Virginia is doing such a good job of running state government (see the previous post) that the General Assembly now feels competent to tell lenders how to conduct their business. In the latest iteration of the payday lending saga, committees in both the state Senate and House of Delegates have passed a bill that creates…

Virginians are Virginia’s harshest critics. We have little good to say about our government or the people who run it. But all things are relative. When outsiders rate the states, as the Pew Center on the States has done, Virginia comes out on top, sharing the highest grade, A-, with Utah and Washington state. To…

House Majority Leader Richard Saslaw, D-Springfield, could do for the Democrats what former Sen. John Chichester did for the Republicans: Keep them divided and fighting amongst themselves. In a Sunday column, Jeff Schapiro described a breakfast hosted last week by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for a dozen prominent Democratic legislators. “Over scrambled eggs, bacon and…

Del. Christopher Peace, R-Mechanicsville, is a bright, young up-and-comer in the House of Delegates. I’ve been impressed by the way he has worked with the Virginia Open Education Foundation in pursuit of open-source textbooks for Virginia schools that can be easily updated and printed on demand as circumstances warrant. (See “A ‘Textbook’ Study of Knowledge-Wave…

Middle income families enjoy the benefit of school choice — they can afford to move to better school districts. Most lower income families don’t have that option. One way to extend school choice to poor families is to create educational tax credits encouraging donations to not-for-profit groups that would fund scholarships, suggests Chris Braunlich, a…

Fifteen-year-old students in Finland rank among the brainiest kids in the world, according to standardized test scores — outperforming their American peers by wide margins. In an article today, the Wall Street Journal asks, what makes Finnish kids so smart? A couple of key findings come through: It isn’t the amount of money spent on…

Like other bloggers, Jeff Baird is a working stiff who plugs away at his job by day and pursues his blogging passion at night. But with virtually no cash — just some help from some of his computer-geek friends — he has produced a news-aggregation website of startling technical sophistication within just a few months.…

One of the responses we received from readers of THE ESTATES MATRIX was that we were a bit hard on the role of advertising in MainStream. Please tell us why it is not a conflict of interest to publish on page A-1 of the 24 February WaPo a He Said / She Said story on…

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is expected to announce today a plan to regulate high-risk mortgage lenders and staunch the rise in home foreclosures — which the Center for Responsible Lending estimates will number more than 62,000 in Virginia before the mortgage crisis ends. According to the Washington Post: Lenders who engage in high-risk lending schemes…

Republicans in the state Senate have spiked the so-called homestead exemption, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have enabled local governments to shift the property tax burden from homeowners to commercial property owners. There are good reasons to oppose the legislation, as I’ve blogged in the past: It would hurt renters, who are disproportionately poor…

Behind the scenes, a major backlash against the Virginia Information Technologies Agency seems to be underway. One bill favored by the Kaine administration, but since deep-sixed, sought to transfer power over the purchase of computer hardware and peripherals to the Department of General Services, which oversees procurement for everything else in state government. Meanwhile, Sen.…

Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell got headlines throughout the region Feb. 21 by showing he was tough on both immigration and sex offenders. Boasting that his cooperation with federal and state law enforcement authorities could be a model nationally, McDonnell said that more than 171 immigrant sex offenders had been identified and set up for…

The elusive militants behind Bacon’s Rebellion have issued another missive, apparently timing their communication to influence the current session of the General Assembly. Authorities say that the Feb. 25, 2008, edition of the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine, which can be found online, made an appeal to elements of the population disaffected with Business As Usual. Particularly…

For people like me, who’ve been deeply distracted all week and haven’t had much of a chance to blog, there’s no better way to get in touch with what’s shaking in River City than reading Don Harrison. This one’s a beauty, covering the mayoral election, the city’s war on nightlife, the decrepit schools…it’s all good.…

I was reading between the lines the other day when I drew some harsh conclusions about recently resigned William & Mary President Gene Nichol (see “The Nichol Resignation Narrative Is Looking Weaker and Weaker“). The charismatic but erratic college president had baldly misrepresented the circumstances of his resignation, I’d written, and in doing so had…