No pardons are necessary and there’s no need for vegetarians to go into hiding this Thursday: the News-Press offers up some tasty meat-free Thanksgiving Day options. SEE PAGE 25
Dianne Feinstein is not sure she’ll ever be able to watch the movie “Milk,” even though she’s in it. There is 1978 footage of a stricken Feinstein in the opening minutes of the new Gus Van Sant biopic of Harvey Milk. SEE PAGE 11
In “Milk,” Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in the U.S. The following year, both he and San Francisco mayor George Moscone were shot to death by city supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin). SEE PAGE 26
The lights are out and the doors are locked again in the vacant 360 S. Washington St. office building in downtown Falls Church, as it awaits demolition. It’s hard to imagine that earlier this month, the ground floor space of the old structure was teeming with life and activity, the temporary Falls Church headquarters of the Obama for
President campaign. One Falls Church city councilman said the space, because of its vitality and success in contributing to the election of Obama, should be revered as “hallowed ground” as a future, new affordable housing project will eventually occupy it. The office space may be shut down, but the mild-mannered, seemingly unassuming young man who commandeered the hundreds of volunteers who
worked out of it is just getting started. Kyle Lierman is only 21, slender and with a year and a half still to go before finishing college. But in the minds of the many who worked at the campaign office he directed, he’d be a prime candidate for a marble statue, straddling a horse, wearing a fancy hat, with a sword hoisted in the air. He’s Continued on Page 5
A massive $3.2 billion shortfall walloping the current and next fiscal year budgets in Virginia will take a deep toll in state funding of localities, Falls Church’s two representatives in Richmond, State Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple and State Del. Jim Scott, told the F.C. City Council Monday night. The two lawmakers were at the meeting to receive Falls Church’s annual legislative agenda, its wish list for new laws in the upcoming legislative session, which will begin in early January. Whipple cautioned the Council that there “should be no sugar coating” obfuscating the impact of the state’s budget shortfall, due to the sharp economic downturn that has impacted most parts of the state more than the Northern Virginia region. She said that while the emphasis will be on one-time, and not structural, reductions in spending, she noted that more than half of the state budget provides aid to localities, and that K-12 education will not be exempt from cuts. Scott noted that both he and Whipple have backgrounds in local government, making them sensitive to the impact of cuts. For one thing, delaying the opening of new state prisons will add greater burdens on local jails. Otherwise, Falls Church has less dependence on state funding than jurisdictions in the southern part of Virginia, some of whom Continued on Page 4