Month: June 2008

No need to bother asking me about being Barack Obama’s Vice President, Mark Warner told about 2,000 delegates at the state convention. If offered the VP spot on Obama’s ticket, Warner will say no.

On Sunday, The Washington Post reported on Warner’s speech at the Democratic state convention, quoting him as saying, "Let me be clear about this: I have been working very hard these last few months to ask the people of Virginia to give me the honor of being their United States senator. I will not seek, and I will not accept, any other opportunity."

That’s been Warner’s standard answer to questions about his VP potential, though his speech on Saturday spelled out his intentions in starkly clear language.

There was an eyebrow-raising moment a little further into the story, however. Here’s the juicy part:

So does this mean that Grisham, Democratic bigwig that he is, isn’t going to vote for Obama? Not donating to the campaign is one (self-defeating) thing. But to sit at home or—gasp—vote for John McCain is quite another.

If it’s the national media’s misogyny that’s making these folks sit on their hands, perhaps they’d like to take all look at The Maverick’s position on women’s issues.

It looks like the local kerfuffle du jour has made its way to, of all places, Baltimore. John Woestendiek, a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, posted about Albemarle County’s decision to begin fining owners of obnoxious dogs.

Woestendiek basically offers a gloss of the ordinance that the Board of Supervisors passed on June 11. It says that a neighbor who’s pissed off at a dog that won’t stop barking has legal recourse. This involves the simple process of trekking on down to the magistrate’s office, swearing out a warrant, providing proof that the dog in question barked for longer than 30 minutes without—and I’ll quote from the ordinance here—"cessation of such sound for time periods greater than five minutes during the thirty consecutive minutes."

The ordinance, however, doesn’t specify what kind of proof is needed. Picture, if you will, a judge having to listen to a recording of a dog barking for half an hour. If it were me, I’d probably be inclined to lock up  anyone who records such things. 

Woestendiek doesn’t offer much in the way of commentary, but there is no dearth of that in the local media. I’ve got a story coming out Tuesday of Dog Barking Commentary’s greatest hits.

There was one, though, that was utterly unsurprising. It pops up whenever a local government around here (I’m looking at you, Albemarle County) tries to institute some kind of ordinance that most places with more than three people per square mile passed some time before the Battle of the Bulge—say, like "No shooting guns in the general direction of children" or "No more than four armadillos per apartment patio." In fact, when I heard about the proposed ordinance, I wondered low long it would take to emerge.

Not long. Joanne Hayden, take it away:

“Tonight I feel like I am moving into the People’s Republic of Albemarle.”

Ms. Hayden spoke thus at the BoS meeting. Look, I know we think we’re being really clever when we compare Charlottesville to Communist China, but I wonder if we can decide, as a people, that this rhetorical devise is overused and ultimately boring. Let’s put a stop to the "People’s Republic of Whatever." It’s just so … I don’t know … Cold War-ish.

But don’t worry, people. I’m not going to leave you without means to compare sensible government to murderous authoritarian regimes. What fun would that be?

So I propose a new devise for those who want to keep government off our backs and out of our barnyards. I actually stole it from my girlfriend’s uncle. He calls Charlottesville "Charlottastan," as in Afghanistan, Pakistan and all those others ‘stans where grumpy fundamentalists grow beards and make life miserable.

It believe it also works with the county … "Albemarlastan." Not quite as catchy, but functional. Kind of like the county.

So, whadaya say? Can we make that switch? Beside, Communism is so pre-September 11 in terms of culturally referencing totalitarianism. Be a pioneer. Be a patriot. Be the first one to use either sobriquet at a public meeting or letter to the editor.

You may want to find another place to grab a couple hostages.

The Charlottesville Police Department S.W.A.T. team took first place at the Virginia Annual S.W.A.T. Competition. Twenty-one teams from Virginia, Pennsylvania and South Carolina competed in the 8th annual contest. The Albemarle County Police Department’s team placed third.

"I am extremely proud of their skill, tenacity, strength and remarkable team
work," says Police Chief Tim Longo via e-mail. "In part, I believe their accomplishment is a testament to the level of time and energy they put into the training both individually and as a team."

The Harrisonburg Police Department hosts the competition each year. This was the first time that Charlottesville’s S.W.A.T team took part in the competition. S.W.A.T. team members were required to master military-type events that involve shooting, running and navigating an obstacle course.

"We’ve been training for the last three months for this," Sergeant L.A. Durrette told Harrisonburg’s Daily News Record. "We tried to focus on the shooting and physical parts."

"The S.W.A.T. Team is a critical resource to both the department and the community," Longo says. "It’s the kind of resource that while it is not deployed on a regular basis,  it is extremely important during high risk situations."

County Executive Bob Tucker isn’t as silly as he seemed when he went through with a Board of Supervisors work session June 11 on whether to make the minutes of Board meetings “summary” instead of “near-verbatim”: He was able to extract $35,000 from supervisors for additional staff to transcribe Board minutes.

The idea of making government less transparent drew widespread criticism from citizen watchdogs. But the Board of Supervisors met 194 times last year, an increase of 43 percent from 2000. Minute transcription is way behind—the most recent minutes available are from January—and staff wondered whether podcasting, which started in 2006, filled the void if the Board went to summary minutes. So supervisors had to choose whether to scrap near-verbatim minutes or to ante up the $35,000.

“I really appreciate staff going through this exercise with us because it gave me a really good idea of what summary and verbatim means,” said Supervisor Sally Thomas. “And I’m strongly on the side of verbatim. Then I had to decide whether it’s just hubris, do I just like being able to pick out what I said, and I convinced myself that had nothing to do with it.”

Only Chairman Ken Boyd voted against it.

Since the minutes of the discussion won’t be available for many moons, you can listen to the full discussion at Charlottesville Tomorrow’s website.

An unidentified man was taken to the UVA Medical Center on Tuesday afternoon following an apparently self-inflicted attack that left him with serious wounds in the abdomen.

According to the Daily Progress, witnesses spotted the man just after 5pm, clutching his side and staggering along the sidewalk near Buford Middle School. The passersby called police, who soon arrived along with rescue squads and blocked off a two-block portion of Ninth Street. An ambulance took the victim away around 7:15pm and he entered surgery shortly thereafter. As of Wednesday morning, media reports indicated that it was uncertain whether the man’s wounds were the result of a stabbing or a shooting.

On Wednesday afternoon, City spokesman Ric Barrick told C-VILLE that, although the man had said he heard a noise and felt pain while innocently walking down the street, then saw two men running away, forensic workers investigating his Orangedale Avenue home found a note he’d left for his wife in which he talked about hurting himself. It was determined that the man’s wounds were in fact from a stabbing, not a shooting, and that he had lifted his shirt to administer the wounds himself.

Barrick said further that the man is a known "cutter" and had recently been released from rehab.