With FloydFest 18 now in the history books and photos and story delivered to The Floyd Press, I return today to coverage of Circuit Court and the escalating level of crime and misdeeds in our county,
Closed session of Drug Court precedes the public case hearings this morning, which allows time for coffee and breakfast at Blue Ridge Cafe beforehand. Tuesday’s docket includes bond revocations, bond hearings, review of some deferred cases and some scheduled trials that will be either resolved with plea bargains or continued.
Supervisors, set for the second Tuesday of each month for the daytime meeting and the fourth Tuesday for an evening session, is still two weeks away, which provides some opportunity for rest and reflection.
Not too much rest because Washington is still a hotbed of lies, scandals and propaganda that fills the news hole of Capitol Hill Blue. See Donald Trump now wants to grant another massive tax cut for the ultra-rich without going through Congress. Typical.
Days like this, when I edit several stories for use on our national political news website, makes leaving Washington in 2004 one of our best decisions. When I have to return there two or so times a year to speak at a meeting or fulfill another commitment I wonder why we stayed in the national capital region for 23 years.
Reminds me of a sentence I wrote in an OpEd piece for The Washington Post back in the 90s: “When you think about it, a sadist is a person who does nice things to a masochist.” Those of us who lived and worked in the Washington metro area are certainly masochistic.
I see some signs in Floyd County promoting the senatorial ambitions of Corey Stewart, the self-declared Trump clone who seeks to unseat Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine in this year’s mid-term elections.
Stewart, a known racist and avowed white supremacist, is supported by many of the Republicans in Floyd County. He will most likely win over Kaine here and in several other parts of Southwestern Virginia.
He won’t, however, win the election because the area we left — Northern Virginia — and the Tidewater areas of the Commonwealth will vote Kaine in and they have more votes than Southwestern Virginia.
Stewart is a racist madman, but that doesn’t matter to most of the Republicans in Floyd County or other parts of the rural areas in the Southwestern part of the state. He’s the GOP candidate and that’s all that matters to those voters. A convicted child rapist could win in Floyd County if he ran on the Republican side of the ticket. No, that is not an exaggeration. I wish it were.
When the votes are counted in November and we see the results here and compare them to how others voted in Arlington County, where we lived for 23 years, it might bring back pleasant memories of our times there.
Then I remember that Arlington was the home of avowed racist George Lincoln Rockwell and his hate-filled American Nazi Party. In 1967, a disenchanted protegé of Rockwell assassinated him outside of a laundromat at a strip mall in Arlington.
Rockwell died but his hate and bigotry live on. We saw it in Charlottesville last year and we see it today in racists like Corey Stewart and the party that support him and Donald Trump.
Such hate and racism have no place in America. It should not have a place in Southwestern Virginia or in Floyd County. The sad fact that it does is depressing and alarming.