Looking for something to do this holiday weekend? See our picks for some fun local events.
It’s a fair question. From the video, it looks to me like the Alaska trooper clobbered the acerbic young woman, Skyler Waite, then arrested her for . . . WHAT? I don’t think there’s a good answer, and this video is going to be rather inconvenient for the officer. Your thoughts?
These two alien figurines, seen here on Robert and Dian Bolling’s front porch in Roanoke, were abducted from their front yard April 22 between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. | Photo courtesy Robert Bolling
In the strange realm of alien abductions, usually it’s the aliens snatching the humans. But in tony South Roanoke, what happened is the other way around.
Some humans abducted the aliens, in broad daylight, on well-traveled Broadway Avenue. The crime occurred April 22 in Robert and Dian Bolling’s front yard, sometime between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. And the Bollings want them back.
They’ve combed the neighborhood, stapled wanted posters to telephone poles and taped them to storefront windows. So far, zilch.
The 3-foot tall bright green molded plastic creatures have been fixtures in the family’s yard for more than a decade, first at their place on Arden Road in Raleigh Court and more recently in South Roanoke, where the Bollings moved with their three sons in 2011.
The couple picked up the aliens for peanuts about a dozen years ago. They can’t recall exactly when, or where or what they paid –$20 each, perhaps. They bought them at an after-Halloween clearance sale.
Since then, passersby have spotted them up on the Bollings’ roof; at other times perched in the trees. At Christmas time they’ve been decked out in multi-colored lights. When the power went out for days after the derecho last June, the aliens held a sign in the Bollings’ yard: “Oops!” Read more »
Dewayne Barger
One of the most talked-about people in the city of Salem these days is Dewayne Barger, a former volleyball coach at Salem High School. Given the gist of the story, it’s easy to understand why.
Salem police arrested Barger on March 22. He’s charged with four counts of possessing child pornography and four counts of producing it.
The charges stem from a pen video camera that an acquaintance of Barger turned over to police. In court documents, police said they found covertly recorded images of nude and apparently underage girls bathing, and images of other underage girls trying on volleyball uniforms.
Salem police said the videos were recorded in Barger’s apartment on Red Lane Extension, where he lived from 2011 to 2012.
Why were underage girls bathing in his apartment? What are the circumstances surrounding the other images? Those questions haven’t yet been answered. But the notions they conjure are skin-crawlingly creepy. Read more »
Shot by Dan, in 2009, on the Tuesday Night Ride.
Since at least 2002, and probably earlier than that, bicycle riders have gathered at the Virginia Museum of Transportation for a weekly celebration of pedal power.
Known widely as the Tuesday Night Ride, or the Tuesday Night Beer Ride, it’s a 20-mile loop that includes 8 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway, one of the best bike-riding roads anywhere. An average of 40 riders participate, but on warm evenings those numbers can swell to 75 or 80.
Afterwards, many of the riders gather for food and fellowship and beer upstairs at The Cornerstone, a bar on Campbell Avenue. It’s a fun time.
Full disclosure: Though I haven’t participated in a few years, I was one of the Tuesday Night Ride’s earliest organizers. It’s been an official ride of the Blue Ridge Bicycle Club since at least 2003 or 2004, and I was president of that organization in 2006. (I’m no longer a member).
The ride normally kicks off the first Tuesday following daylight savings time, which is today. But last week, Blue Ridge Bicycle Club President Chris Berry pulled the plug, after months of back-and-forth with Blue Ridge Parkway authorities and Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s office.
There is no longer any club-sanctioned Tuesday night ride on the parkway, Berry wrote to members. Why? Because parkway authorities have hauled out an old regulation and are suddenly attempting to enforce it in a way that could quickly bankrupt the 175-member club.
This was spelled out in a February letter from parkway Superintendent Phil Francis to Goodlatte.
READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.
Wikimedia Commons
On Friday, a candidate for to the federal bench nominated by President Barack Obama withdrew from consideration. Her name is Elissa Cadish and she’s a state judge in Nevada.
The nomination wasn’t going anywhere. Though recommended by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, it was being blocked by Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nevada. Why?
From the Associated Press:
Heller took issue with Cadish’s response on a 2008 election season questionnaire about the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Cadish wrote that she did not believe it was a constitutional right.
Proababy the AP overgeneralized what she wrote on that questionnaire. What Cadish most likely wrote was that she did not believe there was an individual right to keep and bears arms under the Second Amendment.
Until 2008, with its 5-4 ruling in Heller, the U.S.. Supreme Court had pretty much held the same thing for 100 or so years. So such a statement would not at all have conflicted with mainstream legal thought. Previous to Heller, the court had considered that the right to keep and bear arms existed within the context of a “well-regulated militia,” another well-known phrase in the Second Amendment.
In spite of that, the five justices in the Heller majority who evidently believed there is an individual right to guns were still confirmed. Whatever beliefs they had expressed on the Second Amendment prior to their ascension to the Supreme Court were not viewed as any kind of disqualification.
Yet now, with a judge who had expressed the opposite opinion, it seems more or less taken for granted that it’s a disqualifying factor. Which means now we’ve got a new litmus test, and a double standard to boot.
Wikimedia Commons
The wheels of justice always seem to grind slowly. But in the Roanoke Valley, with six Circuit Court judges, they turn a bit faster than in some other places. The wait for a civil trial is often measured in months, sometimes as few as three or four.
In Montgomery County you’ll find a different story. There, a plaintiff in an auto accident case can expect to wait 10 months to a year for a trial. That delay is frustrating, said Pete Beller, a veteran attorney from Christiansburg.
For a client disabled by an accident that wasn’t his fault, and who’s lost his primary income, it can easily spell bankruptcy. That harks back to the old saying, “justice delayed is justice denied.”
Unfortunately, the Roanoke Valley appears to be headed in that direction, because of a failure of the Virginia General Assembly. We now have two judicial vacancies on Circuit Court and one in Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court.
In the General Assembly session just concluded, none of them got funded or filled. How did that happen?
READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.
School nurse Cathy Bennett (left) and elementary school teacher Angela Nolen, both who worked at Sontag Elementary School. They were arrested and charged earlier this week in an alleged plot to hire a “hit man” to kill Nolen’s ex-husband. The “hit man” turned out to be an undercover cop.
Early in my career, I was a police reporter in Maryland. During that stint, I developed a good working relationship with a state trooper named Butch. He was a detective, with bushy red hair and a bushy beard, who typically wore blue jeans and boots. In other words, he looked and dressed like an outlaw biker, and sometimes he worked undercover.
One day we were talking about his job. Most of it was investigating run-of-the-mill crimes. The big one I had helped him with was a massive identity-theft case in which he had a pretty good photograph of the clever thief but had no idea who the guy was or where he lived. One big story on the front page about the computer-savvy con man’s lurid exploits was all it took to nail down his name and address.
Butch also told me that a less-frequent role he played was “the hit man.” Just about every state police operation has one, he informed me. And they’re responsible for most every headline you ever read about “Person A” being arrested and charged with trying to hire “a hit man” to kill “Person B.” Because the hit man is usually an undercover cop.
My thoughts flitted back to that story this week as a Franklin County elementary school teacher and school nurse were arrested and charged with soliciting murder in alleged plot to kill the teacher’s ex-husband. This happens with depressing regularity. The last time in these parts was 2009, when a son and his mother from Covington were popped for trying to hire a hit man to bump off the younger man’s father so his mom could collect life insurance proceeds. Read more »
Paul Hoyt, Justin True and Doug Fowley in front of the Blue Ridge Coalition of Reason’s billboard on Electric Road at Lynchburg Turnpike in Salem. It was put up Dec. 16 and defaced about a week before Christmas.
Today we have yet another example of the law of unintended consequences. This is the process in which certain people don’t think certain things all the way through. Usually the opposite of what they desire ensues.
It concerns a Roanoke resident, Justin True. He’s 32, an ex-Marine, a full-time student and a self-employed lumber grader. He’s married, is the father of two and he’s an avowed atheist. Back in September he founded the small group, Southern Virginia Atheists.
The term “small” is probably an exaggeration. Itty bitty teeny weeny was more like it when True called their first meeting. Six people showed up. He also garnered a little attention appearing before the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors, and perhaps in some other forums.
In that process True learned it can be lonely being an atheist in a western Virginia city where there’s almost a church on every street corner. He could see that almost every day, as messages from other nonbelievers trickled into his email account.
“That’s one of the very first things I saw” in emails from other nonbelievers, True told me. “They were like, ‘I can’t believe you guys are here! I’m so glad I found you guys.’” He was glad they found him, too.
The group grew slowly — a person here, a person there. They headed into early December with about 33 members.
Then last month an umbrella group for nonbelievers, the Blue Ridge Coalition of Reason, rented some billboard space from Lamar, an outdoor advertising company, to exercise their First Amendment rights. The signs cost $3,500, and were paid for by the Washington, D.C. based United Coalition of Reason. They will be up until Jan. 16. Read more »
Nemo5576 | Wikimedia Commons | Altered by Dan
The Second Amendment was written in a time of muskets and by people who owned slaves. More recently, the National Rifle Association has interpreted the amendment as the right of the individual to bear arms, i.e. the right to own and use a firearm, even an assault weapon.
In 1991, Chief Justice Warren Burger said the NRA’s interpretation of the Amendment is “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public.”
The Second Amendment does not give every citizen the right to own and use a firearm any more than it gives a citizen the right to own and use an automobile. The Second Amendment was written so that we the people have a protective militia (an Army and Navy) for our defense and the defense of our country.
In short, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with our individual rights to own an assault weapon any more than it has to do with our rights to buy and drive an automobile.
What is needed is an amendment that closes gun-show loopholes, bans the sale of assault weapons and regulates the sales of guns to the mentally ill. The latter is no easy matter when it was learned that the weapons used in the Newtown massacre belonged to the assailant’s mother.
Jerry Gibbs
BLACKSBURG
Photo by Justin True | Crop and spray paint added by Dan
Note from Dan: Justin True says the entire sign was torn down Thursday night.
Vandals used spray paint to deface one of the four Blue Ridge Coalition of Reason billboards in the Roanoke area. The billboard on Virginia Route 419 at 1420 Lynchburg Turnpike, in Salem, facing east, originally read, “Don’t believe in God? Join the club.” But the word “Don’t” has been blacked out.
This billboard, along with the other three, was placed by the Blue Ridge Coalition of Reason (Blue Ridge CoR) with $3,500.00 in funding from the United Coalition of Reason (UnitedCoR), headquartered in Washington, D.C. The ad has only been up since Tuesday and was first announced Wednesday morning.
“This unfortunate incident shows just how necessary our message is. Prejudice against people who don’t believe in a god remains very real in America,” said Paul Hoyt, coordinator of Blue Ridge CoR.
United CoR has informed the billboard owner, Lamar Outdoor, of the vandalism and is arranging to have the billboard replaced. But it is leaving it to the discretion of Lamar to file a police report. Read more »
