As Americans across the country attempt to deal with a global pandemic while respecting each other’s rights, Tiverton Town Council President Patricia Hilton has given herself total power over town government.
The law and its enforcement rightly (and inevitably) has some flexibility, but that only puts the responsibility on the citizenry to put up resistance.
A recent bill to mandate aspects of media reporting deserved its death and ridicule, but the reaction does raise questions about when censorship is OK and how much it depends who is being censored.
My weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM show, for March 16, included talk about:
I’ll be on again Monday, March 23, at 12:00 p.m. on WNRI 1380 AM and I-95.1 FM.
State and local governments are going a step too far (or more) over COVID-19, and the time is now for Rhode Islanders and Americans to figure out exactly where their boundaries are.
Advocates for school choice can feel like they’re getting stuck, but a lesson from the Second Amendment movement might help them find new support.
Tanzi’s solution for solving gun violence is not only an overreaction but would be ineffective and unfair, as well.
My weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM show, for March 9, included talk about:
I’ll be on again Monday, March 16, at 12:00 p.m. on WNRI 1380 AM and I-95.1 FM.
The governor’s tax and budget team plainly admits that her proposed tax on gun ranges and clubs is meant to infringe on Rhode Islanders’ civil rights.
So, you believe some government agency is violating your civil rights. What do you do? You file a civil rights lawsuit, you make the argument, a judge gives it some thought, and there you go. Sounds simple, right?
Well, there’s a little more to it than that — time, not the least.
Back in November, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity partnered with the Liberty Justice Center (LJC) to challenge unconstitutional requirements for the disclosure of donors to issue advocacy organizations. As the press release notes, “this invasive and unconstitutional law exposes citizens to possible retaliation and harassment for simply exercising their free speech rights.”
About a month ago, Rhode Island’s attorney general, Peter Neronha, filed a 20-page motion to dismiss the case. And now a month later, as announced in another press release, the Center and LJC have submitted their response.
This is a long, drawn out process that leads one despairing of the capacity of the average citizen to defend his or her rights. Lawyers must either be paid or convinced to donate their time, and those whose rights are being violated must simply live with it for months and years.
If that’s the process, then that’s the process, but it’d be much better for legislators to keep their constituents’ rights in mind when creating laws.
Mr. Calenda was a prosecutor in the Attorney General’s office for many years. Now in private practice he describes how the “Red Flag Law” has been implemented over the last 18 months and its implications on the constitutional protections of due process and unlawful search and seizure. He also discusses the “assault weapons” and “high capacity magazine” bills introduced once again in this current session of the Legislature.
Generation Z should take the opportunity of being young to rethink how we address gun violence to drop misinformation and prejudices.
Guests: Julie Casimiro, State Representative, H-D 31, rep-Casimiro@rilegislature.gov
Camille Vella-Wilkinson, State Representative, H-D 21, rep-vella-wilkinson@rilegislature.gov
Host: Richard August
Topic: Vaping and other pending legislation
Host: Richard August Time: 60 minutes
Representatives Casimiro and Vella-Wilkinson discuss a broad range of pending legislation and other matters, which have their concern. Topics include vaping legislation; a veteran joint oversight committee; pharmacist having birth control prescription authority; reproductive health; firearm legislation; climate control; out of school time learning; early parole for young rehabilitated offenders; military sexual assault trauma; and more. Other matters include the need for a constitutional convention; line item veto; minimum wage; and candidate endorsements.
The former Rhode Island politician seeks the presidency with a new party and a change of heart towards the Second Amendment.
My weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM show, for January 27, included talk about:
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I’ll be on again Monday, February 3, at 12:00 p.m. on WNRI 1380 AM and I-95.1 FM.
Despite heavy regulation of home gun-making already on the books, Rhode Island’s legislature is seeking to turn law-abiding hobbyists into criminals.
If you try to keep track of policy and politics in Rhode Island (and if you’re reading this site, you probably do), you should put the State of the State program on your watch list. The program usually has two half-hour segments, but sometimes sticks with one guest for an hour, and it’s a good way to get a different point of view from the mainstream, from both the guests and the hosts, who often ask questions public figures and others wouldn’t be asked elsewhere.
The latest episode had a segment on Title IX abuse and another on Second Amendment rights.
1-13-20 Recent Title IX Cases from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
1-13-20 Stun Guns, Tasers and the 2nd Amendment from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
In his recent essay on this site, Dr. Stephen Skoly described the consequences of legislation seeking to regulate prescription opioids, but he stopped short of broad conclusions about the politics involved. As it happens, one such conclusion fit in well with the other topics that John DePetro and I discussed on December 30.
We can, of course, debate whether a new $5 million fee for opioid manufacturers and wholesalers is actually about solving a social problem, rather than finding a new source of revenue. But taking the politicians at their word for their motivation, one can at least say that such policies infantilize the people, as if our legislators and governor are the only adults in the state and therefore must protect patients from their irresponsible selves and from greedy doctors.
Something milder and, in its way, worse is probably going on, as well. The theme that John and I happened upon in our segment was that government officials in Rhode Island shy away from addressing actual problems. They look for all sorts of ways to get at them without actually naming and attacking the root causes.
When it comes to a failing education system, they seek work-arounds and small tweaks like, like shifting authority toward principals, rather than draw attention to the labor-union structure that makes the system all about the remuneration of adults rather than the education of children. When it comes to teenage fights at a mall, the focus goes to things like community programs to give kids something to do, rather than unraveling the progressive assumptions that lead to gang-friendly policing and suspension-unfriendly school regulations (not to mention identity-group entitlement).
Just so, going after fentanyl and heroin on the criminal market would manifest in urban areas and among minorities. Many people in those communities would be grateful for the improved environment, but the enforcement and incarceration statistics would look bad and draw the attention of groups like the ACLU. So instead, government tries to find a solution from the other side, making things more difficult (literally more painful) for law-abiding citizens, in the hopes that they can limit the market for the drugs and make the dealers go away for lack of profit.
If that approach also produces a $5 million fee for government, so much the better.
For the category of the news media constructing narratives on behalf of government, is there any way this finding could have been otherwise?
Police: R.I.’s red flag law ‘likely averted potential tragedies’
As of Oct. 31, state and local police across Rhode Island had invoked the red flag law on 33 occasions since its adoption in June 2018. The law allows police to petition a court for an “extreme risk protection order” that allows them to confiscate firearms from individuals believed to be at “imminent risk” of killing themselves or others.
Yeah, of course any time you take away somebody’s gun, you can say you might have stopped some tragedy. But (of course) maybe you didn’t.
The implicit bias of this article is indicative of the entire gun-control impulse. It’s the same mentality that says if we just take away all guns, we’ll obviously be avoiding tragedies.
Except when we don’t. In those cases, there’s always an excuse and an explanation of how being even more aggressive about taking away guns would work better. Contrary evidence is also difficult to connect decisively; while law enforcement can claim that every confiscated gun might have “averted potential tragedies,” we simply don’t know what “potential tragedies” might be caused by confiscation.
There are the immediate scenarios, of course, like the woman who obeyed a gun-free-zone law while the stalker who murdered her husband did not or the Texas church-goers who brought a quick halt to a mass shooting attempt. And then there are the longer-term consequences of being the sort of people who’ll let government promise us greater security if only we’ll sacrifice a little bit more of our freedom.
A kangaroo relationship-court at Johnson & Wales raises the question of the place that colleges (in general and in specific) hold in our society.
Earlier today, I highlighted Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s intention to make gasoline more expensive because “we have to get off of gas-guzzling cars for the existence of us.” By pure chance, today, I also came across this indication, in The Economist, of the future of this sort of argument, under the headline, “How much would giving up meat help the environment?”:
IT IS NO secret that steaks and chops are delicious. But guzzling them incurs high costs for both carnivorous humans and the planet. Over half of adults in both America and Britain say they want to reduce their meat consumption, according to Mintel, a market-research firm. Whether they will is a different matter. The amount of meat that Americans and Britons consume per day has risen by 10% since 1970, according to figures from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.
People who want to eat less livestock—but who can’t quite bring themselves to exchange burgers for beans—might take inspiration from two recent academic papers.
Whether we’ll freely take inspiration from those two academic papers, we can predict that somebody else will take inspiration to use government to force us to stop being “meat-guzzlers.”
Once we allow that government can use its power to nudge us away from exercises of our freedom, activists will find an endless series of activities that the world would be better off without.
Note this, from Guy Bentley on Reason:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has finally identified a primary suspect in the wave of vaping-related lung illnesses and deaths.
Examining lung tissue samples of patients hospitalized with vaping-related illnesses, 100 percent tested positive for vitamin e acetate, often used to cut marijuana oils. This was not a surprise to those who have been arguing that the cause of these illnesses is not the commercial e-cigarette market, but the illicit market for THC vapes.
Now recall that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo moved quickly to hurt Rhode Island businesses by unilaterally banning a legal product that even then looked likely not to be the culprit.
Yes, we’re decades into a campaign by government to create a superstitious dread of nicotine products, but still… part of me can’t help but feel like every incident like this is a test to see how willingly Americans will give up their rights and their freedom. The results of this test were not encouraging, at least in Southern New England.
Putting campaign finance laws in terms of rights and responsibilities brings out the principles on which they should (and shouldn’t) be founded.
My weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM show, for November 11, included talk about:
Rep. Moira Walsh’s desire to shut down any business with margins too thin to increase pay shows progressives’ demand for everybody to adhere to the world as they see it at the moment.
A brief summary of the essential elements leading to no indictments related to the August 14th incident where a Wyatt Detention Center guard drove his truck into immigration-enforcement protesters blocking the entrance to the facility parking lot is as follows…
Protesters at Wyatt wanted some lawlessness, when it gave them an advantage in imposing their will on others.
At the point where the lawless enviornment no longer provided the protestors with the advantage they sought, they wanted the state to step in and take their side.
The system seems to have reached the conclusion that the protestors’ ask was unfair, and has rejected it.
The continuation of events following the decision not to indict is also worth noting…
As recorded in the Woonsocket Call, on the day it was announced, the grand jury decision not to indict was protested at the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office in downtown Providence.
However, despite the parking lot for the Attorney General’s office being nearby, the protestors chose not to block traffic or attempt to deny anyone access to a public space during the Providence protest.
Worth discussing, especially with people with divergent views on how the police, prosecutors and the court system are dealing with these types of events; is why the protesters chose blocking access to a public space as their tactic in one place but not the other. There are variety of possibilities and working through them may be revealing.
Ken Block has been one of the most visible reformers looking for change in the State of Rhode Island, and last year, he directed some of his attention toward the City of Warwick, its financial problems, and the questionable way it was handling some of its operations. That’s when his Warwick-based office received a visit from the fire marshal, conducting a surprise inspection based on an “anonymous, non-specific complaint.”
After waiting a year for Warwick Mayor Joseph Solomon to deliver on his promise of a review of that inspection, Block has filed a complaint with the attorney general’s office:
I write today to file a formal complaint with your office regarding the City of Warwick. I believe that I have been the victim of abuse of power and an unfair and possibly illegal search. …
The visits to my office by first the fire department, then the Mayor and lastly the tax office conspired to send me a crystal-clear message: stop causing trouble or we will make your life hard.
Public servants should never abuse the power that is only made possible by the voters and taxpayers that support them. I look to your office as an important check on this sort of abuse.
Reformers are always at a disadvantage when pushing back against government abuse, particularly in a state like Rhode Island, which is incredibly lopsided, politically, and becoming more so, not less. If the legal system and judiciary won’t act as a check on abuse, then all truly is lost. The same is true if people, like Ken Block, stop pushing back.
Legislators’ relentless attack on Rhode Islanders’ rights may leave only recourse to a constitutional convention.
A British court ruling made international headlines last week when it decided that the Bible is incompatible with human dignity. The case involved a Christian doctor who, out of the conviction of his beliefs, refused to refer to a transgender patient by their desired pronouns. As a result, the doctor was fired.
Should, God forbid, these same sentiments become commonplace in the United States, we should fear that it would mark the beginning of the end of not just religious liberty, but the acknowledgement of universal human rights in general. The most important piece of the philosophy upon which America was founded is the idea that we are endowed by our Creator the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This statement recognizes that human dignity is absolute, not because of the decisions made by judges, rulers, and governors, but because of the dictates of a God that is infinitely more powerful and authoritative.
If the United States, like this British court, at some point decides to throw God out of the picture, we would be forced to come to terms with the fact that government, being the most authoritative force over our lives, is the entity that has the final say over the definition of our rights and dignity. As it currently stands under the precepts of the Declaration, government does not grant us our rights, it dutifully acknowledges them as absolute, universal, and eternal, and protects them accordingly. A society that rejects God’s say in this matter grants this authority to its government, and had better hope and pray it doesn’t change its mind on what human rights should be.
For more thoughts on the issue of human dignity, I have written a more extensive piece on my personal site.
Perhaps the most clarifying statement in Rhode Island politics, recently, came from one of the candidates now involved with Matt Brown’s Political Cooperative (which, despite the name, is not an alt-country band):
“Thought I may be the epitome of the American dream I cannot sit around and watch while many of my brothers and sisters are denied a shot at that very dream,″ said Jonathan Acosta, tracing his own story from “first generation American born to undocumented migrants from Colombia″ to the Ivy League.
“I believe that we are not free until we have dismantled structural inequality, developed sustainable clean energy, enacted a $15 minimum wage that pays equal pay for equal work, extended healthcare for all, provide[d] affordable housing, ensured quality public education starting at Pre-K, undergone campaign finance reform, criminal justice reform, and implemented sensible gun control,″ said Acosta, running for the Senate seat currently held by Elizabeth Crowley, D-Central Falls.
So, to Mr. Acosta, we’re not free until we’ve taken from some categories of people to give to others, limited people’s energy options to benefit fashionable technologies, forbidden employers and employees from setting a mutually agreeable value on work to be done, taken money from some people in order to pay for others’ health care (as defined by a vote-buying government) and/or put price controls on what providers can charge, placed restrictions on who can live where and what they can build, tightened the regulation of politics with limits on the donations and privacy of those who become politically active, and reduced the rights guaranteed under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.
If that doesn’t match your understanding of “freedom,” you’re not alone. Indeed, by its mission, this “cooperative” is cooperating against anybody whose understanding of freedom differs, because it cannot possibly cooperate with anybody who disagrees. You simply can’t hold a definition of freedom that doesn’t have satisfactory outcomes for the interest groups that progressives have targeted.