“One More Sleazy Christian”: Bob McDonnell Is Never Going To Be President
This is so sleazy and cowardly, what he said about the $15,000 from the CEO who helped to pay for his daughter’s wedding:
In Virginia, gifts to family members don’t need to be reported. The governor says that’s why he did not report the $15,000 gift from Williams to help pay for his daughter’s wedding. The FBI is now looking into the details of that gift.
“My daughter indicated that she wanted to pay for the wedding. She and her husband Chris. It’s something my wife and I did 37 years ago,” said Gov. McDonnell.
“As I’ve said publicly, I signed the initial contract, we put down some initial deposits, but my daughter and her husband wanted to pay for the wedding, in fact…they paid a significant amount, in fact, almost all the other expenses and they wanted to do this. Now they accepted the gift from Mr. Williams. And I believe under the reporting laws that this would be a gift to my daughter and not to me,” explained Governor McDonnell.
Is he out of his mind? This is a bribe, pure and simple. It may not be legally or technically, but morally, he accepted a bribe. And now he’s shoving it off on his daughter? I wonder if he had the decency to tell her before he decided to throw her under the bus in public. Unbelievable.
Why do these people always think they’re not going to get caught? And what power on earth could make him think that accepting this $15,000 was okay? It’s mind boggling. And doesn’t this man purport to be a good Christian?
Virginia governors are limited to one term. McDonnell supposedly fancies himself a presidential candidate and sees his path to the GOP nomination as through the Christian right (he studied at Pat Robertson’s Regent University), which is why he proposes all those laws policing vaginas. Those are bad enough, at least to some of us. But this. This is like some corrupt Bronx pol in the 1950s. And it will stick. One more sleazy Christian.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 1, 2013
“Father Of The Bride Meets Drugstore Cowboy”: Virginia’s Bob McDonnell Faces FBI Scrutiny
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) is wrapping his final months in office, and would no doubt like to leave on a high note, en route to pursuing higher office.
But at this point, instead of spending time with volunteers in Iowa and New Hampshire, it looks like Governor Ultrasound will have to spend his time with his attorneys.
FBI agents are conducting interviews about the relationship between Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, his wife, Maureen, and a major campaign donor who paid for the food at the wedding of the governor’s daughter, according to four people familiar with the questioning.
The agents have been asking associates of the McDonnells about gifts provided to the family by Star Scientific chief executive Jonnie R. Williams Sr. and actions the Republican governor and his wife have taken that may have boosted the company, the people said.
Among the topics being explored, they said, is the $15,000 catering bill that Williams paid for the 2011 wedding of McDonnell’s daughter at Virginia’s historic Executive Mansion. But questions have extended to other, previously undisclosed gifts from Williams to Maureen McDonnell as well, they said.
Now, it’s worth clarifying that the FBI’s interest in McDonnell may be tangential — federal law enforcement has taken an interest in Williams and Star Scientific, and it’s not clear if officials suspect the governor of any criminal misdeeds.
But that doesn’t make this story any less damaging for McDonnell, whose political career is in severe jeopardy.
Following up on an item from a few weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that McDonnell’s daughter was married in 2011, and the governor said the bride and groom paid for the event. In reality, $15,000 came by way of Williams. McDonnell not only lied about the financing, but he somehow forgot to disclose Williams’ generous gift, as he’s legally required to do.
Complicating matters, shortly before the wedding, McDonnell’s wife attended an event in Florida to endorse Williams’ product, and shortly after the wedding, McDonnell hosted Williams at the governor’s home for a launch party for Williams’ product.
Then, the story got slightly worse.
Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell has said his daughter and her husband paid for their own wedding. So a $15,000 check from a major campaign donor to pay for the food at the affair was a gift to the bride and groom and not to him, and therefore did not have to be publicly disclosed under the law, the governor says.
But documents obtained by The Washington Post show that McDonnell signed the catering contract, making him financially responsible for the 2011 event. The governor made handwritten notes to the caterer in the margins. In addition, the governor paid nearly $8,000 in deposits for the catering.
When the combination of the governor’s deposit and the gift from the donor resulted in an overpayment to the caterer, the refund check of more than $3,500 went to McDonnell’s wife and not to his daughter, her husband or back to the donor.
The new documents suggest that the governor was more involved with the financing of the wedding than he has previously acknowledged.
Some of this is just amusing on a semantics level. McDonnell’s spokesperson said the governor’s daughter paid for the event, and she “paid for it by accepting it as a gift from one of dad’s campaign contributors.”
But some of it is also interesting on a legal level. It’s true that family members of officeholders don’t have to follow the same disclosure requirements as the officeholders themselves, and in this case, McDonnell is arguing he had nothing to do with the $15,000 gift — it went directly from the governor’s donor to the governor’s daughter. The problem is all the evidence that ties McDonnell to the money.
Making matters slightly worse still, last week we learned Williams also paid for some McDonnell vacations. In 2011, the McDonnell family “vacationed at a lake house owned by Williams and drove the executive’s Ferrari from the home, at Smith Mountain Lake southeast of Roanoke, back to Richmond.”
Yep, Ferrari.
I thought I’d also I’d re-up TNR‘s Alec MacGillis great piece on the controversy, arguing that the governor “can kiss his 2016 hopes goodbye.”
Romney passed McDonnell over and one rarely hears McDonnell mentioned on the short list of 2016 hopefuls. He did not help his standing with conservatives nationwide when, in the just-completed legislative session, he signed a transportation funding package that raises hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and taxes.”
And now this: Father of the Bride meets Drugstore Cowboy. There’s a sad irony in this denouement. McDonnell’s successful makeover involved transforming himself from a disciple of Jerry Falwell into a model Virginia gentleman, sober and highbrow, in contrast with ideological brawlers like Ken Cuccinelli, the arch-conservative attorney general who is running to succeed him. But there’s nothing sober and highbrow about having a dietary-supplement maker funneling money to your daughter’s wedding. With just months left to go in McDonnell’s term, we must say: Bob, we hardly knew ye. Though who knows, in the years ahead we may see more of you yet — on late-night TV, hawking miracle pills.
And that was written before the FBI became interested in McDonnell’s ties to Williams.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 30, 2013
“Nonsensical Overweening Power”: Virginia’s Assault On Abortion Claims Its First Victim
At abortion clinics, the presence of awnings, the width of doorways and the dimensions of janitorial closets have little to do with the health of patients. But by requiring that Virginia’s 20 abortion clinics conform to strict licensing standards designed for new hospitals, the state has ensured that many or most of them will be driven out of business in the coming months.
Just days after the state Board of Health approved the regulations this month, under pressure from Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R), they claimed their first victim. Hillcrest Clinic in Norfolk, which for 40 years had provided reproductive health services, including abortions, closed last weekend.
Hillcrest was partly a victim of its own success in providing women with ready access to birth control. Like most other clinics around the state, it saw demand for abortions dwindle as more women took advantage of options to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Still, even after years of protests, arson, a pipe bombing and an attack by a man wielding a semiautomatic weapon, Hillcrest performed more than 1,600 abortions last year, about 7 percent of the state total. The principal reason it closed its doors was that complying with the regulations would have saddled it with $500,000 in renovations — an unaffordable expense.
That’s precisely what Mr. Cuccinelli and other advocates of the policy intended. According to a survey by the state Health Department, just one of the 19 surviving clinics meets the requirements. Fifteen of the remaining facilities estimated their combined costs of compliance at $14.5 million.
Some of the clinics, including those operated by Planned Parenthood, which has a national fundraising network, will survive. Many others, which are run as small businesses, probably will not. Most have no means to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to widen corridors, install state-of-the-art surgical sinks and expand parking lots.
What’s more, the upgrades they face are arbitrary manifestations of the state’s overweening power. Other types of walk-in clinics, including those that perform oral and cosmetic surgery, are unaffected by the regulations.
As Dr. David Peters, owner of the Tidewater Women’s Health Center in Norfolk, told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper: “I can do plastic surgery. I can stick needles in babies’ lungs. I can put tubes up penises and into bladders and do all sorts of crazy stuff in my office with no regulations whatsoever. No government supervision. But for an abortion . . .it just becomes nonsensical.”
The Board of Health had sought to exempt existing abortion clinics from the regulations, which were never intended for ambulatory clinics. But board members caved when Mr. Cuccinelli, the most political attorney general in Virginia’s history, threatened to withhold the state’s legal help if they were sued.
Regulation is essential for all health services. But there is no evidence that unsanitary conditions or slapdash procedures are common at abortion clinics in Virginia nor that women who seek services from them are at risk. The state’s assault on women’s reproductive rights is an ideological crusade masquerading as concern for public health.
By: The Editorial Board, The Washington Post, April 26, 2013
“This Has Got To Be A Trick”: Is This The Best The GOP Can Come Up With?
I think I’ve figured it out. Republicans must be staging some kind of fiendishly clever plot to lure Democrats into a false sense of security.
That’s the only possible explanation for some of the weirdness we’re seeing and hearing from the GOP. The party must be waiting to come out with its real candidates and policy positions at a moment when unsuspecting Democrats are in the vulnerable position of being doubled over with laughter.
Why else, except for the entertainment value, would the party nominate former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford — he of Appalachian Trail fame, or infamy — in next month’s special election to fill a vacant seat in Congress?
Sanford, you will recall, made news in 2009 when he went missing for a week, which is rarely a good idea for a sitting governor. Upon reappearing, he acknowledged he hadn’t been hiking in the mountains but rather was visiting his mistress in Argentina, which is never a good idea for a sitting governor, especially one who is married and preaches sanctimoniously about family values.
Sanford’s wife, Jenny, refused to play the role of dutiful spouse, basically telling interviewers that her husband was, in fact, a heel; they divorced the following year. After his term ended in 2011, he went slinking into the wilderness. But a toppling of political dominoes — former senator Jim DeMint resigned; then-Rep. Tim Scott was appointed to replace him; Scott’s seat in the House thus had to be filled in a special election — gave Sanford the opening for a comeback.
Last month, Sanford finished first in the GOP primary against a weak field. This week, he won a runoff. Since South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District is solidly Republican, Sanford’s victory on May 7 should be a foregone conclusion. Even the fact that Democrats are running an unusually viable candidate — Elizabeth Colbert Busch, the sister of late-night satirist Stephen Colbert — ought to make little difference. But the GOP establishment is worried.
So far, it appears that Sanford is less interested in victory than personal redemption. He had the nerve to ask Jenny Sanford to manage his campaign; she, of course, declined. As he gave his victory speech after Tuesday’s runoff, his fiancee — Maria Belen Chapur, the former mistress who lives in Buenos Aires — stood behind him. If Sanford ends up making this contest a referendum on his personal life, some loyal Republicans may hold their noses as they vote for him. Others will just stay home.
Republicans are also trying their best to lose a governorship, in Virginia, that could be theirs for the taking.
The Democratic candidate, longtime party fundraiser and operative Terry McAuliffe, has always shown more talent as a kingmaker than as a candidate. But he’s fortunate to have as his opponent Ken Cuccinelli, the commonwealth’s loony-bin attorney general. Describing Cuccinelli’s views as “far right” is like calling Usain Bolt “reasonably fast.”
At the moment, Cuccinelli is challenging an appeals-court decision that struck down Virginia’s sodomy law, which sought to restrict sex acts between any two people, including married couples. The Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional 10 years ago, so the appeals court really had no choice. But Cuccinelli is appealing anyway.
When he was campaigning for attorney general, Cuccinelli refused to endorse his Republican predecessor’s policy of nondiscrimination against gays and lesbians. “My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong,” he said at the time. “They’re intrinsically wrong. . . . They don’t comport with natural law.”
Cuccinelli has also tried his best to halt all abortions, launched what looked like a witch hunt against climate-change scientists and generally pursued an ultra-conservative agenda with chilling gusto. Virginia has voted twice for President Obama; I’ll admit I was surprised when Cuccinelli won statewide office in 2009, even though the attorney general’s authority is limited. I’ll be really surprised if Virginians put him in the governor’s mansion, giving him the whole state as a sandbox.
You’d think the national GOP would try to avoid potential giveaways like these. But leading Republicans are too busy tying themselves in knots over issues that much of the country considers settled and done with — gay marriage, immigration reform, background checks for gun purchases, a balanced approach to debt reduction.
A party can be out of step on any of these issues and still win elections. But on all of them? I’m telling you, this has got to be some kind of trick.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 4, 2013
“Virginia Is The New Florida”: New Voter Suppression Efforts Prove The Voting Rights Act Is Still Needed
In 2011 and 2012, 180 new voting restrictions were introduced in forty-one states. Ultimately, twenty-five laws and two executive actions were passed in nineteen states following the 2010 election to make it harder to vote. In many cases, these laws backfired on their Republican sponsors. The courts blocked ten of them, and young and minority voters—the prime target of the restrictions—formed a larger share of the electorate in 2012 than in 2008.
Despite the GOP’s avowal to reach out to new constituencies following the 2012 election, Republican state legislators have continued to support new voting restrictions in 2013. According to a report by Project Vote, fifty-five new voting restrictions have been introduced in thirty states so far this year. “The 2013 legislative season has once again brought an onslaught of bills to restrict access to the ballot, including proposals to undercut important election laws that have recently opened the electorate to more voters,” writes Erin Ferns Lee. These measures include “strict photo ID policies…voter registration restrictions; voter purges; [felon] disenfranchisement; and policies to cut back or revoke voting laws that have made voting more convenient.”
Here’s the breakdown of where such laws have been introduced.
• Mandating a government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot: Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Washington, Wyoming
• Restricting voter registration drives: Illinois, Indiana, Montana, New Mexico, Virginia
• Banning election-day voter registration: California, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska
• Requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote: Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia
• Purging the voter rolls: Colorado, Indiana, New Mexico, Texas, Virginia
• Reducing early voting: Arizona, Indiana, South Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin
• Disenfranchising ex-felons: Virginia.
(On the plus side, thirty states have also introduced measures to make voting easier by adopting online voter registration, election-day registration, expanded early voting and the restoration of voting rights for ex-felons.)
Most of these measures are still pending before state legislatures, but Virginia, which has gubernatorial and legislative elections this year, is leading the way in enacting new voting restrictions. On January 21, 2013, as Virginia State Senator Henry Marsh, a longtime civil rights activist, attended President Obama’s second inauguration on Martin Luther King Day, the deadlocked Virginia Senate took advantage of Marsh’s absence to pass a new redistricting map that reduced Democratic seats by diluting black voting strength in at least eight districts. The measure was ultimately defeated in the Virginia House, but the move set the tone on voting rights for the legislative session.
On Tuesday morning, as the nation followed the debate over Proposition 8 at the Supreme Court, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell signed a strict voter ID bill. In the last election, Virginians could vote by showing a number of different IDs, including a utility bill, a Social Security card or, this being the South, a concealed handgun permit. The new law restricts the forms of acceptable ID to a driver’s license, a passport, a state-issued photo ID card, a student ID with a photo on it or an employee photo ID. The Commonwealth Institute, a progressive research group, estimates that 869,000 registered voters in Virginia may lack these forms of photo ID, and says the new law will cost the state anywhere from $7 to $21 million to implement.
McDonnell’s spokesman called the photo ID law “a reasonable effort to protect the sanctity of our democratic process.” Yet the measure will likely only exacerbate the existing problems in Virginia’s election system, according to voting rights experts. In the last election, Virginia voters waited up to seven hours to cast a ballot. “Long lines across the state were a result of insufficient resources, poor allocation of resources that did exist, and frequent breakdowns of aging voting equipment,” according to a post-election report by the Election Protection coalition.
Moreover, study after study has shown that voter ID laws disproportionately impact young and minority voters. Not only are these constituencies less likely to have photo ID, but even in states without ID laws, black and Hispanic youth were significantly more likely than whites to be asked to show ID. According to a Politico write-up of a new report by political scientists at the University of Chicago and Washington University, “17.3 percent of black youth and 8.1 percent of Latino youth said their lack of adequate ID kept them from voting, compared with just 4.7 percent of white youth.” Mamie Locke, chairman of the Virginia Black Legislative Caucus, called the ID law “a continuation of attempts by Republicans to suppress the vote of individuals who are not likely to support their right wing agenda.”
Nor is voter fraud a rampant problem in Virginia, as supporters of the voter ID law suggest. There have been only thirty-five cases of alleged election fraud since 2000 in the state, according to an exhaustive survey by News21, and only five cases led to plea deals or convictions. Ironically, the one major case of election fraud in the state last year concerned a GOP firm charged with dumping voter registration forms.
Virginia must receive approval for its election change from the federal government under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The new voting restrictions enacted in Virginia and introduced elsewhere across the country show why Section 5 is still very much needed. If anything, the statute should be expanded in light of contemporary voter suppression efforts, not eliminated.
Virginia is quickly becoming the new Florida when it comes to electoral dysfunction. Like Florida, Virginia also passed new laws this year to restrict voter registration drives and to purge the voter rolls of alleged non-citizen voters. In Florida, such measures forced groups like the League of Women Voters to halt voter registration efforts and wrongly labeled thousands of eligible voters as non-citizens. All of this is happening, coincidentally, in a crucial election year for the Commonwealth.
The continued push to restrict the right to vote reveals the extent to which conservative power remains deeply embedded in the states, thanks to the 2010 election and subsequent aggressive gerrymandering by GOP state legislatures to protect their majorities. To combat this imbalance, Howard Dean’s group Democracy For America is launching a new effort to flip state legislatures from red to blue. The group will start, fittingly, in Virginia this year, and then expand to Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2014. DFA plans to spend $750,000 targeting five seats in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2013. Jamelle Bouie explains why this is savvy politics:
It’s hard to overstate how smart a way this is for liberal groups to invest their time and money. Virginia, in fact, is a great case study for why it’s key for Democrats to make gains on the state level. Democrats control both Senate seats in the state, and it was key to Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012. Despite this, Republicans control all three statewide offices (governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general), the House of Delegates, and have the tie breaking vote in the state senate. The result? Republicans have been able to push a strong conservative agenda in the state.
With Congress deadlocked, the states are where the action is. It’s good that people are finally taking notice, especially as state politics continue to shift further to the right in many places.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, March 28, 2013
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