The web of financial interests in the Democrat bureaucracy extends to activist judges.

Jody Baldwin Stone of Rhode Island asks a question of huge importance to the Constitutional wellbeing of the United States of America: RI Jurnos: Is it true that Judge McConnells daughter, Catherine McConnell, was appointed by Biden and is currently employed by The Department of Education? Did the judges order save his daughter’s job? 👀🤔This…

An elephant defendant is shocked in a donkey court
What is the distinction between a baby in the womb and out?

Charlie Kirk has an interesting business model.  He goes where young adults congregate (presumably college campuses), sets up a booth, and has debates with whoever approaches his microphone.  Then he posts the videos for clicks and (again, presumably) collects advertising revenue. In this video, he stumps a young woman on the issue of abortion.  Kirk’s…

A woman and a baby on a seesaw over a chasm
The rhetorical positioning is the important part of the birthright-citizenship debate.

One sees people take positions of similar structure to Ken Block’s, here, on many issues, from immigration to finance to healthcare to science: One of humanity’s great advantages is that we can divide the labor of understanding.  One person figures something out, and others can build on his or her conclusions without necessarily repeating all…

Gavel with a speech bubble
UPDATED – the Hegseth Nomination: Warriors, Not Culture Warriors, in the US Military, Please

The Senate hearing on President-Elect Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense is now underway. Inasmuch as the objections to his nomination raised so far at the hearing are irrelevant to the vital mission of the United States military, I am bumping up my post of November 17. There has been a “Well…

The Schrodinger Legality of RIDOT Paying a Losing Bidder

This is not the biggest question pertaining to Rhode Island’s handling of the failed Washington Bridge – it is secondary, for example, to WHY the state had to offer a serious incentive for what would seem to be a juicy public contract, not to mention what Ken Block is in the process of turning up…

Hold Up on Making Assumptions from 85% of the Popular Vote

There is a Presidential popular vote chart getting a lot of attention out there that seems to show a big drop in Democratic votes from 2020 to 2024. However, as pointed out by Dan McLaughlin, I think people are getting over their skis before all of the data is in.  I thought a picture showing…

Old-time detective inspects a vote drop-box
American political media has never been self-funding.

While developing plans for the future, I’ve been reading about the history of American journalism, and an observation from the post-Revolution period has been worth more than a few underlines.  Political parties always want dedicated media outlets, but media outlets dedicated to partisan politics never pay for themselves.  Jefferson had to give a no-show State Department job…

A post-Revolution journalist takes notes on an iPad in Boston
RIDOT Contract: Statewide Weigh-in-Motion Enforcement Program. RIDOT: Nah.

Following the determination in April that the Washington Bridge eastbound was becoming “considerably more sensitive” (gulp), RIDOT contracted to install a new, combined structural health monitoring and vehicle weigh-in-motion program on/between the Washington Bridge and the Iway (Providence River Bridge). In May, RIDOT entered into a five year “sole source” – i.e., no RFP –…

What should we conclude from Attorney General Neronha’s support for historical violence against police?

Democrats’ acceptance of violence from their own partisans, especially labor unions, is a major warning sign that they’ll turn away when it happens again in the future, but it’s especially disconcerting to see Attorney General Peter Neronha celebrating violence against police officers: If I seem to be exaggerating, it’s only because I’m not accepting as…

A crowd argues and riots in a large, dark hall
The DOJ’s RealPage lawsuit shows the sloppy thinking behind progressive activism.

As I understand it, RealPage offers landlords software for renting out and managing their properties.  Like other such software across industries, it uses automation and analytics to help its clients conceptualize their assets and their businesses and squeeze out inefficiencies.  Among those services is an algorithm that uses local real estate data, including from its…

A Providence neighborhood through a Statehouse window
How can we renew a sense of shared trust?

Not long ago, the ladies of The View displayed the number of associates of Donald Trump who have recently* gone to prison as evidence that “the system is working.”  We’d be in better condition as a country if more people realized that the very same visual leads to opposite conclusions for different people, creating a dangerous…

A statue of blindfolded justice over a riot in a public park
No, Gene, Do Not Redirect Professor Schiller’s Excellent Questions About the Bridge Fiasco

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…

Important lessons lie somewhere in the details of a Cranston zoning battle.

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…

Shortsighted inspectors of disaster
Targeted tax incentives for businesses are like painting over mold.

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…

A donkey wants to paint over a moldy basement as a skeptical elephant looks on
Ripples
The truth is out there when it comes to progressives theft of money for ideological funding.

This observation points to a useful exercise for all citizens:

InezFeitscher: This is nothing short of simply defunding the professional left. The leftist institutional infrastructure has relied for decades on basically being paid by the taxpayer.

A useful exercise is to keep a look out when news stories at the state or even local level mention some organization.  Do a little research into their history and funding.  Rhode Island has about a million people and a long-languishing economy, yet even on relatively niche issues you’ll find multiple advocacy organizations with the funding and compensation of a healthy small business.

Much of the government grant system is simply laundering money for ideological purposes.

This is, let’s just say, a reasonable thing to wonder:

DataRepublican: After spending too much time on the award search tool, I’m starting to wonder if we’ve had a UBI system all along for one political party—just disguised as grants.

It may have long been the case that federal grants were a major financing scheme for left-wing organizations, but the Obama administration amplified it, flooding the market and giving us much of the confusion and turmoil of the last decade.

Objectively, one can say that Democrats are the party of government and progressives place government centrally in their ideology.  Therefor, the current state of affairs was probably inevitable — that accepting grant-making as a legitimate government function left up to bureaucrats to dole out would lead to a one-sided funding mechanism.

After all, even as far back as Thomas Jefferson’s time in office, the executive created no-show jobs for helpful allies (like newspaper men).  At least back then, however, the feds couldn’t afford to hand out comfortable salaries by means of such corruption.

Whenever I wonder if I’m inflating the significance of radicals in Rhode Island…

… I remind myself that Aaron Regunberg was very nearly governor.  A lot has happened since this tweet, so as a reminder, Brian Thompson was the healthcare CEO murdered in cold blood in New York:

itaisher: These sentiments are repulsive. They are not what our politics should be based on.

Think about the effect of having elected officials like Sam Bell in the General Assembly.

Here is Senator Bell’s response, back in November, to the CEO of Box.com, who offered a mild, moderate suggestion for Democrats after the election:

SamuelWBell: Great example of the kind of CEO we’re taxing when we win.  And his company is a great example of a workplace we’ll make sure gets unionized.

Bell exposes two important things, with this Tweet.  First, a significant portion of Rhode Island’s Democrat power elite are happy to ride the state into utter, Venezuelan devastation for the sake of ideological purity.  Most of us understand the idea of states as testing grounds for different ideas means that states that choose poorly will learn from those that choose well, but for fanatics like Bell, the drive is to control a state simply for the sake of imposing their ideology for the ideology’s sake.

Second, Bell’s ideology is about hurting people he doesn’t like.  He excuses it for himself by insisting the reason he doesn’t like them is they harm others, but that’s a screen.  The ego boost of power over others (probably out of envy) is the fundamental motivation.

Vance should add a point to his view on citizen construction work.

It’s from October, but this argument from Vice President Vance against the view that nobody will build houses except illegals is worth revisiting:

“This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have seven million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force. People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages. But people will do those jobs, they will just do those jobs at certain wages,” Vance said.

A necessary addition — perhaps a deeper cause — is cultural.  We need to stop giving American workers the impression that it’s good enough to be made a client for government services or to work some menial minimum-wage job that was never meant to support a family.  Instead, we need to reinvigorate the sense of the value of producing things and working hard.  Of course I needed to support my family, but the greatest compensation from my years in construction was the feeling of having worked hard and created something that hadn’t been there when I started.

Beneath it all is a character issue.  Government policy has oversimplified our thinking about employment to treat it is as merely a financial exchange, and always sufficient to support a whole family.

To the contrary, employment policy should mostly stay out of the way, but to the extent it has an effect, it should foster the human drive that moves from miniscule pay for menial tasks through rewarding exertion to success through skill and wisdom.

We’re getting a clear picture of what we’ve let our country become.

Mark Steyn’s daily pre-election column is vintage Steyn today.

But in Botswana everyone voted on Wednesday, the last up-country results came in on Thursday, the ruling party conceded and the new guy was sworn in on Friday.

That’s a normal election in a normal country.

Meanwhile, back in the greatest country in the history of countries, in twenty-four hours we shall be embarking on the usual folderol offour-hour lines to vote, malfunctioning machines, burst water pipes, court injunctions to keep polls open or close them down (according to taste), pausing the count before it’s completed, and the GDP-boosting quadrennial spike in plywood sales as storekeepers in DC and elsewhere board up their windows.

And that’s if it’s a “normal” election by American standards.

Read the whole thing, wherein Steyn weaves together multiple stories drawn from our rapid-fire headlines.  The picture he paints is of the mess we’ve allowed our country to become since we elected a community organizer to the Presidency, and no matter who wins on Tuesday (or whenever), we have to take our country back.  As he states in the key point of the essay: “it’s hard to calibrate the precise point at which the soft totalitarianism turns, instantly, into hard, psychotic, murderous totalitarianism … you never know it’s time to break for the border until it’s too late.”

We’re being governed by a deliberately toxic and wasteful bureaucracy.

I’ve fallen way behind, so this tweet from Ken Block is a couple months old, but its content is (unfortunately) timeless in Rhode Island:

The picture being painted for me by over ten current and former DOT employees is a toxically managed organization where who you know is far more important than how you do your job and where technical expertise has been systematically eliminated in favor of managers with no industry experience.

Our state government is a scam taking tax dollars for favored members of the Party.  Unfortunately, journalists have been indoctrinated in the Democrats-as-heroes storyline for generations, so they are fundamentally incapable of reporting on the story in a way that communicates what’s really going on.

Federal government data simply can no longer be taken at face value.

I realized this when watching Democrats’ repeated proclamations about jobs numbers during the Obama years only to see those numbers quietly revised the following month, almost always with the revision making touted jobs disappear, rather than quiet corrections representing improvements. Now, it seems crime data has the same partisan infection.  All year, we’ve been hearing that violent crime is down under President Joe Biden, but a few weeks ago, the FBI quietly revised its numbers to show a 4.5% increase in 2022, rather than a decrease. Naturally, that makes the 2023 decrease seem even larger, but here’s the key point:

“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

These numbers are non-transparent estimates, and no explanation for revision is being offered.  The most rational conclusion is that bureaucrats are doing their part to “save our democracy” by keeping Democrats in power.

A belated word on Russia-funded conservative commentators.

The news cycle flows by so quickly, lately, that political actors and activists are learning it’s sometimes best to just keep your head down and let the controversy of the day join the rest of the noise tomorrow.  Nonetheless, I think there’s something worth noting in the now-passed story about Russia funding some conservative commentators.

First, my caveat is that I no longer trust America’s intelligence services or news media. Even where stories aren’t entirely fabricated, there are simply so many ways to construct a narrative. The agent or journalist can exaggerate claims or leak one-sided information that distorts the context of what’s happening. Imagine, and I’m not saying this is happening, that every commentator across the political spectrum receives some portion of his or her revenue from hostile foreign governments — that it’s simply part of the ecosystem. Releasing that information only as it relates to one group of commentators would make it seem as if they are uniquely bad.

Caveat aside, I can sympathize with some of the commentators’ defenses.  I’ve always said what I have to say, and if somebody’s wants to give me money to say it, that’s great.  That person didn’t change my view or buy my opinion.

What he or she would be doing, though, is making it possible for me to continue saying what I have to say… and to say more of it.  By selectively funding points of view, financiers can adjust the broad field of commentary.  It’s not the writer’s fault for wanting to be heard, and frankly, it’s not even the financiers’ fault for wanting to advance their visions.  We all have to have our own moral compasses and approach information intelligently and with caution.

To be sure, this is a social challenge, but it doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions.  Attempting to force transparency or, worse, ban pernicious funding or statements only amplifies the caveat expressed above.

Are you feeling the wobble in RI’s medical infrastructure?

I find it ominous that one of my children’s dentist just cancelled an appointment for tomorrow due to short staffing. RI’s medical infrastructure feels a bit like we could get the equivalent of an emergency Washington Bridge closure at any time.  Or maybe we’ve been getting them, but the people who run the state are better able to distract from and hide the effects.

We have to take the reality of meddling billionaires into account.

Last night, I read a business case about a handful of billionaires who’ve been trying to make lab-grown meat a viable consumer product, and I wondered something tangential.  Imagine if a handful of billionaires decided they needed to have a pliable big-government progressive in the White House.

They might flood her accounts with hundreds of millions of dollars laundered through untraceable donations designed to appear grass roots.

They might use the major media outlets they own to twist reality.

They might pay people to fill up arenas so that the candidate appears to be popular.

Then they might manipulate an insecure election system, including mail ballots, to simply install their preferred candidate, while pointing at the scandals they generated in media about the other candidate and the astroturf popularity of the “winner.”

This might sound conspiratorial and crazy, but these same people are trying to grow frankenburgers — not because they think it will be profitable, but because they want to “save the environment” and trick you into a diet that they believe is healthier.

The point of government seems to be as a way to make politicians feel like celebrities.

It’s a passing thought, of course, but Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee’s mild lament that a State House celebration of a basketball trophy is happening during school hours bugs me.  Somehow, it emphasizes the point that our government officials see the well-being of children — of all regular Rhode Islanders, for that matter — as secondary side-effects of insiders’ going about their big, important business, which seems often to focus on providing them power and enjoyment.

A local kid making it big is an inspiring story, but local officials use such things to inspire mainly themselves.

Oh, Democrats have a plan for you, alright.

Something more like a cookbook or plantation.  I’ve heard complaints that conservatives have “no plan for you” — or “no vision for what the town should be” — repeatedly over the years, and I think it’s the most disturbing complaint progressives make.

Chris Rufo articulates my view:

realchrisrufo: Our nation was founded on liberty, meaning, that each man was free to pursue his own dream without the heavy hand of the state. Harris inverts this formula: she has a plan for you; the Left's version of liberation can only be achieved through the state.

Where do I see the town, state, or country going?  Well, I hope it’s going toward freedom and mutual good will, but that’s about as detailed as I can get.  Mostly, I’m excited to see where individual people, families, and organizations will take us with their drive and ingenuity, but terrified of where activists who abuse government power to implement their plans and vision will take us if we let them.

Kamala Harris’s notion of an unrealized gains tax is terrifying.

The reason it’s terrifying isn’t only that unrealized gains are purely hypothetical.  The proposal (and defenses of it) show that for many taxation has become purely a money-finding scheme requiring the scantiest of rationale.  By their nature, unrealized capital gains do not actually exist; they are hypothetical.

While striving to come up with some sort of argument that they’d be nothing radical, I’ve seen supporters make two arguments: First, that people pay taxes on the increased value of their homes through the property tax, and second, that people with large assets are able to use them as collateral for loans, which means they are real.

On the first count, the property tax isn’t a tax on gains.  It’s an ad valorem tax — that is, on the whole value — assessed and paid repeatedly every year.  Moreover, in most cases, it’s actually a tax on the percentage the individual or entity owns of all the taxable property within that particular government’s scope.  Typically, the government figures out how much tax it wants to collect, and the value of a piece of property is the proportion the taxpayer will pay.  Some years it will go up, relative to other taxpayers, and some years it will go down.

The same thing partially applies to the other count.  Lenders are considering the entirety of assets as collateral, not just new gains.  More importantly, what they’re doing is assessing that the entire asset is sufficiently secure that it could be sold to cover an unpaid debt, and the lender accepts the risk.  That the lender trusts that the value will be real at some hypothetical future date following a default does not mean that it is real right now.

Neronha’s being silly about electric vehicle charging ports.

With the caveat that we have to infer what he’s trying to suggest, I think we can conclude Attorney General Peter Neronha is implying Rhode Island isn’t keeping up on electric vehicle charging ports:

PeterNeronha: charging port graphic

Well, yeah.  Rhode Island is a small state, geographically, meaning people are never very far from home, and in any event, from what I’ve seen around the state, we’ve already got more charging ports than the population is demanding.

That’s the thing about government-originated “investments.”  In the private sector, somebody would see the need for something, as indicated in this case by lines for charging ports or something like that, and invest in a profitable solution.  In government, activists decree a standard, and politicians lament that they haven’t met the activists’ expensive standards.

Yes, the Republican North Smithfield School Committee candidate’s comment on Tim Walz’s son is uncomfortable.

But we have to be wary of the political whipsaw.  Evan Masse’s tweet was dumb and insensitive, but his practical problem was that he was caught up in what we might call a Democrat call for evidence.

It would be a very normal reaction to pause upon seeing Walz’s son at the Democrat National Convention and observe his filmed reaction was a bit outside of the range for normal behavior, but as the inverted media cliche goes, the Democrats pounced.  TwiX was full of lamentations about attacks on the boy, as if there were Republicans holding mockery parties, as opposed to a few marginal comments.  Democrats were quickly fundraising off their righteousness.

So of course the news media is going to get the message that they should be out there trying to find related stories, and of course local Democrats are going to be eager for the ammunition. Republicans have to expect that and act accordingly, not only for their own behavior, but also for those with whom they interacdt.

In Rhode Island, the GOP is very accepting and eager for support and help, but members of the party have to be vigilant and to coach those in their midst.

Does it really matter who runs the RIGOP?

Katherine Gregg took a look at the current state of the race for leadership of the Rhode Island GOP, and the question that comes to my mind is whether it really matters.  On a surface level, the uncertain proposition is that even a functioning GOP could make a difference, which I’m not sure the Rhode Island system would allow anymore.

More deeply, to the extent the RIGOP could make a difference, I’m not sure any of the candidates or commentators — in or out of Gregg’s piece — say anything that indicates they understand the problem.  There’s a lot about messaging.  Some maligning of Donald Trump as the heart of the problem, and (most usefully) encouragement of the basics of electoral mechanics, such as recruiting and training candidates.

But none of that is adequate.  Even great candidates with the right message will be rolled by aggression and deliberately fostered chaos.  Those who oppose the establishment in Rhode Island need coherence and the mutual support it fosters.  What we need is social, advancing cultural change.  The RIGOP can help or hurt in that project, but the real fix isn’t, strictly speaking, political.

A quick summary of my latest thinking on taxes.

We should repeal all federal income taxes.  Income taxes are a great evil that has changed the nature of our relationship with government.

Instead, the federal government should be funded through a capitation (per-person) tax payable proportionally by each state. That is, our states would be responsible for collecting a tax calculated based purely on their own population counts, and each could collect the money in the way it deems best.

While their geographies, populations, and resources might make different forms of taxation preferable across the states, my generic preference is for a property tax collected at the municipal level and then paid upward to the state as the means of state funding.

The value of the government is the value of being within its borders, and its revenue should be directly related to that value, with as few subjective or confounding factors as possible. Why should we be taxed on income or production (sales)?

Mark Steyn asks a question about elections many of us are pondering.

Observing the lack of media curiosity about who runs the country while Joe Biden takes weeks of vacations, Steyn asks:

If that question is of no interest to the media or the majority of the American people, then what is the point of being breathless with excitement over a two-year presidential election campaign? Or even the truncated three-month express-check-in Kamala Harris version?

Arguably, Donald Trump became president because enough Americans were fed up with elections’ meaninglessness, and the Democrat establishment has responded by making them even more so.  None of it — the health of the nation, the policies, the candidates — seems to matter anymore, provided the Party stays in power.

Steyn goes on to observe that France’s ruling party is refusing to step aside despite losing, and English progressives’ governing like they’ve got a mandate when their victory was narrow.  As he writes, “when the left win, they’re in power; when the right win, they’re in office.”  In England’s case, that means the elimination of the right to speak against government immigration policies.

Again, that “doesn’t leave a lot of point to the democratic process, does it?”  No, and time is getting short to put a stop to this deterioration.

Trump at Arlington is a good lesson in progressive pathology.

Note how progressive Democrats have framed the universe, as Sunny observes:

sunnyright: The implication here, by the way, is that Arlington National Cemetery should have prohibited Donald Trump from visiting a public national cemetery because allowing him to visit might benefit him politically.

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.

A bad magician conjures a KKK mannequin

Politics This Week: The Mainstream Illusion

John DePetro and Justin Katz pull some of the threads from the fraying mainstream narrative illusion.


Weird – Testimony at Washington Bridge Hearing Won’t be Under Oath

A joint Oversight hearing about the Washington Bridge will be held this Thursday at the State House.  [Agenda.] There will be no public testimony and only committee members will ask questions.  There is so far only one witness: Rhode Island Department of Transportation Director Peter Alviti. The Director will not be under oath when he…

A horse-riding general leads his troops off a cliff

Politics This Week: Our Uncredible Elite

John DePetro and Justin Katz break down some of the latest political news in Rhode Island.

The RI State House in the middle of a plantation

Politics This Week: Trump’s Threat to the Government Plantation

John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the danger to the RI establishment’s business model with the incoming Trump administration.

A donkey dressed as a king gives a speech

Politics This Week: Languishing in a Partisan State

John DePetro and Justin Katz check in on the state of RI as the national landscape changes.

Weird – Testimony at Washington Bridge Hearing Won’t be Under Oath

A joint Oversight hearing about the Washington Bridge will be held this Thursday at the State House.  [Agenda.] There will be no public testimony and only committee members will ask…

A horse-riding general leads his troops off a cliff

Politics This Week: Our Uncredible Elite

John DePetro and Justin Katz break down some of the latest political news in Rhode Island.

The RI State House in the middle of a plantation

Politics This Week: Trump’s Threat to the Government Plantation

John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the danger to the RI establishment’s business model with the incoming Trump administration.

A donkey dressed as a king gives a speech

Politics This Week: Languishing in a Partisan State

John DePetro and Justin Katz check in on the state of RI as the national landscape changes.

A politician's photo-op with a corpse

Politics This Week: RI Pols, the Saviors at Every Funeral

John DePetro and Justin Katz talk about RI politicians’ attempts to spin reality.

Politicians speak to a freezing audience from a heated stage

Politics This Week: RI’s Political Ice Age

John DePetro and Justin Katz talk about the gap between RI’s ruling Democrat elite and the people of the state.