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.

For an academic project not long ago I reviewed data on RIPTA bus routes, including surveys of riders of every line in the system, so the unstated assumption of Antonia Noori Farzan’s recent Providence Journal article on the subject jumped out at me.  The headline is, “What’s it like to rely on RIPTA to get around the state? We tried it for a week.”  And the not-quite-articulated assumption is that traveling around using public transit should be attractive even when compared with the ease of cars in a suburban area.

There simply is not the demand to maintain a system that can get any given person to any given location in the state painlessly.  The area didn’t develop for that, and the people don’t really want it.

Frankly, I doubt progressives even want to provide it for them.  It would take larger buses that require fewer drivers in urban areas and smaller buses (or vans) with more amenities for suburban commuters and others, perhaps with less-expensive labor.  Journalists would start writing articles about the contrast in comfort level between the two, while at the same time expressing outrage that urbanites have to pay so much to travel to the suburbs.

Cars are efficient modes of travel, and they are symbols of freedom.  Government should focus on improving our infrastructure and reversing the regulations designed to make them too expensive for working class Rhode Islanders.

Some months, it surprises me to find economists still putting out regular analyses of government employment statistics.  Perhaps I’m too jaded, but I’ve completely lost confidence in the data.

I used to have my monthly jobs review posts for both the Ocean State Current and the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, but during the two years of overlap between the Obama administration in Washington and the Raimondo administration in Rhode Island, the numbers became difficult to take.  The huge revisions to the data began to seem conspicuously to help Democrats, which Raimondo amplified by using her many PR people to spin, typically by digging out any narrow cut of the data that would look positive.

At this point, our economy has become so distorted, I’m not sure the government statistics would be accurately describing the job market even if they were objectively collected and presented.

If I’m remembering the plot correctly, the 2005 movie, Land of the Dead, imagined a world in which living humans had taken refuge in cities while zombies wandered the suburbs.  One character observes that the zombies seemed to have become more cognizant, with some of them going about the trappings of their previous lives, like pretending to work a gas station.

That’s how analysis of economic data feels to me now.

Here’s a good addendum to my post, yesterday, about progressives’ response to discipline policies in charter schools:

Those who oppose school choice are also limiting the options for teachers.  They’re only about control.  They want to make sure teachers can’t get out of the pension system, and they want to make sure children can’t get out of the schools.  They care less about making it work for everybody than about controlling it, and the worse their management of what they control, the more they have to increase control.

Such a system structurally cannot correct itself, which is why we are where we are in so many areas of society.

These sentiments from two prominent Rhode Island progressives are worth noting:

“Harmful practices.”  “Punish children.”  They’re talking about demerits for things like being late or unprepared for class.

Notice that they don’t care whether these policies could help some children.  Either in their arrogance they think they know better or in their malice they want to cultivate a generation that has no self-control.  A healthy society would keep people like Sanchez and Bell as far as possible from the ability to set policies related to children.

Rich Weinstein’s quip, here, exposes a deadly serious problem with the progressive style of governance:

Rhode Island jumped into ObamaCare with both feet, and not only are our hospitals struggling, but people are having a terrible time finding primary care doctors.  Maybe those two things are cause-and-effect, maybe they’re loosely related, or maybe there’s no connection at all, but contrast the absolute surety that ObamaCare would fix all problems with the complete disinterest in exploring new problems that have arisen since it was passed.

If government control were to be effective, it would have to be characterized by continual measurement and reassessment, but the incentives are exactly the opposite.  We don’t get the power of government bent toward cool, clinical evaluation.  We get that power intent on avoiding questions and passing blame to others.

This incident, highlighted by John DePetro, is a few weeks old, at this point, but it’s worth noting nonetheless.  Democrat Governor Dan McKee and Democrat East Providence Mayor Bob DaSilva were supposed to meet with businesses affected by the Washington Bridge closure.  DaSilva has been adamant that people should not avoid his city out of fear of traffic.  Yet, a last-minute rescheduling away from East Providence to Providence wasn’t well communicated, and many people missed the event.

That is, McKee seems not to have wanted to cross the bridge.  It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

I agree with Mickey Kaus, here:

Under President Trump, our dip was shallower than the comparison countries in the chart, and the economy was roaring back by the time Biden took office. If anything’s notable, it’s how hard Biden put the brakes on within months of being in office, with continued slowing in improvement thereafter.  I’d even argue the effect was so profound that it continues to harm the other countries.

This is an interesting bit of data, and Frank Fleming’s response is humorous, but a question of causation and another bit of information are relevant:

The bit of information that’s missing is the percentage of each group who’s asked a healthcare provider to diagnose a mental health condition. No doubt, psychologists and psychiatrists could find something wrong with many a conservative and many a man.

The question of causation is more political.  Progressivism is the ideology for mental illness.  They reinforce each other, and the presence of the latter makes a person vulnerable to manipulation by the proponents of the former.

It’s hard to believe this is the conclusion of the CEO of the “business-backed” Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC):

The state should consider alternatives pursued by other states like road usage charges, electric vehicle charging fees, increased registration fees for hybrid/electric vehicles, or tolls (especially if the state is unsuccessful in its appeal of the ruling in the truck toll court case).

Mo’ money, mo’ money.

Rhode Island does not have a funding problem.  It has a management and priority problem.  Adding to the cost of living and funneling more millions through our corrupt government will not solve the problem.

It’d be interesting for somebody to do a study of the percentage of new money that actually goes toward increased time-on-task for infrastructure in the Ocean State, versus new hiring, increased pay, and graft.  Unfortunately, RIPEC does not appear likely to be that somebody, despite being one of the vanishingly few groups with some resources and mission to do such things.