Category: Courts and law
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The Changing Definition of “Law and Order”
Conservative thinking about crime and “law and order” is changing. When I wrote about overcrowding in Richmond city jail earlier this year, I had little inkling that there was a larger, national conservative movement to re-evaluate ways to reduce jail and prison populations. But it turns out there was. I was surprised to find that…
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Now, The Sharks Are Turning on Each Other
By Peter Galuszka You know something bad is up when Gov. Robert F. McDonnell starts turning on his gift-giving pal Jonnie R. Williams Sr. of Star Scientific and federal prosecutors. On Friday, the troubled dietary supplement maker filed securities documents saying that the firm has been told by federal prosecutors that it would not be…
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Cuccinelli’s Strange Obsession
By Peter Galuszka Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli, now running as a Republican for governor, has had a number of strange obsessions: going doggedly after a climatologist over global warming issues he disagrees with and pushing to arm investigators involved with Medicaid fraud. But nothing compares with Cuccinelli’s stubborn insistence that sodomy should be illegal even…
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Rethinking Ethics in Virginia
By Peter Galuszka Kenneth Cuccinelli’s call for a special session of the General Assembly to consider plugging “severe holes” in the state’s ethics is outrageously self serving but it does show what may be a turning point in Virginia’s attitudes about disclosure and gift rules. It’s about time. Virginia has perhaps the most lax ethics…
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Tawana Brawley Surfaces… in Hopewell, of All Places
An oddity in the news: Tawana Brawley, the 15-year-old black girl who rocketed to momentary fame in 1987 for making racially charged accusations of rape, has surfaced in the public eye. And she’s living the Richmond area! Brawley had been laying low, living in Hopewell and working as a nurse at The Laurels of Bon…
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Another Probe: This Time It’s McAuliffe
By Peter Galuszka All Virginia’s gubernatorial race needs is another investigation for potential wrong-doing. Yet here’s another and it involves Democratic contender Terry McAuliffe. The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission is investigating two McAuliffe-connected firms. They are GreenTech Automotive and a sister firm, Gulf Coast Funds Management, according to the Washington Post. McAuliffe, a veteran…
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Time to Get Serious About Ethics Reform
By Peter Galuszka After months of embarrassing controversy, Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell announced today that he will return gifts that he and his family received from Jonnie R. Williams Sr., the head of a Henrico County dietary-supplement maker. McDonnell had earlier said that he had repaid $120,000 in loans provided to him and his…
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Border Crossing: a 4th of July Memory
By Peter Galuszka Sorry, dear blog readers, but on this Independence Day, I got so depressed reading the mindless blathering on the “Freedom of Americans” on the editorial pages of the Richmond Times-Dispatch this morning that I just had to quote from the excellent book, “The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America’s…
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Overzealous Agents… or Symptomatic of Something Deeper?
The NSA collects meta-data on everyone… The IRS cracks down on Tea Party 501(c)4 applications… The DOJ subpoenas Associated Press phone records and spies on Fox News reporter James Rosen… The abuse-of-power scandals in Washington, D.C., grows so long that we become almost inured. That sort of thing could never happen in Virginia, could it?…
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Cuccinelli, Penguins and Natural Gas
By Peter Galuszka Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli’s strange episode involving a natural gas lawsuit involving one of his largest political contributors for his gubernatorial campaign raises yet another issue about his ethics. First, whatever was a Cuccinelli staffer doing advising a subsidiary of coal and gas giant CONSOL Energy, which has given Cuccinelli more than…
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A Call for Clemency
by Carrington Brown My life would have been a lot simpler had I not met Dustin Turner almost five years ago. Dustin has been in prison for 18 years for a crime he did not commit — a crime to which his SEAL swim partner has admitted. Unless Governor Bob McDonnell accepts a recently filed clemency…
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The Cooch’s Freak Show Dream Team
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Gun rights, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, TransportationBy 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…
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The Tea Party and IRS Abuse
By 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…
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Only Two Words Suffice: Holy Moly! Make that Three Words: Holy Friggin’ Moly!
Portsmouth 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.…
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GiftGate: “If I Were a Rich Man . . .!”
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…