If you don’t get enough Tour de France info over at Reason and Revelation, here’s a great site.
Here you can track individual riders on an interactive Google map with information about their speed, altitude, and even their heart rate. As the cyclists move into the Alps, you might want to check it out.
And as a Norwegian, I was certainly glad that Thor Hushvod (you pronounce his name by clearing your throat) won yesterday’s stage.
Better than June 6 of last year, I guess . . .
This morning, AOL carried a story about the “abuser fee” funding mechanism in the recently-passed transportation bill (lead paragraph on the story, which originally appeared in USA Today: “Virginia is for lovers, or so the state slogan has declared since 1969. Starting today, Virginia also will be the home of the $3,000 traffic ticket.”)
So it’s official: once again the nation’s eyes turn toward the Old Dominion, and don’t quite believe what they see. As was the case a few years ago with the “Droopy Drawers” bill, which  would have made a criminal of “Any person who, while in a public place, intentionally wears and displays his below-waist undergarments, intended to cover a person’s intimate parts, in a lewd or indecent manner,” we’re on our way toward the national spotlight, and not in a good way. Next stop, Jay Leno.
There’s a difference, though: while the “Droopy Drawers” bill kind of flew under the radar until it hit the late-night shows, the abuser fees are an intentional self-inflicted wound. They were designed to plug a huge hole on the revenue side of the transportation package without bringing up the dreaded “T” word. (The Kaine administration deserves credit for insisting on bringing the proposal’s original pie-in-the-sky revenue projections back closer to the reality-based world.)
Well, then, why did so many of us vote for the fees? (The vote on final passage of HB 3202 was 85-15.) Mainly because omnibus legislation is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition: you don’t get to pick and choose among the good, the bad, and the ugly. For a lot of us from Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, the separate regional transportation plans that were included in HB 3202 (both of which, incidentally, are funded with Real Money) were so crucial to our corners of the Commonwealth that we held our noses and voted for the bill.
With the growing furor over the abuser fees, a number of leaders have announced that the issue is likely to be “revisited” next year. Unless there’s a major change of mindset between now and then (think November 6), we’ll see a scramble to come up with some new alternative “out-of-the-box” revenue source to fund transportation. My guess: bake sales.
Thanks to Waldo, we learn about The Redistricting Game–a new simulation that lets anyone try to find a more collaborative way to draw district lines.
The simulation offers a graphic demonstration of the impact of the redistricting process. Among the experts cited is Pamela Karlan, a professor at the Stanford Law School: “It used to be that the idea was, once every two years voters elected their representatives, and now, instead, it’s every ten years the representatives choose their constituents.”
Today seems to be the 50th anniversary of the Frisbee. Or rather, the 50th anniversary of Wham-O, Inc. renaming the “Pluto Platter” the “Frisbee.”
But . . . those of us who advocate for making the redistricting process less partisan have talked for years about the problems with creating one-party districts. We predicted that the net effect would be to give undue influence to people on the ends of the bell curve.
Certainly the results of yesterday’s Senate primaries seem to bear that out.
UPDATE: Commenters have pointed out that I need to clarify. I am talking about the two Republican districts in this case. The McEachin-Lambert race had other issues, and the Barker-Galligan primary came in a district that is, believe me, not drawn to be a Democratic district. I’m not saying it can’t happen in Democratic districts, just that in the case of Sen. Lambert (the only one where the general theory would apply), there was a LOT of other stuff going on.
This is the month when many of my colleagues will be addressing the Graduating Class of 2007. If they have not already written their speech yet, here’s my advice: don’t spell.
Mostly, graduation speeches are pretty forgettable. (Best line of this graduation season belongs to the Governor: “I have forgotten every word that was spoken at all my graduations, and I was the speaker at one of them.”)
But of the (many) cap and gown events I’ve endured, only two rise to the level of off-the-charts bad. Both were absolutely memorable, but not in the way the speaker would have hoped. And both involved the unfortunate rhetorical decision to organize the speech around the spelling of a word.Â
My own graduation (back in the Pleistocene Era) was one. Unfortunately for all of us, the speaker chose to base his speech on the letters in the name of our high school. Sadly, that was Watertown. W-A-T-E-R-T-O-W-N. Yes, NINE key points, including two that began with the letter “W.”
There are not two memorable things in the entire world that begin with “W.”
And of course, he droned on and on. It wasn’t a graduation, it was a hostage release. We finally crawled out of there about dawn.
Sara’s graduation from Princeton was a multi-day affair. (I guess they really wanted those grads to feel they’d gotten their money’s worth.)
One of the many speakers was e Bay’s Meg Whitman. Logical choice: member of the graduating class 25 years earlier who had just given about a gazillion dollars to the college.
And it could have been good. Except she chose to organize her speech around the word Liberty. Which she spelled “L-I-B-E-R-T-R” . . .
Believe me, an audience of Princeton grads is not the forum in which you want to misspell a word like liberty. “I think that second ‘R’ is silent,” the kids said gamely.
So here’s my advice. Have three key points. Four max. But no spelling. Trust me in this.
On this Memorial Day weekend, it’s appropriate that the most famous building in the 48th District should get the attention it deserves.
Yesterday we saw the announcement that the Two Bills–Leighty and Murray–have announced their departure from the Kaine administration. We are sad to see them go.
Virginia has been so fortunate to have stellar (and we use that word advisedly) public servants like Bill Leighty and Bill Murray. Both could have commanded much higher salaries in the private sector. They stayed because they absolutely believe that government has important work to do.
They were masters of the arcane details of government. They worked about 20 hours a day. Their word was good. We wish them both the very best.
Kudos to Congressman Jim Moran. Yesterday, he got the House of Representatives to acknowledge the reality that if the Department of the Army moves 22,000 jobs to Fort Belvoir without investing significantly in infrastructure (read: roads and Metro), we’ll all be stuck in traffic forever.
This is an issue that hits close to home for us at 7 West. Many of the jobs that will end up in Belvoir (adjacent to the 44th District) are coming from the 48th Legislative District. And while over time, we both think this realignment will be a good thing for the economies of both our districts, we want the process to move at a more measured pace. Frankly, we also want the Army to take at least some of the responsibility for moving 9,000 people away from jobs with Metro access and into jobs that can only be reached by car.
The Base Realignment process is always difficult, because change is difficult. But sticking states and localities with all the enormous costs of this particular job move is both unfair and unrealistic.
Really, just one trip down Route One will help you understand just how ghastly things will be if we don’t get some help down here. So thanks to the House for passing this important amendment.
