Falls Church and Northern Virginia's Premier Weekly Newspaper Saturday, February 4, 2023
This week’s seventh public hearing of the House January 6 Committee, focusing on the relationship between Trump and leaders of the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, had two key points generally overlooked in the reporting on the yet-another historically important event.
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court enshrined a woman’s constitutional right to choose in its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade. Nearly 50 years later, a dramatically different Court returned us to a darker time with a decision that is disturbing and just plain wrong.
If the Culmore community had a saint, her name might be Carmen Fernandez. Carmen was born and reared in Cuba and often told stories of the delightful soirees and beach time she enjoyed as a young woman in pre-Castro Cuba. She emigrated to the United States in 1960 and earned a master’s degree in social work at the Catholic University of America.
Since 1940, our county’s motorists have gone for repairs at Joyce Motors, on N. 10th St. at the mouth of Clarendon. But under the Clarendon Sector Plan Update the county board approved April 23, Joyce is slated to enter our collective memory bank, its future undetermined, though honored in a coming new high-rise.
We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. Also a temperate heat wave and an Arctic heat wave, with temperatures reaching the high 80s in northern Norway.
If what’s unfolding in our culture now is not seen as a dire last minute warning, then perhaps it is too late. There is an extreme wantonness to all the gun violence, Supreme Court excess and political tyranny now being exposed at the highest levels of our tattered democracy. It is out of control.
On July 1 each year most of the bills passed by the General Assembly during their winter legislative session become law. With the levers of power in Virginia divided between Democrats and Republicans in 2022, citizens won’t see many of the sweeping progressive changes like those we’ve experienced the last two years (things like elimination of the death penalty, local control over firearms restrictions and legalization of marijuana) nor will they see major backsliding on that progress. That said, there are some new laws that went into effect this week that folks may want to take note of.
The most gripping live TV since the waning days of the Golden Girls and New York Knicks’ glory has been scheduled for its next episode this coming Tuesday morning. Without knowing more than the name of the principal witness and the fact that she’s a former Trump White House insider, the hearing will again be “must see” TV.
We knew it was coming, but the actual release of the Supreme Court’s decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, and ended the five-decade long health care protections for women, their families, and their medical providers stunned nonetheless. The decision automatically put women’s health care into crisis, as health clinics in some states notified patients that they could no longer provide needed care, and closed their doors.
After seven decades in Arlington, William “Pless” Lunger remains awed by the historic role his father played in national security, the career that brought his family to the nation’s capital to help usher in the Atomic Age.
