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THE TOP STORY: Kaine's constitutional-amendment
dilemma INSIDE ... Bringing textbook prices in line By Chris Graham/AFP The average college student pays $817 for textbooks and supplies annually. For those of you who have been out of college for some time now, you know that this is a good bit more than you were used to paying back in the day. For those of you who are gearing up to send your own young'uns off to their own higher-ed adventures, it can be a major-league wallop to the budget ... IN FOCUS: Puckett announces candidacy for Dems' nomination By Chris Graham/AFP For Lebanon Sen. Phillip Puckett, at-home care is not just a campaign issue. "I guess I can tell you a personal story to illustrate how this came to my attention," said Puckett, who formally announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party lieutenant-governor nomination on Monday. The story starts with Puckett's father, the former Lebanon mayor, being diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1977. NOTES FROM THE PRESS: Virginia politics news and notes By Chris Graham/AFP Every time somebody throws out the words push poll, you hear somebody else talk about how there ought to be a law regulating how surveys are conducted. It's the kind of thing that is much easier said than it could be done, to hear University of Virginia Center for Politics analyst Matt Smyth tell it. "If you're looking at ways to reform this or regulate this type of activity ..." EYE ON VIRGINIA: Debate over future of VSDB continues By Chris Graham/AFP It looks like the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind will be in a new home in two or three years - though Sen. Emmett Hanger, R-Mount Solon, isn't about to give up the fight to keep the school in Staunton just yet. "As far as I'm concerned, there is not a suitable location for VSDB outside the Staunton area," Hanger told The Augusta Free Press on Monday. EYE ON THE VALLEY: Local arts groups fare well in state budget  By Chris Graham/AFP It pays when it is state-budget time to have long-tenured legislators going to bat for you. Three Greater Augusta County-based arts projects stand to benefit from capital-improvements grants from the Commonwealth pending the approval of Gov. Mark Warner. The Virginia General Assembly voted on Sunday to include in its series of amendments to the 2004-2006 state budget ... EYE ON THE VALLEY: Mixed bag on home-sales figures By Chris Graham/AFP Homes for sale in Central Virginia and the Central Shenandoah Valley are still moving - but not exactly like hotcakes. The average home sold in January in the Charlottesville-area market was on the market for 77 days, according to figures provided by the Virginia Association of Realtors. The number of homes sold in Charlottesville in January - 258 - was up 59.3 percent from the 162 sold in January 2004 ... EYE ON THE VALLEY: Waynesboro's 15 minutes  By Chris Graham/AFP Lee Paixao didn't know what to expect when he turned his television on Monday night. "You'd think with the Travel Channel doing it, of course, that it would be as professional as possible. And it was. I was very happy with it," said Paixao, whose downtown-Waynesboro gourmet-coffee-shop-in-a-converted-school-bus, The Chatter Bus, was featured on the Travel Channel series "Dreaming Big." THE AGENDA: Waynesboro School Board meeting tonight By Chris Graham/AFP The Waynesboro School Board will meet tonight at 7 p.m. at Waynesboro High School. The public is invited and encouraged to attend. The agenda for the meeting includes ... ROCKINGHAM BEAT: Shooting leads to two arrests By Karl Magenhofer A shooting at a Harrisonburg apartment complex has led to a pair of arrests. Officers responded to the 1200 block of Devon Lane late Saturday night after reports of a fight. Once they arrived, police were told that someone had fired a gun. Officers searched the complex, detained several people, seized a firearm and located shell casings.
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What the secretary really said
Guest View Armond Simmons Special to The Augusta Free Press
Most folks probably had mixed feelings about the national media's highly publicized reporting of a selective mini-sound-bite of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's response to National Guardsman specialist Thomas Wilson's question during a town-hall meeting in Kuwait, why "we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" Tim Russert of "Meet The Press" giddily reported his selectively downsized Rumsfeld mini-bite, "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time. And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee, and it can be blown up." Most folks were surprised to learn that Rumsfeld had actually replied in some detail to the guardsman, acknowledging the problem and providing a report of the status of on-going corrective action. Rumsfeld's actual, unselectively downsized, full-length reply to the guardsman reads ... "I talked to the general coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored," Rumsfeld began in response to Wilson. "They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they're not needed, to places where they are needed. I'm told they are being - the Army is - I think it's something like 400 a month are being done now. "And it's essentially a matter of physics. It's not a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the part of the Army's desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it. As you know, you go to the war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time. "Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce armor necessary at a rate that they believe - it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that can be accomplished. "I can assure you that Gen. Schumacher and the leadership of the Army and certainly Gen. Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable to have, but that they're working at it at a good clip. "It's interesting. I've talked a great deal about this with a team of people who've been working hard at the Pentagon. And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and the tank could still be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee, and it can be blown up. "And you can go down and the vehicle - the goal we have is to have as many of those vehicles as is humanly possible with the appropriate level of armor available for the troops. And that's what the Army's been working on." Initial mixed feelings of folks about the appalling media slight appear to have changed to feelings of disgust for the characteristic, widespread, liberal-media offensive aimed at any and all things Bush administration related.
Armond Simmons resides in Pell City, Ala.
The views expressed by op-ed writers do not necessarily reflect those of management of The Augusta Free Press.
What do you think? Share your thoughts on this story at letters@augustafreepress.com.
(Published 03-01-05/Opinion) Click here to email a copy of this story to a friend |
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