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Day
argued
this week that revenue-neutral tax reform “won’t
fix jack squat.” He
noted that Virginians in overwhelming numbers want
more spent on education and charged that Republican
calls for more tax cutting have become
“shopworn.” His
message: Democrats favoring tax increases might be
able to find “traction” this November.
Campbell,
in a Richmond Times-Dispatch op-ed, discussed
the burden localities face in complying with under-funded
state mandates, then neatly claimed, “Many local
taxes and fees could be lowered if the state would
pay its obligations.”
Presumably, the state would have to raise
taxes to do this, but
Campbell
doesn’t make that leap.
And, despite his implicit promise that
localities would lower taxes if the state paid more,
he favored legislation to give localities more
taxing authority as part of overall tax reform.
Whether
taxes should be increased or not, A.
Barton Hinkle of the Times-Dispatch
highlighted questionable government spending at the
state and federal level.
Hinkle offered this unfortunate truism:
“Budgetary waste is one of the things people talk
the most about and do the least about.”
Melanie
Scarborough made a variation on the same point
in the Washington Post, decrying a Federal government reorganization
proposal being offered by 11th District
Republican Congressman Tom Davis.
Scuttlebutt
Round-Up
Hugh
Lessig and Terry Scanlon of the Daily
Press reported on the latest dust-ups in the
increasingly venomous state Senate races in
Tidewater. The
controversy over dispensing the “morning after”
pill at James
Madison
University
might become a “sexy” issue for Del. Robert
Marshall, R-Manassas, according to Jeff Schapiro of
the Richmond
Times-Dispatch. (No link is available for
Schapiro; for some reason, the RT-D routinely fails to link his work.)
Gordon
Morse of the Daily
Press attended the Wakefield Shad Planking and
was disheartened by the applause offered Senator
George Allen. He
wrote:
There
are rewards these days in Virginia, high
offices and
maybe even a lasting Wakefield
spring en fleur,
for those who blaze the path of least resistance for
a sufficient number of their fellow citizens.
In
the Washington
Post, R.
H. Melton traced what he sees as a Republican
strategy to “write off minority votes.”
Compared to state Republican leaders today,
former Gov. Jim Gilmore comes off as Abraham
Lincoln.
Warn
Me First
Speaking
of Gilmore, one can imagine Margaret
Edds of the Virginian-Pilot
spewing coffee on her keyboard when she learned that
the former Governor has been named co-chair of the
D.C.-based Coalition for Innovative Transportation
Solutions. Her
column barely contains her incredulity.
Resistance
is Futile
Republican
delegate and Roanoke Times columnist Preston
Bryant offered a bleak, if self-serving, outlook
for Democratic General Assembly candidates:
At
this point, if there's any Democrat out there who's
thought to have a legitimate chance of knocking off
a sitting Republican, it's the candidate who's been
on the trail for the past several months, engaged in
full-time door-knocking and near-frantic
fundraising. (The really smart ones would've hit the
bricks in January, when incumbents were tied up in Richmond
for two months with the General Assembly session.) No such ambitious
Democratic candidate comes to mind.
One
Bad Op-ed Deserves Another
In
last week’s Roanoke
Times, Roger Duncan offered a dreadful argument
against racial preferences at Virginia Tech. This week in the Times, Washington
County
teacher
Ed
Clark responded with a non
sequitur in support of preferences. Clark
apparently believes that President Bush’s
private school
experience at Yale in the mid-1960s, before racial
preferences were established, is the key to
understanding a debate in 2003 about actions on
racial preferences taken by a public university
Board of Visitors.
Food
for Thought
Richard
Morin of the Washington
Post reports that two economists have linked
higher calorie lunches served on test day to
improved performance on the Virginia SOL exams:
Districts
that offered the higher-energy lunches reported an
11-percentage point increase in the number of
children who passed the mathematics exam, while pass
rates in English and history/social studies both
increased by 6 percentage points.
One
of the economists, taking advantage of his research
findings, “juiced” the lunches of his child’s
class:
"I
sent enough Snackwells double chocolate cookies to
sustain my son's third-grade class during test week
this past March," he said. "Snackwells
seem to be ideal because they are high in calories
but with very little fat, which apparently slows the
absorption of calories."
--
April 28, 2003
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