Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate/wingnut Ken Cuccinelli is asking the 4th Circuit to reconsider a previous ruling that found a prohibition against oral sex unconstitutional. Since this has a snowball's chance in hell of ever being reheard, guess old Ken is just performing for the anti-sex fundamentalist flying monkeys who make up so much of the state's electorate.

According to Buzzfeed, the alleged reason is that a 47-year-old man solicited a 17-year-old girl for a BJ. She refused, and the man then accused her of "performing oral sex against my will." That charge was later dropped, but apparently was enough for an ambitious crusading prosecutor who's running for governor. Via Mother Jones:

Last month, three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit deemed a Virginia anti-sodomy law unconstitutional. The provision, part of the state's "Crimes Against Nature" law, has been moot since the 2003 US Supreme Court decision overruled state laws barring consensual gay sex, but Virginia has kept the prohibition on the books.

Now Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli is asking the full 4th Circuit to reconsider the case. Cuccinelli wants the court to revive the prohibition on consensual anal and oral sex, for both gay and straight people. (The case at hand involves consensual, heterosexual oral sex.)

Here's more from the Washington Blade:

Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli has filed a petition with the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond asking the full 15-judge court to reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel last month that overturned the state’s sodomy law.

The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 on March 12 that a section of Virginia’s "Crimes Against Nature" statute that outlaws sodomy between consenting adults, gay or straight, is unconstitutional based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2003 known as Lawrence v. Texas.

A clerk with the 4th Circuit appeals court said a representative of the Virginia Attorney General's office filed the petition on Cuccinelli's behalf on March 26. The petition requests what is known as an en banc hearing before the full 15 judges to reconsider the earlier ruling by the three-judge panel.

There's been some commentary in the media about the extra sadness and irony of this latest horrific school shooting coming during the Christmas season, but according to the book of Matthew in the Christian Bible, the first Christmas was one of intense sadness and pain due to unthinkable violence as well. According to this account, King Herod heard about the birth of a baby prophesied to be "a leader who will shepherd my people Israel", and he immediately saw this as a potential threat to his family's, and Rome's, power. Herod ordered the killing of all male children under the age of two years old. Matthew then refers back to a verse from the prophet Jeremiah:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loudly lamenting:
it was Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted
because they were no more.

All Americans with a living heart today are weeping for our children, sobbing and lamenting those beautiful children and their teachers slaughtered in Sandy Hook on Friday. Our little ones are being killed in front of our eyes: why aren't we doing something to stop it? My weeping is turning into anger, but not only at the NRA and the gun industry (which are as inextricably locked together as the machinery of one of their automatic gun killing machines) and the politicians who worship at their altar, but at Democrats too gutless to lift a finger to try and end the madness.

The ironic thing is that the politics of the gun issue is actually a plus for Democrats willing to take this on. When Bill Clinton pushed through the Brady Bill and the ban on assault rifles in his first term, his vote among rural and small town voters in 1996 actually went up in comparison to 1992. In fact, with the NRA in all-out attack mode and running against a rural state, small town icon Bob Dole, Bill Clinton did better among rural and small town voters than any Democratic candidate since LBJ in the '64 landslide, and far better than all the Democratic Presidential candidates who haven't mentioned a peep about gun control since.And with the 52%+ majority Obama has gotten twice being overwhelmingly urban/suburban, women, and people of color, the gun control issue just doesn't have the capacity to shave much from a Democratic majority at the national level.

There are a couple of reasons Democrats are so terrified of this issue, and both of them are based far more on fear than fact. One is that the 1994 tide that swept the Democrats out of power after being in control of the House for 40 years did include a lot of Democrats from the South, where the gun issue mattered a lot. But those seats are mostly not coming back anyway, and it is clear that based on the 2006/8 House majorities that we can win a majority in the House, as we can in Presidential elections, by winning big in the parts of the country where guns are not only not a negative, but can help us win votes.

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Via ThinkProgress:

On WMAL radio, hosts Brian Wilson and Cheri Jacobus pressed Cuccinelli about why he has not opened a major investigation into what they suggested was wide-spread voter fraud in Virginia — an assessment they made based on receiving unproven allegations by email from listeners. Studies have shown Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. Cuccinelli endorsed the idea of such investigations, but noted that he lacks the statutory authority to do launch an investigation.

Cuccinelli backed Jacobus on her conspiracy theories:

JACOBUS: There needs to be a way for people to be able to report this stuff and have it looked into. I mean, just across the country, we’re hearing so many stories. And people can talk about it, but nothing seems to be done. And, in fact in these states where voter ID is required to vote…

WILSON: Photo ID.

JACOBUS: Photo ID. Voter photo ID.

Obama lost every one of those states. He can’t win a state where photo ID is required. So clearly there’s something going on out there and until there’s a way to have something done about it where when you report it, you know it’s going to be looked into, the other side just says “Oh, well, you’re just poor losers,” and that sort of thing.

CUCCINELLI: Your tone suggests you’re a little upset with me. You’re preaching to the choir. I’m with you completely.

These people are just evil. I got into an argument on election night because of people like this who actually think over three million people faked their identity and stuffed the damned ballot box nationwide. Because they hear stories, and damn the facts about Voter ID, all that matters are the stories.

But to tell these radio host conspiracy buffs that their stories suggest Barack Obama would not have won had all 50 states had Voter ID laws? That's evil.

Ken "Cooch" Cuccinelli, by the way, is running for governor in 2013, hoping to ascend to Governor Ultrasound's lofty perch.

I hope Virginia shows him the door and hands him the ultrasound wand on the way out.

That ad was created by the Voter Participation Center in response to outraged fluff from Virginia Republicans over voter registration forms being sent to people, and in some cases pets, who aren't eligible to vote.

This is where I point out that pawprints are not usually accepted as signatures in state registrars' offices. Mailing is not a crime.

The Voter Participation Center (VPC) exists to reach out to unregistered voters in more than half the states in this country and get them to vote. They do this by combing lists, comparing them to registration lists, and sending out a pre-populated voter registration form clearly identified with their organization. Before any mailing goes out, state registrars have an opportunity to review and edit what is sent. It's not being done in a vacuum, and 15,000 people have returned the forms to the Virginia registrar, which is really why the Romney campaign has heartburn, I'm sure.

As usual, the right wing is determined to invent a problem so they can apply a solution like Voter ID, which we already know impacts those very same voters targeted by the VPC.

The Romney campaign has jumped on the bandwagon, calling for an investigation by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli into their practices. Wouldn't that be a nice "get"? A peek inside the lists the VPC uses, a list of voters, all sorts of goodies there for the taking if they actually got the Cooch to agree. The VPC is pushing back hard against their efforts, and well they should. For some bizarre reason the Romney people have it in their head that mailing a form is the same as submitting one for registration.

As anyone who has ever had the misfortune of working with lists knows, it's pretty easy to have entries that aren't right. A typo, someone uses their pet's name to register or subscribe to something, any number of things can cause list errors. But there isn't a problem unless someone actually picks up that erroneous form and tries to use it. Then they're committing fraud, and it would be the job of the registrar to verify those registrations anyway.

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By almost any measure, the 2006 universal care law Governor Mitt Romney championed in Massachusetts has been a clear success. A bipartisan bill which Ted Kennedy worked closely with Romney to pass, the law has reduced the ranks of the uninsured from 10 percent to a national low of two percent. Massachusetts residents overwhelmingly favor the popular health care law there by a 3 to 1 margin.

But in his desperate quest to win over conservative Republican primary voters, Mitt Romney has turned his back on his signature achievement which he once boasted was a health care model for the nation. And to do it, Romney has been lying for months by telling voters "Obamacare is about taking over 100 percent of the people's insurance in this country."

A year ago, Politifact declared the Republican description of President Obama's Affordable Care Act as a "government takeover of health care" its 2010 Lie of the Year. Nevertheless, Mitt Romney has put a variant of this long ago debunked "Pants on Fire" lie at the center of his claim that "Romneycare" and "Obamacare" are entirely different. His latest attempt at misdirection came during Saturday night's Republican presidential forum hosted by Mike Huckabee. As Mitt tried to explain to a clearly skeptical Ken Cuccinelli, Attorney General of Virginia:

"Am I proud of what we did for our state? Yes. But what the president has done is way beyond what we envisioned. We were trying to take of the 8 percent of the population that didn't have insurance. The President is not just worried about the people without insurance. Obamacare is about taking over 100 percent of the people's insurance in this country."

In a September 15, 2011 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Romney made the same charge:

"The Massachusetts plan was crafted for Massachusetts, for the needs of 8 percent of our population that didn't have insurance, not for the 92 percent that did. Obamacare is a plan that takes over 100 percent of the people in the country and their health care, and that's one of the reasons why people don't want it."

Sadly for Mitt Romney, repetition of a lie doesn't make it any more true.

The Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in the spring of 2010 targets the 17 percent of people (over 50 million people) who are uninsured. As Politifact explained in deeming Romney's fraud another "Pants on Fire" lie:

According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans without health insurance nationally was slightly under 17 percent in 2009, the year Obama began pushing for the bill. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, the number was about the same in 2010, when the measure was signed into law. Other estimates have pegged the national number at about 15 percent.

As Henry Aaron, a senior fellow with the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution right noted, comparing 8 percent to 17 percent "would have been apples to apples" when it comes to the impact of the individual mandate at the center of both the Massachusetts and national plans.

But Romney's chicanery (which Politifact branded "a felony case of comparing apples and oranges") hardly ends there:

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Yesterday the Supreme Court declined to fast track the Virginia challenge to the Affordable Care Act, which has Greta Van Susteren in a tizzy over those lazy Supreme Court justices who dare to take their three-month break while the health of America teeters in the balance.

Ken Cuccinelli was happy to oblige her, jumping right in with his assessment that states will spend "millions before taxpayers even see a band-aid or any health care", due to the cost of setting up exchanges in advance of implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

If their estimate is correct and June 2012 would be the earliest a Supreme Court decision would be made on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, that throws it right into the middle of the 2012 general election, which could really be a political neutron bomb. If the Supreme Court decision were a 5-4 ruling it unconstitutional, for example, it could play right into the hands of conservatives who will then begin touting their market-based reforms, a la Ken Cuccinelli at the end of this clip.

Maybe I'm just being cynical here, but I don't see the decision to delay it as particularly good news. It feels just as political as a decision to fast-track it would have been, delaying the outcome until we're right in the thick of the 2012 general election.

Oy. This guy again.

You know, the one who told Virginia universities it was okay to discriminate against gay students? Or how he told Virginia residents that he thought he could challenge Obama's presidency based on his birth place? Or how he said he wasn't getting a Social Security number for his kid because it's being "used to track you"? That's the guy, freakishly right wing, birther numbskull Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

He's talking big again:

Virginia will file suit against the federal government if the Democrats' health care reform bill is approved, said a spokesman for Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) this afternoon.

Cuccinelli has suggested previously he would likely file suit, but spokesman Brian Gottstein said that Virginia's lawsuit over government health care is now certain. Although Gottstein gave no details of the legal basis for this kind of lawsuit, he indicated that the process is "still being worked out."

In a letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Cuccinelli warns Democrats of using the "deem and pass" approach, which would not permit a freestanding vote on the Senate-passed health care reform bill.

They're working out those pesky little details like a legal basis to sue. Of course. I hope they don't let precedent like the vilified "deem and pass" being used over 100 times keep them from wasting the People's tax dollars on frivolous lawsuits. I'm sure the irony of that doesn't even penetrate through his dense little birther skull.

Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli has been in the news a lot lately. You may have heard about the letter he wrote earlier this month to all of Virginia’s public colleges – UVA, VA Tech, William and Mary, etc. calling on them to drop policies banning discrimination against gays and lesbians. He claims they have no legal authority to adopt such policies.

Or maybe you heard Cuccinelli speculate about whether President Obama was born in the United States. In this recently unearthed recording from the campaign trail, Cuccinelli can be heard telling a birther that he might be able to challenge federal laws on the basis of Obama’s birth place:

Cuccinelli has since dashed off a denial, but the fun doesn’t stop there.

In another recently unearthed recording, Cuccinelli told a crowd that he’s worried about the government tracking his family. He said he might not register his newborn son for a Social Security number because "it is being used to track you." He also claimed that many other Americans aren’t registering for Social Security numbers for the same reason:

We're gonna have our 7th child on Monday, if he's not born before. And, for the very concerns you state, we're actually considering – as I'm sure many of you here didn't get a Social Security number when you were born, they do it now – we're considering not doing that. And a lot of people are considering that now, because it is being used to track you.

Cuccinelli’s hard line against gays, paranoia about the Social Security Administration, and openness to birther conspiracies prove that he is the real deal – a bona fide Teabagger of the highest order. And now he’s the chief legal officer of an entire state.

For anyone wondering what a Tea Party-controlled GOP might look like, keep your eyes on Virginia.