Carlos Santos with the Times-Dispatch has joined Bacon’s Rebellion and others who experience cognitive dissonance from the fact that Virginia’s public universities continue to jack up tuitions even as their endowments soar to record levels. The University of Virginia endowment, he notes, grew by roughly $800 million last year even as the university hiked tuitions…

Brace yourselves for another round of provocative, hard-hitting op-ed columns, such a refreshing change of pace from the safe, sonorous expressions of the conventional wisdom you find in the daily newspapers. The February 11, 2008, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion is now online. If you are not a consistent reader of this blog, you really need…

On behalf of bloggers, policy wonks and human settlement pattern junkies everywhere, happy birthday, Mr. Bacon. And many happy returns!

Katharine Weymouth, granddaughter of legendary Washington Post chairman Katherine Graham, has been named chief executive of Washington Post Media, a new division that encompasses The Washington Post newspaper and its online component, washingtonpost.com, WaPo has reported. The appointment accompanies news that in March, WaPo will offer an undetermined number of early-retirement packages to newsroom staffers…

While I’m no fan of Gene Nichol’s policies at William & Mary — I totally share the concerns of certain members of the House of Delegates about the decisions the college president has made — I’m not sure that hauling members of the W&M Board of Trustees into the General Assembly for questioning is a…

Now that Sen. Richard Saslaw, D-Fairfax, is top dog in the state Senate, the General Assembly is getting a lot more entertaining. Last month, the Senate majority leader characterized Southwest Virginia gun rights zealots as Deliverance creatures (see “Quote of the Day: But First Cue the Banjos“). Once again, to paraphrase Britney Spears, oops, I…

Concerned about deteriorating tax revenues, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is putting a freeze on state hiring — and may consider more layoffs, reports Jeff Schapiro with the Times-Dispatch. “Anything is possible; everything is on the table,” Kaine press secretary Gordon Hickey said of firings, which have been limited to less than 100 so far. By…

Here’s the lede and headline in Peter Bacque’s story in the Times-Dispatch about bridges in Virginia with structural problems: It will cost $3.5 billion to replace them all, just a half billion dollars shy of the Virginia Department of Transportation’s annual budget. Sounds like a crisis! Ready to panic yet? Here’s the less alarming news…

The debate over payday lending is getting surreal. Posing as populist champions of the little guy, Republicans in the House of Delegates want to regulate the payday lending industry. They are aligning themselves on this issue with the likes of the Virginia Organizing Project and the Virginia Poverty Law Center. Meanwhile, industry lobbyists are looking…

The war against the much-dreaded and thoroughly feared side boob, has been temporarily avoided: Police plan to drop a misdemeanor obscenity charge filed against the manager of an Abercrombie & Fitch clothing store that displayed two photos of scantily clad men and a woman, a city attorney said yesterday. Police said they confiscated the photos…

It seems Sens. Cuccinelli and Peterson have run into a roadblock on their way to greater budgetary transparency. In his newsletter, and in his inimitable style, Ken shows us that at least one of his Senate colleagues, Sen. Edd Houck, thinks we’ve got all the transparency we need right now, thank you: In our debate…

I continue to be fascinated by the e-mail missives sent out by Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder as he bypasses the Mainstream Media to take his case to the public. His weekly “Visions” newsletter contains data that often gets filtered out in space-constrained news stories, as well as video sound bites that the televisions don’t…

My new state senator, John Miller (D-1SD), saw his bill to kill the HRTA die in committee. He had modified his own bill to end the unelected, unaccountable, unseparated powers Regional Government to exclude only The Peninsula. Still, it went down 10-4. Now, the only chance to kill the HRTA this session is the bill…

Two weeks ago I took note that student organizers at the College of William & Mary wanted to host the traveling Sex Workers Art Show on campus, providing a venue for porn stars, strippers and other sex workers to deliver monologues and otherwise do their thing. (See “Hey, Can Students’ Parents Buy Tickets, Too?”) The…

I can’t believe this made it through a Democratic-controlled state Senate, even if the custom is to honor the requests of local legislators. A bill sponsored by Sen. Steve Newman, R-Lynchburg, would name a section of U.S. 460 in Lynchburg the Jerry Falwell Parkway, according to the News & Advance. The Senate approved the bill…