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The transgender movement is “a social contagion,” says Chris Elston, also known as “Billboard Chris.” Elston has drawn international attention for his work to defend children against gender identity ideology. Wearing billboards on his front and back that say things like “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers,” he travels throughout Canada and the U.S. having […]
When political leaders can’t define what a woman is, society has a problem. The radical left has detached sex and gender from “material reality,” says Abigail Favale, author of the book “The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory.” Removing fact and biological reality from sex has led to a “subtle denigration of … the female […]
Democrats sentence black children to ‘Lord of the Flies’ existence By JASON WHITLOCK (compelling commentary The Current pulled from the Internet. Send your comments to OceanStateCurrent@RIFreedom.org ) Beelzebub killed James Lambert, a 73-year-old Philadelphia man. Beelzebub is one of the seven princes of hell. In biblical times, Beelzebub was a god worshiped in Ekron. He […]
Dear Governor McKee, I am a life-long Rhode Islander, a practicing physician, and an independent voter. I am writing to you regarding the potential for another indoor mask mandate in Rhode Island, and any other potential COVID-related restrictions that people around you may suggest would be helpful. I can tell you that myself, and the […]
The school year is ending. Parents who have children in the failing Providence Public School System are turning to the official school sponsored summer reading list to supplement their child’s education during the break. For many, their hope may be to find educational materials that can make up for the time lost during the pandemic, instead they will find a list of books that promotes Critical Race Theory (CRT), graphic descriptions of both giving and receiving sodomy, and abortion of the unborn… all promoted to children fourteen and up.
Progressive Democrat State Senator Jonathan Acosta may be correct on the policy of a State House dress code, but for a reason that illustrates why he’s devastatingly wrong as a teacher.
Americans are seeing two different realities in the Storming of the Capitol, neither perfectly accurate, and there are two paths forward, one better than the other.
We should acknowledge reality (you know, believing in science and all), respect rights, and do what planning and management we can around those to great Rs.
Putting aside whether we should care about the size of our labor force, it isn’t true that Rhode Island’s has been disproportionately affected by the aging population.
In the world of media and politics, ignoring reality in order to keep your preferred outcome a live possibility may be an option, but for the sake of a healthy reality it cannot be.
The (possibly related) stories about disproportionate COVID-19 cases among Hispanics and COVID-19 deaths at nursing homes fall in a range of topics about which we’re not allowed to have straightforward discussions, and that’s a dangerous problem.
If some evil force were determined to break apart our society and increase the world’s share of misery, it might invent a concept like “non-judgmentalism.”
Legislators’ relentless attack on Rhode Islanders’ rights may leave only recourse to a constitutional convention.
It is not difficult to understand that if our front-line public servants have incentive to not actually be on the front lines, then the overall quality of those public services will suffer.
A new report from our Center, released this week – Paid for Not Working, Collective Bargaining Taxpayer Ripoff #2 : Providence Teacher Leaves of Absence – highlights the many forms of collectively-bargained “leave time” allowed for teachers.
Protecting the Second Amendment on a macro scale can start in a small New England town hall.
What does it mean to say it’s “unfair” for the ultra rich to pay the same tax rate as the merely rich?
Mayor Elorza’s comments only served to illustrate his ignorance—as abortion is not a religious issue. It is an issue that pertains to human life.
An overwhelmingly pro-life crowd of Rhode Islanders gathered at the State House to oppose the Reproductive Health Care Act (RHCA).The bill would expand abortion in the Ocean State removing existing restrictions from state law.
As Progressives push for a dramatic abortion expansion in the Ocean State, the 46th annual March for Life showcased a movement to protect the unborn being led by young people, with recent polling from the Institute for Pro-Life Advancement showing seven of 10 Millennials support limits on abortion.
A scathing editorial in the Providence Journal takes Education Commissioner Ken Wagner to task, suggesting that he never should have been hired:
Buried in the story, on the jump page, was an astonishing revelation. “In my three and a half years, I’ve seen only four classrooms that challenge kids at the levels the standards require. We are dramatically under-challenging our kids.”
That is a shocking admission. In the entire state, with its 300-some schools, Commissioner Wagner has found only four four classrooms where students were being adequately challenged.
The referenced story is an interview with the $225,000-per-year commissioner, and the editorial rightly snarls about his insistence that “it’s no one’s fault.” But in one respect, the editorialists might have been a little unfair, inasmuch as they missed Wagner’s lightly hidden warnings:
Wagner said Rhode Island might be ready for a test-based graduation requirement in two or three years, when educators and elected officials have a chance to dig into the latest test scores. Next year, he said, the education department will release data on students who have reached proficiency on the Rhode Island Common Assessment Program or RICAS, called a commissioner’s seal, side-by-side with high school graduation rates.
“I’m not opposed to it. Just not right now,” Wagner said. “Let everyone digest the dramatic gaps between high school graduation rates and student proficiency and then revisit it.
“If you change the graduation requirements, everyone is going to bank on (the belief) that we’re going to blink,” he said. “The legislature will step in again.”
Also:
“If absenteeism rates are high,” he said, “there is something wrong with the school … with its climate and culture. Our first role is shining a light on this. Every school is talking about this. We have named it.”
There you go. Basically, the education commissioner is confirming that the problem is a system in which powerful labor unions create an unproductive, low-quality environment with no hope of improvement because they can make the politicians blink. The trick those legislators and the governor are trying to pull off is to find a way to squeeze some improvement out of the system without actually naming (or fixing) the underlying problem.
It won’t work, and no one should blame Wagner if he sees escape as the silver lining of his scapegoating. By contrast, we all should wonder what sort of person would want to take the job on the politicians’ terms, even with that six-figure pay rate.
Progressives and conservatives frame things like tax policy differently, and not only does it prevent fruitful discourse, but progressives’ errors undermine an economic system that makes shared prosperity more likely.
America will only make its boy problem worse if it attempts to feminize masculinity.
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds makes a telling connection. He leads with a quotation from former President Obama during the presidential campaign season while responding to Donald Trump’s promise to increase job creation and manufacturing within the United States:
“Well, how exactly are you going to do that? What exactly are you going to do? There’s no answer to it,” Obama said.
“He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, what, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.”
The news to which Reynolds links the reminder is this, from Bloomberg:
U.S. manufacturing expanded in December at the fastest pace in three months, as gains in orders and production capped the strongest year for factories since 2004, the Institute for Supply Management said Wednesday. …
The figures suggest manufacturing strength will persist into early 2018, even after the ISM’s semi-annual survey of purchasing managers published last month showed factories anticipate growth in capital spending to slow this year. The December monthly poll was taken before President Donald Trump signed the tax legislation, which provides companies with incentives to invest more, Fiore said in an interview.
The most telling part of Obama’s rhetoric is the mention of a magic wand. Progressives think that government does things, and the world responds. Central planners inject resources here or there, and that produces a predictable reaction in the market. Look at Rhode Island’s Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo. How are we going to improve the economy? Well, we’ll find companies that the government experts believe will benefit the local market, and we’ll cut them special deals to move here. It is a magic wand, with the progressive wizards wielding the wand.
The free-market conservative approach isn’t so presumptuous. We assume that people want to be productive, create things, and make money, and so if we broadly make it cheaper and easier for them to do so, we expect that they will. We can’t really predict where in the market the slack will go, but we trust that freedom and individual initiative will put the resources where they will be most effective, given the actual conditions and interests of the area.
Zach Maher, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, explains how the government-paid-parental-leave-in-Sweden-is-great scales fell from his eyes:
When the girl’s parents refused to subject her to this unnecessary procedure, the hidden machinery of the Swedish welfare state sprang into motion. My brother-in-law and his wife were required to attend multiple interviews with social workers and to submit friends and neighbors in their small town for questioning. Social workers even inspected their home. Suddenly, decisions as benign as what milk to buy seemed potential evidence of parental deficiency. My in-laws feared their two children might be taken from them.
In Sweden, the state reserves for itself ultimate responsibility for children’s well-being. As a parent my job is to give my kids the trygghet necessary to become productive, tax-paying members of Swedish society. This is why I receive financial support and medical benefits. The state is paying me to be a parent. I am, in effect, an employee—and if I do a poor job, my responsibility as a parent might be taken away from me.
When we give government responsibility for things — even good things, like the well-being of children — we also give it authority over those who provide those things, like parents. Suddenly, government isn’t just filling in gaps, but seeking out gaps by putting parents under the microscope.
The United States is not immune to such thinking, obviously. Some 20 years ago, on Matt Allen’s Mental Floss radio show with the more-liberal Jennifer Brien, the latter argued that schools have to teach sex education (liberally tinted, naturally) because parents simply aren’t doing the job adequately. I called in to ask what gives her or the government the right to make that determination, but she wouldn’t be shaken from the assertion of need. (And then I was cut off.)
Suggesting that he and his wife “insist… on having their own ideas about raising children,” Maher asks, “Does this mean we can’t accept parental support from the state?” My guess is that he doesn’t really have a choice — that the government doesn’t actually see it as an exchange or contract.
Well, the WTNH headline out of Connecticut is just about all you need to know: “Income tax revenue collapses; Malloy says taxing the rich doesn’t work,” but here’s a brief explanation:
Connecticut’s state budget woes are compounding with collections from the state income tax collapsing, despite two high-end tax hikes in the past six years. …
It’s happening because the state of Connecticut depends too much on its wealthy residents, and wealthy residents are leaving, and the ones that are staying are making less, or are not taking their profits from the stock market until they see what happens in Washington.
Rhode Islanders should consider that this goes in reverse, too. Lower, broader taxation will foster the import of wealth and productive activity within the state. For a quick lesson, see Thomas Sowell’s latest post-retirement essay.
For progressive governments in the Northeast, the whole purpose of a civic entity (like a state) is to construct the perfect society as they see it. This doesn’t work.
For classical liberals (now called “conservatives”), the purpose of a civic entity is to provide some structure and security for the society as a whole (as distinct from the security of an individual or particular organization). This does work, and should be the focus of our state.
Government should be small enough in scope that a broadly applied tax won’t hurt the less advantaged. In that way, we’ll have prosperity and greater economic mobility, or opportunity for people to climb the ladder.
When talking among themselves, environmentalist left-wingers will admit that government money allows them to waste resources.
Maybe government officials and union reps’ conspiring to pull their constituencies closer is part of the game, but it’s rigged to make unreasonable employee demands outweigh taxpayer warnings.
UHIP waiting lines illustrate state government’s harvesting of human beings and prove how low the minimum wage really is in a system of government dependency (even as elites throw awards at an unpopular governor).
John McLaughlin understood the productive and clarifying purpose of head-to-head verbal combat.
This is not the sort of thing the government does in a free society:
A California court ruled last week that ChristianMingle and it’s affiliate faith-based dating websites must allow LGBT singles to search and be matched with people of the same gender.
The ruling comes at the end of a 2.5 year legal battle after two gay men noticed in 2013 that new members to the popular dating site, which boasts over 15 million users, could only search for dates of the opposite sex.
In brief, this means that it is illegal for a company in California to set up a business that seeks explicitly to provide services to people with Christian values. I almost made that a more-generic “particular values,” but it would be counterproductive to pretend that the progressive government in California has any intention of applying this principle equally.
When it comes to the government’s demands on Christians, the call of “tolerance” is not answered simply by letting other people live their lives as they see fit. No, we have to facilitate and serve behaviors that we find immoral — now not only through government, but through our own private businesses, too. This isn’t even a matter of our seeking to exclude a class of people; if we wish to provide services that we want but progressives’ favored classes do not, we must provide their closest comparable service, as well.
One cannot avoid the conclusion that all Christians should leave California unless they see themselves as missionaries in a hostile land. More and more, of course, that describes the view we have to take within the United States as a whole, now that progressives have abandoned any pretense of valuing real diversity or true civil rights, which means we are unlike missionaries in that we’ll have no home base to which to return in a land that actively supports our beliefs.
The era of comfortable Christianity is ending, and we should not expect Christian charity and tolerance from people who have explicitly rejected our values.