“On behalf of Governor Abigail D. Spanberger, thank you for giving your time and expertise to serve our Commonwealth as a member of the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin.”
The email from the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Candi Mundon King, went on to say:
“As your term is now complete, please know your contribution to this board has been an essential part of our effort to make Virginia, stronger, safer, and affordable for all Virginians.”
Funny thing is, my appointment was to a term ending in 2029, so it was not “complete.” But it was her language for, “You’re Fired”!
Serving the Commonwealth is a great honor. In the past, I have been confirmed by the Virginia General Assembly for board appointments in the Allen, Gilmore, and Youngkin Administrations. And I was confirmed by the General Assembly during the McDonnell Administration to serve on his Cabinet as Secretary of Natural Resources.
Apparently, my service to the Commonwealth was not good enough for the Democrats now in charge in the General Assembly, since this action was taken on a party-line vote.
News reports of a substantial Marine expeditionary force embarked to the Persian Gulf sparked a musical memory. Jim Bacon may recall we had a colleague at the Roanoke Times, columnist Mike Ives, who was among the Marines that were the first ground troops ashore in South Vietnam circa 1964.
Mr. Seeger always said it well:
But every time I read the papers Them old feelings come on We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy The big fool says to push on
Waist deep, neck deep Soon even a tall man will be over his head, We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy The big fool says to push on
Sen. Warner on March 16, 2026 signing his paperwork to run for a 4th term. (photo/Sen. Warner’s Twitter/X page)
by Scott Dreyer
Sen. Mark Warner (D), one of Virginia’s two U.S. senators, announced on March 16 that he is running for a fourth, six-year term.
Warner, born in Indianapolis and the first in his blue-collar family to attend college, invested heavily in early cell phone technology, which made him tremendously wealthy. Warner has publicly stated he knew he needed to have a large personal fortune if he wanted to fulfill his dream to go into politics someday.
It’s estimated Warner is the wealthiest Democrat in the US Senate, with a personal fortune north of $200 million.
Warner first ran for the US Senate in 1996 against incumbent Republican John Warner (no relation), but lost. In a debate that year, challenger Mark Warner made this claim and promise, which you can watch here:
“I don’t want to be a lifelong politician. My view of public service is something you do for part of your life, not all of your life. If I’m elected to the US Senate, I will serve no more than two terms. Because I think the value of our system is that it’s constantly renewed by new ideas and fresh people.”
Criminals are the winners in Richmond this year as Democrats gut gun rights and attempt to rewrite history.
Image credit: Grok
by Victoria Manning
The 2026 Virginia General Assembly session concluded on March 14th, and Virginia Democrats have passed sweeping far-left legislation restricting citizen rights. Democrats have made life easier for criminals and less safe for Virginians. They’ve ignored the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and gutted Virginia’s right-to-work laws.
On the campaign trail, Governor Abigail Spanberger tried to play the role of moderate but if she signs these bills, the voters will know she was lying.
More than 60 of these new laws are headed to Spanberger’s desk—and she is likely to sign them. All these bills passed with full Democrat support almost exclusively along party-lines. With Democrats in full control of all branches of government, Republicans had no power to stop them.
2026 Virginia legislation that passed the General Assembly
Second Amendment
HB 21: “Allows one of the most highly regulated industries, the firearms industry, to be sued civilly for a variety of already illegal actions. It also holds the manufacturers and sellers of even the most benign of firearm accessories, like a butt stock or a gun case, liable to a civil lawsuit if it doesn’t “properly” protect that item from theft or misuse by a criminal.” Summary by the Virginia Citizen’s Defense League (VCDL).
General Assembly Democrats put self-interest above justice for Harrisonburg.
by Joe Fitzgerald
Several years ago, Todd Gilbert arranged a town hall on immigration in Harrisonburg. Latino leaders organized several speakers to come and speak about the real experience of immigration to the Valley, as opposed to the demonization and slander of immigrants that often comes from rabble rousers on the right. Faced with evidence and testimony about how much a part of the community immigrants are, and how much they enhance the Valley, Gilbert disowned the results of his own town hall.
It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
Undocumented immigrants are a major target of people on that side of the political spectrum. Those people have to have somebody, some Other, to campaign against. Richard Hofstadter wrote about it as the paranoid style or anti-intellectualism in American life. Witches in Salem, Irish in Baltimore and Boston, blacks and Jews anywhere and anytime, Japanese-Americans in World War II, communists in the 1950s. Now it’s the immigrant’s turn.
Let’s stop kidding ourselves and each other about voter ID.
And, yes, I AM talking to you Sen. Mark Warner.
Virginia does not – I repeat – does not have voter ID. No matter what our bloviating senator may say about Virginia being a model for the nation.
The SAVE Act is the most blatant attempt at voter suppression in ages.
I support requiring voters to show identification, like we do in Virginia. However, the SAVE Act discriminates against servicemembers, married women, rural Americans, and anyone else who doesn’t have a…
Fact is, although we’re asked for ID at the polls – and virtually everyone complies, because no matter what the Dems say every voter has a photo ID – you do not need to produce actual ID to vote. Unless you consider your electric bills ID.
Try to board a domestic airline flight with an electric bill as ID. I dare you. Continue reading.
Photo: Lucas Lodge Residential 4-Person Group Home
by James C. Sherlock
This is a real-life horror story.
One hundred and two serious incidents with injuries reported since 2019 by a single provider of community-based residential services whose tiny houses host a maximum of 24 intellectually and developmentally disabled adults at a time. Not counting those who died.
This is the story of Lucas Lodge, a Portsmouth provider of community-based services. It is a story of that provider’s repeated inability to run its program in compliance with the law, and the consequences, including deaths and serious injuries to the people it is paid to protect.
And it is the story of the state regulator, which inspected, found serial violations of safety and health regulations, read the reports of injuries and deaths, and did virtually nothing.
Legal Jeopardy for the Commonwealth
The executive branch of the Virginia government has, for at least 40 years, violated the letter, the spirit, or both of state and federal laws intended to protect the health and safety of the less fortunate. This author has reported on those issues regarding nursing homes for a decade.
But successive Virginia administrations have, as with nursing homes, repeatedly cited both institutional providers and providers of community-based services for persons with developmental and intellectual disabilities (DD/ID) for violations of state and federal laws without imposing significant sanctions. That is a more consequential legal matter than with nursing homes.
The 1999 Supreme Court Olmstead v. L.C. decision (527 U.S. 581) ruled that unjustified segregation of people with disabilities in institutions is unlawful discrimination under the ADA. It established that states must provide community-based services when appropriate, desired by the individual, and reasonably accommodated.
The Commonwealth has twice (in 2012 and 2020) been sued by the Justice Department for violating Olmstead and subject to orders from Senior Judge John A. Gibney Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia requiring compliance. Since January of 2025, Virginia has been permanently enjoined by that same court to comply with the specific settlement agreement criteria certified in the 2020 order and enshrined in Virginia law and regulations since August of that year.
The evidence presented here raises questions about whether the state has ever tried to comply with those orders.
Hairbags. Scum. Thieves. Con artists. Swindlers. Grifters.
I’m running out of nouns.
No, I’m not talking about politicians. I’m talking about the con artists who spend their time trying to fleece hard-working Americans.
Who knows if they operate from Internet cafes in Nigeria, Myanmar or Short Pump. All we know is that their relentless campaigns to separate law-abiding folks from their dough take on a different form daily.
Project quacks like student housing, and city schools will pay the price.
by Joe Fitzgerald
It took me a long time to figure out why Harrisonburg’s Community Development Department doesn’t use one of the clearest metrics available to predict growth in the city’s schools. It’s similar to the reason no local news media use it. In each case, under the rules of their operations, they don’t have permission to use it.
The metric in question is the correlation between growth of JMU student housing and growth of Harrisonburg City Public Schools’ student population. Since Sunchase opened in 1999, three bedrooms of new student housing generate one new K-12 student as the older housing is gradually repurposed as family housing. If you put new bedrooms next to new students in a spreadsheet and ask the program if they rise together, the program will tell you that they do 88 percent of the time. If you ask the program to build a three-year lag into its calculations, it will tell you that the numbers line up 97 percent of the time. For shorthand purposes, let’s call this the Sunchase correlation.
Saying that one asks the program is an old man’s phrasing. (I recently turned 70, which means that in Biblical terms, I’m in overtime.) Today, one does simply ask the computer that’s running the program. Asking in Biblical times, when Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, and dinosaurs walked the earth, meant writing a procedure to step through the numbers one by one and run a formula. Those of little faith would test the formula with a pencil, and a sheaf of paper, and a cup of strong coffee, and perhaps a slide rule. Later generations used a calculator and an energy drink, which didn’t affect the numbers.
DD/ID (Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities) refers to services, supports, and classifications for individuals with cognitive, physical, or emotional impairments. The author’s first three articles on this subject provided background on Virginia’s broken system of services to that population. In many instances, it doesn’t work well due to combinations of oversight failures and unethical or incompetent providers. But overall, the system struggles due to its design. The Commonwealth has shared and devolved authority and responsibility for oversight of services for the DD/ID population beyond any reasonable expectation of effectiveness.
When everyone is in charge, no one is.
This series has focused on the Virginia Departments of Behavioral Health and Disability Services and of Medical Assistance Services. But there is also local responsibility across 40 Community Services Boards (CSBs) and a single Behavioral Health Authority. See afirst-person accountfrom a veteran of a citizens’ advisory board to one of those CSBs, Lefty 665. He speaks more eloquently about the problems in CSBs than anyone this author has read.
Portsmouth
Portsmouth has made its community services board (CSB) a department of the city government. Its mission statement:
The mission of the Portsmouth Department of Behavioral Healthcare Services is to promote independence, recovery, and positive outcomes for those we serve, through excellence in the delivery of integrated Mental Health, Intellectual Disability, and Substance Abuse, and Co-Occurring services.
It has all gone horribly wrong there.
The City of Portsmouth sends “clients” screened by its Behavioral Healthcare Services department to local providers of incredibly dangerous “services” to developmentally and intellectually disabled children, adolescents, and adults. The dangers are catalogued in heartbreaking state and federal inspection records.
Government officials need only read them. They will get an opportunity in this series.
Question: How would Louise Lucas’ “ten to f***ing one” congressional redistricting map fare if voters cast ballots more in line with yesterday’s voting pattern than the 2025 gubernatorial election pattern?
Remember the highly hyped bill at the General Assembly that was going to lower most electric bills by shafting Virginia’s data center industry? It underwent a late transformation, and the promise of big financial relief is fading. It was always unrealistic.
Under a rewritten version of Senate Bill 253, approved as a conference report just before the Assembly adjourned Saturday, Dominion Energy Virginia is still called upon to ask the State Corporation Commission to shift major costs to the largest users. The data centers would be asked to pay 100 percent of the utility’s purchased capacity costs on the theory they are fully responsible for the utility’s energy generation shortfalls (which is absurd).
But as the bill passed the Senate weeks ago, that petition was to be filed by July of this year. Now the proposal will become part of the company’s next general rate review, no earlier than 2027. And the conference version adds a declaration that the Commission “may, in its discretion, approve or deny the Phase II Utility’s proposal in whole or in part.”
There have been so many examples in recent years of the Assembly restricting the SCC’s authority that the inclusion of that clear “be our guests and say no to this” is noteworthy.
By delaying the issue until the end of the next Dominion rate case, what will have happened before this is decided? The 2027 elections for the House of Delegates and State Senate will be over, with Democrats campaigning on the claim that this toothless bill was a great consumer victory. They got the newspaper headlines and X messages they needed from it.
Medicaid and Medicare are established under the Social Security Act. They creates federal and state organizations to set rules, monitor compliance, provide funding, sanction, and ultimately exclude those who misuse funds or fail to follow the rules.
Federal and state governments have proven better at spending than at oversight. Virginia’s programs are literally out of control.
Readers will see diagrams here that the author built describing Virginia’s two funding and oversight architectures, and may question whether such schemes could work.
In Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), the Supreme Court ruled in a major Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) legal precedent that the unjustifiable institutional isolation of people with disabilities is discrimination. States must provide services in the least restrictive environment achievable. That ruling resulted in the shutdown of most state institutions for the intellectually disabled. Since Olmstead, intellectual disability services in Virginia are divided between state-run and private institutional services and private community-based services.
The funding for these programs comes from Medicaid.
The ADA and Olmstead, as executed in Virginia, have resulted in a web of virtually countless providers and services, limitless opportunities for fraud, and an oversight nightmare.
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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