Months to get a car part. No juice boxes at the super market. Computer prices shooting up. Paper towels disappearing from BJ’s. And now simple bloodwork has to be scheduled weeks in advance.
Any chance I’d feel like the only person observing these phenomena if there were a Republican in the White House?
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Literally. Here’s the headline of an interview they did with Jacobin, an explicitly socialist magazine: “Socialist Legislators Are Taking on Rhode Island’s Ultraconservative Democrats.”
It shows you how frighteningly radical these people are that they say, apparently with a straight face, that Rhode Island’s leading Democrats are “ultraconservative.” Naturally, this is standard language for Bell, who characterizes Rhode Island policy as “brutal right-wing economic policies passed by Democrats.” Surprisingly, he doesn’t use the word “horrific” in the interview. (That’s a favorite of his.)
Maybe they’re all laughing into their sleeves. Consider this exchange with interviewer Daniel Crowell:
DC: Sam, I don’t remember anything that extreme during your election, but I imagine you still had some dirt thrown at you.
SB: [Refers to ballot harvesting controversy.] So we do have a lot of aggression and the machine will resort to a lot of dirty tactics. There was also a Twitter account set up to put out memes about me.
DC: I liked that.
SB: I didn’t particularly enjoy it at the time. But I did enjoy how they made Red Scare memes about how I wanted to turn Rhode Island into Venezuela — putting my photo next to Mao and Lenin and Marx.
DC: Since you were exposed to those red-baiting tactics, what do you see as the benefit of associating with Providence DSA and identifying as a socialist?
Notice the effortless wafting across the line where associating them of being socialists is “red-baiting,” while proclaiming how wonderful it is to be openly socialist. They never bother to define where they differ from Mao, Lenin, Marx, and Chavez. If the interviewer were to ask, “Well, what sort of socialist are you?,” the answer would be some variation of, “The kind who supports all of the good things about socialism and none of the bad.”
But socialism is bad. It’s a flawed ideology that packages fairytales as “fairness” and wreaks havoc on a society.
Maybe the kids who’ll be beginning to vote in the next few elections have been sufficiently brainwashed by union teachers and the media propaganda that they’ll be fine with open socialism. If so, we’ll see the little sliver of their remaining mask come off. After all, the actual Jacobins instituted the Reign of Terror in France.
In the meantime, now that they’ve self-identified so as not to be misunderstood, we should insist that Bell and Morales are accurately labeled as socialists.
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Remember the massive coverage and overheated rhetoric (continuing to this day) when the FBI tangled General Michael Flynn into a “false statement”? Compare that memory with this just-the-facts coverage of a Democrat National Committee lawyer’s predicament in the New York Times.
The headline is in the passive voice: “Durham Is Said to Seek Indictment of Lawyer at Firm With Democratic Ties.” The lede emphasizes that “he denies wrongdoing.” The reporters imply that the matter is only newsworthy because, if it goes forward, the case “is likely to attract significant political attention,” in true “Republicans pounce” fashion. Oh, and by the way, “an indictment is not a certainty.”
The New York Times treated such “political attention” cases quite differently when the people in the spotlight were on the other side, with headlines like: “Trump Team Knew Flynn Was Under Investigation,” “What (if Anything) Does Carter Page Know?,” and “Ongoing Trump Migraine: His Initial Foreign Policy Team.”
The Times led the way in drumming up scandal, making them seem real rather than “political,” and pinning things on President Trump. Now they’re doing the opposite.
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In Gaspee Project et al. v. the Rhode Island Board of Elections et al., the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has found that Rhode Island’s requirement for issue advocates to disclose donors over $1,000 is sufficiently narrow and that the goal of an “informed electorate” is sufficiently important to allow an infringement on privacy, associational, and speech rights. That’s not quite how the court and the law’s defenders would put it, but it’s accurate.
The moment the court rejected the notion that campaigning for a candidate is fundamentally different from campaigning for a ballot question, the game was over. When it declared that concerns about the targeting of donors must be concrete and proven, it ignored the huge silencing effect that every example elsewhere in the country can have. Both of those are intellectual and moral travesties.
The “informed electorate” argument related to candidates is defensible because a candidate is a person, and that person may feel obligated to return favors. Thus, disclosing who is paying to elect somebody gives voters a sense of to whom that person might owe a favor. “Issues” don’t return favors. Voters might find it interesting to know who else supports a cause, but the advocacy is entirely about persuasion. Whether the argument for or against a ballot question is sound does not depend on the identity of the people funding advocacy.
Nonetheless, there are two hard lessons for people who begin to engage in the civic legal battle. The first is that legal precedent is so dense and complex that multiple tracks exist from which a judge can choose. If he or she wants to find a reason to rule in one way or another, legal precedent can be found.
The second hard lesson is that judges, smarter-than-average though they may be, often miss points, whether obvious or subtle. I’ve watched them read obviously false statements into the record as part of their rulings, and the only way to correct the record would be a higher appeal. The charitable conclusion is that (surprise) they’re human, and our system asks them to absorb the facts of a relentlessly rolling series of highly divergent cases.
The Gaspee Project tells Anchor Rising that it believes “the United States Constitution provides more safeguards against state intrusion than currently recognized” and looks “forward to a review by the US Supreme Court.” This is good news, because the principle at risk is important, and a Supreme Court ruling makes one of the multiple tracks of precedent the dominant one.
Reading the text of the First Circuit ruling, however, an additional point leaps off the page: the contempt judges David Barron, Bruce Selya, and Pedro Alberto Delgado-Hernandez display toward the plaintiffs. Whatever one’s conclusion about how to balance competing interests, many of us (non-rich, well-meaning Americans) believe that the real purpose and function of disclosure laws is to expose people who support a cause to harassment and cancelling, thus creating disincentive to participate in our system of government when not aligned with the progressive mob.
That is a sincere concern, and yet the court’s language is that of cutesy mockery. Two examples:
In a Rumpelstiltskin-like effort to turn dross into gold, the appellants beseech us to consider the potential effects that the Act — and particularly, its disclaimer requirement — will have on their own organizations and memberships. …
Equating the production order invalidated in NAACP with the disclosure requirements of the Act is like equating aardvarks with alligators.
Notably, this language appears precisely at a pivotal moment, illustrating which track of precedent this court has chosen. The judges insist that the threat to donors must be decisively proven, yet the value to the public of knowing their names is simply assumed. Thus, the mockery reveals the judges’ narratives. On one side are the supposed rich who should man-up and put their names where their money is, while on the other are the innocent, childlike members of the public who will simply take the names of donors under advisement.
This narrative is foolish and flawed. One billionaire who is willing to put his name on a fashionable left-wing cause can fully fund an advocacy organization, but middle-class supporters of a group formed to defend the traditional position would be forced to accept the same degree of scrutiny, or else the organization would have to spend resources collecting many more smaller donations. Thus, the Marxist framing once again benefits the most elite.
The dripping contempt of this ruling is entirely in keeping with that dividing line. A progressive elite considers others’ concerns about their loss of rights to be comeuppance, as something they deserve for being so retrograde.
In this, the judges are contributing to a very dangerous situation. We are not represented. When we manage to elect representatives who share our values, they are coopted and thwarted by the bureaucracy. When we find more-stalwart allies who’ll stand up for our values, the elite treat them as invalid and attack them relentlessly. When we go to court, our concerns are dismissed with contempt.
What’s the next step when this proves to be the case? Certainly not submission of our values… not for long, anyway.
Featured image of the First Circuit building on courtrecordsfinder.
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Ray Rickman for RI Senate (9-13-21) from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Ray Rickman and host Mike Stenhouse talk briefly about Rickman’s extensive public service background and a variety of topics relating his practical, pragmatic and realistic plans as an elected official. Rickman’s major goal is to improve education in Providence public schools with reasonable and achievable changes rather than lofty transformative reforms, which rarely achieve their promised results.
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GoLocalProv is reporting that Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza won’t be following through with his plan to seek the governor’s office. It’s the obvious move to make, given the state of political play in the state right now. I suppose it would be too much to hope, however, that Elorza has realized he’s out of his depth already and the governor’s office would only be more so. It boggles my mind that some of these people even want to go down this path.
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At least the Northeast isn’t completely gone. Particularly encouraging, here, is how deeply the lawsuit is framed in terms of our complete loss of rights under perpetual “emergency” declarations.
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Departing Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s administration under the cloud of an influence peddling scandal, former Chief of Staff Anthony Silva is taking with him a $53,000 payout for unused time off, according to Eli Sherman on WPRI.
This benefit is always an issue when government employees leave office for some controversial reason, and the public is told again and again that it’s simply part of the law. Moreover, $53,000 is a lot of money for somebody to waive away on principle.
These payouts have driven me most crazy when municipal employees who’ve literally been caught stealing time are permitted to part gracefully into their retirements. They are pushed out because they were getting paid while not working, and then they turn around and collect money for paid-time-off benefits they could have used instead of stealing.
Silva’s case is a little different. One does wonder whether the reason he’s accrued so much unused time off (like over a month of vacation time) is that his job really wasn’t that challenging to begin with — not necessarily “no show,” but something more like “can’t tell the difference if he shows.” This suggests a question: Did he not take this time off because he never went anywhere, or was his job such that he just never had to log vacations and illnesses?
It would be very reasonable to tell highly paid office workers that time off is use it or lose it each year. They’ll point to the provisions given those lower down the hierarchy, like frontline workers, but with them at least one can understand that there’s some benefit for the taxpayer that such employees don’t have to worry about losing their compensation if circumstances require them to work through vacations or illness.
In some ways, the scandal with this benefit starts with the news media, which likes to grab easy headlines, but they’ll ignore (or even bring extra heat on) anybody who tries to address such practices. Were some reformer to win office and go after the public sector’s crazy perks, would journalists run stories reminding the public of the many scandals, or would they pull heart strings on behalf of the union employees?
Speculation aside, if these headlines offend you, don’t get in a huff about the controversy and then go on with your life. Change the way you vote. Volunteer to help courageous candidates.
Featured image by Ivan Vladimirov on WikiArt.
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This is surreal and shocking:
Add it to the sense that public health experts, right down to people’s doctors (anecdotally) seem to be following political winds in their advice related to COVID-19, and it sure feels like our society is drifting in a stormy sea. The people in roles meant to safeguard our democracy are proving that their support for the principle is contingent on their getting their own way on the important things.
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Owing to the fact that a local union official and I have the same name, I’ve been peripherally following a controversy in Boca Raton, Florida, involving an unnamed teacher who was suspended for showing his high school history class Civil War–era political imagery, including the one used as the featured image for this post. These lessons are so clearly on the educational side of the divide, it’s shocking that they’re even an issue. Boca News Now has sample images and text from the class, as well as the transcript of a ridiculously simple-minded robocall the district sent to parents:
Your child’s teacher included a political illustration from the 1800s as part of instruction. That illustration contained a derogatory slur. Although the teacher was sharing an example of past political commentary, any type of racial slur, no matter the context, is not acceptable in the District’s educational setting.
We have to be careful what sort of children we’re raising. If by high school teenagers aren’t emotionally capable of putting historically common words in their context, their schools and parents are failing them egregiously. Indeed, an 1861 Chicago Tribune news clipping that the teacher juxtaposed with one from a Southern paper seems poignantly relevant to our times, although the geographies have arguably switched:
The North is prosperous and the South is not. The one increases and multiplies by a process which freedom and civilization constantly accelerates. The South goes far backward by a process which ignorance and slavery inaugurate. The wealth, the power, the intelligence, the religion and advanced civilization are with the first. The last is secondary and retrograde. It is the infirmity of semi-barbarous men to hate what they cannot imitate; hence the bitterness which marks the utterances and emphasizes the actions of the rebels. Dislike of what is above and beyond them is at the bottom of this.
If the geographic divide has (at least) muddied, I’d argue that the parties have not. Look closely at the featured image of the post. Big tents lead to diverse populations, of course, but in general, the party that appealed to racists then is the party that appeals to racists now, although they’re much cleverer about disguising it.
One wonders how much suppressing Democrats’ evil history motivated this suspension.
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