Yearly Archives: 2014

Having a woman deliver a lie doesn’t magically make it true

Posted on by |

republicansinyourvaginaLast night the “official” Republican response to the State of the Union address was delivered by Washington representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who didn’t engage in any distracting large motor activities.

Rodgers made the encouraging assertion that the current Republican Party “trusts people to make their own decisions, not a government that decides for you,” and then a bit later that “Republicans believe health care choices should be yours, not the government’s. And that whether you’re a boy with Down syndrome or a woman with breast cancer … you can find coverage and a doctor who will treat you.”

But obviously that is not at all what Republicans believe, as earlier in the day nearly all of them had voted to prevent women from choosing to access abortion care, and they regularly endorse efforts that would allow health care providers, in the guise of “religious freedom,” to refuse to treat people on the basis of their personal beliefs about those people. Most notably this “freedom” to selectively do one’s job has involved pharmacists who don’t believe that people should use birth control, but it can just as easily be invoked to refuse all kinds of medical care to all kinds of people, care like hormone replacement therapy, fertility and prenatal care, and cancer treatment.

Continue reading →

“Bob Marshall is not, and never has been, an attorney.”

Posted on by |

I continue to be reminded, sometimes several times in one day, of the comment in which anti-gay and anti-labor activist lawyer James Young informed me that “Bob Marshall is not, and never has been, an attorney.”

It explained a lot, and for that I thank him. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports the following:

Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Prince William, said today that he is working with lawyers to file a complaint with the Virginia State Bar against Attorney General Mark R. Herring over his refusal to defend Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban in federal court this week.

Marshall sponsored the 2006 amendment to the state constitution.

“I want the same discipline meted out against him that would be meted out against any attorney similarly situated,” Marshall said in an interview Monday afternoon.

“If after a pleading has been filed an attorney decided that his client is guilty, what would the bar do with that attorney? And they better not go soft because he is the attorney general,” he said.

I suppose that never having been an attorney could explain Marshall being unaware that the legal obligations of a private attorney and a public one, such as an attorney general, are quite different (although that hasn’t prevented me from being aware of it – and I don’t sit on a legislative body). Surely Marshall has some attorney friends in the House of Delegates who could have explained this to him:

Continue reading →

Bob Marshall’s marriage meltdown

Posted on by |

bob_marshallBob Marshall has said some dumb things over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard him embarrass himself more than he did yesterday on the Kojo Nnamdi show.

Marshall was interviewed for a segment about Attorney General Mark Herring’s determination that Virginia’s anti-marriage amendment and statutes are unconstitutional. His remarks start out calmly enough, if poorly reasoned. Then the wheels come off. The entire segment starts at the 9:20 mark; the interview with Marshall is introduced at the 10:56 mark.

Marshall begins this rhetorical circus by asking whether Tim Kaine, governor in 2006-7 when the Marshall-Newman Amendment was enacted, “consciously signed a bill that violated the Fourteenth Amendment.” This is simply a stupid question on its face. Of course he did. How would any unconstitutional law ever become law if this didn’t happen? Every governor in every state that enacted similar amendments signed a bill that violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Does Marshall believe that it’s impossible, by definition, for anything enacted by a legislature or popular vote to be unconstitutional? Because that seems like a problem.

Continue reading →

Taxes, Schools, and Sidewalks

Posted on by |

Kids went to school one day this week. This marks the second week this winter where the Loudoun Schools have only been in session for one day. Many members of the community are incensed at the fact that our kids have been kept home so often this year. They complain that it is “just a little snow and cold,” and where they’re from originally, this kind of “wussiness” in the face of winter wouldn’t be tolerated.IcySidewalkTweet

Funny thing about that, though: Where they’re from originally, there is a long-standing local commitment to the public’s responsibility to take care of public infrastructure, like schools and transportation infrastructure, at the public’s expense. Here in Loudoun County, Republicans who run the Board of Supervisors and the School Board, not to mention those in the House of Delegates, have no such commitment. On the contrary, there is an attitude of “Starving the Beast” when it comes to public services and investment. As if our children’s education were a Beast of some sort.

Continue reading →

“The injustice of Virginia’s position in Loving will not be repeated this time.”

Posted on by |

Last week, in anticipation of this morning’s announcement by Attorney General Mark Herring’s office that he will not be defending the infamous “Marshall-Newman Amendment,” Republican delegates were already trying to lay the groundwork for an end run to get their way:

“[T]he attorney general’s job is like a judge. A judge will tell you, ‘Look, I might not agree with the law, but my job is basically not to make law. It is to look at what the law was [and what] the legislature intended,’ ” House Majority Leader M. Kirkland Cox (R-Colonial Heights) said.

That’s right. AG Herring looked at the Virginia constitutional and statutory ban on same-sex marriage, and what the legislature clearly intended by it, and made the determination that it was unconstitutional. Given the recent rulings in Utah and Oklahoma that affirm the reasoning of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Windsor, it’s clear that the Virginia amendment does, and was intended to, violate the due process and equal protection rights of Virginia same sex couples under the Fourteenth Amendment. There is a reason, after all, that the legal team of David Boies and Ted Olson, who so brilliantly argued the Prop 8 case on behalf of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, chose Virginia as their next venue: Virginia’s anti-marriage amendment is considered the most extremely worded and restrictive in the nation.

Continue reading →

Drinking Water – wasted, polluted, and at risk

Posted on by |

Water_faucetWe’ve all been taught that we are mostly made of water, how we need it to live, to drink, to clean, to grow anything we eat, to nourish the trees that produce the air we breathe, and yet our world right down to the county level where we live fails to protect this precious life resource – like we could survive without water.

300,000 men, women and children in West Virginia found that the water in their home faucets from the Elk River made them ill and smelled something like licorice.  It was the scent of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol.  A negligent coal mining company, Freedom Industries, earning 30 million dollars last year, had 13 tanks all sixty years old and one 35,000 gallon tank leaked 7,500 gallons of this chemical through cracks in the containment wall into the Elk River. Incidentally, the waste water treatment plant’s intake pipe took in the tainted water even after it had notice of the chemical spill, and pumped it out to its customers.  Needless to say, the treatment had not removed the chemical waste.

In Virginia, on January 8, 2014, State Senator Charles W. Carrico, Sr. (R-40SD), perhaps eager to mimic West Virginia’s careless regulatory system, offered a bill, SB 217, in the General Assembly that, if it passes, shall increase the likelihood that we’ll have coal waste in our rivers polluting our drinking water.  Continue reading →

Lessons Learned, by John Whitbeck

Posted on by |
John Whitbeck, Park View High School mass meeting, 2013-12-16

John Whitbeck, Park View High School mass meeting, 2013-12-16

John Whitbeck’s post-election-loss message contains some “lessons learned” that you might find interesting.

Those of you who know me well know that I am not one to get down when things don’t go my way.  In fact, I am already excited to move on to the next phase of my work on behalf of Virginians. That phase has become very clear to me after the results of yesterday’s election and let me share a few observations and goals with you.

First, the Republican Party is not as united as it could be and we need to find a way to correct this very soon.  There are several issues that have created factions within the Party and we need to find a way to reconcile these disagreements if we are going to maximize our success in elections.

There are several issues that have created factions? Could one of those issues be that first Dave LaRock, and then John Whitbeck, maligned twenty year Republican incumbent Joe May with epithets usually reserved for opponents representing the other party? And that the 10th CD under John Whitbeck then chose an exclusionary method for nominating…John Whitbeck?
Continue reading →

The Worst Person in the Universe: Congressman Frank Wolf

Posted on by |

Hat tip to Nolan Dalla for awarding Congressman Frank Wolf The Worst Person in the Universe award. Dalla writes:

Rep. Wolf is a longtime Republican congressman from Virginia.  He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives way back in 1980, riding the cozy coattails of Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory.  Since then, Rep. Wolf has been as faithful as a potted plant, deeply rooted to every corporate-funded, neoconservative, right-wing cause.  Like a slice of cold stale pizza, he’s one of the final leftovers of the late Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” a witch-hunting political movement of Bible-thumpers who once professed to know what’s good for us all, and was dedicated to transforming America into a modern theocracy named “Jesusville.”

In his so-called retirement, Wolf will continue to work with the worst theocratic elements in American society. His retirement statement says, emphasis and annotations mine:

Continue reading →

Saving For A “Rainy Day” – Not Really!

Posted on by |
Saving for a “rainy day” (Photo by John P. Flannery)

Saving for a “rainy day” (Photo by John P. Flannery)

A recent poll said that 40% of our friends and neighbors have made their New Year’s resolution – to save more – in savings accounts, automatic transfers, savings bonds, and certificates of deposit.

We once did save at a decent rate.  Our national saving rate was 12.2% in November 1981.  But the rate fell like a stone starting in 1982 and went as low as less than 1% a number of times between 2000 and 2010.  Easy credit meant you didn’t have to save – so some wrongly thought.

The rate climbed back up when the 2008 recession hit, going from 1.3% in January 2008 to 4.2% in December of 2009.

The latest report from the U.S. Department of Commerce, from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, says our current rate of savings is an anemic 4.2%.

The dilemma for families that want to save is that they likely owe in debt at a higher interest rate than what they can get saving their money.  From 1990 to 2008, the nation’s citizens were convinced, Benjamin Franklin’s advice to the contrary notwithstanding, that being a borrower was not so bad.  Unfortunately, if a nation’s citizens don’t save, then the nation has to borrow from other nation-states who do save. Continue reading →

Photos from 2009 Public Advocate stunt show Delgaudio working with his new extremist Library Board appointee

Posted on by |

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. We don’t yet know how many words Sterling supervisor Eugene Delgaudio will emit claiming that he didn’t know “much of anything” about Andrew Beacham, his nominee for Loudoun County’s Library Board – but we do know that they will be arranged into falsehoods.

According to Chairman York, who apparently agreed to nominate Beacham “on behalf of” his Sterling colleague (how does he manage to get himself into these predicaments?), “the information provided on Beacham was not very detailed. Beacham’s four-paragraph resume only said he had ‘worked in the field of media production and broadcasting over the last 4 years.'”

In fact, Beacham’s “work” includes publicly defacing the Koran “in support of Florida pastor Terry Jones” and other political theater acts with fringe anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry. He is active with nativist and anti-government groups in Loudoun, and calls himself a “full-time Pro-Life missionary and activist for Christian policies in government” while declaring that “the only good progressive is a dead progressive.”

Beacham did not move to Sterling by coincidence.

Continue reading →