THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 16, 1996 TAG: 9609140002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 98 lines
When troubles rain down
A beer commercial says some days are better than others. That's true, but it's equally true that some days are far, far worse than others.
Ask Judith Ann Lister of Timberville, a town about 15 miles north of Harrisonburg. A week ago Friday, she closed on her house in the morning and was warned four hours later to flee a flood.
Minutes after that, the North Fork of the Shenandoah River, bloated with rain from Hurricane Fran, spewed 5 feet of mud and debris into her home.
According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, damage is estimated at $45,000, more than half the home's value.
When she signed the mortgage, Fran was an ``impending storm,'' or in health insurance terms, a pre-existing condition. So her insurance may not cover the damages.
Some days are definitely worse than others. Mutual admiration society
Readers of Monica Crowley's Nixon Off the Record learn that the late president thought that Bob Dole should be the Republicans' choice to oppose Bill Clinton in 1996. ``Dole is the only one who can lead. He is by far the smartest politician - and Republican - in the country today. He is the last great hope for the party in this century.''
For his part, Dole may owe his campaign to the older man. Crowley reports that on Nov. 12, 1992, just days after Clinton was elected, Nixon spoke to the Republican's Senatorial Trust Committee and advised the assembled party grandees to learn from the defeat.
Crowley writes that Nixon told them to ``beat Clinton by posing a fundamental question to the voters: When Clinton argues for more `power to the government,' he said, the Republicans must argue for more `power to the people.''' And exactly that phrase has been a prominent sound bite in Dole's campaigning. This is what progress looks like
The Hampton Roads Partnership, an organization of public, private and military leaders, announced last week it will sponsor a statewide technology conference this November to assess the importance to Virginia of new and emerging technology.
The conference is a joint venture with the Center for Innovative Technology, the Virginia Technology Council and the Virginia Chamber of Commerce.
Partnership President Barry DuVal said the goal is ``to develop a strategic plan for charting Virginia's high technology future.''
Without such a plan, Virginia cannot compete with progressive states. With technology changing so fast, this is no time to drift, while vaguely hoping for the best. The Fed is too fat
The Federal Reserve is a gold-plated anachronism according to a recent GAO report. No one questions its function as a central bank that sets monetary policy. But its regional branches are in the wrong regions, can't compete with private firms in doing routine tasks like check clearing and are bloated drains on the taxpayer.
A Wall Street Journal report describes where some of the $2 billion a year goes. Lavish new quarters in Minneapolis, Dallas and Atlanta that will cost $446 million to build. The Minneapolis palace will cover nine acres including gardens and terraces and feature a 10-story clock tower, fitness center, pistol range and subsidized dining. The system provides personal cars to 59 managers and maintains a fleet of 47 Learjets.
At a time when government is paring down, this aristocratic splendor can't be justified. The Fed needs to get out of businesses where it can't compete, downsize its 25,000 work force dramatically, usher in austerity and return the billions it's been spending on its own perks to the Treasury.
Spitting and smoking
With President Clinton's directive to the federal Food and Drug Administration to regulate nicotine as a drug, the movement to wean Americans from tobacco scored a strategic victory over the megabillion-dollar tobacco industry that most observers thought impossible.
Objections to smoking were raised from the moment in the 15th century that European explorers introduced the Old World to the New World's tobacco leaf. Rodrigo de Jerez, one of Columbus' crewmen, was imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition for smoking, an American Indian habit that some Spaniards read as proof-positive that the sailor was possessed by the devil.
King James I, who ordered tobacco banished from his kingdom in 1603 (four years before the first English settlers arrived in Jamestown), famously denounced smoking as ``a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain and dangerous to the lungs.''
Ah, but smoking is also pleasurable and tobacco highly profitable. These realities long enabled Big Tobacco to keep anti-smoking advocates from imposing restrictions on tobacco.
That has changed. Nonsmokers' demands for smoke-free air have sweetened the atmosphere on public transportation, in enclosed public spaces and at the workplace. Smokers' assertion of a ``right'' to light up whenever and wherever they choose now sound almost as quaint as tobacco chewers' insistence at the turn of the century that outlawing spitting - one of the ways in which public-health officials combatted tuberculosis - attacked individual liberty.
In 1905, after several cities had passed anti-spitting ordinances, Pennsylvania Gov. Samuel W. Pennypacker solemnly proclaimed ``spitting (to be) a gentleman's constitutional right.'' Doubtless many agreed. But spittoons' days were numbered. by CNB