A week ago The Jefferson Council publicly questioned the decision to withhold publication of the investigation into the University’s failure to prevent the Nov. 13, 2022, mass shooting. We were particularly perplexed by who made the decision to delay release of the report until after the trial of the defendant, Christopher Jones. The decision, announced by Rector Robert D. Hardie and President Jim Ryan, apparently was made without the approval of the Board of Visitors. (See “Will the Public Ever Get to See the Mass Shooting Report?”)
I once told a candidate for Harrisonburg City Council that ten thousand people would show up to vote and more than half would never have heard of him. Referring to the expense and effort of campaigning, he asked, “Why the Hell am I doing this then?”
The answer might be to give the voters a fighting chance. City Council actions affect day-to-day lives more than decisions made in Richmond or D.C., but the elections themselves are, if not hidden, at least subsumed into races that get more attention.
State and federal Democratic campaigns in one three-year period, 2012-14, hired at least eight people full-time and paid 30-plus months of office rental. Even allowing for the relatively low pay (and brutally long hours) for campaign organizers, that’s somewhere north of $200,000 over that period, just on one side of the political aisle. The Republican side would be close to the same. That rough guess of $400K over three years doesn’t include state senate and delegate races at a quarter million a pop for strongly-contested races.
City Council races bring in and spend much less money and are harder to analyze. For instance, one council candidate had the Planning Commission chair design a website for him and claimed it was a $4,000 donation. The astonishing thing about campaign finance in Virginia is how much is actually legal, not just in what is raised but in how it’s reported. (more…)
In the relationship between Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, very bad things have happened to Charlottesville and continue to do so.
I have developed a working thesis on that relationship.
The city is at the mercy of the University by virtue of the latter’s wealth, influence, and power in Charlottesville elections.
It is, driven by University community voters, the bluest voting district in the Commonwealth.
Unfailingly progressive Charlottesville city council, school board and Commonwealth’s Attorney candidates are elected by the dominant votes of the University, its employees and its students.
Charlottesville City Schools (CCS) are to a large degree creatures of the University.
Many CCS teachers have their bachelors and/or advanced degrees from UVa’s School of Education and Human Development. Many University ed school students do their student teaching in Charlottesville.
Every progressive educational policy and virtually every experiment the University’s ed school can dream up are visited on those students.The University’s ed school Research Centers and Labs find the proximity convenient and a pliant school board welcoming.
The University can’t bear to leave anything in CCS alone.
As Charlottesville High School faces the aftermath of rising rates of violence at the school and three canceled days of school due to alack of personnel, teachers at the University and other community groups have assisted in the school’s response. Faculty from the University’s School of Education and Human Development were present at development sessions with Charlottesville High School teachers aiming to address underlying issues….
“Dr. Stephanie Rowley, dean of the University’s Education School, said faculty from Education’s counselor education and educational psychology programs were particularly involved with the efforts because of the relevance of their expertise.”
There is no record of their being invited.
“Lack of personnel”. The teachers walked out because of runaway violence.
The University “lent a hand”.
“In light of the University’s recent push to bolster its impact in Charlottesville, some members of the University who specialize in education attended the teacher work day meetings at Charlottesville High School.”
Seriously. To “bolster (the University’s) impact in Charlottesville”.
For Black children in CCS schools, that influence, long-running and well-meaning though it has been, has turned out to have been a disaster unparalleled in the Commonwealth.
Along with the attempt to codify abortion, there is another radical bill being proposed by Democrats in Virginia.
An assault-weapons ban has been filed by Fairfax-area Delegate Dan Helmer in the House and Charlotteville-area Senator Craig Deeds.
HB 2 seeks to “make it a Class 1 misdemeanor for anyone to import, sell, manufacture, purchase, possess, transport or transfer an assault firearm.”
The Bill’s text defines an assault weapons ban as “a semi-automatic center-fire rifle or pistol that expels single or multiple projectiles by action of an explosion of a combustible material with anfixed magazine capacity in excess of 10 rounds.”
Helmer also carried a similar bill in the 2023 legislative session.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch meteorologist, Sean Sublett, recently wrote an article, “What to make of the National Climate Assessment.”He makes little of it in terms of analysis, and he reposts as if the assessment is primarily fact and not scientific speculation.
He provides almost nothing on the uncertainties that drive the National Assessment. The report treats uncertainties as scientific facts, and substantive information about the climate system is limited because uncertainties are not explicit. The long-range projections about temperature, sea-level rise, and extreme weather events are all the result of assumed emission scenarios and climate models that have proven to be too pessimistic. Since the climate is accepted as a chaotic system, it is virtually impossible to make accurate predictions absent actual knowledge of “initial conditions” which are unknown.(more…)
The Democratic leaders in both houses of Virginia’s legislature have just introduced legislation that would raise the Virginia minimum wage from $12 to $15. The bill also retains provisions that make the minimum wage rise with inflation, while preventing it from ever falling due to deflation. As a result, it could rise further in real terms in the future. This minimum wage increase and further increases in the future could lead to a big spike in unemployment in the next recession.
In a deep recession, prices may fall due to deflation, resulting in a dollar of wages being worth more than it was before. If employers can’t adjust wages to match those falling prices, they may have to lay off many more of their employees, because employers cannot afford to pay rising real wages at a time when the demand for their product is shrinking due to the recession. As Jason Lennard noted in the European Review of Economic History, “In the ‘deflationary vortex’ of the 1930s… sticky nominal wages translated to rising real wages, which resulted in mass unemployment.” Moreover, “minimum wage legislation may have contributed to stickiness by preventing nominal wages from falling.”
Tom McLaughlin, editor and general manager, News & Record (South Boston) Photo credit: News & Record
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
A local newspaper closing down is not really news these days. However, the circumstances surrounding the News & Record in South Boston in Southside Virginia and its shutting down are unusual. In addition, the news is personal to me.
For as long as I can remember, the South Boston/Halifax County area has had two newspapers. The Halifax Gazette, later known as the Gazette-Virginian, was the dominant paper in terms of circulation. The South Boston News and the Halifax County Record-Advertiser were essentially the same newspaper, published by the same folks and put out on two different days of the week.
For about a year, I delivered the News and the Record-Advertiser to houses in about half the town of Halifax on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. It was the first regular-paying job I had. I have a lot of fond memories of delivering those papers, although being regularly chased by a large German shepherd is not one of them. I knew the family that bought the paper after I had gotten married and moved away. The current editor is too young for me to have known him, but I knew his older brother; his father was my midget football coach; I remember his unbelievably calm mother coming into the grocery store accompanied with a rowdy bunch of four or more kids; my wife taught one of the boys in seventh grade. (more…)
Meet Chelsea Eileen Steiniger, a 31-year-old Buckingham County woman who, according to The Daily Progress, may have accomplished the feat of having been arrested more often — 63 times — than anyone else in Central Virginia.
One reason she has been arrested so frequently, it appears, is the leniency of judges who are reluctant to sentence her to jail time.
“It’s become a philosophy that you don’t want to put someone in prison for a low-level, low-dollar-amount crime,” Charlottesville lawyer Scott Goodman told the newspaper. “It’s basically treated as a sickness as much as it is a crime these days. If you show any kind of an effort that you’re trying to overcome your addiction, that goes a long way with the courts.” (more…)
Source: State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV)
by James A. Bacon
When Congress adjusts the tax code to promote income redistribution between the rich and poor, a debate plays out in the national media. When universities adjust their tuition to promote income redistribution, by contrast, the process is so shrouded in secrecy that the public has no idea it’s occurring.
That process is less invisible in Virginia than it once was, thanks to a Youngkin administration initiative to post the most comprehensive higher-ed data analysis ever compiled on the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) website. But the data will sit there — as good as invisible — until someone looks at it. And even publicizing the data is next to worthless if key decision makers — university administrations, activist groups, Boards of Visitors — don’t use it to inform their discussions.
The report, compiled over a six-month process with guidance from the Boston Consulting Group, explores three broad themes: enrollment trends, labor market trends, and financial effectiveness & sustainability. SCHEV looks at industry-wide trends for Virginia’s system of public education as well as detailed breakdowns by institution.
There is an immense amount of data to explore, some of which will prove familiar to readers of Bacon’s Rebellion and some of it not. For this post I am focusing on tuition as a tool for wealth redistribution because that is data we have never seen before. (more…)
Gosh, it seems like it was just last month that Virginia Democrats accused Republicans of being too extreme on abortion and used that wedge issue to gain a slight edge in the General Assembly. (The GOP favors a reasonable 15-week limit, preventing the grisly practice of late-term abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or the life of the mother being in danger.)
Now Democrats have shown who the true extremists are. They’ve introduced a constitutional amendment that would guarantee abortion rights, with no restrictions.
Fooled again, Virginia.
After the 2023 elections, Democrats have majorities in both the House and Senate: 51-49 in the House and 21-19 in the Senate. The governor can’t veto a constitutional amendment, so look for all of the abortion enthusiasts in Richmond to merrily support this measure. It needs to pass the General Assembly in two consecutive years and then has to be approved by voters. So this guarantees the Dems will be pimping this issue for the next several years.
Sigh.
They’re just getting started with a slew of bills that they know Gov. Glenn Youngkin WILL veto. The Democrats simply want to get Republican members on the record with “no” votes so they can demagogue the issues in the campaigns. (more…)
Human fetus attached to a placenta. Source: Wikipedia
by Hans Bader
Virginia may permanently legalize abortion in all nine months of pregnancy by banning any regulation of abortion unless necessary to meet a compelling interest, and — more importantly — defining “compelling interest” to exclude the life of the fetus even after viability.
That is what is mandated by a state constitutional amendment that has just been proposed by the Democratic Majority Leader in Virginia’s House of Delegates, House Joint Resolution No. 1
Its text defines compelling interest to include only the health of the mother, not the life of a viable fetus, by stating that a “state interest is compelling only when it is to ensure the protection of the health of an individual seeking care.” Fetuses are not “seeking care,” only their mother is.
By contrast, even when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld abortion rights, it recognized that the state had a compelling interest in protecting a viable fetus, from being aborted in the third trimester of pregnancy. As a result, current Virginia law only allows an abortion in the third trimester to protect the health or life of the mother, when “the continuation of the pregnancy is likely to result in the death of the woman or substantially and irremediably impair the mental or physical health of the woman.”(more…)
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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by Bill O’Keefe
