Author: James A. Bacon
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A Radical Proposal for School Reopening: Let Kids Go to School Full Time
by James A. Bacon There are no easy answers to the question of how to open up Virginia’s public schools next month during the COVID-19 epidemic. While all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that the risk to school children of contracting and spreading the virus is low, the story is different for teachers, especially older…
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Virginia’s Special Session: Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure
by Kerry Dougherty Get ready, Virginia. Bad things are brewing in Richmond. On Friday, Gov. Ralph Northam announced that he was bringing the General Assembly back for a special session on August 18. Lucky us. The mischief that the far-left majority — bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg — could get into should alarm every moderate Virginian.…
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New Regions Won’t Fix Ignoring the Obvious
by Carol J. Bova Governor Ralph Northam opened his July 14 press conference with statements on the increase in cases of the COVID-19 virus in Virginia. “We have not seen the spikes that some other states are now seeing, but we’re seeing some troubling numbers and an increase in cases largely out of the Hampton…
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What If We Ran Grocery Stores Like Public Schools?
by James A. Bacon Imagine our food distribution system worked like our public schools do. Prompted by that very question in a Reason article comparing how private schools are responding differently to the COVID-19 virus than public schools, I began thinking what a public grocery system would look like. The food would be “free,” except…
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Law and Disorder in Richmond
When several dozen protesters assembled in front of Richmond City Councilwoman Kimberly Gray’s house around 10:30 Wednesday night, she feared for her safety. She called the Richmond Police Department, as did some of her neighbors. Gray says the police never responded. The RPD says it did. “I didn’t see any uniformed officers, my neighbors didn’t…
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Bacon Bits: COVID-19 Heroes and Villains
Somebody’s got to do it. Linda Echols has driven school buses for Pittsylvania County for 48 years. At 75 years old, she’s at elevated risk of contracting the COVID-19 virus. She is concerned about her safety when the school year starts back up this summer, but worries more about her students. In marked contrast to…
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Richmond City Council Debates Police Defunding
by James A. Bacon Richmond City Council has taken up discussion of the demand by social-justice protesters to “defund the police.” Richmond is not Minneapolis, or Portland, or Seattle, and the three-person finance committee charged with making funding recommendations for the full council has split the baby. Instead of full defunding, the committee supports asking…
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Teachers Are Afraid to Return to Their Classrooms
by Kerry Dougherty We all knew this was coming. In fact, I suggested last month that if you have kids in local public schools you should quickly enroll them in Catholic or other private schools before those filled and your kids would be stuck trying to learn online. (Some of these institutions have scholarships available.) Most private…
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The Opportunity Agenda: K-12 Vouchers
by James A. Bacon The fastest, quickest, most sure-fire way to eliminate “structural racism” in Virginia’s public education system is to empower parents financially to find alternatives to failing public schools. Let’s crunch a few numbers. This fiscal year, 2021, the General Assembly has allocated a bit more than $7 billion in direct aid to…
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Bacon Bits: Purges, Clickbait, and Drunkenness
Pushing back against the New York Slimes. Liberty University is suing the New York Times for defamation, accusing the paper of crafting a “clickbait” story intended to create the erroneous impression that there was a COVID-19 outbreak on the school’s campus this spring, reports the News & Advance. The lawsuit says that reporter Elizabeth Williamson…
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More Fallout from the COVID Shutdown
by James A. Bacon A least 5.4 million Americans lost their medical insurance when they lost their jobs to the COVID-19 epidemic between February and May, says Attorney General Mark R. Herring in a press release issued today. In Virginia, he adds, it is estimated that 14% of adults lack health insurance. Nine hundred thousand…
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Galuszka Dissects Dominion’s ACP Decision
Bacon’s Rebellion contributor Peter Galuszka discusses Dominion Energy and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline on the Bold Dominion podcast.
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Northam’s COVID Conference
by Kerry Dougherty Well, I sat through another Ralph Northam press conference Tuesday eager to hear if any reporter – just one – would ask the governor if maybe, just perhaps, the uptick in Covid cases in Tidewater might be linked to recent protests. I mean it’s possible, isn’t it? After all, the positive tests…
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Uncertain Times, Uncertain Leadership
by Shaun Kenney You have to give Governor Ralph Northam the tiniest bit of credit. Not only did he survive wearing blackface or wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood (we still don’t know which) but he has done just about everything possible to present himself as the only governor who is also a doctor of…
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Lane’s “Anti-Racism” Revolution in Virginia Schools
by James A. Bacon If you want to know how the Northam administration is transforming Virginia public schools, don’t bother reading the newspapers. They might report on local controversies, but they don’t come close to recounting the wholesale changes taking place under the rubric of social justice. To find out what is going on, subscribe…