Bacon's Rebellion

  • The Ride to Remember

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    James A. Bacon

    by Chap Petersen

    Image credit: Fairfax City Patch

    Yesterday Fairfax City celebrated the annual “Ride of the Patriots” rally at Patriot Harley Davidson in Fairfax City. 

    A Memorial Day staple for 25 years in the City, the “Ride” is a fun way for ordinary citizens to connect with bikers, veterans and significant others who ride into our community from all points of the USA. The ride has gotten smaller over the years; in its heyday, we would have 10,000 bikes lined up on Lee Highway to go thundering down to the Pentagon — but the point and passion remain the same. Put simply, it’s about freedom. Yesterday morning, I had a chance to speak to the assembled crowd about “Heroes in our Community’.

    The Fairfax High School boys who landed at Omaha Beach with the 29th infantry division; Sergeant James Robinson of Annandale, Virginia who won a posthumous Medal of Honor in Vietnam, Fairfax County Police Detective Vicky Armel (FHS’ 83) who was killed in the line of duty in 2006; and Lt. Col. Justin Constantine (FHS ’88) who survived a life-threatening wound in Iraq to live another sixteen years as an American hero.

    The very best of our community.

    (more…)

  • Quote of the Day: Derrick Max

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    James A. Bacon

    “When will Virginia (and America) learn that the answer to increasing diversity in elite schools (and board rooms for that matter) is not quotas or lowering standards, but improving the academic outcomes of African American students — 40 percent of whom are trapped in failing public urban schools. We need DEI to stand for Diversity through Educational Improvement!”

    — from his weekly Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy newsletter

  • Jeanine’s Memes

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    James A. Bacon

    Compiled by the Bull Elephant

  • How John Reid Was Played

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Paul Goldman

    The latest poll predicting a Democratic ticket sweep this fall doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody who has read my columns here. When Donald Trump was in the White House the last time, the Dem nominee for Virginia governor won by the party’s biggest percentage in 32 years. Ralph Northam also swept in his running mates. The only question remaining this November is whether the Democratic ticket eight years later can do better.

    Take it from me: The last four elections have led to ticket sweeps by one party or the other. Virginia’s famed constituency of independent cross-ticket voters exists no longer. 2025 is going to produce the fifth straight ticket sweep, the first time since the end of the one-party Byrd Machine era. President Trump has made NOVA a radioactive zone for the Republican statewide ticket.

    I doubt many Bacon Rebellion readers got a chance to listen to my radio interview last month with Andre Whitehead. In that interview, I explain why I thought John Reid had fallen into a trap far more his own making than he or the media has acknowledged. 

    I believe he has been played by Governor Youngkin and the MAGa crowd here in Virginia. He didn’t really see what was coming due to inexperience. 

    (more…)

  • Bacon Meme of the Week

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    James A. Bacon

  • The UVa of Mr. Jefferson

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    We hear a lot on this blog regarding the current state of the University of Virginia. The Jefferson Council wants to lead it “back to Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of freedom and excellence.” If one examines the actual early years of UVa under the direction of the Sage of Monticello, an interesting contrast arises.

    Let’s examine the faculty. One of Jim Bacon’s most frequent criticisms is how the current UVa president, Jim Ryan, has assembled a faculty of doctrinaire liberals. He longs for the good old days of free inquiry.

    Mr. Jefferson was very particular about whom he hired as faculty at UVa. and was careful not to hire anyone who might espouse a heretical position. As described by Dumas Malone, the esteemed Jefferson biographer (The Sage of Monticello, pp. 397-418), those faculty members not selected by Jefferson or James Madison, his close collaborator, were selected by Jefferson’s agent sent to Europe to find professors. 

    The most difficult position to fill was the professorship of law. Jefferson’s first choice turned it down, perhaps preferring a promising law practice to a teaching position at a still non-existent university. Another possibility could have been James Kent, a distinguished New York jurist, but Jefferson would not even consider him due to Kent’s “consolidationist” views. “An angel from heaven who should inculcate such principles in our school of government should be rejected by me,” he wrote to his talent scout. To Madison, he expressed a fear that “Richmond lawyers” or “someone infected with the doctrine of consolidation” might be proposed. To guard against such an eventuality, he saw it as his duty to prescribe the textbooks in government that were to be used. (Malone, p. 417)

    (more…)

  • One Down, Six to Go

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    James A. Bacon

    The making of an intellectual monoculture at UVA

    by James A. Bacon

    “Conservative students at the University of Virginia,” a fourth-year student once confided to me, “know who all the conservative professors are. … All seven of them.”

    That was only a slight exaggeration. Through my work with the Jefferson Council I have identified dozen faculty members openly identifying as conservative and/or libertarian out of roughly 1,700 faculty members. I have met three or four more not yet willing to come out of hiding.

    Jim Ceaser

    Whatever the precise number, it is pitifully small. And it shrank by one this month when James W. Ceaser retired from the Department of Politics, where he has taught for half a century. He ran the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy (PCD), which provided the few courses at the University where students could gain exposure to major intellectual traditions of American politics, including the thinking of the founding fathers.

    Ceaser’s efforts to find a replacement to run the program with a professor sharing similar philosophical views long foundered on a reef of indifference. He has no idea if the program will survive in a form remotely resembling his vision for it. With no one passionately devoted to the program’s founding spirit, he fears, it could well be co-opted to serve other ends.

    UVA has become a political monoculture. Despite their reputations as counter-culture radicals, Baby Boomer professors were an intellectually diverse lot. As Boomer faculty members retire, UVA is replacing them almost uniformly with younger scholars with a center-left orientation. The tale of the Center for Constitutionalism and Democracy is a case study in what that process looked like and how, despite the protestations of President Jim Ryan that he is committed to intellectual diversity, conservatives are approaching extinction at UVA.

    The problem isn’t that conservative professors get purged or canceled, says Ceaser, it’s that departments dominated by leftist professors don’t give attention to conservative ideas and research, and they are not inclined to hire or promote those who are. The indifference runs through the academic hierarchy from deans and department heads to the provost and president.

    “The lack of interest is endemic,” Ceaser says. “No one is pushing for intellectual balance.”

    (more…)

  • Preschoolers Gone Wild?

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    The number of Virginia preschoolers with disabilities has increased 24% of the past two years. The response of the Virginia Board of Education? Hire more special education teachers!

    Voting 7 to 0, the Board directed the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) to remove the requirement for special-ed teachers to do graduate-level coursework as a means of boosting the supply by at least 70 positions, reports The Virginia Mercury.

    I suppose the action makes sense… if there is a genuine need for more special-ed teachers. But let’s think this through.

    A 24% increase in the number of preschoolers with disabilities in just two years?

    What the heck is going on?

    (more…)

  • It’s a Holiday Weekend. Take the Early Slide.

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Many years ago, when I worked at The Washington Post, I overheard one of our national reporters griping on a Friday afternoon.

    I wasn’t eavesdropping. You could hear him across the canyon of a newsroom.

    “No one in the effing federal government answers their phones on Friday,” he shouted, slamming down his phone and adding a few more descriptive expletives about the goldbricking official he was trying to reach.

    (Note to those under 40, picture this: There was a time when office workers were tethered to actual telephones with spiral cords. These communication contrivances rested on desks and were equipped with heavy receivers that made a most satisfying noise when smashed back into their cradles in anger.)

    Some time after that outburst, probably at the end of a slow-news week, a group of us simultaneously tried to reach several dozen government officials at 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon for a quick metro story. We wanted to see who was working. Besides us.

    If memory serves, the answer was no one. I can’t find a copy of the feature story. We thought it was highly amusing. It’s doubtful the federal workers on the receiving end felt the same way. Continue reading.

  • The Government Blob and UnitedHealth – Which is Worse?

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    James A. Bacon

    by James C. Sherlock

    Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.

    The Guardian, a UK-based tabloid with a U.S. edition, wrote a thunderous exposé about UnitedHealth. The title: Revealed: UnitedHealth secretly paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers.

    First paragraph:

    UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest healthcare conglomerate, has secretly paid nursing homes thousands in bonuses to help slash hospital transfers for ailing residents – part of a series of cost-cutting tactics that has saved the company millions, but at times risked residents’ health, a Guardian investigation has found.

    The details of United Health’s alleged activities were well reported and gut wrenching. UNH stock, already weak, cratered.  

    But the story entirely missed the larger context.

    Readers of that article, and perhaps its author, are left ignorant of the fact that Medicare and Medicaid do the same thing — pay for lower re-hospitalizations — for the same reason that UnitedHealth does. Money.

    Payers. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) uses multiple measures to reward or penalize nursing homes in its value-based purchasing system. One is Skilled Nursing Facility Within-Stay Potentially Preventable Readmission (SNF WS PPR) Measure. Section 2.2 Purpose/Rationale for the Measure focused on cost savings.

    Hospital readmissions among the Medicare population are common, costly, and often preventable. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) and a study by Jencks et al. estimated that 17-20 percent of Medicare beneficiaries discharged from the hospital were readmitted within 30 days. Among these hospital readmissions, MedPAC has estimated that 76 percent were considered potentially avoidable and associated with $12 billion in Medicare expenditures.

    Medicare and Medicaid offer bonuses and levy financial penalties on hospitals and nursing homes for their performances in that measure and several others.

    Medicare, Medicaid and UnitedHealth all claim to be motivated to improve patient care. OK. Maybe.

    (more…)

  • UVA Should Set the Standard for True Equality

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    James A. Bacon

    by Scott Douglas Gerber

    I received my Ph.D. and J.D. from the University of Virginia. I loved my time at UVA but I’m concerned the university has become an institution of indoctrination rather than education.

    On April 29, UVA’s Board of Visitors resolved to strengthen efforts to ensure that the university is an inclusive and welcoming community where everyone can freely express their ideas. In March the board had pledged to dismantle UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus.

    History matters at Thomas Jefferson’s university, and UVA’s recent history is disturbing: In 2020 UVA’s board endorsed radical DEI goals articulated by UVA’s Racial Equity Task Force. Among the goals were “doubling the number of underrepresented faculty at UVA by 2030,” “developing a plan and a time horizon for having a student population that better reflects the racial and socioeconomic demographics of the commonwealth of Virginia and, as much as feasible, of the nation,” “encouraging related organizations to develop a scholarship program for the descendants of enslaved laborers who worked to build and maintain the university,” and “developing a series of educational programs around racial equity and anti-racism, including leadership development programs focused on equity, including racial equity.”

    (more…)

  • Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Want to know more about the latest Medicaid budget controversy? You’ll learn more sitting in your back yard and listening to the crickets.

    Image credit: Bing Image Creator

    by James A. Bacon

    Today we read in the Virginia Mercury the alarming headline that Governor Glenn Youngkin and other Republican governors have signed a letter supporting a congressional budget bill “that would cut billions from Medicaid.”

    After providing some background about the overall budget bill and the politics swirling around it, the article goes on to highlight Democratic Party talking points about Medicaid. It quotes U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, warning that taking people off Medicaid will push them into emergency rooms, shifting costs to others. The article also quotes Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Abigail Spanberger as asserting that thousands of Virginians “will lose their healthcare because of this bill.”

    Ironically, the letter Youngkin signed doesn’t even mention Medicaid. The thrust of the letter is to support the inanely named One Big Beautiful Bill, which will “save taxpayers $1.6 trillion over the next ten years.”

    But saving Medicaid is the Democrats’ messaging strategy, so that’s what the Mercury goes with. The Republican-backed budget, reports the news outlet, would cut Medicaid by $625 billion over the next ten years. By contrast, Democrats want to protect the poor.

    How do citizens sift through the conflicting claims? There is so much we need to know.

    (more…)

  • Not About Aaron Rouse

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    James A. Bacon

    The growing habit of being great to be here.

    by Gordon C. Morse

    Steve Martin, meet Aaron Rouse.

    Early in his career, Martin would walk out onto the stage and say, “It’s great to be here.”

    Then he’d move a few feet away and say, “It’s great to be here, too.”

    He would keep shifting about, as the laughter grew, finally saying, “And, wow, it’s really great to be here.”

    This was meant to be funny and it was, very.

    At the risk of sounding narrow-minded, however, the same approach to political office-holding is less amusing. Hop-scotch through elective office enough and you abuse the trust you’ve been given by the electorate.

    Once upon a time – not very long ago – Aaron Rouse won an at-large seat on Virginia Beach City Council and said, in effect, “It’s great to be here.” That was 2019 and Rouse had been elected to represent nearly half a million residents in Virginia’s largest city.

    Soon after, he wanted to be mayor, but then withdrew. “As a global pandemic put almost everything in our lives to a complete halt,” Rouse said, “it’s not the time for me to ask for your support and vote.”

    Was being mayor of Virginia Beach really Rouse’s object of desire? It hardly seems so. In 2022, Republican state Sen. Jan Kiggins won Virginia’s 2nd District Congressional seat and Rouse immediately found a new love, announcing his bid to replace her in a special election.

    (more…)

  • Heck No to Data Centers? Really?

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Cheryl Cullers

    Rural Virginia localities enjoy a historic opportunity to augment declining tax bases by courting solar farms and data centers. Remarkably, some local leaders regard the opportunity as a threat. They have convinced themselves that the critical infrastructure for the AI age threatens their rural quality of life.

    I can understand peoples’ reservations about massive solar farms that can alter the landscape and potentially cause serious runoff, even though those concerns can be mitigated. But I am downright baffled by the resistance to data centers, which have a tiny geographic footprint and a minimum impact on farms, woodlands, and scenic vistas.

    Thinking that perhaps I have been missing something, I read with interest an interview of Warren County Supervisor Cheryl Cullers. According to The Royal Examiner, she proclaims “heck no” to data centers, and “yes” to Smart Growth and tourism. “I have no intentions of voting for a data center, and I have not heard anybody else say they were either,” she told interviewer Mike McCool.

    I still don’t get it.

    Cullers, a nurse by profession, comes across as a nice, public-spirited lady who hasn’t thought things all the way through. She describes data centers as a “distraction” from more pressing community issues… as if building the tax base to pay for things like, oh, schools, law enforcement, social services, public works, and the like, weren’t a pressing issue.

    (more…)

  • Youngkin Has the Better Message

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    James A. Bacon

    Dems think they have a winning issue in decrying layoffs of federal workers. Don’t count on it.

    by James A. Bacon

    Governor Glenn Youngkin is looking like a pretty darn good steward of the public fisc these days. Bucking a slowdown in the national economy, Virginia’s General Fund revenues increased 8.8% in April, tracking $220 ahead of the state’s official forecast. Instead of spending the money, the Governor is adding the surplus to reserves set aside to weather cutbacks to the federal spending that sustains much of the commonwealth’s economy.

    Predictably, Democrats are in a snit. They want to spend more money to address an inexhaustible well of “unmet needs” and also to tar Youngkin by association with President Trump’s moves to slash the size of the federal workforce. Youngkin has refused to distance himself from DOGE initiatives.

    “I think what bothers me the most is, he isn’t stating what all of us know to be true,” Del. Joshua Cole, D-Fredericksburg, told NOTUS. “He knows what is going to happen down in Washington is having impacts already.”

    Likewise, Democratic candidates for statewide office have adopted the strategy of running against President Trump. “There’s no one I trust more to stand up to Trump and Musk than you, Jay,” says former Governor Ralph Northam to Jay Jones, candidate for Attorney General, in Jones’ latest ad.

    We’ll see how that plays out. If I were a Republican candidate, I would double down in defense of Youngkin’s fiscal policies and in support of restructuring unsustainable federal deficit spending, even if it means short-term pain for Virginians. Moody’s, the bond rating firm, has joined S&P and Fitch in downgrading U.S. federal debt — once seen as the world’s safest — from AAA to AA1. It is far better for Virginia to emancipate itself from federal spending now than wait until the inevitable reckoning forced by merciless bond vigilantes.

    (more…)

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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