The Virginia GOP - Today's Roman Inquisition

It's not just the Times-Dispatch which is bashing Virginia Republicans.  The Roanoke Times is running an editorial that compares today's Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly to the ignorance embracing members of the Roman Catholic Church Inquisition that condemned Galileo for stating that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of vice versa.  This comes after the Washington Post compared GOP opposition to Medicaid expansion to "Massive resistance" - i.e., the closing of public schools rather than allow black students to attend.  Frankly, both comparisons are right on and address the reality that bigotry, racism, and the celebration of ignorance are what motivate today's Republican Party of Virginia.  Here are highlights from the Roanoke Times editorial:

Virginia House Speaker Bill Howell issued a blistering news release Sunday, flaying the Washington Post for an editorial he called “patently offensive,” “outrageous” and “frankly indefensible.”
And that was just in the first paragraph. He was reacting to “Massive resistance, again, in Virginia,” in which Post editors likened the House of Delegates’ refusal to expand Medicaid in Virginia to the commonwealth’s blighted history of massive resistance to school desegregation.

If a historical analogy is wanted, there’s no need to stir up so raw an example of unreasoned policymaking. We’ve been thinking more along the lines of the Roman Inquisition.

Virginia needs Medicaid expansion. By building an impregnable wall against all offers to compromise on particulars to make this part of Obamacare accessible, the House has left the state’s working poor and lower middle class without the means to get health care coverage.

Immovable faith in conservative dogma seems to have blinded the House Republican majority to the reality that, without government subsidy, as many as 400,000 adult Virginians will go without primary health care, much less coverage for hospitalizations – and not for want of honest labor. So, they will ignore troublesome symptoms until they are desperately ill – or not ignore them, and crowd emergency rooms for treatment of minor ailments – because they work for little pay, with no benefits. In this, they do not fit a tenet of self-sufficiency: That any able-bodied adult capable of working can take care of life’s basic needs.

So how is this like the Roman Inquisition? House Republicans bring to mind the Congregation of the Roman Inquisition, which in 1633 silenced Galileo about his observations that supported Copernicus’s theory of the previous century: Earth, rotating on its axis every 24 hours, was orbiting the sun. Earth was not the center around which all of the universe spun.

So radical an idea contradicted church dogma, threatening the established order – though, despite the fears of the Catholic hierarchy, it really didn’t much grab the public imagination. “Common sense” at the time indicated it simply could not be true: The earth didn’t move under people’s feet.

The [Republican] position defies reason. Howell’s protestation that his own opposition “is based on serious worries over its fiscal implications and the effectiveness of the program” are rhetorical static. The federal government would pay almost all of the costs over time, and if – as Republicans claim to fear – it reneges on its promise, the state could withdraw.

People like Amy Hedges of Penhook, a divorced mother of three who works full time in a diner, volunteers one day a month at a nonprofit, and coaches three rec-league basketball teams. Oh, and she can’t afford health insurance. Columnist Dan Casey told her story last week; she wants to know why she does not qualify for a subsidy on the federal health insurance exchange set up under Obamacare. . . . House Republicans seem unable to accept that it exists for people like Amy Hedges.

The editorial gets one thing wrong.  It's not that the Republicans cannot grasp that such people exist.  It's that they simply do not care - despite all their blather about "Christian values."  They make the Pharisees look like pretty decent people in comparison.

For McDonnell Jury, It’s Back to the Basics

Virginia's ongoing soap opera - i.e., the criminal corruption trial of Bob and Maureen McDonnell - has now moved into waiting mode much like the summer wait for the answer of who shot JR on the old Dallas series.  The case has gone to the jury which received over two hours of instructions from the presiding federal judge.  A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the waiting game which, no matter the result will leave Virginia looking like a corrupt banana republic politically.  Here are highlights:

“And with that, we will send you out to begin your deliberations,” said U.S. District Court Judge James Spencer, concluding — after 2 hours and 10 minutes Tuesday — his detailed instructions to jurors in the Bob and Maureen McDonnell corruption trial. “You take your time. It’s your business now.”

Moments later, as the jurors filed out of Spencer’s seventh-floor courtroom, the prosecutors, the defense lawyers and the accused rose in the customary gesture of respect for the seven men and five women whose decisions could lead to the once-unthinkable: a former Virginia governor and his wife behind bars.

To convict or acquit Bob and Maureen on any and all of 26 counts requires the agreement of all 12 jurors. An 8-4 vote won’t cut it. A unanimous vote is mandatory to find the McDonnells guilty or not guilty.

Also, the trial could yield multiple verdicts, muddying a case that prosecutors represented as a clear example of government-for-sale.

The jury could convict Bob and Maureen on some charges; deadlock on others. If there’s a hung jury on certain counts, Spencer could direct jurors to keep working. Were the jury unsuccessful, he could declare a mistrial on the outstanding counts. The verdict on resolved charges would stand. The U.S. Justice Department might attempt a do-over on the unsettled issues.

For instance, Bob could be convicted on a single count of bank fraud; specifically, failing to disclose loans from the protected-from-prosecution Jonnie Williams Sr. on a refi application for the McDonnells’ cash-hemorrhaging resort properties.

Maureen, alone, could be found guilty of obstructing a criminal investigation. After she had been questioned by state police in 2013 on her relationship with Williams, Maureen returned the $20,000 in designer clothing he bought for her in New York. The togs were accompanied by a note in which Maureen said she’d planned to give them back. The government says she was trying to mislead investigators.

The government, Spencer said in his instructions, is not required to produce a contract or expressed agreement to a conspiracy. Plus, it’s not necessary to prove the scheme was successful; unsuccessful schemes are illegal, too.

Further, this corruption case does not require, nor does it rely on, an explicit exchange of goods for services, the so-called quid pro quo. The law recognizes — and the courts have affirmed — that such a trade could be based on a knowing wink and nod.

As for the penalties the McDonnells could face, they’re tougher for bank fraud than corruption.

A conviction for false statements to a federally insured financial institution carries a sentence of up to 30 years and a $1 million fine.

Twenty years is the maximum prison term on each of the corruption charges: conspiracy to commit honest-services wire fraud; honest-services wire fraud; obtaining property under color of official right; conspiracy to obtain property under color of official right, and obstruction of an official proceeding. These offenses can also carry financial penalties.

All in all, this case has been a train wreck for Virginia, but especially for GOP's pretense of upholding "family values."

Kool-Aid Drinking Republicans Go Nuts Over McDonnell Gay Priest Story

I guess it was bound to happen given the lunacy that now is the norm within the Republican Party as a whole and the Republican Party of Virginia in particular.  What am I talking about?  The reactions from the reality free folks at Bearing Drift, a conservative Virginia GOP blog , and the all too typical anonymous commentators who attack me yet lack the guts to reveal their own identities.  Insanity and cowardice seem to be the norm for these folks.  

At Bearing Drift there is a tirade under the headline "Virginia Democrat Bloggers Spew Homophobic Hatred" that accusing Democrats and "liberal bloggers" - which seemingly includes me - of being anti-gay because notice has been taken of Bob McDonnell's hypocrisy when it comes to (i) the "sanctity of marriage" and (ii) the acceptability of gay sex.  In 2003, McDonnell led a lynch mob of Virginia Republicans against then circuit court judge Verbena Askew over unsubstantiated claims that she had sexually harassed another woman.  McDonnell's crusade cause Askew her seat on the bench and first earned McDonnell the nickname "Taliban Bob."  It was during that lynch mob circus that McDonnell was asked if he had ever violated Virginia's sodomy statute to which he responded "not that I recall."    Here some of the drivel:

It’s sad when Democrats who pretend to care about their supporters show their true colors. That’s what Lowly at Blue Virginia did today, launching a hate-filled post targeting a priest who visited a “bawdy place” in the 1990s with a 41-year old man because he had the gall to allow Bob McDonnell to stay in his rectory during Obama’s political trial against him.

But it does show you an insight into the liberal extremist mind. Democrat bloggers, especially Lowly, must not really like gay people. They need their votes, and the fact that they don’t like religion makes gay people social “brothers in arms” with hatemongers like Lowly, but in reality they only use gay people to shore up their own power. 

Note how McDonnell's criminal indictment is described as "Obama's political trial against him."  These folks are insane.   

A cowardly comment on this blog - which will not be given the honor of being published attacks me in part as follows:

Dredging up an incident from a dozen years ago and making the priest the bad guy just seems so petty. He was not even convicted; the charges were dismissed.

Moreover, the writer turns the situation into one of merely being in a park after hours.  The cretin misses the point that the issue is not the priest (although he did plead guilty in a plea deal which is not what one does if there isn't a good chance of conviction) but rather McDonnell's hypocrisy.  Taliban Bob only wants to know gays when they can help him throw his wife under the bus.  He certainly had other option as to where he could stay if he found the marital home to chilly. .