Life under the Regency category archive

Follow the money.

Now you see it, now you don’t.

Round and round it goes, where (or when) it stops, nobody knows.

In summer 2011, Virginia first lady Maureen McDonnell purchased roughly $30,000 in Star Scientific, Inc. stock, using money from a loan the company’s chief executive gave her.

Confirmation of the transactions adds another layer to the connections between Jonnie Williams Sr., the Star Scientific executive who has lavished gifts on Gov. Bob McDonnell and his family. Those gifts are now part of state and federal investigations.

Much more at the link.

Normally, he just gases on and on.

The day (Tuesday–ed.) began with a flurry of emails by state Democrats highlighting revelations reported by the Bristol Herald Courier that the Office of Inspector General is looking into whether a senior staffer for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, improperly advised lawyers for energy companies embroiled in a legal battle with Southwest Virginia landowners.

It peaked with Cuccinelli sidestepping reporters’ questions about the state inquiry just moments after he unrolled his campaign’s educational platform during a lengthy event at a Richmond school.

A reporter barely had time to utter the title inspector general before the attorney general cut him off, a video by Richmond news station NBC 12 shows.

This election season is getting more and more interesting.

Is it going to be a Regency courtroom drama?

After the Virginia dietary supplements maker Star Scientific announced on Friday that it did not expect to be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, a spokesperson for Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) went public with criticism of both the company and its CEO, Jonnie Williams. Williams’ relationship with McDonnell is the subject of both state and federal investigations, and the governor and his family have recently returned over $150,000 in gifts and loans given to them by him in recent years.

“Apparently, the U.S. government has given Star Scientific a free pass for unspecified misdeeds in return for the testimony of Jonnie Williams,” Rich Galen, McDonnell’s recently-hired private spokesperson, wrote in a statement to The Virginian-Pilot on Saturday. “Governor Bob McDonnell has had an 37-year unblemished record of military and civilian government service. Jonnie Williams has been in trouble with government entities since the earliest days of his business career.”

Last week, The Richmonder wondered whether Jonnie Williams, he of the magickal nicotine pills, had rolled on The Regent.

Looks like he may have been onto something there.

It’s sort of like Wall Street: It’s only insider trading if you get caught.

Meanwhile, the Cooch is budget-minded (wait for it; it’s at the end).

Of course, compared to Vince, these guys are pikers.

Via Raw Story.

After all, some things are best left unsaid.

Gov. Bob McDonnell says he and a businessman who gave him and his family more than $160,000 in gifts never discussed the state tax problems of the businessman’s company.

“Absolutely never,” McDonnell said Friday, during a visit to Salem to announce a series of grants to school boards for a new teacher incentive pay program.

Indeed, he never even knew of it.

No indeedy not.

Just ask him.

There’s a difference between corruption and cronyism, even though the two often come in a blend, like a toxic mai-tai. Corruption is about what you can get; cronyism is about who you know.

This looks more like the latter than the former, but it still signals an absence of good judgment. Good judgment goes out of the way to avoid offering a plum to someone to whom you are indebted.

A Virginia Beach radiologist who loaned $50,000 to a real estate company owned by Gov. Bob McDonnell and his sister was subsequently offered an appointment to a state medical board, but he turned it down.

Paul Davis told The Washington Post he has been friends with McDonnell for more than a decade. He said he believes the appointment offer was unrelated to the loan he gave MoBo Real Estate Partners in 2010.

The doctor turned down the post.

Details at the link.

The noxious notion that politicians (and others) must leave behind a single signature Legacy! generally motivates great harms.

It encourages grand(standing) gestures, often poorly thought out and sometimes inimical. The Regent’s plan to outsource this region’s transportation for short-term gain comes to mind.

Belle Rose, though, envisions a constructive legacy! for The Regent.

The Regent continues his give-back tour.

A political donor’s $15,000 check for catering costs at the June 2011 wedding of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s daughter Cailin has been repaid as the governor moves to unload a series of gifts he and his family received.

The Parable of the File:

Once there was a file on a computer.

The file stopped doing what it was supposed to do.

Instead, it did things it was not supposed to do.

Selfish things.

Stupid things.

The operator determined that the file was corrupt.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not un-corrupt the file. so it was “removed” from the public indexes (or, as some would say, “deleted”).

As happens when a file is “removed,” the file itself remained for a long, long time, but all public references to it were expunged and it was never noticed again . . . .

TPM offers a profile of Jonnie Williams, he of the magickal nicotine pills, who made The Regent discover new meanings for the term, “many happy returns“:

A few days before Christmas in 1980, Jonnie Williams shuttered his shop, Colonial Opticians, in Fredericksburg, Va., and skipped town. Williams was in his mid-20s, and he left behind him tens of thousands of dollars in debt (including the balance on a $45,000 Small Business Administration loan), hundreds of frames and lenses and other optical equipment, and a reputation as a flamboyant “super salesman” with a taste for the good life.

“Jonnie Williams could sell a snowball to an Eskimo,” a former employee of Williams’ told a newspaper reporter a few weeks later, in January 1981. “But when it came to backing up what he was selling, now that was another story. Let’s face it, he was a salesman through and through.”

Can ye sayeth, “Snake oil”?

Our wonderful state legisture recently imposed a special tax on hybrid cars, reasoning that they don’t pay their fair share of the gas tax because they don’t guzzle enough gas. This was considered preferable to (gasp!) raising taxes on people with money and had the added benefit of punishing those uppity better-gas-mileage-thou Prius drivers.

In the Roanoke Times, J. D. Hansard follows this reasoning to find additional strategies for increasing state revenues without actually taxing the people who have all the money.

Thinking about that argument led me to consider other taxes we might impose on tax avoiders. Take, for example, home gardeners.

They plant tomatoes and beans in their back yard and at harvest time, they avoid the sales taxes that the rest of us pay at Kroger when we — like God intended — purchase our tomatoes and beans.

By the tax avoidance argument above, we should tax those gardeners.

More ideas for creative finance at the link.

Dressed for success.

Virginia first lady Maureen McDonnell bought nearly $9,800 in clothing with money from her husband’s political action committee and tapped into his campaign and inaugural funds to buy $7,600 in mostly unspecified items, according to records and a representative for the PAC.

The spending is legal under Virginia’s lax campaign finance laws, which prohibit the conversion of political funds for private use only when a PAC or campaign committee disbands — not while it is operating.

Darrell Lease, columnist at my local rag, envisions the machinations behind The Regent’s recent trip to Afghanistan, which followed his apology for “embarrassing” the Commonwealth by inadvertently accidentally unintentionally appearing to be on the take and in it for the money. A nugget:

As you know, the governor was then whisked away to — oh, let’s have the governor tell the story in a bold and innovative statement distributed through his Opportunity Virginia PAC:

“Dear Friend,

As you read this email I’m currently visiting with our troops in Afghanistan. … This is a trip I’ve looked forward to for a long time. Freedom is not free. Every day we wake up safe and secure because our neighbors, co-workers, family members and friends have volunteered to leave the peace of home for the danger and uncertainty of our world’s most volatile locations. On this trip, I’m telling them, on behalf of all of us, thank you.”

(snip)

Some scoundrels had the audacity to ask if the governor is wrapping himself in the flag in an effort to deflect attention from his troubles here at home in Virginia, a state that — let us be clear — has never been stronger.

The Regent gives back:

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has apologized for the “embarrassment” that he and his family have caused Virginia over a gift scandal, and said he has repaid $124,000 in loans to the political donor chiefly involved.

In a statement distributed Tuesday through Twitter, the governor again asserted that he has done nothing illegal and said he intends to remain in office through the end of his term in January.

Most notable about this is that The Regent does not seem to have had any idea how accepting huge “gifts” in cash and in kind from someone who wanted something (must-read link) from the Commonwealth could be or seem in any way improper.

As far as I can tell from the story, he still doesn’t.

He regrets the “embarrassment,” not the venality.

Via TPM.