Life under the Regency category archive

The Regent lawyers up.

Video below the fold because it autoplays.

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The Regent goes national.

Via The Richmonder.

I can’t say I’m a big fan of Al Sharpton, but this item about The Regent is too good to pass:

The governor’s argument seems to be that there was no quid pro quo.

At most, there was quid pro amateur.

Virginia has eliminated state income tax refund checks in favor of debit cards.

When my mother’s accountant was preparing her final tax returns, she (the accountant) called me for bank information; she told me that direct deposit was preferable to the debit cards because the accounting firm’s clients had been having “no end of problems” with the debit cards. According to her, one of the problems is that some merchants are refusing to accept the cards. (What about people who don’t have bank accounts? Apparently, they are stuck.)

The writer of this letter to the editor of the Roanoke Times outlines some more of the problems.

It’s difficult to see how this was anything but yet another “privatization” scam to skim public funds into corporate coffers while providing poorer service for more-er money.

Governor McDonnell has the wedding bell blues.

Via The Richmonder.

Virginia prepares to throw its adjunct (read, “underpaid and exploited”) professors to the wolves.

A “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” need not apply.

Unlike salaried faculty, adjunct teachers are paid a set fee per credit hour taught. They are considered part-time workers. But in practice, many work the equivalent of a full-time job.

Adjuncts have proliferated in Virginia, in no small part because they’re cheap: A typical adjunct who teaches a full course load year-round, including summers, earns about $25,000 a year – barely above the federal poverty level for a family of four.

Adjunct teachers are being snagged by Gov. Bob McDonnell’s decision to limit part-time state workers to a maximum of 29 hours a week. The reason: The federal Affordable Care Act requires that employees working 30 hours a week or more receive health care benefits, which by one estimate could cost Virginia more than $100 million a year.

(snip)

“I have colleagues with Ph.D.s who moonlight at restaurants to get health insurance or, in some cases, have no health insurance at all,” she (Sarah Williams-Tolliver–ed.) said.

’nuff said.

Cianti Stewart-Reid addresses Virginia Attorney-General Ken Cuccinelli’s crusade to keep them wimmen folk barefoot, pregnant, and under control. A nugget:

Despite all this, Cuccinelli’s crusade continues. Earlier this year, he compared his fight against the birth control benefit to the civil rights struggle led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and argued that opponents of no co-pay birth control should be willing to “go to jail” to fight the law. Furthermore, in his book, “The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty,” he makes no apologies for his anti-women’s health record and agenda and instead attacks laws requiring insurers to cover certain kinds of health care – such as preventive care for women – likening them to forced food purchases. He repeatedly calls the birth control benefit the “sterilization mandate.”

I grew up on Pine View Farm in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, the bit of land that makes the Chesapeake a bay.

Shoremen do not forget the Shore. It is part of us wherever we go.

You know the peninsula.

It’s the one that Virginia Tech left off its map of Virginia on its helmets for one game many years ago. (For only one game. The Eastern Shore alumni–and they are many–were not happy. They protested with their wallets. Virginia Tech may not remember, but we do.)

The world is divided into two parts.

The Shore and “across the bay.”

You are from one or from the other.

We always joked, “Virginia forgets about us except for taxes and elections.”

The Shore has two counties, Accomack and Northampton. (Southampton is on the Western Shore, that is, “across the bay.” We used to play them in high school sports. It was a damned long drive in a school bus to get to the games with the cheerleaders in the back of the bus and no canoodling–too many kids for canoodling and I would have missed out on any canoodling anyway. Dammit. If I knew then what I know now . . . . oh, never mind.)

Accomack is on fire.

This was one public-private partnership we don’t need.

Virginia has rejected unsolicited bids by two companies to operate a state facility that detains violent sex offenders for treatment after their sentences are completed.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that state officials who evaluated the proposals concluded that GEO Group, a private prisons operator based in Boca Raton, Fla., focused too much on incarceration and not enough on treatment. Liberty Healthcare Corp. of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., scored better on treatment but would have charged the state $2.4 million a year more than it is spending to run the facility itself.

They work out so well. Like the one to fix potholes in my area’s roads rather than having the highway department employees do it themselves and do it right, as they used to when I spent a summer working for the highway department back in the days of bench seats and no seatbelts:

Siddiqi said he knew motion would quickly break apart any patch poured over it and told as much to a manager. The debris needed to be cut out to make way for a clean, lasting fix, but that was never done while he was there, he said. Instead, Siddiqi ended up patching the hole seven or eight times in six months, he recalled.

“It’s more about filling holes than trying to fill them properly,” Siddiqi said about what he witnessed while working for TME from early 2009 to June 2011.

Two other former employees and one still with the company gave similar accounts of the time they spent maintaining the interstates in South Hampton Roads for TME. They described an operation that often cut corners to save money and relied on aging equipment that frequently broke down.

Much more privatization wonderfulness at the link.

The Commander Guy has the latest.

Additional comment superfluous.

The thousands of unmarried Virginia couples who are living together would no longer be breaking the law under legislation advanced by a House committee.

The House Courts of Justice Committee on Friday unanimously approved Sen. Adam Ebbin’s bill repealing Virginia’s 136-year-old law against what the state calls “lewd and lascivious cohabitation.”

Virginia Governor Bob McDonald has a bizarre plan to fix Virginia’s chronically underfunded highways (underfunded because raising the gas tax is verboten in Virginia, though the gas tax is one of the lowest in the country, having been lowered by Republicans), by eliminating the gas tax, raising the sales tax, and imposing a special tax on owners of hybrids.

I can’t quite figure out the reasoning behind it, other than legacy! innovative thinking! ground-breaking! Plus, it’s deeply regressive, skewing more taxes towards those who have the least.

Maybe Dan Casey of the Roanoke Times can help make sense of it.

The same sort of thing is going on in other places ruled by the party of the takers Republicans.

There is no honor amongst thieves. Or amongst the Virginia Republican Party.

My local rag’s news story here.

It’s the one on the right, the road for persons who want to buy stuff without paying for it.