As is often the case with tales of great discovery, the details of how buried treasure came to be found beneath the rolling countryside of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, have grown a little gauzy over the last 30 years. But here is the story as the prospectors tell it. One day, in March 1979, a man named Byrd Berman, a geologist by training, was driving down a road through cattle pastures when the scintillometer sitting on the dashboard of his Hertz rental car began to beep.
As someone who has long believed that there is something morally repellant about living in a country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy in the world but where the top one-tenth of one percent of the people "earn" as much money per year collectively as the entire bottom fifty percent of working people, I would like to offer a modest proposal that might "level the playing field," as the popular saying has it, and thus provide a foundation for a democracy worthy of the name. Instead of the old Marxist plan to redistribute property--and let's face it, that always took a bloody revolution and even then, it didn't always work out so well--how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?
Since it is a matter of sheer luck whether one is born into a rich family and then, as a birth-right, is entitled to first-class housing, top-flight health insurance, excellent schools, and, if need be, the best attorneys money can buy, or whether one is born into a poor or middle-class family and not be assured of getting any of these amenities, why not give rational order to what has been a wildly haphazard and obviously unjust state of affairs? A public program implementing the big baby lottery would at last make official what has in truth been the unspoken ethos of our government policy for decades and is in accord with the casino way of life--the stock market, the housing market, the state lotteries--to which so many Americans are wholeheartedly committed.
The new governors that recently took office in Virginia and New Jersey are facing a challenging fiscal environment. Chief among thorny issues are the looming shortfalls on the transportation front for both states.
Governor Christie is facing the reality that by 2011 all the revenue flowing into the New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund will be going toward debt payments. Virginia’s “three-alarm” transportation crisis is part of a $1.8 billion mid-year budget gap for fiscal 2010 that new Governor Bob McDonnell has to fix. Beginning next year Virginia will have scarce funding for primary, secondary, urban, and unpaved roads.
What’s to be done? The obvious answer to many is raise the state motor fuels tax. After all, neither state has raised its gas tax in over 20 years. Both are below the 50 state average of 20.8¢ per gallon. New Jersey’s, in fact, is the third-lowest in the nation (10.5¢). As a result, the most recent federal highway data shows that only two states have a lower share of their highway revenues coming from the gas tax than does the Garden State.
On the other hand--and as anyone who’s driven through the state can attest--New Jersey also takes advantage of tolling more than any other state. Nearly 30 percent of the revenue the state uses for highways comes from tolls, principally on the New Jersey Turnpike. Virginia is heavily-reliant on the gas tax but also depends on a range of state imposts.
In any highly fluid political situation, you will always find some observers determined to argue that it's not fluid at all--that underneath the surface, the status quo prevails, and anyone thinking otherwise is naive or poorly informed.
Over at the Spine, Marty Peretz writes about the struggles of Martha Coakley, Democratic candidate in the special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. (Marty called this one a while ago.*) And the news is indeed alarming, according to Public Policy Polling:
Last week, the Republican Governors Association held a conference outside Austin where the group predicted that the ideas-oriented campaigns of Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell would serve as harbingers of the 37 gubernatorial races next year--an issue I touched upon in a Continue reading "Governors Still Aiming For A Comeback"
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- Tuesday's elections were a rebuke to the right wing and a warning to Democrats.
They were also a timely reminder that President Obama needs to tune up his celebrated political organization and find a way to make Americans feel hopeful again.
Republicans are proclaiming victory after their candidates won statehouses in New Jersey and Virginia. And well they should. These were both states that went for Barack Obama in 2008. But how much do these elections really say about Obama and the prospects of the national Democratic Party? Some network commentators, citing suspiciously high approval ratings for Obama in New Jersey and Virginia, claim the elections say nothing at all about the president and his party.
If Creigh Deeds loses today—and few candidates have hoisted themselves out of the kind of hole he’s dug—let it be known that the Commonwealth of Virginia missed out on having a very nice man in Richmond.
“When you elect a governor, you elect not only their positions, but you elect their character, their heart,” declared Senator Mark Warner, to a gamely cheering crowd of about 150 in Alexandria’s Market Square last night. “This is a good man, a man who has served Virginia and Virginians with distinction.”
“I think there’s something to be said for having a little emotion,” said the state’s other senator, Jim Webb, on Deeds’ well-known sensitivity.
The current governor Tim Kaine then explained that each of his three children in the page program at the Virginia state senate had picked Deeds as his or her favorite senator at the end of the session. “Somebody who is in a high and exalted position, who will take the time to make an impression upon a young person, that’s my kind of person,” Kaine effused. “I know his heart, I know his character, and character counts at the end of the day.”
As the state’s Democratic firmament praised Deeds, the candidate stood off to the side of the stage, smiling, not talking to anyone. When Kaine called him up onstage, Deeds approached people in at the border of the crowd and started hugging and handshaking. Those he made contact with seemed more surprised than anything else to find themselves being embraced by the gangly Deeds; he comes off more like a man pretending to be a candidate than the real thing.
Whenever I read the words, "You're not from around here, are you?" I automatically imagine them being said with a serious Southern--or at least rural--twang. This election year in
Ever since 2001, when their successful gubernatorial candidate Mark Warner commissioned a bluegrass campaign song and sponsored a NASCAR team as part of his "rural strategy," Virginia Democrats have been preoccupied with winning over rural voters, especially in
WASHINGTON--Memo to Democrats: You will be defined by President Obama whether you like it or not, so you might as well embrace him for the benefits he can bring you.
Memo to Republicans: Talk a right-wing game in your ideological magazines and at your tea parties if that makes you happy. But to win elections, your candidates had better look like middle-of-the-road problem-solvers.
Those are the two outstanding lessons from the campaigns for next Tuesday's governors' races in New Jersey and Virginia. Both parties would be smart to apply them in 2010.
Doug Wilder tells TPM that if Bob McDonnell becomes governor, "Virginia won't sink into 
the seas." Probably not, but McDonnell does seem to be a bit confused about global warming.
Putting aside for a moment my own longstanding beef with Sheila Johnson, I'm not so sure that she deserves the pillorying she's currently receiving for her mocking of Creigh Deeds.
As analysts in both parties debate the possibility of a 1994-style pro-GOP landslide in 2010, an interesting thing is happening in the two gubernatorial races that will conclude this very November. As you may know, it's supposed to be an iron law of history that the party controlling the White House always loses gubernatorial elections in these two states, and early general election polls this year
McLEAN, Va.--Will the bitter, smoldering feelings let loose by Washington's health care fight ricochet across the Potomac River and decide Virginia's race for governor? Will a Republican be able to escape his right-wing record and his incendiary past writings to rebrand himself as a pragmatist?
The battle for the Virginia statehouse always gets outsized national attention because of its unusual timing, just a year after a presidential election. Virginia results are typically dissected with the kind of passion that readers bring to sorting through the arcane symbols in Dan Brown's novels.
How can Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Bob McDonnell erase the impression, recently given a boost by the release of his 1989 master's thesis, that he's a religio-traditional extremist? By indulging in some gratuitous profanity, of course! CNN:
