So we’ve been here 6 months, we have over 40 registered users, 4 regular bloggers, and 6 guest posters!
We’ve had debates on transportation, schools, CPBO, and whether or not Obama is progressive enough (personally, I say, “no”).
I’ve certainly enjoyed our first 6 months. It’s an honor to blog here.
Don’t forget that you can post without registering, by signing in as Guest (password is Guest).
And donating blood is fast, and easy, and almost entirely risk free to the donor, right?
Yet, donating blood is not mandatory. It’s entirely voluntary. Nobody forces you to go through the very minor effort of donating blood to save lives.
Nor is anyone forcing you to get tested for compatibility with people awaiting kidney, or liver, or bone marrow transplants. Those are not minor procedures, but they save lives at relatively little risk to the donor’s life (it takes several months to recover fully), yet nobody suggests that anyone should have to sacrifice their health or an organ to protect the life of someone else.
Unless that organ is a uterus.
You know what they say about legislation, it’s like how they make sausage…links.
Okay, this isn’t really political, nor did it make it onto the pop charts, but the song I’m featuring today was a favorite of mine back when I worked on my college radio station in the late ’80’s. It’s the B-side of Naked Raygun’s Vanilla Blue. It’s basically the best of Slim Pickens, set to a rollicking, rolling guitar and drum score.
And yeah, Slim uses language in this piece that I won’t let you use in comments. Autre temps and all that.
So now, without further ado, I bring you “Slim”
Click through for an important message from our sponsors.(Paradox13 posts the following at Doorbellqueen’s request.)
And here’s a special bonus, from Surviving The World.
Loudoun’s own David Waldman is leading the fight for filibuster reform, as he explained when he spoke before the LCDC earlier this year.
DailyKos is stepping up to help as well.
Last month, 21,000 Kossacks signed a petition asking all Democrats to support changing Senate rules with 51 votes. Along with our allies, we took that petition to Capitol Hill, and to Democratic campaigns. What we found is a big win: not a single Democrat who will be in the Senate next year is outright opposed to changing Senate rules. Even Ben Nelson isn’t a clear “no” anymore (seriously).
Two months ago, filibuster reform was declared dead because it lacked the votes. We have momentum now because you spoke up. On our end, it took hard work in the form of dozens of meetings with advocacy organizations and Capitol Hill staff to educate them on the issue. Reform of any sort, even filibuster reform, doesn’t happen without leaders putting their boots on the ground.
Our own David Waldman (Kagro X) is one of these leaders. He started this campaign 18 months ago, and it never would have gotten anywhere without him. For years, he has been the nation’s preeminent public voice on Senate procedure. Now, he is at the center of the emerging coalition of labor, civil rights, environmental, and netroots organizations that are working together on Capitol Hill to reform the filibuster.
As much as anyone, David helped make the campaign to reform the filibuster a reality. With three months left in this fight, he needs your help to keep up his excellent work. Progressive Congress has found a donor who pledged $5,000 to support David’s work over the next three months, but only if members of the Daily Kos community can match that with another $5,000.
To meet that goal, Daily Kos needs your contribution of $10 to keep up the momentum and support David’s work to reform the filibuster. You can contribute directly to Daily Kos on the Orange to Blue page, where every candidate supports reforming the filibuster.
Even if Democrats keep Congress, there won’t be any victory in November unless we fix the filibuster in January. We can’t do that unless there are leaders like David Waldman on the ground, in DC, working on the issue. Your $10 contribution to Daily Kos will make sure David is able to keep going.
Keep fighting,
Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos
Send your support, if you can.
A friend in Leesburg emailed me to let me know that he would be unavailable to volunteer on Election Day because of work. He isn’t even sure he’s going to be able to vote because of job commitments. No one should be asked to forgo their right to vote in order to put food on the table. (This is why Election Day should be a non-negotiable national holiday, but that’s a different diary entirely.)
Luckily, Loudoun County recognizes that people have lives and commitments, and provides an opportunity for people who may not be able to vote on Election Day to vote early, through Absentee In Person voting at the Board of Elections.
An in-person absentee voter visits an absentee office location to vote. In Loudoun County there are two locations: the Voter Registration office in Leesburg and the Cascades Senior Center in Sterling. Arriving voters complete the Absentee Ballot Application and provide appropriate identification. The Absentee Ballot Application is processed there and voting takes place on a voting machine just as is done on Election Day.
Absentee in-person voting begins approximately 45 days prior to a general election (30 days for primaries) and ends at 5:00 p.m. on the Saturday before Election Day. – Loudoun County
The process involves going to the Board of Elections and filling out an application for an absentee ballot. They will process the application right there, and then provide you with your ballot and let you vote, immediately.
Follow through the jump for times and locations where you can vote, today!Here are the dates and locations where Absentee In Person voting is available.
Absentee Voting Hours
Extended hours for absentee voting in Leesburg will be offered at 801 Sycolin Road, Suite 102, Leesburg, 20175
November 2, 2010 General Election
o October 18-22, 8:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
o October 25-29, 8:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
o Two Saturdays: October 23 and 30, 8:30 a.m.- 5:00 p.mSatellite absentee voting will be offered at the Cascades Senior Center, 21060 Whitfield Place, Sterling, 20165.
o October 18-22, 4:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
o October 25-29, 4:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
o Two Saturdays: October 23 and 30, 9:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m.
Here is a map showing the Board of Elections office, just north of Leesburg Airport on Sycolin Road.
High Fructose Corn Syrup — which the corn refiners are trying to get renamed to “corn sugar” — has been in the news a lot lately. I’m not fond of ingesting, or letting my son ingest, things that have been found to contain mercury, so we’re trying to stay away from HFCS. And so we’ve been reading labels. Lots and lots of labels.First on the list to go was factory-produced breads. Believe it or not, most of them contain HFCS. So now we buy what they bake on the premises at Wegmans.
Corn Flakes (yes, plain Corn Flakes!) is no longer welcome in our house due to the pernicious presence. Amazingly, Wegmans Brand Marshmallow Treasures is HFCS-free. I can’t pronounce everything else it contains, but it doesn’t have that.
Cheerios is HFCS-free. Yay Cheerios!
Old Dominion Root Beer has no HFCS. It is made from cane sugar and honey. And it used to be produced locally. I miss Old Dominion, don’t you?
Global Foods Mart has an enormous offering of packaged foods that don’t contain HFCS.
In general, the fresher and less packaged the product, the less likely it will be to contain HFCS. Just read the labels.
Bill Maher, in this linked column, is rude and crude, with attitude, but he knocks it out of the park.
Under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 91%. Under Nixon, it was 70%. Obama just wants to kick it back to 39 — just three more points for the very rich. Not back to 91, or 70. Three points. And they go insane.
That’s the tame stuff.
The missing links have returned! Or been found. Anyone watch that Futurama where Professor Farnsworth keeps finding the missing link, but the chimp professor keeps questioning it? It’s like that.
If the Recovery Act failed to stimulate Americans’ confidence, it’s because it replaced more things than it built. It filled the crater left by the financial crisis. By and large, it succeeded. But its success has been nearly invisible. After all, a filled hole looks like nothing at all. – The Atlantic
Earlier this week, Leesburg Councilmember Dave Butler introduced a resolution to provide pedestrian crosswalks on the Leesburg Bypass. This is in response to the significant danger posed by people crossing the Bypass unsafely, today.
To protect residents that need to cross the Bypass, and to further the goal of increasing bicycle & pedestrian use within the Town, on Monday, Town Councilman Dave Butler will propose installing crosswalks at all four Bypass intersections including Battlefield Parkway, Edwards Ferry Road, Fort Evan’s Road, and Sycolin Road.
“Obviously, Leesburg Town staff will need to investigate cost and feasibility, but this is a critical need for Leesburg and we need to move this forward. Too many of our residents cross the Bypass to earn a living to survive,” said Councilman Butler. “We owe it to them to come up with a better solution than just a bus.” – Dave Butler
The best solution for the Bypass is a series of interchanges from Fort Evans Rd. north to Battlefield Parkway, and a flyover at Sycolin Road. These are, in fact, the Town’s plans for the road, but there is no funding for these critical, necessary plans.
The fact that we need to consider pedestrian crosswalks on the Leesburg Bypass is due to the total ineffectiveness of our legislative Republican representation in Richmond and Washington DC. Yes, the mess that is the Leesburg Bypass at rush hour is the fault of Joe May and Frank Wolf. For lack of legislative gumption from our representatives, the Town is forced to consider striping a major throughway in the name of safety. Both Joe May and Frank Wolf have served as chairmen of their respective chambers’ Transportation Committees at various points over the past decade. Joe May is Chair of the Transportation committee in the Assembly, today! And yet, in spite of these positions of power within a legislative majorities, they ignored the emerging need for a solution on the Leesburg Bypass as the problem was building.
During this past decade, the commonwealth faced its biggest battles over transportation funding and planning, but Joe May and Frank Wolf were conspicuously absent from those important debates. In fact, in 2008 – after the 2007 compromise that yielded the NVTA was declared unconstitutional – Joe May said, “We need money raised in Northern Virginia to be spent in Northern Virginia. It is becoming rapidly apparent that we’re at the point where if we don’t address transportation in Northern Virginia it will start to affect the rest of Virginia.”
That was two years ago and yet Delegate May has done nothing to address that imbalance since then.
Similarly, Frank Wolf’s signature legislative accomplishment of the past five years is the Journey Through Hallowed Ground. A significant portion of this “Journey” is US 15 from Charlottesville to Gettysburg. That means the Leesburg Bypass, here in Mr. Wolf’s district. If ever there were a vehicle for addressing the need for interchanges on the Leesburg Bypass, this was it. And yet, though he had been Chair of the Transportation Committee, and though there was bipartisan support for the bill establishing the Journey, Frank Wolf did nothing for Leesburg when given this golden opportunity.
For the record, by the time the Journey Through Hallowed Ground legislation was finally passed, the need for interchanges on the Bypass was clear. The fact that the longest-serving member of the Virginia delegation to Congress could not secure at least some part of $35 million to make his precious Journey Through Hallowed Ground actually safe for pedestrians in his own District is laughable.
Both Joe May and Frank Wolf have served for decades in their respective chambers. Both of them have seen to their personal, parochial issues during that extensive period. But both of them have failed, miserably, to address the real, pressing traffic problems of their Districts. Both of them deserve to be sent home. We need to change our representation in Congress and Richmond before anything will be done to solve the problems of the Bypass.
[Update] I was remiss in not mentioning that Sen. Herring has put together a Rt 7 Task Force to look at interchanges on that critical artery.
On Sept. 21, state Sen. Mark Herring (D-eastern Loudoun) told the Times-Mirror he will soon announce the formation of a new community task force with the goal of developing prioritized solutions to alleviate congestion on the Route 7 corridor between the Fairfax and Loudoun line in the east to the town of Leesburg in the west. – The Loudoun Times
Adam from Sen. Herring’s office has confirmed that the Leesburg Bypass was part of the area that the Task Force is going to be examining closely. Once again, Joe May is silent, absent and ineffective. Thankfully Sen. Herring is looking out for us and building a consensus among stakeholders in the County.