indicted on a Federal
tax evasion charge.
Whodunit?
You
may not have known he was a suspect, but Richard
Cullen of the McGuire Woods law firm was exonerated
by Barnie
Day of the Roanoke
Times in the case of who killed the two-term
governorship bill. Detective Day fingered the
Republican Majority Leader in the House:
Pure
and simple, the governor’s marquee issue fell
victim to a partisan ambush. Who engineered it? My
bet is Morgan Griffith. I’d say he made it a
‘loyalty’ vote to deny Warner a win. I could be
wrong. But I doubt it.
Diff’rent
Strokes
Last
week, we noted Gordon
Morse’s Washington
Post column. On
the same day, the venerable Daily
Press editor published a different
piece
for his own paper.
In
the WP
version, Republicans were “blinkered, provincial,
self-aggrandizing, ecclesiastic and dumb.”
Democrats were “flaccid, uninspired, inert,
confused and dumb.”
In
the DP
version, “The familiar, more moderate, more
level-headed politics of Virginia's not-so-distant
past are kaput.”
Some
Things Never Change
Rob
Hedelt
of the Fredericksburg Free-Lance
Star returned to the General Assembly after a 15
year break. He
found more partisanship, less experienced
legislators, but the same little pecan pies at
Chicken’s, the snack bar in the Capitol.
Other
Roanoke Voices
The
Roanoke Times
found a Virginia Tech professor who didn’t want to
write an anti-war op-ed screed.
Sam
Riley, a communications professor, satirized the
Lee Ware, R-Powhatan, bill allowing guns to be
brought into bars (it failed).
And, after several op-eds calling for
construction of I-73, B.
E. Goehring, a businessman, argued against the
new highway, supporting the upgrading of US Route
220.
The
Great Mentioner
Hugh
Lessig and Terry Scanlon
of the Daily Press ((registration required) were poking around UVA Professor
Larry Sabato’s Crystal
Ball website and found Governor Mark Warner
listed as a “dark horse” candidate for the
Democratic Presidential or vice-presidential
nomination.
Complaint
of the Week
Kerry
Dougherty
of the Virginian-Pilot
took on windshield “dings”:
Not
only do I have a ding in my windshield, I have two.
A big one, the size of a quarter, in the center of
the window. And a smaller one on the passenger side.
Hey,
I live in Tidewater, the cracked windshield capital
of the world. Everyone has dings.
Fixing
your windows around here is fruitless. And expensive.
--
February 24, 2003
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