How do you feel about an unelected multi-billionaire “moving swiftly to exert control over vast swaths of the U.S. government,” as the Wall Street Journal put it, with plans to shut down spending and programs he does not like?
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King Elon I
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Too Many of Virginia’s Skilled Nursing Facilities Present a Public Health Problem
by James C. Sherlock
In a recent 12-month period overlapping 2022 and 2023, almost 8,400 Medicare patients alone were admitted to a hospital directly from or within 30 days after discharge from one of Virginia’s 280+ skilled nursing facilities.
We simply do not know how many eventually died as a proximate outcome of poor care in those facilities.
But we can examine some of the human costs.
A death in Chesterfield County. In late October of 2024, a Chesterfield County woman is alleged by the Commonwealth’s Attorney to have suffered horribly and died from an infection she acquired at Colonial Heights Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center (Colonial Heights).
“Those arrested included multiple nurses and the charges include felony abuse and neglect of vulnerable adults, falsifying patient records, and obstruction of justice.”
The charges include criminal abuse and neglect of a vulnerable adult resulting in serious bodily injury or disease. The allegations in this case include:
- Victim was left in her bed for days in her own urine and feces, not turned or changed, resulting in severe flesh wounds.
- The wounds were so severe that they allegedly caused sepsis, which ultimately led to the patient’s death.
- The patient’s foot was reportedly broken, and
- She was given incorrect medicine that “poisoned” her.
Some are further charged with falsification of records and obstructing justice to cover it up.
Now a 19th staffer has been arrested and charged with felony abuse.
In a separate case, a physician was arrested two weeks ago in connection with the death of another Colonial Heights patient.
All of those arrested, by working in an “administrative, supportive or direct care capacity” in that nursing home, were mandated reporters of suspected abuse, neglect or exploitation of aged or incapacitated adults. We do not know if any made the required reports in this case or any other.
Systemic problems pre-dated by years the employment of some of the people arrested. Circumstances hauntingly similar to the neglect alleged in this case were reported pursuant to a state complaint inspection in 2021.
But after all of this, a check with Colonial Heights admissions about a week ago revealed that it was accepting new patients.
Thus motivated, I offer here a broad background for the evidence in the case.
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Making VCEA Even More Expensive and Onerous
By Steve Haner
The 2024 General Assembly ended with a promise from its majority Democrats to review and perhaps revise the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which mandates the end of hydrocarbon electricity. The revisions are now pending at the 2025 General Assembly and are uniformly bad.
One positive development this session has been an increased and more honest focus on the consumer cost these laws will impose on Virginia’s residential and business energy users. But a leading Democrat, during a floor debate Friday, dismissed the billions of dollars extracted by VCEA as a cheap investment to prevent hurricanes and cure cancer. Watch it yourself.
Governor Glenn Youngkin opened the session with a speech in which he called the VCEA a “quagmire” that wasn’t working and was a threat to our economy. Legislation from his fellow Republicans to reform it has failed on party-line votes. His last option will likely be another round of vetoes after adjournment of the Democrat’s bills.
First on the veto target list should be a bill to make it easier to override local objections to the placement of large solar and battery facilities. The VCEA mandates more than 10,000 megawatts of additional solar panels which will need several square miles of land and extensive new transmission lines.
Companion bills were introduced in both chambers to create a Virginia Energy Facility Review Board with extensive powers to intervene in local permit debates. Its endorsement of a contested project would have made a denial by a local government body far harder to defend in court. Because this bill has been widely reported and drew opposition from the public and local governments, the versions which are pending have changed. The substitutes are subterfuge.
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Voting Rights for All!
(And by “All,” We Mean Cats, Dogs, Spotted Owls, Snail Darters….)
by James A. Bacon
There exists on the fringe of the environmental movement a proposition so crazy that some who first hear of it will think it a spoof: Nature has rights that should be granted legal standing in laws and representation in systems of government.
But the Rights of Nature (RoN) philosophy is not a Babylon Bee parody. It is making inroads in the real world. The high court of the Indian state of Uttarakhand, for instance, has recognized the Ganges and Yamuna rivers as legal entities with rights. Colombia courts have done much the same for the Atrato River and Mexico’s with the Rio Atoyac and Rio Papaloapan rivers. New Zealand has granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River, which the Maori revere as a living ancestor. Ecuador’s constitution grants nature the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, while Bolivia has passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth. In Australia, a 12-person council has been established to advocate on behalf of the Yarra River. And in the United States, according to the Matador Network, “dozens” of communities across the United States have codified rights-of-nature laws.
Endowing rivers, animals, plants, and ecosystems with legal and constitutional rights might sound deranged, but Noah M. Sachs takes the Rights of Nature ideology very seriously. Indeed, the University of Richmond law professor has published an essay in the Georgetown Environmental Law Review to critique the movement.
Sachs is a political progressive. He believes climate change is a threat to humans and nature alike. A supporter of social justice movements, he celebrated when the Confederate statues fell in Richmond; he even composed a folk song in honor of slave rebel Gabriel Prosser. But he regards the Rights of Nature as profoundly anti-democratic. The philosophical principles are vague, self-contradictory and hideously impractical to implement, he asserts. If somehow “Nature” could be given rights and representation, the legal mechanisms could be easily co-opted by groups speaking in Nature’s name to advance their own self-serving aims.
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Building a Virginia Workers Paradise in Just One Meeting
By Steve Haner
Presumed Democratic nominee for governor Abigail Spanberger Virginia Democrats envision a Workers Paradise and are busy trying to create it. By way of illustration, below are ten bills that were approved by the House Labor and Commerce Committee last week in just one of its meetings. This is by no means a complete list of the new mandates on Virginia’s employers working their way through. This is one short meeting’s work.
Many are the same issues that passed in 2024, the first year after Democrats regained control of both chambers after losing their political trifecta in the 2021 election. All of these will be on Governor Glenn Youngkin’s list of possible vetoes, but concerned employers should weigh in.
The key question should be, would Abigail Spanberger sign them all if she is governor next year? My political advice is to affirm over and over that she will sigh each and every one until she is forced to deny it, if indeed she ever does. Each has its problems, but the cumulative impact is should not be ignored.
The bills follow, with no commentary. The words in italics are from the official summaries.
House Bill 1919: Requires any employer of 100 or more employees to develop, implement, and maintain a workplace violence policy no later than January 1, 2026. The bill includes requirements for such a policy, such as procedures and methods for employee reporting of incidents and post-incident investigations. Employers subject to the bill are required to maintain documentation of workplace violence incidents for not less than five years. An employer that violates the provisions of the bill shall be subject to a civil penalty of not more than $1,000 per violation.
House Bill 1921: Expands provisions of the Code that currently require one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked for home health workers to cover all employees of private employers and state and local governments. The bill requires that employees who are employed and compensated on a fee-for-service basis accrue paid sick leave in accordance with regulations adopted by the Commissioner of Labor and Industry.
There is a fiscal impact statement for the millions this will cost the state, but no estimate of the impact on employers.
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Jeanine’s Memes
From The Bull Elephant
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Laboring in Virginia
An instructive session at the State Capital
by Gordon C. Morse
Tuesday’s Virginia Senate Commerce and Labor Committee meeting deserves watching. You can pull these things up on-line and watch them at your leisure. It offered some clarity on the divisions in this state.
The particulars of the debate — the cost of retail electricity — are less important than the regional dynamics. A Republican representative of Southwest Virginia sought to relieve economic pressure on his constitutents and the ruling, majority Democrats did not give a hoot.
There’s calculation here by Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell: He’s cutting rural Virginia loose. He would never say so in specific terms and may make occasional gestures in its direction, but that’s Trumpland down there and in fundamental disagreement with what his caucus believes and desires.
It’s jarring to watch. There were once many, many Democrats representing the rural reaches of Virginia. The influence of Northern Virginia, despite a stumble here and there, continues to grow and Surovell knows it. Why worry about the unattainable and, in his eyes, the unattractive?
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Bacon Meme of the Week
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Did Levar Stoney Crack the Anti-Poverty Lock?
Cracking the anti-poverty lock. Image by ChatGPT by James A. Bacon
I’ve made no secret of my disdain for former Levar Stoney’s track record as mayor of Richmond between 2017 and 2025. His only tangible accomplishment, I’ve said, was tearing down Confederate statues. But perhaps I was too harsh. If we’re to believe Governing magazine, a national trade publication that covers state and local policies, Stoney should share the credit for cutting the city’s poverty rate almost in half: from 27% in 2014 to 17.1% in the most recent American Community Survey.
That’s a major accomplishment, if warranted.
I’m a bit skeptical of the case laid out by Governing’s former executive editor Christopher Swope. The policy mix detailed in the article seem too pedestrian — job and financial-literacy training, after-school programs, free transit programs, new recreation facilities — to account for the change. But Swope cites a forthcoming paper by University of Richmond professor Thad Williamson, which finds that local policies and programs made a “meaningful contribution” to the reduction in poverty. So, who knows, maybe there’s something to the claim.
In the meantime, you can be sure that Stoney will use Swope’s column to burnish his credentials as an anti-poverty champion during his campaign to win the Democratic Party nomination for lieutenant governor. Given the scandalous maladministration of city government, culminating with the week-long interruption of water service barely a week after his term ended, he’ll need something to run on.
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Surprising No One, Study Finds Skill Games Target Poor
By Steve Haner
One of Pace-O-Matic’s Skill Games A Virginia economist has turned up hard data showing which neighborhoods contained the highest concentration of the gaming devices called “skill games” by some and “neighborhood slot machines” by others, when last they were legal. The result will not surprise you.
Fletcher Mangum of Mangum Economics in Henrico County was hired by a lobbying group called Virginians Against Neighborhood Slot Machines, which released his report Thursday as part of their effort to stop bills to authorize the gaming devices. This news release accompanied the report.
Being an economist, he also reported that the money lost on those machines would have produced major economic benefits if spent on useful things.
Probably true. But that assumes the money is not simply plowed into some other form of legalized gambling in this state, which includes the Virginia Lottery, sports betting, casinos, charity bingo and betting on horses at tracks and in parimutuel betting parlors.
Mangum also cites national statistics that show the convenience store sector is booming around the U.S. and the industry might not be on life support without this extra revenue. They are the most likely venue for these machines, along with truck stops and watering holes.
A bill to allow the machines again passed the 2024 General Assembly but was vetoed by Governor Glenn Youngkin (R). The advocacy coalition formed then and includes the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, Family Foundation, a liberal group Freedom Virginia, and a bunch of competing gambling interests. In other words, the classic strange bedfellows of legislative life.
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Keeping Seats Open for Next Governor to Fill
By Chris Braunlich
The Democratic State Senate last week rejected nine of Governor Youngkin’s appointments to key governing Boards in the state.
Although Senator Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) used high minded language to defend the action, it is much more likely that the rationale was baser — simply keeping important policy-making board seats open for what they believe will be an incoming Democratic Governor.
It certainly couldn’t have been a problem with the appointees. Even the progressive blog Blue Virginia, which has never approved of anything this Governor has done, seems confused about why some were rejected.
After all, the rejected appointees included a) a Black businessman, b) a Jewish scholar, c) immigrants, d.) accomplished women, and e.) an opponent of Donald Trump on January 6th. Were we to utilize the language of Progressives, we must necessarily conclude that the action of the Senate was a) racist, b) antisemitic, c) xenophobic, d) misogynistic, and e) part of a conspiracy of Trumpist retaliation.
But while it is tempting to give the Left a taste of its own attack mode language, we know it’s not the reason for the nominees’ rejection.
Nor is it the argument Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell seems to have made on the Senate floor: “Donald Trump Made Me Do It!”
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UVA Shooter Report Delayed… Again
Kicking the can down the road. Bing Image Creator We knew the $1.5 million, taxpayer-funded Attorney General report on the circumstances surrounding the Nov. 13, 2022, triple murder at UVA would be delayed past the promised release date next month — we just didn’t know the excuse for doing it.
Now we do.
UVA President Jim Ryan vowed to release the report, which he withheld on the grounds that the contents might be prejudicial to the case, after the sentencing of the shooter, Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. The sentencing was scheduled for February 4. Now the proceeding has been delayed nine-and-a-half months to November 17, reports The Daily Progress.
An attorney for the families of the murder victims said that Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney Jim Hingely sought the delay after the defense submitted a lengthy mitigation report. “Something this important, you’ve got to have your experts review it,” said the attorney, Michael Haggard. “It’s unfortunate.”
Review it for nine-and-a-half months? Wow.
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Another Hidden Income Redistribution Scheme
Source: “Tracking Virginia’s 2023 Health Care Spending & Employment Trends” by James A. Bacon
Virginia’s healthcare system, like that of the U.S. as a whole, functions as a massive income redistribution scheme from private insurance customers to Medicare and Medicaid patients.
That’s the conclusion I draw from data from a new report, “Tracking Virginia’s 2023 Health Care Spending & Employment Trends,” prepared for the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association (VHHA) by OnPoint Health Data.
That’s not what the VHHA chooses to emphasize. In its press release accompanying the report, VHHA touts the finding that private health insurance premiums increased at a dramatically faster rate (22.1% for family policies) than personal health care (PHC) spending (1.2%) between 2019 to 2023.
VHHA also notes that Virginians spent 12.2% less on hospitalization compared to the national average in 2023. If that’s so, it’s a fair point for the VHHA to bring to the public’s attention. We should seek to understand the reason why in the hope that, whatever we’re doing right, maybe we can do more of it. It’s also fair for the hospital trade association to shift blame for rising insurance premiums to the insurance industry. If hospitals have been holding down their charges, they deserve credit for it.
But there’s more to the story. If hospital, prescription and nursing-home spending is stable, why are private insurance rates spiking?
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Don’t Let Virginia Fall Behind in the AI Race
by James A. Bacon
A House bill aiming to prevent “algorithmic discrimination” would cripple Virginia’s ability to compete in the rapidly evolving Artificial Intelligence sector by creating excessive compliance burdens, legal ambiguities and astronomical costs, warned Caleb Taylor, director of police at the Virginia Institute of Public Policy in an email distributed yesterday.
HB2094, sponsored by Delegate Michelle Maldanado, D-Manassas, is a “well-intentioned but deeply flawed piece of legislation,” Taylor wrote. Small businesses could see compliance costs between $10,000 and $500,000 annually. Large corporations may face costs exceeding $10 million, he claimed.
“Whilst states like Indiana, Tennessee, and Minnesota are actively courting AI investments with business-friendly policies, Virginia must not throttle our own businesses in a vital, growing sector,” said Taylor.
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White House Attacks Harrisonburg Schools
by Joe Fitzgerald
The post-truth nature of the Trump White House came home to Harrisonburg today.
One of Trump’s hundreds of executive orders demands that schools stop teaching critical race theory and quit indoctrinating students. The text is on the White House news site, for those who want to read the entire text. The jargon and faux-legalistic writing can’t hide its incoherence.
The local part is in a fact sheet distributed with the executive order, but not yet posted on the White House news site. The fact sheet says:
Harrisonburg City Public Schools in Virginia implemented a policy forcing teachers to “always use a student’s preferred names and pronouns” while using different ones with their parents.
The policy never existed.
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