Bacon's Rebellion

  • Reba McClanan: An Authentic Public Servant

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Rebe McClanan from her Facebook page

    by Kerry Dougherty

    You wouldn’t know it from some of the news accounts of her life this week, but former Virginia Beach Vice Mayor Reba McClanan was more than just a woman who wanted to plant pretty flowers and trees around the Resort City.

    Much more.

    She was a tireless advocate for good government and a public servant in the truest sense of the word. Emphasis on servant. She was also the first woman to run for public office in Virginia Beach, according to a Facebook post by her daughter, Anne.

    In a Virginian-Pilot column in 2007 I dubbed her “the consistent conscience of city council.”

    That she was. (more…)

  • Is Anyone In Charge Over There?

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    James A. Bacon

    The new rules for occupying a prestigious room on the University of Virginia’s Lawn allow students to post comments and materials on two message boards affixed to each door. An addendum to the “Terms and Conditions for Lawn and Range Residents, Housing and Residence Life” states:

    “Any materials placed on the message boards must fit within the four corners of each message board and cannot extend beyond the outer edges of any such board.”

    The addendum also provides this context: (more…)

  • Youngkin Promises to Reverse Northam Tax Hikes

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    James A. Bacon

    by Steve Haner

    Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin is proposing to reduce Virginians’ taxes in much the same way Governor Ralph Northam raised them: Use several individual proposals, some not all that large, which accumulate into a significant change.

    As Northam ends his term, his attitude seems to be, what tax increases? He claims the current $2.6 billion general fund surplus and the almost $400 million transportation fund surplus are due to economic growth. (more…)

  • Left Behind…

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    James A. Bacon

    Richmond resident and green card holder Javed Habibi has lived in Richmond since 2015 with his wife, and four daughters. The electrician and his family visited Afghanistan in June and was scheduled to return to the U.S. Aug. 31, but all hell broke loose when Kabul fell to the Taliban. The U.S. government promised him that he and his family would be evacuated. Said Habibi to the Associated Press: “They lied to us.” — JAB

  • Bacon Bits: Reality Sucks Edition

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    James A. Bacon

    Bye, Bye, Brackney. The City of Charlottesville will not renew the employment contract of Police Chief RaShall Brackney, who took on the job in June 2018, the City announced on its website yesterday. No explanation was given. However, the announcement follows less than two weeks after publication of a survey of Charlottesville police officers showing the morale was in the dumps, that toxic city politics had prompted many to scale back on traffic stops, arrests and community policing, and that few officers felt that Brackney had their back. Among other actions as the city’s first Black female police chief, who came on shortly after the tumultuous Unite the Right Rally, Brackney had dissolved the SWAT Team after allegations of misogynistic and other inappropriate behavior.

    Speaking of employment contracts… University of Virginia President Jim Ryan was awarded a $200,000 bonus during a closed session of the June 3 Board of Visitors meeting, The Cavalier Daily student newspaper has revealed. The university froze salaries for all employees during the early months of the COVID-19 epidemic, and Ryan and other senior officials took a 10% pay cut. Said Rector Whittington Clement: “When the situation this year became clearer and we had a highly successful handling of COVID-19, we think the University did as well as, if not better, than any institution of higher learning in making the adjustments necessary to COVID-19, we thought that it was appropriate to give him a bonus.” (more…)

  • Nine Years Later, Bon Secours Still Hasn’t Made Good on Promises

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    James A. Bacon

    With help from Redskins cheerleaders, then-Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones announces the $40 million Redskins training camp deal. Photo credit: Richmond Times-Dispatch

    by James A. Bacon

    In October 2012, the City of Richmond negotiated a $40 million deal with the Washington Redskins and the Bon Secours Virginia Health System to build a Redskins training camp in the city. The complex deal had many moving parts. To make it happen, the city gave Bon Secours a long-term lease on the property of the old Westhampton School site so it could build a medical facility in the city’s prosperous West End. In exchange for favorable lease terms and the right to sponsor the training camp, the Richmond-based health system agreed to construct a medical office and fitness center in the poor, inner-city East End where it also operated the Richmond Community Hospital.

    “This agreement will allow Bon Secours to significantly expand upon our effort to build healthier communities across Richmond,” CEO Peter J. Bernard said in a news release at the time.

    Bon Secours did build the fitness center. But nearly a decade later, no ground has broken for the medical office.

    Time is running out for the company to make good on its agreement, warn Michael Schewel, former executive vice president of Tredegar Corp., who served as Secretary of Commerce and Trade under Governor Mark Warner, and Steve Markel, chairman of the Markel Corp.

    “They’ve gotten an extension from the EDA (Economic Development Authority) and they’re absolutely at the end of their time,” says Schewel. They’ve got to get a building permit, build a building, hire people, and get it done within a year of Jan. 1. It takes six months just to get a building permit from the city!” (more…)

  • Redistricting, Part 2: Squabbling Among Democrats, Republicans, and Citizens

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    (Author’s note:  This is the second installment of my reporting and comment on the Virginia Redistricting Commission. Warning — it is long.  I apologize for the length, but it seemed best for interested readers to have a fairly thorough summary of the Commission’s doings up through the end of August in one place, rather than breaking it up in pieces.)

    The story of the Virginia Redistricting Commission so far is one of two battles.  One is the partisan struggle between Democrats and Republicans. One side does not trust the other. The other battle is the effort of citizen members to ensure that the process does not become one in which legislators devise districts to suit their own interests. This effort ran into opposition from legislators, primarily, but not solely, the Republican legislators.

    Presiding officer

    The partisan split was made clear from the beginning. At its first meeting, in an obviously orchestrated move, Sen. Ryan McDougle, R-Hanover, moved that the commission elect co-chairs, one from each party. Sen. George Barker, D-Fairfax, seconded the motion. Del. Marcus Simon, D-Fairfax, declared it a great idea. There was no mention that the state constitution provision establishing the Commission stipulated the election of “a chairman” (emphasis added).

    The constitution also stipulates that the chairman be a citizen member. In complying with this provision, the members unanimously elected as co-chairs Mackenzie Babichenko, an assistant Hanover County prosecutor, from the Republican-nominated citizen members, and Greta Harris, from Richmond and president/CEO of the Better Housing Coalition, from the Democratic-nominated citizen members.

    The Commission later established two subcommittees and designated Republican and Democratic co-chairs of each one. (more…)

  • Last Year’s Enrollment Declines Sharpest in Kindergarten

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    James A. Bacon

    Annual District Enrollment for Kindergarten using 2015 as the base year, comparing remote only (straight line), hybrid (dashed line), and in-person (dotted line) trends.

    by James A. Bacon

    National enrollment in public schools across the country fell by 2% nationally — by 1.1 million students — in the 2020-21 school year as school districts and parents grappled with how to respond to the COVID-19 epidemic, finds a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

    The decline was concentrated in the early grades. Kindergarten enrollment plummeted by 9%, concluded the study, “The Revealed Preferences for School Reopening: Evidence from Public-School Disenrollment,” by Thomas Dee and three co-authors, all with Stanford University.

    “These results suggest that significant numbers of parents, particularly parents of younger children, did not want their children to participate in remote instruction,” write Dee et al. (more…)

  • Virginia Has a Rising Sea Problem, Relatively

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    Steve Haner

    Ninety years of relative sea level rise (SLR) at Norfolk’s Sewells Point gauge, with mean lines added by Kip Hansen. It is about two-third due to sinking land, one-third due to long term absolute SLR, and in no way due to modern CO2 emissions.

    by Steve Haner and Kip Hansen

    When discussing sea level rise, on Virginia’s coast or anywhere else, watch the terms being used very carefully. Absolute sea level is the height of the ocean compared to the center of the Earth. Relative sea level is the height of the ocean compared to a specific point on the shore. They are not the same. (more…)

  • The President Had Somewhere Important to Be

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    sherlockj

    Credit: Getty Images

    by James C. Sherlock

    The caption of the photo:

    “US President Joe Biden looks down alongside First Lady Jill Biden as they attend the dignified transfer of the remains of a fallen service member at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, August, 29, 2021, one of the 13 members of the US military killed in Afghanistan last week.”

    I watched.  I am sure I had lots of company.

    • Virginia Veterans — nearly 730,215 — one out of 10 adults.
    • Virginia active duty (89,303) and reserve military (25,977) = 115,280
    • Virginia Army National Guard 7,500 soldiers and 46 armories
    • Virginia Air National Guard 192nd Fighter Wing at Langley AFB Hampton – approximately 200.

    In an unblinking story for The Washington Post, Matt Viser exposed a failure of leadership and understanding of the moment that was a direct insult to all Americans.

    The President was there to representing us all. He shamed us. (more…)

  • Hospitals Experiencing a COVID Crunch

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    COVID-19 hospitalizations in Virginia. Source: Virginia Department of Health

    The media is full of stories about how the rebound in COVID-19 cases fueled by the Delta variant is putting hospitals under the most stress since the peak of the epidemic in February. Hospitals are rapidly filling up. Some are reporting shortages of beds, others of staff. Making matters worse, hospitals from other states, also inundated by COVID, are so desperate they are poaching nurses from Virginia.

    In no way do I minimize the current challenges facing hospitals. But it is important to maintain clarity about what’s going on. Hospitals are not feeling a crunch because hospitalizations have reached the same level as during the peak. You can see clearly in the graph above that hospitalizations are running about one-third the level of February.  (more…)

  • Welcome to America

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Afghan refugees boarding a bus at Dulles international Airport. Photo credit: AP

    Thousands of Afghan refugees are arriving at Fort Lee in Virginia for medical treatment and immigration processing before settling permanently in the U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, who visited Fort Lee Monday, estimates that 70,000 to 80,000 Afghans live in the U.S., reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Odds are that most of the refugees from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan — more than 140,000 have been evacuated by the U.S. military — will end up in the United States, where they will plug into existing Afghan communities in Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, Charlottesville, and elsewhere. Here at Bacon’s Rebellion, we thank the Afghans for their assistance to American forces, welcome  them to the U.S., and wish them well as they build new lives for themselves.

    — JAB

  • Fairfax Schools to Spend $188 Million Undoing Shutdown Damage

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Source: Fairfax County “ESSER III Spending Plan”

    by James A. Bacon

    Fairfax County Public Schools are getting $188 million in federal helicopter COVID-19 relief funds, and school officials propose spending about 88% of the sum undoing the damage caused by the system’s COVID-19 shutdowns. Eighty-six million will go toward addressing “unfinished learning,” and another $78 million to “academic, social, emotional and mental health needs.”

    “Disruptions to learning during COVID-19 have resulted in significant ‘unfinished learning’ or ‘learning loss,’” states the proposed ESSER III Spending Plan. (ESSER stands for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief.) Studies predict that students will return this fall with roughly 70% of learning gains in reading achievement compared to a typical school year and 50% of the gains in mathematics, the document says.

    The pandemic and “initial school closures” had a disproportionate impact on students with disabilities, English Language Learners, students of color, and economically disadvantaged students, the document says. Nationally, White students likely lost four to eight months, while students of color lost six to twelve months. (more…)

  • Wrestling Control of Schools from the Loony Left

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    I’ve never been a fan of checkout charities.

    You know how they work: The cashier loudly asks you if you want to round up to fight something like restless leg syndrome and you are shamed into contributing, even though you know this lets the Piggly Wiggly take credit for a fat check to charity.

    Yesterday I was picking up notebooks at a Virginia Beach office supply store when the checkout clerk asked if I wanted to donate to “local schools.” He didn’t ask if I wanted to buy school supplies for needy kids, which I would have done in a heartbeat. He wanted to know if I’d like to lard something onto my bill for local schools.

    “Nope,” I replied without hesitation.

    Frankly, I don’t want to give one penny more to our Virginia Beach schools where the far-left majority on school board fought reopening classrooms last year. Where teachers are quietly being indoctrinated in critical race theory under euphemistic names. Or where the superintendent’s wife in 2020 posted a snuggly photo of herself and her husband to Facebook with an obscene message directed at then-President Donald Trump. (more…)

  • A is for Activist

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    Sometimes the discussions about the ever increasing political content in Virginia K-5 classrooms is hard to visualize. Perhaps this will help.

    The Daily Wire discovered the video below posted on a VDOE website by a couple of teachers in Chesapeake public schools as a resource for 3rd grade teachers.

    The website is GoOpenVa.org, a site for sharing “digital resources with the end goals of providing equitable access to great learning materials throughout the state, and supporting new approaches to learning and teaching for all Virginians.”

    The Daily Wire article explains.

    To make it enticing to teachers looking to check off boxes, each lesson on the GoOpenVA platform is marketed as fulfilling certain state educational standards.

    By instructing students to liken Black Lives Matter to Martin Luther King (after learning about him from a tumblr account), (this) lesson says teachers can take credit for fulfilling the “Learning Domain: History and Social Science” Standard: “The student will compare and contrast ideas and perspectives to better understand people or events in world cultures.”

    Digital content for the students in this lesson plan includes the YouTube video above.

    “Great learning materials” indeed.

    Coming to a third grade classroom near you.

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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