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31

We Won’t Always Have Paris, Thank Goodness

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In light of Dan Yorke’s surprising incredulity that Mike Stenhouse would be satisfied with President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, I was happy to come across Roger Kimball’s shared glee over the withdrawal and the ensuing lunacy from the Left:

Hysteria on the Left was universal. But as many cooler-headed commentators observed, one of the really amusing things is that the Paris Accord means exactly nothing. Since it requires nothing of its signatories, it will yield nothing from them. As an editorial in The Wall Street Journal pointed out, “amid the outrage, the aggrieved still haven’t gotten around to resolving the central Paris contradiction, which is that it promises to be Earth-saving but fails on its own terms. It is a pledge of phony progress.”

Kimball offers two things that Paris does do, though.  First is offering people an opportunity for cheap-to-them virtue signaling.

The second reason for the hysteria follows from the one serious effect of the climate accord. It has nothing to do with saving the environment. Every candid observer understands that the real end of the accord is not helping “the environment” but handicapping the developed countries. At its core, the accord is intended as a mechanism to redistribute wealth by hampering countries like the United States from exploiting its energy resources and growing its economy. Hamstring the United States, but let countries like China and India—industrial strength polluters, both—do whatever they want.

Like many international agreements, the unspoken subtext of the Paris Climate Accord is “hamper America. Grab as much of its wealth as you can. Say it’s in the name of ‘fairness.’”

The irony is that the Left is throwing around terms like “traitorous” and “betrayal,” which makes me think of Indiana Jones.  Kimball quotes left-wing billionaire political activist Tom Steyer on the first term; I’ve noted our own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s using the second, conspicuously just a few days after the mega-donor’s statement.  And yet, they’re using those words to describe an action that, from the perspective of many conservatives, puts working Americans’ interests first.

That’s a strange sort of betrayal, if your loyalty is to Americans.

32

Rich Senators Target Poor Children’s Scholarships

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Yes, of course we should be interested in having government-driven programs be free of waste, fraud, and abuse, but this sure does seem like a political attack on a policy that helps disadvantaged students escape failing government schools and secure real opportunities through private schools.  According to Emma Brown, in the Washington Post, three Democrat Senators are asking the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate states’ tax-credit scholarships, which allow businesses to donate money for scholarships in exchange for some percentage back as a tax credit.

Naturally, Rhode Island’s upper crust U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is one of the three signatories.  The emphasis of the letter on whether such programs “pose a risk of waste, fraud, abuse, misconduct, or mismanagement” indicates that the objective is to attack the programs, not simply to learn from them.  Note, especially, that the letter doesn’t ask the GAO to look into the positive results of the programs.

One wonders where Whitehouse sent his own children to school.

Meanwhile, in Rhode Island, Republican state representative Robert Lancia (Cranston) has submitted legislation that would increase the cap on Rhode Island’s tax credit scholarship program and implement a feature that would allow it to grow according to demand.  His bill (for which I offered feedback based on a review of other such programs) would also make scholarships more predictable, by prioritizing continued funding of scholarships for students already receiving them.

33

Weird Absence in the Notes

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An obvious point is oddly missing from Ted Nesi’s Notes item on the possible Republican campaign of Robert Flanders for U.S. Senate:

His announcement that he’s exploring a 2018 U.S. Senate run against Sheldon Whitehouse, first reported by the indefatigable Kathy Gregg, had the Rhode Island political class chattering all week. Flanders told me he isn’t doing interviews yet, but suggested in a statement he’d be “a senator that works with Republicans, Democrats, and independents to promote practical solutions.” The former judge is no fool, so he knows the tough odds he’d face – the last time a Republican not named Chafee won a Rhode Island U.S. Senate race was 1930. Flanders would have a number of advantages, including his intellect and a robust Rolodex to tap for donations, which is why some local Republicans are enthusiastic about his chances. He also has some disadvantages: the deep pension cuts he approved as Central Falls’ receiver are ripe for negative TV ads, and President Trump’s unpopularity could allow Whitehouse to effectively rerun his 2006 campaign, which was technically against Linc Chafee but really against George W. Bush. Flanders says he’ll make a final decision “over the next several months.”

Know what I mean?  Maybe this, from an item farther down in Nesi’s column, will help:

Two Rhode Islanders who did not visit Trump, however, are Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse – both men skipped a White House dinner for senators the president held on Tuesday night.

Sure, Trump is unpopular in Rhode Island (particularly in those circles with which journalists have the most interaction), but even people who don’t like the president, if they’re just a little pragmatic, can see the advantage of having at least one of our four federal legislators be from the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.  The question, then, is whether the Republicans, pragmatic Democrats, and friends of Flanders can outnumber those who like the fact that Whitehouse repeatedly stands out as an especially radical and aggressive voice in the party out of power.

34

Breaking – Former RI Supreme Court Justice Flanders Exploring Run for US Senate

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Well, things just heated up in Rhode Island’s 2018 race for US Senate. Kathy Gregg has the scoop in the Providence Journal.

Robert G. Flanders, a former Rhode Island Supreme Court justice, respected Providence trial lawyer and onetime Brown University football star, has taken the first step toward a potential GOP run for the U.S. Senate against two-term Democratic incumbent Sheldon Whitehouse.

This is somewhat out of the blue: rumors where that Justice Flanders was considering, at the urging of RIGOP Chair Brandon Bell, a run for Governor. Justice Flanders isn’t technically announcing his candidacy, as Gregg notes, but rather, he

plans to create an “exploratory committee” to determine whether he will be able to muster the money and support he would need for a potential GOP primary fight and, ultimately, a 2018 run against Whitehouse.

He is certainly clear as to why he sees the need to run, however, as he indicates to Gregg in a statement that includes a nice little zing at the incumbent.

“With the unease and hyper-partisan political environment in Washington,” Flanders said, Rhode Island needs a U.S. senator who “will work across the aisle to unlock innovation and job growth, provide a system of high quality and affordable health care, reform unfair and anti-competitive tax policies, lift regulatory burdens off the backs of small business, promote better education and enhance our security by restoring global confidence in America.”

“In short, we need a climate change in Washington,” he said in a play-on-words on Whitehouse’s signature issue.

If his candidacy is a go, he will first face off in a primary against State Representative Robert A. Nardolillo III (R-Coventry).

35

Corporate Personhood and Three Steps to No Rights

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Brad Smith recently took up an important point in the Providence Journal, responding to Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who is seeking to “strip rights from corporate entities,” in Smith’s words.  He cites the 1819 Supreme Court case, Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward:

A corporation, the court noted, “is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” But that didn’t mean that people gave up their rights when they formed a corporation. Rather, the decision emphasized that when people join together to accomplish things, they usually need some form of organization, and shouldn’t have to sacrifice their rights just because they organize.

This is one of those recurring discussions that are frustrating because they’re mainly semantic, and one feels as if normal people sitting down to fairly explain to each other what they mean will agree and move on.  The danger is that the semantics could allow radicals like Whitehouse to push the law a few steps to totalitarian control.

Step 1 is to force people to organize for any sort of public activity by offering either competitive enticements (from tax benefits to liability protections) or regulations restricting activities if people do not organize.  We’re already pretty far along this path.

Step 2 is declare that those organizations that people have formed don’t have rights.  Another way of putting that, as Smith explains, is to say that people lose their individual rights when they organize as corporations… which they were more or less forced to do in order to accomplish their goals.

Step 3 will be to force people to do what government insiders want by imposing requirements on the rights-less corporations.

36

Pundits Looking for Elusive Footing of Normalcy

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Like everybody else who follows policy and politics, I’m still trying to figure out how to interpret the Trump administration.  I have to say, though, that I think a lot of established pundits on my side of the ideological field are getting something very wrong.  Here’s Jonah Goldberg, for example, writing about Trump’s executive order related to refugees:

If Trump had given agency professionals 30 days to review his order on refugees, he could have avoided the confusion at airports, not to mention the media hysteria and the protests. And if his communications team had been given time, they could have preempted some of the wild claims made by Democratic detractors.

I don’t believe this is accurate. If word of the deliberation had leaked — or if the policy had been discussed openly — we’d have had the same reaction, but without its being rooted to an actual order.  Opponents would have been able to warn of even more extreme possibilities, and moderation in the course of developing the policy would have been presented as hiding true, evil intentions, rather than error.

Then there’s John Podhoretz, talking during a Commentary podcast on Ricochet.  He warns that President Trump’s style and speed is galvanizing the Left, worrying, for instance, that no Democrats will be able to vote for Trump nominees, and the president won’t be able to peel Congressional Democrats away from their party for his policy initiatives.

Democrats may take that approach, but I’m not so sure it’s something that should frighten Republicans.  From where I stand in Rhode Island, waching the Far Left push the U.S. Senate’s most outrageous lefty, Sheldon Whitehouse, to be even more unreasonable, I don’t see how this can possibly be a majority-winner, especially this far out from an election

It seems like even conservative pundits want normality to apply in some way, but Obama, his party, and the news media have proven that the state of affairs we used to see as normality was just an illusion that served progressives’ ends.

37

The Left’s Intimidation Game

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As usual, the content on this Prager University video — featuring Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel — won’t be new to readers of the Ocean State Current, but it’s well done and worth the reminder:

Progressives are in the intimidation game for the long haul; indeed, Strassel points out that Southern Democrats used the tactics progressives now focus on conservatives (or any non-progressives) to suppress blacks.  The strategies are:

  1. Harass, as with the IRS targeting Tea Party groups
  2. Investigate & prosecute, as with Wisconsin prosecutors raiding the homes of conservatives, or our own U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s attempts to criminalize opposing views and activities
  3. Blackmail, for which Strassel provides the example of threats made against corporate sponsors of ALEC
  4. Expose, by which progressive seek access to lists of donors and other supporters in order to apply the first three techniques

On the last count, Democrat Tiverton/Portsmouth Representative John “Jay” Edwards had a coup this latest legislative session with his legislation to harass with regulations any citizen who attempts to have a public say on any local ballot question and to open such local activists and their supporters to harassment by vicious groups like Tiverton 1st, which not only succeeded in making public office seem like a costly volunteerism, but also in driving some of its opponents clear out of the town and the state.

38

Providence Journal Gives Up on Objectivity

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I’ve long harbored the hope that journalists with integrity at the Providence Journal were quietly embarrassed by their paper’s dabbling in PolitiFact.  In the past, I charted PolitiFact’s bias, and I even wrote a parody song about it.  In PolitiFact, the mainstream media has the perfect representation of the pretense of objectivity being used as a partisan political weapon.

With its coverage of this year’s partisan conventions, the Projo appeared to have committed the entire paper to the PolitiFact aesthetic.  With today’s front page, it appears to have taken up its method, too:

projo-trumptruth-081116

The “news” of this story is that Donald Trump, (sadly) the Republican nominee for president, is habitually dishonest.  Disliking Trump, myself, I’m not inclined to object to such investigation, but I still find it shocking to see it as such a prominent report in the Providence Journal, partly because it is inconceivable that the paper would give similar treatment to the similarly dishonest Hillary Clinton.

In fact, take the analysis a bit farther and open the paper to its “Campaign 2016” coverage.  The headlines are:

Pay special attention to the bullet in the middle, because it may indicate why the editors felt it necessary to land so hard on Trump’s honesty today.  The “lack of filter” story is used as an envelope around an inset about the latest Clinton-related revelations, which I mentioned this morning, and that story is couched in terms of “Trump pounces.”

A search of the last fifteen days of the Providence Journal turns up no other news reports including the words “Clinton Foundation email.”  In other words, for the paper’s only reporting of emails that raise ethical questions about the Democrat nominee for president, it minimized the find (excluding, notably, the Obama Justice Department’s killing of FBI requests to investigate the foundation further), presented it in terms of Trump’s response, surrounded by a story about Trump’s wild speaking habits, next to a story about a U.S. senator calling him a kook, within an issue fronted with bold declarations of Trump’s habitual lies.

This is a newspaper attempting to affect the outcome of an election along predictable party lines, pure and simple.  Few remain so naive as to believe in mainstream objectivity in the post-Bush era, and I personally think we need less regulation of speech, not more.  Nonetheless, while this may do little more than show my age, I’m still shocked by the tabloid-esque brazenness.

39

Stop Expecting Corrupt Government to Prosecute Corruption

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Not to be contrarian or anything, but really, what more of relevance did we expect to learn about the 38 Studios debacle?  The whole thing is outrageous from ignominius start to Friday news dump end, but State Police Colonel Steven O’Donnell has a point when he says, “A bad deal does not always equate to an indictment.”  Neither does corrupt government.

Look, 38 Studios is the brand of Rhode Island’s deepest corruption for a reason.  The General Assembly and the governor slipped through a big-money program with the promise of creating jobs, and a quasi-public agency put taxpayers on the line for a private company’s failure.  Partly because the politicians and bureaucrats involved have our electoral system locked up with a mix of handouts, demagoguery, insider advantages, and (some of us suspect) not a little outright cheating, there were no real consequences.  Moreover, the very same system that created the opportunity for corruption and failure in the first place is now the central economic development plan of our state.

It’s no good sitting around hoping that the corrupt will slip up and break the law so that the legal system can do what voters refuse to do.  We’ve seen all the way up to the White House that America’s legal system doesn’t do that anymore.  (A tweet that flitted across my screen this morning suggested that “the law is no longer working to protect us from the corrupt, but to protect the corrupt from us.)

More importantly, though, much of what we consider to be corruption is legal in Rhode Island, and that’s not necessarily wrong.  Expand the scope of activities that are illegal — to include bad decisions or working with people you know, for example — and you’ll find it becoming a weapon used by the corrupt against those who are not corrupt.  Look to Sheldon Whitehouse and various attorneys general for evidence or consider that, while the 38 Studios process may have been entirely legal, it is now illegal for people to spend almost any money advocating on local ballot questions without registering with the government.

The obvious solution is this:  Get off the sidelines.  Maybe run for office.  If that’s more effort than you can reasonably muster, then resolve to support those who will shake up the system, both in office and in organizations that strive to keep the pressure on politicians and government.  Perhaps reevaluate how much weight to give to different political issues (corruption and good government should maybe outweigh social issues in your decision-making for a decade or so).

That’s where change has to occur.  Otherwise, each investigation, indictment, and prosecution is just a bucket of water as we attempt to bail out a submarine a mile below the surface. The fact that these suggestions are nothing new doesn’t make them less true.

40

When Government Secretly Coordinate, That’s a Conspiracy

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There’s a certain irony, here.  Rhode Island’s far-left Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is leading the charge to criminalize research and expression of views that don’t fit his extreme ideological and political view and a gang of thuggish attorney generals have been coordinating legal attacks on fossil-fuel companies and conservative think tanks on the claim that they’re engaged in an anti-environmentalist conspiracy, and yet the attorneys general are hiding their coordination from the public.

A press release from the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity (for which I work) notes its participation in an effort to ensure a little bit of transparency into this actual conspiracy:

The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity (Center) announced that it assisted a national nonprofit organization in a lawsuit, filed today, demanding that the Rhode Island Office of the Attorney General (OAG) release documents they have refused to make public. The legal complaint calls for the release of documents related to AG’s United for Clean Power, a group comprised of politically-motivated AGs from about a dozen states, including Rhode Island, who have secretly teamed up with anti-fossil fuel activists to investigate dozens of organizations that have exercised their free speech by challenging the global warming policy agenda. …

In a series of April emails obtained by E & E Legal, the RI OAG consented to sign-on to an “agreement” among the larger AG cabal that is colluding to investigate if RICO statutes may have been violated. However, the Rhode Island AG now refuses to make public the group’s ‘Secrecy Pact’ documents related to that taxpayer funded activity.

That is, the attorney general will not release the terms of his office’s agreement or even the text of the documents pledging to keep that agreement hidden.

41

Is Climate Change Persecution Fading Already?

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With one of our U.S. Senators’, Mr. Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat, naturally), being a key figure in the fascist effort to pursue legal persecution of people who have a contrary opinion to him on the politically charged issue of global climate change, Rhode Islanders might be interested to hear that some of his allies are backing away from his level of aggression, as the Wall Street Journal notes (text here):

Virgin Islands AG Claude Walker recently withdrew his subpoena of Exxon Mobil. He was a leader among the 17 AGs charging that the oil giant defrauded shareholders by hiding the truth about global warming. That’s hard to prove when the company’s climate-change research was published in peer-reviewed journals.

Mr. Walker also targeted some 90 think tanks and other groups in an attempt to punish climate dissent. These groups and others, including these columns, pushed back on First Amendment grounds, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute counter-sued Mr. Walker and demanded sanctions. He pulled his subpoena against CEI last month.

The real shame, and the real warning sign, is that those AGs, and fellow travelers like Whitehouse, weren’t instantly lambasted by people across America’s political spectrum for even initiating such patently offensive-to-freedom steps .

42

6% and Flawed Models: Why We’re Skeptical of AGW

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A second day, a second applause-worthy editorial by the Providence Journal yesterday. They politely call out Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who

… asked [US] Attorney General Loretta Lynch whether the Justice Department had considered pursuing fraud charges against those who have, in his view, misled people about climate change. ….

This is troubling: a U.S. senator and attorney general, both sworn to uphold the Constitution, mulling legal action against American citizens and companies for the “crime” of challenging a scientific theory.

The ProJo correctly points out that

… it is vitally important that America not discard its essential values of freedom.

With Earth Day coming up this Friday, it’s important to note the two simple facts that make so many of us skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. 1.) Man only generates 6% of all greenhouse gases. 2.) The heart of the case for AGW, the climate models, are flawed (see here and here, and lots of other places).

Accordingly, the proposal by Senator Whitehouse and others to silence by prosecutorial bullying those who question AGW not only violates, as the ProJo points out, free speech, one of America’s essential values, but also comes across as someone who … well, doesn’t want to hear why he may be wrong about something he believes in. It’s fine to disregard facts and evidence that contradict your belief in something. It crosses the line to narrow-minded despotism, however, to propose the use of the considerable powers of government to punish people or companies attempting to present such facts and evidence.

43

On Climate, It’s the Government That’s Acting Conspiratorially

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Ted Nesi’s Saturday roundup column gives Rich Davidson, the spokesman for far-left-radical Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, room to offer some spin related to the senator’s push to make a crime of disagreeing with him on climate change:

Simply denying climate change isn’t what Senator Whitehouse believes could violate federal law. Like courts found with tobacco companies, it can be a violation of the federal civil RICO statute when companies engage in an enterprise designed to mislead the public about the dangers of their products. The senator’s questions to the attorney general were to learn whether the Department of Justice is doing its due diligence to investigate whether fossil fuel special interests are leading a coordinated fraudulent effort to deceive the American people.

Two observations.  First, the entire effort, including Whitehouse’s public pronouncements and especially the hearing with the attorney general, is an excellent example of how government can make the process the punishment and use broad threats to chill speech and activity.  What company or organization wants federal law enforcement agencies rifling through its files or telling the public that it’s under investigation for potentially criminal activity?  This sort of “due diligence” is thug government.

Second, it doesn’t get nearly as much press coverage as it should — particularly when the media presents Whitehouse’s tyrannical overtures as just a bit of he-said-she-said politicking (at worst) — but in this entire controversy, it’s the government that looks like a more likely candidate for RICO investigations.  Consider, for example, the relatively minor matter of an Obama administration video promoting propaganda about how “climate change” is producing polar vortexes (i.e., how global warming makes winter colder).  When the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) requested through official channels that the video be corrected and then requested documents substantiating the refusal of that request, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) engaged in a time-and-money wasting exercise to keep its documents secret, lying about the nature of the video.

Now, one could interpret the White House’s actions as evidence that it wants to hide its efforts to deceive the public, or one could interpret them as a bid by an over-sized organization that overspends its revenue by hundreds of billions of dollars every year to drain scarce resources among its ideological opponents.  Either way, Sheldon Whitehouse comes out looking objectively worse as a representative of the people of Rhode Island.

If only there were some way the news media could provide residents with an accurate picture of their junior senator and the schemes of which he’s a part…

44

UPDATED: About That Global Warming Consensus

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Obviously, a survey does not an argument make, but this is an interesting tidbit that one might expect to be getting more attention if the news media were truly on a politically neutral search for truth and compelling stories [see update for an important note]:

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

I’ve wondered if such things as the rush to a non-binding agreement in Paris and Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s enthusiasm for prosecuting political opponents indicate that those who wish to use “climate change” as justification for sweeping away freedom see their window closing.  Perhaps in part because real and immediate threats are arising for contrast (such as terrorism and the rising wave of refugee invaders throughout Europe), the spell whereby environmentalists have silenced skeptics appears to be wearing off.

UPDATE (1/3/16 12:38 p.m.)

A reader points out that the first link above points to an article from 2013, which I’d missed.  Obviously, that removes the oddity of the news media’s not following the story now (although not back then).  However, the chronology actually contributes to the possibility that the alarmists have been making a push because they sense the window closing.

45

Climate Change by Anecdote and Science

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Just up on the Providence Journal Web page is a new part of “a special report on Confronting Climate Change in Southern New England.”  The story is about steps that some local businesses are taking in response to recent extreme weather events, and it’s generally interesting, as a tale of local life, but the larger purpose of reporter Patrick Anderson, one suspects, is to have some anecdotal spikes with which to garland a more-political narrative, as follows:

The resilience of businesses along Rhode Island’s southern shore after Sandy mirrors the approach much of New England has taken to severe weather and the persistent, advance of the ocean — linked to climate change.

The actual business owners seem to be deciding things more as a matter of interest, investment, and risk, but (scary music) we all know that climate change is coming!  One wonders how much Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s political rhetoric inspired the story.  The odd thing is that it’s actually a simple matter to look into how much the ocean has risen in the area.  Of course, the answer “not much at all in the past two decades” would complicate the narrative.

As a fan of complicated narratives, though, I thought I’d throw in E. Calvin Beisner’s thoughts on a recent U.S. Senate hearing about climate science.  Beisner’s basic conclusions are that the science isn’t settled and that there’s reason to doubt alarmist claims, not the least because of government influence:

Christy, Curry, and Happer also testified that government funding of climate research biases subjects chosen for research (e.g., lots of focus on human causes of climate change and little on natural causes), and Steyn joined them in testifying that threats (by Rep. Raul Grijalva [D-AZ] and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI]) to investigate and prosecute skeptical scientists under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) law had a “chilling effect,” undermining both First Amendment freedoms of speech and press and the free inquiry essential to scientific progress.

They recommended instead that the federal government should fund competing research teams in climate just as it has done on other issues. When the two teams critique each other’s work, both improve.

Of course, then the debate would have to be covered, rather than reported as if it were over.

46

Edward Fitzpatrick’s Conditional Opposition to Vitriol

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In his Providence Journal column, today, Edward Fitzpatrick takes on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia because, as the headline says, “Scalia’s vitriol undercuts his influence.”

It’s not enough for Fitzpatrick to highlight Scalia’s colorful language; he’s got to find an objective reason why the justice should tone it down.  I’d say Fitzpatrick is playing the quietly liberal journalist’s role in changing America.  Objectively speaking, public debate would be healthier if people in that role were more self-aware when it comes to their arguments.

The first step is trying to see things from the other person’s perspective.  If you’re Justice Scalia, you believe that the court on which you serve has become a mechanism for rewriting the Constitution on the fly, in a way that has no real basis in law and therefore cannot be consistently applied.  This lawlessness, from his point of view, invites (perhaps requires) the people of the United States and their elected representatives to begin ignoring the court.  As he put it in his Obergefell v. Hodges dissent:

Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall. The Judiciary is the “least dangerous” of the federal branches because it has “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm” and the States, “even for the efficacy of its judgments.” With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the “reasoned judgment” of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.

Fitzpatrick can disagree with that, of course, but if he shared Scalia’s view about the huge importance of this matter, would he still be fretting about whether Scalia’s strong language costs him influence?  I tend to doubt it.  A search of the Providence Journal archives, for example, produces no instance of Fitzpatrick’s worrying about the effects of Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s vitriolic attacks on his fellow Americans, notably his commentary asserting extremism and insinuating racism when it comes to people who were wise enough to oppose ObamaCare.  Fitzpatrick also does not appear to have commented on the senator’s zeal for investigating American organizations with which he disagrees because there might be something for which they could be attacked.

Instead, I found a Fitzpatrick column in which the writer trumpets Whitehouse’s role pushing the minority Democrat line on climate change, which ends with Whitehouse’s not-at-all vitriolic quip that “the best news about a Republican Majority in the Senate is that the Republican minority is now gone. They were just a God-awful minority.”

Again, it’s all well and good for Fitzpatrick to do his part to advance progressive causes, but this pose that he’s simply offering his opposition friendly strategic advice gives the game away.

UPDATE (7/2/15 12:55 p.m.):

See here for a partial correction of and some context for the above.

47

Marketplace Fairness or a Tax Trap?

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Beware the word “fairness” when elected officials propose new laws.  Be doubly wary of the word when it appears in the name of an act, as it does in the case of the recent second attempt to pass the “Marketplace Fairness Act” through the U.S. Congress, to allow states to collect sales taxes on Internet (“remote”) retail.

The first attempt, in 2013, made it through the Senate, but not the House. All four members of Rhode Island’s federal delegation jumped on the bandwagon ascosponsors, but of the four, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, may have done the most to give the game away.

In his related press release, Whitehouse emphasized that unfairness in retail pricing isn’t really an issue for Rhode Island, because consumers are supposed to pay the state’s 7 percent sales tax–rebranded as a “use tax”–no matter where they buy something.  (Other states’ taxes, if collected, count toward the total.)

To the extent that the pricing difference is unfair, it’s because Whitehouse considers Rhode Islanders to be scofflaws who use online purchases as a means of skirting tax laws.  That, obviously, is unfair to the government officials who would like to have more money to spend.

A series of related Rhode Island statutes reinforces Whitehouse’s emphasis on tax collections.

Continue reading on WatchDog.org.

48

Projo Hearts Government

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At some point, reality doesn’t need anymore evidence, and anybody who doesn’t like it has to figure out what to do about it.  One such reality (proven long ago, to my satisfaction) is that the Providence Journal is a newspaper written for the progressive Democrat audience.  Yes, there’s a journalistic drive to present some form of opposing arguments, but that’s the paper’s target audience.

The objects of the reporters’ suspicion are not those who have the power to take away your money, restrict your freedoms, and even lock you up at gunpoint.  Rather, the villains are those who argue on behalf of your freedoms.

To expect its reporters to cover issues of ideological concern as if conservatives might be right would be to expect PolitiFactRI to choose a Pants on Fire statement to check from among far-left U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s inflammatory screeds against people who are ostensibly his constituents.

PolitiFactRI is much more tuned to digging into statements such as one made by RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse on the Dan Yorke Show.  Having followed the progression of RhodeMap RI for some years, with a substantial degree of related research, Stenhouse offered Yorke his “interpretation” and “belief” about the ideological position of the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  Alerted that the PolitiFact kangaroo court was in session on his comment, he sent a long list of evidence that had helped to lead him to that interpretation and belief.

PolitiFact reporter Katie Mulvaney skimmed the evidence and contacted a few people who could be trusted to disagree with Stenhouse’s interpretation (professionals in the central planning industry), and PolitiFact presumed to rule his interpretation and belief false.  That’s laughable by any non-partisan, non-ideological standard for public discourse.  But the Providence Journal dominates the local news market, so there you go.

Or take Kate Bramson’s news story about the meeting at which the state Planning Council approved RhodeMap.  She quotes Stenhouse as warning that RhodeMap eases the way for eminent domain takings of private property.  Bramson’s follow-up sentence isn’t so much an addition of context as it is a debating point from somebody on the pro-government side: “The term ’eminent domain,’ in which governments may seize private property for broad economic purposes, appears nowhere in the plan.”

Well, sure.  Neither does the term “freedom” or “property rights.”  Bramson appears entirely ignorant of the foundation for Stenhouse’s understanding of RhodeMap, including the fact that his statement on eminent domain is absolutely true.

So how should we proceed?  The problem, ultimately, is not that the Providence Journal is biased.  It’s that there’s no alternative.  Accepting reality, those who have been marked by the news department as the enemy should stop responding to the paper (and especially PolitiFact) as if it’s a neutral arbiter.

49

Coordinating Instructions in Plain Sight

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Via Instapundit comes an interesting observation from the National Republican Senatorial Committee:

Yesterday, our friends at the DSCC tweeted this “important message for New Hampshire.” It linked to a hidden “message” page on Jeanne Shaheen’s website providing what seems to be a script with research and high resolution images of the Senator that would be the type that commonly appear in political ads run by outside groups like Harry Reid’s Majority PAC. Remember, coordination between the DSCC and these outside groups is prohibited by law.

Turns out that over the last few months, we’ve picked up on the fact that each time the DSCC sends an “important message” to voters of a battleground state, a liberal outside group quickly adheres to the message by producing an ad to be run on television. In other words, anytime the DSCC sends an “important message,” it is a directive to outside groups to run an “uncoordinated” ad (since, you know coordination would be illegal).

In other words, to avoid the appearance of “coordinating,” it looks like the politicians make a public statement that the outside groups know to be a directive.  That seems very similar to the way Rhode Island’s own U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s anti-Tea Party rhetoric was apparently taken by officials in the IRS and other government agencies as an instruction to target them.

50

IRS Scandal Expands into Cross-Agency Planning to Prosecute

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It’s not mentioned loudly in Rhode Island, but revelations keep on coming in the IRS targeting of conservative groups:

 … on March 27, [former IRS non-profit-division head Lois] Lerner in an email to top IRS staff wrote that “folks from the FEC world,” were pressing for “tax-fraud prosecutions” for nonprofit organizations accused of lying about not conducting political activity. “This is their latest push to shut these down,” she wrote. “One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn’t feel so comfortable doing the stuff.”

It’s especially curious that this news hasn’t been bigger in Rhode Island, because the name of our own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse appears in the controversial emails.  Apparently, the prompting of some of Whitehouse’s anti-Tea Party theatrics helped get the ball rolling for cross-agency talks about finding a group of which to make an example.

It seems to me the Left and the media are happy to let this scandal slip through various cracks.  On the one hand, we’re supposed to take the Senator’s rhetoric as simply that.  When he slanders people who disagree with him on policy, that’s just talk, not to be treated as if it’s actionable (or, for that matter, worth fact checking).  Yet, when the rhetoric turns into targeting, well, that has nothing to do with the rhetoric; it’s just the government trying to make the world safer for democracy… or at least Democrats.

51

Climate Change Words and Behavior

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Over the weekend, I had an extended Twitter discussion with Philip Eil, news editor of the Providence Phoenix; here’s the (somewhat jumbled) main thread.

During the course of the discussion (in a side thread), Phil asked me for an example of a local global warming advocate who doesn’t quite live like it’s such a dire threat. Of course, nationally, Al Gore is exhibit #1, but it’s an aggregate impression; specific examples come and go. One occurred to me, yesterday, though.

A few years back, with his children off to college and boarding school, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) sold one of his two Rhode Island estates and moved permanently into the other. He offloaded the one in East Side Providence and moved into the ocean drive one in Newport. That is, when he had to make a decision about a massive financial asset, he chose to keep the $2.3 million property overlooking the supposedly rising oceans.

As a carpenter, I spent a year working on a house directly across that little inland pond, which was once in large part lined with Whitehouse family properties, and a few more years working on one diagonal and across Ocean Ave. If I’m remembering the architects’ quick structural history lessons correctly, both of those houses sustained massive damage during the hurricane of 1938.

Lots of things go into the decision of which mansion to keep and which to sell, and somebody of Whitehouse’s means might value a few decades of Newport life enough to face the ultimate demise of the property. Nonetheless, I find it hard to ignore the message sent when the guy who declares that “God won’t save us from climate catastrophe,” and attacks political opponents in irrational terms, proceeds to settle his life where that catastrophe will eat away his personal fortune each year.*

 

*Note that there’s a low, easily flooded, strip of land between the pond and the ocean. Until the rising seas erase this distinction, the erosion of personal fortune will not be physical, but a matter of increased risk of owning the property… theoretically.

52

RI Senator Works for Fundamental Corruption for Partisan Advantage

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When Sheldon Whitehouse won his election to the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island, I was hopeful that his being such a caricature of the rich New England liberal would leave him vulnerable to future challenge from a down-to-earth regular-guy/gal candidate with common-sense conservative ideas and values. That has yet to be tested, but Whitehouse’s status as far-left commentator Rachel Maddow’s “political crush” suggests that he’s been working to make my reasoning more plausible, not less.

And now, there he is, the name that Bradley Smith plucks, in a Wall Street Journal essay, from the vast selection of the federal government, as the face for a willingness to bring fundamental political corruption to the IRS for partisan advantage:

Why is the IRS regulating political activity at all?

The answer is that many Democratic politicians and progressive activists think new rules limiting political speech by nonprofits will benefit Democrats politically. …

Nobody will admit that the goal is to hamper the political opposition. To make the case for IRS regulation of politics, these progressives, such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) and the Campaign Legal Center, have promulgated three myths.

The irony is that, throughout the secondary-school and college courses designed to convince me that liberal policies were not only more intelligent, but also more moral, because supportive of The People, was a repeated sneer against “aristocrats.” Well, here you go, folks: an actual aristocrat who wants to make it more difficult for The People to organize in support of their own views, if their own views conflict with his.

53

Both RI Senators Support Tipping the Balance of Power via D.C. Statehood

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Washington DC Democrats are making a power play to permanently increase their numbers in the US Senate … and both Rhode Island Senators, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, support the unlawful move to turn the Constitutionally defined federal district into a state. With over 700,000 registered voters in DC, and with recent history showing a […]

54

2 VICTORIES: Center co-Signs National Coalition Letter Earns Congressional Opposition to Biden’s WOKE 401(k) Rule

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The RI Center for Center for Freedom & Prosperity, earlier this month signed a national coalition letter urging Congress to oppose a federal attack on citizens’ 401(k) pension savings. The letter opposed Biden’s Department of Labor rules that would allow environmental extremists to divert hundreds of billions of dollars of Americans’ pension savings into green […]

56

Green on the Grid:  Texas is a Huge Red Flag

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Count me among those somewhat surprised to learn that the electric grid of the State of Texas, perhaps best known for oil production (and proud of it), incorporates wind turbines in its electric grid. In fact,

… wind generation ranks as the second-largest source of energy in Texas, accounting for 23% of state power supplies last year

But as you have probably seen, this “green energy” source has turned into a big Achilles heel for Texas’ electric grid in the cold front that has descended on that state and much of the country. As of yesterday,

Frozen wind turbines have caused almost half of Texas’s wind generation capacity to go offline in the midst of an “unprecedented storm”.

The Lone Star state is under a state of emergency after freezing conditions swept the region, causing dangerously icy roads and leaving nearly 3 million people without power.

Update: frozen wind turbines led to a drop in Texas’ wind power from thirty one gigawatts to six and there are currently 3.4 million power outages. The situation is getting worse, not better.

Texas, and other states, has resorted to rolling blackouts. In below-freezing temperatures, this is literally a life-threatening situation for states like Texas which rely on electricity for heat (and lots of other critical activities).

A small but vocal group of advocates, promoted by many gauzy-eyed members of the mainstream media, have for years been pushing to transition to green energy away from fossil fuel.

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