Over the past week or so I’ve written on the Bond Issues that will be placed before RI voters on November 7. I’m not entirely clear on the positives or negatives of all of the questions, but the comments offered have helped to clarify my own thoughts. Since we’ve got a week+ to go–and because I generally like to wrap up a series of posts in such a way–I thought it’d be helpful to put all of the posts together in an Index (or would it be a Table of Contents?) so that those so inclined can take a look at them.
Examining the Bond Issues I : Higher Education
Examining the Bond Issues II: Transportation
Examining the Bond Issues III: The Zoo
Examining the Bond Issues IV: Recreation
Examining the Bond Issues V: Affordable Housing
A George F. Will thought about Iraq from the winter of 2004 seems increasingly prescient…
A manager says, “Our team is just two players away from being a championship team. Unfortunately, the two players are Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.” Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.At the moment, current Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki doesn’t seem destined to be remembered by history as the George Washington of Iraq. This is from a Reuters report from this morning…
Al-Maliki told Reuters on Thursday his Shiite-led government could get violence under control in six months if U.S. forces gave them more weapons and responsibility.The militias referred to are the Shi’ite militias operating in Baghdad and the southern part of Iraq.
He said police were having to share rifles but, with better American help, could bring respite from dozens of daily killings in half the 12-18 months the U.S. commander in Iraq says is needed before Iraqis can take full control.
Al-Maliki also said his priority was to suppress the insurgency and root out al-Qaida, rather than to disarm the militias.
The combination of wanting more weapons, but not wanting to confront the militias is not promising. Maliki’s statement suggests that his highest aspiration for the Iraqi government is building it up to the point where it shares power with Shi’ite militias. If this is the best Maliki has to offer, it will become increasingly difficult to convince America that there is any purpose in staying in Iraq much longer.
Ralph Peters expresses this idea in his New York Post column…
Our soldiers and Marines are dying to protect a government whose members are scrambling to ally themselves with sectarian militias and insurgent factions. President Bush needs to face reality. The Maliki government is a failure.Peters has a specific idea about what getting tough means…
There’s still a chance, if a slight one, that we can achieve a few of our goals in Iraq – if we let our troops make war, not love. But if our own leaders are unwilling to fight, it’s time to leave and let Iraqis fight each other.
The first thing we need to do is to kill Muqtada al-Sadr, who’s now a greater threat to our strategic goals than Osama bin Laden.(Muqtada is the head of the Mahdi Army, Iraq’s largest Shi’ite militia. Peters continues…)
We should’ve killed him in 2003, when he first embarked upon his murder campaign. But our leaders were afraid of provoking riots.Another option comes from Max Boot (both Peters and Boot are experts on military affairs) writing in the Los Angeles Times…
Back then, the tumult might’ve lasted a week. Now we’ll face a serious uprising. So be it. When you put off paying war’s price, you pay compound interest in blood.
We must kill – not capture – Muqtada, then kill every gunman who comes out in the streets to avenge him.
There’s another course short of withdrawal: reducing U.S. forces from today’s level of 130,000 to under 50,000 and changing their focus from conducting combat operations to assisting Iraqi forces. The money saved from downsizing the U.S. presence could be used to better train and equip more Iraqi units. A smaller U.S. commitment also would be more sustainable over the long term. This is the option favored within the U.S. Special Forces community, in which the dominant view is that most American soldiers in Iraq, with their scant knowledge of the local language and customs, are more of a hindrance than a help to the counterinsurgency effort.Boot’s plan would help get Prime Minister Maliki more rifles for his soldiers, but as Peters noted about his own call for an offensive, Boot’s lighter, specialized force only works if implemented in conjunction with an Iraqi government determined to make itself into the sole legitimate governing authority in the country, and not just Iraq’s biggest militia.
Make no mistake: This is a high-risk strategy. The drawdown of U.S. troops could catalyze the Iraqis into getting their own house in order, or it could lead to a more rapid and violent disintegration of the rickety structure that now exists.
We have reached a point where how much of a commitment America continues to make towards Iraq will be largely determined by how much of a commitment the government of Iraq makes towards Iraq — all of Iraq, not just a few favored sects. [Open full post]
Over the past few months, the Projo has been running an interesting series of energy-policy editorials. Today’s editorial contained a reference to a possible new way to produce gasoline that I had never heard of before…
The coal in Illinois alone could make more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. And the technology to turn coal into gasoline is well tested. The Germans used it extensively during World War II. And the technology to control emissions of the traditional pollutants from coal-burning electricity plants — such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, which cause acid rain — is readily available.The editorial calls to mind this famous (at least amongst energy-wonks) quote…
What is still needed is a way to remove carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas, in large quantities.
Wallace Broecker, a climatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, says that pulling out the carbon dioxide is not difficult. It’s already done in submarines and space shuttles. The tough part is doing it on a gigantic scale, which would be necessary if coal were to be turned into motor fuel in large quantities.
Mr. Broecker asserts that doing this would come at a cost, but a manageable one. He says that gasoline can now be produced from coal for from $40 to $45 a barrel. The cost of capturing and storing the carbon dioxide would raise its price by 20 to 30 percent. But with oil recently at over $75 a barrel, the gasoline produced from coal could be economically competitive.
The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.If you think the above quote came from someone like a venture capitalist trying to drum up investement for an alternative energy start-up, you’d be wrong! The quote is actually from Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a former Saudi Arabian oil minister, expressing concern that continually high oil prices would accelerate the process of alternative energy development and reduce the demand for (and therefore the price of) his country’s oil.
This kind of concern among oil-suppliers, intensified when they start hearing people talking about making gasoline from coal, is almost certainly a large part of the reason we’ve seen a sharp and sudden decline in oil and gas prices over the last couple of months. [Open full post]
Mary Norton and Wendy Becker — both from the famously underprivileged professional class of college professors — have made substantial progress in their quest to disprove all of those same-sex marriage advocates who swore that judges would not be able to export the marriage policy that they (the judges) had created in Massachusetts. In a letter to the Providence Journal in which the couple responds to a letter to the same publication by Providence Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin, they give some explanation as to their motivation:
We have been involved in a loving relationship for 18 years. We are raising two wonderful children who are growing up to be compassionate, inquisitive, and kind. We wanted to be married to provide our children with the legal protections they may need and provide our relationship with the security it deserves.
Being sufficiently charitable to see this paragraph as more heartfelt than a regurgitation of movement talking points, I find its thematic transition somewhat perplexing. The first sentence of this truncated quotation is presented as if to indicate that the women’s relationship has been as committed as marriage for almost two decades, yet the last sentence insists that they require marriage in order to make their relationship secure.
I understand that proponents of pushing same-sex marriage through the judiciary find themselves having to maintain a careful linguistic balance. On one side, they must make an essentially moral argument in order to leverage the strength of civil rights sentiment. On the other, however, they must couch their goals in the language of cold law and civic interests; otherwise, it would be more difficult to hide the reality (and it is a reality) that they ought to be working through the legislative process. In their own effort to strike this balance, Norton and Becker only point the way to the public interest that both makes marriage crucial to public well-being and allows it to remain exclusive to oppose-sex couples without amounting to invidious discrimination.
If marriage is intended to encourage stability, then it is implicitly geared toward relationships that:
- would cause harm were they to end and
- are in danger of instability.
On the first point, the only circumstances that fall within the government’s scope to care is when the end of the relationship would affect children. Yes, the public has an interest in encouraging mutual care, but not only is such a goal arguably beyond the boundaries of vagueness past which the government is simply meddling, but it also offers no justification for excluding relatives or those who wish to form groups of larger than two people.
On the second point, the targeted couples are plainly not those whose commitment is ensured even without the encouragement of the marital institution. And the only relationships into which children are likely to enter (bringing with them the overriding public interest) without a previously formed commitment are those in which the partners are capable of creating children through their own actions. A long-term couple that has gone through the process of adopting children is not likely to be under the same threat of insecurity.
The argument is well worth considering that non-procreative opposite-sex couples are allowed to marry and present no relevant distinctions from same-sex couples. (In this area, I agree with Bishop Tobin on matters of morality, but we apparently differ on how morality ought to affect and operate with the law and the legislative process.) The observation that ultimately undermines that argument, however, is that same-sex couples would inherently sever the link between marriage and procreation, while non-procreative opposite-sex couples do not.
Norton and Becker end their letter with a question that presumes too much: “What could the Church find immoral in protecting children and creating secure families?” Children are most protected by a culture with the confidence to insist that their creation — not a set of legal rights and privileges — ought to be inextricable from their families’ security.
Consider this an open-thread on the day’s multiple political headlines…
- Carcieri: Labor group violated election laws (the Associated Press via the Boston Globe).
- Plunder Dome witness shows up in Senate race (Katherine Gregg, Mike Stanton and Steve Peoples in the Projo’s 7-to-7 blog).
- Lynch Requests Grand Jury Testimony In Station Case (WJAR-TV NBC 10).
Here’s a fascinating factoid for the day and a point to ponder in the casino debate, from Michael Mandel et. al in Business Week (h/t Jonah Goldberg)…
What you may not realize is that the government’s decades-old system of number collection and crunching captures investments in equipment, buildings, and software, but for the most part misses the growing portion of GDP that is generating the cool, game-changing ideas. “As we’ve become a more knowledge-based economy,” says University of Maryland economist Charles R. Hulten, “our statistics have not shifted to capture the effects.”In other words, the government’s system of economic statistics is likely to count a casino as a better investment than a new pharmaceutical research center, if the casino is in a big enough building! [Open full post]
The statistical wizards at the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington can whip up a spreadsheet showing how much the railroads spend on furniture ($39 million in 2004, to be exact). But they have no way of tracking the billions of dollars companies spend each year on innovation and product design, brand-building, employee training, or any of the other intangible investments required to compete in today’s global economy?
Machines and buildings were counted as future-oriented investment, but spending on education, training, and R&D was not. No attempt was made to judge the social utility of expenditures. For example, the $6 million cost of building the Flamingo Hotel, the Las Vegas casino opened by Bugsy Siegel in 1946, was tallied as an investment. But AT&T’s funding of Bell Labs, where the transistor was invented around the same time, wasn’t even included in GDP.
Bill Harsch, Republican candidate for Attorney General, has sent out a letter detailing actions he would take if elected with regards to The Station fire…
In his letter, Mr. Harsch tackles the question of “politicizing the death of the Station Fire victims” head-on…
- A complete review of the original state criminal case as well as the indictment and prosecution of all parties including town officials responsible for the events of February 20 , 2003;
- The initiation of criminal prosecutions in conjunction with the US Attorney targeting those parties responsible for the violation of the guaranteed civil rights of the Station Fire victims [including the right to equitable enforcement of all public safety laws];
- A reform of a broken plea bargain system which now favors who a perpetrator of crime knows rather than being based on what he or she has done wrong.
In writing this letter I will surely be accused of politicizing the death of the Station Fire victims. To the extent that my voicing of what the law demands of the Attorney General’s office will draw fire from those believing that the Station Fire prosecution is a closed subject, I will gladly take such risk knowing that your Attorney General must demonstrate leadership and competency in the quest to provide justice and protection for all Rhode Island citizens.[Open full post]
I am tired of being a victim of the continued incompetency and mismanagement of the Attorney General’s Office – to the extent I know that most Rhode Islanders feel as I do – I believe the time for change is now.
A detailed but accessible summary of Save the Bay‘s assessment of how conditions in Narragansett Bay have improved and declined since the year 2000 is available from the StB website (h/t RightRI)…
This edition shows that, despite considerable progress in some of the indicators, the Bay has declined slightly from an overall score of 4.5 in 2000 to a 4.3 today. The negative trend is driven by sharp declines of fish and shellfish resources, and a spreading area of low dissolved oxygen and unusually warm water temperatures creating a “dead zone” on the bottom.Though the report labels some of its own recommendations as “strong and even controversial”, its description of fish and shellfish depletion suggest that Narragansett Bay will not fully rebound (especially as a commercial fishing center) in the absence of changes to current environmental management programs. [Open full post]
