Three Up, Three Down

Three Up

If you think Detroit carmakers are run poorly, take a look at baseball, once America’s pasttime, now an afterthought with most small-market teams cast into the role of also-rans. So why is baseball in this space? Because despite the failings of Commissioner Bud Selig, the game remains a quintessential part of American life. It’s every day. And it’s back Sunday.
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Nancy Sorrells, Augusta County’s Riverheads District supervisor, has taken her lumps in this space before, most recently for logging more than 30,000 miles on the taxpayers’ dime over the last four years. During a stop by our offices Thursday, she vowed she’ll forgo her travel expense money for six months. We commend the move.
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It isn’t often that we get a chance to pat the backs of the crowd in the US Senate. So we’ll seize the rare opportunity. Forty-one Republicans and 26 Democrats combined Wednesday to approve a requirement that a so-called cap-and-trade scheme be approved by 60 votes or more. Cap-and-trade ostensibly would reduce carbon emissions by making violators of carbon caps pay. In the end, it’s consumers who would pay.

Three Down

As gatherings of world leaders go, the G-20 Summit did far less harm than one might have expected. The gang decided to toss out another $1 trillion from the International Monetary Fund, spending most of the powwow admiring their efforts, such as they were. The Fed these days zips out $1 trillion like it were a report for the boss coming off the copying machine. So the G-20 move was considered restrained. Still, they boasted it was more than they’d ever spent before. Yippee. What a milestone.
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Saul Alinsky lives. The bespectacled rabble-rouser famous for “Rules for Radicals,” published shortly before his death in 1973, once advised, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Allies of President Barack Obama, and sometimes Obama himself, have been employing that tactic in earnest of late. Now one of their targets, Karl Rove, writes in The Wall Street Journal that Obama may be employing the same approach to get fellow Democrats to back his budget. Please, let the ’70s die.
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We hate to say it, but we think Churchville lawyer Francis Chester’s lawsuit against Augusta County over the reassessment is dead on arrival. He needs to prove some inherent flaw in the methodology of the appraisal or in its execution. The suit he filed this week does not strike us as meeting that criteria. The end of the battle appears near.