Governor McDonnell: “Slavery? Huh? What? Oh, That…”

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell has declared April 2010 to be Confederate History Month. He said it was important for Virginians to:

“Understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War, and to recognize how our history has led to our present.”

For some odd reason, he didn’t mention anything about, uhh, what’s that word again? You know, when millions of native Africans were captured, shackled and brought over here on ships, and a lot of them died on the journey over here and the lucky ones who survived were herded into American plantations to become slaves — Slaves, that’s it! Slavery!

Anyway, that long dark chapter of Confederate history wasn’t important enough to be worth mentioning in McDonnell’s “Whip up the good ol’ boys” speech.

McDonnell’s “explanation” was:

“There were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”

And them there nigras just ain’t significant. All righty then…

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Q. Why is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce like a cockroach?

A. They both scurry away frantically when somebody turns the lights on.

(Didn’t mean any disrespect to cockroaches.)

As you know, the Supreme Court has legalized bribery. But they haven’t legalized money laundering. Not yet anyway.

Money laundering, of course, is when a shell corporation is created by somebody who’s made a ton of money illegally. A drug kingpin, for example, could say “You’re accusing me of selling drugs??? I made this money through my tireless hard work at the ZYX Corporation, located in a post office box in the Cayman Islands. Any other questions?”

The corporate — and still legal — version is when a large company or wealthy individual decides to purchase an election by paying for a multimillion dollar advertising campaign. But they don’t want the lowly public to know that “ExxonMobil spent $300 million to defeat clean energy legislation.” (That’s just a made-up example.)

So they turn to their friendly neighborhood money launderer — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. All Exxon Mobil (continuing the same example) has to do is donate their $300 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Then the only information voters have is that microscopic lettering at the bottom of the screen saying “this sleazy mudslinging intelligence-insulting commercial was paid for by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.”

And now Congress — led by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — is getting ready to crack down on this slippery tactic. Needless to say, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is acting like — well, like a cockroach when you turn on the kitchen light at 3 in the morning.

If this law passes, corporations who purchase the legislative process will have to slither out from under their rocks, into the sunlight, and identify themselves.