Bacon's Rebellion

  • Asleep at the Switch in Harrisonburg

    Posted on

    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Joe Fitzgerald

    At some point while on the Harrisonburg City Council, I quit worrying about or getting angry about being misquoted by the Daily News-Record, and I got used to the people I met saying I wasn’t anything like what they expected. The expectations the paper created were just part of the gig. And I remember one time that I was pretty sure I’d be misquoted when I opened my mouth. I don’t remember what we, the council, had screwed up, but I told the reporter we had been asleep at the switch.

    I thought as I said it that he’d quote me as using the more well-known expression, asleep at the wheel. One means, in railroad terms, letting the train go down the wrong track. The other means, in driving terms, losing control through inattention. I didn’t complain. The difference didn’t matter, because it was just a metaphor.

    A lot has changed in 20 years. In the city politics of 2023, being asleep at the wheel is no longer just a metaphor. The other change is that City Council members no longer talk to the media. City publicist Michael Parks is quoted as often as the council members, and some weeks it seems he writes half the News-Record. The recent statements to school officials from Councilman Chris Jones at least brought comment from Mayor Reed, although Jones only answered through a prepared statement and the other three members were silent. Reed indicated the three were not upset by Jones’s remarks. It’s too bad they couldn’t speak for themselves.

    School officials, on the other hand, have legal and policy restrictions on what they can say about any situation in the schools, leaving Jones free to claim he was courteous and respectful and to claim school officials confirmed that characterization. (more…)

  • Kalven Principles for UVa?

    Posted on

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Five years ago, University of Virginia President Jim Ryan took to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter to comment upon the horrific murder of 11 Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by a white nationalist.

    “This kind of hate and violence goes against everything this country should stand for, and for which the University of Virginia will always stand,” he tweeted. “It falls to all of us to do everything we can, not just to keep our community safe but to prevent hate and bigotry from taking root in the first place.”

    Someone warned him at the time to be careful, Ryan recalled in remarks to the UVa Board of Visitors Friday. Once he started commenting on news headlines, it would be difficult to stop. There is always something happening around the world. If university presidents comment on one story, they are expected to comment on the next. And if they don’t, people read meaning into the silence.

    Maybe it’s time to rethink the practice of making public pronouncements on events of the day, Ryan suggested. Maybe it’s time to consider adopting the Kalven principles, a set of principles articulated by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee that urged colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality on social and political issues. (more…)

  • SCC Examiner Says No to Dominion Gas Plans

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    Steve Haner

    By Steve Haner

    A hearing examiner at the Virginia State Corporation Commission has recommended rejection of Dominion Virginia Energy’s plan to maintain and add to its fleet of fossil fuel generators. It failed to overcome the presumption in state law that all such plants must go away, she wrote.

    In her extensive report following the months-long regulatory battle, Ann Berkebile notes that the Commission itself (still hobbled with only one full member and a retired commissioner sitting in) may reach a different conclusion. And the pending case, Dominion’s Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), does not actually involve final decisions on what power plants to add or delete from its assets in coming years.

    But Dominion was looking for a blessing from the Commission on its proposal to maintain most of its natural gas plants and even add one, a 1,000 megawatt facility it wants to place in Chesterfield County. The 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act has set a schedule for their retirement, with all fossil fuel generation expected to be gone in about 20 years. Dominion’s announcement last May that it was seeking to keep and add to its natural gas plants was immediately denounced by environmental advocates.

    The 2020 legislation included a provision to allow the SCC to approve an additional fossil fuel plant if a utility demonstrates “that it has already met the energy savings goals identified in § 56-596.2 and that the identified need cannot be met more affordably through the deployment or utilization of demand-side resources or energy storage resources and that it has considered and weighed alternative options, including third-party market alternatives, in its selection process.” (more…)

  • Jeanine’s Memes

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Liz Magill, former Provost at the University of Virginia and recently resigned president of the University of Pennsylvania.

    From The Bull Elephant.

  • Does UVa Need to Charge Higher Tuition to Keep Pay Competitive?

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    The Ryan administration notched up two big wins in the University of Virginia Board of Visitors meeting Thursday and Friday. It pushed through 3% tuition increases for the next two academic years and it framed the budgetary debate to its advantage. Rather than engaging in a wide-ranging discussion of how UVa might hold down costs, the Board spent most of its time talking about the challenge of hiring and retaining faculty and staff, with the implicit assumption that staying competitive will require higher pay, more money, and higher tuitions.

    The administration carefully orchestrated the discussion of tuition & fees from the very beginning — through an initial Finance Committee meeting in October, a public hearing on tuition increases at which only one person testified in November, and then the Board vote Friday. Each step of the way, the administration made lengthy presentations contending that UVa provides a superior value proposition to students, that it has restrained spending, and that inflationary pressures and cutbacks in state funding compel the university to raise tuition. Discussion was restricted to the data presented by the administration. Past efforts by board members to obtain additional information about UVa’s cost structure — in particular, about administrative costs — were ignored.

    Bert Ellis, a former president of the Jefferson Council and appointee of Governor Glenn Youngkin, was the only board member to abstain from voting for the tuition increases. The seven other Youngkin appointees on the Board voted for the tuition increases, as did every holdover from the Northam administration.

    The Ryan administration presented a case that was sometimes valid but frequently used cherrypicked data or made points that were shorn of context, as the Jefferson Council has documented in previous posts. There are no simple answers to the question of what the “right” level of tuition & fees should be. Optimal tradeoffs between affordability and costs require a vigorous and free-ranging debate at the Board level that simply did not occur. (more…)

  • Bacon Meme of the Week

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

  • Virginia’s Final (Maybe) RGGI Tax Grab: $97M

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    Virginia’s final (maybe) sale of allowances for power plant carbon emissions produced a record $97.4 million. The price for each permit to emit one ton of carbon dioxide, which is passed to customers, has about doubled in four years.

    by Steve Haner

    Virginia has participated in its final (for a while anyway) Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative auction and the proceeds on the carbon tax set a new record, with Virginia collecting more than $97 million in one swoop. The total carbon tax take for the state is just under $828 million in three years.

    The clearing price on December 6 reached $14.88 per ton. It would have been higher but the demand for allowances was so high the RGGI organization released some of its “cost containment reserve” or CCR allowances to tamp down the price increase. The news release on the auction is here. A chart showing Virginia’s proceeds over the three years is attached.

    Why the record price? Here’s a solid suggestion: Power producers fear another major winter stressing their systems and know full well that wind and solar are unpredictable and unreliable. They are stocking up on allowances to keep our lights on with fossil fuels.

    Just four years ago when the Thomas Jefferson Institute of Public Policy produced this explainer on what RGGI was, the “carbon price” was $5.27 a ton and the prediction was Virginia would collect $150 million a year from electricity producers and eventually their customers. “There is no guarantee the price won’t rise,” we noted, and indeed a steadily rising price for carbon emissions is entirely the point of RGGI.

    Pushed by Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) the Air Pollution Control Board voted earlier this year to rescind the state regulation that forces Virginia’s larger electric power plants to purchase allowances from RGGI for every ton of coal, natural gas or oil they burn. So far, efforts to reverse that decision in the courts have failed. (more…)

  • Proposed Reproductive Freedom Amendment Could Eliminate Limits

    Posted on

    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Emilio Jaksetic

    House Joint Resolution 1 (HJ 1) and Senate Joint Resolution 1 (SJ 1) have been prefiled for consideration of the Virginia General Assembly to propose an amendment to the Virginia Constitution captioned “Article I, Bill of Rights, Section 11-A. Fundamental right to reproductive freedom.” A copy of HJ 1 is available at here and a copy of SJ 1 is available here.

    Virginians need to (1) carefully consider the danger that vague and undefined terms in the proposed constitutional amendment could be exploited to advance an agenda that extends far beyond just abortion rights; and (2) consider the need for an alternative proposed amendment that is compatible with compromises likely to be acceptable to a majority of Virginians. (more…)

  • Insufferable and Dangerous Nonsense in Academia – Antisemitism Sector

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    A rally on the steps of the University of Virginia Rotunda calls for a free Palestine amid the war in Israel on Thursday, Oct. 12. CAL CARY, THE DAILY PROGRESS

    by James C. Sherlock

    I read this morning in the latest issue of Chronicle of Higher Education a particularly smarmy article by a Keith E. Whittington.

    He is, among other things, “professor of politics at Princeton University and founding chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance”.

    Good to know.

    He addressed in his article the Congressional hearing that put the presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT on the hot seat for the unaddressed antisemitic turmoil on their campuses.

    Other articles in the same issue called the hearings a disaster for the colleges.

    “Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, administrators have struggled to respond. Many issued statements that faculty members, students, and others saw as tepid, while protests drove deep rifts into campus communities.”

    Whittington’s was titled:

    “Colleges Can Recommit to Free Speech or Double Down on Sensitivity – The congressional hearing on antisemitism presents a stark choice.”

    He offered a false, self-serving choice of only two ways forward.

    If President Ryan of UVa had joined the others in front of the committee, they could have gotten past statements to actions, and lack of them. (more…)

  • A Day Which Will Live In Infamy

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

  • Dem Shrouded in Controversy Announces Gubernatorial Run

    Posted on

    by

    Bob Rayner

    Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney

    from The Republican Standard 

    It’s official.

    Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (D) is running for governor of Virginia in what’s set to become a free-for-all primary.

    Stoney has courted controversy in the past as former Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s chief strategist. Critics, including former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D), accuse the ambitious politician of being a hatchetman. (more…)

  • Hardest Job in Virginia: Making Aaron Spence Look Good.

    Posted on

    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Kerry Dougherty

    We tried to warn you, Loudoun County.

    We told you that Virginia Beach School Superintendent Aaron Spence was trouble. That he was one vote away from being sacked by the newly elected Beach school board when he decided to bolt for greener pastures. That he was a devoted wokester.

    We even pointed to his wife’s crude New Year’s Tweet from January 2020 where she hurled a profanity at then-President Trump as she posted a photo of herself draped over her greasy-looking husband.

    Spence was pressured to apologize. And he did, twice.

    The Fun Couple is your problem now, Loudoun.

    Shoot, the new school year was barely underway before news broke that Spence failed to inform parents – FOR 20 DAYS – that kids were overdosing on fentanyl in one Loudoun high school. He dodged pesky reporters and television cameras with the nerve to ask why he delayed.

    In short, Spence is a public relations nightmare.

    So it should come as no surprise that the superintendent’s brought one of his old mouthpieces up from Virginia Beach to run interference for him.

    (more…)

  • Governor’s Chronic Absenteeism Task Force – Part Three – Vital New State Roles

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    By James C. Sherlock

    A compilation from https://www.doe.virginia.gov/data-policy-funding/data-reports/data-collection/special-education

    I have found in 18 years of reporting on education in the Commonwealth that each school, each school division and each region is to some degree its own ecosystem.

    Taking the example of chronic absenteeism, an individualized assessment of causes could be attempted:

    • if a single school‘s chronic absenteeism can be adjusted statistically for differences in its demographics (race, ethnicity, economic status, English learners, IEPs, etc.) to its division norms, and
    • if that school is a statistical outlier from its division good or bad.

    But those are very big if’s because of the complex algorithm that would be required for comparing.  And the results would apply only to that specific school.

    I have sometimes compared divisions‘ statistical performances on absenteeism and SOL pass rates against state norms, but usually at the extremes.  There are too many variables to sort among the bulk of them.  At the division level, the variables are as great as at the school level.

    Regional differences are there, but causes are hard to pin down beyond differences in demographics and cultures.

    That said, and to some degree for that reason, I offer two new state roles for improving school attendance:

    1. marketing, which is either not now done at all or done ineffectively, to increase parents understanding of the value of school; and
    2. investigations and enforcement, which are done sporadically across the state.  That is because of both the time and expertise investigations take and current laws that require schools to involve the court system in enforcement.

    Those recommendations are not budget neutral.  This is a budget year.  They are tailored to draw Democratic support.  The time for them is now.

    Given the time necessary to prepare proposals, it will likely take a special session to address them.

    The chronic absenteeism crisis, appropriately designated by the Governor, rates one.

    (more…)

  • Governor’s Chronic Absenteeism Task Force – Part Two – Restructure for Balanced Debates

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    By James C. Sherlock

    Lisa Coons, Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction

    I have watched the public sessions of the Governor’s Chronic Absenteeism Task Force.

    The structure of the task force, and its proceedings, have been fatally flawed.

    That panel has been dominated by the progressive worldviews of Attendance Works and FutureEd.

    I offer as evidence the “resources” for the first meeting on October 24th.  Every single one uses Attendance Works or FutureEd for its expert assessment.

    Then consider the agenda, discussion guide and this slide deck used on November 7th to set the stage for deliberations.

    Such meetings have not encouraged debate, but rather have seemed to suffocate it.  The process as it exists seems destined to coronate failed progressive ideas.

    Progressive pressure reached the point that a member of the panel, Dr. Keith Perrigan, Washington County Public Schools Superintendent and President of the Coalition of Small and Rural Schools of Virginia, on November 7th felt it necessary to apologize in advance for seeming to be an “ogre” to the rest of the panel.

    Because he spoke in favor of enforcement of truancy laws.

    The Task Force needs to change that environment and the makeup of the task force or they will get more of what Virginia has already experienced using progressive approaches: chronic absenteeism.

    (more…)

  • Norfolk Hipsters & Lefties Try to Block a Military-Themed Brewery

    Posted on

    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Now is the time. If you believe that cities ought to be open for business, regardless of the viewpoints of the business owners, if you support the military and don’t consider flag-waving a provocative act, you might want to let Norfolk’s City Council hear from you.

    On December 12th it is scheduled to vote on the application of Armed Forces Brewery to open its doors on the same premises that housed O’Connor Brewing in the so-called Railroad District of Norfolk.

    The business was lured to Virginia by Gov. Glenn Yougnkin who helped the founders secure tax incentives to open their craft brewery in Norfolk rather than in Florida. The owners have pledged that 70% of their employees will be veterans.

    Normally, that would be seen as good news in this military town. (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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