Living Successfully with Visual Impairment (3/28/22) from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Michael Prusko talks with Darlene D’Arezzo about his experience of visual impairment. Prusko began to experience vision problems at age 45. Over time, he was seen by four different eye doctors and was eventually diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa. He takes us step by step through this diagnostic process. His condition progressively worsened, and eventually he retired from his job. A variety of life changes were made in order to begin to manage his loss of sight more adequately. He acknowledges the support from his wife, children, and various helping professionals. Prusko has learned to use various prosthetic devices and a few very helpful technology tools. He cites a couple of organizations that were helpful to his learning to live successfully with his vision loss.
[Open full post]
John Loughlin talks with Dr. Timothy Shafman and Phil Nigro, inventor of the Stud Grabber.
Featured image by Manu Schwendener on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Without insinuating an answer, I find myself wondering how it was that progressive Democrat state senator Dawn Euer, apparently alone among all people who track and inform the public about such things was the one who knew of three voter fraud arrests. Think of that. If she hadn’t mentioned the situation to score political points, many well-informed Rhode Islanders would still be walking around saying there was no proof of any fraud.
Maybe some small-scale local reporter caught wind of it. Maybe Euer has a regular topic search that lets her know when communities near her are mentioned online. But in a state where minor political stories are often considered newsworthy, this seems like one that others could have caught.
More important, however, is the rhetorical use to which Euer put her information:
“It is so dangerous to come up with false accusations, that are not grounded in reality. So I do want to give some facts,” she explained. “There were three people who were registered and voted in multiple states. Two people who voted in Rhode Island and Florida, and one person who voted in Rhode Island and Illinois. Guess what? We caught them.”
It’s a bit presumptuous of Euer to claim that “we caught them.” Notably, Katherine Gregg doesn’t tell us, at the first link above, who the “national watchdog group” was that “alerted election officials in other states who, in turn alerted Rhode Island election officials” of two of the three cases, but it wasn’t “we,” the Rhode Island government. The state got a couple lucky tips, meaning we have no basis to claim that these three cases are unusual, rather than broadly representative.
This point gains especial poignancy in contrast with a related topic: campaign finance and disclosure. In that case, folks like Euer are not nearly so cavalier. When we hear about a case of corruption — and they are still rare, given the number of public officials — nobody proclaims it as evidence that we catch all such cases. Rather, activists impose layer upon layer of restrictive regulations upon those who wish to run for office.
I won’t hazard a guess at the number, but we can be sure that a significant portion of the public shies away from public engagement so as to avoid all the invasive reports and disclosures, along with processes that seem designed to trip a busy person up. Advocates call for such things, presumably, because access to the power of public office creates an attractive target for people trying to gain control and buy favors.
Why, by the same token, do we assume the corrupt won’t attempt to influence government through voter fraud? Moreover, why do some assume that making it ever easier to cheat won’t make cheating ever more common?
Featured image by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
There isn’t anything redeeming about Democrat Representative from Cranston and Warwick Joe McNamara’s highly inappropriate abuse of his position as Chairman of the House Education Committee to posture politically over legislation from Republican Representative Patricia Morgan (West Warwick, Coventry, Warwick), captured in this video clip:
On first pass, the unprecedented attempt to give Morgan “the opportunity” to withdraw a bill during the hearing is exposed as pure showboating. More importantly, McNamara is either lying or wholly ignorant about how the laws the General Assembly passes actually function, which makes him a dangerous person to tolerate in public office regardless of his political stances.
The details of the bill are incidental to this point, but for the sake of clarity, we should understand his claim. Morgan’s legislation is an attempt to head off some of the worst excesses of Democrats’ use of our schools to politicize, racialize, and sexualize children. McNamara’s claim is that the bill itself violates a state statute against bullying. That’s not how the law works, and after his many years in the General Assembly, one would have expected McNamara to know that.
Each session, the people’s representatives enact laws that (ostensibly) reflect the will of the people. A law can be invalidated if it violates the Constitution, but one law cannot “violate” another; they are on the same plane. If, in a specific circumstance of an actual individual who is subject to the state’s laws, two statutes appear to be in conflict, the judiciary will interpret the laws, first, to determine whether they can somehow both operate in concert and, if that is not possible, to determine which controls in that particular circumstance.
If McNamara were sincere in his strictly legal concern, he would raise the contradiction he sees and ask Morgan if there is some way to resolve the conflict within the bill. That is what the committee process is supposed to do — gather information and revise the language in substitute bills that can then go to the entire legislative chamber for consideration. His asking Morgan to withdraw the bill entirely, proves that McNamara was deceitfully attempting to dress his political opinion in presumably objective legal dressing.
The more divided our society becomes, the more clearly we can see the importance of process and the rule of law. Ultimately, the only thing holding us together is the principle that we can affect the rules by which we live through a predictable process that does not privilege one ideology over another. That principle is already fraying, and to score a few political points, McNamara gave it a whack with his rhetorical ax.
Rhode Island is fortunate that McNamara’s rhetoric is as dull as it is, but nonetheless he should step down for his assault on our most fundamental shared civic heritage.
[Open full post]
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Fallout from Sam Bell’s new infamy
- Segal brings the progressive establishment fully to RI politics
- Kalus’s introduction to the RI bureaucracy
- Polisena sours on McKee
Original image by Justin Katz.
[Open full post]
Socialist Rhode Island state senator Sam Bell (Democrat, Providence) has gotten a good deal of richly deserved negative pushback over truly terrible legislation he submitted in the state General Assembly (which is not to say that some of the correspondence he’s received hasn’t gone too far). As the cosigners on Bell’s legislation back away from the heat, we shouldn’t lose track of just how close our government is to using the income tax for explicitly punitive reasons.
It ought to terrify Americans across the political spectrum that elected officials didn’t laugh Bell out of the State House over such an assault not only on our bodily integrity, but also on the idea that the income tax shouldn’t be a means of manipulating us financially.
The following paragraphs from a recent ProPublica article by Paul Kiel, titled ” If You’re Getting a W-2, You’re a Sucker,” provides two important threads to tease out along these lines:
This basic divide [between those taxed as workers and those taxed as business owners] is also apparent in how tax laws are enforced. To the IRS, the average worker is an open book, since all their income is disclosed on those W-2s and 1099s. Should they enter an errant number on their tax return, a computer at the agency can easily catch it.
But that’s generally not true for private businesses. Such companies are often tangles of interrelated partnerships that, like densely grown forest, can be hard to penetrate. Auditing businesses like these “certainly is a test of endurance,” said Spretnak, the former IRS agent.
The first, and less significant, thread has to do with the relative advantage of working for one’s self. Kiel’s headline suggests W-2 employees are on a foolish path, and yet union-backed progressive legislation in Rhode Island is attempting to make it risky for businesses to treat workers more as owners by labeling such practices as “wage theft.” Without spending paragraphs attempting to reconcile ProPublica with the unions, we can observe that the activists are oversimplifying employment decisions in a way that may very well harm Rhode Islanders and limit our flexibility as the economy evolves. The unions want Rhode Islanders to be suckers, so that we’ll have no choice but to be their suckers.
The more-important thread, however, emanates from the image of tax agents poring over Americans’ finances, attempting to discover their mysteries and have a complete, open-book picture of everybody’s financial existence. Is that really what the income tax should be about?
I’d say it’s a rather dramatic downside to the very idea of an income tax. That one change in the law a little over a century ago completely shifted our relationship with the government, and we should move quickly to learn the lesson and fix the vulnerability.
Featured image by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Pending Legislation: A Labor Union Perspective (3/28/22) from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Patrick Crowley, Secretary-Treasurer, RI AFL-CIO, joins host Richard August to discuss pending Rhode Island legislation from a labor union perspective. The discussion includes various voting changes; driver licenses for undocumented persons; $3,000 vaccination incentive/bonuses/retention pay; state employee contracts/wages/benefits packages; minimum wage changes; wage theft by some employers; and some suggestions for changes to existing laws.
[Open full post]
Glenn Valentine of the RI Firearm Owners League
John Mark Antonio of the Rhode Island Home Show
Rhode Island Federation of Gardening
Art at the Rhode Island home show
Josh Fenton of GoLocal on the Superman building
Tim Johnson of Propane Plus
Bishop James Hazelwood of the ECLA
Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies
Ethan Hattoy of Hattoy’s Nurser and GardenCenter
Jason Simoneau, author of The Job for All Debts
Featured image by Adam Niescioruk on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
A theme of progressive politics is coming into sharp clarity, exposing how the ideology brings about totalitarian ends while using the language of freedom, democracy, individualism, civil rights, and so on. Many on the right have observed that the progressive dictionary is simply different from standard English — they use words to mean things that those words don’t mean for everybody else — but there’s a mechanism behind their strategy. How does a platform of representation, diversity, and mutual respect boil down to actually mean elite progressives dictate rigid rules for what everybody must uniformly believe?
We can unravel the thread a bit if we tug on this tweet from Rhode Island progressive David Pepin:
The cultural Taliban’s efforts to seize school boards and cut student access to controversial books are just the warmup act. They’re already going after public libraries in some places. Remember, it CAN happen here.
A couple clicks brings one to a Washington Post article about a library board in Llano County, Texas, which community has a whopping population of about 21,000 spread out over an area 80% the size of Rhode Island. Some in this small rural community object to books that a decade ago would have been widely recognized as well beyond the standards of decency for children, with an emphasis on moving the books elsewhere in the library or putting them behind the counter, and one of the country’s major newspapers labels it as “national news.” Establishment library types like Texas Library Association President-elect Mary Woodward start talking about “the danger” of having “books that only address one viewpoint” and the importance of “diversity of thought.”
This is the first part of the scam.
A year ago, when Dr. Seuss began to fall under the woke movement’s scythe, the tone from American Library Association Director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom Deborah Caldwell Stone was quite different:
“The fact is that library collections are dynamic,” she said. “There’s only so much shelf space, and over time collections will shift.”
Some libraries may move an offending book to the adult collection or historical archives, where it can live as a “historical artifact” that reflects the dominant attitudes of the time it was published.
But perhaps the most important consideration a librarian has is the wants and needs of their readers – is a book reflective of the community the library serves? Is it still popular among readers? If a librarian decides a book is “no longer serving the needs of the community,” it may be weeded out, Caldwell Stone said.
See, it’s not “censorship” if the book is simply being “weeded out” because tastes have changed, it “is no longer reflective of the community the library serves,” or it “no longer serv[es] the needs of the community.” Who decides these things? Well, that’s the other part of the scam.
In Llano, community members began to pay attention to what was in their public library, and they didn’t like what they saw. So, they organized, secured positions on the library commission, and changed the policy to be more reflective of and better serving of the community they represent. This sort of availability of institutions to public control is a significant part of the rhetoric progressives use when they want to pour more and more authority into the hands of government, except they don’t really mean it.
When progressives want to get a wedge into some cultural crack, they’ll cite the unique interests of a very limited area, insisting that it should be permitted to exist by its own terms, as expressed through duly elected or appointed local officials, without interference. When a community anywhere in the United States wishes to live differently, well, then they’re the Taliban, with a view that it is impermissible to represent.
The mechanism is pretty simple, really, amounting to hypocrisy. Progressives’ real coup, though, is taking themselves so seriously that moderates and conservatives believe their stated principles are sincere. That’s true only inasmuch as they truly believe what they say… when translated using their internal dictionary.
Featured image by Reed on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
You don’t have to pay very much attention to political discourse in the United States to know that “mass shooting” has a very particular definition. When Americans hear the phrase, they think of one or more psychotic gunmen killing people indiscriminately as an expression of alienation.
It feels deliberate, therefore, that the mainstream media appears to have decided to broaden its use of the term to cover other sorts of shootings affecting more than one people, probably including what used to be known as “gang violence.”
Russians with experience of life in the Soviet Union say that the Communist Party’s propaganda organs would report actual news, but readers had to learn to parse the meaning carefully to understand what was actually going on, and it wasn’t always easy or possible to come to a conclusion. This Orwellian shift is very much like that.
Across a wide range of issues, we’re seeing how the ability to twist a phrase just a little can make a huge difference in the political meaning of an event.
[Open full post]