This proves that even a tiny newspaper (circulation 29,000) can do great reporting. Nice job, Bristol Herald Courier!

The prize for public service went to the tiny Bristol Herald Courier of southwestern Virginia, circulation 29,000, for revealing that many energy companies failed to pay required royalties on natural gas drilling, and that the royalties that were paid were not reaching the local people who deserved them.

Also, congratulations to conservative political columnist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post for winning an award for commentary. I don’t always agree with her, but I find her writing to be well-informed, thought-provoking, and fair (unlike George Will, for instance).

Finally, kudos to Iraq correspondent Anthony Shadid, who won the Pulitzer for international reporting. For those who haven’t read his book, I definitely recommend Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War.

(Interesting diary by Alice Mountjoy, Founding Member of Virginia Center for Public Safety.  This is one of the advantages of a community blog; I encourage other NGO’s to post their reports on Blue Virginia. Thanks. – promoted by lowkell)

Who pays for background checks? We all pay, but some gun rights enthusiasts have complained that background checks take too long and cost too much.

I reviewed the Virginia State Police website to see who is required to have background checks and who pays for this process. There are requirements in the Virginia Code for people who care for children and adults in day care centers and foster care facilities to undergo a background check.

Pharmacy employees also are required to submit to background checks to ensure the trust that society places on these people who deal with precious human lives and with dangerous products. All of these checks require a $15.00 processing fee and require a 12-14 day wait for the background check to be performed.  The person who needs the check pays the fee unless an employer elects to pay it.

The background check for gun purchasers has been $2 for Virginia residents since it was adopted 20 years ago. Federally licensed firearm dealers are required to collect the fee from the buyer although some dealers will absorb the cost in the price of the firearm. Federally licensed firearm dealers must insure that the buyer is not a convicted felon, terrorist, illegal alien, domestic abuser, and habitual drunk or otherwise ineligible to purchase through this instant computerized check (IBC) by the Virginia State Police. This safety net is designed to promote the public welfare. Unlike the background check for employment or work with children, the firearms background check is completed in 3-5 minutes.

In 2009, at the request of the Virginia State Police (VSP), Virginia Senator John Watkins (R) Richmond introduced a bill to increase the $2 IBC fee to $5 for Virginia residents to buy firearms. The gun lobby worked to defeat this increase in the processing fee. The VSP warned that the increase was necessary to keep staff in place to conduct the background checks. Now the gun lobby wants the additional cost to be paid with General Funds to keep the staff to process the background checks and avoid a wait.  

Considering the cutbacks to education, public safety, transportation, and all government agencies, it is only fitting that the gun lobby and  hobbyists must wait to clear the background checks a bit longer….any effort to circumvent a thorough background check would be reckless. After all, persons who want background checks for employment and work with children must be prepared to wait up to 2 weeks and they pay 7.5 times more for the wait!

It is insulting that anyone who advocates for common sense measures to ensure public safety regarding guns is labeled “liberal” or “gun grabber”.  It is more conservative to seek to ensure the public safety of all our citizens than to assume that anyone who wants to buy a gun should need instant gratification and have first dibs at the public trough.

Alice Mountjoy, Founding Member of

Virginia Center for Public Safety

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I read the Post article with mild surprise, since I also had no idea about the Deeds divorce.  And it was clear that the Post had an agenda — to portray Deeds in a particular way, which was not terribly positive.  I have no idea how long or how much of the interview was printed, but it seemed to me that the Post went out of its way to make sure a quote like “I still got things to do” and “doggone” were chosen to be included.  (How colorful!)  If I had any doubts about what they were trying to do, those doubts were removed when I actually read the article a second time on my computer and saw the picture they selected to accompany the article — a picture of a man breaking down.

But that’s not what I read in the article.  I read a man who is in mourning.  He’s in mourning for his marriage, obviously.  I have never been divorced but I’m old enough to have seen many marriages of dear friends fall apart, and there is a mourning process involved.  Especially the long marriages that began when you were quite young (I’m someone who married young) — who you are in relation to your spouse is formed before most other ways of defining yourself (through your work for instance.)  

He’s also mourning his ambitions.  Deeds isn’t a stupid man — he had a shot at something really big.  It was always a long shot, and he knew that, but it was a real shot.  How many shots do most people (even ambitious, intelligent people) get in one lifetime?  It’s hard enough to reach middle age realizing that certain things that you wanted and fought for in your life aren’t going to happen for you.  It’s a whole other struggle when you realize that you actually had a chance for those things, but it didn’t happen.

The other thing I read in the article is a defiance.  It’s a quiet defiance, and to be honest, I’m not sure that it’s a defiance that comes across to someone who isn’t mountain born.  This may sound strange, but when I read the quote: “What choice do I have? You either live, or you die. If you die, you’re dead. If you live, you’ve got a responsibility to keep moving, keep working, keep fighting. The struggle goes on. That’s the position I’m in.” I actually laughed out loud.  Not because it’s funny, but there’s a black humor familiarity that anyone from Appalachia recognizes.  I’ve said things like this myself, in hard times in my life.  It’s something said over and over at every funeral in WV I’ve been to.  It’s being said, I guarantee it, to the miner’s families this week in Montcoal.  

In my novel THE MINER’S DAUGHTER, I touch upon this quiet, even desperate defiance.  The father tells his daughter, “You always have a choice.”  That choice may be as stark as living or dying, but it does a human being psychological good to know they have SOME choice and aren’t victims of fate, (which, quite frankly, people from Appalachia often become, but that’s another post) and not someone who will be defined by their hard times, contrary to how “outsiders” (such as the WashPost) see them.  In many ways, this comment sort of sums up Appalachian thought more succinctly than any novel I could write.

This was a petty article.  As others have said, the “real story” (about the divorce) could have been written in a few paragraphs at most.  (And the divorce IS news, as difficult as that may be for the Deeds family.)  When I read the story I couldn’t help but think that the WashPost maybe was having a moment of guilt itself — they know the role they played in helping Deeds in Northern VA during the primary.  Many of the people who write and produce the Post live in Northern VA.  There was also the oh-so-helpful editorials about how Deeds was going to raise taxes.  (It’s true, but blaring this certainly wasn’t helpful.)  I know it sounds silly to say that a newspaper may be feeling pangs of guilt (sort of like calling a corporation a person), but newspapers are written and produced by people.  Perhaps some of the defeatist attitude they were putting on Deeds is a projection of their own guilt.

Anyway, I knew this would be a long post, and I apologize again at the end.  By all means, let’s figure out what went wrong last fall so it doesn’t happen again.  But we can do that (and have done that) while giving a good man and his family some time and space to grieve in peace.

I was out canvassing for the Alliance, the folks who are trying to replace the current Herndon town council, when I witnessed, in real time, if not an actual crime itself, then what has to be even more exciting, the CSI for a heinous crime, committed right here in Herndon, VA.  

A little background first.  The current membership of the town council is known mostly for its fearlessly wrong-headed advocacy on issues that, even if their stands were not wrong-headed, have nothing to do with the actual business of the town council.  Maybe healthcare and immigration reform are more important issues than zoning — that’s at least arguable.  What isn’t arguable is that neither is at all the business of the council.  That hasn’t stopped these guys and gal from ignoring their real business to spend time on advocacy, Tea Party affiliated advocacy in several cases, over these issues.

So as I was making my way down one side of a street in Herndon last Saturday, knocking on doors to let people know about the election and the opportunity it presents for them to get a council that will do its actual job, I couldn’t help overhearing what one gentleman across the street was saying to a uniformed policeman.  I couldn’t help overhearing because I’m not clinically deaf, and this gentleman was expressing himself at a volume, and with an urgency, that commanded attention.  It seems that a yard sign for Charlie Waddell, one of the incumbents, had disappeared from this man’s yard the night previously.

Now, I am not a certified expert in yard signology, though I am a practitioner in the field, and have extensive experience in the installation and maintenance of standard political yard signs.  Given the 40+ mph winds we had the night before the disappearance of the sign in question, my first guess would have been that the wind blew it away.  Of course, that shallow opinion just proves that I lack the professional qualifications of this gentleman, who was certain that it had been stolen by a covert political operative of the Alliance.  As a mere foot soldier in the not-terribly-vast overt political operation of the Alliance, I cannot say what covert black ops capabilites our team might have squirreled away somewhere (maybe on a secret island base somewhere in Herndon), so I have to defer to this gentleman’s obviously superior knowledge of those covert operations.

The guy went on, and here he really impressed me with his expertise, demonstrating for the policeman several times, the exact method and location of emplacement of the purloined sign.  It seems that he has a very methodical, dare I say, obsessively compulsive, approach to sign emplacement, and so was able to demonstrate, in a dramatic slow motion recreation of the original event, played many times over, every step he took as he paced five steps from his driveway, perpendicular to his driveway, to place the sign with its long axis parallel to the driveway.  He seems to have expected the policeman to be able to use this information to do some fancy technical CSI work that would reveal the identity of the perpetrator, perhaps from shoe impressions still liftable from the grass.  I can’t get inside the head of someone with such evident subject matter expertise, but perhaps the slow motion as he recreated the events was designed to not disturb the grass impressions left by the criminals, since these impressions might be the only way these criminals will ever be brought to justice.

At any rate, the policeman eventually succeeded at moving further discussion indoors, so my ability to report these events ends here.

I made an initial guess that the gentleman in question was Charlie Waddell himself, since he is reported to be a Teabagger, and this gentleman’s behavior fit that profile in many ways.  But neither the picture, nor the address to send money to, at the Waddell website, match up very well with the gentleman I observed, so it remains a mystery how this guy was able to get the police to respond to a suspected yard sign theft case in any fashion that involved more than about 30 seconds of even one policeman’s time.  This guy had over 20 bumper stickers, mostly rightwing political, on the SUV parked in the driveway, which also fits a certain profile.  The numerical count plays roughly the same role in quantity of bumper stickers per vehicle as in quantity of cats per household — 4 or 5 of either just means you’re committed to that activity, while 20 of either means you’re a nut.  That fits the profile as well.

One final detail from this crime scene.  Amid all the partisan bumper stickers was one that proclaims that this gentleman is a Civil War reenactor.  But you, Holmes-like, had deduced that already, hadn’t you, because you read Blue Virginia, where we connect the dots on all the Republican nuttiness, the harmful as well as the harmless, all the doings of these latter-day, self-imagined, Dr. Moriarty knock-offs.