Bacon's Rebellion

  • Venture Global: Virginia’s Unknown Energy Giant

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Venture Global’s CP2 facility in Lousiana, if approved, will be capable of liquefying 20 million metric tons a year of natural gas. Image source: Global Venture

    by James A. Bacon

    An Arlington-based company that most Virginians have never heard of could well alter the global energy balance of power — if the Biden administration doesn’t get in the way.

    In 2023 and 2024 alone Venture Global LNG., Inc., has announced long-term deals to supply 3 million tons of LNG to the United Kingdom (equivalent to about 5% of the U.K.’s demand), 2.25 million tons to Germany, and 1 million tons per year to Japan from its LNG facilities in Louisiana. In March the company announced that it was ordering six giant LNG vessels from shipyards in Korea to transport the hydrocarbons.

    Now it appears that Venture Global, whose corporate headquarters is in Rosslyn, has struck a deal with DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, according to the Wall Street Journal. DTEK would buy up to 2 million tons yearly of LNG from a proposed export facility in Plaquemines Parish — CP2 — to resell in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. The deal would reduce dependence of the eastern European nations from Russian gas supplied through a pipeline through Ukraine, the transit agreement for which expires at the end of the year.

    But a Biden moratorium on LNG exports, ordered at the behest of environmental groups, could scuttle the deal.

    (more…)

  • Rambling: Guess Who He is Voting For

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    There is no doubt as to whom the residents in this house perched on the edge of Rt. 58 in Grayson County are supporting!

  • Bacon Bits: Encampments and Memorials

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Globalize this! Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Americans recently polled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) responded that setting up pro-Palestinian tent compounds was “never” or “rarely” justified. Nearly half (47%) said that students participating in college encampment protests should be expelled, suspended, or put on probation. Only 23% thought the demonstrators should not be punished at all.

    But breaking university rules against round-the-clock camping on college campuses and chanting, “Globalize the intifada,” pales in comparison to burning the American flag. Eighty percent responded that flag burning is never or rarely justified.

    FIRE did not ask about protesters who erected an encampment and burned the flag. View the detailed survey results here.

    Explain again, please, why so many statues came down. The Public Religion Research Institute has released polling results for questions on a wide array of issues relating to race relations that are worth examining. What caught our attention were a series of questions about Confederate memorials and statues. While 45% of the 5,500 respondents from around the country view the Confederate flag as a symbol of racism (and 54% say it reflects Southern pride), only 33% regard statues to Confederate soldiers that way (and 63% say they reflect Southern pride).

    (more…)

  • Bacon Meme of the Week

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    James A. Bacon

  • Honey, I Shrunk the Newspaper

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Newspapers are dying slow deaths of a thousand small cuts. Here’s the latest from the Richmond Times-Dispatch…

    According to Executive Editor Chris Coates, beginning July 4, the RTD will switch to a “digital-only format” on the following holidays: Independence Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day and Memorial Day.

    Translation, the RTD will stop publishing its print newspaper on nine major holidays.

    I’m surprised he left off Juneteenth.

    Coates could have mentioned that the RTD will be in good company. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t publish on holidays either. Not even Juneteenth. It doesn’t publish Sundays either. I wonder if that’s the next step for the RTD. (more…)

  • Senator Lucas’ “Big Gamble”

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Kayla Owen

    Senator Louise Lucas

    Virginia state Senator and Chair of the powerful Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee, Louise Lucas, is known for her love of casinos, skill games, and other gambling enterprises. Her greatest political gamble may be unfolding before our eyes this week.

    When Virginia’s biennial 2024-2026 budget was signed on May 13, 2024, just two-weeks before Memorial Day, Virginia’s veteran community discovered language hidden within the budget bill (SB/HB 6001) that gutted the Virginia Military Survivors and Dependents Education Program or VMSDEP. VMSDEP is a longstanding state tuition waiver program for the surviving family members of soldiers killed or missing in action and military veterans left severely disabled from their service. The recent cuts to VMSDEP constitute the largest rollback of Veterans Benefits in Virginia’s history — a state that supposedly is committed to being the most Veteran-friendly in the country.

    Facing public outrage over the surprise cuts, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and House Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, publicly announced their commitment to a full repeal and restoration of VMSDEP to its pre-March 13th language. Standing in the way of righting this wrong is Louise Lucas.

    The Senate finance chair flat out refused Tuesday to entertain a bipartisan bill that would reverse the cuts. She appears hellbent on betting her political future as well as the democrats’ razor-thin majority in the House and Senate on this latest political stunt. Virginia’s over 700,000 veterans, Gold Star survivors, and First Responders are monitoring her every move.

    (more…)

  • Clean Economy Act: A Refresher on What it Does

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    by

    Steve Haner

    By Steve Haner

    A senior Democratic state senator is leading an effort to review and possibly revise the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which orders the future elimination of hydrocarbon fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) used in making electricity.  His goal is to conduct a stakeholder process and bring legislation to the 2025 General Assembly.

    Before delving into what those changes might look like (or what we might propose the changes look like), it is helpful to understand what the current law requires. To use a common colloquialism of the Assembly, “what do the bill do?”

    The final version approved in 2020 was long and written mainly to be read by utility lawyers and regulators.  The vote was largely along party lines, but one Republican in the House and one in the Senate joined with Democrats in approving it.  Two years later, when the Republicans regained control of the House of Delegates, a repeal of the entire statute passed the House but stalled in the Senate, where Democrats remained in control. (more…)

  • The June 18 Primary: Money, Trump and Identity Politics

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    By Ken Reid

    It’s not an exact science to get lessons from primaries, where turnout can be as low as 10% and when voters can choose which primary they want to vote in (as is the case in Virginia). But I will go ahead and play political scientist here and give you some takeaways from what happened in Virginia Tuesday.

    Republicans — money and Trump’s endorsement matter. Hung Cao, the best financed among five running for the GOP nomination to face incumbent Democrat Tim Kaine, had Trump’s endorsement. None of his opponents came close to beating him — despite a scandal about his formation of a PAC that benefited his campaign not the Republicans he said he was going to help in 2023, and being dismissive of visiting far- flung areas of the state and avoiding debates.

    Cao won the primary with 166,668 votes (61.79%). Coming in second was Scott Parkinson with only 10.95% of the vote – not even close. Collectively, his four opponents got 100,000 votes, which means if Cao faced just ONE opponent in the primary, instead of four dividing the vote, he still would have won the nomination to face Kaine.

    Cao is a prolific fundraiser who relies heavily on the Vietnamese communities in California and Virginia (his family fled Vietnam when he was four). I had thought the Vietnamese community in Northern Virginia would have fueled his vote, but in looking at his vote, he won pretty much every county and city in the state, including areas where the Vietnamese community is small.

    (more…)

  • Cao Sweeps the GOP Primary… Almost

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Hung Cao won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate yesterday by an overwhelming margin, collecting nearly 62% of the votes in a five-man race. Scott Parkinson trailed in the No. 2 position at 11%.

    Cao could almost claim a sweep. He reaped a majority of votes in every locality but one. In the small Southside city of Emporia, Eddie Garcia squeaked out a plurality of 33% (see map above).

    The media made much of Cao’s comment about it not being worth the trouble to travel to Abingdon for a debate, but the remark didn’t appear to hurt him. He carried Washington County where Abingdon is the county seat with 54% of the vote. Admittedly, that was lower than his statewide average but, then, so was his showing throughout much of rural Virginia. He racked up his biggest margins in Northern Virginia and the big metro suburbs.

    And therein lies an interesting angle as we handicap Hung’s odds of success against popular incumbent Tim Kaine. (more…)

  • Fissures in the Education-Industrial Complex

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Cracks in the monolith

    by James A. Bacon

    Virginia’s public-school districts are fracturing along the same lines of the culture war as the rest of American society. Four school districts have pulled out of the Virginia School Board Association (VSBA) on the grounds that the training and advocacy supplied by the 118-year-old organization does not reflect their values. The board of a fifth school district, Hanover County, is considering doing the same.

    “They lobby for many things that I, on principle, stand against,” Orange County school board member Darlene Dawson told Radio IQ. “If you try to disagree with them, they will shut you down. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve listened to recordings where they mock our governor and anyone who holds a conservative viewpoint, which I’ve been very clear that I do.”

    The School Board Member Alliance of Virginia (SBMAV) has emerged as a potential competitor to the VSBA. According to The Virginia Mercury, the association represents one-tenth of Virginia’s school board members. Unlike the VSBA, whose members are school districts, the Alliance offers individual memberships.

    The mainstream media coverage is vague about the specific issues that school board members in smaller districts are upset about. As a generality, the VSBA is dominated by larger school districts that advocate liberal/left policies antithetical to the values of smaller districts with more conservative populations. Articles allude to parental rights, the teaching of “divisive concepts,” transgender policy, DEI, and other issues that Governor Glenn Youngkin has tackled. (more…)

  • Note to Readers: BR Website Upgrade

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Bacon’s Rebellion is in the midst of a website upgrade, and some issues are cropping up that didn’t appear on our test site. Please bear with us as we work through them.

    WordPress is no longer supporting the design/layout theme we were using, Coraline, with the result that functionality and security are expected to degrade over time. Additionally, years of accumulated dreck in the back end of WordPress have been slowing down page download times. I decided to kill two birds with one stone and upgrade to a new theme and clear out the dreck. The look and feel is similar to the old Bacon’s Rebellion. Hopefully, download speeds will improve. Comments, which reside on a Disqus platform, should not be affected.

    Let me know if you spot any issues.

    Thanks to modest advertising and a loyal corps of readers who contribute through the donation button, Bacon’s Rebellion covers its ongoing expenses for web hosting, registrations, security, and a variety of web-related subscriptions. However, the cost of making a major overhaul to the website comes out of my own pocket. I don’t make a dime from the blog, and neither do our regular contributors (Steve Haner and Dick Hall-Sizemore), proofreader (Janice Stewart), or comments monitor (Carol Bova). We all volunteer our time to bring the blog to you.

    I have rarely, if ever, asked readers to donate to the blog. Having nearly drained the Bacon’s Rebellion bank account dry, I’m making an exception this year. I would like to continue making upgrades to improve the reader experience. Advertisers offer to pay us to post content on Bacon’s Rebellion, but I refuse to lower our editorial standards. Unlike some Virginia news sites, we don’t tap into wealthy foundations for funding. We are beholden to no one but you. Please support independent journalism and commentary in Virginia by chipping in a few bucks. The donate button is in the upper left-hand corner of the blog.

    Many thanks. Jim Bacon

  • Defending Jon Baliles: An Answer to the Lost Cause of Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Paul Goldman

    Does Bacon’s Rebellion recognize the validity of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States? I’m not sure and here’s why.

    Had Dick Hall-Sizemore written his response to Jon Baliles’ column, “Bonding With (or Against) the People,” prior to the Civil War, he would have caught Jon with his constitutional pants down. Indeed, the Sizemore doctrine regarding the various rights of cities and counties to issue bonds did have sway among the leaders of Virginia until the famed 1966 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections poll tax decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. At long last the leaders of Virginia had to admit the entire 14th amendment was the law of the land. They had reluctantly accepted a few years before that the due process provision gave Virginia voters first amendment protection. But Harper demanded state government accept the equal protection clause as well.

    A bitter blow no doubt — 100 years after the lost cause lost — to lose again to a court dominated by liberals. To be sure, there were three dissenters who said Virginia should be allowed to promote monetary fees as a discrimination against equal voting rights. The poll tax at issue was just $1.50, a small price to pay said Virginia leaders for the right to vote. If someone couldn’t afford $1.50, then the segregationists said that person was not the kind of individual you want voting on important issues.

    With this background, it will hopefully be easier to understand my puzzlement as to how Mr. Sizemore could write an article justifying a clear discrimination in the right to vote based only on the state constitution, while never mentioning the federal constitution.

    His article is exceptionally well written and researched for a complicated issue. I learned a lot of historical stuff. But again: you can’t write an article about the right to vote in America without discussing the two main provisions of the 14th amendment and how they apply to the state of Virginia. (more…)

  • Keeping Up with Wokeness: “Indigiqueer”

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Credit: Bing Image Creator, mutating COVID virus

    by James A. Bacon

    In the thought bubble of intersectional oppression, language mutates faster than COVID-19. It’s almost impossible for us normies to keep up. I consider it a point of professional pride to stay up to speed, but even I find it astonishing at how rapidly the woke mind virus is evolving.

    Delving into the thinking of left-wing faculty at the University of Virginia introduced me to the idea of the United States as a product of “settler colonialism.” The ideology goes far beyond the assertion that European settlers in North America brought nothing but disease, war and dispossession of indigenous peoples. This strain of progressivism propagates a fairy-tale narrative that indigenous societies lived in concordance with progressives’ 21st-century fantasies.

    As the oppression narrative has evolved, progressives now aim to “decolonize gender,” as part of a larger project of taking back power from the colonizers. That entails celebrating the “indigiqueer” of North American peoples who didn’t conform to Westerners’ gender binary. (Islamic conquerors imposed their gender binary upon indigenous societies of Africa, but progressives don’t lose much sleep over that.) (more…)

  • Meteorologists Hype the Weather. It’s What They Do Best.

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    There was a time when I was fluent in Celsius. Today I have to turn to Google to translate.

    But back in the summer of either 1982 or 1983 I remember a headline in The Irish Press that was something like this:

    “Dublin Sizzles In 22-Degree Heat.”

    I was living in Ireland’s capital city at the time and when the mercury climbed to 22 — that’s 72 Fahrenheit — I was finally able to venture outside without a jacket for the first time in two years.

    I thought the front page was so funny that I mailed it home to my parents who were cooking in temps near 100.

    My Irish friends and neighbors were truly perishing in the heat. Everywhere you looked, the natives were red-faced and panting. Dublin buses, which were already a fetid mess what with smoking allowed on the second deck, became unbearable with sweat added into the mix.

    At the time I lived in an old house south of the city center with three apartments. One afternoon during Dublin’s “historic heat wave” I spied one of my neighbors sitting in our front garden — in full view of the busy street — in just her panties and bra. She was fanning herself and listening to music. Continue reading.

  • An Answer for Jon Baliles: It’s the Constitution

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Shame on Jon Baliles for not knowing why cities and counties are treated differently in the Code of Virginia regarding the issuance of general obligation debt. The answer is simple;  the state constitution requires the different treatment.

    Article VII, section 10, of the state constitution deals with the issuing of debt by local governments. After setting out the process for issuing local bonds or debt, the constitution stipulates that the issuance of general obligation debt by counties is contingent upon the “submission to the qualified voters of the county… for approval or rejection by a majority vote of the qualified voters voting in an election on the question of contracting such debt. Such approval shall be a prerequisite to contracting such debt.” Thus, the statutory distinction is rooted in the constitution; that distinction cannot be changed by the General Assembly passing legislation.  Furthermore, the statutory provision that, through a referendum, a county can choose to be treated as a city for the purposes of issuing bonds, is also a reflection of the language in the constitution.

    Baliles implies that there is no limitation on the issuance of debt by municipalities. That is not accurate. Cities and towns may not incur total general obligation bond indebtedness that exceeds ten percent of the assessed value of the real estate in the city or town subject to taxation. There is no such cap on counties. In summary, cities and towns are subject to an assessment cap on the amount of general obligation debt they can issue whereas counties are subject to the approval of voters on whether they can issue general obligation debt. (more…)

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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