Three Up, Three Down

Three Up
FINE WINES, FUN TIMES: The middle in a trio of signature summer events, the annual Daylily Festival kicks off this morning at the Andre Viette farm in Fishersville. The event features wine tasting, beer, live music, good food and more. Next week comes the Sweet Dreams festival in Stuarts Draft. Here’s to a series of splendid events to celebrate that most glorious of seasons. Until fall comes.
PRIVATIZED REST STOPS: Seething continues over a state plan to close 19 interstate rest stops, in-cluding a pair in Mount Sidney. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine wants to privatize the stops. That makes sense to us. Slashing the stops saves the state $1.9 million, hardly noticeable in tens of billions of dollars in state spending, but every cent counts these days and we’ll bet private contractors can do a better job than the state of maintaining the stops. So sign somebody up already.
PERRY MASON: Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor masterfully ducked tough questions in her Senate hearings this week. But new Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., whose presence in the whole affair was way funnier than his comedy routines, revealed that perhaps Sonia Sotomayor was not the avid watcher of “Perry Mason” that she’d indicated. Uh, gee, thanks for that Sen. Franken.
Three Down
BIPARTISANSHIP: What, you swallowed that bilge President Barack Obama spewed on the campaign trail about bipartisanship? Another sign of the divide came Thursday when a Senate committee backed Obama’s health care overhaul by a party-line 13-10 margin. Democrats call Republicans obstructionist. Gee, didn’t the other guys say the same thing a few years ago. Here’s a direction in which to point fingers: the president’s plan is about as realistic as the new “Transformers” movie and the premise about as sen-sible.
DEMOCRACY IN IRAN: With that nasty protest business is out of the way, along with a few of the pro-testers, the Obama administration wants to talk with Iran about its nuclear program. “We remain ready to engage with Iran,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says. Protests persist beneath CNN’s radar. Team Obama persists in embracing a crippled, despotic regime. Why?
SAY IT AIN’T SO, JOE: Our pal Vice President Biden ventured Thursday into Old Dominion to give Democrat Creigh Deeds a hand in the gubernatorial race. In so doing, Ol’ Joe accomplished the especially remarkable feat of touting the stimulus with a straight face. Cyanide stirs more life than the Obama stimu-lus plan has so far. Has Joe now reached that point where cannot believe himself any longer?