Moonhowlings

Virginia has no official state song.  It has a Virginia Official Song Emeritus.  Ok.  So what’s the problem?  No one would be caught singing the  Virginia Official Song Emeritus, Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, written by an African American man named James Allen Bland who was born in 1854 in New York. 
 

Some history:

James “Jimmy” Allen Bland was born on October 22, 1854 in Flushing, Long Island, New York. When he was 12 and living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he saw an old black man playing a banjo and singing spirituals. He fell in love with the banjo and tried to make one using bailing wire for strings. This didn’t work very well and, besides, a big kid took it and broke it into pieces. Jimmy’s father bought him a real banjo for $8.00 and Jimmy taught himself to play… very well.

Later, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Jimmy finished high school and enrolled in Howard University. He was so talented and had become so proficient with the banjo that he was entertaining professionally at private parties and in hotels and restaurants from the time he was 14.

At Howard University, he met a young lady named Mannie Friend. On a trip with Mannie to her birthplace in Tidewater, Virginia, Alan Bland composed “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”. Sitting on the banks of the James River, Mannie wrote the words down on paper while Jimmy played and sang to her.

 

Read more…

Talk about gaffes. McCain’s adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer told viewers that McCain had a good chance of taking Virginia because of his support in ‘Real Virginia,’ rather than Northern Virginia. MSNBC host Kevin Cork gave her every chance to get off the ledge. The lady blew her chance.

You just have to see this one. A picture is worth a thousand words:

ABC news for entire story

And so it begins… are the prostitutes victims or are they criminals?  Yesterday’s Post article, Immigration-Linked Prostitution Cases Pose Challenge; Pr. William Crackdown Highlights Complex Legal Issues states -

…these immigration-related cases raise complex questions about the interplay of local and federal law and are likely to pose special challenges for Prince William County police in the push against illegal immigration that began this week.

The police department has said it will treat illegal immigrants who are criminals differently from those who are crime victims. But in prostitution cases, the women involved might be both.

These types of cases are going to cause a nightmare for our local police who will have to add extra time to investigating in order to ascertain which of these two categories suspects fall into – are they victims or criminals. As word gets out about the differences between the two groups one could expect to see a lot less ‘criminals’ and a lot more ‘victims’ being caught.