Tag: Guest contributors
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Stronger Teacher Unions = Weaker Parents
Allowing collective bargaining will put yet another special interest ahead of the parents who simply want a say in what is best for their children. by F. Vincent Vernuccio First published by Virginia Works and reprinted with the author’s permission. Virginia parents soon could lose even more control over their children’s education. Parents frustrated with school…
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Who Will Guard the Guards?
by Michael Fruitman and Jim McCarthy Emily P. Newman is a member of the Virginia State Bar (VSB), admitted, i.e., licensed to practice, in 2012. Publicly available information reveals that Ms. Newman was a staffer in Congress and in the administration of Donald Trump up to the time of the election of Joe Biden. It…
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Northam Plastics Order Will Backfire
by Brett Vassey Governor Northam recently issued Executive Order 77 (EO 77) mandating all state agencies (including colleges and universities) to ban purchasing or using certain plastics products (primarily foodservice and trash bags) by October 2021, ban plastic bottled water, phase out all single-use plastic items by 2025, source and use non-plastic alternatives, and compost…
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Porn OK in Schools If It Has “Literary Value”?
by Deborah Hommer Parents all across the United States parents are discovering shocking reading materials in their school libraries and classrooms. We’re not talking about “Lady Chatterly’s Lover.” To give one particularly horrendous example, we’re talking graphic novels depicting fellatio and pedophilia. Many parents are asking, How can this be? The U.S. federal government and…
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The Tide Celebrates Ten Years of Waste
by Randal O’Toole The Tide, Norfolk’s light-rail line, has been open to the public for ten years. As noted in this article in The Virginian-Pilot, it opened 18 months late after a 60% cost overrun. The article claims the light-rail line carried its first million rides “five months ahead of original projections,” but that’s a transit…
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A Racially Divisive Disaster
by Marilyn Rainville As a retired teacher and mother of two raising a school-aged grandson, I am concerned about what is being taught in the Virginia’s public schools. Two weeks ago, I spoke at a Mathews County School Board meeting to voice my concerns about Critical Race Theory. The school Superintendent declared that our county…
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Charlottesville a Pioneer of Woke Architecture
A dustup over classical architecture at the University of Virginia prefigured the controversy over Donald Trump’s architecture executive order. by Catesby Leigh When Donald Trump ordered a traditionally oriented reform of federal architectural patronage in his final days as president, its life expectancy was exceedingly short. Sure enough, his successor soon revoked the order and…
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Virginia Job Growth Trails U.S. Averages
by A. Fletcher Mangum Virginia’s employment growth has been underperforming the national economy for quite some time. As shown in Figure 1, soon after the recovery from the Great Recession began in earnest in 2011 Virginia’s year-over-year growth in total employment uncharacteristically fell behind the national economy and even briefly went negative in 2014. Then…
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Hudson, Hold My Beer
by Deborah Hommer In Hudson, Ohio, several days ago, Mayor Craig Shubert addressed the School Board. “It has come to my attention that your educators are distributing essentially what is child pornography in the classroom,” he said. “I’ve spoken to a judge this evening, she’s already confirmed that, so I’m going to give you a…
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What I Saw at My Son’s Middle-School Orientation
by Nathan Brinkman By now, most of us have probably lost count of stories about the culture wars being waged in our nation’s public schools. Whether it’s footage of school boards mired in debates over the use of “critical theory” (as seen here, here, and here)… or battles over “gender ideology” (here, here, and here)……
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Virginians Seek Help for Problem Gambling as Industry Expands
by Carolyn Hawley In the first six months of 2021, individuals requesting help for gambling-related problems made 394 phone calls to the Virginia Problem Gambling Helpline. That compares to 335 intakes in all of 2020, and 311 intakes in 2019 — meaning the Commonwealth is seeing a significant increase in call volume made by individuals…
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Virginia Has a Rising Sea Problem, Relatively
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…
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The Other Side of the “Intensifying Rain” Claim
by Steve Haner and Kip Hansen With the rainy remnants of another hurricane heading for Virginia from battered Louisiana, the stories of a coming Climate Armageddon will again ramp up. A couple of good examples of what to expect recently appeared in Virginia Mercury, the main one quoting numerous sources claiming Virginia is seeing more…
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Let Me Get This Straight…
by Paula Harkins Let me get this straight. I’ve got to show a valid ID to dine out or take a spin class… but not to vote? A growing number of Virginia businesses, restaurants, and venues are requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination and a photo ID to enter. Richmond was the first Virginia locality to…
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VMI, Media Bias, and Lies by Omission
by Larry Houseworth Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics addressed journalism’s turn to emotionalism in a talk given at the 2015 Science Festival in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England (“How journalism is turning emotional and what that might mean for news.”) He stated, “the value of objective journalism is the idea that journalism can…