Here are a few Virginia (and national) news headlines, political and otherwise, for Thursday, August 1.

*The Next Filibuster Face-Off: Obama’s Judicial Nominees

*Obama gives Dems marching orders for budget fights in fall

*Rand Paul’s lopsided loss (“The senator’s fellow Republicans resoundingly rebuked his views.” Can someone please tell me how this guy is “libertarian” on social or economic issues, exactly? Who the @#!#!@ does Ken Cuccinelli think he is?!?)

*Kochs hire ex-Cantor aide to lobby against carbon tax (That really says it all about so many things…corruption, looniness, extremism, etc.)

*Va. AG says he has no intention of reimbursing businessman for $18,000 in gifts (Excuuuuuse me?!?)

*Bob McDonnell’s disgrace (“Virginia’s governor returns money and gifts but continues to dodge responsibility.”)

*McDonnell: Daughter repaid $15,000 catering gift for wedding (How did she just suddenly come up with $15,000? And if she has that kind of money lying around, why didn’t she pay for the catering herself in the first place?)

*The governor’s mixed message on ethics (“If McDonnell is truly contrite, he should stop trying to rationalize gifts and loans from a big donor.” Obviously, he is NOT “truly contrite.” He just got caught and now sees his future going up in smoke.)

*The Case Of The Disappearing Lt. Gov. Candidate In Virginia (The fact is, Cuccinelli and Obenshain are very, very similar on the issues to EW Jackson, as much as they try to run away from him.)

*McDonnell is Avoiding Virginians (“While appearing contrite – or at least writing contritely, in his news release, or sounding contrite, in his radio interview, McDonnell has yet to address Virginians in person on the scandal and its impact on his stewardship of the governor’s office. Face to face. Man to man. Live with video at noon. It is the very least he owes Virginians.”)

*Democrats: Gov. McDonnell Should Repay Va. for His Legal Bill (No way the taxpayers should pay to defend McDonnell’s corruption.)

*Court fight looms over Va. ban on gay marriage (“Voter-approved amendment faces attempt to overturn”)

*Trust is common theme in new campaign ads on McAuliffe, Cuccinelli (We know Cuccinelli’s record on public policy issues. That’s the #1 theme in this campaign – Cuccinelli and his running-mate “clones” are extremists, while Cuccinelli himself is also corrupt. Terry McAuliffe is a mainstream Democrat who will govern Virginia in the mode of Warner and Kaine. Not a tough choice.)

*Next move: Reform state ethics laws (“Gov. Bob McDonnell’s decision to return gifts from Jonnie Williams is another important step toward unwinding a wildly inappropriate relationship between the state leader’s family and a Virginia businessman.”)

*Documentary takes aim at McAuliffe over his electric car company (I watched it, found it boring, extremely biased, and containing no new information. We’ll see how voters react, if at all…)

*D.C. area forecast: Some showers today, most of the weekend looks dry

*Nationals come undone in loss (“Gio Gonzalez surrenders 10 runs in 3 1/3 innings as Washington suffers a punishing loss in Detroit.” This season appears lost…wait ’til next year?)

Ken Cuccinelli confirms he’s not just a right-wing extremist, he’s also got absolutely ZERO ethical or moral compass.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli says he’s glad Gov. Bob McDonnell is returning all the gifts he received from a major political donor. But he has no plans to repay the more than $18,000 in gifts he received from the same benefactor.

Cuccinelli told reporters Wednesday that Star Scientific CEO Jonnie Williams didn’t give him the kind of gifts that can be returned. Among the gifts from Williams listed in Cuccinelli’s financial disclosure statements are a $1,500 catered Thanksgiving dinner, private jet trips and vacation lodging. Cuccinelli said, “There are some bells you can’t unring.”

What a bizarre quote. Of course Cuccinelli could “unring” those “bells,” simply by writing a check for the value of all that stuff and – wait for it, cuz this is apparently difficult for Cuckoo to understand – pay for what he got from his pal Jonnie Williams. As usual with “the Cooch,” the rules don’t apply to him, only to everyone else.

P.S. In addition, it may be that Cuccinelli doesn’t have the money to repay this stuff. Which raises the question, where on earth is Bob McDonnell getting all this money to repay the loans and gifts his family and he received?!? Verrrry suspicious.

So far, the commentary I’ve seen regarding the death of former Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr. has ranged from bland to boilerplate to bizarre. Sen. Mark Warner fell mostly into the first two categories, issuing a VERY short statement praising Byrd’s “commitment to fiscal accountability,” and noting that “when Sen. Byrd and I occasionally agreed to disagree, he always was a gentleman about it.” Uh huh. Ditto for Sen. Tim Kaine, who also issued a short statement, praising Byrd’s “civil manner and commitment to public service,” but not getting into any substance regarding Byrd’s record. And Gov. Bob McDonnell issued a statement that’s a bit longer, but still manages to not say much, other than biographical information (ignoring the bad stuff) and how “we’ve lost a good and decent person and a dedicated public servant,” one “rightly known for his civility, candor and wit.” In fairness, the Warner, Kaine and McDonnell statements appear to be nothing more than attempts to say something – anything – nice about someone who just passed away. That’s fine, for the most part.

Then there was this bizarre statement from former Sen. George Allen, who somehow managed to call the underachieving, segregationist Byrd, Jr. “one of the most influential, respected and principled leaders of the 20th Century” (I bet we could quickly come up with a list of several hundred – thousand? – more “influential…leaders of the 20th Century” in America) lauding his “consistent, sound and unflinching leadership in working to achieve the ideal of a wise and frugal government.”

None of those statements by Allen, of course, come even remotely close to the truth of the Byrd, Jr. (and Byrd family in general) legacy, including his never-renounced support for segregation and “Massive Resistance” (to school integration). Who knows what Allen’s thinking, exactly, but consider who we’re talking about here: a man who used a racist slur towards an Asian-American in the 2006 campaign; who habitually used the “n word” and even shoved a severed deer head in a black man’s mailbox as a sick “prank” of some sort, who claimed that mentioning his Jewish heritage was casting “aspersions” on him (as if there’s something bad about having a Jewish heritage), etc, etc. Should we, therefore, be surprised that Allen would feel the way he does about Harry F. Byrd, Jr? Obviously not.

So, that’s three bland/boilerplate statements (from Senators Warner and Kaine and Gov. McDonnell), plus one (predictably) loony one (from former Senator George Allen), and a lot of silence from most other Virginia elected officials. How about something intelligent? For that, we’ve got to turn to the straight news articles, which noted Byrd, Jr.’s strong support for segregation, and to Bacon’s Rebellion blogger Peter Galuszka, who has some choice words for Byrd, Jr. specifically, and for the Byrd machine in general.

One of the most important figures who defined much of what was wrong with Virginia in the 20th century has died at age 98.

more on the “flip”

Harry F. Byrd Jr., the son of the man who set up the one-party system of control in the state…was a three-term U.S. Senator best known for supporting Massive Resistance against court-ordered school integration and maintaining a limited government dogma that gave Virginia attractively low taxes but has starved the state for revenues as it grew.

Otherwise, Byrd, who grew up as a child of the privileged elite partly in the Richmond Executive Mansion where his famous father was governor, did little…introducing very few bills on Capitol Hill, other than ones supporting a rollback of a moratorium of chromium ore controlled by the white-controlled government of Rhodesia and letting the late Confederate General Robert E. Lee become an American citizen again.

A sad legacy, in other words, and one that we still need to work on moving past in the 21st century.

In the end, Harry F. Byrd, Jr. marked a transition phase, during which the segregationist “Dixiecrats” shifted away from the Democratic Party – overwhelmingly becoming Republicans (or in Byrd Jr.’s case, an independent) – while the previously strong, progressive (on things like the income tax, estate tax, the New Deal rural anti-poverty programs, civil rights, etc.) Republican tradition rapidly met its demise. Sad to say, but Harry F. Byrd, Jr. basically kept many of the negative aspects of the Dixiecrats, without the positive, progressive tradition of a sizable segment of his former party. That’s not a legacy to celebrate, as George Allen does, but it’s certainly a part of our history that we need to be aware of…

This piece will be appearing –probably next weekend– in some newspapers in Virginia.

For Republican to follow the “Hastert rule” in today’s House of Representatives is a betrayal of the public trust.

The “Hastert rule” (named after a former Republican Speaker of the House) says that no bill will be brought up for a vote unless it has the support of a “majority of the majority” party.  A bill that would get a majority of the entire House by combining its supporters among Republicans with its supporters among Democrats never gets a chance, by this rule, unless a majority of the Republican caucus favors the bill.

Under some circumstances, that could be OK.  The majority party is entitled to address our national problems with the solutions it prefers rather than make unnecessary compromises with their political opposition.

But today, that’s not the choice.  Following the Hastert rule does not give us Republican solutions to our problems.  It means there will be no solutions.

That’s because what the House can pass, requiring the Hastert rule, is unlikely to become law.  Any measure that cannot command a large measure of Democratic votes in the House has much chance to pass the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority, or to be signed into law by the Democratic president.

So with the Hastert rule, under the present circumstances, what we get is government paralysis, and record lows in the esteem in which the public holds the Congress.  But it’s not Congress as a whole that’s the problem, it’s the Republicans in the House that are taking a “my way or a highway” approach to government, despite controlling less than half the government the people elected.

Fortunately, the present speaker, John Boehner, has disregarded the Hastert rule in emergencies.  On New Year’s Day, for example, the bill that saved the U.S. from going over the “fiscal cliff” passed the House without a majority of the majority.  Likewise with the measure to provide relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy in mid-January.  A majority of Republicans voted against both those measures.

But overall, nothing is allowed to reach the House floor unless most Republicans favor it, and pretty much nothing that can come out of the House on that basis has a chance to become law.  

That gives the American people the spectacle of a Congress that, for two and a half years, has been setting records for how little it accomplishes.  Meanwhile, indifferent to getting anything done for the American people, this same Republican-dominated House of Representatives has voted dozens of times to repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), despite everyone knowing that those repeals will change nothing.

No one expects politicians and political parties to ignore the quest for partisan advantage.  But it is a betrayal of the trust of the public — which sends politicians to Washington to do the people’s business — to make partisan dominance the top priority.  

The question we need our public servants to ask is not “How can our party maintain maximum control?” The right question, rather, is “Given the realities of who the people have put into office, how can we enact the best possible solutions to our national problems?”

Following the Hastert rule under today’s power realities is a choice to leave our government crippled during challenging times.  To serve partisan interest at the cost of paralyzing the people’s government is not a choice that real patriots would make.

Here are a few Virginia (and national) news headlines, political and otherwise, for Wednesday, July 31. Also, check out the new ad featuring Ken Osborne, a Southwest Virginia landowner, who is fighting against Ken Cuccinelli and out-of-state energy companies over royalties owed for gas extracted from his property.

*Yellen/Summers and the Twilight of the VSPs

*Manning is acquitted on key charge of aiding the enemy

*Obama Calls Out Republicans For Wasting Time On Keystone: ‘That’s Not A Jobs Plan’ (“While Republicans have advocated for Keystone by insisting that it will create jobs, Obama slammed that assertion Tuesday, pointing to the Cornell University estimate that Keystone would only create 50 permanent jobs.” That’s right, only 50 jobs in a country of 300 million people. This is a bad, bad joke.)

*The GOP’s shutdown showdown (“Republicans try to put the brakes on Obamacare, again.” And the motive for this repetitive lunacy is…???)

*Democrat-turned-indy plans to endorse McAuliffe (“[Watkins] Abbitt, who represented a large swath of Southside Virginia farm country in the House for 28 years before retiring in 2011, says McAuliffe will be the first Democrat he’s backed since he left the Democratic Party in 2001.”)

*State Charged $54,000 For Gov. McDonnell’s Legal Fees (Great, huh?)

*Creep of the Week: Ken Cuccinelli (“If this guy gets his way, Virginia is going to have to change its motto to ‘Virginia is for lovers, but not the icky kind that makes God puke.'”)

*Planned Parenthood leader slams Va. Republican ticket (“This race is our top priority this year, and the stakes couldn’t be higher, not only for the women in the commonwealth but women across the country.”)

*McDonnell says he will return family gifts from political donor (The bottom line is that ONLY after he’s caught does he start to do something about the situation, while still calling Jonnie Williams a “friend” and trying to claim that every governor has done the same thing. Pathetic.)

*Cuccinelli dismisses McAuliffe call to return gifts (Right, because Ken Cuccinelli is better than everyone else and gets to do whatever the heck he wants to do. Or he’s just abusing his power, like he did in his climate science witch hunt, his corrupt dealings with Consol Energy, etc, etc.)

*Stuck on the side  of the road (“A spat over U.S. 58 puts the governor’s race  deeper in the ditch.” I’m not sure I understand this “both sides” disgust. It was Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign, and ONLY Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign, which put out the brain-dead video. What’s Terry McAuliffe supposed to do, not point out the false attack?)

*Harry F. Byrd, Virginia Senator, Dies at 98 (“…a conservative senator from Virginia who was appointed to his father’s seat and retained his father’s segregationist views but not his affiliation with the Democratic Party, died on Tuesday at his home in Winchester, Va. He was 98.”

*Jackson says Trayvon Martin slaying wasn’t motivated by race (So, tell us Bishop Jackson, what exactly WAS this motivated by exactly if it wasn’t race or “Stand Your Ground?”)

*Calls ring louder for tighter gifts laws (Gee, ya think we need to tighten up a bit?)

*Time to Get Serious About Ethics Reform (Peter Galuszka nails it as usual.)

*Portsmouth takes next step in upgrading its aging water system

*Summer swelter still missing in action

*13-year-old boy who inspired Nats’ Harper loses battle with brain cancer

*Nationals fall further behind

I’m generally not a big Chris Christie fan, but I absolutely despise Rand Paul and his phony “libertarian” bloviating. In fact, as Christie points out, Kentucky is a HUGE net recipient state, getting “$1.51 on every dollar they send to Washington.” In stark contrast, “blue” states like New Jersey are major net DONOR states. That’s right, the “conservative” states – in the Great Plains (massive corn ethanol subsidies), Deep South (massive transfers for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, you name it), etc. – are overwhelmingly redistributing money from the more progressive states like New England, New York, and New Jersey. Gotta love it. So yeah, let’s see Rand Paul give up all that federal money if he hates the federal government so much. Same thing with Bob McDonnell, Ken Cuccinelli, and every other Republican who likes to bite the federal hand that feeds their state. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen.

P.S. Of course, Paul isn’t “libertarian” on social issues any more than he’s “libertarian” on federal government transfer payments to his state.