Probably more than you ever want to know about The Post’s media critic.

Stephen D. Haner, a newspaperman-turned-political operative-turned-lobbyist, is leaving the Virginia Chamber of Commerce to open his own public-affairs shop.
Haner, 50, steps down July 31 as the organization’s vice president for public policy to “establish a consulting firm to represent clients on state government affairs and public-relations projects,” the chamber said in a written statement yesterday.
“It goes without saying he will be missed,” Hugh D. Keogh, the chamber of commerce’s president and chief executive officer.

Don’t bet on it. There are plenty of moderate Republican businessmen who think Haner’s stewardship was a disaster for the Chamber, which is why other ad hoc groups have been forming to push for a more responsible approach to state spending.

The Washington Times has decreed that the budget surplus will be the hot topic on the gubernatorial campaign trail. Well, yeah, they’d like that, and along with The Washington Post, I’m sure they’ll make taxes the overriding issue in the campaign. Which is bassackwards. You figure out what you want and how much it will cost frist; only then can you determine if you’re willing to pay for it.

But let’s put to rest the silly argument that Kilgore repeatedly makes.

“The fact that the state’s revenues continue to climb with each passing day underscores what Jerry Kilgore was saying last year, which was that the economy was improving, and we should wait to see the numbers before raising taxes unnecessarily,” [spokesman] Mr. Murtaugh said.

If you recall, Virginia was drowning in a sea of red ink when Warner took office, thanks mostly to Jim Gilmore’s ill-advised car tax scam and his reckless spending. If Gilmore was to have followed Kilgore’s plan of action, he would have waited before spending all that money until he knew whether the late 90s windfall was sustainable. But he didn’t. He spent recklessly and cut taxes instead of seeing whether those revenues were to continue.

So even if a governor is expected have a crystal ball, why is it that Kilgore wants to look at only a year’s horizon before making fiscal policy? If you add up skyrocketing Medicaid costs and simply transportation maintenance needs, you can see that the current surplus isn’t, as Russ Potts says, not really a surplus at all.

In fact, Mr. Potts — a Republican state senator from Winchester who is running as an independent — has said that a shortfall in the state pension fund and a lack of funding for health care and education should dispel talk about a surplus.

“There is no surplus. Nothing could be further than the truth,” said Mr. Potts, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, which pushed for the tax increase in May last year. “Not only do we have bills in the drawer, we have massive bills in the drawer.”

Potts, of course, has gone in the other direction, seeming to demand a tax hike for transportation without any idea of how he’d spend it. If he thinks a blue ribbon committee is the way to go, he’ll have plenty of push-back from the many people who voted against the transportation referenda a few years ago precisely because they didn’t like the idea of an non-elected commission deciding the future of the Commonwealth’s transportation system.

Kilgore, Potts and Kaine should be called on to outline what those bills in the drawer may look like and how they plan to pay them.

Don’t hold your breath.

Well, Mark Warner has officially gone from being a scared of his own shadow to being my hero. Not that they are two ends of a continuum, I realize. Sure, his leadership on the budget issue went a long way toward changing my opinion of him, but a fall over the handlebars sealed the deal.

Having suffered three broken collar bones, a cracked scapula, numerous broken ribs and a concussion that striped me of hours of my recollected life — all thanks to my suicidal (says my wife) bike riding — I can say, Governor, I feel your pain. And your embarrassment. I cracked several ribs years ago when I stood and looked back over my shoulder to make sure my kids were still behind me while simultaneously braking with my left hand, the one that controls the front brake. As Warner learned yesterday, that means over the handlebars we go.

So Governor, join the ranks of the slightly suicidal and occasionally stupid cyclists. We probably deserve each other.

Michael Getler of The Washington Post has been pretty good about responding to FAIR’s complaints in the past few weeks, the latest being the Downing Street Memo-gate. Dana Milbank, whose work I think is top notch, seems a bit defensive in his reply to Getler’s saying the memo may have deserved wider coverage.

“While you have been within your rights as ombudsman over the past five years to attempt to excise any trace of colorful or provocative writing from the Post [Milbank wrote], you are out of bounds in asserting that a columnist cannot identify as ‘wingnuts’ a group whose followers have long been harassing this and other reporters and their families with hateful, obscene and sometimes anti-Semitic speech.”

Touchy!

Apparently, Milbank thought all who believe the memo was indeed news, should be lumped in with Democrats who held a press conference about it. Milbank, in his column, which should have more leeway for opinion than a news piece, showed his disdain for the group.

A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 members of Congress, only one — Conyers — had mentioned the memo on the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in Conyers’s session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.

OK. So the memo is not news to Milbank, but what also struck me was the anti-Semitism charge. Here’s what Milbank had written.

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration “neocons” so “the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.” He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation,” McGovern said. “The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic.”

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering whether the true war motive was Iraq’s threat to Israel, thanked McGovern for his “candid answer.”

OK. Jim Moran is involved, so it must be anti-Semitism.

Howard Dean was quick to disavow the group.

There are plenty in the blogosphere who agree with Dean: The group must be anti-Semitic.

Now you can argue that Ray McGovern doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And you can surely argue that those who think Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks are loony.

But why is it that if one ever charges that the government of Israel — not the citizens and certainly not all Jews — might be conspiring with the U.S. to transform the region in their image and to their liking you must, ipso facto, be anti-Semitic. As one commentator on Daily Kos put it, “Israel has successfully wrapped themselves in the protection of persecution, meaning, criticize us, you are anti-semetic (sic). It is the SAME way here, when if you criticize Bush, you hate America.”

Maybe these kids will start a movement about their right to hear information, that whether adults like it or not, they need to know.

One thing that shocks me when we talk to our teenagers about sex is their telling us how shocked their friends are that we talk to our three about it.

What does this article add to the political debate? There is nothing new here. No news, just the trading of the same old charges. Why invest reporters (this time it took two of them to tell us nothing new) in something like this when they could be investigating the real problems Virginia is facing and outlining some of the solutions we might implement and then getting candidates to answer questions about such options.

The Post actually did give us a great article today about HOT lanes, though it could have given us more info. on whether such HOT lanes actually reduced congestion on the regular lanes. The local angle story didn’t do that, either, but gave us an insight to how the slugs feel about HOT lanes. They make legitimate points. Remember, the idea that’s pitched to us about HOT lanes is that while it will improve the commute times of those who pay the tolls, the rest of are supposed to get relief because HOT lanes takes traffic off regular lanes.

Maybe Mike Shear, Chris Jenkins and the rest of the Virginia political reporters will use the info. on HOT lanes to probe the candidates for in-depth answers. But it seems such a waste of talent to have Shear & Co. writing these useless stories.

You see it starts with late-term abortions, but then goes here.

After reading this Columbia Journalism Review Daily entry about Nancy Grace, I can’t quite figure whether they like or hate her. Can you?

…the editorial writer(s).