Virginia politicians are back in the news.

Daniel Horowitz reports in Conservative Review,

Virginians might have dodged the bullet of a mass gun control bill, but lest some think sanity has been restored to the Virginia legislature, the same Democrat politicians relentlessly promoting restrictions on self-defense for law-abiding citizens are pushing for release of violent criminals. One major bill is now headed to Governor Ralph Northam’s desk.

On Monday, Virginia’s Senate passed HB35, which offers early release to juveniles serving a life sentence without parole once they have already served 20 years. This is a growing trend in a lot of liberal states, but a number of Republicans have bought into this radical idea of retroactively abolishing life without parole for juvenile murderers. This bill will potentially offer release for over 700 people sentenced to life as juveniles, according to liberal activists supporting the bill.

...Moreover, this is not just about juvenile murderers. The bipartisan Left in this country doesn’t believe in the concept of incarceration, and leftists are now seeking to dismantle life sentencing for adult murderers as well. As I reported in January, the Virginia Senate passed the Orwellian-named “Geriatric prisoners; conditional release” bill, which would release, in most cases, anyone who is 55 years of age or older and has served at least 15 years or anyone who is 50 years of age or older and has served at least 20 years of the sentence imposed. Most murderers and rapists would be eligible. The bill passed the Senate along party lines, making it all but certain to pass the House, where Democrats enjoy a larger majority.

Read more here.

Promoting a self-invented phantom enemy

Violent Extremism. Remember those words. Memorize them like "Hope and Change." Those are the "in" words in Washington this week. Mark Steyn gets it:

"Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to "the fabric of our country" for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody's fabric but instead tends to unravel it - as it's doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.

But President Obama knows better than you. So he organized a summit dedicated to creating and promoting a self-invented phantom enemy.

...We are at war with a depraved enemy, but we cannot be allowed to assert our moral superiority even to head-choppers, rapists, slavers and immolators. Thus the priority of Barack ("Hey, how 'bout those Crusades?") Obama has been to undermine our sense of probity, and make us not merely equivalent to but worse than our enemies. That was the purpose of this last week of Official Lies.

Read more here