On December 11, 2023, a small group of citizens stood outside the Prince William County Government Complex, distributing a letter delivered to the County Board that morning. The letter, drafted by your humble correspondent, pointed out that the County had failed to properly advertise its upcoming December 12th public hearing re “the Digital Gateway” — the largest data center park in human history — and, therefore, any result would be void.
The message was clear: the County and the data center developers had all the money and all the power. Who was going to stop them?
This week, that person stepped forward: Circuit Court judge Kimberly Irving. In a brilliant 18-page opinion, Judge Irving affirmed the obvious, i.e. the County had violated state law in proceeding with the December 12th hearing and it was not entitled to any legislative exception.
Mark Christie Photo credit: Richmond Times Dispatch
The Richmond Times-Dispatch had an interesting article about Mark Christie. Christie served a member of Virginia’s State Corporation Commission for 20 years until Trump appointed him to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in his first term. In January, Trump named Christie to head FERC. Then, in June, Trump fired Christie without explanation.
In the article, Christie has some important comments and warnings regarding the production and regulation of energy in the Commonwealth. I am not qualified to weigh in on those topics, but I do have a bone to pick with Christie on another matter.
Christie came to Virginia state government as a senior member of Gov. George Allen’s staff. A large part of Allen’s campaign for governor was devoted to tearing down government. In his inaugural address, he lamented that state government was too big and had “lost touch with the people.” He complained about the “heavy, grimy boot of excessive taxation and spending and regulation.” He declared, “In recent times, the will of the people has been frustrated by an unholy alliance of well-heeled interests, entrenched bureaucrats, and political opportunists.” He eliminated 5,500 state positions, five percent of the workforce, through buyouts.
If ABC news reports are true – that Fairfax county school staff arranged and bankrolled abortions for pregnant students in 2021 without informing the girls’ parents — the state should come in and take control of the district.
People need to go to prison for this.
FAIRFAX, Va. (7News) — Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) tells 7News Reporter Nick Minock that they are launching an investigation into claims that school staff arranged abortions for students and didn’t tell their parents.
This story has blown up on social media — a report that says school officials at Fairfax County’s Centerville High School arranged and bankrolled abortions for girls without so much as a phone to their parents back in 2021.
The report says one of the two girls involved was 17 years old.
I’d say this is shocking, unbelievable even, but it’s not. Everyone knows public schools are in the control of far-left teachers unions and administrators that work together to undermine parental rights.
Shoot, Terry McAuliffe lost his race for the governorship in 2021 over that issue. The rim shot came during a debate with Glenn Youngkin. The words that cost McAuliffe the election?
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Virginia voters disagreed.
While most of the commonwealth has embraced parental rights, several Northern Virginia school districts have resisted. Continue reading.
Speaker Don Scott, $1.55 Million from Dominion Energy
As of the last round of campaign finance reports, Dominion Energy Virginia is smoking its political nemesis Clean Virginia in donation totals, with more than $11 million given compared to $3.2 million. At $14.3 million in combined donations, the two are well on their way to matching or exceeding the $23 million they spent two years ago.
What is this unrestrained bidding war accomplishing? A powerful monopoly utility is getting much more powerful, and Virginia’s political process is taking on a deeper odor of corruption. It is important for those who think facts and arguments and public input decide issues at the General Assembly to get a dose of realpolitik.
The reports available on the Virginia Public Access Project track giving through the end of June, and the next round of reports will add in the totals for July and August. Those are due September 15, just as early voting starts. The amounts discussed here are just for this election cycle, donations in 2024 and for 2025 through the primary.
Attorney General Nominee Jay Jones,
$1.1 million from Clean Virginia
The House of Delegates and the three top statewide offices are on the ballot this year, but the state Senate is not. Despite that, Dominion has made large contributions to several senators in both parties, mainly those in leadership positions or on committees that consider energy bills.
Virginia law allows all this. Virginia’s voters tolerate all this. Nobody really tries to make it a political issue because the powerful floor leaders and committee chairs in their own parties are the ones taking the money. Some cash has gone to campaign accounts and some to leadership political action committees, used to reinforce their power with their peers. ‘Tis a distinction without a difference.
Little Iijayah Johnson spent only nine days on earth.
Her short sojourn was hell. Death, when it came, may have been a relief to her tiny battered body.
According to news reports, when Iijayah’s parents brought her lifeless body to Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk on the 4th of May the infant had several broken ribs, deep “partial thickness burns on her feet,” a blunt force trauma to her head, “healing cuts on her face and head” and bruises on her back.
When asked the date of the baby’s birth, her parents reportedly laughed, as they “struggled to remember.“
Are you sick yet?
It gets worse.
On Wednesday Norfolk Circuit Court Judge Jamilah LeCruise accepted a guilty plea from the newborn’s father, Hilary Darnell Johnson II. In it, the 24-year-old pleaded guilty to 2nd degree murder. In exchange Norfolk prosecutors dropped charges of child abuse and neglect and agreed to a prison sentence that “shall not exceed 19 years.”
Nineteen years.
He will be sentenced in October. The judge could give him fewer than 19 years.
Unthinkable.
In Virginia, 2nd degree murder carries the possibility of 5 to 40 years. If the killing of a helpless newborn doesn’t cry out for a maximum sentence, what does?
Iijayaj’s mother, Z’Ibreyea Parker is scheduled for trial on August 19.
Norfolk Commonwealth Attorney Ramin Fatehi just won the Democrat primary despite Mayor Kenny Alexander and other prominent Democrats supporting his opponent because they saw the city’s top prosecutor as soft on crime. He will almost certainly be elected to a second term as the city’s top prosecutor.
Fatehi is a self-described “progressive prosecutor” who opposes cash bail, long prison sentences and who took $200,000 from George Soros PACs when he ran for office last time. Continue reading.
Most of them are quite young. They have a lot in common.
They are friends in many cases. Some grew up together. More are related through blood or marriage. Many have worked together. Some are a second generation of their families in the nursing home industry;
To address the elephant in the room, virtually all are ultra-Orthodox Hasidic (Haredi) Jews. Most are graduates of Touro University‘s New York or Skokie campuses or Lakewood, New Jersey’s Haredi Beth Medrash Govoha (BMG). BMG, with 9,000 students is the second largest Yeshiva – rabbinical school – in the world. We note that Israel has its own issues with the Haredi. So has New Jersey and the federal government. For Jewish people everywhere, my Reformed Judaism grandsons and many of my best friends, I sincerely wish that were not the case. But it is. And it is necessary to air it.
Many worked together for friends and family in the industry before starting their own companies. Most get nursing home administrator credentials working in a facility for a year or two before moving into chain management;
After a few years of experience there, they start their own chains. The junior managers become CEOs and the young accountants CFOs, usually before the age of forty;
The sources of their seed money are not banks or other traditional financial institutions but rather a relatively few number of trusts and LLCs. Private equity. Perhaps the money is not fully reported. Nothing else is.
Today we will discuss one Lakewood partnership that operates nursing homes in five states. It is the largest chain in Virginia.
It displays a business model that consistently features extreme understaffing combined with far above average occupancy rates.
Onsite-assessments by facility staff on average show their residents to be in truly exceptional need of care. That spikes insurance per diems and authorized lengths of stay.
Low costs, high occupancy and high reimbursements have led to extraordinary profits.
But their facilities have been documented repeatedly by state inspectors to produce resident humiliation, horrible suffering and premature death because of what happened to them in the nursing homes not because of the afflictions with which they arrived.
Here I will show rather than just tell readers what is wrong with government oversight at its core to demonstrate how they get away with it. It is a long story It needs to be told.
A Virginia corporation is one of a handful of companies involved in developing an energy alternative that, if successful, will render the debates over solar, wind, and fossil fuels moot. The alternative is miniaturized nuclear power.
Not to be confused with the small modular reactors (SMRs) being explored by Dominion Energy, these reactors, as described by the Washington Post, would be “small enough to be packed in a shipping container and loaded on a truck.” The fuel for these microreactors would be uranium sealed in poppyseed-sized pellets coated with layers of heatproof material. The U.S. Dept. of Energy describes them as “meltdown-proof.” Instead of using water as a coolant, these reactors would use helium gas, molten salt, or air-cooled alkali. They can be designed to generate as little as a single megawatt of power—enough for a single manufacturing plant. One of these reactors next to every data center built in Virginia would go a long way toward resolving the Commonwealth’s future power needs.
With statewide elections coming up this fall, all candidates have an opportunity, indeed an obligation, to state clearly their position on a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation passed during the Northam administration: the net-zero greenhouse gas emission goals contained in the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA).
The VCEA mandates Virginia reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gasses such as nitrous oxide to the point where Virginia greenhouse gas emissions are completely offset by the amount of such gases removed from the atmosphere in Virginia. The VCEA sets goals to achieve net-zero emissions for electric generation by 2045 and for the entire Virginia economy by 2050.
These utopian milestones cannot be achieved. Enormous economic and social damage will be done in the futile attempt to do so. The Electric Power Research Institute, the respected research arm of the American utility industry, published a detailed study showing that no combination of existing or feasible technologies -– wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, battery storage, energy efficiency, atmospheric carbon dioxide removal –- can get our country to net-zero by 2050. The study estimates that attempts to achieve the impossible goal will cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Even if these milestones were achievable and achieved at enormous cost to the lives and livelihoods of Virginians, the result would do absolutely nothing to reduce the global emissions of the greenhouse gasses said by environmentalists to be the primary cause of global warming.
Rendering of Chesterfield project from Dominion’s public website.
By Steve Haner
The State Corporation Commission’s (SCC) decision on whether Dominion Energy can build a new natural gas-fired power plant will depend on which expert or set of experts it believes, and which of the many computer models that dominate the testimony it judges best predict Virginia’s energy future.
Dominion has filed testimony to the SCC from its outside expert backed by computer modeling that concludes there is a risk to the reliability of our electric grid unless additional “dispatchable” generation resources are built. “Dispatchable” means that they are under operator control, can be turned on or off as needed, and are not dependent on the weather.
The wind, solar and battery resources that are demanded under the Virginia Clean Economy Act are not considered “dispatchable,” at least not as dispatchable as a natural gas plant that starts on ten minutes notice. But opponents of the gas plant application have hired several experts of their own, armed with their own models, who assure the SCC those generation assets coupled with heightened efforts to limit demand will be adequate to keep the lights on in the next decade and beyond.
On behalf of Attorney General Jason Miyares, who participates in utility regulation as the state’s consumer counsel, an expert witness that office often uses endorsed the Dominion application. Scott Norwood did not dive into the reliability debate, however, and noted Dominion only expects the plant to run about 16% of the time. It is designed to be a “peaker” plant, running only at times of constrained electricity supply.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) and Winsome Earle-Sears have attacked Abigail Spanberger for receiving a $50,000 campaign donation from an individual whom they claim is a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
There is one little detail that the Republicans fail to mention. The individual, Pin Ni, has also donated to a long list of Republicans, including the RNC and the National Republican Campaign Committee.
Ni is the president of Wanxiang America Corporation, a Chinese-owned auto parts company based in Chicago.
Republicans claim Spanberger broke the law by accepting donations from a foreign national. However, according to the Virginia Political Newsletter, Ni has had a Social Security number since 1992. That would mean that he is at least a green card holder, making political contributions legal. Even if that were not true, then Sen. Steve Daines (R-Montana), the RNC, and other Republicans are also guilty.
The University of Virginia, it announced on Monday, has an interim president. His name is Paul G. Mahoney and he’s been around for a while – living and working within the body of the beast – and that’s promising. He has friends; he knows the culture. He might do some good while the 28-member search committee looks about for a permanent person.
Mahoney is a former dean of the UVA Law School, a product of MIT and Yale Law School, a corporate law scholar -– securities regulation, financial derivatives, contracts, stuff like that — and a former clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Interesting, huh? Interesting is good. Interesting may help get people to listen.
Mahoney can’t just occupy space, breathing. Not while matters continue to throb and roll. He should wield complete leadership, even if over a limited tenure. Between the existing UVA faculty, the existing governor, the existing state legislature and all the rest of the things that exist -– the students start returning soon -– calm seas hardly beckon.
We know about the Department of Justice, of course. It seeks to enforce the Supreme Court’s 2023 Harvard ruling which bars racial discrimination as a categorical factor in the admissions process. Logic leads to an obvious conclusion: collegiate race-based administrative dictums are kaput.
A recent headline indicated that Abigail Spanberger, Democratic nominee for Governor of Virginia, had “embraced” natural gas in an interview. A reading of the text left a very different conclusion, as in reality what she embraced was the anti-natural gas Virginia Clean Economy Act.
Abigail Spanberger
Spanberger did tell Inside Climate News that natural gas will be “part of the energy mix into the future,” which is a statement of the obvious. The reporter noted her support was “for now.” But then the reporter quoted her saying:
“However, I think when it comes to new natural gas infrastructure, that’s where we really need to be focused and sort of thinking carefully about the lifespan of those projects and whether indeed they are the most cost-effective solution.”
Let’s break the code on that one. Dominion Energy has an application pending to build a new, 944-megawatt natural gas plant in Chesterfield County. The plant would open in 2029 and under the Virginia Clean Economy Act, it would have to close by 2045. One major argument the opponents are raising is that it would become a stranded asset, far too expensive to build with the assumption of a mere 15-year life span.
The Sierra Club and others fighting the plant read that line and knew they have an ally in Spanberger, as if they didn’t already know. The fight over that application at the State Corporation Commission is the ultimate test case on natural gas’s future in Virginia, although the law only prohibits utility-owned generation, not merchant generators.
Winsome Earle-Sears
A few days before the Inside Climate News report, Republican nominee Winsome Earle-Sears provided a guest editorial column to the Washington Examiner. She was quite clear in her endorsement of Dominion’s application for the Chesterfield County plant. “The Spanberger-Hashmi-Jones ticket will kill this project, and consumers will suffer. It’s not just expensive, it’s offensive,” she wrote.
The Earle-Sears column was the longest exposition on energy she or her campaign has produced, but apparently it was only distributed on social media, and that by the Examiner itself, not her campaign. It was not picked up and shared in the daily news feed of the Virginia Public Access Project, which reaches thousands of key inboxes. In fairness, VPAP might not have seen it.
I’ve been publishing Bacon’s Rebellion since 2002 (with one short interlude). My goal has been to create a platform for quality conservative journalism and commentary on Virginia-specific issues that allowed for civil dialogue and contradicting views. It’s been a good run. The blog has been a huge part of my life, and I have made many wonderful friends both in person and through correspondence. For entirely personal reasons, I have decided it is time to step aside. It’s not a decision I make lightly, but it is one that I must make.
I want to thank the many people who supported me along the way — readers, donors, and collaborators. Your encouragement is what kept me going these many years.
The blog isn’t going away (not yet anyway). Just me. I will continue to maintain Bacon’s Rebellion as long as there is interest in it. You’ll still be able to read Steve Haner, Dick Hall-Sizemore and regular outside contributors.
But I will say this: If anyone is interested in acquiring and investing in the blog with the aim of nurturing the spark of independent reporting and commentary on state and local issues in the great commonwealth of Virginia, please contact me at [email protected].
To borrow the great Douglas Adams line that conveys parting in a spirit of gratitude and a light heart, let my final words be, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
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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