Our region seems plagued by embarrassments, and now a hurricane too?

Oh Earl, must you?

I really don’t want to be hit by a cat4 hurricane, so Earl, please stay out to sea. My rickety old house is just gonna fall apart if you ride through town! Seriously, Earl, just go back to Bermuda.

For the rest of you, if you want better maps than the Pilot provides, check out www.stormpulse.com. And if the city says hit the road, please go. Norfolk’s been embarrassed enough lately–we don’t need a lot of TV footage of rooftop rescues to make us look any dumber to the rest of the country.

Cleaning up the mess

Speaking of our embarrassments, the City of Virginia Beach is still floundering around, trying to recover from the shame of one of its employees running over a man with a garbage truck in June. The lawyer for Michael Knockett’s family played the Pilot a recording of the driver’s call to 911, where she said, “I was picking up trash, and I think I might’ve run someone over.” The city continues to claim “sovereign immunity” on the grounds that the driver, Heather Boyd, was performing routine work for the City at the time of Knockett’s death. They may have a sound legal basis for this claim, but they still have to deal with the problem that this woman killed a man and is getting away with it scott-free. Knockett’s lawyer is challenging the immunity claim, and if he has anything to say about it, the incident could cost the City as much as $25 million.

No muss, no fuss

Back in Norfolk, Pilot reporter Harry Minium has been waging war against our Commissioner of the Revenue, Sharon McDonald, on the grounds that she’s been abusing her City-issued credit cards, hiring her daughters, and other improprieties. A City auditor has just concluded, however, that McDonald did not violate any laws or commit wrongdoing when she paid for her lobbying trips with the city credit card. Even so, there are some excessive sounding charges on there, such as a $450 tip for a 60-day hotel stay.

I suppose coverage like this falls under the categories of “holding the City’s feet to the fire” and keeping a close eye on those who are authorized to spend the taxpayers’ money. Harry Minium seems to be doing a good job in both those categories in this continuing coverage of McDonald’s excesses, but the Pilot‘s treatment of this story feels overblown to me. Does it really merit top-of-the-front-page coverage, again and again? Is this the worst thing happening in Norfolk? I wonder.

The end of another mess

On the brighter side, the list of our embarrassments may have gotten shorter by one this week, as a judge set aside Ken Cuccinelli’s demand for climate scientist Michael Mann’s research records from the University of Virginia. According to Circuit Judge Paul Peatross Jr., the AG “failed to justify his demand for the records because he did not demonstrate how he has ‘reason to believe’ that Michael Mann might have committed fraud as part of climate-change research he did as an assistant professor” at UVA. Cuccinelli, who has determined for himself that Michael Mann deliberately misrepresented climate data as part of the vast green conspiracy to kill God and impose socialism on the USA, failed to state exactly what it is that Mann did that violated the law.

Cuccinelli is not done yet, of course. His anti-global-warming bias is too strong to let this case rest for long. He’s planning to regroup and resubmit his demand, academic freedom be damned.

If our own John McManus is looking for a protagonist for Ken Cuccinelli, The Musical, I’d recommend Michael Mann.

Science marches on

To be fair, climate scientists aren’t entirely without reproach. In fact, they are busily reproaching themselves at the moment. Yesterday, an independent review of the U.N. climate panel, the IPCC, recommended a number of reforms and changes to tighten up procedures and management at the panel. A number of errors in recent IPCC reports have threatened to undermine the panel’s credibility. It is important to note, however, that even with these admissions of error, the overall findings of the panel are regarded as sound. The key quote: “Several outside reports–including those by the British, Dutch and American governments–have supported the chief scientific finding of the climate panel: that global warming is man-made and incontrovertable.”

Dougherty loves suburbia, sneers at cities

In her column today (which you can’t read online), Kerry Dougherty reminds us that cities are rats’ nests of crime, stress, pollution, and inconvenience; that vertical buildings are human ant colonies; and that cars are fun. I’m driven to remind her of a few things too: suburbs are wasteful voids of cultureless sprawl; chain restaurants are boring and bad; driving everywhere makes you fat; mowing is not fun; cities attract young professionals; the per capita pollution of a city-dweller is significantly lower than that of a suburban sprawler; and driving, more often than not, means sitting in a long, slow-moving line of traffic. Those are just a few of the good reasons to push for “new urbanism” in Virginia Beach. But please, stay in the suburbs if you prefer to drive everywhere, watch TV for fun, and eat at Applebee’s.

Grandy Village Learning Center rises by the river

I’ll end with this one today, because I think it’s cool. Grandy Village, a public housing complex near the Elizabeth River in Norfolk, has just opened a new community learning center. The center will be the home for pre-kindergarten and day-care classes, and will host nature field trips from elementary schools throughout Norfolk. I completely agree with Rusty Carlock, the senior architect of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing authority, who said, “you shouldn’t have to live in an expensive neighborhood to have this type of amenity for your children.” Follow the link for some photos of this wonderful new building. This is a win for Norfolk’s kids. Well done.