In response to Marc’s post on the DJs’ being fired from Roger Williams’s WQRI, program director Mike Martelli has left the following comment (which I’ve also read his expressing in an email that reached me through a series of forwards):
As the Program Director of WQRI it is my responsibility to determine what content is inappropriate to be aired on the station. After much discussion with the entire air staff I have come to the conclusion that the infamous phrase, “nappy headed ho” should not be repeated over our airwaves. I have given the air staff a lot of freedom with the content of their shows. However, when Dee Jays have pushed the envelope sometimes I have to bring them back to a reasonable level.
At the air staff meeting we discussed the First Amendment issues regarding the Imus phrase. It was at this meeting, which took place on Wednesday April 18th, we discussed whether or not the air staff felt as if they would be censored if I asked them not to repeat the Imus phrase. Mr. Peloso and Mr. Porter were not in attendance. The consensus from the air staff was that there was no problem to the ban. I had to call a special meeting with Jon Porter and Dana Peloso on Monday the 23rd in which I passed on the order. We were all in agreement that the phrase should not be said.
I don’t think that the phrase needed to be said again, especially since the Imus incident had taken place more than 2 weeks prior and was no longer newsworthy. I also felt that phrase could be offensive to some and with WQRI’s FCC license up for renewal I did not want to risk offending the community. We are a music station and we have spent lots of time trying to build up a reputable image with the community and have successfully done so.
The issue here is that the College Republicans have failed to comply with direct orders and station policy. My decision was based on WQRI issues only; my personal beliefs had to stay out of it. It is unfair that the media is pulling my blog posts and taking them out of context. The only reason I chose to suspend and fire Dana Peloso and Jon Porter is their blatant insubordination. The First Amendment was not an issue here as there was an obvious disregard for WQRI policy and leadership.
The accusations that I acted in collaboration with Vice President John King to censor the College Republicans is completely false and completely ridiculous. I have stood against VP King on many occasions and I can describe our relationship as professional but not one of great chemistry. VP King and I have clashed on issues of Student’s Rights and I have consistently stood as an advocate of these Student Rights. The issue with King and the CR’s has been misunderstood. VP King had only mentioned in passing to our General Manager that the content of the show might not be the best to display during the Accepted Students Day, and I completely agree.
VP King never, I repeat never, gave us an order to take any kind of action against Mr. Peloso or Mr. Porter. In fact he never even suggested that anything should happen to the College Republicans. Just because he mentioned that the content was not appropriate for Accepted Student’s day does not mean he wanted us to give the CR’s the Axe. He is an ambassador for the University and he has the right to comment. The comment had nothing to do with my decision. At no time did VP King or any other Administrator tell me what to do.
Jon Porter and Dana Peloso were suspended because of insubordination and have consequently been fired because they did not have the patience to take part in an investigation by the station’s student run executive board. If Jon and Dana let us examine the tape of their show they would also have had time to defend their actions in front of the board. Since they decided to jump the gun and go to the press I am lead to believe that this has little to do with concerns of censorship and has more to do with gaining attention. Jon and Dana mentioned the Imus Phrase more than 30 times in 28 minutes, they did little to actually discuss the first amendment and it was quite clear that Jon and Dana were trying to cause trouble. Their actions were irresponsible and had no journalistic character. This is the reason I have decided to let them go. The University has nothing to do with this decision, it is 100% mine.
Mike Martelli
WQRI Program Director
(401) 254 3282
Programdirector_wqri@hawks.rwu.edu
Personally, I’d be interested to hear the offending tape, myself (and if Porter and Peloso wished, I’d be happy to host a streaming version on Anchor Rising). From what I’ve read so far, although one can argue the merit of each decision leading up to the firing, my impression remains in sync with the instinct with which I received the initial “breaking news” announcement: I worry that coastal conservatives — by necessity a countercultural lot — can too easily be manipulated by attention-seeking yutes. That a particular incident reinforces our beliefs or advances our cause doesn’t mean that we ought uncritically to pounce on it.
It might arouse less suspicion if the students were out in the public offering their own intellectual position and explanation, as Mr. Martelli is, rather than merely pointing to the fact that they’d been canned.
It’s a tricky business responding to the personal anecdotes that opinionists sometimes use in their columns. The reader was not there, for one thing, and it isn’t always evident what emotions the memory revives, for another. But the stories are offered, ostensibly for the purpose of illustrating an important point relevant to current events, and so they would seem fair game for commentary.
The disclaimer thus expressed, this in-my-life anecdote from M.J. Anderson is a doozy:
I WAS AN ELF ONCE. At the campus dining hall where I worked, somebody thought it would be fun if the servers dressed as elves for the Christmas dinner, so we did.
I am hazy now on what our exact duties were. What counts in memory is that a diner in his cups — a large, athletic-looking guy — grabbed me, threw me over his shoulder, yelled “I got one of ’em!” amid a roar of male laughter and marched toward the door.
What counts is that I pounded on him with all I had and it did not matter. Suddenly, I was in a world I did not know. …
As for my dining-hall abductor, he had me out the door and into the night before finally putting me down. What to him was a game was to me an education. I had found myself helpless against force, and never forgot the sensation.
This, we are meant to understand, relates to the ordeal of those Duke lacrosse players who took on the role of evil white males for the mainstream media for more than their promised (or threatened) fifteen minutes. See, M.J. was “put down” — spared the rape, one gathers she means — just as the fellas at Duke had the resources to ensure that they, too, were “put down” — spared wrongful prosecution and sentencing.
To be honest, I’m not sure how this observation should work into and/or unravel Anderson’s parallel, but it seems not insignificant that the reason the elfish M.J. was powerless that evening wasn’t that Mr. Athletic-Looking Guy could have done anything he wanted with her. Surely even some among his roaring peers would have stepped in had she been in any real danger. Rather, the reader mightn’t be presuming too much to wonder whether her powerlessness derived from her inability to sense the joke.
It is precisely the humorless sense that all males — in their cups or otherwise — are potential abductors and rapists that set the scene for the actual and rending violation of those young athletes and, perhaps as bad, lured the unfortunate young woman who made the allegations, lacking the boys’ “strong families and skilled lawyers,” into that overly bright and wasting spotlight from which one is put down only after years of anonymity.
Peggy Noonan gets it exactly right in her recent musing about modern media’s effect on children:
For 50 years in America, whenever the subject has turned to what our culture presents, the bright response has been, “You don’t like it? Change the channel.” But there is no other channel to change to, no safe place to click to. Our culture is national. The terrorizing of children is all over.
We’ve been having discussions, on Anchor Rising, that are related to Noonan’s point in their dealing with the fading distinction between censorship and the encouragement of self-control. There’s so much talk about my right to speak, my right to know, my right to do whatever-the-hell-I-want-to-and-you-better-not-push-your-morals-on-me-buddy. Speak of responsibility, and the reply is likely to be either “don’t you talk to me about responsibility” or “yeah, I wish people would be more responsible, but…” or “I know; I’ve written my legislators about that very issue.” Noonan:
We are not giving the children of our country a stable platform. We are instead giving them a soul-shaking sense that life is unsafe, incoherent, full of random dread. And we are doing this, I think, for three reasons.
One is politics–our political views, our cultural views, so need to be expressed and are, God knows, so much more important than the peace of a child. Another is money–there’s money in the sickness that is sold to us. Everyone who works at a TV network knew ratings would go up when the Cho tapes broke.
But another reason is that, for all our protestations about how sensitive we are, how interested in justice, how interested in the children, we are not. We are interested in politics. We are interested in money. We are interested in ourselves.
Do you get the sense that today’s grown-ups are often chasing that tingly, exciting fear they got that pre-Halloween night watching a Disney special in grandma’s basement? Perhaps that’s too personal a representation to apply beyond myself, but perhaps this: Do you ever get the sense that a world of truncated innocence is one without true adults?
[Open full post]It’s worth noting, as an addendum to Andrew’s post, that the two metrics aren’t merely correlative. A substantial portion of the tax revenue goes toward those sorts of programs that attract poor people to the state (see, e.g., here, here, and here). In other words, the option is more likely to be “all of the above,” as more tax dollars go toward handouts, draining funds both from general public services (such as road upkeep) and from taxpayers’ wallets, driving them out of state or into poverty.
[Open full post]The Providence Phoenix’s Brian C. Jones puts the idea that high taxes are driving people away from Rhode Island into the category of just-a-theory…
There has been a growing conviction that high taxes drive people away from Rhode Island and deplete the lifeblood of the private economy. Whether the world really works that way is debatable. What is not in dispute is that many economists and policymakers believe it to be the case, including Republican Carcieri, and legislative Democrats.
The theory is actually a bit more complex, that the combination of high taxes and poor-to-average public services in return drives the middle class away, because they can get more bang for their buck by moving elsewhere.
That point aside, data sources exist allowing the history of tax impact on demographics to be examined in some detail. Let’s begin with the U.S. Census Bureau’s yearly data on the poverty rate in each state. According to that data, the poverty rate in Rhode Island has been over 90% of the national rate for four years in a row, the first time the relative rate has been that high for that long since the data series began in 1980. That means in those four years…
- Poor people have come to the state, or
- Middle-class people have left the state, or
- Middle class people have been driven into poverty, or
- Any or all of the above.
But does the unprecedented relative poverty rate have anything to do with tax policy?
Well, the Tax Foundation has compiled data on each state’s tax-burden ranking since 1970 (Rhode Island is currently ranked 4th). By combining the Tax Foundation data with the Census Bureau data, we can see if there is a correlation between tax-policy and poverty rates. The plot below compares Rhode Island’s relative poverty rate between 1980 and 2005 to its tax-burden ranking from the previous year. The trend is unmistakable…
The high poverty period in the upper left-hand corner of the graph isn’t unique to the here-and-now, it also involves the years 1982-1984, the only other period since 1980 prior to the stretch beginning in 2002 where the RI relative poverty rate was over 88% for three years in a row. You can make the plot in other ways, tax-burden this year versus poverty rate, tax burden over the past two years averaged together, etc. and you’ll see basically the same trend.
Jones’ article includes this bit of analysis from University of Rhode Island Political Science Professor Maureen Moakley…
“Up until the 1980s, we were in the bottom of per-capita income,” Moakley says. “We really were a poor state, and that kind of body politic was very sympathetic with the social-welfare programs, because, ‘we need them.’ We now are a very prosperous state. We have more people doing better and [being] less concerned; there’s less of a critical mass that demands social services.”
From the graph above, if the goal is to generate more political support for poverty programs by creating more poor people, then raising taxes seems to be the way to go!
[Open full post]The Providence Journal’s editorial on the Supreme Court’s partial-birth abortion ruling isn’t quite as deceptive/deluded as Mary Ann Sorrentino’s, but at the very least, it’s misleading (emphasis added):
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision upholding the right of the federal government to impose a ban on a certain form of rarely performed second-trimester abortion is unfortunate in two major ways.
First, it extends the role of the federal government into areas best left to physicians. The court upheld the idea that there be no medical exception in which a woman’s physician, after determining that so-called partial-birth abortion (“intact dilation and evacuation”) was necessary to protect the health of the woman, could then perform the procedure.
Apparently, allowing for the procedure in order to save the life of the mother doesn’t count as a “medical exception.” Judging from the Projo’s bizarre notion of federalism, however, one must leave open the possibility that the word “exception” is used, here, to mean “constitutional right to whatever abortionists can do.” I say this because it seems the editors feel that the federal government’s power should be limited to granting broad rights to death, thus barring states from making anything more than moderate exceptions, without its being, for some reason, as unfortunate when a state government meddles in “areas best left to physicians.” (Curious, that.)
Further, whatever you think of this procedure, that the federal government in this case has again intruded into an area that seems to us to be most properly situated close to or in domestic law — and therefore in our federal system under state jurisdiction — should trouble even many conservatives. This is part of a troubling pattern we have seen in the Bush administration of undermining the right of the states to regulate medicine within their boundaries. The Terry Schiavo case and the Oregon assisted-suicide law provide the best known cases of such, to us, inappropriate intervention.
In short, the ruling appears to be a dangerous over-reaching of federal jurisdiction, and one that we especially fear may set an unfortunate precedent for further inroads into individual rights and the relationship between physician and patient, up to and including an outright federal ban on abortion, thus overturning 1973’s Roe v. Wade protection of that right.
Contrary to the Projo’s dismissive “whatever you think of this procedure,” before conservatives — or just, you know, human beings — decide what they should be troubled about, it might be helpful for them to understand just what they’re supposed to gloss over. Here’s a passage from Gonzales v. Carhart by which future generations will have opportunity to judge us for centuries hence (citations removed):
The surgical procedure referred to as “dilation and evacuation” or “D&E” is the usual abortion method in [the second] trimester. Although individual techniques for performing D&E differ, the general steps are the same.
A doctor must first dilate the cervix at least to the extent needed to insert surgical instruments into the uterus and to maneuver them to evacuate the fetus. The steps taken to cause dilation differ by physician and gestational age of the fetus. …
After sufficient dilation the surgical operation can commence. The woman is placed under general anesthesia or conscious sedation. The doctor, often guided by ultrasound, inserts grasping forceps through the woman’s cervix and into the uterus to grab the fetus. The doctor grips a fetal part with the forceps and pulls it back through the cervix and vagina, continuing to pull even after meeting resistance from the cervix. The friction causes the fetus to tear apart. For example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix and out of the woman. The process of evacuating the fetus piece by piece continues until it has been completely removed. A doctor may make 10 to 15 passes with the forceps to evacuate the fetus in its entirety, though sometimes removal is completed with fewer passes. Once the fetus has been evacuated, the placenta and any remaining fetal material are suctioned or scraped out of the uterus. The doctor examines the different parts to ensure the entire fetal body has been removed.
Some doctors, especially later in the second trimester, may kill the fetus a day or two before performing the surgical evacuation. They inject digoxin or potassium chloride into the fetus, the umbilical cord, or the amniotic fluid. Fetal demise may cause contractions and make greater dilation possible. Once dead, moreover, the fetus’ body will soften, and its removal will be easier. Other doctors refrain from injecting chemical agents, believing it adds risk with little or no medical benefit.
The abortion procedure that was the impetus for the numerous bans on “partial-birth abortion,” including the Act, is a variation of this standard D&E. The medical community has not reached unanimity on the appropriate name for this D&E variation. It has been referred to as “intact D&E,” “dilation and extraction” (D&X), and “intact D&X.” For discussion purposes this D&E variation will be referred to as intact D&E. The main difference between the two procedures is that in intact D&E a doctor extracts the fetus intact or largely intact with only a few passes. There are no comprehensive statistics indicating what percentage of all D&Es are performed in this manner.
Intact D&E, like regular D&E, begins with dilation of the cervix. Sufficient dilation is essential for the procedure. To achieve intact extraction some doctors thus may attempt to dilate the cervix to a greater degree. This approach has been called “serial” dilation. Doctors who attempt at the outset to perform intact D&E may dilate for two full days or use up to 25 osmotic dilators.
In an intact D&E procedure the doctor extracts the fetus in a way conducive to pulling out its entire body, instead of ripping it apart. One doctor, for example, testified:“If I know I have good dilation and I reach in and the fetus starts to come out and I think I can accomplish it, the abortion with an intact delivery, then I use my forceps a little bit differently. I don’t close them quite so much, and I just gently draw the tissue out attempting to have an intact delivery, if possible.”
Rotating the fetus as it is being pulled decreases the odds of dismemberment. A doctor also “may use forceps to grasp a fetal part, pull it down, and re-grasp the fetus at a higher level–sometimes using both his hand and a forceps–to exert traction to retrieve the fetus intact until the head is lodged in the [cervix].”
Intact D&E gained public notoriety when, in 1992, Dr. Martin Haskell gave a presentation describing his method of performing the operation. In the usual intact D&E the fetus’ head lodges in the cervix, and dilation is insufficient to allow it to pass. Haskell explained the next step as follows:” ‘At this point, the right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left [hand] along the back of the fetus and “hooks” the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down).
” ‘While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.
” ‘[T]he surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into the foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening.
” ‘The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.’ “This is an abortion doctor’s clinical description. Here is another description from a nurse who witnessed the same method performed on a 26-week fetus and who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee:
” ‘Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby’s body and the arms–everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus… .
” ‘The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.
” ‘The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp… .
” ‘He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.’ “Dr. Haskell’s approach is not the only method of killing the fetus once its head lodges in the cervix, and “the process has evolved” since his presentation. Another doctor, for example, squeezes the skull after it has been pierced “so that enough brain tissue exudes to allow the head to pass through.” Still other physicians reach into the cervix with their forceps and crush the fetus’ skull. Others continue to pull the fetus out of the woman until it disarticulates at the neck, in effect decapitating it. These doctors then grasp the head with forceps, crush it, and remove it.
Some doctors performing an intact D&E attempt to remove the fetus without collapsing the skull. Yet one doctor would not allow delivery of a live fetus younger than 24 weeks because “the objective of [his] procedure is to perform an abortion,” not a birth. The doctor thus answered in the affirmative when asked whether he would “hold the fetus’ head on the internal side of the [cervix] in order to collapse the skull” and kill the fetus before it is born. Another doctor testified he crushes a fetus’ skull not only to reduce its size but also to ensure the fetus is dead before it is removed. For the staff to have to deal with a fetus that has “some viability to it, some movement of limbs,” according to this doctor, “[is] always a difficult situation.”
D&E and intact D&E are not the only second-trimester abortion methods. Doctors also may abort a fetus through medical induction. The doctor medicates the woman to induce labor, and contractions occur to deliver the fetus. Induction, which unlike D&E should occur in a hospital, can last as little as 6 hours but can take longer than 48. It accounts for about five percent of second-trimester abortions before 20 weeks of gestation and 15 percent of those after 20 weeks. Doctors turn to two other methods of second-trimester abortion, hysterotomy and hysterectomy, only in emergency situations because they carry increased risk of complications. In a hysterotomy, as in a cesarean section, the doctor removes the fetus by making an incision through the abdomen and uterine wall to gain access to the uterine cavity. A hysterectomy requires the removal of the entire uterus. These two procedures represent about .07% of second-trimester abortions.
As one who is generally strongly supportive of states’ right to differ substantively in their laws, I have to say that, as with slavery, I’ve no qualms about allowing the federal government to “dangerously overreach” to make blanket prohibitions of monstrosity.
[Open full post]Mary Ann Sorrentino’s Providence Phoenix article on the Federal partial birth abortion ban and the Supreme Court’s decision upholding it in Gonzales v. Carhart repeats a serious factual error multiple times…
The court’s decision to uphold a ban on late-term abortions — even when the mother’s health is endangered — codifies what pro-choicers have suspected (and warned about) for decades. Abortion opponents grant the fetus “paramount right-to-life” status, while pregnant women apparently have no right to any life.The assertion that the Federal partial birth abortion contains no exemption for the life of the mother is not accurate. Here is the text of the law…
If, in month five of a pregnancy, a woman faces a medical situation guaranteed to injure or even kill her through pregnancy-related complications discovered at that time, compassionate conservatives say, “Tough!”
Any physician who, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both. This subsection does not apply to a partial-birth abortion that is necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself.How could a life of the mother exception possibly be any clearer?
Secondly, the Supreme Court in Carhart did not even hold that all partial birth abortions (except in cases where the mother’s life is threatened) are prohibited. The Court only ruled that its precedents requiring that late-term abortion restrictions include an exception for the health of the mother extending beyond life-threatening circumstances did not justify overtuning the partial birth law as a whole and permitting the procedure in any situation. Because “as applied” challenges to the law are still allowed, the court may still yet find that a health of the mother exception is automatically built into any late-term abortion law.
The issue of abortion ban health exceptions in non-life threatening situations has become a contentious one because many abortion rights activists refuse to draw a distinction between mental and physical health. Froma Harrop has expounded on this point in the past…
Most of us agree that these abortions [to protect the health of the mother] should be done only under extraordinary circumstances. So if by “health” we mean the psychic well-being of someone who decided late in the game that she didn’t want a baby, then no, the pregnancy must go to full term. But if something has gone terribly wrong, and the woman would be physically ravaged by continuing a pregnancy, then we must have a different kind of debate.If Ms. Sorrentino doesn’t think that physical versus mental health is a legitimate distinction, then why does she limit herself to physical health examples (unless she considers raising or maybe giving a child up for adoption a “pregnancy related complication”) to make her point about the situations where partial birth abortion needs to be allowed?
Mary Ann Sorrentino is not a newcomer to the abortion issue. Her inability to get the basic facts right shows how the abortion rights movement has become consumed by political rhetoric that has little or nothing to do with reality. [Open full post]
I share Justin’s concern that some of what has gone on may not be “out of deliberate strategy” and instead may be for the sake of “the sheer self-gratifying joy of subversion and recognition.” It is this line between publicity-for-its-own-sake and polemic that is sometimes hard to toe. (Ann Coulter comes to mind). So, perhaps I was a bit too hard on Wingfield, but there is certainly a place for using free speech–including tough language–to shake up the campus conventional wisdom. Keeping in mind that most College Republicans are essentially apprentices in field of polemics, some line-crossing is to be expected.
If nothing else, Wingfield’s resignation–which, by the way, is largely symbolic as he’s graduating in a couple weeks by which time his replacement will have been elected–has brought to the fore a debate that is going on in the wider world of conservative and Republican politics. It’s encapsulated well in this post from National Review’s Jonah Goldberg in which one of his emailers observes:
The vast right wing conspiracy at some point seems to have decided that we’ll command, if not dominate, the following:
– Think tanks
– Talk radio
– Blogs
This strategy seems to depend on persuading opinion leaders of the merits of our case, preferably using 10,000+ words to do so. The opinion leaders then hold court at family barbecues, dazzling friends and family with facts and logic and slowly converting them to our side.
That’s a perfectly legitimate approach, but it has three problems that make it less than sufficient as a marketing strategy: (1) political junkies aren’t necessarily opinion leaders; (2) the arguments are usually too complex to be easily distilled into something that could lead to opinion leadership; and, (3) it assumes that people’s views are shaped by facts and logic, when things like the aforementioned group identity are at least as important among many people.
In other words, we need counterparts to MoveOn and its ilk that can succinctly and persuasively communicate meaningful information to largely disinterested voters, and do so using the tools and tones appropriate for our target audiences.
Young and motivated College Republicans are the GOPs counterpart to the liberal foot soldiers of MoveOn. Wingfield is correct to caution them about stepping over the line. But we also have to realize that there is a difference between the language used in discussions held at a suburban, backyard barbecue and the jawing that goes on at a kegger.
[Open full post]Inasmuch as it is difficult to discuss a document that is not readily available to the public, herewith is Ethan Wingfield’s letter of resignation as Chairman of the College Republican Federation of Rhode Island (printed with permission):
To all,
I write this evening to announce my resignation as Chairman of the College Republican Federation of Rhode Island, effective at midnight, tonight. The petty in-fighting in this organization, led by arrogant and immature personalities, is beyond belief. Labeling vitriol, arrogance, and dogmatism as “getting work done” is quickly developing a dominant culture within this organization with which I will not associate. Over the past year, I have worked to change the organization into one that will invite interest among its members, command respect from the community, and promote dignified discourse on the college communities throughout this state. However, others involved in the organization have not contributed the maturity, hard work, and political will necessary to accomplish this much-needed transformation. Sadly, this is the second year in a row that a chairman has attempted to accomplish this, and also the second year in a row that culminated in the resignation of the chairman under similar circumstances.
Under my leadership, CRs from Brown, PC, and RWU logged hundreds of hours working on campaigns leading up to the November elections. We launched a comprehensive website. The Federation held a successful fundraiser, hosted by prominent Providence Republicans, drawing donors from all over the state. The Roger Williams University chapter has been reestablished and is among the strongest in the state, after only two semesters of activity. College Republican involvement and activity is at an all-time high in this state. I am proud of the work I have done, but fear for the future of this organization.
Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman, is esteemed by many to be the father of modern conservatism. In his book, “Reflections on the Revolution of France,” Burke wrote, “But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”
As I leave this post, College Republicans around this state have created multiple controversies by exercising our liberty of free speech. We are conservatives, not liberals. Use wisdom, and be virtuous when you exercise free speech. Do not use your liberty to incite your campus against you: the purpose of this organization is to grow and support the Republican party, and that end will only be accomplished when our message is one that appeals to the ordinary sensibilities of every individual. Seek rapport with your campus so that you can win their hearts and minds.
As you seek rapport with your community, work tirelessly to put the culture and mission of this organization back on the right track. Seek guidance from the state party and esteemed Republicans throughout the state. Be sure to include and encourage; maintain a relentlessly positive message to leaders and members. If this does not happen, then the Federation will become irrelevant to the strong chapters in this state, and useless to the chapters that are weak.
All my best,
Ethan
Observing, first of all, that the usages of “our liberty of free speech” that Wingfield finds objectionable appear to be associated in his mind with a more characteristic trend among his peers, I have to admit frankly that I — manifestly not a Chafee Republican — share his concern, more broadly among conservatives, that “vitriol, arrogance, and dogmatism” are finding free rein under the excuse of “getting work done.”
Perhaps I differ from Wingfield in that I think using “liberty to incite your campus against you” is a valid strategy (metaphorically, for most of us, of course). However, I am less and less confident that it is being done out of deliberate strategy, as opposed to the sheer self-gratifying joy of subversion and recognition.
According to a report in the Financial Times:
Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits…
The FT investigation found:
■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.
■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.
Aw, so what? If it makes you feel better…
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