Tag Archives: General Assembly

Evan Mantel’s Whistleblower Letter

Having worked for Dave LaRock’s 1789 Project, Evan Mantel, a recent graduate of Patrick Henry College, says he is now “cynical towards politics.”

I wonder if he’s also now cynical toward our local press. Mantel’s letter to the editor describing his unpleasant experience appeared in the Loudoun Times Mirror on May 2, and was removed on May 5. I’m still waiting to hear an explanation for the removal, but given other recent conduct by the LaRock campaign the application of pressure to the editor seems likely. If that turns out to be true, it’s very disappointing behavior from a candidate for public office.

Luckily, the original letter was saved in Google’s webcache. It reveals a pattern of self-indulgence, abuse, and theft of labor hours. See for yourself: The letter is reproduced here, just in case LaRock’s campaign to represent Virginia’s 33rd District is successful at bullying Google, too. Continue reading

Juvenile Injustice In Our Schools

Many students and parents are rightly upset that school principals, administrators and counselors conspire and combine with police assigned to the schools (called “resource officers”) to make schools more like prisons.

Police are assigned to almost every school with one principal function being to criminalize what used to be student discipline, to stigmatize young students, to compromise their futures – what schools they may attend and what jobs they may aspire to have.

Nor is this some informal arrangement between the school and the police.  It’s the law.  Virginia Code Annotated Section 22.1-279.3:1 spells out how student discipline at the school transmogrifies into a crime.

This offensive pincer movement, by which the state combines a school disciplinary action with a criminal prosecution has prompted righteous fury among students and parents for the students have been denied the basic protections any adult would enjoy in his defense. Continue reading

“Tebow Bill” passed by House Reps; Intercepted by Senate Dems

Home school advocates are suffering buyer’s remorse and lately demand the right by legislation to select ala carte services from the public schools that they, by homeschooling, have pronounced unworthy to educate them.

Home school parents want the right by law for their home school students to play on the athletic teams of the schools that they have chosen to avoid.

Republican Delegate Rob Bell, from the 56th District, Albemarle County, authored what he called the “Tebow bill” to force every public school in the Commonwealth to allow homeschoolers to compete on public school teams even though they don’t attend the school.

The first fair concern is that Bell has widely characterized his proposal as the “Tebow bill” after the home-schooled Denver Bronco’s quarterback, Tim Tebow, who struck kneeling, fisted praying poses on the playing field when he scored.

Bell plays to that large fraction of the home schooling movement therefore that schools at home to avoid being taught, among other things, modern science that contradicts their fundamentalist beliefs that the Bible is to be understood literally and not as metaphor or allegory. Bell says he is a “committed supporter of home schooling.” Continue reading

Links for Tuesday, April 24 (aka what I’ve read since the last links).

Links from Twitter, Facebook, and my blogroll.

Thanks, Republicans

And thanks to you also, Governor McDonnell, for your leadership on this. Thank you for amending the Ultrasound Rape bill to be merely an Ultrasound Battery bill. And then passing it.

This action unequivocally proves that the purpose of this bill has nothing to do with ensuring that a woman sees an ultrasound image of the embryo she has decided to abort, since in almost all cases, an external ultrasound won’t produce anything to see. No, this is just about throwing up any old pesky obstacle in her way and making it more inconvenient and expensive to exercise her legal, constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Thanks again for making that so clear. It’s way more convincing than us saying it.

Road spam and special rights: Two great tastes that taste great together?

Now this is really getting interesting. The new Board of Supervisors is apparently considering a motion to kill the volunteer illegal sign removal program, and it is not going over well with LI. I happen to agree; the program seems like a perfectly sensible way of dealing with the vexing problem of road spam.

“So in keeping with the overriding theme of this Board, paybacks, one of their first acts will be to kill this program as payback to those who helped fund their campaigns – the builders and developers and David Ramadan, and Godfather Dick Black as well. Here is the link to the staff report for this item, pay special attention to the motions at the end. They’re not doing this to keep things the way they are. This program costs Loudoun very little in minimal staff oversight, and provides its citizens with a great service – keeping our roadways safe and free of trash. But does that matter to this Board? Apparently not – this program ticks off their masters, so it must be done away with.”

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The first priority of the new School Board: sneer at human rights

Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

The very first action taken by the newly elected Loudoun County School Board was this:

Regarding the Virginia Human Rights Act:

“I move to amend the Board’s previously adopted Legislative Program by removing the recommendation to expand the protected classifications contained in the Virginia Human Rights Act, Code of Virginia §2.2-3900 and §2.2-3901, to include gender orientation and gender identity and to further amend the Code of Virginia §22.1-78 to allow local school boards to similarly expand the protected classifications contained in local school board policies and regulations and that Staff be directed to make such other changes to the Legislative Program as to conform to the Program language of this motion.”

[from page 5 of the adopted Legislative Program]

Motion: Mr. Kuesters
Second: Mr. Fox

Vote: 6-3-0 (Mr. Reed, Mrs. Bergel, and Mrs. Sheridan opposed)

The only reason for initiating such an action is ideological, and the idea in play is that gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transgender and gender variant youth are not deserving of having their human rights protected. The Wisconsin School District that was the subject of the film Bullied found out the hard and expensive way that this is not a good position for school boards to take. I hate to being up money when this is a fundamental moral issue, but unfortunately that’s the only language some people seem to understand.

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Patricia Phillips is Pro-Communist

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!

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Randy Minchew Opposes Birth Control

You might have heard about Mitt Romney’s kerfuffle with a voter in Iowa over the banning of hormonal birth control (the Pill and its successors). Essentially, policies that declare “life begins at conception” would have the practical upshot of banning the Pill, and hormonal birth control in general. It should be noted that this kind of birth control is a choice made by individuals – and couples – by the millions every day. It is safe, legal, effective and has improved the lives of innumerable people for fifty years.

So, of course, Republicans oppose it.

Here in Loudoun, the LCRC and its candidates want their radical anti-choice (and anti-women) polices declared “off limits” for public debate, or even mention. Indeed, I have no doubt this very post will result in a series of comments accusing me of being sensationalist or stirring up controversy. It is in the nature of these things. But when you ask the right questions, or read the right letters, (and I do mean right letters) you discover that the LCRC’s candidate’s positions on the fifty years of gender equality progress are, in fact, directly in line with the most radically paleolithic candidate they support. Which is why candidates that purport to be “moderate” like Randy Minchew, are in fact no better than Dick Black. They want to take away our daughters’ rights and supplant them with their own paternalistic hooey. In fact, Randy (and candidates like him) are actively campaigning on it.

RandyLetter1

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that a blastocyst is not a baby, and calling it a baby is disingenuous at best, the stridency of the language and appeal in this letter is worthy of note and consideration by Loudoun’s voters. Mr. Minchew has positioned himself as a calm, moderate voice, but it is clear from this letter that he is, in truth, anything but. He is as fringey as his Senatorial ticketmate Dick Black when it comes to advocacy on this issue.

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Post-primary postmodernism

Wherein a few loose ends are explored.
(Updated to clarify meaning of terms.)

1. The GOP has a bigotry problem. Those who are genuinely trying to combat it have my sympathy, if not my confidence. A commenter at TC who goes by Muslim Conservative has been patiently doing a lot of heavy lifting in that regard, and has managed to dislodge some damaging admissions, to wit: Former Republican candidate for Sheriff Greg Ahlemann has stated once again that he categorically does not “vote for or support candidates who support or practice Islam.” He also stated that he would never vote for or support “a homosexual.”

That statement might surprise those who read my interview with him on Equality Loudoun back in 2007, in which he talked about Muslim friends and gay friends in a way clearly intended to dispel the rumor that he harbors bigotry. What might also surprise you is that his views haven’t changed since then, and that he doesn’t see any contradiction. He genuinely believes, I think, that these statements do not constitute bigotry, and he is not alone in this view.

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