Donna Blanton’s petition for appeal hearing granted by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Why? Because apparently the prosecutor isn’t supposed to refute the defendant’s bizarre arguement that the prosecution is supposed to do the defense’s job.

Or something like that. You can read the defendant’s appeal here and the Commonwealth’s response here.

Frankly, Bob McDonnell needs to clear the Supreme Court of these idiots. That’s what you get when you have “Democratic” “leadership” for eight years.

Crazy teabaggers unite!

The following is a letter from Anna Yeisley, a member (or head?) of the “Spotsylvania County Campaign for Liberty” (the Ron Paul offshoot groups) and “Spotsylvania Patriots”; she’s also a member of that nut group, founded by Herb Lux, the “American Patriots Committee”:

Dear Senator Warner [same letter sent to Senator Webb]

Please vote NO on Senate version of Health Care bill.

What should worry every American and you, Senator [Warner/Webb] as our Virginia senator, are how chronic illnesses and cancers are increasing despite alleged advances in medical science.

There is a growing voice of common sense that links our diet with the rise and increasing incurrence of cancer and life threatening illnesses. Our medical establishment disparages the illness and cancer reversing benefits of changing our diets from animal product based to plant based. This simple inexpensive change has been reversing countless cases of chronic disease and cancer, yet the American Medical Association (backed by pharmaceutical, surgical equipment corporations and the meat and dairy industry) refuse to release statistics that show that dietary changes can be as effective (and for some people, more effective) than standard toxic drugs and body deforming surgeries to treat cancer and other life threatening diseases.

Our Congress and government have allowed the AMA to stifle evidence and confuse statistics to force our nation’s physicians to treat all disease and illness with toxic drug treatments. Do you realize it is illegal to treat cancer with any other treatment other than surgery and/or chemotherapy? Many physicians are speaking out against the ineffectiveness of treating dietary caused cancers and illnesses with toxic drugs and deforming surgeries that many of our physicians KNOW will never cure, but instead create more illness and chronic ailments and more likelihood for cancers to return.

The AMA is behind this push for governmental involvement in health care. If they had their way, there would be no cancer prevention taught to anyone so they and the corporations they represent can continue to make billions of dollars in revenue in aggressive and toxic and body deforming treatments and surgeries. At the same time, more and more physicians are waking up to the realization that lack of nutrients and toxic chemicals in our food, air and water is what is causing the majority of cancers and chronic illnesses.

You can’t treat toxicity with more toxicity!! With chemotherapy treatments costing anywhere from $800 a day to $80,000 a week – can you see the lucrative incentive in making it illegal to treat cancer with anything but toxic drug treatments? Particularly considering that 1 in 2 people will get cancer in their lifetime?

If our established medical establishment cannot see the connection between a high fat non nutritional diet and cancer and chronic disease, and relate dietary changes to reversing a good majority of life threatening cancers and illnesses; then what good is this medical establishment???? What do they know? They are ignorant and so consumed with making billions of dollars from established medical treatments that they refuse to see the death and disability caused by their ignorance.

Pushing health care upon this nation is AMA’s way of using government to continue to cover up the importance of a plant based diet to health and recovery. They are determined to use government to force Americans to be treated by invasive aggressive and often unnecessary surgeries (for our own good?) NO! For the good of the out of control and ever more powerful pharmaceutical and medical establishment.

Our nation must return to an agricultural commodity base where food is grown on our soil, free of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, steroids, growth hormones, petroleum products and governmental intervention. We must return to a state of balance and health that will only come from returning to our agricultural roots where the family farm was the norm and not just a memory.

The decisions you are making every day will affect our future as no other decade. Your most important work as every other senator is to return this state to an agricultural commodity base by encouraging our citizens to consume a plant based diet to help us regain our strength, balance and health economically, physically and spiritually.

God created this planet to care for human beings. Pure food and water is elementary important to the health and life of human beings, to Americans, to Virginians and to every individual created by God.

Governmental health care will continue to move our nation away from health and towards a nation of a sick and weak citizens dependent upon drugs and tax payer funded health care in order to function.

Please vote down the Senate version of this health care bill and view with suspicion those who are pushing for it.

I urge you to view the documentary called, “Healing Cancer” available from Netflix. There is indisputable evidence all over the world that a plant based diet reverses disease and cancer. Countries all over the world accept this premise but it is rejected by our American medical establishment.

We are not safe in the hands of physicians who cannot connect high fat non nutritional diets to ever increasing incidents of illness and cancer. We are not safe with governmental mandated health care particularly if it as heavily influenced by the traditional medical establishment as is this Senate version ‘health’ care bill.

Common sense is crucially important in this nation. The Senate health bill is all about the money to be made by the traditional medical establishment that is doing so little in restoring this nation’s health.

Anna Yeisley

There’s so much good (i.e., crazy) stuff there you have to read the whole thing.

And would you be supposed to hear that she also endorsed Catherine Crabill’s candidacy in the 99th District? Shocker, right?

Some of my brethren on the right and in the small-l libertarians are annoyed at the rampant anti-intellectualism being displayed by both the GOP and their “friends” in the teabagger coalition. While I agree with them — to an extent — after all, who finds a claim that “[t]he federal government is gang-raping the people” to be a persuasive argument?

A bigger issue I see is the rampant neo-Luddism and anti-science sentiment being displayed by the crazies on the far-right: “Vaccines are bad!1!” “They caused autism!!1!” “We don’t care if dozens and dozens of studies say otherwise!!1!”, etc. And this is just another perfect example.

Witch-hunt in the 99th House District.

I first got wind of this little witch-hunt at the 1st Congressional District Republican Committee meeting on December 11th. I was sitting in the back of the room when Bill Kling (Crabill’s campaign manger) went to up Larry Kile (King George County Republican Committee Chairman), who was sitting about ten feet away from me, and starting talking. While I couldn’t hear everything that was being said I did hear, “Caroline”, “Jeff”, “censured by the central committee”, and “not going to be Chairman much longer”.

See, that’s the problem with loud mouths: They don’t think — if they ever think — to check to see who’s around them before they starting running their mouths. The even funnier part was when it came to introduce any guests that were present at the meeting: I introduced myself and Larry Kile responded clear as day from ten feet away: “Ugh, that’s him!” That quote now graces my subtitle and will be staying there for a while.

Then there was the 99th Legislative District Committee meeting on December 14th. After spending over an hour hurling insults at the bloggers, at the statewide candidates, and at Republican Party of Virginia (RPV) Chairman Pat Mullins, the committee went into executive session.

After executive session, the committee voted 4–0 (Jeff Sili was at a School Board meeting from what I’ve heard and not present to vote) directing the Chairman, R. Allen Webb, to draft and send a letter asking that Caroline County Republican Committee Jeff Sili be censured and removed as Chairman of the Caroline Committee.

His crime? Not supporting Catherine “OKC Truther” Crabill in her run for Delegate.

Um, Jeff Sili is the only person that’s expressed an inkling of common sense and intelligence in this whole fiasco. The Caroline delegation unanimously voted against nominating the OKC Truther as a Republican. The Caroline Committee also decided that her name shouldn’t be included on their sample ballots for the district. And that decision was definitely clairvoyant because the day of the election, Catherine Crabill’s supporters were responsible for the theft of several Democratic signs, which were replaced with her signs, at the Bowling Green Town Hall (the district’s polling place). Definitely the type of campaign I want to associate myself and my committee with.

But, of course, the folks on 99th District Committee would vote for David Duke if he had an R by his name and harshly attack anyone that dared to oppose his candidacy (“He shares out values! His opponent is anti-family!”, etc.). I notice they decided not to formally request that Bob McDonnell, Bill Bolling, or Ken Cuccinelli be censured (for Pat Mullins see below). They also don’t seem to have a problem with Chris Saxman, who openly endorsed Delegate Pollard for reelection.

Apparently the true Republicans in the district (not the ten people that show up for the 99th District Committee meetings) weren’t too upset with Bob McDonnell’s opposition to Crabill since he won with 69% of the vote in the district (Bolling got 66% and Cuccinelli got 67%) .

The 99th District Committee also approved a motion, again 4–0, directing Webb to draft and send a letter “expressing displeasure” at RPV Chairman Pat Mullins for his refusal to support the OKC Truther.

Hopefully Pat Mullins gives them the Dick Cheney treatment (anyone else remember what Cheney said to Patrick Leahy?).

Cross-posted at On The Right and Virginia Virtucon.

Bill Kling: Just as crazy as Crabill.

[audio:https://www.imsurroundedbyidiots.com/videos/Kling_2009_12_14.mp3]

If you want to download the whole file to your hard-drive click here (11.6 MB MP3).

Things to consider as you listen to the audio:

  1. Winning against no one with 63.89% of the vote is a “substantial margin”?
  2. Of course, the federal government dared to provide response and recovery operations when a federal building was destroyed (federal jurisdiction) and a large quantity of explosives were used (again, federal jurisdiction).
  3. Yes, that evil liberal Washington Times misquoted her. I blame the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
  4. It’s nice to see him getting friendly with 9/11 conspiracy theorists like Jesse Ventura. ‘Oh, I don’t agree with him, but he raises the same points about 9/11 that Cathrine does about Oklahoma City.’ Uh-huh…
  5. And, yes, those evil blogs like Virginia Virtucon. Interesting fact: The 99th Legislative District Committee’s website actually links to Virtucon.
  6. And it’s nice to see that Bill Kling confirms everything that the Democrats have been saying about the “tea party” movement: There nothing but a bunch of crazy Republican astroturfers.
  7. And how does comparing your town to Mayberry make the people “country bumpkins”? Last time I watched The Andy Griffith Show, everyone on the show, for the most part, was portrayed as being pretty smart (Barney and Otis being the exceptions). What Mrs. Sili was saying is that she didn’t want to have to work with people the day after election after supporting someone that called anyone that disagreed with her a “traitor”.
  8. And, of course, that evil Albert Pollard engineered a conspiracy to call Catherine Crabill’s home! Call the police! And, funny, when I was doing door-to-door in Spotsylvania County for the Republicans I encountered a bunch of solid Dems that were on the Republican lists. So I guess I was engaging in “voter suppression”.

Cross-posted at Virginia Virtucon.

My agnosticism towards the tea party movement validated once again.

Does anyone consider this rhetoric attractive? (The Free Lance–Star):

Members of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party and questions about health care greeted Rep. Robert J. Wittman (R-Montross) at a gathering Tuesday night in his hometown.

“Where in the Constitution is government charged with protecting people’s health?” asked Catherine T. Crabill, a maverick Republican who, despite being shunned by Wittman and state GOP leaders, came close last month to winning the seat Wittman once held in the House of Delegates.

“My frustration is that we don’t want any government-run health care. The Constitution is the only thing that will save us from this death spiral that the country is in,” Crabill said.

“Some elected officials are committing treason by not upholding their sacred oaths. Do you intend to uphold your oath of office and fight to make sure that your elected colleagues uphold theirs?” she asked Wittman, who promised he would.

I’m still laughing about how the constitutional scholar, Catherine Crabill, is making comments about what’s in the United States Constitution when she’s apparently unfamiliar with the Article III, where the founders went to the trouble of specifically defining the crime of treason:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

And why did Madison et al. decide to be that specific regarding the crime of treason? Consult Federalist No. 43:

As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it. But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.

But that nut Catherine Crabill wants to prosecute people for political disagreements (and probably execute them). This is the same thing that the crazies on the left wanted to do for George Bush et al. for the Iraq War and the USA PATRIOT Act.

And then we have this one:

“The federal government is gang-raping the people,” said Mark Carpenter of Acorn, a Westmoreland County community–not the controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Do I need to expand how absurd, vulgar, and bordering on obscene that comment is? Does this idiot need someone to explain to him what the crime of rape is, much less the crime of gang-rape?

Caroline County Board of Supervisors: Fredericksburg’s public safety is a legislative priority, but not our own.

What passes for a (proposed) legislative platform for this county is laughable (PDF).

If you read through the thing, where at the specific issues facing Caroline County (and, yes, I know it is a regional platform. *snort*)? On the last page, it mentions funding for the HB 599 Program. The HB 599 Program is funding appropriated through the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) for local police departments. While some of the incorporated towns in the local counties receive some money, the main recipient of HB 599 locally is the Fredericksburg Police Department. Bowling Green, for instance, received a misery $26,310 of funding in FY06 through HB 599 (PDF).

Where in the legislative platform is the request that Compensation Board funding — which funds the offices of the sheriff, commonwealth’s attorney, clerk of the court, treasurer, and commissioner of revenue — not be cut? Where is the request for full-funding of offices that the Compensation Board states are understaffed according to their own standards?

According to the state’s own guidelines, the Caroline County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office should be getting additional funding for a full-time position for FY10 (while simultaneously being ranked as most in need) (PDF). The Clerk of the Court’s Office should getting an additional position (PDF). The Treasurer’s Office? Two positions (PDF). Commissioner of Revenue? Two positions (PDF).

The most egregious of these are the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and the Clerk of the Court’s Office. Last year, the Board of Supervisors in its infinite wisdom decide that money should be given to Big Brothers, Big Sisters because a child might be saved (“Won’t someone please think of the children?!”). Seriously, someone (Floyd Thomas) said that. They did all this while refusing to funding an additional position in the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office. You know, that office that actually prosecutes the people who harm the county’s children and who may in the future harm the county’s children?

And meanwhile in the Clerk of the Court’s Office, the clerk (Ray Campbell) decided, starting July 1, 2009, that they would no longer prepare sentencing reports for the judge. In doing so, the clerk’s office became only the second office in the state to not prepare sentencing reports alongside the city of Richmond.

Because the presiding judge went to the Board of Supervisors stating that they could be sued if they didn’t give him money to hire a clerk (separate of the clerk’s office) to prepare the sentencing reports and because he absolutely had to have the money right then (!!!), the BOS decided to add a full-time clerk’s position (costing $22,000+) on top of a budget that had absolutely zero money to spare.

All this while the county believes that Fredericksburg’s police force is a pressing issue on the county’s legislative platform.

And then we turn to the composite index issues. The composite index is a complicated formula that the Virginia Department of Education uses to determine how much money each jurisdiction should get using several figures, including assessed real-estate values.  The higher the determined value for each county, the more able those counties are supposed to be to fund their school system. In addition, the higher the composite index value, the more money that the jurisdiction has to provide to the system if they want the state’s money.

For years, Caroline County’s composite index has been higher (therefore, we are supposed to be able to fund our schools) than our neighboring counties Spotsylvania and Stafford. That’s right, Caroline is be able to pay for schools than Spotsy and Stafford. While in this biennium (2010–2012) Spotsylvania’s composite index is no long lower than Caroline’s, Stafford’s still is. Caroline’s composite index is .3580, Stafford’s is .3362 (Spotsylvania is at .3594) (PDF).

So, where is this address in the proposed legislative platform? Well, of course, it isn’t. After all, neither Spotsy nor Stafford would be too supportive of a platform that resulted in less money going to themselves.

But the Caroline County Board of Supervisors isn’t Spotsy nor Stafford. Why don’t they tell the Virginia Association of Counties Region 7 to take a hike? Why don’t they worked with places like Lancaster County (composite index of .8000 [Ibid] while half of their school kids are on free or reduced price lunch) to put pressure on the folks in the General Assembly to actually get something done?

Caroline County has three Delegates (one of whom lives in the county) and a State Senator representing their interests (allegedly) in the General Assembly. And Caroline County can not come up with a list of pressing issues without the help of the folks in Spotsy and Stafford? The board nor county staff can’t spend thirty minutes sitting down to identify these issues that are affecting the county and propose a solution to fix them?

Heck, if I can do in less that 30 minutes, they should be able to.

My ballot picks.

These should be pretty obvious but anyway:

Governor: Bob McDonnell

Lieutenant Governor: Bill Bolling

Attorney General: Ken Cuccinelli

99th District: Hamilton “Ham” Sandwich, Esq. (write-in candidate)

97th District: Chris Peace

And for the voters in the Lee Hill District of Spotsylvania County: D.J. McGuire