Amusing tongue-in-cheek conversation between John Reid and former Governor/Senator George Allen.
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Is West Virginia Unconstitutional?
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New School Accountability System Could Use Some Tweaking
by Matt Hurt
In December JLARC released a report on the School Performance and Support Framework (SPSF), Virginia’s new accountability system. The report states that the new system is better than the old Accreditation system, but improvements are needed. From the perspective of an educator who has spent the last twenty years focusing on student outcomes and accountability, I largely agree with the report. The following are some facets of the system that should be reviewed and hopefully improved.
Complexity
I used to believe that the old Accreditation system (our previous accountability system) was extremely convoluted. However, compared to the SPSF, I would now consider the old Accreditation system the model of simplicity.
Under the old Accreditation system, there were only a few things that were calculated differently among schools by level (elementary, middle, or high school), namely graduation rates, college and career readiness, and growth. Given that there was no summative score for each school, there was more inherent simplicity. There were thresholds for each of those categories to identify schools for overall support, and there were predetermined thresholds for subgroup performance for federal accountability purposes that everyone knew prior to beginning the school year.
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Welcome Todd Truitt
Todd Truitt I’m pleased to announce that Todd Truitt will join the Bacon’s Rebellion team as a regular contributor. His editorial concentration will be K-12 education policy in the commonwealth.
Todd is a parent of two Arlington Public Schools (APS) students in Arlington County and an education advocate during his free time. He has been active on K-12 education policy issues as a volunteer at the local level for 5 years and at the state level for two years. His main areas of focus in education policy are on accountability, assessment, instruction (especially math) and school finance.
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How to Make Sure a Slum Stays a Slum…
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Be Warned: The Death Cult Is Coming
by Kerry Dougherty
This is a cautionary tale. So when the ghoulishness of Canada spreads to Virginia you can‘t say you weren’t warned.
Here’s how it starts:In 2016 Canada passed the so-called MAID law, legalizing medical assistance in dying.
It was presented as a compassionate measure. One that would allow suffering patients, whose deaths were imminent, to get help from their doctors in ending their lives.
However, it wasn’t long before so-called medical doctors were actively killing patients who were not near death but whose conditions were uncomfortable. A decade later, they’re starting to execute the mentally ill. (Killing the mentally ill was approved in Canada last year but implementation was supposedly delayed until March 2026. The case cited below shows it’s already in effect.)
Between 2016 and 2023 60,000 Canadians were killed by these executioners with medical degrees. In 2023 alone 15,000 Canadians were murdered by medical providers.
MAID now accounts for 4.7% of all deaths in Canada. Continue reading.
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RECs are Costly Pretend Renewable Power the VCEA Makes Us Buy
by Steve Haner
All electrons are agnostic until buying a REC makes you green! A key, but poorly understood, provision of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) is a requirement that Virginia’s two largest electric utilities must either generate or purchase a growing number of renewable energy certificates (RECs). Eventually their RECs must equal 100% of their non-nuclear generation. What are RECs and why do they matter to you?
Put simply, a REC is an electronic record that proves a generator produced one megawatt hour of electricity from an approved “renewable” source, usually solar or wind. It can be a utility, an independent energy generator, a business with solar on its roof or even a shared community solar system that is granted a REC. A small portion of RECs are awarded for hydro or geothermal generation.
The certificate is issued and tracked by a third party, and – here is the point – can be sold. Recording and tracking RECs is one of the jobs done by the PJM Interconnection regional grid operator. There are several marketplaces compiling and transferring them.
The buyer then “retires” the REC, in effect cashing in the environmental virtue of that “green” energy. It can be retired only once. The entity that earns the REC can also be the one to retire it, but usually they are traded.
One website that reports on the REC industry put the total world REC market at more than $20 billion in 2024, predicting it will exceed $40 billion by 2030. The annual compound growth rate is higher than 10%. The same website was quite open about what is going on:
“By buying RECs, companies can effectively offset their carbon emissions and achieve 100% renewable energy consumption without significant investment in renewable energy infrastructure.”
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Jeanine’s Memes
View more memes at The Bull Elephant.
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Quote of the Day: Helen Andrews
Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.
— Helen Andrews, “The Great Feminization“
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Ouch. It Hurts, But It’s True
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If Personnel Is Policy, Watch Out!
The incoming Spanberger administration, writes Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation, “is structured to consolidate power in Richmond, expand bureaucratic reach, and normalize government intrusion into family life, healthcare, education, and the economy.”
From a Thursday Family Foundation Action Letter:
Governor-elect, Abigail Spanberger, is quickly making her selections for cabinet and senior staff appointments. But these are not just routine staffing decisions, they are signals of the kind of administration and government she intends to implement. And the signal coming from Richmond is deeply troubling for Virginians who value limited government, individual liberty, parental rights, and constitutional restraint.
As the saying goes, personnel is policy. When you look carefully at who is being placed in charge of health care, labor, education, public safety, elections, and the overall legal strategy of the Governor’s Office, a consistent theme emerges: centralized authority, aggressive regulation, and ideological governance, with little regard for the proper limits of government power.
Below are some of (not all) Governor-elect Spanberger’s troubling appointments:
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Bacon Meme of the Week
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Dancing on the Watery Grave of CVOW
By Steve Haner,
As it becomes clear that the 90-day pause of the Dominion Energy Virginia offshore wind project is probably its final death rattle, the folks who encouraged the Trump Administration to kill it are looking to shift the blame to outgoing Virginia Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.
One of the organizations that filed a federal lawsuit against the project, a lawsuit that itself proved to be a futile exercise, is promoting a letter it sent the governor demanding he rescind his previous support for the $11.2 billion facility, which was just about to enter its final stage of construction when the federal pause order came down just before Christmas.
The National Legal and Policy Center was joined in the lawsuit by the Committee for a Construction Tomorrow (CFACT) and the Heartland Institute. All have been dancing a joyous victory jig on the project’s watery grave for about two weeks, although the Trump Administration’s pause order had nothing to do with the allegations of injury to the whales they had raised.
Nobody with the utility, the Commonwealth of Virginia or the federal agencies involved has formally declared the project dead. The silence is deafening. News reports indicate Dominion is telling the federal court hearing its challenge to the order that the federal government has refused to provide details on the supposed new national security threat it has identified. The goal of the pause apparently was not to give the utility, and the developers of four similar projects elsewhere on the East Coast, a chance to look at how to mitigate that “risk” after all. More should be clear after a hearing on January 16.
As all this unfolds, this policy group wants Youngkin to do a public mea culpa:
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I Can’t Help Myself!
This is a Virginia public policy blog. Someone please stop me before I publish more AI-generated cat videos!
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A State Income Tax Rate to 10% for $1 Million-per-Year Households?
Image credit: Grok by Hans Bader
Delegate Kelly Convirs-Fowler, D-Virginia Beach, has introduced a bill (HB 188) to increase state income taxes in Virginia, raising the marginal tax rate from 5.75% to 10% on people making over $1 million.
Virginia already has higher state income taxes than most of its neighbors. Kentucky has a maximum tax rate of 3.5%, North Carolina has a maximum tax rate of 3.99%, West Virginia has a maximum tax rate of 4.82%, while Virginia has a maximum tax rate of 5.75%. Tennessee has no state income tax. As a result, Virginia is now one of the higher-tax states both in terms of dollars paid, and tax burdens compared to other states.
That’s a big change from the recent past. In 2015, Virginia had lower state income tax rates than West Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Back then, the top marginal tax rate was 6.5% in West Virginia, 6% in Kentucky, and 5.8% in North Carolina, compared to 5.75% in Virginia. And the lowest tax rate (for low-income households) was 5.8% in North Carolina, 3% in West Virginia, and 2% in Kentucky, compared to 2% in Virginia (most taxpayers pay the top marginal tax rate in each state). But since then, Virginia’s neighbors have cut tax rates a lot, unlike Virginia.
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A Golden Parachute for Some
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
So far, Gov.-elect Spanberger has designated four members of the General Assembly for her Cabinet or high level administrative position:
Del. Mark Sickles (D-Fairfax)—Secretary of Finance
Del. David Bulova (D-Fairfax)—Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources
Del. Candi Mundon King (D-Prince William)—Secretary of the Commonwealth
Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Arlington)—Senior Adviser to the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority
For each legislator, particularly Sickles, Bulova, and Ebbin, the appointments will result in a financial windfall for each of them in the future. That is because members of the General Assembly are members of the Virginia Retirement System.
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