Tag: Joe Fitzgerald
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Crossing the County Line
by Joe Fitzgerald They’re the exaggeratists. Maybe the Exaggerati. They take the smallest thing and blow it up to a crisis. Their eye is not on the sparrow, but on its feathers. And heaven help the sparrow whose feathers don’t decently cover her. In the city this year the Exaggerati went door to door speaking…
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Now It’s a Party: Local Elections May Be Decided in June for a While
by Joe Fitzgerald It looks like 12 percent of people voting in Harrisonburg’s Nov. 8 City Council election cast a vote for only one of the four candidates instead of the two they could have voted for. But that number needs more asterisks on it than a home run record. Single-shot votes are difficult to…
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Green’s Law
by Joe Fitzgerald Green’s Law was in effect this week. Green’s Law was named, by me, for longtime mayor and councilman Walter F. Green III, and originated at a council meeting when he did an even worse job than usual of hiding his disdain for opponents of the golf course. I don’t remember what was…
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Parental Rights, My Ass
Attack the most vulnerable and say it’s for everybody. What could go wrong? by Joe Fitzgerald The so-called “parental rights” policies designed to force questioning teens to out themselves to their families would affect perhaps 4,000 students in Virginia, according to the Post. Bringing it a little closer to home, that would work out statistically…
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Can’t Buy Me Dirt
by Joe Fitzgerald For a while, you couldn’t get dirt in Harrisonburg. The developer who was helping bankroll city council candidates in 2000 told us about the dirt shortage. The city was buying up all the topsoil in town and using every city dump truck to put it somewhere near the then-proposed golf course. Opponents…
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What If They Gave an Election, and Nobody Came?
by Joe Fitzgerald This is the most open Harrisonburg City Council election in a generation, and nobody seems interested. Barely 300 people turned out Saturday to choose the Democratic nominees, and the Republicans have been silent. Only one obscure independent has emerged. If nothing happens between now and June 21, the race effectively ended this…
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Unaffordable? A Proposed Town Center Doesn’t Have to Answer the Questions It Raises.
by Joe Fitzgerald On the website for a proposed 1,000-unit housing development in Harrisonburg is a description of the players in the project. Included is a history of sorts of the Harrisonburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority: “[A] local election was held on November 8, 1955 and a majority of those voting in the election approved…
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Can We Afford Affordable?
Magical thinking doesn’t build schools or roads. by Joe Fitzgerald Harrisonburg’s taxes are going up and will continue to go up because of housing decisions. Stated another way, because talking about taxes makes me sound like a Republican, the city will have to keep building more schools and hiring more teachers and bus drivers and…
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When the Numbers Stopped
by Joe Fitzgerald The Virginia Department of Health began posting daily COVID numbers on March 17, 2020, and effectively quit Thursday. A press release on the VDH website explains the changes, but doesn’t include enough real information to make it worth the trouble of linking there. For two years, though, VDH produced daily information that…
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The Governor’s Surge
We’ll know soon if the rest of us get what the unvaxed voted for. by Joe Fitzgerald Virginia’s governor ran on a platform to protect children from critical race theory and expose them to COVID. The first goal was moot, since CRT wasn’t often mentioned in public schools to begin with. How well the second…
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Belligerence as Leadership
by Joe Fitzgerald About one in 16 American adults suffer with chronic pulmonary disease. Serious health guidelines say they’re the primary ones who should not wear masks. Some of them still can, but a figure of 6% is about the maximum of adults who shouldn’t wear them. The governor of Virginia, elected to eradicate a…
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This Didn’t Have to Happen
by Joe Fitzgerald A year ago, the post-Thanksgiving surge was still raging, but there was hope in the imminent availability of vaccines. But 2021 would be the year of criminals who stormed the Capitol because they didn’t understand democracy and of their intellectual brethren who didn’t understand science or medicine. Virginia set a record today…
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Let Teachers Teach
by Joe Fitzgerald Remember when SRO was standing room only? It’s not now. That’s not truly a loss, nor is it unexpected in a language whose alphabet only offers 17,576 three-letter combinations for abbreviations. The number goes up to almost half a million, specifically 456,976, if you go to four letters, and still there are…
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No, Parents Should Not Tell Schools What to Teach
by Joe Fitzgerald “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The statement is actually one of the bedrocks of our public K-12 system. Teachers will go to college for four years to learn what to teach. Literature, history, civics, arithmetic, mathematics. They learn how these things link together, and can…
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Last Local? Harrisonburg’s City Races Could Still Top the Ballot
by Joe Fitzgerald I barely recognized Mark Obenshain (the Republican state senator from Harrisonburg — ed.) the last time I saw him, and had to tell him who I was. Odd, because we used to run into each other regularly at Keister Elementary, at one time our shared precinct. That was back when all politics…