The Virginian Pilot Wants You to Pay More at the Pump.

Is there a group of people more anxious to collect more taxes than politicians?  

Why yes, gentle reader.  The people who insist that your tax burden is too light and that the failure to shovel more money into the maws of ever-expanding government coffers is bad are the editors of the Virginian Pilot. 

While the headline on the paper version is “OOPS,” the e-version screams that the Virginia legislature failed – in the Virginian Pilot’s version of its duty – to force you to pay more tax at the pump.  Mistake may cost area $10M a year in road money and refers to it as a “goof.”

 … lawmakers apparently goofed and failed to guard against falling fuel prices two years ago when they created a regional tax.

Now it is certainly possible that the Virginia legislature did not take falling gasoline prices into account when it added a regional tax to a state tax on the price of fuel.  But the emphasis on the tax collector’s coffers rather than the tax payer’s purse is typical of the people who run the Virginian Pilot. 

The Virginian Pilot is reliably Liberal (or Progressive, take your pick).  Totally committed to the religion of Global Warming™ they regularly predict that Norfolk is going to sink beneath he waves unless Global Warming™ is halted.  We have not seen that many stories on the inundation of Norfolk recently, the region having suffered through one of the coldest winters in memory.  But we are confident that if summer ever gets here the Virginian Pilot will blame it on Global Warning™ and demand the end of fossil fuels.  The alternative is to head for higher ground.  

One who will not heed that is billionaire Frank Batten, Jr. whose Landmark Media owns the Virginian Pilot and whose waterfront home is surely going to be under water if his employees are right.   

And while today’s paper also refers to the Norfolk mayor’s city owned luxury auto in a tone of outrage, the over-all editorial position of the paper is that government is both more trustworthy, wiser and more efficient than the private sector. 

Today’s paper features Virginia Secretary of Transportation Aubrey Lane who uses the opportunity to tell us how wise his administration is, how bad the previous administration was, and how bad public-private partnerships are. 

The Virginia Pilot also fans the embers of racism by regularly publishing Eugene Robinson – a one note columnist whose focus on race borders on the pathological - who tells the Virginian Pilot readers that racism is still alive in white hearts because a couple of college freshmen sang a song using the "N" word; in other words, using words that are found in the lyrics of much of the music produced by members of Robinson’s own race.  For Robinson the town of Ferguson is the heart of darkness and that police officers were shot from ambush because “feelings are running high.”  Quite a number of by-standers are beginning to wonder who is really the racist: the Liberals –white and black - for whom “racist” is the one go-to epithet that can be used to slander people they don’t like, or frat boys who sing songs?

And here's a delicious bit of irony.  It fulminates against Dominion Resources for failing to be transparent enough, noting that:

Dominion, [is] the state's biggest electric utility and biggest corporate political donor,

Note the word "corporate" modifying the term donor.  In true Clintonian fashion, the Virginian Pilot fails to note that the biggest contributors to Virginia's politicians are not corporations but private individuals.  And that includes and that includes Frank Batten, Jr.s own father.  

So we can be sure that the Virginian Pilot will urge that more taxes be collected from you at the pump, at the store and where you work.  But except for penny-ante issues like the mayor's car, there will never be a call for government to live withing its means.   Not even Jesus, who hung out with sinners, loves tax collectors more than the press.