Month: December 2009

Governor Tim Kaine has proposed to extend the Virginia health care plan to include domestic partners and other qualified adults of state employees. One major reason for extending the health care plan is to attract highly qualified individuals to the Virginia job market, especially at the college/university level.

The highly qualified adults could include grown children, a domestic partner, parents-in-law, to name a few relationships. One qualifier would be that the person must live with the state employee. The cost would be picked up by the employee, not the state.

Opponents are already offering up a hue and cry over Gov. Kaine throwing a bone to the gays. Additionally the opponents have said it will cost the tax payer money. The employee would bear the cost. Still others feel that only married couples and their children should have the privilege of health care.

Many major companies coming in to the Old Dominion have offered similar type benefits to their employees. State officials feel that extending state benefits puts the state, as an employer, on a level playing field with other companies and agencies.

Would state employees be exempt from having to pay income tax on these benefits? Good for Virginia for seeing the need to incorporate as many into a health care program as possible. This is a positive step that costs the state nothing.

The PWCA blog has information about an opportunity to open Lake Manassas to the public. After being closed for years and years, it’s about time!

The Manassas City Council is considering opening Lake Manassas to the public for fishing, paddling and wildlife watching. They’re discussing options to provide public access to Lake Manassas at a special work session on Monday, Dec. 7, at City Hall. Read more here and attend the meeting if you can so that the Council knows people want public access to Lake Manassas.

During the past week there has been a great deal of news, especially out of conservative blogs and media, about scientists at the Climate Research Unit who  may have cooked the books regarding data on global warming.  

According to US News:

Preliminary analysis of the contents of thousands of E-mails and documents taken from the computer archives of the Climate Research Unit at England’s University of East Anglia—possibly by a hacker, possibly by a whistleblower—indicate a number of the world’s most important scientists engaged in research designed to prove that global warming really does exist may have been cooking the books.

As columnist Michael Barone wrote in Sunday’s Washington Examiner, “The CRU has been a major source of data on global temperatures, relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the e-mails suggest that CRU scientists have been suppressing and misstating data and working to prevent the publication of conflicting views in peer-reviewed science periodicals.”

If true, the cooking of the temperature data to provide support for the idea that man-made global warming is occurring is a scandal of most serious proportions. It should force policymakers to reconsider the role science plays in the formulation of policy if its conclusions can be manipulated the way those concerning climate change now appear to have been.

Well, maybe yes, maybe no.  Assuming that the books were cooked, does that mean we turn our backs on cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink and wash with?  Do we continue to squander our natural resources because some science jerks didn’t dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s?   Cities around the world are cloaked in a haze of pollution.  Our athletes had to get off the plane in Beijing wearing serious masks to block out pollution.  I had a friend who almost died while visiting the pyramids in Egypt.  The reason, air pollution and smog.  He is asthmatic. 

I hope all the doom and gloom was somewhat overblown.  It didn’t paint a pretty picture for the future.  We cannot continue to dump pollutants in our water supply and our air without serious consequences.  Millions of gasoline engines dump carbon bi-products into the air daily.  Again, common sense.  Forest must be replanted, streams protected from chemicals.  Mining must not ravage the earth.  Unfortunately, man cannot come to these conclusions on his own.  Just look around.  He has done a lousy job so far.