School Choice Makes Families Consumers, Not Commodities

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A great short report for which I’ve done some research, but which I never manage to get to, would look at the effects of Vermont’s legacy school choice program.  Given the long-rural history of the state, some districts offer students actual school choice, including to private schools, and a key finding that Rhode Island homeowners should find interesting is that property values go up significantly in areas with choice.  Geoffrey Norman doesn’t offer more than a nod to that dynamic in a recent article in The Weekly Standard, but he does use the current debate in Vermont to make a key, fundamental point (emphasis added):

So, school choice is not—and could never be—supported by the education bureaucracy. It threatens not just their convictions but their livelihoods. Where parents can take their kids and the public money that is being spent on them out of one school and move them, and it, to another—well, this threatens the entire system.

Why it might even, in the dark vision of one of the prominent Vermont opponents of school choice, “turn children into commodities.”

Which of course stands the whole thing on its head. Commodities don’t make choices. They are manipulated, packaged, and bundled. As are students in the grip of the industrial-education complex.

What Norman is touching on, here, is the government plantation.  Attracting people to an area who are likely to need government assistance, binding them to their region with government dependency, and locking their children in government schools creates a captive audience with little power to affect the services their receiving.  Again, “commodities don’t make choices,” but when human beings are “manipulated, packaged, and bundled,” they lose the authority to do anything but sit on the shelf until they’re of use to some powerful consumer.

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Setting RI Right on Crime

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For the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, I’ve posted a brief report suggesting reform to Rhode Island criminal justice system, helping families to break the cycle of crime and familial breakdown.  With my interest in how the state government functions to restrict our freedoms and perpetuate a public-sector-first business model, the most important piece is also the one least likely to generate supportive legislation:

… it isn’t surprising Rhode Island has the lowest incarceration rate in the country. It is surprising, however, that the Ocean State’s probation and parole rate is fourth highest. That, in turn, leads to a high rate of recidivism, with 52% of former prisoners re-arrested within three years.

As researchers find to be true with other government programs, Rhode Island’s cost to supervise and provide services to prisoners and parolees is high (over $58,000 per prisoner). One might conclude that the state has an institutional bias against letting go of residents once they fall within its net of supervision.

Criminal justice reform is not only the right thing to do for Rhode Island families, it’s also a good example of the bureaucratic mentality that is strangling our state.  For reforms to be sufficient, they’ll have to begin treating that attitude as the crime that it is.

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When the Tolerant People Go to the City Council to Silence Those with Whom They Disagree

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Writing in the Newport Daily News, reporter Colin Howarth slips in a helpful reminder — as we watch the Left attempt to make American life a non-stop political rally — of Lefitsts’ understanding of the role of government (emphasis added):

Locals have used social media to voice their concerns about DePetro’s rhetoric in the past, citing what they perceive as misogynistic and hateful remarks. A day after the announcement, a Facebook group was created titled “Get John DePetro off WADK.” Two local residents used the citizen’s forum at Wednesday’s City Council meeting to express their concerns about DePetro.

That’s right.  Progressives in Newport are going to the government in an attempt to silence somebody with whom they disagree.  As Mayor Harry Winthrop says, when others criticize him for welcoming a new talk-show-host to the market, “It’s unfortunate people don’t understand the role of mayor.”

WADK President and Owner Bonnie Gomes notes that, if boycotts threaten anybody, they threaten the 15 employees of the station.

For a long time, in our country, those of a progressive persuasion have been sold on the idea that opposing views are illegitimate.  It’s OK to silence conservatives while proclaiming dedication to free speech.  It’s OK to lock those who hold traditional religious views out of self-governance (by ruling their worldview unconstitutional) while pretending to be an advocate for religious freedom.

It’s time to insist on bringing real tolerance into American society, not just the phony one-sided version that progressives like to put on bumper stickers.

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Refreshing Our Memory on the State of Debate on Torture

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As our view of torture becomes a matter of public debate again under President Trump, public debate must consider what counts as torture and what makes it wrong.

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One Day They’ll Be Ashamed to Have Supported Planned Parenthood

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Gee, hard to believe that this story isn’t getting more coverage, isn’t it?

While Live Action was hard pressed to find any Planned Parenthood that offered prenatal care, some of the investigators posing as pregnant women were offered abortions instead. The abortion business does almost one third of all abortions in the U.S. — 887 per day on average or about 320,000 a year.

“Planned Parenthood says it’s a champion of women’s health care, yet prenatal care, which is an essential service for expectant mothers, is virtually nonexistent,” said Lila Rose, president and founder of Live Action. “Our investigators who wanted to keep their babies were turned away by 92 out of 97 Planned Parenthood centers. It’s clear that despite its claims, abortion is the priority and the only option for pregnant women that visit Planned Parenthood.”

Planned Parenthood is an evil organization: “some of the investigators posing as pregnant women were offered abortions instead.”

The other day, one of my young children asked how the heroes of our national founding could have supported slavery.  It occurred to me after the conversation that children of the future will ask their parents how decent people once thought it was OK to tear babies limb from limb as long as they were still a few inches from birth.

The same politicians and news media who’ll use an unsourced document about “torture” of terrorist enemies for their daily dose of outrage against the Trump administration studiously ignore the dishonesty and death-profiteering of an organization that kills innocent children.

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Deescalation After the Left-Wing Hit

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In November 2015, while progressives at the University of Missouri were busily destroying the school’s image with their fascism, I pointed out an Alinsky-style manipulation of a student journalist by religious-studies professor Richard Chip:

To me the most telling moment comes at the beginning, when a bespectacled guy who looks a little older than the average student tells photographer Tim Tai, from within the arm-linked circle of “protestors,” that the photographer “cannot push [the protestors] to move closer.”  It’s a reasonable sounding rule of engagement from somebody presenting himself as some sort of an authority figure.

A moment later, the students start pushing Tai away from the center of the circle, and he turns to the same guy with a complaint that they’re breaking the rules that he had just laid out.  The reply: “Don’t talk to me; that’s not my problem.”

The professor appeared to be an authority and articulated what sounded like fair rules, but then he only stood by the rules when it served his ideological (rather, tribal) purpose.  Something similar is in play in the video of Canadian conservative reporter Sheila Gunn Reid being punched by a left-wing thug, apparently named Dion Bews.

After the attack, a woman steps between Reid and Bews and — as the other “feminists” casually form a wall behind her and usher the violent man away from the scene — speaks in reasonable-sounding terms to “deescalate” the situation.  The clearly missing component is justice, which would have required similarly reasonable actions to keep Bews in the area for a civilized resolution when security had arrived.

As it was, Reid’s employer, The Rebel, had to offer a $1,000 reward and run a campaign to find the guy.  Whether government authorities would have taken the same pains is another question, and it depends in large part how far along they, too, are in seeing justice as a one-way street.

The lesson: When anybody (particularly a progressive) assumes a position of authority or mediator in a conflict, assume that he or she will apply justice only when it suits him or her and act accordingly.

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Marches More Militant than Unifying

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Yesterday’s “marchers” or “protesters” illustrated the divisive bigotry the Left is leveraging to push the nation toward civil war.

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Surprise: Teachers’ Unions Are Just Political Activist Groups

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I’ve written several times in the past that employee representation services are simply the fund raising mechanism for teachers’ unions’ real reason for being: progressive political activism.  Here’s Paul Bedard in the Washington Examiner:

Promoting a “National Day of Action” on Thursday, the NEA said, “On Thursday, January 19, the day before Donald Trump assumes the presidency, thousands of students, parents, educators and community members from across the nation will hold rallies in front of school buildings to inclusively stand up for all students.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t need to represent their members enough to ensure that they stay members (with wide rivers of funding) at the expense of those whom progressives claim to support.  David Harsanyi in The Federalist:

… teachers unions are the only organizations in America that openly support segregated schools. In districts across the country — even ones in cities with some form of limited movement for kids — poor parents, most typically black or Hispanic, are forced to enroll their kids in underperforming schools when there are good ones nearby, sometimes just blocks away.

The National Education Association spent $23 million last cycle alone working to elect politicians to keep low-income Americans right where they are. Public service unions use tax dollars to fund politicians who then turn around and vote for more funding. The worse the schools perform, the more money they demand. In the real world we call this racketeering.

It’s a travesty that teachers give these organizations a prominent, lucrative place in our government.

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H5026 Builds the Government Plantation and Dependency Portal

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It’s that time of year, again, for charitable-sounding legislation to enter the scene and ensure that government controls every aspect of our lives and interactions.

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“Unfair Shot” Government Legalizes Theft

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The “Fair Shot Agenda” of progressive Democrats in Rhode Island is morally indistinguishable from a mob deciding to give somebody permission to steal somebody else’s money.

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China’s One-Child Policy and Rhode Island Job Initiatives

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Something occurred to me when I came across Glenn Reynolds’s link to a New York Times article about China’s change of government heart regarding its one-child policy.  After having forced women to have IUDs implanted, with resulting health problems, the government has decided it needs more people and is now moving to have the IUDs removed.  Says documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming:

In the eyes of the government, women are labor units. When the country needs you to give birth, you have to do so. And when they don’t need you to give birth, you don’t.

That’s exactly right.  Humanist-driven progressivism sees people as units to be managed.  I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a pro-choice woman some years back.  She was adamant that her view was all about the freedom of women, so I asked about China’s one-child policy.  Her response: “Well, what do you expect them to do?”… meaning, to address their overpopulation problem.

To make you happier, government has to make you less human.  It’s in the same line as government confiscating resources and distorting the market to retrain workers to fill the jobs that politicians declare necessary for their own political benefit.  They know what’s best for us, and to implement that wisdom, we’re just cookie-cut shapes on a board.

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Saying “No” and then Changing the Times

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Mark Glennon’s thoughts on how the state of Illinois will fall apart — is falling apart — in a long, gradual process will resonate with Rhode Islanders capable of seeing what’s going on.  In this paragraph, Glennon raises an historical cliché that I’ll likely start quoting every time somebody expresses bewilderment at Rhode Islanders’ political behavior:

The Illinois General Assembly majority, the Chicago City Council and Mayor Emanuel are the obvious villains, but as for the ultimate culprits — voters who elect them — consider what Alexander the Great supposedly said about why Asians in his day were easily made slaves: “Because they never learned to say ‘no.’” Just saying ‘no’ to the incompetence, graft, lies and rank stupidity of their own government would end it all. But Illinoisans, especially Chicagoans, won’t say it, content to march blithely into indentured servitude.

Perhaps the core feature of the system that our forefathers gave us is that we really can avoid servitude by saying “no.”  We are allowed to change things.  We are allowed to insist that all of the reasons insiders tell us we can only say “yes” are false and that believing as we do does not make us bad people.  Saying “no” is only the first step, of course, but we are permitted to change things, and even change them back to something that we’ve lost, like true representative democracy and the rule of law.  The past is fertile ground from which to draw seeds for the future, not a wasteland of toxic superstition.

As for the “how,” I’m more and more convinced that hoping for some catalyst or hero is folly.  Rather, I believe Saint Augustine had it right in his Sermon 311:

You say, the times are troublesome, the times are burdensome, the times are miserable.  Live rightly and you will change the times.

The times have never hurt anyone.  Those who are hurt are human beings; those by whom they are hurt are also human beings.  So, change human beings and the times will be changed.

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A Strange Issue on Which Not to Tolerate Dissent

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This, from Jacqueline Tempera in the Providence Journal, seems related to the decriminalization of child prostitution in California:

Amnesty International’s policy on sex workers, which was published in May after a vote by chapters internationally, calls for “the decriminalization of all aspects of adult consensual sex work due to the foreseeable barriers that criminalization creates to the realization of the human rights of sex workers.”

[Rhode Islander Marcia] Lieberman, and most of the members of the 10-person chapter she coordinated, disagreed with this, she said. They felt the research into the policy was scant and that it would embolden “pimps and johns” who were exploiting “mostly young women and girls.”

“We believe there should be help for people in sex work,” Lieberman explained in an interview. “But we did not believe it should be legal for customers to buy sex.”

So, Amnesty International excommunicated her.  The organization is free to have its policies about internal agreement when it comes to its far-left, radical progressivism, but consider the issue that this is about.  There may be more to the story than presented, of course, but this hardly seems like an issue so fundamental to the organization that no prudential disagreement can be tolerated.

One certainly gets the impression that there’s an ideological agenda at work behind the scenes across the progressive movement.

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Not Surprising a Social Justice Warrior Would Bring Students to a Trump Protest

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This is hardly surprising:

Central Falls High School math teacher Seth Kolker has independently organized the group [joining the anti-Trump “Women’s March on Washington”]. He did so to help students “channel their fear, anger and confusion” after the election, when they began asking such questions as, “Will I be deported,” or “Are Latinos going to be allowed to go to high school in America anymore?” 

Some might question the propriety of public school teachers’ using their positions of influence with students as a connecting point for political activism, but remember that Central Falls is the school district that is literally hiring social justice Warriors.  Of course, if we were to flip the politics, the Providence Journal would have written a scandal story rather than a celebrate-the-community story.

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The EPA Restricts Lifeboats While Driving into an Energy Iceberg

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Ah, the tender extremism of the Environmental Protection Agency, as John Daniel Davidson writes on The Federalist:

… now comes the federal government to tell the inhabitants of Alaska’s interior that, really, they should not be building fires to keep themselves warm during the winter. The New York Times reports the Environmental Protection Agency could soon declare the Alaskan cities of Fairbanks and North Pole, which have a combined population of about 100,000, in “serious” noncompliance of the Clean Air Act early next year.

Read the whole thing, but in sum, according to Davidson this is a local problem isolated to an area that people can choose to leave.  The writer, for one, is willing to take the health risks associated with some wood-fire-related pollution for the benefits of life in the area, but the distant federal government isn’t willing to allow him that option.

Like much progressive, big-government action, the effect of this regulation (intentional or not) will be to limit the places humanity can settle… except, naturally, those privileged few with money to burn.  To be sure, it must be difficult for federal bureaucracies to tell people how to live their lives when we’re so spread out into the wilderness.

Indeed, one finds it difficult not to see a deliberate restriction of human freedom if the picture combines Davidson’s explanation of the energy challenges in the region…

Heating oil is too expensive for a lot of people, and natural gas isn’t available.

… with the EPA’s restrictions and President Barack Obama’s imperial ban on oil drilling along Alaska’s coast.

In The Titanic, one passenger laments that there aren’t enough lifeboats for half of the passengers, and the movie’s wealthy villain proclaims that it won’t be “the better half” who are stranded.  Think of government as a crew both steering toward an iceberg and restricting access to escape and you’ll have something of the sense of how progressive policies function.

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The Key Question When Government Enlists Stylists as Informers

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On the sagacity of Illinois’ forcing beauticians to be trained in discerning signs that their clients are in damaging relationships (and, presumably, to do something with that knowledge), Mark Steyn offers his usual insightfulness:

Just as the Stasi turned neighbors and relatives into spies, the State of Illinois is making your stylist one. Will the “spirit of camaraderie” survive this new legislation? Or will such stock inquiries about coming vacations and plans for the weekend suddenly seem far more loaded and alert the customer that she’s now in the blow-dried equivalent of a Bulgarian hotel lobby circa 1978? …

… like so much government makework paper-shuffling schemes, it won’t do anything to reduce the problem it’s meant to be addressing, but it will be just one more tedious time-consuming obstacle to making a modest living.

There is likely one of two processes behind this legislation.  One is that activists with some ulterior motive (whether reducing competition in the beauty industry or padding the budgets of abuse and assault activists) pressured legislators.  The other is that some Illinois lawmaker observed that stylists fill somewhat of the same role that bartenders used to be considered as filling for men and thought it would be a great way for government to “do something” if the law went straight from social truism to professional mandate.

Either way, the most important question is:  Who keeps electing these people?

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Maybe Child Prostitution Isn’t Something to Decriminalize, Just Now

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As Rhode Island enters another legislative session, we should keep a careful eye on other states so we can spot progressives’ destructive plans when they make their way here.  Republican Assemblyman Travis Allen points out, in the Washington Examiner, a big one out of California: 

Beginning on Jan. 1, prostitution by minors will be legal in California. Yes, you read that right.

SB 1322 bars law enforcement from arresting sex workers who are under the age of 18 for soliciting or engaging in prostitution, or loitering with the intent to do so. So teenage girls (and boys) in California will soon be free to have sex in exchange for money without fear of arrest or prosecution.

Government imposes too many criminal penalties for people’s free activities, catching too many people up in the system and making it more difficult for them to overcome adversity and thrive.  But can we at least agree that the underage sale of sex is a likely indicator that the public has an interest not in punishing the kids, but in taking a closer look at what their problems are?

To be sure, I’ve got a generally dark view of government’s ability to do such things, but as with legalizing marijuana, we have to acknowledge our current circumstances and consider the effects of changing them at this particular time in a particular way.  If our society were healthier, with strong social institutions, instead of deteriorating ones, we might consider changes that will tend to produce socially harmful effects, but to do so in a rush of progressive ambition is lunacy.

ADDENDUM (12/31/16 4:16 p.m.):

In anticipation of objections, I should address immediately objections that the intent of the law is not as Allen suggests.  Nobody should doubt that most progressives think they’re doing good by their actions.  But consider this, from bill author Holly Mitchell:

The problem is that not every county has services available in juvenile justice for minor victims.

Followed with NBC’s note that:

Various district attorneys’ offices in the state have expressed a similar apprehension toward the law —but some say it’s because the state just isn’t ready to provide adequate services.

Good intentions can be deadly.  If they feel, for whatever reason, that sex for money is in their best interest, CA children can now know that the worst-case will be services (for which they’re probably already eligible).

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Policies to Help Poor and Minority Families in Inner Cities

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Policies that start by asking what’s best for inner city families will be conservative in nature and will prove activists who thrive on urban angst to be demagogic frauds.

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Setting Degrees and Boundaries for Telling Parents What to Do

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Abby Schachter raises a warning flag on the presumption of government agencies to tell parents how to raise their children:

The fact that legislation is necessary to correct the imbalance between parents’ rights and the separate, independent rights of their minor children is one of the defining characteristics of our current age, one in which the government at all levels has become involved in the private lives of families, dictating child-rearing standards and penalizing parents who do not follow the rules. This condition of overbearing state interference in the lives of families is pervasive, though not coordinated…

“Not coordinated” in the sense that there is no secret council with a defined plan to absolve parents of the rights and responsibilities of parenthood and transfer them to the government.  However, one would have to deny the link between big-government philosophy and a definable set of beliefs associated with progressivism not to acknowledge an implicit coordination.

Look, this is one of those areas in which the degrees to which interference is permissible and the boundaries at which such interference ought to be allowed through government, through social institutions, or merely through personal social pressure ought to be available for debate, but such decisions, being so personal and intrinsic to the perpetuation of families’ belief systems, ought to be made at the most local level possible.

My opinion is that government oversteps its boundaries when it mandates behaviors beyond immediate harm and with less than near-certain risk.  As for voluntary association with moral institutions, like churches, they ought to be nearly as free as individual families are.

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When the Providence Journal Is Part of the Activism

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Whose shame should be greater for tarring Republican U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (the President-elect’s choice for attorney general), Senator Whitehouse’s or Journalist Gregg’s?

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An Opportunity for Secularists to Recognize How Far They’ve Leaned

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Even non-Catholic Rhode Islanders, particularly those of progressive bent, should carefully read this recent editorial from The Rhode Island Catholic:

What happens now [following the national election] is the continued battle between good and evil. God’s people must not discount the work of Satan in our world, who will be working full time to stop the progress of God’s will. If the administration-elect, in conjunction with the support of Congress, achieves even a few of their stated objectives, the devil will not be pleased. He will fight against the pro-life movement. He will fight against the repeal of the Johnson Amendment, which stifles the voice of the Church in the public square. He will fight against religious liberties. He will fight against the appointment of constitutional Supreme Court justices. Like a dog backed into a corner, he will turn on the good even more viciously and seek any opportunity to exacerbate the divide among the people. As long as the devil is fighting, the faithful must stay vigilant as they continue to pray and support those who were raised up.

I hope non-radical liberals in Rhode Island understand how important this paragraph is.  As a local conservative and Catholic who has periodically had difficulty publishing in the paper, I can say that The Rhode Island Catholic is by no means a right-wing publication.

Some quick googler may prove me wrong in some degree, but my impression as a reader is that the conclusions of this editorial have been a long time building, not only at the paper, but in the Catholic-community context that informs and influences its editors.  Under Obama, nationally, and Chafee-Raimondo, statewide, even people who are relatively moderate religious believers feel under attack, and for good reason.

As a matter of practical analysis, this editorial could be put among the evidence behind Donald Trump’s electoral victory, indicating yet another factor that contributed to his upset victory.  But moderates and liberals should look past the political calculation and recognize the extremity toward which they’d been leaning, away from their neighbors.

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Excluding Religion from Government Schools Effectively Establishes Religion

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Young Catholics find secular education pushes them away from their faith, which proves that government schools are not truly neutral on the most fundamental question of our lives.

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Speaking of Degradation Applies to Representative Democracy, Too

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While this outcome, reported by Matt Hadro of the Catholic News Agency, is obviously worth a small celebration, it raises disturbing questions about the state of representative democracy in Massachusetts:

Then in a Nov. 7 letter, the state announced that it had changed its guidance on the rule [forbidding all organizations to divide any facilities by biological gender] and would not be including “houses of worship” among the “public accommodations” that would be subject to the law.

“Your lawsuit caused us to focus on these issues and to make this revision to our website.  Thank you for bringing the issue to our attention,” the state attorney general’s office said in the letter to ADF.

Of course, the same objection applies to religious exemptions as to journalists.  Why should particular organizations have specific rights?  Organizations shouldn’t have to be explicitly card-carrying religious organizations to have the right to set the terms of the use of their own property.

But more importantly — much more importantly — this should not be how representative democracy works. If the agency is able to preserve citizens’ rights through a simple change of its Web site, it will be able infringe on their rights the same way.  Lawmaking via regulation, or even casual interpretation in letters and Web site posts has gone much too far.

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A Lesson in the Malignant Spread of Tyranny

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If bakers can’t choose their projects, what about film makers? Poets? Anybody?

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Public-Options-Only School Choice Relies on Irrational Prejudice

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Notice anything about the recent op-ed from RI Education Commissioner Ken Wagner?

Some claim that charters take money that is owed to district schools. In my view, the money is not “owed” to district schools or any other education provider. Local, state and national taxpayers raised this money for a specific purpose: to educate the youth of a community. We have an obligation to ensure the money serves the children rather than simply maintains the current system.

This is the core of the argument that I’ve been proffering for total school choice.  Public dollars aren’t collected and expended for the maintenance of a government-branded school system, but for the cause of educating the public.  Whatever structure or method will accomplish that goal most effectively and economically is the proper one.

Indeed, just about every argument in Wagner’s essay would apply to education savings accounts (ESAs), vouchers, or any other school choice vehicle and could be added to the Bright Today list of myths.

It is only through the devotion of insiders to the status quo and their control of public information that this point remains sufficiently obscure that Wagner doesn’t feel he has to address it.  The people are starting to figure it out, though, and it is yet another area in which those of us who really wish to move Rhode Island forward for the benefit of its people need only guide their natural conclusions.

Consider Dan McGowan’s WPRI article on public testimony regarding the Achievement First charter school expansion proposal before the state Council on Elementary and Secondary Education.  The article is 17 paragraphs long.  Here’s the 13th:

But the majority of individuals who testified about Achievement First Tuesday encouraged the council to back the expansion.

That is, after 12 paragraphs — three-quarters of the article — conveying the points of view of insiders, who are in the minority, McGowan finally gets to what should arguably have been the headline of the article: that people want school choice.  When all is said, the only argument to prevent the people from using public funds for their preferred public policy is maintenance of the government plantation.

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Sexist Myths and the Injustice of Identity Politics

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Here, from Robert Franklin in the Washington Examiner, is an interesting data point that somehow never makes it into news and commentary about sexism in politics:

Back in 1997, three scholars, Richard Seltzer, Jody Newman and Melissa Voorhees Leighton examined every state legislative race from 1986 to 1994 and every governor’s race, U.S. House race and U.S. Senate race from 1972 to 1994. Combined, they analyzed almost 62,000 candidates. They divided the races into three categories: Male incumbents vs. female challengers, female incumbents vs. male challengers and male non-incumbents vs. female non-incumbents.

The results were unambiguous: When women run, women win just as often as men do.

Add this research to fair-minded reason, as I touched on while addressing the concept of “moral self-licensing,” and one begins to get the sense that progressive talking points that push for equality of outcome, rather than opportunity, require a great deal of selective information.

Think about it.  Picking nice round numbers, if women were only half as interested as men in entering politics, we’d have to disadvantage men — through rules, culture, and rank-skipping appointments — by half in order to ensure a completely even outcome.  Even where the gap is less than half, how can that reasonably be called fair?  For the sake of identity politics, progressives are piling injustice upon real people striving to get through life. As Christine Hoff Sommers writes in the Washington Post (via the Chicago Tribune):

It is men — especially working-class men — who are disproportionately crushed, mutilated, electrocuted or mangled at work. Activists lament the dearth of women in the Fortune 500, but they fail to mention the Unfortunate 4,500 — the approximate number of men killed on the job every year.

Men are also the have-nots in education. Hispanic and Native American women are now more likely to attend college than white men. Unless we find ways to help them, a large and growing cohort of young men — white, black, Hispanic, you name it — are unlikely to find a place for themselves in the modern economy. When men languish, so do the women who love them.

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Vicious Atheism at the State House Deserves Thoughtful Response

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Ted Nesi tweeted out a picture of the annual Christmas Insult poster from the Freedom From Religious Foundation:

I wrote about this display back in 2013, and the key point is only emphasized in this time of deep division and distrust.  It wouldn’t be difficult to design objective, non-sectarian policies that would disallow mean, petty people like these fundamentalist atheists from insulting visitors to the State House while allowing diversity of views.

In the meantime, though, it’d be great if Rhode Islanders came up with creative responses.  Sadly, John DePetro appears to be out of commission for the moment, but it’d be great if somebody were to make a poster of Donald Trump’s Christmas card from last year and insist on displaying it at the State House:

I’d love to see how the “tolerant” crowd would react to that display.

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The Rumbling of Tyranny Is Coming from the Left

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In an essay titled “Is Democracy Doomed? We’ve Been Here Before.,” by left-wing writer Bill Scher, the author looks to historical examples that Donald Trump may be dangerous to “the fabric of democracy,” with the “most notable” being early-Twentieth-Century Louisiana Governor Huey Long:

Long seized complete control of all levels of government, from the courts to the vote-counters to the public schoolteachers. His tactics included more than demagoguery. Political critics suffered beatings and kidnappings. When the mayor of New Orleans resisted Long’s power grabs in 1934, Long (at that point a senator but still in command of Louisiana via his hand-picked successor as governor), declared “partial martial law,” then ordered state’s National Guard to occupy the registrar of voters office and train their guns on the mayoral office across the street.

Yet Long built a huge national following thanks to his “Share Our Wealth” program, going well beyond the New Deal to propose a robust guaranteed minimum income and a ceiling on maximum income and wealth. Long claimed 7 million people joined “Share Our Wealth” clubs. While Schlesinger calls that number a “wild exaggeration,” he observed voters “from the old lower-middle classes [and] from provincial and traditionally nonpolitical groups in the population … felt threatened by organized economic power” and were therefore quite content to join in  “resentful revolt against both contemporary politics and contemporary economics.”

How myopic does your perspective have to be to read this and associate it with not-yet-president Trump, rather than too-long-been-president Obama? Progressives are the ones using the IRS as a weapon, conducting politically motivated pre-dawn raids in Wisconsin, and declaring our entire society an illegitimate implementation of “white privilege.”  (One need hardly ask whom our public school teachers unions support.)

I’ve got a particular point of view, of course, but it must take quite a bubble to prevent people from seeing the direction in which they really should be looking if they fear tyranny.

By the way, Huey Long was a Democrat.

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Selling Compassion Makes the Immigration Issue Intractable

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Without the motivation of the government plantation, Americans would find their comfort point and compromise on immigration.

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Farewell to Ambiguity About Journalists’ Narrative

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Readers of the Providence Journal can move forward, now, fully aware of just how much bias they should read into the newspaper’s handling of particular topics, like race and the president elect.

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