The constitutional amendment that would allow prayers in schools is in the Senate, where the Courts of Justice Committee is expected to take up the measure Monday. Problem is, prayers are already allowed in schools, even praying out loud, if you don’t disturb others. So what’s the point of this amendment. Only to propagate the notion that this country has become anti-Christian.

Delegate Charles W. Carrico Sr. said the amendment is needed because there is a growing effort to silence Christians.

“I think the American people and the courts have been saying that the wall in the separation of church and state has gone too far, and it’s suppressed — I’d even say oppressed — the Christian faith and silenced it,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have to check your deeply held beliefs at the door of the courthouse, at the door of the Statehouse or at the door of the schoolhouse,” said Delegate Bill Janis, Goochland Republican.

… Another supporter is Del. L. Scott Lingamfelter (R-Prince William). “There is now a poisoned environment for religious expression that the founders never, never desired,” said Lingamfelter, who voted for the proposal.

No one is suppressing the Christian faith. There’s not a “poisoned environment.” No one says you can’t pray as long as you don’t do it with tax money, which is what you’re ding if you try to push your faith on other people at schools and during other public meetings. With the minute of silence, we already allow people time to pray in schools. What are we to do, stop lessons when somebody says they want to pray out loud during class?

Can you imagine what Carrico or Janis would say if school allowed fundamentalist Muslims to push their idea of a Holy War in our classrooms?

The main problem with such legislation is that it doesn’t address the question of who is to determine when and what prayer is allowed.

The idea that Christianity is “under attack” serves the right’s purpose of making Christianity the national religion and the basis for our form of government.

The Rev. C. Douglas Smith, executive director of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, said the amendment is not a “prayer issue or religious issue,” and said he believes it is unconstitutional. “There is no question in anyone’s mind there are volumes of case law that would render this null and void immediately,” Mr. Smith said. “It puts at risk the constitution’s hundreds of years of history which have sought to protect religious freedoms.”

Debra Gold Linick, assistant director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, opposes the measure because she worries her 6-year-old daughter, Rebecca, will one day have religious views imposed upon her in the classroom.

“We don’t need prayer in schools during instructional time,” Ms. Linick, a Fairfax County resident, said yesterday. “We don’t send our kids to public schools to get a religious education.”

I failed to see how claiming there is call to “silence” Christians is anyway different from the red-baiting days of Joe McCarthy. I soon expect hearings where somebody is going to ask a witness, “Are you a Christian?” with there being only one right answer.

UPDATE: After posting, I found this article addressing the constitutionality of taking school time for prayer, which includes the controversy in Staunton that I neglected to mention. Thanks to Bacon’s Rebellion for the reference.

A popular bill in the House this year was the one offered by Dels. Dave Albo and Tom Rust, two Republicans from Fairfax. The bill would have increased fines for moving violations, with the funds going toward transportation projects.

Six major newspapers in the state and the Associated Press, whose stories are picked up by smaller papers, yesterday reported on the bill’s demise in the Senate. Let’s look at how they covered the alleged amount the bill would raise.

Hampton Roads Daily Press
The money raised – an estimated $180 million a year – would have been used to help pay for transportation projects across the state.

Associated Press
The committee killed a House measure that would have generated at least $114 million (up to $180 million, supporters said) by levying hundreds or even thousands of dollars in fines on drivers who pile up too many traffic citations. (Note, the AP doesn’t even attribute the estimate to anyone but presents it as fact.)

The Roanoke Times
Committee members also rejected a bill that would have imposed stiff, annual fines for serious driving violations – such as $350 for reckless driving and $750 for drunken driving – as well as for repeated speeding violations. Supporters said the bill would have generated between $114 million and $188 million for road construction.

The Washington Post
House Republicans had said the bill on reckless driving would have raised more than $100 million a year by imposing tough fines on what they said were seriously abusive drivers.

Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
The bill was expected to raise anywhere from $114 million to $180 million, money that the House appropriated in its budget to pay for certain transportation initiatives. The loss of that money leaves a hole that House budget negotiators will have to try to fill in talks with the Senate.

Richmond Times-Dispatch
The Senate committee also voted down a separate House bill, by Del. David B. Albo, R-Fairfax, that would generate at least $100 million a year for transportation improvements through tougher traffic fines.

Six stories tell us how much supporters say the new penalties would raise. But only the Virginian-Pilot challenges the assumptions.

Senators were equally critical of the proposed abuser fees. Supporters estimate the measure would generate at least $114 million annually, but government budget analysts have said actual revenues could be less than $25 million per year.

I’ll venture to guess that a lot of people will judge this bill based on what the supporters say it would raise, and even these recent assumptions have come down significantly from earlier estimates which, if memory serves me, were closer to $250 million, again according to supporters of the bill. Shouldn’t the media stop taking the word of proponents of measures when reporting these bills? The same thing happened last year when the press accepted Bush’s estimate of the cost of his Medicare bill: a little over $400 billion. Shortly after the bill passed, we found out he likely knew, as a Social Security actuary did, that it was well over $500 billion. And now we’ve learned that it’s over $700 billion and perhaps $1 trillion.

Kudos to Christina Nuckols of the Pilot. To the rest of them: Do your job.

The Washington Post today has a front page story about a poll suggesting people would rather pay tolls than taxes. But to me, that’s a gross generalization. When you go to the specific questions on the survey, you’re able to sort the answers by a number of demographics, but where you live isn’t one of them. And as the article points out, that could make a difference.

Three out of 4 D.C. residents said they favored tolls over taxes, while 61 percent of Marylanders and 53 percent of Virginians shared that view.

The national numbers suggest people prefer tolls over taxes. But that question is too vague to be meaningful. How much in taxes and tolls? On which roads? All the time or just at peak hours?

In fact, Virginia Transportation Commissioner Philip A. Shucet’s comment in the article suggests a public education campaign might alter the answers.

Shucet cautioned drivers to consider a little math before backing tolls in all cases. He said tolls on new highways would be at least $1 in each direction. So even if gas taxes were raised 20 cents a gallon — the amount he said was needed to fund all the state’s transportation needs — a driver who spends $2 a day on tolls would have to use more than 10 gallons of gas a day to save money. That’s a 100-mile commute — in a Hummer.

Of course, money isn’t the only consideration. Reduced stress and travel time are the major objectives. But there’s no guarantee that a roads program, paid for by a 20-cent tax increase or tolls, would reduce either stress or travel time.

It’s always puzzled me why the GOP can tolerate and accommodate pro-choice folks in its party but Dems can’t do the same with anti-abortionists. NARAL Pro-Choice America has dropped its opposition to a federal bill requiring anesthesia for fetuses over 20 weeks old, according to the New York Times. A similar bill has passed the Virginia House of Delegates, with support from a few Democrats, and awaits Senate action.

While I support Roe v. Wade, I wish the Dems and pro-choice folks would focus more on measures that obviate abortions and hold Republicans accountable when they are indifferent to such measures, as when they withhold funding (scroll down story) from groups like Planned Parenthood.

UPDATE: The New Republic blog and Washington Monthly’s Political Animal have more on the issue of Dems using contraception as a “wedge” issue. I’ve written before how, at least in Virginia, there’s seems to be a move to restrict contraception, given the bill against Planned Parenthood and the defeat of Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple’s effort to define contraception so it can’t be considered abortion. Focusing on contraception may be a way to flush out and isolate the wing-nuts.

Good story this morning by The Washington Post’s Chris Jenkins on the rising impact of medical care on the state’s budget. Even the fabled fickle Del. Vince Callahan (R-Fairfax) says there’s not much you can do about it.

“If anybody had any good ideas about reducing these increases, I haven’t heard them yet,” Callahan said. “We can save some money around the edges, but the inevitable fact is that [costs] just keep going up.”

Now the anti-taxers are fond of suggesting that costs shouldn’t go up more than the rate of population increase and inflation. But as Jenkins points out, the cost of medical care is predicated by increases in technology, which in turn, have helped people live a lot longer.

But if the anti-taxers want to keep costs down, I’ve got an idea: Let them give us a date when they should die. It should be before they start to require extraordinary facilities to keep them alive, say a hospital bed, or at least any medical device, drug or service discovered after they were born. Then on that date, assuming the gas chamber is free that day, we’ll send them to their final reward. They should be pleased as it minimizes the taxes they’d have to pay.

For some time, I’ve had a project in mind. I plan to record the early day’s Wall Street news as reported by the AP as compare them to the day’s trading. Frequently, it’ll have stories that predict stocks will climb, only to see them nosedive during the early hours of trading. Or vice versa. The point is whatever reasons reporters give for the stock market movement or predicted daily trend, they are bogus. Nobody seems to be able to predict the daily swings. If they could, they’d be selling their advice for big bucks.

I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years working with business reporters. There are some good ones. Most of them work for the Wall Street Journal. The rest seems to be marking time until a hot political investigative beat comes open because they don’t seem to try to understand business.

And today, we have an example of how business reporters can’t even agree on what published data means. AP New York: Call your Washington bureau. Get your stories straight.

Next to each other on the business news section of my Yahoo home page are these two stories.

Dateline: Washington
Retail Sales Are Weakest in Five Months
Retail sales fell 0.3 percent in January — the weakest showing in five months — as a big drop in demand for cars offset strength at clothing and department stores. Spending was powered mostly by consumers anxious to use holiday gift cards.

The Commerce Department reported that last month’s decline in retail sales followed a huge 1.1 percent surge in December. Both months were heavily influenced by a swing in activity at auto showrooms.

In January, car sales fell by 3.3 percent, the biggest decline since last June. Car sales had surged by 4 percent in December as buyers had flocked to showrooms to take advantage of attractive incentive offers.

Dateline: New York
Stocks Push Higher on Strong Retail Data
Investors pushed stocks higher Tuesday, cheered by strong retail sales data, a possible acquisition in the retail sector and a market that has managed to hold on to its recent gains.

Wall Street welcomed the Commerce Department’s report that overall retail sales fell 0.3 percent in January, less than the 0.5 percent economists expected. Taking sluggish auto sales out of the equation, retail sales rose 0.6 percent, also better than expected.

Volume was light prior to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s congressional testimony on Wednesday and Thursday, when he’ll give his semi-annual report on the economy. But analysts said investors took comfort in the fact that the major indexes did not give back their gains over the past two weeks.

OK, which is it? “Weak Sales” or “Strong Retail Data”? The Washington story deals mostly with retail data as reported by the Commerce Department, whereas the New York story talks mostly about stock activity.

Maybe that’s why voters in November didn’t vote their pocketbooks. They couldn’t figure out from the news whether the economy was in good shape or bad shape. Seems business reporters themselves don’t know.

In the month leading up to last year’s presidential election, local television stations in big cities devoted eight times as much air time to car crashes and other accidents than to campaigns for the House of Representatives, state senate, city hall and other local offices, according to a new study to be released tomorrow.

…”I think most stations fear that covering politics is ratings poison,” said Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School and one of the lead authors of the study. “Interestingly, they don’t seem to fear that running a torrent of political ads hurts them with their audience.”

Mr. Kaplan, who hosts a weekly program on “Air America,” a liberal talk radio network, and his colleagues found that in the 11 markets studied, the hours of advertising by House candidates eclipsed actual coverage of those races by a ratio of 5 to 1.

Virginia Gov. Mark Warner has a following at a web site call Draft Mark Warner. I’ll post the link on this page, not that I endorse him for president. The web site states, “The moderate wing of the Democratic Party must fight for a ‘New Generation of Leadership.’ This is crucial to winning future elections. This past election was our call to action to bring the Democratic Party back to the center.”

If the Democratic Party was to go back toward the center it would be moving left, in my opinion. Still, I’ll give the man his due. It’s just way to early for me to back anyone in particular.

You think it’s OK to teach religion in public schools even if the kids are allowed to opt-out? Read this lady’s memories.

The Washington Post is certain to boil the red blood of Bush supporters with what appears to be a concerted effort to highlight the disingenuousness of the Bush budget plan. A series of articles and postings in the last two days go for the jugular.

Yesterday’s Outlook section had a commentary that suggested that the Bush administration is “Enronizing” the budget, although its first comparison is to the Boeing deal where the Air Force wanted to lease planes from the aircraft maker rather than buy them, despite the higher costs. Why? To reduce cost in the annual budget.

The president and Congress continue resorting to ever more smoke and mirrors to veil the truth about the costs and burdens that will be placed on American taxpayers. Moreover, they’re using precisely the sorts of gimmicks and tricks that we wouldn’t tolerate in the private sector.

The Boeing deal was eerily reminiscent of corporate deals using the same kinds of long-term leases for exactly the same reasons. I still carry images in my mind of that imposing Enron headquarters building in Houston that we saw on the nightly news as the Enron scandal unfolded about four years ago. Guess what? Enron acquired that building by creating a special entity solely for the purpose of purchasing the building and then leasing it back to the company. Its reasons were the same as the Air Force’s in the Boeing deal — to avoid recording the full cost of the building up front, effectively keeping the purchase “off the books.”

You’d think the embarrassment of the Boeing deal, and the lessons of Enron et al., might have compelled the administration to cease and desist from the use of such accounting tricks. But in this new budget, they’re everywhere.

Then today, an A1 story carried the headline “After Bush Leaves Office, His Budget’s Costs Balloon.”

Congress and the White House have become adept at passing legislation with hidden long-term price tags, but those huge costs began coming into view in Bush’s latest spending plan. Even if Bush succeeds in slashing the deficit in half in four years, as he has pledged, his major policy prescriptions would leave his successor with massive financial commitments that begin rising dramatically the year he relinquishes the White House, according to an analysis of new budget figures.

Bush’s extensive tax cuts, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit and, if it passes, his plan to redesign Social Security all balloon in cost several years from now. His plan to partially privatize Social Security, for instance, would cost a total of $79.5 billion in the last two budgets that Bush will propose as president and an additional $675 billion in the five years that follow. New Medicare figures likewise show the cost almost twice as high as originally estimated, largely because it mushrooms long after the Bush presidency.

Finally, Terry Neal in his Talking Points online column writes

The one-year budget deficit will be so large in the next fiscal year that if the government stopped funding everything except defense, homeland security and entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the nation would still be $75 billion in the red.

Put another way, if the government decided this year to eliminate every education, school lunch, public health, housing assistance, space exploration, medical research, environmental protection, highways, national parks and veterans program, it would still run a deficit in 2005.

That’s because domestic discretionary programs that aren’t associated with defense or homeland security make up only about 20 percent of the federal budget. President Bush proposes spending about $352 billion for those domestic programs this year. The estimated budget deficit is $427 billion. The difference: $75 billion.

For all of the White House crowing about holding down spending, it is clear the government is not going to be able to cut its way out of this deficit — not without making drastic cuts that would completely redefine the role of the federal government.

Oh my, how Scott McClellan must be boiling!