I’m not sure what its significance is, but a Warwick Daily Times story, by Matt Bower, on the Yorke/Avedisian kerfuffle places the story largely in the context of blogs and their commenters:
Matt Jerzyk, administrator of the generally liberal RIFuture blog, www.rifuture.org, said he wrote a post the next day expressing his outrage that the media was staying silent about Yorke’s comments, rather than holding him accountable and taking him to task. …
“Anytime we get over 20 comments on a post, it’s considered a pretty hot issue. A lot of people were weighing in with their opinions on the matter,” he said. …
When Mark Comtois from the generally conservative AnchorRising blog, www.anchorrising.com, got wind of Jerzyk’s post, he wrote a blog entry of his own asking whether or not bloggers have a responsibility regarding the comments on their blogs. …
Justin Katz, administrator for AnchorRising, said bloggers need to be careful about spreading rumors that they may have heard.
“I think Matt’s outrage is ludicrous and it’s bizarre to believe that outing someone – the idea that that could affect someone politically and adversely is bizarre,” he said. “The leftists see an opportunity to silence a voice that they want out of the media. It’s almost as if we’re requiring gay politicians to have a stance on [their own] gayness, which raises issues for concern.”
Katz said there’s value to the area in which public figures’ lives aren’t spelled out and scripted.
“I think there’s a humanity lost if we start requiring a checklist of what we’re allowed to say about each other,” he said.
The fact that the story centers on a blog debate puts blogs in the position of being generators of news. That, of itself, isn’t particularly unique at this point, but the number of commenters whom Bower quotes strikes me as a new development — almost as if blogs can become a repository for quickly available and easily quotable man-on-the-street reactions.
Frankly, I’m not altogether sure that such a thing would be a healthy development. One doesn’t often read news stories in which the reporter writes, “One person I stopped on the street said X. Some guy sitting at a table outside the local coffee shop thought Y.” (I’d categorize separately lazy/suspicious constructions such as “some people feel.”) With an abetting blogger, anonymous commenters — perhaps each pretending to be multiple different people — can now generate the impression of a movement within minutes and reach a large audience of not-necessarily-tech-savvy print news readers within days. Just look at the upshot in this particular case: Matt and a bunch of nicknamed commenters manufactured some outrage, and now a print media source has given their production old-media credibility. Here’s a well-lubricated chute for the creation of political avalanches out of a little spit and froth.
On the other hand (or perhaps on the same hand, I suppose), this dynamic clearly presents people a channel through which to discuss matters — such as the evolving significance of politicians’ sexuality and society’s reaction thereto — but have felt it improper to raise on a public stage for quite some time. Perhaps there is grounds for faith that free expression and a growing reward for participation are ultimately beneficial, despite opportunity for abuse.
ADDENDUM:
The relevant page at RI Future appears to be unavailable for the time being. It may be some sort of technical glitch, but until Matt resolves it, here’s the Google cache.
ADDENDUM II:
The original post is back up, and the only thing that I can spot that’s changed from the cached version is that comment #27, by Mike, has been deleted. It read as follows:
Oh, Matt-everyone, and I mean everyone, in Warwick has known he was gay for years. I don’t think he’ll be running to the courthouse to file a defamation complainyt. LOL.
Of course, the cache is short 50-some comments from the actual post, so who knows what else Matt might have deemed inappropriate in that range. Other comments make it clear that Mike had other posts, and their disappearance is particularly peculiar, given comments to this post. I’d be curious what Mike might have said to become erased from the page that was more worrisome, from a blogger’s standpoint, than comment 46.
[Open full post]Not exactly. There are, however, potential Electoral College ramifications for states that choose to participate.
The Interstate Voting Compact is an attempt to bypass the Electoral College and elect the President of the United States through a direct popular vote. A state legislature signing on to the compact agrees to disregard the choice made by its own state’s voters in a Presidential election and allocate the electoral votes under its control to the winner of the national popular vote. For example, had Rhode Island been a party to the compact in 2004, Rhode Island’s four electoral votes would have been given to national popular vote winner George W. Bush even though a majority of Rhode Islanders cast ballots for John Kerry.
This scheme is acceptable under Article II of the U.S. Constitution which gives state legislatures carte-blanche authority to choose their state’s Presidential electors…
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.But does this really mean that the power of state legislatures to choose the President is absolute? Hypothetically, state legislatures might decide to cut voters entirely out of the process. A legislature could mandate, for example (and not entirely inconceivable in Rhode Island), that its electors vote for the nominee of the Democratic party, no matter the result of the vote at any level. Would this too be legal?
Under Article II, the answer is yes. However, any system that bypasses a state’s voters brings another section of the Constitution into play. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment also has something to say about electing Federal officials, President included…
Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.In extreme cases, this means that if no citizen votes are counted in a Presidential election process, then no citizens are counted towards a state’s total representation either; a state that ignores its citizens when allocating its electors loses representation in the Electoral College — and possibly in the House of Representatives.
The problem with the Interstate Voting Compact is that it abridges the right of state voters to choose their Presidential electors nearly as egregiously as an ignore-the-voters-completely scheme does. To understand this, consider some other systems acceptable under the letter of Article II. The Rhode Island legislature could decide to allocate Rhode Island’s electoral votes according to the decision of a 10 member blue-ribbon commission of experts chosen in a nationwide search. But then the right of Rhode Islanders to select their Presidential electors would have been completely abridged and the Fourteenth Amendment would mandate that Rhode Island lose representation.
How about a hybrid system for choosing Presidential electors? The people of RI would get to cast ballots for their Presidential preference. A national blue-ribbon commission would also get to make a selection and the choice of the blue-ribbon panel would be awarded a certain number of “bonus” votes in the final tally — perhaps more bonus votes than there are voters in Rhode Island! But since the wishes of Rhode Islanders would now be only one factor (and perhaps a very minor factor) in choosing Rhode Island’s Presidential electors, the right of Rhode Islanders to choose their Presidential electors would have been abridged, and the Fourteenth Amendment would mandate that Rhode Island lose representation.
The Interstate Voting Compact is no different from the above scheme, except in the size of the commission being used to award the bonus votes. Under the terms of the compact, every Rhode Islander’s voice in choosing Rhode Island’s Presidential electors is diluted by a factor of about 300. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, Rhode Island’s representation must be reduced correspondingly.
The exact nature of the reduction in representation is open to some interpretation. Here are a few possibilities…
- A state abridging the right of its citizens to choose its Presidential electors by joining the interstate voting compact could lose Electoral College representation in terms of its citizens counted towards the House of Representatives, but since no state can drop below one Rep, no state could be reduced below a minimum of 3 electoral votes.
- “Representation” in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment could also be interpreted to directly apply representation in the Electoral College, so a state joining the interstate compact could conceivably forfeit all of its electoral votes.
- “Representation” could be taken to apply to representation in the Electoral College and the House of Representatives, so states joining the compact could have both their electoral votes and their number of Representatives reduced.
On Wednesday, the Rhode Island House Judiciary Committee voted to hold a bill that would have Rhode Island join the Interstate Voting Compact for further study. [Open full post]
It turns out that the budget cut proposed by Governor Carcieri won’t go far enough, so what is the solution? The ProJo’s Steve Peoples went to the usual suspects:
“There’s no easy fixes. The programs that all Rhode Islanders support are in danger,” said Ellen Frank, senior economist at Rhode Island College’s Poverty Institute. “If you don’t look at revenue, you’re not going to solve the problem.”
Frank, like Guillette and Karen Malcolm, the head of Ocean State Action, pointed to the state’s tax system, especially the capital gains tax (set to be phased out next year at an estimated cost of $25.4 million), the historic tax credit (the state will distribute credits worth an estimated $82.5 million this year — the cost will likely come next year) and the television and film credit ($10 million).
The governor, no surprise, isn’t about to accept higher taxes as a solution. Hopefully, the leadership in the General Assembly won’t cave, either. It’s a spending, not a revenue, problem.
[Open full post]Give me a break.
I realize that progressives don’t want to lose one of their weapons for public assassination, but must we continue pretending that anybody on either side of the aisle actually thinks being gay, of itself, is political poison — especially in Rhode Island? (Not so ironically, one suspects that those politicians who might actually suffer some loss of support for being homosexual — i.e., right wingers — would be somewhat less likely to fall under the protection of liberal outrage.)
I guess we should send out a memo that Rhode Island’s leftists believe that every politician must have an official position on whether or not he or she is out. Then perhaps people who must be in the public spotlight for hours each day can at least be blamed for telling on-the-record secrets.
With the release of Cape Wind, a book co-authored by the Projo’s Robert Whitcomb, about rich and influential people, ostensibly with socially appropriate environmental consciousnesses, and their fight to kill an environmentally friendly energy project involving water-based windmills, the example on the grounds of the Portsmouth Abbey that I pass twice a day caught my attention more than usual today:
Maybe there’s something in human nature that wind-driven motion sooths, but whatever the reason, I think it would add to, rather than detract from, the scenery if there were more of them around — whether waving to passing commuters or appearing as dots in the waterviews of the hoity-toity.
[Open full post]… or does it seem as if things are starting to roll, just a bit:
Denouncing as “outrageous” the 145.99-percent markup the state has been paying a private company to staff the traffic-monitoring center across the street from the State House, Governor Carcieri yesterday initiated an inquiry into “all state contracts that involve the retention of professional services.”
He also announced that the company, Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, had agreed after a telephone call yesterday from state transportation director Jerome Williams to slash its overhead-and-profit rate to 22.5 percent for those among the 36 workers doing largely “administrative” tasks — including the “typist” for whom the state had been paying the company the equivalent of $102,858.
Saying he was unaware of the VHB staffing contract until it was brought to light by The Providence Journal this week, Carcieri said he has now asked Gerald Aubin, the former deputy Providence police chief who heads the state Lottery, to lead a task force charged with finding out whether any other “similarly outrageous arrangements might exist in other departments of state government.”
The governor said he had asked Aubin “to review all these contracts to determine if the state is paying similar overhead rates in any other instance, to compile a comprehensive list of these contracts and their costs, and to determine what, if any, work would better be performed by state employees.”
Not to assume too much about a man whom I don’t know, but I get the impression of faux cluelessness from this:
Asked yesterday for comment on Carcieri calling for an investigation of professional-services contracts, Sen. J. Michael Lenihan, the East Greenwich Democrat leading the Senate inquiry, said:: “Well quite honestly, it’s an absurd situation. It merits investigation.
“I guess my question is, whatever the role of the federal government in terms of mandating this kind of thing, didn’t somebody have the common sense somewhere along the line to say — ‘Wait a minute. This is absurd.’ — and call it into question. Apparently that didn’t happen.”
It didn’t happen because government employees in Rhode Island — including those whom we elect — see their role as ruling the state, not representing the interests of its citizens. The real question is whether enough of those citizens will wake up before too many flee to avert catastrophe.i
[Open full post]I agree with the Providence Journal that it is “perverse” for the CEO of a health insurance company to make one-and-a-half times the entire payroll of a 2,000-employee hospital. Considering how often Republicans and conservatives are saddled with the ideological blame for these supposed excesses of the free market, that admission may surprise some readers. We’re not talking an ideological paradox — or even run-of-the-mill self-contradiction — though.
Such stark comparisons should actually lead one to question whether we’re seeing evidence of capitalism unbound or capitalism unwisely bounded. The fundamental differences between modern economic philosophies (e.g., between Keynesianism and supply-side economics) sometimes seem to come down to conflicting opinions about how to get the rich to keep their money moving (e.g., as corporate profits or as private income) — indicating a general understanding that those who control wealth will tend to try to take as much as possible for themselves. It is reasonable to suggest, therefore, that the encouragement of competition is perhaps the most effective means of placing natural, market-driven limits on the amount of wealth that it is reasonable for the rich to siphon away from productive ends. Try to grab a $100 bill from somebody, and he’ll hold it out of reach, dodge left, dodge right, and run you in circles; offer somebody else a profitable opportunity while the first guy is hoarding his cache, and that $100 bill might not be so difficult to liberate.
The healthcare industry is plainly not an example of a free market, what with regulations, coverage dictat’s, and the insurer/customer relationship’s being all tangled up with the customers’ unrelated careers. as much money as $124 million might be, throwing it away is apparently not a competitive handicap in the face of high barriers to entry and high costs of doing business once a company has entered the industry.
So no, I don’t support a system of such gargantuan inequalities. I support a system in which competition puts the avaricious in danger of eating themselves.
There has been much media and internet speculation on the subject of whether incoming French President Nicolas Sarkozy could become France’s version of Ronald Reagan. But isn’t a comparison to Richard Nixon equally, if not more, valid…
- Domestically, just like Nixon, Sarkozy was clearly the law-and-order candidate.
- In foreign policy, the analogy is less perfect, but like the Richard Nixon of the Vietnam era, Sarkozy’s promise is to help his country, shaken by some foreign policy missteps and unsure of its place in the world, develop better relations with a superpower that no one expects to go away any time soon.
But even if Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel aren’t going to be updated versions of Reagan and Thatcher, the fact that French and German electorates have chosen the unabashed pro-American candidates a fact worth noting. The downside to the observation is the ray of hope it gives to Socialists in Europe and elsewhere — they might begin to experience more electoral success if they ever decide to drop their reflexive anti-Americanism! [Open full post]
I was reading an article in the current issue of City Journal by Sol Stern about the state of Catholic Schools in general and of New York City’s Rice High School in particular when I came across these sentences that startled me a bit…
When I went unannounced into classrooms [at Rice High School], I encountered teachers standing at the front of the class and students working quietly at individual desks, aligned in straight rows. (This method of direct, teacher-centered instruction is, of course, anathema to progressive educators, but it surely works.)Any of the teachers, students, or parents in the audience have any idea what Stern is talking about, and/or any comments on the state of “direct, teacher-centered instruction” in the state of Rhode Island? [Open full post]