An Organic Farmer Running in Virginia's 9th District

I just took a road trip up into Virginia's 9th Congressional District, which is huge, stretching from Cumberland Gap eastward and northward, taking in over 20 counties and parts of counties and also several major universities including Virginia Tech and Radford. It's the second largest district in the state and includes the coal fields of far southwest Virginia. The district is larger than the entire state of New Jersey.

On Saturday I happened onto a small-town July 4th parade in the district. Except for one -- and only one -- local politician and some dude driving a four-wheel recreational vehicle displaying a "Corey Stewart for Senate" placard, the parade was otherwise completely free of politicians, a remarkable void in itself, I thought.

(Corey Stewart, incidentally, is the white-supremacy-curious Republican candidate for Senate that is causing enormous heartache among mainstream and country club Republicans. There's a big article in this morning's WashPost about the split in the party over Stewart's candidacy. I noticed at the parade on Saturday that no one was applauding the dude with the Stewart placard.)

What I did notice everywhere else I went in the district were "Flaccavento for Congress" signs, from the smallest towns to good-sized cities. Anthony Flaccavento is the Democrat running against the incumbent Republican Morgan Griffith, whose reputation at least among the folks I spoke with is aloofness from his district and a disassociation from its problems. He was first elected in the 2010 Tea Party wave and shares those lack-of-sympathy values. The constant complaint I heard about Griffith: He never comes back to the district. He never holds townhall meetings with his constituents. (Sound familiar, Virginia Foxx?)

Anthony Flaccavento

Flaccavento is a farmer in Washington County. He ran against Griffith once before, in 2012, and didn't come close. I hear he's much more organized this time around and is working that huge district from one end to the other. He's recruiting 1,000 foot-soldier volunteers and holding 100 town meetings. He's got a populist message for those who'll listen. According to Carmen Forman:

Flaccavento is critical of the Democratic establishment because as he sees it, the party has abandoned working people, especially in rural areas.

“I am going to shout at the Democrats the whole way through this campaign because that needs to change,” he said. 

Flaccavento argues that progressives should not ignore rural communities. He launched a website called Rural Progressive Politics this summer to help make his case. 

His platform stresses that land, livelihood and community shape the way rural voters see politics and the world, and his campaign will focus on fostering healthy local communities. Flaccavento is an organic farmer, and much of his message stems from his consulting work devoted to growing healthy, sustainable regional economies.

“When we invest in local communities, when we invest in small, independent businesses and mid-size businesses, when we invest in innovative manufacturers, we get much, much, much more bang for the buck than the corporate giveaways that have become the foundation of most state and local economic development policies,” he said.

Vigorous local economies means fewer tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and lower taxes for small businesses, instead of significant tax breaks for major corporations that can afford to pay them, Flaccavento said.

Flaccavento is also an author and has a website which predates his campaign, "Bottom Up Economy, 'Cause Trickle Down Doesn't," where he advances the cause for a resurgence in rural America. His book on rural issues, "Building a Healthy Economy From the Bottom Up," was published by the University of Kentucky Press last year.

The 9th CD of Virginia is still considered "Safe Republican" territory, but we're pulling for Anthony Flaccavento to turn that around in 2018.

The Party of State-Mandated Vaginal Probing Goes Limp

For the second day in a row, once some of the Republican members of the Virginia General Assembly got a good look at the women massing on the Capitol grounds in opposition to 10 inches of government snooping shoved up their vaginas, the sponsors of Virginia's proposed new anti-abortion bill were said to be in deep contemplation of "compromises" that might save their mortal souls from the hell about to be unleashed on them.

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), who up until day-before-yesterday said he was just itching to see all those women spread their legs to state-mandated probing, is now signaling that maybe it was some governor-impersonator who said he would sign any vaginal-poking-around law that the General Assembly cared to put on his desk.

Gov. McDonnell's ringing endorsement has changed to something resembling under-cooked pabulum:

"Our position is: If the General Assembly passes this bill the governor will review it, in its final form, at that time,” McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin said in a statement.

Seems like the Republican war on women, when faced with actual resistance, gets a whole lot less "manly."

Can Women Scare Some Sense into Virginia?

Yesterday's impromptu protest at the Virginia state capitol over several pieces of anti-woman legislation -- mandating an invasive "transvaginal ultrasound" for women seeking an abortion and a law declaring a fertilized egg a person -- is perhaps only the first wave of a tsunami of female (and male too) resistance to the conservative Republican theocracy that has taken over Virginia government.

The protest was organized very suddenly and very quickly via Facebook and other social media. Over 1,000 mostly women stood in a silent queue that stretched nearly three blocks on a sidewalk. Later, they were allowed to flank both sides of the sidewalk taken by many state legislators to the Capitol, standing two and three deep.

The protest seems to have shaken Republican self-confidence a wee bit, since the chief sponsor of the transvaginal ultrasound bill -- an alleged woman, incidentally -- opted to put off final consideration of her proposed law.

Fairly Fresh French-Fried Friday Filets

I'm feeling the need to go prune something but can't seem to drag myself away from various spectacles on the InnerTubes:

1. Yesterday Republican Speaker of the NC House Thom Tillis ordered citizens cleared from the hallways outside his corner office in the General Assembly in Raleigh. The crowd was orderly, respectful, quiet, and merely curious about what surprise moves the Speaker might be planning to take away rights from the people. John Frank of the News&Observer was on hand to record the event. Apparently, protesters of Republican smash-and-grab politics are now not welcomed on the second floor of the building, while lobbyists from Time Warner and other fat-cat corporatists are. Who knew?

2. Meet Foster Friess, the billionaire born-again backer of Rick "Womb Police" Santorum, the money-man who's been pretty much single-handedly keeping the loser senator's race for president alive ... that and the reanimation of the War on Women's Rights. Friess jokingly told Andrea Mitchell yesterday that in his day (approximately 1905), women didn't need expensive contraception, only an aspirin held tightly between their knees, a joke as revelatory of the century Santorum seeks to reestablish in America as it is tone-deaf. Molly Redden's profile of Friess is not to be missed. And you can thank the good Lord again for a Supreme Court that unleashed the likes of Friess on what's left of our democracy.

3. Speaking of the war on women, female-impersonator Congresswoman Virginia A. Foxx was front and center (and "indignant," according to this reporter) in the Washington carnival of Republicans suddenly newly energized to stop female contraception. Foxx's "indignant" moment came when the reporter pointed out that the man she's endorsed for president, Mitt Romney, while he was governor of Massachusetts "remained mum as the legislature implemented a law requiring insurers to provide contraception in 2003 and his health department issued regulations requiring all hospitals — including Catholic institutions — to offer emergency birth control to rape victims in 2005." You can put a string of pearls on rank hypocrisy but you can't make it think.

4. Meanwhile, the state of Virginia (not named for the Congresswoman, but still) has motored completely off the round ball we call Earth with not one but two legislative assaults on women: (a) declaring that a sperm that has penetrated an egg is a "person" with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of someone actually breathing air. Now we would assume that once those wise Virginians have amended their Constitution in this fashion, they'll be recalculating when those former fertilized eggs can register to vote ... precisely 18 years from conception, right, or else Virginia has taken away one right in order to manufacture another. (b) A new law forcing -- and we mean that in its rawest, cold-metal form -- a women seeking a legal abortion to undergo a state-sponsored "transvaginal ultrasound," actual penetration with a probe, because -- hey! -- there ain't no humiliation too severe to visit on women who think they own their own bodies.

Only the Pure May Vote in Virginia

The fact that Virginia voters will salute and do as they're ordered -- and that voters will be ordered to take a loyalty oath when they vote in the Republican Party's primary on March 6 -- is all the evidence we need that Virginia conservatives are lacking both self-awareness and the least spark of resistance to illegitimate power.

Make that "conservatives everywhere."

Cover-Up

What is it about these self-righteous Christian conservatives and their terror of women's breasts?

The hyper-Christian Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has decided that the Virginia state seal, in use since Thomas Jefferson's day, is just too x-rated for his sanctified tastes. The original seal (on the left) depicts "Virtue" with a bared left breast. Attorney General Cuccinelli, who perhaps knows as much about the law as he does about classical art, has issued a new version (on the right), with that offending breast now covered up, in fact, iron-plated.

It took all of a nano-second for a reporter to remember that in 2002 then U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, another notorious saint, spent $8,000 on some blue drapes installed to cover partially nude statues at the Justice Department.

What was it Jesus said one of the times he was cussing out the Pharisees? Try Matthew 23:27: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness."

We know at least some of the nastiness now that was hiding in Ashcroft's "whited sepulchre." His Justice Department was presiding over a virtual criminal conspiracy to enable a "unified executive" to do exactly as he pleased. In Cuccinelli's case, we just have to wait to see what interior rottenness his exterior holiness is screening from view. He's also the guy, please recall, who ordered Virginia's colleges to stop protecting gay employees from discrimination.

The Mullah Who Would Be Governor of Virginia

You're given a pass if you're not following the election contest for governor of Virginia this year, but you might want to check out the Republican who is leading in most polls, one Robert F. McDonnell, who was fostered by Pat Robertson's university and who clearly wanted to keep women roughly in the same place that the Taliban reserved for them. He's now disavowing those views he put into his student thesis, but his history in the Virginia state legislature suggests otherwise. From the WashPost:

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families -- a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women.

In his run for governor, McDonnell, 55, makes little mention of his conservative beliefs and has said throughout his campaign that he should be judged by what he has done in office, including efforts to lower taxes, stiffen criminal penalties and reform mental health laws. He reiterated that position Saturday in a statement responding to questions about his thesis.

Conservatives Lose Struggle for Virginia GOP

The Virginia Republican Party Central Committee ousted its conservative chair on Saturday, signaling that it intends to follow the more moderate path being advocated by its probable candidate for state governor this year.

That gubernatorial candidate, Robert F. McDonnell, along with other top Republican elected officials in the state, says he wants to play down the conservative "focus on ideology and such hot-button issues as gun rights, immigration and abortion."

No, really.

The state party chair did not go easily and vowed vengeance after he was voted out. His conservative supporters screamed "mob lynching."

The ousted party chair -- his name is unimportant; he could be any one of a dozen state GOP party chairs across the nation -- had distinguished himself last year by refusing to coordinate with the less-than-pure John McCain campaign and had compared Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden. He's that kind of conservative.

But apparently, Virginia is not that kind of red state any more.