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.
A new column by National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg has prompted me to clarify something, at least about myself. Goldberg has pointed out that he is primarily a conservative, which is too-often conflated to mean the same thing as being a Republican. In fact, they are different. It is obvious that to a large degree Republicans and conservatives hold the same view on a wide array of issues. It is safe to say that the Republican party is more amenable to conservative viewpoints than is the Democrat, as the recent retirements of Zell Miller (obvious) and John Breaux (just a guess) indicate.
In my previous post on Karl Rove, I alluded to the difference between the political calculation of a party seeking to build itself by widening its appeal and conservatives seeking to maintain their ideals, regardless of whether or not they garnered widespread political appeal. Goldberg illustrates the dichotomy thus:
By all accounts, Bush and Karl Rove want to seal the Republican party as the majority for a generation. I’m all for it, but that doesn’t mean I’ll like everything the White House does to achieve this. The No Child Left Behind Act was a deliberate attempt to steal education from Democrats as an issue. It was somewhat successful, but that doesn’t mean conservatives should suddenly cheer federal meddling in local education. The expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs was a fiscal train wreck.
The White House has many excellent ideas � tax reform, overhauling Social Security, etc. � that conservatives should get behind. But if the goal is to make the Republican party the majority party by making it the more “reasonable” big-government party, I suspect you won’t find it so easy to confuse conservatives and Republicans in the near future.
Keeping this in mind, while I may sound like a Republican cheerleader at times, I will also try to point out the good, conservative things that Democrat politicians accomplish, too. Therefore, I point you to the success that Democrat Providence Mayor David Cicilline has had in negotiating a more reasonable contract for the city’s municipal workers.
The three-year contract gives some 900 city workers pay raises of 7.5 percent over three years. More important, the workers — who on Oct. 6 strongly endorsed the contract — agreed to pay for 10 percent of their health coverage, as did the pensioners. Perhaps above all, the contract increases the flexibility of departmental managers by eliminating a no-layoff clause and by reducing the red tape involved in reassigning workers.
There is more work to be done with the firefighter and police unions, but Mayor Cicilline has shown that he is willing to fight for the taxpayers. For this I congratulate him.
[Open full post]As detailed in this morning’s ProJo, Karl Rove went into a deep statistical analysis of where the Republicans gained in the electorate during the recent elections. One of his examples, surprisingly, was the increase the President enjoyed in garnering the vote of Rhode Islanders.
Kerry carried Rhode Island with 59.4 percent of the vote. Mr. Bush’s 38.7-percent share was 6.8 percentage points higher than in 2000. Nationwwide, Mr. Bush’s 51-percent majority last week was 3.1 percentage points higher than his total in 2000.
For my part, I guess this small, but significant, gain was obscured by the relative margin of Kerry’s victory. Perhaps progress is being made.
Interestingly, Rove also made a point of warning against assuming that the much-talked about “moral values” issues were those that carried the day for the President.
“Be careful,” Rove said more than once, of stereotyping Mr. Bush’s victory as the work of evangelical Christians who flooded the polls in the heartland because they oppose gay marriage. Rove affirmed the importance of such voters and issues, but he said the true portrait of the 2004 electorate is much “broader and more subtle.”
Indeed, Christopher Hitchens for one has pointed out that Bush improved in the secular/atheist vote over his performance in 2000. However, the one religious group in which the President made a substantial gain was Roman Catholics, where he experienced a 5% increase.
Finally, Rove confirmed something that I have suspected: there is a real effort at party building going on by the RNC.
Rove also said that Mr. Bush intends to help the Republican Party “grow our numbers” in New England and other areas that Sen. John F. Kerry carried. In a related matter, Rove hinted that Republican Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee may get a fence-mending White House invitation from a president determined, in Rove’s words, to “serve all the people.”
Rove hinted that “gestures have been made” from the White House to Chafee and other Republican moderates. Chafee later confirmed that, saying he has had more than one conciliatory phone call from the White House — though not, so far, from Mr. Bush.
Rove also said that Mr. Bush was not irritated by Chafee’s symbolic protest of writing in the name of the president’s father on his ballot. “Look, he’s a wonderfully independent guy and he’s entitled to his opinion,” Rove said.
“And he also runs in a very tough state.”
Yes, he does, and it appears that political idealism is taking a back seat to political practicallity. This is not a bad thing, but as the Arlen Specter debate has revealed, it is a difficult spot for a conservative.
[Open full post]Froma Harrop walks a strange line between liberal and conservative principles in a recent column about economic differences between the Red States and the Blue States, and the tax-cut implications thereof. It’s a thick topic, even when it isn’t encumbered by an underlying theme of pinning something undesirable to President Bush’s back. Consequently, I’m not inclined to take it up, just now.
However, something that protrudes from the column almost as a tangential distraction strikes me as telling, and in a way that’s relevant to the rest of the piece:
California seems poised to profit from both Bush’s tax cuts and his moral disapproval of embryonic-stem-cell research. We speak of California’s vote Tuesday to spend $300 million a year on this promising field. The sum makes a mockery of the measly $25 million Bush doled out last year — and only for work on existing stem-cell lines.
This investment will make California the stem-cell champ of America, if not the world. Biotech centers in other regions now fear a brain drain to California. And economists say the program could bring the state a bonanza in jobs and patent royalties worth hundreds of millions.
What, precisely, is Harrop’s understanding of federalism? Ethics aside, is it the federal government’s role to invest heavily enough in lucrative research so as to prevent any given state from dominating the market? Moreover, is it the government’s role to put ethics aside so as to give states a fair share of the profit from endeavors of which their citizens want no part?
I’d be surprised to learn that there’s a subindustry of Tupelo biotech companies now fearing the loss of faculty because Cali has become the place to do immoral research. And as far as I know, California’s decision to fund the research isn’t the result of some loophole that’s not available to other states. Red-State Americans can invest in ESCR by way of their governments, just as they can invest in it individually. That’s another distinction that Harrop loses:
No one has made a connection between the Bush tax cuts and the research, but someone should. The tax cuts have made California $51 billion richer. So Californians can think of the $3 billion they will spend over the next 10 years as found money.
Correction: the tax cuts have made Californians that much richer. That’s not the same thing. If the citizens of the Golden State choose to process their research-funding dollars through a corrupt bureaucracy, that is their right. At least the poorer citizens of fly-over country aren’t being forced to devote their hard-earned money on Blue-Staters’ hot-flash quest for immortality.
[Open full post]Edward Achorn has a column in today’s ProJo denouncing state Attorney General Patrick Lynch for his confusing and specious written justification for not prosecuting Cranston Firefighter Union head Paul Valletta for threatening Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey at a City Council meeting in August. The incident is on tape and no reasonable person would argue that Valletta was not threatening Mayor Laffey. However, Lynch’s office disagrees, according to Achorn:
In a strange 11-page document, Mr. Lynch’s office twisted itself in knots arguing that the law did not apply to this case. Among the reasons: Mr. Laffey did not display sufficient fear; the City Council has met since Aug. 23 without incident; Mayor Laffey has “by all accounts, maintained a full public schedule, including an active political campaign for his re-election.” Thus, “While his conduct was certainly disruptive, Valletta’s words at that point can not be factually considered as ‘true threats.’ ” The A.G.’s office recommended prosecution of Mr. Valletta on a misdemeanor charge, for “disruptive activity,” rather than for making a threat.
In essence, Mr. Lynch, in a highly subjective ruling, nullified the law on making threats. But is Mr. Lynch truly fit to be the final word, to be judge and jury?
Good question and there are reasons other than this that should give all Rhode Islanders pause when considering the veracity of Lynch. As Achorn writes:
After all, Mr. Lynch is a Democratic politician, brother of the state party chairman. Since the spring, Patrick Lynch has received $450 from the Rhode Island State Association of Fire Fighters, run by labor boss Frank Montanaro. Such labor contributions are the lifeblood of Rhode Island Democrats — a big reason they narrowly won a number of close legislative races on Nov. 2. They are key to Mr. Lynch’s future in politics…
He found nothing amiss with government officials in West Warwick, and helped fight to keep basic information out of the public’s hands, after the Station fire claimed 100 lives. He displayed brazen disregard for the First Amendment in seeking criminal action against The Journal for publishing a photo from its own files. He found nothing actionable when a powerful Democratic legislator, Rene Menard, urged police to commit a crime and erase from a public log the name of a Massachusetts official…
Many thinking people cannot help but conclude that there are two sets of laws in Rhode Island: One for friends of the politically powerful, and another for those who dare challenge the political orthodoxy. That is a fair description of a lawless society, which can ultimately do nothing but terrible harm to the people of Rhode Island.
As a result of the AG’s recommendation, the Cranston police charged Valetta with a misdemeanor. Never one to take things lying down, Mayor Laffey said his piece:
Angered by the attorney general’s response, Laffey last week called it “a political decision”
“This is why Rhode Island is such a sick political state,” Laffey said at a news conference. “You have public officials making decisions based on who their political buddies are.”
Looking forward, it’s obvious to me that Patrick Lynch has his eyes on the Governor’s office and that he is not above doing “business as usual” to sit in that seat. Let this serve as an early warning that Lynch, as a governor, would be beholden to the very same interests that have put this state in the governmental quagmire from which Governor Carcieri is trying to free it.
[Open full post]U.S. Senator Lincoln Chafee (RINO, RI) has promised to remain a Republican, offering the supremely confidence-inspiring declaration: “Yes, at this stage, that is my intention.” In a sad echo of President Bush’s overused phrase in the first debate, Chafee says it is also his intention to “work hard to regain the support” of Republicans. Personally, I think the state GOP chairwoman’s defense of Chafee tells Republican voters all they need to know:
“The media forced him to make statements that were contrary to how he actually views his role,” Morgan said, speaking of Chafee’s months of inconclusive public musings about whether he would support Mr. Bush and remain a member of the Republican Party.
“You guys backed him into a corner,” Morgan said, “and he wasn’t adept enough at dealing with the media to sidestep the issue.”
Perhaps it’s best that he not “rehabilitate that,” as Morgan put it.
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