It’s a shame the mainstream media (extended to glossy magazines) has no space for illustrated commentary as powerfully accurate as this.
We’re so comfortable these days that progressives can exist many layers of abstraction removed from the consequences of their policies and therefore enact policies that roll painfully downhill while undermining real progress.
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I’m midway through reading a book about the psychology of changing your mind, and the author apparently sees understanding the subject as an important tool in overcoming our polarization. I’ll have much more to say about the book, no doubt, not least to suggest that increasingly subtle psychological manipulation may be causing the polarization. After all, the target of the techniques, even if they work, may feel targeted and generally lose trust in reality. On the other side, a movement has to be pretty confident in its righteousness in order to self-justify manipulation and, where it fails, can feel the recalcitrant opposition is something other than human.
Be that as it may, with the federal government currently performing one of the dances by which the permanent uniparty continues to grow its budget, we should consider a more practical reason we’re so divided. For that purpose, I’ll hearken back to a 2021 commentary by Betsy McCaughey concerning the Democrats’ Build Back Better bill:
Barack Obama, the community organizer who became president, was a master at machine politics. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) outsourced the important job of health plan enrollment to community organizations, handsomely funding them and entrusting them to register people to vote at the same time. Obamacare turned community organizations into a fifth estate with government funding but without government rules.
Now, Build Back Better is funding an even wider array of organizations. It allocates a whopping $5.7 billion “for community-led projects to stabilize neighborhoods.” Translation: rallies and legal action to stop gentrification and “displacement.”
I watched this happening in real time during Obama’s reign. The federal government gave money to state and local governments with the requirement that they hire approved advocacy groups to do the analysis (or whatever it was). Billions of dollars have been flooding into the bank accounts of activists. At a minimum, it keeps them flush and free of the burden of finding other work. More broadly, it gives them money to throw around and multiply themselves. I’d surmise, too, that federal money is helping to fund the research in how to psychologically manipulate public opinion for progressive ends.
These practices must stop. Depressingly, however, a string of revelations show the consequences for those who might disrupt the scheme — from the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups to the reaction to President Trump to the government’s involvement with social media censorship and propaganda to much, much more.
Featured image by Bermix Studios on Unsplash.
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From the other side of the election, with the Hunter Biden laptop known to be real, the J6 commission calling for criminal prosecutions, COVID-related decisions coming under renewed scrutiny, and Elon Musk providing revelations about what really went on inside Twitter to support the Democrat Party, it’s worth revisiting J. Peder Zane’s fictional account of how journalists would be acting if their reality matched the image they promote.
Showing what could be investigated really highlights what is not.
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… as New York has done. It’s to make civilians more vulnerable. Supporters framed their intention as making bad people more vulnerable to the police, as during mass shootings, but the ban doesn’t apply only to bad actors.
As simple common sense, policies designed to make people more vulnerable ought to be approached with suspicion. They are difficult to reconcile with the notion that we are a nation of free, independent people.
Keep in mind that, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center poll, nearly half of Democrat men under age 50 support assassination of political figures they don’t like. Unfortunately, that’s just the biggest cut of the data. The percentages of Republican women (40%), Republican men (34%), and Democrat women (32%) in that age group supporting political assassination are way too high and contrast hugely with those over 50, who remember more-chaotic times and are much less likely to support assassination.
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Although the core political story in Rhode Island is inevitably Democrat, this isn’t a partisan post. The one detail I recall from Amity Shlaes’s book, Coolidge, that detracted from the 30th President’s story was an anecdote from when he was the Republican president of the Massachusetts Senate. A lobbyist persuaded him to go one way on an upcoming question and, holding the vote by voice, Coolidge gave him a win even though reports suggest the shouts of the legislators were clearly in the other direction.
Whether Coolidge was right on the issue (or there was some corruption in the background that history did not capture) is beside the point. The parliamentary leader of a legislative body isn’t meant to be a single decision-maker when it comes to its actions.
Thus, it’s a matter of grave concern that Rhode Island Speaker of the House Joseph Shekarchi seems to think he’s the king of his chamber. Note the following statements from a recent interview with the Boston Globe’s Edward Fitzpatrick (emphasis added). On early voting:
“I heard a little bit of pushback from some of the boards of canvassers that it was too long of an early voting period,” Shekarchi said. “They had to open a polling station at the city or town and man it for 20 days, and the first five, six days no one showed up. They came on the last part of that.”
But, he said, “If someone can convince me that we need it, I’ll keep it. But if someone can convince me to adjust it, maybe we’ll look at adjusting it. I’m not going to eliminate it because I think it has a great benefit.”
On shoreline access:
Shekarchi said the House passed the measure late in last year’s session, so it will try to get the bill over to the Senate early in the 2023 session. But also, the Senate has a “constitutional concern” that the bill would take property from private land owners, he said.
“I personally don’t believe that it’s a taking, or I wouldn’t have passed the bill if I thought it was unconstitutional,” Shekarchi said. “But there are ways to resolve that issue.”
Agreement or disagreement with Shekarchi on the substance of the issues should be less important than the fact that he appears to believe that the decisions are his alone.
The fault is ours as Rhode Islanders for having been manipulated into a system that guarantees one-party rule, and more immediately, the fault lies with the legislators who tolerate their reduction to courtiers for the sake of keeping their seats. Still, this is plain, deep corruption right there on the page for all to see, but few even notice that the king believes he’s wearing a garment of authority that is not there.
Featured image by Vilhelm Pedersen on Wikipedia.
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… but keep an eye out for claims of increased flooding that could be caused by a wobbling moon (which, if it needs to be said, is in no way related to carbon emissions):
Beware, coastal communities. The U.S. is set to face a surge in high-tide floods along its coasts due to a “wobble” in the moon’s orbit coupled with global warming, according to NASA.
Starting in the mid-2030s, a lunar cycle will amplify rising sea levels fueled by climate change, causing rapidly increasing high-tide floods on every U.S. coast, according to findings of a new study by the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team from the University of Hawaii.
The “coupled with global warming” piece is the CYA maneuver. Otherwise, people might begin to wonder if maybe all the “climate change” evidence might have other contributing factors that are even more beyond our control than completely reversing the course of human progress by undermining our energy and industrial bases.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee’s next round with the homeless
- The media’s turn toward advocacy
- Elorza’s red pill
- The Speaker’s admission of kingship
Featured image by Paulette Vautour on Unsplash.
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This tweet from local left-wing writer Phil Eil, quoting WPRO journalist Steve Klamkin, is some months old, but it’s still worth a head-shaking ponder:
Is it possible that progressives don’t recognize that their co-ideologues are the ones forbidding a counterculture from forming because they’re in power and don’t want alternative views to be heard? Is there any psychological mechanism that could get them to recognize that the Tea Party, MAGA, and so on are the counterculture for which they claim to pine?
As I near a half-century of life, it seems to me that what they want is what Boomers enjoyed for the entirety of my life, and then some: a safe, pop-culturalism counterculturalism in which the mainstream society is so secure and so competent that lifelong adolescents can rebel forever and never reap the damage of revolution.
Ah, well. Those days are gone. The damage cometh.
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Clearing out some links from the past year, I came across this abortion-related interview with URI student Antonia Simmons by The Public Radio’s Lynn Arditi. This part makes me wonder if maybe all that’s needed is more education about biology:
I am a 20 year old woman and I deserve the right to make my own choices about my own body and my own health and my own future.
So if I were to get pregnant, first of all I am in college, I have absolutely no desire, or really the ability right now to be a good mother to raise a child. So the first thing on my mind would be, how can I safely end this pregnancy. And as somebody who’s on the state health insurance, it would not be covered currently by state health insurance. And abortions can run between $500 and $1,500 for the procedure. So we would have to pay that out of pocket.
Maybe the problem is that young women just don’t know how it is that they can “get pregnant,” because then they could make informed choices about their health, bodies, and futures. If that’s not the problem, then it seems what women like Simmons want is an undo to make the choices they prefer easier at the expense of whoever is paying for the procedure and, of course, the children whose lives they would snuff out.
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A prolonged occupation outside the State House by homeless people and advocates urging that the state do more for homelessness has put the issue in headlines in recent weeks, with most of the commentary along the thought-free, almost panicked lines of “Do something! Do something! Do something!”. On Friday, a judge ruled in favor of Governor McKee’s “Notice to Vacate” and the encampment was cleared yesterday. But the issue itself, of course, has not gone away.
Let’s edge into the main point of this post with a few bigger picture items about homelessness that do not seem to have made it into the recent commentary. It’s important to note, first of all, that all public funds to address homelessness do not fall harmlessly from the sky but come out of the pockets of taxpayers, most of whom already have a lot to pay for.
This raises some questions. Are Rhode Island officials addressing some of the root causes within their purview – high property taxes, high cost of living, including energy costs, and business (un)friendliness – of homelessness? How much is enough for government to spend on affordable housing and alleviating homelessness? At what point does this burden, along with other things government deems taxpayers should fund, tip the balance of household budgets towards unaffordability and actually increase the number of those who are homeless? And the question that is the focus of this post: is government most efficiently using taxpayers’ dollars, both generally and to address the matter of homelessness? Because every dollar poorly spent, i.e. wasted, by state government takes resources away from valid public services and projects.
This brings us to the Industrial National Bank Building; a.k.a., the Superman Building in downtown Providence. This former office building has been vacant for years. The State of Rhode Island and the City of Providence have agreed to participate in the rehab and redevelopment of the building into mostly residential apartment units by partially funding this project with significant public subsidies, a.k.a. hard-earned tax dollars; local, state and federal. The Providence Journal puts total public participation dollars, including Providence’s thirty year tax stabilization (love the euphemism; can we all get a tax break … er, tax stabilization?) agreement for the property, at over $90,000,000.
Objections to the development have understandably been raised about its high rent rates. This is due in part to the very high cost of the project itself. Rehab construction is notoriously more expensive than new construction. A more extreme and, therefore, more expensive type of rehab conversion project is turning a century old office building to modern, code-compliant residential units, throwing into question the wisdom of any public dollar participation in what is arguably a boutique, or even vanity, project.
The project, especially the $90,000,000 in taxpayer participation, has been sold on the basis of hazy nostalgia for the building – nostalgia that is probably non-existent for the vast majority of Providence residents and Rhode Islanders footing this significant bill. Another selling point has been that 20%, or 57, of the residential apartments will be “affordable”; double the normally requested percentage for a new residential development in Rhode Island. But while this may have been done so that we would think better of public participation in this dubious project, it actually adds another level of very poor value for the public dollars earmarked for this costly development: the expensive creation of “affordable” apartments. And the natural follow up question: how many more affordable housing apartments could be created if those funds went towards newbuild units?
State leaders have indicated that addressing homelessness is a priority for them. It is difficult, however, to reconcile these statements with the action of directing public dollars towards hazy nostalgia and an expensive rehab development that is very poor value for the public dollar.
This is not to necessarily advocate for an increase in public resources for homelessness or to redirect some of that $90,000,000 from the Superman Building project towards newbuild affordable housing projects (though certainly, all public funds should be immediately withdrawn from the project). Rather, it is to highlight, lest state officials think it is going unnoticed, a sharp contradiction of nice-sounding words and profligate actions that will, in a double irony, not only result in fewer affordable units built for the money spent but perhaps nudge a few more people towards homelessness by adding to the financial burden of living in the state.
Featured image by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash.
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