Publisher's Notebook

Here’s what was happening this past week…

The week may have been a day short, if your office observed Columbus Day on Monday. Judging from the number of cars in downtown Richmond that day, it doesn’t look like Columbus is getting that much respect, even if he gets a federal holiday.

The Latest on the Northern Virginia Episcopal Church Spat

The Supreme Court of Virginia has granted a writ to the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, which lost a lawsuit over millions of dollars in property. Nine congregations in Northern Virginia, unhappy with the direction of the dicocese and the national Episcopal church, broke away, taking their buildings and property with them. A Fairfax circuit judge said they could do that. Now the high court gets a say. (Washington Post)

Clemency for The DC Sniper?

John Allen Muhammad, the convicted DC sniper sitting on death row, will seek clemency from Gov. Tim Kaine next week, according to his lawyer. Good luck on that one. (News & Messenger)

Tommy and Bill and William and Mary

The attorney general’s office usually represents the commonwealth’s colleges, but the College of William & Mary has its own stable of lawyers, including Sen. Tommy Norment. Norment’s pay from the College – he gets $160K a year to serve as a part-time teacher and legal advisor – had him in the headlines this week. Expect to hear more from AG Bill Mims on this story, which won’t be going away soon. (The Virginian-Pilot)

A Win for the First Amendment

The taxpayers in Buchanan County will be little poorer, thanks to their county school board, if a verdict holds up on appeal. Three years ago, the school board voted to bar a newspaper publisher from school property; he said they were retaliating for critical news coverage and responded with a lawsuit claiming a violation of his First Amendment rights were violated. A federal jury in Abingdon agreed with the guy and gave him $200,000. The board’s lawyer will be heading to the 4th Circuit. (Bristol Herald Courier)

Sign o’ the Times in Southside

Down in Martinsville, Commonwealth’s Attorney Joan Ziglar will have to furlough all employees in her office for 17 days under a city budget cut plan. The city was hit hard by budgets cut made by Gov. Tim Kaine. (Martinsville Bulletin)

Comings and Goings

Item 1. There’s no surprise here. Tim Heaphy has been unanimously confirmed as U.S. Attorney for the Western District. (Main Justice).

Item 2. Richmond City Attorney Norman Sales announced he’ll retire from that job at the end of the year, after four years in the post. Sales, 51, says he plans to continuing working, just not for the city. (Richmond Times-Dispatch).

Item 3. Sands Anderson Marks & Miller will be leaving the Wytestone Plaza Building at the corner of 8th in Main in downtown Richmond and moving to the Bank of America building down the street after the turn of the year.

Digging Out

Roanoke lawyer Chip Magee, appointed as receiver for the bankruptcy practice of Anne Marie Miller, whose office was essentially shut down by court orders. Magee said it may take two years to sort things out. (Roanoke Times)

The new Double A baseball team in Richmond has a name: The Richmond Flying Squirrels.

It was a busy week on the baseball-team-name desk. First, one of the possible names, “Hambones,” was determined to be potentially offensive to African-Americans. Then another finalist, “Flatheads,” ostensibly selected for its association with a fish, was deemed offensive to Native Americans.

Then the team management announced “Flying Squirrels” was the winner. As in the Richmond Treerats. The Richmond Killers of Tomatoes and Other Vegetables You Might Try to Grow on the Deck. The Richmond Bird Feeder Destroyers. The Richmond Times-Dispatch has details.  

“Let’s go nuts!” exclaimed the team’s general manager at the announcement. Sorry, when I heard that, I couldn’t help but recall the really lame “theme song” foisted by the Washington Nationals management last year, “Nuts about the Nats.” The tune, which sound like a bad glee-club song from the 1950s, was widely hated by DC-area fans. When my son and I went to a Nats game this past summer, mercifully the song had ben retired. I think.

So heave a big sigh over “Flying Squirrels” and hope for the best. At least baseball is back in River City.

It hasn’t been easy being a baseball fan in the Holy City on the James during the past year or so.

First the Triple-A Richmond Braves left town, after about 40 years here. Then there was the back and forth of whether we’d get a Double-A team. (With the demotion, I couldn’t shake from my head that line from Alabama’s tune, “The Cheap Seats”: “Our ball club may be minor-league, but at least it’s Triple-A….”).

Then we got a team – the Double-A Connecticut Defenders, a San Francisco Giants affiliate, were moving to Richmond. Okay, at least it’s baseball.

For the last few weeks, the club’s owners have tried to build excitement, seeking fan entries for the new as-yet-unnamed Richmond Fill-in-the-Blanks. Team names in minor league baseball often are “fun” or whimsical, such as the Montgomery (Ala.) Biscuits, or the Lansing (Mich.) Lugnuts, or the Las Vegas 51s.

In this morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, we learned the potential names of the Fill-in-the-Blanks. All five finalists are, well, to use a football term, this is a “fumble.” The choices:

* Flatheads. “A kind of catfish commonly found in the James River.” A bottom-feeder, in other words. Not to mention that a team called the Carolina Mudcats already plays in suburban Raleigh.

* Flying Squirrels. “Soar in Virginia.” Forget it, unless Rocky leaves Bullwinkle to become team mascot.

* Hambones. “Paying homage to Virginia ham.” Would make sense if the team was in Smithfield…sounds like a riff on the Montgomery Biscuits.

* Rock Hoppers. “People or animals on river rocks.” Not to be confused with grasshoppers or clodhoppers.

* Rhinos. Alliterative, “featuring a powerful image.” Does anyone else remember the failed attempt to get an NHL franchise in Norfolk, to be called the “Hampton Roads Rhinos”?

Fans can vote online for the winner, which will be announced Oct. 16. Too bad the date is set. The team’s owners need, to use a golf term, a “mulligan.”

The justice greets Richmond lawyer Gen Dybing, while MRWBA President-Elect Jayne Pemberton looks on.

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was in Richmond Sunday, at a reception held by the Metro Richmond Women’s Bar Association.

The MRWBA is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year and the group was able to get O’Connor to appear as she was making a southern swing. The justice was in Charleston, S.C., at the end of last week and she appeared at William and Mary, where she serves as chancellor, on Saturday.

In Williamsburg, O’Connor spoke at the Supreme Court Preview, an annual gathering hosted by the W&M law school. Among the items noted in the report in Sunday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch: She thinks new Justice Sonia Sotomayor is settling into her position just fine, but “two women [on the high court] is not enough.” And she is a strong advocate for eliminating the popular election of judges, citing the power of money in those elections.

At the MRWBA reception held at The Jefferson, O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, fittingly was introduced by the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court of Virginia, Justice Elizabeth Lacy.

But O’Connor set a ground rule for her MRWBA appearance: Her talk would be off the record, with no press coverage of her remarks. That’s a requirement I’ll respect, but allow me an observation.

In 1985, while seated at the same table at some D.C. banquet, Washington Redskins running back John Riggins famously (and drunkenly) told O’Connor “to loosen up, Sandy baby!”

Memo to Riggo: Head back to the banquet-room floor, John, you’ve got it all wrong. O’Connor was funny, feisty, down to earth and direct. Rather what you’d expect from a self-described “cowgirl from Arizona.”

O’Connor’s name has cropped up on a number of the 4th Circuit decisions we’ve digested in the past few years, as she has been sitting from time to time on appellate panels since leaving the high court in 2006.

I don’t think the justice will mind if I bend her ground rule and mention one of her other activities in retirement (especially since there was a Washington Post article about the project yesterday).

Deeply concerned over the lack of civics education, O’Connor said she has been promoting a new Web site, www.ourcourts.org, that aims to teach middle-schoolers about government in a guerrilla fashion – by making education fun. The site has several games for kids. In one called “You’ve Got a Right!” you play a lawyer researching clients’ issues. In “Supreme Decision,” you’re a clerk helping a Supreme Court justice decide cases.

One hopes this project will have some impact on a country where only one in 70 people can identify one Supreme Court justice but where 80 percent can name one judge on “American Idol.” One hopes.