Category Archives: Electoral process

McGlothlin’s GiftGate Connection

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 17 Comments

mcglothlinBy Peter Galuszka

The McDonnell GiftGate scandal and issues about the disclosure of money and gifts to Virginia politicians has only become more intense.

The Washington Post reported today that Maureen McDonnell, wife of the governor, accepted $36,000 as a paid consultant last year while her husband listed her work as that of a trustee of a philanthropic foundation run by a coal baron.

The Post says that, in fact, Ms. McDonnell was paid as a consultant by the United Company, a coal and real estate firm in Bristol, rather than for the Frances G. and James W. McGlothlin Foundation as her husband reported in state filings.

In doing so, the Post says, “the governor never had to say on his disclosure form how much she was paid.” Spouses of elected officials must report incomes more than $10,000.

First off, the news ratchets up the tension on McDonnell, who did not disclose payments of $15,000 for a wedding meal for his daughter from another firm, Star Scientific, among other benefits. The FBI and the Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney are investigating.

The new twist includes a new player, James W. McGlothlin, a conservative multi-millionaire who is one of the state’s and Richmond’s biggest philanthropists. A Southwest Virginia native, McGlothlin made lots of money mining and selling metallurgical coal of which his birthplace and surrounding areas have rich reserves.

He started United Coal Co. in the 1970s and branched into other ventures such as golf courses and pharmaceuticals. He sold out for a while and then came back to run the firm which he sold in 2009 for about $1 billion to Ukraine’s Metinvest firm, owned by Rinat Akhmetov, said to be one of Europe’s richest individuals.

Along the way, McGlothlin racked up considerable wealth that he has given away. Perhaps his single largest donation was $100 million for an architecturally significant wing at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond along with a $70 million trove of   19th and 20th century artwork, including pieces by Mary Casatt and Winslow Homer. Through his foundation, McGlothlin has supported other good works, such as funding research at the medical school at Virginia Commonwealth University.

A staunch conservative, McGlothlin was a major player in a controversy involving the 2005 firing of Gene Nichol, the president of the College of William & Mary who had been deemed too liberal by critics. Nichol was blamed for changing how a Christian cross was displayed at a chapel and for supporting an art show by sex industry workers. McGlothlin, an alumnus of both W&M undergrad and law school, supposedly threatened to withhold a $12 million donation to the school over Nichol.

McGlothlin told the Post that Maureen McDonnell was paid by his firm and not his foundation although McDonnell reported on state disclosure filings also put out by the Virginia Public Access Project that she had been a “trustee” of the McGlothlin foundation. Apparently, the state’s First Lady made $36,000 — more than a beginning school teacher makes in a year — by spending a few days talking about philanthropy.

Two other points: Ms. McDonnell also had worked in some capacity for Star scientific boosting its dietary supplement products that got her husband in trouble.

Also, as I noted a few days ago, the non-partisan, non-profit VPAP, where many get their information about political giving in Virginia’s lax system, cannot be relied upon if inaccurate information is put into state disclosure filings made by politicians. VPAP is a service, and a good one, but it has no investigative role to vet the data it uses. It never had that mission and there is no state ethics commission to check into filings. That seems up to the news media and prosecutors who made or may not know if something is amiss.

The latest McDonnell disclosure only shows the weakness of the current system.

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My Moment of VPAP Clarity

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 15 Comments

star scientific By Peter Galuszka

Last week, the Virginia Public Access Project held its annual luncheon and invited gubernatorial candidates Kenneth Cuccinelli and Terry McAuliffe to speak. No debate. No questions. Just a few minutes of remarks.

The ballroom of the downtown Richmond Marriott was filled with the usual suspects, including lobbyists, lawyers, corporate officials and politicians. Some reporters were there, but they had been informed that their lunch was not included.

I attended and managed to sneak in a glass of iced tea when I came upon a moment of clarity. VPAP performs a useful service by detailing with sophisticated software and data bases who gives what to whom. I use the services of the non-partisan system all the time and over time, it has become the go-to source in Virginia. There are other services such as the Center for Responsive Politics, but this is the one that drills down in Old Dominion affairs.

Therein lies the problem. VPAP is part of an institution that backs inadvertently benefits from the lax and permissive Virginia-style rules of gift giving to politicians. Gov. Robert McDonnell and Cuccinelli are both caught for not readily disclosing the apparently legal gifts they got from the executive of a suspect company, Star Scientific that is under investigating by the FBI and a local prosecutor.

At the luncheon table sipping my purloined iced tea, I noticed the VPAP program. Its biggest contributors ($10,000 each) are Alpha Natural Resources and Dominion. The former is a Bristol-based coal firm that bought out Massey Energy whose officials are the target of a federal probe that they spent a decade conspiring against mine safety officials and the result was the death of 29 in a blast at Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va., on April 5, 2010, the worst in 40 years.

Alpha says it is trying to correct the defects in the Massey organization in bought but it, too, is a huge player on the political front and has its own agenda, such as keeping alive a destructive type of mining called mountaintop removal. Dominion has a highly sophisticated advocacy operation since its survival depends on regulation. Other big-time VPAP contributors are car dealers, tobacco giant Altria, Comcast, lobbying law firm McGuireWoods, health groups, a few other utilities, and so on. Even NOVA real estate John “Til” Hazel is on the list, but much farther down.

I really didn’t see any citizen groups or anyone that wasn’t bound to benefit by giving legal gifts of jumbo shrimp, lakeside vacations or money to someone in a position of power in the state.

The problem, therefore, isn’t the fact that anything is illegal, but just about everything is and it is peculiar to Virginia. I was amused to read New York Times columnist Gail Collins write this morning about Virginia’s anything-goes gift policies:

“Under Virginia’s ethics laws the governor can accept anything – house, car private jet, former Soviet republic – as long as he puts it in the proper form.”

Ms. Collins details the familiar Giftgate issues, stating:

“Looks like an investigation for Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli. Except — whoops – it turned out that Cuccinelli had also taken gifts from the same business man, some of which he, too, had failed to report.”

She adds: “ Perhaps unreported freebies will be a big campaign issue. Although in a more perfect world, voters might focus on the attorney general’s two-year investigation of a University of Virginia scientist for the crime of believing in global warming.”

All good points from someone far enough from Virginia and its entrenched gift-giving structure that is designed precisely to enhance the influence of the rich and elite while pretending to let all Virginians now what is going on.

It is time for a basic rethink and restructure.

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Posted in Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Finance, Governance reform, Money in politics, Politics, Regulation

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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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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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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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McAuliffe: Can a Schmoozer Transform?

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 3 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

On Easter Sunday, I was driving in a cold rain to Charlottesville for a family event. My cell phone started beeping with messages from Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe.

He said he was on his way to his own family brunch but wanted to tap me for $5. I got similar messages from two other staffers.

Why bother me at Easter? Political analyst Larry Sabato wondered the same thing. In a tweet that day he complained about finding “11 obnoxious messages for $$$. Now I know the answer to the age old Q; Is nothing sacred?”

And that may be McAuliffe’s biggest problem as he faces arch-conservative Ken Cuccinelli in the off-year governor’s race. In my profile of him in Style Weekly, I note that McAuliffe is trying to rein in an expansive personality that has made him a top political schmoozer and fundraiser for Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

A decades’ long political operative who has never been in elected office, he can be bombastic and smooth, as his recent dealings with GreenTech Automotive shows. He flirted with Virginia for a hybrid  car plant before going to Mississippi. He has been accused of somehow using the car plant to win special visas for foreign workers and maybe misleading the Virginia Economic Development Partnership about his intentions in the Old Dominion.

Meanwhile, he must overcome some of his misunderstandings of traditional Virginia thinking. However, it’s probably a good thing that he’s going to skip the Shad Planking in Wakefield tonight with its Confederate flags where Cuccinelli will be keynote speaker.

While polls are about 50-50 in the race, McAuliffe’s fundraising prowess has shown brightly. In the first quarter, he raised more than $5 million — more than double the take of Cuccinelli, who has hamstrung by not being allowed raise money during the General Assembly session because of his position as Attorney General. Read on…

(Also, here as a Q&A with McAuliffe)

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McAuliffe Pitches Jobs vs. Ideology

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 17 Comments

 By Peter Galuszka

“Fantastic,” says Terry McAuliffe as he listens to officials at the Culpeper, Va., campus of Germanna Community College talk about projects ranging from designing machine controls to a weight-loss competition. The tall, curly-haired McLean businessman — a Democrat who wants to be Virginia’s next governor — walks through a campus building while tossing out a barrage of questions and furiously taking notes. “I’m going to help with you with that, Ben,” he says to one teacher. “These community colleges are just jewels,” he remarks to another.

The visit to the Germanna campus, on which I tagged along in February, is part of McAuliffe’s effort to cast himself as a moderate jobs creator in a head-to-head campaign against firebrand Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II. The off-year race is already attracting national attention as Republicans seek to turn the page from their drubbing in the 2012 elections. The media are watching closely to see how Cuccinelli will play his hand — how much will he tone down the rhetoric that’s made him a star on the right? — and a flood of out-of-state money is expected to flow to both candidates.

“My focus is all on economic development,” McAuliffe says flatly. “It’s job-creation, and that’s why I am touring every community college in Virginia. That is my focus — to bring mainstream, pro-business ideas. My opponent’s more into a social, ideological agenda.”

This bread-and-butter strategy is as obvious as it is essential. Early polls show the two candidates running neck and neck, but Cuccinelli has assets that could give him an edge: experience in state government and a better-known name. News this week that Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling doesn’t have the cash to mount an independent bid only puts more pressure on McAuliffe to reach beyond the safely anti-Cuccinelli, Democratic base. University of Virginia analyst Larry Sabato and his colleagues noted that Bolling’s decision leaves the state with “two deeply flawed candidates” who “have limited positive appeal.”

McAuliffe indeed has baggage to overcome. In decisively losing the Democratic primary for governor in 2009 to underwhelming state Sen. Creigh Deeds, he was unable to shake off an image as a hard-charging Democratic Party operative and former fundraiser for Bill Clinton. More recently, the Connecticut-born banker-turned-entrepreneur has been criticized for locating a hybrid-car factory in Mississippi instead of Virginia — a story line that offers an obvious counterattack to his Virginia-jobs-first appeal.

McAuliffe clearly will have to contend again with accusations that he is a carpetbagger out of touch with Virginia’s problems. The Cuccinelli campaign played that card this month when it ridiculed McAuliffe for urging in a tweet from Florida that Virginia residents take care as snow approached. McAuliffe’s answer is to stress his Old Dominion ties: “My wife and I have lived in the same home in Northern Virginia for 21 years,” he says. “We have five children. I want our children to stay here and have jobs.”

This outsider problem may actually be less than meets the eye. Plenty of successful Virginia politicians did not grow up in the Old Dominion. One is none other than hugely popular Democrat Mark Warner, an Indiana-born entrepreneur who ran Douglas Wilder’s 1989 campaign for governor before becoming a successful governor himself and then a U.S. senator.

Warner’s brand of tech-savvy centrism clearly has not been lost on McAuliffe. As he steps through classrooms at Germanna, he regularly brings up Warner’s name. He also praises fellow Democrat Tim Kaine, another former governor who became a U.S. senator, and even Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, as pro-business leaders. In contrast with Cuccinelli, McAuliffe backs McDonnell’s breakthrough with the General Assembly that produced the first real money for roads since 1986. “I’ve got to give Gov. McDonnell credit for keeping the discussion going,” he says.

The big question is whether identifying with practical politicians such as McDonnell will be enough to distance independents and moderate Republican voters — who might be turned off by McAuliffe’s deep history with the Democratic Party — from Cuccinelli and the tea party movement that stands with him.

Cuccinelli may be wondering the same thing. Lately, he seems to be avoiding inflammatory rhetoric (there was hardly a reference to gays, abortion or any other social flashpoint to be found in his recent book about constitutional federalism). He might be wise to stick to that approach. McAuliffe is clearly planning to pounce if Cuccinelli goes rogue.

“I always say the most important family value you can have is a job,” McAuliffe says at the end of his community college tour. “There’s a real difference between us, and we can’t be sending out signals with a social-ideological agenda that says that people aren’t wanted. We can’t divide people. We’ve got to unite them.”

(Note: This is article appears in the Local Opinions section of The Washington Post)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-frame-mcauliffe-wants-jobs-vs-ideology/2013/03/15/caf57a3e-8c11-11e2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story.html

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Bolling says, “No.” Who Really Gains?

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Groveton| 6 Comments

Don’t send me the Bill.  Bill Bolling today announced that he will not run for Governor of Virginia in 2013.  A copy of the Lieutenant Governor’s full statement can be found on his website.  In the missive Bolling admits that he seriously considered an independent run.  He also believes that he would have been a good candidate and the right kind of governor for Virginia.  However, he cites three main reasons for not running – fundraising, alienating the Republican Party and the current hyper-partisan political process.

Channeling Woody Hayes.  Woody Hayes was best known as the iconic head football coach of Ohio State.  He was once quoted as saying that, “Only three things can happen with a forward pass and two of them are bad.”  Hayes’ boring approach led the Ohio State Buckeyes to a 205-61-10 record.  I suspect that Bill Bolling might be looking at this election in the same way Woody Hayes looked at forward passes.

Could Bolling win?  Probably not.  Ken Cuccinelli’s hijacking of the Republican nominating “process” (think of the Cantina Scene from the original Star Wars) left Bolling too little time for fund raising.  As Bolling wrote in his announcement, “ To run a winning campaign I would have needed to raise at least $10-$15M.  That’s a very difficult thing to do without the resources of a major political party and national donors at your disposal.”

Perils of menage a trois.  If Bolling ran and lost he would face a dim future regardless of who won.  If McAuliffe won Bolling would be blamed by the Republicans for costing Cuccinelli the race.  Then he would disappear into the unelected woodwork in a McAuliffe Administration.  If Cuccinelli won it would be after campaigning against Bolling.  No doubt “the Cooch” would feel that he won in spite of Bolling.  No room at the inn in a Cuccinelli administration.

He who turns and runs away.  Lives to fight another day.  By dropping out Bolling has opened a pretty big door.  He’s still probably toast if Cuccinelli wins. Cuccinelli as governor becomes the face of the Republican Party in Virginia and bad blood takes a long time to dry in this state.  Meanwhile, Bolling goes back to his insurance executive gig without any particular spotlight.  However, if McAuliffe wins it’s a different story.  Cuccinelli ends up in the wilderness while Bolling leads the opposition.  Plenty of spotlight for an opposition leader – even if he doesn’t hold elected office.

60 ways to leave your lover.  Bill Bolling was born in June, 1957.  He’ll have just turned 60 at the time of the next governor’s election in 2017.

Playing the odds.  Much of what I have written has been discussed by others – especially Paul Goldman.  However, I’ll take what’s been said a step further – Bolling needs Cuccinelli to lose.  In fact, the worse he loses, the better for Bolling’s 2017 chances.  Bolling’s calculation involved assessing his odds of winning against Terry McAuliffe’s odds of winning.  Once he decided that McAuliffe had a better chance to win than he did, the die was cast.

What do you feed an invisible cat?  Evaporated milk.  Look for Bolling to disappear during the campaign.  Remember, he needs Cuccinelli to lose (preferably badly).  But he can’t risk alienating the Republicans by speaking out against “the Cooch.”  Bolling’s third reason for not running (hyper-partisanship) gives him cover during this election.  As Bolling writes, “Politics is much different today than it was when I was first elected.  In many ways I fear that the ‘Virginia way’ of doing things is rapidly being replaced by the ‘Washington way’ of doing things and that’s not good for Virginia.” How long will Bolling refrain from re-entering the mud of modern day Virginia politics?  Until Nov 6, 2013.

– D.J. Rippert

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Posted in 2013, Electoral process, Politics

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The Lessons of the 2013 General Assembly

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 21 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

If there’s any good news from the 2013 General Assembly session, it is that the hard right’s strange hold on taxation has been broken. Republicans can start acting like responsible adults once again instead of dogmatic shills or spoiled children.

Gov. Robert F. Donnell and legislators found a way to raise badly needed money for transportation although it came via a very bad law that ties itself up like a contortionist doing this and that when all that needed to be done was to simply raise the gasoline tax for the first time in 26 years.

The Democrats were right to strong-arm McDonnell into going along with expanding Medicaid. It would have been absolutely ridiculous for Virginia to hold its stubborn head high and deny thousands of needy people medical assistance so they can feel good about some ludicrous oath from Grover Norquist they may have recited at one point to get votes. The feds will be paying for the expansion until 2016 and then for 90 percent of it. Imagine a well fed delegate saying, “No, you poor person can’t have health care because it is doctrinally impure!”

The upshot is is that we need to get of the Grover Norquists, the Tea Baggers and all their ilk to get on with the serious business of running the state and country. The sequestration debacle is more than embarrassing for its stupidity. So is Kenneth Cuccinelli with Bob Marshall cheering him to to find any bogus constitutional challenge to anything he finds political impure as far as taxation.

The bottom line is that if you want fixed roads, good schools and a decent place to live, you have to pay for them through taxes. Simple. You can’t depend on private industry to see you through, especially not when a good chunk of it in the Old Dominion is actually federal government money that’s about to be cut off in a big way. You can’t do it through little shell games with public private partnerships to build roads you often do not need. And you just can’t kick the can to younger generations so you can remain holy.

In other words, the days of the Tea Party, “Boomergeddon” and all the clarion calls to the need for budget cutting are over. They’ve been over for a while. We get it. We’ve been spending too much. But it is idiotic to go cold turkey without some thought given to it because you will crash the economy and die of the DTs. You don’t cure a crash victim by denying him blood. That’s not voodoo economics, that’s vampire economics. You need a balance and that’s exactly what the Boomergeddons and Baconauts want to deny us.

As for McDonnell, well, he’s finally got his legacy. It looks pretty messy. He did manage to get more money for roads, but he did through a Rube Goldberg contraption of taxation. He has a totally wrong-headed tax on alternative vehicles which shows,once again, just how Neanderthal much of the thinking in the General Assembly is.

McDonnell failed to get legacies through privatizing state alcohol stores or erecting offshore oil rigs. Last year, the legislature got so out of control with social conservative nonsense — another Tea Party legacy — that Virginia scored on national Snark TV for its inane war against women. That cost McDonnell a hell of a lot, namely the vice presidential nomination.

Now, he’s reportedly thinking about something bigger and I gather his platform for that will be his tax victory. Good Luck.

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Virginia Uranium’s Strangely Short Half-Life

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 4 Comments

Peter Galuszka

After years building up to a critical mass, Virginia’s uranium controversy never quite reached fission.

State Sen. John Watkins, a Republican and uranium backer from Powhatan, pulled the plug on his pro-mining bill Thursday as it faced certain death at a Senate committee. There are a couple of other legislative efforts out there, but it probably safe to say that the state’s now 31-year-old ban on mining uranium stays.

This year’s dramatic battle joined well-pocketed interest groups from both sides. Virginia Uranium, which wants to develop the 119 million pound deposit near Chatham, had given thousands of dollars in donations, trips and gifts to many legislators. Anti-mining advocates, including the cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach who feared for their drinking water sources, hired their own advocacy muscle. Ordinary folks down in the gently rolling hills of Pittsylvania County organized a strikingly tightly-disciplined and effective anti-mining campaign.

At the end of the day, however, the real reason uranium failed lurks behind the scenes far from the polished floors of the State Capitol.

The fact is that the dynamics of energy pricing are undergoing a huge change in this country. A flood of natural gas, some from controversial “fracking” drilling methods, is making other forms of electricity generation, notably nuclear, financially less attractive.

Back in 2007, uranium prices were about $140 a pound. That touched off a renewed effort to mine the Coles Hill Farm tract in Pittsylvania County, one of the country’s largest uranium deposits.

As both sides of the argument poured money into lobbyists’ pockets, something happened that was beyond their control. Uranium prices set by global demand started dropping. By 2010, they had plummeted to about $70 a pound because of the global economic slowdown. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011, they fell to the mid-$40-a-pound level, where they are now.

What that means for uranium mining in Virginia can be explained with simple arithmetic. According to Brett Arends of the Wall Street Journal, “The industry needs prices to be at $75 to $80 a pound for future mine production to be profitable.” In other words, for Virginia Uranium’s project to work, prices would likely need to rebound by about $30 a pound. I have noted this in a previous blog.

The bad news for uranium continues. According to another article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, U.S. utilities are starting to shut down or consider dropping some of their nuclear power stations because of unexpectedly cheap natural gas. Richmond-based Dominion Resources has announced it is shutting down its Kewaunee nuclear plant in Wisconsin this summer, even though it has 20 years left on its operating license.

Dominion says it is cheaper for it to meet its sales contracts with other utilities by buying electricity on the open market. Presumably that means electricity created by gas. Industry analysts believe that other nuclear utilities that might consider shutting down or have already idled some of their nuclear operations are Exelon Corp., Entergy Corp., Edison International and Duke Energy Corp.

The invasion of natural gas also means tough times for the future of nuclear power, which just a couple of years ago seemed on the verge of a rebound. According to the Journal, fixed costs for a power stations run $15,000 per megawatt for a modern gas plant, $30,000 for a coal plant and $90,000 for a nuclear plant. The newspaper notes that nukes also have extra costs because they need more security guards and have more demanding maintenance and spent fuel storage issues. It is hard to recover the higher costs because regulators who set electricity rates in some states require utilities to go with the cheapest fuel possible.

To be sure, demand for nuclear power still looks promising in places such as India and China, but that is unlikely to result in a spike in global uranium prices for at least a few years.

This all made Virginia Uranium’s proposal look shakier than ever, despite all of the hullaballoo, battling op-ed pieces in newspapers and expenses-paid trips to Paris and Canada organized by the firm.

For now, at least, uranium is dead. Its killer was cold, hard economics.

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