Category: Governance
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Northam Administration Information Technology Failures Continue
Help! WJLA is reporting that the State of Virginia is using a 35-year-old computer system to process unemployment checks. The system has buckled, leaving 70,000 Virginians without their unemployment benefits. In a stunning admission, Bill Walker, Director of Unemployment Insurance with the Virginia Employment Commission says, “We are right at the first of July now”…
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Shortage of Health Facilities Inspectors Puts All Virginians at Risk
by James C. Sherlock I have been the single fiercest public critic of the Virginia Department of Health in general and its Office of Licensure and Certification (OLC) in particular. I have been particularly critical of OLC’s inspections of nursing homes. We need them to do better, and they agree. This essay will report what…
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Part III – Questions raised by Attorney General Herring’s Loudoun County Schools Determination
by James C. Sherlock The citizens of Loudoun and LCPS need to understand all the implications of the Attorney General’s determination. This essay will offer questions that I sincerely recommend that LCPS pose to the Attorney General in order to get enough information to decide what to do. The AG’s office was given 60 days…
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Herring’s Academies of Loudoun Ruling – Part I – Only Cure for Disparate Impact is Fewer Asians
by James C. Sherlock I just finished reading the 61-page “Final Determination of the Office of Attorney General Division of Human Rights in DHR Case No.: 19-2652, NAACP Loudoun Branch v. Loudoun County Public Schools.” The first thing I discovered is that the Democrats in the last session created a kangaroo court within the Attorney…
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Belly Flops Make a Splash – Virginia Attacks on School Quality Gain National Attention
by James C. Sherlock The Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed today, the first four words of which were “Attorney General Mark Herring.” No picture of the AG, so I offer one here, but they spelled his name right. so perhaps it will be Senator Herring or President Herring one day soon. Unfortunately, the next…
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Mark Herring’s Worst Thanksgiving – Conspiracy Against EVMS may lead to Federal Involvement
by James C. Sherlock Scandals are sometimes overrated. Not this one. I have reported here before on the strange case of the EVMS-ODU merger. I posted here on Nov 1, Nov 2 and Nov 3 with my own concerns on the subject. Many of my assessments came to fruition. On November 13 and 20, the Checks…
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Governor Northam: Do You Believe in Miracles?
by DJ Rippert Come out with your masks on, we’ve got you surrounded. COVID-19 new cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise in Virginia. However, the situation is not as dire in Virginia as elsewhere in the United States (see graphic above). At 229 new cases per million people Virginia is well below all neighboring jurisdictions.…
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The Failure of University Governance
by James A. Bacon In his new book co-authored with Richard J. Cebula, “Runaway College Costs,” James V. Koch goes beyond the usual lamentations about how out-of-control costs are making colleges and universities increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible to millions of Americans. He describes how higher-ed governing boards have largely failed in their fiduciary duty to…
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U.S. Supreme Court Must Limit Virginia’s Gubernatorial Authority in Emergencies
by James C. Sherlock Kerry Daugherty, as is her want, posted a particularly compelling essay today. The most important thing Kerry wrote was: “Please let there be another lawsuit. And let it get to the Supreme Court…. Seems only the courts can save us from these tyrants.” She is absolutely right. Article IV of the United…
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Virginia’s Government – a Critique
by James C. Sherlock At the age of 75 with a life of experience in and with government, I will offer here my assessment of the current structural problems in our state government that make that government significantly less efficient and effective than it should be. You will note that these comments generally do…
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Higher Education and Economic Mobility
Virginia’s top public universities are largely stratified by socioeconomic status. Consider the following statistics that appear in the new book by James V. Koch and Richard J. Cebula, “Runaway College Costs: How College Governing Boards Fail to Protect their Students.” At the College of William & Mary only 13.6% of the student body comes from…
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Anti-Bias Training… or Government-Mandated Indoctrination?
by James A. Bacon In September President Trump issued an executive order banning bias and diversity training in the federal government that inculcates divisive concepts such as the idea that some people, by virtue of their race or sex, are inherently racist, sexist or oppressive. Three days ago, Virginia’s attorney general, Mark Herring, joined a…
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Fairfax School Board Should Focus on Schools, Not Environmental Policy
by Emilio Jaksetic Not content with running the county’s public school system, the Fairfax County School Board now is involved with developing strategies and recommendations for county environmental policy. The results can be seen in the Final Report of the Oct. 1, 2020, Fairfax County Joint Environmental Task Force (JET). In April 2019, the JET…
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The University of Virginia Eastern Virginia Medical School
by James C. Sherlock With additional information and thoughts generated by responses to my original posts on this matter, I offer this post as a final proposal before the November 15 release of the Sentara-funded “study” of what I call the Sentara Plan for Eastern Virginia Medical school. The nation is short of doctors and…
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Voters, Consider the Fate of the Bill of Rights
by James C. Sherlock Before voters go to the polls on Tuesday, I think it a useful exercise to consider the future of the Bill of Rights with a Supreme Court “expanded,” as promised by Democrats if they control the Presidency and the Senate, to provide a leftist majority. To enable that reflection, it is…