Author: James A. Bacon
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Governor Northam, Crack Down on Nursing Homes, Not Restaurants
By Carol J. Bova Last week Julie Henderson, director of the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) Office of Environmental Health Services, said her agency was going to request $6 million for 92 positions to educate the public and businesses about executive orders and how to enforce them. If there is $6 million available for enforcement…
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A College-Student Bill of Rights
by James A. Bacon College students should be reimbursed if they don’t receive the full benefits they pay for in tuition, fees, room, and board, declares the Partners for College Affordability and Public Trust. “COVID-19 has illuminated the long over-due need for basic consumer protections for those who are struggling to pay for the cost…
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Closing the Digital Divide More Imperative than Ever
by James A. Bacon As K-12 schools, community colleges and universities shift ever more learning online, the so-called “digital divide” — disparate access to high-speed Internet access and computers — is looming as a bigger problem than ever before. A new analysis by the State Council on Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) finds that more…
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Substandard Schooling for All!
by Kerry Dougherty File this under “You just can’t win.” Parents of Fairfax County school children have had enough. For decades these folks were accustomed to excellence in public education. They proudly sat atop the Virginia educational heap. Shoot, Fairfax is home to Thomas Jefferson High School, widely considered the best public high school in…
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Do Summer Camps Warrant Bail-out Funds?
by James A. Bacon A philosophical question to ponder: If the Commonwealth of Virginia shuts down an entire industry by executive order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, what moral obligation does it have to help the businesses survive the epidemic? Literally no industry in Virginia has been more impacted by the emergency…
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As COVID Looms, W&M the Latest to Cut Executive Compensation
by James A. Bacon We won’t know for another week or two, when kids show up on campus, what enrollments will be at Virginia’s colleges and universities. Due to massive uncertainties engendered by the COVID-19 epidemic, no one is sure how many students who committed to attend will appear when dormitories open in the next…
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Saylor Invests a Quarter Billion in “Digital Gold”
It’s one thing for some geeks in a garage to spin up a new Bitcoin currency. It’s another when a sophisticated data-analytics company with nearly a half billion dollars in revenues dives in the cyber-currency. MicroStrategy Inc., one of Northern Virginia’s more prominent IT firms, has invested $250 million from its cash stockpile to purchase…
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UVa Task Force Doubles Down on “Anti-Racism”
by James A. Bacon The University of Virginia’s Racial Equity Task Force has released its final report, recommending 12 initiatives to promote “systemic change” and racial equity, and it’s everything you’d expect it to be. Reflecting the blinkered thinking of the academic Left, the report provides a lot of navel-gazing, virtue-signaling and window dressing while…
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Worthy Cause, Wrong Approach
by James A. Bacon Give Amanda Chase credit for one thing: She knows how to get into the news. Whether the resulting headlines help the Chesterfield state senator win the Republican Party nomination for governor is quite another matter. The latest brouhaha over her refusal to wear a mask in a Harrisonburg restaurant is not…
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Law School Deans Ask for Mandated Anti-Racism Training
by Hans Bader As lawyers like Barack Obama have noted, law school is already a year too long, with lots of nonessential classes. As a result, law students often graduate with over $150,000 in student-loan debt. Yet law students may soon be required to take more unnecessary classes. One hundred and fifty law school deans…
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Everyone Has the Capacity to Be Great
The following post republishes an excerpt from B.K. Fulton’s new book, “The Tale of the Tee: Be Kind and Just Believe.” Fulton, an African-American Christian, entrepreneur and philanthropist, co-wrote the book with Jonathan Blank, who is Jewish, a lawyer and an activist. The two men did not know each other prior to June 14, 2020.…
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Pining for the Days of Hanging Chads
by James A. Bacon It’s been twenty years since the Bush-Gore presidential election that brought the term “hanging chads” into common parlance. But that controversy, which plunged the nation into intense partisan acrimony, was mere dress rehearsal for what could be coming. Thanks to the COVID-19 epidemic, there likely will be an unprecedented volume of…
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Let-Em-Out-of-Jail Policy Ends in Tragedy
by Kerry Dougherty Last spring, at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, Gov. Ralph Northam announced that he wanted to release about 2,000 state prisoners to save them from the pandemic that promised to turn the prisons into COVID-19 killing fields. These would be inmates with less than a year to serve and who were…
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No Equal Justice for Landlords
The Virginia State Supreme Court extended yesterday the judicial moratorium on eviction proceedings for another 28 days. The split decision prompted a blistering rebuke from D. Arthur Kelsey, which L. Steven Emmert summarized yesterday in the post below, republished here from his blog, Virginia Appellate News & Analysis. — JAB Today the court responds to…
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More Evidence Demolishing the Oppression Narrative
by James A. Bacon Hamilton Lombard has posted some fascinating data on the University of Virginia Demographic Research blog, Stat Chat, that illuminates the income gap between whites and blacks. For Lombard’s spin on the data he presents, I suggest that you read his commentary here. It’s different from my take. I wouldn’t say that…