I generally don’t post pictures of myself on this web site but reader Jeff Blakley sent in this shot taken in front of the Floyd County Store a couple of Friday nights ago. Thanks Jeff for reminding me that some of us just never grow up.
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I once looked forward to the Fourth of July. Of course, I once believed in the Easter Bunny. Lately, it seems the independence that defined this great nation is as mythical as that Easter egg laying rabbit. Our Founding Fathers would not recognize America today: They would emerge from their graves to find an over-governed [...]
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Any way you slice it, Friday nights are special in Floyd and a holiday weekend brings out even more of a crowd on the streets with music (top), street artists (right) and what Floyd is best known for: Bluegrass. This Friday night also featured the opening of new shops in the Station on South Locust, [...]
Continue reading …There’s a stench that hits you full in the face as soon as you pass Ingram’s store while headed northbound on U.S. 221. You also see a brown path that goes down the center of the northbound lane of the pavement and then makes a right on Poor Farm Road, where it continues for about a half a mile before turning left into a farm.
That brown path and the stink comes from liquid manure that is leaking from one of Ingram’s trucks. It has dissipated some now but at the beginning of the week the hills were alive with the smell of cow dung.
Those of us who live in the area of Poor Farm, Sandy Flats and Harvestwood know when David Ingram is spreading the liquid stuff on his fields. That’s part of living in the country. But this is the first time I’ve seen it on the road. David’s truck is leaking and it stinks to high heaven. It was also slick along that stretch of road right after the truck made a trip with is load of watery cow excrement.
David is also chairman of the Floyd County Board of Supervisors and, frankly, I’m surprised that he is operating a truck that leaks liquid manure onto the road. I’m used to politicians spreading crap when they get together and meet or deliver another promise-laden but truth-lacking speech, but not on our public roads.
I suppose I could complain to my supervisor (Virgel Allen) but would he do something against the chairman of the board?
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Freshman Democrat Tom Perriello is not paranoid: The National Republican Congressional Committee, along with a bunch of Virgil Goode’s good ole boys in white sheets down in Franklin County, are out to get him.
The NRCC opens a new ad campaign against Perriello in the Roanoke and Lynchburg media markets today. It criticizes Perriello for his vote on the energy reform bill that passed the House last week and hopes to stir up some racist hatred at the same time.
In last year’s election, Perriello sent longtime racist Republican Congressman Virgil Goode back to Franklin County to be with his Klan buddies. Goode, who has embarrassed Virginia time and again with his racism and nasty comments against Muslims and anyone else who doesn’t agree with the white sheet crowd, is already working on a campaign to win the seat back in 2010 and the GOP is pumping money, staff and resources into his campaign.
The 30-second ad will also attack President Barack Obama, a calculated move to appeal to Goode’s racist base.
This is the second time the NRCC has flooded the Roanoke media market with ads attacking Perriello. For reasons that escape logic and common decency, they want Goode back in Congress even if the voters of his district made it clear last year they have had enough of his racist ramblings.
During my venture into the dark side of politics in the early 1980s, I worked as a field operative for the NRCC in the 1984 elections and saw first hand how their operation works. There is nothing they won’t do to win an election even if it means stirring up racism, homophobia, bigotry or religious fervor. It’s unusual for the NRCC to pay for ads in an "odd year" between elections but they are desperate this time to undermine any Democrat who beat a Republican incumbent last year.
It’s not known yet if Goode’s campaign team will include well-known Republican racist political operative Bobby May, who has worked for Goode in the past. May was John McCain’s campaign chairman in Buchanan last year when he wrote that Obama, as President, would:
Hire rapper Ludacris to paint (the White House) black. Taxes to be increased to by enough paint for the job plus spray-paint for graffiti.
Raise taxes to send $845 billion, most to Africa so the Obama family can skim off enough to allow them to free their goats and live the American dream.
Republicans tried to dismiss May’s extremism as the actions of a "low level campaign operative" but the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the state’s most conservative newspaper, reported:
Continue reading …May has been involved with dozens of Republican campaigns throughout Virginia, including former gubernatorial candidate and Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr., R-5th.