The DC Examiner is usually better than this (UPDATED: correction coming)

I’ll get to the main point of this DC Examiner story (h/t: Tertium Quids) in a later post, but William Flook made a bad mistake recapping the special session in the piece:

Each party in Richmond rejected the other’s tax proposals during the session .  .  . House Republicans pushed a bill that would raise money solely in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, which died in the Senate.

Wrong!  The House plan that was sent to the Senate did not include any tax increases.  Once again, readers will think the Republicans backed a tax increase when in fact that they didn’t.

UPDATE: After corresponding with the reporter who wrote this story (William Flook), I received an apology and was informed that a correction would run in tomorrow’s edition.  I’ve liked the Examiner for some time, and this quick reaction (less than an hour) only makes me like it more.

The evolving Washington Post: good news for McCain, bad news for Gilmore

The refusal of the Washington Post to follow the rest of MSM on the Iraq theatre of the WBK War has been its shining moment of the 21st Century.  The editors are not only standing firm on that, they’ve even taken Barack Obama to task for refusing to accept reality in Iraq.

Now, the Post hasn’t endorsed a Republican for president in half a century, and I don’t expect them to start this year.  It’s more likely they’ll either give a tepid endorsement of Obama or endorse no one (which they did in 1988).  Either way, however, the editors’ refusal to give Obama a pass is slowly seeping into its news coverage, as this Postpiece from Howard Kurtz on the media tilt toward Obama shows.  I remember no such Post piece during any of the previous four campaigns in which I’ve paid attention to the paper.

So, for John McCain, the press in the nation’s capital (and MSM in general) will be far better than for any Republican candidate in decades.  It should be noted, however, that it wasn’t McCain’s unusual (and for many on the right, maddening) courtship of the media but a brave editorial decision on the part of the Post that led to this reality.

That said, this is still the Post, where the center-left holds sway.  In the past, the paper has always reacted to its center/center-right shift on the national scene with more blatant partisanship locally.  We saw it in the Allen-Webb race, the 2007 elections, and the recently adjourned special session.  With no real GOP in either DC or Maryland (although recovery in the latter is likely in two years), that means the Virginia GOP will take it on the chin - again.

So, if Jim Gilmore is counting on the Post giving him the benefit of the doubt it still gives McCain and other supporters of Iraq’s liberation, he’ll be sorely disappointed.  I suspect, however, that Gilmore harbors no such illusions.  Just keep it in mind, dear reader, when the Post starts to go especially ballistic on the ex-Governor.

More Richmond Times-Disptach follies: Jeff Schapiro

Jeff Schapiro’s abysmal post-mortem on the special session didn’t surprise me; after all, I’m already on record calling for him to be fired.  Still, I was gratified to see Tim Watson (I’m Surrounded by Idiots) fillet the piece while I dealt with the Free Lance-Black Hole.

Among the many things Tim mentioned in his rebuttal post (and you really should read the whole thing):

Back to RT-D:

The House version was carried by Del. Phil Hamilton, R-Newport News, an inartful dodger carrying water for the big companies angling to run, for fun and profit, vast hunks of the Hampton Roads road-tunnel-and-bridge network.

As Christina Nuckols, of The Virginian-Pilot, reminded her readers: Those firms are represented by lobbyists who sit in the privy council of Speaker Bill Howell, ensuring Republicans receive only objective, dispassionate advice on what could prove a giant government giveaway.

Oh my God! Those evil “big companies”!

They have some nerve employing people and giving them a paycheck for work! Those saps that work for those evil “big companies” should just quit, get on welfare, and live off the government.

What’s even worst is that the companies hire people (lobbyists) to represent themselves to the legislature. Those bastards should be executed for using their First Amendment rights.

Remember that hating corporations is #82 on Stuff White People Like (RWL Note: maybe I need to pay more atttention to SWPL; he may be more perceptive than I thought).

 . . .

Does anyone notice that this reporter has time to go through and check out every little resolution that the General Assembly dealt with and proceeded to complain about the unimportance of them?

Did he write a story about the transportation bills that were dealt with? No, of course not; those aren’t important.

Is this not the very height of irony?

. . .

Second, while Jeff was tracking down every resolution the General Assembly dealt with, he missed the following:

The Republicans went from wanting (unconstitutional) regional taxes imposed on Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to offering a no-tax solution: The Republican solution include appropriating money to NoVA and Hampton Roads from airport fees and taxes and port revenues to pay for the transports needs that are partly caused by the airports and port!

Where’s the story about Jeff Frederick’s bill that would give money to localities to pay for their own roads instead of giving money to the monstrosity that is VDOT (HB6025)? That bill didn’t even make it out of the House.

How about the bill that would implement the 2002 Governor’s Commission on Efficiency and Effectiveness that died in the House Rules Committee (HJ6061)?

How about the the great idea for the state to stop paying for roads in subdivisions (HB6041)? Why should I be paying for someone else’s subdivision roads that I and 99.99% of the state will never see or use?

How about the bill that would required an independent audit of the monstrosity-known-as-VDOT (HB6023)? The Senate refused to act on that bill.

RT-D had time to nitpick about every little resolution that was passed by the General Assembly, but couldn’t do their jobs and actually tell the people what did occur during the session.

A fine takedown of a sorry columnist for a once-elite newspaper that has devolved into an “elite” newspaper whose better days seem to be behind it.

Dear Richmond Times-Dispatch, please DON’T recycle columns

Normally, I’m very happy to see a Bob Marshall column in a Virginia newspaper.  However, I do think the Richmond Times-Dispatch fumbled the ball on Marshall’s latest column.  Why do I sat that?  Because the column - which the RTD touted as a post-mortem on the special session - was actually written before the sessions pivotal last day, and I know that because it ran on the morning of July 9 (before the session re-convened) in the Daily Press.

Now, I will give the RTD editors some credit, in that they edited the verbal tenses where applicable.  However, they needed to look a little harder at the nouns, because the outdated language led to some embarrassing errors.

For example, in the DP, Marshall laments that his bills had not gotten out of the House Rules Committee:

Sadly, these and similar measures have been sent by House Speaker William J. “Bill” Howell to his Rules Committee, where he is simply sitting on them.

The RTD ran it like this:

Sadly, these and similar measures were sent by Speaker Bill Howell to his Rules Committee, where he simply sat on them.

That’s not exactly correct; two bills (on ethanol and the spending oversight commission) were actually sent to the floor of the House.  Neither were passed, so this is largely a distinction without a difference, but it does reveal the age of the piece, which was of much more importance up in the fourth paragraph:

No Democrat (SB 6009) or Republican (HB 6055) tax proposal in the General Assembly during the recently adjourned special session raised more than $1.1 billion a year.

This is completely wrong.  HB6055 was not a tax proposal at all when it passed the House and was killed in the Senate three days before the RTD ran this piece.  Had the editors actually paid attention to the House activity, they might have caught that mistake.  Instead, readers in Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield, Powhatan, Hanover, and everywhere else in the Richmond metropolitan area who read that piece came away from it still thinking the House GOP had proposed a tax increase - the exact opposite of what really happened.

Again, when Marshall wrote the piece (before the session reconvened) HB6055 was still the disastrous tax-hike that had set off activists, bloggers, and other conservatives for nearly two weeks.  Why the RTD didn’t bother to notice the discrepancy created by the passage of time is a complete mystery to me.

MSM special session follies: the Roanoke Times

Given what I have seen of the Roanoke Times from Jerry Fuhrman (From On High), it doesn’t surprise me that the paper missed the entire point of the special session.  That said, the Times really outdid themselves with their awful editorial.

We’ll start with the childish bombast:

So Virginians will face a choice in November 2009: Keep in power a recalcitrant House leadership that refuses to view transportation as a statewide issue in need of a statewide solution, or elect delegates willing to put governance ahead of ideology.

Who’s putting governance ahead of ideology?  The House Republicans came up with a creative plan that doesn’t raise taxes, ties transportation funding closer to transportation activity, and could still bring more money to Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads than the Senate Democrats’ plan.  Yet the Senate Finance Committee and Governor Kaine dismissed it out of hand because it didn’t include a tax increase.  Sounds to me like we could use some a new Governor who will “put governance ahead of ideology.”

Of course, you wouldn’t know that the House plan was without tax increases, because the Times never bothers to mention that.  All they do is rip the Republicans and offer a false choice:

Republicans stuck to their insistence on concentrating solely on the regional problems, ignoring a mounting maintenance shortfall that was forcing the state to divert more and more funds from new construction.

Wrong!  No one is “forcing the state to divert more and more funds from new construction” - except for Governor Kaine, who wants the money to go to his pet projects first.  If he had decided to swallow hard, defer his wish list, and implement the Wilder Commission budget recommendations, he would have had ample funds for new road construction.  Instead he took the easy way out and demanded Virginians pay more.  Because the House Republicans refused to knuckle under, he and his MSM friends have gone ballistic.  That the Roanoke Times has joined them is no surprise; neither is it a surprise that they did it in the same juvenile way everyone else has outside of the Washington Post.

The Free Lance-Black Hole does it again!

The editors of the Free Lance-Black Hole took a little longer than the rest of MSM to miss the point of the House Republican transportation plan, but they missed it all the same.  In fact, the FLBH (along with the rest of MSM) are actually making me do the unthinkable (for me) - defend Bill Howell!

The FLBH editorial is full of errors (and I’m being charitable, otherwise I’d call them “lies”), but the main thrust is that they simply can’t handle the fact that the House Republicans came up with a plan that ties transportation funding in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to transportation activity in those regions, provides more money to the two regions than the Democrats’ statewide plan, and does them both without raising taxes.

Shall we begin?  Here’s the first paragraph:

GROUCHO MARX reportedly said, “I have my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” Alas for a traffic-mired commonwealth, the Republican caucus of the House of Delegates has only one principle: no new taxes. Here’s one hundreds of thousands of Virginian motorists wish it had: do your duty.

So . . . the folks at the FLBH would rather the Republicans were unprincipled and malleable ciphers than dedicated and creative public servants.  As for the “do your duty” nonsense, what would you call presenting a plan that sends up to $600 million to NoVa and $300 million to HR and ties future monies to the port and airport activity there?  I’d say the House GOP did its duty just fine.

However, it’s the next paragraph where the FLBH reveal their real problem with the House GOP plan:

. . . House Republicans, meeting last week with the rest of the General Assembly in special session, for the third time refused to advance statewide transportation bills based on new taxes–a time-proven method of building roads dating to ancient Rome, and tied up with the very definition of civilization.

Well now!  Centralized taxing for roads is “time proven”?  Then why is Virginia one of only three states that don’t localize road funding?  Furthermore, Virginia itself not adopt this method until 1932, which last I checked was more than thirteen centuries after the last Emperor to rule over Rome passed from the scene.  Then again, Rome also had slavery and murder-for-sport.  is the FLBH looking to bring those back, too?

The fact is, the FLBH wanted a tax increase, and the House GOP wouldn’t give it to them, so the editors are acting like spoiled children spouting words that sound smart but have no basis in fact.  to see what I mean, check out the next paragraph:

. . . House Republicans once again willfully failed to meet their basic legislative responsibility to produce critical infrastructure. Think about that dereliction when a formerly three-hour trip down I-64 to the beaches takes five or six, or when the minutes of your life dribble away in a Northern Virginia that is pushing its frontier of traffic frustration ever deeper into Greater Fredericksburg.

So, if the FLBH is to be believed, the Democrats were the ones who would have provided the funds needed for HR and NoVa.  Well, let’s take a look at the two proposals.  Which one provides more potential funds for Northern Virginia?  If you answered the one from the Senate Democrats, you’re wrong.  The Senate plan provides $2.28 billion over seven years (less than $330 million per year on average).  The House Republican plan (the new HB6055) by contrast provides up to $600 million a year.  As for Hampton Roads, it’s the same story; the Senate plan provides $1.55 billion over seven years (Under $225 million per year on average), while the House plan has up to $300 million a year.

Keep those numbers in mind when the Democrats and their MSM enablers tell you the Republicans don’t care about Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.

The rest is just mindless ranting that I wouldn’t even expect from a freshman in college.  Still, the end of the piece had a nice line that just needs a little tweaking:

The latest obstruction in Richmond is, however, clarifying. It verifies, almost according to the scientific method, that Virginians can have an effective transportation system, or they can have a Republican majority in the House of Delegates. “Or,” not “and.” The next election will settle which Virginians hold more important.

Not quite, fellas; as I noted earlier, the Republicans had a perfectly viable first step to a more effective transportation system.  What we actually learned goes something like this: that Virginians will have their taxes go up, or they will have Republicans control the House of Delegates. “Or,” no longer ”and.” The next election will settle which Virginians hold more important.  I’m guessing they won’t go for the former.

Cross-posted to Rappahannock Red

The MSM goes on a pro-tax-hike bender

After watching Tim Kaine miss the boat on what the Republicans did during the special session, I’m not surprised that MSM remained as blind as he is.

The Washington Post, for example, is very sober on the WBK War and some national domestic issues (for which it has taken quite a bit of flak from lefties), but on Virginia politics it is still the screaming Democratic rag it has been for over a decade - and outside that weird endorsement of Mark Earley in 1997, for several decades.  All one had to do was look at their endorsements in the Virginia races last year to know what the Posteditors would say about the innovative and tax-less Republican plan. 

Still, one argument the Post tries to raise needs answering:

Republicans like to pretend that state transportation funding, last meaningfully increased a little more than halfway through the Reagan administration, can be addressed by diverting existing general fund money to build and maintain highways, bridges, tunnels and rails. They like to pretend that those funds are not needed for public schools, the salaries of sheriff’s deputies, the operation of prisons, or payments to Medicaid providers. The bills they offered this week on transportation — proposing to divert future tax revenue from Dulles International and Reagan National airports, for instance — were therefore fraudulent; if push came to shove, those bills would have been undone by Republicans themselves.

Allow me to be blunt; if this editorial were published anywhere else in the Anglosphere, the Virginia Republicans would sue for libel - and win.  Not to say it should be that way; I prefer the right to throw around whatever assertion pops into my head.  Clearly, the Post editors do, too, because that’s all they did here.

Are we supposed to believe that the near-doubling of the state budget in 10 years is all for schools, cops, prisons, and Medicaid?  Should we automatically assume those dollars are all spent wisely and prudently?  Should we just ignore the fact that states actually have far more control over Medicaid coverage than politicians like to admit?

The fact is, the Republicans stunned MSM, Kaine, and every other Democrat in the state by coming up with a proposal that doesn’t raise taxes and forces them to defend the bloated budget.  So it’s back to Jim Wright’s old mantra: it’s “wah on students, ole folks, and cripples” (that was an attempt by Bill Buckley to capture Wright’s accent, not a typo).

As for the Virginian-Pilot, which I remember from my time at William and Mary being basically in the position the Post is now (generally good on national security and some national issues, more flaky on state and local stuff), they managed to waste over 500 words without ever mentioning what the Republicans actually proposed.  At least the hyperbolic Post editors acknowledged the existence of an opposing policy.  Perhaps the V-P editors were just upset that the House Republicans were more interested in getting a real plan passed than letting reporters get their beauty sleep Wednesday night (and, I should note, that if I published that anywhere esle in the Anglosphere . . .).

All that aside, it’s the Richmond Times-Dispatch in whom I’m particularly disappointed, because I expected them to know better.  I was particularly put off by this:

Throughout the year we have discussed our transportation preferences. An editorial tomorrow will reiterate our arguments regarding revenue. There is no need to recapitulate the entire platform here. At least our files have copy we can re-run on slow days next year.

That wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that they demanded higher taxes, right?  After all, if they put that in the editorial, their readers might find out the Republicans proposed a solution without tax increases, and made them look like utter fools.  Instead, their words are just as chippy, vague, and lacking in substance as the V-P’s.

The more I ponder the three reactions (note: the editors of the Free Lance-Black Hole have been surprisingly silent so far), I actually have the most respect for the editors of the Post.  Their insane hyperbole aside, they were the only ones to even acknowledge the Republicans had a plan of their own - let alone respond to it.

That said, the silence of the other papers is quite revealing.  The Post has a large chunk of its readership that will react positively to the big government manifesto.  The RTD and V-P have no such political demographic, and they know it.  Thus, they have all but conceded that the Republican plan is a political winner in Hampton Roads and suburban Richmond - and given the hemorrhaging of Republican support in those regions over the last six years due to all the prior buckling on taxes, this is a very good thing.

This is not to say the Post editorial means Northern Virginia is in the bag for the Dems on this one.  Both the Times and the Examiner have taken issue with the higher-taxes-or-else mantra.  What I am saying is that the various reactions of the papers provide a glimpse into ow the 2009 campaign will go, and it looks very good for the newly united Virginia Republican Party.

The Washington Times tells is like it is

The editors of the Washington Times hit the nail squarely on the head, and by example embarrass their cross-town rivals.  Here are the choice cuts from their blistering editorial:

At times, it seems as if the governor, Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, Fairfax Democrat, and House Republicans led by Speaker Bill Howell are competing to see who can take “credit” for pushing through the worst possible package of tax increases on the people of the commonwealth.

As far as I know, the Times in the only paper to see through the madness and put the pox on all taxes.  Meanwhile, those of us on the Jeff Frederick watch wil be happy to see his mention here (emphasis added):

Mr. Kaine’s proposal to spend $1 billion annually through increases in the motor-vehicle sales tax, higher registration fees and sales tax increases in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads was bottled up in the Republican-controlled House. Mr. Saslaw was successful in pushing his plan for a 6-cent increase in the state gasoline tax through the Senate on a largely party-line vote, but it has little chance of winning approval in the House. Unfortunately, however, senior Republicans in the House will put forward an alternative pushed by Delegates Phillip Hamilton of Newport News and David Albo of Fairfax that would provide new road funding through a series of increases in taxes and fees.

This is a terrible idea - a point being made by more sober-minded Republicans. State party Chairman Jeffrey Frederick, a Prince William County delegate, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times yesterday that the House tax increases were poor public policy and would hurt the Republican Party. Sen. Ken Cuccinelli, Fairfax Republican, warns that GOP lawmakers who support tax increases could run into the same problems Republicans faced in supporting Gov. Mark Warner’s $1.4 billion tax increase in 2004 (only to learn several weeks later that the deficit Mr. Warner warned about was fiction, and that Virginia had a budget surplus.) Mr. Howell would do well to heed the warnings from Mr. Frederick and Mr. Cuccinelli.

Indeed, Howell should heed those warning; sadly, he won’t.  Still, it’s good to see that the folks in Northern Virginia will get to hear from the voices of reason.

Marc Fisher still doesn’t get it

How did Marc Fisher get his job?  It sure wasn’t by fact-checking.  The lone local Washington Post columnist with enough snark to be a decent blogger badly nukes the fridge in his special session column from earlier today.

Fisher’s first glaring mistake comes in paragraph three:

Senate Democrats proposed the first increase in the gas tax in 22 years, and House Republicans made it clear they would kill that right quick. The governor proposed a slew of less-dramatic tax and fee increases, and legislators met his offer with yawns and chortles. Republicans proposed to let Northern Virginians tax themselves if they really want to . . .

Come again?  The Senate Democratic bill is awaiting a vote on the House floor; it was the House Democrats that have driven stake through its heart (though, to be fair, that was after Fisher wrote the column).  More to the point, the House Republican bill provides no actual choice for Northern Virginia (and Hampton Roads - more on that later), the provisions of the bill put a gun to the heads of NoVa and HR locals and demands they raise taxes.  That may seem a small mistake at first, but it leads to much bigger ones down the line.

First, though, Fisher engages in some revisionist history:

But the bottom line is that decades-old tax levels can no longer provide the funding necessary to keep up with the burgeoning population in Virginia’s two main urban regions: the Washington area and Hampton Roads.

Decades-old?!?!  Where was Marc Fisher in 2004?  I think that’s all I need to say about that.

Then things get really bad:

What will happen when the legislators reconvene this week? Nothing but wasted tax dollars — at best, the special session will end with a deal nobody likes, one that saddles Northern Virginians with the task of taxing themselves with little or no help from the state government this region so lavishly subsidizes.

Then it’s back to politics: Democrats will say, ‘See? If you just finish the job and give us the House, too, we can get past this Republican roadblock.’ Republicans will say, ‘See? We’re your only safeguard against those tax-loving Democrats.’

Um, Marc, have you been paying attention for the last two weeks?!?!  If you had, you would have known that there is no way the GOP can get away with forcing tax hikes on Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads and claim to be “your only safeguard against those tax-loving Democrats.”  In fact, what damaged the Republicans last year was their embrace of tax increases.

How does Fisher miss this?  The answer is simple, and in fact, he reveals it himself in his last, and most egregious, error:

The real divide in Virginia is neither ideological nor partisan, but rather geographic and cultural. It really is NoVa vs. RoVa (the rest of Virginia.)

I hate to break it to Marc and his cronies, but Northern Virginia hasn’t even been the catalyst that set off the political events of last year: Hampton Roads earned that honor.  Now, for narrow-minded provincials like Fisher, Hampton Roads is still nothing more than the Great Dismal Swamp and the College of William and Mary, but the rest of us know it is just as vibrant, dynamic, and traffic-choked as NoVa.  More to the point, Hampton Roads has been at the center of the tax revolt that has seized eastern Virginia over the last half-dozen years - a tax revolt which has repeatedly put the wood to tax-hiking Republicans (Nick Rerras, Marty Williams, John Welch, and Chris Stolle, to name four).  If anything, HR has led Northern Virginia on this issue, not the other way around.

Again, if Fisher actually read something - anything - besides his own paper, he might have noticed this.  He would have seen bloggers from Chris Beer to Chris Green, and from Poquoson to Prince William, rail against HB6055 as the one thing Fisher can’t seem to call it - a tax hike.  Then he might have realized that the problem wasn’t the GOP anti-tax message, but the tax-hiking GOP trying to deliver it.

All the news that’s fit to - Hey, let’s go to the movies!

If you want to understand the decline of MSM, if you want it distilled to its very essence of arrogance, laziness, and lack of professionalism, look no further than the Sports Pages of the New York Times on the epic Nadal-Federer Wimbledon match (via Kevin D. Williamson in National Review Online’s Media Blog):

No one expected a day-night match for the ages.

Who thought that in a stretch of 24 hours, Venus Williams’s great accomplishment — a fifth women’s singles championship — would be dwarfed by a tennis marathon?

Who thought? Not us. So we watched as Nadal took a commanding two-set lead, concluded that this was Nadal’s day and decided to take in a movie, “Hancock.”

What’s that?  You wanted the sports reporter who was at the tennis match to report on the actual match?  Sorry, no account of how Federer clawed back from two sets down to a 7-7 tie in the fifth set (Wimbledon allows no tiebreaker for the deciding set).  Had to see the Will Smith and all.

What’s all the more embarrassing is that tennis, like baseball, has no time limit.  There’s no clock to run out; the match ends with the winner actually having to win the last point.

Yet the NYT guy couldn’t be bothered.  He had already decided who would win, so it was off to the movies . . .

. . . and they wonder why the blogosphere is more trusted!