OUR VIEW: It's great to be back doing what we love
Just some recently observed holiday oddities.
Virginia is mounting an extensive campaign, fueled by millions of dollars, to cut the mounting death toll on the commonwealth’s highways and streets. Everyone who drives should also do his or her part. Alarmed by the recent sharp increase in traffic fatalities, the Commonwealth Transportatio…
OUR VIEW: A clean break is needed, not timid hedging that hopes he’ll go away on his own
NASA’s Artemis program is edging toward a return to the moon — this time to stay — with its successful launch this week of an uncrewed rocket. Some Americans looking at the Earth-bound problems all around us might reasonably ask: Why? The answer is not just about the scientific discovery tha…
Politicians often hold their noses to cut deals with people they wouldn’t normally speak with in order to advance their agenda, or their own political futures. The question each politician must ask is: How much nose-holding can I tolerate before I have to open a window and catch a breath of …
Good news: It looks as though the giant wind farm project off the coast of Virginia Beach is back on track. Dominion Energy, the Office of the Attorney General, environmental groups and advocates for ratepayers have hammered out what looks like a creative, equitable agreement on how much Dom…
It may be a bit late in the game, but the Biden administration could benefit by creating a new Cabinet position: The Secretary of Thinking Things Through. If the president had such an adviser, the White House wouldn’t be in the position it is now, informing those applying for student loan debt relief with the web site message: “At this time, we are not accepting applications.” That sotto voce ...
With Donald Trump almost certain to announce his presidential candidacy for the 2024 election soon, any Justice Department investigation into his multiple acts of criminal behavior risks becoming tainted in politics, no matter how hard Attorney General Merrick Garland tries to assert his independence. The smartest move Garland could make at this point is to seek the appointment of a special counsel to help distance the investigation from the inevitable accusations of political bias. And the sooner he does it, the better.
It is both heartbreaking and infuriating that the man accused of killing three people in downtown Norfolk in March may never see the inside of a courtroom. Charges against him were dropped on Nov. 1 when two witnesses failed to appear for a hearing. The judge in the case had no choice, nor could the prosecutors move to intervene. This was up to the witnesses who, for reasons known only to ...
OUR VIEW: Democracy shines while Trump and transparency tumble
The Supreme Court of Virginia has done the commonwealth’s citizens a favor. Recently, two court rulings made public access to court hearings and government employee information easier to obtain.
The much-anticipated red wave didn’t materialize, but it’s still too early to know which party will control Congress after Tuesday’s midterm elections. Will election deniers overturn results in key battlegrounds? Will Biden be impeached? Stay tuned.
In an election season marked by wide ideological divisions but narrow margins of victory, we think Virginians and all Americans can profit from understanding how reliable the U.S. election system is. Even the most contentious disputes can be settled, so long as losers trust the system and accept evidence of their defeat.
The debate over the Biden administration’s college loan relief plan has obscured a broader and more important issue: Why has college education become so expensive to begin with? It’s a complicated question that has many answers, but it’s one that anyone interested in real college-debt reform should be asking.
Recent social media posts by a conservative political commentator raging about being “wedged between two obese people” on a three-hour flight from New York to Dallas were tasteless. But she wasn’t wrong, or alone, in complaining about a lack of personal space on U.S. airplanes these days. More than 25,000 Americans have responded to the Federal Aviation Administration’s request for comment to ...
We may be entering a new chapter in the gamification of American politics: election betting. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) recently considered whether to allow a company called Kalshi Inc. to open the first U.S.-based election betting market, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal. Election betting is a sticky business. It opens all manner of ethical questions, ...
Various prominent U.S. corporations, including Walmart and Intel, might be shying away from principled stances condemning foreign uses of slavery and child labor for the production of cheap consumer goods. An importation rule change proposes to eliminate declarations on imported goods that offer insights into where goods come from and whether abusive labor practices were at play. The net effect would be to help countries of origin hide their abuses from their American customers.
Though the oral arguments were contentious, lawyers on both sides of the debate over race-conscious admissions at the University of North Carolina and Harvard and their respective allies on the Supreme Court agreed on something significant Monday: There ought to be a very high bar for allowing colleges to continue to use race as a factor in comprising their classes, and race-neutral admissions ...
Finding reliable, affordable child care was tough for most parents before the pandemic hit. Now the pandemic has made things worse — so much worse that the crisis needs the urgent attention of businesses, government and society as a whole. Well before COVID hit, it was apparent that child care had not evolved to match changes in the economy and in American families. The days when most mothers ...
Few Americans remember when polio-stricken children relied on seven-foot-long iron cylinders to breathe. At its peak in early 1950s, polio caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis a year and over 3,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. In the decades that followed, a massive vaccination campaign nearly eradicated the disease from the globe. Now, a perfect storm of factors has made polio a threat ...
The Congressional Progressive Caucus last week issued, then quickly withdrew, a poorly timed letter to President Joe Biden urging stepped-up efforts to negotiate settlement to the war in Ukraine, putting their fellow Democrats in the awkward position of appearing hand-wringing and indecisive ahead of midterm elections. The letter’s wording raises the question of whose side the progressives are really on: Russia’s or the West’s?
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Need gift ideas to help with the ladies in your life? This list will surely help you make the grade.
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Content by Jennette’s Pier, North Carolina Aquariums. If you’ve never been or if you want to return for a jaunt, here are the top five reasons why you should check out Jennette’s Pier.
Here are 10 great gift ideas that are sure to please everyone on your list.
As the November election looms, Democrats are in desperation mode, particularly as inflation and high gasoline prices dog voters as they cast their ballots. The president’s response has been to deny reality. On Monday, the White House put out a release hailing a slight drop in prices at the pump over the past few weeks. “Gas prices have declined by an average of $1.22 per gallon nationwide ...
Our Saturday editorial briefs analyze items you might have missed in the past week’s news.
The new National Assessment of Education Progress report exposed a disaster in Virginia’s K-12 public school system. The state’s fourth graders suffered the worst decline in math and reading scores in the country. No amount of lipstick can make over this pig of a performance. Citizens, especially parents, need an explanation from school administrators about why the catastrophe happened. For the sake of our children, what the public can no longer accept are excuses.
Immigration is an issue fraught with multiple points of disagreement and one point where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle tend to agree: Unauthorized immigrants brought here as children, who have essentially grown up as Americans, shouldn’t have to live under constant risk of deportation to countries they may not even remember. Yet despite that agreement across the political spectrum, ...
For U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Joint Consolidation Loan Separation Act (JCLSA) started in 2017 with a story from a constituent. A teacher from Northern Virginia named Sara contacted Warner’s office to describe her struggle as a single mother trying to raise two children while paying off a student loan she had consolidated with her ex-husband.
President Joe Biden’s recent mass pardon for people convicted of non-violent marijuana offenses has the support of almost two-thirds of Americans, according to new polling. That may explain why even Republicans in Congress, who are reflexively critical of virtually anything Biden says or does, have been mostly silent in response to his historic move. Which makes this the right time to finish the reform by removing marijuana from the federal list of Schedule 1 drugs where, contrary to all reason, it sits alongside more dangerous drugs stuff like heroin, LSD and ecstasy.
Short-lived governments are routine in some democracies, with uncertainty the norm and predictability ever elusive. Yet never in London, where hundreds of years of steady parliamentary rule set a standard for the world going back to the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, three centuries ago. His two decades were a picture of stability. Not now, as His Majesty’s government is in chaos, with ...
The teacher crisis is real, and we’re not going to work our way out of it simply by making it easier to hire teachers.