From the “there’s no pleasing some people” category (or is it the “live by the sword, die by the sword” category?), we now have this.

After eight years of Democratic rule, Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell was seen by conservatives as a political savior, someone who would restore the state’s right-leaning policies and traditions. But less than four months into his term, many conservatives have grown disenchanted, even as he has made direct appeals to causes they care about.

Two recent high-profile efforts to cater to parts of the conservative coalition — declaring April as Confederate History Month and slashing funding for Planned Parenthood — only further agitated many.

McDonnell’s failure to mention slavery in the Confederate proclamation led to a cycle of national ridicule followed by an apology from the governor, dampening whatever boost he might have gotten. And although McDonnell removed most state funding from Planned Parenthood, he stopped short of his campaign promise to cut all funds from the nation’s largest abortion provider, leaving many social conservatives feeling let down.

As if all that isn’t bad enough, McDonnell also endorsed that known liberal/radical/commie John McCain. Even worse, McDonnell “angered conservatives by issuing a directive outlawing discrimination in the state workforce, including on the basis of sexual orientation.”  Apparently, certain “conservatives” saw McDonnell’s toothless, anti-discrimination “directive” as – get this – “legitimizing homosexuality.”  Gasp.

In short, as much of a right wingnut as “Pat Robertson’s Manchurian Candidate” has been as governor, it’s apparently never enough for the far-right-wing “base” of the Republican Party here in Virginia. Apparently, these people won’t be happy until Virginia secedes from the Union; is turned into a Pat Robertson-ruled religious theocracy, with enforcement by Grand Inquisitor Ken Cuccinelli; is armed by the NRA (or is the NRA too squishy for these people?); is taxed by…well, noone, since there won’t be any taxes, except maybe on poor people; has its environment protected by BP, Exxon Mobil and Dominion Power; has its workers’ safety ensured by Don Blankenship; has its education provided by charter schools and home schools, the godless public schools abolished; provides health care, if you can get it at all, in exchange for some chickens; changes its state flag either to “Don’t Tread on Me” or to the Confederate battle flag; outlaws “sodomy” and makes “sodomites” subject to caning (or worse); jails abortion providers and women receiving abortion services; etc., etc.  And even then, it probably won’t be enough for the Pat Robertson and Grover Norquist crowds.  But until that glorious day comes, it looks like they’ll have to put up with the “gutless” Bob McDonnell and his “bad cop” sidekick, Grand Inquisitor Kookinelli.  

As for the rest of us?  We can just scratch our heads and wonder, how did Virginia go so far off the deep end after becoming a moderate, “purple” state during the 2000s?  Were Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Jim Webb, and Barack Obama some sort of strange aberrations in Virginia’s political history?  Or, was 2009 more the result of a nasty recession causing a toxic political climate; a fundamentally dishonest-but-slick Republican gubernatorial candidate; and a disastrous Democratic gubernatorial nominee who, I’d remind everyone, also lost statewide in 2005, when Democrats were becoming ascendant. My guess is that 2009 was the latter case, that the inexorable demographic changes we’ve seen for years in Virginia are continuing, and that eventually – November 2010 would be nice! – there will be a strong backlash to the backlash. In the meantime, witness what “conservative” ascendancy means, never forget it, and never EVER let anyone tell you again that elections don’t have consequences or that your vote doesn’t matter!

Sen. Mark Warner said today on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” that the Senate could approve an amendment to reinstate a main element of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. That law separated commercial banks and investment banks into separate entities.

Sen. Warner is a member of the Senate Banking Committee and has been closely involved in negotiations to get a Wall Street reform bill to the floor. Warner said that he personally opposed such a measure, but there is a bipartisan group of senators who have pushed for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall,  which would force banks to separate their commercial and investment activities.  

The reason Warner gave for opposing reinstatement was that he thinks that it would put U.S. banks at a competitive disadvantage compared to the banks of other nations. (Perhaps this is where the G-8 could do something about that situation, instead of simply gathering from time to time for photo ops.)

“I think that we can’t unscramble those things. A lot of senators wish they had their votes back in 1999 when they basically did away with the walls and the barriers between investment banking and banking that Glass-Steagall had in place,” Warner said. “But the world has changed pretty dramatically.”

“Let’s put rules of the road in place that can stand the test of time,” Warner stated.

Sen. Carter Glass of Lynchburg was a former Secretary of the Treasury and the brain behind creation of the Federal Reserve System. He worked with Rep. Henry Steagall to devise the bill that forced the separation of commercial banking from investment activity in 1933 and also created the FDIC to insure bank accounts.

According to Sen. Warner, the world economy is so much more complex now that Glass-Steagall may not be what we need right now in regulation. He noted that Canada did not have the extent of problems with their banking that the United States had, even though Canadian banks are relatively large. He implied that there is a way short of bringing Glass-Steagall back that can mitigate the sort of risk taking that almost brought down the world economy in the past few years.

Warner wants the Senate bill to include some strong language that will allow regulators to look at bank leverage and risk management. “There’s a way to find common ground,” Warner said.

That remains to be seen in the partisan atmosphere that is poisoning Washington these days.

President Obama just delivered a major speech at the University of Michigan. It is worth listening to in its entirety. (h/t to DailyKos for putting up the YouTube)

It’s time to recap the brief “career” so far of AG Ken Cuccinelli, who all by himself seems determined to make the office of Virginia’s attorney general the continual butt of television comedians’ jokes.

On February 16, just one month after taking office, Cuccinelli filed a request with the Environmental Protection Agency asking it to reopen its proceedings regarding the finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health.

Of course, at the same time he also asked for judicial review of the EPA’s finding in federal court. As a result, Virginia has joined Alabama and Texas as the only states seeking to overturn any EPA action to control greenhouse gases. According to Cooch, the EPA is just a bunch of “bureaucrats with political agendas” who have falsified data in order to drive American business into the ground. He doesn’t say how he know that scientific data is “falsified.”

February was just Act One of the Cuccinelli absurdist theater acted out in the office of the attorney general. We had much more waiting for us…

On March 4 Cuccinelli sent a letter to Virginia public colleges and universities stating that, in his opinion, Virginia law prohibits them from including sexual orientation or gender expression in any non-discrimination policy they might have. In the national uproar that followed, Cuccinelli never said why he had released the letter and maintained that some unnamed colleges had asked for a ruling by his office.

It was March 22 when Cuccinelli filed a lawsuit in the US District Court challenging the constitutionality of the federal health care bill that passed Congress on March 21.

Hmmm. I’m beginning to see a pattern here. Every two weeks or so, Cuccinelli’s ego drives him to usurp headlines from the governor by issuing some extremist diatribe aimed at his Tea-Party-like base.

On April 1 – appropriately April Fool’s Day – Cuccinelli announced a challenge to new standards for fuel efficiency for cars and trucks by the Obama administration and the EPA. (All those standards do is move up the date to meet goals that were set in 2007 when Republican President George W. Bush signed The Energy Independence and Security Act, which changed economy standards for cars and light trucks for the first time in more than 30 years.)

Now, as April has ended, Cooch has unveiled, a la John Ashcroft, his own prudish version of the Virginia state seal. A breastplate of armor covers the breast of Virtus in Cooch’s version of the seal. Whew! Talk about “political correctness.”

God only knows what Cooch will come up with as May winds down. Maybe he could revisit some of his state senate peculiarities, such as his attempt to amend the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to revoke the citizenship of children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants.

(The two methods of amending the U.S. Constitution, as outlined in Article V, state that both houses of Congress may propose an amendment by a 2/3rds vote of members, or 2/3rds of state legislatures may ask for a convention to amend the document, a process never used. Nowhere does it state that an obscure, extremely odd state senator from Virginia can propose such amendments.)

I guess Cooch could declare that his idea from back then to allow one business to sue another if it is proven that it hired illegal immigrants is now fine in Virginia because he, as attorney general, says so. Or, perhaps he would like to try to resurrect his wish to deny unemployment benefits to any person who could not speak “proper” English in the workplace.

I also must remember Cooch’s love for abstinence-only sex education, even though all reputable studies have shown that such “education” is completely ineffective and a waste of taxpayer money.

We all know that Cooch made quite a fool of himself by first appearing to endorse the “Birthers” in their attempt to change the birthplace of President Obama from Hawaii to Kenya, using a crazy, fake lady lawyer and a heaping helping of inchoate racism in the attempt. Cuccinelli quickly backed down from that piece of red meat that he threw to his “base.”

My personal favorite Cooch story is when he told an audience of fawning far-righties during the  2009 campaign that he and his wife were contemplating not filing for a Social Security number for their new son because,  “it is being used to track you.” Please. Spare me that ridiculous statement. Cooch and his wife, who have many other children, know that a Social Security number is required for a family to declare a newborn child for tax purposes. That requirement was put into the tax law to foil people who had been making up kids to get the tax deductions. (I personally knew a fellow back then who had declared his dog and two cats as children until the time came when he had to have actual Social Security numbers for the “children.”)

I guess Social Security numbers could be the basis of Cuccinelli’s next publicity stunt. Perhaps he could sue the federal government and say that it has no right to demand that citizens prove the existence of their tax exemptions.

We all should stay tuned for the next act of the farce that is the attorney general’s office in the great state of Virginia. What I wish would happen instead is for the governor to call Cooch in and demand that he stop making a fool of himself and the state that put him in office.

I will wait a very long time for that to happen.