Presidential address on jobs

AFP

Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country.  We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that’s made things worse. This past week, reporters have been asking, “What will this speech mean for the President?  What will it mean for Congress?  How…

Carl Larsen: ‘One Day’

Carl Larsen

“Let’s go see the new Hugh Grant movie!” chirped Poppy, my movie buddy. It was a mistake. The film, “One Day,” had neither Hugh Grant or much of anything else to recommend it unless, like me, you just enjoy looking at Anne Hathaway. Poppy had been told by one of her myopic friends that “oh,…

Fort Defiance team does well in Envirothon

AFP

More than 270 high school students from 45 U.S. states and nine Canadian provinces assembled July 24-29 in Sackville, Canada, to participate in North America’s largest high school environmental education competition, the 2011 Canon Envirothon. Having placed first during May’s Virginia State Envirothon competition in Mechanicsville, Fort Defiance High School moved on to the national competition,…

Ken Plum: Virginians leading the nation

Ken Plum

In the late 1990s the state teachers’ organization distributed a hopeful poster. With scenes from Monticello and colonial Virginia printed in the background, the text proclaimed that “Virginians led the Eighteenth Century, Virginians can lead the Twenty-first Century.” There is a plentiful supply of documentation of Virginians providing leadership in the Revolutionary period through the…

Wilson Library to host teaching institute

Chris Graham

The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum today announced it will host a one-week institute for Virginia history teachers from Monday, July 11, until Friday, July 15. The summer institute is the second of three annual week-long sessions in a professional development curriculum entitled “American History in International Context” that the Presidential Library is holding…

Ken Plum: Lowest score in the House

Ken Plum

We politicians like to take credit for accomplishments even when our connection to what has been achieved may sometimes seem less than clear. We also tend to ignore things that are not going as well as they might. For example, Governor McDonnell as most governors before him regularly announces new jobs that are created in…

Carly at the Movies: ‘Crowne’-ing achievement

Carl Larsen

With the holiday theaters generating nothing but broken Transformers, Bad Teachers and pop-up Penguins, a hunk of fluff like “Larry Crowne” becomes a summery cinematic lifeboat for us adults. Although it was savagely attacked by a phalanx of sophisticated film critics as being too corny and lacking chemistry, what could be more entertaining than an…