Elizabeth Warren's Inspiring Response to the Alexandria Shootings

While promoting her new book on "CBS This Morning" Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took a moment to acknowledge the shooting that took place in Alexandria, Virginia during a congressional baseball practice early Wednesday morning.

Virginia gubernatorial candidate blames the left for anti-Semitism

Virginia Republican Corey Stewart thinks that the left is to blame for rising anti-Semitism in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, Stewart, a gubernatorial candidate, was speaking at a Northern Virginia synagogue in Fairfax County Sunday night when he blamed progressives in the United States for an uptick in anti-Semitic incidents across the country.

Candidate for Virginia governor says there’s nothing racist about the Confederate flag

Virginia gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart, a Republican, embraced the Confederate flag and Virginia’s history of defending slavery on Saturday, using multiple phrases that indicate his appeal to white supremacist voters.

Stewart championed Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and repeatedly emphasized Virginia’s “heritage.”

Virginia county approves massive natural gas compressor over community outrage

A $5-billion, 600-mile, multi-state natural gas pipeline project cleared another hurdle Thursday evening, when the Buckingham County Board of Supervisors in Virginia approved an application to build a compressor station.

If constructed, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), proposed by the energy company Dominion, will run from eastern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia to North Carolina and Virginia. But the project faces major public opposition — even in Buckingham County, where Thursday’s meeting dragged on for five hours, and many residents testified in opposition.

Virginians Describe How The State Has Made It Harder For Them To Vote

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA — When Karen Stallings decided to move her blind, 84-year-old father from Arizona into her home in Virginia, she expected many new challenges in her life. She did not expect voting to be one of them.

And yet, a few months before election day rolled around, she realized her father’s drivers license was out-of-state and expired. And under Virginia’s strict voter ID law, every voter needs an acceptable, unexpired form of photo identification to cast a regular ballot. So in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, Stallings drove her father to the DMV to register to vote and get a photo ID card.

Utility Dumps Over 30 Million Gallons Of Coal Waste Water Into Virginia Creek

Allegations of dubious practices are mounting against a Virginia state agency that last month approved the disposal of millions of gallons of partially-treated coal ash water in two Virginia Rivers. This time, however, harsh comments are not coming from environmentalists alone.

Just days after Dominion Virginia Power, a utility company, confirmed it released 33.7 million gallons of coal ash water into a tributary of the Potomac River last spring, county officials say they distrust the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the company alike.

Virginia Republicans Admit They Rigged The State’s Congressional Districts To Elect GOP Lawmakers

Virginia is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. During the last presidential election, President Obama won the state by three points, but Republicans still picked up 8 of the state’s 11 congressional districts under the GOP-friendly maps drawn by the state legislature.

In a court filing offered by the Republican members of Virginia’s congressional delegation, the lawmakers who benefit most from these gerrymandered maps admitted that the GOP intentionally rigged the state’s congressional districts in order to produce a lopsided delegation. The state legislature’s “overarching priorities” in drawing the maps, according to the court filing, was “incumbency protection and preservation of cores to maintain the 8-3 partisan division established in the 2010 election.”

In Fairfax, Va., a different, no-less-scary police shooting

White privilege didn't protect John Geer.

That's not to say he didn't have it. As a middle-class kitchen designer living in the pleasant Washington suburb of Fairfax, Va., he had nothing whatsoever in common with the impoverished black men killed by police in Missouri and Brooklyn last year.

Those deaths triggered riots, marches and demonstrations across America, and interventions by the White House.

But Geer, pierced 18 months ago by a police bullet as he stood inside the screen door of his own home, his hands raised, begging not to be shot, simply disappeared into the emotional mixing bowl of American news and political priorities.

WHICH IS MORE CORRUPT: VIRGINIA OR SICHUAN?

As a transplant to the D.C. area from Beijing, I felt nostalgic as I read about the indictment of my new neighbors, the former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen. On January 21st, a federal grand jury charged the couple with accepting more than a hundred and forty thousand dollars in loans, vacations, and gifts from a friend and political patron named Jonnie R. Williams, Sr. He was seeking their help in touting his dietary supplement—a “wonder product” derived from tobacco.

Some gifts were public: Williams’s company donated more than a hundred thousand dollars to McDonnell’s campaign and political-action committee. Other items were less open: cosmetic dental work for Maureen, jewelry, a fifteen-thousand-dollar shopping spree at Bergdorf Goodman, plane rides, a check for their daughter’s wedding, a sixty-five-hundred-dollar Rolex inscribed to the “71st governor of Virginia.”

Offshore Wind Lease Near Virginia Won By Coal Power Giant Dominion

WASHINGTON -- A giant of coal-fired power won a $1.6 million lease to build the first wind farm off the coast of Virginia on Wednesday, a development that renewable energy advocates are cheering.

Dominion Virginia Power had the winning bid on 112,800 acres of land 27 miles off Virginia's coast. Bidding on the plot went for six rounds, escalating from a starting offer of just $225,600. Dominion's final bid topped that of Charlottesville, Va.-based Apex Clean Energy.

Virginia Abortion Clinic, Busiest In State, Closes Due To New State Regulations

The busiest abortion clinic in Virginia has closed its doors, the Washington Post reported Monday.

NOVA Women's Healthcare, which had been located in a Fairfax City, Va. office building since 2006, needed to either upgrade its facilities or move to a new location after state regulations changed to require clinics to meet strict, hospital-level building standards. The Associated Press reports that the clinic submitted an application to retrofit another space to meet the new codes, but was denied due to inadequate parking.

E.W. Jackson, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Candidate, Compared Planned Parenthood To KKK

E.W. Jackson, the conservative minister nominated to run for lieutenant governor by the Virginia Republican Party, once compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan, Politico reported Sunday.

In a video posted to YouTube last September, the minister and activist urged black Christians to reject the "ridiculous lies" of the "Democrat Party."

"It is time to end the slavish devotion to the Democrat Party," Jackson says in the clip. "They have insulted us, used us and manipulated us. They have saturated the black community with ridiculous lies... They think we are stupid and that these lies will hold us captive while they violate everything we believe as Christians.

Virginia Electoral Votes Allocation Measure Advances In State Senate

Legislation that would apportion Virginia's electoral votes by the winner of each congressional district, instead of the current winner-take-all system, emerged from a Senate subcommittee today without a recommendation.

The vote in a Privileges and Elections subcommittee was 3-3, with Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel, R-Fauquier, siding with the two Democrats on the six-member panel to produce a tie. The legislation now heads to the full committee, where a 10-5 GOP majority is likely to send it to the floor of the full Senate for a vote.

Virginia Protesters Arrested: More Than 30 Protesting Anti-Abortion Legislation Arrested At State Capitol

RICHMOND, Va. -- More than 30 activists have been arrested for refusing to leave the Virginia Capitol steps during a protest of anti-abortion legislation.

Virginia Capitol Police Capt. Raymond Goodloe says 31 protesters were arrested Saturday. The demonstrators were some of an estimated 500 people who had gathered to protest legislation like a bill that passed the General Assembly earlier in the week that requires an ultrasound before an abortion.

The group had a permit to rally at the Bell Tower on Capitol Square, but Goodloe said rallies are not allowed on the Capitol steps.

Original Article
Source: Huff
Author: AP

Virginia Mandatory Ultrasound Bill Passes In State Senate

The Virginia Senate narrowly passed a bill on Tuesday by a vote of 21-19 that would require women to have an ultrasound procedure 24 hours prior to having an abortion.

The Senate passed a similar bill earlier this month that would have required women to undergo an invasive transvaginal ultrasound procedure. After that bill stirred up a firestorm of controversy, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) helped House Republicans write and pass a revised bill that mandates the more common transabdominal procedure, even when it's not deemed medically necessary or the woman does not want to have it.

Senate Democrats charged that even though the controversial transvaginal procedure would not be mandated, the bill still constituted government overreach into women's personal medical decisions and the doctor-patient relationship.

"We have taken out the state required rape from the bill, but the way it is now is still an assault because it's an unwanted touching," Sen. Janet Howell (D) told HuffPost on Monday, "and the woman is being coerced to have that happen in order to exercise her constitutional right to an abortion."

Republicans, meanwhile, framed it as an informed consent issue, arguing that the bill would enable pregnant woman to discover the age of the developing fetus before deciding whether to terminate the pregnancy.

The bill now goes to McDonnell, who is expected to sign it into law.

"Virginia will have a strong women's right to know bill to provide the information necessary to make fully informed consent," he said of the bill at a Politico panel on Friday, "So I think it's the right decision."

This story is developing...

Original Article
Source: Huff
Author: Laura Bassett

Inside Virginia's Abortion Crackdown

It's 10 a.m., about an hour after the Falls Church, Virginia, office of Planned Parenthood opens for the day. As I enter, a young couple is waiting for the nurse practitioner. There's a small television in the corner showing morning talk shows, with a large basket of condoms balanced atop. Brochures on STI testing, emergency contraception, breast self-exams, and HPV are about in abundance. It's not that much different from any other doctor's office you've ever visited, with dated copies of People and fluorescent lighting.

Last year, 3,900 patients visited the Falls Church office. Eight hundred and seventy-five of them were tested for HIV, 633 took a pregnancy test, and 743 had a pap smear. More than 600 women came in for the morning-after pill. The office dispensed 1,699 prescriptions for the birth control pill, and another 917 prescriptions for contraceptive rings. The vast majority of the women and men who come to the Falls Church clinic come for health screenings and family planning services, but another 900 visited for abortion services—a fact that has put the clinic's future in peril.

New regulations that require abortion providers to comply with building codes designed for hospitals could force this Planned Parenthood health center to shut its doors as soon as next year. Unveiled in August and approved by the Virginia Board of Health last week, the rules would likely be impossible to meet within the space that Planned Parenthood currently rents on the third floor of a nondescript, brown-brick office building about 10 miles from downtown Washington, DC.

Are Virginia's New Abortion Rules the Worst Yet?

On Friday evening, Virginia's Department of Health issued a strict new set of rules for abortion clinics—and women's health advocates fear that facilities that can't comply could be shuttered.

The regulations require Virginia's 22 clinics to meet strict new physical standards; pre-op rooms, for example, must measure at least 80 square feet, and operating rooms must measure 250 square feet. Hallways must be at least five feet wide. The requirements are based on the state's 2010 guidelines for new outpatient surgical facilities.

Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia, told Mother Jones on Monday that the new rules may actually be the most strict regulations in the United States. "It would be challenging for the majority of our facilities to continue offering first-trimester care," Keene said. "These are designed to really cease first-trimester abortion services in the Commonwealth of Virginia."