Month: April 2007
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The Housing Bubble: The Pain Intensifies
Home ownership is a wonderful thing — if you can afford it. Given the lax lending standards the prevailed during the housing bubble, however, a lot of people wound up with houses they couldn’t afford. It’s not just the known expenses like principle and interest payments that kill you, it’s the unanticipated expenses — the…
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Conservatives Should Embrace, Not Trample, Journey Through Hallowed Ground
I find myself getting sucked into the controversy over the Journey Through Hallowed Ground more than I anticipated. A group of hard-core property rights groups has rallied against the federal legislation to designate the 175-mile Journey region as a National Heritage Area. I’d ignored these guys until now because I deemed their views not only…
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More Creative Destruction of Outmoded Ideas: Bacon’s Rebellion Publishes Again
The April 30, 2007, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion has been published. You can view it in its entirety here. Don’t miss an issue — sign up for a free subscription here. This week’s features include: Missing the PointA Heritage Foundation paper attacking the Journey Through Hallowed Ground as a tool of Virginia’s landed elite is…
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Filling the “Black Hole” of Local Disclosure
Ever wish you get do the same financial background checks on candidates for local office as you can for statewide candidates? To pick an example, wouldn’t it be cool to know how much money Gerald E. Connolly, chairman of the Fairfax County board of supervisors, has raised in the current campaign cycle and where his…
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A Blueprint for Petersburg
Petersburg may be Virginia’s hardest hard-luck story. It tops the list for just about every kind of economic problem and social pathology you can think of. Yet the city has so much history and such a rich architectural heritage — one of the largest collections of ante-bellum buildings in the country — that its inhabitants…
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A Washington-Miami “Corridor of the Future” in the Works?
CSX Corp. wants to upgrade its railroad lines into a “corridor of the future” between Washington and Miami, a move that would permit freight trains to operate at speeds of 50 mph to 70 mph and passenger trains up to 110 mph. That would fall far short of a bullet train, but it would significantly…
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Like Horse-Drawn Carriages — Without the Poop
I’m always on the look-out for novel transportation options, and pedicabs appear to have a viable economic future in Washington, D.C. — although I wouldn’t count on it to solve Virginia’s transportation congestion problems. DC Pedicab, founded by three friends, now has a team of 12 drivers and will expand its vehicle fleet from six…
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Frederick County Works on Neo-Traditional Zoning
Frederick County has a head start over most other fast-growth counties in Virginia in adapting to The Comprehensive Transportation Funding and Reform Act of 2007. It already has an Urban Development Area, mandated by the legislation, which says where development should take place. Now Frederick planners are turning their attention to revising their zoning code…
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A Power Line Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You
The Department of Energy has moved a step closer to designating a swath of Virginia as part of a National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor in the Mid-Atlantic region, one of two in the country. (See DOE press release.) The practical import: If Dominion gets turned down by the State Corporation Commission in its bid to…
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Lots of Room for Growth Left in Fairfax County
Fairfax County’s population zoomed past one million residents a couple of years ago, but there’s still plenty of room in the county for more through re-development of underutilized land. Citizens were treated to a new vision for the Merrifield section of the county near the Capital Beltway in an area that, until not long ago,…
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Does Lawmaker Cronyism Extend Even to Ethics Panels?
On Tuesday I declared the ethics flap involving Sens. Kenneth Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, and Thomas Norment Jr., R-James City, to be “Case closed.” Perhaps I was premature. David Nixon, the Roanoke attorney who charged the two veteran politicians of conflict of interest, now levels similar accusations against two members of the ethics panel that absolved…
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Hitchens the Contrarian
There has been an undercurrent through the coverage of the Virginia Tech killings regarding what, exactly, is the appropriate response for those who were not directly affected by the events. The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger called it the “numbing down” of America, where the mass of people have become “hollowed out” by the seemingly…
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Government by Pressure Group
In today’s Times-Dispatch, Barton Hinkle wonders if government energy, environmental and transportation policies aren’t at odds: Just in case you lost track of the bouncing ball, here it is: Virginia has finally put the crisis-ignoring haters of truth in their place by passing a roads package to encourage the use of cars that are destroying…
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Cho’s Temporary Detention Order
Via Slate comes a facsimile of the papers which called for the hospitalization of Cho Seung-Hui as he “present[ed] an imminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for self and is incapable of volunteering or unwilling to…
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Inflammatory Questions about Gun Control
I’m agnostic on gun control — I see the merits of both points of view. So, I don’t necessarily embrace the point of view of Pierre LeMieux with the Independent Institute, but I find it worthy of discussion. In an essay published yesterday, he argues: Contrast the horrific Virginia Tech shootings with the January 2002…