Friedrichs’s Freedom Not to Be Spoken For

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Readers might have noticed a buzz around the conservative media, recently, about the Supreme Court’s hearing the case Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Association.  The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has republished a background brief from the Mackinac Center on the case with a couple of local hooks.

One is a case of non-union reserve police in Westerly, about which Stephen Hopkins Center for Civil Rights Chairman Giovanni Cicione has an op-ed in today’s Providence Journal:

Individual liberty in the workplace seems, amazingly, to be a hot topic these days. Here in Rhode Island, the Stephen Hopkins Center for Civil Rights is litigating a case to defend nonunion reserve police officers in Westerly from being forced to contribute $5 of their $35 hourly pay to the local union (and yes, you read that right — almost 15 percent of their paycheck!). This was foisted on them without their consent, and these good public servants, many of whom are part-timers and retirees, are being forced to subsidize an organization they do not support and from which they receive no benefits.

Much of Friedrichs has to do with “agency fees,” which the labor unions like to call “fair share fees” for propaganda reasons.  The idea is that the union negotiates salaries and benefits for all workers, regardless of membership, so non-members should have to pay for that service.  In practice, this fee is often the same as full union dues.

In fact, as the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s brief notes, Rhode Island is one of just three states that requires by law that state employees pay such a “service charge,” and that it be the same as dues.  (In all other cases, the fees/charges, are left to each contract negotiation, so in theory a critical mass of non-union employees could demand that their employers remove the fee.)  As familiar as it is, I still find it disconcerting how common it is, when looking into issues of labor, regulation, taxes, and so on, to find Rhode Island not only on the more-burdensome, more-graft-producing side, but also taking that side to its extreme.

The Westerly case shows that these fees aren’t really for services rendered.  The unions aren’t so much negotiating employees salaries as they are negotiating their cut of payroll.

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Monday Morning Economic Thought

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When it comes to political debates, the economic points can sometimes make one wonder, “We’re really arguing about this?”  Kevin Williamson has a knack for plucking those points out, as in last week’s essay about “Chinese volatility and American hubris”:

Volatility is not caused by the absence of artificial anti-volatility measures.

That’s something that is almost always overlooked in politics: X is not usually caused by the absence of measures against X. For instance, the United States doesn’t have high levels of violent crime because of an absence of laws against guns, but because we are a violent and unruly society. (If you think our rate of shootings is elevated, compare our rate of death by bludgeoning, or our rate of accidental vehicular deaths, to the rates in Switzerland or Singapore.) And it isn’t a lack of appropriate regulation that causes some business executives to make dumb decisions or to take on excessively risky investments, any more than car wrecks are caused by the absence of guard rails, or obesity by Happy Meals.

Human society cannot be guided by the nose, at least not for long.  Attempting to put a lid on some behavior — whether unhealthy eating or stock sell-offs — will often lead to the cask’s springing unpredictable leaks or just exploding.

This is why all but some irreducible rules ought to be resolved at the most-local level possible, and through the least intrusive social institution possible.  Locally is the only level at which people have a shot at figuring out what’s going on, and it’s where they should have a right to decide whether they want to fix it.  A local lid might leak the people causing the discord if they can go elsewhere to find what they want.  Moreover, at the local level, government isn’t the only means of affecting behavior, because cultural community activity has a greater influence.

Back to Williamson:

But every expensively miseducated jackass who thinks he should be president of these United States has an opinion about what a bottle of grape soda ought to cost in Des Moines or Dixville Notch. The assumptions in Washington are the same as those in Beijing: that everything is subject to political power, that it all comes down to having the right sort of enlightened rulers with the right sort of enlightened ideas, that everything else — the real world — is detail. But human beings, and their relationships, are not electrical circuits. They are not governed by circuit breakers. Not in reality.

It very well may be the single most discouraging thing about political and policy debate that so few people understand this or have such a need to believe otherwise that they, well, try to put a lid on it.

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Obama Administration is Government on the Attack

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Well, we knew this to be true all along, didn’t we?

Administration health policy officials were downright obsessed with figuring out which Catholic institutions would fit within the section 6033-based exemption. As early as October 2011, the White House was trying to figure out how to structure the exemption so that Catholic universities would be forced to provide student contraceptives in student health plans. In July 2012, emails show officials trying to make sure that the contraceptive mandate would treat the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops – the spiritual leaders of Roman Catholic entities in the United States – differently from the colleges, charities, and other groups that they lead. The documents were originally discovered during congressional inquiries into the sharing of tax information between the IRS and the White House.

In direct contravention of his (lying) image as a bridge builder back before he was elected, Obama’s style of governance is never about respecting other people’s beliefs and space, but rather about attacking groups with which he disagrees and advancing the narrow lunacy that he’s fashioned as his ideology.

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A Back Door for Religion in Schools

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Reading Carol Bragg’s Providence Journal op-ed titled “Nonviolence transforms R.I. school” might make one wonder how its topic could be considered anything other than an establishment of religion in a public school:

Broad Rock Middle School in South Kingstown has embarked on an ambitious mission to become a model school based on Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolence. The inspiration came from Robin Wildman, a fifth grade teacher at the school who has taught about nonviolence for 15 years. Observers have remarked that they can feel in her classroom the respect, compassion and community she has built with her students.

Wildman accomplishes this by spending the first three weeks of the school year teaching nonviolence lessons, to establish the framework for how the class will operate for the remainder of the year. She says it is time well spent. The outcome is more time spent on teaching, and less on discipline.

Really, substitute a single name and it’s crystal clear that we’re talking a religion, here:

Education in Jesus’ method of nonviolence does this and more. It teaches respect. Encompassing the teachings of Jesus, it promotes love over hate; justice, forgiveness and reconciliation over revenge; respectful dialogue over rancorous debate; and positive, peaceful action over inaction or violence. The Broad Rock initiative has the potential to give young people skills they need for happy, healthy relationships throughout their lives. In addition, it will empower them to play an active, productive role in their communities, state and nation.

The article’s mention of non-profit organizations that are now being brought in proves that this isn’t just one teacher’s technique, but an organized cultural movement beyond the school’s walls.  The only conceivable difference between the cult of “nonviolence” and a religion is that the cult doesn’t go so far as to claim any real existential foundation for preferring its teachings over any other.  But teachers are still telling children what they should believe about the world, how they should interact other people, and what they should value.

Only a society enveloped in a fog of dim confusion could fail to be outraged at the notion that a secular humanist appropriation of Christianity is perfectly fine in a public school, while schools must be forbidden across the country from allowing any expression of genuine Christianity.  This is another example of the ways in which progressivism constrains allowable actions in a way that gives it an advantage as a proselytizing faith.

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Another Government Office… Yeah, That’s the Ticket

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Treasurer Seth Magaziner’s debt-oversight proposal and the Providence Journal’s endorsement of it avoid the fact that we can’t trust state government.

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The Freedom Index and the Continual Sinking of Rhode Island

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With the start of the legislative session, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has released its Freedom Index report for the 2015 session, and as usual, the results are discouraging.  Also as usual, I find the most telling chart to be the one that places individual legislators in a downward spiral:

freedom-index-spiral-2015

 

Notably, not a single legislator of any party landed in the positive range, which means that in the Center’s assessment no legislator managed to vote the correct way often enough to make up for all of the times he or she voted the wrong way.

Naturally, this raises questions about our methodology — whether we’re too rigid or too extremist or too something.  Value judgments are for each person to make, individually, but we don’t set out to draw an extremist line.  Rather, the goal is to judge bills and quantify their likely effect on Rhode Islanders’ (you guessed it) freedom and prosperity.

I’m primarily responsible for reading the bills, writing brief descriptions of them, and compiling a broad list of which ones we should track, but a panel of reviewers goes through the list, and bills’ scores often go up and down based on that feedback, periodically being removed based on the shared assessment that they really aren’t consequential.  From there, it’s just a matter of counting votes.

When other (non-politician) people have gotten a look behind the curtain, they’ve sometimes expressed surprise that they agree with (first) the bill descriptions and (next) the scores that the bills receive.  If there’s anything radical, in other words, it’s the simple act of thinking about each bill.

That’s the only reason I can come up with, anyway, that the General Assembly would be home to such universally bad voting.  People with whom I would expect to agree on just about everything vote in ways that I find inexplicable.  I wonder, therefore, whether the problem isn’t so much one of political philosophy as of civic understanding.

The role of representatives and senators isn’t (or shouldn’t be) to act as quality assurance on an assembly line of legislative widgets, determining whether each one meets muster to pass into law.  That’s much too passive.  Every new law is something that the government is doing to somebody.  The standard shouldn’t be: “Is it reasonable for somebody to ask government to do this to people.”  It should be: “Does government have to do this to people.”

In that process, legislators who vote for a bill (or fail to vote against it) are just as responsible for the effects as the sponsor who introduced it, the lobbyist who was paid to promote it, and the special interest who will benefit from it.  It is not acceptable for legislators to wave the widgets on through simply because they don’t have the expertise to know whether they will do any harm.  The people promoting new legislation should have the burden of affirmatively proving to each and every legislator that the thing must be done.

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Nanny State Edges Toward Your Children

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Way out yonder in Utah, Connor Boyack notices that federal bureaucrats are beginning to articulate a principle that the public should be able to sense in just about everything the federal government does: They aren’t clear on the threshold at which their responsibility to protect children crosses into our right to raise our own.

The entire purpose of the 18-page statement is to explain, promote and bureaucratically implement what the departments call “family engagement.” This term sounds like something every good parent would inherently want, but here’s how the government defines it: “the systematic inclusion of families as partners in children’s development, learning and wellness.”

Actually, Boyack could have selected worse phrases from the document in question, like this one:

It is the position of the Departments that all early childhood programs and schools recognize families as equal partners in improving children’s development, learning and wellness across all settings, and over the course of their children’s developmental and educational experiences.

The local school department and the state and federal government are not an “equal partner” with parents in raising our children.  At best, the government is a provider that we engage for certain services (and some of us do our best not to allow it to be even that).  The U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Education may presume to “recognize” parents as the equal of government, but what they’re really doing is asserting not only their equality with the parents, but also the authority to determine whether that equality exists.

And don’t think the federal government is alone on this.  Last month, I highlighted a similar philosophical impression coming from Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s Children’s Cabinet:

According to the governor, the government is going to link together all of its agencies, along with federal funds, private non-profits, and private companies to take it upon themselves to stop children from “feeling sad.”  This is the stuff of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.  We used to chuckle about these make-work political initiatives because we knew we were protected by the limited powers of government, but we can’t chuckle anymore because it’s undeniable that people in and around government really mean it.

The Children’s Cabinet buzzwords haven’t yet crossed the threshold into subordinating parents, but it’s difficult to decide whether it’s a good sign or a bad one that its strategic plan only mentions parents three times, and only as the income-earners and housing-providers of their families.  The lack of mention could be taken as an acknowledgement that the government isn’t on the same plane as parents, when it comes to their children, or an insinuation that parents’ rights are largely an irrelevant political problem to be addressed down the road, when strings come with the oft-mentioned federal grants.

As bureaucrats ease into language that better reflects their political philosophy and state agencies define their role as totalitarians, the public should be sure to keep one thing very clear: They are subordinate to us, not the other way around.

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The Odd Language of Progressive Activism

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A line in Kathy Gregg’s Providence Journal article about protests at the State House today — one against the truck toll proposal and one in favor of giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants — seemed to stumble on language in a telling way:

“No more second class status. All Rhode Islanders should come in from the shadows. It is time for all of RI’s workers to have equal access to our roads,” said Mike Araujo, executive director of the coalition known as “RI Jobs With Justice,” in a media advisory for this 3-to-4:30 p.m. march and rally.

“Second class” is an adjective, and “status” isn’t a very descriptive word.  Second-class what?  Most commonly, in American politics, one would expect the noun to be “citizens,” but that’s clearly not the case, here.  Second-class residents?  That still seems odd.

The phrase “second class status” deliberately attempts to skirt this question in a way that insinuates rights without thought, skipping a legitimate question:  Are there rights and privileges that somebody who came to this country and this state illegally should be denied?  Clearly, the answer is “yes,” unless one intends to claim that anybody who manages to cross a border should be entitled to vote and hold public office.

Such rhetoric, frankly, reveals the lie behind claims like Raimondo’s assurances that granting licenses to illegal immigrants is simply a safety issue.  It’s all about safety in much the same way that same-sex marriage was all about allowing gay partners to visit each other in the hospital… until to turned out to be about forcing Christian bakers to help celebrate same-sex marriages or Catholic adoption agencies to place children in same-sex households.

Americans should stop falling for the bait and switch.  If advocates and progressive Democrat politicians want to push our society in a particular direction, they should make the case.  They shouldn’t try to sneak it in as simply a practical tweak.  Supply the noun.  Giving illegal immigrants licenses would make them “full” whats?

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President as King, Governor as Lord

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A recent Charles C.W. Cooke essay from the print National Review is definitely worth a full read, but here’s a taste of his point:

In his recent book Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Columbia University professor Philip Hamburger suggests that we are not. The Constitution of the United States, Hamburger contends, represented a conscious attempt to banish from this country’s political structure a host of the insidious tools upon which monarchs and emperors had historically relied: among them prerogative lawmaking, legislative enabling acts, suspending and dispensing powers, and the investment of legislative, judicial, and executive functions into one body. Alarmingly, Hamburger concludes, these features have gradually found their way back into the system — not because the Constitution has been overthrown or because Washington, D.C., has been occupied by an invading force, but because over time we have constructed an unwarranted “fourth branch” in addition to the original three, and we have allowed the executive branch to take advantage of it.

By “fourth branch,” Hamburger is referring to the vast caste of unelected government employees who staff the array of administrative agencies that have sprung up around the country since the start of the 20th century and, slowly but surely, enjoyed ever-increasing power over our lives. Far from reflecting a benign, novel, and necessary change in the detail of our self-government, Hamburger submits, these entities are returning us to the bad old days of rule by fiat. Unlike the Prussians and the French, he argues, Anglo-American societies have historically insisted that the liberties of free men be restricted only by the legislature and the courts, not by executive decree. By permitting a vast and unaccountable bureaucracy to grow in their midst, Americans have reimported into their system a virus against which their Constitution was supposed to protect them. Worst of all: They have done so without a care in the world.

We see this at the state level, too, with state agencies that set their regulations, adjudicate controversies about them, and impose resolutions.  Often the most destructive form this practice takes doesn’t target individuals or private organizations, but government.  Relatively early in my involvement in Tiverton, the problem became clear.

Locals concerned that their town government was not following the process for raising taxes above the state cap, as described in statute but really fleshed out in regulation, found conspicuously that the dubious interpretations made by local politicians, supported by a paid solicitor, were ratified by the relevant state agency.  (As with Ethics Commission rulings, it’s not always obvious why one question is answered one way while a similar question elsewhere might be answered another.)  Similarly, in battling over the specific import of budget appropriations at the towns’ financial meeting, we found the Dept. of Education, having made the rules, judged them and imposed the ruling, conspicuously tiptoeing around politically sensitive conclusions.

With the “fourth branch,” the government always wins, from the most local level to the national or even global level.  That’s not liberty.

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IRS Powers Expand… Get Out While You Can?

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Seriously, what is this country coming to?

A new enforcement provision passed by Congress and signed into law earlier this month allows the government to revoke the passports of seriously delinquent tax scofflaws — people who owe more than $50,000 to Uncle Sam.

As with many such first steps, the limits seem high enough that most people won’t be able to imagine themselves in such circumstances, but this is an obnoxious line to cross.  Primarily, it reinforces the sense that American government is mainly a money-confiscation scheme targeted at its people.

That’s a more fundamental problem than just concern that Uncle Sam has become a shakedown artist; it changes the relationship of people to their government.  Government of, by, and for the people begins to look like something else when owing the government money becomes grounds for restricting their ability to travel.

Worse yet, as Investors Business Daily suggests, the IRS just can’t be trusted.  The agency targeted groups for political reasons on the non-profit side and has suffered no consequences and has taken to confiscating people’s money simply because agents find small cash transactions suspicious.  Worse, the corrupt organization essentially determines its own rules and polices itself.

Citizens of the United States can have no expectation that the IRS will apply this rule evenly, fairly, or honestly.  A few trumped up allegations, potentially no more significant than a computer glitch, could find anybody who opposes the ruling regime in the cross hairs, while those on the preferred side have their transgressions overlooked.

Even when the country doesn’t have a president who jokes about using audits as a weapon, the IRS is many steps beyond its prudent boundaries.

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An Essential Difference in Understanding of Rights

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In their understanding of rights and government, Obama and progressives are the true descendants of imperialists, colonialists, nationalists, and racists.

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The End of Another Unconstitutional Year

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Ilya Shapiro revisits his biannual practice of listing “President Obama’s Top Ten Constitutional Violations of 2015.”  It’s not an easy task, to be sure.

Setting aside legislation and executive action (on which more imminently), we note that one of President Obama’s chief accomplishments has been to return the Constitution to a central place in our public discourse.

Unfortunately, the president fomented this upswing in civic interest not by talking up federalism or the separation of powers but by blatantly violating the strictures of our founding document. With his pen and his phone, and hearkening to Woodrow Wilson’s progressive view of government, he’s been taking out his frustrations with the checks and balances that inhibit his ability to “fundamentally transform” the country.

This president has certainly been a lesson in how easily a demagogue with the backing of the elite (which brings him a palace-guard news media and a judiciary wanting, at the very least, not to provoke him into full assault) can make treasured civic freedoms and rights disappear in just a matter of a few years.  Mind you, Obama has been busy mainly knocking out procedural rules that the average American won’t perceive as grounded in rights — unconstitutional revisions to ObamaCare, for example, and expanding the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  For the most part, these are actions that people generally accept that government can do, even if they’re supposed to involve the legislature.

Protecting such structural pieces of our constitutional order, however, is how we prevent the next step into dictatorship.  After all, the legislature isn’t just a bureaucratic spot for new laws to stop for the proper stamp.  It’s how we’re supposed to ensure that we consent to the laws under which we live.  In that regard, the damage that Obama has done goes way beyond a few legislative shortcuts, and we’ve seen hints in such things as the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups to ensure the president’s reelection and the scapegoating of a filmmaker over the Benghazi attack, as well as the dubious transfer of taxpayer dollars to preferred businesses and activist groups.

We live in perilous times.  That too few people recognize that fact only exacerbates the peril.

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The Slippery Ground of Driver’s Licenses and Voting

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The barriers between driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and their ability to vote are not very daunting, and citizens who suspect the rule of law has eroded should be concerned about the government’s intentions.

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The Real Risk of Public-Private Partnerships in Education

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The Commerce Corp.’s P-Tech program is an example of education reform and public-private partnerships that ought to set off alarm bells for those concerned with individual rights.

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Prosecuting Government

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My first thought, reading Andrew McCarthy’s review of Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Stealing America, was to wonder whether Providence Journal Edward Fitzpatrick knows anything about D’Souza’s travails:

It is no coincidence, D’Souza convincingly argues, that the Obama Justice Department scorched the earth to convict and attempt to imprison him. The brazenness of its aggression took the breath away from such hardened criminal-defense attorneys as Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, an Obama supporter who found the vindictiveness of D’Souza’s prosecution shameful, and Benjamin Brafman, the legendary New York City defense lawyer who represented D’Souza.

As D’Souza and McCarthy both acknolwedge, D’Souza plainly broke the law, yet a modern device of tyranny is to make everything illegal and then give clemency to friends (or simply ignore their transgressions).  In this, one could wonder whether politicians are simply following the practice of the news media.

The more-interesting point, however, comes with these paragraphs:

The principal evolution in the author’s thinking involves seeing his political adversaries as, yes, enemies. And as criminals. As a conservative intellectual, D’Souza had assessed progressives as true believers in an utterly flawed ideology. He was a forceful advocate of the conservative counter-case: liberty, limited government, human fallibility, the wisdom undergirding our traditions. Yet implicit in his arguments was the sense of engagement in a real battle of ideas against a bona fide political opponent.

After his harrowing adventure — first, in the crosshairs of a corrupt executive branch that knows that the administration of governmental processes can ruin even the most innocent of men, never mind one who has actually committed an infraction; then, in the company of lifetime criminals whose lives are mainly about taking what is not rightfully theirs — D’Souza has changed. Progressives, he now perceives, are engaged in a massive scheme to “steal America,” meaning all of its wealth and traditions. Their ideas and the foibles of their interest-group politics are often incoherent because they are not actually meant to cohere. They are, instead, a Machiavellian ploy, a pretense to morality (because the public expects it) that camouflages the remorseless acquisition of power needed to rob the public blind.

The unfortunate problem is that there are no police or legitimate authorities to whom to turn for protection and appeal against corrupt progressives when they’ve twisted the language so as to make it unusable for resolution of real differences of opinions and when they so obviously see the only rule being “we must win.”

That’s a hard lesson people getting involved in politics have to learn. You can’t “win the argument” because the debate has no referee. This leaves only development of an opposing gang, which many on the right find appealing. That strategy, however, is vulnerable to the fact that destroying everything serves the progressives. Conservatives should want our system to work as advertised.

The good news is the ultimate judge on high who gives us the space to push back but to trust in reward and final peace whether or not we win on Earth.

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A Warning in Three Steps

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The warning signs for civil unrest are all there, plain to see, but America’s ruling class is marching along nonetheless

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What to Do About Those Privileges and Advantages

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Making up for past advantage from racism is an impossible and immoral task; better to move on from our current moment.

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Hey, Tony (Defeat of the Dancing Cop)

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With the realization that it’d be impossible to parody the Saga of the Dancing Cop, here’s a song to mark this moment of loss for quirky Rhode Island.

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Heed John Kerry and Halt Global Totalitarianism

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Spun up on the topic of climate change, Secretary of State John Kerry has been letting some problematic phrases fly out into public awareness.  Here he is talking about how binding the United States even to impossible standards for green living would essentially be pointless:

… The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what – that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.

If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions –- remember what I just said, all the industrial emissions went down to zero emissions -– it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65% of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.

But this, from the same speech, is what really gives the game away:

Addressing climate change will require a fundamental change in the way that we decide to power our planet. And our aim can be nothing less than a steady transformation of a global economy.

The global ruling class wants the authority to dictate around the globe how people and businesses collect and use energy.  To help developing countries address the burden, governments in wealthy countries will confiscate money from their own people and deliver it to poorer countries.  This will help the leaders (often dictatorships of one kind or another) maintain a minimal standard of living without having to loosen economic policy or allow alternative sources of power (as through successful businesses) develop beyond their control.

Meanwhile, much of the wealth being redirected will simply go to well-connected cronies providing this alternative energy.  Because their technologies require subsidies, this switch also eliminates the energy sector of the economy as a source of wealth and power beyond the reach of government, making the rise of future Koch Bros. impossible.

This explains the repeated insistence (for decades, now) that this is the last chance to stop the end of the world.  It explains why useful idiots like Harrison Ford proclaim the risk of human extinction.  Appearing before the U.S. Senate Sub-Committee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, writer Mark Steyn explained the McCarthyism of the climate science cabal by saying the cabal gives itself license for inappropriate behavior because “it’s no longer about “meteorology”, it’s about saving the planet.”

At that level of urgency, all quaint traditions about rights go out the window.  That should not be acceptable.

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Raimondo Echoes Prayer Mockery

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It’s difficult to understand why the governor of Rhode Island, a week later, would decide to echo the ghoulish and offensive attack of left wingers on those who offer thoughts and prayers for the victims of attacks — in this case, a terrorist attack — but she did.

Last week, as the nation watched with concern the slow trickle of information about the attack in San Bernardino and victims requested prayers, left-wing politicians, journalists, and activists turned their ire against those who were offering “thoughts and prayers,” mocking them as an ineffectual substitute for more gun control laws further eroding the Second Amendment.

Already out on a limb with that sentiment, those expressing it looked downright foolish when the attack turned out to be terrorism, and the taint of foolishness has darkened as information has come out about the incident, suggesting that it was part of a plot in which somebody else bought the guns (which, I believe, are actually outlawed in California) and sending the FBI to Europe for the investigation.  And yet, during a media event intended to promote anti-gun laws in Rhode Island:

“When I became governor, I never thought I would spend so much time ordering our flags at half mast on account of gun tragedies in this country, and we just did it again,” [Democrat Governor Gina] Raimondo said, referring to last week’s San Bernardino, Calif., shootings. “We spend entirely too much time extending our good wishes, sympathies, thoughts and our prayers to victims, and not enough time getting around the table and saying, ‘What can we do?'”

At least as presented in Alisha Pina’s Providence Journal report, the answers of the panel were pretty thin, mainly having to do with increasing restrictions for those involved in domestic violence disputes.  But the event and Raimondo’s rhetoric during it suggest that the governor is either steeped in left-wing talking points and media or is deliberately coordinating her actions as our governor with national Democrats, most likely in support of likely presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton — whom Raimondo vocally supports and who is currently under investigation by the FBI for alleged misuse of a private server to process her classified email when she was Secretary of State.

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Ripping up the Gun Control Clichés

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Larry Correia offers a good summary romp through some of the gun-control-related nonsense that followed the — “Straight up terrorism. Like dictionary definition terrorism.” — attacks in San Bernardino.  Read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

Then they revealed who the shooters were.

Immediately the same exact people who’d just been screeching about evil Tea Party, racist, hate monger, right wing, ciswhitehetero male phantoms, began urging calm, saying don’t jump to conclusions. It isn’t fair to tar the big group because of the actions of a few. Watch out for that hateful rhetoric, because you might inflame people.

Sure, they had no problem making sweeping generalizations and “inflaming” half the country a few minutes ago… But that’s okay. Because when the left talks about how violent and blood thirsty the right is, they’re just virtue signaling for their tribe. If my people were a fraction as evil and hateful as they portray us, they’d never say a word. They do it because they know it is safe to do so. Christians aren’t going to saw their heads off. The Tea Party isn’t going to set off a car bomb in front of their house. Ever notice how to the media talking about radical militant Islam is islamophobia, but there’s no equivalent media buzz word for being irrationally terrified of half of America?

They attack us because they know we’re really the ones who can take their livelihoods and privileges away, if we should decide to cut off the constant flow of government funds and social privilege.  Yet, they still expect we’ll continue to provide the feed stock for the military, emergency personnel, and security staffs on whom they rely to keep them safe.

It’s a dangerous game they’re playing, but they aren’t exactly known for living in reality.

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Taking Us Over with Created Money

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Those who wish to re-engineer our society to better fit their tastes (and usually their own personal financial interests) have been staying quiet about RhodeMap RI and its related plans.  The juggernaut keeps moving, though, with the persistence of the Obama Administration; the money never runs out, largely because it’s not real money.

As Ken Blackwell and Rick Manning mention, Congress is in the process of removing funding for enforcement of a rule propagated by the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).  Basically, federal bureaucrats use their limitless resources as a bribe for states, cities, and towns to commit their neighborhoods to social experimentation.  (One suspects that we’ll be able to tell who’s really rich and/or influential by the fact that their own neighborhoods will remain untouched.)

This method raises an interesting point:

Refusal to comply with these invasive, unfunded mandates would empower the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to withhold millions of dollars in community development block grants from the area – effectively turning this $3.5 billion annual program into a political redistricting tool.

Like a drug dealer, the federal government has worked, over the years, to hook more-local governments on federal funds, which allows them to skirt mechanisms in the U.S. Constitution designed to prevent an overly powerful national government.  The HUD bureaucrats aren’t specifically mandating local zoning rules, but they’re dangling a pretty big lure on that hook.

Some of us find it difficult to understand why it’s so difficult just to refuse the money, but our political system has come to be built for invidious incentives.  Doing things with money that comes from a higher tier of government gets elected officials credit for spreading money around and getting things done without their having to suffer the consequences of taking that money away from somebody.  The feds take that heat.

But then, they really don’t.  Until the early-to-mid 1900s, the federal government ran surpluses more often than it ran deficits.  Since then, surpluses have been very rare, and the deficits have been massive.  Since Obama took office, the average annual deficit has been nearly a trillion dollars, and the government expects them to continue at around a half-trillion dollars for the foreseeable future.

That is, our local governments are being bought off with money that nobody currently in office has to take responsibility for collecting at any level.  That’s not how our government is supposed to function; rather, it’s a recipe for lost rights, followed by disaster.

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Government Resources to Promote Politicians (Who Work to Limit Opponents)

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I’m mentioned in today’s Providence Journal Political Scene as the right-wing branch of a broad consensus that Governor Gina Raimondo is inappropriately using public funds to promote herself as a politician:

“So … Raimondo used taxpayer funds for what smells an awful lot like a campaign ad. Like what Chris Christie did,” tweeted Sam Bell, state coordinator for the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats of America. (“Agree 100% with Sam. Both the video and its prominent placement on the public Web site are inappropriate,” said Ocean State Current blogger Justin Katz.)

Raimondo Communications Director Joy Fox declares this a new media thing, but it’s not.  New media is just the pretense to completely eviscerate the etiquette that politicians should at least look for some pretense to promote themselves — as with former Providence Mayor Angel Taveras putting his face on a Rt. 95 bulletin board to welcome a new musical to the city or the Taveras–David Cicilline practice of putting their names on Graffiti Task Force vans that drive around the city.

Such affronts are rarely mentioned, naturally, when politicians like, umm, David Cicilline work to limit the amount of money that their opponents can bring to bear in political races (generally known as “campaign finance reform”).  When you’ve got the advantage that other people, including taxpayers, pay to have your face and name plastered everywhere in which your voters can be found, it’s surely desirable to impede your opposition’s ability to collect enough money to compete.

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The Criminal in Racially Imbalanced Prison Statistics

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Want the source of “institutional racism” resulting in disparate imprisonment statistics? Look to big government and liberal social policies.

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Enhancing Votes with Non-voters

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While I’m on the topic of electoral integrity, here’s a peripheral story worth keeping on the radar:

A Supreme Court case being argued Tuesday threatens to diminish Latinos’ clout and benefit white, rural voters.

Two voters in Texas are asking the court to order a drastic change in the way Texas and every other state divides their electoral districts. Rather than basing the maps on total population, including non-citizens and children who aren’t old enough to vote, states must count only people who are eligible to vote, the challengers say. They argue that change is needed to carry out the true meaning of the principle of one person, one vote.

Naturally, journalists and activists have to make this all about race and ethnicity, because that’s how they think — as racists do.  That perspective does, however, shed an interesting light on the urge to keep up the flow of low-income, poorly educated immigrants to urban areas.  Even if they can’t vote, they effectively increase the weight of their neighbors’ votes.

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The March of Government at the Speed of Business

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Various steps that Governor Gina Raimondo has been taking give clear indication of where she’s taking Rhode Island government (and where it was already headed), and it’s the stuff of Orwell and Huxley.

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That’s the Final Straw Hops

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This is going too far, and if it isn’t stopped, 2016 may not only be the year I buy a gun, but also the year I start distributing pitchforks:

FDA busybodies will mandate by next December that restaurant chains offer full nutritional information for beers on tap — everything from calorie counts to protein content. The rule forces breweries to do expensive tests to keep their suds flowing at places like Applebee’s or TGI Friday’s. …

Such lab work costs more than $600 per brew and takes weeks. Big manufacturers like Bud can absorb the expense and delays, but [New York City’s] 30 small craft brewers will be hit hard.

Many of these local artisanal brewers make dozens of different styles of beer, many of them seasonal — and each variety would require the costly, time-consuming analysis. Other Half Brewing in Brooklyn, for example, lists 42 brews on its Web site.

When I was younger, the understanding was that all the cool kids and rock stars were liberal because conservatives were all about preventing you from finding pleasure and enjoyment in life.  (Clearly, sometimes the most patently idiotic propaganda is the most effective.)

News flash for all you liberal beer drinkers (wasn’t “Drink Liberally” a thing around here, recently?):  It ain’t conservatives who think you need protection from yourself when it comes to experimenting with differently flavored ales, lagers, and stouts put out by small companies that mostly want to make ends meet while producing products that they, themselves, enjoy.

For crying out loud.  We didn’t even get the intermediate step of forcing bars to post signage reading “drink at your own risk.”

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A Telling Priority for Electoral Integrity

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A member of an international commission undermines his complaint against the United States by admitting something the commission left out of its report.

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Watch What You Type in Modern America

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A Reuters article by Dustin Volz offers a good reminder about the nature of the Internet:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has used a secretive authority to compel Internet and telecommunications firms to hand over customer data including an individual’s complete web browsing history and records of all online purchases, a court filing released Monday shows.

The documents are believed to be the first time the government has provided details of its so-called national security letters, which are used by the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance without the need for court approval.

Scott Shackford has posted a sample letter on Reason.  The government’s requests for this information — and the gag orders that it imposes on the Internet service providers that hand it over — are significant most of all because they illustrate that this data is out there.

What you search for online, what you look at in online stores, what ebooks you read, what Netflix movies you watch (including where you stop, pause, and rewatch, probably)… all of this information is out there.  Imagine a spy following you around everywhere and noting everything you say and do.  Sure, the likelihood is that the notes will simply disappear into a sea of similar information, but they’re there, and if people with access ever have a reason to review it, the recall is instantaneous.

It’s healthy to disconnect from the Internet for health, psychological, sociological, and spiritual reasons, but privacy should be factored in there, and it’s becoming harder and harder to find.

Once in a while, it’s nice to take some cash out at the bank, drive an older car to the book store, pick up a subversive book, and bring it home to read just to know that nobody knows you own it… at least until face-recognition software is perfected.

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What Rhode Island Politicians Have Been Building Toward

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Whether in Chicago or Rhode Island, the progressive project is a society in which government officials have power to force their own policies on the people and collect lots of money.

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