En route from visiting my grandson in college in Kentucky, I stopped at Breaks Interstate Park.   I will save a discussion of the park for another post, but, in the meantime, this vehicle was parked at one of the overlooks.  I immediately thought that WayneS, one of the active BR participants, would appreciate it ..read more

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Before folks got carried away with sarcasm and “I told you so”, it would have been best to examine a few facts regarding the ranking by U.S. News and World Report of the Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology (TJ): The ranking fell to fifth last year. The data for that ranking pre-dated the change in the admission process for TJ. The changes in the admissions process were adopted in 2020 and were first effective for the class entering in the fall of 2021. Those students would be juniors this year. Next, it is worthwhile to examine the criteria used by U.S. News: College readines ..read more

by Kerry Dougherty  Hire more traffic cops. At the very least hire Virginia companies to fleece Virginia drivers. That’s the advice I have for Chesapeake and Suffolk, where instead of sending cops with radar guns out to catch speeders, they’ve hired out-of-state vendors with cameras. Worse, according to attorney and former Del. Tim Anderson, who’s filed suit to stop the practice, the cities allow the vendors – did I mention they were out-of-state? – to impersonate cities when collecting fines. Anderson says the cameras are cropping up all over the commonwealth. He’s handling two local cas ..read more

Score a big victory for “equity.” The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, ranked the top high school in the country by U.S. News & World Report two years ago, has fallen to 14th place, tweets the Coalition for TJ. TJ had been the center of an admissions controversy after progressives, who found it scandalous that 70% of the school’s students were of Asian ethnic origin, rejiggered its admissions criteria to make it more demographically diverse. The revised policy, which did succeed in increasing the admission of Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, survived legal challenges ..read more

by Kerry Dougherty I can’t be the only Virginia Beach taxpayer sick of watching my real estate taxes climb every year while the city council wastes money on pricey gimmicks like “free” Tesla rides for residents and visitors to the city. For two years we’ve picked up the tab for a small fleet of Teslas to be summoned to haul swells and drunks around the oceanfront. The first year, the misnamed “Freebee” program cost taxpayers $500,000. Last year the project cost $1.3 million. According to city officials, 52% of riders who were too cheap to call a cab or Uber were visitors, while 48% were ..read more

by James A. Bacon Natalie J. Perry, who now leads the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion program at UCLA, plagiarized long passages in her PhD dissertation at UVA, allege Luke Rosiak and Christopher F. Rufo in The Daily Wire. In describing the plagiarism in Perry’s dissertation, “Faculty Perceptions of Diversity at a Highly Selective Research-Intensive University,” Rosiak and Rufo write: An analysis of the paper found it ridden with the worst sort of plagiarism, reproducing large swaths of text directly from several other authors, without citations. The scale of the plagiarism suggests that Pe ..read more

Credit: Cardinal News by Dick Hall-Sizemore For all those readers who complain that Northern Virginia gets screwed by state funding formulas, Dwight Yancey of Cardinal News has provided an eye-opening rejoinder. Many rural counties have been hit disproportionately hard by the new calculations for the local composite index used to determine the local share of the costs of basic aid for schools. The main driver in these increases has been significant increases in the total value of real estate in those counties. Many of them have become havens for folks leaving urban areas for the rural countr ..read more

by Jock Yellott  Speaking off-the-cuff at a Charlottesville/Albemarle Bar Association lunch on April 18, 2024, Senator Creigh Deeds offered some pointed remarks about Governor Youngkin. The Governor and the General Assembly had just the day before agreed to scrap the budget and the Governor’s proposed amendments and start over from scratch in May, averting a crisis.  Youngkin’s more than 200 proposed budget amendments are evidence of a CEO mentality, Deeds observed. Compared to other governors the Senator has worked with, this one seems disengaged from the political process.   S ..read more