Home is behind, the world ahead... And there are many paths to tread. Through shadow, to the edge of night, until the stars are all alight... Mist and shadow, cloud and shade, all shall fade... all... shall... fade...
What path are you treading today?
There's one sure way William Fleming principal Susan Willis can back up her claim that she did not cheat and deserves her job back: Release the transcript and recommendation from the panel investigating the claim.
We are planning an editorial for tomorrow that urges Willis to do so. The Roanoke School Board cannot say anything about a personnel matter. Willis told Roanoke Times reporter Courtney Cutright that she feels vindicated. There's a one, good way to verify that.
Remember back when the Republicans were complaining a lot about President Obama's budget, then unveiled a budget of their own that was lacking only one thing: numbers?
Well, those rascally Republicans are at it again. Now they've released a health care reform proposal that is lacking only one thing: reform.
The Republican proposal won't ensure insure significantly more people (leaving about 52 million Americans uninsured by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office). It doesn't prevent insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. Oh, and it doesn't lower the deficit as much as the Democratic plan.
As Matthew Yglesias summed it up, the GOP has come up with a plan that "works better for people who don't need health care services, and much worse for people who actually are sick or who become sick in the future. It's basically a health un-insurance policy."
We're writing our NRV Current editorial today about electoral hiccups in Montgomery County on Tuesday night. First there was an error in a spreadsheet formula that caused delays in reporting results. Then there was a data-entry error that for a while reported the wrong winner in a race.
No one wants to see those sorts of problems, but in our editorial we will commend Registrar Randy Wertz and his staff for catching them. They did not rush to produce results but instead made sure everything added up. Nor should anyone take this as an indictment of electronic voting machines. There are plenty of reasons not to like them, but this wasn't their fault.
The votes are counted and the people have spoken. Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell is to be congratulated on a well-run, focused campaign that seldom veered from what the public needed to hear: He'll create jobs and return the state to prosperity. He was not this newspaper's pick as the candidate with the more realistic agenda for getting Virginia where it clearly needs to go. We'll add our voice, though, to all who respond to his call for opponents to "give me a chance to earn your trust and work with you for the betterment of the commonwealth of Virginia."
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Call us old-fashioned, but we think that when people sign agreements, they ought to abide by the terms. That goes for an 18-year-old taking out a loan to buy a car, and it should go for Roanoke and the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority. The city and the authority so far have not lived up to a bargain they struck with Dana Walker.
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Norb Weckstein
Weckstein is a retired G.E. engineer and manager. He lives in Roanoke.
As Virginia Tech finance professor G. Rodney Thompson noted in his Sept. 11 commentary, "Return taxes to '60s levels," the "heady days of the 1950s and 60s, when the U.S. was ... the envy of the entire world" was also a time when taxes on the highest increment of earnings (affecting only the top 1 percent of taxpayers) were appreciably higher. Financial analyst Bob Barnes' failed attempt to ridicule those facts not withstanding ("Confiscatory tax levels stifle the economy," Oct. 19 commentary), the issue of excessive executive pay that has resulted from lowering the top tax rate is a major problem.
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Nada T. King
King lives in Elliston.
Recently, I had a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the graduations of two of my daughters, both having completed their education in a medical field: one as a lab technician, another in hospital administration. But as the time passed and I watched them going about placing their applications and résumés, diligently seeking employment in their fields of study, I've seen discouragement, disappointment and their hopes go dim.
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Obama at Dover, the end of daylight savings, leaf blowers and more in today's letters to the editor.
The days go on and on... they don't end. All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.
Where are you going today?
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