The Left Doesn’t Believe in Agreeing to Disagree

/by

It seems that no school is too small to draw the attention of the conformity police in the new American progressive totalitarianism, as Holly Scheer highlights on The Federalist:

… The Obama administration is investigating a school in Wisconsin for sending home letters telling parents and students that they expect students to live within Christian values while at school. This is a private Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod school that serves a tiny group of students—from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade they have 147 students and 10 teachers.

In February the school instituted some new policies that sparked a complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. These policies include having parents provide a birth certificate (with the child’s sex on it) and signing a handbook that gives the school the right to discipline students for exhibiting sinful behavior.

Christians thought they could carve out enclaves for their beliefs if they gave up the tax dollars that they’ve already paid for public school and paid again for private school.  Now, progressives claim Christians can avoid persecution if they just give up their right to equal access to government funds for educational services.

We know that to be a temporary position, though, allowing the Left to keep its mask on for just a while longer, because we’ve already seen Christian bakers persecuted for declining to participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies.  The clear reality is that if you go out in public — if you do anything that can have any effect on other people in any way (see Senator Whitehouse’s desired climate change inquisition) — progressives believe government should force you to conform to their worldview.

Whatever these people believe in, it isn’t freedom.  They are the heirs to the ideological oppressors against whom our history lessons were supposed to inoculate us.  They’ve just created a new church for themselves, and it will be all the more difficult to correct for the fact that it’s Godless.

Read more

Serving One Another Through Innovation

/by

There are bills being considered by the RI General Assembly, H8044 &S2864, which may kill the efficient transportation network services like Uber & lyft in the Ocean State.

In this video, I give commentary on testimony given by Rhode Islander to the RI State Senate on the role of Uber in his life. Nick Zammarelli, a blind Coventry school teacher, testified to RI State Senators: “As a totally blind school teacher, prior to Uber’s arrival in Rhode Island, I had to think about how got from point A to point B every single day. ”

Watch my commentary on the compelling testimony now. For my money, the most important part of the testimony had nothing to do with Uber, per se. It had everything to do with innovation and everything to do with the way in which Rhode Island government prevents us from finding the most effective ways to serve one another. Why do we tolerate elected officials to kill the innovation that will help the disadvantage among us?

Read more

The Panopticon State Moving Forward with Prescriptions

/by

For the 2013 Freedom Index, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity highlighted legislation that was ultimately signed into law “to create a state-controlled electronic prescription database storing all information related to electronically distributed medical prescriptions.”  We gave it a -2, and naturally the General Assembly passed it and Governor Lincoln Chafee signed it into law:

  • S0647, sponsored by Democrat Senator Donna Nesselbush (Pawtucket, North Providence)
  • H5756, sponsored by Democrat Representative Joseph McNamara (Warwick, Cranston)

Well, surprise, surprise, legislators are in the process of expanding the reach of this database in newly invasive and frightening ways, and naturally the Senate passed the legislation last night, with only Republican Elaine Morgan (Charlestown, Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond, West Greenwich) voting “nay.”  This legislation will “empower the state Dept. of Health to combine its drug prescription database with any other source of data to analyze the behavior and personal connections of patients and pharmacists, under the pretense of finding abuse”:

  • S2946, sponsored by Democrat Louis DiPalma (Little Compton, Middletown, Newport, Tiverton)

Add this database to the information that will be produced by gantry-based tolling systems and license-plate readers looking for the uninsured, and then mix in the comprehensive data to be collected by the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) and that which is already collected for taxation and other economic activity, and everybody in Rhode Island will have a frighteningly complete digital profile accessible to unaccountable bureaucrats, following the lead of a gang of elected officials best known for violating ethics rules and being investigated by the feds.

Read more

Overtime Rule Affects Freedom and Innovation

/by

Multiple posts on Instapundit, today, expand on the harm of the Obama administration’s mandating expanded requirements for overtime, which I mentioned yesterday.  Walter Olson hits on a key point:

Perhaps most significant, it would force millions of workers into time-clock or hour-tracking arrangements even if they themselves prefer the freedom and perks of salaried status. … Many workers will also lose the option of “comp time” arrangements, often valued as family-friendly, by which extra hours worked one week are offset by a paid day off in the next.

James Sherk fills in more similar details:

The rule will change how employees work. Overtime-eligible salaried employees must carefully log their hours. Each time they respond to a work e-mail, take a work phone call, or do any other work from home, their employer must track and pay them for it. If they do not, they risk getting sued. Trial lawyers filed 8,800 Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuits in 2015, many of them for employers who did not compensate overtime-eligible employees for work done remotely.

In order to avoid lawsuits, many employers deny flexible work arrangements to overtime-eligible employees. Virtually all employers who permit remote work and flexible work arrangements allow overtime-exempt employees to use them.

Apart from the economics that I discussed, yesterday, the act of enforcing such regulations and the necessary calculations that businesses must make have an effect, too.  Even if both the employer and the employee wish to experiment with some new arrangement, the employer has to carefully consider the possibility that they’ll accidentally run afoul of the rules and create vulnerability for a lawsuit.

Ultimately, all innovation is related.  Innovative ways of working create new markets and may open up the possibility of innovative new methods, services, or products, while also freeing up costs in the economy that can be put toward something more desirable.  If you commute to work, would you rather spend your money on gas and your time on traveling, or would something else be of higher value?  The answer is obvious.

One unspoken rule of big government, though, is that society can never be permitted to advance more quickly than unimaginative politicians and insiders can figure out ways to profit from innovations and further entrench their power.

Read more

More Pay or Job Loss. Win Either Way!

/by

The big-wave reaction of conservatives to news that the Obama administration is expanding the eligibility for overtime pay for U.S. workers in the private and public sectors is apt to be something like: “Where do these people think the money comes from?”

The hours and compensation of any given worker are determined by a complicated mix of factors that are impossible to tease out of the economy.  Using the blunt force of federal power, Obama is forcing all businesses to reevaluate that mix, all in the same direction.  If the progressives’ starting assumption is that workers are powerless and exploited, such mandates do not change their leverage.  Arguably, they weaken it by reducing their options for negotiation.

That’s the smaller wave that winds up stinging one’s eyes.  Here’s the vice president of the United States:

The White House estimates that the rule change will raise pay by $1.2 billion a year over the next decade. In addition, some companies may instead choose to reduce their employees’ hours to avoid paying the extra wages.

“Either way, the worker wins,” said Vice President Joe Biden on a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez adds a cryptic note to the same sentiment:

Secretary Perez says employers have a variety of ways they can comply with the new rule when it takes effect Dec. 1. “People are going to get at least one of three benefits,” Perez said. “They’re either going to get more money … more time with their family, or everybody is going to get clarity.”

Putting aside the problem with interpreting “clarity” or assessing its potential value to workers, who are these people indiscriminately to determine what workers should value?  What if your employer gives you the “more time with family” benefit, but you want to be able to work, both for more money and more opportunity?  (What if — mystery of mysteries — you like your work?)

What they’re really doing is stealing your right to determine your own priorities and values and trading them in for some cheap votes and political support.

Read more

What’s Really In Your Best Interests? Overreach in Obama’s Transgender Bathroom Directive

/by

On this episode of, “What’s Really In Your Best Interests?” I discuss President Obama’s recent transgender bathroom directive. The administration’s directive regarding transgender access to bathrooms in public schools can only be viewed as a blatant threat and yet another assault against the cherished American cornerstones of federalism, local governance, individual rights, and transparent government. Rhode Islanders should speak out against this growing federal intrusion.

Regardless of how you feel about transgender access to facilities, the process by which this executive action will be implemented is nothing short of pure corruption.

If ever there was a time for school choice, to empower parents with the choice to escape schools that do not respect their personal values, that time is now. This increasing trend of arbitrary and unconstitutional government by activist and elitist executives, often a direct affront to the values of the very people they claim to represent – is dangerous to the cornerstones of our great American democracy.

Read more

Agencies Are Our Servants and Should Behave as Such

/by

Focusing on the experience of farmers, Michale Walsh illustrates how government-by-bureaucracy is entirely antithetical to the principle of a government for, by, and of the people:

Faceless bureaucrats with guns arriving on your doorstep one fine day in order to investigate a citizen who is not even under suspicion. The Constitution doesn’t matter to them, nor do legalistic protestations, nor simple human decency. No, armed with nothing more than their own impunity, agents from EPA or OSHA or any other federal agency with a SWAT team (which is most of them) can simply make demands on citizens in the name of “regulations.”

It’s a nifty, tautological trick, government agencies have pulled in the United States:  Somewhere along the process, we all get to vote on politicians.  In progressives’ minds, that makes the government the Voice of the People, and as our duly elected, appointed, or hired “representatives,” they determine what the will and interests of the People are.  If you resist when they come to enforce that will and protect those interests, well, then, you’re an Enemy of the People.

Want to resist by legal means?  That’s fine.  They’ve got the endless resources of the People — even people who haven’t been born, much less voted, yet.

And don’t think this is just a problem with giant federal agencies.  Even in the government comedy that is the State of Rhode Island, agencies write their own regulations, work to enforce them, and then stand as the judges when people challenge them.  Tax officials pick businesses to target and then forbid them from talking about the extortion (thus keeping us from knowing how common it is) while legislators pass new enabling bills into law without even reading them, partly on the strength of leaders’ leverage with small grants that sometimes end up the pockets of the legislators or their friends.

This is a metastacizing disease that will not going away until We the People cut it out, but in practical terms, we’re probably beyond the point at which that’s possible.  After all, start running campaigns against the inside interests, and you too become an Enemy of the People.

Read more

Excepting Freedom of Speech

/by

No, campaign finance law isn’t like preventing people from shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, and no, voters don’t have a right to know how other people feel about issues or politicians.

Read more

The Narrative of the Americas

/by

A narrative of American advance and decline that misses the importance of the rule of law in mediating ideological differences pushes us toward tyranny.

Read more

Malevolence in Manipulation of the Insecure

/by

Reflecting on the recurring question of whether Barrack Obama is “incompetent or malevolent,” in reaction to national security advisor Ben Rhodes’s admission that his administration worked to scam America into the Iran deal (among other things), Richard Fernandez suggests that incompetence may be the more dangerous possibility:

For all his persuasiveness, incompetence is Satan’s principle problem. The devil always sets out to construct heaven and winds up with hell because he uses the wrong principles.  Castro, Kim, Stalin, Chavez, Mao — who all would have ruled the universe if they could have, yet finished up ruling trash heaps — probably were surprised at the turn of events. Yet why should it be surprising? Mordor in The Lord of the Rings was the shabbiest place on Middle Earth just as Pandemonium, Milton’s capital of hell in Paradise Lost, is the most frightful place in the universe because these turkeys were going about it the wrong way and were too proud to admit error.

Of course, a blend is generally at work, inasmuch as Satan is malevolent but sells the wrong principles to his followers, the failure of which then reinforces their grievance against the world.  In that line, Fernandez suggests that “society is stupid” and inclined toward being groupies for the “madman on stage.”

Perhaps “unthinking” would be a better term for the masses, but it’s difficult not to see malevolence in the manipulation of them.  And malevolence finds a convenient tool in human beings’ insecurity.  In particular, look to the federal Dept. of Justice’s insistence that it has the authority to interpret federal law newly to invalidate North Carolina’s recently passed law on bathroom assignments.  To progressives in the federal government, this is a transparent power play, but the tyrants’ power lust dovetails with more submissive emotions among their supporters.

For progressives, it isn’t tolerable for people to behave according to disagreement on anything that matters.  To the extent that it is not merely an admission of one’s powerlessness (accepting difference because one has no choice), allowing alternative views is either an indication of ideological confidence (that one will be proven correct) or an admission that one’s own views might be incorrect.  Being neither confident in their own understanding of the world nor willing to admit that their leading lights might have something wrong, they support the destruction of our entire system of government in order to impose their views on the country by whatever undemocratic means are available.

Read more

How a Free People Comes to Want a Strongman

/by

David French’s kick-off point has to do with a clear-cut case of the federal administration’s creating new law in an unconstitutional way — even skirting the rules for implementing regulations — by simply interpreting statutes to mean whatever it wants via memo.  Specifically, he mentions the finding that somehow existing law forbids school districts from separating boys and girls in the bathroom.

However, his conclusion applies much more expansively:

This is how you start to lose a democracy. When an unprincipled elite exploits public ignorance to trample the rights of those out of power, it builds resentment. But unless the resentful are informed and aware, they’re vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation by their side’s own “elites” and its demagogues. Thus, here we are, facing the most miserable presidential choice in generations, with two major-party candidates competing for the right to desecrate the Constitution to their own ends.

So don’t roll your eyes at the “bathroom wars” or any of the other countless brush fires stirred up by post-constitutional, lawless leaders left and right. We can’t always choose our battles or our issues, but we must choose whether to resist.

We have the civic structures that we do precisely so that we can disagree in substantial, fundamental ways and still work together as much as possible.  I’ve written before that this boils down to a requirement for three basic freedoms:  the right to speak your mind, the right to work to change the government, and the right to leave.

The problem is that for a variety of reasons — notably a fundamentalist conviction that they are correct, a lust for power, and a political strategy of buying off constituencies — the modern Left will not allow disagreement.  Within our country, they want homogeny.  They want to be able to go anywhere within the nation’s borders and know that their worldview is enforced as law.  And they believe that no rules should hamper their ability to implement Objective Moral Truth.

Obviously, a society cannot long remain free when that view gains ascendancy; slightly less obviously, it cannot remain peaceful.  At some point they tyrants either have to crack down with violence or they are resisted with violence, and the walls that they’ve knocked down in order to get to everybody else can no longer protect against even more-objectionable intrusion.

Read more

Gender Gap as Excuse to Take Over Private Companies

/by

Another example of legislation that proves legislators’ abhorrent understanding of government’s role in our lives is the deceptively named “Fair Pay Act.”  In the Senate, it’s S2635, and in the House, it’s H7694, which is (it’s depressing to note) cosponsored by Republican Doreen Costa (Exeter, North Kingstown).

Not satisfied with the law already on the books to forbid discrimination in employees’ pay based on sex, the legislation attempts to make the factors by which an employer can explain differences between individuals’ pay more rigid when appearing before government officials concerning a complaint.  In essence, every business in the state would practically be forced to have a detailed catalog of adjustments for employees’ pay.

So, whereas before an employer could argue that a particular man had an edge in “seniority, experience, training, skill, or ability” over a female colleague, the law would require the company to have “a seniority system.”  Other systems that employers would have to have in place are “a merit system,” “a system that measures earnings by quantity or quality of production,” and some way to demonstrate that some other “bona fide factor” exists.

Somehow, employers would have to be able to define every difference in the qualities that their employees have according to some sort of “system.”  That things just seem to go better when John (or Jane, for that matter) is doing them would be insufficient.

The “bona fide factor” exemption is where things become truly objectionable, with this:

This defense shall not apply if the employee demonstrates that an alternative business practice exists that would serve the same business purpose without producing the wage differential.

Think about what this means.  Based on the nature of the business, the company’s business model, and just the way that the people who own, work for, and patronize the company operate, the organization does something in a particular way.  If this particular way of doing business happens to favor the unique qualities of a man in the organization over a particular woman, the woman can go to a faux judge in the Department of Labor and Training and get him or her to force the company to change the way it does business.

Companies could no longer just experiment and find ways to do things that seem to work in the most efficient way possible for that company.  Rather, at the urging of a disgruntled employee, a bureaucrat in a state agency could insist that the business must try some other possible approach.  The only burden to prove that it might work is the subjective judgment of the bureaucrat, and the process to undo the change would, it appears, be for the employer to do a careful study to prove that the second option is not working as well and to return to the bureaucracy to make that case.

Who really owns the business? This is completely out of keeping with the principles of our country.  Indeed, it’s the sort of thinking that drains economies and pushes civilizations to collapse.

Read more

For Formation as Adults, Avoid Connecticut Higher Ed

/by

My entire life, the mainstream message has been that conservative Republicans, particularly the Christians among them, are so uptight and scared of sex that they want to “put the government in our bedrooms.”  I don’t know if that was always and everywhere baloney, or if the sorts of people who used to gravitate toward that political position because it empowered them to be busybodies are simply now gravitating to the progressive Democrat side.  Or maybe the loose family policies and social aesthetics that progressives have preferred since the ’60s have created so much cultural insecurity that progressives now feel they must patch the holes they’ve put in Western civilization’s zeppelin.

Whatever the case, legislation that passed the Connecticut House last week is wrong in a variety ways and, if it makes its way into law, should signal to parents and students the world ’round that Connecticut colleges are not the place to go in order to find formation as a young adult:

“It clarifies that a yes-means-yes policy will be the policy for the state of Connecticut for all public and private colleges,” said Rep. Gregory Haddad, D-Mansfield, who serves on the legislature’s Higher Education Committee and who introduced the bill. “The presence of ‘yes’ is required rather than just the lack of ‘no’ ” in determining consensual sexual activity.

Apparently in keeping with the politicians’ rhetoric, the article goes on to cite bogus sexual assault statistics.  Using false information and propaganda is hardly a new development among those who want to control our lives for us.

But to the manifest wrongness of the legislation:  The state government of Connecticut is presuming to dictate policy for the operation of every college and university, whether public or private.  I’d be interested to know what the progressives think is the difference between the two types of organization, because they don’t tend to respect distinctions.  Indeed, it’s beginning to seem that progressives think of private organizations, including businesses, as slightly less heavily controlled charter schools.

That attitude makes sense, of course, from people who insist that young adults are still “children” for health care purposes well into their 20s and who believe it’s the duty of the government to protect those grown children from uncomfortable incidents of intimacy.  Those of us who are actually grown up, however, should reject this assertion of authority.

Laws against actual criminal behavior are appropriate, to be sure, with standards of evidence and adjudication, but this new assault from the would-be nannies goes well beyond that, into a realm that is best handled at the level of the individual, the social group, and (where consumers desire it) the individual institution.  Given their power as consumers, then, young adults who believe that they can and should make their own way in the world — and parents hoping to foster that sense — should apparently look elsewhere than Connecticut for higher education.

Who knows how much the creepy overseers will slip into your bedroom and your life?

Read more

The Message Government Sends When Everything’s Regulated

/by

A society in which every action is potentially a violation of some law or regulation is one in which residents will think twice before doing anything in public, especially attempting to innovate and grow the economy.

Read more

Whitehouse’s Focus as RI’s Senator

/by

Back when Rhode Island’s Junior Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse led the charge to mandate the audio of television commercials, I suggested that “government regulation of television volume is not likely to signal the end of the republic, but the oppression of ‘there ought to be a law’ is a patchwork, encouraging voters to acclimate to the big government mentality and investing them in its exercise of power.”

Having gone some years without another such coup, Whitehouse is apparently at it again, as Shaun Towne reports:

“There’s a big, it appears, emerging scam of selling people cheap, lousy products that have been misdescribed for purposes of getting their business,” said Whitehouse.

Rhode Island’s junior senator is pushing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to crack down on fraudulent clothing websites. In a letter to the agency, Whitehouse said the websites “…use stolen photographs and deep discounts to lure consumers into buying products that are indeed “too good to be true.”

One suspects laws against stolen photographs and false advertising are already in place, so it isn’t clear what a “crack down” would entail, but is this really the sort of stuff-of-life priority that a U.S. senator should have?

It’s not coincidental that Whitehouse is also arguably the nation’s leading advocate for using innovative legal maneuvers to intimidate and “crack down” on organizations that disagree with his conclusions about climate change.  Building on what I wrote in 2011, a public that gets used to having government go after every little inconvenience or example of advantage-taking will produce a weakened backlash when that same government begins taking advantage of the new practice in order to punish political enemies and help political allies (while enriching politicians).

Read more

Whitehouse and the Literal Conspiracy to Deprive Americans of Rights

/by

Law professor Glenn Reynolds has an important essay in USA Today, this week, that’s relevant to RI’s former attorney general and now U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and other far-left loons who seek to implement an environmentalist inquisition and prosecute organizations that will not proclaim their unassailable faith in the doomsday wickedness of anthropomorphic climate change:

Federal law makes it a felony “for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the Unites States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”

I wonder if U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, or California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have read this federal statute. Because what they’re doing looks like a concerted scheme to restrict the First Amendment free speech rights of people they don’t agree with. They should look up 18 U.S.C. Sec. 241, I am sure they each have it somewhere in their offices.

One suspects neither the law nor the science nor the long-term fate of the planet is actually a higher priority to such corrupt politicians than their own lust for power.  And any journalist or other person who handles these affronts as if they might be legitimate should be doubted if he or she claims to be interested in preserving Americans rights.

Read more

Why Are Social Conservatives Being Boxed Out?

/by

One key strategy for those seeking to grow tyranny is to make people feel as if they are isolated in challenging the government or, more generally, the tyrannical minority.  One suspects, for example, that this is why China is forcibly removing thousands of crosses from the rooftops of churches; religious symbols on the landscape are powerful reminders that people believe things that they are instructed not to believe.

The United States is not quite there, yet, but the past decade has brought valuable experience as to the process of getting there.  Basically, the strategy entails seizing power in one area of society — with government being the linchpin — and then breaking down the social barriers that allow multiple centers of power to develop and maintain their independence in a free, stable society (government, business, religion, information, etc.).

Maggie Gallagher’s recent National Review essay describing the disadvantage that social conservatives have on today’s political landscape offers, among other notions worth considering, this explanation for the entry of businesses into the political fray in recent years, under the bullet point, “crony capitalism is fueling sexual liberalism”:

Many of the 100 corporations speaking out about the issue — an issue that does not affect most of their core business interests — are, no doubt, expressing their own values. But it is striking that these firms do not mind running roughshod over so many of their customers’ values. Why? Why are corporations, historically averse to public controversy, wading directly into the culture wars? Part of the reason is that by engaging on this issue, they can cheaply please the regulators in Washington (and the Obama administration). The massive expansion of vague regulations under the Obama administration means that virtually every major corporation in America has some interest in keeping Washington off of their backs: Trouncing gay-marriage dissenters is a cheap strategy to curry favor.

It’s no coincidence that we’ve been seeing this great lunge not only to advance progressive social views, but to make it unacceptable to disagree during the Obama administration, which has proven lawless in its operation.  Coming into power with a demagogue’s flair, Obama has joined great gobs of largess given to ideological allies with the abuse of regulatory and administrative power to suppress ideological opponents.

The more decisions government gets to make, the more it will add ideological strings for those who receive benefits or simply wish to avoid persecution.  Progressives have been using that leverage to build the illusion that everybody agrees with progressives on fundamental questions about life, reality, and rights.  The next step, already underway, is to isolate and exclude anybody who visibly disagrees.

Now and in the near future, it will be critical for those who disagree to do so visibly and confidently, making dissent permissible and perhaps forcing the tyrants to move too soon in their oppression.

Read more

Elorza’s Continuing Aggression Toward the First Amendment

/by

It’s really no surprise that Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza is among the showboating progressive politicians banning official travel to states, like Mississippi, that take steps to protect their residents’ religious liberty:

Mayor Jorge O. Elorza says he’ll ban “nonessential, publicly funded travel” to North Carolina and Mississippi, after governors in those states signed laws he believes discriminate against the LGBT community.

After all, among various other more-debatable examples, Elorza is the same guy who argued that public schools can establish the religious principle that there is no God and promised to prosecute the distribution of anonymous literature.  No doubt, a good number of people would argue that Elorza is doing many things wrong, as mayor, but one fundamental principle on which he fails conspicuously is the First Amendment.  Visitors, businesses, and voters should take notice.

P.S. — On all of these matters, shame on journalists who prove that they don’t support the First Amendment, either, except when it’s politically convenient for them to do so.

Read more

When the Government’s Thugs Want Your Property

/by

From time to time, I’ve pointed out that the state’s economic development efforts resemble cliché villains in a movie when it comes to setting aside certain areas for special “districts” planned out by people who think they have a right to design our entire society.  The difference is that Hollywood tends make business moguls the villains.

Time is running short for Americans to realize who the real bad guys are.  Take, for example, the story of Hinga Mbogo:

… thanks to a little-known zoning tactic known as “amortization,” the Dallas City Council is trying to remove Hinga from his own property. Back in 2005, the council re-zoned Hinga’s neighborhood for a “planned development district.” Any properties that were “nonconforming” with the new zoning designation had a limited amount of time to comply. For Hinga, that would mean closing down his business. …

… Hinga is the only pre-existing property owner left in his neighborhood who continues to operate amid redevelopment. As Hinga put it, the city is “cloaking” its actions. “They’re putting me out of business.”

Instead of sending in gang members to rough Mbogo up and send him a message, the government sends lawyers and, ultimately, police officers because they’re operating within the law, albeit unjust law.

Another item in the news (via Instapundit) shows that it isn’t unfair to think of these development-related government agencies as criminal organizations:

The oversight panel, in 2012, was uncovering the fact that then-Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez made a secret deal to make a potentially damaging lawsuit go away. He reportedly told the litigant that in exchange for dropping the suit, the government would look the other way on fraud the litigant was doing in an unrelated matter, which was being investigated by HUD….

HUD …. refused to allow Congress to speak to the regional director six months later, despite repeated requests, so the committee issued a subpoena.

The non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) has ruled that two officials from Housing and Urban Development (HUD) must return some of their salaries as “improper payments,” a penalty that HUD is so far declining to impose.

From the federal government down, agencies are acting like organized crime syndicates, and at the local level, municipal enforcers are clearing entire neighborhoods of business owners out of their property in the name government-preferred economic development.  The fact that they’ve corrupted our system of government in order to make the theft and thuggery legal doesn’t change its nature.

One suspects “follow the money” still applies, and that there are plenty of special deals to be uncovered, but if not, if the government is acting this way for no other reasons than ideology and petty power fixes, I’m not sure that’s any better.

Read more

Testimony in Rhode Island Senate Judiciary on S2369

/by

Read more

Investigative-Film Maker a Sign of America’s Frightening Turn

/by

When the day comes that all but the most deluded must acknowledge that the United States has become a country unlike the one that stood against totalitarianism in the last century, nobody will be able to claim there weren’t warning signs.  To pick just a few examples from a very long list during the past few years, the United States is a country in which a film maker finds himself scooped up by police in the middle of the night, apparently as a cover-up to the administration’s ineptitude in a foreign country, authorities raid the homes of people connected to a particular politician, apparently as a political attack, the IRS targets grassroots groups of a particular political persuasion, apparently in an effort to blunt their effectiveness during election season, and prosecutors go after a governor and presidential possible under the pretense that he used his veto power illicitly.

It’s not surprising, in this atmosphere, to see an activist/journalist who conducted undercover investigations of Planned Parenthood have his home raided and his computers and videos confiscated for careful review by politicians and bureaucrats who are sure to be favorably disposed to the abortion mills he exposed as trafficking in the body parts of the babies they’d killed:

Authorities seized a laptop and multiple hard drives from his Orange County apartment, Daleiden said in an email. The equipment contained all of the video Daleiden had filmed as part of his 30-month project, “including some very damning footage that has yet to be released to the public,” he said.

A spokeswoman for California Attorney General Kamala Harris (D) said she could not comment on an ongoing investigation. But the raid confirms that California is among the states looking into possible criminal activity on the part of Daleiden and his organization, the Center for Medical Progress, which have been the center of controversy since releasing videos purporting to show that Planned Parenthood illegally sells fetal tissue for a profit.

Two lessons for people who might fall on the same side of the political divide as Daleiden and who might be considering similar approaches to making the world a better, more just, place:  Think carefully about the state and region of your base of operations, and ensure that copies of your work are well dispersed if you don’t release it all to the public from the start.

Read more

If the Data’s There, Government Will Grab It

/by

As I read through all of the legislation submitted in the General Assembly, one of the recurring themes is the creation of vast stores of data.  Toll gantries will collect data.  A statewide database on prescription drugs will collect data.  Medical information will be collected.  Proposed license plate scanners will collect data.  The unified health infrastructure program (UHIP) will collect data on a variety of life details.  Schools collect data.  DNA collection will be collected even based on accusations of crimes.

Well, speaking of DNA:

Two major companies that research family lineage for fees around $200 say that over the last two years, they have received law enforcement demands for genetic information stored in their DNA databases.

How much easier it will be when the government owns all these databases.  And how easy it is to predict that assurances that the information will never be mixed together or used for anything other than the initially stated purpose will prove completely worthless.

Read more

RI Campaign Finance Law Nears Its Unconstitutional Conclusion with H7147/S2369

/by

Legislation targeting individuals who advocate on local ballot questions would infringe on constitutional rights and could expose the flaw in all campaign finance law.

Read more

Passing Unconstitutional 7147 Cluelessly

/by

The House floor debate on 7147 betrays the reality that legislators pass laws having no idea what they actually do or what their consequences might be.

Read more

Kilmartin’s Padded Social Media Room Bill and What People Hear About RI

/by

Oh, wonderful.  Legislation that Attorney General Peter Kilmartin has proposed to (in the description of the Freedom Index) “restrict freedom of speech by making it a crime to post an online message to somebody if doing so might make another person feel frightened or harassed or lead other people to do things that cause those feelings” has attracted national attention.  As the Breitbart headline puts it, “Dangerous Online ‘Harassment’ Bill Being Pushed by Rhode Island Attorney General“:

“In the new age of the Internet and social media, once a harassing statement, image or video is posted online it can be there forever,” said Kilmartin, blissfully ambiguous as to what he counts as ‘harassing’. “In addition, other persons may respond to or repost the harassing statement, image or video, which would continue to harass and seriously harm the victim. Unfortunately, the current law provides no protection to victims of this type of harassment as such behavior is not be considered a ‘course of conduct.’” …

“Someone could be arrested for re-tweeting a photo sent to them,” claims Hillary Davis, a policy associate at the American Civil Liberties Union. “The problem is you can’t always be responsible for the actions of other people and shouldn’t go to jail for their actions. If someone takes something and twists it around, should you be responsible?”

Rhode Islanders really need to begin asking themselves if they want elected officials to treat them like children who need helicopter-parent government, because that’s exactly the political mentality that has infected this place.

The bill’s numbers, just so you know, are H7763 and S2630, and the House Judiciary Committee will be hearing its version on Wednesday.

Read more

Updated: H7147 Will Show Who Understands Rights, Democracy, and Freedom

/by

The RI House will vote today on legislation that will show which legislators actually understand their constituents’ rights and are willing to defend them.

Read more

The General Assembly as Our State’s Parents

/by

When it comes to the economy, the people whom we elect to public office at the state level seem to think that they’re a sort of corporate board for the entire state.  With licensing, regulations, taxes, tax breaks, and other economic development matters, elected officials behave as if they have every right to decide the direction of the state and tell businesses how they have to operate.  Even where there’s debate, it tends to be whether the regulation will be a net positive or negative, not whether government officials have the right to make such decisions.

An AP article in today’s Providence Journal, by Matt O’Brien, shows that this conceit extends to telling Rhode Islanders how they have to parent:

State lawmakers are debating a bill that would punish parents for leaving a child younger than 7 alone in a car. They’ve also proposed legislation to ban kids under 10 from being home alone and older kids from being home alone at night. Legislation could even extend to private preschools, where a bill would ban outdoor recess when the temperature drops below freezing. …

“We have kids constantly left home alone. It’s a danger,” said state Sen. William Walaska, the Warwick Democrat who introduced “home-alone” age restrictions that could affect child custody cases. “Imagine they open up a cupboard and there’s some chemicals in there.”

Note the reliance on imagination and the refusal to allow individual parents to make judgment based on individual children.  What if a family is wise enough to put anything dangerous where the child cannot access it?  What if a particular child is simply very responsible and well behaved, and his or her parents recognize it?  Walaska would insist that we all have to live in a room that’s sufficiently padded for the least responsible among us.

This simply is not the role of government.  Indeed, it’s the sort of meddling that ways down an economy’s advancement and a society’s development, harming individuals along the way, even beyond the degree to which it tramples on the rights of others, treating us all as subjects who must live according to the preferences of our betters.  It also creates an insecure, vulnerable society in which nobody can possibly avoid breaking the law in some way or other.

Read more

Mark Levin Features Soviet-Like Whitehouse

/by

Rhode Island’s own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat) led off episode 4 of Mark Levin’s new online show.  Reviewing a clip of Whitehouse presenting an obviously prepared line of questioning for President Obama’s Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, Levin draws parallels between Whitehouse’s content and presentation and the sort of government activity we used to expect from the Soviet Union.

Without any specifics — leaving much to the imagination and the insinuation — the senator and the AG discussed criminal and civil investigations of private companies that aren’t fully in line with the required climate change ideology.  Levin suggests that the entire performance isn’t meant to enlighten the senator from Rhode Island, but rather to get the message out there in the air, so to speak, that companies should start worrying about an FBI knock on the door.  “It’s as tyrannical as is possibly imaginable.”

The idea is to intimidate the public in order to prevent real debate over public policy.  In practice, the government doesn’t have to take oppressive action to the extent that people believe that oppressive action is always a possibility.  The great majority of people (including business leaders) just want to move along with their lives, and so they’ll respond to implied threats from officials.  Then, those who either won’t or can’t capitulate so easily seem like extreme cases and are easy to marginalize in an environment in which everybody else just wants the tension to go away.

This is how freedom dies, and it’s sad to see how large a role even little Rhode Island has managed to play in the process through its electoral choices.

Read more

Um, Can We Send the R.I. Attorney General Some Material on the First Amendment?

/by

With it shaping up to be a contentious election year here in Rhode Island and concerned citizens poised to be sharp in their criticism of legislators who voted for the horrendous new tolls, it is easy to agree with a caller to the Tara Granahan Show who finds the timing of this proposal quite … interesting.

But another bill would target a wide range of social media activity that makes people “feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested.”

Unlike current state “cyber-stalking” laws, which require police to prove a pattern of harassing behavior, someone could be prosecuted under the new Kilmartin bill for a single post if at least two others pile on with “separate non-continuous acts of unconsented contact” with the victim.

Read more

Colleges Suffering for Their Campus Lunacy Remind of Rhode Island

/by

Over the past… what?… six months, America has watched its campuses taking the next step in their descent toward madness.  One can’t help but get the sense that they may no longer be places where learning is the top priority, but rather that they have moved on even from indoctrination to the stage of training shock troops for ideological war.  We may now be beginning to see what happens when students who do not wish to invest so much in that sort of training (and their parents) look for institutions that won’t make them the background bit-players on which the apprentices of outrage can practice.

In Missouri, for example, enrollment is down at the state’s flagship campus, and Mizzou is facing an unexpected deficit of $32 million.  Locally, the Brown Daily Herald may be reporting hints of a similar reaction among non-donating alumni of Brown University:

Students at the call center who chose to remain anonymous cited multiple instances in which alums have chosen not to donate as a result of student activism in recent years.

The Herald article adds an interesting wrinkle that ought to raise doubts about the university’s — about universities’ — ability to respond to the feedback they’re getting from those outside of their towers:

Another staff member pointed out that though older alums may be worried about the direction Brown is moving in and refusing to donate, these may be the same alums who are upset that Brown started accepting students of color or became co-educational.

True to the progressive formula, which prevents substantive communication and reconsideration through its control of language and handbook of knee-jerk explanations, this staff member doesn’t seem to understand why people might be uncomfortable with scenes like this, this, and this,  with the complementary indications that real free speech has been driven underground in a way against which we’d all thought Dead Poets Society and decades of similar themes had provided immunization:

Another staff member pointed out that though older alums may be worried about the direction Brown is moving in and refusing to donate, these may be the same alums who are upset that Brown started accepting students of color or became co-educational.

No need to consider the outrageous behavior of social justice warriors on campus; those non-donating alums are probably just racist misogynists.

Rhode Islanders, especially, ought to pay attention to these developments, because the campuses are providing a miniature of our state’s experience.  Give in to special interests and force people to live in a bizarre, contrived environment that doesn’t provide for their needs and interests, and they’ll go elsewhere.  Just as colleges and universities appear to to be turning away from education as a first priority, so too Rhode Island has turned away from its people.

In the long run, nothing is too big to fail, not even a state.

Read more

FIND GREAT CONTENT

Search through articles, research, and policy papers. Search by keyword, tag, author, date range, and category.

YOUR CART
  • No products in the cart.
Subtotal:
$0.00
0