As a partial follow up to my previous post about the interwoven connections among the (let’s call it) influencing class in Rhode Island, I note that the state’s judiciary has permitted the governor to switch healthcare providers:
The state Supreme Court ruled today that the state can award the contract for its employees’ health insurance to UnitedHealthcare of New England, over the objections of competitor Blue Cross & Blue Shield.
The high court said the state did not manage the bidding process as well as it could have, but still conducted it in good faith.
“We recognize the unfortunate fact that the state’s officials did not handle the task of awarding the state’s health care contract with the level of expertise that would be desirable,” the court said in its ruling. “Any mistakes made during the process simply do not rise to the level of palpable abuse of discretion.” …
The United Contract will save Rhode Island taxpayers $25 million over the next three years, Carcieri said, and also enable Rhode Island cities and towns to save by contracting with United for the same administrative rate as the state.
While I’m glad that the executive branch secured the approval of the judiciary, in this case, trusting judges with the gauging of “abuse of discretion” in state business matters makes me a bit uneasy. Perhaps I’d feel differently if Superior Court Judge Netti Vogel could conceivably face any sort of adverse consequences from being overruled — especially since the executive branch has lost its say in the judiciary’s budget.
[Open full post]During his State of the Union speech, President Bush introduced an Iraqi citizen with these words:
One of Iraq’s leading democracy and human rights advocates is Safia Taleb al-Suhail. She says of her country, “we were occupied for 35 years by Saddam Hussein. That was the real occupation. Thank you to the American people who paid the cost but most of all to the soldiers.” Eleven years ago, Safia’s father was assassinated by Saddam’s intelligence service. Three days ago in Baghdad, Safia was finally able to vote for the leaders of her country – and we are honored that she is with us tonight.
Subsequently, in praise of an American soldier who had given his life for freedom, the President said:
One name we honor is Marine Corps Sergeant Byron Norwood of Pflugerville, Texas, who was killed during the assault on Fallujah. His mom, Janet, sent me a letter and told me how much Byron loved being a Marine, and how proud he was to be on the front line against terror. She wrote, “When Byron was home the last time, I said that I wanted to protect him like I had since he was born. He just hugged me and said: ‘You’ve done your job, mom. Now it’s my turn to protect you.'” Ladies and gentlemen, with grateful hearts, we honor freedom’s defenders, and our military families, represented here this evening by Sergeant Norwood’s mom and dad, Janet and Bill Norwood.
The National Ledger captures a very poignant moment that followed when Safia Taleb al-Suhail turned and hugged Janet Norwood:
The symbolism was striking. A mother had lost her patriot son so that this woman–a person she had never met before–would have the opportunity to be free. Janet Norwood had her son’s dog-tags wrapped around her hand while Safia Taleb al-Souhail’s index finger was still slightly stained with ink from her first vote.
It was a moment to make every patriot proud.
By contrast, The Washington Post described the hug with the following words:
The emotional highpoint of last night’s event came near the end when Bush introduced the parents of a U.S. Marine from Texas, Sgt. Byron Norwood, who was killed in the assault on Fallujah, Iraq. As Norwood’s mother tearfully hugged another woman in the gallery, the assembled senators and representatives responded with a sustained ovation, and Bush’s face appeared creased with emotion.
Just “another woman?” And the mainstream media insists it carries no bias. Well, it is either bias or incompetent reporting – their choice.
ADDENDUM:
Power Line offers this update:
[Open full post]A reader says that the Post has now updated its story so that the offending paragraph now reads:
The emotional highpoint of last night’s event came near the end when Bush introduced the parents of a U.S. Marine from Texas, Sgt. Byron Norwood, who was killed in the assault on Fallujah, Iraq. As Norwood’s mother tearfully hugged Safia Taleb Suhail, leader of the Iraqi Women’s Political Council, the assembled senators and representatives responded with a sustained ovation, and Bush’s face appeared creased with emotion. Suhail also was a guest of the White House sitting with the first lady in the gallery who had been introduced by Bush earlier in the speech as “one of Iraq’s leading democracy and human rights advocates.
No credit to Power Line, however, for pointing out the Post’s blunder.
Heck, may as well pile on. . . For those of you who drop by my Ocean State Blogger site, I thought I’d prepare you for a new site design. (Nothing big, but it’s an improvement). Secondly, over at OSB I’ve announced another new “niche” blog, called Spinning Clio. Thanks!
[Open full post]For anybody who’s interested: now that the issue of National Review with my piece on Andrew Sullivan has slipped into the back catalogue, I’ve posted a version of my contribution over on Dust in the Light, with the title “The Foibles of Longing.”
[Open full post]I previously endorsed a call for more troops championed by Sen. Jack Reed. Now, an open letter from a bi-partisan group (really!) has done the same. An excerpt:
The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away. The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today. The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today’s (and tomorrow’s) missions and challenges.
So we write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. . . There is abundant evidence that the demands of the ongoing missions in the greater Middle East, along with our continuing defense and alliance commitments elsewhere in the world, are close to exhausting current U.S. ground forces. For example, just late last month, Lieutenant General James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, reported that “overuse” in Iraq and Afghanistan could be leading to a “broken force.” Yet after almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice’s term, a “generational commitment.” The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership.
The administration has been reluctant to adapt to this new reality. We understand the dangers of continued federal deficits, and the fiscal difficulty of increasing the number of troops. But the defense of the United States is the first priority of the government. . . We can afford the military we need. As a nation, we are spending a smaller percentage of our GDP on the military than at any time during the Cold War. We do not propose returning to a Cold War-size or shape force structure. We do insist that we act responsibly to create the military we need to fight the war on terror and fulfill our other responsibilities around the world.
The men and women of our military have performed magnificently over the last few years. We are more proud of them than we can say. But many of them would be the first to say that the armed forces are too small. And we would say that surely we should be doing more to honor the contract between America and those who serve her in war. Reserves were meant to be reserves, not regulars. Our regulars and reserves are not only proving themselves as warriors, but as humanitarians and builders of emerging democracies. Our armed forces, active and reserve, are once again proving their value to the nation. We can honor their sacrifices by giving them the manpower and the materiel they need.
I was initially against increasing the troop levels, but a better understanding of the way the military operates, such as how people are cycled in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, has made me rethink my initial assumptions. Before the War on Terror, before 9/11, and in the aftermath of the Cold War, a solid case could be made for “downsizing” the military. Since 9/11, our foreign policy goals have changed and it seems it would behoove the Pentagon and the Bush Administration to also adjust. Am I saying that more troops will enable us to be a more effective (gasp) EMPIRE? No, and I refuse to get into semantical games over the definition of empire. (I think the recent elections in Iraq and Afghanistan give proof to the motives of the “American Empire.”) Instead, as one who believed in the ideal of spreading freedom as expressed by the President in his Inaugural Address, I think that all of the tools for effecting that spread of freedom — be they diplomatic, political or military — are necessary. Simply put, more ground troops will allow the U.S. to cover more ground.
[Open full post]News reports have arrived in the last hour or so that Pope John Paul II has been hospitalized.
Whether this is the time at which God calls his servant home or not, I found myself stopping this time upon hearing the news to ponder the enormous contribution he has made to the world and the cause of good over the last few decades, including:
His example of piety and devotion.
The grace and forgiveness he showed after being shot.
His deep and influential writings on major religious, political, and economic issues that have influenced many of us and defied simplistic categorization.
The strength of his leadership in the fight against Soviet communism, especially in his Polish homeland.
His reaching out to people everywhere as he traveled around the world combined with his overt challenges to many societal practices.
The valiant fight against disease that has ravaged his own body in recent times.
I doubt there will be another pope like this one for many, many years and the world is a better place due to his service.
Horrible wrongs have occurred in the American Church in recent years. In contrast to those misdeeds, Pope John Paul II’s life provides all of us with a role model of devotion to God. I believe we would be better off both individually and as a Church in the future if we paid greater attention to the example he set before us.
God bless you, Holy Father.
Boy, I’ll bet — rather, I hope — that, after Sunday, Joseleyne Slade of Providence had her fingers crossed that the Providence Journal wouldn’t publish her letter:
The world was in mourning for the thousands killed by or suffering from the tsunami. That disaster he did not plan, but the awful desolation that is accompanying his unilateral attack on Iraq is his responsibility. In an unjustified and illegal war, more than a thousand very young American soldiers have been killed and horribly wounded, and thousands of Iraqi civilians, most of them innocent, have been slaughtered. The end of this disaster is not in sight.
Of course, human beings are capable of transforming vitriolic attacks that turn embarrassing into escalated hatred of their object. But the more healthy choice that all Republicans of good will should hope Ms. Slade has followed is to ponder the imponderable that more prominent figures have voiced: “What if Bush, the president, ours, has been right about this all along?”
[Open full post]I’ve been pondering Lane Core’s suggestion that Sen. Kennedy’s fire-breathing speech last week was an attempt to set himself up for further histrionics after a calamitous election day in Iraq (emphasis in original):
But it occurred to me today — I wish it had done so last week — that Kennedy’s speech was not occasioned merely by the election in Iraq. No, it was occasioned by his expectation of a debacle in the election.
And what should I come across but an article about Rhode Island’s federal representatives:
All four members of the delegation explicitly rejected the call — from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and other war critics — to start pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq immediately and to set a timetable for total withdrawal. But all four were cautious in their assessment of post-election Iraq, stressing that this week’s advances do not guarantee a successful democracy.
Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy said he doesn’t “differ with the sentiment” behind calls for bringing the troops home, “but we don’t want to give up on the success that we’ve created.”
“We’ve moved the ball toward the goal line here. It doesn’t make sense to pull out now,” said Kennedy, a son of the Democratic senator from Massachusetts and the only member of the local delegation who backed Mr. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.
It’s easy to be reasonable in retrospect. Let’s see how quickly that “goal line” moves — and how quickly Papa Ted manages to recast any scripts that he’d already prepared.
[Open full post]A Letter to the Ed. in today’s ProJo calls to mind another example of polemics over scholarship. William Beeman is a Professor of Anthropology and Theatre, Speech and Dance as well as the Director of Middle East Studies at Brown and a long time critic of President Bush’s policies. He has been accused of having some questionable facts at hand in the past. He predicted abject failure in Afghanistan. In the aforementioned letter, Karl F. Stephens, M.D. wrote
As Iraq gets its first free elections, I hope that Brown University Professor William Beeman and his disciples will have a chance to read “Assignment Afghanistan,” a report about post-liberation Afghanistan by Washington Post writer Pamela Constable, in the February Smithsonian magazine.
She gives a moving account of Afghanistan’s first election, describing “farmers and herders who lived hard lives on meager land” having “an almost childish excitement, a look both nervous and dignified: a feeling of hope . . . gazing down on the [ballot] as if it were a precious flower.”
And while a free and open society has attendant ills — hey, we have corruption, crooks, and ethnic differences right here in River City, folks! — the Afghanistan she describes is far different from the one predicted by Professor Beeman when he pontificated in the pages of The Journal and on the local airwaves at the time of its liberation.
One can easily forget that all the “War is not the answer” bumper stickers and posters first appeared when we entered Afghanistan — well before Iraq.
I don’t have the time to detail some of the “facts” and opinion proffered by Prof. Beeman, but suffice it to say that if his stance is the norm on the Brown faculty, perhaps another Ivy League school should join Columbia in investigating its Middle East Studies group.
[Open full post]To dot an “i” and cross a “t”, the Lincol School System has reinstated the Spelling Bee that was once presumed to conflict with the No Child Left Behind Act.
School officials, who said last week Lincoln wouldn’t participate in the state spelling bee this year, were eating their words yesterday.
Lincoln’s four elementary schools and its middle school will hold school spelling bees this week and next week, and the winners will face off in a district-wide bee Feb. 17, the School Department announced yesterday.
“It’s something that a lot of people have an interest in doing, so we’re going to do it,” Schools Supt. John Tindall-Gibson said. . .
The decision against participating came after last year’s spelling bee when school principals gathered for a “debriefing.” They told Asst. Supt. Linda A. Newman they felt the spelling bee didn’t foster children’s self-esteem and conflicted with the goals of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind education law because it didn’t allow all students to succeed. However, even the School Committee chairman didn’t know about the decision until newspapers and talk radio got wind of it last week.
Because three of the five principals who helped make last year’s decision have since retired, Newman and Tindall-Gibson spoke last week of reconsidering participation for next year. . .
Although Lincoln’s change of heart came just two days after the cancellation made the front page of the Providence Journal, the release said “thoughtful reconsideration” informed the reversal.
Thoughtful reconsideration, and a lot of input, it would seem. “Thank you for phone calls, in-person conversations, and e-mails regarding the district-wide spelling bee,” the School Department’s statement said. “We heard your concerns and respect your opinions.”
The things to take away: 1) The phone lines rang with protest so they reinstated 2) 3 of the 5 decision makers had retired. Any chance this was a parting shot against the NCLBA? Regardless, it’s good that it’s back.
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