They all put their misogyny on full display last week.
Trump: Offensive remarks about Fox News Debate Moderator Megyn Kelly.
Howell, Norment, and Virginia Republicans: Kicking a qualified woman off the Supreme Court of Virginia, attempts to defund women's health clinics.
Donald Trump's recent offensive comments were outrageous – but not any more outrageous than Virginia Republicans' latest front in their war on women.
“Donald Trump's war on women is alive and well in the Republican Party of Virginia – look no further than Speaker Howell and Leader Norment's efforts to kick a qualified woman off the Supreme Court,” said Morgan Finkelstein, Press Secretary at the Democratic Party of Virginia. “Donald Trump would be right at home in the Republican Party of Virginia.”
Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Tuesday, August 11. Also, click on that link to learn about the increasingly more-than-competitive economics and advanced technology of wind power.
(Wild waste of money…could have invested that in energy efficiency/solar/wind and gotten a gazillion times more bang for our buck! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…. – promoted by lowkell)
Dominion Virginia Power is projecting that the capital cost of a third nuclear reactor at its North Anna facility will total over $19 billion, according to filings in its 2015 biennial review before the State Corporation Commission (PUE-2015-00027).
This works out to over $13,000 per installed kilowatt, according to the testimony of Scott Norwood, an energy consultant hired by the Attorney General’s Department of Consumer Counsel to analyze Dominion’s earnings evaluations. He notes that this capital cost is “approximately ten times the capital cost of the Company’s new Brunswick combined cycle unit,” which will burn natural gas.
As a result of this high capital cost, the “total delivered cost of power from NA3 is more than $190 per MWh in 2028.” That translates into 19 cents per kilowatt-hour.
By comparison, in 2014 the average wholesale price of electricity in the PJM region (which includes Virginia) was 5.3 cents per kWh. Dominion currently sells electricity to its customers at retail for between 5.5 and 11 cents/kWh.
In other words, NA3 is ridiculously expensive.
Dominion had kept its cost projections for NA3 secret until this rate case forced the disclosure. Previously, executives had acknowledged only that the cost would be “far north of 10 billion.”
This cost revelation may point to the real reason Dominion pushed so hard for SB 1349, the 2015 legislation that insulates the company from rate reviews until 2022. As Norwood testifies, “DVP forecasts a dramatic increase in NA3 development costs over the next five years, during which there will be no biennial reviews.”
These costs are dramatic. A table included in Norwood’s testimony shows Dominion expects to have spent $4.7 billion on NA3 development by the end of 2020. By the time the SCC is allowed to review this spending, more than one-quarter of the total cost will have been spent, and Dominion will be looking to ratepayers to cover the bills.
With perfect deadpan, meanwhile, Dominion executives told legislators this year that SB 1349 was necessary to protect ratepayers from higher costs to be imposed by compliance with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan.
This isn’t the first time legislators have been snookered in the cause of NA3. Recall that in 2014 Dominion succeeded in lobbying for a law that allowed it to shift 70% of already-spent NA3 development costs onto ratepayers, some $323 million. The effect was to soak up the company’s over-earnings so it would not have to rebate millions of dollars to customers.
This year’s snookering was more comprehensive. Given that Dominion has continued to over-earn, those who opposed SB 1349 assumed it was this year’s version of the 2014 maneuver, designed to protect over-earnings this year and for years to come. Now it appears the real purpose of SB 1349 was to allow Dominion to spend freely on NA3 development costs in amounts that it knew would be unacceptable to state regulators, not to mention the public.
That Dominion thought it could do so in secret is especially reprehensible. Lawmakers and the Governor should be outraged by this deception, whether they voted for SB 1349 or not.
The Attorney General’s office is now trying to force Dominion to justify NA3 to regulators before it racks up billions in sunk costs. Norwood recommends that the SCC “initiate a proceeding to address the prudence of DVP’s planned future investments for development of NA3. This proceeding would allow the Company to present its case regarding the need for and cost effectiveness of NA3, including the value of the proposed project from a fuel diversity perspective and as a means to comply with any final version of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan and other potential future environmental regulations.”
One of the most critical races this year in Virginia is for the seat of retiring State Senator John Watkins (R) in the 10th State Senate district (Chesterfield County, Richmond City, Powhatan County; 51% Mark Herring district in 2013). If Democrats are to have any chance of taking back control of the Virginia State Senate, we absolutely need to pick up this seat, in addition to holding all the ones we do now. In the primary, as you might recall, I backed a strong progressive and environmentalist, Emily Francis, over two opponents. In the end, Francis finished second to Dan Gecker, who is the Democratic nominee against the guy in the video, Republican Glen Sturtevant.
Since June, Sturtevant has been busy posting on social media, including a series of “Conservations with Glen” on YouTube. To date, the subjects of these “conversations” have been: education, small business and public safety. Basically, .these videos have been vapid, milquestoast, whatever other word you want to use for “saying absolutely nothing beyond meaningless buzzphrases like ‘common sense solutions’ and ‘supporting public safety from top to bottom.'” In other words, they’ve said absolutely nothing of any substance. They also have most certainly NOT been “conversations” in any way; I just re-watched the first three videos, and the only person talking in them is the candidate, Glen Sturtevant — the voters are just silent props to Sturtevant’s brilliance, apparently.
Anyway, just a few minutes ago, I saw a new “conversation” with Sturtevant pop up. When I saw the title, “Obamacare,” I was wondering how Sturtevant would manage to say nothing while avoiding the obligatory right-wing hack job on the Affordable Care Act. This time, whether by design or by accident, it turns out that Sturtevant went from vapid milquetoast to standard, right-wing idiocy and lies.
To wit, according to Sturtevant, we need to get rid of “overburdensome” (is that a real word?) “regulations so that [small business owners] can start creating good-paying jobs again.” Of course, that’s utter horse****, as the economy’s been producing jobs steadily since Democratic leadership pulled our country out of the Bush/Republican Great Recession. As for “Obamacare,” Sturtevant finally allows someone other than himself to speak, an unnamed construction worker who claims that “Obamacare” has supposedly raised the cost of health care for his business (who knows if this is true, but it is very hard to believe – would love to see the details on that one!).
In response, Sturtevant looks the guy (in)sincerely in the eyes and promises that if he’s elected to the Virginia State Senate, he’s going to work on…rolling back and fighting against…making sure that Virginia is not expanding ‘Obamacare'” and instead “bringing those free-market principles into the health care system to drive down costs and to make health care affordable again and something that you can decide as an individual what you want, not the government telling you what they think you need to have.”
Of course, for anyone who knows anything at all about the U.S. health care system pre- and post-“Obamacare,” you know that all of that is just Fox “News”-style right-wing talking points with little-to-no connection to reality. In reality, of course, the Affordable Care Act was based heavily on conservative, market “principles,” including the “individual mandate” (see here for more on that, including that it first “appeared in a 1989 published proposal by Stuart M. Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation”). Same thing with the idea of “exchanges,” which are designed to allow consumers to compare plans at a glance and figure out which one works best for them. Same thing for keeping U.S. health insurance firmly in the private sector, instead of going to a single-payer system as in nearly every other industrialized country (or even allowing a robust “public option”). Finally, note that Republicans have never come up with a serious alternative to “Obamacare,” but instead have simply ranted and raved about how horrible it is (false), how it’s destroying the economy (wildly false), blah blah blah. Oh, and at the state level, thanks to an extremely foolish decision by the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court, Republicans have been able to block Medicaid expansion in Virginia and numerous other states.
That, in the end, is what Sturtevant is pledging to fight, since obviously the Virginia State Senate has no power whatsoever to “roll back” a federal law, in this case the Affordable Care Act. Perhaps along with not understanding economics or health care, Sturtevant also doesn’t understand the U.S. sytem of government? Regardless, the guy has no business being elected to the Virginia State Senate. Unless, of course, you want someone in there who ranges from vapid milquestoast to right-wing idiocy. But don’t we have enough of those folks in there already?
Imagine that you are a group of rich and powerful people eager to be still richer and more powerful. But you live in a democratic society that gives each citizen an equal vote and thus sets sets limit on how much power you can amass. So you decide to steal the people’s democracy.
How can this be done?
For starters, you would work to prevent the people from working together. As long as they can unite for common purposes, they can prevent you from gaining power over them.
Sowing hatred among them will work well to stop them from coming together. You don’t have to reach all the people–half will do. If one half hates and distrusts the other half deeply enough, that will suffice to ensure that the people will be unable to cooperate to achieve goals they have in common.
To sow this enmity, you will need a media system. Through that system, you continually tell the people who listen to you how terrible the others are. They are not your fellow citizens with a somewhat different point of view, you tell them. They are the enemy. They don’t love the nation; they have betrayed it. They want to steal your liberties and set up a tyranny over you.
Making one large group of basically decent citizens hate another large group of basically decent citizens requires getting people to believe many false ideas and “facts.” That’s not difficult in a totalitarian society where the ruling powers can block competing sources of information. But it’s a huge challenge in a democratic society where freedoms of speech and press give everyone access to information that can expose your lies.
This challenge can be met, however, by training the audience to listen to no one but you.
You teach them to disregard anything they hear from members of the political party opposing the one you have chosen as your instrument. You teach them to have contempt for the scientific and scholarly disciplines that pursue truth for its own sake. You teach them that all the media you don’t control are tools of the enemy. And you teach them to disrespect other nations whose judgments will likely cast what you’re doing in a harsh light.
It also helps, in selling lies, to continually feed people’s fears because fear makes it more difficult for people to think rationally.
Those steps are important but not enough. If the system you’re trying to take over is based on “one person, one vote,” the people can still take control. As part of your strategy, therefore, you will work to take power in the election process away from the vote (where citizens are equal) by increasing the power of money (whose unequal distribution favors you).
The more that wealth is able to buy elections, the more you can pick the winners, and the readier the winners will be to serve you and not the people. If there are laws that limit the role of money in elections, you’ll need to work behind the scenes for years to place judges who will sweep those laws away.
Even that is not a complete strategy for maximizing your power.
So long as you don’t completely control the government, you’ll want to weaken its ability to regulate — in the public interest — those economic organizations that made you rich and powerful to begin with.
To weaken government as a potential check on your power, you will use your propaganda apparatus to persuade those citizens who get their view of the world from you to distrust government, to believe that the biggest threat to their liberties is not from your stealing their government but from government being “too big.”
In these ways, you can come to dominate and exploit what had been a free people.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
[This piece will be running in newspapers in my conservative part of Virginia. I note that because it is relevant to my purpose to address not only those who agree with me, but also to challenge those on the other side. This embodies the strategy I recommend for this historic political battle against the force that has taken over the right: a strategy of “See the evil. Call it out. Press the battle.” (Showing people on the right the dark truth about what they are supporting is one important way of pressing the battle.)
Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Monday, August 10. Also, check out the video of “JEB” Bush kissing up to raving misogynist (and all-around nut) Erick Erickson.
*A “No” to Iran Means No Forever (“Voting no deprives this president, or a future president, of bargaining power over the Iranians. It isolates us in the world. And it allows Iran to move further toward a nuclear weapon, presenting the United States and Israel with terrible choices.”)
Time was when I couldn’t wait to move to NC, especially for family and my new location. It didn’t hurt that I’d leave behind then-Governor Ultrasound, the House of Delegates, and the repeated concern that one day Cuccinelli would actually get elected Governor. Good bye to the politically vicious US Rep. Morgan Griffith. (How did the 9th ever think that was a good idea?). In NC I was about to have a Democratic Governor, Lt Governor and AG. And the NC House was a bit more sane than Virginia’s. Adios Bob Marshall. Whoopee! 2012 changed all (the political part of) that.
We had barely arrived when we got gerrymandered out of Democrat US Rep. David Price’s district and into the district of then Tea Party darling, Renee (Ellmers, friend of Sarah–yep Palin campaigned for her). NC revoked its state voting rights act, lifted the moratorium on fracking, and set out to destroy virtually all the progress of the last 100 years. It conjured up the most creative and misanthropic “voter ID” bill (Voter ID was just the subterfuge). The Tea Party “had to destroy the state to save it.”
In short, despite the fact that I still love NC, we have become a national embarrassment. Out with an unpopular Gov. Bev Perdue (and markedly better one than what we have now). Instead we got Pat McCrory, a former Duke Energy exec and living proof that being a mayor doesn’t necessarily qualify one for the Bigs. He’s a caricature of a governor who accomplishes nothing except licking the boots of big donors, and whom no one respects however often he furrows his tiny little brow and tries to act serious and intelligent.
Last week he wept (yes, really) at at the resignation of wealthy donor/physician whom he had appointed to wreck Health and Human Services. She did not disappoint (him). Singularly unqualified and ideologically wingy she made an incredible mess. But, hey, it is “only” human lives lying in ruin. So, weep Mr. Governor, but not for Aldona Wos.
He also misleads–about everything. If he promises something, he will not deliver. The women of NC know better than to ever trust the man who is now Governor Ultrasound, Jr, but promised otherwise.
Virginia, on the other hand, since 2013, has a governor who is surprising (for the better) even those (such as myself) who supported him the first time he ran, but lost. Except, perhaps, for his less-than-stellar record on moving beyond coal, oil and gas, Governor McAuliffe is proving to give us down here a real case of “Governor Envy.” And you got a budget in a timely manner too. We still have none. Additionally, never underestimate the power of the governor’s veto pen, or the value of having an excellent AG. McAuliffe has shown himself to have the diplomatic skill balanced with feisty courage needed to get things done.
What’s the relevance, you ask? Why tell you this? You know the cliche is true: Elections have consequences. You have such an important election coming up this fall. Things are on the upswing in Virginia. It’ no time to become complacent (or pessimistic either). The Virginia Senate hangs in the balance. And there is a glimmer of hope you can possibly take the House.
I keep getting requests for money by email, snail mail and by phone, even, from Virginia candidates. If we are ever to fight back against the Kochs and their NC buddy in Ayn Randian-Bircher-Tea Party-extremism, Art Pope, we need to focus closer to home where my donations belong. What I can do is write about them, as I will in coming weeks. What affects Virginia, our neighbor to the north, is still very important to me.
You already know every election matters. Especially yours in 2015. Please donate to your candidates. Register voters. If someone gets inappropriately knocked off the voting rolls, help legally get them back on. Get them to turn out. Shine a strong light on and resist any inkling of vote suppression by the other side. You know it’s true: When Democrats turn out, they win. Come on Virginia, give us down here hope.
You know it’s bad when even an extremist nutjob like Ken Cuccinelli thinks you’ve gone too far and should apologize! LOL Of course, Cuccinelli didn’t condemn Trump for his innumerable, bigoted and otherwise offensive remarks previously, ONLY when he attacked Fox’s Megyn Kelly. Hmmmmm. Plus, of course, Cooch has never apologized for his OWN offensive remarks over the years, but whatever.
No, there’s not a “legitimate debate” about climate science; yes the “theory” is “proven;” and yes, anyone who says that s*** should be automatically disqualified from holding higher office in America – let alone becoming president!
Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Sunday, August 9. Also, check out Scaling Green’s grades of the 2016 presidential candidates on energy and climate issues (mostly “D”s and “F”s among Republicans…and also Jim Webb).
*29 U.S. Scientists Praise Iran Deal in Letter to Obama (“The letter from some of the world’s most knowledgeable experts in nuclear weapons and arms control called the agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program innovative and stringent.”)
*Kaine: Plan to oust Va. Supreme Court appointee is worrisome (“‘The governor appointed, by all accounts, a very, very qualified jurist to the Supreme Court,’ said Kaine, D-Va., adding he finds it ‘odd’ that lawmakers almost immediately announced plans to replace her.”)
*Virginia solar power development lags neighboring states (Yep, solar has been bringing jobs and clean power to NC and MD, but not to VA thanks to our laws written to favor coddled monopoly Dominion Power. So, so stupid…and anti-“free market”…and corrupt.)
Dominion Virginia Power is projecting that the capital cost of a third nuclear reactor at its North Anna facility will total over $19 billion, according to filings in its 2015 biennial review before the State Corporation Commission (PUE-2015-00027). 
Time was when I couldn’t wait to move to NC, especially for family and my new location. It didn’t hurt that I’d leave behind then-Governor Ultrasound, the House of Delegates, and the repeated concern that one day Cuccinelli would actually get elected Governor. Good bye to the politically vicious US Rep. Morgan Griffith. (How did the 9th ever think that was a good idea?). In NC I was about to have a Democratic Governor, Lt Governor and AG. And the NC House was a bit more sane than Virginia’s. Adios Bob Marshall. Whoopee! 2012 changed all (the political part of) that. 
