Tea Party Ejects College Student and AltDaily Reporter from Meet and Greet for Endorsed Candidate

As you may know, the Republican Party will be selecting their nominee against Democratic Senator Ralph Northam at a July 9th Convention at the Masonic Temple in Norfolk. There are two candidates in the running, Dr. Joanne Lapetina and Ben Loyola. If you’ve read my previous IYRTPs and my article on Ben’s questionable residency, it should be obvious that I am supporting Dr. Lapetina. I am not, however, as some have claimed, a paid member of her staff. I have done my best to recruit delegates for her, but no money has changed hands. So why is this important? Well, aside from padding my own ego, it plays to a very disturbing narrative by the Hampton Roads Tea Party that came to a head last night at Cagney’s Restaurant.

Big Ben.

For the past week, the Tea Party had been promoting a meet and greet with Ben Loyola as a chance to meet the candidate and fellow patriots. On the page for the Facebook event, they encouraged you to bring friends. Tyler Spires, the former chairman of the ODU College Republicans and a longtime GOP volunteer, and myself, a former GOP staffer and AltDaily Political Reporter, decided to attend in hopes of seeing Ben talk about issues important to Norfolk. So far, Ben has acted like he is still running for Congress; his radio ads mention Obamacare and Cap and Trade.

We walked in the door at Cagney’s at around 6:40 p.m., came into the side room where the event was being held, and were greeted by Debbie Pavon, the secretary of the Hampton Roads Tea Party. We chatted for a minute and then took a seat at the large table set up for the event. While talking with those around us about the race, we were completely positive. I made no snide remarks about Ben’s residency or past problems and even gave him about a 50/50 shot at winning the race if he won the nomination.

Loyola’s Political Director, Josh Clark, came up to me, said hi, and shook both Tyler’s hands and mine. One of his campaign consultants, Chris Woodfin, came up, shook my hand, and asked If I was having fun yet. Everything was cordial, but then Karen Hurd, former Hampton Roads Tea Party chair and current head of the Virginia Tea Party Alliance PAC, came up behind us and said the event was only for Loyola supporters and that it wasn’t open to the media either. She gestured toward the door and told us we had to leave.

Needless to say we were both stunned and so were the people sitting around us. None of them were supporting Loyola. In fact, several of them had never even met him before. They were invited by friends to meet the candidate and their first exposure was seeing two young men being asked to leave for not supporting him.

At this point I lost my cool, but only slightly. I asked Karen if she had a comment about supporting someone who was lying about their residency to run for political office. She responded, “no comment…but you can copy what I’ve said publicly on Facebook if you want.”

We then quietly exited the room when we were greeted by another Loyola staffer, an old friend of mine, wondering what was going on and why we were told to leave. He seemed quite surprised as well.

So there you have it folks. The Tea Party–at least evidenced by this interaction–doesn’t support freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or free and open discussion about candidates for public office. In short, their leadership are total hypocrites. The chair of the Norfolk Chapter of the Tea Party was standing right in front of me as this all happened and he did nothing to stop it. I don’t fault Loyola’s staff, because it was not their event, but it’s very sad indeed that a group started with such high purported morals has stooped to the levels of a British Monarch in stifling dissent.

Now, without further ado, on to news actually reported in the paper…

Norfolk Council Rejects Ward Plan Proposed and Supported by Local Citizens

At least there's Tommy.

Any high school civics class ought to instruct you that the highest position in the United States is not the President, but that of a common citizen. This makes council’s decision to reject a ward plan drawn by such a person, and supported by dozens of others, all the more disconcerting. It was too radical a change, they cried. It would put too many incumbents in danger of not being re-elected. Alas, they fail to recognize that the city council belongs to the people, not the individuals who happen to occupy the chairs right now. At least one person on council understands this, Tommy Smigiel. We need to work hard to give him two more allies next May when Barclay Winn and Angelina Williams are up for re-election.

Work Begins to Clear Virginia Beach Right-of-Way for Light Rail

I still maintain that Light Rail was a massive waste of money that could have been better spent improving bus routes, especially the MAX service that I’ve taken to work for the past 3 years. Even so, it’s very cool to see the train running down the tracks from the balcony of the Hague Towers Apartment where I live. Now that our system is almost operational, Virginia Beach is clearing the way for their own system by removing the train tracks from the former Norfolk Southern line. It will likely be years before construction starts and it may not ever begin with the current $800+ million price tag, but it’s nice to know Mayor Sessoms is still pushing ahead with the project despite his many mixed messages regarding its future.

Norfolk Council Appoints 2 New Members to School Board

Yes, our school board is appointed not elected, and no, it doesn’t seem like it will be on the ballot to change it this year. That hasn’t stopped Norfolk’s City Council from making some major changes, however. Board Vice-Chair Karen Jones Squires asked not to be re-appointed. I would surmise it was because she didn’t realize what she was getting herself into. I have audio and video from meetings where she is totally lost on the budget process and complaining that staff didn’t ask her for enough input. The real surprise though, is that Jim Driggers wasn’t given another term after 6 years on the board. I’d been told by several in the know that he had been leaking information to the Pilot during the testing scandal, so perhaps that has something to do with it…

Space Station Crew Forced to Evacuate to Avoid Space Debris

Astronauts have to avoid all sorts of things, like Space Wine bottles.

I thought having to ollie over the occasional beer bottle on the street was bad, but the guys up in the International Space Station had to scramble into two Soyuz Spacecraft for fear of getting smashed by rogue pieces of space junk. The debris reportedly passed within 82o feet of the multi-billion dollar station, an extremely close call by astronomical standards. Just recently a small asteroid passing within a few thousand miles of Earth made big news, so imagine being in outer space and seeing a chunk of satellite hurtling toward you.

Scientists have been worried about this for years and Japan has even come up with a novel method for removing unwanted objects from our orbit. They propose launching a satellite to deploy a mile wide metal net that would be magnetized to collect space debris and then re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn to pieces. Pollution and trash here on the ground is definitely a big problem, but your car running over a glass bottle is nothing compared to the havoc that would occur if a GPS or major telecommunications satellite was destroyed in a collision.

Somalia Becomes War Number 6 as Obama Becomes the Nobel Peace Prize Winner to Fire Most Cruise Missiles

Yes, I know, Predator Drones don’t fire cruise missiles, but that’s beside the point. When you add up everything done in Libya, Obama has definitely fired more than any other previous winner. Let’s put aside the fact that except for maybe Jimmy Carter, no winner has fired any cruise missiles, and examine the United State’s latest illegal and undeclared war in Somalia. Apparently some senior members of an Al-Qaeda (see: Al-CIA-DUH!) affiliate were hiding out in a building, so we bombed it. Normally, when you bomb another country it means you are at war with it, but not in our twisted legal world. We can be advocating for the death/ouster of another country’s leader, be dropping bombs on it, killing civilians, and still not even have so much as Congressional authorization. As much as I think Iraq was a huge mistake, at least Bush got approval from Congress before going in. Obama can’t even claim that. According to him, what we are doing in Libya does not even count as hostilities. I bet when you voted for change you didn’t realize you were voting to change the definitions of half the words pertaining to armed conflict in the dictionary.

SEALs Reportedly Used Night Vision Contact Lenses in Raid on Bin Laden Compound

Ending on an arguably positive, but definitely purely awesome note, it is being reported that the Navy SEALs who raided the Bin Laden compound were using contact lenses that gave them night vision. They won’t be available in stores anytime soon, if ever, but I definitely want some. My last boss, Kenny Golden, was one of the first two helicopter pilots in the active duty Navy to qualify with night vision goggles and I’ve heard some pretty crazy stories about the training they went through. One involved taking his squadron on a midnight ride across the desert in hot rods wearing NVG’s with no headlights on. I’ve always wanted to do something like that, but until now, I figured it was just a pipe dream. Let’s all hope we see these in some cheesy infomercial sometime soon, because I’m thinking they would be the perfect accessory for this year’s Survive Norfolk event.