Monthly Archives: September 2015

Rep. Barbara Comstock – the closer (of governments)

barbaraComstock

Northern Virginia’s Congressperson, Barbara Comstock (R-VA), doesn’t care so much about breast cancer, or a woman’s constitutional right of privacy and choosing when and whether to have a child – not as much as Barbara cares to impose her religious belief on everyone else — that a “person” exists at the moment of conception.

Barbara was ready to close down the government based on this superstitious belief.

Barbara believes no woman should have an abortion any time after that elusive indeterminate moment when conception has occurred. That’s the only way you can understand her public statement that Roe v Wade should be reversed.

Barbara is free to practice her religious belief but not in disregard of the constitution and laws that she swore to uphold that permit abortion. But she looks for her openings to squeeze and restrict a woman’s right of choice even while Roe remains the law of the land.

In 2012, when Barbara was in the General Assembly, she voted for a bill to require women to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds before having an abortion; she sought to discourage abortions. Continue reading

Political brawling in Loudoun

boxingBrawlFighters like politicians don’t always know when to step down.

Loudoun County Board Chairman Scott York is that kind of fighter who doesn’t know when to quit.

On about January 8, 2015, Scott said he’d put a lot of thought into whether he’d quit and decided his future “just didn’t include being Chairman for another four years.”

If Ali, a three time heavyweight champ, had listened to Doc Ferdie Pacheco, he might have gone out like undefeated heavy weight champ Rocky Marciano, physically intact, laurels strewn in his wake, without the humiliation of a drubbing by Leon Spinks and Larry Holmes.

York badly wanted those laurels from the Chamber of Commerce and he told them, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, not to worry, he really wasn’t going to go for a fifth round to get elected.

The Chamber conferred on pug Scott York his desired “laurels,” and, no sooner did they rest upon his hallowed crown, did he throw a sharp left jab at his own integrity, and jump into the political ring, seeking re-election.

“Slippery” Scott is like a small club fighter who slips punches, shifts his stance to suit election year allies, tracks backward in the ring, the “Slippery” Scott shuffle, and, between rounds, his corner men treat his cuts, an expanding contributing entourage of developers, according to VPAP, including real estate developers, general contractors, highway contractors, building trades, excavation contractors, so they can have their hoped-for fifth round, more pay days by our County, for even more development. Continue reading

Fools destroy trees

What’s left after cutting down a 95 year old tree

What’s left after cutting down a 95 year old tree

While Joyce Kilmer said, “only God can make a tree,” he did not consider those fools who destroy these trees with glee.

In my home town of Lovettsville, Tree City USA, VDOT destroyed a 95 year old Maple tree, with leaves no lower than 10 feet above the ground.

The reason, they said, was to make a bike path 8 feet wide, when the distance from the base of the tree to the roadway where the path would be placed was 16 feet, twice the width of the path.

They destroyed a majestic Maple for no good reason – as VDOT does characteristically treat trees as “inconvenient” – for VDOT is of the school of dig and destroy.

Susan Clark said, “It was a perfectly good tree and they cut it at ground level.”

Briana N. Edelman said, “Why does everyone feel the need to cut down trees? Trees provide shade, cooling, prevent erosion, hold sentimental and historical value, clean the air, house birds, insects, animals….among so many other things.”

Trees also produce the oxygen we breathe. Some think that’s important.

When trees abut a stream or river, their root system holds the bank together, reducing erosion, and curtails the runoff of the killing chemicals, pesticides and herbicides, acting as a natural system of filters restraining pollutants.

Our problem is not, however, a single tree that once grew in Lovettsville.

We have an epidemic of foolishness beyond VDOT’s serial violations, among developers, and prominent individuals who prefer a “scenic view” over what is environmentally conscientious. Continue reading

Law breaker

kimdavisThe Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis from Kentucky is not the first public official to defy a court order based on her intolerance, religious or otherwise, nor to claim the constitutionally impermissible defense that God told her to do it.

In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace refused to allow black students to join Alabama’s lily white school system, declaring Alabama to be the “great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” justifying segregation as a defense against forming a “mongrel unit” should the South integrate. Governor Wallace referred to the 14th Amendment as the “infamous illegal” 14th amendment, and said, of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown, “[l]et those certain judges put that in their opium pipes of power and smoke it for what it is worth.” Wallace explained, as has Clerk Davis more recently, “[O]ur grandfathers bent their knee only in church and bowed their head only to God.”

A federal judge ordered Wallace to admit those black students to his lily white school system. Rather than be carried off by the National Guard and be put in jail, Wallace backed down for, as we have seen throughout history, demagogic bullies and their arrogant threats often dissipate like a cloud of pipe smoke when tested.

Around 2002, in Alabama again, Chief Judge Roy Stewart Moore created a 5,280 pound granite reproduction of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the central rotunda.

Moore told the federal court that the purpose of the monument was to recognize “the sovereignty of God over the affairs of men.”

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson said that, since the purpose of the monument was to signify the authority of God over all citizens, the Judge’s purpose was to establish religion and the monument had to be removed.

Judge Moore told the Court that he would disobey the court’s order. The other judges of the state supreme court, however, overruled their colleague, Judge Moore, and directed that the monument be removed.

Chief Judge Moore himself was then removed by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. The State’s Assistant Attorney General argued that a Judge that disobeys a court order, “undercuts the entire workings of the judicial system” and is telling the public, “[i]f you don’t like a court order, you don’t have to follow it.”

Clerk Davis elected to follow in these dishonorable footsteps when she defied a court order instructing her to perform the ministerial function of her Court Clerk’s office and issue lawful and secular marriage licenses to same sex couples.

Clerk Davis said she refused “on God’s authority,” a transparent concession that she was really seeking to violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against establishing religion, by supplanting the lawful execution of her office with her personal religious belief and disregarding the Supreme Court’s decision that same sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Continue reading

Ban guns

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, reviewing amendments to deal with Columbine, with her Special Counsel, John Flannery.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, reviewing amendments to deal with Columbine, with her Special Counsel, John Flannery.

Once again, the hand wringing commences in Virginia and across the nation.

Guns again destroyed a network of family, friends, of co-workers, and, in a city, Roanoke, where the victims were known and loved; indeed, many watched them killed on tv in real time.

Before the camera, a young popular reporter, Allison Parker, 24, and her cameraman, Adam Ward, 27, were shot dead; the shooter filmed the murders as well, and posted the carnage he created on line.

These deaths by gunfire will shortly be regarded as indifferently as the 20 children who were killed in Newton, Connecticut, those children killed at Columbine in Colorado, and those students killed at Virginia Tech.

Our nation’s sense of morality and of conscience has grown weak to the point of complicity in these murders for our failure to act to stem the flood of weapons that make any one that we care about more at risk every day.

Our elected “leaders” cower before the “new” NRA, a cultish front group for the firearms industry leaders who sit on its Board and who help fund the organization. Politicians fear that they will lose the approaching election without the NRA’s political support if they dare to think to say or do anything that might control gun violence in America. Continue reading