Hello all, and Happy Halloween.

It’s my favorite mainstream pagan holiday, but this year’s revelry will be hard to lose ourselves in, given the proximity to Election Day. Yes, come Tuesday we’ll be longing for the catharsis of Zombie Prom. Not to pollute the one holiday’s innocence with the other’s filth, but I will say it makes me feel downright libertarian when I see that every Hampton Roads city has regulated that children’s trick-or-treating must end by 8 PM.

I’ll postpone the hostilities by starting with a Halloween headline:

10th Annual Masquerade in Ghent

Today we have the 10th Annual Masquerade in Ghent Halloween Block Party and Costume Contest beginning at 5 PM at the corner of 20th and Manteo Streets. Word is that Bike Norfolk will be offering free bike valet parking in the Nancy Chandler Parking lot. No need to bring a chain or lock: they’ll keep your bike safe.

Bad grammar: the new casual speech

Now for the hostilities. The Pilot ran an 0p-ed Sunday full of hateful language by guest columnist Mike Cohen, whose bio line calls him “a manager for a government contractor.” Cohen says in his column that “it’s a mystery to me why cultures that have been in this country for centuries – before it even was a country – insist on perpetuating crude dialects and expect the academic community to lower its standards rather than raising their own.”

It’s not hard to guess which cultures Cohen means. He states himself earlier in this piece of sinister belligerence that “It doesn’t matter whether you call it ebonics, Appalachian, casual speech or some other euphemism – it won’t change the impression you make on those around you.” Cohen hardly reveals himself as an expert on knowing what impression he’s making on those around him, though, and he similarly fails to express with clarity why he’s so angry about this subject at this moment. His only hint is that the Pilot wrote earlier this month about efforts by South Hampton Roads teachers to let “informal speech … be acknowledged while at the same time emphasizing the importance of mastering standard English.”

Speech and writing are completely different entities, as Cohen fails to acknowledge in his ideological screed. Linguists are in agreement about this the same way scientists are in agreement about climate change and evolution. And as is the case with climate change and evolution, there are ideological warriors who hate the idea that African-American dialects have any legitimacy.

In that Pilot article that Cohen criticizes, which chronicles local educators’ overdue recognition that non-standard spoken dialects are legitimate, my ODU colleague Dr. Bridget Anderson explains that “All dialects are equal linguistically. They all have a grammatical system. They all have a sound system. They all have a lexical system.” Again, this is not controversial in the slightest among people who make a career of studying linguistics.

If you go and read Mike Cohen’s op-ed, you won’t realize at first that it’s grounded in hatred of a feared and unknown other. That’s because he cloaks his argument in generic concern for the future economic success of today’s students. It’s an insidious bait-and-switch: one minute he’s telling us that he could lose his company millions of dollars if he weren’t such an ingenious communicator, and the next he’s equating the use of “crude dialects” with “act[ing] illiterate.”

I support a robust and dynamic Pilot op-ed page with a free exchange of ideas. It seems to me, though, that the editors of that page should make sure their authors are making logical sense of the subjects they’re writing about. Cohen fails ever to acknowledge that speech and writing are distinct and different systems. He, like everyone else, speaks differently than he writes. Perhaps he’s too blinded by his ideology to realize as much. But an editor should have done so.

State accepts plan to expand HRBT

It’s been three weeks since I’ve ranted about public transit, and I can’t hold it in any longer. VDOT has accepted a private plan by Hampton Roads Crossings to build a second Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel that would double the size of the current crossing and be funded by a toll as high as $6. The acceptance of this plan means other proposals can be submitted for the next 120 days.

Unless the Pilot article is omitting major aspects of the Hampton Roads Crossings plan, there’s no room in it for light rail to extend eventually to the Peninsula. There’s no consideration whatsoever of a rail line that could cross parallel to the new road. There’s nothing on the table about congestion pricing or a tiered pricing system based on vehicle occupancy. Nothing, of course, about any potential bike lane. In other words there’s no innovative thinking in this plan whatsoever: nothing that would distinguish it from a plan that might have been submitted in 1970. Nothing, that is, except the $4 billion price tag.

Perhaps most ludicrous of all is this bit of information: “HRBT construction would begin in 2014 and end in 2018.”

We need a new crossing to the peninsula, but this plan is typically unambitious and regressive. The City of Norfolk opposes it, perhaps for the wrong reasons. According to the article, “Norfolk stands behind building … a bridge and tunnel that would head west from the port terminals and naval station in Norfolk, connect to Craney Island in Portsmouth, then cross to the Peninsula at the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel.” Unless I lack access to information not covered here, I can’t see how that’s substantially different than the Hampton Roads Crossings plan.

Virginia gets $45M federal grant for high-speed rail

The Pilot reported this week that Senators Jim Webb and Mark Warner have announced a grant from the Federal Railroad Administration that will “start developing high-speed passenger rail service between Richmond and Washington.” Sounds great, except for one thing: the project “ultimately would provide train service that would take passengers between the two metropolitan areas in about 90 minutes.”

This is more promising than the Hampton Roads Crossings plan described above, but it still doesn’t come anywhere close to being high-speed rail. I’m thrilled for any improvements whatsoever to Virginia passenger rail. But the use of “high-speed rail” to denote utterly unambitious projects like this one is helping to turn people against the whole idea of high-speed rail. Let’s call it what it is: medium-speed rail.

I happen to have ridden on a few high-speed trains: between Madrid and Seville, between Paris and Marseille, between Paris and Amsterdam. They go so fast that it’s hard to see the scenery outside. It makes you dizzy to try to focus when you look out the window. Walking down the aisle can feel a bit like being in a high-gravity machine. I’ve also ridden on Amtrak in Virginia, which feels nothing at all like being in a high-gravity machine.

Right now our train service in Virginia is what you could call low-speed rail. Occasionally the trains speed up to a velocity that you could call fair-to-middling-speed rail. What Webb and Warner’s grant portends is a rail network that, for the first time in Virginia history, reaches not high speed but rather medium speed.

Like I said, I’m glad we’ll have medium-speed rail between Richmond and Washington DC in the future. I’m downright ecstatic that medium-speed rail will start running in three years between Norfolk and Richmond. By 2013 we’ll be able to travel by rail from downtown Norfolk to the nation’s capital at medium or near-medium speeds.

I’m not just being pedantic. I have a theory that Norfolk and Virginia and the whole country would support high-speed rail if more people knew its real possibilities. High-speed rail means traveling from Norfolk to DC in one hour and Norfolk to New York in two. That’s what the Japanese and Chinese and French get to do between similar distances. In those countries, if powerful politicians proudly trumpeted a project that created train service to carry passengers 100 miles in 90 minutes, and called it “high-speed rail” to boot, they’d be laughed out of office.

So if senators who announce grants from the Federal Railroad Administration persist with this misnomer, let’s at least call them on it in the press. Oh, and this seems like a good time to mention, courtesy of Virginia Young Democrats, that “China and India spend 9% and 5%, respectively, of their GDP on transportation infrastructure, while the United States only spends .93%.”

Times-Dispatch launches website to factcheck politicians

Virginia politicians are quaking in their boots after today’s announcement in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that “Beginning today, Virginia’s politicians will have to face the Truth-O-Meter.” No word on what the Truth-O-Meter is replacing, and also no word on whether systems already put in place by politicians will face the Truth-O-Meter. I’m thinking now of the incredibly regressive voting policies in Virginia. As the Pilot reports, the deadline to vote absentee by mail is today. Virginia makes early voting absurdly hard. If Virginia wanted more people to vote, the state would hold early voting for everyone, but the state’s goal is to keep us saddled with regressive voting policies.

McDonnell orders review of textbook screening process

Kudos to the governor for stating unequivocally that he “[doesn’t] want to have any historical inaccuracies taught for any reason in our schools.” When you-know-who assumes the reins in 2013, he won’t be so willing to listen to reason.

Cuccinelli blasts Clark, endorses Hurt in VA-05

In a fundraising letter Ken Cuccinelli says, “No wonder President Obama has called Perriello his ‘favorite Congressman!’” I’m surely breaking some journalistic rule by even bringing up such a workaday, average statement from Cuccinelli, but I want only to point out that the president never said any such thing and that it would be nice if local media would call him on this sort of blatant lie.

Direct mail watch: Nancy Pelosi has Boucher “in the palm of her hand”

House Speaker Pelosi is an evil witch who maneuvers Congressmen against their will into submitting to her whims. To escape her, we should vote Republican so that John Boehner can lead a caucus of independents who will always vote their conscience and never operate in party lockstep.

Okay, that’s all for today. Mike Cohen, if you’re reading, please check my words against your manual of standard orthography and let me know how well they align. Everyone else, please help me think of a Halloween costume. I thank you in advance.

Editor’s Note: A previous update on this piece mislabeled Cohen’s essay as an editorial. We apologize for the mistake.