Waterside’s future to be decided with public input

I was starting to think Norfolk would never ask me what should be done with Waterside. For starters, I’d like a Whole Foods Market, a Bikram yoga studio, and a 100-foot indoor climbing wall. I’m tired of driving to Richmond every day for Bikram class and the Whole Foods salad bar, and my gym’s climbing wall is only 20 feet high. A maglev station that connects to the maglev spur at ODU would also be nice.

General Assembly: Where it stands at the halfway point

Here’s some of what Virginians are probably looking forward to: Guns in bars, offshore drilling, more capital punishment, delayed regulations on stormwater pollution, reduced benefits for state workers, increased retirement age, required ultrasounds before abortions. Here’s some of what’s been killed: Privatization of ABC stores, banning of cell phones while driving, an easing of restrictions on medical marijuana, background checks on purchasers of guns at gun shows, a $2 HRBT toll, a charge of five cents for plastic and paper bags at retail stores.

McDonnell’s cuts: Answer to crisis or framework for future?

Governor McDonnell is proposing to cut $2.2 billion from his budget, in ways that will make you cry if you possess tear ducts and empathy. Divide $2.2 billion by Virginia’s population and you get $257. Divide that by the number of days in a year and you get 70 cents. Read this article and ask yourself if you wouldn’t pay 70 cents a day in taxes so none of these things would be cut. (Remember that even just the defeated five-cent tax on grocery bags would reduce the 70 cents a day by a significant fraction. Remember too that if you aren’t obscenely rich, you would pay much less than 70 cents, because despite the Great Recession there are still a few billionaires around to pick up the slack.)

Beach’s False Cape on list of possible state park closures.

Closing False Cape along with four other parks could save Virginia a whopping $500,000. Let’s assume each of those five parks costs $100,000 to maintain. That’s 0.00004% of the budget shortfall made up by denying us access to one of the last stretches of undeveloped Atlantic beach. It’s also 0.00007% (i.e. not enough to bend over and pick up off the sidewalk) of the net worth of the richest citizen of Hampton Roads, Winnie Johnson-Marquart (this according to Forbes Magazine), who at $2.2 billion is tied with her siblings and mother as the 215th-richest person on earth. That’s a small enough fraction of her net worth that calculators abbreviate the number seven times ten to the negative fifth power. (Incidentally, the four Virginians who appeared on the last Forbes list searchable by state were worth a total $23.7 billion in 2005. One-eleventh of that amount would solve our problem. Please, someone write a comment telling me I’m fundamentally misunderstanding basic economic principles.) Winnie, if you’re still reading, please consider making a matching donation: I’ll give False Cape 0.00007% of my net worth if you’ll do the same. (Actually, as long as I have your attention, can I have a grant?)

Meet Virginia’s 13 millionaire lawmakers

Senator Jeff McWaters, a freshman Republican from Virginia Beach, has a personal wealth of at least $25 million. It’s not exactly $2.2 billion (as RNC chair Michael Steele recently pointed out, “Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money”), but it probably keeps the senator out of coach class. The Pilot doesn’t reveal the nature of McWaters’s wealth, but it does tell us that two other Republican millionaire legislators, Bob Purkey and Frank Wagner (both of South Hampton Roads), own at least $250,000 in “companies that lobby the legislature: Bank of America in Purkey’s case and Dominion Virginia Power in Wagner’s.” The wording of the headline leads one to hope a meet-and-greet has been scheduled with these fellows, but there’s nothing about it in the text of the article.

Windsor man gets suspended time for buying wild rabbits

Douglas M. Arnette Jr., 45, was arrested Thursday by an undercover game agent for buying eight wild rabbits. This seems to have happened in two different transactions: “Arnette purchased eight of the animals—three one time and five the next, [an] agent said.” So after the first illegal exchange, the undercover agents didn’t yet feel confident enough about their case against Arnette and decided to set him up again, just to make sure? I have two things to say here. The first, addressed to Governor McDonnell, is that if state money pays for these sting operations, I can think of some dollars to cut from your budget. The second goes out to my wild rabbit dealer: if I ever find out you’re a cop, watch your back.

Norfolk sheriff says he’ll stop booking prisoners

Maybe I’m not so worried about my wild rabbit stash after all.

Man angry at IRS crashes plane into building

Yesterday a man took off from a regional airport near Austin, Texas, and flew his Piper Cherokee into a government building in a suicide attack. Over 200 people work in that building. Two bodies have been found; others have burns and broken bones. The now-dead pilot, Joseph Stack, left lots of anti-government screeds lying around at his house and online. Some anti-Obama folks have launched a Facebook page to pay homage to Stack, because I guess that’s what we do now when folks fly planes into buildings. The newly-elected junior senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, suggested that the pilot had maybe possessed some of the same anti-incumbent spirit that got him, Senator Brown, elected: “I don’t know if it’s related,” he told Fox News, “but you can just sense not only in my election and being here in Washington, people are frustrated.”

We try to focus on Hampton Roads stories here at AltDaily, but I must comment on this. When Facebook took the adulatory pro-Stack page down last night, a new one was immediately put up in its place. Facebook took that one down too. Kudos to them. Here are some representative comments. “Mr. Stack is a true American hero.” “So we should just sit there and take what Uncle Sam gives us in the ass? Joe Stack had the balls to make a point.” (Remember in 2001 when Bill Maher was forced off the air simply for making the pedantic argument that terrorists aren’t cowards?) “This poor man was hunted to insanity. I pray for his family.” “In death we are all Joseph Stack.”

Last week in this space, when I made fun of comment pages, I was doing just that: having a bit of fun. This is more serious. It may be shooting fish in a barrel to find some ultra-crazy comments on a blog and call them out for their craziness, but the page I refer to was created expressly for the purpose of honoring the deeds and “sacrifice” of Joseph Stack. I promise you the comments I quote are the entirely representative words of people who spend much of their lives excoriating President Obama for such failures as not keeping us safe from terrorists.

Another reason to remark on this is that I lived in Austin for five years, and it takes only a photograph of Austin in the news to make me weepily homesick. (A live oak tree is visible in one of the pictures of the damaged building. Some live oaks at Waterside would be nice, maybe to shade the outdoor café tables at Whole Foods.) Having lived in Austin causes me to expect more than I should out of other places. There are maybe three dozen independent coffeeshops in Austin. I’ve been accused of fetishizing independent coffeeshops (guilty as charged), but what is the deal with the complete dearth of them here in Hampton Roads? Were they done away with during some previous budget shortfall? In Norfolk there’s Fair Grounds, which is wonderful but which has only six tables, and Borjo, which is also nice but could use some wear and tear (its atmosphere will probably be evocatively shabby by about 2050), and that’s it. There are two or three others with virtually no place to sit, and then there are chains. Is there something I’m missing?

Savage Love

Maybe if we all write in and request it, the Pilot will start printing Savage Love.