RICHMOND — Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II urged Gov. Robert F. McDonnell on Monday to call a special General Assembly session to repair “severe holes” in the state’s ethics laws.
With McDonnell embroiled in a gifts scandal over luxury items, five-figure monetary gifts and $120,000 in loans from a Virginia businessman, the Republican candidate to succeed him said Virginia cannot wait until the legislature reconvenes in January to tighten the state’s lax disclosure requirements.
“Trust is something that is easy to lose and hard to recover,” Cuccinelli said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I think the longer we let this go, the more difficult it is for Virginians to achieve the level of faith in their government that I think they’re accustomed to. And I think that’s something we can achieve if we move quickly.”
Cuccinelli’s chief deputy asked the governor to call the session in a face-to-face meeting Monday.
Stratford Hall: A Whale of a Find
From the banks of the Potomac River, in a region steeped in American history, a massive fossil was dug up last month that apparently can be traced back to a time long before this country’s recorded history, a time deep in the world’s prehistory.
The fossil is the skull of a whale that is “approximately 15 million years old,” said John Nance, the paleontology collections manager at the Calvert Marine Museum in Southern Maryland.
The skull is about six-feet long and is believed to weigh about 1,000 pounds. It was excavated in July from the cliffs at the edge of the Potomac on the grounds of Stratford Hall, the home of Virginia’s Lee family and the birthplace of Robert E. Lee.
The rest of the skeleton, which experts believe belongs to a type of baleen whale that has since gone extinct, remains embedded in Stratford Hall’s sand-colored cliffs.
Stratford Hall is in Westmoreland County, and both George Washington and the country’s fifth president, James Monroe, were born in the county on the Northern Neck, about 100 miles southeast of Washington.
VRS: Virginia Pension Fund beginning to look anemic under Republican reign
The VRS has been in a steady decline in the past 5 years, since the onset of the Great Recession. One has to ask why, since the stock market recovery has been remarkable and is at an all time high. In short, the VRS got knocked on its financial ass, like everyone else, during the crash. It has not kept pace because the General Assembly has refused to fund it at the levels where they should be funding. Additionally, the State of Virginia has used the VRS like an ATM. It owes the fund millions of dollars that must be repaid. Part of this ‘loan’ is from municipalities and school system pay-ins being deferred.
