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91

The Doubtful Refugee Screening Process

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At the outset, let me say that I’m not fully committed to the no-Syrian-refugees position, either on a temporary or permanent basis.  However, there’s something suspicious in the quick progressive push-back against concerns about the process.  For some, it’s simply a partisan position.  For others, it’s the progressive foible of the total domination of feelings and simplified morality:  Refusing people who are fleeing danger is bad, and I’m not bad, so therefore any resistance to this specific refugee process, performed by this specific presidential administration, is immoral.

When it comes down to it, very few of the people raising concerns about Syrian refugees are absolutists.  Letting in two-year-old Christians, for example, would not meet much, if any resistance.  In other words, while one side is arguing principle, the other is arguing process.

I bring the issue up again because a Facebook thread initiated by Matt Fecteau includes a link to a White House infographic about the refugee-acceptance process, and reading through it reinforces concerns about the process.  Fecteau repeatedly insists that the burden completely falls on the candidate for refugee status, but that’s really not what the steps illustrate.  Sure, they can’t withhold information that they have (and get caught), but it’s entirely a process of checking the information that’s available.  In a war-torn country (that wasn’t exactly First World to begin with), that’s a risky proposition.

The steps rely almost entirely on the records of the United States, or those to which it has access, which might weed out the upper tiers of those involved in global jihad, but certainly not all those who are just sympathizers or who have simply not done anything, yet.  Moreover, there’s no indication of risk for potentially risky refugees if they are caught.

The most important point, however, continues to be the lack of trust that the Obama Administration has earned.  The refugee process puts the burden on a bureaucracy under a petulant, ideological executive, and that executive has decreed that he wants 10,000 people pushed through this system in the next year.

The fact that so many people are responding to concerns about this matter with accusations of bigotry is a sign both that there’s even more reason to fear that the process won’t be well executed and that our society has a serious cultural illness.

92

Terrorism and the President

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Last night, I received a little push-back on Twitter to my reaction to the attacks in Paris, specifically President Obama’s comments thereon.  By Obama standards, the commentary wasn’t that bad.  His bar is so low it’s on the ground, of course, but he managed to refer to himself fewer than a dozen times in the 500 words, and at least he didn’t deny that Islamic terrorism was behind the attacks; he just sidestepped the perpetrators altogether.

The problem is that he’s just so weak, and the world is as it is in large part because of his weakness.  (Whether it’s deliberate is another subject.)  He came into office and traveled the world to point a finger of blame at his own country.  He cashed in a victory in Iraq for electoral gain and thereby precipitated much of what followed.  His actions in Afghanistan have been less than impressive, his administration (with Hillary Clinton) turned Libya to (even greater) turmoil, he helped foment unrest in countries like Egypt, while knocking the wind out of it in Iran, where it might have turned things for the better.  His fecklessness in Syria drew that country toward its calamity, and his timidness against Russia has invited that country to press for advantage.

That’s before we get to domestic politics, where open borders have drawn masses of untraceable, low-skilled people into our stagnant economy (which his policies have helped to keep stagnant), and his strategy of fomenting divisions along lines of identity politics (especially race) has weakened us as a nation.  And don’t forget the observation that he’s used taxpayer dollars to make it boom-time for left-wing activists while the bureaucracy under him directly attacks his opponents and imposes policies across the board that erode freedom and opportunity.

All of this leaves us extremely vulnerable.

On the national security front, the two options are to attack the terrorists’ infrastructure in their home countries, thus drawing the fighters back to that land, over there, or to build our own defenses and attempt to identify, trace, and neutralize them on our land, over here.  President Obama apparently lacks the will and clearly lacks the credibility to attack over there, and in any event, it likely aligns with his domestic goals to increase the reach and invasiveness of the government among its own people.

At this point, however, the country is so divided and distrustful of itself and the government that a dragnet sufficient to stop the largest attacks (but never all of them) is sure to fray as Americans resist it.  Meanwhile, the enemy is inside the gates and proclaiming, “The American blood is best, and we will taste it soon.”

It takes a great deal of inanity to get the world to a precipice like this, and another year of this president promises only more inanity.

95

UPDATED: Correction (Sort of) on Ed Fitzpatrick’s Column

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Soon after I put up my post, this morning, on Ed Fitzpatrick’s Providence Journal column, the man himself responded to my Twitter link that he’d criticized Sen. Whitehouse for commentary on the floor of the Senate in which he raised the specters of the French Revolution, the Nazis, and Southern lynchings in a column back in 2009.

That column didn’t appear in my search of the Providence Journal’s archives because they don’t go back that far, but Fitzpatrick was good enough to send me the text.  Rereading the 2009 column, while I would have definitely included it in my earlier post, I’m not sure it changes my criticism at all.

For instance, I suggested that Fitzpatrick should have tried to understand why Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would have such strong sentiments toward his court, and if we look back to the 2009 column, it’s practically slathered with sympathy for Whitehouse’s heat.  Fitzpatrick presents it as a response to Republican ire, emphasizes that Whitehouse “gave voice to the Democratic anger and frustration” (with examples), and gives the senator space to contextualize his comments.

If I may paraphrase the impression the column gives, it’s that:  Whitehouse was only responding to the bad Republicans; he has a lot of company in how he feels; and after all, he’s got underlying reasoning, which Fitzpatrick validates with a “good point.”  None of these qualities are present in the Scalia column.  Indeed, here’s the point of actual criticism of Whitehouse:

Perhaps it’s good for Rhode Island to have a fiery, outspoken senator to go with the understated Sen. Jack Reed. Perhaps there is some political utility to such speeches. If Palin is going to be using her Twitter account to perpetuate the “death panel” idea (PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year”), maybe Democrats need to do more to fire back.

But I don’t see why Whitehouse had to go all Judgment Day on the GOP when he knew they’d lose the vote. Why not just watch them wail and fail?

Scalia didn’t even go as far as “all Judgment Day,” and he was, in fact, issuing a warning about the actions of the victorious majority.  In Scalia’s case, though, Fitzpatrick is on the side of those who want to insist that there’s nothing wrong, or even questionable, about the outcome or process by which they redefined marriage and likened traditional values to pure bigotry.

As the progressives march across the country trying to put pizza parlors out of business, prevent businesses that receive this treatment from using online tools to collect donations, and grab tax exemption away from churches and charities, one can only hope that liberal columnists prove to object to government oppression, not just reference to oppression from the past.

UPDATE (7/2/15 2:35 p.m.)

In response to the suggestion that I didn’t do an adequate job presenting Fitzpatrick’s objection to Whitehouse above, here’s another statement from the 2009 column, which was what Fitzpatrick put forward as the summary of his criticism in his tweet:

But in the end, Whitehouse only added to that toxicity. He accused the Republicans of going too far and, in the next breath, he went too far himself. Quoting Lord Acton and using vivid literary allusions didn’t save him from venturing down the well-worn path that ends with someone accusing an adversary of being like the Nazis.

I didn’t exclude this paragraph to downplay Fitzpatrick’s criticism of the senator; I just didn’t see that it added anything not covered in my descriptions or quotations.  The context also brushes away much of the criticism.  The paragraph before quotes somebody who liked Whitehouse’s outburst (as pushback against Republican “toxicity,” and the paragraph after notes references inappropriate Nazi references by Lyndon LaRouce (not labeled as a Democrat, though) and Rush Limbaugh.

96

Edward Fitzpatrick’s Conditional Opposition to Vitriol

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In his Providence Journal column, today, Edward Fitzpatrick takes on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia because, as the headline says, “Scalia’s vitriol undercuts his influence.”

It’s not enough for Fitzpatrick to highlight Scalia’s colorful language; he’s got to find an objective reason why the justice should tone it down.  I’d say Fitzpatrick is playing the quietly liberal journalist’s role in changing America.  Objectively speaking, public debate would be healthier if people in that role were more self-aware when it comes to their arguments.

The first step is trying to see things from the other person’s perspective.  If you’re Justice Scalia, you believe that the court on which you serve has become a mechanism for rewriting the Constitution on the fly, in a way that has no real basis in law and therefore cannot be consistently applied.  This lawlessness, from his point of view, invites (perhaps requires) the people of the United States and their elected representatives to begin ignoring the court.  As he put it in his Obergefell v. Hodges dissent:

Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall. The Judiciary is the “least dangerous” of the federal branches because it has “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm” and the States, “even for the efficacy of its judgments.” With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the “reasoned judgment” of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.

Fitzpatrick can disagree with that, of course, but if he shared Scalia’s view about the huge importance of this matter, would he still be fretting about whether Scalia’s strong language costs him influence?  I tend to doubt it.  A search of the Providence Journal archives, for example, produces no instance of Fitzpatrick’s worrying about the effects of Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s vitriolic attacks on his fellow Americans, notably his commentary asserting extremism and insinuating racism when it comes to people who were wise enough to oppose ObamaCare.  Fitzpatrick also does not appear to have commented on the senator’s zeal for investigating American organizations with which he disagrees because there might be something for which they could be attacked.

Instead, I found a Fitzpatrick column in which the writer trumpets Whitehouse’s role pushing the minority Democrat line on climate change, which ends with Whitehouse’s not-at-all vitriolic quip that “the best news about a Republican Majority in the Senate is that the Republican minority is now gone. They were just a God-awful minority.”

Again, it’s all well and good for Fitzpatrick to do his part to advance progressive causes, but this pose that he’s simply offering his opposition friendly strategic advice gives the game away.

UPDATE (7/2/15 12:55 p.m.):

See here for a partial correction of and some context for the above.

98

The GM Bailout and the Pawsox

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The other day, somebody speaking favorably of moving the PawSox to Providence with a taxpayer “investment” cited the bailout of GM as an example of how taxpayers can actually get their money back from such activities.  As it happens, I was just clearing out some old bookmarks and came across this, from Conn Carroll on Townhall:

In his 2014 end of the year press conference, President Obama claimed that, “effectively today, our rescue of the auto industry is officially over. We’ve now repaid taxpayers every dime and more of what my administration committed.” (emphasis added)

And it is true: if you look at only the new money the Obama administration spent bailing out General Motors, Chrysler, and Ally Financial, taxpayers did get back “every dime” of that cash.

But that completely ignores the $17.4 billion President Bush promised General Motors and Chrysler in December 2008.

If you take the entire Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout into account, taxpayers spent a total of $79.7 billion on the auto bailout, received only $63.1 billion back, for a total loss of $16.6 billion.

It’d be nice if we all could start learning our lessons on this stuff.

99

Marketplace Fairness or a Tax Trap?

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Beware the word “fairness” when elected officials propose new laws.  Be doubly wary of the word when it appears in the name of an act, as it does in the case of the recent second attempt to pass the “Marketplace Fairness Act” through the U.S. Congress, to allow states to collect sales taxes on Internet (“remote”) retail.

The first attempt, in 2013, made it through the Senate, but not the House. All four members of Rhode Island’s federal delegation jumped on the bandwagon ascosponsors, but of the four, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, may have done the most to give the game away.

In his related press release, Whitehouse emphasized that unfairness in retail pricing isn’t really an issue for Rhode Island, because consumers are supposed to pay the state’s 7 percent sales tax–rebranded as a “use tax”–no matter where they buy something.  (Other states’ taxes, if collected, count toward the total.)

To the extent that the pricing difference is unfair, it’s because Whitehouse considers Rhode Islanders to be scofflaws who use online purchases as a means of skirting tax laws.  That, obviously, is unfair to the government officials who would like to have more money to spend.

A series of related Rhode Island statutes reinforces Whitehouse’s emphasis on tax collections.

Continue reading on WatchDog.org.

100

Policies So Good, You’re Not Allowed to Say “No”

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Kevin Williamson’s “Utiopia’s Jailers” would be good assigned reading for a low-level political philosophy course:

The Left’s heart is still in East Berlin: If people want to leave your utopia and have the means to do so, then build a wall. If they climb over the wall — as millions of low-income parents with children in private schools (very commonly Catholic schools) do — then build a higher wall. …

It isn’t just education, of course. In much of Canada, private health insurance is effectively banned. The existence of private insurance is a very strong indicator that there are some people who are not entirely pleased with Canada’s single-payer system. (Monopolies rarely have happy customers.) So they opt out, at least in part, exercising the right of exit that is the most fundamental of civil rights. This is an affront to progressive values. Solution? Ban private health insurance. …

… try opting out of Social Security or Medicare and see how long it takes for Uncle Stupid to put you in prison as a tax evader. Those metaphorical prison walls are almost always political veneers for actual prison walls.

A more difficult question is why we let them do it.  In East Berlin, there was the little matter of an invading military force, but Americans are letting progressives rope them down like an incrementally compliant Gulliver.  Williamson’s examples give a good indication of the answer.

Acquiescence to the pitiful likes of President Obama and former Governor Chafee, let alone the legions of Whitehouses, Cicillines, Foxes, and so-ons, requires a long-term effort to miseducate the population, promise them things at others’ expense, and gain a patrician’s power over them.  As the wall goes up, the effort of dismantling it becomes greater and greater, making it easier and easier to succumb to the hope that the malicious builders will stop after one more row of bricks.

They won’t.

101

Projo Hearts Government

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At some point, reality doesn’t need anymore evidence, and anybody who doesn’t like it has to figure out what to do about it.  One such reality (proven long ago, to my satisfaction) is that the Providence Journal is a newspaper written for the progressive Democrat audience.  Yes, there’s a journalistic drive to present some form of opposing arguments, but that’s the paper’s target audience.

The objects of the reporters’ suspicion are not those who have the power to take away your money, restrict your freedoms, and even lock you up at gunpoint.  Rather, the villains are those who argue on behalf of your freedoms.

To expect its reporters to cover issues of ideological concern as if conservatives might be right would be to expect PolitiFactRI to choose a Pants on Fire statement to check from among far-left U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s inflammatory screeds against people who are ostensibly his constituents.

PolitiFactRI is much more tuned to digging into statements such as one made by RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse on the Dan Yorke Show.  Having followed the progression of RhodeMap RI for some years, with a substantial degree of related research, Stenhouse offered Yorke his “interpretation” and “belief” about the ideological position of the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  Alerted that the PolitiFact kangaroo court was in session on his comment, he sent a long list of evidence that had helped to lead him to that interpretation and belief.

PolitiFact reporter Katie Mulvaney skimmed the evidence and contacted a few people who could be trusted to disagree with Stenhouse’s interpretation (professionals in the central planning industry), and PolitiFact presumed to rule his interpretation and belief false.  That’s laughable by any non-partisan, non-ideological standard for public discourse.  But the Providence Journal dominates the local news market, so there you go.

Or take Kate Bramson’s news story about the meeting at which the state Planning Council approved RhodeMap.  She quotes Stenhouse as warning that RhodeMap eases the way for eminent domain takings of private property.  Bramson’s follow-up sentence isn’t so much an addition of context as it is a debating point from somebody on the pro-government side: “The term ’eminent domain,’ in which governments may seize private property for broad economic purposes, appears nowhere in the plan.”

Well, sure.  Neither does the term “freedom” or “property rights.”  Bramson appears entirely ignorant of the foundation for Stenhouse’s understanding of RhodeMap, including the fact that his statement on eminent domain is absolutely true.

So how should we proceed?  The problem, ultimately, is not that the Providence Journal is biased.  It’s that there’s no alternative.  Accepting reality, those who have been marked by the news department as the enemy should stop responding to the paper (and especially PolitiFact) as if it’s a neutral arbiter.

103

The Cultural Disconnect on Abortion

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Gina Raimondo’s pro-abortion radicalism and District Court Judge Ronald Lagueux’s ruling making partial-birth abortion legal suggest a disconnect between the general public and the ruling elite.

106

Coordinating Instructions in Plain Sight

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Via Instapundit comes an interesting observation from the National Republican Senatorial Committee:

Yesterday, our friends at the DSCC tweeted this “important message for New Hampshire.” It linked to a hidden “message” page on Jeanne Shaheen’s website providing what seems to be a script with research and high resolution images of the Senator that would be the type that commonly appear in political ads run by outside groups like Harry Reid’s Majority PAC. Remember, coordination between the DSCC and these outside groups is prohibited by law.

Turns out that over the last few months, we’ve picked up on the fact that each time the DSCC sends an “important message” to voters of a battleground state, a liberal outside group quickly adheres to the message by producing an ad to be run on television. In other words, anytime the DSCC sends an “important message,” it is a directive to outside groups to run an “uncoordinated” ad (since, you know coordination would be illegal).

In other words, to avoid the appearance of “coordinating,” it looks like the politicians make a public statement that the outside groups know to be a directive.  That seems very similar to the way Rhode Island’s own U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s anti-Tea Party rhetoric was apparently taken by officials in the IRS and other government agencies as an instruction to target them.

107

IRS Scandal Expands into Cross-Agency Planning to Prosecute

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It’s not mentioned loudly in Rhode Island, but revelations keep on coming in the IRS targeting of conservative groups:

 … on March 27, [former IRS non-profit-division head Lois] Lerner in an email to top IRS staff wrote that “folks from the FEC world,” were pressing for “tax-fraud prosecutions” for nonprofit organizations accused of lying about not conducting political activity. “This is their latest push to shut these down,” she wrote. “One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn’t feel so comfortable doing the stuff.”

It’s especially curious that this news hasn’t been bigger in Rhode Island, because the name of our own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse appears in the controversial emails.  Apparently, the prompting of some of Whitehouse’s anti-Tea Party theatrics helped get the ball rolling for cross-agency talks about finding a group of which to make an example.

It seems to me the Left and the media are happy to let this scandal slip through various cracks.  On the one hand, we’re supposed to take the Senator’s rhetoric as simply that.  When he slanders people who disagree with him on policy, that’s just talk, not to be treated as if it’s actionable (or, for that matter, worth fact checking).  Yet, when the rhetoric turns into targeting, well, that has nothing to do with the rhetoric; it’s just the government trying to make the world safer for democracy… or at least Democrats.

108

But wait, the President just said…

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… that the Affordable Care Act was bringing health insurance premium increases down.  And yet:

[Morgan Stanley]’s April survey of 148 brokers found that this quarter, the average premium increase for customers renewing an insurance plan is 12 percent in the small group market and 11 percent in the individual market, according to Forbes’ Scott Gottlieb.

The hikes — the largest in the past three years, according to Morgan Stanley’s quarterly reports — are “largely due to changes under the [Affordable Care Act],” analysts concluded. Rates have been growing increasingly fast throughout all of 2013, after a period of drops in 2012.

 

109

Another Indication Government Can Shrink

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Michael Barone reports the findings of Canadian economist Livio De Matteo, who says that the optimal size of government — in terms of economic growth — is 26% of GDP. Having not investigated how De Matteo gets to that number, I can’t say whether it’s unreasonably high or even too low, but out of curiosity: How do we stack up in Rhode Island?

Given available data, 2011 is a good year to check, and it looks like the following:

  • Rhode Islanders’ portion of federal spending: $12.75 billion
  • State general revenue spending: $2.96 billion
  • State restricted receipt spending: $0.16 billion
  • Total municipal tax levy: $2.25 billion

That list misses some stuff, such as fire district taxes and municipal revenue not included in the levy. (I went with levy rather than budget because much of the additional spending would double-count federal dollars.)

Duly noting the minor tweaks, that list totals to $18.12 billion, or 37% of the state’s $49.42 billion GDP that year. Government is 41% to big in Rhode Island. Put differently, optimal economic growth would require the three tiers of government to cut their Rhode Island–related budgets by $5.27 billion.

That’s a big number that nobody would expect to realize, but it kind of puts in context the few hundred million dollars that the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity projects to be the cost of eliminating the sales tax, doesn’t it?

110

Longest Pensioner Retired in 1950 After 20 Years on the Job

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After Providence Journal reporter Kathy Gregg tweeted that “only 24,297” ballots went out to retirees to vote on whether to accept the pension settlement, I took a look at RI Open Gov’s pension module. Gregg says she counts 31,829 retirees in the state system. RI Open Gov lists 27,864, but if you take out “beneficiaries” (people who inherited workers’ pensions), it drops to 25,108. The ballots being sent out may also subtract those who get to vote through some other means, like a retiree group set up specifically to negotiate the terms of the settlement.

While I was playing with the spreadsheet, though, I noticed Elizabeth Blythe, who appears to have retired in 1950 after 20 years with the state police at the age of 36.

Think about that. In 1950, Harry S. Truman was president. World War II was a recent memory, the United Nations and NATO were new, and the United States had just airlifted supplies to West Berlin in response to a Russian blockade and responded with military force to the North Korean invasion of South Korea.

The cycles of history move slowly, but it’s amazing to know that Rhode Island is still paying for employees who haven’t worked for the government in almost as long as my children’s grandfather has been alive. With modern medicine, we can be sure that Ms. Blythe’s future counterparts will not be quite so few in number when my children are doting on their own grandchildren.

112

Climate Change Words and Behavior

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Over the weekend, I had an extended Twitter discussion with Philip Eil, news editor of the Providence Phoenix; here’s the (somewhat jumbled) main thread.

During the course of the discussion (in a side thread), Phil asked me for an example of a local global warming advocate who doesn’t quite live like it’s such a dire threat. Of course, nationally, Al Gore is exhibit #1, but it’s an aggregate impression; specific examples come and go. One occurred to me, yesterday, though.

A few years back, with his children off to college and boarding school, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) sold one of his two Rhode Island estates and moved permanently into the other. He offloaded the one in East Side Providence and moved into the ocean drive one in Newport. That is, when he had to make a decision about a massive financial asset, he chose to keep the $2.3 million property overlooking the supposedly rising oceans.

As a carpenter, I spent a year working on a house directly across that little inland pond, which was once in large part lined with Whitehouse family properties, and a few more years working on one diagonal and across Ocean Ave. If I’m remembering the architects’ quick structural history lessons correctly, both of those houses sustained massive damage during the hurricane of 1938.

Lots of things go into the decision of which mansion to keep and which to sell, and somebody of Whitehouse’s means might value a few decades of Newport life enough to face the ultimate demise of the property. Nonetheless, I find it hard to ignore the message sent when the guy who declares that “God won’t save us from climate catastrophe,” and attacks political opponents in irrational terms, proceeds to settle his life where that catastrophe will eat away his personal fortune each year.*

 

*Note that there’s a low, easily flooded, strip of land between the pond and the ocean. Until the rising seas erase this distinction, the erosion of personal fortune will not be physical, but a matter of increased risk of owning the property… theoretically.

113

RI Senator Works for Fundamental Corruption for Partisan Advantage

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When Sheldon Whitehouse won his election to the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island, I was hopeful that his being such a caricature of the rich New England liberal would leave him vulnerable to future challenge from a down-to-earth regular-guy/gal candidate with common-sense conservative ideas and values. That has yet to be tested, but Whitehouse’s status as far-left commentator Rachel Maddow’s “political crush” suggests that he’s been working to make my reasoning more plausible, not less.

And now, there he is, the name that Bradley Smith plucks, in a Wall Street Journal essay, from the vast selection of the federal government, as the face for a willingness to bring fundamental political corruption to the IRS for partisan advantage:

Why is the IRS regulating political activity at all?

The answer is that many Democratic politicians and progressive activists think new rules limiting political speech by nonprofits will benefit Democrats politically. …

Nobody will admit that the goal is to hamper the political opposition. To make the case for IRS regulation of politics, these progressives, such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) and the Campaign Legal Center, have promulgated three myths.

The irony is that, throughout the secondary-school and college courses designed to convince me that liberal policies were not only more intelligent, but also more moral, because supportive of The People, was a repeated sneer against “aristocrats.” Well, here you go, folks: an actual aristocrat who wants to make it more difficult for The People to organize in support of their own views, if their own views conflict with his.

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