🔎 Good morning, RVA: Medium COVID-19 level, exciting primary news, and collective bargaining

Good morning, RVA! It’s 36 °F, and yesterday was too freaking gloomy. Today, though, we can expect sunshine, highs in the 50s, and a great opening to the—at least for me—long-awaited weekend. In fact, NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says today is the verified best weather day of the week. Get out there and enjoy it!
 

Water cooler

As of last night, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield continue to have medium CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 86, 152, and 128, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 11.2. If the third straight week at a medium level does not convince you to take a few extra measures to keep you and yours healthy, maybe reading the latest post by Katelyn Jetelina about longcovid will do the trick. 16 million working-age Americans have longcovid and it will have a total economic cost of about $3.7 trillion. Your risk of getting longcovid is about twice that of being permanently injured in a car crash (1-in-370 compared to 1-in-700). Luckily, getting vaccinated not only helps prevent you from getting COVID original, but studies have show that vaccinated people are less likely to get longcovid, too. Double lucky, at least for babies, everyone aged six months and older is now eligible for not only a COVID-19 vaccine but one of the new, bivalent vaccines that also protects against the omicron variant. If you haven’t yet for some reason, make a plan this weekend to get everyone in your immediate sphere of influence boosted and keep your holidays healthy.
 

Exciting news about next week’s Firehouse Primary to fill Virginia’s 4th Congressional District seat: Delegate Lamont Bagby has suspended his campaign and endorsed Senator Jennifer McClellan. Bagby’s not the only one to endorse the senator, though, and you can read through her list of more than 75 endorsements (and counting!) here. McClellan has done the seemingly impossible and found something that the Mayor, a majority of City Council, and a majority of the School Board will all agree on—herself! If you live in the 4th, you can (and should, because there will be other candidates on the ballot) vote for Senator McClellan on Tuesday, between 6:00 AM and 7:00 PM at one of eight location around the region.
 

A while back, the RPS School Board voted to give District employees the right to collectively bargain, and, as of last night, RPS and the Richmond Education Association reached their first-ever collective bargaining agreements. RPS Superintendent Kamras has some of the specifics in his newsletter from last night. At least from this perspective, it seems like the process was a success—maybe something that the City can model whenever they get around to kicking off their own collective bargaining.
 

Yesterday, the Governor released his proposed budget amendments. You can read the press release here and, perhaps more interestingly, read through the actual amendments here. Youngkin’s $230 million proposed behavioral health and substance abuse plan headlines the list, followed by tax cuts, a bunch of cop stuff, and some significant investments in “resiliency and the Chesapeake Bay.” Of course, as always, the warm and fluffy world described in a press release is often miles apart from the cold, harsh reality of a budget. If you’re looking for something closer to the latter, Graham Moomaw and Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury have a good early look at Governor’s proposal.
 

Remember just yesterday when I was like, “hmmm maybe keep an eye on the situation at the jail”? Well, WTVR’s Tyler Layne reports that “after Richmond officials put a spotlight on safety concerns at the Richmond City Jail, Sheriff Antionette Irving’s office polygraph tested at least two deputies, multiple sources told CBS 6. Sources said the sheriff’s office attempted to find out which jail officers have been leaking information from inside the jail to members of the public and the press.” What the heck! That doesn’t seem appropriate at all.
 

This morning’s longread

Elon Musk Is a Far-Right Activist

I know, I know, another boring article about Elon Musk and Twitter—I still can’t help myself. This article, Musk’s recent anti-trans and COVID-denialism tweets, and his recent banning of reporters has convinced me to begin a transition away from using the platform as a news source. What took so long, right? Moving forward, I’ll try my best to avoid linking to tweets in this email (not always possible, see previous link). I still don’t know where to go for the type of first-person, live, breaking-news information that ends up on Twitter, but I hope it’s something we’ll figure out together (and soon).
 

The hypocrisy at the center of Musk’s Twitter tenure is crucial to the understanding of Musk’s political activism. He has championed ideals of free-speech maximalism and amnesty to those who’ve offended his rules. Twitter, under his management, has let back on organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; neo-Nazis such as Andrew Anglin; and January 6–investigation personalities such as Roger Stone. At the same time, Twitter has suspended accounts that have mocked Musk or expressed left-leaning views. Whether intentionally or not, Musk has, in effect, been governing Twitter using the classic Frank Wilhoit maxim: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Put differently, the billionaire has been advancing a long-running right-wing political project described recently by my colleague Adam Serwer as a “belief in a new constitutional right. Most important, this new right supersedes the free-speech rights of everyone else: the conservative right to post.”
 

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Picture of the Day

Deeply ready for a drier winter.