Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Saturday, March 7. Also see President Obama’s weekly address, on girls’ education and their “Let Girls Learn” initiative.

*Krugman: Here Come the Employment Truthers (“Hence the eagerness to publish any argument claiming that the numbers are somehow fake. Expect more dumbness.”)

*G.O.P. Sets Up Shop in Iowa, Where Few Will Prosper

*Losing Selma’s Legacy (“The march 50 years ago advanced the civil rights movement. Now it’s coming undone.”)

*Right-Wing Media Lash Out At Liberals After Ringling Bros. Announces They Will Remove Elephants From Shows (Yep, these people apparently are fans of harming sensitive, intelligent animals on top of all their other deep flaws.)

*Team Clinton Will Beat the Press-Again (“They know they can outlast the media’s attention, even with the email scandal.”)

*Sotomayor May Have Saved Obamacare (“How she backed Kennedy and Roberts into a corner.”)

*Donna Shalala to head Clinton Foundation

*After Netanyahu Speech, Congress Is Officially High School

*Clean power is right for Virginia (“Based on current energy trends, Virginians’ utility bills will go up if the state chooses not to cut pollution through renewable energy and energy efficiency. This was just confirmed by PJM, the operator of the largest electricity market in the world, including Virginia, and the entity tasked with keeping Virginia’s lights on at the lowest cost. PJM announced this week that Virginia’s energy costs would be lower under the [EPA’s Clean Power Plan] than without it.”)

*Warm Welcome for Moran at McDermott (The revolving door…well, revolves!)

*Could the state allowing gifts be enough to toss out McDonnell’s conviction?

*Governor names interim director of technology agency (“Eric Link will replace Sam Nixon at a crucial juncture for the agency that oversees the state’s vast computer system.”)

*Sweet Briar alums hire Richmond-based law team in effort to stop closure

*Judge unseals some records in Jesse Matthew’s Fairfax case

*Flu activity no longer widespread in Virginia

*Finally, a hint of spring is at hand with warmer weekend weather

Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Friday, March 6. Regarding Terry McAuliffe’s interview on the Kojo Nnamdi Show yesterday, I’m including it in part because there’s some decent stuff in there, but also to demonstrate that even a Democrat can go almost completely off the rails/be almost 100% wrong on a subject, in this case energy (see 11:43-18:15 of the video) and specifically Dominion’s proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

*Netanyahu enters never-never land (“His speech to Congress painted a scenario utterly divorced from reality.” Totally delusional.)

*Senator cites pope in ObamaCare’s defense (“Kaine, a Catholic, pointed to the pope’s message from the beginning of the season of Lent, when he called for ‘islands of mercy in the midst of the sea of indifference.'” Amen!)

*Dems vow to protect Boehner from conservative coup (“Replacing him with a Tea Party Speaker, they say, would only bring the legislative process – already limping along – to a screeching halt.”)

*Here’s What Gas Would Have To Cost To Account For Health And Environmental Impacts (“According to the study, accounting for the social costs of burning gasoline would add an average of $3.80 per gallon to the pump price, raising the price to $6.27.” Seems very low, actually, compared to other estimates I’ve seen up to $10, $15 per gallon. Regardless, the point is that fossil fuels are artificially cheap, as they do not include the cost of all the damage they do to the environment, people’s health, national security, etc, plus the massive direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies they receive.)

*Jeb Bush owns his email server, too (So, the media’s going to give this attention commensurate with what they’re giving to Hillary Clinton, right? Right?!?)

*What Obama’s trip to Selma means (“He’s more publicly embracing his role as America’s first black president.”)

*Virginia’s GOP moves further away from democracy (“Rather than rethinking that losing strategy, Virginia’s conservative activists now seem inclined to double down on it. They are pressing for the GOP to hold a convention rather than a state-run primary to choose a presidential nominee in 2016.”)

*Editorial: Bill to hide execution drug info deserved to die

*Fairfax officials trying to oust deputy county attorney over Geer case

*Reason for mistrust in Norfolk schools (“It’s impossible to make a compelling pitch for more money for Norfolk’s struggling schools when the administration can’t figure out how to spend what it has.”)

*Controversial former Norfolk official lands a job with Richmond (“Sharon McDonald, Norfolk’s former commissioner of revenue, works for the city of Richmond, responsible for the collection of city taxes, fees and utility payments.”)

*Less snow, more sleet brings icy glaze to Richmond area

*Blistering wind chill smacks D.C. area early Friday as the frigid air lingers (“Yes, it’s cold. But think positively. This may be our last extremely cold day this winter.”)

Great stuff from House Minority Leader Del. David Toscano (bolding added by me for emphasis):

Republicans would have you belief that this General Assembly session was one big Lovefest. They even celebrated the fact that we adjourned one day early, as if that fact itself was enough to prove that they should be trusted with governing the Commonwealth. To be sure, the working relationships with Speaker Howell and House leadership are generally civil, far superior to Washington, and a good thing.

There were some measures about which we can all be proud — passing a budget on time, investing in job creation and workforce development, providing raises to teachers and state employees, educational reform, attacking problems of campus sexual assault. These were enacted by broad bipartisan majorities, and supported by our constituents across the state. And all of these will be used by Republicans as they seek to maintain their majorities in the House and the Senate elections this fall. With the end of the McDonnell ethics trial and no vaginal probes populating late night television, it was a less controversial and more civil session.

But before we get too gushy about our accomplishments, let’s dig a little deeper.

First, let’s remember that this is an election year and that the Republicans were smart enough not to push a Tea Party agenda that has taken hold of their party nationally and that has so dominated Virginia’s legislature in recent years. They could avoid this in 2015 because they did their greatest damage in earlier years, whether it was over transvaginal ultrasounds – a term few of us would have uttered in political discourse a mere two years ago, much less debate in a public forum, TRAP regulations, repealing the one-gun-a-month handgun purchase law, allowing citizens to carry  guns into bars, railing against the children of immigrants, trashing reasonable EPA regulations designed to make air cleaner and our planet more secure, making voting more difficult, or bottling up a way to bring our taxpayer dollars back to Virginia to create jobs, help our hospitals, and provide insurance to 400,000 Virginians by embracing Medicaid expansion.

The Republican leadership had a game-plan from the beginning. It first involved going soft on social wedge issues. For example, the so-called personhood bill, which would have created constitutional rights for unborn fetuses, and sailed out of the House last year, was sent to a subcommittee where it died an unceremonious death.  And Republican bills that would arm teachers and put guns in airports experienced a similar fate. Leadership was even able to derail a darling of a significant segment of the right wing, the proposal to convene a new U.S. constitutional convention, on the House floor without taking an embarrassing vote that would have lead to its defeat.

The plan also required criticizing the President at every opportunity. The Republicans were anything if not united, especially when it came to the EPA and “war on coal.” Every measure that attempted to poke the President in the eye was embraced unanimously by a party which has a hard time using the word “science” in a sentence.  And that included even those who fancy themselves as moderate, but remain fearful of a primary challenge from the right.

And finally, the Republican plan sought to downplay and bury Democratic proposals. One need only look at the initiatives Democrats proposed that never got a hearing much beyond small subcommittees which met at times when few citizens could attend, took few recorded votes, and which are controlled by a small number of conservative Republicans, where two or three delegates essentially decide the fate of the legislation. Almost all of the reasonable gun safety bills were consigned to a small subcommittee of the Militia and Police committee, a group largely controlled by the NRA and by its even more conservative cousin, the Virginia Citizen Defense League.

The bills were unceremoniously killed in one meeting without ever getting to full committee. Even my bill for voluntary background checks, a measure that would have simply allowed a private gunseller at a gun show the right to ask the Virginia State Police to run a background check of an individual before making a sale, ran afoul of the Republican litmus test opposing any gun safety measure.

The same fate befell the numerous bills designed to take the partisanship out of redistricting, or at least lessen its influence. In this case, it was a subcommittee of the Privileges and Elections committee jettisoning both House AND Senate bills that would have restored the idea that constituents should choose their legislators rather than the other way around.  This same committee, however, found a way to again make it harder to vote absentee.  If you can’t win at the ballot box, just change who can cast votes.

And when the Republicans had the chance to vote to make nondiscrimination in the workplace part of state law, they flinched rather than embrace equality for all Virginians.

There is little doubt that Democratic control would have fundamentally changed the budget. For starters, we would not have left money on the table that could have been used to fund core services, particularly education. Medicaid expansion alone would have replaced approximately $105 million in state appropriations for hospitals and other medical care with federal dollars, thereby freeing monies for other core purposes. We would have capped, if not eliminated, the massive taxpayer subsidies flowing to the utilities and coal companies (over $600 million over the last twenty years) through two coal tax credits, which the Commonwealth’s own independent audit committee, JLARC, concluded do not work for their intended purposes. This would have raised at least $20 million this year alone. Having a government that works better and utilizes business principles means gathering those resources available, using them wisely, and not investing in programs that no longer work. Democratic pushing and prodding made the budget better, but this is not the budget we would have passed had we been in charge.

Democrats would likely have captured more of the cost of government by linking fees to the services being provided for inspections that protect the public. The Republican aversion to anything that raises revenue allows them to starve agencies that serve the public good; the result is that there are fewer dollars for initiatives in core services like education and public safety. And, speaking of education, Democrats would not have supported the undermining of public education through education tax credits. And we would have expanded pre-K to more youngsters throughout the Commonwealth.

Democratic control would have meant more economic initiatives to get resources into the hands of working people and the middle class. We were happy to support the job creation efforts of the Governor that were embraced by both parties in the House.  But we would have done more; our members supported both the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a program that Ronald Reagan said was the most effective way to end poverty in America, and an increase in the minimum wage, an initiative that not only would help working families but get more money into circulation, thereby providing a stimulus for growth. These two economic initiatives never got to committee level, much less to the floor of the House.

To be sure, there were some good things in the budget, particularly in the area of higher education and raises for public employees. But it did not go far enough in meeting the core needs of the Commonwealth in the way a Democratic budget would.

Finally, there was ethics reform, which Republicans wanted desperately in response to the McDonnell scandal. At the last minute, however, the package began to unwind as the pressure by House Republicans to adjourn early began to take precedence over the deliberative legislative process. In the end, the deliberative process lost, and a bill was forced through at 8:00pm Friday without enough time for careful reflection and amendment.  And we are now seeing that there are problems with the bill, particularly in terms of its enforcement provisions and the total amount of gifts legislators may take. While many of us voted for the bill, a Democratic majority would have created an independent commission and given it some real teeth.

While we may have operated with more civility and comity in Richmond this year than in Washington, don’t be distracted by the so-called Lovefest; the Democrat vision for the state is fundamentally different from our Republican colleagues. But we will not be able to showcase it until we increase our numbers in the House of Delegates.

Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Thursday, March 5.

*D.C. area federal offices and many schools are closed today.

*Fossil fuel civil war is good for renewables – and the planet (“David Crane, the CEO of NRG, the largest generation company in the country, has said that centralized fossil fuel generation is essentially dead, and the future lies in decentralised energy, and local generation, solar, wind; battery storage, micro grids and electric vehicles.” Hello Dominion, are you paying attention?!?)

*Justices appear divided over health-care law (“Ninety minutes of lopsided argument in favor of the Obama administration’s defense cast significant doubt on what had been a plausible challenge to Obamacare’s legality. The conservative majority could still knock down the law, of course, but given the ambiguity exposed Wednesday, it would now be a breathtaking surprise for the justices to cause such massive upheaval – taking health-care immediately from 8 million and causing a death spiral for the rest of Obamacare – based on such a slender legal reed.”)

*Argument analysis: Setting up the private debate on the ACA (“…the public signs were that the tone could be mostly favorable to the government – that is, the chances seemed greater for a ruling salvaging a nationwide subsidy system that makes the new health care insurance exchanges actually work in an economic sense, thus keeping it alive.”)

*The court can’t hide (“King v. Burwell arguments favored the White House”

*Netanyahu’s damage (“His speech threatens U.S. support for Israel”)

*Top Biden backer: Hillary Clinton will ‘die by 1,000 cuts’ on e-mail story

*Caught Off Guard by Disclosure of Emails, Democrats Rally to Clinton’s Defense

*Ferguson Police Official Fired Over Racist Emails, 2 Others on Leave (Disgusting. How many police departments across the country are like this, though?!?)

*Coverage for 300,000 Virginians could hinge on court’s ruling (“The outcome of the challenge to President Barack Obama’s health care law before the U.S. Supreme Court could affect more than 300,000 Virginians who receive federal tax credits that help them pay for insurance under the Affordable Care Act.”)

*Jones to step down as head of state Democratic Party (“Susan Swecker, a longtime state Democratic operative, is said to be among those who could be under consideration for the post, which will play a pivotal role in this year’s upcoming state legislative elections and the 2016 presidential campaign.”)

*Richmond mayor is set to step down as state Democratic Party chairman (It’s about time; clearly, he was an absentee chair, not in any way interested in this job.)

*Va. school boards’ anti-discrimination stands can mention sexual orientation (Thank you once again to Attorney General Mark Herring!)

*Virginia’s toothless ethics reform (“When the dust settled in the GOP-controlled legislature, the loopholes stayed wide open, and the action turned out to be mostly pantomime.”)

*Va. House speaker accused of using hardball tactics to rush ethics measure (“Five people familiar with negotiations – two of them GOP senators – told The Post that Senate Republicans considered walking away from what they called an overly complicated bill unless they had more time to get it right.”)

*Ethics as usual in the General Assembly (“Unfortunately, too many have spent the session whining and wringing their hands, claiming they’ve been victimized by the news media, or that it’s not possible to ‘legislate ethics’ – a variant of the cliche that it’s impossible to ‘legislate morality.'” They’re talking about you, Dick Saslaw and Tommy Norment.)

*Ending sex trafficking (“Within the flurry of bills descending on Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s desk is one long awaited: a measure establishing sex trafficking as a standalone felony.”)

*Roanoke Del. Sam Rasoul joins House Democrats in urging Terry McAuliffe to amend ethics bill

*Democrat[ic] Challenger in Virginia’s 13th Senate (“Leesburg attorney Colonel Tom Mulrine has filed to run against Senator Dick Black in the 13th district. Colonel Mulrine is a 70 year old long time resident of northern Virginia.”)

*Cutler: Want to know more about the pipeline? Here’s how

*Editorial: Bedden’s decision delights Richmond

*Henrico school board member Bagby announces bid for Morrissey’s House seat

*Northern Va. teen thought to have helped man join Islamic State

*Wintry mix changes to substantial snow, record cold likely to follow

Arlington County Board member Walter Tejada gives a fiery farewell speech to the Arlington County Democratic Committee.  Tejada emphasizes his commitment to fighting for human and civil rights, for economic justice, and for progressive values generally. Tejada blasted the election of John Vihstadt, a person he (correctly) argues “ran on an anti-government agenda and who does not share our Democratic values.” He repeatedly stressed the importance of electing Democrats, that ACDC is a Democratic committee. He defended what has been criticized as “group think” as creating one of the best places to live in the country. “Standing up for progressive values could be at a crossroads in Arlington today…will we continue to make long-term investments and lead with bold and innovative initiatives, or will we become a timid and stagnant community?” He asked whether we would allow Arlington to become “a new Arlington of rich, entitled people lacking in compassion, empathy and sense of community, viscerally opposed to government of any kind, opposed to everything [they allege to be] ‘overspending’ on every front?” He reiterated his “unequivocal and unapologetic” support for the “modern streetcar system” and affordable housing efforts (also ending homelessness, providing resources for mental health treatment, helping integrate immigrants into the community and fighting xenophobia, among other things). Great stuff, gracias por todo a Walter Tejada!

Also see the comments section for speeches by the two Democrats (Reid Goldstein and Sharon Dorsey) running for Arlington County School Board, and the five Democrats (Peter Fallon, Andrew Schneider, Katie Cristol, Christian Dorsey, James Lander) running for two open seats on the Arlington County Board.