Stephen Green refers to this policy change as “the Pedophile Protection Act”:
Joe Biden’s Department of Education is seeking to roll back a Trump-era effort to collect data on teacher-on-student sex crimes.
“The department’s Office for Civil Rights will not ask school districts questions regarding teacher-on-student sexual assault allegations as part of its 2021-2022 Civil Rights Data Collection, proposed Thursday,” reports the Washington Free Beacon. According to an Education Department spokesman, the change is designed to “reduce burden and duplication of data,” but not everyone is buying that explanation.
For a variety of reasons, this morning, I’ve been thinking about how support for Democrats has mainly to do with (1) purchased votes and (2) a false, long-cultivated image of the party. This policy is a good illustration of both.
It is in the teacher unions’ interest to focus on the members who are most in need of protection (i.e., most deserving of lower salaries and losing their jobs), and it is in the interest of the Democrats to maintain that cash cow, activist base, and voting bloc. Meanwhile, children don’t vote, and parents aren’t single-issue voters, even to the extent the media tells them what’s going on.
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During our weekly conversation on Monday, John DePetro and I had some mild disagreement about how one might explain the most recent results of Morning Consult’s regular ranking of U.S. governors’ popularity.
The headline for Rhode Island is that Governor Dan McKee is the second-most-popular Democrat governor in the country (at thirteenth overall), behind Connecticut’s Dan Lamont (at seventh overall). This represents quite a reversal from the same poll in 2019, when RI’s Gina Raimondo was the third-least-popular governor in the country, with Ned Lamont almost as low, at fourth-least-popular.
During our radio segment, I observed that New Englanders seem relatively easy to please when it comes to their governors in this poll. Even at thirteenth in the country, McKee is still the second-least-popular governor in our region, besting only Maine Democrat Janet Mills… and she’s seventeenth-most-popular. That is, the governors of all six New England state are comfortably near the top of the list, as follows:
- Republican Phil Scott of Vermont, most popular
- Republican Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, second most popular
- Republican Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, fourth most popular
- Democrat Ned Lamont of Connecticut, seventh most popular
- Democrat Dan McKee of Rhode Island, thirteenth most popular
- Democrat Janet Mills of Maine, seventeenth most popular
John raised the excellent point that Morning Consult’s polls are ongoing and cover large spans, with these scores reflecting voter opinions all the way back to July 21 and up to October 20. During the summer, there was a bit more jubilation about coming out of the COVID lockdowns, and Joe Biden hadn’t yet cratered with his mishandling of Afghanistan, inflation, and so on.
Maybe we’re both right, to some extent.
Looking back to 2019, New England’s Republican governors were still in the top five: Baker was third; Scott was fourth; and Sununu was fifth. This was in stark contrast with the Democrats, who were all in the bottom seven: Raimondo was third worst; Lamont was fourth worst; and Mills was seventh worst.
Indications have been over the past couple years that people in the Northeast have, unfortunately, wanted the heavy hand of government during the pandemic. (Optimistically, we might say that they were sold on it, but that’s not much better.) Democrats may also have been riding the sugar high of defeating President Trump still in early summer.
The question going forward, as Biden tanks, COVID recedes, and New Englanders can go back to assessing their governors based on the job they’re actually doing running their states, is whether our Democrats return to their place at the bottom of the list. If they want to avoid that fate right before an election, perhaps they should ask themselves why their Republican peers do so well.
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Gregory Booth, who works with the advocacy section of Rhode Island’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) makes a reasonable point when he suggests that it might not be in our state’s best interest to have National Grid sell its Ocean State electrical distribution business to another company that lacks its cross-state infrastructure, but that isn’t why Attorney General Peter Neronha opposes the deal:
The Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office says state regulators should block the sale of the state’s largest electric distribution utility until the buyer assures that it can comply with the state’s ambitious new climate law. …
In written testimony for the attorney general’s office, consultants Mark Ewen and Robert Knecht, principals at Industrial Economics, noted that the state’s Act on Climate, enacted into law earlier this year, sets one of the most aggressive goals for greenhouse gas reductions in the nation. And while PPL Corp. “appears to agree that it will need to undertake extraordinary efforts” to meet those goals, it has offered “little in the way of proposals” for doing so, they said.
The environmental activists who push the legislation don’t seem to care what the effects on human beings who live in and around Rhode Island will be, and politicians just want the activist support and campaign messaging that they’re “doing something” about climate change. The broader swath of our population probably doesn’t think the policies through, seeing goals and greenhouse gas reduction targets as nice, but soft, statements of ambition, and that officials would never actually let them hurt actual people.
Take this story as a reminder, however, that these laws are starting to have real teeth, and the well-being of Rhode Islanders is not, even in principle, their primary purpose. It can’t be, because Rhode Island’s effect on the global climate is negligible. These laws are passed to please ideologues for votes and money and, even at their purest, to signal virtue.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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During the flu season of 2018, newspapers published a number of heartbreaking articles profiling people who’d died from it. That was a pretty bad flu season, but still, almost everybody recovered from the flu. As those articles rolled out, though, it changed how the illness felt. The stories provided a context of unease.
We’ve seen that many times escalated during the COVID pandemic, but this Epoch Times article about airline workers who’ve had terrible reactions to the vaccine is a reminder of what we aren’t seeing from the mainstream: the sorts of stories they’d publish if they weren’t promoting the government’s preferred solution:
[Open full post]“I sat down in the chair at the minute clinic, rolled up my sleeve, prayed, asked God to forgive me, and cried,” Williams told The Epoch Times. “The minute they stuck that needle in my arm, pain went up through my neck and I have not been the same since.” …
The day that she received the vaccine, Williams began having severe headaches and muscle spasms that would wake her from sleep. She said she went to bed and stayed there for four days in an “almost coma-like state.”
Reacting to Joe Biden’s comments on the Waukesha Christmas parade massacre, Brown University political science professor Wendy Schiller linked the incident to domestic violence:
Here’s an idea. Take domestic violence more seriously at every level of government. Biden should know as he authored the original Violence Against Women Act.
Although the mainstream narrative doesn’t make much room for this and tends to brush contrary evidence aside, taking domestic violence more seriously requires reversing the practice of treating it as something that only affects women. File this reality in the Through the Looking Glass folder of items everybody thinks they know that is wrong.
According to the most recent “National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey” from the CDC, published in 2015, domestic violence has been equalizing between the sexes. Tables 9 and 11 show the reported incidents from women and men, respectively, and they show that 3,455,000 women reported physical violence in the past year, which was actually less than the 4,255,000 men. Other measures (like contact sexual violence) go the other way. Taking stalking out of it, the combined sexual and physical violence numbers are women 6,387,000 and men 6,088,000, but each victim could report both, so the numbers of victims making reports is probably closer to even.
This shouldn’t be unexpected. In the ’00s, we started to hear reports that women were more likely to be perpetrators of abuse. A national study of adults between 18 and 28 conducted in 2007 found:
In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases. Reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.3; 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.9, 2.8), but not men (AOR=1.26; 95% CI=0.9, 1.7). Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women (AOR=1.3; 95% CI=1.1, 1.5), and reciprocal intimate partner violence was associated with greater injury than was nonreciprocal intimate partner violence regardless of the gender of the perpetrator (AOR=4.4; 95% CI=3.6, 5.5).
That is, when only one partner is abusing the other, its usually the woman doing it. The study found that when the violence was mutual, men and women were equally likely to have started it. Men were more likely to inflict injury, but the study doesn’t tell us whether that’s because they’re more serious in the assault or just stronger.
This study isn’t all. In 2006, a study across two college campuses (the University of Florida and the University of South Carolina) suggested that women were more likely to report having been the perpetrator of abuse and stalking. Other studies around the same time found that mothers were more likely to abuse their children.
Whether the culture shifted back toward stereotypes after these studies or such studies stopped being conducted or broadly reported in the years since, we can’t say. But with this issue, as with so many others, if we really want to improve people’s lives, we have to stop setting policies according to erroneous progressive assumptions.
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So, ho hum, 32 American students were chosen to study at the University of Oxford via Rhodes Scholarships, and surprise, surprise, the AP report amplifies the progressive stories within the story. But at what point do the headlines stop promoting the disproportionate distribution of prestigious awards to females?
The class of U.S. Rhodes scholars for 2022 includes the largest number of women ever selected for the scholarship in one year, the Rhodes Trust announced Sunday.
Of the 32 students chosen to study at the University of Oxford in England, 22 are women, the office of the American secretary of the trust said in a statement.
Nationally, females are already disproportionately enrolled in college (about 54%), and this result shows they’re even more disproportionately recognized by the Rhodes Scholarship organization (69%).
If that’s how a merit-driven process shook out, whatever, but at some point shouldn’t the narrative change from proclaiming girl power to wondering what’s going on with boys?
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A week ago, Anchor Rising reported on toys being given to children in school-based COVID vaccination clinics. A spokesperson for the state said that it was only one clinic, and it was done to distract children while getting the shot. Elizabeth McNamara reports for East Greenwich News that children in that town are going home with even more SWAG:
Upon check in, each child received a small stuffed animal and when they got to their vaccine spot, they were given a fidget spinner to keep them occupied. The comfort dogs – Holly and Bill – were available as needed. After they got their shot, a smaller dose than is given to older recipients, the children received a treat bag and were able to spend the 15-minute waiting period watching the movie and checking out the treats (playdough, crayons and a snack bar).
At least this clinic isn’t in a school, making the bribes seem less like a ploy to lure other children in through peer pressure. However, this comment from pediatrician Patricia Flanagan, who signed the irresponsible Rhode Island Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics letter on masking children in August, is troubling:
“Getting the 5 to 11 year olds vaccinated is such a triumph. What these kids have been through – to get them a little bit safer and a little bit more normal, less quarantine, less restrictions, that’s what they need,” she said.
When it comes to the vaccine, “a little bit safer” is right. A very little bit safer. Pfizer’s own data supporting child vaccination found that only 1.4% of children without vaccination caught COVID, compared with 0.3% with vaccination, and none had severe illnesses. Children are already safe.
What is forcing them into abnormal lives is the irrational fear from adults like Flanagan. They’re bribing kids to be vaccinated so they, the adults, can feel safer.
One wonders how such people will react if objective analysis eventually finds that short- and long-term side effects of the vaccine actually caused more harm to children than it offered additional protection. Denial seems likely, but they’ll probably let the kids keep the toys.
Featured image by the CDC on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The mask of Cicilline and others comes off after the Rittenhouse verdict
- The mixed messages of McKee’s vacation and his $3,000 union giveaway
- Boys, you can win a government contest, too! (If you live in CT.)
- TCI’s welcome collapse
- Nicole Solas’s welcome full-on rebuff of NEA’s Bob Walsh
- Warwick fire fighters’ misbegotten funds
- Polls for the governor’s race
- Mattiello’s obvious move to become a lobbyist
Featured image by Jonny Gios on Unsplash.
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That billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is giving Barack Obama $100 million for his foundation points to the reality that we really have to rethink our concept of money in politics:
“I’m told the $100 million was midwifed by Jay Carney, Bezos’ political sherpa and the former Obama press secretary. Carney ran point for Bezos, and Obama eventually spoke directly with the Amazon C.E.O. earlier this year. The two are not close, but ‘have seen each other socially from time to time,’ Valerie Jarrett, the Obama family’s longtime aide-de-camp told me,” Theodore Schleifer of Puck News reported, adding, “The gift, the largest single donation ever made to the Foundation, has no restrictions on its use. … The Obama Foundation, for instance, has already raised over $720 million from donors toward its $1.6 billion goal, including about $170 million in 2020 and $140 million in 2019, according to recent tax filings.”
Gifts of this size doubtless have politicians salivating across the country, and the rising tide of their spittle shows what a long view corrupt people can take of a quid pro quo.
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