Bacon's Rebellion

Even I felt bad for Jerry before this one was over. It was painful…like watching the Rodney King beating all over again. I understand now why Kilgore is hesitant to debate. He should be. Watch for any future encounters already scheduled to be cancelled.

Bob Lewis of the Associated Press has posted a story on today’s gubernatorial debate that is on the Virginian-Pilot website.

He doesn’t declare a winner, but quotes highlights and declares that well-worn answers and barbs were the order of the day.

Commonwealth Conservative has the reactions of two non-party spinners, one of them UVA’s Larry Sabato, contradicting the impression left by the observers at TK4G that Kaine destroyed Kilgore.

And here I trusted Democrats to “tell it like is.”

I just checked the liveblogging of the gubernatorial debate over at TK4G. Here was their most balanced entry:

Jerry’s opening statement is basically an attack on Tim… the usual stuff. He was a little shaky talking about himself, but he appears to warm up when going negative on Tim. Charming.

I guess I’ll wait for Russ Potts’ spin; it’ll probably be less predictable.

Via Commonwealth Conservative and Waldo Jaquith, we learn that a long-awaited event has finally been scheduled. The Summit on Blogging and Democracy in the Commonwealth will be held Satuday, August 27th, at the Doubletree Hotel in Charlottesville.

As soon as I finish this post, I’m going to register. I hope as many of both my blogging colleagues and our readers will also consider attending. Follow one of the links above to register. Big kudos to Waldo, “John Behan,” the Sorensen, and anyone else who put this great opportunity together.

Virginia, with nearly 800,000 veterans—better than 1-in-10 of the state’s population—trails 48 states in compensation to its disabled veterans, according to an analysis released this week by the Chicago Sun-Times. Disabled veterans in the Commonwealth receive, on average, $6978 in annual disability pay. Only Ohio, at $6860, kept Virginia veterans from being dead last in the nation.

According to the report, disability pay nationally averages better than $8000. Puerto Rico leads the nation, with $11,422, followed by New Mexico. Even U. S. veterans in the Phillipines—with annual compensation of $9971—fare far better than Virginia’s disabled veterans.

Regionally, disabled veterans in North Carolina receive $8750; in Tennessee, $8295; in West Virginia $10,373; in South Carolina, $8056.

The disclosures are sure to inflame criticism of the Bush Administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which revealed a $1 billion funding shortfall earlier this year, will likely set the state’s congressional delegation to scrambling in search of corrective action , and may become a key point of contention in the run-up to Virginia’s election of a new governor and a new House of Delegates in November.

And well it should. There is no excuse—none—for this kind of discrepancy in how disabled veterans are treated state-to-state across the nation.

I have to admit that I was surprised by Highland County Supervisors’ 2-1 vote in favor of Virginia’s first industrial wind farm. There was huge opposition to the project, generating large turn-outs at public hearings.Supervisor Robin Sullenberger cast the negative vote. He’s a well-known economic developer in the Valley.

As one might expect, this decision is headed for the courts.

It is obvious that the tax-happy folks at the Newport News Daily Press are behind Russ Potts. They need to end the charade of being open-minded observers of this gubernatorial campaign and formally endorse the Winchester Senator.

The DP‘s latest editorial whines over Potts’ exclusion from tomorrow’s debate. They print Potts’ responses to a few softball questions.

Undoubtably, the Daily Press will comment on the actual debate responses of Kaine and Kilgore. They can redeem themselves if they also compare and contrast the questions asked those two and the questions/responses of their man Potts. I can’t imagine Kaine or Kilgore being any more vacuous and repetitive than this:

Everything has to be on the table including public-private partnerships, land use policies, private toll roads, private ownership of highways, which has proven to be successful in Holland and Belgium, mass transit and rail. Everything has to be on the table. My plan will be presented to the General Assembly early in 2006, and we will call a special session to address the transportation crisis, and I will keep the delegates and senators there until we vote our plan up or down. Everything does have to be on the table ….[italics mine]

Of course, we know that some things aren’t on the table because Potts doesn’t want to use general fund money for transportation and he doesn’t want any regional transportation solutions. But everyting has to be on the table!

Update: Norm at the real Potts Truth Squad is back from vacation and is all over this in much more detail than I provided. Welcome back, Norm, it’s been lonely ….

In what is surely one of the oddest political traditions anywhere in the country, the Republican and Democratic nominees for governor of Virginia hold their first debate at the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. I’m wondering if our bloggers could engage in a little handicapping before the event.

Has Tim Kaine so pysched out Jerry Kilgore regarding his accent and debating skills that Kilgore’s performance will be affected?

Given the incredibly low expectations for Kilgore, will merely getting clobbered instead of getting annihilated constitute a “win”?

Given the non-televised nature of the joust, does the debate really matter?

Can we trust the Sunday morning evaluations of the reporters covering the event as to which candidate acquits himself best?

Michael Hardy of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that a bunch of GOP notables are praising Attorney General candidate Robert McDonnell because of his “pro-business record.” That record was compiled in the House of Delegates.

That’s nice, but what exactly would McDonnell do as AG that would help or stimulate business?

I’ve got one suggestion. Virginia agencies that deal with business could use some help from the AG’s office when answering queries from business. There’s a lot of confusing Code of Virginia language and the creativity of new business ventures and structures magnify that confusion. A little help, more easily accessed by agencies, would go a long way. Del. McDonnell can contact me for more details.

“Republican candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general are calling for changes to state laws defining when a government can seize private property,” writes Michelle Washington in this morning’s Virginian-Pilot. Virginia Republicans have jumped on the issue in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month that expanded the definition of “public use” to include expansion of the tax base — giving local governments more latitude in seizing private property for economic development.

In a Tuesday news conference, Attorney General candidate Bob McDonnell said that “public use” should be better defined. “Whatever public use means, it will not include the primary purpose of economic development or tax enhancement.”

A word to the Democrats. Don’t let the Republicans dominate this issue. When local governments want to take land for redevelopment purposes, they’re not going after the mansion on the hill. They’re taking run-down property on land that some developer thinks he can make more valuable — in other words, they’re taking land from the poor and the powerless, supposedly a Democratic constituency.

All right, sports fans, Tim Kaine and Jerry Kilgore debate Saturday. Michael Shear of the Washington Post will be online at 11 taking questions and comments about this mildly anticipated West Virginia event. Shear’s story on debate prep is here.

Let’s see if anybody asks about policy, or if it’s all just partisan hackery.

The Washington Post Race to Richmond blog isn’t setting the world on fire. There hasn’t been a legimate comment on the blog since June 28th. Half the comments on the 28th were duplicates from Carol Wolf, a City of Richmond School Board member flacking for Tim Kaine.

The “Question of the Week” in the Post‘s online forum is,

Blogs are playing an increasingly visible role in Washington area politics … What do you think about blogs — are they a good or bad influence?

It’s been up almost a week and has only attracted 37 comments, most of them irrelevant.

The Blue Dog gets that many comments just by signing his name. Heck, NotLarrySabato gets twice as many comments as that from one person.

For the third time, a criminal enterprise of selling drivers’ licenses out of a Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles office has been uncovered. This one occurred in Springfield, with previous cases prosecuted against employees in the Tysons Corner and Richmond offices. There are two contrasting stories on the latest case, one from Jerry Markon of the Washington Post and one from Paul Bradley of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Bradley concentrates on how the DMV employees operated the sale. Markon casts a critical eye on DMV:

DMV spokeswoman Pam Goheen called the arrests “unfortunate and disappointing” and said the “vast majority of DMV employees are honest and hardworking.”

Goheen could not explain how two similar scams might have been carried out so close together in two Northern Virginia DMV offices. But she said the agency has stepped up its enforcement and auditing efforts. Since 2002, she said, DMV “document verifiers” have double-checked every application processed by customer service staffers.

“It’s two sets of eyes on every transaction,” Goheen said. “There is a heightened awareness of the importance of a driver’s license.”

Most reporters might have stopped there, but Markon has researched this case:

Yet court documents said the latest alleged scam was uncovered not by DMV but by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. After a six-month investigation that included the FBI and the DMV, officials are alleging that Francisco Martinez issued the licenses and falsified DMV records to make it appear that applicants had surrendered valid licenses from other states.

The DMV might still have some work to do on that “two sets of eyes” process.

Journalists focus on problems they understand. As a result, they address trivial matters while overlooking systemic ones. Nowhere is this truism more evident than the realm of transportation policy. Take the latest mini-scandal at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel Commission.

It turns out that board members racked up a $900 restaurant tab at topless cabaret in Paris two years ago, putatively while learning how other toll roads operate. When the (Newport News) Daily Press disclosed this abuse of public funds, people were understandably outraged. The press flogged the story and now the Commission has changed its travel policy: No more than $45 per day food allowance while on travel.

I have no problem with changing the policy. Here’s my concern. At the bottom of today’s Daily Press’ wrap-up on the policy changes, we read: “Lawmakers also criticized the commission for a plan to spend an estimated $900 million for two additional tunnels. … Commissioners say the tunnels are needed to handle increased traffic in 20 years. Lawmakers said traffic projections do not justify the expenditure.”

Whoah, Nelly! I’d say the $900 million construction is a lot more important than the $900 bill for food and champagne in a Paris strip club. But what gets the attention — the strip club, or the new tunnels and higher tolls directly impacting the lives of thousands of Virginians? The strip club, of course. Where are the headlines about the $900 million boondoggle?

Hopefully, the Daily Press will continue its coverage of Bridge-Tunnel governance by digging into the proposed Bridge-Tunnel expansion. Which lawmakers are opposed? Why are they opposed? Who developed the idea for the project? What are the numbers in the traffic projections? Are those projections, in fact, flawed? Those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking. And we need to ask them not just about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, we need to ask them about the other $108 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) worth of transportation projects that the Warner administration asserts in VTrans2025 that Virginia needs but cannot pay for.