Barbara Hollingsworth

Barbara Hollingsworth: More than a year late and $15 billion short

Now he tells us. Walter Alcorn, vice chairman of Fairfax County's Planning Commission, finally conceded last week that turning suburban car-centric Tysons Corner into the Virginia version of downtown Manhattan is going to take some serious cash -- at least $15 billion for roads, sidewalks, overpasses and feeder buses necessary to make Phase 1 of the Dulles Rail project a success. That's in addition to the $18 billion collected from drivers on the Dulles Toll Road for construction and interest for Phase 2 over the next 40 years, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority's August 2009 bond prospectus, and $4 billion ($100 million annually) in operating...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Energized Virginia Republicans roar back to life

Turns out that the widely reported demise of the Grand Old Party in Virginia last November was a tad premature. Buoyed by gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell's double-digit lead in the polls and the White House's public spanking of Democrat Creigh Deeds, Republican strategists predict they will retain all their seats in the House of Delegates, where all 100 members are up for re-election. And they might even pick off a few Democrats in Northern Virginia, which just last year was written off as a virtually impenetrable Democratic stronghold. What a difference a year makes. Especially if that year includes skyrocketing unemployment, record foreclosures, bank and auto company bailouts,...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Scary, true story of the FDIC and the Halloween bank

In "Silver Blaze," by Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scotland Yard inspector investigating a missing racehorse asks Sherlock Holmes: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" Holmes replies: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time," the puzzled inspector retorts. "That," says Holmes, "was the curious incident." A year after the $700 billion bank bailout, let me draw your attention to the curiously missing warnings from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's (FDIC) army of bank examiners who, like the dog in the story, were supposed to bark at...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Craziness behind Loudoun's suburban facade

Whoever thinks suburbs are boring hasn't been to Loudoun County, until recently the fastest-growing jurisdiction in the United States. Loudoun has more than its share of real world craziness. This is the county that once tried to outlaw Christmas lights. A more current example comes courtesy of Loudoun Supervisor Stevens Miller, D-Dulles, who moved out of his home in Ashburn and rented a town house in the only section of Sterling that allows him to keep his current job while running for the General Assembly against Del. Tom Rust, R-Herndon. The schools in Miller's magisterial district are bursting at the seams. So in July 2008, the Loudoun School Board signed a $20 million contract to...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: First, we need a new power superhighway

Whether the goal is decreasing U.S. dependence on imported oil or reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it can't be fully realized until the nation's cobbled-together, decades-old electric grid gets a major makeover that will, to a large extent, determine how Americans live in the 21st century. Most of the focus so far has been on renewable energy and so-called "smart grid" technology that allows consumers to reduce their demand by monitoring how much electricity they use. Boulder, Colorado is the first fully functioning "smart grid" city in the world, with automated substations that reroute electricity around bottlenecks, identify power outages as soon as they happen,...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Still tearing families apart in Arlington

What a farce. Arlington County recently received $187,600 in state tobacco settlement money to fund its "Strengthening Families Program." How much of it will be used to identify at-risk families so that Arlington judges and social workers can tear them apart? Think that's too harsh? Talk to Nancy Hey or Benita Washington, whose parental rights were both terminated on unsubstantiated grounds of medical neglect by Arlington Juvenile Court Judge Esther Wiggins Lyles and Circuit Judge James Almand. Hey's daughter, Sabrina -- snatched by Arlington social workers when she was just 3 weeks old -- was later adopted by her politically connected foster parents. Washington's 8-year-old...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Maryland becoming the East Coast California

Gov. Martin O'Malley and the Maryland legislature seem dead set on turning their state into the East Coast version of California - the once happy and prosperous jurisdiction on the West Coast that's now on the verge of chaos and bankruptcy. One of California's many suicidal impulses was a landmark law it passed in 2006 giving unprecedented authority to the California Air Resources Board to implement regulations aimed at reducing emissions at the state level, including a provision mandating a 40 percent increase in fuel efficiency for new cars by 2016 that is currently being challenged in the U.S. Court of Appeals by the Chamber of Commerce and the National Automobile Dealers Association....

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Alternate assessments are better for educrats than students

Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Jack Dale referred to my Sept. 22 column on inflated tests scores as "inaccurate" and "unsubstantiated" in his Sept. 27 letter to the editor ("Column on test scores misleading, inaccurate and unsubstantiated"). But if that's the case, Dale himself is to blame. The data I cited, which was sent by FCPS to the state Department of Education, shows an exponential explosion in the use of the Virginia Grade Level Assessments in Fairfax County schools. For example, the number of students taking VGLAs instead of Standards of Learning tests at Poe Middle School more than doubled this year from 75 to 165 -- after the alternative assessment program was...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Even federal programs that don't work are tough to kill

Federal programs that have failed to accomplish whatever they were initially set up to do should be perfect candidates for the budget chopping block, especially after the Congressional Budget Office's newly revised prediction that the federal deficit will hit $7.1 trillion in the next 10 years. But getting rid of programs that don't work is much easier said than done. Take federal fire grants, which are used to subsidize more than 10,000 local fire departments and emergency medical services. Congress wanted to reduce fire casualties in high-risk areas when it authorized the grants under the FIRE Act of 2000 and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2001. But fire grants, which are...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Fairfax public schools officials cheat on test scores

Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Jack Dale recently announced impressive improvements in test scores among special education students and those with limited English proficiency. Nobody on the Fairfax County School Board thought to ask how he managed to produce almost miraculous pass rates among student subgroups that have historically been the hardest to improve. Instead, the board used the higher scores to justify extending Dale's lucrative contract an additional four years. But when members of FCPS Watch did what the School Board should have done, one statistic popped out: Since 2006, the first year the county was allowed to use an alternative to the Standards of Learning,...

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UPDATE: Veteran FAA whistleblower quits in disgust

Twelve years after first reporting serious safety problems at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, including numerous cover-ups of near collisions and the abuse of prescription narcotics by her fellow air traffic controllers, Anne Whiteman has resigned. The 25-year FAA veteran told CBS affiliate WFAA-TV (http://www.wfaa.com/video/index.html?nvid=398097) that she was isolated, demoted, and physically assaulted for filing complaints with the Office of Special Counsel, which confirmed most of her safety concerns, including her accounts of air traffic controllers blaming pilots for their mistakes. She also said her equipment was sabotaged in retaliation. FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt, who was...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Instead of a check, VA sends widow a profanity-laced screed

Following my Aug. 25 column ("Does government-run health care work? Ask vets"), I got a call from Bessie Krone, the widow of a World War II Navy veteran. She faxed me a copy of a shocking letter she said she recently received from the Department of Veterans Affairs' regional office in Montgomery, Ala. The profanity-laced screed, date-stamped Sept. 3, 2009, and stapled to Form 4107 ("Your Rights to Appeal Our Decision"), brazenly admits that VA employees deliberately removed medical records from her late husband Robert's file. "Mrs. Krone, are you that f***ing stupid?" asked the letter, supposedly signed by triage assistant coach Mark Carter, who...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: FAA, Congress ignore pilots' many safety warnings

Pennsylvania-based Business Travel Coalition is asking Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate Amerijet International. Sixty-two pilots and flight engineers went on strike Aug. 27 when one of the air cargo carrier's planes lost cabin pressurization and was forced to dump 23,000 gallons of fuel into the waters off Miami. Fatigued, overworked employees are protesting what they say are working conditions in one of the most congested airspaces on the planet that "are worse than the sweatshops of the 1930s" -- and which put "schools, neighborhoods, the environment and the flying public at significant risk each and every day." Good luck with that. For at least six...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Defending the honor of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, the once -revered sage of Monticello and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, has been knocked off his pedestal in recent years, the victim of what many historians believe is his own hypocrisy. But William Hyland, Jr. claims that Jefferson himself is the victim of a 200-year-old character defamation recast as revisionist history. A former Virginia attorney who now practices law in Tampa, Florida, Hyland has taken on the academic establishment defending Jefferson from oft-repeated accusations that he fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemings. Hyland told me he spent close to three years researching "In Defense of Thomas Jefferson," which has...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Does government-run health care work? Ask vets.

Anybody who still thinks it's a good idea to give the federal government total control over health care should consider the case of Philip E. Cushman, a Portland, Ore., resident and decorated ex-Marine whose back was broken when a fellow serviceman accidentally dropped a sandbag on top of him when their unit was under attack in Vietnam. For the past two decades, Cushman has been unsuccessfully trying to get the Veterans' Administration to hand over some $100,000 it owes him for his service-related disability. Finally, in an Aug. 12 landmark decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Cushman's statutorily mandated, non-discretionary, service-related...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Kaine tells Tech families they can't handle the truth about massacre

Remember the unforgettable scene in “A Few Good Men” when actor Jack Nicholson growled, “The truth? You can’t handle the truth”? Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is basically saying the same thing to the relatives of victims and survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre. Kaine set up the Virginia Tech Review Panel to find out if the April 16, 2007, mass murders at the Blacksburg campus could have been avoided. After the panel issued its report, Tech officials admitted that the timeline they had provided the panel was not accurate. That fact was reason enough to reopen the investigation. But Kaine refused to reconvene the panel - claiming some families don’t want...

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Iranian police use force against graveside rally

Iranian police fired tear gas and beat anti-government protesters with batons to disperse thousands at a graveside memorial Thursday for victims of post-election violence, witnesses and state television said. Demonstrations that drew thousands more later spread to other parts of the capital Tehran and more clashes with security forces erupted. Witnesses said police fired tear gas at dozens of demonstrators on Valiasr Street who set tires and trash cans ablaze in response. Police barred opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi from joining the crowd around the grave of Neda Agha Soltan, a young woman was shot to death at a June 20 to protest the disputed presidential election. The...

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Poll: Public wants to rein-in the Fed

There is a growing public consensus that the highly secretive Federal Reserve System, which controls the nation’s money supply and sets interest rates, needs to do business out in the open. A new Rasmussen poll finds that a large majority of Americans (75 percent) want Congress to audit the Fed, which has not accounted for the trillions of public dollars it spent over the last year and a half in an attempt to shore up failing financial institutions. More than half of the members of the House of Representatives have co-sponsored a bill introduced by Rep. Ron Paul, R-TX, to require a public accounting of the Fed’s activities. The Obama administration wants to give the private...

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Barbara Hollingsworth: The Bill of Rights makes a comeback

Americans worried sick about the erosion of constitutional liberties can take some comfort in two recent Supreme Court decisions that have unambiguously upheld Second and Sixth Amendment rights. In the 2008 landmark District of Columbia v. Heller case, the court rejected the rationale behind D.C.'s three-decades-old gun ban, ruling that the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to own firearms for their personal self defense in addition to the collective right to keep and bear arms that applies to state-regulated militias. This was the first time that a local gun ban law was struck down on Second Amendment grounds, and liberals were furious. In this year's Melendez-Diaz v....

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Going to a TEA Party in Fairfax County

On a beautiful summer evening at a gorgeous home overlooking Lake Barcroft in eastern Fairfax County, not far from where Virginia Sen. Jim Webb lives, four dozen or so suburbanites showed up for a TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party. They were uniformly polite, well-dressed, and well-spoken. They were also hoppin' mad. "People are fed up with representatives who do not represent us," Julie Vaughn, a freelance writer and editor who lives in Herndon, angrily told me. "I just feel like the country is falling apart." Sevil Kalayci, who lives in Vienna, echoed Vaughn's sentiments. "We are worried sick about our country," the retired Loudoun County elementary...

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Metro's problems go deeper than one faulty track circuit

Metro riders like me who depend upon the transit system to get to work are disturbed by the spectacular failure of Metro's highly automated "fail-safe" system. But news that Metro is planning to spend $177 million next year on a major overhaul of the Red Line is not very reassuring. To me, the scariest thing about the fatal crash on June 22 that killed nine people and injured 80 was not that both the computerized system and the human operator failed to avoid a collision, which is scary enough, but the fact that the accident occurred just five days after a Metro crew "fixed" that particular section of track.__ Shortly after the accident, investigators from the...

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Standing in the transit bread line

He was outnumbered four-to-one at a Senate hearing on transportation and climate change, but nobody challenged CATO senior fellow Randall O'Toole's claim that rather than saving energy, mass transit uses massive amounts of it and produces copious amounts of greenhouse gas emissions to boot. "Transit produces as much greenhouse gas emissions [per passenger mile] as the average SUV, and consumes far more energy," O'Toole told the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development. "Transit is the culprit, not the savior." Neither of the two senators there - Chairman Robert Menendez, D-NJ, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA - nor any of four...

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EXAMINER SPECIAL REPORT: ACORN's muscling for money is nothing new

ACORN has used threats and intimidation to advance its agenda since its founding in 1970 by Wade Rathke, who adapted the tactics he learned as a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society - a group former New Leftist David Horowitz describes as "the first terrorist political cult." In 1969, Rathke started a Massachusetts chapter of the militant Welfare Rights Organization founded by George Wiley. As Horowitz explains in his book, "The Shadow Party," Wiley used the Cloward-Piven strategy (named for left-wing Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven) to purposely overwhelm New York's welfare system and thereby encourage either...

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Forget about renaming Reagan National

When H.R. Crawford, chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, mentioned at a MWAA Board meeting last week that he had heard "talk" on Capitol Hill about removing former President Ronald Reagan's name from Washington National Airport, he undoubtedly didn't anticipate the firestorm that would ensue. Frankly, neither did I. Thanks to the Internet, a small blog posting went viral all over the country and people who live far from Washington are now steaming at the implied insult to our late 40th president. They'd be even hotter under the collar if they knew the backstory. In 1997, Congress renamed the airport in honor of Reagan. The legislation was signed into law...

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Now they want Reagan's name off the airport

At Wednesday’s Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board meeting, chairman H.R. Crawford – a former District Council member and Marion Barry confidante – told fellow Board members that he has heard talk on Capitol Hill about yanking former President Ronald Reagan’s name off the local airport and returning it to its previous generic moniker: National Airport. “It was just a discussion. We’re not aware of anything specific,” MWAA spokeswoman Tara Hamilton later told The Examiner. It’s clear that the current crop of congressional leaders want no part of Reagan’s grand conservative vision for America, but erasing all trace of his...

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Is America really over?

Think you still live in the last, best hope of mankind? Get over yourself. That's the basic message of National Journal correspondent Paul Starobin's new book, "After America," which can only be classified as a clarion call to Americans to downsize their expectations for the future. The Falls Church resident acknowledges in his book that "optimism stands out as a signature trait of the American mind-set," but his outlook for the future of the United States is anything but. "America has reached the end of its political and economic cultural ascendancy," he told me in an interview from Los Angeles. In his view, there's nowhere for us to go but down. The...

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UPDATE: Is FAA blackballing veterans?

Email from a retired USAir captain and former Air Force officer: “I applied several times to work for the FAA for various positions that I qualified for but I was turned down for various reasons. “There was a law that was concocted many years ago that stated if you were over the military rank of Major and or Lt Commander you would not be allowed to use your Veteran’s disability Preference points for job consideration. The DOT, OPM and DOL conveniently left off the last paragraph stating that if you were a retired Reservist this rule did not apply.... With the aid of two DOL vets...we were able to find out that the OPM/DOL were intentionally keeping me from being...

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Senate panel misses the point on aviation safety delays by FAA

Leave it to Congress to hold not one, but two public hearings and still not get to the heart of the matter: For at least six years, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has failed to heed warnings by airline pilots who reported serious safety concerns that put the public at risk. And the very same safety issues are still not being adequately addressed now. Like the first hearing held a week earlier, last Wednesday’s inquiry by the Senate Aviation Subcommittee focused on the crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 in Buffalo, which killed all 50 people aboard and one on the ground. The lack of adequate training and pilot fatigue were cited as the two major contributing factors by FAA...

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Arlington's $150 million trolley folly

Arlington County is planning to spend millions of dollars on a nostalgic-looking streetcar that will cause massive traffic backups on Columbia Pike and help drive out the small businesses and moderately priced apartments that give the Pike its funky urban charm. The trolley, which will run down Columbia Pike from Pentagon City and then veer over to Skyline Mall on Route 7, will supposedly reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality while it spurs economic development. But not even some Arlington environmentalists are buying it. Last year, during his unsuccessful campaign to unseat Barbara Favola on the County Board, Green Party candidate John Reeder challenged Favola’s...

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Virginians know there’s no such thing as free money

Three contenders are still duking it out for Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination, but party strategists have already turned their attention to the general election, where either Creigh Deeds, Brian Moran or Terry McAuliffe will take on Republican “Bob for Jobs” McDonnell. Common Sense Virginia, an out-of-state group funded by the Democratic Governors Association, is running a series of negative TV ads admonishing McDonnell for his supposedly “career-long failure to stand up for laid-off Virginians,” and for leading the fight to reject $125 million in federal stimulus funds to extend unemployment benefits. This despite the fact the former attorney...

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Study found nine daily near-misses at Boston's Logan Airport

A recent study funded by the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S Air Force found an astounding number of near mid-air collisions – average nine per day – involving commercial airplanes landing and taking off from Boston’s Logan Airport. Despite this evidence from one of the nation’s busiest airports, FAA officials have inexplicably delayed certifying a cheap but effective device that its developer claims could great reduce or eliminate the hazard, The Examiner has learned. The National Transportation Safety Board has been warning FAA for decades about the danger of collisions between powered aircraft and recreational gliders flying near busy airports,...

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Keeping the borders open no matter what happens

With an economy in tatters and more than six million Americans already out of work, why does the federal government insist on bringing in even more workers to compete for a dwindling number of jobs? For the first time in American history, immigration is at an all-time high despite a protracted and punishing recession, says Dan Stein, president of the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Our southern border remains open even though the World Health Organization raised the threat level from an outbreak of swine flu in Mexico to its second-highest category, just short of worldwide pandemic. Closing the border "would be akin to closing the barn...

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What’s up with the FAA?

Federal Aviation Administration officials’ insistence that a photo-op of Air Force One flying over the Statue of Liberty – which spooked half of Manhattan - was classified information that should not be made public beforehand is the latest example of the agency’s disturbing lack of common sense. During the last two decades, nine people died and three were injured in preventable mid-air collisions between motorized aircraft and gliders. There have been dozens of near-misses that could have taken many more lives. The National Transportation Safety Board recommended twice – in 1987 and again in 2008 - that the FAA remove its “glider exemption” from a...

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Was the D.C. Madame a secret agent?

“The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.” William Faulkner’s famous quote comes to mind as the one-year anniversary of Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s death approaches. On May 1, 2008 the 52-year-old D.C. Madame was found hanged in a shed behind her elderly mother’s Florida home. Local officials quickly classified it as an apparent suicide after finding hand-written notes at the scene. It should have been the tragic end of a lurid sex scandal involving high-priced call girls and their top-secret-clearance johns, including a U.S. senator and at least two high-ranking State and Pentagon officials. A year later, however, a few troubling loose ends still...

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Dulles Rail is already obsolete

Last week, Chicago-based General Growth Properties, owner of some 200 shopping malls in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy protection - the largest real estate bankruptcy in U.S. history. One of GGP’s local holdings is the upscale Tysons Galleria on International Drive – right in the heart of the urban utopia envisioned by the Smart Growth crowd.

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FAA fudges FOIA on glider safety

Attorney General Eric Holder issued new guidelines March 19 regarding release of non-classified information to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. That statute, better known as the FOIA when it was first approved in 1966, says all federal documents should be made public on request unless there are strong grounds – which are described in detail in the law - for keeping them behind closed doors. Holder’s memo to executive branch departments and agencies rescinded more restrictive rules issued by his predecessor, John Ashcroft in 2001. Holder said he wanted to restore “the presumption of disclosure that is at the heart of the Freedom of Information...

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What else is the mayor's office hiding?

A fire truck is rather hard to misplace. So when one went missing in late January, it should have been pretty obvious - even to District of Columbia government officials who subscribe to the “See No Evil” school of management when people are carting public property out the door. Last week, The Washington Examiner’s Michael Neibauer was the first to report that a “surplus” D.C. fire truck and ambulance were handed over to former drug dealer Ronald Moten, often described as a “close associate” of Mayor Adrian Fenty. Moten runs Peaceaholics, a group that gets millions of tax dollars to help at-risk D.C. youth. Somebody apparently just handed the...

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What goes up doesn't always come down

Your local real estate taxes are tied to the assessed value of your home. When home prices go up, as they did during the most recent housing bubble, your taxes go up, too. However, when home values are declining, as they are now, your property taxes are supposed to decrease as well. Taxpayers across the nation are finding out that contrary to the laws of physics and economics, what goes up doesn’t always come down, especially where confiscatory taxation is concerned. This gut-wrenching realization is fueling a grassroots Tea (“Taxed Enough Already”) Party movement that is spreading like wildfire across the nation. Fairfax County is a perfect example of this phenomenon....

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About that boarding house reach and Fairfax County's declining real estate values

After the swearing-in ceremony of John Cook, Fairfax County’s newest supervisor, the chairman of the Democratic County Committee posted an article on the DCC’s website entitled: “Cook Pulls Off the Sheep’s Clothing.” I called Scott Surovell to make sure he really meant it when he accused Cook, a Republican attorney and former president of the Kings Park Civic Association, of “race baiting to make his point” about the need to close down the numerous illegal boarding houses in single-family neighborhoods that contribute to declining property values in Fairfax County. Unfortunately, he did. “What I said was that he was grandstanding on the...

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Why commuting in Washington takes so long

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Commentary: The continuing foster care fiasco

Published: Mar 15, 2009

Despite evidence that removing children from their homes traumatizes them, millions are still being forced to live with strangers or adopted out like shelter pets. One activist recently told Congress that many children are sent to “clearly inadequate families” just so social service agencies “can ‘succeed’ by boosting their numbers.” Children like 13-year-old Alexis "Lexie" Agyepong-Glover, who was dumped, still alive, into an icy creek in Prince William County and left to die. Lexie was never removed from adopted mother Alfreedia Gregg-Glover’s home despite numerous reports of abuse. She ran away three times in the weeks prior to her...

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The Fear Factor meets the Human Factor

Published: Mar 09, 2009

Steve Korman voted for Barack Obama and, unlike radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, fervently hopes the new president will succeed. However, Korman and his fellow CEOs are deeply concerned about the “fear factor” that’s keeping them from retaining and hiring workers. “Look at all the big corporations,” Korman told me. “I don’t know any that are hiring. Most are letting people go. Unemployment is the biggest problem we have in this country.” But after spending trillions on government bailouts, there’s even more laid-off workers than before. Friday’s Labor Department report shows that 651,000 more jobs were eliminated last...

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You call it green, I call it Slovak

Published: Mar 02, 2009

If we're now in a new "progressive" era, why does it feel so much like the past? As the granddaughter of (legal) immigrants from Eastern Europe, I know a thing or two about conservation. In fact, my Czech and Slovak elders probably invented it. Growing up in a working class part of Chicago, we got a tongue-lashing from my father if we didn't turn out the lights whenever we left a room. We didn't get new shoes until we could demonstrate that the old ones had holes - in the soles. A little fraying on top was not considered sufficient wear to throw them away. Money didn't grow on trees, after all. But the urge to conserve went much deeper than that. My Czechoslovak ancestors...

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ACORN, LaRaza get double-dips of pork barrel in stimulus, omnibus spending bills

Published: Feb 25, 2009

So President Barack Obama wants to cut the federal deficit in half by 2013? He can start by downsizing the amount of pork fat flowing to dozens of special interest groups that supported his candidacy. About a hundred of these groups, including the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the National Education Association (NEA) and the National Council of La Raza, have already received billions of tax dollars under Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Yet they now stand to rake in even more federal money under the $410 billion omnibus spending bill now wending its way through Congress. “The Democrats are asking taxpayers to pay for over 100 accounts in...

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Instead of ‘GT’ for gifted and talented, how about ‘M’ for mediocrity?

Published: Feb 23, 2009

Kumar Singam knew his selection to an advisory committee that’s currently considering controversial changes to Montgomery County Public Schools’ (MCPS) gifted-talented program would not exactly be a cake walk. That much became clear when program director Marty Creel Blackberried the president of the Asian-American Parents Advocacy Council (AAPAC) and offered to help him pick a “better” candidate. When Singam, a medical researcher who lives in Bethesda, showed up for the committee’s Feb. 12 meeting, Creel and MCPS chief of staff Brian Edwards literally refused to seat him at the table. Instead, Singam was taken to a conference room around the corner from...

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Another legal kidnapping in Arlington

Published: Feb 08, 2009

On January 4, WRC-TV’s Barbara Harrison featured Arlington social worker Jenna Duffy and one of her young charges, 11-year-old foster child Moses Washington, on the station’s long-running “Wednesday’s Child” feature. Moses said his “big hope” was to find a permanent home. Viewers had no idea that Moses had been taken away from his mother on unsubstantiated charges of medical neglect. Or that the same cast of characters who snatched Sabrina Slytor from her parents - even though they had previously been cleared of wrongdoing - were involved in Moses’ case as well. In February 2005, Banita Washington was forced out of her Arlington apartment...

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Judicial hot potato: Is Judge Finch fried?

Published: Feb 02, 2009

A rare pitchfork rebellion has derailed the reappointment of longtime Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch, one of just two judges among 60 incumbents who were not reappointed to new terms by the Virginia General Assembly. Finch supporters say that complaints lodged against him are just sour grapes by bitter people who lost in court. Of course, the corollary is that beneficiaries of a rigged process seldom complain. It takes a pretty powerful sense of grievance to drive down to Richmond and face public ostracism for criticizing a veteran judge. The inherent difficulties tend to weed out most of the frivolous accusations. And the accusations made by litigants who stepped up to...

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A tear-stained face in the other crowd

Published: Jan 25, 2009

Angele came to Washington last week, but she was not one of the multitude who converged on the nation's capital to joyously proclaim their support of the new president on his Inauguration Day. Angele came with the other crowd. Just two days after Barack Obama was sworn-in as the first African American president, hundreds of thousands of protestors returned for the annual March for Life - the largest and longest mass protest in U.S. history. For 36 years, they've been in a quixotic quest to convince Congress, the Supreme Court, and every administration since Richard Nixon's to protect the civil rights of unborn children even their own mothers don't want. It's been a hard sell. By any...

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Fairfax School Board's Gateway drug

Published: Jan 19, 2009

Like school systems everywhere, Fairfax County Public Schools must tighten its $2.2 billion budget for the 2009-10 school year. Superintendent Jack Dale has already told teachers not to expect any pay hikes or cost-of-living increases and theatens to cut more than 1,000 jobs. The girls gymanstics program has been axed and parents are being warned that class sizes will increase next year due to a $170 million budget shortfall that could balloon to $215 million, Dale warns, if the equally cash-strapped Board of Supervisors doesn't give him the 3.5 percent increase he asking for. If FCPS doesn' get the money, more student programs - including indoor track and field, fine arts classes and...

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That giant sucking sound is Dulles Rail

Published: Jan 12, 2009

Any hopes that the federal government, so recently stung by the implosion of the housing and credit markets, would finally kill the outrageously bloated Dulles Rail project were dashed for good last week when lame duck Transportation Secretary Mary Peters gave her final blessing to this $5.2 billion-plus boondoggle. It was like 2008 never happened. Last year, Federal Transit Administration officials wisely refused to approve the project for funding, citing its low cost-effectiveness rating, the fact that the unelected Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board has no experience managing complex transit projects, and Metro’s own deteriorating physical condition. None of...

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Bailout fever reaches Charlottesville

Published: Jan 05, 2009

Turns out we were afraid of the wrong bug. Bailout fever has proven a much more contagious disease than the dreaded bird flu. In a little over two months, this economically deadly pathogen has spread from Wall Street on the east coast to California on the west and infected all of Detroit. Entire states have been reduced to begging on political street corners. Spent all of the last decade’s record revenue on patronage jobs instead of highways, bridges and schools? No problem. Just get in line and the new administration will miraculously cure what ails you. The epidemic is even making its way into prosperous enclaves such as Charlottesville, where the president of the University of...

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Metro Execs Threaten Service Cuts, Then Hike Their Own Pay

Published: Dec 30, 2008

As its financial situation worsens, the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority is threatening major service cuts and perhaps even some layoffs. But one steadily growing budget item seems particularly impervious to belt-tightening - employee compensation, particularly in the executive suite. Metro’s Approved Fiscal 2009 Annual Budget includes large pay hikes for salaried management employees, as well as hourly workers such as bus drivers, rail operators and maintenance workers. But the numbers take on added significance when compared to previous years. For example, in the section entitled “Multi-Year Operating Cost Comparison,” we see that salaries for Metro...

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The 3-minute interview: William Blazek

Published: Aug 31, 2007

A former Army Ranger who served in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, William Blazek is an adjunct assistant professor of medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine. He also spends time treating the homeless in D.C. while training to be a Jesuit priest.How long have you been treating the homeless?I arrived here a year ago, and I’ve been working with them ever since at Unity Healthcare at Second and D streets near Capitol Hill. This year I’m focusing on Spanish-speaking immigrants at the Spanish Catholic Center adjacent to Sacred Heart......

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The 3-minute interview: Mildred Muhammad

Published: Aug 01, 2007

In October 2002, John Allen Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, 17-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo, terrorized the Washington region during a shooting rampage that left 10 people dead. Both were captured and found guilty of murder. Muhammad was sentenced to death and is awaiting execution. His ex-wife, Mildred Muhammad, tells The Examiner how she’s made a new life for herself and her three children.What happened when your husband returned from military service in Saudi Arabia?Something happened over there. He asked his commander for help in filing a discrimination complaint, but they......

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Maryland leaders cautious about putting state spending online

Published: Mar 22, 2007

Baltimore area members of the Maryland House of Delegates are more likely than those in the Washington region to support a bill that would enable residents to track on the Internet how the legislature spends public finds.Even so, just 25 delegates out of 116 surveyed by The Examiner — 19 in the Baltimore region and six in the Washington suburbs — were willing to go on record supporting a measure already adopted at the federal level and that advocates say would give Marylanders a more open and transparent state government.Introduced......

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Did you know this about Christmas in Washington?

Published: Dec 22, 2006

Celebrating Christmas in the nation’s capital means choosing from a smorgasbord of sensual delights. Here are the top 10 ways Washington celebrates the yuletide:» This year’s National Christmas Tree, a towering 39-foot Colorado blue spruce, is decorated with thousands of lights and 250 platter-sized ornaments by Hargrove, a Lanham-based special events company that designed the floats for Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural parade. The presidential lighting ceremony on the Ellipse in early December has been a tradition ever since President Calvin Coolidge threw the first switch in 1923.» The "Christmas Pageant......

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