Envy Apartment

Axl Rose (Photo: File photo) Pressed onto the record this week about the surge in calls across the nation to take down statues of Confederate leaders, Vice President Mike Pence played it sufficiently vague in the name of more is better. Pence, saying he was uneasy about any effort to “erase parts of our history just in the name of some contemporary political cause,” made his case Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends” that “we ought to have been building more monuments.” The rationale, via Indiana’s former governor: “We ought to be celebrating the men and women who've helped our nation move toward a more perfect union and tell the whole story of America.” Given the context, with Jefferson Davis and Gen. Robert E. Lee as the baseline of a nation moving toward a more perfect union, Pence offers some awfully broad parameters here. THROWBACK: The day Axl Rose came to town BANGERT: Monument to Confederates remains in Lafayette's Greenbush Cemetery BANGERT: If only there was a way...

Flagship Inn, Petersburg Two Sundays ago the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a disturbing special report on poverty and housing insecurity along the Jefferson Davis Highway in Chesterfield County. Hundreds of people live in shabby motels, paying $200 or more per week to live in conditions almost as deplorable as Richmond’s public housing projects . These hotels, the housing equivalent of pawn shops and payday lenders, serve the poor and the desperate who have nowhere else to turn. It is depressing to think that people live this way. People pay huge sums — $200 per week translates into more than $800 per month, enough to rent a nice, two- room apartment in a decent neighborhood — to dwell amidst deplorable conditions . Many hotel rooms have roaches, bedbugs and other insect infestations. The article cites leaking sewage , mold, mice droppings, and inoperable door locks . Conditions sound similar to those of the public housing projects — without the same level of crime. The plight of ...