It seems the continuing debate debate misses a crucial point. Larry Sabato and others suggest that Russ Potts shouldn’t be included in debates until he garners about 15 % of the hypothetical vote in polls, and even then it’s doubtful Kilgore the pansy would debate him. But the hypothetical is the nut. Judging from what I’ve heard about the polls, few people say they know either Tim Kaine, Jerry Kilgore or Russ Potts. I’m willing to bet the only reason Potts is getting so little support is that when people are asked who they support in the November election the question is, “Do you support Tim Kaine, the Democrat, Jerry Kilgore, the Republican or Russ Potts, the independent?”

Now keep in mind a huge number of people vote based on party ID alone. Even by November, people know little of the candidates and just vote for the party. So when asked the hypothetical question, they choose either the Dem or the GOPer. As far as they know, Russ Potts, “the independent,” could be a left wing wacko or a right wing ideologue. Kaine or Kilgore could be wackos, too, but at least they have a tag that goes with them, somehow describing what they’re all about.

(Of course, with Tim Kaine wandering around in some vague conservative, moderate, I-won’t-offend-anybody purgatory, I keep wondering how many Democrats recognize him.)

Since conservative bloggers have picked up statements like the previous one to suggests that we’re so disaffected with Kaine that we’ll stay home or vote for Kilgore, for the record let me say, no, I won’t vote for Kilgore.

But about that Russ Potts. The Washington Post editorial page thinks he’s the only straight shooter.

State Sen. H. Russell Potts Jr. (R-Winchester), who is running for governor as an independent, is the only one in the race calling for swift action now. He would convene a special legislative session on transportation, as Gov. Gerald L. Baliles (D) did nearly 20 years ago; not since then has the state faced up to its transportation needs. Mr. Potts says he would press the lawmakers until they produced a long-range financing package. That’s what it will take, and the longer Virginia leaders dodge and dawdle, the costlier the solution will be.

Do I hear an endorsement in the making?

But still, by November only a few more people will really know anything more about Kaine and Kilgore than their party ID. So maybe Potts is destined for only 5%, among them The Post’s editorialists.

I’ve got to agree with Brian Moran on this.

“Anyone who does [blogging] anonymously is being cowardly, in my opinion,” he said. Blogs, he added, “don’t seem to be used constructively at this point. It just seems to be wild potshots at people.”

I’ve been thinking about the issue of anonymous blogging lately. Gutless was the word I used on a comment I made on another blog discussing the topic.

And yet, The Post article this morning on political blogs quotes at length the anonymous blogger known as “Not Larry Sabato.” His blog has become a lengthy list of anonymous commentators in addition to his anonymous predictions and opinions. Many of the comments are personal attacks. I had a link to it on this blog, but I took it down today.

I recently received an inquiry from another government official who has started a blog, asking me if I’d link to him. Thus far, I’ve decided not to as I don’t want to encourage anonymous blogging. Blogs like Not Larry Sabato’s (to which I’ve intentionally not linked here) have little credibility and cheapen the discourse by making it anonymous. I’ve used harsh language attacking politicians, but at the very least I have a short bio of me on this site, and one can easily Google me for more info.

I’ve thought of not allowing anonymous comments on Commonwealth Commonsense. In fact, I’ve thought of taking the comments section off completely because of anonymous commentators.

Clearly, some blogs are setting the stage for what they hope to be greater influence on the elections. They do that by wild accusations that elicit many anonymous commentators that then engender coverage in the mainstream press. And The Post fell into their hands with today’s article. I will be-thinking providing any links to blogs written in anonymity.

The New York Times has picked up with story about Tom Davis’s bullying. And he’s backing down.

Some Republicans went so far as to suggest that Major League Baseball, which owns the team, could lose its antitrust exemption if it permits Mr. Soros, who would be a part-owner with a group of investors headed by a local entrepreneur, to buy it – a threat that drew immediate ridicule in the sports pages and outrage from Democrats.

By Wednesday, one Republican, Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, backed away from that suggestion, saying he never intended any threat. But Mr. Davis and other Republicans did not back down from their criticism of Mr. Soros, who, they took pains to note, has been convicted of insider trading in France – a ruling he is appealing – and has supported ballot initiatives to legalize medical marijuana.

Unfortunately, the Times story doesn’t add much to what Sally Jenkins wrote yesterday in The Post. But one of her more salient points was picked up by the Times reporter.

“Marge Schott owned a team,” said Senator Herb Kohl, the Wisconsin Democrat, recalling the former Cincinnati Reds owner, who collected Nazi memorabilia and was ultimately suspended from baseball for making racial slurs.

Is that the kind of owner Tom Davis wants?

Nicolas Kristof has the right framing when he talks about the burgeoning debt we are accumulating during the Bush II regime. Perhaps it is language progressives should adopt.

President Bush has excoriated the “death tax,” as he calls the estate tax. But his profligacy will leave every American child facing a “birth tax” of about $150,000.

Yesterday E.J. Dionne adopted the frank language that is usually reserved for the blogosphere, calling the regressive leadership on their modern day McCarthyism. I’m amused that Karl Rove’s saying that many citizens are un-American because they are liberals has been justified by the administration because after all, he wasn’t accusing Democrats of being un-American , just liberals. For years, calling someone a liberal was a sure way to win elections, but this new step is accusing them of sedition is outrageous.

But you expect that from a Karl Rove. Unfortunately, Republicans who have had moderate reputations are jumping on the bandwagon. And they’re ready to blatantly threaten industries that dare to consider Democrats as owners. Sally Jenkins has a good column this morning on Congressman Tom Davis’ attempt to blackball George Soros, the billionaire supporter of liberal causes.

I must have been napping, and that’s why I missed the part where we became a country in which Democrats are no longer allowed to buy things.

If lawmakers start banning people from owning ballclubs just because of their politics or because they have a few woo-woo ideas, there are going to be a lot of shuttered ballparks. Anybody who tries to say that MLB owners should meet a certain standard of political correctness will get knocked back on their butts every time by two simple words: Marge Schott.

It was all right for Schott, the racist collector of Nazi memorabilia, to own a baseball team for years, but it’s not for Soros, the billion-dollar philanthropist and Nobel Prize nominee?

That’s exactly what some Republicans on Capitol Hill are suggesting, led by Tom Davis, the Republican from Virginia who is trying to steer the sale of the Nationals and who says Soros is just not the kind of person “we need or want in the nation’s capital.”

I don’t much care about George Soros, and I don’t care at all which rich guy gets the privilege of spending $400 million in heavy sugar on the Nats. But I do care when members of a ruling party start pushing people around, because next, it could be me. This is supposed to be the party that doesn’t believe in government telling business or private citizens what to do.

Davis defends himself by saying his is “just one fan’s opinion.” That’s the same tact he took in opposing a proposed home and office development he didn’t like near his neighborhood. He said he was just attending a community hearing as “a homeowner.” But then he threatened to pull federal funding for the project.

… the crowd of about 500 broke into applause when Davis announced that he would amend a Metro funding bill to block the sale or lease of land the agency owns next to the Orange Line station in Fairfax County.

In this case, he seemed more interested in keeping Democrats out of his district than he was about the impact on the neighborhood.

With the Nats sale, he seems again intent on keeping out Democrats and proving himself a hypocrite.

You can’t help wondering what’s behind the outrageous attack on Soros, who isn’t even a major partner in the bid for the Nats. (Local entrepreneur Jon Ledecky is the real bidder.) Isn’t it strange that rival bidder Fred Malek, the head of the Washington Baseball club, just happens to be a very big GOP fundraiser? And isn’t it strange that, in a telephone interview, Davis went out of his way to praise Malek’s bid? And isn’t it strange that these attacks on Soros from Republicans came on the very day that Ledecky and his partners were being interviewed by MLB?

Davis doesn’t bother to hide his agenda. He says straight out that baseball needs to cultivate some good will on Capitol Hill at the moment, given the steroid investigations, and that selling the team to billionaire Soros, a critic of President Bush and a massive financial supporter of liberal causes, would anger him.

Yet, Fred Malek is praised.

Malek is a former Richard Nixon aide. When he was White House personnel chief, he was summoned by Nixon to discuss a “Jewish cabal” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nixon believed Jews in the bureau were tilting stats to make his policies look bad. He wanted to know how many Jews there were in the bureau, and he wanted Malek to count them. Malek eventually complied and produced a list.

Where’s the ADL on this?

Most people will tell you that the most important ingredient in a school is the faculty. You want good schools? Hire good teachers. But of course, finding good teachers is tough because the job usually doesn’t pay all that well. Then add the requirements of No Child Left Behind and you can imagine how much harder it will be to find good teachers. Here’s an analogy.

A chief executive decides he wants better performance from his company. He issues a mandate that all employees be highly qualified. Then he proposes, as No Child Left Behind does, that the staff members be more tightly controlled, that they conform closely to his top-down directives and that they be tested yearly to keep their jobs. And he wants all of this without raising salaries a penny. Who would want to work for such an outfit?

Good point. Where do we get the money, though, for good teachers if people complain about taxes, especially property taxes, whence come teacher salaries?

One idea: every day, bonds are approved to build stadiums, even schools. The presumption is that the new buildings will increase the profile of a given city, thus attracting more visitors, more businesses, more families and more tax revenue, all of which will pay down the bond. By the same token, then, wouldn’t it make sense to create a bond to pay for better educators?

The district would get the best teachers, families would get better schools, businesses would settle in the city with the great public schools, property values would go up [Editors Note: Maybe not such a good reason to hire better teachers], and everyone would be happy. Especially the students, who would get the best educators, gain respect for the profession and might even consider becoming teachers themselves. The talent pool would then grow ever stronger, and in 20 years we could have created the best corps of teachers the country has ever known.

I admit that borrowing has its drawbacks. But what better investment can a community make than in its schools?

Some say The Truth About Hillary should be burned.

Prurient in its focus, shameless in its methodology and vile in execution, this volume is a near-perfect example of what has come to be called “bio-porn,” a particularly noxious subgenre of the polemic literature that nowadays infests our bestseller lists.

Others say it unwittingly helped the former first lady.

In terms of political impact it is not a takedown but a buildup. Dick Morris says its sensational charges will only “embolden” her. They will certainly tend to inoculate her against future and legitimate criticism and revelations. The book is poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work.

Says the LA Times Tim Rutten,

The way to handle “The Truth About Hillary” responsibly is to give it no further notice, no wider discussion.

Silence.

If the serious media can’t draw the line on this one, then there no longer are any lines to draw.

Funny, I’ve made that suggestion before. When the media covers lies it just gives the lie credibility.

I guess one could argue that a best selling book can’t be ignored. But we really don’t know if it’s best selling. Let’s wait until the returns come in. The book business is one where retailers can buy books on a bet that they’ll be successful but then return them to the publisher if they tank. Judging from the reviews this one is getting, it will soon be on the bargain tables. Where I hope it is also ignored.

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.