A Pause to Thank Obama for the Lesson

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Lots of things happen when an incompetent administration bullies, lies, and buys off a nation into a breath-takingly complex experiment in government power grabbing in a critical area of every citizen’s life. Most of them are bad — catastrophic, even, especially for individuals — but one small positive thing we can salvage is the lesson.

So, let’s pause to thank the narcissistic head of that administration for the clarity. According to Obama voter Walter Russell Mead, “the most shocking ObamaCare revelation” is that “the President of the United States didn’t know that his major domestic priority wasn’t ready for prime time — and he thinks that sharing this news with us will somehow make it better.”

Adjusting for the attributes of this administration that give the impression of cosmic hyperbolism, that shocking fact actually may derive from a commonplace error of progressive thought… a sort of infant peek-a-boo game for politics… the notion that if one cannot see a harm, it does not exist.

This came up during the Wingmen segment on minimum wage. It might feel good to force employers to give employees more money, but advocates can’t see the people downstream in the chain of consequences whose lives become more difficult when case-by-case decisions are forbidden. The sympathetic target of the altruism may actually be the collateral damage from some prior decision that helped somebody else.

With ObamaCare, the administration allowed the consequences to come too quickly and the lines from handout to hindered to be too direct. They’re unmistakable.

Maybe Obama didn’t think he needed to pay attention to details because in every other progressive rewriting of reality, the consequences never stain the original good intentions. Like the Joshua computer in War Games, Americans should learn from Obama’s Tic-Tac-Toe that the game of central planning cannot be won.

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But It’s Better

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We’ve already gone over the “If you like your plan, you can keep it” promise and seen how hundreds of thousands of cancellation notices have gone out to people. The notices are going out because the new health care law has requirements for health care coverage and many plans don’t meet these requirements. The insurance […]

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Five Rhode Island Scholars Sign a Letter to US Bishops Opposing the Common Core

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Five professors from Rhode Island institutions of higher learning have signed on to a letter sent to all of the Catholic Bishops in the United States, urging that the Common Core not be adopted by Catholic primary and secondary schools.

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The brakes that aren’t there for QE.

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One point from this morning’s post on quantitative easing and big government on which I’d like to expound is the notion that there have not proven to be brakes on the inflation of the stock market.

What I’d sort of expected (and feared) was that, as portfolios inflated their way back to the dollar amounts that they had been projected to hit during the boom, investors would begin to move their investments around. Some would transition some of their profits toward safer investments to reduce overall risks and protect gains; some would diversify into riskier, more speculative ventures. Either way, I thought, the inflation of the stock market would begin to seep into the broader economy and make life more expensive.

But as it happens, the gains have been so dramatic, so consistent, and so clearly related to political pressure that (as a group) investors aren’t mixing things up as much as I’d expected. Maybe at bottom they’re afraid to reconfigure the economy, for fear the money flow will stop. Indeed, the markets appear to have trained the Fed (and the federal government) not to apply the brakes. As Andrew Huszar suggested, “We saw this past summer there was this announcement of potentially a taper and the markets actually tanked, and after that the Fed backpedaled.”

Perhaps worse is that people don’t see signs of problems. Read Mangeek’s comment to the post this morning: “But really, there aren’t indicators in the market that we -shouldn’t- inflate ourselves out of some of the pain.”

The bottom line is that we’re not learning from either history or experience — most profoundly concerning the inability of masters of the universe can micromanage the economy to reduce pain on some without inflicting it on others (and magnifying it in the process).

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Political wisdom at the barber’s shop.

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I overheard some edifying conversation at the barber shop today, from the older guys waiting for cuts.

It started with taxes, a topic that’s apparently leading all concerned to fear each day’s news: “They’re taxing the middle class so it doesn’t exist any more.” Also on the subject of money and government, there were complaints about Fed policy… vague complaints that didn’t seem to have much detail beyond “I don’t really get it, but I don’t think they’re up to anything good.”

None of this, I should note, was presented as if it were in any way in conflict with some of the other subjects that arose. For one, it seemed to be taken as positive that the town government of Tiverton is planning (without any apparent mooring to legal authority) to buy a beachfront gas station (thereby adding to the town’s burden of debt while removing a piece of prime real estate from the tax rolls). Another chunk of time was spent discussing the ways to maximize one’s take from Social Security (even from the 62-year-old who appears to have retired with a pension a few years ago).

As I paid my bill and left, the subject turned to the cell-phone lithium mines that were our real reason for war in Afghanistan and China’s suspicious designs, now that the world is no longer on the dollar standard. (Did you know we’re not even on the gold standard, anymore?)

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Big government and QE serve the big wigs.

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Note former Federal Reserve official Andrew Huszar’s apology for his role in inflicting quantitative easing (QE) on the country:

The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.

As I was saying… QE and Obama’s massive deficits, requiring money to be injected into government from the economy of the future, through debt, have had little economic effect except to inflate the stock market, not the least because they combine with an increase in regulations, making it difficult to turn cash into productive action. My previous operating theory was that the objective was to inflate the holdings of the investment class to where they were headed during the housing bubble, so as to socialize the bust, but I missed the blank spot where the brakes should have been.

After all, Huszar points out that the stock market stumbles at the mere mention of easing up on the new-money injection. The folks pulling the levers in government have never had an exit plan, and the folks whose portfolios are expanding relative to the shared economy aren’t likely to want the party to end.

Big government and powerful money (both intoxicated from the open taxpayer bar) are in a dance that’s clearing everybody else off the floor and destroying the band’s instruments. This is such an obvious and predictable display from these two lushes that one marvels that a democracy invited them in.

Here’s a pair of straightforward, complementary truisms from those of us who believe the club should be BYOB: You can’t reduce the leverage of the powerful by giving them more power; you can’t empower the people by taking their freedom away.

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CORRECTED: The Pre-Spin on Forthcoming Unemployment Spike

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CORRECTION

The central premise and complaint of this post is factually incorrect. According to an October 30 release from the BLS:

Persons on temporary layoff need not be looking for work to be classified as unemployed. (Persons not on temporary layoff need to have actively looked for work in the 4 weeks prior to the survey in order to be classified as unemployed.)

I’d thought people on temporary layoff were counted in one of the more-expansive, alternate measures of unemployment; that was incorrect, and inasmuch as the above clarification was published before my post, I could have discovered my error if I’d looked more carefully.

I apologize to readers and to Christopher Rugaber and thank commenter Joe Smith for bringing my attention to my mistake.

We may be about to see a big spike in the unemployment numbers, warns AP writer Christopher Rugaber, but don’t go thinking there’s anything wrong with the Obama economy. No, sir, it’s a statistical quirk and the fault of the so-called Republican shutdown… you know, when the Republicans had a score-plus of votes to keep the government open while trying to negotiate with Democrats to budge even a little to soften what predictably proved to be a disastrous ObamaCare implementation.

Unfortunately, the reasoning that Rugaber conveys contains a glaring contradiction:

One [measure of unemployment] is a household survey. Government workers ask adults in a household whether they have a job. Those who don’t but are looking for one are counted as unemployed. That’s how the unemployment rate is calculated. …

Suppose you’re a federal worker who was furloughed by the shutdown. The payroll survey would consider you employed.

Note that people are only counted as “unemployed” if they say that they are not working and have looked for work in the past month.

“Furloughed” means an unexpected period of time off, and the article goes on to explain that government workers furloughed for the shutdown were promised back pay (a promise made pretty quickly in the shutdown). So, for this analysis to be accurate, government workers who were essentially given some unexpected paid time off would have had to tell the employment-survey interviewers that they were actively looking for work. That doesn’t sound very likely.

Of course, this sort of spin is now par for the course on the media’s Obama-era golf course.

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Investing taxpayer money to give it away.

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Along with the federal government’s roll-out of the bad news surrounding enrollment in the health benefits exchanges of the Affordable Care Act (ACA; aka ObamaCare), HealthSource RI has published a more-complete picture of Rhode Islanders’ use of the site.

Basically, of the 4,405 “processed applications,” 73%, or 3,213, are Medicaid recipients, meaning that they were “shopping” for a welfare program that’s free to them. Of the remaining 1,192 presumably-paying customers (although many will likely be mostly or partially subsidized by federal taxpayers), only 267 have fully enrolled — that is, they’ve made the first payment indicating that they’ve actually purchased the plan.

As shown on the chart that I’ve posted on the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s site, that works out to $371,268 in U.S. taxpayer-funded grants to get the exchange working per enrollment.

As she might be expected to do, HealthSource director Christine Ferguson puts a positive spin on the results, saying that “the Medicaid piece is a great, smashing success.” Make it easy for people to get something for free, I guess, and you’ll have takers.

My favorite paragraph in Felice Freyer’s Providence Journal article, though, is this one:

Among those buying private insurance, Ferguson said that Rhode Island has exceeded the first-month target of 890, which was set by the federal government but not previously revealed. (Of the 1,192 who are buying insurance, 267 have already paid their premiums, which are due Dec. 15.)

Beware previously unrevealed goals, especially when it’s not clear when the federal government actually defined “enrollee.” One wonders where that goal — which is exactly 75% of the actual number (to the nearest ten) — came from.

In August, Spokesman Ian Lang told me that the exchange “anticipates” enrolling at least 70,000 people by the end of next year. Even if that includes Medicaid recipients (which wasn’t clear), they’re not on track to make it.

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Districts for the Indoctrination of Children

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Linking to yet another story of a parent’s facing surprising behavior from people within a public school district, Glenn Reynolds repeats his common refrain, “I’m beginning to think that putting your kids in public schools is parental malpractice.”

In this instance, a Jewish man from Pennsylvania objected to the political slant that he perceived in his child’s homework, related to the government shutdown, and his complaints appear to have inspired the local teacher union president to make at least one call to a third party in the community suggesting that he is a neo-Nazi.

Another recent story concerns a Georgia mother who has allegedly received a criminal trespass warning banning her from her disabled daughter’s school because she posted on Facebook about having been issued a concealed carry permit.

On the list of Rhode Island stories on which I have information, but for which the involved people are disinclined to come forward for fear of repercussions against them and their children, is one about a student assigned to do a project on one of the amendments in the Bill of Rights who told that he had to pick again when he chose the second amendment.

Add into the mix a worksheet “aligned with the controversial national educational standards” called Common Core that uses subversive sentences as examples for grammar assignments — un-American notions like, “the commands of government officials must be obeyed by all.”

Of course, as with random shootings, it’s easy to get the impression of epidemics when there’s a nation’s worth of bleeds-it-leads local news coverage flying across the Internet. That said, Americans should realize that there are no inherent protections in government when it takes over a public activity like education and a growing degree of opportunity to use its assumed authority to restrict and to indoctrinate.

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Apathy’s a rot, not just something you (don’t) do on election day.

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Making the most of the East Coast’s overall continuation on its unhealthy path, I had a bit of fun on Twitter, last night, noting the abysmal election returns in Woonsocket’s mayoral race.

The point:

Valley Breeze reporter Ethan Shorey asked, “is apathy wrong if residents don’t like either candidate running?” He then told me that (“whoa”) I was “entirely wrong” to suggest that “apathy is part of the reason why they don’t like either candidate.”

But apathy is a wide-reaching rot, not just a failure to show up on election day. I’ve observed at both the local and state levels that even people who are somewhat involved (say, like reporters who follow politics for their jobs) have an expectation that their neighbors will step forward to volunteer their time, often subjecting themselves to vicious, personal, and localized attacks, out of some mysterious, irresistible motivation.

Rhode Islanders need to stop expecting competent, talented, and honest people to materialize on the ballot when a poorly informed public leaves them vulnerable to baseless attacks, campaign and political events are attended by only the same handful of people, and few other people are willing to volunteer, much less step forward into the spotlight with them.

The oozing sores of pus that are election-day statistics are the symptom; the sense that other people will take care of everything — just because — followed by despair and further disengagement when nothing changes is the disease of Rhode-apathy.

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The Budding Federalism of Sen. Whitehouse?

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Last week, Ted Nesi interviewed RI Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about the ongoing problems with the ACA Health care rollout. Said Whitehouse, “I think it’s been a botch, and when you consider that little Rhode Island can get it right, it’s frustrating that the federal government didn’t.”

Today, Erika Niedowski reports that Senator Whitehouse, during some hearings in the Senate, remarked that it’s “‘a little nervy to be complaining that the federal government didn’t do it for you well enough’ when states could have ‘simply saddled up and done it’ themselves.”

Seems like Senator Whitehouse is implying (admitting?) that, just perhaps, smaller units of government are more effective than larger ones, even when it comes to implementing grand schemes.

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Tiverton Town Administrator Resigns

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After a performance on a channel 10 news report regarding an employee with suspicious work habits that raised questions about the administrator’s attention to employees… not to mention his potentially leaving the town open to a lawsuit for firing a whistle blower who’d sought to alert him to it… Tiverton Town Administrator James Goncalo has resigned his position.

One suspects this story is far from over, especially with a state police investigation ongoing.

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Go figure: aid down, cost increases slow.

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I was just telling my eldest daughter (still some years away from high school, let alone college) that everybody should study economics for a mandatory year when I came across a blurb that made me chuckle. It’s the text summary of a data inlay to an article about moderating tuition hikes at public colleges and universities:

College costs rose again this academic year, but not as steeply as they have in past years. However, federal aid, which eases the burden for most students, has declined over the past two years.

The punchline is that “however.” Imagine that: When the federal government pours less money into higher education, colleges slow down their tuition increases! It’s almost as if federal aid doesn’t help students so much as inflate the cost of education.

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UPDATED: This Isn’t How a Town Administrator Should Be Reacting

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NBC10’s I-Team reporter Parker Gavigan has posted a follow-up to his investigative report showing (allegedly?) Tiverton employee Robert Martin spending 60% of his work time on his own rental properties. The follow-up article provides reactions from Town Administrator Jim Goncalo, and if anything, parts of it are more disturbing.

Gavigan asks whether Goncalo has ever caught wind of Martin’s activities, and by the substance, the administrator answers in the affirmative, saying “I questioned him and it seemed to be reasonable.”

When an employee went to Goncalo to report Martin, the administrator terminated the whistle blower because of “certain allegations he made toward other employees that would make it impossible for him to work in the presence of these employees.” He even denies that the employee was “fired,” but rather “was let go.” Asked what the difference is, Goncalo responds, “the term.” As Gavigan reports, the letter given to the employee makes the distinction pretty well moot, seeming to indicate that he was terminated for cause.

As an insult to injury, the Town of Tiverton has denied the reporter access to Martin’s time sheets.

The state police are investigating, and we’ll see where this goes, but unless there are some surprises, it’s difficult to see how Goncalo keeps his job. Of course, this is Tiverton, and this is Rhode Island. Odds are that too few people will actually learn of the story for its import to overcome the demagoguery and hard-ball tactics that have come to characterize local elections.

Given past history of similar investigative reports statewide, accountability will probably come in the form of a few uncomfortable months waiting for the noise to fade out.

(More analysis and video at link.)

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Lies Behind Closed Public-Sector Doors

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Of the six locations at which home child-care providers voted to pay dues to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), volunteers for the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity managed to get close enough for actual observations at only one, having arrived before the armed policeman was at the door.

Among the more curious notes from that polling place was one about a woman waiting in line to vote, who said that somebody she knows used to work at “the Center” and didn’t meet the director until she’d been there for five years. Given my organization’s involvement in the issue, I don’t think it’s a stretch to infer that she meant our Center and that the intended message was that we’re a shadowy organization with suspicious motives.

The thing is, the Center hasn’t been around for five years. More than that, it’s not so big that employees can avoid each other and the boss. And more than that, CEO Mike Stenhouse is the one primarily tasked with interacting with everybody in and associated with the organization.

It’s a small thing, I know, but even as cynical as I am, I still find it surprising when people simply make things up for political ends. Which naturally feeds back into my cynicism. If unionizers will make stuff up about an organization that questions their promises and their methods, would a bureaucracy put a small thumb on the scale to help a favored president win reelection? What are the people who make decisions, including voters, actually being told is true?

Anyway, back to trying to figure out how to get accurate, consistent transparency data from RI government agencies.

Oh, by the way: As the observer in question left the location, the policeman outside said she’d be arrested if she went to any other polling places. She didn’t.

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Tiverton Town Foreman Filmed Doing His Own Work on the Clock (Allegedly)

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Those who used to attend the Tiverton financial town meetings (FTMs) will remember town Maintenance Foreman Robert Martin’s annual practice of moving the entire budget without amendment. Now, Channel 10’s investigative reporters say they have filmed him in the regular practice of working on his own rental properties while on the clock. [Click “Continue Reading” below for the video.]

10’s I-Team estimated that, during their two-month investigation, the local Council 94 president spent 60% of his time on the clock doing his personal work, using the truck that he leases to the town for $55 per week, bringing waste to the dump, and even using town employees for help. One such employee tells reporter Parker Gavigan that he reported Martin and was himself fired for his trouble.

The question that Tiverton residents may want answered is how a town employee with responsibility managing others could only spend 40% of his time actually doing his job and not raise any red flags. In the video, a blank-faced Town Administrator Jim Goncalo curtly answers “yes” to the question of whether he’s surprised.

Speaking to Martin, Gavigan asks, “If I’m paying the tax bill here in town, is this what I deserve?”

“Oh, absolutely,” replied Martin.

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Wouldn’t we all like to pick our titles?

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Via law professor and uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds comes this gem, which is the legal response that a Tennessee defense attorney filed when the prosecutors for the State of Tennessee filed a motion seeking to bar him or his client from referring to them as “the government.” After arguing that the government’s request should not be approved on the basis of the law, the aptly named attorney, Drew Justice, writes:

Should this Court disagree, and feel inclined to let the parties basically pick their own designations and ban words, then the defense has a few additional suggestions for amending the speech code. First, the Defendant no longer wants to be called “the Defendant.” This rather archaic term of art, obviously has a fairly negative connotation. It unfairly demeans, and dehumanizes Mr. Donald Powell. The word “defendant” should be banned. At trial, Mr. Powell hereby demands be addressed only by his full name, preceded by the title “Mister.” Alternatively, he may be called simply “the Citizen Accused.” This latter title sounds more respectable than the criminal “Defendant.” The designation “That innocent man” would also be acceptable.

It’s worth reading the whole thing to see how Justice progresses from there to his conclusion, which begins: “WHEREFORE, Captain Justice, Guardian of the Realm and Leader of the Resistance, primarily asks that the Court deny the State’s motion, as lacking legal basis.”

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The Open and Free GOP…but Open-Minded?

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Today, RI Republican Chairman Mark Smiley has an OpEd in the Journal telling us what the RI Republican party is about. Its focus is on freedom. He went into detail about how it was the Republican party who worked to free the slaves. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and it is widely believed that Lincoln […]

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When Even NBC Calls Him A Liar…

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We’ve seen the battles between Fox News and NBC as they effectively act as the PR wing for the right and left. But what does it mean when one of them breaks ranks and writes an article that could have just as easily come from the other side? NBC News did a little digging and tells us what many of us already knew. President Obama has not been telling us the truth about the Unaffordable Care Act.

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The compliance regime is the frightening thing.

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The City of Woonsocket’s closing down a home-made haunted house that raises charitable donations is a pretty good emblem of why the state’s economy is failing and where government is going wrong more generally.

The cease-and-desist order presented to the Dens-mores says their Halloween house is considered a “special amusement building” and requires a sprinkler system. David Densmore says they could not afford that. He used old fences, palettes and tarp and donations of gently used ghouls to make hellish scenes both kitschy and creepy.

The city told the Densmores they must close or have their utilities shut off.

When we accept that the role of the government is to proactively keep people safe — rather than imposing penalties when things go wrong and allowing both producers and consumers to assess their own risks — we’ve entered into a society in which freedom is on the wane and innovation is chained by the inelastic limits of government functionaries. People lose the ability to try and to fail because, even if they accept the risks associated with what they’re doing, they can’t afford the requirements that government has imposed as it’s tried to imagine every possible outcome of every situation.

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When I read that Rhode Island is pledging to increase electric car use…

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… all I can think about is the message to the many Rhode Islanders who are unemployed or otherwise struggling. Namely: You and your suffering are not by a long stretch our top priority. Consider:

The agreement signed Thursday is aimed at coordinating efforts among the eight states so that incentives, zoning laws and other ideas for promoting zero-emission vehicles can be more quickly implemented.

“What I expect will come out of this pact is that Rhode Island will consider the full menu of options for incentivizing electric vehicle purchases and there will be additional charging stations,” said Al Dahlberg, founder of Project GetReady Rhode Island, the local affiliate of the national initiative to promote electric vehicles.

Why are elected officials in Rhode Island even thinking about this sort of thing? No wonder we languish in so many national rankings. No wonder the population is apathetic and feeling as if nothing can change.

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A little context before we go praising HealthSourceRI

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Driving home from Woonsocket, this evening, I heard Karl Wadensten (president of VIBCO and board member for Rhode Island’s Economic Development Corp.) on Matt Allen’s 630 WPRO show saying that the state’s ObamaCare exchange, HealthSourceRI, has done a pretty good job getting rolling.

Compared with the absolute disaster that is the federal Web site, I suppose the point is irrefutable, but a few considerations shouldn’t be forgotten, not the least because they shed light on the broader problems that Rhode Island has created for itself:

  1. Rhode Island has driven all but three insurers out of the state, so we’re not talking about a huge job pulling together pricing for the handful of options that the state government has left for us.
  2. Rhode Island already led the nation in mandates on insurance, so there was relatively little for the federal government to force us to change, meaning that “the sticker shock” was bound to be less… because we were already paying more than we should have been.
  3. Rhode Island received $84 million to set up and get rolling a Web site to serve its population of one million people. Obama-style transparency leaves the question of cost of the federal exchange unanswerable, but $400 million is a reasonable estimate, and it serves more than half of all U.S. states.

It seems to me that proclaiming the Ocean State’s relative success at stepping farther into government control of healthcare is a bit like acknowledging that it’s easier to walk over people when you’ve already knocked them down.

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I’ll be on 1380 AM with Lee Ann Sennick tonight at 6:00

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… talking sales tax elimination and perhaps some other stuff. You can listen online at WNRI.com.

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The Projo needs self awareness, not self defense.

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The response PolitiFactRI editor Tim Murphy tacked onto the end of Jennifer Parrish’s objection to PolitiFact’s treatment of her is in keeping with something that I’ve found worrisome, lately.

Understandably, Murphy defends his department, but he does so in the form of an argument, without responding to or even acknowledging Parrish’s legitimate concerns. There’s no concession that the paper’s other sources were SEIU clients; there’s no explanation about why PolitiFact picked a particular fact to check; there’s no promise to look into claims made by the union. His commentary gives the impression of one party to a debate responding to another, not the disinterested judge that PolitiFact claims to be.

Murphy’s response brings to mind a recent column by Mark Patinkin, in which he defends newspapers — beginning with the cover price, but delving into the value proposition. He notes the number of reporters, some specialized; he talks about their watchdog function and the value of editors.

Arguments are possible, but for now I’d highlight what he doesn’t include: any sort of introspection about the paper’s responsibility to prove its value and question whether it’s doing the things that make a watchdog and layers of editors valuable. Maybe Rhode Islanders need and want a watchdog against powerful organizations that strive to change policy to their own benefit, not individual child care providers who are part-time advocates against those forces. Maybe skepticism about the watchdog function is justified when it looks like the DNC is doing the paper’s page layout.

Maybe when folks dip into the “splintered, random view” that Patinkin says he gets from online news, they see that the “informative portrait” they get through the paper is leaving out or amplifying details in a way that serves an agenda other than informing the consumer.

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Hess: Differentiated Instruction = “benign neglect” for gifted learners

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In his latest dispatch, Rick Hess makes the following observations about “differentiated instruction” and how, in general, some education “reforms” offer diminishing returns for children with parents who actively take a role in their education.

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What Jonah Goldberg Misses About Indiana Jones

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Jonah Goldberg writes that his most recent email-based G-File column sparked some conversation about theology in the Indiana Jones movies. He makes a good point, but I think he misses something important about Indy’s cultural significance (and that of the superficial, modernist culture of which he’s a part):

My dad — who loved the movie — always laughed at the idea that the Nazis would be able to use the ark for their dastardly purposes. The idea that God would be like, “Darn, it’s out of my hands. I guess I have no choice but to lend you my awesome powers for your evil deeds,” is pretty ridiculous. They even returned to this idea in the third movie, when the Nazis tried to get their hands on the Holy Grail — because, you know, Jesus would totally say, “Nazis!? Rats. There’s nothing I can do. It’s life everlasting for the SS!”

In keeping with the secularization of our era, the assumption of Spielberg’s movies is that, while there may be magic and ghosts, there needn’t be a God, or even gods. Finding the end goal in every story involves a minefield of puzzles, booby traps, and tricks, and Indy overcomes them with knowledge and agility, not divine intervention or prayer.

So, when finally the Ark or Holy Grail is found, the appearance of the supernatural isn’t an affirmation of divinity, but a mysterious technology. Chanting “you betrayed Sheba” may be the magic words to make the rocks hot in Temple of Doom, but Kali (the evil god) doesn’t have the power to stop Indy from taking them from her temple in the first place.

This is why, as much as it may have crossed into the realm of overdone camp, the final movie could introduce aliens as the mystical force, rather than spirituality.

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All Four Exeter Recall Petitions Verified

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Tatiana Pina of the Projo reports that sufficient signatures for all four petitions calling for recall elections for members of the Exeter Town Council have been verified…

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Updating the Conspiracies: House Stenographer Tangentially Raised a Good Point Last night

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Further to the … um, unscheduled remarks of a Stenographer at a live microphone last night in the U.S. House, where exactly do Freemasons fit on the chart of shady, new world order organizations? After the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Counsel on Foreign Relations but perhaps ahead of the Bildeberg Group and Yale Skull and […]

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Obvious health care changes make one wonder why not

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The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity released the third and final report on reforming health care, by Sean Parnell, yesterday. The focus is a few steps that Rhode Island could take, accepting that ObamaCare is law and that Rhode Island is not a state to buck it:

It is our Center’s conclusion that it is not feasible that a government-centric, one-size-fits-all approach via the state’s health benefits exchange can adequately address the needs of a highly diverse population. Only with additional patient-centric, consumer-oriented options can we move toward the goal of ensuring that more Rhode Islanders achieve health care and financial peace of mind.

The list of suggestions is actually pretty modest and, frankly, obvious:

  • Mandate-free and mandate-lite, full-disclosure insurance policies — so that people who don’t need or can’t afford all of the bells and whistles in an insurance plan can still get coverage.
  • Interstate insurance sales — so that Rhode Islanders don’t have to be trapped by their borders.
  • Health care sharing ministries — so that Christians who prefer a different mechanism than “insurance” to cover their costs can live according to their values.
  • Critical illness and accident insurance — so that individuals can assess their own tolerance for risk and determine how they’d like to address challenges that come up.

Some legislators appear interested in potentially advancing some of these policies, but honesty requires one to acknowledge that it’ll be an uphill battle, for much the same reason that ObamaCare wasn’t challenged in RI. Too many powerful people want to be able to make promises that others have to honor.

But the fact that those four items would be revolutionary is something folks should think about when big-government activists claim our health care system was struggling because it operated by “free-market principles.” (Hard not to laugh, I know.)

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A major lesson in the consequences of media bias

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Without agreeing with much else, I think Jim Geraghty gets this right, in his Morning Jolt email, today, and that it offers a lesson that Rhode Islanders and their local media ought to take sincerely to heart:

We live in an atmosphere where Democrats aren’t worried about any of their decisions backfiring, because they know the mainstream coverage will always give them the better of the doubt, hammer their opponents, and gloss over or downplay their worst moments. The flip side of the coin is a “Tea Party caucus” (for lack of a better term) that has absolutely no fear of getting bad press — because they feel/suspect/know they’ll get negative coverage no matter what they do. Most of these guys shrug at the Morning Joe panel unanimously denouncing them as fools and unhinged extremists, because they think the only way that panel won’t denounce them as fools and extremists is to stop being conservatives. A lot of those House members feel they might as well vote their principles and draw the hardest line possible — because if you’re going to get bad coverage, you might as well get bad coverage while fighting for a good cause.

I thought of this again when Jessica David tweeted an observation from Joshua Wright:

At the bottom, Rhode Island is the only state that’s lost middle-wage jobs the last few years. Coincidentally, it’s also seen a decline in high-wage jobs, meaning all of its job growth has been in occupations that pay $13.83 or lower.

Rhode Island is a land with no hard rules and an establishment that can’t lose, in large part because the media won’t push in the necessary places, because the only thing worse than a corrupt Democrat who destroys his community is a conservative who actually believes what he says.

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