Va. Senate passes curb on AG’s civil inquiry powers

Democrats in the Virginia Senate have “passed legislation to curb the Republican attorney general’s power to conduct civil investigations,” reports the Pilot, which means I can stop fearing speech prison for the work I’m doing on Cooch: The Musical.

Cuccinelli wants SCOTUS fast track

In a world where the majority wants affordable health care, one man will stop at nothing to destroy affordable health care; based on a true story and coming soon to theaters everywhere.

Coalition criticizes Va. transportation plan

The Coalition for Smarter Growth’s executive director must have been reading If You Read the Paper, because he now says Governor McDonnell’s $3 billion initiative “could soak taxpayers and worsen sprawl.”

House advances Va. governor’s $4 billion transportation bill

It worries me to think this bill’s cost could increase by a billion dollars every time I link to a new article about it, but on the other hand, if it reaches $25 billion there might be a few thousand dollars for smart-growth projects.

New HOT lane plan for Virginia’s I-95 corridor

Let me again suggest low-occupancy toll lanes to keep the high-occupancy toll lanes company.

Hampton Roads will lose legislative power due to census shift

The people who moved away will return before the 2020 Census if we put a Whole Foods in downtown Norfolk; in the meantime you can have fun playing around with this interactive census map.

Black mother Kelly Bolar jailed for sending kids to white school

One of the more outrageous justifications I’ve seen for jailing someone.

City worker dies in back of recycling truck in Norfolk

Jerry Holton, who had worked for the city 21 years, died yesterday morning in the back of a city garbage truck in Wards Corner.

Another DADT horror story—the financial witch hunts continue

Required reading for anyone who’s under the widespread impression that DADT has been erased and gays can now serve openly in the military.

The Presidential Prayer Team

Some years back, in a youthful prank, I signed a friend up for email updates from the Family Research Council and the John Birch Society. He got me back by putting me on the permanent email list of the Presidential Prayer Team, which regularly sends instructions on what members of the government I should be praying for. This week’s legislative prayers focus on Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). I’m more than happy to pray that Sen. Coburn has stopped believing that “lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.”

We’re also praying this week for Jay Carney, the new White House Press Secretary.

Va. Senate panel defeats anti-abortion bills

The state politicians working hardest against the Affordable Care Act have simultaneously been trying to give “human rights” to the unborn, which isn’t hypocritical if you don’t consider the right not to die of a treatable illness to be a human right.

McDonnell proposes budget amendment to ban stem-cell research

If we prevent new cures from being developed, the government won’t have to pay for poor people to get them.

“Stupak on Steroids”

The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, now being considered in the U.S. House, seeks to redefine rape by distinguishing between “forcible” and other kinds of rape, and to allow abortion only in the “forcible” cases. As Sady Doyle explains in Salon, the bill aims to “make exemptions for rape and incest survivors practically unenforceable.”

It’s worth quoting Doyle further: “Those who were raped while drugged or unconscious, or through means of coercion, would not be covered. Survivors of statutory rape would not be covered: ‘if a minor,’ one is only covered in case of incest. And if one is a survivor of incest, and not a minor, that’s also not covered. Studies of how rapists find and subdue victims reveal that about 70 percent of rapes wouldn’t fall under the ‘forcible’ designation.”

If you support your local Republican Congressman then it’s also what you yourself are supporting. A vote for Scott Rigell in VA-02 has turned out to be a vote for redefining rape by dividing it into two categories. Forcible rape? Still wrong. Mere rape? Not so wrong.

I’ve heard a lot in the wake of the Tucson shooting we should listen to each other more, and assume the other side’s arguments come in good faith. In the case of this bill, that’s impossible. If I’m an uncivil ideologue to call the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act an attack on all women in America, so be it. And when I say attack, I don’t mean an abstract one. Women are more likely to be raped when the law of the land is based on a virulently sexist wink-nudge idea of what rape is. Because from now on, would-be rapists will know they live in a country where the man who’s second in line to the presidential succession doesn’t think rape is that big of a deal.

As a result of that view, Boehner has been endorsed by something called the Republican National Coalition for Life, which gives out endorsements only to those candidates who “do not justify abortion for innocent babies who are conceived through rape or incest.” I clicked on the “About Us” link at their website hoping to learn more about their demographics, to no avail; suffice to say probably not so many rape victims belong to their coalition. In fact I’ll bet a lot their coalition believes there aren’t many rape victims period.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, one in six women will be sexually assaulted during their lifetime. That translates to about 25,000,000 of the women who are alive today in the United States.

When we talk about economics, budget structures, etc., there’s plenty of room for disagreement and reasonable differences. Not here. Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos has come under fire for referring to certain right-wing radicals as the “American Taliban.” In my mind this debate vindicates him.

Attacking Social Security

Last week in this space I upset some folks by suggesting that Social Security isn’t going bankrupt. I’m sorry for any apoplexy caused by my assertion that America’s most successful anti-poverty program actually works, but it does work and will continue to until those who desire to kill it succeed in their pernicious misinformation campaign.

Here’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on the topic in August 2010: “Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come.”

If you’re confused about Social Security, go read Krugman’s entire column. Maybe you think due to the sheer number of people who claim that Social Security is unsustainable, they can’t be wrong. Explains Krugman:

“To a large extent [claims of crisis] rely on bad-faith accounting. … It would be easy to dismiss this bait-and-switch as obvious nonsense, except for one thing: many influential people — including Alan Simpson, co-chairman of the president’s deficit commission — are peddling this nonsense.”

It’s tempting to quote his whole column, but just click the link.