Voters should demand ethics reforms, including a cap on gifts and a commission to enforce the laws.

Gov. Bob McDonnell and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli are lawyers surrounded by legal advisers. Yet they accepted lake house vacations and free catering services for a wedding and Thanksgiving dinner from a business executive and campaign donor. They failed to report those gifts, either because they employed legal loopholes as an excuse not to or conveniently forgot until the FBI began poking around asking awkward questions.

Constituents lacking in juris doctor degrees have no trouble understanding the conflict of interest their leaders allowed to fester. Indeed, most Virginians belong to professions or work for companies with explicit policies banning such graft.

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Will chef dish on Cuccinelli?

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli scored a procedural victory Thursday when a Richmond judge agreed to recuse his office from prosecuting the embezzlement case against a former chef at the Virginia governor’s mansion.

But if the case proceeds to trial this summer, it may continue to dog Cuccinelli and raise questions about his judgment as he runs for governor. . . .

No crying in Bedford . . . or else

When a public official feels compelled to clarify what she meant when complaining about the “crap” (stuff or nonsense) she has taken from some school teachers, it’s appropriate to include some acknowledgement that she failed to do her part to elevate the level of public discourse in her community.

Bedford County Supervisor Annie Pollard invited criticism last week when she described several teachers as “crybabies” because they had the temerity to attend a public hearing and speak in favor of a 3 percent raise for school employees. Her attempt at damage control via an emailed statement lacked any semblance of an apology for her name-calling, potty-mouthed outburst, and thus it had the opposite effect.  . . .

Festivities on every corner

Much of Elmwood Park is under renovation as the spring festival season kicks off this weekend. Rather than view the shifting venues as an inconvenience, festival-goers should take the chance to circulate and explore other corners of Roanoke’s downtown as well as other host sites around the region. . . .

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Cuccinelli says he forgot to disclose big-ticket gifts but promises amnesia won’t cancel proposed ethics reforms.

In Virginia, elected officials aren’t asked to do much to comply with the state’s embarrassingly weak ethics laws.

Officeholders can accept unlimited gifts but must disclose items with a value greater than $50. Those who have fought restrictions on dinners, football tickets, plane rides and other favors heaped on executive and legislative officials argue that disclosure is the best disinfectant. But, sometimes, public officials have trouble complying with even the flimsiest of standards.

On Friday afternoon — the perfect time for a politician to dump bad news — Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli announced that he had received more gifts from Star Scientific executive Jonnie Williams Sr. than the nearly $13,000 in largesse he had previously disclosed. Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor, failed to account for two stays at Williams’ Smith Mountain Lake home. One of those getaways with his family came with a catered Thanksgiving dinner, courtesy of Williams.

“I declared everything I remembered when I filled out the forms,” Cuccinelli told reporters.  “It happens that some of the things I forgot were Jonnie Williams related.”

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The Republican’s determination to keep his old job is making it increasingly difficult for him to pursue a political promotion.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli moved last week to recuse his office from a felony embezzlement case against a former chef at the Virginia governor’s mansion, the house Cuccinelli hopes to call home in 2014. In a motion filed in Richmond Circuit Court, the Republican attorney general cited an unspecified conflict of interest as his reason for wanting to step away from a case that has tongues wagging in the state capital.

A Cuccinelli spokesman said the conflict will be explained at a May 2 hearing. But it has become apparent that Cuccinelli’s core conflict stems from his own competing interests. He’s finding out how difficult it is to faithfully execute the office of attorney general and run for a higher office at the same time.

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Evolution and guns in today’s letters to the editor.

Empowering terrorists for the almighty dollar

In the wake of the Boston bombing, we need to have a national conversation about whether there’s such a thing as “good” terrorism. Consider Washington’s support for the proto-Taliban against the Soviets or the Chechen separatists against the current Russian state.

And while Boston was gripped with fear, Secretary of State John Kerry was overseas trying to drum up support for the destruction of Syria as a unified political entity by any means necessary. That nation is presently attracting violent Salafist mercenaries from across the Arab world, some of whom just recently took two Syrian bishops hostage.

What’s it all for? Qatar and Turkey wish to construct a pipeline across a post-Assad Syria, and Washington, I suppose, is pleased to see plans for a competing Iranian pipeline scuttled.

I would argue that allowing profit motives to dominate our foreign policy has nothing to do with making America safer and, in some cases, achieves quite the opposite.

SCOTT BARRIOS

ROANOKE

The only limit on gifts to public officials is a requirement that they disclose the swag, but McDonnell found it’s easy to avoid that rule.

The latest revelation about the June 2011 wedding of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s daughter makes it all the harder to swallow his explanation that a businessman’s $15,000 check to cover the catering was a gift to her, not him — so, by law, he needn’t have reported it. And didn’t.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported it had obtained documents showing McDonnell had signed the catering contract, assuming financial responsibility, and had put down almost $8,000 in deposits.

Even before that story broke, the smell was building around the poached jumbo shrimp served courtesy of Jonnie R. Williams Sr.

On Monday, McDonnell spoke directly to reporters for the first time about the catering payment, but wouldn’t answer questions about whether Williams had given other gifts to his family.

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Gov. Bob McDonnell allowed his relationship with a business executive to become inappropriate with free jet trips and noshes for his daughter’s wedding.

Gov. Bob McDonnell shouldn’t need an ethics commission to tell him his friendship with the executive of a dietary supplement company crossed the line from innocent camaraderie to unseemly misbehavior between bites of free poached jumbo shrimp served up at his daughter’s wedding.

A random survey in downtown Richmond would have generated enough guffaws to nix that indelicate delicacy before the butter melted.

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Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli

The attorney general and gubernatorial candidate should recuse his office from a tax suit because of his financial ties.

For more than a decade, Star Scientific Inc. has contested a state sales and use tax assessment on its tobacco-curing barns in Mecklenburg County. In 2011, the Glen Allen-based company sued the Virginia Department of Taxation after the agency rejected Star Scientific’s claim that the barns should be exempt from the tax.

The stakes are significant for Star Scientific, which is making a push to market a plant-based dietary supplement designed to reduce inflammation. The company could be on the hook for at least $1.7 million in taxes, penalties and interest if it loses the dispute, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics prescribes a controversial remedy to prevent teen pregnancies.

The American Academy of Pediatrics this week prescribed a remedy to combat teen pregnancies that at first blush seems quite radical: Give young teens prescriptions for emergency contraceptives before they are sexually active.

But from a strictly practical view, the recommendation makes sense: Teenagers who engage in unprotected sex or whose primary method of birth control has failed should have immediate access — without hassle — to the means to prevent pregnancy.

Sound health advice, though, is tangled in the knot of ethics, morality and religion that binds conversations of teen sexuality.

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By Phil Olson

Thanks to modern chemistry, new alternatives for the final disposition of the formerly living are emerging. If you haven’t thought about having your body dissolved in a mixture of water and alkali, you soon might. But Brenda Pogge would rather you didn’t. On Jan. 10, Pogge, a Republican delegate representing the 96th District in Virginia, introduced House Bill 379 to the commonwealth’s Health, Welfare and Institutions Committee. The bill would have made it a class one misdemeanor for anyone to dispose of human remains using a relatively new disposition technique called alkaline hydrolysis. The bill did not make it out of committee, but you can rest assured that Virginia’s lawmakers soon will resurrect discussions about alkaline hydrolysis.

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Olson is an assistant professor in the Department of Science and Technology
in Society at Virginia Tech.