News in review

Tuesday, May 11 Free Clinic has it covered To mark “Covering the Uninsured Week” in Virginia, Del. Mitch Van Yahres today presented a proclamation signed by Gov. Mark Warner to the Charlottesville Free Clinic. Among Virginians ages 18 to 64, 14.2 percent do not have health insurance, according to a study cited by the Free […]

Politics as unusual

There has never been a shortage of partisanship in presidential campaigns, as each party spends millions of dollars to support its nominee and rally its base. Yet while both sides have actively supported their candidates in recent years, there hasn’t been a lot of excitement.    Wake Us When It’s Over is the title of Jack […]

News in review

Tuesday, May 4 Chain saws in Jefferson National Forest? The Charlottesville based Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) today released a report claiming that 313,00 acres of Virginia’s forests could be available for logging and road-building if the Bush Administration reverses a 2001 conservation law, as many enviros are predicting. The forestland at risk, which is […]

News in review

Tuesday, April 27 General Assembly raises taxes The Virginia House and Senate today agreed to a package of tax increases, more than six weeks after the March 13 scheduled conclusion of the General Assembly. Albemarle Del. Rob Bell, a Republican, voted against the plan, which will boost Virginia’s two-year, $60 billion budget by about $1.6 […]

News in review

Blood on the tracks Are the CSX tracks the most crime-friendly spot in Charlottesville? Every community has its proverbial “dark alleys,” mysterious places where boogiemen live.    One of UVA’s scary spots is a half-mile leg of CSX railroad that arcs northeast from University Avenue to Rugby Road. The tracks form a popular, but potentially dangerous, […]

Burning Bush

George Bush strides confidently in the background, looking strong and presidential. As the images taken from his campaign ads referring to the September 11 attacks scroll across the screen, a voiceover intones, “George Bush shamelessly exploited 9/11 in his campaign commercials.” Soon after, we hear the voice of Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke: “Frankly […]

News in review

Blood on the tracks Are the CSX tracks the most crime-friendly spot in Charlottesville? Every community has its proverbial “dark alleys,” mysterious places where boogiemen live.    One of UVA’s scary spots is a half-mile leg of CSX railroad that arcs northeast from University Avenue to Rugby Road. The tracks form a popular, but potentially dangerous, […]

News in review

Tuesday, April 6 – Heckling the ambassador Rich Felker, a UVA grad student, spent a night in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail for his role in a Students for Free Tibet protest of a campus appearance by Yang Jiechi, the Chinese ambassador to the United States. Felker, who was released this morning, was arrested while attempting […]

News in review

Tuesday, March 30 We’re No. 61! In addition to scoring big in the much ballyhooed “best places to live” ranking, our area was rated in today’s release of an annual toxic chemical survey from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. First place was definitely not desirable in this list, which tallied the amount of toxic […]

Do the arts mean anything to anybody anymore?

Second only perhaps to God, nothing has been more eulogized in recent decades than Art. Commercial concerns have killed it, we hear. TV is its poison. Vulgarity and an overriding concern for celebrity have castrated painting, poetry, music, theater and literature. Pop is pap. Funders don’t understand art’s Significance. And so on. Yet an inevitable […]