In Sunday’s ProJo, M. Charles Bakst, erstwhile stakeholder of the political commentariat of Rhode Island, took Sen. Lincoln Chafee to task for his waffling on both supporting fellow Republican President Bush and staying a Republican at all.
His flirtation with bolting the party — and, more especially, his decision not to vote for George W. Bush and instead write in the name of the president’s father — has been an excruciating episode that has done the senator no good in Rhode Island or in Washington.
He has been in these matters the picture of indecision, and his dithering has been a distraction that has needlessly punctuated political conversation.
Indeed, all Senator Chafee has managed to do is to further call into question his own suitability as a responsible member of the Senate.
A spectacular low point came on the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention. (He would make only a brief appearance on the New York scene.) Chafee said he supported Mr. Bush’s reelection but wouldn’t commit to voting for him. He looked ridiculous, and Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey, more conservative, more combative, and a possible challenger in a 2006 Senate primary, could barely contain himself, asking in an interview:
“What does that mean? Usually, the people you support you vote for. Would you vote for one you wouldn’t support? Or is he saying he supports two people?
Then Chafee, distancing himself further from the president but also wanting to stay away from Democrat John Kerry, hit upon the solution of writing in the name of the president’s father, an old family friend whose policies he like better.But, in declining to choose between candidate Bush and candidate Kerry, Chafee didn’t make a decision, he avoided a decision. Citizens look to leaders to lead. Chafee is often accused of wanting to have things both ways. This time he outdid himself.
He certainly did. In trying to be all things to all people, he seems to take few principled stances except for the few instances (environmental, War in Iraq, Tax Custs) that find him at odds with his own (ostensibly) party. This is exacerbated by the perception that he lacks critical thinking abilities and is not the best at offering well-reasoned arguments for some of his postions.
He is who he is, not the most polished operator, but a bright guy, an honest guy, moving as best he can through the political jungle. He has plenty of interests in life, and he and his wife, the former Stephanie Danforth, have a ton of money, and he is very competitive, but he doesn’t need this job, and when he’s through, or when voters decide he’s through, he’ll find something else to do.
I suspect that in 2006 Lincoln Chafee will be the former Senator from Rhode Island.
[Open full post]The President and his conservative coalition, as a matter of principle, do not like activist judges, i.e. judges who use their power to go beyond just interpreting the law. Here is uber-conservative and Bush supporter Phyllis Schlafly on the subject…
“Finally, we have a president who comes right out and targets ‘activist judges’ as the enemy of traditional values and urges us to use ‘the constitutional process’ to remedy the problem….Bush called on Americans to defend the sanctity of marriage against activist judges who force ‘their arbitrary will’ by court order ‘without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives.'”
Alas for Ms. Schlafly, conservatives have a poor track record of limiting the power of activist judges. The above quote shows why. Almost always, conservatives pick a hot-button issue — gay marriage, flag burning, ‘under god’ in the pledge of allegiance — to advance the cause of placing limits on the power of the judiciary. By the time the debate reaches the public sphere the issue of activist judges generally gets lost in the more visceral substance of the case being decided. For better or for worse, people respond more strongly to ideas about ‘traditional values’ and ‘the sanctity of marriage’ than they do to ideas of ‘activist judges’.
Because the Taricani case is not the usual kind of case people have in mind when they hear talk of ‘activist judges’, it an ideal circumstance for a President concerned about activist judges to step in. This case does not involve a hot-button issue. If the President were to announce a pardon for Taricani, the civic debate that ensued would focus on the President’s power to limit the actions of the judiciary. And the President would be the one broadening rights and expanding freedoms that the judiciary wants to limit… [Open full post]
Rhode Island just passed a separation-of-powers referendum on the state level. But do we have it at the Federal level? Separation-of-powers means that a legislative branch of government makes the laws, a judicial branch of government interprets the laws, and an executive branch of government enforces the laws.
At the moment, Jim Taricani is being denied the protection that separation of powers is supposed to provide. What law did Taricani break? Well, it was not a law exactly, it was a “court-order” not to release information. And who is enforcing this court-order? Well, it is a “special prosecutor” appointed by the judge who issued the order. In other words, in the state of Rhode Island, an American citizen may be imprisoned by his government for violating a rule made by judge Ernest Torres, interpreted by judge Ernest Torres, and enforced by judge Ernest Torres.
This is a clear breach of the principle of separation-of-powers. Fortunately, the Federal constitution anticipated excesses of judicial authority, and provides a remedy — the Presidential pardon.
And, for a variety of reasons, President George W. Bush should be inclined to use his power of the pardon in this case…
Providence Journal media writer Andy Smith has an update on the Jim Taricani situation in Sunday’s paper.
For those unfamiliar with the events, here is the background. Jim Taricani is a political reporter for the local NBC affiliate, WJAR-10. In 2001, about two months before the (former) Mayor of Providence was indicted on federal corruption charges, an anonymous source provided Taricani with a videotape showing one of the Mayor’s aides taking a bribe. Taricani showed the tape on WJAR.
The judge presiding over the case, Judge Ernest Torres, ordered Taricani to reveal his source. Taricani refused. Beginning in March, Torres imposed a $1,000-a-day fine on Taricani. This Thursday, Taricani goes to trial for criminal contempt, and, according to Smith, could face six months in jail.
There is a solution to this problem, though it will not fully please everyone. The case is a federal matter. As such, it is possible for President George W. Bush to use his power of the pardon to end it. This week, I will lay out the reasons why President Bush should pardon Jim Taricani…
While we’re in the midst of our first weekend content lull, it seems as good a time as any to republish a vlog post of mine from January 2003 (mostly so it’ll be in the archives here). In the surrounding weeks, I made a few short blog-like videos, but the time it took to make them became too costly for the payoff in viewers. It is, however, something that I’d love to take up again if the fruits of blogging begin to cover the expense in hours.
This time around, the vlog goes on the road… literally. (And the vlogger realizes that, if he’s going to make these things on a regular basis, he’s going to have to begin getting his hair cut more than once a season — like he did when he was single and didn’t work at home.) I’ve used some new tricks, so please feel at liberty to let me know what you thought and to offer suggestions.
Click the picture for the interactive RealMedia version that makes my head look wide (for which you’ll need the free RealOne player available on the right side of this page). Click here for the plain ol’ high-bandwidth, thin-headed Windows Media file, and here for the low-bandwidth Windows Media file.
Transcript
I don’t know if this holds true for others at the tail end of Generation X, but it seems as if I’ve frequently been just a bit too late or a bit too early. And I mean more than being born just in time to model plaid bellbottoms for the family photo album.
In grade school, renovations were just beginning while traditional activities were being canceled. In high school, dances and proms had become shadows of the glory days pictured in teenybopper movies. The University of Rhode Island, when I attended, was in the process of shedding its party-school image but had barely begun its efforts to improve its academic reputation.
Out in the “real world,” the economic boom began to contract just as I entered the job market, and the teacher shortage that promised to land my wife a job has yet to materialize. Now, we’re beginning to look into buying a house just as rising property taxes are forcing residents of our income level to sell, while the healthy real estate market has kept the prices out of our reach.
Mackey Ervin of Midland, Texas, recently made news by trying to sell a $100,000, four-bedroom house once inhabited by the Presidents Bush on eBay for $250,000. Within the past few years, real estate in my neighborhood has jumped that much even for cramped homes with no presidential history: $200,000… $269,000… $325,000… $449,000.
And I live on the less-expensive side of town. I don’t even want to know how much these houses go for. Back in New Jersey, we used to call such areas “yuppie developments.” They always remind me of the firstPoltergeist movie.
But that’s midtown. The jaw-droppers are in Congressman Patrick Kennedy’s neighborhood. Combining prices in the multiple millions for these houses and the fact that I can’t even afford to live on the “wrong” side of the tracks, a natural impulse is to cry foul. Somebody of Kennedy’s ideology might feel the need to “do something” about it.
Maybe it’s a result of conditioning, but I can accept that this is just the way it goes. The rich have a right to raise the level of the municipality. Personally, I’d prefer to see property taxes arranged in such a way that locals wouldn’t be thanked for helping to build the community by being forced to leave town. But that wouldn’t help me; I came too late to grab a plot of land back when prices were in the five digits.
People in my position will have to do what we’ve always had to do: forge on. We can rent sheds with plumbing and enjoy the waterfront… only below the mean high-tide line. Or maybe we should move across the river, where the land is more reasonable, and build communities there, perhaps one day to sell our houses for many times our investment.
The world changes, often cyclically. Just as nature reclaims abandoned land, perhaps this town will once again be accessible to new families and regular folk. Change always brings as well as takes, so maybe you’re never too late. As for being chronically early, the remedy is as simple as having patience.
Commenting to a post by Marc, Rich from East Greenwich offers several specific questions that he might ask if mediating teacher contract disputes there. Among the considerations that he proposes is a comparison of teachers compensation with the median for the town.
Although not addressing East Greenwich, Marc and I worked through some of these sorts of questions on our personal blogs (pre–Anchor Rising). The following figure, which tells nowhere near the whole story, provides a baseline beyond which the picture only gets worse:
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.