A family plot in the cemetery of a church in the Northern Neck completed in 1714 is the final resting place of a Virginia native who was one of the United States’ modern heroes.
A highway historic marker caught my eye this weekend while I was exploring the Northern Neck on my way back home from a conference in the Newport News area and I decided to visit the grave site of a man whom I had heard much about: Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller.
Puller was the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps. He was awarded five Navy Crosses (second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor for the Navy), the only person to receive that many. In addition to the Navy Crosses, he was awarded the Army equivalent, the Distinguished Service Medal, as well as the Army Silver Medal. Along with those medals and other awards, he was awarded a Purple Heart for being wounded in battle. (more…)
Welcome to the new normal. In 2020 the General Assembly enacted a law giving local school districts the right to engage in collective bargaining. Our friends at the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy warned that much mischief would ensue, an assessment I shared.
On November 2022 the Prince William County Board of Supervisors adopted a collective bargaining ordinance, allowing county employees to negotiate contracts, though not to strike. “Prince William County workers are one step closer to bargaining a historic contract that will lift up all working families,” said David Broder, President of SEIU Virginia 512, reported the DCist at the time.
Now the Prince William Education Association is demanding a 17% pay raise for teachers, which, if enacted without budget cuts, would add $364 million to the county’s $1.5 billion school budget. According to the Potomac Local News, such a pay raise would require a 73% hike in homeowner tax bills. The working families paying real property taxes might beg to disagree with Broder’s assessment.
Among other demands, the teachers union is protesting a new regulation that requires teachers to teach classes remotely when bad weather disrupts in-school instruction. (more…)
A transgender man has filed a lawsuit against the LGBT Life Center in Virginia Beach, which provides health, housing, and other social services to the LBGQT community, on the grounds that it maintained a toxic work environment.
Alexia Kaelber, reports The Virginian-Pilot, had “dreams of helping the marginalized community and uplifting LGBTQ+ Hampton Roads residents.” Among other issues, he told the newspaper, the financially ailing nonprofit was unable to pay rent and electric bills for his clients. But here’s the kicker:
Kaelber, who is a transgender man, said his managers misgendered him and would not stop after being corrected.
Jeez, if you can’t get properly gendered at an LGBTQ+ center, where can you get properly gendered?
Schisms are occurring in the LGQBT community that the mainstream media is not reporting. It seems that many gays — how’s that for a sign of where we are as a society when traditional gays are now the reactionaries? — have reservations about the whole transgender thing. (more…)
It is gratifying to see the editors of The Cavalier Daily engage in an exchange of ideas, albeit indirectly through dueling editorials, with conservative proponents of free speech at The Jefferson Independent, the University of Virginia’s independent student publication, and The Jefferson Council.
It is even more gratifying to see that the CD editors embrace a principle in an editorial yesterday with which we whole-heartedly agree: “Free speech does not guarantee comfort” (even though we’re pretty sure that it’s our comfort that deserves no guarantee, not their own).
However, even as they tout the University of Virginia’s No. 6 ranking in the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) 2024 free speech survey, the authors argue that there are justifiable limits on speech — and that those limits should apply to people at UVa whose views they happen to dislike.
The event precipitating the editorial is the impending visit to UVa of Abigail Shrier, a journalist whose writings about the role of social contagion in the spread of transgender identity among adolescent girls has triggered trans activists across the country. “We must … recognize that certain types of speech simply should not be tolerated here on Grounds,” writes the editorial board, “even if this speech is technically permissible under the law.” (more…)
They tried. Lord knows they did their best to find fault.
But even the leftie Washington Post was forced to hold its nose and admit that Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s commitment to his signature program — “Partnership for Petersburg” — is genuine and getting results.
For more than a year, Youngkin has been working with local and state officials, the private and public sectors and especially with Petersburg Mayor Sam Parham to turn that city’s fortunes around.
Petersburg is a city in distress. It’s riddled with crime, grinding poverty and the worst-performing schools in the commonwealth.
A hopeless example of urban decay, some would say, and on the decline.
In a lengthy story this week, The Post wrote about the friendship that has blossomed between Youngkin and the African-American mayor of that troubled city. (more…)
On the evening of Friday, Sept. 22 and on Saturday, Sept. 23, The Virginia Council and Common Sense Society were planning to host citizen-journalist Andy Ngo (pronounced no) at a forum in Richmond. The intention was to hear Ngo speak about his experiences exposing the violence and intimidation from leftwing Antifa and autograph copies of his book, “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.”
The original venue was to be at downtown Richmond’s Commonwealth Club. According to their website’s “Welcome” page, “Founded in 1890, the Commonwealth Club is proud of its history as a premier social club, outstanding event venue, dining destination, and Richmond institution.”
However, when word about the event got out, Antifa began an intimidation campaign, club management buckled, and withdrew their welcome. Scrambling, the event sponsors quickly found a second venue: the Westin Hotel, owned and operated by Marriott Corporation.
Seemingly encouraged by their success at intimidating the Commonwealth Club, the bullies next directed their attacks at the Westin by sending threatening phone calls.
As Ngo shared in his PowerPoint, one example of a threat was a tweet on X, formerly known as Twitter, that stated: “Example script: ‘Hey, the event this evening features a racist, misogynistic, homophobe intent on provocative neo nazi (sic) speech. His name is Andy Ngo and he’s a violent extremist. Many of his attendees are armed neo nazis.’”
The threats fly in the face of all reality. As for racism, Ngo is himself non-white, the first-generation son of parents who fled communism in their native Vietnam. As for homophobia, Ngo is himself an open homosexual.
Nevertheless, around 7:00 am on Sept. 22, a mere twelve hours before the event was to begin, Marriott too folded.
The Roanoke Star reached out to the managers of The Commonwealth Club and Westin, Eric Abuneel and Rodney Moubray respectively, asking what was the exact wording and nature of the threats received, and why they chose to cancel. (more…)
The primary duty of board members of Virginia’s public colleges and universities is to the commonwealth, not to the individual institutions, Attorney General Jason Miyares wrote Monday in response to an advisory opinion requested by Governor Glenn Younkin.
According to Miyares’ missive,Youngkin asked whether Virginia law imposes upon boards of visitors “a duty to serve the interests of the university or college only, or the Commonwealth more broadly.”
“Although they extend services to non-residents, Virginia’s institutions of higher education exist to fulfill the commonwealth’s commitment to provide education to the students of Virginia,” the AG answered. “It is clear that the boards of visitors serving them, as public officers of the state, have a duty to the Commonwealth as a whole.”
The letter does not elucidate the particular circumstances that led to the request for clarification, but the issue of board members’ primary duty did arise during the September 2023 meeting of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors meeting. Rector Robert Hardie had invited Clayton Rose, former president of Bowdoin College and currently a Harvard University professor, to lead a discussion of “best practices in board governance.” (See our coverage here.) (more…)
When I had a meeting set up with (JMU President) Ron Carrier soon after I was elected to (Harrisonburg) City Council in 2000, someone warned me that he would change the time at the last minute just to show he was more important than me. He did, and maybe he was. But it was good to be warned.
Some years later, those of us who had to use a new software for our jobs found that a prerequisite for the technical training was an orientation session with a JMU communication official. Not only did he change the time at the last minute, disrupting the schedules of a few dozen people, but he began the unnecessary meeting when it eventually happened by talking about how many Grateful Dead concerts he’d been to.
The session was about the philosophy and vision of the new software. The JMU official fulfilled the academic administrative definition of a visionary as someone who knows exactly how things should be done if he knew how to do them. (Using “he” in this instance is not a generic pronoun, but a bow to the statistics of who fits this description.)
I was reminded of those earlier occasions recently while watching Councilman Chris Jones interrupt and disrupt his way through a liaison meeting between City Council and School Board members. I had to wonder if his attempts to dominate the meeting with irrelevant or borderline false information were obvious to the casual observer. Not that a casual observer is going to be watching a governmental liaison meeting on a Wednesday afternoon. I may be a nerd.
Governor Youngkin talks a lot about election integrity. By that, he obviously means keeping people ineligible to vote from voting. However, integrity cuts another way, as well. It means allowing people who are eligible to vote the opportunity to vote.
The governor’s Department of Elections (Elections) seems not to worry too much about that second aspect of election integrity. Last fall, due to a computer glitch, the agency discovered that it had not processed thousands of new voter registrations completed by the Department of Motor Vehicles and had to scramble to notify local registrars of the eligibility of those folks as early voting was underway. This year, it is another group of registered voters who have been disenfranchised. (more…)
According to lore, Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
Dominion must have had a séance with Yogi and just learned that piece of wisdom because until its latest filing with the SCC it maintained that it would build its giant offshore windfarm for $9.8 billion while also getting to zero emissions by 2045. Now it is fessing up to that being a pipe dream. Until the recent switch, Dominion gave every indication of supporting the Virginia Clean Economy Act’s goal of zero emissions by 2045. Its latest submission to the SCC reverses course.
In its recent submission, Dominion stated, “Due to an increasing load forecast, and the need for dispatchable generation, the Alternative Plans show additional natural-gas-fired resources and preserve existing carbon-emitting units beyond statutory retirement deadlines established in the VCEA.” Its new demand estimate comes from PJM, the regional grid operator that Dominion is required to use. Its earlier rosy scenario proves that analyses can be constructed to produce whatever answer you want. In this case, Dominion saw a way to increase its profits by gaming the VCEA, at least until it began to look like Democrats might lose this year’s election and with it the VCEA mandates.
Similar projects on the East Coast have been confronted by demands for larger subsidies by offshore developers like Orsted or outright contract cancellation. On Monday, Avangrid, a subsidiary of the Spanish utility Iberdrola, announced that it was abandoning the 804-megawatt Park City Wind project offshore Connecticut because it has become unfinanceable. (more…)
California comes to Charlottesville: urine, feces, hypodermic needles, trash, and all.
“Affordable housing.”
by Jock Yellott
“What happened to the First Amendment in this country . . . ?” demanded somebody calling himself ‘Rudy Hess.’ Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook cut the audio. This was late in the City Council meeting, about 10 p.m. during public comments mostly taken up by remarks on Charlottesville’s new homeless tent city.
Several previous callers had exhausted Snook’s patience and good humor. They started by pretending to be agreeably Woke. “Speaking as a transgender person,” said one before launching into obscenities, which had to be cut off. Another, ‘Sadie Enwird’ (sound it out after you finish the paragraph) claimed to be a Social Worker helping the homeless. Two minutes later she broke into a toxic rant: “The best solution is to round them all up and send them back to Africa, all these fucking niggers . . . ” Such hate speech, the City Attorney opined, justified cutting her off, too.
Then came ‘Rudy Hess.’ The original Deputy Führer Rudolph Hess sentenced at Nuremburg, committed suicide in prison at age 93. Why would a dead Nazi war criminal poseur phone in to Charlottesville’s City Council? Or the others who were cut off?
Calling it Poking the Woke.
City Council and the Woke champions of the “unhoused” who dominate public comments in the last couple of meetings are easy targets. The activists hurl invective and obscenities of their own, as well as indulging in make-believe. They fomented a fake grievance to loosen the City’s purse strings and get funding for a homeless shelter. From the video of the City Council meeting September 18, 2023, starting at 2:53:19:
There was a incident at the park, where one of the officers kicked the young man that was setting here …. [The officer] was trying to wake him up. But instead of gently touching him … he decided to kick him. And … prior to that … your officers went over to Lee Park and woke everybody up, and made ’em leave with the exception of the white people that were in the park.
He kicked that boy like he was kicking a football down the field to the other team,” another alleged witness told our local paper, the Daily Progress. “He put his soul into that kick.
Virginia experienced the largest decline in homeownershipof any state during the new millennium. In 2000, the homeownership rate sat at 73.9%; it declined to 67.4% in 2022. This makes for a percentage-point change of 8.8% since 2000 in 2020 — the most of any state. “With the average state decline sitting at 1.3%, Virginia’s dwindling rate of homeownership is the most drastic nationwide,” states the email.
Virginia has a home-ownership problem, which is intimately connected to the home affordability problem. What’s next — tent cities? (more…)
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) believes there are 17 safe Democrat state Senate seats in the General Assembly. (There are a total of 40 seats in the state Senate.) Democrats need to pick up 4 additional seats to keep their majority. To do that they are putting millions into these races:
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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