Category Archives: Courts and law

The Cooch’s Freak Show Dream Team

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 6 Comments

cooch dream teamBy Peter Galuszka

Ken Cuccinelli just can’t keep away from the bizarre, but perhaps that’s what makes him what he is.

He stages a convention instead of a primary to neuter Bill Bolling. And since a convention is smaller, it draws more GOP hard-righters than  June bugs on a humid night and they succeed in getting Bishop E.W. Jackson and Mark Obenshain selected. They underline the social conservatism that turns millions off and makes Virginia the butt of jokes on late night talk shows.

The Bishop is an even bigger gay basher than Cuccinelli and says that Planned Parenthood is responsible for more fatalities among African-Americans than the Ku Klux Klan. This may be new to a Harvard Law graduate, but women of any color have a legal right to an abortion within limits. The U.S. Supreme Court said so. Look under Roe vs. Wade.

Then there is the attorney general candidate Mark Obenshain of the legacy Republican family. He proposed and withdrew legislation to require any woman in Virginia who miscarries a pregnancy to report it to the police. The idea is so repulsive it is beyond words. A woman may have miscarried to her great sorrow due to medical reasons and then would have to go through the added horror of having to report to the police? Yes, this comes from a cabal that otherwise wants to keep the government out of your lives. Even Josef Stalin wouldn’t think of this.

What does the dream team have to say on the many policy issues facing a troubled state? We have a bunch of lame and poorly thought out tax cuts and Cooch playing hardware store populist. Cuccinelli was against McDonnnell’s mammoth road building tax plan and has since backed away from his opposition.

Is this good news for Terry McAuliffe, who has plenty of issues of his own? Yes, I would think. Cuccinelli doesn’t need the fringe hard right voters. He’s already got them in his pocket. He needs the center and Mark and the Bishop aren’t going to be much help there.

It boggles the mind how Virginia is so schizo. It is attracting hundreds of thousands of newcomers who are running the state’s economy and are dragging it into the 21st century world. Yet the Republicans put up people like this who aren’t dragging us to Virginia’s recent dark past but to medieval times.

Global investors might think twice or three times before investing in this freak show.

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The Tea Party and IRS Abuse

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 5 Comments

richmond-tea-partyBy Peter Galuszka

News that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has targeted Tea party groups, including one in Virginia, along with other right wing organizations is deeply disturbing and conjures up ghosts of other government witchhunts.

President Barack Obama has chastized the IRS for singling out the Tea Party and other groups that say they want to educate Americans about their constitution. One group that got “dozens and dozens” of questions about its application for a non-profit status was the Richmond Tea Party, according to leader Laurence Nordvig.

A government report traces the IRS activity to its Cincinnati field office that was charged with reviewing applications for non-profit status.

True, there are any number of groups seeking non-profit status for flimsy reasons, but being part of the Tea Party sure isn’t one of them.

And, using taxes as a weapon is hardly new and has been used by all sides of the political spectrum. Richard Nixon was famous for sicking the IRS on his “enemies” list in the 1970s. In Russia, Vladimir Putin used the Russian tax authorities to imprison potential political rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky who remains incarcerated.

Throughout the Civil Rights and Vietnam War era, the FBI had its COUNTELPRO to gather information about and disrupt groups on both left and right, including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Cuban and Irish nationalist organizations.

Some groups merited watching such as some of the Weathermen and the Ku Klux Klan who practiced violence.

But it is wrong for the federal government to harass peaceful, law-abiding political groups. I may not agree with the Tea Party, but they do meet this description.

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Posted in Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Politics, Public safety & health, Regulation, Taxes

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Only Two Words Suffice: Holy Moly! Make that Three Words: Holy Friggin’ Moly!

Posted on May 2, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 42 Comments

midtown_tunnelPortsmouth Circuit Court Judge James A. Cales Jr. ruled Wedesday that the state’s $2.1 billion public-private partnership deal for the Downtown-Midtown Tunnel project is unconstitutional. Reports the Virginian-Pilot:

Cales said in his ruling that the General Assembly exceeded its authority in giving VDOT “unfettered power” to set toll rates under the 1995 Public-Private Transportation Act. The decision was a blow for Gov. Bob McDonnell and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, whose office defended VDOT against the lawsuit.

The ruling surely will be appealed to higher courts. If upheld, it would threaten the state’s ability to use public-private partnerships to build major transportation projects and, according to attorney Patrick McSweeney, it could hurt the state’s credit rating. McSweeney led the successful campaign several years ago to create regional transportation taxing authorities and participated in a legal bid to derail the Rail-to-Dulles project.

The McDonnell administration will seek a stay from either Cales or the Virginia Supreme Court, allowing work on the project to continue. Elizabeth River Crossings has spent $348 million on the project so far, as of March 31.

Bacon’s bottom line: Holy friggin’ moly!

– JAB

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Posted in 2013, Courts and law, Transportation

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GiftGate: “If I Were a Rich Man . . .!”

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 5 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Richmond’s “Giftgate” scandal just gets worse.

On Friday, Atty. Gen. and presumed GOP gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Cuccinelli announced that he was amending his required disclosures of gifts to show that he took more goodies from Star Scientific plus previously undisclosed gifts of a $7,750 trip in 2010 to Southwest Virginia from coal giant Alpha Natural Resources of Abingdon and $795 to speak at a coal industry rally in 2012.

While the tardy disclosure is questionable, the gifts are not illegal but they would be in other states.

This, moreover, raises another tricky question. How wealthy should politicians be so they can’t be bought?

Could it be that officials  of more modest personal means such as Cuccinelli might be somehow be more vulnerable to gift-giving by individuals or corporations with a definite agenda, such as Star Scientific and Alpha Natural Resources.

Cuccinelli disclosed income of $134,000 in 2009 and $264,296 in 2005. He makes about $150,000 as the state’s top legal officer and got a $30,000 advance from Crown Publishing for a book. His disclosure was a political ploy to embarrass McAuliffe but in the wake of the gifts, it has backfired.

McDonnell’s net worth is about $1.8 million.

Compare that to two Democrats. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, no stranger to big money fundraising, earned $8.2 million in 2011 from his various business interests. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner was once said to be worth about $200 million, much of it from investments he made in the cell phone industry and high-tech financing a couple of decades ago.

It’s tough to say that politics should be only for rich men. But the curious thing about these two Republicans, supposedly the silk stocking, country club party, is that McDonnell and Cuccinelli “are actually very much middle class guys,” Richmond political analyst Bob Holsworth recently told me.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the fact is that both Cuccinelli and McDonnell have spent most of their careers in low-paying public service jobs. McAuliffe and Warner, both accused of being anti-capitalist regulators by the GOP, actually made millions in the free market system that they supposedly disdain.

Painting them as such might be a plus to rank and file voters, but in a strange way, it can put them at risk. Why, for instance, did Cuccinelli feel compelled to accept $13,000 in gifts from Jonnie Williams, the head of troubled Star Scientific, which is the object of shareholder lawyers and a federal probe? These included the use of vacation homes and expensive foreign cars. One vacation cost $3,000 and was a gift. Even an underpaid journalist like myself has paid $2,000 for a week at a beach house with my family. Why couldn’t he have rented his own place?

Williams is involved with a disputed state tax assessment of $860,000 and Cucccinelli has had to recuse himself as he has from another court case involving the fired executive chef who is seeking information that McDonnell’s family used publicly-funded goods like energy drinks, state-owned beach cottages and liquor for themselves.

The Alpha and coal business is rather obvious. Alpha took over Richmond-based Massey Energy in 2011 after the firm’s noxious corporate culture is said to have led to the deaths of 29 miners in West Virginia making it the worst deep mine disaster in the U.S. in 40 years. Massey’s CEO Don Blankenship was famous for bankrolling West Virginia judicial officials and other candidates. He went so far as  to vacation with the State Supreme Court Judge on the French Riviera.

Alpha has a better safety record than Massey but is taking its lumps, having lost $2 billion in one quarter last year. Coal in general has been in the tank thanks to cheap natural gas and some new federal environmental rules plus a slow-down in Asia’s demand for coal to make steel.

Naturally, the beleaguered coal industry wants to beat back what it considers onerous regulations.  It was a major bankroller of Mitt Romney’s campaign last year and Alpha was a big participant. Cuccinelli is perfect because he denies that carbon dioxide is responsible for climate change – a pet issue for King Coal. So, he was instrumental in the right wing’s counter attacks on the “War On Coal” last election.

What bothers me is not that Cuccinelli would flack for them but why did it cost $7,750 for him and his parents, paid for by Alpha, to visit Southwest Virginia. Last year I published a book on Massey and had made many trips to Southwest Virginia, including Alpha’s headquarters and a mine. I paid for it myself and I think it cost me maybe $200 in gas and a night or two at a two star motel at maybe $110 a night. I ate at Hardees where a steak biscuit is about $1.50 although I did splurge at a fancy Abingdon restaurant that had knock-out martinis with blue cheese filled olives.

But it didn’t cost me $7,750 or even one third of that.

Would McAuliffe or Warner have accepted a such largesse? I am sure they have moved and grooved with the rich and famous for years but both men are in a position to say “no thanks.”

And that is what Cuccinelli and McDonnell should have said, even if Virginia has hardly any rules on gifts.

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Posted in Abortion, Children and families, Consumer protection, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Economic development, Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal, Finance, Governance reform, Money in politics, Politics

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Corruption? This is Virginia!

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 11 Comments

 By Peter Galuszka

An old adage in journalism has it that good stories just keep getting better.

And so it is with the saga of Jonnie Williams Sr. and the family of Robert F. McDonnell, the governor. First we learn, courtesy of The Washington Post, that the head of Star Scientific gave McDonnell’s daughter $15,000 worth of food for her Executive Mansion wedding in 2011 along with $100,000 worth of corporate jet rides for McDonnell and his staff.

Now we also learn that Williams paid for McDonnell to vacation at Smith Mountain Lake and loaned him a Land Cruiser and a $190,000 Ferrari.

There’s nothing illegal about any of this given Virginia’s toothless government accountability laws. Gifts have to be disclosed annually and the only problem seems to have been that McDonnell did not disclose the wedding meal because the gift was for his daughter even though he signed papers for the wedding celebration.

One reason why Virginia is so incredibly weak in regulating donations and gifts to public figures is another one of its conceits. There is an old saw that if one is elected to office he or she must be a gentleman or lady, after all they are Virginians. Presumably, this also means they are appropriately of English or Anglo Saxon ancestry.

There’s another reason as well, according to Gordon Witkin of the State Integrity Investigation Project that flunks Virginia for acountability.

In an interview I did with him for Style Weekly, he says that Virginia’s preference for loose regulation is based on its limited government, libertarian mind set that is more in keeping with attitudes in the Plains or Western states than the Northeast or Midwest. “It’s like in Wyoming where a state senator was asked why it was OK to make a right or left turn in a car without signaling. His response: “If you want to make a turn, it’s no one else’s damned business.”

That’s about the size of it among some of the most influence conservatives in the state, including gubernatorial hopeful Kenneth Cuccinelli, unless, of course the matter involves abortion in which case the state will add on all sorts of regulations.

Witkin’s group gave Virginia an “F” its recent survey. The Old Dominion was one of eight states to get the rating and was ranked 47th out of 50 stats. The ranking was based on awful scores in public access to information, executive and judicial accountability and budgetary, lobbying and ethics enforcement. “The systems and procedures in Virginia for accountability and procedure are weak,” says Witkin.

Denise Roth Barber, managing director of the National Institute on Money and State Politics, based in Helena MT, says that “Virginia is one of four states that have no limits on contributions. It is one of seven states with no limits on corporate giving.”

Virginia also allows unlimited gifts as long as they are disclosed annually. Florida, by contrast, forbids any gifts at all, including a free cup of coffee.

Virginia is also one of nine states that have no ethics commissions. The State Corporation Commission, which oversees business and sets electricity rates, is  immune from the Freedom of Information Act.

Why so lax? One explanation is that years ago, the idea took somehow shape that Virginia’s politicians are gentlemen and ladies above the tackiness of graft. That would be in marked contrast to such sleazepots such as Illinois and New Jersey, which, curiously, received a “C” and a “B+” ranking for accountability the State Integrity survey. Witkin says that states such as these erect tighter rules after significant scandals.

This leads to a chicken or egg kind of problem. “I don’t think the level of public corruption in Virginia is high at all,” says political analyst Bob Holsworth, noting that the survey rated the toughness of laws not how crooked a state is. However, in light of the McDonnell wedding meal, ‘the gift issue is clearly a loophole that should be closed,” Holsworth adds. For starters, he says, gift disclosures should include immediate family members of the public official.

Sounds like a great place to start.

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Posted in Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Electoral process, Finance, Money in politics, Politics, Regulation, Uncategorized

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Re-engineering Criminal Justice in Richmond

Posted on April 10, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 1 Comment

Richmond City Jail. Photo credit: Scott Elmquist, Style Magazine

by James A. Bacon

The average cost for housing an inmate in Virginia’s jails and prisons runs roughly $25,000 a year. Add to that the fact that some jails are antiquated, overcrowded and need replacing. The Richmond City Jail, for instance, designed in the 1960s to hold 856 inmates, is routinely crammed with a number that fluctuates around 1,400. To address the severe overcrowding, the City of Richmond plans to open a new, state-of-the-art facility in 2014 at a cost of $134 million.

But the new hoosegow will be designed for only 1,030, not 1,400. What gives? Won’t it be almost as overcrowded the day it opens? Doesn’t it make sense to build a bigger jail?

Not necessarily. Building a bigger jail would be the easy, brain-dead thing to do. But it wouldn’t necessarily be the right thing — either for the inmates or for Richmond taxpayers.

“The opening of the new jail serves as a catalyst to do things we’ve been thinking about doing for a long time,” Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Herring told me for an article I just published in Style Weekly. “It more or less forces our hands.”

A task force headed by David Hicks, senior policy advisor to Mayor Dwight Jones, is working on a plan to reduce the city’s inmate population. Although key details still need to be hammered out, the broad outlines are clear enough:

  • Mentally ill. Stop throwing the mentally ill into jail because there’s no other place to put them. It would cost taxpayers half as much money to treat them effectively in the community.
  • Non-violent offenders. Petty thieves, vandals, deadbeat dads and even small-time drug dealers don’t need to spend time in jail. They should be diverted to a “day reporting center” during the day at half the cost.
  • Pre-trial inmates. Re-think the city’s bond policy. Inmates awaiting trial are required to post bond and come up with 10% of the cash themselves. Most don’t have the money, and they spend a week on average taking up jail space while scraping up the money from friends and relatives. Studies show that requiring people to post bond does not make them any more likely to show up in court.

Sheriff C.T. Woody says it should be possible to reduce the jail population by half, saving millions of dollars and posing little additional safety risk to Richmonders. There are questions whether the city can achieve its ambitious goals before the new jail opens. But Herring says, “Whether we hit the target on day one is less important than the reforms we’re putting into place.”

For details, read the full article in Style.

Bacon’s bottom line: The Virginia Department of Corrections spends roughly $1 billion a year incarcerating prisoners — and that doesn’t include what local governments spend on jails. There is a lot of money to be saved from re-thinking our traditional “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” approach to criminal justice. The City of Richmond is engaged in fundamentally re-thinking how it provides essential government services — exactly what Virginians need to be doing across the board for everything from transportation and land use to education and health care.

Kudos to Hicks, Herring, Woody and everyone else involved in this effort to make government both more humane and more efficient.

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Posted in 2013, Budget, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Social services

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No Reform Three Years After Massey Disaster

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 3 Comments

 By Peter Galuszka

Three years ago today, a tremendous blast caused by bad safety conditions at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va., killed 29 miners. It was the worst coal mine disaster in this country in 40 years.

But three years later, very little has been done to toughen mine safety regulations so that serial violators such as the now defunct, Richmond-based Massey can squeeze profits from miners’ lives and also, from the mountains they have destroyed through severe mountaintop removal mining methods.

J. Davitt McAteer, a former U.S. Labor official and mining expert, and Beth Spence, a coalfield specialist for the American Friends Service Committee, write of failures on the state and federal level to stem safety abuses in the Charleston Gazette.

The West Virginia legislature passed a reform law in 2012 but much of it hasn’t been implemented, including improved measures to spray rock dust to keep down the coal dust of the type that helped carry Upper Big Branch’s destructive blast through seven miles of underground seams with fatal results.

The U.S. Congress is even more laggard. It has considered several versions of a law first proposed after Upper Big Branch by the late Sen. Robert Byrd to punish repeat safety violators, protect whistle blowers and make top management accountable when they make decisions that put safety at risk. The Byrd bill, as it is known, has been nowhere ever since the Republican Party, riding the Tea Party wave, took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010.

Other disturbing points include a new audit at the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration that it has implemented only about half of the internal changes recommended after the disaster. Also, legal teams at the Labor Department assembled to force mine operators to improve safety are being disbanded due to federal budget cuts. A favored Massey tactic was to mount legal challenges to most safety violations. The result was that important corrections were not made.

An even older problem seems unresolved. For years, miners were afflicted with pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease, a debilitating and often fatal illness that comes from breathing coal dust. For 24 of the miners whose bodies had enough lung tissue to sample at autopsy (the rest were too ripped apart by the blast) there was evidence of black lung even though some were only in their 20s.

True, the coalfields of Central Appalachia are in a slump now that natural gas has out-priced coal in the electric utility market. But the fields of Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky still produce plenty of metallurgical coal that is typically exported to make steel in China, India and Brazil. That was the product produced by the dead Massey miners.

Meanwhile, miners continue to die. In the first quarter of this year, eight miners have died including five in West Virginia alone. “This compares with five during the same period of 2012, two in 2011 and two in 2010 (before Upper Big Branch),” write McAteer and Spence.

Mind you, this is more than a year after Bristol-based Alpha Natural Resources, which bought Massey in 2011, entered into an agreement with federal prosecutors as part of a Massey settlement to spend millions in mine safety training and improvement.

The Alpha deal, however, has no legal clout over the coal industry. It would take legislation for that.

Sadly, miners’ lives don’t seem important enough to merit new laws.

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Posted in Courts and law, Economic development, Economy, Energy, Environment, Health care, Money in politics, The Economy

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What’s the Deal With Star Scientific, McDonnell and Cuccinelli?

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 10 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

What, exactly, is the relationship between Governor Robert F. McDonnell, his family, and Attorney Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli with the head of a money-losing, tobacco-related dietary supplement maker that is the target of federal prosecutors?

All involve Jonnie R. Williams Sr., chief executive of Star Scientific, a Henrico County-based firm that has sold discount cigarettes, smokeless tobacco products and dietary supplements, including one called Anatabloc, that might someday have medical applications, according to The Washington Post in a front-page story today. A key ingredient for Anatabloc is found in tobacco and other plants, the newspaper says.

Star was sued last week by a former shareholder, Francis J. Reuter, who claims that Star misled investors about research involving the dietary supplements and the fact that the firm has been subpoenaed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Eastern Virginia.

The Post details links between Star and Williams and McDonnell and his family. Not only was Star a major campaign contributor to McDonnell, it allowed the governor to ride on its corporate jet and provided $15,000 worth of catered food, including shrimp cocktails, for the Executive Mansion wedding of his daughter Cailin in 2011.

McDonnell’s wife, Maureen, a former Washington Redskins cheerleader and skilled marketer, attended a Florida conference to tout Star’s products three days before her daughter’s wedding, the Post reports.

From 2009 to 2012, Star gave $130,000 to Virginia officials and a political action committee that supports McDonnell, the Post says.

The Star case becomes even more intriguing with Cuccinelli’s involvement. The attorney general and Williams are personal friends. Cuccinelli has stayed at Williams house and used his boat. In 2010, Cuccinelli bought 5,060 shares of Star stock at $1.98 and later increased his holdings by more than 3,500 shares at $2.79 a share. He sold 1,500 shares at $4.70 a share last year, the Post says, making a $7,000 profit.

Cuccinelli, however, failed to disclose his financial interests in Star for more than a year. An aide told the Post that the attorney general did not realize that his financial interest in the firm had passed the $10,000 threshold needed for reporting, but has since updated his disclosure. Records also show that Cuccinelli stayed at Williams’ house, used a lake home and a boat owned by Williams, was given a trip to Kentucky valued at $3,200 and a box of “food supplement” valued at $6,700.

A spokesman for McDonnell says the governor did not disclose Williams’ wedding gift of the catered meal because the gift was not intended for him. McDonnell and Williams declined to be interviewed directly by the Post.

Star Scientific had been seen by some of the state’s business elite as a way the Old Dominion can wean itself from its historic dependence upon tobacco by deriving healthy products form it. Star has attempted to do that over the years and dropped selling tobacco products last year in favor of dietary supplements and skin cream products. Last year, the firm lost $22.9 million and laid off some of its employees. It needs Anatabloc to be successful, the Post reports.

Star Scientific says that the lawsuit against it by Reuter has no merit.

This intriguing story is bound to become more interesting.

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Posted in Courts and law, Economic development, Economy, Governance reform, Money in politics, Politics, Science & Technology

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“One Piece At a Time”

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 7 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Straying from the Virginia plantation, I’ve been noticing how Cyprus, a small historic island nation in the Mediterranean Sea, is once again acting the tail wagging the Euro-system dog and is affecting the finances of many farflung people.

The Euro-crisis has taken hold in tiny Cyprus, forcing such draconian suggestions as a tax on all bank accounts and account closings. The uncertainty, once again, has rattled global markets and is affecting the investments of millions, including mine.

The reality of Cyprus is that much of the hot money there, according to Joe Nocera of The New York Times, is from Russia where a paucity of rule of law encourages rich Russians to park their cash elsewhere lest it be confiscated by Vladimir Putin or who knows whom else.

Cyprus has long been a jumping off place for questionable Soviet or Russian activities for decades., be they illegal arms, drugs or dollars.

Example, back in the mid 1990s, when I was an American news correspondent in Moscow, I got to travel to Izhevsk, an industrial town in the central province of Udmurtia a couple of hours by air from the capital.

Izhevsk had been closed for many years to foreign visitors because it is the home of the Kalashnikov assault rifle and other vital defense plants. The city had something like five main factories where various forms of the venerable AK were made, although plenty were made under license in countries such as China, Romania and Poland.

The day my photographer and I got there, the city was in turmoil. A high ranking police officer and most of his family, including a couple of his children who were themselves police officers, were slaughtered at his birthday party by Kalashnikov-wielding thugs who broke into his apartment.

The police official was about to launch a major crackdown on the illegal gun trade that had gotten out of control when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. It was an open secret in Izhevsk that factory workers were siphoning off gun parts in their lunch pails, sort of like in the Johnny Cash song about the pilfered car, “Once Piece at a Time.”

Many of the gun parts ended up, you guessed it, in Cyprus, where underground plants reassembled the AKs for sale on the world market.

We stayed in town long enough for the funeral of the police officers which was attended by 30,000 people.

Mind you, this happened almost 20 years ago. What’s sad is that this kind of sleazy dealing is still going on between Cyprus and Russia and the rest of us are affected. One can’t help put think of the euphoria that came when the Euro was adopted and how it has turned out to be a total disaster.

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Posted in Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Gun rights

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The Myth of Cuccinelli the “Straight Shooter”

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Groveton| 11 Comments

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Ken Cuccinelli spends a lot of time admiring himself. He’s long on portraying himself as a heroic figure fighting federal over-reach and short on the self-deprecating humor that evinces a certain level of humility. This habit is particularly notable when it comes to being a “straight shooter.” At the recent CPAC conference Cuccinelli gave a keynote speech. He almost threw his shoulder out of joint patting himself on the back and congratulating himself on being a “straight shooter.” But is he?

Kill Bill.  There is little doubt that Cuccinelli and his henchmen short circuited the democratic process in order to make sure he was the Republican nominee for governor. Cuccinelli used a deal from the smoke-filled back rooms of the Republican Party of Virginia to avoid an open primary in favor of a convention.  Cuccinelli knew that the extremists who frequent Republican conventions would put him on the ballot. Apparently, he was less sure of the rank and file Republicans who would have voted in an open primary. Not the straightest of shots there.

Channeling his inner Clinton. Cuccinelli’s web site, on the education section of the issues page, has this sentence:”I was raised in Fairfax County and attended public schools.”  One is led to believe that Mr. Cuccinelli’s views on education in Virginia are well formed since he is a product of Virginia’s public school system. Not so fast. Which one of Fairfax County’s many fine public high schools counts Cuccinelli as an alumnus? None of them. He went to high school at a very private, very expensive school in Washington, D.C.: Gonzaga College High School. Interestingly, the reference to Cuccinelli graduating from Gonzaga has been removed from his official biography. I am sure that Cuccinelli attended public school at some point in his life. However, shouldn’t a self-proclaimed “straight-shooter” write, “I was raised in Fairfax County and attended a mixture of public and private schools?”

Come hell or high water. One of Cuccinelli’s rare victories against the federal government came from a case where the Environmental Protection Agency wanted to force Fairfax County and Virginia to cut back on sediment pollution caused by runoff into the Accotink Creek. Cuccinelli derisively accused the EPA of trying to regulate water as a pollutant. That statement is an outright lie. Cuccinelli personally argued the case. The judge’s opinion states, “Both parties agree that sediment is a pollutant and stormwater is not.” I guess “straight shooters” can take a little liberty with the truth when it suits their needs. H/T – Blue Virginia.

Rippert’s Read Out.  Cuccinelli is as slippery as a greased eel. He uses back- room deals to stab members of his own party in the back. He ignores the teachings of the Jesuits at Gonzaga High School and lies through omission about his own educational background. He knowingly lies about the EPA in his comments regarding the Accotink case. Cuccinelli a straight shooter? Yeah, and I’m Brad Pitt’s brother.

– D.J. Rippert  

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Posted in 2013, Courts and law, Politics, Water-waste water

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