Tag: James A. Bacon
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Things that Work — Virginia Department of Elections and the Virginia Beach Registrar’s Office
by James C. Sherlock Sometimes, government offices are better than you can imagine. My wife and I cast early ballots on Thursday. We went to the Virginia Beach Director of Elections office at the Municipal Center. Everything about the experience was great, and better than it needed to be. Now, an interruption in a communication…
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Is This a Wise Expenditure or Not?
A news release from the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission touts the the fact that it’s Commuter Choice transit program, funded by tolls on the Interstate 66, Interstate 94 and Interstate 395 corridors, has eliminated 3.5 million single-occupancy vehicle trips over five years. Wow, 3.5 million trips sounds significant. But, wait. That’s only 700,000 trips per…
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Enrollment Winners and Losers
by James A. Bacon The fall 2022-23 enrollment numbers are in for Virginia’s institutions of higher education. Collectively, the state’s public colleges and universities held their own in a year in which enrollment continued to decline nationally. The community colleges staunched their bleeding after a couple of years of severe losses, keeping numbers stable, while…
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Coming Soon to a School Near You: “Equitable Grading”
by James A. Bacon The inexorable logic of “equity” has come to the dispensing of grades in Virginia public schools. Having effectively abandoned the hard work of raising the educational achievement of minority students, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is lowering standards — implementing “equitable grading” practices in order to combat “institutional bias” and eliminate…
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Virginia as Tech Worker Paradise?
There is good news and bad news in a recent ranking of the best places in the U.S. “to work in tech” by Zurich, Switzerland-based SmallPDF, a company that converts PDF files to Word files. The good news is that Virginia ranks at the top of the list. From the press release: The research found…
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The Shockley-Goldsby Debate: The Rest of the Story
by James A. Bacon In August The Cavalier Daily ignited a furor over Bert Ellis, a conservative businessman whom Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors. In a lengthy article, the student newspaper detailed Ellis’ role, as a tri-committee chairman of the University Union, in bringing Nobel Prize winner William…
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Graph of the Day: Virginia CO2 Emissions
For the record: Virginia’s electric utility sector reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 43% between 2010 and 2020. Globally, CO2 emissions continued to increase during that decade. The vast majority of the decline can be attributed to the shift from coal- to gas-fired generation. As of December 2021, only 3% of the state’s power supply…
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Disabilities and Discipline
by James A. Bacon The American Institutes for Research has published a review of the Fairfax County Public Schools special-education programs for students with disabilities. Here’s the lead paragraph of The Washington Post: “Students with disabilities in Fairfax County Public Schools are more likely than their peers without disabilities to be suspended and to fail…
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Youngkin Energy Plan Restores Emphasis on Cost and Reliability
by James A. Bacon Virginia’s energy policy needs to establish a better balance between cost, reliability, and environmental sustainability, says the Commonwealth of Virginia’s 2022 Energy Plan. In practice, that means backing off rigid timelines to achieve a net zero carbon electric grid and investing in emerging technologies such as hydrogen, carbon capture, and small…
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How to Think About Monuments
by James A. Bacon The conservative movement in Virginia faces a huge dilemma: how to build a “big tent” political coalition that is welcoming to African Americans and other minorities while resisting the cultural cleansing of everyone associated, however remotely, with the Civil War, slaveholding or segregation — including founding fathers of the republic such…
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The Greens, Their Quiet Partners, and Trains
by James C. Sherlock I love trains. Always have. Took my first train ride at a very young age with my mother and brother from D.C. to Birmingham to visit mom’s family. After the Navy, my private sector work was based in McLean. I had regular business in New York I took Amtrak whenever feasible.…
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Scandal in Virginia Not-for-Profit Hospital Reported by the NY Times – Regional Perspectives
by James C. Sherlock Sometimes my subscription to The New York Times pays off. This is one of those times. The subtitle on the Times story is: Bon Secours Mercy Health, a major nonprofit health system, used the poverty of Richmond Community Hospital’s patients to tap into a lucrative federal drug program. It is a blockbuster…
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GMU Rebates Tuition Increase Students
by James A. Bacon George Mason University, the last holdout among Virginia’s public universities in freezing tuition for in-state undergraduate students this year, has announced that it will rebate this year’s 3% tuition increase. Now all 15 public colleges in Virginia have acceded to a request by Governor Glenn Youngkin to forebear on raising tuition…
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Bacon Bits: Signs of the Times
I identify as a rattlesnake. The Department of Motor Vehicles has issued approximately 5,600 drivers licenses and other forms of identification with a “nonbinary” identification since an enabling law went into effect July 1, 2020, reports the Virginia Mercury. “For decades the government put lots of people in boxes in lots of ways,” said the…
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Graph of the Day: Maternal Mortality
by James A. Bacon When writing about “systemic racism” in health care, journalists routinely cite the disparity in health outcomes between White and Black Women. Here in Virginia, the maternal death rate per 100,000 for Black women in 2018 was 37.3 — nearly twice the rate of 14.9 for White women. The disparity has grown…