Andrew has pointed out the latest very troubling actions and words of Guy Dufault in the postings entitled Another Crisis in West Warwick? and Carcieri Unafraid of Dufault’s Stuff.
No one should be confused: Dufault’s behavior on behalf of the public employee unions and gambling interests – and to the detriment of the working families and retirees of Rhode Island – is nothing new. Do you remember how the Constitutional Convention ballot vote was narrowly defeated in November 2004? Do you recall who deceitfully led the effort to block Rhode Island citizens from having the right to alter the misguided status quo of politics in this state? Guy Dufault.
A previous posting references an Ed Achorn editorial in the ProJo, which states:
The people who led the fight against a constitutional convention in Rhode Island – members of an organization called Citizens for Representative Government – went to great lengths to cover their tracks. But all roads seem to lead to Guy Dufault, the labor and gambling lobbyist.
The public-employee unions put up the money to run phone banks, air TV and radio ads, and print posters in narrowly defeating a constitutional convention, 52 to 48 percent, on November 2. Mr. Dufault acknowledged on Friday that he filled out most of the group’s campaign-finance report now on file with the Rhode Island Board of Elections.
But you wouldn’t know of Mr. Dufault’s role by reading that public document. He kept that carefully hidden from the public…
What’s the upshot of this?
I don’t know if any of this constitutes filing and signing a false report…But it does seem puzzling that Mr. Dufault and Citizens for Representative Government chose to make it so difficult for the public to find out who was running the show. Why bother?…
Maybe Citizens for Representative Government did not want citizens to find out easily that it was a prominent State House lobbyist for the public-employee unions and gambling interests who fought to deny people the chance to shake up Rhode Island government with a constitutional convention. (Now, citizens will have to wait until at least 2016.)
I would encourage you to read the entire editorial for further details.
Kudos to Governor Carcieri for directly taking on this seedy underbelly of Rhode Island politics. It is about time that a bright light was focused on these people and their unacceptable behavior.
Rod Dreher’s latest addition to the conservative-ire-at-Bush line of commentaries has made an appearance on Anchor Rising, so I thought I’d mention that I’ve contemplated part of it further in a post over on Dust in the Light:
[Open full post]Dreher, it seemed to me, began to drift not long after he made the leap from displaced red-stater-in-NY working for National Review to editorial writer and columnist for the mainstream media down in the Great Red Yonder. He’s still to be counted among conservatives, without doubt, and fairness requires that I admit to not reading him much anymore.
Still, “rolling disaster” is a strong and unambiguous characterization of the war, and I wonder whether being steeped in media that “harp on the negative and pessimistic” explains the ease with which Dreher bowls it out.
Which member of the state Board of Elections made this statement about the BOE case concerning Republican advertisements during the 2002 election…
“I made the decision summarily on my own that, no, the proposed settlement terms that the governor and the Republican Party were suggesting were entirely inappropriate and unacceptable to me as the complainant and I would not participate and agree to any such settlement terms. . . . Let the chips fall where they may.”Actually, it wasn’t a board member. It was State Democratic Party Chairman William Lynch, on the Dan Yorke show, as quoted by Katherine Gregg in the Projo. I know that Lynch brought the original complaint, but does that give him the power to decide it?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. According to apparent Board of Elections practice, you don’t have to be involved with the case in any way to have a voice in deciding it. You only need be a member of the state’s Democratic leadership! Here’s Edward Achorn, in today’s Projo…
Last week, we learned that Roger Begin, chairman of the state Board of Elections and a former Democratic lieutenant governor, had chosen to run the idea of settlement of a politically explosive case involving the governor past Speaker Murphy and Senate President Joseph Montalbano.
Remember, campaign finance-related limitations on political speech have been approved by the courts because the courts have found that government has a compelling interest in preventing — not just corruption — but the appearance of corruption. The behavior of the Rhode Island Board of Elections is not serving this purpose. The board is now doing more to create the appearance of corruption than it is to prevent it, and the BOE needs to do something to remedy the situation. [Open full post]
According to Michael Barone:
The political risks of opposing an Italian-American are therefore probably less than in 1983 [when Judge Antonin Scalia was nominated and confirmed]. But they’re not zero. I wonder whether Tom Carper of Delaware (where 7 percent of the population in the 2000 census said they were of Italian ancestry), Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey (14 percent), Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York (11 percent), Christopher Dodd and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (14 percent), and Jack Reed of Rhode Island (14 percent) really want to go to the length of supporting a filibuster against an Italian-American judge with sterling credentials and majority support in the Senate. I’m pretty sure that Lincoln Chafee, facing a conservative opponent in the Republican primary in Rhode Island, the state with the nation’s highest percentage of Italian-Americans, doesn’t want to oppose Alito. If I were giving him political advice, I would certainly advise him not to do so. As much as one quarter of Republican primary voters there will have Italian names or Italian ancestors.
Barone also provides this statement:
The National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) applauds President George W. Bush on his nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr., a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, to the position of associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.Judge Alito, whose father immigrated to the United States from Italy, is highly respected in the judicial community for his constitutional knowledge and his impeccable character.President Bush has chosen an individual whose intellect and qualifications are above reproach. We are proud and fortunate that he shares our Italian heritage. Washington, D.C. Oct. 31, 2005.
In heavily Roman Catholic (and Italian-American) Rhode Island, can Chafee afford not to support such a well-qualified judicial candidate? Will concern for his “pro-choice” interest group rating prevail over political calculation? On the other hand, despite what Barone may think, I have little doubt that Senator Reed will pay little heed to this sort of “identity politics.”
[Open full post]According to this story:
For years, slot machines at Lincoln Park and Newport Grand have seen double-digit growth. But now — while the machines are still extremely profitable — they are not producing the same boom, and that could have grave ramifications for the state.
This year’s state budget is based on the assumption that slot-machine revenue would increase by 15.3 percent. However, data presented yesterday by the Rhode Island Lottery show that since the start of the fiscal year on July 1, there has been only a 4.2-percent bump.
While it’s early in the year and there are many other factors that go into the state’s budget, failing to meet the expectations could create a multimillion-dollar shortfall. . .
State leaders yesterday urged caution about the lottery figures.
“These estimates are preliminary and based only on the first quarter of the fiscal year,” Carcieri’s spokesman Jeff Neal said. “However, these estimates highlight the fact that we must begin to get control of state government spending. Rhode Island has the sixth-highest tax burden of any state in the nation. We will never be able to cut those taxes until we reduce spending.”
House Majority Leader Gordon D. Fox, D-Providence, said through a spokesman that he is concerned about the lottery but that it is “too premature right now.” Fox said he wants next week’s final report so he can see the gambling numbers “in the broader context” of the rest of the budget.
Setting aside the questionable practice of relying on gambling revenue to the degree that Rhode Island does, what was the thinking that went behind a projection of 15% growth? Doesn’t that seem a little too rambunctious?
[Open full post]Upon the withdrawal of Harriet Meirs nomination to the Supreme Court, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) said: “The radical right wing of the Republican Party killed the Harriet Miers nomination. Apparently, Ms. Miers did not satisfy those who want to pack the Supreme Court with rigid ideologues.”
Well, once again, Senator Reid doesn’t know what he is talking about.
Rather, here is a more accurate “reid” of the conservative view of American politics today.
An editorial by Rod Dreher offers these comments:
…American conservatism is in crisis at the moment because the bizarre Harriet Miers nomination imposed a surreality check on the right, forcing us to consider just how much nonsense we had gone along with for the sake of party discipline.
Where to start? With the Lyndon Johnson-level spending? The signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill, which candidate Bush had denounced as unconstitutional? The race-preferences sellout in the University of Michigan cases?
There was also the cynical use of the federal marriage amendment, which the administration dropped after turning out the social-conservative vote in 2004. And grass-roots conservatives cite the president’s intent to liberalize immigration policy with Mexico.
Then there is the Iraq quagmire, which, even if initially a worthy cause, has become a rolling disaster.
On top of this came the Katrina debacle, which further damaged conservatism’s claim to competent governance.
Conservatives, consciously or not, looked the other way for far too long, mostly because we felt it important to back the president in wartime and because nothing was more important to the various tribes of Red State Nation than recapturing the Supreme Court. For the first time in a generation, a conservative Republican president and a Republican majority in the Senate made that dream a real possibility.
Whatever else Bush might fumble, we trusted him to get that right.
Instead, he gave us a crony pick of no special talents or discernible vision, except for love of Our Lord and George W. Bush, and support for racial preferences. This is what we drank the Rovian Kool-Aid for? The Miers selection was no isolated incident, but the tipping point in a series of betrayals…
A Washington Times article added these comments:
…The choice of Miss Miers was significant because, conservatives critics agreed, it caused some on the right to go public for the first time with their criticism of Mr. Bush, blaming him directly for a major decision he made instead of blaming it on White House advisers, administration aides or renegade Republicans in Congress.
“Withdrawing Miers put a Band-Aid on the rift,” says George Conway III, a New York lawyer who is beginning to emerge as one of the new generation of conservative-activist leaders. “That rift now is healed and will be reopened only if he makes the same mistake twice — then the Band-Aid will come right off.”
“Miers was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back among conservatives,” says Mr. Conway, who worked behind the scenes against President Clinton during the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky scandals.
He says some nationally prominent conservative leaders have privately dissented from most or, in some cases, all of the president’s initiatives on a range of fronts. “It’s a long, long list.”
He says it includes expanding the federal government’s role in education and the welfare state through Medicare drug benefits, encroachment on personal freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism, the decision to go to war with Iraq and what they see as mismanaging the war, not opposing the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance regulations, promoting a guest-worker program for illegal aliens and not fighting the principle of enforced diversity in the University of Michigan racial-preferences cases…
Many anti-Miers conservatives disagree on the desirability and purpose of a nomination fight.
“I think it is a bogus claim people in the press make when they say what the right wants is a fight about ideology,” Mr. Conway says. “No. What we want is a good justice nominee but not a fight for the sake of having a fight. If it takes a fight to get a good justice, fine.”
Horace Cooper, a former Bush Labor Department official who is now a constitutional law professor at George Mason University, supported the Miers nomination, and he now says a Senate confirmation fight could be useful.
“We need a certifiably conservative judge as Bush’s choice so that the fight in the Senate provides that ‘teaching moment’ when we can explain to the nation what we mean by conservative and constitutionalist.”…
Wanting a strong candidate for the Supreme Court, an “A” player and not an unqualified crony. Wanting a teaching moment, a moment to stand on principles carefully and rationally articulated to the American public. Being willing even to lose in the short run in order to take that principled stand. Acting based on the knowledge that, in politics, there is a need to stay on offense – even after a defeat – because there will always be future opportunities to win the battle. This is conservatism at its principled best.
Contrast that principled approach with the way the Democrats are handling the hot topic of special counsel Fitzgerald’s investigation, as noted in this excerpt from a New York Times’ editorial by David Brooks:
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald did not find evidence to prove that there was a “broad conspiracy to out a covert agent for political gain. He did not find evidence of wide-ranging criminal behavior. He did not even indict the media’s ordained villain, Karl Rove,” writes David Brooks in Sunday’s NY Times.
“Leading Democratic politicians filled the air with grand conspiracy theories that would be at home in the John Birch Society.”
“Why are these people so compulsively overheated?.. Why do they have to slather on wild, unsupported charges that do little more than make them look unhinged?
Brooks quotes from an essay written 40 years ago by Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”
Hofstadter argued that sometimes people who are dispossessed, who feel their country has been taken away from them and their kind, develop an angry, suspicious and conspiratorial frame of mind. It is never enough to believe their opponents have committed honest mistakes or have legitimate purposes; they insist on believing in malicious conspiracies.
“The paranoid spokesman,” Hofstadter wrote, “sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Because his opponents are so evil, the conspiracy monger is never content with anything but their total destruction.”
Brooks summarizes: “So some Democrats were not content with Libby’s indictment, but had to stretch, distort and exaggerate. The tragic thing is that at the exact moment when the Republican Party is staggering under the weight of its own mistakes, the Democratic Party’s loudest voices are in the grip of passions that render them untrustworthy.”
As this previous posting noted, the left is trying to frame this judiciary debate on false terms:
Implicit in the public debate about the upcoming Supreme Court nomination is the assumption by many on the left that any nominee by President Bush is going to be an activist from the right who will seek to undo the aggressive legislating done by the Court in recent years with an equally aggressive counter response. Such a belief reduces the debate to nothing more than a raw power struggle between competing interests. And it completely misses the real point of the judicial activism debate…
Those of us who believe in an original intent approach to judicial behavior believe that legislatures are the place where democratic processes should play out in order to build a public consensus on important policy matters. It takes time and it frequently seems like a messy, inefficient process. But, consider the horrible alternative we now live with: When the Supreme Court legislates on policy matters, it immediately stops any public debate before there has been sufficient time to develop a public consensus. As a result, their action immediately yields a polarization on the topic which, as the abortion issue has shown, makes reasoned debate and building a public consensus practically impossible. We have become a more divided society due to judges legislating from the bench.
Nothing would be more valuable for the American public than to see a very public debate between a principled conservatism and a paranoid, unhinged left.
[Open full post]Blogs are a marker of a new elite. More accurately, they represent one area in which the ways society works around elite structures must be reconceived.
That’s the central theme with which I approached the annual professional development seminar of the Legislative Information and Communications Staff Section (LINCS) of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) as a speaker for a session addressing “Blogs: The Wave of the Future?” Along with RI Future moderator Matt Jerzick (he sat to my left) and Ric Cantrell, the organizer of a blog by the Utah Senate, I explained the significance of blogs to professionals who handle public information, media relations, and civic education services in state governments:
This summer, my wife took a part-time job as a waitress over in Tiverton, Rhode Island, in a restaurant that turned out to be somewhat of a summer hotspot. No reservations available; a two-hour wait every night throughout the season.
Sometime in August, one of my fellow carpenters mentioned that well-connected acquaintances of his — professional lobbyists — had pulled every string trying to get a table there, and it occurred to me that I would probably have a better shot at getting them in than all of the powerful people with whom they’ve worked so hard to develop networks.
Now imagine if there were a network for waiters, busboys, bouncers, or even roadies, concert security guards — all of those people who are very narrowly connected to something desirable. Individually, they’re not powerful people; collectively, they’d have clout. Moreover, their network needn’t be such that its capital would be consolidated in some sort of negotiating leadership, as is the case in unions. This, in a limited way, is how the blogosphere functions.
For a quick local example, in February 2004, Rhode Island’s governor put forward a terrorism-related bill, which essentially would have updated state laws to factor in terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Well, an existing network of mainstream media outlets, the ACLU, and ostensible “experts” (professors and such) flipped the switch, putting political pressure on the governor, and succeeding in getting him to withdraw the bill. Libertarian law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh, who is himself part of that network, initially contributed to the pressure.
I — just some nobody from Rhode Island — was interested enough in the issue to look into the claims and to read the bill, and I found that the breathless reportage exaggerated its language to such an extent that one might reasonably fling an accusation of falsehood. I wrote up a post for my blog, Dust in the Light, with an embedded picture of the Providence Journal‘s front-page story and pointed it out to Prof. Volokh. He modified his stance and included a link back to my blog, leading thousands of readers — interested readers, connected readers — to my argument. Subsequently, the Journal replaced the picture that I’d included with a blank image, and as I recall, they issued a correction.
In our small way, the emerging network of bloggers had offered a counterforce to an existing network of elites. Since this incident, that sort of activity — that role — has become a hallmark of blogs. Dan Rather’s memo scandal perhaps being the most prominent example.
As it concerns you, in your role with state legislatures, the important lesson is that a local blogger now has the power to tap into national or international interest in an issue and bring that force into the mix for local concerns. The challenge for you is that it won’t be enough simply to think of bloggers as another channel of media; they’re not in it for money; they’re more ideologically driven. But it won’t be adequate, either, for you to handle them as, say, a special interest group, because they’ve got direct access to a broad audience, consisting not necessarily of fellow ideologues.
And now — as we at Anchor Rising discovered a couple of weeks ago — bloggers are also filling the role of experts in that old network. One of our writers, Carroll Andrew Morse, was recently interviewed for the six o’clock news to offer “the conservative side” for a report on national Republican ads against local Republican upstart Steve Laffey. Instead of a bow-tied professor behind a desk, viewers saw some guy whom the reporter met in a parking lot on his lunch break. In the case of Dan Rather, people who happened to know about typesetting contributed their expertise to the aggregate understanding; others spent their lunch breaks duplicating the forged documents on their own computers.
What it comes down to is that lawmakers are no longer dealing with a categorized and hierarchical field of players. Every constituent is a potential influencer and conveyor of news, and those who excel in that role will approach it from that perspective. In other words, they themselves will not turn to an established network of elites, but to their peers.
Among those peers, just as among blue collar service providers, will be somebody with an inside connection, as well as somebody with the wherewithal to put pieces together and somebody with access to an audience. One fortunate consequence of this new reality is that the best strategy for legislators to begin addressing blogs is to be respectful of and responsive to constituents. What blogs ultimately make palpable is the reality that legislators are also among citizens’ peers.
The theme echoes more broadly. I recently heard it in the strains of the latest bit of D&G (that’s “doom and gloom”) to thud onto the conservative reading list. Writes Peggy Noonan:
Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.
Ms. Noonan is surely in a better position than I to judge whether this attitude drives the Western elite, but I can’t help but wonder whether, similarly, she’s more susceptible to elites’ false conceits. Perhaps it isn’t “the whole ball of wax” that’s falling apart, but just the artificial system — long sensed to be untenable — by which the elites, the conceit-full Baby Boomer elites, have managed to secure the “grim comfort” that “I got mine.”
Or perhaps we are headed toward “the next chapter of trouble,” and it may be trouble from more than merely a limited perspective. But blogs are proving that, if the functional elites are too resigned to that trouble to lead our society through it, the underclasses now have the technology — and the faculty — to pick up the slack. Maybe the sky is falling only to reveal the truer sky beyond, and in its light, we will be better able to respond to the troubles with which life — and history — accosts us all equally.
A Wall Street Journal editorial today says this:
Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation took nearly two years, sent a reporter to jail, cost millions of dollars, and preoccupied some of the White House’s senior officials. The fruit it has now borne is the five-count indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff–not for leaking the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak, which started this entire “scandal,” but for contradictions between his testimony and the testimony of two or three reporters about what he told them, when he told them, and what words he used…
…[Fitgerald] noted that a criminal investigation into a “national security matter” of this sort hinged on “very fine distinctions,” and that any attempt to obscure exactly who told what to whom and when was a serious matter.
Let us stipulate that impeding a criminal investigation is indeed a serious matter; no one should feel he can lie to a grand jury or to federal investigators. But there is a question to be asked about the end to which the accused allegedly lied. The indictment itself contains no motive. And Mr. Libby is not alleged to have been the source for Robert Novak’s July 14, 2003 column, in which Valerie Plame’s employment with the CIA was revealed…
If this is a conspiracy to silence Administration critics, it was more daft than deft. The indictment itself contains no evidence of a conspiracy, and Mr. Libby has not been accused of trying to cover up some high crime or misdemeanor by the Bush Administration. The indictment amounts to an allegation that one official lied about what he knew about an underlying “crime” that wasn’t committed…
On this much we can agree with Mr. Fitzgerald: These are “very fine distinctions” indeed, especially as they pertain to discussions that occurred two years ago, and whose importance only became clear well after the fact, when investigators came knocking. In a statement yesterday, Mr. Libby’s counsel zeroed in on this point when he said, “We are quite distressed the Special Counsel has now sought to pursue alleged inconsistencies in Mr. Libby’s recollection and those of others’ and to charge such inconsistencies as false statements.”…
On the answers to these questions hang a possible 30-year jail term and $1.25 million in fines for a Bush Administration official who was merely attempting to expose the truth about Mr. Wilson, a critic of the Administration who was lying to the press about the nature of his involvement in the Niger mission and about the nature of the intelligence that it produced. In other words, Mr. Libby was defending Administration policy against political attack, not committing a crime.
Mr. Fitzgerald has been dogged in pursuing his investigation, and he gave every appearance of being a reasonable and tough prosecutor in laying out the charges yesterday. But he has thrust himself into what was, at bottom, a policy dispute between an elected Administration and critics of the President’s approach to the war on terror, who included parts of the permanent bureaucracy of the State Department and CIA. Unless Mr. Fitzgerald can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Libby was lying, and doing so for some nefarious purpose, this indictment looks like a case of criminalizing politics.
For a review of the chain of events in this whole episode, read The White House, the CIA, and the Wilsons: The chain of events that gave rise to a grand jury investigation. For more on Joe Wilson, read The Incredibles: The only debate about Joseph Wilson’s credibility is the one taking place at the Washington Post and the New York Times.
This is part of a bigger and more important issue. Power Line has this to say: “The administration long ago gave up making the factual case to support the centrality of Iraq in the war on terroristm” and refers us to another Hayes article entitled A Spooked White House: The damage that has already been done by the CIA leak investigation, which notes:
[Open full post]There are other documents from Iraq that would help the American public understand the nature of the former Iraqi regime and why a serious war on terror required its removal. Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents currently stored in a warehouse in Doha, Qatar, as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s document exploitation project are a case in point. Many of these documents, listed in a database known as HARMONY, have rather provocative titles:
Money Transfers from Iraq to Afghanistan
Secret Meeting with Taliban Group Member and Iraqi Government (Nov. 2000)
Iraqi Effort to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals
Order from Saddam to present $25,000 to Palestinian Suicide Bombers’ Families
IIS Reports from Embassy in Paris: Plan to Influence French Stance in UN Security Council
IIS Report on How French Campaigns are Financed
Improvised Explosive Devices Plan
Ricin research and improvementThere are thousands of similar documents. Many have already been authenticated and most are unclassified. That’s worth repeating: Most are unclassified.
Of course, nothing is more important than winning on the ground in Iraq. Demonstrating that we are killing terrorists and making steady progress on the political front will do much to blunt the criticism of the war. But if the White House refuses to challenge its critics, and refuses to explain in detail why Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, and refuses to discuss the flawed intelligence on Iraqi WMD, and refuses to use its tremendous power to remind Americans that Saddam Hussein was, in fact, a threat, then it risks losing the support of those Americans who continue to believe that the Iraq war, despite all of its many costs in blood and money, was worth it.
What do they mean, exactly, when they say the United Nations is trying to take over the internet? Bascially, they mean that at the next meeting of the WSIS, the WGIG may recommend replacing ICANN with a more direct authority over the 13 root name servers.
I explain in a bit more detail in my latest TechCentralStation column.
Sometimes things you really care about in life don’t work out as planned, even when those things are special, world-class, and deserve only the best.
It hurts like hell when something like that happens. And when it does, it is hard to keep perspective.
Steve Jobs gave an amazingly insightful speech last June at the Stanford University commencement that talked about perspective. Video is here.
When I first started this posting, I tried to excerpt key parts of the speech. But there are so many good parts to the speech that I can only simply encourage all of you to read the whole speech.
