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Jeanine’s Memes
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A Birthday Letter to America
by Chap Petersen
Image credit: Grok A long time ago, I was a freshman at an elite New England college, just graduated from Fairfax High School. (“F-A-I-R-F-A-X-R-E! B-E-L-S, Oh yes! Those Rebels are best!”).
On a gorgeous fall morning in 1987, I was taking a class in Colonial American history, when the topic turned to the American Revolution. The professor asked the class whether it was truly a “revolution” or merely a reordering of the pre-Marxist power structure.
Of course, I fell for the bait. The American Revolution was different, I opined. It changed the world by basing government on democracy, not aristocracy.
The professor laughed and pulled a nickel out of his pocket. This is the home of Thomas Jefferson, he declaimed, the author of American liberty. He then passed it around the class, so everyone could examine Jefferson’s modest abode.
The point was clear: Jefferson was not a “democrat” in any modern sense. He was a gentleman planter, a slaveowner. The Revolution he spawned was a myth.
In the past five years, as I’ve done research for my upcoming book, I’ve confirmed what I had suspected that morning:
My learned Marxist professor was not just wrong — he was spectacularly wrong.
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Three Founders. One Day. One Destiny.
by David Botkins
On July 4, 1826, Americans gathered across a still‑young republic to celebrate a milestone some believed we’d never reach: the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Church bells rang. Cannons fired. Citizens reflected on how far the country had come since that audacious summer in 1776.
Then the news spread. Thomas Jefferson was dead. Hours later came another report. John Adams was dead as well.
Two architects of the American experiment, gone on the same day the nation marked its birth. Five years later, on July 4, 1831, James Monroe — another president, another founder — also died.
Three Founders. Three presidents. One date.
Whether one sees coincidence, providence, or simply one of history’s remarkable convergences, the symbolism is hard to ignore. The timing reads like a passing of the torch from the founding generation to the nation they helped create.
Jefferson gave America its language of liberty. Adams gave the cause its fierce defense. Monroe guided the republic through its formative years and left a foreign‑policy doctrine that shaped American statecraft for generations. Their personalities clashed. Their visions diverged. Yet each devoted himself to an unprecedented experiment in self‑government.
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Happy 4th!
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Virginia as California — but with 98% Humidity
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Golf, Data Centers and the Water Crisis
From Rod D. Martin on X:
US golf courses use 531 billion gallons of water per year. That’s down from 759 billion gallons per year in 2005 and is 0.5% of total annual water withdrawals in this country. And somehow, the country manages to not look like the Sahara Desert.
Meanwhile, data centers – the things actually powering the future instead of your uncle’s 18th hole mulligan – use somewhere between 17 and 70 billion gallons annually. That’s 0.017% to 0.070% of total withdrawals.
Or, for the math-challenged among us, roughly 3-14% of what the golf courses are using.
Sure, plopping a massive data center in the middle of nowhere without proper planning and infrastructure can stress local water systems. That’s called “basic engineering,” folks, not some apocalyptic thirst apocalypse.
But these lurid headlines screaming that AI is going to suck the rivers dry and leave us fighting over the last drop like Mad Max at a Buc-ee’s? Read the whole post.
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Catch and Release
Footnote: The X post should describe Arevalo as an alleged rapist.
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No, Virginia, Heat Waves are Not More Common
A bit of hard data as the Virginia and national media go into hysterics over a very typical Virginia heat wave and repeat endlessly the claim that this is becoming more frequent. Uh, no, no it’s not. From the CO2 Coalition’s recent updated compilation on “climate stability” in Virginia, worth reading and sharing. While you are staying out of this heat, obviously. (Everything I know about heat safety I learned in kindergarten, at Edwards AFB in the Mohave). — SDH
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ICE Thwarted in Its Effort to Protect Us from Dangerous Criminal Immigrants
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja, arrested and detained by ICE It is so heartening to see ICE protecting the United States from the dangerous violent immigrants in our midst.
One of the latest of these violent individuals apprehended and detained was Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja, a Catholic nun from Nigeria, as she was walking to Mass on Sunday in McAllen, Tex. According to her diocese, she had been working as a nurse in Texas hospitals for the last decade, after entering the U.S. legally.
Of course, ICE knows what it is doing and knows who the violent illegal immigrants are. The diocese must be mistaken.
Unfortunately for the safety of the residents of McAllen, Sister Ugboaja was released only a few hours later following protests to the Dept. of Homeland Security by both a Democrat and Republican member of the House of Representatives.
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Data Centers Should Pay Their Own Way
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Nothing in Commonwealth
by Joe Thomas
Summer heat and electric bills. Image credit: Grok. As July begins, Virginians brace for higher gas taxes, hoping that the $68 price of a barrel of crude oil will start to bring the price at the pump back down. However, they will very soon be hit with a 7% increase in their electric bills.
Iran? No. Trump tariffs? No.
This is because, as Gov. Abigail Spanberger promised the lords of the Green Energy Cabal, Virginia has reentered the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. This is the classic cap-and-trade scheme with a cool new, hip name.
Not a week passed after she announced the reentry into the initiative before Dominion filed with the State Corporation Commission for rate increases to cover the fees they will have to pay to the overseeing body for the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
You have to pay for credits if you use more than your allotment of carbon credits to generate your electricity. You buy them from members who don’t, and if there aren’t any to buy, the money just goes into the initiative’s bank account for when someone does have credits to sell.
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Spanberger, Assembly Pass on Meddling With Dominion Sale
by Steve Haner
The most important energy outcome of recent legislative wrestling over Virginia’s energy-focused state budget is what it didn’t include. Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) and the legislators did not meddle with the plan for Florida’s NextEra Energy to acquire Dominion Energy.
The application for that transaction (it is not a merger, but a sale) could appear at the State Corporation Commission as early as this week. The Commission and its staff will have only 180 days to consider the application, do its own analysis, and absorb all the stakeholder commentary that will flow into its case files.
The statute setting that deadline could easily have been amended by a budget provision in either the legislative conference report or the short set of final amendments offered by the Governor. They meddled with plenty of other state laws unrelated to the budget, but not that one, despite a strong call to do so from Lieutenant Governor Gazala Hashmi (D) and the environmental groups key to their political success.
The 180-day deadline, if met, means the SCC’s decision will come before the General Assembly returns in January. The lobbying campaign to keep the legislature on the sidelines was below the radar. By far, this was Dominion’s largest victory from the session, and its other interests were well protected across the board, as always.
No, the political heat and legislative creativity this year were focused instead on the data center industry, the favored scapegoat of the hour. Blaming them for the results of all the energy policy failures since 2020 proved effective.
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Democrats and the New American Royalty
by Patricia N. Saffran and Ann McLean
Governor Spanberger in the style of Gainsborough. Image credit: Grok Governor Abigail Spanberger signed two bills from the Virginia General Assembly recently to require ICE officials to stop wearing masks and identify themselves. The DOJ sued as a result. She knew she would lose this case as California recently lost to the DOJ on these same issues. The question is why would the governor burn up taxpayers money on a court case she would lose involving ICE’s ability to easily process illegal criminals and eliminate them?
Apparently, Virginia’s governor must show that she’s in step with other socially aware pro-criminal and immigrant governors and mayors such as California’s Governor Gavin Newsom who congratulated Spanberger on her bills. He presides over the burgeoning humanitarian homeless crisis mostly of citizens. These so-called progressive politicians and officials go against the public’s wishes who overwhelmingly want illegal violent and other criminals deported.
Governor Spanberger also revealed that she’s not in sync with the public’s wishes on historic and Confederate monuments, over 52% want them standing. She exercised her will, against the public, to champion General Assembly bills to order statues of three important Virginia leaders removed from Richmond’s Capitol Hill where they have stood for 100 years. They will be given to the Shanendoah Battlefields Trust Foundation for display.
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Virginia’s Gas Tax Increase: What Drivers Need to Know
by Rich Tucker
Drivers in the commonwealth will pay more for gas beginning on Wednesday. This isn’t because of the recent legislative budget deal. It isn’t because of a war in the Middle East. It isn’t because of a pipeline shutdown. It’s because lawmakers put tax policy on cruise control years ago, and prices just keep climbing.
It is a tenet of American governance that a previous legislature may not bind a future one. In simple terms, that means that today’s lawmakers can’t make spending and taxation decisions for their successors. That’s why Virginia’s budget lasts for two years, not 10 or 20, and even the second year is subject to change if circumstances change.
Today’s General Assembly, however, is allowing a House elected in 2019, three governors ago, to bind its hands. In 2020, lawmakers tied fuel taxes to the consumer price index, so as overall prices increase, so does the gas tax. Lawmakers started from what today looks like a very low rate. On Jan. 1, 2020, the retail tax was 16 and two-tenths cents per gallon of gas.
That jumped to 21.2 cents in July 2020, when the next fiscal year started, and has been soaring along with inflation ever since. It reached 28 cents in 2023, 9.8 cents in 2024, and 30.8 cents in 2025 before the next jump this year.
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A Judge Who Moved Justice Forward
Judge Penney Azcarate. Image credit: Grok by Chap Petersen
We spend a lot of time complaining about public servants in today’s America. And, truthfully, a lot of elected officials are pretty worthless. But there are exceptions.
Last Friday, Judge Penney Azcarate presided over her final Motions Day docket as the Chief Judge of Fairfax County Circuit Court. She will be best remembered as the trial judge for the Johnny Depp defamation trial, but her career was a lot more than that.
Let’s start with another legend: James Riddel, the former Marine and Fairfax County cop nonpareil. In 2007, Riddel adopted me as the Democratic challenger for the State Senate. He knocked on every door in Vienna and single-handedly won me the police union’s endorsement. (Pretty much my only one that cycle). When I stood on the stage that night, he was right there beside me, along with my family. We were that close.
Jim Riddel asked for one thing: Make Penney Azcarate a judge. She had been an assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney, then briefly in private practice. Her main background had been as a Marine Corps JAG officer. Impressive.
Azcarate was an easy sell to the delegation. We nominated her to the GDC bench in 2008. She moved up fast. In 2012, she had been elected to the Circuit Court and quickly developed a reputation as a no-nonsense judge, who did not suffer fools. (And there were more than a few in the local Bar).
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