Voting along party lines, a legislative committee in Virginia’s Republican-controlled House of Delegates voted 5-to-3 yesterday to kill a bill that would have allowed a large proportion of the state’s murderers to seek release from prison.
The bill, SB 378, would have allowed Virginia prison inmates to seek release from prison after 10 or 15 years if they hadn’t committed a specified “disciplinary offense” in the preceding five years, or if a soft-on-crime prosecutor or judge waived such “behavioral standards.” Progressives argued that the bill should be approved because everybody deserves a second chance. Conservatives opposed the bill, saying that it would increase the crime rate and reopen old wounds for crime victims. The Democratic-controlled state senate had passed the bill on February 15. (more…)
Recently Jim Bacon argued that the University of Virginia needs to conduct another Climate Survey to compare the results with the one conducted in 2018. He argued as follows:
The premise of the Ryan administration is that making African-Americans feel more welcome at UVa requires rooting out the racism endemic in the old system, and the only way to extirpate that racism is to make “anti-racism” (as defined by leftists) the university’s number-one, all-consuming preoccupation. If that premise is correct, then one would expect African-Americans to give higher scores in a survey given today.
But there is a different view: that the obsession with race feeds the sense of minority victimhood, grievance and alienation, and encourages minorities to be hyper-sensitive in their interactions with others. In this view, the predictable result is that Blacks will feel less welcome and experience less belonging — precisely the opposite of what President Ryan wants to achieve.
There is only one way to find out: conduct another survey.
It’s high time we find out whether the sweeping changes implemented by [President Jim] Ryan are having the desired effect.
Last week Victoria Manning, a member of the Virginia Beach school board, posted a comment on her Facebook page noting that the school system had added 300 additional English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students the past year, mostly from “South America.” The city’s ESL budget had increased more than $1 million over two years, she wrote. “Continuing to educate South Americans is not sustainable.”
Predictably, her comment drew fire. “When you say and specifically mention Latin Americans, you’re telling me indirectly that you have something against people that are brown or Black or Indian or aboriginal and so on that come from south of the United States border,” said Luis Rivera with the Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission. The Virginia Beach Democratic Committee termed the statement “racist.”
Once you call someone a racist, you pretty well shut down the conversation. But there are legitimate issues here. That the ESL program is causing fiscal stress to Virginia Beach schools is undeniable. WAVY-TV reports the numbers here.
Manning elaborated upon her comments to the television station. The city is already short 100 teachers, she said, and now it has to add eight more ESL positions. “If you have a program with an increasing number of students with fewer teachers then the program is unsustainable.”(more…)
Mountain Valley Pipeline. Image source: The Virginia Mercury.
by James C. Sherlock
The green wall preventing businesses from operating at some level of certainty when and if their development proposals will be approved is missing a brick today.
The days of a Virginia State Air Pollution Control Board and State Water Control Board overruling the findings of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality in permitting matters are over.
SB 657 passed the House and is on its way to the Governor. (more…)
After two years of constantly hectoring us to wear masks, public health officials and Democratic leaders have now decided that it’s time to lose the face diapers.
Just in time for the State of the Union Address! Exquisite timing.
Remember, this is just two weeks after Virginia Democrats howled that Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s emergency amendment — the one that activated on March 1 a law forbidding the forced masking of Virginia’s school children — would kill people.
Will the left-wing harpies in the General Assembly now praise the governor for leading the way? (more…)
Del. Barry Knight (R-Virginia Beach, chairman, House Appropriations Committee
Budget is policy. A budget reflects what an organization chooses to spend its money on.
The differences between the versions of the 2022-2024 biennial budget passed by the House and Senate this year are starker than they have been in recent memory. There are major philosophical and policy differences that the conferees will need to work out.
However, before they even get to those differences, there is another obstacle they will need to confront: they differ significantly on how much money the state will bring in. They have to agree on ow much money they have to spend before they can seriously discuss how to spend it.
The Senate budget is based on total general fund revenue that is about $3.4 billion higher than projected by the House. (Unless otherwise specified, all funding amounts in this article refer to the general fund.) The reason for the wide gap, of course, is the House adopting greater tax cuts than the Senate. Steve Haner has very ably compared the different approaches to tax cuts on this blog here, here, and here. (more…)
In elections this week, University of Virginia students will vote on a measure to reduce the punishment for honor-code violations (lying, cheating, stealing) from expulsion to a two-semester suspension. At least 10% of the student body must participate in the referendum, and of those who vote 60% must vote in favor.
The honor code is administered by students, not the university administration, and it has evolved over time as cultural values have changed. But faculty, administrators and the Board of Visitors traditionally have buttressed the system. For decades, stirring introductions of the honor code were a central part of the student orientation. Benefactors endowed the alumni association with a multimillion-dollar fund to support the system. To this day, the Board of Visitors mission statement lists preservation of the honor code as one of the board’s core duties.
You would think that after two years of folks marching around with useless rags on their faces and wearing rubber gloves to grocery shop, we’d be weary of empty gestures.
You would be wrong.
Over the weekend another kind of mass foolishness gripped the country that was watching in horror as Russia attacked Ukraine:
Vodka signaling.
If you weren’t dumping your vodka down the drain and demanding that liquor stores smash the bottles already on their shelves — you know, the stuff the retailers ALREADY BOUGHT FROM RUSSIA — you were secretly supporting warmonger Vladimir Putin.
Politicians, including the leader of the Democratic brain trust running Virginia’s State Senate, DEMANDED Russian vodka be swept from ABC store shelves. (more…)
Headline: “New York City says it will end the school mask mandate and indoor vaccination requirements.” And “New York indoor school mask mandate to be lifted this week.”
Progressive Virginians have been stabbed in the back. Et tu, New York?
So, imagine you have filed a law suit against Governor Youngkin on the same issue.
When you have lost New York, not to mention TheNew York Times, CNN and the CDC, what is a righteous science follower to do?
COVID-19 County Check
In Virginia Beach County, Virginia, community level is Low.
Watch this space for the self-flagellation, rending of garments and desperate references of the woke.
Peter Finch in iconic mad-as-hell scene from “Network”
by James A. Bacon
College alumni, to borrow the classic phrase from the 1976 movie Network, are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. Unlike the fictional TV newsman played by Peter Finch, who had no idea how to channel his frustration, alumni groups around the country are organizing to push back against the relentless assault on free speech and diversity of thought in American universities.
Woke leftists are deeply entrenched in higher education, but alumni who attended a two-day conference organized by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA) are stoked. The movement is spreading, and alumni are taking heart, knowing that they aren’t isolated and alone.
Groups from eleven universities have joined AFSA, and several more are in the process of creating viable organizations. Alumni from dozens of other universities have expressed an interest in launching their own initiatives. Meanwhile, AFSA has forged valuable alliances with well-resourced national organizations such as ACTA and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) that stand ready to help.
Three of the 11 alumni groups hail from Virginia — the Generals Redoubt (Washington & Lee University), the Spirit of VMI (Virginia Military Institute), and The Jefferson Council (University of Virginia), with which I am affiliated. Virginians are at the center of the storm. We are perhaps better positioned than any of our peers to transform the state’s higher-ed institutions from bastions of narrow-minded leftist orthodoxy into centers of learning where pluralism is tolerated and diverse ideas are allowed to contend. (more…)
God looks after the United States of America. The fracking revolution tripled our recoverable natural gas volumes. America is the world king of natural gas.
In 2008, the wellhead price of natural gas reached $8 per thousand cubic feet in the United States. By 2012, it was $2.66. It fueled a new, cleaner industrial revolution.
God also smiles on Virginia. He put a huge percentage — nearly half — of America’s natural gas close to us.
But He also gave us too many lawyers, too many green-funding billionaires and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (more…)
79-year-old Ukrainian woman learns to shoot Russians
Denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Governor Glenn Youngkin has directed a series of actions to show solidarity with the Ukrainian people. “The invasion of Ukraine by Soviet dictator Vladimir Putin cannot stand, and the people of the Commonwealth are ready to rally in opposition to this senseless attack on a sovereign nation and western ideals,” he said in a press release issued this afternoon.
(I hope I’m not being churlish by pointing out that Putin is not dictator of the Soviet Union, which no longer exists, but of Russia.)
The actions include: (1) reviewing all state contracts to determine if Virginia tax dollars are spent on goods and services provided by Russian companies; (2) calling on the cities of Norfolk and Roanoke to end sister city partnerships with Russian cities; and (3) asking the Virginia Retirement System to divest itself of any holdings of Russian currency or securities.
As much as I support these actions, they are symbolic and will have no practical effect. Yes, it is important to send a message. But surely there is more that we, as freedom-loving Virginians, can do to help the Ukrainians.(more…)
Jillian Balow, Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction
by James C. Sherlock
I have reported for four years on the unrelentingly woke and destructive Board of Education (VDOE) and Superintendent of Public Instruction (SOPI) memorandums, instructions, guidance, model policies and reading lists.
I do not exaggerate, the last SOPI published his personal reading lists to an audience he clearly thought hungry for them.
VDOE engaged in a full-court attempt to define education down and create “training” that was effectively state-enforced reeducation of teachers to enforce dogma. The panelists permitted in the development of instructions and guidelines were exclusively hard left academics, consultants, division superintendents and special interest activists. They, too, shared reading lists.
To report on this dangerous rubbish, I had to read the VDOE website. Regularly. There was never enough hot water in my shower to wash those experiences away. But it is being expunged. Finally.
This work is, of course, characterized as “ending equity initiatives” by most of the press. (more…)
We’ll know soon if the rest of us get what the unvaxed voted for.
by Joe Fitzgerald
Virginia’s governor ran on a platform to protect children from critical race theory and expose them to COVID. The first goal was moot, since CRT wasn’t often mentioned in public schools to begin with. How well the second succeeds should be apparent by the Ides of March.
It’s been known from the outset of the pandemic that masking, social distancing, and vaccines were the primary defenses against COVID. A year after vaccines became widely available the pandemic could have been effectively over, had rightist demagogues not discovered something new to rail against. If the 1950s were like this, iron lungs would dot America’s red counties like coal-rolling pickups.
And it is in the coal-rolling counties that the Republican freedom-to-infect mandate will be tested beginning Tuesday. Statewide, red counties are less vaccinated. The nearest example is comparing the age 5-17 populations in blue Harrisonburg and red Rockingham, 60% and 34% vaccinated, respectively. Let’s be judgmental, and assume that there is some overlap between the intentionally unvaxed and those who think spewing COVID aerosols is enshrined in some amendment they haven’t read. (more…)
In October, Bacon’s Rebellion contributor Steve Haner outlined a “despicable act” perpetrated by Dominion Energy on Glenn Youngkin, by sending $200,000 to a mystery PAC created to suppress turnout for the Republican gubernatorial candidate.
But now, with further public disclosures, we see the devious actions by Dominion CEO (and former Democrat operative) Bob Blue and other top executives were more “despicable” than first thought.
The severity was greater partly because Dominion actually sent $250,000 to Accountability Virginia PAC, which posed as a right-leaning group in order to raise doubts about Youngkin’s 2nd Amendment credentials with rural voters. The political strategy was to diminish enthusiasm – and therefore turnout – for the now-governor.
But the degree of deceit has even more to do with the timeline of the contributions rather than the aggregate amount. (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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by James C. Sherlock
