Remember the old adage — the goal isn’t to win the debate, but to make sure you don’t lose the debate.
Former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe was pressed on graphic textbooks — and I mean graphic — of a sexual nature being included in government school libraries, and McAuliffe exploded with rage.
Not towards school districts, mind you — but towards busybody parents who had the audacity to look into what their children were actually being taught in the classroom.
That’s when McAuliffe decided to say the quiet part out loud:
Terry McAuliffe: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." pic.twitter.com/7S15pTv1gY
Senate Finance Committee data illustrated the expected state revenue boost caused by 2017 federal changes. Predicted and seen in 2019 and 2020, it carried over into 2021.
by Steve Haner
At Tuesday night’s debate Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe dismissed the 2021 $2.6 billion general fund revenue surplus as entirely due to extra federal COVID relief funds, which is absurd on its face. By definition, every dollar is general fund state tax revenue. It came from some form of state tax.
Why do Virginia Democrats continue to deny that recent state tax law changes are in part responsible for almost-embarrassing large cash surpluses recently announced? At the time the deeds were done, nobody was denying the big revenue impacts. The really big hit was a totally bipartisan decision, so Democrats can share the credit or blame. (more…)
I have long observed that nonprofit colleges and universities, by virtue of being nonprofit, behave very differently than for-profit enterprises. Having weak systems for accountability, higher-ed institutions are captured by their internal constituencies whose interests they place of those of students and their families. Instead of endeavoring to maximize profits, as profit-seeking enterprises do, university leaders seek to maximize prestige compared to other institutions. The result is an endless “arms race” treadmill that misallocates billions of dollars across the industry.
Now comes some empirical support for my hypothesis from Peter Q. Blair and Kent Smetters, with Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania respectively, in a paper entitled, “Why don’t elite colleges expand supply?”
In a word, universities don’t expand supply because it increases institutional prestige to not do so. (more…)
Good neighbors. Janique Martinez and her family, who are Black, moved into a Virginia Beach cul-de-sac on Jessamine Court five years ago. Some time ago, “constant” banjo music began emanating from the house next door. Then in July, sounds of a monkey screeching came through a window every 15 to 30 seconds. The loud noise was a nuisance, but multiple visits by police to the neighbor brought only temporary respite. Then in September, Martinez said she started hearing the n-word. Virginia Beach officials say they can’t do anything more than they already have. But the community has rallied around the Martinez family. Last Friday about 25 people gathered on the street Friday chanting, “Spread love, not hate,” according to The Virginian-Pilot story. Apparently, the neighbors didn’t need indoctrination sessions under the guise of “training” to know racism when they see it, to stand up against it, and to show solidarity with their Black friends.
Bad neighbors. Chad Wolf, who served as acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump, writes today in The Daily Signal how he was targeted last year by protesters outside his house week after week. The “protest” played out the same way every day: the demonstrators would organize a quarter mile away, march through neighborhood streets, holding up traffic, then remain for an hour or more while shouting through loudspeakers. They never applied for a permit, which was required in the City of Alexandria. But there was a difference from the Martinez case. City Councilman John Chapman joined the protesters on several occasions. And so did some of Wolf’s neighbors.
No one who knows my political leanings would expect me to watch a debate between Glenn Youngkin and Terry McAuliffe and declare the Democrat the winner.
And I’m not going to do that.
But I was worried before the cameras rolled. I’ve met McAuliffe. I’ve seen him work a room. The guy Larry Sabato once dismissively called “a bag man for the Clintons” can be rather charming.
That Terry McAuliffe was not on stage last night.
In his place was a man who was positively Nixonian: angry, dour and rude. He engaged in name-calling – repeatedly calling Youngkin “clueless” – and yapped incessantly about Trump. (more…)
It was a gird-your-loins kind of day in Virginia on Monday. While we were on the radio in the morning, our producer handed me a bulletin announcing that Governor Ralph Northam was holding a press conference in the afternoon, on the subject of COVID.
Uh-oh.
I can’t repeat what I said off the air. But on the air, I reminded listeners that these press conferences fill many of us with dread.
The point of yesterday’s presser? To scold and scare Virginia’s unvaxxed. To begin pushing vaccines for children, even though they aren’t yet approved. And to field a couple of softball questions from the poodles in Virginia’s press corps. (more…)
Last week a large fight broke out at Meadowbrook High School in Chesterfield County. Police were summoned, and the school shut down for the day. According to WWBT-TV, a video circulating on social media showed school resource officers (SROs) getting hit as “more than ten” students attacked one another in the hallway.
Some Virginia school districts are eliminating SROs, declaring their presence to be oppressive. One question: How would you feel if you were the student being protected in the photo above? Chesterfield County Police Chief Jeffery Katz released the image of SRO Anthony Bowen using his body “to shield a young man from a mob attacking a student.” Bowen was struck several times in the process. Praising the officer for his selflessness, Katz said he remains committed to keeping Chesterfield school children safe. (more…)
Absolute Percentage Difference Between 2020 Projections and Census Count. Source: StatChat
The Weldon Cooper for Public Service at the University of Virginia, in charge of the state’s demographic count, has given itself a pat on the back for its ten-year projection of 2020 Virginia population. The self congratulations are probably deserved.
Weldon Cooper’s projection was only 0.27% higher than the Census Count. The actual population increase was 7.4% between 2010 and 2020. Also, projections for 90% of Virginia’s localities fell within 5% of the actual count.
Making population projections is a tricky business. Check out Shonel Sen’s discussion on the StatChat blog to get an idea of the challenge. The projections are used by a wide variety of state agencies for planning purposes, so accurate forecasts are important.
Traditional civics education, meet the new civics education.
by James A. Bacon
The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) announced today that it has joined forces with dozens of higher education and student organizations in a “shared commitment” to make “democracy learning” a top priority for higher education.
In a SCHEV press release, this commitment is expressed in the most neutral and anodyne of terms. The Shared Commitment signatories, says the SCHEV statement, calls for “civic inquiry, practice in civil discourse and collaborative work on real-world public problems.”
“By thoughtfully incorporating civic learning into their academic and extracurricular programs, Virginia’s colleges and universities are equipping students with knowledge and skills that will benefit not only the students themselves, but their families and communities now and well into the future,” says SCHEV Director Peter Blake.
It sounds benign. Every thinking person would agree that all Virginians would benefit from learning how to be better-informed and more-engaged citizens. But is that what SCHEV and Virginia are signing up for? Or is the Shared Commitment just another tool for making “social justice” a core mission of Virginia’s colleges and universities? Will the result be a citizenry that is more capable of thinking independently and rigorously about public issues, or one that is more steeped in the “woke” pieties about race, class, and gender? (more…)
A new digital publication serving Southwest and Southside Virginia, Cardinal News, has launched today under the editorial direction of Dwayne Yancey, recently retired as editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
The inaugural edition opens with articles and editorials on Grayson County Wi-Fi, how redistricting affects western Virginia, and headlines from around the region.
In explaining its mission, the website states:
Southwest and Southside are two very different regions of the state but they share many things in common. Among them: They’re increasingly left behind in a state that’s dominated by the urban crescent from Northern Virginia to Hampton Roads and they’re both faced with inventing new economies after traditional employers have declined. They’re also left behind by legacy news organizations that have cut their staffs deeply and no longer support in-depth reporting.
Michelle Vermillion was raised an old-fashioned liberal. She grew up thinking that people should be treated as individuals, judged, as Martin Luther King once dreamed, by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. She supports civil rights causes and endorses diversity in the workplace. Getting to know people of different backgrounds at work, she believes, is key for America to move beyond its racist past. When you get to know your coworkers as fellow humans, she says, you learn they want basically the same things you do.
But as a library staffer working at the University of Virginia Library, Vermillion felt increasingly increasingly ill at ease in the past few years. Rather than seeing a person’s race as an incidental part of his or her identity, the UVa Library administration began putting racial identity front and center. Town hall meetings and training programs made race a person’s defining characteristic.
“I’m not the one who changed,” Vermillion says. UVa changed. The traumatizing 2017 Unite the Right Rally, in which white supremacists clashed with counter-protestors, precipitated a bout of introspection about the role of slavery and segregation in the institution’s past. The Ryan administration doubled down on a commitment to recruit more Black students and faculty with its “Inclusive Excellence” program. The end result: library administrators today are fixated on race, and they are dedicated to imposing their ideological framework derived from Critical Race Theory upon library staff.
There is no escaping the obsession with race, she says. Many employees have reservations, but, for all the administration’s happy talk about engaging in a “dialogue,” they are afraid to speak out.
By this summer, Vermillion couldn’t take it anymore. She tried introducing different perspectives and sparking a conversation. The administration shut her down. Submitting her resignation, she worked her last day at the library Sept. 3. (more…)
Virginia’s employment growth has been underperforming the national economy for quite some time. As shown in Figure 1, soon after the recovery from the Great Recession began in earnest in 2011 Virginia’s year-over-year growth in total employment uncharacteristically fell behind the national economy and even briefly went negative in 2014.
Then in early 2020, just as in the rest of the country, economic conditions in Virginia changed drastically when the governors’ lockdowns of economic activity were imposed in response to the pandemic. Between March and April of that year nearly 20 million jobs were lost nationally (or approximately one out of every eight jobs in the country), while in Virginia the employment loss was 428,000 jobs (or approximately one out of every nine jobs in the state). Virginia was not as badly hit as the nation as a whole because of its heavy dependence on federal employment and contracting (which were not significantly impacted by the lockdowns) and disproportionate employment in the Professional and Business Services sector (where people were better able to work remotely).
However, history is now repeating itself as Virginia once again falls behind the nation in the recovery and that trend is getting worse. In April of this year, when year-over-year employment growth turned the corner and moved into positive territory nationally, Virginia trailed the pack and continues to do so. In April Virginia ranked 41st among the states in year-over-year total employment growth, gained ground to hit 32nd in May and 30th in June , and then fell back to 39th in July and all the way to 47th in August. (more…)
The news is full of stories about labor shortages. The latest case in point, which prompted this column, is Virginia Mercury article focusing on the paucity of nurses. The author lists several plausible reasons to explain the deficit, from COVID-related burnout to a shortage of nursing school faculty. Similarly, Bacon’s Rebellion has discussed the shortfalls in police departments across Virginia and the lack of teachers. I hear trucking companies advertising repeatedly on the radio for truck drivers, and as I look for suitable living arrangements for aging relatives, I have heard similar tales from retirement communities. Meanwhile, small businesses everywhere are reporting that they cannot find enough workers.
While observers can cite narrow-bore explanations to explain what’s happening in, say, the nursing industry, the ubiquity of the problem across all economic sectors suggests that there may be a common cause. (more…)
Yesterday’s edition of The New York Times contains an opinion piece — “How Do I Tell the Story of Robert E. Lee,” by Allen Guelzo a professor at Princeton University. It came to me from a colleague of his whom I casually know but respect. Guezlo is about to publish “Robert E. Lee: A Life,” and the opinion piece is about his struggle to do so fairly. His book represents seven years of effort and, as he himself states, “Lee is a study in contradictions.” Dealing with those contradictions fairly would explain a seven-year undertaking.
Guelzo makes his challenge clear with this statement: “There are some biographies that are almost impossible to write, but write them we must. Biography demands a close encounter with a subject, an entrance into motive, perception and explanation. The intimacy of that encounter carries with it the danger of dulling the edge of the historian’s moral judgment — and that kind of judgment is what makes historical inquiry worthwhile, something more than a mere jumble of events and dates.”
Guezlo brings out the point, often overlooked, that Lee believed that slavery was “a moral and political evil in any country,” but that he also believed, as did others, that blacks were better off as slaves than living in Africa. Perhaps that is how many slave owners soothed their consciences. (more…)
Virginia public schools are facing a crisis in legitimacy. Never in recent history have parents been so up in arms. This morning I published three columns submitted by readers, all on the subject of the dismaying disconnect between educators and parents in K-12 schools. I did not solicit them. Readers sent them in. The educational melt-down is not just on my mind, it’s on their minds.
The column by Arthur Purves below sums it up well. It’s one thing to soak taxpayers to support public schools. It’s another thing to tax them for inadequate student achievement. It’s another thing yet again to increase taxes on middle- class families to indoctrinate their children with antithetical values.
Not all school districts are equally contemptuous of middle-class values. Schools in Northern Virginia and Virginia’s other major metros are the worst. But they are cheered on by a state educational apparatus in Richmond that seems intent upon using schools to implement a social revolution that portrays “whiteness” as a form of oppression and promotes offensive sexual values. (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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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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