Let's start with some of the creative hand-held signs brought to the Tea Party by concerned citizens:
This one says "Let's scuttle the Beltway pirates too!! They're asking 10 trillion $$$$ ransom!!!!"
Here's a slogan for the ages: "Capitalism Rocks / Socialism Sucks" -- no doubt Adam Smith would approve!
A twist on an old joke (which I think originated with "The Wizard of ID" on the comics page): "Congress is revolting and so are we!"
Virginia's state motto: "Sic Semper Tyrannis" or, in English, "Thus always to tyrants"
What does "TEA" stand for? "Trillions Endanger America"
This young lady had a two-sided sign that seemed to refer to the notorious reportissued by the Department of Homeland Security on April 7, which identified activists for smaller-government and respect for the constitution as potential terrorists. As recently as Thursday, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano was defending the report rather than admitting it is an embarrassment.Napolitano does not, apparently, believe (as does, for instance, Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation) that "dissent is patriotic."
These signs say: "In 1773, I'm a patriot" and "In 2009, I'm a terrorist."
A slogan for the Age of Obama: "I'll keep my money, freedom, and guns. You keep your change."
Now for some photos of people at the Charlottesville Tea Party:
Former Charlottesville City Council member Rob Schilling, now a talk show host on WINA-AM, poses with Jim Moore, president of the Charlottesville Taxpayers Association.
Delegate Rob Bell (R-58), whose seat in the Virginia General Assembly was once held by Thomas Jefferson, was the only elected official to address the Tea Party multitude.
Charlottesville-area resident Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as Secretary of State under President George H.W. Bush, also addressed the crowd.
Just beyond the boundaries of the Tea Party area, on Charlottesville's downtown mall but outside the Pavilion, I caught these images:
The First Amendment Monument (which may, within the next few years, have to be renamed the First Amendment Memorial) was a beehive of activity while the Tea Party was going on.
Some bright wag chalked this thesis on the wall: "The problem with socialism is you run out of other people's money!"
Another teabagger put the case more crudely: "Taxes Blow"
How appropriate it was that the whole Tea Party enterprise was watched over by three of the Founders: James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe. Whether they watched with bemusement or pride -- or horror that such a protest was necessary -- is unknown.
The interview touched several issues, including the potential of Texas secession, Albright's collection of brooches and pins (including a "snake pin" she wore at the United Nations to goad Saddam Hussein), the Secretary's new book (Memo to the President Elect), and one thing that both host and guest have in common:
Both Madeleine Albright (born in what was then Czechoslovakia) and Craig Ferguson (born in Scotland) are naturalized American citizens -- that is, they are Americans by choice (and working to achieve it) rather than by birth.
In the course of their conversation, Dr. Albright mentioned that, on July 4, 2000, she visited Monticello and participated in the annual citizenship ceremonies there. She said that, as she handed out the certificates of citizenship to each of the new Americans, she told them, "Treasure this paper. It's the most important piece of paper you will ever have."
Let me make a suggestion to the folks up on Mr. Jefferson's little mountain: Craig Ferguson would be an excellent candidate to speak at the annual July 4th event. He's earned it. He'd also be entertaining, and I'm sure his remarks would be both intelligent and witty.
At least 1,500 motivated citizens and liberty-oriented activists crowded under the lobster-trap-like canopy of the Pavilion on the east end of Charlottesville's downtown mall on Wednesday. While shelter from the cold drizzle and grey skies may have been one reason for being there, the primary reason was to raise their voices in protest against a government that is growing into an even bigger Leviathan than it has been.
Considering that liberal Charlottesville is one of the bluest areas in an increasingly blue Virginia, the size of the crowd was unexpected. Parking was at a premium. (The Market Street parking garage was full and on-street parking was virtually non-existent. Even the Water Street garage, several blocks away from the site of the rally, was more than three-quarters full.) One speaker, Delegate Rob Bell (who represents the same district in Central Virginia that was once represented by Thomas Jefferson) said he was told to expect about 50 or 60 people. Others commented that a maximum of 200 would be an achievement.
How wrong they were!
It was not just about numbers, however. The event brought together a coalition of citizen activists whose backgrounds could be characterized as conservative, libertarian, or (previously) apathetic. There were signs touting Bob McDonnell for Governor. Another sign, echoing Sarah Palin, said "Read My Lipstick!" Some in the crowd had supported Ron Paul for President last year, others John McCain, still others LP candidate Bob Barr, and some had voted for Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party. There were high school students and pensioners, blue-collar workers and executives, radio hosts and elected officials.
The event was non-partisan and lived up to that. There were no calls from the podium to vote for specific candidates this fall, although master of ceremonies Joe Thomas of radio station WCHV-AM urged everyone to get out and vote and send a message to incumbent officeholders by voting them out of office if they are not doing all they can to reduce government spending and the taxes that go along with bloated government.
Because I had to drive around looking for a parking place, I missed the first 20 minutes or so of the 3-hour rally. I arrived just in time to see former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger address the crowd, and I managed to capture his remarks on video:
Secretary Eagleburger, a resident of the Charlottesville area, was followed by John Taylor, who lives in Northern Virginia and is president of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy and Tertium Quids. Taylor is well-known as a grassroots organizer for issues that affect Virginia voters and taxpayers. Taylor spoke longer than Eagleburger, so his remarks are divided into two videosegments:
After he left the stage, Taylor headed to Richmond, where he was scheduled to address that city's Tea Party at around 6:00 p.m.
During an interlude, Joe Thomas took an opportunity to tell a joke at the expense of Charlottesville's City Hall (did this rally really look like a Dave Matthews Band concert?) and to urge the crowd to continue the fight beyond tax day:
I will have more video tomorrow -- this stuff takes time to edit into easily digestible segments! -- as well as more photos from the Charlottesville Tea Party.
While many of my friends will be participating in tax-day "tea party" protests across the country and across the Commonwealth of Virginia (in Charlottesville, Richmond, Newport News, Reston, and other locations), primarily to draw attention to the federal government's rapid and unconscionable expansion and the accompanying increase in the taxes extracted from citizens to pay for bloat and imaginary "stimulus," a different kind of "tea party" will be taking place in New York City.
On Wednesday, April 15, AT 4:20 PM, representatives of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), including the organization’s national director Allen St. Pierre, will stand on the steps of the General Post Office in Midtown Manhattan and present a check for $14 billion to the US Treasury Department.
The check total is an estimate of what American taxpayers spend every year to maintain marijuana prohibition, according to the report, “The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States” (prohibitioncosts.org), Americans spend some $6 billion on law enforcement costs related to enforcing marijuana laws. Taxing and regulating the production and sale of cannabis like alcohol would reduce these costs while raising an estimated $8 billion in new tax revenue. That’s according to Nobel Prize Winner Milton Friedman and over 500 other accredited economists.
“We’re representing America’s millions of otherwise law-abiding cannabis consumers who ARE ready, willing, vocal and able to contribute this huge sum to our struggling economy, while providing truly ‘green’ jobs and allowing police to focus on more important priorities,” says Allen St. Pierre, NORML’s Executive Director. “All we ask in exchange for our $14 billion is the right to smoke our pot responsibly and in peace – just in the same way as the millions of daily consumers of alcohol products in our country.”
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Taxing marijuana and regulating it are long overdue. I can guarantee there will never be a need to subsidize it.
Talk about intellectual dishonesty! In the age of Google, it is truly remarkable that anyone would make a statement in print -- and in the Washington Post, no less -- that is so easy to disprove.
Last week in the Post's Metro opinion section, Karin Agness wrote about student protests over the choice of federal Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson to be the University of Virginia's commencement speaker. This past Sunday, Amelia Meyer explained some of the reasons for those protests against Wilkinson, a Charlottesville resident who sits on the bench of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond:
Wilkinson's arguments against gay marriage were made clear in an article he wrote for The Post in 2006. The thrust of his argument was that matters of family law shouldn't be dealt with constitutionally. But he further argued against the very idea of gay marriage, writing, "Marriage between male and female is more than a matter of biological complementarity. . . . Without strong family structures, there will be no stable and healthy social order, and alternative marriage structures might weaken the sanction of law and custom necessary for human families to flourish and children to grow." It is this statement with which a number of U-Va students take issue, rightly seeing it as a threat and an insult to many gay students and advocates.
Meyer had to work extra hard to take Wilkinson's words out of context and misrepresent what he said. That's because Wilkinson's original article, appearing in the Washington Post on September 5, 2006, was an argument against banning gay marriage through amendments to either the federal or state constitutions. His point was precisely the opposite of what Meyer claims it was.
Wilkinson said, in part:
To constitutionalize matters of family law is to break with state traditions. The major changes in family law in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the recognition of married women's property rights and the liberalization of divorce, occurred in most states at the statutory level. Even the infamous bans on interracial marriage were adopted nonconstitutionally by 35 states, and by constitutional amendment in only six....
Is it too much to ask that judges and legislatures acknowledge the difficulty of this debate by leaving it to normal democratic processes? In fact, the more passionate an issue, the less justification there often is for constitutionalizing it. Constitutions tempt those who are way too sure they are right. Certainty is, to be sure, a constant feature of our politics -- some certainties endure; others are fated to be supplanted by the certainties of a succeeding age. Neither we nor the Framers can be sure which is which, but the Framers were sure that we should debate our differences in this day's time and arena. It is sad that the state of James Madison and John Marshall will in all likelihood forsake their example of limited constitutionalism this fall. Their message is as clear today as it was at the founding: Leave constitutions alone.
Wilkinson was writing in the midst of the debate in Virginia over the so-called Marshall-Newman Amendment, which appeared on the ballot in the fall 2006 election. (It passed and made it unconstitutional for same-sex couples to marry in Virginia.) For a conservative jurist to go on the record against that amendment (as well as the Federal Marriage Amendment favored by President George W. Bush) when being silent would have been the more prudent course (politically speaking) does Judge Wilkinson great honor.
It does him great dishonor when people like Meyer lie about the record. It says a lot about Meyer's dishonesty that she is willing to distort the record when it is so easy, as they say, to go look it up. I don't know whether to be more disturbed by Meyer's intellectual dishonesty or by her intellectual snobbishness -- that is, her thinking that readers of the Washington Post are too stupid to see through her editorial sleight-of-hand.
It is noteworthy that, in her piece, Agness was identified by the Post as
a law student at the University of Virginia and founder and president of the Network of Enlightened Women, a national organization for conservative college women.
The Post did not identify Meyer beyond her name. So, for the record, let's note that she describes herself on her Facebook page as a member of the UVA class of 2009 and as "very liberal" in her political views. She also says she is a fan of both the Colbert Report and the Human Rights Campaign. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- but let's make sure that the record is complete as well as, pardon the expression, set straight.
On April 8, I participated in the third annual Bloggers' Day at the State Capitol, at the invitation of Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling.
A few of the other participants (there were between 15 and 20 of us there on Wednesday, with numbers fluctuating through the course of the day as some had to attend to other business) have already posted their reflections on Bloggers' Day: Bearing Drift; Virginia Conservative (with pictures); and a brief mention on Tertium Quids.
What follows is an adaptation of an article I prepared for The Metro Herald in Alexandria. (Since some of that article will refer to this blogpost, it made sense to edit out various redundancies.)
(RICHMOND, April 8, 2009) --- Political bloggers from across Virginia were invited to the state Capitol on April 8 for a series of briefings by elected officials, candidates, campaign consultants, and pundits. “Bloggers’ Day at the State Capitol” coincided with the annual veto session of the General Assembly, at which the House of Delegates and State Senate accept or reject the amendments to bills made by the Governor and consider whether to override the Governor’s vetoes of other bills.
The sponsor of the day’s activities was Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling, who is also a candidate for re-election this year. Bolling faces token opposition for the Republican nomination from Patrick Muldoon, an attorney from Giles County. The Lieutenant Governor estimated that 20 or 22 bloggers would participate in the day’s events; the actual number fluctuated during the course of the day from about 15 to about 20.
Bolling greeted the group of bloggers at his office in Richmond, and began the day’s discussions by giving an overview of the forthcoming statewide political campaign.
He started with a note of optimism: “We feel good about where we are,” Bolling said. “We’re usually fighting while the other side is united. This time we’re united while the other side is fighting.”
Bolling was referring to the fact that Republicans have already chosen their candidate for governor – former Attorney General Bob McDonnell, who faces no opponent in the GOP convention on May 30 – while the Democrats will be choosing their candidate in a primary on June 9 from a three-man field of state Senator Creigh Deeds of Bath County, former Delegate Brian Moran of Alexandria, and former Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe of McLean.
The only actively contested race for nomination to statewide office in the Republican Party is that of attorney general, which also features three candidates: former U.S. Attorney John Brownlee of Roanoke, state Senator Ken Cuccinelli of Fairfax County, and former Arlington County School Board chair David Foster. There is only one candidate for the Democratic nomination for Attorney General, Delegate Steve Shannon of Fairfax County. (All four are lawyers.)
Democrats also have a contested race for lieutenant governor, with three candidates seeking the nomination: Jon Bowerbank, a Russell County supervisor; Mike Signer of Arlington, a former advisor to then-Governor Mark Warner; and former state Secretary of Finance Jody Wagner of Virginia Beach. A fourth candidate, Virginia Beach school board member Pat Edmonson, failed to gather a sufficient number of petition signatures to qualify the June 9 primary ballot.
Bolling said the “conventional wisdom is my opponent will be Jody Wagner, who helped Tim Kaine botch up the state budget.”
The budget, he said, is one of many issues that favor Republicans in this fall’s elections.
“The issues are lining up our way,” Bolling said. “I don’t want to be overly dramatic about this, but if we win [in 2009], we’ll be well positioned for 2011 and 2012.” The entire General Assembly, both the House and the Senate, are up for election in 2011, and 2012 is a presidential election year as well as the year the junior U.S. senator from Virginia will face re-election.
“Conversely,” Bolling continued, “if we lose, it will be a decade or more before we elect another Republican statewide. Virginia will be blue.”
Bolling brought up what he called an “interesting” statistic borne out by recent polls. Among Virginia registered voters, 38 percent consider themselves Democrats; 33 percent consider themselves Republicans; and 29 percent are independents.
What Republicans have to do to win this year, Bolling said, is “we have got to reach the 29 percent. We have got to motivate the 33 percent.”
In reference to the recent decision of the Republican Party of Virginia to fire party chairman Jeff Frederick, Bolling said: “I stayed out of that [situation]. We have to turn the page and move on.” He added that he hopes “the State Central Committee will find someone who is a unifying voice.”
The Republican State Central Committee meets on May 2 to choose an interim chair; a permanent chair will be elected by the state party convention at the Richmond Coliseum on May 30. Between 8,000 and 10,000 delegates are expected to attend that convention, contrasted with about 4,000 who attended the convention last year that chose Frederick as chairman.
Bolling noted that “we can handle disagreements within the party but we cannot handle divisions within the party. To win elections we have to build consensus and build coalitions.”
Concluding his remarks as gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell joined the discussion, Bolling said: “This is not the time to be discouraged. It’s OK to be disappointed; it’s not OK to be discouraged.”
For his part, McDonnell greeted the gathering of bloggers by saying “it’s helpful to navigate our way around the mainstream media,” or MSM. He noted that, in the past, he had spoken to blogging conferences in his role as Attorney General. On those occasions he talked about the rules – rules about libel and slander, for instance, and the line that might be crossed in terms of campaign finance laws.
Having just launched his campaign for governor with a tour of 27 cities and counties over eight days, McDonnell declared that “Virginia is a competitive state. It is certainly not a blue state.”
McDonnell admitted that there are independents “who have left [the Republican party] because they don’t feel we’ve been addressing quality of life issues… We want them back.”
As well as engaging with bloggers, McDonnell said, “we’re using Twitter, MySpace Facebook, text messaging,” and other online tools for reaching voters and volunteers. He said his campaign has hired the firm that did text messaging for the Obama presidential campaign as part of this outreach effort.
McDonnell noted the concerns he is hearing from voters as he traveled across the state. He said he had discerned “great unrest in increasing numbers [of people] about whether a great increase in government spending” is the right way to address the economic crisis. “Is that really the answer?,” he asked.
He admitted that Republicans over the past eight years of the Bush administration had increased discretionary spending, so that the GOP does not have clean hands when it criticizes the new Obama administration.
McDonnell noted that voters have “great concerns about federalizing health care” and “great concerns about the federal government intruding into private corporations.”
In response to these concerns, McDonnell said “we need a rebirth of federalism. The Tenth Amendment has been trampled, undermining what makes America great.”
McDonnell acknowledged that his campaign faces “a difficult dynamic of more government spending and more government solutions.” He asserted that his campaign will be talking “about big ideas to fix the economy.”
“I want Virginia to be the best place in America to start a small business,” the candidate said. “We need to cut red tape.” In addition, McDonnell said, Virginia should be the best state for film production and tourism (sectors of the economy that have also been singled out by McDonnell’s potential opponent, Terry McAuliffe).
Opening up the floor for questions, McDonnell was asked about the leadership crisis in the Republican Party of Virginia. He replied that “grassroots leaders of the party should decide who the chairman should be.” The best person for that job, he said, is someone who is a “solid conservative with management experience.” He added that he and his campaign “want a good, strong working relationship with the party.”
Another question was raised about a controversial issue that would be taken up by the General Assembly that day: whether to accept federal stimulus money that would extend unemployment compensation programs. (In the end, the General Assembly rejected the Governor’s amendments that authorized acceptance of the federal funds, but this action was in the future during the bloggers’ discussion with McDonnell and Bolling.)
McDonnell answered that he was against accepting the federal stimulus money for this program because it would bring with it an “unfunded mandate” that required a change in Virginia law. “In the long term,” McDonnell said, this program would “hurt the effort to expand jobs and stimulate the economy.”
Lieutenant Governor Bolling added that this program would have a “tremendous [negative] impact on the cost of doing business,” that would lead to more businesses laying off employees in order to absorb the costs imposed on them by the government. This would lead, he said, to a “vicious, endless cycle that ends up with more people being unemployed.”
After a few questions about issues that might be discussed on the floors of the House and Senate during the veto session, Bolling and McDonnell left for other meetings.
The bloggers in attendance sat in the gallery of the state Senate, where they were welcomed by the 40 members of that legislative chamber, after being introduced from the floor by Senator Ken Cuccinelli, who called the bloggers “a distinguished group of rabble rousers.”
Here is the video record of the welcome by the state Senate, which includes the invocation by the Reverend James Porter and remarks by Senators John Watkins and Donald McEachin; the welcoming remarks by Senator Cuccinelli begin at minute marker 3:01:
Throughout the rest of the day the bloggers were briefed by political consultant Chris LaCivita of Advancing Strategies, LLC; Ford O’Connell and Steve Pearson of Project Virginia, a new social networking platform for civic engagement; former VCU political science professor Bob Holsworth, now with Virginia Tomorrow; Delegate Chris Saxman (R-Staunton), and Paul Haughton, executive director of the House Republican Campaign Committee.
Here, in five segments, is Dr. Bob Holsworth's assessment of the state of Virginia politics; he answers questions from the bloggers in parts 4 and 5:
Part V, in which I ask a question about the Fifth Congressional District, Congressman Tom Perriello, and former Congressman Virgil Goode:
Dr. Holsworth was followed by Delegate Chris Saxman, who gave the right answer when I asked him about the Virginia government's new prohibition on smoking in restaurants. Let's go to the tape:
This was the third annual “Bloggers’ Day at the State Capitol” and participants expect that there will be more in the future.
On Monday evening, April 6, NBC broadcast the 31st Annual Academy Awards show from the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Gigi won the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year, David Niven was named Best Actor for Separate Tables, and Susan Hayward was named Best Actress for I Want to Live! Burl Ives and Wendy Hiller won the awards in the supporting categories for, respectively, The Big Country and Separate Tables.
On Tuesday, April 7, film director Francis Ford Coppola and talk-show host David Frost were celebrating their 20th birthdays. James Garner, then starring on TV's Maverick, blew out 31 candles on his cake. Oscar winner Russell Crowe was five years from being born.
And then, at 12:43 p.m., it was my turn.
The fact of my birth must be true, because it was reported days later in The Milwaukee Journal (look at the top of the middle column):
There is also photographic proof:
But I grew up quickly. Pretty soon I was sitting without assistance:
I eventually met taller people than myself:
And I went to school. I am sure that several of my classmates from St. Agnes in Butler are celebrating milestone birthdays this year:
Then there was my first time in a newspaper (aside from my birth announcement); I'm the one carrying a processional crucifix, and it was heavy:
High school was not far away. I started off as a bedraggled freshman at Marquette University High School:
But joining the debate team was an affirmatively transformational experience:
Participating in the Class of '77's Senior Follies ("Blazing Seniors) was transformative in its own way. Performing live on stage before an audience was a real revelation. It led to a long run of college and community productions:
My sister, Cathy, did the same thing (different high school), eleven years later:
Meanwhile, after getting a degree at Georgetown University, I was hanging out with a different crowd than I ever would have expected during my childhood. For instance, Nobel laureate physicist Eugene Wigner...
... and the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller:
I did some traveling:
Along the way I held several jobs (Ethics and Public Policy Center, Center for Strategic and International Studies, International Freedom Foundation, and my current gig as a consultant) and became a theatre critic.
My theatre life has been rich. I have seen Carol Channing as Dolly Levi at least three times, and on stage twice more in the infamous Legends! (with Mary Martin) and on a panel discussing the 1940s at the Kennedy Center with Dick Cavett, Debbie Reynolds, and the late Kitty Carlisle Hart. I saw Yul Brynner in the title role of The King and I, Rock Hudson and Imogene Coca in On the Twentieth Century, Angela Lansbury and George Hearn in Sweeney Todd, Tony Randall as Harold Hill in The Music Man, Paul Scofield in I'm Not Rappaport, Maggie Smith in Coming in to Land, Frankie Howerd in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,Richard Kiley in Man of La Mancha, and Jason Robards in several O'Neill plays, including The Iceman Cometh. (And that was just the 1970s and 1980s.) I met Barbara Cook outside the stage door of the Albery Theatre in London and asked for her autograph; both she and Wally Harper signed my program.
More recently, I have seen all three of Eric Schaeffer's stagings of Sunday in the Park with George (Arlington Players, Arena Stage/Signature, and Kennedy Center) and both his London and Arlington productions of The Witches of Eastwick. Since 1995, the number of plays and musicals I have attended is impossible to count. Whether in Charlottesville, Washington, London, or New York, there is nothing better than sitting in a dark room with strangers to watch a live performance.
In the parallel universe of politics and policy, I wrote twobooks, edited two others, and I have debated congressmen about U.S. policy toward Africa, appeared on television to discuss nuclear weapons policy, testified before House and Senate committees, and served as the foreign policy advisor to the 1992 Libertarian presidential candidate, Andre Marrou.
I have met presidents, prime ministers, and at least one king. I have attended an inaugural ball, celebrated New Year's Eve in Trafalgar Square, and marked my birthday by dining in an Alsatian restaurant in Paris. I have thrice run for public office but am now satisfied with my role as a member of the Charlottesville Electoral Board. Plus I get to blog.
The first fifty years have been filled with surprises. (These are just highlights.) Who knows what follows?
If there is any doubt that some people earnestly identify our current president, Barack Obama, with the promised Messiah who saves the world from sin, death, and penury, that doubt was removed by this advertisement in Sunday's Charlottesville Daily Progress (p. B3), among a full page of Easter Worship Services announcements from local churches:
Is any further comment necessary? Even Pepsi's new logo is more subtle than this.
As a follow-up to the video I posted on Tuesday, here is what preceded it. (That sounds rather oxymoronic, doesn't it?)
Before gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell answered questions from the news media on the porch of Jefferson Hall on the grounds of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on March 31, he addressed a group of about 65 (by my rough count) supporters, GOP activists, and curious onlookers. Perhaps due to the rally being held at 1:00 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, the audience consisted largely of retirees and college students. (About 10 percent of the crowd were members of the Fourth Estate, including reporters from local TV and radio stations, the Daily Progress, and the Charlottesville weeklies.)
Delegate Rob Bell (R-Albemarle/Greene/Orange) acted as master of ceremonies for the event. In this video segment, he begins by pointing out local dignitaries in the audience, calls on people to lead the group in prayer and in the Pledge of Allegiance, and calls upon Albemarle County Republican Committee chairman Christian Schoenewald to introduce the featured speaker.
Former Attorney General Bob McDonnell then takes to the lectern to give a version of is campaign kick-off tour stump speech. His remarks took about 20 minutes, so I have divided them into two parts.
"One of the smarter blogs is the libertarian-leaning collection of Charlottesville posts put up by Rick Sincere..." -- Bob Gibson, The Daily Progress, May 8, 2005
Following up on my initial post on Wednesday's Tea Party in Charlottesville, I would like to share a few photographs that I managed to take that day.
" on the comics page): "Congress is revolting and so are we!"
Some bright wag chalked this thesis on the wall: "The problem with socialism is you run out of other people's money!"
" by The Fleetwoods, "
" by Dodie Stevens, Brook Benton's "
," and "
" and "
won the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year, David Niven was named Best Actor for 
, blew out 31 candles on his cake. Oscar winner Russell Crowe was five years from being born.
, 
, and I have debated congressmen about U.S. policy toward Africa, appeared on television to discuss nuclear weapons policy, testified before House and Senate committees, and served as the foreign policy advisor to the 1992 Libertarian presidential candidate, Andre Marrou.
