How bad is on-time mail delivery to Central Virginia? According to U.S. Post Office inspector general figures, it is the worst in the country. Postal service is so bad that a Richmond electoral official warned voters not to risk letting their ballots, in the words of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “be swallowed by a dysfunctional Postal Service.” — JAB
by Joe Fitzgerald
“Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane.”
Depending on your age, you may think of this as the opening to the Box Tops biggest and most iconic hit. If you don’t follow pop music, you may think any song that begins with “gimme” might be from a news story about a county school board chair.
The line of course kicks off the 1967 hit, “The Letter.” Those two words are being bandied about now in reference to a document the Rockingham County School Board (RCSB) says people can’t be allowed to see.
The Letter was apparently written to the RCSB from the law firm that represented it beginning when LBJ was president and ending last week. “To the RCSB” is the certain part. It may have been from the firm, or from one attorney in the firm.
I have not seen The Letter. I have not talked to anyone who has seen The Letter.
But a lot of people seem to know what is in The Letter. If it was written to the five people on the county board, and each one of them had a single conversation about it, and each of the people spoke to . . . etc. More people have heard about what was in The Letter than have actually seen it. But the degrees of separation mean the knowledge of what’s in The Letter has been paraphrased more than once.
The single thing from The Letter that everybody seems to know is that The Letter and not the county School Board’s secret actions ended the firm’s relationship with the county board. Everybody knowing it does not make it true, but if it is not true, the School Board should perhaps show it was not fired as a client. The board could show that by releasing The Letter. Continue reading
Posted in Education (K-12), Leadership, Open Government, Transparency
Tagged Joe Fitzgerald
by Joe Fitzgerald
If I were a more articulate man, I could explain what sorry shape the governments of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County are in right now.
Rational people have little doubt about the county. The biggest government expense, the school system, is currently being run by people who do not know what they are doing. That’s one possibility anyway. The other is that they’re causing randomly divisive chaos on purpose.
In the city the schools are being run well, but the city council approves housing as if it were free. The schools will be overcrowded soon enough. Five years? Ten? We can’t afford to build another one.
Relationships are being destroyed. The city flirts with leaving the Chamber of Commerce. The county board casually damages the shared technical center. Massanutten Pique would describe their behavior. Continue reading
Photo credit: Babs Reh, Flickr
by James A. Bacon
Congratulations to Virginia Commonwealth University for winning a “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) after making conscientious efforts to improve its formal free-speech policies. VCU is now one of five universities in Virginia and only 64 nationwide with the designation.
Since 2018, VCU revised several policies governing dorm room decorations, computer use, student conduct, sexual harassment, and reservation and use of campus spaces. But VCU’s sex-based misconduct policy remained a problem, according to FIRE.
“VCU’s old policy included a laundry list of behaviors, such as mocking and name-calling, that the school might have classified — and therefore made punishable — as sexual harassment. It was both overbroad and vague,” said FIRE in a statement.
“A single insult or joke does not qualify as sexual harassment,” explained Laura Beltz, FIRE director of policy reform. “It has to actually be a part of a pattern of conduct that meets that definition of harassment before being punishable. But that was not made clear under the old policy. For all students knew, they were always one strike away from getting in deep trouble on account of something they said.” Continue reading
Posted in Individual liberties
You have to click on the illustration and expand it to even see the percentage of carbon dioxide from human activity in our atmosphere. A new lesson plan in waiting?
By Steve Haner
Young Virginians are not getting enough instruction on the deadly existential threat of climate change from the news media, their favorite social media sites, Hollywood productions and President Joe Biden’s campaign stump speeches. Virginia’s General Assembly Democrats are demanding that the public schools double down with a wave of new classroom materials.
The curriculum wars at the State Board of Education and in local school board meetings may now move on to a new topic if Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) signs House Bill 1088. The bill is ripe for a veto, having received support from only one Republican legislator out of 68, but after the first 100 or so vetoes, Youngkin’s veto pen may tire.
Should he sign the bill, do not assume the process will go as the patron (Delegate Betsy Carr, D-Richmond) intends. In fact, if the bill is followed to the letter, the resulting materials probably will not be to her liking. The text is short:
A. The Board shall make available to each local school board instructional materials on climate change and environmental literacy that are based on and include peer-reviewed scientific sources.
B. The Board shall develop, adopt, and make available to each local school board model policies and procedures, based on peer-reviewed scientific sources, pertaining to the selection of instructional materials on climate change and environmental literacy, including a requirement for any such selected material to accurately portray changes in weather and climate patterns over time, the impacts of human activity on changes in weather and climate patterns, and the effects of climate change on people and resources.
Posted in Education (K-12), Energy, Environment, General Assembly
Tagged Stephen D. Haner
by James A. Bacon
The “fixation” of modern-day Israelis on the Holocaust has become a “vast and ugly fig leaf” hiding oppression of Palestinians and giving Israelis license to brush aside moral qualms about their response to the October 7 terror attacks, Brown University historian Omer Bartov told an audience of 60 or so people Tuesday at the University of Virginia.
In vowing to “never again” let Jews fall prey to genocidal extermination, Israelis indulge in “self-victimization,” “self pity,” and “self righteousness,” said Bartov, an Israeli-born Jew who has built his academic career around the study of the Holocaust and genocide. “It’s not a condition conducive to understanding, toleration, and reconciliation.”
The lecture, entitled, “The Never Again Syndrome: Uses and Misuses of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Global Politics,” was one in a series of events billed by UVA leadership as broadening understanding of the Middle East conflict. The lecture series is an outgrowth of the tension between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups at UVA. Jewish students have complained of a hostile environment that leaves them afraid to speak out or even openly identify as Jews. In a parallel initiative, the Ryan administration created a religious diversity task force to understand how Jewish and Muslim students, faculty and staff “experience life on Grounds.” Continue reading
NOAA Right Whale status graphic, updated this month to report 123 recent deaths and injuries.
By Steve Haner
A coalition of public interest groups has now filed its expected lawsuit seeking to halt construction of Dominion Energy Virginia’s offshore wind facility off Virginia Beach. Its key complaint is the federal permits were issued without a full and fair evaluation of the potential impact of the turbines on the shrinking North Atlantic Right Whale population.
The Heartland Institute, based in Illinois, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, with offices in Washington, D.C. and the National Legal and Policy Center of Falls Church, along with two individuals, are the listed plaintiffs. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and federal office holders are among the named defendants, along with Dominion.
The 61-page complaint to a District of Columbia federal court seeks relief under the Endangered Species Act. It claims the law requires the federal government to study the combined impact of all the planned East Coast wind projects, from New England waters down to North Carolina’s outer banks. Instead, the federal permitting authorities to date have looked at individual projects without regard to cumulative effects when issuing wildlife impact opinions and permits.
From the article on the CFACT website: Continue reading
Posted in Courts and law, Energy, Environment, Utilities
Tagged CVOW, Dominion, Stephen D. Haner
by Jerome Woehrle
“Marriage fundamentalism” promotes “white supremacy,” according to a professor at Virginia’s largest university.
“Marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy,” wrote George Mason University Professor Bethany Letiecq in the Journal of Marriage and Family. “Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family.”
Letiecq, an official of the American Association of University Professors, says she employs “critical family theorizing … to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages [white heteropatriarchal nuclear families] and marginalizes others as a function of marriage fundamentalism.”
Letiecq says the government has coerced “its citizens to enter into an institution built upon White heteropatriarchal supremacy.” Letiecq says marriage as an institution has allowed white heterosexual couples “to gain access to benefits, rights, and protections.”
She lives with her partner and their children in what she describes as “a committed heterosexual union outside the institution of marriage.” Letiecq claims that only White heterosexual couples reap the social and financial benefits of marriage subsidized by the government while minority Americans do not gain any such benefits.
Continue reading
By Steve Haner
Pick any member of the General Assembly at random, stop them in the grocery store for a chat, and quiz them about the digital sales tax they approved a week ago Saturday. It will quickly become clear that most had no idea what they were voting for when they approved it.
What will the tax add to the cost of your Amazon Prime or Netflix? (For most, 6-7%.) Will the tax be collected on both the monthly fee and on anything extra you download? (Yes) Will it add to the cost of preparing your tax to file online, your annual lease for Microsoft programs on your laptop or your security system program? (Yes, most digitally-based services will all be taxable to individuals, and many of them will be taxable to businesses. If you are doing something on a computer or phone that costs money, it is likely to become taxable.)
Even for a business, if some software package its employees use includes a combination of online services, will it owe tax on the entire package? (Yes, unless the vendor is willing to break apart the bill, which many may refuse to do. That is because of the new language about taxing bundled services.) If an out of state vendor does not add tax to the invoice, taxpayers will be required to calculate and pay it as a use tax, with auditors ready to pounce if they don’t.
Think of engineering, law, banking, or medicine. So many of their processes are now controlled by expensive software, most of which is about to be 6-7% more expensive. At the shipyard in Newport News, paper blueprints and printed job instructions were replaced with tablets and digital design programs years ago. Continue reading
Posted in Budgets, Business and Economy, General Assembly, Taxes
Tagged Stephen D. Haner
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
One of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s top priorities has been to extricate the Commonwealth from participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). One of the top priorities of the Democrat-controlled General Assembly has been ensuring that the Commonwealth participates in RGGI.
For those readers unfamiliar with the purposes of RGGI and how it functions, along with the pros and cons of membership, those topics have been covered extensively in this blog. See here, here, and here. This article will focus on the constitutional struggle between the governor and the legislature.
Brief legislature history
In 2020, the General Assembly authorized the director of the Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to establish a market-based energy allowances trading program and the Governor to include the Commonwealth in RGGI. The Air Pollution Control Board (“the Board”) and the Governor exercised their authority to act, and Virginia became a RGGI participant on Jan.1, 2021.
When he took office in 2022, among the first executive orders issued by Gov. Younkin was one directing the DEQ director and the Board to begin taking steps to end Virginia’s participation in RGGI. The Board adopted the final repeal of the RGGI regulations in July 2023, to be effective at the end of the year. Environmental groups sued and those suits are still pending in court.
The next stage of this saga came as the new Democratic majority in the 2024 General Assembly adopted language in the budget bill prohibiting the use of state funds to “impede” the state from rejoining the RGGI and directing all relevant agencies to take steps to immediately rejoin the RGGI and continue participation. Although some Democrat legislators and environmentalists believe the language is vulnerable to a gubernatorial veto, court precedents and recent actions would augur a more favorable outlook on their account. Continue reading
The population of Virginia’s state and federal prisons posted a 10.5% decline between 2021 and 2022 — the largest drop of any state, according to new Department of Justice data. Oregon saw the second largest decline at 5.2%. Many states saw increases in their prison populations, as reported by WRIC news.
The total prison population for Virginia in 2022 was 27,162. The numbers do not include inmates of local jails.
The fall-off in prison population was especially marked among females — 18%. The DOJ report did not break down state-by-state prison populations by race.
With the exception of drug offenses, which declined, the crime rate per 100,000 population increased in almost all categories in 2022, according to the Virginia State Police “2022 Crime in Virginia” report.
— JAB
