Fund the government until January 15…extend the debt ceiling until February 7…budget conference for fiscal negotiations later this year…keep sequestration intact (from National Review Online).
The news media under President Obama has been proving that it’s not going to be very much protection against tyranny, unless it comes in a retro fascist costume from the early Twentieth Century. A man targeted by the Obama Administration as a fall-guy for Benghazi disappears into prison for a year? Not much noise. The administration drives people off federal land, even out of their homes, to prove a political point? Hardly worthy of note.
The one-sided perspective extends even to poll results about blame for the government shutdown. Tom Kludt phrases it in the terms of the media’s common wisdom: “Republicans continue to absorb the bulk of the blame.”
That’s not an accurate statement. The poll in question didn’t ask respondents to pick a side; it asked about approval and disapproval. Yes, 74% disapprove of the Republicans’ handling of the issue, but 61% disapprove of the Democrats’. Much of the difference, I’d propose, has simply to do with the skewed way in which current events are presented to the population. (How many Americans know, for example, that Republicans in the House have voted eleven times to fund the government?)
Much of it also has to do with the lack of specificity for “approval.” The “liberal” category’s view of the Democrats is comparable with the “very conservative” category’s view of the Republicans. It would be difficult for the Democrats to take any harder line, however, while many conservatives disapprove of the Republicans because of a presumed weakness and likelihood to cave.
Most people don’t desire to swim against the tide, especially when complicated subjects blend with overheated rhetoric, as in politics. It would be more accurate to say, of the poll, that Americans are blaming both sides for the shutdown, but that wouldn’t serve the political ends of the people doing the reporting.
Mark Curtis of WLNE-TV (ABC 6) is reporting that the required number of signatures needed to trigger a recall election of Exeter Town Council President Arlene Hicks have been verified, while “signature verification on the other three targeted Council members continues”.
I’ve been invited to provide the contrarian view on affordable housing at a workshop hosted by the Barrington Town Council, next Tuesday (October 22) from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., in the Barrington High School Auditorium.
The organizers are requesting that folks submit questions for us panelists beforehand. They’re due tomorrow (October 16). More information here.
Panic may be gripping that minority of Americans who pay more than passing attention to the operation of the federal government. As a pair of Washington Post writers put it, the “Obama administration will have to decide whether to delay — or possibly suspend — tens of billions of dollars in Social Security checks, food stamps and unemployment benefits.”
That’s a suspiciously selective list of options to reduce federal expenditures. The Social Security fright-note is especially selective, inasmuch as the money for Social Security comes directly from FICA taxes, and when there isn’t enough there, the rest comes by cashing in Treasury debt for the money the federal government spent out of the infamous “lock box.” As Treasury pays Social Security back, it reduces its debt by that amount, leaving the government free to borrow it from some other means and remain under the cap.
It’ll be important to keep in mind, if the feds whack their heads on the ceiling, that cuts are their choice. If Obama decides to withhold food stamp money, it’s because he thinks other spending (such as future golf trips with Tiger Woods) is more important. The media being what it is, that point won’t likely be made prominently.
But there is an important truth underlying the article: “Economists roundly agree that no matter which course Obama chooses, a drop in federal spending that large would exert a huge drag on economic growth.” As I’ve been pointing out for a while, growth in the U.S. economy has long relied heavily upon national debt.
I expect history to prove that those round economists have it backwards: The singular focus of public policy must become unleashing economic growth, with federal spending as an afterthought — mainly something that gets in the way.
Former Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy gave students at Texas State University some insight into how the United States Congress works out its differences and hones bills down to well-deliberated new laws, regarding his mental-health-parity legislation:
“I called my dad and said, ‘Dad, it’s sitting in the Senate, it’s not passing, you got to call somebody.’ Of course my dad had lots of favors to call in,” he said. “He called, and Chris Dodd said: ‘I’ve got just the answer.’ ”
The mental health bill passed the Senate after it was tacked on to the federal bank bailout, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in September 2008.
So, as Rhode Islanders may recall, the healthcare-related bill became a necessary appendage to an economy-related bill. The timing of this anecdote is especially auspicious, given Democrats’ and media’s heated insistence that it is inappropriate for House Republicans to link healthcare-related policy with budget legislation.
Kennedy also called for more civility in politics, while passing off barbs against the Bible Belt and Texas.
It may be one of the hoarier clichés about the mainstream media, but it’s no less true, for that, to observe that an event like this would be major news if it happened under a Republican president (particularly one perceived as some variation of conservative):
As Twitchy reported, citizens attending the Million Vets March in Washington, D.C., Sunday tore down Barrycades at several memorials. The crowd then picked up the Barrycades and began transporting them to the White House.
Let’s state that objectively: U.S. military veterans are protesting the Obama administration’s decision to actively expend resources to close down and close off federal land in order to amplify Americans’ experience with the federal government shutdown by performing an act of civil disobedience and bringing the barricades to the White House.
This is the sort of thing that ought to wind up in Life magazine retrospectives and history books’ sidebars to give the sense of the decade. Time will tell whether it will, but given the media’s practice of pre-writing history to serve ideological ends, I’m not confident.
Six-month extension of government funding…debt limit increase through January…two year medical device tax delay…income verification for Obamacare subsidies…sequestration cut flexibility…sequester level of $967 billion (says Politico).
… nobody thinks the regime can afford to show vulnerability. That’s why there’s such a gaping hole in Linda Borg’s Providence Journal article on results for Rhode Island’s new teacher evaluation experiment.
It isn’t just that weak-kneed administrators don’t want to risk the careers of teachers or the wrath of unhappy unions; it’s also that the administrators, themselves, look bad if they’re building “ineffective” organizations. And if they start reporting an honest and negative assessment of their schools, then the only people who can really enforce accountability — those who ultimately hire them and pay their salaries (taxpayers and voters) — might actually begin to do so.
What these results suggest is that there is zero institutional incentive for school districts to evaluate themselves honestly, and much incentive for them to take up the teacher union talking point of “an effective teacher in every classroom.”
This simply isn’t credible, and if you think about it, it isn’t surprising that those five systems reporting the worst results are Barrington and four alternative schools. For alternative schools, accountability is enforced, ultimately, by parental choice (limited as it may be), so they can better afford to utilize evaluation tools as intended.
Allowing parents to evaluate their children’s teachers and potentially withdraw funding for them is the only means of real accountability. When that’s the case, administrators don’t have to manage via public report and can actually work with teachers to improve.
I used to think it was too pat to be possible, but my skepticism is decreasing the more involved I get: If we listen, progressives will tell us exactly what they’re doing by accusing conservatives of doing the same. Here’s a data point from James Taranto, citing leading leftist Robert Reich:
“An old friend who has been active in politics for more than 30 years tells me he’s giving up,” claims Robert Reich in a Puffington Host post: ” ‘I can’t stomach what’s going on in Washington anymore,’ he says. ‘The hell with all of them. I have better things to do with my life.’ ”
… “My friend is falling exactly into the trap that the extreme right wants all of us to fall into–such disgust and cynicism that we all give up on politics.” The “Tea Bag Republicans,” as the homophobic Reich calls them, “want to sow even greater cynicism about the capacity of government to do much of anything.”
That statement should look very, very familiar to folks in the land of Rhode-apathy. The difference is that Reich says that the Tea Party wants people to believe that government can’t do anything (which, let’s be honest, is a message that government furthers pretty well on its own), while the establishment wants people to believe that they simply cannot ever roll government back.
Witness top national Democrats declaring that even slowing the rate of growth of the federal government would be “catastrophic.” Think of the resistance to any policy proposal that would help Rhode Islanders (like eliminating the sales tax) if it would make it at all harder for the state government to continue its proven-failure practices.
Gallup released a poll today talking about how Republicans have sunk to a new low in the favorability ratings. Now, I hate to be one of those people who simply “blame the media” for everything. At its heart, every individual and every group needs to take some accountability for its own failures and shortcomings. However, […]
From a column by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, with the provocative title of “Rejoice: the Yellen Fed will print money forever to create jobs“, a glimpse of what Fed Chair nominee Janet Yellen and our own Justin Katz both think is worthy of attention…
According to an article in today’s Providence Journal, former RI State Treasurer and former candidate for Governor is going to run for Treasurer again. The immediate thought that I have is that he already was the state’s treasurer. Additionally, when he was running for Governor, he was questioned about the health of the state’s pension […]
Sol Stern’s interesting review of Diane Ravitch’s conversion from school choice to radicalism doesn’t take a stab at the cause. Was it a virus, as some theories of the zombie apocalypse would have it? Was it blood drawn while necking with a Marxist? A massive infusion of National Education Association union funding? We may never know.
But a quotation that Stern highlights stuck out to me:
“I don’t care if my two grandsons … have higher or lower scores than children their age in California, Florida, Iowa, Finland, Japan, Korea…” [Ravitch] recently declared. “I don’t think their parents care either. They care that their children are healthy; are curious about the world; are loved; learn to love learning; are kind to their friends and to animals; and have the confidence to tackle new challenges. . . . Let’s all read Walden, read poetry, listen to good music, visit a museum, look at the stars, and think more about what matters most in life. Let us see our children not as global competitors, but as children, little human beings in need of loving care and kindness.”
That sounds swell, but it takes a bit of the specific meaning out of “education” to include “loving care and kindness.,” which sounds a bit more like “parenting.”
Therein lies the flaw of government-school centralization. It is the job of parents and social groups to ensure that children are “loved” and “love learning.” It is a tragedy when children are deprived of such influences, but the gap between those who have them and those who do not is so tremendous that no single institution or regulatory regime can answer the needs of both.
That’s where choice comes in. If it’s not viewed as edification, reading Walden and poetry is probably worse than useless for students, who may only learn that knowledge is a means of using words for fakery.
Proving the value of the arts under tyranny, Mark Steyn parodies the Obama Administration’s attempted shut down of all public land, including open-air monuments, road-side viewing areas, and even the open ocean:
This land is our land, it sure ain’t your land
From downtown DC to the Lake Mead shoreland
From the Arctic Refuge to the Gulf Stream waters
This land is closed to you and yours
It’s only four stanzas, so read the whole thing and follow all of the embedded links (especially if you normally get your news only from mainstream sources). Personally, the episode is leading me to reevaluate whether the government’s buying up land for public use is even as benign as I’d thought it was (and I was already skeptical).
Any land we allow the government to purchases or any program we allow it to undertake with the intention of making it available to “all of us” through the political process implicitly becomes wrapped up in politics. When elected officials make as much abusive use of their leverage as the current administration, “our” shared possessions can become their weapons to manipulate us.
I slipped, again, and read today’s Froma Harrop column. Here’s the breezy way in which a pro Projo columnist characterizes the legal and political debate around ObamaCare:
Nothing the Tea Party people demand can’t be had through the normal political process. It happens that a duly elected House and Senate passed Obamacare. And when asked, the U.S. Supreme Court said it’s cool with it.
That’s that, sneering away so much legitimate argument that a reader remembers why he’d determined her columns not worth the effort. The “Tea Party people” are “tyrants.” Condescendingly: “They are martyrs, you see” — out there in their filthy, suspect difference.
Harrop should read an excellent column by Andrew McCarthy, who argues that the passage of ObamaCare was pure unconstitutional “fraud” and will be back before the Court on additional grounds. For the likes of Harrop, one senses, the intellectual validity of a law is chiefly determined by whether or not they like the result.
So, she insists, the tyrants are not those who control most of government, who managed to push through an ideological boondoggle as law because there was nobody with power to enforce the rules, and who are now putting up absurd barriers and shutting down businesses deliberately to cause people pain, while proving the “most closed, control-freak administration” ever (even in the eyes of a New York Times reporter). The tyrants are not the ones who apparently used the IRS and other agencies to target the Tea Party for engaging in “the normal political process.”
Rather, in Harrop’s view, the tyrants are ordinary people with the effrontery to utilize our system’s deliberate protections for political minorities. Kinda makes you worry what’s to come as our betters forget that old yack about sticking up for process and remembering that we’re all Americans, doesn’t it?
“Nobody said they were the brightest generation.” Wow. I guess Bill Maher doesn’t realize that if not for these veterans, he’d be doing political stand-up comedy in German. (Warning: Maher uses the F word in the video) Nice job by one of the voices of the progressives. We’ve seen lately where some of our friends […]
Readers will note that today’s Providence Journal had space to inform Rhode Islanders about a comment related to same-sex marriage made by Pennsylvania’s governor. (For those who don’t know, in most cases, Rhode Islanders would have to travel through three other states to go see a friend in Pennsylvania.)
Rhode Islanders who expand their reading lists beyond their “paper of record” will discover such stories as:
A media industry that truly saw itself as the guardian of the people would be all over these outrages. One that is not all over them seems more likely to see itself as the guardian of a particular political party and a particular president.
Governor Chafee says he’s all for stronger gun laws and claims we need changes every time there is a mass shooting. But RI doesn’t submit records of people with mental health issues to the national background check registry. Why hasn’t Chafee done anything about this? Yet another time when he’s all sound bites and no action?
Back when the idea of government-run health insurance exchanges first entered into Rhode Island state government policy, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity warned that they were being set up to become “dependency portals“:
The exchange will become a dependency portal when other forms of public assistance — from food stamps to cash-payment welfare to child-care subsidies — are integrated into the system and promoted to the exchange user based on information that he or she provides while seeking health coverage — perhaps automatically enrolling people with the merest expression of consent.
As James Taranto points out, the evidence wasn’t long in arriving upon the exchanges’ unveiling:
… Brendan Mahoney [is] 30 years old, a third-year law student at the University of Connecticut. He’s actually been insured for the past three years … through “a high-deductible, low-premium plan that cost about $39 a month through a UnitedHealthcare subsidiary.” But he wanted to see what ObamaCare had to offer. … Now, he says, “if I get sick, I’ll definitely go to the doctor.” Even better, if he stays healthy, he won’t need to go to a doctor, and his premiums will support chronically ill policyholders on the wrong side of 40.
So, how much of a premium is strapping young Brendan Mahoney paying to help make ObamaCare work? Oops. The Courant reports that Mahoney “said that by filling out the application online, he discovered he was eligible for Medicaid. So, beginning next year, he won’t pay any premium at all.”
Sure, it’s just one anecdote, but a policy sold on bringing healthcare to the uninsured appears to be structurally indistinguishable from a policy designed to push people who are willing and able to take care of themselves into dependence on government.
The Obama Administration is spending taxpayer funds to actively block off monuments and tourist attractions:
This indefensible activity is progressive community organizing, and it’s what government becomes when the people in power are statists who define the nation by its government.
After a TV news report on channel 10 and some time on Matt Allen’s 630 WPRO talk show, the story of the Coventry middle school student suspended for a gun-shaped key fob caught national attention on the Internet, by way of the Ocean State Current, picked up by Instapundit and other libertarian/conservative blogs, and then the Daily Beast, followed by the Huffington Post. Now, by way of the Matt Allen Show, we learn that administrators had had enough attention by Monday:
Keith Bonnano, the boy’s father, said both the superintendent of Coventry Public Schools and the principal of the Alan Shawn Feinstein Middle School called him Monday and assured him that his son would get help with any missed schoolwork. …
They’re also going to allow the boy to accompany his classmates on a field trip to Salem at the end of October, something Bonnano said his son was very much looking forward to.
Additionally, Bonnano will be able to appeal the suspension to have it removed from his son’s permanent record.
RIFuture’s Bob Plain is reporting that a judge has dismissed the marijuana possession charge against him and, indeed, that the local police have returned the drugs that they confiscated. (Which is peculiar, because I never got back the Super Soaker that police took from my car in the parking lot before a rock concert at Jones Beach on Long Island twenty years ago.)
I’ve written that I disagree with the “obstacle course of compliance” that tripped Bob up, so I’d hate to appear to be flipping sides now that the incident is history, but there is a legal question in play, and Bob says the judge didn’t state his reasoning. The medical marijuana statute contains two relevant sections.
One says that use of pot is assumed to be medical if the user is “in possession of a registry identification card.” The other says that other people aren’t breaking the law if they’re in “constructive possession… or any other offense” for being in the presence of somebody using marijuana medically or for helping somebody to do so.
It’s a bit of a leap from that to the argument that simply knowing somebody with a registry ID card who is willing to claim ownership allows anybody in Rhode Island to carry otherwise illegal drugs around.
Psst. Republican politicians in Rhode Island. Can we talk quietly? You really need to up your strategic game.
Take this non-story about the gun raffle. The false narrative that the national Democrats and mainstream media have painted on a specific firearm is an incredibly sloppy production; you can see all of the traced lines. After the Navy Yard shooting, the media proclaimed that the AR-15 was “back in the news,” but it was only so because they had mistakenly reported it as one of the weapons used. NBC was finally reduced to reporting that the shooter had handled one at a range recently.
Likewise, the Providence Journal’s online headline that you’re “under fire for gun raffle” is only the case because reporter Kathy Gregg called people for comment. She set up the firing squad. Caving to this is like clearing takeoff for the plane that’s going to drop a bomb on you.
I get the sense that you aren’t spending much time hanging out with your base across the state, because if you were, you’d see that they’re dejected and demoralized and rapidly concluding that being active in the public sphere isn’t worth the effort. You better do something about it fast. You’re about to enter the election year playing field only to find that your team is limited to those who are there by habit.
This thirty-second television spot is the latest aspect of HealthSourceRI that Rhode Islanders should feel just oversteps the appropriate bounds for government:
As a functional matter, I’ll say once again: The government shouldn’t be acting like a start-up company. On the substance, Chris Caramela tweeted it well: “Love RI’s new healthcare ad, 1st to declare independence, 1st in industrial revolution.. Then they leave out… 1st to give back both!!!”
The fact is that Rhode Island was second last to ratify the Constitution. With respect to Constitutional Amendments, we specifically rejected the income tax and prohibition of alcohol and only just ratified a change in the U.S. Senate election process this year. Rhode Island’s history is one of suspicion of centralized authority, and it is an insult to the state for government operatives to claim that heritage while obliterating its principles.
So, the Obama administration settled on the talking point pretty quickly, this morning, as people began to notice that healthcare exchanges across the country weren’t working very well. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was first out of the gate with a statement that Obama would repeat almost verbatim for TV and radio audiences:
“No one is calling on Apple to not sell devices for a year or to get out of the business because the whole thing is a failure,” she said. “Everyone just assumes there’s a problem, they’ll fix it, let’s move on. . . . Hopefully, they’ll give us the same slack as they give Apple.”
Here’s the thing: The government is not a business. For one, government has made its product obligatory. For another, the product involves safekeeping of highly sensitive personal information and the critical app of healthcare.
It’s just plain inappropriate for billions of taxpayer dollars to be handed to government agents so they can try their hand at running a start-up company. When you force people to invest in a venture and then you require them to buy the product, you get less room for error than companies that raise money and put their own existence on the line to try something new (which consumers can reject).
That’s just the way things work, and being able to pretend that it is not is exactly why the incentives are all wrong for government’s entering into business ventures in the first place.
As of 8:30 a.m. on the first day for HealthSourceRI, Rhode Island’s ObamaCare exchange, I’m getting this error message: “The service is overloaded or offline. Please try again later.” Three thoughts:
In any standoff, doesn’t it take two to tango? And if you think it’s ridiculous to hold up the debt ceiling in order to get changes to the Affordable Care Act, let me ask this. If the Republicans simply approved the debt ceiling increase and then minutes later said, “Ok, let’s talk about changes to ACA now” what do you think would be the reaction from the Democrats? Yep, crickets. I hate horse-trading as much as anyone else but unfortunately, this is how it works.
An interesting discussion is taking shape on National Review’s the Corner concerning the propriety of the U.S. Senate’s amending a budget bill. Mark Steyn offers the latest word:
… had the British or Canadian House of Commons, the Australian or Fijian House of Representatives, the Indian Lok Sabha, the Dáil Éireann, the Bahamian or Bermudan House of Assembly, etc, etc, etc, voted as the U.S. House of Representatives did, that would indeed be the end of the matter. The blurring of responsibilities between the Upper and Lower Houses is a not insignificant reason for the fiscal debauchery in Washington.
In a big-picture way, I’m inclined to agree. As a practical matter, however, I’d suggest that Steyn’s argument pretty much became moot after the ratification of the 17th Amendment, which Rhode Island made the inconsequential mistake of affirming earlier this year. (See the fourth section, here, for some argument on that).
A news release just out from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) shows Rhode Island lagging the nation and (especially) New England on personal income growth from the first quarter to the second quarter.