Arianna Huffington has an article on her blog nominally analyzing how Kerry’s reluctance to talk about foreign policy contributed to his defeat, yet in her detailed tactical description how foreign policy came to be muted, she doesn’t tell us what she thinks that the Kerry campaign should have been saying. She attributes the avoidance of foreign affairs to “the old obsession with pleasing undecided voters”. The question is: if she didn’t want Kerry to court undecideds, whom did she want him to go after?
The possibilities are 1) turn out the base with a more stridently anti-war position. But all the anti-war voters were already vehemently against Bush. Were there that many more votes to be found on the hard left?
By default, the other possibilty is to 2) convince Bush voters to switch sides. This option breaks down into two sub-options…
a) Push the “competence” angle, i.e. I’ll fight the war better than Bush. Do this, however, and the pro-war talk drives voters on the left away, probably in greater numbers than the gains in the middle.
b) Talk about the war as unwinnable, and say the best you can hope for is an open-ended truce. Convince the public that a detente with Islamist terror is the only “reasonable” option.
I fear that this position is going to gain strength as the Democrats redefine themselves in the coming election cycle. Remember where you heard it first.
Pre–election day, Marc and I had a short cross-blog exchange that touched on the state ballot’s spending referenda. Marc did his homework and argued on behalf of some of the spending measures, including the URI biotech center.
For my part, noting that I considered mine little more than a protest vote, I declared: “not a penny.” Yes, various projects are good ideas. Yes, rehabilitation and maintenance are important. Still, it all seems like a scam to me: the powers that be spend all the money and then return to voters with some of the more important and/or interesting items and ask them to replace money squandered elsewhere.
Well, in a letter to the editor of the Providence Journal, Jeff Opalka of Cranston appears to be somewhere between. I think we all agree on the bottom lines, though:
Our state ranks 46th out of 50 for providing a business-friendly environment. Rhode Island also stands shamefully above the crowd with the third-highest gasoline tax, second-highest cigarette tax, fourth-highest property tax and eighth-highest corporate tax. If anything is preventing business opportunities in this state, it’s the tax climate, not a lack of a biotech center or improvements in Quonset Point. …
I recall the gas tax was to be used solely for maintenance of roads and transportation. The lottery was to be used for education, and the 7-percent sales tax was to be temporary during the banking crisis. How many more lies can Rhode Islanders endure? Now we have an additional 1-percent restaurant tax. When is enough enough? When will we start holding our officials responsible for what is an increasing fiscal crisis, with agencies like RIPTA constantly over budget?
A couple of days ago, I mentioned Froma Harrop’s concerns about a “brain drain” as scientists interested in embryonic stem-cell research flood into California for that state’s newly available largesse. Extending URI’s biotech branch is a natural tangent to include in that discussion. That tangent, however, cannot be shorn of yet another tangent: the brain drain that occurs as a result of Rhode Island’s high cost of living and lack of opportunity or incentives to build a business here.
As Mr. Opalka puts it, “We need to closely consider where this state is going, because soon many of us will no longer be able to afford to live here.”
While I’m proud to see him touting New England’s Roman Catholics as a pivotal demographic, University of Connecticut and Catholic University professor William D’Antonio was a bit bold in his comments last week in the Boston Globe:
For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry’s home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the “blue” states, led led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over time to foster the reality of what it means to leave no children behind. And they have been among the nation’s leaders in promoting a living wage as their goal in public employment. The money they have invested in their future is known more popularly as taxes; these so-called liberal people see that money is their investment to help insure a compassionate, humane society. Family values are much more likely to be found in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family life through the way they live their family values.
Oh yes, Massachusetts and Connecticut leave no children behind — except the 27.1% and 26.2% that they respectively left behind in abortion clinics in 2000. Rhode Island outdid them both, at 30.9%.
As for “conserving family life,” one wonders what that might mean to the 42.4% (MA) and 43.2% (RI) of households with members over 65 that are actually households of one — older folks living by themselves. For context, the average for the Southern states that D’Antonio lists in the following paragraph is 38.8% of households, and for the Northeast, 41.3%:
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that “the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people.” The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Those are odd states to group for D’Antonio’s purposes. New Hampshire’s 2001 divorce rate (PDF) was only lower than those of four of the ten Southern states, and Oklahoma and South Carolina would only be average among the Northeastern states. Nonetheless, he is correct to note that Massachusetts had the lowest number of divorces per 1,000 inhabitants in 2001, at 2.4. Leaving out the flukish Nevada, Arkansas was at the other end, with 6.6 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants.
Of course, that year, Arkansas also had one of the highest marriage rates, at 14.8, compared with Massachusetts’ 6.4, which was the sixth lowest. That means that Arkansas gained 8.2 marriages per 1,000 inhabitants, while Massachusetts gained only 4.0. (For Rhode Island, the calculation is 8.6 marriages minus 3.3 divorces equals a 5.3 gain.) Little wonder that the 2000 Census found that 54.3% of Arkansas’s households were married-couple families, while only 49% of Massachusetts’ and 48.2% of Rhode Island’s were.
Michael Triplett, who (via Marriage Debate Blog) led me to D’Antonio’s editorial, concludes that “liberalism, tolerance, and permissiveness [don’t] appear to lead to high divorce rates.” I’d suggest that D’Antonio’s bout of what Tom Sylvester calls “increasingly trite, self-congratulatory” analysis doesn’t quite justify declaration of those three qualities’ success.
In 1990, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut topped the list of states when viewed according to Catholics’ proportion of the population (63.1%, 49.2%, and 41.8%, respectively). Not surprisingly, I’m willing to agree with D’Antonio that New England Catholics represent a net plus for “family values” statistics. (Stanley Kurtz also highlights the Roman Catholic factor in Massachusetts.) That being the case, one wonders what New England’s numbers might look like if church-going religious citizens were removed from the tally, leaving secular liberals without recourse to their good behavior when the notion of values becomes politically important.
I’d like to offer a suggestion to the conservatives mounting a challenge to Arlen Specter’s chairmanship of the Senate judiciary committee. They need to do a better job explaining what exactly the powers of a committee chair are, and exactly how a committee chair can frustrate the appointment process in a way that any other indivdual Senator cannot.
I’m not sure that the general public understands that committee chairmen are more than just the time-keepers during hearings. Some detail about how legislative committee chairmen can use scheduling and other powers to dominate the legislative process would help explain the urgency of their campaign.
My latest article for TechCentralStation, on the subject of the Democratic party and national security issues, ran today. As luck would have it (or maybe it’s my vast network of spies in the vast right-wing conspiracy), the article serves as something of a response to blog entries from Kevin Drum and Matt Ygelsias (scroll up) that ran yesterday.
[Open full post]After 20 months of fruitless contract negotiations, the School Committee and the Warwick Teachers Union are about to put the dispute to arbitration hearings — but now they can’t even agree on when to meet to frame out a schedule for the proceedings.
So begins the latest report on the latest chapter in the Warwick Teacher Contract dispute. (I’ve written more extensively about the Warwick teacher dispute here). The union clearly seems disinterested in engaging in talks and has continually thrown up excuse after excuse to delay the arbitration hearing.
The union has also filed a motion to have the arbitration proceedings cover only last year and this year. The School Committee wants to extend its scope forward a few years.
Committee Chairwoman Joyce L. Andrade called the union’s request “absolutely ridiculous.”
“Who the heck wants to go through this again next summer and start all over again? I don’t know what they could possibly be thinking,” Andrade said. “We need to get this contract settled long term. Why on earth they would want to put those type limitations on it is beyond me.”
The only reason I can think of is that the current situation is seen by the teachers as “better” than any new contract that could be negotiated. Right now, they have the best of both worlds: an old-style contract with no real health care co-pay and no obligation to help in after-school or extra-curricular activities. What is their incentive to change? More work for “less” pay and fewer benefits?
Meanwhile, the recent display in East Greenwich in which students marched to a School Committee meeting to express their displeasure over the current “Work-to-Rule” situation in the district strikes me as sending the wrong message.
They were met at the school by applauding teachers and parents. Many of the parents belong to the six local parent-teacher organizations that had organized the demonstration.
“We don’t want to take sides on this issue, but we wanted to let the School Committee know that we are very concerned about the welfare of our kids,” Lillian DePietro, president of the Hanaford School PTO, said after the meeting.
She said one of the main concerns is that, with teachers working to rule in the absence of a new agreement, students are missing out on many activities as well as the extra help they used to get before and after school.
Only a few of those in the crowd addressed the school board. Patty Streich, co-president of the PTG at East Greenwich High School, urged school officials and union leaders to continue to “work diligently” for a contract settlement.
“We ask both sides to remember what you represent,” she said, citing examples of many of activities and services students have to do without as long as teachers are working to rule.
Though ostensibly meant to be a “criticism” of both sides, WPRO’s Dan Yorke pointed out that by going to a School meeting, the message sent clearly seems to put the onus on the board to resolve the situation moreso than on the teachers. And the fact that parents AND TEACHERS applauded the students certainly lends credence to his point. One idea expressed on his show, though unlikely to happen, would convey a true sense of “bipartisan” criticism on the part of the students. Why don’t they next march on a Teachers Union meeting? Finally, Yorke had the head of the East Greenwich PTO call him in and she stated (and I’m paraphrasing) “All of us think that the Teachers should have to have a Health Insurance co-pay…” This, Yorke concluded, should have ended any argument that the parents and students had with the board. It is not the board that is categorically denying this provision, after all.
School Committee members did not respond directly to speakers’ comments. But after the crowd left, the board distributed a statement prepared by their labor lawyer, Richard Ackerman.
Reiterating points the board made in a statement issued earlier this month, Ackerman said that the School Department is facing tough financial times and that teachers have not agreed to pick up enough of the cost of their health insurance premiums.
So far, the union has only agreed to about a 2 percent contribution, the statement said, but the School Committee does not consider anything less than 10 percent “meaningful.”
Roger Ferland, president of the teachers union — The East Greenwich Education Association — has said that many of the details being released by the school officials are being taken out of context but that the union does not want to get into a point-by-point rebuttal because it does not want to negotiate in public.
I find it hard to understand how the basic numbers concerning the health care premiums could be “taken out of context.” It sounds to me like the union doesn’t want to “negotiate in public” because they know they would probably lose that P.R. battle.
[Open full post]And having opened talking about the local roots of this blog, I now move immediately to a national-level post…
The (mostly tongue-in-cheek, I think) talk about some sort of red-state blue-state secession has me feeling like I’m living in the Bizarro World. I have a track record on the issue of secession. I’ve written a couple of Tech Central Station columns advocating secession and/or partition as a potential solution to problems in Iraq and Sudan. Based on the reaction to these columns, it would not surprise me if many of the people pondering an American secession think that idea of partitioning Sudan to protect the people of Darfur from the Sudanese central government is too radical to be considered.
I would never advocate secession for a democracy for a simple reason. Ultimately, assuming that the democracy is working, partitioning it limits the choices of an individual. Right now, a resident of Rhode Island can drop everything and move to Southern California without asking anyone’s permission. If the US broke into smaller states, however, the departing Rhode Islander would have to get some form of governmental permission to settle in California.
p.s. Is there one “r” or two in “Bizarro”?
Michelle Malkin color-coded a by-state generosity index to reflect the election outcomes. Wading through the eighteen blue states — not one of which broke the top twenty-five — I found a silver lining for Rhode Island: at least we beat Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Putting aside methodological questions, what could account for RI’s poor showing? One… umm… charitable possibility is that we’re so over-taxed that we’ve little left to give. Adding a layer of culpability to the guess, perhaps Rhode Islanders have a gave-at-the-town-hall attitude.
