We again have sorry events that captured the news cycle and are emblematic of what we seem to stand for.  And icons that shill for this, Joe Paterno for college football, and Charlton Heston (aka John Charles Carter) for a moron’s right to deliver unspeakable evil and harm from a gun barrel.

As to Paterno, I contend that looking the other way is shameful, particularly when the reasons for doing so were ignominious and venal.  Paterno is a creep for placing football above pederasty, which puts him squarely with the mealy-mouthed priests (or rabbis, ministers or imams) that violated innocent young people in the pursuit of their own perverse satisfactions.

Football is not salvation, nor is it a moral compass.  At bottom, it’s an advertising vehicle for snacks and beer and an entertainment for those requiring passive and vicarious pleasure.  And that’s all it should be.  There is nothing wrong with this but if you wish to acquire the life lessons to constitute a moral compass, as those paying to get an education at institutions that ostensibly prepare them for a rich, full, and productive life – exalting football uber alles ain’t the answer.

Neither is Charlton Heston.  Imagine for a moment Charlton Heston being required by a just God to deliver eulogies at funerals of Columbine, Tech, or Aurora victims. What do you suppose he’d say?  “Serves you right for not being armed?” Or would a just God have performed justly, giving CH a Sandy Weill moment by forcing him to say something like, “you know, I was wrong”.

There’ll be those reading this who can go no further since a brain spasm to invoke the argument that guns don’t kill people will have fully taken hold.  My friends, guns do kill people. Lots of them.  Everyday. Take guns away from Columbine, Tech and Aurora shooters, and they ain’t shooters anymore.  How would they then act out their desperate fantasies?  A bomb?  Poison?   Maybe.  But recognize that such incidents are rare because it takes much more planning and organization to perpetrate such acts, and because those modalities are very tightly controlled.

I’d guess the argument for gun rights is Constitutional or opposition to government intrusion.  But no Constitutional reasoning supports the massacres that a wrong-headed reliance on the 2^nd Amendment has produced.  I challenge the many Constitutional scholars who read this paper and this letter to furnish a factual predicate and arguments to support a slaughter of innocents.  Even Scalia recognizes limits on guns, but don’t let that stop you.

As to government intrusion, I challenge those of you willing to set aside hypocrisy long enough to explain why it is a government intrusion to regulate strictly something that takes so many innocent lives when you’re perfectly willing to take away happiness from same sex couples or the freedom that permits women to decide on conception or childbearing.

Will I convince anyone with this effort?  Sure I will.  And I may persuade someone to speak out if they would have otherwise been silent.  Or perhaps persuade the otherwise closed-minded to read Tuchman’s The March of Folly or Diamond’s Collapse, books which articulate the social dangers better than I could ever hope to.  So I will have contributed, in some small way.

Donald Marro

The Plains, Virginia

No, nothing Biblical or from Pat Robertson or Franklin Graham, just an examination of how our Governor, some legislators and the Senator from the Religious Right all reveal themselves as contemptuous of most everyone who isn’t.  As the E*Trade baby says, “here’s my shocked face”.

So, what revelations?  First, the Governor and conservative Republicans ran on promises to restore prosperity.  Their base knew this was nonsense, but the good burghers took the bait and now are yanked unceremoniously from their complacency.  Guns and god, si; jobs?  maybe later.

Why?  Because culture warfare is precisely the distraction that’s needed to obscure the widening wealth and privilege gap and diminishing prospects of economic improvement for non-elites.  Global prosperity is a better strategy than containment but the conservative Republican construct requires non-elites to work against their own interests and become an underclass, to be realized fully by destruction of safety nets, education and unions, the offsetting balancing and bargaining forces for non-elites.  And remarkably, hereabouts at least, the non-elites cheerfully do so.

Make no mistake that unions and government can be abusive: so too Wall Street, Congressional or religious miscreants.  The solution is for unions to be like they are at Caterpillar or in the auto industry, and for Government to cut civil service, pension padding and the lifetime employment nonsense.  But the trickle down economics crisis led to, even forced, Clinton era surpluses and balanced budgets, so Bush-era enormous borrowing and the Wall Street Crash (v. 2.0) isn’t being used to punish Wall Street excesses or restore tax code equity but to terminate contract and personal rights.  Conservative Republican hypocrites never met a crisis they didn’t make, or like.

And we also have McDonnell and legislators (including Mrs. Vogel) claiming they didn’t know a trans-vaginal ultrasound was invasive.  They wrote the legislation after what, sampling medical marijuana?  Anyone who pretends to this wide-eyed stupidity has no business legislating, has no respect for the electorate, and raises questions of competence for themselves and their defenders.

Closer to home we have Clarke County citizens advocating armed insurrection: no doubt the “I can’t have enough guns” crowd taking seriously Palin’s foolish comment.  Palin’s pandering was what consuming ambition demands even though impressionable minds take such statements as an invitation to murder.  Spare me that abortion is murder; abortion is the law.  Or prove it shouldn’t be, not to your clan or from the pulpit but with scientific rigor.  Or is science trumped by religion, again, as in Galileo’s time.  You don’t like Sharia law but find nothing wrong with Vatican law?  You want to imagine a future under religious teachings, look at Afghan tribal areas or most of the Middle East (except Israel where religious law is for the religious, not the state).

The knee-jerks who disagree first and analyze later miss that a more perfect union means letting others do as they wish within universally accepted bounds of public policy; and that an armed insurrection isn’t some romantic notion that Palin and her ilk make it out to be, or a drunken walk in the woods to shoot critters that don’t shoot back.

Is it clear yet that there is a compelling need to take back the system from those who’d prefer that ballots may be won by false promises, or worse, that the ballot may be replaced by the bullet?

Sure it is.  Any takers beside Shaun Broy?

Donald Marro

The Plains, Virginia

Our President proposes to extend & expand payroll tax cuts from the Social Security Trust Fund.  Why would he want to endanger the promised benefits to our Senior Citizens by not fully funding this program?  If his motivation is to allow citizens to keep more of their own money, why not reduce the gas tax or some other similar Federal revenue?   How about serious Tax Reform that reducing rates and eliminates loopholes?  Why not “Freeze” spending at last year’s level? How about a 1% decrease in all Federal programs? Why is it that the only proposal to pay for this Trust Fund cut is an increase in taxes on other citizens?  Class Warfare?  Is there not any program of lesser priority in the Federal Government that could be trimmed back to offset the reduction? 

We need political leadership that brings forth substantial change in the size & scope of our Federal Government.  Our country is approaching federal spending levels at 25% of GDP and has now gone over $15T in debt.!!  There should be no discussion of any SPENDING GROWTH.  Big Government is not working, it is the problem.  This large bureaucracy should be dismantled.  Our elected representatives, Democrat & Republican, need to quit “playing on the margins” and get serious about changing the fiscal course of this country.

Please join the Northern Shenandoah Valley TEA Party in a discussion on this topic and other public policy issues.  We must hold these politicians accountable.

Jay L. Marts

Frederick County

Jay Marts is a political activist and organizer of the Northern Shenandoah Valley TEA

Virginia Senate election results (including for the 27th District race) are now final.  Reason lost.

But the press confirmed my contentions of an apathetic electorate, a Democratic Party inept, effete and moribund, and a press happy with highfalutin moral positions but averse to coverage, exhortation or the sponsoring or organizing of debates.  Nice to be a prophet in my own lifetime.

So few of you voted this time that perhaps a legal challenge to what makes an election will arise.  If voter registration policy, candidate conduct and special interest influence and money combine to discourage 75% from voting, isn’t that a conspicuous denial of citizenship rights.  But that’s as the minority wants it, however stunningly perverse it is.  Perhaps our elected officials can say why mandatory voting isn’t public policy, and why apathy is OK, and why contorted redistricting not geographic representation should make voting a joke, and why candidates can make claims so utterly baseless that their mere expression signals profound contempt for voters.

Let’s use Mrs. Vogel’s claims as example.  First, she claimed support from local Sheriffs based on a bill (SB329) she didn’t author and which didn’t pass, and claimed to help autistic kids based on a bill (SB1062) she also didn’t sponsor and that McDonnell, Cuccinelli and her party won’t implement.  But there was nothing about guns, god and women’s reproductive rights (anathema to those who want a child delivered only to be poorly educated, obese and unloved thereafter).  Why bother with real purpose when those dogwhistles are well-known to the base (our culture warriors did promise gun, god and more abortion restrictions promptly as soon as results were in) and there’s no point being honest about purpose if it wakes anyone up.  Just ask Scott Walker.

And this election isn’t the conservative mandate Mrs. Vogel claimed.  Fewer people (24,531), and only her base, voted for her this time, yet she spent some $500,000 (VPAP), 35% of what she spent in 2007, on a race where her opponents together spent about $1,000.  Most voters but not this paper sat still for this.  Conservative Republicans were elected when we’re worse off than 2007 because other papers thought more of pontificating than improving democratic processes, and Democrats had such tired leadership and no vision even their Sheriffs felt safe jumping ship.

Now we’ll see what jobs our culture warriors create that aren’t at McDonald’s but making things to compete with China and India.  In the face of less federal spending and a Virginia budget shortfall of $1.5 billion, and with job creators, as Boehner says, “on strike” against Americans.  Scary, but surely patriotic – put Americans to work only when they’re grateful for crumbs.  And maybe more mining disasters, oil spills, Loughners, Madoffs, Abramoffs, and legislators who bring guns to the General Assembly and fire them accidentally are actually good for tourism.

Or do you think our legislature will help people die with dignity, be our brother’s keepers, take the drug franchise from Mexican cartels, prepare kids for work at a time of nanotechnology, gene-sequencing, Watson and commercial space utilization.  In your dreams.  Elected officials can’t get transportation right or vegetables, not tomato paste or ketchup, into school lunches.

Perhaps I’ll write regularly on the absurdities of guns, god and denying abortion as public policy, to do my part in challenging culture warriors that think the earth is 4,500 years old and Frederich Hayek should be worshipped as divinely inspired.  Or maybe just re-read Lord of the Flies.

Thanks to those of you who voted against culture warriors.  What are the rest of you thinking?

Donald C. Marro

Mr. Marro ran as an Independent candidate for Virginia’s 27th District Senate seat in the 2011  

I’ve decided not to run.  I’ve decided to withdraw.

It won’t take long to explain why.  There was no groundswell of support for an issues campaign from the press, the people, or the Parties.  The press, except the Clarke Daily News, uniformly supports money politics.  The people, by and large, are too lazy to educate themselves on an opposition candidate that doesn’t titillate or intimidate, and Democrats are such a shadow of their former selves that the Party clanks around like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Clarke Daily News - Opinion & Editorial

I chose to run only because the incumbent Senator, Jill Vogel, is a culture warrior with ambition.  It was wrong, it seemed to me, that there was no opposition for a freshman senator who won by a whisker and whose proudest first term achievements were to turn back the clock on women’s reproductive rights, deny healthcare to the disadvantaged and pander to NRA crazies who just can’t have enough weaponry in enough places to really feel really safe.

But that’s the way to get ahead and surely that’s what Mrs. Vogel and conservative Republicans desperately need and want – a charming female face to swan an apathetic electorate.

I stayed in the race even when a Democrat surfaced because Democrats gave only begrudging, almost meaningless support to Shaun Broy, their candidate.  Mr. Broy is young, lacks gravitas, has no meaningful professional experience and espoused unpopular ideas in an unpopular style, and so courageous Democrats found ways to avoid appearing with or supporting him.

I understand the practical realities but also understand loyalty and strategy; Democrats spent no time thinking about the value of beating Mrs. Vogel and upsetting the Republican apple cart as a consequence.  Broy could’ve been their Pygmalion – he’s smart and intense training could have re-made him quickly, as in fact, it has.  So I made it my business to make a race so he could.

The irony is Democrats convinced 47% of the people last time to vote for a female equivalent of a cigar store Indian, then couldn’t find a candidate this time to carry a Democrat banner, except, of course, Mr. Broy, on whom they then turned their backs.  Democratic Party leaders should remove themselves from this District, or at least from active involvement in political matters.

I know the future of Virginia is not in its elites but in its people.  If we don’t educate, protect, motivate, resource and facilitate through effective government the productive use of the human capital of Virginia, we’ll have a period more like the 19^th Century than the 21^st.   But now it’s not my fight but Mr. Broy’s.  And so, I thank those of you who thought well enough of my candidacy or positions or both to help me get on the ballot and/or helped roadtest my positions.

I offer no advice on what to do November 8^th other than turn out and vote.  I’d endorse Mr. Broy if he had active support from a remade Democratic Party, one committed to Mr. Broy as it was to Karen Schultz in 2007, a remade Democratic Party to give Broy’s generation and mine choices other than OWS or the Tea Party.  A remade Democratic Party attractive to moderates makes my withdrawal a victory for those who disdain money politics and prefer truth seeking and issues.

And by the way, I saw the movie: the meek do not inherit the earth.