With all that has been going on here in Warwick regarding the mycoplasma outbreak, I need to give public recognition to my wife. When we were informed that the schools throughout the city were shutting down for the rest of the week, my gracious spouse refrained from telling me, “I told you so,” though she had every right to do so.
You see, she had kept our own kids out of school since Tuesday, reasoning that it was better to be safe than sorry. She figured that, given the rather ambiguous nature of the assurances uttered by our public health officials, that the conservative (and safe) course of action would be to wait a week for “them” (government officials) to figure out what exactly was going on. I, on the other hand, thought she was overreacting, based on what those very same officials were saying and some of my own “expert” research at WebMD, eMedicine and Wikipedia (heh).
Nonetheless, I did defer to her based on the well-established and scientifically proven fact that wives–especially those who are also mothers–are always right. Whether you want to call it mother’s intuition or the she-bear protective instinct, events have borne out her intial suspicions. Never again will I question her instincts when it comes to the safety of our children. “The hand that rocks the cradle; Is the hand that rules the world“?
Yes. And my wife definitely has “hand.”
On January 5, 1995, Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House, the first Republican to do so in 40 years.
Newt Gingrich took the Capital by storm today like many of the generals he has studied — before dawn, with a plan and with an eye on history.
As he achieved his longtime dream of becoming Speaker of the House, his method was also characteristically Newtonian — expansive, buoyant, heavy on the symbolism and a bit disjointed.
His plan included, typically, a symbolic act of defiance. In the weighty moments just before he was elected the first Republican Speaker of the House in 40 years, Mr. Gingrich slipped away from the throngs like an outsider and spoke as a guest on a radio call-in show.
During the program, Mr. Gingrich sat with his helmet of gray hair cuffed by a big headset beneath a wartime poster of Winston Churchill that declared “Deserve Victory!” and took shots at the mainstream media and the Democrats. Then he strode onto the House floor and delivered a generously bipartisan acceptance speech to thunderous applause from his fellow House members and visitors from the other side of the Capitol, including Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the new majority leader, and the other side of the aisle, like Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts…
Mr. Gingrich’s big day began at a little after 6 in the morning when he arrived at the Capitol. It was to extend until at least midnight tonight because he wanted to be sitting in the Speaker’s chair to gavel to a close the longest opening day in House history.
In between, the House, now his House, with 230 Republicans at his command, passed a flurry of bills to revamp internal House rules. The point was to signify the end of the imperial era, when Congress held itself above the laws of the land, and the beginning of a new era of openness. Not only were many of the day’s activities open to television cameras, but the House voted to abide by the laws that it imposes on everybody else.
After grabbing a cup of black coffee and a banana at a take-out store, Mr. Gingrich arrived at the Capitol for interviews with all the morning network news programs as well as a morning drive-time broadcast interview with The Associated Press. He then attended a prayer service at St. Peter’s Church…
Mr. Gingrich said that when he stepped out on the balcony [of his new office] today for the first time, on what was a crystal-clear morning, he was filled with “the sense of being part of history and part of the romantic myth of this country.” {NY Times, January 5, 1995, p.A23}
Ah yes, remember the “coup” of 1994, led by Generalissimo Gingrich and his cohort of nast, mean conservative Republicans? But never fear, the true heir has been crowned! The Queen has arrived!!!
“We have waited over 200 years for this time to come,” Mrs. Pelosi said on the eve of her selection as speaker, a position that makes her second in line to the presidency after Vice President Dick Cheney.
“We will not just break through a glass ceiling, we will break through a marble ceiling,” she said. “In more than 200 years of history, there was an established pecking order — and I cut in line.”
After calling herself “the most powerful woman in America,” Mrs. Pelosi flexed her right muscle like a weight lifter to much applause at an event yesterday titled a “women’s tea.”
“All right, let’s hear it for the power,” she screamed as the jubilant applause continued.
When Mrs. Pelosi tried leaving the podium, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Connecticut Democrat, asked her to stay.
“There is so much love and warmth that’s in this room today and that’s because of the new speaker,” Mrs. DeLauro said. “And that tells you about what the future is all about in the House of Representatives.”
Yesterday’s event was part of three days of festivities to mark the historic moment. Later, Mrs. Pelosi and special guests dined at the Italian Embassy.
Today will be the official vote by her colleagues installing her as speaker, followed by a “swearing-in celebration concert” in the Great Hall of the National Building Museum.
Tomorrow will feature an “open house for the People’s House,” a nod to Democrats’ professed commitment to the common man. For the rest of the day, Mrs. Pelosi will celebrate her roots with a visit to a statue of her late father, former Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, and later the dedication of a Baltimore street to Mrs. Pelosi.
But wary of accusations of arrogance, Democrats have included other, less celebratory events. Those include a Mass yesterday at Trinity University in remembrance of “the children of Darfur and Katrina and a prayer service this morning at St. Peter’s Catholic Church to honor the troops.” {emphasis added}
Note the difference in tone as expressed by the actual Speakers-to-be. Gingrich “was filled with ‘the sense of being part of history and part of the romantic myth of this country.'” Pelosi referred to herself as “the most powerful woman in America” and exhorted “All right, let’s hear it for the power” to her followers. Methinks, despite the protestations to the contrary, that the “imperial era” has returned.
[Open full post]Two more comments about the Phillipe and Jorge column from this week’s Providence Phoenix.
1. In commenting on conservatism in general, Phillipe and Jorge do express strong approval of market-based ideas…
When will we acknowledge that the free market system is not a panacea, but an excellent path with limits? Those shortcomings include health-care, education, mass transit, and environmental safety (although environmental sanity can become profitable in certain respects).Most conservatives would agree with the “excellent path with limits” sentiment (it’s generally libertarians who want to reduce limitations on capitalism to a bare minimum, despite the consequences).
But with regards to their specific counterexamples, how exactly do P&J reach the conclusion that education represents a market failure? A better case can be made for the opposite; higher education is run on a much more free-market basis than primary or secondary education. Does anyone seriously suggest that higher education would improve if we replaced the existing colleges and universities with the geographic monopoly system we use for K-12?
2. P&J also express less than approval, but definite sympathy, for a certain strain of conservative thought…
Many of the thoughts recently expressed about Gerald R. Ford’s presidency remind your superior correspondents of just how dangerously far to the right this country has veered. We’re not talking about the small government/fiscally prudent right that we can understand and respect, even if we frequently disagree with it. This is the totalitarian right of Bush and the neo-cons.Now, P&J’s characterization of limited government conservatism suggests that its opposite would entail support for big government and fiscal imprudence, correct? But that’s probably too simple…
…or is it? Here is Rhode Island’s newest United States Senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, as described in John Mulligan‘s article from today’s Projo…
On the Budget Committee, [Senator Sheldon Whitehouse] said he expects to see tension between the principle of “paying as you go” and the need for more spending on social programs. He took a wait and see stance on how to resolve that dilemma.So Senator Whitehouse has decided there is a need for more spending, even though it won’t fit within the current budget and he knows that the country is running deficits.
Isn’t this an obvious case of wanting to combine fiscal imprudence with big government? [Open full post]
During the 2006 election cycle, I chided Providence Phoenix News Editor Ian Donnis about his labeling of Senator Lincoln Chafee as a moderate, despite a voting record and issue stands that were demonstrably liberal. I attributed the labeling choice to the fact that a garden-variety liberal might actually seem moderate to someone who spends his typical day with Phoenix staffers. Exhibit A in support of the assertion that the overall Phoenix political scale some Phoenix staffers use a political scale that is leftward-shifted comes from this week’s Phillipe and Jorge’s column on former President Gerald Ford. Any historian or political writer will tell you that President Ford was the archetypal Republican moderate. Through the filter of the Phoenix Phillipe and Jorge, this of course means that President Ford was a conservative…
Bob Woodward’s interviews revealed Ford as a traditional conservative Republican who was appalled by the hard-right swing of his party….
The Bush administration’s incompetents have no vision. They are tone-deaf to real progress and imaginative thinking. Despite his conservative leanings, Jerry Ford seemed to have a far more open mind….
Inequity is here, and the path of tax cuts for the rich, and eat sh** for the poor and middle classes, is the status quo. Jerry Ford was a conservative who knew better. Where are his likes today?
Seriously though, this labeling stuff does matter. Labeling choices in political writing are the canaries in the coal mine, warning when other perceptions of a political writer might be a bit off. The important perception in this weeks P&J’s column in need of some serious critical scrutiny, more subtle and important than the ideological taxonomy, is the idea that the contemporary Democratic party agenda is somehow based on “imaginative thinking”. Look at the Democratic agenda on the most important domestic issues facing the United States…
- The Democratic agenda on retirement security is raising social security taxes and cutting social security benefits for future retirees.
- The Democratic agenda on healthcare reform(*) tends towards raising taxes to fund a government takeover of the current healthcare system, then, once in control, cutting benefits to contain costs.
- The Democratic agenda on improving education is raising taxes and/or cutting programs in suburban areas to subsidize failing urban schools (and in the case of Rhode Island, also raising taxes to pay for increased non-educational social-services spending).
(*)I’m not including Senator Ron Wyden’s universal healthcare proposal which I have recently written about in the unimaginative category, but it’s not a mainstream Democratic position.
CORRECTION:
I’ve been counter-chided (politely and fairly) by Ian Donnis, who suggests that Anchor Rising has demonstrated enough familiarity with the Rhode Island political scene & RI media outlets to realize that Phillip and Jorge are opinion columnists whose choice of conventions has no bearing on the Phoenix’s news reporting.
Mr. Donnis is correct. I wouldn’t attribute a position to “the ProJo” or the New York Times; I would specify the “ProJo Editoral Board”, or the name of a specific columnist. It was unfair of me in the above post to attribute any positions to the Providence Phoenix staff as a whole, and I’ve corrected the original post to remove my mistake. [Open full post]
In his innaugural address, Governor Carcieri vowed to reform our current education system. As Maggie Gallagher reports, maybe getting rid of “middle schools” entirely is one worthwhile goal.
According to the New York Post, almost 50 of the city’s 220 middle schools have closed in the last two years, part of a plan to move back toward the old K-8 grammar school model. New York City is joining Baltimore, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, among other urban school districts.
Why did this take the “experts” so long? Many parents can tell you: If an otherwise decent school district has a problem school, it’s going to be the junior high. And even high-functioning middle schools can be a problem for the students in them.
After a miserable two years in junior high school, for example, my niece entered high school in Oregon this fall. We all breathed a sigh of relief. A straight-A student, she was never in any academic trouble, but the social horrors of junior high school for this graceful, outgoing teen left us all stressed on her behalf. The level of peer-generated torture suddenly dropped considerably.
Apparently we are not the only ones. The most striking research result of our middle-school mania is that American early adolescents are unusually miserable, according to international survey data.
“Folks have been aware, in achievement terms, that what happens in the middle grades is disappointing,” Douglas J. MacIver, a principal research scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for the Social Organization of Schools, told Education Week. “But I don’t think they realized how stressed middle-school students are.”
…This June, Pittsburgh closed seven middle schools and doubled the number of K-8 elementary schools. One advantage of the K-8 model is that it tends to spread the potentially problematic middle-graders around…Brent Johnson, a former principal in Pittsburgh, credits his school’s performance…to the fact that he has between 100 and 500 fewer middle-graders to deal with than the average middle school. About half his sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders have been in the school since kindergarten, making relationships with teachers, administrators, and their “buy-in” to the school culture more likely. The K-8 model tends to keep parents more attached and involved, too, another plus for the model, according to the Rand Corp. study.
Plus, when kids stay in grade school, they tend to stay “younger, longer,” reports a Long Beach, Calif., principal, and that’s been my experience, too. I didn’t pick a Catholic grade school for my younger son because of the K-8 structure that most Catholic schools retain, but I immediately noticed the benefits. Same kids, same principal, same parents for eight years — it does build community. And maybe it’s a “kibbutz effect,” but kids who have been in class together since kindergarten seem less eager to launch into the distracting peer torture of premature dating games.
“It turns out the onset of puberty is really a bad reason to try to move kids to another structure and to another school altogether,” the Rand report’s primary author, Jaana Juvonen, told Education Week.
Another bad idea from ed school hits the dust.
I know that Julia Steiny, for one, has written extensively on the perils that middle schools can pose to our pubescent progeny. I realize that the current infrastructure of our school districts probably wouldn’t support such a change, but I wonder if educators in RI would concur with this, at least conceptually?
[Open full post]Kari Chisholm of “Stand Tall for America”, a web-based effort founded to promote Oregon Senator Ron Wyden’s universal healthcare plan, answers a few questions about the Wyden plan put forth by me in the comments section of the Virginia Progressive blog. (The Wyden Plan is a federal proposal different from the Rhode Island small business health insurance plan, a state-level proposal also introduced last month). My original questions are in bold. Mr. Chisholm’s answers are in italics.
The Wyden Plan begins from the radically simple notion of decoupling health insurance from employment. For the first two years, Senator Wyden is proposing that employers increase the wages and salaries of their employees using monies originally allocated for the purchase of group health plans. Employees would use their pay increases to purchase individual health insurance policies. Changes in the tax code and insurance regulation would be enacted to make individual insurance purchases feasible. That’s all good. However, after year two, Senator Wyden wants to begin paying for his system through a payroll-style tax. That’s not so good. The post-year two payroll tax was the subject of my first question…
1. The plan, as I understand it from the Los Angeles Times summary, has people directly buying their own insurance in years 1 and 2. Why not keep with this system after year 2 and let people spend their own healthcare dollars (perhaps through a HSA) into the future? After taking employers mostly out of the mix for two years, what’s the motivation for shoehorning them back in?
People will buy their own insurance long after years 1 and 2. That’s the crux of the plan. Employers will be out – forever. After year 2, employers will pay a per-person contribution to the health care system – that roughly approximates to 25% of the cost of health care. This cuts the cost of health care for those responsible folks who have been paying for it until now; while getting a contribution from the cheapskates (Wal-Mart and friends.)
(Me again: But employers aren’t out if they are required to pay a new tax. This new tax means that after year two, most individuals will experience a sudden drop in the amount of healthcare they can afford per-hour of work. In years one and two, people will spend a certain percentage of their incomes on healthcare. After year two, across-the-board pay-cuts will be needed to pay for the new tax, even though healthcare costs will likely remain about the same. Workers won’t get as much healthcare per dollar collected by the government as they were getting per dollar paid to them directly because much of the new tax-stream will be going to subsidize healthcare for the poor. For most folks, a better solution than a payroll tax would be to allow tax-breaks for individuals and employers for monies paid into HSAs, and to allow individuals to take tax-breaks for purchasing high-deductible insurance.
Now, if you want to argue that we need a better subsidized healthcare system for the poor in this country, that is a perfectly legitimate argument, but it is a separate argument from how to provide health insurance to people that could afford it already, if not for the strange system of health insurance regulation that currently exists in America.
So Rhode Island is hemoraging its young and ambitious citizens. That’s not really news, but its mention gives us an excuse to consider our state in broad terms.
Any state-sized entity will have a broad middle for which life simply goes on — with more or less difficulty — whatever the trends along the all-important margins. But as a general proposition, it strikes me as characteristic of Rhode Island to enable policies that drive out the young and the entrepreneurial, while attracting those who will surely be state-dependent (i.e., welfare recipients, in one form or another). As a matter of simple logic, then, it follows that the movers and shakers who remain will be those who’ve found a way to capitalize on the ill health of the state, whether directly or indirectly. That would seem likely to result in a self-reinforcing downward spiral.
According to University of Rhode Island economist Leonard Lardaro:
With our budget deficits, the fact that our population is declining and the fact that we know our tax and cost structure is not competitive, Rhode Island needs to reinvent itself. This is not the time for piecemeal answers.
So what do you think? How about we “conserve” huge swaths of land, dictate a $10 per hour minimum wage and non-discrimination rental status for felons, layer regulations (as opposed to, say, consumer choices) on healthcare by government fiat, and finance our legislators’ progressive education? Okay, fine. You drive a hard bargain, but we’ll keep allowing public-sector employees (such as teachers) to unionize.
If that’s not a formula for success, then I’m not a native Rhode Islander…
The wonders that modern science is promising in the very near future (really, so near we can touch it, honest) seem so bright that they impart such sparkling innocence that even constitutional pessimists fail to see obvious dark sides. One such, John Derbyshire, writes:
If you don’t like eugenics, you are not going to like the 21st century. “Eugenics” became a scare-word because of ***STATE-SPONSORED*** eugenics programs, which were indeed a horrible idea—especially in the 1920s, when promoters of eugenics had very little idea what (as a matter of technical biology, I mean) they were talking about. State-organized anything is pretty dubious. We’re conservatives; we know that.
Private, commercial eugenics is here, though. It already has a foot in the door, & pretty soon it’ll be sprawled on your living-room couch. My children (probably) and my grandchildren (certainly) will practice eugenics. Why would they not? The desire to have smart, healthy, good-looking offspring is wellnigh universal. If parents can get assurance of such an outcome for a few thousand bucks, why should they not purchase that assurance? In a free country, how will you stop them? And why would conservatives or libertarians want to stop them? “Eugenics” has become such a scare-word that we’ll probably have to re-name the process to avoid all the shrieking and skirt-clutching; but it will be eugenics just the same.
Just how long does Mr. Derbyshire believe we’ll be able to deny a state-sponsored “right to eugenics” for those who cannot afford a few thousand bucks? (Per child, remember. The picture is compounded by the tendency of such folks to have more children.) Surely even small-government conservatives (if I may indulge in a redundancy) would have reservations about allowing the free market to create a permanent underclass — one with fruits borne within a single short generation.
I’ve little doubt that Derb is correct that I’m not going to like the 21st century. It does not make for an auspicious beginning that high-profile conservatives have so abandoned the notion of a higher morality that they cannot believe otherwise than that “objections [to eugenics are] so abstract & theoretical [that] it would be hard to get anyone to care about them.” Gone, apparently, is the societal stigma against attempting to play God. We’re so advanced, nowadays, that we’re well beyond such ancient precautions. Really, we’ll get it right this time — when the stakes are such that we cannot afford to get it wrong. Honest.
ADDENDUM:
Big, big oops: in the brackets of that last Derbyshire quotation, I at first used “euthanasia” rather than “eugenics.” That was some very substantial and stupid mistyping on my part, and I apologize for having made the error, not the least because it distracts from what I believe to be a strong point. I can only plea for your belief that simple intellectual honesty and a sincere interest in truth, rather than victory, keep me from playing deliberate games of that sort. I suppose the best I can do, after owning up to the mistake, is to take it as reminder that I have to be particularly careful now that I’ve gotten in the habit of finishing up my customary 12-hour workday before blogging.
In the end, the Massachusetts Legislature ignored governor Duval Patrick and decided to listen to the voters–or perhaps the Massachusetts Supreme Court–and voted to allow a vote on a State Constitutional ban on gay marriage.
[Open full post]Lawmakers in Massachusetts, the only state where gay marriage is legal, on Tuesday voted to advance a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a critical step toward putting the measure the 2008 ballot.
The proposed amendment, which would define marriage as between one man and one woman but ban future gay marriages, still needs approval of the next legislative session before it can go onto the ballot.
The vote Tuesday in the constitutional convention came without debate, immediately after Senate President Robert Travaglini officially opened the joint session.
Earlier in the day, Gov-elect Deval Patrick had met with Travaglini and House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi to urge against a vote, calling it a “question of conscience.” He said the proposed amendment was the first time the amendment process was being used “to consider reinserting discrimination into the constitution.”
But the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled last week that lawmakers’ had shirked their constitutional duties in November by recessing instead of voting on the proposal.
The supporters of the amendment collected signatures from 170,000 people in an effort to get the question on the ballot.
The amendment would need to be approved by 50 member of the current Legislature and 50 members of the new Legislature before going to voters on the 2008 ballot. On Tuesday, 61 lawmakers backed moving the measure forward, compared to 132 opposed.
I know the dollar amount is minimal, and I’m not even sure that I’d make any blanket policy suggestions, but something just seems wrong with making taxpayers cover expenses for this:
Rhode Island sent three state lawmakers to Washington, D.C., last month for a conference put on by the Center for Policy Alternatives.
Rep. Edith H. Ajello, D-Providence; Rep. Arthur Handy, D-Cranston; and Sen. Juan M. Pichardo, D-Providence; attended the three-day conference Dece. 8 to 10 at the Capitol Hilton. Seminar topics included same-sex marriage, mortgage foreclosure laws and predatory lending, stem-cell research and divestment from Sudan.
Also part of the trip was a day-long seminar put on by Catholics for Free Choice, in conjunction with the Center for Policy Alternatives. Besides abortion rights, discussion topics included preventing pregnancy through age-appropriate sex education in schools, Ajello said.
Ajello described the Center for Policy Alternatives as “A progressive organization that works on public policy issues at the state level, providing information and model legislation on this range of issues.” She said she didn’t come back with specific bills she plans to file, but rather that the conference provided an opportunity to consider ways to frame the issues during discussion back in Rhode Island.
Again, the cost — just under $500 per person — is insignificant in its effect on the state budget, but implementation of the CPA’s agenda would be much less benign. Indeed, my negative reaction to the trip is more a moral one… against making us finance the processes of our own state’s demise. It seems especially wrong given that the CPA makes is frighteningly comprehensive guide to undermining a society available online for free.
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