Jones’ soft-on-crime, anti-police stances will undermine public safety in Virginia
by Jacob Grandstaff
Virginia Democrat Attorney General candidate Jay Jones has persistently demonstrated a troubling pattern of leniency toward criminals through his legislative record and statements. Virginians deserve an attorney general who will prioritize public safety and uphold the rule of law—not someone who will make their state a magnet for criminals.
As a House Delegate, Jones developed a pattern of voting for lighter sentences for criminals and expanding their rights. His most dangerous position, however, centers on his leftist contempt for law enforcement. This raises serious concerns, as he is running to serve as Virginia’s top law enforcement officer.
Creating a safe haven for criminals
Since his election as a Virginia Delegate, Jones has consistently supported policies that make Virginia less safe. His record includes multiple examples of promoting leniency toward criminals and undermining deterrence.
State Senate Democrats announced yesterday a deal to pay off $36 million in toll debts accumulated by thousands of drivers using the Downtown and Midtown tunnels connecting Norfolk and Portsmouth.
Woo hoo! Free money for everybody! Well… free money for some! Image credit: Bing Image Creator
“I’m proud to announce because of our 2025 Appropriations Bill, the Virginia Department of Transportation and Elizabeth River Crossings have successfully completed negotiations and reached an agreement to wipe out all outstanding toll balances and fees from 2014 to December 31, 2023, for drivers in Portsmouth and Norfolk. That’s right, the toll debt is gone,” said House Speaker Don Scott, D-Scott, as reported by WVEC News.
“If you have been buried under toll tickets and those late fees have been holding you back, if you felt like no one in Richmond was listening, we heard you,” said Scott. “Nobody should be buried under hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines just because they are trying to get to work or take care of their kids.”
But not just anyone gets their debts wiped away. As WVEC makes clear: “The relief package is targeted specifically at Portsmouth and Norfolk drivers, recognizing that they have carried the brunt of Elizabeth River Tunnel toll costs since the fees were imposed.”
Hmmm. Don Scott’s district is Portsmouth. The district of his collaborator in this deal, Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas includes… Portsmouth.
Rendering of Chesterfield gas generation project from Dominion’s public website.
By Steve Haner
The State Corporation Commission has judged Dominion Energy Virginia’s latest integrated resource plan (IRP) – the one with controversial proposals for additional use of natural gas— to be merely “legally sufficient.” In its final order issued July 15, the commission applied the term “reasonable” to only a few elements of Dominion’s 15-year roadmap on how it would meet the growing energy demands of the Commonwealth.
Leaving no room for interpretation, the order emphasized that “such acceptance does not express approval in this Final Order of the magnitude or specifics of Dominion’s future spending plans, the costs of which will significantly impact millions of residential and business customers in the monthly bills they must pay for power.”
This at least is a slightly better outcome than the regulatory body’s rejection of Dominion’s previous integrated resource plan, but that was before the SCC had a full panel of three members approved by the General Assembly. If Dominion was hoping it could now get agreement from the SCC that natural gas is essential for future electricity reliability, as it argued in this IRP, it came away disappointed.
The SCC will not be able to dodge that all-important reliability question in another pending Dominion application, this one to build a new natural gas plant in Chesterfield County on the site of a retired coal plant. That case is still in its early stages but is drawing a crowd of participants and will soon see filed testimony from the SCC staff and various parties. The public hearing will be held September 23 (the height of the fall political season.)
The Jefferson Council calls for Board of Visitors to take action.
Melina Kibbe
Melina Kibbe, dean of the University of Virginia Medical School, has been offered a job at the University of Texas Health Center at Houston, and will be officially named president after a 21-day waiting period, reports the Daily Progress.
“I look forward to building on UTHealth Houston’s legacy of innovation and excellence to strengthen our communities across the state and nation,” she said in the UTHealth statement making the announcement.
Kibbe’s impending departure worsens the leadership void at the University of Virginia where the positions of president, provost, and CEO of the health system are also open. There is no sign that UVA is close to filling any of those key positions permanently — or even appointing an interim president to serve until the top office can be filled permanently. The search for a new provost, which began in February with the aim of filling the position by August, has been rebooted and may not be filled until a president is selected.
Additionally, Bacon’s Rebellion has learned from an informed source that another top executive, UVA Health Medical Center CEO Wendy Horton, has just accepted a job offer from the University of California-San Francisco.
“UVA is in a leadership crisis,” charges Joel Gardner, president of the Jefferson Council, an alumni group focused on governance issues at the University. “The board is doing nothing!”
“Rome is burning,” declares Bert Ellis, a former UVA board member who was fired by Governor Glenn Youngkin for his confrontational style demanding more forceful action and now serves on the executive committee of the Jefferson Council. “We need a board meeting.”
Several board members had planned Monday to call a special board meeting to address the leadership void, Bacon’s Rebellion has learned from multiple sources, but Governor Glenn Youngkin was informed of the initiative and scuttled it over the weekend. Normally, the rector schedules special meetings, but the board manual allows three or more regular members to call a meeting. All meetings must be published seven days in advance.
John Reid, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, stakes out a conservative issue on almost every important issue but one — gay marriage. As a gay man in a committed long-term relationship, he supports gay marriage. Yet he would vote against a constitutional amendment before the General Assembly as currently written because it might abrogate the rights of those who oppose gay marriage.
He worries that priests and other religious leaders who do not support gay marriage would be compelled to officiate them, opening Virginia up to lawsuits should a gay couple be turned away at a church door, he tells the Daily Progress. “I think there will be an aggressive effort to go after churches and try to strip them of their tax-exempt status, trying to make sure that they can’t engage in government programs,” he said.
Democrat Jay Jones’s record reveals a champion for large, well-connected entities at the expense of everyday citizens.
by Jacob Grandstaff
Virginia Democrat Attorney General candidate Jay Jones presents himself as a defender of the working poor, but his career and political history tell a different story—a lawyer and legislator who consistently prioritizes corporate giants over the individual and the underprivileged.
In an interview with the leftist environmentalist group Clean Virginia, Jones said, “Everything that I have done in my career, whether it be in the legislative space, in the public sector, or in the private sector has been focused on helping people and protecting people.”
His record, however, suggests he’ll help and protect the powerful and well-connected and leave the vulnerable behind. From high-powered law firms defending large corporations to legislative votes enabling the exploitation of the poor, Jones’s track record shows a clear allegiance to big business. Many in that world recognize this and have rewarded him with handsome campaign contributions.
OK, we locals don’t really loathe tourists. We actually hate some of them.
The ones who forget that when they park their cars on residential streets they’re in neighborhoods. Where people live. Where children play. And learn to ride their bikes.
We’re happy to share our beaches with visitors, but we’d like them better if they adopted the national parks motto: take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints.
I’ve lived near the oceanfront since 1984. I wish I could tell you that the dirty diaper I found on the street Sunday evening was the first left behind by a tourist. Or even the second. Truth is, I’ve lost track. At least this one was neatly secured, left behind by a thoughtful slob.
I’ve found beer bottles, condoms, broken beach chairs, and vomit on the streets near the ocean. I once found a Burger King bag in my front yard that seemed heavy. When I peeked inside I saw a man’s wallet in with the greasy remains of someone’s lunch. That leather wallet contained a $100 bill and identification. Continue reading.
While we’re on the topic of efficiency in government (see previous post) here’s a shout-out to Arlington County for deploying a fleet of robots to report sidewalk defects.
The bots, owned by Kiwibot, a Berkeley, Calif.-based renter of robots used in logistics and maintenance, use laser scanners, mobile mapping, AI and machine learning to look for cracks, weeds, and gaps in sidewalks. The bots are surveying about 45 miles of linear sidewalk in a pilot project. The county will decide whether to use the technology in its next countywide sidewalk assessment.
Ultimately, reports ARL Now, “the goal is to streamline “the regular human assessment process.”
Sidewalk inspectors (is there such an occupation?) may not be thrilled by this development but pedestrians will be forever grateful. — JAB
Governor Glenn Youngkin has issued an executive order establishing the nation’s first AI-powered review of state regulations.
The order will build on previous work of the Office of Regulatory Management (ORM) conducted by humans, which Youngkin claims streamlined 26.8% of state regulatory requirements, eliminated 47.9% of the words in guidance documents, and saved Virginians $1.2 billion a year.
“Given our tremendous success in streamlining the regulatory code thus far,” wrote Youngkin in his executive order, “it is paramount to maintain momentum and continue search for reductions. AI presents an opportunity to supercharge these efforts to further reduce excessively burdensome regulatory requirements in the Commonwealth.”
In a recent post on Bacon’s Rebellion, I cited what I felt was the disproportionate treatment of some undocumented immigrants by the criminal justice system. There was a lot of push back.
Most of the negative commentary centered around the fact that the immigrants were in the United States in violation of federal law. As one person commented, “Either we enforce the law or we don’t.” One commenter went so far to accuse me of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, by saying, in reference to me, “The only laws that matter are the ones he likes.”
That last comment hit home and resulted in my doing some reflection. The clear gist of these comments are that laws are laws and all should be enforced, whether we like them or not. But, as a society, do we really believe that? Do we really want all laws to be enforced, or just the ones we like?
Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia, ran a column Saturday in the Wall Street Journal about threats to academic freedom.
He leads with an anecdote about teaching John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” with his students. “Milton can help you think about almost any consequential human subject. How shall we govern ourselves? … I am never tired of Milton and neither, it seems, are my students. And I sometimes give quiet thanks for the freedom to teach ‘Paradise Lost’ as I like.”
“One of the best freedoms in the world,” he writes, “is the freedom to sit in a quiet room and try to get at the wisdom in great writing with a group of students,” he writes.
But now, as the WSJ sub-head puts it, “ideological demands from the right” are putting the teaching of literature “in danger.”
In danger? Really?
The irony is that Edmundson’s column describes a very real threat to academic freedom — from the left, although he minimizes it. He offers no tangible evidence whatsoever of a peril from the right. When I say no evidence whatsoever, I mean no evidence whatsoever.
The propensity of American news outlets to spread outright falsehoods about extreme weather and the claimed (but easily refuted) link to “climate change” has been on full display this week.
Any observant person who spends even a day driving in the Texas Hill Country can see it is one giant flood plain. If you understand geology at all, you can see indications along the streams that point to past high-water marks over not just centuries, but eons. If you can read, you’ll notice all the highway signs warning of high water on bridges, most of which also have a flood gauge attached.
The flood that struck the Guadalupe basin last week was predicted by the National Weather Service in plenty of time for action, but local officials didn’t take it seriously. Kerr County lacked an aggressive warning system and suffered the worst casualties, while other counties with sirens fired them off and saved more people. Kerr had considered a similar warning system and rejected it. Shame.
But the average media consumer this week could be left with a strong impression that no such flood had ever happened before. The records kept since people started doing so prove otherwise and even that flood had several precursors as bad or worse. The Texas summer climate that produced such floods a century ago is indistinguishable from the climate in 2025.
We had a very similar rain and flood event in downtown Richmond in 2004, and 56 years ago I personally rode through the remnants of Hurricane Camille that devasted Nelson County. A possible 1-degree Fahrenheit change in average temperature in the half century since then is meaningless. But the media soldiers on with its mission to spread fear and nonsense.
The University of Virginia Faculty Senate today passed a resolution expressing “no confidence” in the Board of Visitors for failing to “protect the university and its president from outside interference” and for “not consulting with the faculty Senate in a time of crisis.”
The faculty called for a full accounting of the “series of events and actions taken by the board that resulted in the resignation of President Jim Ryan,” and demanded that the search committee to find a replacement be comprised of “at least 75% of UVA employees.”
According to the statement, “the university’s board of visitors states that visitors actively safeguard principles of academic freedom for the university and its faculty and endeavor to protect the university from outside influences seeking improperly to shape it.”
However, the “tone and content” of seven letters from the Department of Justice regarding the dismantling of racial preferences and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion addressed to university leaders “can reasonably be understood to constitute outside influences seeking improperly to shape the governance of the university.” (Find the full text at the bottom of this post.)
The statement reads like an incoherent cry of angst.
The statement provided no citation for its contention that responsibilities of the Board of Visitors include safeguarding “academic freedom” and protecting the university from “outside influences.” The phrase “academic freedom” does not appear anywhere in the Board of Visitors Manual.
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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