Three Up; Three Down

THREE UP

JIM PERKINS has occupied a spot in this space before mostly for the same reasons he’s here again. The Greater Augusta Chamber of Commerce on Thursday named Perkins its Citizen of the Year. The Blue Ridge Community College president who’s retiring after 20 years there built the school into one of the state’s finest, adding new facilities and driving up enrollment. Perhaps the best testament to Perkins’ leadership: the prognosis for the school’s future remains bright; his legacy likely will grow.
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An uproar began building over Augusta County school officials’ plans to cut INDOOR TRACK even before the move became public. That led Thursday to the sport being pulled back from the chopping block. Student athletes and parents made impassioned pleas to the school board to keep the program, the elimination of which would have saved the district a paltry $11,000 when it needed to slash almost $6 million. Here’s to democracy in action.
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Rep. DAN BOREN, a rare Democrat from Oklahoma, has dared to defy Big Labor by opposing secret ballot union elections. That resulted this week in a union attack on him over the death of an Oklahoma worker at an industrial laundry company, the presumption being that unions could have saved him. Undaunted, Boren stands tall against a bad bill and an old-fashioned smear campaign. Good for him.

THREE DOWN

President BARACK OBAMA savors being a man of firsts. He captured headlines Thursday night as the first sitting president to appear on “The Tonight Show” and again Friday as the first to deliver a videotaped message to an enemy (or so we thought), this to Iran, in hopes of easing simmering tensions. A lesser-known first reported by The Washington Times: Shortly before taking office, Obama picked up a $500,000 advance for a children’s book project. The audience may be apropos, but it perhaps has escaped notice that America now desperately needs a grownup in the White House.
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We wonder if DEMOCRATIC PANDERERS have heard of that ancient document known as the Constitution. It forbids legislators under the Bill of Attainder Clause from singling out individuals or groups for punishment without trial. It also forbids laws punishing people ex post facto, or after the fact. This is precisely what lawmakers are seeking to do in taxing AIG executives’ bonuses. Surely, the bonuses are objectionable, but that should have been considered when authoring bailout legislation – which we say never should have been written. The fix Democratic lawmakers seek to their own mess is unconstitutional and wrong.
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We wonder if the GANG OF FIVE Augusta County supervisors who refused to delay the reassessment have noticed the impact of appeals on values. We reported this week that appeals dropped commercial real estate values by 15 percentage points since January and residential values by 10 percentage points since last fall. Appeals covered less than 20 percent of county properties. Too bad the Gang denied property owners a closer look at the remaining values, which might have shown further discrepancies.