Quick views on some of the week's news.

Tom Gasparoli
Gasparoli is a former journalist who is now in media relations for the state of Virginia. He lives in Richmond.

My picture of the Roanoke Valley has become so much clearer over the last month, 30 years after I graduated from Andrew Lewis Middle School, got some more education and then moved away to live and work in many other cities as a reporter. I compared them all to Roanoke, of course, because Roanoke was all I knew. When people asked, I would say the valley was "noncontroversial," but I realized later that was probably because nearly everything I did as a journalist was controversial in one way or the other. I didn't pay much attention to the news while growing up here.
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What are you wrapped in today?

Boehner writes: "It’s right there beginning on line 11, page 122, section 1303, under 'Actuarial Value of Optional Service Coverage.'  The premium will be paid into a U.S. Treasury account – and these federal funds will be used to pay for the abortion services."

Let's nail the coffin lid shut on this nonsense right away. The law does not do that, and even a cursory reading of the cited language (you can read the entire bill here) makes it clear that the purpose of the section is to instruct insurance providers that do cover abortion services to segregate those costs from policy holders requesting such coverage into a separate account to ensure that federal subsidies are not used to cover abortion services.

Boehner is the House Minority Leader of the Republican Party. He should know how to read legislation. Yet he got this one absolutely, monumentally wrong.

So, either he's being intellectually dishonest, attempting to ramp up more uninformed hysteria about health care reform, or he's too stupid to be in such a position of responsibility.

In either case, Republicans should be ashamed to call this man a leader in their party.

(Hat tip: Talking Points Memo)

Update: More reprehensible scaremongering and lies from the Republicans on this bill. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, is claiming that the Senate health care bill adds a tax for breast reconstruction following a mastectomy. The claim is absolutely, 100 percent false. The bill does add a tax for elective plastic surgery, but specifically exempts surgery "necessary to ameliorate a deformity arising from, or directly related to, a congenital abnormality, a personal injury resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring disease."

It's a sad state of affairs. Apparently, Republicans cannot debate this legislation on the merits, and are thus forced, as they have been from the beginning with the "death panel" nonsense, to resort to easily debunked lies. It's pathetic.

As reported in the Virginia Politics Blog on The Washington Post Web site, House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, didn’t take kindly to Kaine’s pledge, noting that it is the General Assembly’s responsibility to appoint judges.

In an editorial for next week, we'll tell Kaine that he would be wasting time to make this appointment on his way out the door.

Isn't that compassionate and patriotic? Conservatives suggesting people pray for America's leader, even though he's pushing policies they abhor. It's like a return to more civil days of yor.

Or not.

Read Psalm 109.8:

May his days be few;
may another take his place of leadership.

Well, ok. So it's just more of the same, conservatives hoping for a quick end to Obama's presidency. Or is it worse than that? The psalm continues:

May his children be fatherless
and his wife a widow.

Yep. That's right. Some conservatives out there are using a Bible verse to urge people to pray for Obama's death.

It's wrong, and it's shameful - a new low in American politics.

Republicans use a tactic to block judicial nominees that they decried as unconstitutional a few years ago.

Roanoke schools have come a long way in a short time.