McDonnell: Virginians should be suspicious…again

Is Bob McDonnell corrupt or just dumb?

Washingtonpost.com:

A suspiciously large public grant from the controversial Virginia tobacco commission to a natural gas project in the southern part of the state should add to citizens’ misgivings over how business gets done in the Old Dominion.

The tobacco commission dished out $30 million for a gas pipeline even though its staff calculated that the project merited just $6.5 million based on the commission’s own economic formulas.

Intriguingly, commission staff said the larger grant was made because of political pressure from the office of former governor Bob McDonnell, according to a draft report by the state inspector general’s office recently made public by the Associated Press.

Neither the commission’s acting head, Tim Pfohl, nor McDonnell’s lawyers denied that such lobbying might have occurred.

Pfohl insisted, however, that the larger grant was made to ensure that a $1 billion power plant and $300 million pipeline would be built in tobacco country, which the commission is supposed to serve, rather than in a competing location.

“What may be political pressure in one person’s eyes to us is normal business to bring a Virginia team approach to projects like this,” Pfohl said in a phone interview Tuesday.

Maybe so. The inspector general’s final report didn’t include any mention of political pressure, saying it lacked corroboration.

Nonetheless, the staff’s account offers yet another bit of evidence that the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission serves at times as a kind of slush fund to help the politically connected.

Does the corruption end?  Ever?  Why is there always something fishy associated with the McDonnell administration?  I still want to know why VRS was buying trash stocks like Star Scientific.  That makes no sense.  I think I am the only person who cares.