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Pols gone wild: Watch what you share, people!

Mike Webb explains the porn tabs on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Well, here we are in the thick of the congressional election season, with strivers from both parties jostling and jockeying to grab one of the limited number of golden tickets to the halls of political power. This is, it goes without saying, one of our favorite times of the electoral cycle, as the probability of chaos is high, and the likelihood that some neophyte wannabe Congress-critter will make a truly boneheaded mistake is a near certainty.

Case in point: Mike Webb, a former Army officer who claims to be mounting an independent run in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District (he lost the Republican nomination to Charles Hernick last month). A deeply conservative fellow, Webb is basically running his campaign via his Facebook page, where he posts all manner of self-promotional materials, conspiracy theories and extended religious rants.

This compulsive oversharing finally caught up with Webb on May 16, when he posted a screen grab of a map to illustrate his theory that he had been prank called by an Arlington County Republican Committee member. Unfortunately for him, two other visible browser tabs in the screen grab were very obviously porn sites (please feel free to Google “Layla Rivera tight booty” and “Ivone sexy amateur” to see what’s trending on the world wide Webb).

The best part of this entire story has been Webb’s reaction, which has been in turns completely surreal (Facebook posts that addressed the epistemological question, “Is the Lord against porn?” and detailed “the results of my empirical inquiry that introduced me to Layla and Ivone”), and oddly endearing (his goofy appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live”). One thing’s for sure: Webb’s political career might be toast, but his career as an Internet sensation is surely just beginning.

While Webb was certainly the most high-profile misbehaving Old Dominion candidate we’ve seen lately, he certainly wasn’t the only one. Our other favorite imperfect pols include 11th District Republican John Michael Wolfe who, after filing to run against incumbent U.S. Representative Gerry Connolly, failed to show up at the nominating convention, thereby leaving Connolly completely unopposed, and Charlottesville’s own Michael Del Rosso, who unloaded on his opponent after multiple rounds of balloting to choose the Republican standard-bearer for the 5th Congressional District.

Frazzled after a Hunger Games-style winnowing of the field from four candidates down to two, Del Rosso reached his boiling point when one of the eliminated candidates, Jim McKelvey, made an alliance with the eventual victor, state Senator Tom Garrett, which turned the odds decidedly in Garrett’s favor (have we taken this metaphor too far?). Anyway, Del Rosso’s impassioned speech (in which he complained that Garrett “slandered me in Buckingham County, called me a liar… a snake oil salesman”) obviously did little to help him, as he was roundly defeated on the final ballot.

Finally, we simply must mention our favorite non-candidate of the week: Richmond strip club owner Mike Dickinson, who—after failing to clinch the Democratic nomination in the 7th Congressional District—recently decided against a threatened independent bid to challenge current incumbent Dave Brat. Luckily for us, he’s still promising to run for mayor of Richmond, so perhaps our dreams of conducting an extensive interview in his place of business will come true.

And who knows? Maybe we’ll even see Webb there. Doing research, of course.

Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.

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Trumped: Whoops! There goes the election

The man with a local winery bearing his name likely will be the Republican candidate for president. Photo by Amanda Maglione

Greetings, dear readers. Before we dive mirthfully into the fact that Donald John Trump is now the de facto Republican presidential nominee, we’d like to hop into the wayback machine and take a quick trip to the evening of Saturday, April 30, when Republican Party of Virginia state convention attendees gathered to approve a slate of delegates for the national GOP convention in July. Now remember: Trump won the Virginia primary, and thus whichever slate was chosen would be obligated to vote for him on the first ballot. But back then, in those halcyon days when the #NeverTrump movement had yet to realize it was a complete joke, the fight to elect anti-Trump delegates (who would theoretically abandon him on the second ballot) was fully engaged.

Leading this fight was former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who was there to make sure his preferred candidate, Ted Cruz, dominated the delegate race. Opposing him was Trump’s Virginia campaign chairman Corey Stewart, a Prince William county supervisor and candidate for governor who is, if possible, even more of a nut job than Cuccinelli (to be clear, this may not actually be possible).

As these two tactical geniuses girded themselves for battle, the assembled throng of pumped-up partisans engaged in an unofficial voice vote for the three remaining would-be GOP nominees, which went about as expected. Cruz! (Huge cheer.) Trump! (Less huge cheer.) John Kasich! (A sad smattering of applause that sounded like air leaking from the tail end of a balloon dog.)

But once the actual voting began, it became clear that Trump’s Virginia delegate operation was, like the man himself, a completely disorganized and ad hoc affair, with no actual plan other than to show up and make noise. And so the Cooch steamrolled them, getting a slate approved that was 10-3 in favor of Cruz. Even better, Cuccinelli trash-talked the Trump effort (“This is a competition. And they are incapable of competing effectively on the ground,” he sneered to the Richmond Times-Dispatch), and bragged that he could have easily nabbed all 13 slots, but gave three to Trump as an “olive branch.” (Stewart, charmer that he is, angrily retorted that it was actually a “screw-you branch.”)

And we all know what happened next. Trump romped to victory in the Indiana primary, and Cruz and Kasich immediately dropped out, essentially ceding the nomination to the orange-hued huckster.

The fallout from this insane turn of events is really just beginning, but one thing’s for certain: The electoral prospects of elephants across the commonwealth just took a huge hit. Cuccinelli has already announced that he will not be running for governor in 2017, and Republicans from U.S. Representative Dave Brat to once-and-future gubernatorial hopeful Ed Gillespie have been mouthing the sort of tepid, generic words of support you might use when discussing a future son-in-law whom you secretly despise. (“Republican voters have nominated Donald Trump for president, and I will vote for him against Hillary Clinton,” Gillespie said, issuing a written statement so you couldn’t see him gritting his teeth.)

And so, as we contemplate the upcoming presidential battle for the swing state of Virginia, for once we heartily agree with a Republican strategist, Tucker Martin, who told the Times-Dispatch: “I don’t expect Virginia to be a battleground state this time around. Hillary will win, and I believe she will win handily. And that makes any chance of the Republican Party winning the White House that much more unlikely.”

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.

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Drop the mic: The legislative season comes to a welcome end

Gavin Grimm ACLU

We would like to dedicate this edition of our humble column to a brave and tenacious young man: the awesomely named Gavin Grimm, who has (thus far) triumphed in the face of unrelenting adversity and intolerance to champion a basic human right: to pee in peace and comfort. A junior at Gloucester High School, Gavin has long identified as male, and was allowed to use the boys room at his high school for almost two months after he went public with his innate dudeness. But then some local parents got their hate on, and a small-minded district court judge named Robert Doumar ruled that Gavin could not, in fact, use the bathroom that matched his identity.

Luckily, a federal appeals court has now reversed that decision and, for the first time, said that transgender students are covered by Title IX, which bars discrimination on the basis of gender. Even better, this fourth circuit court ruling also covers North Carolina, which recently passed a bill that basically forces everyone in the state to carry around a birth certificate in order to prove they’re in the “correct” bathroom.

The reason we are saluting Gavin at this particular moment (other than the fact that he is awesome) is because, with the final gavel falling on the General Assembly’s veto override session, we have now officially exited Virginia’s annual legislative onslaught without any horrible transphobic legislation becoming the law of the land. This is no mean feat, people! Both Senate Bill 41, which protected gay-marriage-refusing officiants, and House Bill 781, which sought to levy a fine on the Gavin Grimms of this world for simply using the bathroom, could easily have become law.

But they did not, and for that we are profoundly grateful. We are also grateful that not one of Governor Terry McAuliffe’s well-considered vetoes was overridden during the one-day exercise in futility the General Assembly recently endured. Without the Macker’s veto pen, we would now be living in a commonwealth that not only allowed blatant discrimination against same-sex couples, but also propped up the coal industry with taxpayer dollars, cut funding to Planned Parenthood, expanded access to guns, protected all Confederate monuments from being removed from public lands and allowed parents to bar their children from reading any books in school that contained “sexually explicit material” (the bye-bye, Judy Blume bill, as we like to call it).

Of course, Governor McAuliffe also helped draft a bill that would allow the state to obtain drugs for executions under a veil of secrecy, so that nobody would know which compounding pharmacy is blatantly violating the Hippocratic Oath.

But all in all, considering what a horror show the recent legislative session could have been, it feels like we dodged a bullet (in the case of that vetoed gun legislation, quite literally). Then again, with the Republicans firmly in control of the assembly for the foreseeable future, there’s always next year. And the year after that. And the year after that…

Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.

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A sorry state: Things could always be worse

Governor Terry McAuliffe likely would veto a bathroom bill should one pass in Virginia. Photo by John Robinson

Imagine, if you will, an alternate reality version of our beautiful commonwealth. A bizarro Virginia where Ken Cuccinelli won the governorship in 2013, and E.W. “Yoga is a tool of Satan” Jackson was elected lieutenant governor. Now imagine that this dynamic duo were in charge when Senate Bill 41, which would exempt religious organizations from any liability if they chose to discriminate against same-sex couples, hit the governor’s desk.

Is there any doubt that a Governor Cuccinelli would not only sign such a bill, but hold it up as a model for even more discriminatory “religious freedom” legislation? And that Lieutenant Governor Jackson, adding to his long history of outlandish and offensive statements, would be all over the airwaves, yammering on about the “homosexual agenda” and insisting that a “sincerely held religious belief” should allow all manner of discrimination?

Well, sadly, you don’t need to look very far to see this alternate reality in action. Just over our southern border, in the great state of North Carolina, the ugly repercussions of such legislative action are playing out, and the results are sobering, to say the least. Under the thoroughly misguided leadership of Governor Pat McCrory, the Tar Heel State recently rushed through a law that bars local governments from extending civil rights protections to LGBT individuals, while also making it a crime for transgender people to use a bathroom that doesn’t match their biological gender.

This is just the latest in a flurry of similarly discriminatory state laws, but its broad and incoherent provisions (including that basically unenforceable bathroom mandate) have caused a backlash that we imagine Governor McCrory (never the sharpest tool in the shed) did not see coming. Not only have multiple states instituted travel boycotts for government employees, but a large number of companies, including PayPal and Braeburn Pharmaceuticals, have announced that they are reconsidering sizable business investments in the state due to the law, and Bruce Springsteen recently canceled a show in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Now, we will be the first to admit that our own illustrious Governor Terry McAuliffe is far from perfect. (We were particularly cheesed off by the way he undercut Attorney General Mark Herring by summarily reversing a ruling that would have enforced Virginia’s laws on concealed handguns for all visitors to the state.) But his recent vetoes of a number of terrible bills produced during the winter legislative session—including the odious Senate Bill 41—once again demonstrated that Virginia’s voters made the right choice in the last election.

As for North Carolina…well, it pains us to say it, as we have great affection for the state, but the current political leadership deserves all the pain and misery it is currently receiving. We can only hope the majority of voters agree, and throw Governor McCrory out on his ear in the next election.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This week’s column was written before Governor McCrory signed an executive order April 12.

Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.

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President Clinton: Get used to it, folks

OD_©Ron Sachs CNP via ZUMA Wire

Okay, we’re calling it. As of this moment, it is virtually guaranteed that Hillary Clinton will be the 45th president of the United States. She has an almost insurmountable delegate lead over her Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders, and even if she should lose every remaining primary and caucus, the Dems’ lack of winner-take-all states makes the chances of Bernie overtaking her in pledged delegates vanishingly slim.

And then, of course, there’s the ongoing disaster that is the Republican primary race. The elephants basically have three choices right now: run with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket and lose; deny Trump, the highest vote-getter by far, the nomination at a contested convention, run somebody else and lose (with The Donald mounting a third-party bid) or break the GOP in half by supporting a “moderate” third-party candidate and lose. There are seriously no other options, and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying sufficiently close attention.

And now that we’ve got that settled, we can focus on the more interesting question. Namely, what does a Clinton victory look like, and how will it affect the other races on the ballot, both in Virginia and nationwide? If the Republicans completely surrender to Trump (a distinct possibility) and offer only token resistance before giving him the keys to the Grand Old Party, the result could be a wave election that upends the balance of power both in the U.S. Senate (already a likelihood) and the U.S. House of Representatives (until recently an unthinkable turn of events). If, on the other hand, the Republican establishment explicitly rejects Trump, and allows vulnerable Congress-critters to run against him, they might still salvage their majorities in both chambers.

But it sure ain’t gonna be easy. And making things tougher is the fact that, with the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, conservatives have lost an important bulwark in their fight for electoral dominance. This became exceedingly clear last week during oral arguments in  Wittman v. Personhuballah, the Supreme Court case focused on whether Virginia’s 3rd District was drawn by the Republican majority in 2012 to dilute the black vote in surrounding districts.

The answer is yes, without a doubt. But with Scalia on the court this case could have gone either way. Without him, the balance of power has shifted, and it appears likely that the court will either deadlock on the issue—which would mean the district court ruling that found this “racial gerrymandering” unconstitutional would stand—or even muster a 5-3 vote against the practice.

The practical effects of this ruling will mean that Representative Bobby Scott, currently the only black congressman from Virginia, will probably be joined by another Democrat on Capitol Hill, and Republicans will find their sizable majority decreased by two.

Now, considering that the donkeys need to flip a total of 30 seats to retake the House, one might not seem like that big a deal. But with all of the stars seeming to align against the elephants heading into the general election, it’s small defeats like this that could build into a tsunami of electoral misery.

And trust us: Every step Donald Trump takes toward securing the Republican nomination is one more step toward President Clinton beginning her term with both houses of Congress firmly under Democratic control.

Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.

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And away we go… Everybody back in the pool!

With so much going on in the executive branch, it's easy to neglect what's happening in the General Assemblyl as the session hits its . midpoint. File photo.

Ah, January in the capitol, when Virginia’s legislators swarm in from all corners of the commonwealth for the annual General Assembly session, bringing along the petty grudges and crackpot bills they’ve managed to generate over the previous year.

And every year we sit in anticipation, just waiting for the next intemperate floor speech or ill-considered legislative proposal that will, once again, make Virginia into a national laughingstock. (The high-water mark for this sort of thing was, of course, 2012’s forced transvaginal ultrasound debacle, which earned our humble Assembly months of mocking comedy-show coverage.)

But even before Virginia’s senators and delegates could push through the swarm of lobbyists and find their seats, the session was already mired in controversy. On the Senate side, reporters discovered that their customary perch on the chamber floor had been removed by Majority Leader Tommy Norment, and that they were now banished to the upper gallery. When asked about this and other rule changes, Norment—who has apparently never heard the old adage “never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel”—smiled slyly and said, “What new rules?”

Meanwhile, over in the House of Delegates, the Republican majority had to take the unusual step of closing out a months-long special session before gaveling in the winter session. The purpose of the fake session was to keep Governor Terry McAuliffe from using his recess appointment powers to keep Justice Jane Roush on the Supreme Court (he did it anyway). Republicans, who claim they have no problem with Roush herself, are almost certainly going to replace her simply because they object to the way she was appointed.

And then, with all of these unseemly preliminaries out of the way, it was on to the big show! The first order of business for us, of course, was to scan the reams of submitted legislation to figure out which bill or bills would become notorious as the year’s stupidest piece of proposed law.

There were, as always, many contenders (barring sex offenders from owning Kids First license plates, criminalizing referee-punching, limiting the crime of “brandishment” only to those who point a firearm at someone with “the intent to induce fear”), but this year’s idiotic idea award has a clear winner: Spotsylvania Republican Delegate Mark Cole, who introduced a bill mandating a fine for schools that allow any student to use a bathroom or locker room that does not match his or her “correct anatomical sex.” Besides the reprehensible homophobia and bullying of transgender students inherent in this proposal, the real-world effect of such a law would require that school officials inspect the genitalia of any child who wanted to use the bathroom—not exactly the family values scenario we imagine Delegate Cole was going for.

Not to be outdone, Cole’s fellow delegate Rick Morris used his valuable floor time on opening day to give a speech for the ages. He began by incongruously praising the Black Lives Matter movement (Morris is a well-known religious conservative). But then he quickly clarified that he didn’t mean the movement “that calls for the killing and injuring of our law enforcement and the destruction of our cities. …I rise for the original Black Lives movement.”

What followed was a long-winded, rambling diatribe that equated America’s “national sin” of slavery to abortion, repeatedly invoked the stalwart Republican “a-bo-lutionists” who apparently single-handedly ended slavery, and helpfully explained that “if you are okay with the harvesting of the body parts and tissue of those murdered children then your soul is walking with Satan.”

And yes, in case you were wondering, there was a hearty round of applause as Delegate Morris returned to his seat. And so it begins.

Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.

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Opinion: Deadly numbers and weak laws

File photo.

A year ago in April, a UVA student nearly shot his neighbor, a UVA law student, when he accidentally fired his AK-47 through his wall and into the next apartment. Because the judge didn’t find enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn’t simply an accident and not a criminal act, charges were dismissed, but this frightening incident could easily have added to the growing number of victims of firearms.

Since the Newtown shootings in 2012, every day eight children in the U.S. die from guns, according to the Brady Campaign. In domestic homicides, a gun is the most commonly used weapon. From 2001 through 2012, the Center for American Progress says 6,410 women in the U.S. were murdered by an intimate partner using a gun, more than the total number of U.S. troops killed in action during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. And using Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, Mother Jones says more Americans have been shot to death in the past 25 years than have died in every war, from the Revolutionary War to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Law-abiding, responsible gun owners are not the problem,” says former Congresswoman Gabby Gifford, herself a victim of gun violence. “The problem is that we have weak laws that let dangerous people get their hands on guns.” Gifford and her husband, Captain Mark Kelly, support bipartisan legislation sponsored by Representative Peter King (R-NY) that would both protect Americans’ Second Amendment rights as well as make communities safer by expanding background checks on the Internet and at gun shows.

The National Rifle Association has lobbied to prevent gun safety laws even though a Johns Hopkins University survey reveals that 74 percent of NRA members favor a waiting period for the purchase of a handgun and more than 81 percent of Americans support limiting sales of military-style assault weapons. Further, the NRA has been successful in keeping a congressional 19-year prohibition on Centers for Disease Control studies of gun violence.

According to the medical journal Pediatrics, nearly 10,000 American children are killed or injured every year due to gun violence, most recently a 6-year-old shooting his 3-year-old brother October 17 in Chicago. The mortality rate from firearms in the U.S. is 10 times higher than rates in other wealthy nations, says Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

“The lives of American children are precious, they matter,” says Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action. “Legislators need to stand up and say, regardless of the efforts of the gun lobby to protect their profits, we are going to protect our children.”

Now which candidates in November have the courage, the will and the moral outrage to act in the name of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and Umpqua Community College in Oregon?

Marjorie Siegel is a member of the Charlottesville Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, which is dedicated to reducing gun deaths and protecting human life.