Virginia Foxx Should Open Her Eyes

In this photo: Mason Hardin, 7, and his brother Matthew, 8, wait in line before sunrise last Friday to enter a Remote Area Medical (RAM) health clinic at the Wise County Fairgrounds in Wise, Virginia. The free clinic, which lasts 2-1/2 days, is the largest of its kind in the nation providing medical, dental and vision services from more than 1,400 medical volunteers to thousands of mountain residents. For many this is the only medical care they may receive each year. (For this and several other Reuters photos of this event, happening this weekend just over the mountain, see this site.)

The 10th annual Remote Area Medical (RAM) Health Expedition opened its doors at the Wise County Fairgrounds at 6 a.m. Friday morning, with almost 2,000 people already in line. The people volunteering to run this event had given out 1,600 numbers by 5 a.m., an hour before the start. (Local coverage in the Kingsport Times-News.)

The pictures of people receiving basic medical care in fairground horse stalls might seer into your conscience, if you had one. It took a British wire service -- Reuters -- to even document it. No American network news cameras were there (that we know of), possibly because there was no celebrity in line.

This is the state of American health care. This is what the American insurance industry has yielded.

This is what Virginia Foxx denies. This is what Virginia Foxx turns her hardened heart away from. This is what Virginia Foxx would not see, even if she looked in that general direction.

Virginia Foxx, on Friday, the same day that the horse stalls at the Wise County Fairgrounds hosted thousands of people with no health insurance and precious little health care, stood up at a Capitol Hill press conference and said, "There are no Americans who don't have healthcare. Everybody in this country has access to healthcare."

We guess she was talking about this: If you fall down in the public street with a heart attack, or get hit by a skate-boarder, someone will eventually pick you up and take you to an emergency room. That's what she means. And because that is true, despite the thousands at the Wise County Fairgrounds and the millions like them all across this wide expanse, we do not need to reform health care in American, sez Madam Foxx, currently insured by a superb government-sponsored health-care plan that you and I are paying for and which she and her family will enjoy for the rest of her unnatural life.

There is no hell hot enough.

Gov. Perdue Torpedoes General Assembly

We like it when she gets tough.

Governor Perdue came out last night and said no way would she support a budget bill that raised taxes on "anyone other than the wealthy" (according to the N&O). She was reacting to a budget deal reached between the N.C. House and the Senate that would slap an across-the-board surtax on all income taxpayers, as well as raise sales taxes. (Republican leaders in the General Assembly accuse Perdue of supporting the proposed increase in sales taxes, which would hit the poor harder.)

Anyway, we're glad to see the Guv start throwing some elbows.

Heath Shuler a C-Streeter?

Maybe so.

Pulling Rank

During our years in academe we occasionally ran across some pretentious s.o.b. who insisted on being addressed as "Doctor So-and-So," and we chalked it up to an overweening snobbishness. Or to over-compensation for an actual lack of intellectual heft, or a poor self-image that relished the groveling of underlings.

So this item on Politico about Madam Virginia Foxx was more than merely instructive. She alone among her colleagues in the House of Representatives insists on having "Doctor" prominently displayed on her name plate at her desk on the Rules Committee ... as though that title compensates for her documented loose-cannonism.

We Hate the Sales Tax

Because sales taxes are not based on the ability to pay. Sales taxes are essentially underhanded. One sees different brands of coffee on the shelf, ranging in price from (very) high to (possibly) affordable. But that's not the price of the coffee, 'cause at the cash register the agents of the state are going to tack on 6 percent or 10 percent or whatever percent, and you've been snookered. Worse, sales taxes are regressive, meaning that as income decreases, tax as a percentage of income increases.

And the Democratic grandees in the state Senate intend for us to pay more of this regressive tax, while they coddle their corporate buddies. N.C. House leaders had wanted, for their part, to reform corporate taxes by instituting "combined reporting," which would have made it harder for mega-corps to hide their profits, which is to say, pay their fair share of state taxes for the privileges of doing business in N.C. But under pressure from the state Senate, the House has abandoned that reform.

A 1-cent sales tax increase (which seems likely) would raise $843 million in the next fiscal year. Legislative analysts predicted requiring combined corporate reporting would have raised $18.5 million this year and $43 million next year. Apparently, our working citizens are much greater money-bags (and softer targets) than big corporations

You don't have a lobbyist down in Raleigh, most likely. The corporations do.

Templeton Loses in Court (Again)

Back a year ago, Superior Court Judge Ronald Payne ruled against the Town of Boone and said Phil Templeton could build his medical clinic in the single-family neighborhood of VFW Drive. The Town of Boone appealed that ruling. (Another Templeton lawsuit, challenging Boone's steep slope development ordinance, was thrown out of court earlier this year.)

Yesterday the N.C. Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that Judge Payne erred in substituting his judgment for the Boone Board of Adjustments: "The Superior Court was not free to find facts in place of the Board of Adjustment; its function was to determine whether the Board of Adjustment's findings were supported by competent evidence in the record before it." The Appeals Court noted that Judge Payne at one point declared that he himself planned to visit the proposed construction site (though whether he ever did that is unclear).

The Boone Board of Adjustments erred in not making a formal finding of fact, though the BOA had "substantial evidence" before it opposing the Templeton special use request, and so the case is remanded back to the Boone BOA so that a finding of fact can be made.

Once the BOA does that, it's possible that Templeton could appeal again. However, the Court of Appeal's opinion essentially holds that the record contains sufficient evidence to support denial of the permit, and that would seem to destroy Templeton's procedural arguments. So, assuming that the Board adopts sufficient findings on remand, Templeton should have little ammunition for another appeal.

Ventriloquist's Dummy

Madam Foxx (R-LooseCannonville) is not the only Republican copying the words of Republican consultants looking for language that will galvanize citizens to run away from the president's health-care reform.

Republican smear merchant Alex Castellanos advised his pay-masters to harp on the word "experiment," and ever the obedient mouthpiece, Republican national party chair Michael Steele used some form of that word over 30 times in about as many minutes.

Dana Milbank was in the room for the ventriloquism.

Republican Neuroses Becoming Psychotic

Like this.

Or this.

Simple Math

Bill Greener, a Republican operative who on the eve of the election last fall was arguing that "undecideds" were going to break for McCain because of Obama's race, is now whining a very different tune:

Unless and until Republicans can demonstrate an ability to attract more support from minority voters, from younger voters, from voters living in urban areas, it seems to this die-hard Republican that we are kidding ourselves if we think the 2008 election was just a speed bump on our road to a lasting majority. Looking at nothing more than the math, it appears to me our challenge is far more daunting.

For a party whose Congressional leaders seem obsessed with finding the next racist argument against the president and whose "youth" just installed an openly racist candidate as president of the national Young Republicans, Greener's whistling through a particularly deaf graveyard.