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Bacon Meme of the Week
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A Bad Poll, Like a Blind Hog, Finds Some Acorns
By Steve HanerThe myth of the climate catastrophe is an easier sell to younger people with their shorter memories. A recent poll of Virginia adults 18 and up showed a marked difference of opinion based on age, with older voters less likely to claim they had personal experience of โimpacts from climate change.โ
The poll was a recent one conducted by the Virginia Commonwealth Universityโs Wilder School of Government and Public Policy, released in two parts. The first part dealt with election matchups and the second with issues, frankly using some ridiculous questions. They were not so much biased as just worthless. Other examples will follow but here is the climate issue question: (more…)
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Balladeer of the New Class War
Oliver Anthony, a Farmville musician, has racked up 1.8 million views on YouTube for his song, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” He lives with his three dogs on a plot of land he hopes to turn into a small livestock farm. If you want to understand the “deplorables” and “bitter clingers,” don’t listen to the affluent, credentialed talking heads on MSNBC. They don’t have the faintest clue. Spend three minutes listening to Anthony — an authentic voice of the working people.
“These rich men north of Richmond / Lord knows they all just want to have total control / Wanna know what you think / Wanna know what you do / And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do/ Cause your dollar ain’t s***, and it’s taxed to no end / ‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond.”
— JAB
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More News from the Berkeley of the South
The fun never ends in the People’s Republic of Charlottesville. Rather than subject readers to excessive content about the University of Virginia, I’ll boil the latest two stories down to their essence and provide links for those who wish to read more.
The Curious Case of the Missing Podcasts. Walter Smith delves into the 2019 launch of the University of Virginia’s Woodson Institute series of podcasts reinterpreting Thomas Jefferson. UVa rolled out the program with great fanfare.ย Unsurprisingly, the “reinterpretation” was uniformly negative toward the university’s founder. But only two of the planned six recordings were produced. The series was canceled without explanation, and the two podcasts and accompanying features were buried deep in the Woodson Institute’s website where, for all purposes, they are inaccessible. What happened? Smith makes a powerful case that the decision had to have come from high up in the UVa hierarchy.
Student Veterans Are Up in Arms. UVa President Jim Ryan insists that he supports “all dimensions” of diversity at Thomas Jefferson’s university, extending beyond race, gender, and sexual orientation to religion, political beliefs, geography, socioeconomic status and even veteran status. But UVa’s student veteran organization isn’t feeling very welcome at the moment. It seems that the Office of Student Affairs has unilaterally co-opted space at the Veterans Students Center to create an office for an assistant dean of student affairs. The veterans’ pleas to Ryan and former Dean Robyn Hadley have gone unanswered. Frustrated, they have organized a petition to seek redress.
— JAB
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Check Out the Partisan Lean of Every Virginia District
by Jeanine Martin
VPAP.org has given us maps of the political leanings of all the districts, how far each district leans Republican or Democratic.ย Methodology
To make any of these maps interactive with more details on each district click here.
House of Delegates:
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Details of Newport News School Shooting Make Horrific Case Even Worse
by Kerry DoughertyJust when we thought we knew all of the horrific details of the shooting of Abby Zwerner we get more revelations.
Chilling ones.
You remember Miss Zwerner. Sheโs the 25-year-old Newport News first-grade teacher who was almost killed by one of her students in January.
Sheโs suing school officials for $40 million and they refuse to settle the case with her. Instead, these heartless โeducatorsโ pretend that getting shot is just an occupational hazard of teaching – sort of like paper cuts – and she was injured in the course of her daily responsibilities.
If they can persuade a court of this lunacy they will be off the hook for monetary damages.
And the woman whoโs endured surgeries and God-knows-what-trauma will collect a few dollars from Virginiaโs workmanโs compensation fund.
If youโre the praying type – and I am – be sure to bombard the Almighty with petitions for Ms. Zwerner. The courts need to use common sense and give her the green light to sue the ever-loving crap out of a school district that ignored multiple warning signs and tolerated a psychotic child in class with normal kids and a devoted teacher.
Make no mistake. The school board, former superintendent and Richneck administrators set the table for this bloody mess: (more…)
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The Ongoing Tragedy of Virginia’s Nursing Homes
by James C. Sherlock
Virginiaโs Health Commissioners have a job that is broad and deep in its responsibilities and authorities.By statute, appointees must be physicians.
Each is the chief executive of the Virginia Department of Health (VDH): a central office in Richmond and 35 local health districts.
By Virginia statutes and regulations, they are also the final decision authorities on such issues as the licensing of hospitals and nursing homes and all Certificate of Public Need decisions.
Nursing homes. To the point of this particular discussion, Health Commissioners have since at least 1989 possessed statutory (Code of Virginia ยง 32.1-135) and regulatory 12VAC5-371-90. Administrative sanctions authority to sanction Virginia nursing homes.
B. The commissioner may impose such administrative sanctions or take such actions as are appropriate for violation of any of the standards or statutes or for abuse or neglect of persons in care. Such sanctions include:
- Restricting or prohibiting new admissions to any nursing facility;
- Petitioning the court to impose a civil penalty or to appoint a receiver, or both; or
- Revoking or suspending the license of a nursing facility.
The results of a FOIA request inform me that not one of them has ever used that authority.
Not once in 34 years. (more…)
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The Democrats Are Coming For Your Children!
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Do parents have a RIGHT to be in charge of their childrenโs education?
Should parents be at the head of the table when it comes to what their kids are learning at school?
Governor Youngkinโs PAC, Spirit of Virginia recently sent out a fundraising letter headed by these questions. It declared that โGovernor Youngkin believes the answer to all of these questions is YES.โ
I realize that subjecting campaign literature to logical analysis is a foolโs errand.ย Nevertheless, letโs look at these questions a little bit closer. (more…)
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The Sorry State of the ACLU of Virginia
by Hans BaderThe communist activist Angela Davis advocated abolishing prisons in the U.S., while supporting the incarceration of political prisoners in totalitarian communist regimes overseas. The ACLU of Virginia has touted Angela Davisโs stances in the past, such as in an April 4, 2022 tweet ย quoting Davis.
Now, the ACLU of Virginia has returned to promoting these extreme positions, in addition to new ones. In an August 7 post, the ACLU approvingly featured an image with the message โAbolish Prisons,โ โAbolish White Supremacy,โ and โNo One Is Illegal On Stolen Land,โ accompanied by a tweet agreeing with this sign, and saying โThatโs right, NO ONE.โ
We do not all live on stolen land, contrary to the claim made by some left-wingers. A great deal of land was voluntarily sold to settlers by Native Americans. Law professor Stuart Bannerโs book How the Indians Lost Their Land explains this. Some land changed hands through โconsensual transactions,โ and other land through โviolent conquest.โ
Banner is a mainstream, well-respected academic at UCLA Law School who may have been surprised by what he discovered about the large scope of voluntary transfers of land from Native Americans to whites. But the large number of land sales by Native Americans makes sense because North America was a much emptier place after European diseases wiped out most of the Native American population, leaving many Native Americans with plenty of land even if they ceded some of it to white settlers.
The ACLUโs apparent call to โabolish prisonsโ is also misguided, because peer-reviewed academic studies show prisons prevent many violent crimes and property crimes. One such study is โThe Incapacitation Effect of Incarceration: Evidence from Several Italian Collective Pardons,โ which found that reducing incarceration increased the crime rate. This article was published in the American Economic Review, which is a peer-reviewed journal. (more…)
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An Investigation… into an Alleged Attempt to Discredit a Student Newspaper… that Criticized the VMI Administration
by James A. BaconThere appears in the minutes of the Virginia Military Institute Board of Visitors meeting of July 13, 2023 an abbreviated mention of a very hot topic:
Mr. [Thomas E.] Gottwald raised concerns about the administrationโs continued conflict with The Cadet newspaper. Five news articles have been written regarding a challenge to the Virginia Press Associationโs awards given to The Cadet. [Board President Thomas R.] Watjen suggested a conversation be had to better understand the administrationโs involvement with the news articles.
That would be the same independent student newspaper whose denigration by The Washington Post we have chronicled here on Bacon’s Rebellion. Although Superintendent Cedric Wins has publicly praised The Cadet for its prestigious award, allegations have been circulating that negative stories about The Cadet were prompted by the VMI administration itself. I have refrained until now from reporting on those charges, but they have surfaced in the VMI board meeting, in an online petition, and again in an article appearing in Cardinal News. (more…)
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Paid In Full, State Needs to Give Us Our Change
By Barbara Hollingsworth Imagine a merchant refusing to hand over the change when a customer paid with a $20 bill for a $17.50 item. Virginians would be irate if a restaurant, bar, grocery store, or other private establishment decided to keep the change because the business might โneedโ the extra money in the future. Yet the Virginia General Assembly is attempting to do the same thing on a much larger scale.
The latest preliminary figures from the Virginia Department of Revenue put the current general fund budget surplus at more than $5.1 billion for fiscal year 2023, which ended June 30. This is more than double the $1.94 billion surplus the commonwealth posted in 2022. This huge surplus is money left over after every single item in the state budget was fully funded under the amended 2022 Appropriation Act, including education, health and welfare, transportation, public safety, and every department and program funded with state tax dollars.
This unprecedented revenue surplus was largely due to higher-than-expected payroll withholding of individual income taxes (which are still not indexed to inflation), as well as corporate and sales taxes.
In other words, Virginia taxpayers were overcharged $5.1 billion over the past two years and $3 billion more than the commonwealthโs own 2023 revenue forecast. And yet some members of the General Assembly, all of whom are up for re-election in November, donโt want to give any of it back. (more…)
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Oceanfront Unisex Bathrooms? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
by Kerry DoughertyOf all the cockamamie ideas cooked up at City Hall in Virginia Beach, this may win an award.
A fat, legal award. But thatโll come later.
Right now the city is bursting with pride over its new, $650,000 5-stall unisex restroom at 20th Street.
Because letโs be honest, thereโs nothing women like more than using the potty with nothing to separate them from the men doing their smelly business in the next stall but a thin metal wall.
Itโll be a haven for perverts too, because clueless parents often send their unaccompanied kids into public restrooms. Pedophiles will love the convenience of peeking through cracks at naked children.
The long washing trough is a lovely touch. So is the attendant stationed on a metal folding chair outside.
Best of all, itโs only going to cost taxpayers half a million a year to maintain! (more…)
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Bacon Bits: Plumbing New Depths of Depravity
“I shot that bitch dead!” Those are the words of the six-year-old student at Richneck Elementary School in January shortly after he shot his teacher Abigail Zwerner, according to recently unveiled court documents reported by The Virginian-Pilot.ย One has to ask: in what kind of world does a six-year-old child think that way? In what kind of world would a six-year-old who thinks that way actually carry out his violent intent? Somehow, we have come to live in a world in which many families fail to teach the most basic norms of civilized behavior. I apologize: I shouldn’t have used the word “civilized.” Even in so-called uncivilized societies, young children don’t behave that way. The United States of America has reached a new stage in human social evolution that is more debased than any other.Parents’ rights and social media. Speaking of plumbing new depths of depravity, there is a growing sense that social media has a corrosive effect on America’s children — mainstreaming pornography, violence, and reckless, self-destructive behavior. Social media was a major topic of conversation in a “parents matter” town hall meeting that Governor Glenn Youngkin held in Hanover County yesterday. Said one participant: “It is like closing a door with all the windows open. I feel like anyone can come in at any time, and as much as we try to protect our children, itโs really hard and you feel incredibly vulnerable.โ (more…)
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Ryan Ignored Board of Visitors in Formulating Admissions Policy
Screen capture from UVa’s “Common Application” form. UVa no longer has a checkbox for race — but it does ask if applicants belong to a Virginia-recognized Indian tribe and if they identify as a “sexual minority.” The applications also invite applicants to share their “personal or historic connection with UVa,” including legacy status and descent from “ancestors who labored at UVa.” by James A. Bacon
When University of Virginia President Jim Ryan and Provost Ian Baucom announced the university’s new admissions policy last week, they made a point of saying that they had sought input and guidance from “leaders across the university,” including members of the Office of University Counsel.
But one key group was not consulted: the Board of Visitors.
That’s noteworthy because state code says the Board of Visitors sets the university’s admissions policy.
Describing the powers and authorities of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), state code notes that the SCHEV shall prepare enrollment projections for Virginia’s public colleges and universities. However, “the student admissions policies for such institutions and their specific programs shall remain the sole responsibilities of the individual governing boards.”
Not university presidents — the governing boards. (more…)
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Dominion “Bill Relief” Disappears September 1
By Steve HanerHomeowners willing to cut back power usage when Dominion Energy Virginia asks them could earn rebates of up to $28 a year. So reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch, citing yet another final order from the State Corporation Commission.
The Richmond paper is always bringing us such great news about the folks at the giant utility looking out for us. The headline in the print edition today is even more positive: “New Rebate Program Could Lower Power Bills.”
Who is actually going to provide the $28 in hard cash? Yep, Baconโs Rebellion readers get it on the first try. Dominion will raise the rebate money given to the few by raising its cost of electricity to everybody. Even the people getting rebates will pay the surcharge. But your bill just goes up a bit — so little you wonโt notice the increase starting on September 1.
You also wonโt notice it because the increase in the energy efficiency programโs rate adjustment clause (a separate charge also known as a RAC or rider), is just one of several such increases, all hitting September 1.
The higher bill totals will be creeping into your email and snail mail inboxes along with all the campaign brochures about how the 2023 General Assembly provided โbill relief.โ That is gone in a puff of smoke. Come September 1 Dominion customers also start paying for, or start paying more for: (more…)
