A view from Richmond

JUSTICE FOR THE RICHMOND 31?

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:24:00 -0400

I just returned from Richmond’s Oliver Hill court building, where they had the initial hearing for the 31 Virginians arrested on the steps of the State Capitol recently. They were arrested during a peaceful rally to oppose the ludicrous legislation that is being forced on us by the GOP “majority”. They are all charged with “trespass” and “unlawful assembly” after they sat on the Capitol steps and refused to move to the “Free speech” area of the Capitol grounds. The judge set dates for the next phases of the proceedings as follows:

April 20^th Written motions by the Defense.

May 11^th Written motions by the Commonwealth.

May 25^th at 10:00 AM Oral arguments regarding the motions.

June 19^th at 11:00 AM Trial!

It was rather comical to see almost the entire group of 31 called, one at a time, along with a group of lawyers to stand before the judge. I don’t think that the designer of that courthouse had in mind the idea that 31 people would ever be tried at the same time! The group was a real cross section of Virginia, old and young, men and women, black and white and all looked the perfect picture of respectability. If I was to have a dinner party and they were all the guests, I would be very pleased to see them and raise a glass in their honor!

I came within a hair’s breadth of being one of them that day, but for the intervention of the cooler head of Eileen Davis, I stepped back at the last second and merely observed, with an ominous feeling that I was somehow betraying those brave people.

How can a member of the public be accused of trespassing on public property? What does public property mean if not that it is the rightful place for the public to be? And what about the 1^st amendment, that says: “Congress shall make no law………….or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”

The 31 are definitely “the people” and they were seeking to petition for the redress of a serious grievance, namely the imposition of a new law that clearly violates a woman’s rights, by forcing her to undergo an unnecessary medical procedure against her will and (to add insult to injury) to force her to pay for it herself!

If the McDonald administration believes that it is acting within the law to preposition a swat team and another heavily armed police team to augment the Capitol police, simply to harass and arrest a peaceful group of disgruntled Virginians, then he is not paying attention to the real world. You would have thought that, at a time when Virginia was the laughing stock of the nation for the obvious overreach of his GOP colleagues in the General Assembly, not to mention in light of his larger ambitions on the National stage, that he would have gone out of his way to avoid anything as patently ridiculous as these arrests and these hollow charges.

In the past, I have personally witnessed a large group of heavily armed citizens meeting on the grounds of the Capitol in Richmond and shouting, even screaming, for their “right” to overthrow the elected government by force of arms, while a handful of Capital police just stood their ground and watched. How can a group, comprised mostly of women and children with handful of men, who are all unarmed, pose a greater threat to security that they have to be arrested and taken to court.

Something is seriously out of whack in this country when a person can be arrested immediately for throwing flour on a celeb, but another can shoot dead an unarmed boy and walk free moments later.

Justice is often portrayed as wearing a blindfold, to symbolize impartiality, not to symbolize blindness!

ALEC PROTEST TOMORROW IN DC

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:14:25 -0400

PROTEST “KILL AT WILL” LAWS THAT ARE KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE AND PROTECTING VIGILANTES

Thursday, 3/29 at 12 PM

Outside ALEC Headquarters

1100 Vermont Ave. NW WASHINGTON, DC

Join the National Urban League, NAACP, Color of Change, Moveon.org, AFL-CIO, SEIU, ProgressNow, Center for Media and Democracy/ALECexposed.org, Presente,Public Campaign,CommonCause, People For the American Way,UltraViolet,National Council ofChurches,US Action, and more.

Urge ALEC to stop promoting its lethal “Kill at Will” law.

The “Kill at Will” law is being used to justify Trayvon” killing and may prevent the prosectuon of his shooter. Since the NRA wrote this law for Florida in 2005, the “justiable homicide” rate has jumped by 300%!

The NRA – a major ALEC benefactor – then helped pass similar legislation in 30 states - and the

tragic body count is growing.

VA General Assembly off in fantasy land!

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:25:00 -0400

HOUSE BILL NO. 666

Offered January 11, 2012

Prefiled December 21, 2011

A BILL to amend and reenact § 555-69.1 of the Code of Virginia, relating to the juggling of live elephants in public parks.

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Patron—A.N. Other

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Referred to Committee for Courts of Justice

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Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia:

1. That § 555-69.1 of the Code of Virginia is amended and reenacted as follows:

§ 555-69.1. Juggling of live elephants in public parks –penalty..

It shall be unlawful for any person to engage in the practice of juggling live elephants within the confines of a public space designated as a “public park”, according to the definition of “public park” outlined in subsection 555-69.7. Any person found to be juggling live elephants in violation of this statute shall be guilt of a class 5 naughtiness that shall be punished by a mandatory minimum sentence of being squashed flat like a bug……………………….

Does anyone spot the rather obvious flaw in this proposed legislation? No, not the fact that naughtiness is not a real crime classification, it is simply that juggling live elephants has never taken place, and could never take place, since it is physically impossible! Surely it would seem straight forward enough to most people, yet the 2012 Virginia General Assembly appears to believe that this most fundamental form of logical standard need not be applied to all prospective legislation. As an example, let’s write a bill to protect people that have been prosecuted for protecting their home and their loved ones, even though nobody ever has been prosecuted for that, or is ever likely to be. How about a bill to make sure that nobody can impersonate a dead voter, to cast an illegal vote in an election, even though it is already a federal crime to do so and there is no evidence that anyone ever has. Better still lets pass a bill to try and prevent all gun buyback programs and to ensure that if any manage to take place that the guns surrendered for destruction are resold back into the marketplace. Why? Just on the off chance that one of the guns that would otherwise be destroyed might be of some value – oh, and by the way, the option of selling valuable guns collected in buybacks already exists.

With just 8 weeks a year to solve all the Commonwealth’s problems and over 2,000 bills to consider, do our legislators really have time to propose imaginative bills that seek to solve imaginary problems? What about the economy, what about jobs, what about our underperforming schools, our needy veterans, who’s needs are not being served? Come on people STOP HORSING AROUND!

Contrast in Response

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:09:28 -0400

Picture the scene, a cold January day in Richmond, Virginia and a group of about 120 people are gathered for a solemn vigil on the grounds of the Capital building, to commemorate the lives of the more than 800 Virginians killed by gunfire in the previous year. The group listens in complete silence as one of the speakers, a mother whose child was shot dead in his own bed by a stray bullet passing through the wall of his home, hold up his photograph. As she speaks, a large group of armed men surround the crowd, their coats removed even on this cold day, to reveal the handguns they carry on their belts or the assault rifles slung over their shoulders. Some of them push so far forward that those on the fringes of the crowd can feel the weapons pushed up against their backs. As the woman describes her harrowing loss in a faltering voice, one of the intruders yells out “Guns Save Lives” and the others laugh cruelly. Meanwhile, a small number of armed Capital Police stand idly by, yet, despite direct pleas to move the gun wielders back from our lawfully permitted event, they simply reply that “These folks have a basic 1^st. amendment right to gather and speak”.

Now fast forward a few years to the same place, but with a different, larger, crowd. Imagine this time a group, mostly of women, a few pregnant, some with children in strollers or hand in hand. Older women, some with husbands and groups of college age women, all standing on the grounds of the same Virginia Capital, but there this time because of the recent barrage of legislative attacks on women’s health and a woman’s right to choose. Nobody armed, nobody behaving badly, just a large well behaved crowd, fired up by righteous indignation over the actions of some of their elected officials. The big difference this time is that the armed capital police are now more numerous and they are backed up by riot police and a fully armored swat team – “to ensure that the protest is conducted safely” they say. Admittedly the crowd is now standing near the front steps of the magnificent Capital building, that signifies the location of the oldest democratic institution in the country, in the state that gave us so many of the Founding Fathers and early Presidents. The place built by Thomas Jefferson, the man without whom it was said “there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.” A clause which clearly states “Congress shall make no law ……abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Yet this peaceable assembly of people, gathered to petition the State Government for a redress of grievances, has discovered something quite unexpected, they have found themselves in a “Constitution Free Zone”, a place where the 1^st amendment clearly does not apply, a place where armed riot police, standing just feet away from Jefferson’s shrine to democracy and freedom, are ready to arrest people for “unlawful assembly”.

So what is it that makes these two events so different? What is it that causes such alarm for the authorities? How can armed men intimidate gun violence victims with impunity and yet unarmed women cannot gather peacefully to preserve their dignity? Those questions are what we all need to ponder and when we come up with answers we should remember them in November, when we all have the right to assemble at our polling stations and exercise our most precious right – the right to vote these hypocrites out of office!

Draft Resolution on Gun Personhood

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:06:26 -0400

WHEREAS, Corporations are to be considered as persons, as referenced by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision, though not specifically mentioned in the Constitution of the United States of America, or the Bill of Rights, and

WHEREAS, upon initial division of a human egg cell, after it has been fertilized by a sperm, the resulting cell bundle is to be considered as a person, despite the terms “egg”, “sperm” or “fertilization” not being mentioned in the Constitution of the United States of America, or the Bill of Rights and

WHEREAS, arms are indeed referenced directly in the Bill of Rights portion of the Constitution of the United States of America, notably in the 2^nd Amendment

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that guns, being for the most part the common interpretation of arms in the context of civilian ownership, shall henceforth be considered as persons, with all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this Commonwealth, subject only to the Constitution of the United States and decisional interpretations thereof by the United States Supreme Court and specific provisions to the contrary in the statutes and constitution of this Commonwealth.

LET IT BE FURTHER RESOLVED that as persons, it will henceforth be acceptable for Commonwealth Citizens (of appropriate age) to marry a firearm, however, in order to avoid any same sex unions it will be necessary to ensure that male citizens will only be allowed to marry female firearms and vice versa. To facilitate this, the Commonwealth of Virginia will establish a Department of Gun Sexing to determine and duly certify the sex of all eligible firearms. Any person married to a firearm will not be able to marry another person, or firearm, unless and until the existing marriage is annulled or a legal divorce takes place. Marrying more than one firearm would be considered as polygunmy and is thus prohibited by law.