First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy.
The highest priority on a Virginia energy reform agenda proposed a few weeks ago was restoring State Corporation Commission oversight over decisions on massive renewable energy investments. Under current law, the General Assembly has basically dictated billions of dollars in such future investments, responding too often to donor demands.
Several bills are pending at the 2022 General Assembly to accomplish that goal, some more comprehensive than others but all with merit. Many of the reform bullet points are checked off. The bills are in the House of Delegates and must be acted upon by February 15. (more…)
Read Saturday’s VaNews January 29, 2022, from the Virginia Public Access Project.
It will provide you everything you need to assess how TheWashington Post, Richmond Times Dispatch and Virginian-Pilot will cover the Youngkin administration. In their news sections. (more…)
There is a bill, HB 646, Nursing homes; standards of care and staff requirements, regulations in the General Assembly.
I support its intent.
As written it specifies minimum hours of direct care services for each
resident per 24-hour period.
In actuality, numbers of personnel required to provide the services depend upon the physical health of the patient population of each home. Specific numbers in the current bill also make the law vulnerable to changes in Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) policy. Such specificity is neither necessary nor, I suggest, appropriate.
The law can be amended to leverage existing federal monitoring of staffing to make it much easier to administer, less vulnerable to federal policy changes and tailored to the needs of the patients of each nursing home;
The amendment that I recommend will also enable the fiscal impact statement to be far more precise and far lower.
These goals can be achieved with an amended bill. (more…)
This is the second of three posts about COVID and kidney transplants.
James A. Bacon
In January Stafford County resident Shamgar Connors, who has undergone kidney dialysis for nearly three years, engaged in an annual consultation with the University of Virginia Health system’s organ transplant team. His conversation with Dr. Karen Warburton went like this:
Warburton: [A social worker] said you’re not interested in the COVID vaccine. It is a requirement for you to be active–
Connors: I just had COVID, so I don’t know, why would I get the vaccine?
Warburton: You may have had Delta, and that may not protect you against the Omicron variant, which is what we’re seeing now. Also, our policy is, in order to have people active on the transplant list and get a transplant, you need to be fully vaccinated. You’re on the list. You’re just not on active status right now, as we tied up all these other loose ends. In order to be activated on the list, you will need to get the vaccine. … Are you willing to do it? [silence] OK, so, you don’t want to move forward?
Connors: I’d rather die of kidney failure than get the vaccine. (more…)
Can a Commonwealth’s Attorney (CA) decide to decline prosecution of an entire class of misdemeanors?
If so, are there any constraints available in the law?
By law and precedent the answer to both questions is yes.
A CA has discretion in prosecuting misdemeanors.
A Circuit Court can require her to explain herself to the court as to how that discretion is used in each case. That makes ignoring entire classes of misdemeanors very difficult.
I am not an attorney. I welcome the comments of attorneys whose practices intersect this matter, especially in Fairfax. (more…)
You would never know it from meeting him over Zoom that Shamgar Connors is living under a veritable death sentence. He requires kidney dialysis 12 hours per day. His doctors tell him that the average life expectancy for his particular kidney disease is about five years…. and he started dialysis a year-and-a-half ago. He has been on the kidney-transplant list for about three years now, but the University of Virginia Health system has put him on “inactive” status on the grounds that he refuses to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
The lengthy dialysis treatments, Connors says, make him tired. If that’s true, one wonders what he was like before they began. During our chat, the former 8th-grade teacher came across as passionate, energetic and physically vigorous. He has gained national notoriety for his stand, conducting numerous media interviews and generating hundreds of social media responses as he rallies support for his cause. Strangers have showered him with love and support; one offered him her own kidney. Others say they hope he dies.
He has found his sense of purpose, and he shrugs off the ill wishers. “I’m going to stay as stable as I can and fight this,” he says. “I don’t want a solution just for me. God has put this cause on my shoulders. I’m going to fight for all the other people. There are people sicker than me who are desperate. … I’ll go out like a super-nova.”
Connors’ case raises profound scientific and ethical issues. Kidney transplants are hard on patients’ immunological systems, which makes them more vulnerable to infections, including COVID. Because donor kidneys are scarce, hospitals don’t want to give them to patients with lower odds of survival. UVa Health insists that transplant patients get vaccinated. Connors, who sloughed off a case of COVID over Thanksgiving, says he has acquired natural immunities. UVa says those immunities aren’t good enough. (more…)
Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano
by James C. Sherlock
Yesterday I offered for consideration a lengthy list of misdemeanors that Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano in Fairfax County is declining to prosecute.
I did that with a hope that the House of Delegates will amend and pass HB 1198.
Today I am going to ask Virginians to consider in what type of society they wish to live. What is the proper balance between concern for victims and concern for perpetrators?
No one wants anyone jailed unnecessarily. It can ruin the life of the perpetrator and the lives of his family. We agree with Mr. Descano on that.
We value prosecutorial and judicial discretion. But we ask that it be used wisely, not in blanket refusals to enforce entire sections of the Virginia criminal code.
Every scrap of historical evidence says that the citizens of Fairfax County will get more of the crimes Mr. Descano ignores. (more…)
A 28-year-old man, Martin Jose Alvarez, was arrested Wednesday for causing a disturbance at a Cape Coral, Fla., Waffle House restaurant over the way his bacon was cooked. When police officers arrived, they heard him yelling expletives at the staff. “You better cook the f—– bacon right!” he was accused of yelling, according to the local Florida TV station.
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand the problem. When a man pays for bacon, he is absolutely justified in expecting it to be cooked properly. The police charged him with disorderly intoxication, resisting arrest and intent to do violence. You call this justice? The cooks got off scot free! I doubt there’s a jury in the country that would convict him.
Senate Democrats are up in arms over Governor Youngkin’s nomination of Andrew Wheeler as Secretary of Natural Resources. Today, TheWashington Postreports that Republicans have upped the stakes.
It seems that a member of the State Corporation Commission is up for election. Angela Navarro was elected by the Democratically controlled 2021 General Assembly to fill a seat that had been vacated. Her term expires this coming Monday unless the General Assembly elects her to a full term.
Angela Navarro
The House Republicans are threatening to hold up, or scuttle, the re-election of Navarro unless the Democrats back off on their opposition to Wheeler. If the SCC seat is left vacant when the General Assembly adjourns, the governor can appoint someone to serve until the 2023 session of the General Assembly. The Senate majority leader, Richard Saslaw, D-Springfield, declared, “We’re not going to operate that way.” However, another member of the Democratic caucus, Senator Scott Surovell, D-Mount Vernon, had a more nuanced view. He pointed out that a member of the SCC is much more important than a cabinet post. (more…)
The backers of Glenn Youngkin on this blog have got to be feeling confused, at least, if not downright betrayed.
Youngkin promised to expand the number of charter schools in the Commonwealth. They cheered.
Now, he has revealed his plan for charter schools. As reported today by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Governor has gotten “the support of a number of Virginia higher education leaders who signed onto a proposal by the administration to open charter schools run by their institutions and funded by the state.”
That’s right. The Governor wants the institutions of higher education to be his vehicle to expand the number of charter schools in the Commonwealth. And he is proposing to pay them $150 million over the biennium to do it.
These are those same institutions of higher education that have been criticized endlessly on this blog for being hopelessly and dogmatically liberal; squelchers of dissenting viewpoints; purveyors of critical race theory; awash in diversity, equity, and inclusion nonsense; and top-heavy with bureaucracy, among other evils. In addition, their schools of education, which would probably take the lead on the development and running of these charter schools, have been held to be at the root of all that is wrong with education in Virginia today.
The sounds you hear are screams of disbelief and anguish.
The primary obligation of government has always been to protect its populace from harm. That is the basis of the social contract. The people give up absolute individual liberty to achieve group safety.
Necessary restrictions on government power started in English-speaking countries with the Magna Carta. In the United States Constitution they are codified in the Bill of Rights.
House and Senate bills have been filed that will permit the Attorney General to intervene at the request of local law enforcement to prosecute violent crime when Commonwealth’s Attorneys will not.
A committee of the Senate voted the Senate bill down 8-7. All six of the Republicans and one Democrat in that committee voted in favor.
The rest of the Democrats opposed it. They deserve the benefit of the doubt. Some may not have understood the facts on the ground. Few Virginians understand exactly what some progressive Commonwealth’s Attorneys are doing.
Source: Virginia Department of Health, via StatChat.
The number of births in Virginia has been declining for years, not just in rural counties with shrinking populations, but across the state. Indeed, since 2016 the fall-off in births has been sharpest in Northern Virginia, according to data published StatChat, the University of Virginia’s demographic research group blog. Birth rates are declining in all developed countries. In Northern Virginia, suggests analyst Hamilton Lombard, the drop is aggravated by young adults and families leaving the region.
Falling birth rates have been reflected, after a few years’ delay, in falling Kindergarten enrollments in public schools. In the reverse image of the pig-in-the-python — a mouse in the python? — the birth dearth will lead to smaller enrollments at every grade level as the smaller age cohorts pass through the system. Assuming the COVID-induced exodus of families to homeschooling is not reversed, enrollment projections look like this: (more…)
The following was issued today by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy as a news release:
As National School Choice Week 2022 concludes, the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy today released results of a polling question demonstrating the overwhelming popularity of Virginia’s sole education choice program. Support is particularly strong in the state’s Black community. (more…)
I’ve always thought that it would be a humbling experience — and an immense honor — to be elected to serve in Virginia’s General Assembly, the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World.
To be part of the House of Delegates is to follow in the footsteps of great men of the Enlightenment: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry.
You’d think the history of the place alone would be enough to make members leave behind their bad manners, their hateful diatribes, their name-calling.It’s an institution that demands decorum.
You’d think that. But you would be wrong. Some partisan hacks can’t help themselves.
Just two weeks into the term of the 74th governor of Virginia, one delegate stood up this week and gave a gratuitous, despicable speech attacking Gov. Glenn Youngkin and accusing him of not being a Christian. (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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