Thanksgiving roundup

hello there...sorry for not posting this week. I am at my in laws out of state and studying for the various finals I have in the coming weeks.

I was reading the Richmond Times-Dispatch this week and it was interesting to see how they talked about Gov.-elect Kaine, who is fulfilling at least one campaign promise by having town hall meetings about transportation around the state of VA. The writers seemed to suggest that the consensus of the Richmond meeting was that people didn't want higher taxes since no one mentioned it, yet that Kaine wanted higher taxes since he referenced the last time the state seriously addressed the issue and said it was solved with higher taxes.

Personally, I don't think Virginia can built its way out of the traffic mess with more freeways. They really just need to make their cities, especially near DC, more commuter friendly by expanding the Metro, Rapid Transit Buses, and VRE (the commuter rail lines that go all the way to Fredericksburg). It seems like everyone has a car and they all want to drive it on the roads right now.

My daily outrage is Justice Scalia's comments about Bush v. Gore. In typical GOPer fashion of late, he blames someone else for his mistake. "The election was dragged into the courts by the Gore people. We did not go looking for trouble." What was really at stake was not who won rather, "The issue was whether Florida's Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court [would decide the election.] What did you expect us to do? Turn the case down because it wasn't important enough?" How about turn the case down because the Florida Supreme Court got it mostly right.

Gore's people should have challenged statewide and the FL court told them as much but I really don't know why a Federal court should decide state election law.