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R.
Warner: “Warner, as is his custom, has been all
over the map.” A.
Barton Hinkle, in the Richmond
Times-Dispatch, lampooned Warner’s conflicting
statements on the estate tax:
Warner
didn't exactly do a bang-up job making his case. As
a former Republican Party official noted, Warner
first said he was "sympathetic to abolishing
the tax, but not when the state is in financial
crisis." Then he said estate-tax repeal should
be examined as part of a comprehensive revision of
the tax code. Then he called it flat-out
"irresponsible." So he was sympathetic to
an irresponsible repeal, but some other time.
Lest
anyone think Hinkle was singling out Warner or
Democrats, he wrote, “The Republicans come off
looking even worse,” saying they caricatured
themselves as “The let-them-eat-cake party that
takes from the poor and gives to the plutocrats.”
Melton,
normally churning out only his “Virginia
Notebook” for the Post on Thursdays, had a “compare and contrast” column
on Warner and Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich in
Sunday’s “Outlook” section.
That gave him a chance to repeat a long
litany of criticism against Warner, from the catty
changing-hair-colors charge to the more substantive
“botch” of numerous initiatives complaint.
Zinger
of the Week Runner Up
Gordon
Morse
of the Daily
Press, offering his monthly screed in the Washington
Post, excoriated Virginia’s whole political
organization:
Who
pays what taxes in what form and at what level of
government -- state or local -- really comes down to
the bizarre way that Virginia organizes itself. The
history of that is complicated, but suffice it to
say that in our great republic, Virginia alone
follows a practice of city-county separation, with
different powers for each. Over the years, mergers,
annexations and revenue arrangements have only
complicated the core problem, which is that
Virginia's organization is astonishingly expensive,
inefficient and self-defeating.
Worse,
Virginia has spent the past 10 years corrupting the
tax code with loopholes and revenue giveaways that
have created an expectation among residents that
they can have ever-greater services for ever-fewer
taxes.
Zinger
of the Week
From
Patrick
Lackey of the Virginian-Pilot:
I've
been accused of dampening others' spirits by
relentlessly pointing out the ways that other
states, especially North Carolina, do things smarter
than Virginia. I may even have written that North
Carolina legislators are three times brighter than
their Virginia counterparts. If so, I apologize to
the Tar Heels for damning them with faint praise.
Oasis
of Thoughtful Commentaries
Not
every pundit was hurling zingers.
Preston
Bryant of the Roanoke
Times expressed his hopes, however “naïve,”
that tax restructuring could succeed.
Margaret
Edds of the Virginian-Pilot
thoughtfully evaluated the in-state tuition issues
for immigrants that proved so controversial in the
General Assembly.
Lambert
Covers for Allen
The
nomination of Susan Allen, Senator George Allen’s
wife, to serve on the Dominion Resources Board of
Directors, has Jeff
Schapiro of the Times-Dispatch
all in lather:
The
seemingly cozy arrangement with Dominion has the
potential to backfire for the Allens, the GOP and
Dominion and its executives, a swaggering bunch
skilled at muscling pols.
Schapiro’s
indignation is tempered a bit by the presence of
Sen. Benjamin Lambert, D-Richmond, a Dominion board
member since 1994:
Lambert
nonetheless faces directly the same
conflict-of-interest issues that indirectly affect
George Allen because of his wife's pending
appointment.
Schapiro
indulges in an evaluation of the Allen family’s
finances, speculating that they might “need the
cash” that a board seat pays.
Still
Fighting
The
Virginia Tech Board of Visitors decision (since
rescinded) to administer “color blind”
admissions continues to be bitterly debated in the
commentary pages of the Roanoke
Times. Two
Hollins University professors (a school with a
whopping 9 percent minority enrollment), Arthur
Poskocil and Eric Threthewey, criticize the
straw-man notion that SAT scores are an objective
criterion for admissions:
Not
only are SATs less geared to black Americans,
psychological research has proved that minority
students who, stereotypically, are expected to
perform poorly on aptitude tests, are highly likely
to experience a level of test anxiety far in excess
of the typical white student. Consequently, they
underperform even beyond what would be expected from
the subcultural bias built into the SATs.
Roger
Duncan, a Blacksburg engineer with obvious
personal issues, bitterly recounts an alleged “low
SAT” admission story and writes, “Affirmative
action is racism. Period.”
Political
Handicapping
Bob
Gibson
of the Daily Progress provided a useful preview of
the fall General Assembly senate races.
He sees the Senate becoming more conservative
based on likely replacements for retiring members.
Several Republicans face tough primary
challenges; Democratic Senators Edward Houck,
D-Spotsylvania, and Charles Colgan, D-Manassas, have
potentially strong conservative Republican
opponents.
Jesse
Todd
of the Daily
Press offered insight into several hotly
contested Tidewater primaries slated for June.
The
Forest for the Trees
The
supervisor of the Jefferson National Forest, William
Damon, announced in a Roanoke
Times piece that a draft plan for the future of
the forest was finally completed.
He invited the public to an April 17th
open house to view the plan, which he described as
preserving recreational uses and natural habitats.
More
Fodder for Lawyer Jokes
Bruce
Green
tells a good lawyer joke, then explains in a Roanoke Times op-ed why Liberty University in Lynchburg is founding
a new law school to keep the good material coming.
--
April 14, 2003
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