Columns

Few people study their telephone and Internet bills closely, but it might be worth taking a second glance next month. Take a close look at your next phone bill, and at the bottom you will see a laundry list of access taxes. But if you look at your Internet service provider’s bill, those access taxes will be missing. Wouldn’t you like to keep it that way?

    The workings of a political party hack’s mind are always fascinating. Sometimes they seem to think their party is more important than their state, or the United States itself. It’s even more fascinating when a party hack’s thinking ends up in print.
    That happened last week.

As more information surfaces, the severe mismanagement and “lack of integrity” within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system has grown increasingly clear. A nationwide audit of access and wait times at 731 VA facilities was released just days ago. The results were highly alarming and only added to my serious concerns about veterans’ access to medical care. The audit found that more than 57,000 veterans have waited at least 90 days for their first appointment at a VA facility.

While one Virginia politician was making national headlines last week, another one lit a fire in the same kind of partisan fight that had brought down the first one.
    Eric Cantor and Phil Puckett may not know each other, but they found themselves front-line players in the same fight: the ideological battle between the few common sense Republicans left, and the “tea party” fanatics who imagine themselves on some holy mission, like the Crusaders of old.