Norfolk officer charged with DUI after Beach wreck

Woman’s lawsuit says Norfolk officer raped her

Student charged in shooting death at Elizabeth City university

Extortion allegations mount against retired Norfolk detective

Portsmouth sheriff defamed nurse, jury says

The Pilot online has run five stories in the last 24 hours that report on local police officers and police detectives who have allegedly broken laws. The offences include murder, rape, defamation, embezzlement, and drunk driving. Maybe this is a bizarre coincidence, but it doesn’t inspire much confidence in local law enforcement. In lines of work that invest employees with even a modicum of power, criminality and corruption probably exist everywhere. But these five stories in one day suggest a level that is endemic.

If we can’t trust the police to protect us, a basic compact of democratic government has failed. Surely there will be statements forthcoming from agencies involved in these allegations, to the effect of an assurance that we’re not living in a two-tiered justice system in which the powerless are subject to laws the powerful can ignore.

Teen bicyclist hit by car and killed in Va. Beach

A teen bicyclist was killed yesterday at the corner of Bonney and Rosemont Roads. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, and the Pilot reports that the driver of the car that struck him seems to have had the right of way. Still, this tragic case provides an opportunity to argue yet again for bicycle lanes everywhere.

It’s a little-known fact that roads in North America were first paved not for automobiles but for cyclists, as a result of lobbying and advocacy by the League of American Wheelmen. According to the site Inventing Green, “The explosive popularity of the human-powered, two-wheeled vehicle sparked road construction across the Western world’s cities. The League of American Wheelmen was a major vector for the political will necessary to build better roads with more than one million members (out of a mere 75 million people) at its peak. … The group was a potent, progressive social force that inadvertently helped bring about its own end by getting roads paved, thus making long distance ‘touring’ possible in automobiles.”

Can anyone think of a logical reason why we shouldn’t have twenty times more bike lanes than we currently have, in this region where the terrain is perfectly flat yet cycling is dangerous on most roads?

Light rail gets moving, burden to keep moving may fall to taxpayers

This WVEC report notes that “Everyone in [Norfolk] will likely fund the [light-rail] system’s operating costs.” Everyone funds roads, sidewalks, the airport, and the patrolling of our waterways. So why is this news, and why should it be considered news? Later WVEC notes redundantly that “although not everyone uses [light rail], everyone in some way pays for it.” Again, while that’s technically correct, it’s hard to think of a government service of which the same isn’t true.

Yesterday Jay covered the pronouncements of ODU economist and former university president James Koch, who thinks the Hampton Roads economy will be slow to recover and that light rail costs too much and provides too little. I would add that the Pilot article doesn’t challenge Koch’s idea that light rail will never grow beyond a single seven-mile line. Perhaps it won’t. But that doesn’t mean there’s any intelligent city planner around who thinks it shouldn’t.

Virginia Beach has secured the Norfolk-Southern corridor to the Oceanfront. If it uses that line for light rail, folks will start seeing the wisdom of extending the Tide north to ODU and the Naval Base, or even along the new toll-based HRBT that sounds like it will be built parallel to the old one. The interstate highway system in Hampton Roads was once the equivalent of the Tide’s seven-mile EVMS-to-Newtown-Road line. That is, it was a few miles long. It grew beyond that not because its growth was inevitable but because there was a widely shared opinion that it would continue growing, and because it was well funded by multiple levels of government.

Also, I would echo Jay’s sentiment about our local economy’s reliance on warfare. For the continued economic success of the region to depend on a foreign war that’s lasted nine years and is likely doomed to failure is a disgusting position to be in. I’m not disagreeing with what Koch deems economic realities, but it seems that, economically speaking, going to war is a lot like taking up a hard-drug habit.

Governor McDonnell accepts funding from the Affordable Care Act

This link will take you to a press release from Governor McDonnell bragging about the Affordable Care Act. What’s noteworthy about it is that it never once acknowledges the existence of the Affordable Care Act.

Bedbugs stage comeback in U.S.

The Times-Dispatch has a feature story today on bedbugs. This may suggest that Virginia will be riddled soon with bedbugs. Or maybe it suggests only that the city Richmond will soon be riddled with bedbugs. In related matters, the Tea Party Convention is in Richmond this weekend. Organizers predict as many as 2,000 attendees. Is that a lot?

2nd District candidates campaign at Eastern Shore festival

The three candidates for Glenn Nye’s House seat (Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District) will debate Saturday at the aforementioned Tea Party Convention. The three also appeared this week in Cape Charles, the lovely town on the Eastern Shore where I lived for several months in 2009. Rarely is there a chance to mention Cape Charles in this space, perhaps because much of the charm of Cape Charles is that very little that happens there is newsworthy.

The link above will take you to a WVEC video in which Nye, Scott Rigell, and Kenny Golden are interviewed in Cape Charles by a WVEC reporter. I wish I could attack the three candidates for their almost identically vacuous statements about how the Eastern Shore is a really important part of their really important district, but perhaps the reporter is to blame for asking leading or vacuous questions. Anyway, the race remains close, with no candidate getting more than 50% of the vote. And on Wednesday Nye received the endorsement of the National Rifle Association.

Virginia Public Access Project

Now’s as good a time as any to provide a link to the Virginia Public Access Project, where you can see how much money each person and organization in Virginia has donated to each candidate for office. You can search by name, locality, donation size, recipient, party committee, and other categories, and see whom the politicians running for office have donated to, and so on.

Virginia voter registration deadline

Registration deadline for Virginia elections is Tuesday, October 12.

Gingrich brands Democrats ‘Party of food stamps’

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has called Democrats “the party of food stamps.” He hopes Democrats will run screaming from this taunt. I’m sure he’s right, given that Democrats have hidden from nearly all the accomplishments of the 111th Congress. A recent poll showed that “Only one third of Democrats think this Congress has achieved more than other recent Congresses. Meanwhile, 60 percent of Dems think it has accomplished the same or less.”

As Matt Yglesias of Think Progress pointed out yesterday, “Among other things, this Congress passed a comprehensive overhaul of student loans. It also mandated calorie labeling on chain restaurant menus nationwide. It created a pool of community transformation grants to help municipalities reconfigure their infrastructure in a more public health-friendly way. In fact, those things were all in a single bill. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, an act whose major changes are in totally different areas.”

Voters appreciate representatives who stand up for what they believe in. For instance, if Democrats believe food stamps are a worthwhile way to keep poor people from going hungry, they should stand up to the petty threats of media shills. Here’s betting they won’t.

George Allen preps for 2012 Senate bid

According to the Pilot, the former senator “has even launched a Facebook page.”

Farewell to Wall Street

The 2008 bank bailout is widely loathed by people I typically agree with and people I never agree with. But consider this quote from a Guardian economy article: “[Treasury Secretary] Paulson suggested that a failure of the financial system had been ‘mere hours’ away when, on the evening of 16 September 2008, the US government wrote a cheque for $85bn to stop the insurer AIG from going bust. … If the government hadn’t helped AIG to cough up, those banks could have been threatened – leading to a ‘complete collapse’ of finance, with unemployment rocketing as high as 25%.”

It’s hard to imagine what 25% unemployment in America would look like, but it would undoubtedly create a complete collapse of finance. Whether or not Paulson’s assessment is correct is disputable. Still, anger about the bailout is rarely accompanied by acknowledgment of what the alternative might have been.

National Coming Out Day to take place next week in midst of bullying-related suicides

Monday 11 October is an important holiday, and I don’t mean Columbus Day. It’s National Coming Out Day. If all gay people came out, there’d be no more battles for gay rights; equal rights would simply be a given. Study after study suggests somewhere between 5% and 8% of the population is gay. That makes for about 500 million worldwide, and over 100,000 here in Hampton Roads, where it seems to me a considerably higher percentage of gays are living in the closet than is average for such a large metropolitan area.

33rd annual literary festival

Today at ODU it’s the last day of a wonderful week-long literary festival. Ted Conover, Natalie Diaz, Sarah McCoy, and Dennis Lehane are all reading. Go hear them!