To absolutely no one’s surprise, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has taken on the role of leading advocate for a foreign policy of punishing allies and ignoring enemies. From Charles Bakst in today’s Projo…
Whitehouse told me that unless Iraqi leaders see that the United States is serious about withdrawing troops, “They’re perfectly happy to have us there keeping the police for them, spilling our blood for them, spending millions of dollars … It’s just extremely frustrating to have the president fight with us … rather than go and raise hell with the Iraqis. And I think the strongest way he can raise hell with them is say, ‘Look, guys, this party is over unless you get serious. We’re going in a new direction.’ ”Contra Senator Whitehouse, the real frustration lies in having a Congress that wants the U.S. government to be fighting against the imperfect but legitimate government of Iraq, instead of fighting against terrorists. [Open full post]
Here is the boilerplate from We Win, They Lose, a coalition of bloggers who seek to impress upon Congress that, no matter what history–revisionist or otherwise–you want to believe about the Iraq War, we need to be in it to win it.
For those who missed Providence Mayor David Cicilline’s annual budget address last night, here’s the abbreviated version: We need to raise taxes on the rest of Rhode Island to provide more money for Providence. The Mayor essentially touted a plan to reduce property taxes while raising income taxes that has long been popular in progressive circles.
Mayor Cicilline attempts to use the flatness of the property tax to justify the proposed tax-shift…
A senior couple with a retirement income of 35,000 dollars a year who own a home valued at $250,000 pay about $300 a month — that’s over 10% of their income in property taxes.But if the Mayor really sees his city’s property tax system as the problem, there are in-community solutions that can be explored. Some Rhode Island communities freeze the property tax amounts that senior citizens are required to pay. Some states determine the tax liability of properties based on their assessed values at the time of purchase, protecting long-time, fixed-income residents from constant tax increases. Another possibilty would be exempting a certain amount of property value, say the first $50,000 of the value of a residential home, when determining tax liability. None of these solutions are perfect. But Mayor Cicilline isn’t interested in investigating their pros and cons anyway; his interest lies solely in finding a way to grab money from the rest of Rhode Island that can be spent on Providence, an option that will require either a statewide tax increase or service cuts in other Rhode Island cities and towns.
On the other hand, a wealthy working couple making $200,000 a year and who own a $500,000 home pay about $700 a month, which is just 4% of their income.
Simple mathematics dictate that…
- A revenue neutral plan (where overall income tax collection is raised by the amount exactly matching a property tax cut) cannot deliver to Providence a bigger share of state aid than the city receives now unless other communities have their revenues reduced and are forced to cut services.
- An income tax hike bigger than a property tax cut (making Rhode Island’s fourth highest tax-burden in the nation even worse) is needed to increase Providence’s share of state aid without forcing service cuts elsewhere.
I don’t think we’re yet at the point where shutting down the rest of Rhode Island in order to increase funding to the urban core is getting serious legislative consideration. Rhode Island State Senate Majority Leader Teresa Paiva-Weed, for instance, has recently stated that she sees the goal of a new state education aid funding formula as providing more aid to “second-tier” urban and suburban communities. But if we do reach the point where plans to increase Providence’s already generous share of state aid begin to take shape, a fundamental issue of governance comes into play.
The Providence school system already receives about 2/3 of its funding from state sources. Already, everyone in Rhode Island is paying for Providence, but only the government of Providence – and its appointed school committee – decides how the money is spent. If the state of Rhode Island is going to be paying for 70% to 80% or more of the Providence school budget, an oversight authority with a substantive role in budget matters representing the interests of the broad base of Rhode Island taxpayers who will be paying for Providence’s schools will need to be created.
The government of Providence doesn’t have the right to tell the people of Rhode Island that their place is to just pay and go away. [Open full post]
The ProJo’s Mark Reynolds reports:
The town’s police officers and many of its municipal workers have made concessions that will ease financial pressures on the taxpayers, officials said yesterday.
Without the unions’ help, the town would have been responsible for budgeting an extra $349,000 to pay for contractually mandated raises and other provisions during the fiscal year that starts July 1, according to Mayor Joseph M. Polisena, who is shepherding an effort to cut costs and eliminate more than $7 million in debt over the next several years.
Polisena had reached out to the unions and asked them to give up pay raises in light of the town’s dire economic situation.
“They have truly stepped up to the plate to help our town and the taxpayers,” Polisena said at a Town Hall news conference. “Today, I say to our residents, ‘When you see a police officer, when you come into the building and see municipal workers, thank them.'”
The municipal workers agreed to give up a 2.9-percent raise this fiscal year – an expense of about $171,000 – and accepted 1.5-percent raises in the final two years of their newly extended contract. Meanwhile, each police officer ceded $2,250 in allowances that pay for new uniforms, cleaning for uniforms, and various firearms expenses.
In turn, the town agreed to lend the unions some additional stability and security by extending their contracts another two years.
Kudos.
[Open full post]Paul Edward Parker of the ProJo investigated the voter rolls and found some discrepancies.
The Board of Elections — which oversees the counting of votes — says 392,884 voters cast ballots in the Nov. 7 general election.
The secretary of state’s Elections Division — which oversees the state’s Central Voter Registration System and tracks who voted in which elections — counted 387,952 voters in the same election as of Jan. 16. In a new tally Monday, that number had risen to 390,340.
That leaves 4,932 ballots that were cast without a voter voting — or 2,544, depending on which number you use from the secretary of state.
The Providence Journal began examining the results of the November election this spring, after reporting last fall that the names of nearly 5,000 registered voters in Rhode Island appear on a federal list of dead people. The Journal sought to find out whether any of those dead people voted.
The newspaper’s review found no evidence of systematic fraud by people casting ballots in the names of voters who had died. But it did find a voter tracking system susceptible to error that could throw into doubt the results of close elections.
…
Robert Kando, executive director of the Board of Elections, attributed the discrepancies to errors in how voter tracking information was entered into the secretary of state’s computer system. “I don’t have the slightest inclination there was ballot stuffing.”
Kando said that comparing the number of votes cast to the number of voters who checked in at each precinct is not part of the process of declaring the results of an election. “We certify winners without doing that. That doesn’t mean we don’t validate our system by examining that.”
Feeling confident? You can find the numbers for your town here.
[Open full post]According to a press release issued by the RI GOP, URI College Republican Chair Ryan Bilodeau has been elected as the new head of the College Republican Federation of Rhode Island. Comments to this post hinted that a change was afoot within the RI College Republican ranks. From the outside, it would appear as if the majority of College Republicans are now more inclined to engage in the confrontational campus politics that the previous leadership found so abrasive.
[Open full post]Perhaps I should say “election change”…? Today, the RI Senate is supposed to discuss and vote on:
S0020 – “This act would reduce the waiting period required for disaffiliation with a political party from 90 days to 29 days.”
S0760 – “…an individual cannot file a declaration of candidacy for more than one elected public office, either state or local, in the same election cycle and the filing of a declaration thereby withdraws any previously filed declarations for an elected public office, either state or local, in said election cycle.”
S0740A – “…move the primary date for election of delegates to national conventions from the first Tuesday in March to the first Tuesday in February beginning with 2008 and every fourth year thereafter.”
S0725 – “…limit political party committees from contributing more than $25,000 to any group of candidates as opposed to present law which limits such amounts to any one candidate. In addition, it would limit it to one thousand dollars ($1,000) the maximum allowed contribution that a political party committee can make to any candidate more in any one calendar year.”
S0189 – “…prevent employees of local canvassing authorities from serving on local canvassing boards.”
Stay tuned…
The reported death of Abu Ayyud al-Masri is still unconfirmed, but the firefight in which he was allegedly killed illustrates a change in Iraq that has been little noticed until recently: the deepening antipathy of the Sunni tribes of al-Anbar province toward the foreigners of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
There were reports of red-on-red” battles in the Sunni triangle as early as 2005, but the real shift began in the summer and fall of 2006 when a substantial majority of Sunni sheikhs in al-Anbar began to defect from their previous alliance with AQI. Bing and Owen West described the sheikhs’ defection in The Atlantic recently and even the New York Times reported the security improvements in al-Anbar resulting from the change in attitude and behavior by the Sunni sheikhs.
This is a positive development. Intelligence tips from the Sunni concerning AQI operatives and operations have been on the increase for some time and this event suggests that this trend will continue. The number of policemen has increased exponentially from a year ago. The Bush “surge” deserves some credit but AQI has brought most of this on itself by the barbarity of its attacks on Sunni civilians.
But as positive a development as it is, we need to realize that the fact the sheikhs have abandoned their alliance with AQI and are cooperating with the Iraqi government and the Americans doesn’t necessarily adumbrate a permanent situation. The long-term attachment of the Sunni of al-Anbar to the Iraqi government depends a great deal on the actions of the latter.
The New York Times calls it a “new dynamic” (h/t Rich Lowry)…
The turnabout began last September, when a federation of tribes in the Ramadi area came together as the Anbar Salvation Council to oppose the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia….But those who have been paying attention know that the dynamic is not entirely new. The Sheiks didn’t decide, four years after the invasion of Iraq, that they could instantly trust the Americans in their midst. They made their decision only after observing years of dangerous and thankless work done by American soldiers and civilians to improve the lives of oridnary Iraqis. And after close and direct contact with both sides, the Sheiks decided that the future offered by America was better than the one offered by Al-Qaida.
For all the sheiks’ hostility toward the Americans, they realized that they had a bigger enemy, or at least one that needed to be fought first, as a matter of survival.
The council sought financial and military support from the Iraqi and American governments. In return the sheiks volunteered hundreds of tribesmen for duty as police officers and agreed to allow the construction of joint American-Iraqi police and military outposts throughout their tribal territories.
A similar dynamic is playing out elsewhere in Anbar, a desert region the size of New York State that stretches west of Baghdad to the Syrian and Jordanian borders. Tribal cooperation with the American and Iraqi commands has led to expanded police forces in the cities of Husayba, Hit, Rutba, Baghdadi and Falluja, officials say.
The surge is working, not just because of extra manpower in Iraq now, but because it builds on the foundation created by those who were gutting it out in Iraq at the same time many at home were declaring that there was no hope at all. And just as it would have been a mistake then, it would be a mistake now for Congress to forsake the civil society of Iraq, to abandon the work that has been done to build it up so far, and to bolster the position of those who would destroy it. [Open full post]
