An alert reader calls attention to the fact that not only has the Courthouse Grounds Facilities Committee outsourced work on the design of Loudoun County’s new completely religion-neutral holiday display to the local Bible college (as noted here the other day): Committee Chairman Clint Good further reports that he had the honor of having lunch with said Patrick Henry College’s “Chancellor” (and “preeminent constitutional lawyer”) Michael Farris, who personally assured him that the display would pass constitutional muster. Continue reading
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What's REALLY going on in politics in Loudoun County, Virginia
Strictly secular promotion of religion
To insure that the new committee-designed holiday display for the courthouse lawn strictly adheres to the constitutional requirement that government may not favor one religion over another, the Courthouse Grounds Facility Committee has wisely enlisted the help of Ayatollah Farris’s local Christian bible college, according to Leesburg Today: Continue reading
Our far flung supervisors
Yes, the payoffs to Loudoun County from the extremely efficient business friendly trip by Chairman Scott York (R-At Large) and friends to our German “sister county” (partnerdistrict) Main-Taunus-Kries just keep pouring in.
First there was the major development of a press release published in no fewer than two local German newspapers declaring “new friendship on the baseball field” between the two districts. And not only friendship, but the promise of “exploring” further cooperation in this rich area.
This cooperation is to take some unspecified form between the Main-Taunus amateur baseball team der Redwings and the extremely minor league, if as yet nonexistent, Loudoun Hounds. The nonexistence of the Hounds is however no reflection on the very real existence of the Hounds’ owner Bob Farren or of the very real $19,219 that he so generously provided York and his fellow all-Republican supervisors to help them get elected last fall, which may have explained his presence on the German junket.
Now we can barely contain our excitement at the news of yet another major accomplishment of York’s far-flung travels: a “live video simulcast” set up last week that allowed Loudoun-based artists and their counterparts in M-T-K to do something or other to mark the opening of an art show, featuring exciting speeches by Loudoun County officials, the high point of which was apparently the chance for Loudoun artists sitting at the certified tick-free Franklin Park Arts Center in Purcellville to hear Loudoun County participating artist and sometime politico Priscilla Godfrey speak to them from the other end of the hookup in Germany, where she had flown just for the occasion.
Of course, maybe she could have stayed home and spoken to Loudoun artists without all this trouble. But never mind. It was very important.
Merely incompetent and corrupt
We should probably be happy that our local Republican machine here in Loudoun County is merely incompetent (see: Reid, Ken) and corrupt, rather than completely unhinged.
Some of our neighbors to the south in Greene County, Virginia
For a specimen of the latter, we have our neighbors to the south in Greene County, a region of our state located between Culpeper and Charlottesville, and apparently populated by a disproportionate number of people who like to wear tricorn hats and carry muskets and recite lines from elementary school history pageants about giving ’em liberty or death. (Or sometimes wear even more outré headgear, as depicted in the accompanying photo.) Continue reading
Read and follow directions!
The only thing conceivably more ridiculous than spending thousands of taxpayer dollars to spray pesticides all over 9 county parks in the hopes it will reduce the incidence of Lyme disease is . . . to do that and not even follow the application directions on when and where not to spray.
Guess which version of ridiculous our all-Republican Board of Supervisors in Loudoun opted for?
Ignoring recommended procedure (and common sense) to limit spraying to actual tick habitat along wooded edges, the Board had 62 acres of open area in Franklin Park needlessly treated
As noted previously, the Board, falling over itself to pretend to be doing something about Lyme disease, rushed to divert as much as $20,000 of existing funds from the county Parks and Recreation budget to its new tick spraying crusade (particularly fearless supervisor “Ken” Reid, never at a loss for absurdity, boldly promised to “wipe out” ticks in Loudoun County)—but without bothering to ask such niggling questions as whether this was likely to accomplish anything (other than looking busy). Continue reading
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