On various issues of public controversy recently (notably transgenderism), some conservatives have suggested that forcing the population to assent to outlandish propositions is the point. Whether changing how society thinks about a particular matter is the central goal or incidental, progressives want to train the public to accept reality as whatever the activists say it is.
One wonders if something similar applies to the people whom progressive activists elevate. Nikole Hannah-Jones, a now-star professor who came to fame claiming to be some sort of history expert recasting America’s founding in terms of slavery, appears not to know what year the Civil War began.
Of course, if you were asking people on the street about a fact like that, you’d probably expand their target area to a decade, at least, but this is a person who’s “disrupting the narrative” and having a real effect on the education of young Americans. That she would make such a mistake really does suggest that forcing people to pretend activists are serious academics is another part of the point of domination.
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Steve Ahlquist has a strange explainer on Uprise RI about how Barrington got away with implementing a minimum wage policy for municipal workers:
State law passed during the regime of House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello prevents municipalities from raising the minimum wage within their borders. But the state cannot prevent individual cities and towns from establishing their own labor and payment policies. So Barrington municipal leaders are free to pay their employees above minimum wage if they so choose.
This appears to illustrate the way progressives put governments and private-sector employers in completely different mental buckets. Why would anybody think a municipality couldn’t determine how much to pay its employees? What they can’t do is limit the freedom of other employers and their employees to set the terms of their own relationships just because they have the misfortune of being within the municipality’s borders.
Of course, whether municipal employees should get special treatment is something that Barrington residents should consider. On the other hand, one suspects that this policy in Barrington scores progressive points rather cheaply, because few municipal employees are in that territory of pay.
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Criticisms of Allan Fung among Rhode Island Republicans have always struck me as either too demanding for purity or else founded in personal animosity (albeit perhaps with some justification… I don’t know). He was a solid Republican mayor and, from what I could see, a reasonably loyal member of the party. Given the GOP’s position in Rhode Island, one can’t expect the fields to sprout politicians who never stray, from cradle to grave, and put party building ahead of their own prospects.
So, claims that Fung was faking his party membership have never resonated with me. Moreover, the biggest hit against him thus far, a big report from the State Police, struck me at the time (here and here) as more plausibly evidence of that agency’s corruption under Governor Gina Raimondo.
I was a little surprised, therefore, to find myself thinking, “Please, no,” while reading Dan McGowan’s Boston Globe column suggesting Fung should run for governor rather than treasurer, which the former mayor has apparently been considering:
The former Cranston mayor just completed his first full year out of politics in almost two decades – he’s a law partner at Pannone Lopes Devereaux & O’Gara LLC – but he clearly misses the game. He’s been talking to friends and supporters behind the scenes about running for state treasurer, which might be easier to win, but would undoubtedly be less fulfilling.
McGowan thinks Fung would be a match for any of the Democrat candidates, all of whom will come out of a primary competition bruised and with crooked noses, and maybe so. To be sure, compared with them, it would be difficult for Republicans outside the inner rings of the game to see a reason not to prefer Fung.
That said, his detractors within the GOP can make a much stronger case for distrust now that Rhode Islanders have seen his wife, Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung, in action. She’s gone from recognition as a leader of Young Republicans more than a decade ago to potentially being one of the most radical members of the General Assembly. (See, e.g., here and here.) On a personal level, McGowan highlights Fenton-Fung’s feud with party chair, Susan Cienki, and she reinforced that tendency with her gratuitously aggressive and condescending response to Patricia Morgan’s travails last week.
A husband and wife can have very different political views, of course, but the feeling that Fenton-Fung pulled a massive bait-and-switch on conservatives — who have also been noticing that Nicholas Mattiello was much more of a firewall than they’d thought when they helped Fenton-Fung take him out of the General Assembly — will stain her husband, too. More importantly, the prospect of solidifying her status as half of a cross-State House power couple is enough of a practical concern that some voters who prefer Republicans will have to consider whether the long-term risk of elevating her stature is greater than the near-term benefit of better governance from the chief executive’s office.
That better governance might be slight, in any case, given that Fenton-Fung’s chamber of the legislature has a quietly progressive speaker and the Senate president is a union stalwart who has proven his willingness to swing non-union-issues to the progressives when opportunity arises.
Whatever Rhode Island needs in a governor, Fung isn’t it. At least not now. The above concerns won’t apply nearly as much to the race for General Treasurer, and political circumstances will certainly change over four or eight years. Who knows but that Allan’s significant other will join other Rhode Islanders in waking from the radical madness that has been sweeping the land and apologize for her role in it.
Featured image by Kenneth Zirkel on Wikipedia.
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In fact, in my admittedly short experience with whiskeys, it may be my favorite of any style. (Subject to revision, of course!)
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Big lessons from Rep. Morgan’s star turn
- COVID lessons McKee won’t learn
- Hospitals’ early lesson in RI’s decay
- Disappointment in advance of the General Assembly session
- The big picture on immigration policy
Featured image by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash.
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Ryan Rappa thinks the Fed is going to have to make debt relief part of any plan to control inflation. Actually, I should specify that whoever wrote his commentary’s headline thinks that, because Rappa’s essay mainly just ruminates about the problem. The closest he comes is this:
This risk is multiplied by other forms of debt, including mortgages, car loans, student loans, municipal and corporate debt, and financial leverage. Altogether, the total is in the ballpark of $100 trillion, much of which needs to be rolled over or refinanced on a regular basis, just like the federal debt. At least $2 trillion of this belongs to “zombie companies” that cannot make ends meet without borrowing more at ultra-low rates, and there are many near-zombie companies yet to come out of the woodwork.
As a result, the Fed has largely lost control of its most powerful tool against inflation. Yes, it plans to raise rates in 2022, but given the size of our collective debt, each minuscule bump is like trying to fix an electrical outlet with the power turned on.
I’m not so sure this is really a problem so much as a consideration to factor in. Massive debt and the interest payments thereto could mean smaller adjustments to interest will have bigger effects.
Naturally, there will be pain, but ultimately, there is no solution if people don’t insist on change, so motivating them could be part of a longer term solution, while ameliorating their experience could produce short-term fixes.
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Following up on a question I sent to the state Department of Health, spokesman Joseph Wendelken tells me that instances of people being hospitalized while testing positive for COVID, but for whom COVID is entirely unrelated to the reason they’re in the hospital, account for only about 6% of the number.
The question gained increased prominence in Rhode Island as Christmas break approached and Kent Hospital Chief of Emergency Medicine Laura Forman told National Public Radio that the virus was spreading like “wildfire,” and “even patients who are coming in after car accidents or with ankle sprains are testing positive.”
According to Wendelken, “someone who goes to the hospital for another reason but is COVID-19 positive would not get admitted unless that other health issue was dire.” After “a closer clinical analysis on the charts of a subset of patients,” the DOH came to the conclusion that the virus “played a role ” in the conditions of 94% of patients testing positive for COVID.
Applying that percentage to the latest data from the DOH, of the 325 people currently listed as “hospitalized with COVID,” the virus would be deemed entirely incidental for about 20.
Nonetheless, the need for Rhode Islanders to postpone procedures because they are not “dire” must be counted among the costs of the current condition of our health care system. Though seasonally elevated, the number of COVID patients in Rhode Island is still down considerably from this point last year. If patients who would otherwise have been admitted are being turned away, then one would expect hospitals to have excess capacity, rather than experiencing a crisis.
I’ve asked if the state has a sense of how many patients are being turned away and whether patients for whom COVID is a factor in their illness are also not being admitted unless they are in dire circumstances.
Featured image by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash.
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Thinking about Governor McKee’s (let’s just say) uninspiring leadership on COVID in preparation for my weekly conversation with John DePetro, I wondered why we can’t just follow the obvious path of sanity.
Never in my life have I heard so many people talking about believing science and engaging with concepts of risk and mitigation, but it’s all become meaningless because there is no talk of tradeoffs. There’s no discussion about acceptable risk.
If public health authorities wanted, they really could offer the public a clear presentation of the actual risks to people of different ages or in different circumstances. They could then illustrate the practical (and realistic) benefit of each form of mitigation.
We could then figure out where we should focus as a community and what we can or are willing to do as individuals. But the conversation pulls up short of that sort of consideration, perhaps because the panicked people and those looking to make ideological gains know they couldn’t dominate that discussion.
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As the editor of the Rhode Report puts it while linking to this story, “This is what is important to the morons of the Democrat Party”:
As of January 1, restaurants across Rhode Island are no longer allowed to give out single-use plastic straws unless a customer asks for one.
Violators will get warnings for the first and second times that they fail to follow the law.
It is in the nature of zealots to be relentless. Just so, as COVID was first engulfing the planet, Rhode Island legislators were working on a law against the intentional release of balloons.
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Governor Dan McKee implemented an inflexible COVID-19 vaccine mandate on Rhode Island’s healthcare workers in the midst of a healthcare worker shortage. How much did the mandate exacerbate under-staffing? Director of Health Dr. Nicole Alexander Scott was asked this at a press conference on November 16.
“It’s a contributing factor that is small in the grand scheme of things,” Alexander-Scott said, noting that Rhode Island is at 98% compliance with the state’s vaccination policy.
98% of healthcare workers in the state had gotten vaccinated. So 2% did not get vaccinated. Two percent of 65,000 comes out to 1,300 healthcare workers involuntarily removed from their jobs by Governor McKee’s vaccine mandate.
Contacted by Anchor Rising on December 29 about this, the office of Governor Dan McKee did not offer comment. The office of Rhode Island Director of Health, Dr. Nicole Alexander Scott, replied,
Healthcare facility administrators have reported to us that the healthcare worker vaccination requirement has helped stabilize the workforce because less illness among staff means fewer people having to isolate and quarantine (and miss work). For this reason, the major health systems in Rhode Island put healthcare worker vaccination requirements in place before the State enacted a regulation statewide.
But this does not altogether address the crux of the matter, which is that the vaccine mandate itself has “destabilized” the workforce by removing 1,300 healthcare workers. Let’s stipulate that the number of vaccinated workers is, in fact, 98% and not a lower number, which would increase the number of workers sidelined. Governor McKee and Director Alexander Scott have involuntarily removed 1,300 workers from an already short-staffed healthcare system during a pandemic on the basis of a rigid mandate that was implemented without an analysis as to its impact on public health.
1,300 is not a “small” number on its face. Further, in the absence of an analysis, there is no basis to assert that 1,300 fewer workers is just a “small” contributing factor to the state’s serious healthcare short-staffing problem.
Now it is clear that it was not. Kathy Gregg at the Providence Journal yesterday broke the disturbing news that the Rhode Island Department of Health had established and issued guidelines, obtained by Gregg, on December 30 for COVID-19 positive healthcare workers to work at hospitals and nursing homes.
Governor McKee and his Department of Health now need to explain, carefully and with specificity, how it can be that COVID-positive healthcare workers pose less of a risk to patients, long-term care residents and the overall public health than 1,300 healthy ones.
Featured image by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
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