Note how progressive Democrats have framed the universe, as Sunny observes:
As always, people who disagree with progressives are abusing power when they do anything to their own advantage, but progressives are never abusing power when they do whatever it takes to win. Keep an eye out for this dynamic especially when it comes to cheating in elections. Whatever they can’t claim is unproven, they excuse as simply doing what is necessary to win.
Progressives won’t admit it, often even to themselves, but the only thing that is truly against the rules is defeating progressives.
[Open full post]
Gabrielle Caracciolo, of NBC 10, reports that the McKee administration is hiding behind its lawsuits to avoid releasing the “forensic analysis… to determinhe what went wrong and who is responsible for the failure of the Washington Bridge.” But she did do some investigating:
An NBC 10 News investigation found when it comes to “quality control and assurance,” the state’s bridge inspection manual indicates both the consultant and the state bear some responsibility.
According to the manual, consultants responsible for inspections are required to ensure the reports are reviewed for “completeness, accuracy and content.”
It is (or should be) obvious that the government entity accountable to the public for public works projects is ultimately responsible for failure. Journalists shouldn’t have to investigate that proposition, and the governor shouldn’t pretend it isn’t so for the sake of lawsuits.
We’re entering a truly bizarre form of representative democracy in Rhode Island. Just as the government regulates speech in the one area in which it should be least involved — politics and elections — it is claiming to be the one entity not accountable to the public. In essence, the governor’s position is that Rhode Islanders don’t need facts to ensure accountability of state department because the governor represents us, and he knows them, so we can hold him accountable for facts that we don’t know… or something.
[Open full post]
Gene Valicenti’s weekly Tuesday conversation on WPRO with Brown University Professor Wendy Schiller took a slightly unexpected turn yesterday when Gene honored her request to comment on the handling of the Washington Bridge closure. (Starts at Minute 06:45.)
Schiller: This is a significant, major problem that if something goes wrong with the eastbound side, for any reason … what is plan B. This is an important part of the state. We’re seeing signs in Providence that it is hurting the Providence economy in some quarters of Providence. Restaurants are closing …. We are seeing some serious ripple effects, at least in Providence. Like, Smiley, McKee, Shekarchi. Where are they? I just don’t understand. We pay taxes. This is a major, major thoroughfare for the entire state. We’re just not seeing any, any responsiveness. … How about a plan, Gene? How about a plan? They’ve got a broken bridge. They’ve had a broken bridge since December. It hasn’t even … I believe, construction hasn’t even started to take it down yet. At least, not that I’ve seen so far. They’re preparing for it. They haven’t taken it down. Look at the Jamestown Bridge, you know, the new one. That took a while but they got the old bridge down. Look at Baltimore, Gene. Right? The federal government’s getting $400M and ordered construction of the new bridge.
Valicenti: Okay, hold on, hold on. First of all, listen. Alviti comes on once a week, every Thursday, 8:00. Good times, bad times, he’s on the radio. So what exactly do you want from him?
Nice try, Gene. Adroit, even. But no. Professor Schiller didn’t want anything from an appointed state employee. She directed her excellent questions about the poor handling of and seeming lack of urgency about the abrupt closure of the failed Washington Bridge to the relevant parties: our state’s elected officials. The governor. The mayor of Providence. The Rhode Island Speaker of the House. And correctly so.
Whether to shield those elected officials or, less nefariously, to promote a weekly segment of your radio show, Gene, do not re-direct her very correct request for action and demand for accountability – emphatically shared by many, many Rhode Islanders! – away from where it belongs.
[Open full post]
… to relieve their existential anxiety, people want a simple story in which the good guys and the bad guys are easy to identify.
Genuinely bad people are willing to lie and tell that simplistic story, while good people acknowledge nuance and accept a share of blame. This imbalance tilts the community’s judgment scale against the good people and worsens as individuals who are less bad become more invested in the story and individuals who are less good become less willing to stand with the nuance because they are then saddled with disproportionate blame.
A moment will come (and we’re fast approaching it) when the lies of the bad have become so outrageous and harmful to everybody that their badness is, indeed, obvious and nuance does not apply because their blame is wholly owned. Yes, that moment will come, but its arrival does not inevitably portend the victory of the good; it may come too late.
[Open full post]
Mark Steyn raises the peculiarity of the mysterious deaths of two businessmen who actually managed to beat the U.S. Department of Justice’s process-is-the-punishment racket. Apparently, the statistics suggest that the DOJ way overcharges its targets in the hopes of pushing for a settlement: “95 percent of cases are won by prosecutors, 90 percent of those without trial.”
Despite the odds, Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain won their case, but now both are dead under mysterious circumstances. Lynch’s yacht fell victim to a fluke boating calamity, and Chamberlain was hit by a car while on his daily run.
The latter is what brings to mind a bit of forgotten Rhode Island mafia history. Shortly after his paper published information about a secret mafia ceremony, publisher Michael Metcalf died by falling off his bicycle. Sure, authorities concluded it was simply an accident, but Projo chairman and publisher, at the time, Stephen Hamblett expressed some skepticism: “we cannot forget that Mr. Metcalf was publisher of newspapers known for their investigative stories and editorials on crime. This fact, coupled with the unique circumstances surrounding his death, make it impossible for us to rule out foul play.”
I’ve often noted that the popular Crimetown podcast had a notable shift in its first season, starting with mafia corruption and moving into government corruption. It has seemed to me that perhaps that captures a trend that actually happened in the Ocean State. If the United States government is following the same trend, we should all be worried, indeed.
[Open full post]
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Does it matter who runs Providence schools?
- Does the leader of the RIGOP matter?
- Does anybody care that the state keeps hiring companies it sues?
- Should voters care about Hopkins’s car controversy in Cranston?
- Is Sen. Reed still concerned about Biden’s cognition now that it’s less of a political liability?
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
[Open full post]
In the heat of the battle, political controversies over yard signs can become an almost comedic proxy for heated disagreements. I’ve seen people in the heat of a busy campaign drop everything to do battle with people stealing the yard signs of the other side or placing their own signs on property where they aren’t allowed.
A consistent lesson is that people will cheat when they perceive the stakes to be high, when they’re caught up in the result, and when they think it unlikely they’ll be caught. So, it’s disconcerting to see mail ballots joining yard signs in the heat of the Democrat primary for Rhode Island House District 9.
In addition to the normal yard sign controversies, State Representative Enrique Sanchez is raising a red flag about voters’ phone numbers being switched for mail ballots. More dramatically, one of his opponents, Santos Javier, has filed complaints, accompanied by notarized letters from people alleging that a Sanchez supporter has been pressuring voters to sign ballots before taking the ballots and filling in the vote for Sanchez.
That sounds like a pretty drastic and risky approach to mail ballot fraud, leaving campaigns apt to be caught, but we should take it as a warning. The placement of a particular yard sign is of unknowable value in a campaign, but these are actual votes.
[Open full post]
They may not be straightforward or easily articulated, though, so just read them through and absorb the awfulness. Here’s the background:
Built in the 1980s and 1990s where Scituate Avenue meets Furnace Hill Brook, Alpine Estates was one of the first of what would become many modern subdivisions on what used to be western Cranston farmland.
It features large Colonials with stately garages – some might call them “McMansions” – on half-acre lots. Only one home was listed for sale in the neighborhood on Zillow last week: a 3,200-square-foot three-bedroom whose owner was asking $800,000.
The undeveloped western edge of the neighborhood still requires a minimum of 2 acres per lot because, despite the city’s Comprehensive Plan calling for it, it was never rezoned to match Alpine Estates. …
In 2019, the Casales asked the city for a zone change to half-acre minimum lots so they could build eight houses in Alpine Estates instead of the four possible under the existing 2-acre zoning.
Being a bit of a policy nut, I think the most-important detail is the plaintiffs’ argument that “under state law, the Comprehensive Plan trumps the zoning ordinance.” That’s a crucial reminder to Rhode Islanders that we can’t think of these planning activities as somebody else’s nice little community-focused hobby. The intent is to dictate the rules for our towns and cities when nobody is watching and make it impossible to resist the push of the top-down planners. I think of a nice lady in town who casually talked about figuring out the best use of Tiverton’s waterfront and manipulating ordinances to devalue the land so its current owners wouldn’t be able to continue their current usage or sell it for use that might not fit the nice lady’s ideal view for her commute home.
That said, the nitty-gritty political processes are telling, too. The reason a mayoral veto was not overridden to change the zoning was that Democrat Speaker of the Rhode Island House Joseph Shekarchi once represented the plaintiffs as a private attorney, so one of the Democrat council members recused from the vote because she works in Shekarchi’s legislative office at the State House.
The speaker of the house has long been understood to be the most-powerful elected official in the state, yet a person in that office is out there advocating for paying clients before other elected officials in his own political party, one of whom works for him. Imagine if the governor maintained private practice as an attorney while in office. The incestuous knot is tangled, indeed.
To be fair, the practical solution is not obvious. Voters can’t really expect part-time legislators not to have other jobs, and not many people agree with me that we’d be better off with a full-time legislature enabling people with ordinary jobs to substitute elective office for them. As it is, running for legislative office only makes sense for those who are retired (often from unionized government jobs that enable early retirement), independently wealthy, and/or able to integrate elective office profitably into their careers. Banning lawyers from holding these offices, however, would be politically impossible.
On the other hand, the theoretical solution is obvious. We need a government that is less intimately involved in our lives. If voters preferred politicians who promised not to meddle, rather than promising to impose their interests on everybody else, “part-time legislator” could, indeed, be a side gig of community service. Moreover, the speaker would not be so powerful, and towns wouldn’t be grappling with progressive planning schemes pressured on them from above.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
[Open full post]
… by the discomfiting fascist, Orwellian tone of this campaign from supposed good-government-group Common Cause RI:
It’s bad enough on its face, but it’s worse when you break down the manipulative message. First, Common Cause wants you to believe that you can instantly identify “disinformation about voting.” Next, the organization asserts that you have a responsibility to act against it. The first step in doing so is to help censor it by failing to “engage, react, or comment.” Instead, you’re to run to the nearest authority — Common Cause — in order to file a report.
And who are these authorities? That’s the curious part. Common Cause RI has been a leading force in our state creating regulatory barriers to civic engagement, with the excuse of providing voters with information about who’s supporting candidates and causes. Yet, the ReportDisinfo About page is laughably sparse. There’s a box on the bottom that looks like a button, saying “Paid for by Common Cause Education Fund,” but it’s not a button. You’d have to investigate even that.
There’s little doubt in my mind that Common Cause RI will be onboard someday when progressives start rounding people up for wrongthink.
[Open full post]
Although it feels as if genuine policy debates have receded into the background in Rhode Island, reviving them may help correct the corrosion spreading throughout our civic house. Corporate tax incentives, for example, are an area in which conservatives and progressives in Rhode Island tend to agree on the binary “yes/no” question, raising the possibility not only of collaboration, but also of changed minds. If we agree on the conclusion, perhaps interaction will give us the farther-reaching chance to be persuasive about our reasoning, which is where the difference comes in.
Put in context, the problem with government’s corporate incentives is not that private-sector greed corrupts the pure intent of government officials, but that they allow the corrupt impulses of all people to work around natural social forces while failing to accomplish their stated goals. Rather than fix an unhealthy regulatory environment, for example, the relevant government offers to compensate its chosen businesses for the regulations’ cost while imposing new requirements that have nothing to do with the economic reality of the area (such as employment targets, products offered, and store hours).
John Mozena explains the problem succinctly, with examples, for the Iowans for Tax Relief Foundation:
The Hy-Vee saga demonstrates one of the biggest flaws with the way government-run “economic development” programs function in Iowa and across the country: Elected officials and bureaucrats always have big plans, but the marketplace often has different ideas. These taxpayer-funded subsidies are meant to cover over the gap and create incentive for businesses to locate in one place instead of another.
The problem is that subsidies have become so common — and are so valuable as a political tool for politicians wanting to claim they “created jobs” for their constituents — that not getting money from taxpayers is now far more unusual for a project of any meaningful size than receiving it. As expensive as they are, however, the real-world evidence is that these subsidies aren’t big enough to change companies’ decisions about where to go, what to build, and how many people to employ.
Mozena cites a study from Iowa academics finding that these incentives are a waste of money 90% of the time.
Unfortunately, they’re so darned attractive to government officials, at least as long as taxpayers are apathetic, bought-off, or confused by the tangle of issues on which they’re supposed to base their votes. Officials get to pretend that they can use other people’s money to wish away economics and human nature. Their urge to control gets another boost when they find themselves empowered to pick and choose the beneficiaries of that largesse, which they can dispense based on their own pretense to entrepreneurial insight, organizations’ alignment with their ideology, or the tendency of the company’s officials to put money in their campaign coffers. And finally, rather than private sector businesses’ being a competing source of power and influence in the local community, they become dependent on government for subsidies.
In theory, in studies, and in common sense, corporate subsidies can be seen to be worse than useless. After agreeing on that proposition, however, progressives and conservatives part ways, with the former seeing it as a reason for putting more resources under total government control. Conservatives, in contrast, see it more like mold in the basement; you can clean it up and dress up the damaged areas, but the wiser course would be to understand it as a symptom that points to a deeper problem to resolve.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 40.
[Open full post]