[This post was written by our friend Tony, I’m proud to be able to share it. – P13]

On Saturday, December 18, 2010 I heard Senator Lieberman (a supporter of Senator John “The sky is Falling” McCain who is a staunch advocate of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell)  speak in favor of repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” by saying that this was not a Liberal, Conservative, Democratic Party or Republican Party issue but that it was an ‘American issue”  I agree!!!!

I also heard it mentioned that the staunch conservative (former Senator Barry Goldwater) once said that he did not care if a soldier was gay or STRAIGHT as long as he could  SHOOT STRAIGHT.  That sums up the issue very nicely.  Can a gay or lesbian soldier perform his of her duties?  If the answer is YES, then they should be allowed to serve openly.  They have proven that they can do the job since they have been a part of our military for as long as I have been associated with the military (since 1955 when I joined the Temple University ROTC) and probably before.

I served full time for 35 years (20 in uniform and 15 as a Department of the Army civilian) at home and abroad, Germany, Italy, Korea and Vietnam.  I am sure that I served with many gays and lesbians.  When I was the US Army’s Casualty Reporting Officer as a major in Vietnam in 1970, I am sure that many of the names of those who I reported to the Pentagon who were wounded or killed were not straight.  At least ONE ot TWO of the over 58,000 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC have to be the names of gay soldiers.  So if they are willing to serve our country and even die for our country, why not let them serve openly?  They must wear the same uniforms, follow the same orders and are subject to the same laws as straight soldiers.  A great majority of soldiers serving today say they could and have served with gay soldiers.  Many former generals and admirals , the Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said we should repeal  “Don’t ask, Don’t tell”.  Some other country’s military have allowed gays to serve openly without falling apart!.

When I first went into the Army as a second lieutenant blacks were treated a second-class citizens and could only rise to the rank of colonel.  Similarly, women could never be generals and they were segregated into the Womens’ Army Corps or WAC.  When plans were put in place to fully integrate blacks and then women, many said that “the sky would fall”.  Well it didn’t and it won’t this time.

Thanks to all who voted for this measure and thanks to President Obama for pushing this long overdue repeal.

Better late than never!

A friend and fellow Loudoun Democrat forwarded a wonderful op-ed by Frank Schaeffer. As a bit of background, Frank Schaeffer is the son of one of the founders of the religious right who has since come out strongly in favor of a more progressive America.

This post-election season, his reminders are worth reading.

Not since the days of the rise of fascism in Europe, the Second World War and the Depression has any president faced more adversity. Not since the Civil War has any president led a more bitterly divided country. Not since the introduction of racial integration has any president faced a more consistently short-sighted and willfully ignorant opposition — from both the right and left.

As the president’s poll numbers have fallen over the last two years, so has his support from some on the left that were hailing him as a Messiah not long ago; all those lefty websites and commentators that were falling all over themselves on behalf of our first black president during the 2008 election.

The left’s lack of faith has become a self-fulfilling “prophecy” — snipe at the president and then watch the poll numbers fall and then pretend you didn’t have anything to do with it! The left wanted a rock star and got a president smarter than the talking heads. They wanted miracles and got hard work instead, they wanted magic and got the slogging reality of trying to govern. – Frank Schaeffer

The entire thing is well worth your time, if only for the itemize lists of challenges and solutions that the Obama Administration has already faced and implemented.

Governing is hard, but luckily Democrats do it well. After all, we’re the party that thinks Government should do stuff to make things better. Funny thing about that, in the past few years, we have!

The Loudoun Times-Mirror does a good job of covering the latest dust-up over transportation. Though, I do the story a disservice in calling it a dust-up. To summarize, in the Fall the Governor asked Democrats for ideas to deal with the transportation funding problem in Virginia, seeing as his ABC privatization plan was a feverish dream of pink elephants. Our own Sen. Mark Herring responded with no fewer than five constructive ideas on November 1st. The Governor and his team never responded, but some of the ideas the Governor announced shortly thereafter sounded very familiar to Sen. Herring.

In a bid to share the political burden of tough choices on road funding across both parties and chambers in Richmond, McDonnell’s letter asks Herring and others for “specific ideas and concrete input on how best to increase transportation funding.” The letter set a Nov. 1 deadline for response.

Herring responded on Nov. 1 to McDonnell and several staff aides, with five specific and more general transportation related initiatives, some of which he sponsored in the past General Assembly session. They include privatizing Virginia’s interstate rest areas, changing the state’s revenue sharing program, the creation of a “bipartisan blue ribbon transportation commission,” and the formation of a state “infrastructure bank” to provide financing for qualified roads projects in the state and “leverage resources to stimulate public and private investment.”

“I never heard back from them,” Herring said Dec. 10, referring to the Governor and his chief policy aides. But Herring said when McDonnell made his transportation funding plans known at a state conference on Dec. 9 in Roanoke, “one or two things the Governor mentioned [as part of his plan to fund roads] sounded very familiar.” Herring believes at least one of his ideas was taken from his letter and included in the Governor’s proposal. – The Loudoun Times-Mirror

And now, Republicans are accusing the Democrats of having no ideas on Transportation.

This is classic Republican projection. They accuse Democrats of doing the very things they, themselves, do as a matter of course. Another term for these kinds of accusations are “lies.”  I, for one, am ecstatic to see Sen. Herring pushing back. Far too often, Democrats in the past have taken these kinds of slanders in stride, believing in the inherent goodwill of their fellow elected officials, Republican or not. Sen. Herring has shown that falsehoods about records and actions must be, and can be dealt with swiftly and directly.

Thank you Sen. Herring, for standing up for yourself, and for the rest of us here in Loudoun and across Virginia.

Loudoun County recently completed a survey of County residents regarding the human services that the County provides.

Loudoun County recently released an assessment of human services provided by local government and non-profit organizations over the past year.

Beth Rosenberg of the Loudoun County Department of Family Services said the county contracted with the University of Virginia in April 2009.

The university mailed surveys to 2,200 households in Loudoun County, a “scientifically significant, random sample,” she said. Surveys were mailed in June of this year, and the county sent a mailing reminding participants to complete the surveys in July. – Leesburg Patch

(Incidentally, that story link is from Leesburg Patch, a new microtargeted news site from AOL. It’s worth a read!)

When you dig into the survey results themselves, you find out some interesting things.

The opinions about human service revealed in the general population survey illustrate a central tension. Despite significant concerns that human services are often abused or cheated, do not solve underlying problems, or may lead people to become dependent on them, about three-quarters of county residents say that providing human services is the right thing to do – including a clear majority of respondents who are the most skeptical of human services in general. And eight in ten county residents agree that some tax dollars should be used to pay for human services. – Loudoun County Community Assessment

That point bears repeating, with emphasis. “About three-quarters of county residents say that providing human services is the right thing to do – including a clear majority of respondents who are the most skeptical of human services in general.”

The most important question to ask the “always lower taxes, every year” crowd is “which services would you cut.” The vast majority of Loudoun residents support providing public human services. And that includes a majority of Republicans. Cuts due to falling revenues do not fall on the amorphous “budget.” They fall on specific services, which hurt specific people.

So in the 2011 elections, Republican (and Democratic) candidates who campaign on the mantra of doing more with less, and keeping taxes low must answer the question of how, and what cuts to what services.

Because as this assessment shows, we need those services. And that “we” is us, the people of Loudoun, who will be voting in November.

These links thought they could slink away, but we caught them.

The statistical results were striking. The things you prefer – tastes that you like to think of as personal, unique, justified only by sensibility – correspond tightly to defining measures of social class: your profession, your highest degree and your father’s profession.  

…

Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up. These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters. – The New York Times

• TSA Sexual Assault – The TSA has gone too far, too damn far. Sign the petition to stop it.
• The Sociology of Hipsterism – A French philosopher in 1979 explained the essential sociology behind post-modern hipsterism in the 2000s. What, you’re surprised this is from The New York Times?
• Growth: Why Is America So Rich – In a short blog post, the Economist reminds us that America is still the land of opportunity and wealth. And in another, reminds us how Social Security helps keep it that way.
• A Cop’s Advice On Dealing With The Police – We have a lot more rights than we think, but police do everything they can to make sure we don’t know that when they deal with us.
• Space-time cloak to conceal events – A freaking cloaking device. For events and information, not just stuff. Damn.
• Got Science? – Take a quiz on global warming, get a sticker.
• Want the good life? Your neighbors need it too. – How inequality is bad for public health. No, seriously.

Keith Olbermann makes the case for a press corps that’s more than a group of stenographers, and uses the icons of American journalism to do it.

These were not glorified stenographers. These were not neutral men. These were men who did in their day what the best of journalists still try to do in this one. Evaluate, analyze, unscramble, assess – put together a coherent picture, or a challenging question – using only the facts as they can best be discerned, plus their own honesty and conscience.

And if the result is that this story over here is a Presidential chief of staff taking some pretty low-octane bribes and the scandal starts and ends there, you judge all the facts, and you say so. And if the result is that that other story over there is not just a third-rate burglary at a political office, but the tip of an iceberg meant to sink the two-party system in this country, you judge all the facts, and you scream so.

Insist long enough that the driving principle behind the great journalism of the television era was neutrality and objectivity and not subjective choices and often dangerous evaluations and even commentary and you will eventually leave the door open to pointless worship at the temple of a false god.

Go. Read.The video:

There’s a helluva lot of soul-searching among Democrats right now. I figured it might be useful to mention the core of my Democratic beliefs, if only to start a conversation.

Social Security, equality, health care.

That’s it. Oh, there are a lot of other things embedded in there, things like the minimum wage, civil liberties and progressive taxation, but when I get right down to it, I’m a Democrat because Democrats fight for Social Security, equality and health care, and Republicans don’t.Social Security means a lot more than just transfer payments to retirees. It is a modicum of income for families who have their primary breadwinner disabled, or die. It is a balm to the persistent and eternal worry about what will happen when we get old. It is a great foundation of the American economic engine.

Like all forms of insurance, Social Security allows people to do things they otherwise couldn’t. If Americans had to worry that they might wind up in starvation-level poverty in their old age, they’d have to save more rather than spending on consumer goods, and they’d be more hesitant to take risks like changing jobs or careers. – The Economist

This point doesn’t get mentioned enough in the debates over Social Security. The fact that we have universal retirement income insurance means that people are more willing to take risks during their prime working years, and it is the willingness to take those risks that drives innovation and economic growth.

Equality throughout history has been a tough word to cope with. It’s the idealistic rocks on which so many good intentions founder. And when Mr. Jefferson encoded the equality of all men in our founding doctrine he set a bar that we can never reach, but one that we do better in trying to achieve than we would without it.

For Democrats, equality has been with us for good or bad since the beginning. In the eras of Jefferson and Jackson we fought for the equality of the poor man with the rich man at the ballot box. We fought for the equality of the immigrant with the native in the years before the Civil War. It is when we shy away from equality that we fail and lose. By failing to recognize the equality of black and white (and brown, and red, and every other color) we cursed ourselves with irrelevance in the management of the Nation for decades. And we deserved that irrelevance.

Democrats came back only when we began to find, once again, our dedication to equality of rich and poor, and then man and woman, and then, finally, belatedly, black and white. We are constantly challenged by equality, again today native and migrant. And gay and straight. Equality is hard, but it always, always prevails.

Being a Democrat, to me, means never saying “that’s enough equality, thanks.”

Health care is a helluva lot more than must-buy insurance. But it starts there, perhaps. Just as Social Security started small, so too does health care as a right start small. It started with our Veterans, believe it or not. The first group of people in our country to get national, universal health care. And here’s the funny thing, it worked. It’s not perfect, but it is way more consistent across boundaries of wealth and power than any other system in the country.

From there we provided care to the old, and poor. And in my short political lifetime, for kids. It is often forgotten that the second bill that President Obama signed was one making childrens health insurance the law of the land. The great health care battle of 2009 is not over. We are now in the winter of that war, with a grand strategy of exchanges and rules in place that will take years to come to fruition. But unlike the other side we have years. Universal civil rights took years. Universal retirement insurance took years. Heck, universal unemployment insurance took years. “The arc of the universe is long, but bends towards justice.”

And as with Social Security, universal health care will reduce the risks of taking risks like switching jobs, or starting your own company. It will provide a critical form of social insurance that reduces the worry and timidity of creative, innovative people. It will spur creativity, and economic growth.

And all three are things Democrats stand for, and Republicans stand against.

And that’s why I stand with the Democratic Party, today.

The Secretary of Finance under Gov. Jim “Bankrupted the State” Gilmore has been indicted.

John W. Forbes II, who served as Virginia’s secretary of finance under former governor Jim Gilmore (R), has pleaded guilty to charges connected to defrauding the [Tobacco] commission of $4 million.

Forbes entered a guilty plea in August and will be sentenced Monday. According to court documents, Forbes convinced the commission to award a $5 million grant to the Literary Foundation of Virginia, a charitable group that he founded.

Authorities allege that the foundation was not a real group. Instead, Forbes diverted the tobacco commission money to salaries for himself and his then-wife and created a series of shell businesses that he used to divert the funds to his own use. – The Washington Post

Recall that the money from the Tobacco Settlement, which the commission manages, is supposed to go to help rural Virginia. It is supposed to help create jobs and improve things. This Republican criminal literally took money from the poorest, neediest Virginians, the ones most hurt by the economic transition away from tobacco farming, and used it to line his own pockets.

Meanwhile, a failed gubernatorial candidate (who happens to be a Democrat) went down to rural Virginia and worked to create jobs there. And he did it without stealing money!

Who is fighting for rural Virginia again? Who is bringing jobs to the state?

And who is stealing?

The first post-election links, would that they were golf links.

But if health care did cost the party its majority, so what? The bill was more important than the election.

I realize that sounds crazy. We’ve become so obsessed with who wins or loses in politics that we’ve forgotten what the winning and losing are about. Partisans fixate on punishing their enemies in the next campaign. Reporters, in the name of objectivity, refuse to judge anything but the Election Day score card. Politicians rationalize their self-preservation by imagining themselves as dynasty builders. They think this is the big picture.

They’re wrong. The big picture isn’t about winning or keeping power. It’s about using it. – William Saletan

• The Best Campaign of the Cycle – How Harry Reid won. Hint: By being a Democrat, with all that means.
• WTF Has Obama Done So Far? – The question is answered quite succinctly, many, many times.
• Black Out 2011 – Dick Black is trying to stage a comeback. It’s a good thing we have the Internet.
• Finish Yitzhak Rabin’s Work – Bill Clinton writes a powerful editorial about an old friend. I still remember the day Rabin was assassinated, by an extremist Israeli, clearly. I was a student at UVA at the time.
• Democrats Didn’t Lose the Battle of 2010, They Won It – A valuable counterpoint to the mindless, first-order analysis that so dominated the results discussion last week.
• The Newest, Latest Parenting Trend – This one seems custom-made for Loudoun County.
• Fighting Bullying with Babies – Instead of only punishing bullying, why not encourage compassion among kids who might otherwise bully as well?

Sen. Webb will be speaking here in Leesburg on Veterans Day.

Senator James Webb and Rear Adm William Cross (ret.) will be speakers at a Veterans Day Commemoration on Thursday, Nov 11 at 10:15 a.m. a ceremony to honor the courage and sacrifices of our Vietnam War veterans.

Participants will include members of the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 227, Leesburg VFW 1177, Sterling VFW 9478, VA Hospital of Martinsburg WV, American Legion, Virginia Defense Force, Virginia National Guard and Loudoun County High School NJROTC.

The free event will be held at the George C. Marshall International Center, Dodona Manor, 217 Edwards Ferry Rd., Leesburg, VA. Dodona Manor was George and Katherine Marshall’s residence from 1941 until the General’s death in 1959.

Tours of the manor and refreshments will follow the event.

Parking is available at the Shops at Dodona Manor (310 East Market Street) and the Loudoun County Government Building parking garage (entrance on Loudoun Street, between Harrison Street and Church Street). For more information and directions, contact Dodona Manor at 703-777-1301 or info@georgecmarshall.org or go to: http://www.georgecmarshall.org/AboutUs/Contact_Us.asp