Whatever one thinks of Avedisian, seeing Alviti in this picture is a reminder that state government incompetence can harm the lives of hundreds of thousands, but it’s the guy who leaves the scene of a fender bender who’s shown the door.

As he’s done for a long time, Mark Steyn zeros in on the truth with panache:

There are times, however, when it is necessary not to conceal it. This week’s Trump Trial of the Week is the bazillionth attempt by the ruling party to nail the leader of the opposition on …something, anything, whatever’s to hand. So naturally a certain artfulness is required. In this case, if one accepts as true the charges of corrupt prosecutor Alvin Bragg, Trump paid former crony Michael Cohen to pay off Stormy Daniels. Which would be a falsification of business records. Which is, under the “laws” of New York, a misdemeanour – albeit one in which the statute of supposed limitations has already kicked in. So Bragg is arguing that the expired misdemeanour is actually a non-expired felony, because it was used to cover up another crime.

What other crime he has not said. And, as is now familiar in the State of New York, the corrupt judge Juan Manuel Merchan has been happy to indulge him.

… why all the Trump cases wind up in the hands of this particular Biden donor is a mystery to me.

Well, actually it isn’t: much of “American justice” is stinkingly corrupt. QED.

One wonders if the enormity of the corruption has become its own incentive for Democrats to turn a blind eye.  Once down the road of acknowledging it, what else might be overturned?

As shocking videos emerge of progressive fascism showing its antisemitic face, Nick Freitas’s on-point observation here comes to mind:

Americans have been had in a major way (this issue not the least), and I’m not sure there’s any way to turn things around.

One has to wonder such things after seeing posts like this, from Rhode Island Democrat State Senator Tiara Mack:

Teenagers lack the maturity and experience to know what it is they need to learn or how it should be taught.  Raising doubt about adults capacity in this regard would be a fair response, but for this purpose we draw the line at 18.  If anything, given the lengthening of adolescence in modern America, we should be considering a move in the other direction — opening elections only when people are a bit older.

In any event, giving teens a means to vote themselves other people’s money would be more of a disaster than Rhode Island already faces.

While we’re on the matter, contrast Mack’s suggestion with progressives’ antipathy to school choice.  One suspects she wants kids voting in government school elections because they’ll be easier for radicals and union organizers to manipulate.

Unfortunately, Rhode Islanders don’t want it.  The Ocean State could be a beacon collecting some of tech jobs California is losing, as Joey Politano shows here:

Rhode Island is so in the grip of its special interests and ideologues that they’d rather imitate California than create opportunity.

As I suggested in a post this morning, it’s an error to think we can impose requirements on the status quo and not risk any loss of what we have.  “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) principles are the archetype of this thinking.  Admittedly, I don’t know whether a U.S. Navy officer who didn’t notice that the scope on his AR was backwards, among other errors, in a photo-op — not to mention the assistants who prepared it and the media professionals who developed and promoted the post — was a victim of DEI, but it’s a good warning sign, nonetheless.

The more we prioritize things that are irrelevant (at best, nice to have) to jobs, the more likely it is that the people who take them will lack some other experience.  We don’t live in a world in which there are just so many identically good candidates for every role that new requirements will have no effect.  Pretending otherwise is going to get a lot of people killed.

This flaw of inexperience among the young (and progressives) has become far too pervasive in our society and is particularly notable in Rhode Island.  People seem to think that the current state of affairs has been established and will continue indefinitely, so we can shape it like clay to the future we want to see.  Investors will continue to build businesses… producers will continue to produce… minority parties will continue to fight the good fight to keep representative democracy honest.  And so on.  That’s not how reality works, though.

The above was my reaction to this tweet from left-wing Democrat state representative David Morales:

It might be nice to hire a chief executive with intimate and specific experience with the product, but past experience as a customer is not typically an overwhelming advantage and certainly not one that can’t be compensated once in the role (not least because customer experiences differ).  Morales’s underlying assumption is that there is a pool of indistinguishably high-quality candidates for the role, so adding a mandate won’t have any negative effects.

The more likely outcome, from which Rhode Island increasingly suffers, is that the pool of candidates will be so uniformly unqualified that additional requirements won’t make things notably worse.  The first step to fixing this problem is a more mature understanding of how reality actually functions.

On the list of people for whom the exposure of social media has been a source of disappointing exposure, novelist Stephen King has got to be near the top. Like his books or not (and, honestly, given the content, I regret the influence that he had on my younger life), authors are generally placed in the “intellectual” category, and one would expect more insight than tweets like this:

I’m on the pro-life side of this issue, but I also wish we could have honest discussions about public policy.  The anachronism of this state law isn’t evidence that the federal government has to set policy for every state in the country, which was essentially the state of affairs while the horrible Roe v. Wade ruling was in effect.  Rather, it should be a reminder that we have an entire system built around the principle that people can change the laws under which they’re governed over time.

It’s telling that advocates for the permissibility of killing of children are so much more focused on deriving political benefit from old laws than changing them where they can be changed.  Apparently, what they really want is a world in which a rich old writer from Maine can tell the people of Arizona what sort of laws they live under.

The Rhode Island Office of Revenue Analysis releases regular reports summarizing the state’s tax credit programs, and sometimes progressive politicians and journalists get a news story out of them.  What’s disappointing is the paucity of the opposing voices.  According to Katherine Gregg’s Providence Journal article the Rhode Island Business Coalition is fine with ending the program for any new participants.

For their part, the authors of the report acknowledge that the businesses that use the program tend to be among the largest, so without programs designed to make them stay, like tax credit programs, the state’s economy could suffer.

There we see the underlying problem that nobody wants to address.  Rhode Island’s economic policy is terrible.  We’ve taken a beautiful state in a great location and made it so difficult and risky to operate in that we have to lure businesses here.  Progressives with a coherent philosophy should realize this is their ideal policy.  They get to pick and choose who gets relief from what imposition and to maintain a lever for bribery and ideological pressure.

I’m all for ending tax credit programs, but we should lower taxes and regulations generally.  If we make Rhode Island a beacon for economic activity, businesses will pay their full taxes to be here.

I don’t want to read too much into a few seconds of video, but something is chilling about progressive Democrat Representative Brandon Potter’s face as Meara began to speak in favor of Republican Representative Patricia Morgan’s bill to prevent transgender-related mutilation of children:

His facial expression is not just of hatred.  It’s cold, as if promising that one day he hopes not to have to sit there and be polite while people speak blasphemies.

That means most of us have to be servants to somebody else.  That’s why a political party that still pretends it’s “for the little guy” is relentlessly targeting “little guys” who work for themselves. This video from John Stossel is worth watching:

If you’re independent, you’re difficult to manage. If top-down government can pressure top-down business with the aid of top-down labor unions, things are easier (and more profitable) for the people at the top.

For those of us who’ve been mystified by economic news, E.J. Antoni’s summary of results from the March employment report is worth a read.  The key confusion is that “the headline numbers once again look good.”  Yet, all the jobs are part time, with Americans replacing their full-time jobs with multiple part-time ones to make ends meet.  This finding is found in both the divergence of measures that count workers and jobs and in the number of people working multiple jobs.

Meanwhile, hours per week are trending down, and the ratio of jobs that are government is growing.  Too few private-sector jobs are generating economic productivity to support the government jobs.  Moreover, most of the “private sector” jobs are actually in fields that are more like government satellites, like health care.

Now add the fact that labor-force participation is down, and the jobs are entirely going to people who are foreign born.  There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but at a time of massive illegal immigration, it presents a troubling picture.

Things are not going well under Biden, no matter what the propagandists insist.

This seems kind of like an important story, but despite some weeks, I’ve seen nothing on it elsewhere:

The problem with our current media situation is that, whether Callahan’s assessment about sanctuary state policies is fair or not, we know for a certainty that we’ll only ever hear that it is not fair from the partisan media, if we hear of the situation at all.  They leave us completely in the dark when it would be politically inconvenient to do otherwise.

A point I made yesterday in an essay on Dust in the Light was that we communicate with God in where we choose to direct our attention, and one of the ways in which we make that choice is by how we act.  Taking an action is like moving your position on the landscape; your observations will be made in a world in which you took the action.  Call it “action space.”

Revisiting James Lindsay’s analysis of Joe Biden’s trans-Easter affront has a related ring:

This provocation, published yesterday, is overwhelmingly likely aiming to feed into those prevailing active measures (“ops”) meant to drag Christians into a positions of fruitful reaction that the Regime can use to clamp down on them. Again, Christian reaction is their real action, and we know for certain that Christian circles are deeply infiltrated with a chest-beating and growing radicalism that is being baited toward and associated with a growing antisemitism. The responses to this post will almost certainly prove this out, btw. Your evil government wants this to happen. They are baiting you into it.

Because we live in a world of free will and Original Sin, God’s is not the only determinant of how the world responds to our actions.  Other people play a role, and that can be manipulated.  Activists can attempt to provoke actions, as Lindsay suggests, or they can use other techniques, like creating confusion by reacting in contrary ways.

In any event, such manipulation is contrary to fair play, pluralism, and democracy.  It’s truly diabolical.

Keep in mind that Thundermist Health Center is interwoven with Rhode Island’s political elite and is working within our school districts:

The “health center” is encouraging mental illness, not helping people with it.

Roger Kimball has in mind, here, the attacks on Donald Trump:

The disappointing thing is how many Americans just don’t care, because the Democrats have whipped them into a frenzy of hatred.  We are fortunate, indeed, to have basic rights protected in our fundamental laws, but no piece of paper can withstand the desire of a mob when it takes power.  If too many people allow their principles to be corrupted, and if too few speak to uphold those principles that once were shared, the mob will have its way.

Yes, we’ve reached the point that the place to get real, non-partisan journalism is on a social media platform from such people as “Mel,” whose X address is Villgecrazylady.  For example:

The thread that follows explains how former Congressman Adam Kinzinger — a darling of the J6-investigation crowd — turned campaign donations into usable funds.  Another good example is this pinned post from September 3, which observes the amazing and sudden shift of national politicians to micro-donations.  There sure is a lot of smoke around this area; why aren’t mainstream journalists digging into it?

(Meanwhile, by the way, if you’re a Rhode Islander who wants to have some small effect on the well-being of your town or school district, you better find time to keep your miniscule campaign finances in order!)

I’m still puzzled by the presence of the leader of the Rhode Island Foundation in this image:

Is the foundation involved with this project, was this just a bunch of buddies hanging out for a photo op, or is there really no space at all between state government, federal government, and the non-profit sector — all united under the Party?

To be honest, I feel for Gus Schumacher, the young man whom many conservatives mocked when he was the target of pointed questioning from Republican Senator John Kennedy:

Yes, it’s telling that an ostensible witness for greater government control as a response to “climate change” knows very little about the science, but we’ve raised several generations believing a progressive fallacy.  Our focus should be there, not the least because it has such opportunity for revelations on their part.

An underlying conceit of progressivism is that what needs to be done is obvious.  Schumacher may, indeed, be an expert on that which he’s observed as an Olympic cross-country skier, but he should have some humility when advocating for a particular interpretation of the causes and, especially, humanity’s appropriate response.

The urge to “just do something” is deadly dangerous, and I’m not sure mockery is going to change the hearts of those who’ve been indoctrinated to cultivate it as a first response.

I don’t doubt Ken is being honest about his findings, or lack thereof, from his voter fraud review in 2020, but from the very first, I’ve though he’s was overstating his scope and the extent to which his investigation was conclusive.  Very plainly put, “I did not find evidence” is not the same as “there is no evidence to be found.”

Mark Davis, who also investigated the election, takes Block to task on exactly these grounds in an important article on The Federalist which honest journalists would ask Block about in every interview.  Unfortunately, we’re a long way from a civic society in which such things could be expected.

One suspects that if Block’s book told an opposing story — if it were Proven, rather than Disproven — its national promotion would have been much less enthusiastic.  Odds are good the local media in Rhode Island would have ignored it entirely.

That’s the civil society in which we live.  The guardians of the public square aren’t interested in robust, reasonable debate.  It’s vulgar political warfare to them.  And it’s disappointing to see a good-government advocate cash in on our devolution.  Davis ends by suggesting Block won’t likely be hired to do such work again, given how publicly he’s betrayed the trust of his highest-profile client.  Local reformers in RI should take note, too.

Joe Biden abusing the authority of his office to buy votes by transferring student loan debt to other Americans is back in the news, and it reminds me that I haven’t seen any mainstream coverage of a disaster facing just about every college-bound family in the United States this year:

If, like me, you have a college-bound high-school senior in your family, you’ve likely been on the receiving end of yet another colossal screw-up by our federal government: the overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA. Every year, students (or more commonly their parents) need to fill out the FAFSA with information about their income, assets, and expenses in order to qualify for federal student aid. Many colleges require the FAFSA before awarding other forms of need-based aid, and some require it to be filed even by people without need before they can qualify for scholarship aid. There’s a more detailed and onerous form, the CSS, operated by the College Board and required by some schools. Filling these out is like doing your taxes, only more so. Typically, the forms are available in October, and schools may set filing deadlines in the fall so that they can deliver financial-aid awards at or near the time they send out acceptances.

Not this year. The FAFSA wasn’t even fully available until January 8, after the Department of Education briefly flicked on the lights on the form on December 30 just so it could claim that it launched in 2023.

This is not just conservative media hype.  My family is grappling with this at the moment, and yet the regime media seems not to care.  The media’s inability to hold Democrats accountable is one of the strongest argument for voting for the other party, even though Republicans aren’t as apt to give you cash for your vote.