Commonwealth of Virginia: We're #1! Oops, not in a good way

Out of 50 states, the government shutdown is affecting Virginia more than any others. We're number one ... only this is not a contest we want to win.

The Daily Press has all the details.

Forbes, Wittman, Rigell: 'Sequester impact on military a disgrace'

By Reps. Randy Forbes, Rob Wittman, and Scott Rigell
The Daily Press

If you were told that your son or daughter was going to fly on an airplane that had only 70 percent of its required maintenance, or whose pilot had trained for less hours than optimally required to maintain proficiency, would you allow him or her to get on the plane? Of course not. Yet thanks to sequestration, the U.S. military is facing a situation where our sons and daughters are being asked to do more with less training, less maintenance, and less modern platforms. Today, the military is experiencing the greatest readiness crisis since the Vietnam War. Should the president and Congress fail to find a solution to our nation's budget woes, readiness will likely degrade even further. Forced to find immediate savings, the services have curtailed training and deferred maintenance in ways that threaten to damage our national security for decades.

Sequestration's roughly $500 billion in defense cuts over the next decade have come on top of the administration's already substantial reductions to national defense spending. Accordingly, the services have chosen to absorb the majority of these cuts by reducing their near-term readiness, which generally means less training for the men and women wearing our nation's uniform.

For Army and Marine units, other than those scheduled for deployment to Afghanistan, this means substantially less time firing live ammunition and fewer opportunities to train with the vehicles they may eventually take into combat.

Read the rest of this article here.

Big Bird, PBS, $$$, and Governor McDonnell

Personally I agree with Governor Bob McDonnell's proposal to cut funds to the Public Broadcasting System and, apparently, Brian Kirwin at Bearing Drift agrees, writing an excellent article in the Daily Press about those who declare Big Bird will disappear from the air waves if taxpayer money is not spent on public television:

But that's the cry you'll hear now that Gov. Bob McDonnell proposed to wean public broadcasters from special privileges and tax money. It's a cry that he should ignore.

He goes on to outline just how irrelevant PBS has become at this time of instant information:

In 1967, perhaps the three networks and a smattering of UHF stations didn't broadcast enough "quality" programming.

If I can scan past the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, the History Channel, Animal Planet, The Learning Channel, Bravo, the Travel Channel, Arts & Entertainment, American Movie Classics, Food Network, and Home and Garden Television, I might trip over the public broadcasting station.

Public affairs programming? C-SPAN shows live coverage of the House and Senate, and there are enough 24-hour news networks to whet any activist's appetite. The only thing interesting about PBS/NPR's news reports is how different they are from reality.

Today's radio has so much public affairs talk programming that government is trying to find ways to suppress it. Add the growth in digital and satellite radio and the cry for government-funded broadcasting becomes silly.

And if cable and satellite hadn't made PBS irrelevant, the internet has made it virtually obsolete.

Gov. McDonnell gets it. Now wait for the howls of protest from those who will want to remain on the public dole.