Sampson and Delilah by The Washington Squares. I love their shirts, don’t you?
Pop and Politics: Washington Squares edition
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Yearly Archives: 2011
Pop and Politics
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The clearing of Zuccotti Park in NYC, the violence against the peaceful protesters on the Berkeley campus in California, and the violence against the protesters in Oakland have made me think of this song:
Banks of Marble by the Weavers
It’s not personal
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Students riot Nov. 9, 2011 in State College, PA. (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
Veteran’s Day
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Remembrance Day.
Armistice Day.
Thinking of the men and women who have served, and those who are serving.
May all who are serving now come home safe.
“Not a peep on Loudoun Progress” (Edited to add what I said on DBQ)
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Well, that’s because I’m making noise at doorbellqueen.com. I’ll post some thoughts here later, but the thoughts I’m expressing at the moment are not appropriate for this space.
Earlier this year I resigned from the LCDC because it was the right thing to do. I knew I would not be supporting Andrea McGimsey for re-election and Party politics being an all-or-nothing proposition, I knew I must step away.
Shortly before my resignation and for the months thereafter I sat saddened as the current LCDC leadership often paid more attention to petty personal squabbles then they did their candidates for local office. Fundraising was non-existent. They failed to take advantage of the Loudoun Republicans making international news with their Obama Zombie screw up. They sat quiet as Republican Supervisors openly accepted contributions from corporations with business before the board. They felt it was more important to punish dissenters than to fight for a common cause. And, of course, the redistricting debacle.
The LCDC is so fractured that they couldn’t agree on one single location to have a watch party. Each faction had their own gathering: one in Leesburg; one in Cascades; one in Sterling.
Loudoun County being what it is, Republicans would probably have won pretty big this year anyway. But it is due to the leadership of the LCDC that the Republicans won all but two and a possible third. The LCDC leadership forgot what its mission is: which is simply to elect Democrats.
In May, I resigned from the LCDC because I should have. After the results yesterday, I hope Mike Turner, Ellen Heald, Bob Moses, Denis Gordon, Evan MacBeth and Jenniffer Denegris-Kalinowski do the right thing too. It’s time for them to resign.
I will not be rejoining the LCDC, since it’s pretty obvious that my focus and that of the committee often diverge. But I hope that whoever steps up to take the reins will be someone who can woo back some of the good people lost during the past two years and who will make the LCDC into an organization even people on the outside can view as energetic and effective.
This is what hate speech encourages.
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Photo credit: John Wright at The Dallas Voice
This is what hate speech gives people with violent inclinations license to do. When they are erroneously told, by someone like hate group leader Eugene Delgaudio, that gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people are threatening to something they value, such as their children or their right to worship freely, such people feel justified in resorting to violence. They are fearful, and feel that they are acting to protect something of great value.
Engaging in hate speech is not illegal. Lying is (usually) not illegal. But when hate speech is used to motivate people to make donations or to vote in a particular way, there are unintended (or perhaps intended) consequences. Anyone who engages in such behavior is unfit for public office, by definition. Such a person does not serve the public, by definition.
A “new, dark legacy” that should be decisively rejected
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The following letter is online at Leesburg Today. It presents even more troubling information about the threatening political climate that came spectacularly into public view with the exposure of two violent images sent by Loudoun Republican leaders.
This is the first I’ve heard about the threatening phone calls to League of Women Voters members, or the harassment of the Electoral Board.
Where are our investigative reporters?
Like Sarah Palin’s bull’s eye on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s congressional district, the Loudoun County Republican Committee’s image of President Barak Obama with a bullet hole in his head adds to the violent imagery that has increasingly taken over public discourse in this nation.
This is not a single, anomalous event in recent Loudoun politics. A significant factor behind the Loudoun League of Women Voters cancellation of a candidate forum for this election was threats made to LLWV members by phone at their homes by advocates of concealed weapons, and the League’s concern about the cost and adequacy of security for what has been a regular voter education event.
Sterling District Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio’s bloody handprint in literature denouncing homosexuality is another item to add to the pile.
One more problematic image: The case of Ting-Yi Oei
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With all the focus on images lately – from witlessly offensive to intentionally menacing to so hilariously unexamined that the possibility of sabotage has been raised – it’s no wonder that Governor McDonnell didn’t stay longer for a photo op with Loudoun Republicans.
There’s another image for voters to keep in mind. It’s an image that a man had cause to upload to his phone one day in the course of doing his job – and he paid dearly for it, due to an inexplicable series of actions taken by Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Plowman.
TOLD THAT a judge was dismissing all charges against him, Virginia educator Ting-Yi Oei had just one thought: “Hallelujah.” Given his nightmarish prosecution on child pornography charges, it was an understandable, even restrained, reaction. What’s not understandable is why criminal charges were ever brought against an unassuming assistant high school principal who was just trying to do his job. Loudoun County residents are right to wonder about the unsettling circumstances of this case and to demand better answers.
–A Nightmare in Loudoun; Why was a respected educator subjected to baseless child pornography charges? Washington Post, April 30, 2009.
Mark Herring Stands With Veterans
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Mark Herring does so much for us here in Loudoun from the Virginia Senate that many of his accomplishments for the wider commonwealth get under-reported and under-appreciated here in his home county. Given some of the things in the news, I thought it might be nice to post something positive for a change, and Sen. Herring’s service to Virginia’s veterans seemed an obvious choice.
Sen. Herring Awarding the Virginia National Guard a Commendation Resolution.
For example, Sen. Herring is the Co-Chair of the Virginia National Guard Caucus in the General Assembly, and has been instrumental in making financial help for veterans easier to provide. During the 2010 Session, Senator Herring sponsored and passed legislation that exempts payments to individuals from the Virginia Military Family Relief Fund from state income tax.
He has stood up for the rights of our veterans and their families. In 2008, he sponsored and passed the Virginia Military Parents Equal Protection Act, which protects military parents from losing important child custody and visitation rights as a result of their deployment out of the Commonwealth. And in 2011, he sponsored and passed a bill to enhance the Military Parents Equal Protection Act by allowing deployed military parents to delegate their visitation rights with children to a member of their family while they are stationed overseas. Indeed, Sen. Herring supports the service of all military families.
Now those are Virginia family values.
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Patricia Phillips is Pro-Communist
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Patricia Phillips is incensed at the treatment of Soviet communist veterans in Virginia. No, really. Here’s the picture of the veteran from her most recent, utterly misleading, mailing.
Note all the red stars on the medals? Or how about the “CCCP” on the one to the right of the coat’s button? And it’s pretty clearly a profile of Lenin on the medal in the top row. Clearly this veteran served the USSR with distinction! How horrible to have been treated so badly by Virginia!
In all seriousness, though, it would behoove a candidate for state Senate in the state with the largest U.S. Naval installation in the world to at least avoid using a picture of the enemy that Navy was built to defend against for fifty years in her political mail. This is more than just politics 101, this is a question of respect for the voting public who did serve.
What is with Loudoun Republicans and their inability to look at a picture and see what the rest of us see? From bloody doorways to Presidents with headshot wounds to, now, a picture of the wrong Naval veteran, Republican candidates and committees are incapable of actually looking at what they’re putting out there!