McDonell proposes $4 billion for road projects in Virginia

“Virginia will apply about $4 billion in borrowed money over the next three years to address the state’s staggering backlog of highway construction projects, Gov. Bob McDonnell said Thursday,” reports the Pilot.

Webb says Obama should not listen to “dwindling” liberal base on taxes

Virginia Senator Webb tells Obama to ignore the “dwindling” segment of the “liberal base”—aka 53% of the country—that opposes extending the Bush tax cuts to the few wealthiest Americans. I can’t find evidence that the 53% used to be higher, but presumably it did and now it’s dwindled. In other words, save the date for George Allen’s victory party.

Allen attacks Webb

The above is not to say I would welcome the return of “Macaca,” who today lambasted labor unions in a statement that defies logical parsing. “Virginia has long placed the safety of citizens ahead of the interests of Big Labor by preventing the forced unionization of public safety workers,” said Allen. Virginia has indeed long been hostile to workers’ safety, which could be what he meant.

Cuccinelli: End justice oversight

Ken Cuccinelli thinks “a provision in the Voting Rights Act that has required the commonwealth and other Southern states to submit their [redistricting] plans to the Department of Justice” has come to the end of its usefulness.

VPAP Lobbyist Disclosure Reports

VPAP has released its Lobbyist Disclosure Reports. If you think I’m being sarcastic when I say I’m thrilled to read them, you’ll doubt that I sat glued to the Iran-Contra hearings when I was nine.

Third crossing wins the most recent transportation battle

Someone or other has named the Third Crossing its top recommended interstate project. This road would “cross the Elizabeth River near Norfolk Naval Station and connect with Craney Island and the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel.”

Va. gasoline prices hit highest mark in 2-plus years

The Times-Dispatch quotes a AAA spokesperson as saying that “Consumers have an intuitive disdain for $3.00 per gallon gasoline.”

Tipsy drivers can get free ride from AAA

Speaking of which, AAA Tidewater Virginia is offering a free tow and ride home to anyone too drunk to drive. According to the Pilot, “motorists, bartenders, restaurant managers, party hosts or passengers of a drinking driver can call (757) 631-1700 and request a free Tow To Go.”

Framed for murder?

When I wrote recently in this space about the execution of Teresa Lewis, a few dissenting commenters cheered her death. While I was obviously not arguing Lewis’s innocence—her guilt was not in question—I strongly opposed Virginia’s killing her. Nicholas Kristof’s latest Times column illustrates one of many reasons why.

It tells us (or reminds us) about Kevin Cooper, a man soon to be executed in California. If you haven’t heard this story, you’ve heard some other iteration of it, because Cooper is black and the victims were white and he almost certainly didn’t kill them. Or I could leave out the almost, because I’ve been reading the “extraordinary judicial opinion” (Kristof’s words) that Judge William Fletcher wrote in dissenting from the court’s refusal to rehear Cooper’s case.

It’s 114 pages long. To read it and then still trust in the justice and efficacy of the death penalty would be depraved. In case you’re thinking, “Who would read a 114-page legal opinion?” this one isn’t dry; it could serve as a writing-class text to demonstrate the shape of lucid, clear nonfiction. In fact its argument has been so convincing that four other circuit judges have signed onto it.

The reason this qualifies as local news is that Virginia kills people: more people, in fact, than any other state. Sure, Texas is momentarily ahead of us in the annual count, but we’re playing the long game. According to Wikipedia, we’ve carried out 1,384 executions. In 1951 we killed five in a day! (All were black, naturally.) The pace may have slowed since then, but we’re still at it.

Does anyone believe none of those 1,384 were innocent? Earl Washington, Jr., spent nine years on Virginia’s death row before DNA evidence exonerated him. Yet prosecutors nationwide have resisted calls for post-conviction DNA testing, “even where such testing would clearly prove either a defendant’s innocence or guilt.”

Those who gleefully cheer on executions in public forums (I’m looking at you, Archie Whitehill) would do well to read Kristof’s column.

Watch the Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies live on NobelPrize.org

Every year I get to celebrate my birthday by watching the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony live from Stockholm. The day I turned thirty, I watched Al Gore’s address; the day I turned twenty-five, the laureate was the only American president in my lifetime for whom I have real admiration.

This year’s laureate, Liu Xiaobo, won’t be speaking; he’s in prison. According to his citation, he’s being honored in absentia “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” Also not in attendance are delegations from 19 countries which might have attended if they weren’t bowing to pressure from the Beijing government.

Assange. (Pic | Martina Haris)

Expressing disdain for Beijing’s attitude toward free speech (among other freedoms) is hard for Americans when our own politicians are calling for Julian Assange to be killed. To those of us who feel responsible for the actions of our democracy, the party-line attitude toward Liu can seem hypocritical. Then again, if a recent press release from the U.S. State Department is to be believed, hypocritical is how our government hopes we’ll feel.

To wit: in announcing “World Press Freedom Day,” State notes that “New media has empowered citizens around the world to … exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information.”

Click the link to confirm that I’m not making this shit up.

I won’t be surprised if Assange, who has done considerably more to promote peace than certain recent Nobel peace laureates, wins the Nobel prize himself one day. If on some future December tenth he is honored in Stockholm—probably in absentia, since he’ll probably be in prison—it will be interesting to see how much pressure Washington puts on foreign governments to boycott.

This is not to conflate two fundamentally different activists. Liu and Assange are not the same, and I’m not trying say that they are. But they’re each loathed by one of the world’s two most powerful governments for similar reasons. China believes Liu has “incit[ed] subversion of state power,” and the American neocons who set Pentagon policy believe Assange “is aiding and abetting terrorists in their war against America.”

I can’t claim this is local news, but it’s my birthday and I get to talk about what I want: Wikileaks. Or, rather, I get to direct your attention to others who have been talking about Wikileaks more persuasively than I can. This Atlantic piece by David Samuels is the best explanation I’ve seen of the true value of that site—or at least the best explanation outside of every entry on Glenn Greenwald’s blog lately.

Greenwald has been on fire not only indicting our government for its attitude toward Assange but also the media for its capitulation to the government’s talking points. Read his recent posts and you’ll be convinced that investigative journalism in the US isn’t just dying; it’s dead. If that’s not true, show me one newspaper that, like Greenwald, has listed the many ways Wikileaks has been furthering the cause of peace in the last four years.

He systematically shows how and why virtually every statement about Wikileaks by any member of the administration or the establishment media is a lie, or a misstatement based on an understanding informed by a lie. I could provide link after link after link, but just go to Salon and read his latest entries. They’re long, and it will take a while, but this is one of the most important stories of the decade. Imagine an alternate-history version of Watergate in which Woodward and Bernstein advocated for the government assassination of Deep Throat, and you’ll have the Wikileaks story.

Here’s an example Greenwald gives of why Wikileaks matters: “These documents reveal to the American public… that the U.S. Government is involved in a secret war in Yemen which it has never disclosed to the American citizenry, let alone subjected it to any form of real debate, and about which the State Department spokesman gave extremely misleading answers. Making matters much worse, at least one of those air strikes was directed at killing an American citizen.”

Got that? A secret war which the government has never disclosed to our citizenry. Greenwald quotes Bush adviser Matthew Dowd’s latest column thus: “My oldest son, who served in the Army for five years and was deployed in Iraq for nearly a year and half, turned to me and asked, ‘When as a country did we become a place where the government gets upset when its secrets are revealed but has no problem knowing all our secrets and invading our privacy?’”

In other words, says Greenwald, “you have no right to know what the Government does and those who expose its activities are traitors and criminals, all while the Government demands to know everything you do and say and uses sprawling technology to invade your communications at will.”

It’s been stunning to watch American journalists from all parts of the political spectrum parrot our politicians’ near-universal condemnations of Wikileaks. The only good that can possibly come of this is that the Washington press corps—especially these guys—will disappear and make room for a few journalists.

December 10, 1830

Someone else whose birthday is today once wrote,

This is my letter to the world,

That never wrote to me,

but none of her fascicles had a comment field.