From this morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch:

” . . . Warner’s donors include singer and actress Barbra Streisand, movie director Steven Spielberg, television producer Norman Lear, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley of Coeburn, singer and actress Bette Midler, musician Bruce Hornsby of Williamsburg, writer John Grisham of Albemarle County and Walt Disney President Robert Iger. Warner also received a donation from Madeleine K. Albright, secretary of state in President Bill Clinton’s second term.”

Today we learned that Sen. Joe Gartlan, who served in the Virginia Senate for 28 years, died. Few Virginians have made such an impact on our Commonwealth.

Joe never blew an uncertain trumpet. He was a clear and forceful voice for the issues he believed in. He was determined to protect the Chesapeake Bay. He was outspoken in his commitment to persons with mental health. 

He was known for a ready supply of Irish jokes and a belief that government could make a difference in people’s lives. He was truly a great Virginian, and I will miss him.

Our little community, tucked in south of the Beltway in the Washington, DC suburbs, lost a good neighbor this weekend.

We knew him as a devoted dad. He showed up at swim meets. He sat through elementary orchestra concerts. (Greater love hath no parent.)

We knew him as a neighbor. He helped raise money for local charities. He pitched in whenever he could.

Oh, and he apparently also did something at the White House.

I’ll leave it to others to talk about the political legacy of Tony Snow. I’ll just say that we’ll miss him as a good neighbor and a good dad.

At 1:39 a.m. Thursday, the House and Senate staggered to an end of the Special Session on Transportation. The result: very little. I am deeply saddened by this outcome.

I went to Richmond to solve problems. Over the years, that has meant voting for many bills I did not think were perfect, but that represented the best compromise we could find. Like Reinhold Niebuhr, I understand that “Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.”

So I was pleased when House and Senate Democrats and the Governor created a compromise bill that we could all support. It wasn’t perfect-no bill is. But it offered the opportunity of making real progress. In all, it would have generated approximately $1.92 billion in statewide revenue, $2.28 billion for Northern Virginia, and $1.366 billion for Hampton Roads over the next 7 years.

It would have raised the revenue in a variety of ways - a ¼¢ increase in the sales tax statewide, a full penny here in Northern Virginia, and a few other modest increases. There was no increase in the gas tax in our compromise. It would also have reduced the state sales tax on food.

But on virtually a straight party-line vote, the bill was defeated. Instead, we were offered the opportunity to vote on “innovative solutions” that were not serious efforts to provide the funding we need.

We heard about the need for audits. (I’m for them-and even carried a VDOT audit bill designed to measure the maintenance funding gap.) But ask anyone sitting in traffic on the Beltway whether we need an audit to know there’s a problem. Audits are no excuse for inaction.

We heard about “public-private partnerships.” (That’s legis-speak for “tolls.”) Again, I think PPPs can be part of a solution-but we should not sell off assets that taxpayers have already paid for.

Finally, we heard a proposal that I called the “pixie dust” proposal. We would not raise any taxes. We would just dedicate “future growth” to transportation funding.

Does that sound familiar to you? That was how we were going to pay for the car tax. Instead, we were left with a billion-dollar hole in our budget that it took Mark Warner two years to address. Of course it passed the House, but the Senate took little time to dispose of it.

We all know the truth-if we want something, we have to pay for it. Promising people they can get something for nothing is a way to economic disaster. And economic disaster is what we’ll have if we don’t do anything about transportation.

Pixie dust is not a grown-up funding proposal.

How did you like the play?

That’s pretty much what our day has been like. Speech, recess, speech, recess. The House actually had a transportation bill that would have provided substantial transportation revenue. It was killed on basically a party line vote.

We did pass what I am calling the “pixie dust” transportation funding bill. HB 6055 won’t raise taxes. It won’t raise fees. It will just dedicate FUTURE revenue to transportation.  How much? Don’t know. But trust us.

We have been down this road before. That was how we were paying for the car tax. And we all know how well that turned out.,

The House (again on basically a party line vote) passed this. I am confident that the Senate will dispose of it in the appropriate way.

For people in our line of work, this is pretty much a Holy Day of Obligation. I’ll be doing the usual rounds of parades and picnics.

But my very favorite will be the first–the Waynewood parade. Waynewood is a suburban neighborhood that maintains a true small-town feeling. The Fourth of July parade looks like a Norman Rockwell painting — kids with crepe paper streamers in their bikes, big sisters and brothers pulling younger ones in wagons decorated with stars and stripes. The parade traverses a three-block route and ends at the community pool.

It’s a chance to connect with old friends (some of Sara’s friends are now there with THEIR kids). We’ll all wave flags and eat hot dogs and be thankful for all the sacrifices (past and present) that make this a truly Glorious Fourth.

Hope yours is half as good.

For most sane people, Summertime is Vacationtime; for legislators, it’s Conferencetime. (For Virginia legislators, of course, it’s Conferencetime and SpecialSessiontime.)

This weekend I was able to break away from the doldrums of the transportation wheel-spinning in Richmond to attend the Democratic Leadership Council’s “National Conversation” in my hometown of Chicago. The DLC describes itself as a “reform movement that is reshaping American politics by moving it beyond the old left-right debate.” It provided much of the intellectual firepower for the Clinton presidency, and, with the Obama-Clinton primary season just concluded, I was concerned that I would see evidence of  lingering animosity among former Clinton partisans. But that wasn’t the case: at least in public, all the participants were looking forward to the promise and potential of an Obama presidency.

Coming on the heels of our Indecision 2008 in Richmond, one session seemed particularly pertinent: it was a discussion of nonpartisan redistricting, highlighted by a DLC study on the impact of gerrymandering. On a policy level, gerrymandered districts lead to the gridlock we’re experiencing in Richmond. The report, which focuses on gerrymandering of Congressional districts, notes, “In large measure, today’s stalemate is the result of partisan gerrymandering. The boundaries that separate districts hew to the partisan advantage of one party or the other, encouraging members of Congress to play to their party’s base, rather than the broad center of the electorate.”

Coincidentally, the same theme was picked up locally this weekend by Richmond savant Jeff Schapiro, who (in the course of prematurely proclaiming the irrelevancy of Governor Kaine) observed, “Redistricting only makes it easier for Kaine’s opponents to resist him. Nowhere is this more evident than in the House, where a Republican majority, though reduced, endures because of the artful manner in which it drew districts in 2001. . .Republicans created, in effect, minority districts wherein narrow bands of the electorate, often anti-tax conservatives, have disproportionate influence. The key to winning and holding such House seats: sucking up to the right. It’s not always a pretty sight, but survival compels it.”

The DLC study also analyzes the impact of gerrymandered districts (at the Congressional level) on decreased voter participation. The basic idea is simple: if you don’t think your vote matters, because the lines are drawn to guarantee either the victory or the defeat of your favored candidate, you’re less likely to bother to vote. By the study’s reckoning, Virginia was the fourth least competitive state at the Congressional level in 2002 (after Massachusetts, Arkansas, and Nebraska). That ranking is perverse testament to the skill of our partisan line drawers in the previous year’s redistricting.

By 2006 (due largely, I think, to demographic shifts within the state), our ranking had dropped — or risen, depending on how you look at it — to 17th in the nation. (Iowa, which is the model of nonpartisan redistricting nationwide, was among the most competitive states in both years.)

We heard a lot about audits in the past few days. “We can’t possibly fix transportation now,” we were told. “We have to have an audit first.” There’s nothing wrong with the audit bills introduced (see here and here).

Except that they are no reason to delay action. Since 2001, there have been no fewer than EIGHT audits of VDOT. Including one that focused specifically on the maintenance deficit.

That was introduced, well, by me. In compliance with HB 2838, VDOT dutifully reported its findings to our own oversight agency, the Joint Legislative Review and Audit Committee last September. The figures show we have a maintenance deficit.

After yesterday’s contentious Rules Committee meeting, there is perhaps not a lot of hope for a transportation funding solution.

But we might pass another audit.

Slate foresees the death of the semicolon.

The author observes, “. . . in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe declared himself ‘mortified’ by printers once again using too many semicolons. Poe may have the distinction of being the last writer to complain of the semicolon’s popularity.” And we all know what happened to him.

That’s the formula for the happiest day of the year. Which today, apparently, is. The formula (O is for outdoors, N is for Nature, S is for socialization with neighbors, Cpm stands for childhood pleasant memories, He represents holiday expected) was created by British psychologist Cliff Arnall.

He also figures that a date in late January is the most depressing day of the year.