On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Much ado about the Independent Man
- What’s the plan for Matos?
- The quiet general election for CD1
- Park Theater socialism
- Rights for the Left but not for thee
- Media blacklisting of Solas
- Looters after the flood
- Neronha speculation
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 2.
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Current Rhode Island public school policy on transgender and gender nonconforming students was formally passed as a regulation in April 2018 by the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education and then-Education Commissioner Ken Wagner under the authority of the governor.
Anchor Rising made the following inquiry by e-mail last month of the Rhode Island Council on Elementary and Secondary Education, current Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green and Governor Dan McKee through his Press Secretary.
Current RIDE policy permits schools to discuss transgender procedures with students. RIDE policy also permits schools to refrain from notifying the parents of students at the secondary level who may be considering or are undergoing gender transition. My question: is RIDE considering changes to these policies given the increasing publicity around “detransitioners”?
No response has been received, though staff members of all three offices politely indicated in follow up calls they would pass along the inquiry.
The effects of transitioning – sterility and non-functional organs – are significant and permanent as the thousands of transgender individuals who detransitioned (the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey alone documents 2,242 individuals who have done so; how many since?) have learned. And the stories of an increasing number of detransitioners have been in the news recently.
Rhode Island’s transgender policy on underage students, accordingly, is consequential and carries potential long-term implications for at least some of the students in our elementary and secondary schools. For this reason, Anchor Rising will make follow up inquiries of the above officials.
[Featured image by Kenny Eliason via Unsplash]
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Ana Quezada gives RI advanced warning of the mail-ballot calamity
- The painters’ union finds (lead) dirt on its competition
- Local newspapers run into the problem of losing audience and revenue
- The “sanctuary city” label becomes less fun
- Flooding becomes more common
- Rob Cote gets the mic, but not justice
- (Most) Democrats come together
- School kids (still) don’t like school food (even as they’re prepped to look for handouts)
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- WPRI rehabilitates Crowley
- Identity politics in CD1
- Polling and media endorsements in CD1
- Giant fake stuffies
Featured image by Justin Katz using DALL-E 2.
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Rhode Island has reached the point that election day isn’t election day, and not only because early and mail voting blur the calendar. As we’re seeing with the special Congressional race currently underway, for all intents and purposes, the Democrat primary is the election. And with so many candidates vying for that position, one can hear murmurs for ranked choice voting (RCV). That would be a mess.
Advocates claim RCV is just like runoffs, except taking place on a single ballot, but it’s not. Vote counters run through everybody’s first choice, and if nobody wins a majority, the second choices of voters whose first choice came in last are added to the appropriate candidates’ totals. If no candidate then has a majority, the next-to-last candidate is eliminated and those voters’ second choices are applied to the total.
In a runoff, a second election is held including just the top 2 candidates from the election, and everybody has to choose between them.
One could play mental games with the possible strategies with RCV, but suffice it to say peculiar outcomes would be more than possible. For one example, in a five-way race the electorate could face a situation in which the top 2 candidates both lose because voters for the bottom 2 chose the third-place candidate as their second choice. By eliminating from the bottom up, voters for the most-losing candidates get two votes while the voters for the top candidates only get one.
Rather than inviting confusion and novel strategies, we should strengthen the funnel that gets candidates to the ballot. We should think more like a tournament than a cage match. Constituencies should make their decisions, join forces, and then present their best option to the whole electorate. That way, the parties have some incentive, at least, to consider what members of the other party would find palatable.
This is the purpose of primaries. Unfortunately, the system of electors, committees, and so on has become muddied, but the solution is to shore them up. To do so, we’ll have to address two unhealthy trends: the muddying of government’s purpose, which has come as a consequence of increasing its top-down power, and the loss of common values.
Without repairing those two wounds, RCV would be a way to create the illusion of majority support among an even more fractious public.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 2.
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A new study by criminology professors from the University of Rhode Island and Rutgers University — Luzi Shi and Jason Silver, respectively — produces some interesting results, although the URI press release is arguably inaccurate. Here are the headline and lede:
Americans favor punishing only protestors they disagree with, new research shows
Study finds Americans support harsh punishment – and even government repression – for protestors and protest movements on the opposite of the partisan spectrum
While charts from the report might seem to support that characterization (and while one can understand the desire of people in New England academia to shape the conclusion to be more comfortable for their audience), the true finding is substantially different. Yes, generally, groups tend to be more supportive of suppression and punishment of those in other groups, which isn’t surprising, but the only group that, collectively, supports repression and harsh punishment is the “very liberal” group, and only when thinking about “MAGA protesters.”
The axes are the key. For the charts about police and legal repression, anything less than a three is opposition, so shifting from 1 to 3 is more-accurately characterized as being “less opposed,” not “more supportive.” It’s also important to be clear that “police repression” is simply defined as some sort of police or military control of the protest, which is very different from “legal repression,” which is defined as “banning future protests altogether” and “banning political action by groups with this goal.” The former implies keeping order and arresting people who violate the law while protesting. The latter is proactive elimination of civil rights.
The study finds that, as a group, conservatives never support “legal repression,” whereas liberals do. Conservatives are also less supportive of “police repression” even of their ideological opponents.
The question of punishment is a bit more difficult, because the study’s methodology is questionable. The authors average give five forms of punishment: nothing, a fine, probation, prison less than five years, and prison over five years. The authors assign numbers from 1 to 5 for each of these and then average them, but it isn’t obvious that these are even ordinal categories (meaning they can be ranked), let alone interval categories that can be averaged.
Putting this problem to the side, however, one interesting observation emerges: The strongest support for imprisonment is from liberals when imagining a MAGA protester hitting a police officer with a rock. BLM-supporting liberals are the party of “defund the police,” yet they are less incensed by assaults on innocent bystanders than on officers. One wonders whether this response is conditioned by the media narrative of “insurrection.” The liberals react strongly, in other words, because the picture closely matches an event to which they’ve been conditioned to respond.
The possibility of such conditioning is reason to be wary of the current news narrative, which (as this study supports) may be conditioning progressives to support broad suppression of people who disagree with them politically.
Dangerous ground.
Featured image created by Justin Katz using DALL-E 2.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Don Carlson and allies’ complete mismanagement of the scandal
- Sabina Matos’s complete incompetence as a politician
- The Republican candidates’ complete lack of strategy
- What Regunberg gets that his competition does not
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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This is precisely the sort of application of supposed common sense without due process that incrementally undermines our rights.
There is no process for a candidate to remove him or herself from the ballot, and as far as I know, there are no standards in law or regulation for the Board of Elections to determine when it can post signage in a polling place discouraging voters from choosing a candidate. This is very, very dangerous.
Voters can choose to vote for Carlson regardless of his statements, and if they don’t know he’s insisted he’s withdrawn, then maybe they deserve to see their votes thrown away.
Take particular note that Carlson used the word “suspend,” not “withdraw,” in his announcement (which has no legal effect). The BOE should not be doing this.
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Rhode Island Current, a newcomer to the Ocean State’s media landscape, recently published an article by Nancy Lavin asking the perennial question, “What’s with RI jobs data?” Over the decades of my interest in the topic, this ambiguity has been a running theme. The state has no (and cannot have any) economic confidence.
We’re like a sick person in the constant throes of self-evaluation looking for any sign that maybe… maybe… there’s hope he or she is on the upswing. I feel a little less congested today. My temperature is down a tenth of a degree. There’s not quite as much edge to my cough this morning.
In this case, the specific mystery that captured Lavin’s interest is how the state can be losing jobs even as more Rhode Islanders report that they’re employed. She asks a handful of the standard experts, and they provide a handful of the standard answers: Most prominently, the employment numbers, which come from surveys asking if a person has worked at all recently, include those who work in other states (including remote work), whereas the jobs numbers, which come from the government reports of businesses located in the state, do not.
Department of Labor and Training information and operations manager Donna Murray comes close to a point that’s less often made when she mentions the “gig economy.” The jobs number doesn’t include independent contractors, so to the extent businesses are using their services, rather than hiring employees, people will be employed without “jobs,” technically speaking.
This isn’t really new, though. Independent contractors are essentially bosses of their own businesses, and they’re indistinguishable from one-person shops. Your self-employed plumber, for instance, will be employed but not count as a job. For decades, Rhode Island has done conspicuously well (from a certain perspective) when it comes to business starts, and analysis has led me to conclude that the reason is people can’t find suitable jobs.
They look for work and can’t find it (or they lose it). Then they start doing anything they can for money (gig economy). If their businesses begin to grow, Rhode Island regulations tend to put them out of business once they start to become more official “small businesses.” So, then they lose hope and leave for a healthier state.
In other words, Lavin’s article may miss a key point. In RI, the gig economy isn’t only another option. Our terrible tax and regulatory policy discourages job creation, forcing them to piece together an income.
Increasingly, all that remains are government-centric service jobs (as evidenced by the industries Lavin notes are growing). As government becomes the primary industry of the state, policy shifts to support the need to import “clients” for its services and to find money from somebody else (either taxing the productive or snagging gifts from the feds). This — what I’ve called the “company state” or “government plantation” — in turn makes jobs more difficult, reinforcing the detrimental cycle.
Featured image by Shaojie on Unsplash.
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Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos’s attempt to tar competitor Gabe Amos for — get this — having ties to Home Depot is fascinating:
He wants voters to focus on his work as a public servant and to ignore the fact that he was a registered lobbyist for Home Depot despite the company’s ties to the far-right agenda, earning tens of thousands of dollars for his work.
- Amo says “we must all be steadfast in our advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community” but was a paid lobbyist for Home Depot after the company donated $1,825,500 to 111 anti-LGBTQ politicians from 2017-2018.
- He says he will fight back against MAGA Republicans, but he lobbied for Home Depot in 2019, despite calls to boycott the company during that time because of its co-founder full throated support of Donald Trump’s re-election
- Home Depot’s co-founder Bernie Marcus donated $7 million to Trump’s campaign in 2016.
- An analysis found that Home Depot was the single biggest corporate donor to 2020 election objectors, contributing over $265,000 to lawmakers dubbed the “Sedition Caucus”
- Home Depot has contributed tens of thousands to legislators who are anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, anti-voting rights, and insurrectionists.
The core deceit, here, is to extend the degrees of separation through which a political stain can carry, with a close second being the use of labels in lieu of facts. The first bullet above does both: Readers must rely on Matos’s unsubstantiated claim and then stain Amo for associating with a company (one degree of separation) that has had some sort of dealings with various politicians around the country (two degrees of separation).
Both are lessons of recognizable manipulation strategies that progressives use repeatedly. For instance, politicians vote on a wide variety of legislation applying myriad rationales. Activists then go through and pick and choose sets of litmus tests to which they apply an indiscriminate label like “anti-LGBTQ politician.” Usually the translation is “people who veer in the slightest bit from our most extreme position,” although they reserve the right to excuse any given politician for reason of political expediency.
In this case, though, note the target. Matos (our lieutenant governor, remember) implicitly assumes Rhode Islanders will readily think of Home Depot as a bastion of evil bigotry. This company is a familiar part of most of our lives. It employes hundreds, or maybe thousands, of Rhode Islanders and is a massive part of our economy across multiple industries and people’s quality of life.
None of that matters to a radical like Matos. With opportunity for the slightest bit of political advantage, she’ll tear it all down.
In short, she’s a consummate example of the cynical and destructive power of progressivism. Rhode Islanders should remove her at first opportunity and rethink any positive view of progressives they may have.
Featured image by Moritz Mentges on Unsplash.
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