Joe Stanley
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National Freedom of Information Council Announces Waldo Jaquith as Keynote Speaker Waldo is one of those people whose dedication to Making Things Better just passively rubs off on others. Glad to see more groups recognize that.
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It Bears Repeating
A community needs to develop their own voice before they can add that voice to a larger effort. Any attempts to construct that voice for them, or simply integrate disparate members of the demographic into a larger coalition, will ultimately be an inauthentic and unsustainable exercise.
Then again, sometimes an inauthentic and unsustainable exercise is all that is required for the situation. -
Came for the Kid President. Stayed for the Kid President. Definitely stick around for after 1:14.
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Well, at least the Uranium Mining Bill is DOA.
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“Optics-wise, the state Senate GOP’s move could reverberate far beyond the Commonwealth: after using the absence of civil rights leader Marsh to push through the legislative changes, the Senate adjourned in honor of a well-known Confederate general.” -
Wow.
So Virginia’s Senate Republicans just pushed through a new redistricting plan today while a Democratic Senator (active in the civil rights movement) was still out of the capital due to the inauguration.
This left the otherwise balanced chamber with 20R-19D, key because the Republican Lieutenant Governor who would otherwise decide tiebreakers is mulling a run as an independent for Governor this year, and is thus unreliable.
The bill, which is not yet available online due to the abruptness of it all, is purported to gerrymander out at least one Democratic Senator. Ironically, the Senator in question (Creigh Deeds) has been one of the most vocal proponents of a bipartisan/nonpartisan redistricting method over the past decade.
This would come into effect for the 2015 elections, the approximate midway point between traditional redistricting intervals, and when many weakly gerrymandered districts start to lose their potency against natural demographic changes.
Gotta love the Commonwealth.
Edit: While I have mixed feelings on Ben Tribbett, he’s likely going to be one of the first places to get news on what the new map looks like.
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Virginia Bill Would Order Schools to Arm Teachers From the party that is trying to break the teacher’s union, feels they are overpaid and underworked, and could probably afford to have less training for their jobs overall.
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The Virginia General Assembly likes to keep their proceedings a secret. Missed the live webstream of a debate or discussion about a bill? You’re out of luck—there’s no way to watch them later.
But. The Virginia General Assembly sellsvideo of their proceedings for $10 per DVD. For the past five years, Richmond Sunlight has annually managed to cobble together the funding to buy a copy of each and every one of those DVDs, rip them, and put them online (on Richmond Sunlight and the Internet Archive) for anybody to watch.
That’s where you come in. It’s expensive to buy all this video. There are guaranteed to be at least two DVDs per day—one for the House, one for the Senate—but some days they go long and two, even three DVDs are created for one or both chambers. Legislative staff tell us that it’ll cost us $1,240 to buy the DVDs for all of 2012, and the video for 2013 will run approximately $930.
So that’s $2,170 to acquire approximately 81 days of video. With the 5% Kickstarter fee and the 5% Amazon Payments fee, that’s a cost of $2,387 to acquire the 2012 and 2013 video, or an average of $14.73 per day per chamber (the House and the Senate).
Richmond Sunlight makes no money off of this—all contributions will be passed along directly to the legislature to buy these DVDs. In fact, Richmond Sunlight has no money, and never has. It has bank account, no revenue, no way to pay for anything at all. (As a result, the IRS counts this as taxable personal income for me, so I’ll probably have pay a few hundred bucks out of pocket come April 15.) In short, if you don’t donate, this won’t happen.Period.
$15 will pay for one day’s video for one chamber. $30 will pay for one day’s video for both chambers. $150 will acquire one week’s video for both chambers. For every $15 you donate, Richmond Sunlight will permanently credit you on one day’s video for one chamber, thanking you for buying that video to make it available freely.
Support transparency. Join us in liberating the 2012 and 2013 Virginia General Assembly video.
Seriously, if you can afford a Starbucks latte, you can afford to help back this project.
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Gun Control
Is not a term you can seriously support or oppose, any more than you could the term finance. It is not some checkbox that you can scratch through, turn to your partners and with nods all around, congratulate one another on a job well done. It is not some particular action that, by definition, will make all of us more vulnerable to predation.
But it’s easy to say you support Gun Control, or you are opposed to Gun Control, because then your beliefs are broadly etched, and you can go back to a world where you need not re-evaluate them. Do you support licensing before the purchase of a firearm? Do you think guns should be able to be concealed in schools and places of worship? Do you oppose the sale of high-powered automatic firearms? What about armor-piercing or hollow-tip rounds? What about body armor? Do you think that guns should be able to be sold privately without a background check? Do you think there should be any limits on how many guns can be purchased in a given time span? What about your thoughts on the funding of mental health services, or the frequency of violence on television? These are but a sampling of the actual issues and policies that fall under this term Gun Control.
The single best thing you could do right now, if you want to prevent what happened today from happening again, is to just get Gun Control defined when someone mentions it, and then actually listen to them before responding.
Because before we can have a conversation, we need to all agree on what we’re actually talking about.
