Bacon's Rebellion

  • Redistricting Now Final

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Final Congressional District Map
    Source: Virginia Supreme Court

    By Dick Hall-Sizemore

    The redistricting for General Assembly seats and those in the U.S. House of Representatives is complete. The Virginia Supreme Court issued its final order and approved maps on December 28, 2021.

    There are some significant changes from the earlier proposed maps. For a discussion of the first maps released by the Supreme Court’s special masters, see my earlier post here.

    The report of the special masters is a good example of civic education. They explain, in plain language, why “redistricting is a complex task, one that requires the balancing of multiple competing factors.” It is not a simple matter of dividing the state into X number of evenly populated pieces. One example of this balancing act can be seen in their treatment of the Shenandoah Valley. They made a policy decision at the beginning to treat the Valley as “an important community of interest worth preserving.” Thus, they avoided drawing districts that crossed the mountains. However, they point out “that comes at the expense of drawing compact districts, particularly at the congressional level.” Succinctly  put, “Tradeoffs are simply inevitable.” (more…)

  • Arlington Union: Test Everyone or Close the Schools

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    James A. Bacon

    Click for legible image.

    by James A. Bacon

    I can’t decide which is scarier: a letter from the Arlington Education Association (AEA) urging school superintendent Francisco Duran not to resume full-time instruction tomorrow in the absence of sufficient COVID-19 testing, or the insouciant attitude toward punctuation and grammar by the signatory, AEA president Ingrid Gant. Take your pick: no in-person school, a proven disaster… or the possibility that the letter represents the literacy standards of Arlington school teachers, a potential disaster that will long out-last the COVID virus.

    Arlington parent Ellen Gallery, a  home-schooling mom, ridiculed the letter on social media, highlighting typos and garbled syntax in the manner of an English teacher grading a paper. All the mark-up lacked was an F- at the top. Gallery’s post was disseminated widely in conservative media, and the letter well deserves the mockery it has received.

    However, let us not overlook the substance of the missive. The Arlington teacher’s union is pushing back against reopening the schools. Gant wants to ensure that “teachers spending hours in close contact are not inflected.” If the Arlington teachers’ union is making this demand, surely teachers in other districts are as well. The Omicron school panic could well become Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s first big leadership test. (more…)

  • Jeanine’s Memes

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    From The Bull Elephant

  • This Didn’t Have to Happen

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Joe Fitzgerald

    A year ago, the post-Thanksgiving surge was still raging, but there was hope in the imminent availability of vaccines. But 2021 would be the year of criminals who stormed the Capitol because they didn’t understand democracy and of their intellectual brethren who didn’t understand science or medicine.

    Virginia set a record today for statewide number of new cases. That’s the third day in a row the number has been a record (12,112 Wednesday, 13,500 yesterday, 17,618 today.) Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro have seen a total of more than 20,000 cases as of today, and Harrisonburg-Rockingham will pass that milestone over the weekend.

    The largest strain is on the health-care system. Hospitals are all but closed to all but the most serious illnesses and injuries. Nurses face not only the crush of cases, but the fact that those getting most seriously ill are the most stubborn in their denial about COVID. Those people don’t know enough science to get them to the first mid-terms of nursing school, but anecdotally many of them are abusive and sometimes violent in their resistance to COVID facts. (more…)

  • One More Race Baiting for the Road

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Days before leaving office, Attorney General Mark Herring has filed a complaint against the Town of Windsor in Isle of Wight County, charging the police department with a pattern of unlawful racial discrimination.

    The lawsuit cites data showing that between July 1, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2021, 42% of the traffic stops conducted by Windsor police were of Black motorists. That was two times more “than would be expected” based on the number of Black residents of the Town or Isle of Wight County. Windsor police also searched the cars of Black motorists more frequently than those of White drivers “even though Black residents do not constitute the majority of the population of the Town or the Commonwealth.”

    “Based upon the disproportionate stopping of vehicles driven by Black motorists, the Department is performing its law enforcement activities in a discriminatory and biased manner,” alleges the complaint.

    That statistical disparity is the sum total of the evidence offered in support of the assertion that the department engaged in a “pattern” of racial discrimination. Herring offers zero evidence that Windsor police were motivated by race in any specific stop. (more…)

  • How’d Virginia Do in “The Great Pandemic Migration?”

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Glenn Youngkin was right. Yes, Virginia, we have a problem.

    by Chris Saxman

    Most mornings start with brewing a large pot of coffee, letting the dogs out into the fenced in backyard, and waiting for the papers to be delivered. Usually I can skim through the local old soldier, the Richmond Times Dispatch, before the coffee finishes brewing. But that first magical sip of morning hits with the opening the Wall Street Journal.

    Ahh….the splendor of predawn America.

    I read newspapers in reverse by taking the sections and rearranging them in order to read as many articles as possible before doing battle with the editorial section. The Sports section is always first. It’s like stretching before a work out — not legally required, but strongly encouraged.

    SO. Wednesday’s lead editorial headline in the WSJ print edition really grabbed my attention:

    The Great Pandemic Migration

    Boom.

    The online version reads like this:

    The Great Pandemic Migration
    Census data reveal huge shifts out of the most locked-down states.

    As Sheriff Buford T. Justice would say, “That’s an attention getter.” (more…)

  • It’s New Year’s Eve. What, Me Worry?

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    When I was a kid, my mother said I worried too much.

    “Consider the lilies of the field,” she’d say, taking a drag on a Pall Mall before paraphrasing Scripture. “They neither toil nor spin, yet the Bible says God gives them beautiful blossoms.”

    “So cut it out, and just relax,” she’d say, as she stubbed out a cigarette and began to gnaw on her cuticles.

    Anxiety came naturally to me. It was in my DNA. Like my parents, I worried about everything. I stayed awake at night fretting about communism, nuclear war and what I could do to make the popular girls like me.

    I still worry. About big things and small ones. Instead of communism I worry about socialism, AOC-style. I also worry about my kids. My granddaughter. And whether my Welsh Terrier will ever stop biting us. (more…)

  • Arlington Schools Likely to Abolish Graded Homework in Name of “Equity”

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Hans Bader

    Students learn less if they don’t do their homework. And many of them won’t do their homework if they aren’t graded on it. But in the name of “equity,” the Arlington County Public Schools are likely to abolish grades for homework, which will result in students studying and learning less. Arlington is also considering letting students have “unlimited redoes and retakes on” assignments they fail, reports ABC Channel 7.

    The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews discusses these proposed changes in his column, “Abolishing grades on homework will hurt the neediest kids”: (more…)

  • Standards? We Don’t Need No Stinking Standards!

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Francisco Duran, superintendent of Arlington County Public Schools

    by James A. Bacon

    The Arlington County Public School system has designed a sure-fire strategy for ensuring “equitable” educational outcomes — set standards so low that everyone can pass them no matter how little effort they make.

    In the process of updating its policies and PIPs (peer intervention programs), Arlington’s school board proposes to change the way grades are administered. As reported by Washington’s ABC-7, preliminary revisions call for:

    • No late penalties for homework, because penalties reflect a student’s behavior, not his or her actual achievement;
    • No extra credit, because the practice penalizes students with fewer resources;
    • Unlimited re-does and re-takes on assignments;
    • No grading for homework, because mistakes are vital to learning, and students are less likely to take risks when they fear they will be graded down for making mistakes.

    “There’s no labeling of students or ranking of students,” said Dr. Erin Russo, the Principal of Discovery Elementary, during a meeting discussing the proposal. “It’s the ownership of what do I need to work on and where am I?”

    Fortunately, for the cause of sanity, the proposal is getting pushback — from teachers, no less. (more…)

  • A Broken Meritocracy

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    The following post has been extracted with permission from the book, An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy.

    by Kenny Xu

    There were just too many Asians.

    Thomas Jefferson High School for Mathematics and Science in Arlington, Virginia, is widely considered the best high school for math and science in the region. It is the number one ranked high school by the U.S. News and World Report in the entire nation.

    “That place is so difficult and so rigorous, that you’re just beaten,” said Asra Nomani, the Indian American mother of a Thomas Jefferson student. “You don’t even know if you’re going to make it, like as a family, because your child is slogging so much. And I have issues with that because they almost crush the passion of math and science out of you because they are just so rigorous, so hard. …”

    Before 2020, admissions to Thomas Jefferson involved a standardized test, along with grades, teachers’ recommendations, and course rigor. It is all standard fare that anyone would know. For a long time, admissions to TJ were mostly white. As late as 2002, Thomas Jefferson was 70 percent white, 25 percent Asian, and 5 percent Black or Latino.

    But starting in the 2000s, the composition of the class of Thomas Jefferson changed. It got more Asian. Way more Asian. The reasoning for this change was pretty simple: Asian immigrants started pouring into Northern Virginia in the ’90s. They got married and had kids. In the new millennium, those kids were reaching high school age. And they were studying to go to TJ. (more…)

  • Virginia Omicron Update: December 29

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    New COVID cases. Source: Virginia Department of Health

    by James A. Bacon

    Omicron is upon us, cases are surging and local media are sounding the alarm. Nationally, hospitalizations are setting “grim records,” according to the Washington Post. Closer to home, Loudoun County’s government-run drive-through testing center reached capacity within an hour of opening. Mary Washington Healthcare providers are closing a COVID clinic after exhausting supplies of monoclonal antibodies. Virginia Tech is mandating booster shots, and Norfolk State University is postponing spring-semester classes. And that’s just today’s headlines.

    So, how bad are things in reality? The statewide data tell us two things. First, new COVID cases are increasingly rapidly. Second, hospitalizations are increasing, too, but less rapidly. The big caveat is that data reported on the Virginia Department of Health COVID dashboard is more than a week old, and with the fast-moving Omicron variant now the dominant strain, the data can be pun-ishly described as “out of data.” (more…)

  • The 2021 Election: Firing up the Base

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Virginia Public Access Project

    Virginia’s electoral map favors Democrats. But according to this graphic from the Virginia Public Access Project, Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin did a better job of boosting turnout in Republican-leaning localities in November than his rival Terry McAuliffe did in Democratic-leaning localities. See the details here.

    — JAB

  • Bear With Us. It’s a Slow News Day.

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Just what we need right now.

    As the national and local news turned once again to COVID, COVID and more COVID, a mama black bear and her three cubs provided Tidewater with a brief but delicious distraction.

    The furry family was first discovered on Monday, napping high in a tree in the Western Branch section of Chesapeake.

    The appearance — and the fact that it occurred on Bruin Drive — was a gift to journalism. There is nothing news outlets crave more during the dead week between Christmas and New Years than a human interest story with a happy ending. Cuddly animals? A bonus.

    The media was so hungry for a non-COVID feature that the quartet of suburban interlopers made the national news. (more…)

  • Abortion, Black Women, and the Thirteenth Amendment

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Paul Goldman

    I write today to put the abortion debate in its proper Virginia political, social, and legal contexts.

    The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution banned not only slavery but also “involuntary servitude.” “While the general spirit of the phrase ‘involuntary servitude’ is easily comprehended, the exact range of conditions it prohibits is harder to define,” declared the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Kozminski. The decision in United States v. Shackney said the ban on involuntary servitude “was to abolish all practices … having some of the incidents of slavery.” One of those practices, I will argue in this column, was depriving enslaved women the right to end unwanted pregnancies.

    Given sympathetic comments by the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority to antiabortion efforts in recent litigation, the nation’s top constitutional scholars say the Court intends to use the Mississippi case argued earlier this year to give state legislature’s wide new latitude to restrict “the right to choose” established by Roe v Wade nearly fifty years ago. The intentions of Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin and his allies, including Democratic Senator Joe Morrissey, remain to be seen. But it is difficult to imagine that the publicly proclaimed foes of abortion will miss this opportunity.

    I believe that Governor Ralph Northam and the White Boys Club now running the General Assembly have a moral obligation to call a Special Session to stop such an effort. (more…)

  • Is Virginia’s Higher-Ed System “Inequitable”?

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Source: “Higher Education School Finance Inequity and Inadequacy in Virginia”

    by James A. Bacon

    State appropriations per student to Virginia’s four-year colleges and universities vary widely, ranging from $14,121 in FY 2019 for the University of Virginia’s College at Wise to $4,460 at George Mason University, according to a recent report, “Higher Education School Finance Inequity and Inadequacy in Virginia.”

    Not only is state funding per full-time student lower than in most other states, argues the report, published by left-leaning Education Reform Now (ERN), state support does not appear to be linked to need, access, affordability, or success.

    ERN’s social-justice critique of Virginia’s higher-ed system contends that state funding short-changes lower-income and minority students. Some points it makes are valid. Some are tendentious. (more…)

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

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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