Tomorrow’s Washington Post report — I haven’t read other newspaper reports of the supposed “question of trust” yet — is enough to make one question whether the GOP has become unhinged or The Post and likely other media are trying desperately to “[breath] new life into Virginia’s tax debate at the beginning of an election year.” I’m betting it’s the former.

First of all, Larry Sabato is dead wrong on this. It is not “a good election-year stance for Republicans. It’s what their folks like to see, and they remember a GOP landslide in 1997 [based] on three words: ‘No car tax.’ “

House Speaker Bill Howell (left) and Del. Vince Callahan speak at a news conference where they revived the No Car Tax pledge. Anti-tax stallwarts Dels. Scott Lingamfelter (left) and Jeff Frederick (right) stand dutifully in the background.

As President Bush said, fool me once and shame…on….fool me…well you can’t fool me. Well, maybe you could fool him, but this “no car tax” stance will not fool most voters. All it does is reveal the GOP leadership in Virginia for what it is: lacking any substantive agenda, any vision, any modicum of respect for the voter. Do Sabato and Speaker Bill Howell, who proved himself last year to be an inept politician totally out flanked by the governor and the Senate, actually think voters who were more engaged than ever last year are going to fall for the same refrain they heard was the cause of the budget deficits?

As The Post story points out, Howell is trying to have it both ways. He wants to max the car tax and yet provide a larger transportation package. A free lunch from the flat earth bunch.

Either The Post listens too much to Sabato or it is pulling our leg.

Tuesday’s GOP announcement also positions the car tax as a preeminent issue in the 2005 campaign for governor between Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) and Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore (R), the leading candidates for their parties’ nominations.

Ending the car tax was one of the most popular campaign issues in Virginia history. In 1997, it quickly caught fire in vote-rich Northern Virginia, where many families own several expensive cars, and swept Republican James S. Gilmore III into the governor’s mansion.

Do they think voters can’t learn a lesson? It’s been eight years since Gilmore’s election. During that time, we’ve seen the K-12 schools struggle to jump through the No Child Left Behind and SOL hoops as school buildings crumble. We’ve seen school overcrowding and teacher shortages. Our premier universities — and now most of them — want to opt out of state funding and state control. Since 1997, the kids that were going to UVa. now will be lucky to get into JMU, Mary Washington and other second tier schools. Traffic has become much worse, Medicaid rolls are rising and health care has grown much more expensive. Meanwhile, real estate taxes are soaring to compensate. And they expect the voter to roll back to the 1997 mindset and vote for the GOP based on a “No Car Tax” pledge?

If you notice, The Post and many other papers, always call the same usual suspects they position as non-partisan seers. If it’s not Sabato, it’s Steven Farnsworth of MWU or VCU’s Robert Holsworth. They get into a rut asking the same guys to gaze into their crystal balls. I guess the profs feel compelled to come up with something provocative. But if the others also think this is good politics for the GOP and the defining issue of the next election, I certainly wouldn’t hire them as campaign managers.

At least Howell is somewhat consistent. Once a bush leaguer, always a bush leaguer. But Vince Callahan used to be the respected dean of the Northern Virginia delegation.

House Appropriations Chairman Vincent F. Callahan Jr. (R-Fairfax) said Republicans in the House will seek to undo the legislation that stopped the car-tax relief plan from reaching its original goal of paying for 100 percent of the tax on the first $20,000 of a car’s value.

“We pledge now to end this interruption and honor our commitments to the people of Virginia,” Callahan said. He said the tax could be phased out over six years.

This is the guy who voted for the tax hike before he voted against it and then reportedly sent a letter to his constituents taking credit for all the new money that was coming to his constituents.

Gov. Warner was almost caught speechless.

The move caught Warner and his allies in the Republican-controlled Senate by surprise and threatened to ignite the still-simmering tensions of last year, when the legislature battled for months over whether to increase taxes.

In a statement, Warner said the House Republican proposal would “almost certainly condemn us to repeat the same mistakes we’ve spent three years trying to fix. In one stroke, it would create an entitlement that would quickly grow to be larger than everything we now spend on all our state colleges and universities combined.”

Warner said the proposal appears to be the result of “election year pressures.”

Yeah, he had to say that. But my guess is he and his staff had to pick themselves up off the floor where they found themselves laughing.

But the biggest disappointment has to be Tim Kaine.

In an interview, Kaine said he supports fully phasing out the car tax but called the House proposal “an election-year thing.” He said: “You have to come up with money to fund it. That’s what they haven’t done this year.”

Mr. Kaine, you’ve been blessed. You get to follow a guy who three years ago was considered an inept, overly cautious, over his head political neophyte but who today is considered presidential material. Follow his lead — and I don’t mean promise a tax cut you don’t really mean. Voters will see through that. Shoot straight. After all, Howell, Callahan and company are swimming in a barrel.

UPDATE: I should go to bed but I thought I’d see how the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported this proposal. It seems to downplay it, pointing out that the votes aren’t there to pass it. Michael Hardy and Pamela Stallsmith also write:

The quickly tossed-together proposal — it contained no specifics — was almost immediately dismissed by the governor and the key state Senate leader as irresponsible electioneering.

…”In light of these surpluses and because of our continuing desire to help hard-working Virginians and their families, we are in a position to fulfill the commitments we have made to Virginia’s citizens and our local governments,” said House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford.

However, they offered no specifics, such as a timetable or total cost.

“We have not worked out the details,” Callahan said.

Does this sound strangely familiar to the tax referendum idea that the House leadership quickly threw together before it was laughed out of town?

Having avoided reading anything about the inauguration, I missed this in the Washington Post. Comedian Rich Little was “entertaining” folks at an inaugural ball.

Little said he missed and adored the late President Ronald Reagan and “I wish he was here tonight, but as a matter of fact he is,” and he proceeded to impersonate Reagan, saying, “You know, somebody asked me, ‘Do you think the war on poverty is over?’ I said, ‘Yes, the poor lost.’ ” The crowd went wild.

Torture jokes must have had them rolling in the aisles.

Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple’s (D-Alexandria) bill to narrowly define contraception was an effort to thwart what seems to be a growing movement of the anti-abortionists to outlaw contraception. But an anti-abortionist Senate colleague, Sen. Jeannemarie Devolites Davis (R-Fairfax and wife of “moderate” Congressman Tom Davis), added an amendment that effectively neutered the bill. So Whipple plans to pull it.

Whipple said Monday she had no choice but withdraw her legislation after it was amended during floor debate to expand her tightly drawn definition of contraception.

“In fact, it may be more dangerous to abortion rights now because it would put an inadequate definition into the code,” said Whipple, D-Arlington.

Her bill would legally define contraception as the prevention of the union of sperm and egg or implantation of an egg in the uterine wall.

Commonly prescribed birth-control pills prevent pregnancy through both means. Abortion opponents who contend life begins at conception insist that denying a fertilized egg the opportunity to attach itself to the womb and develop as a fetus is a form of abortion.

Whipple’s bill and a companion measure by Del. Kristin Amundson, D-Fairfax County, would head off anti-abortion groups’ efforts to classify birth control pills as a form of abortion. That could subject obtaining the pills, intrauterine devices and other forms of birth-control to Virginia’s growing list of abortion restrictions, including parental notification and consent for girls under 18.

Anti-abortionists deny the threat.

Victoria Cobb, the executive director of the Family Foundation of Virginia, said Whipple’s bill was an attempt to “replace common sense with politics” and said the suggestion that abortion foes want to deny access to contraception is absurd.

“This bill is an attempt by pro-abortion advocates to divert attention from the public debate over when life begins — a debate they are losing,” Cobb said in a two-paragraph statement.

Devolites-Davis claims she supports contraception, but others wonder.

Sen. Janet Howell said the amendment would make it more difficult _ and in some small towns impossible _ for women to obtain legally prescribed birth control pills.

“If you were to ask people, as I have been doing for the last several days, what’s contraception, what’s interesting is they don’t give you a definition, they give you an example. They tell you, ‘It’s the birth control pill,’ or ‘It’s the IUD,'” said Howell, D-Fairfax County.

The Devolites-Davis amendment opens the way to define those methods as abortion, Howell argued. That could force women in rural areas to drive for miles to get birth control prescriptions filled should local pharmacists who oppose abortion refuse to dispense the pills on grounds that they constitute abortion, she said.

The folks at The Virginia Progressive are following this issue. They point to a bill introduced by Del. Bob Marshall (R-Woodbridge), the nut case, that is summarized thusly:

Creates a Class 6 felony to provide a minor with a contraceptive or contraceptive device if the person knows or has reason to believe that the minor is engaging in sexual relations with a person three or more years older than the minor.

You break the law if you provide contraception to a girl who is being statutorily raped.

Here’s the vote on the Devolites amendment:

YEAS–Bell, Blevins, Bolling, Chichester, Colgan, Cuccinelli, Devolites Davis, Hanger, Hawkins, Martin, Mims, Norment, Obenshain, O’Brien, Rerras, Ruff, Stolle, Stosch, Wagner, Wampler, Watkins–21.

NAYS–Deeds, Edwards, Houck, Howell, Lambert, Locke, Lucas, Marsh, Miller, Potts, Puckett, Puller, Quayle, Reynolds, Saslaw, Ticer, Whipple–17.

RULE 36–Newman–1. (Apparently means an abstention due to a conflict of interest)

NOT VOTING–Williams–1.

Note Dem Sen. Chuck Colgan (Manassas) voted to neuter the bill whereas Republicans Sens. Russ Potts (Winchester) and Fred Quayle (Chesapeake) voted not to. Otherwise, it was a party line vote.

Del. Jeff Frederick (R-Woodbridge) has never struck me as the brightest bulb on the tree so the irony of his reasoning for House Bill 1536 probably never dawned on him. The bill would remove the cap on the car tax that was passed last year.

The cap, Frederick told the [Augusta Free Press], was put in place to prevent revenue triggers included in the original tax-relief legislation that dates to former governor Jim Gilmore’s 1997 gubernatorial campaign from taking the reimbursement from the 70 percent level that it has been stuck at since 2001 all the way to 100 percent.

“I’m calling this like it is. A supermajority of the General Assembly, and the governor, all campaigned on the promise of finishing what was started on the car tax,” Frederick said.

“The cap that is in place now will send us in the other direction. Estimates have it going from 70 percent last year to 63 percent in the current year to 56 percent and on down. Effectively, the car tax, which Virginians voted to have removed eight years ago, is going to go up again,” Frederick said.

“What this does is pass the buck to local governments to come up with other means to raise the revenues that they need to balance their budgets,” Frederick said.

Passing the buck to local governments is what tax-cutters like Frederick do when they slash state support for schools, transportation and a host of other services. It’s no secret that officials in areas with escalating home assessments are taking the heat for increasing local real estate tax bills because local governments have to make up the difference between sometimes what is required by higher levels of government (SOLs and No Child Left Behind requirements) but without appropriate funding.

By the way, another recent example of an “unfunded mandate” is the security costs for Bush’s inaugural.

Del. Dick Black (R-Sterling) who has been strangely quiet this session, nonetheless couldn’t resist remembering the anniversary of Roe v. Wade by likening pro-choice advocates to slavery proponents.

Del. Dick Black, R-Sterling, said one day, people will look back on the start of the 21st century the way they look at slavery today.

“Once it’s gone, you’re never going to be able to explain to your grandchildren how you ever backed it,” he said.

FULL DISCLOSURE:
Given the recent admission by Armstrong Williams that he was paid to comment favorably on the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” policy and the rightful furor it caused in the media, I want to ensure my own full and clear transparency.

I am a liberal, progressive, or wacko bleeding heart, if you prefer. Many will have a definition of those terms and they’re entitled to it. I see it as simply a fondness for benevolent government as a pact among citizens of a country whose signature gift to the world is its form of self-governance. To me, that pact calls for government to actively seek to make life better for its citizens, to protect minority as well as majority rights and to seek a fundamental fairness in the institutions that rule our daily lives.

While my knee may jerk, I support politicians who seek, at the very least, equal rights and fairness. (Many, a rive gauche et rive droite, think too much government is a big problem.) As someone who’s eked out a living as a reporter and public relations guy (also known as “flack” among my previous cohorts), I try at the very least not to trade in blatant untruths.

But this blog, Commonwealth Commonsense, was not started to compete with The New York Times. It was meant all along to be an opinionated forum for my beliefs and those who care to comment. Therefore, without the time and resources to hire an editor, I – and you – are left to my own devices.

But I am also an activist. I support people I like with (very) modest amounts of money and a lot of (mostly unsolicited) advice. Some politicians actually listen, if only politely, to what I advise. A few might pay for it. Whether they do or not, if they or their opponents are mentioned on this blog, I’ll let you know.

For now, be advised that David Poisson, who is planning to challenge Del. Dick Black (R-Sterling) for the right to represent citizens in the 32nd district in the Virginia House of Delegates, is a long-time friend who I pester ad nauseum about how he might win. Thus far, a few dollars have floated — but from me to him, not the other way around – between us, but I am an unabashed supporter of his candidacy. I’ll use this blog to let you know why and to skewer Black when he deserves it. (Yes, I have a license to shoot fish in a barrel, too.)

If that upsets you, well, you heard it from me first.

Cell Phone Ban for Papa Bear and Mama Bear, Too
…says the Roanoke Times.

Look for the worse in Jerry Kilgore’s campaign.

…can get you 10 years. These kinds of stories (here and here) have gotta make you chuckle at how silly the job of lawmaker often is.

More than 50 years his junior.

The Armstrong Williams flap over his accepting nearly a quarter of a million dollars from the Bush administration to tout the No Child Left Behind Act while posing as a dispassionate pundit has led one conservative media critic to accuse the press of racial bigotry. Tim Graham of the Media Research Center thinks it’s much ado about nothing.