Hate crime hoaxes not just for minorities anymore. According to Willfred Reilly, the expert on hate crime hoaxes, the fastest-rising category of hoaxes is perpetrated by whites, as white groups take a lesson from the Left’s grievance-and-victimhood playbook. The latest instance involves a Civil War reenactor by the name of Gerald Leonard Drake, reports the Washington Post. Two years ago an undetonated pipe bomb was discovered at the annual reenactment of the Battle at Cedar Creek, in which Drake, a 61-year-old Virginia man, participated. A series of threatening letters issued under the name of Antifa followed, and the 2018 event was canceled. “We will make Charlottesville look like a Sunday picnic!” said one letter. Now the FBI has issued a search warrant revealing investigators’ belief that Drake wrote the letters. Drake has not been charged with a crime.
Sauce for the goose… The Virginia Education Association has been fighting for the right to engage in collective bargaining for its members, and many members of the General Assembly think that’s a dandy idea. The VEA is, after all, a staunch supporter of the Democrats who now run the legislature. But writing in his blog Union Report, Mike Antonucci recounts a little history. The VEA does not have the most harmonious of relationships with its own employees. Employees of the union formed a picket line outside VEA headquarters in 2012, and management-employee relations have been simmering ever since. Employees have filed a lawsuit, petitioned the parent union, and in 2018 even filed an unfair labor practice complaint. Schools are chaotic enough. Do we need to add collective bargaining to the list of woes? (Hat tip: Chris Braunlich.)
Enticing creative-class Millennials. The labor market in Northern Virginia is exceedingly tight, and that’s before Amazon has ramped up its hiring of 25,000 employees. Economic developers are shifting some of their attention from recruiting corporate investment to… recruiting talent to fill jobs that are going begging. The Northern Virginia Economic Development Alliance and the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce are making it their top priority to lure bright young minds to the region, reports the Washington Post. Northern Virginia has a tough sell on a couple of quality-of-life indicators: traffic congestion and the cost of housing. The target audience, says Victor Hoskins with Fairfax County economic development, is “looking for a food culture, brew and distillery culture, bike paths, walking trails. How can we package this so they can easily navigate it and relate it to a job opportunity, too?”
By Dick Hall-Sizemore
The capital projects section of the budget bill is often overlooked by the media. That has been especially the case this year, with all the major initiatives brought forth by the Democrats.
